They joined the trickle of comrades slipping out of the church hall. In Albion Lane, the pavements shone with rain.
She took his arm. ‘It was interesting, wasn’t it?’
‘It was a lot of hot air. I don’t believe that chap’s done a day’s work in his life. Silly ass.’
‘I think what Mr Dawlish says makes a lot of sense. He can’t help his background. In a way that makes what he does for the cause all the better.’
‘You know him, do you?’
‘I’ve met him once or twice.’
‘How old is he?’
‘I don’t know. Early thirties? Why?’
He grunted. ‘Old enough to know better.’
They walked in silence.
‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you?’ she said after a moment. ‘About not being engaged.’
‘Of course I’m not angry.’
‘Of course you are. But it’s better this way, truly.’
‘Better for who?’
‘For both of us. We’ve talked about this.’
Rory let the silence lengthen. Then he said, ‘I’ve found a flat.’
‘That’s wonderful. Where?’
‘In Bleeding Heart Square.’
Fenella snatched her arm away. ‘In Aunt Philippa’s house?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought we agreed to leave all that.’
‘We agreed nothing. Listen, it’s a perfectly good flat in exactly the right place for me. I can walk into the City, I can walk into the West End. They know nothing about us, nothing about my connection with your aunt. There’s no harm in it. Besides, I’m fed up with Mrs Rutter’s.’
All this was perfectly true. There was also a small malicious pleasure in going against Fenella’s wishes, something Rory did not choose to examine too closely. If she had given him any encouragement, he might also have told her about Sergeant Narton. But she didn’t. They turned into Cornwallis Grove.
‘Did you hear anything about Aunt Philippa while you were there?’ Fenella asked.
‘No.’
‘Who did you meet?’
‘Some of the lodgers. There’s a dressmaker, and an old chap and his daughter. Perhaps other people. And the landlord keeps a room on, but I gather he’s not always in residence.’
‘So you saw him too? Mr Serridge?’
‘Yes. How often did you meet him?’
‘Once or twice. Mother didn’t take to him, and Father was awfully rude. Aunt Philippa was furious. She wanted us to like him.’ Fenella walked on in silence for a moment. Staring straight ahead, she said, ‘What did you think of him?’
They paused at the gate of number fifty-one. He sensed that she didn’t intend to ask him in.
‘Bit of a brute, probably, but quite straightforward in his way,’ Rory said. ‘I shouldn’t have thought he’d have much in common with your aunt, or she with him.’
Fenella lifted the latch. ‘Aunt thought he was wonderful.’ She pushed open the gate with such violence that it clattered against the retaining wall of the lawn. ‘Aunt thought he was God.’
There was a time very early in their acquaintance when Lydia had considered Marcus to be a god. Not God himself, whom they visited every Sunday in church, and who was supposed to be uncomfortably omnipresent, seeing everything one did or failed to do; Marcus’s divinity was of a different kind.
When Lydia was nine, she had had a governess who told her stories from Greek and Roman mythology. Marcus was the sort of god who appeared in classical legends. There was something anarchic and capricious about him. Though enormously powerful in some areas, he was weak, even powerless, in others. He could be cruel and he could be kind, switching from one to the other with bewildering rapidity. But he was always impersonal, for gods are like that. It was she who interpreted his actions as cruel or kind, whereas for him such labels were meaningless.
His standing as a god was further supported by the fact that he was six years older than her, and by the brief and unpredictable incursions he made into her life. Also, she later came to realize, if she came to see him as a god it was partly because she wanted a god and he was the only realistic candidate available.
Even at the time, she bore him no malice for the episode of the child-eating slugs at Monkshill Park. Later, she looked back on what had happened in the shed at the end of the kitchen garden almost with pleasure. After all, it had been the first time she had met Marcus. Moreover, she had never been in any real danger, either from the allegedly man-eating slugs or from the less obvious but more serious risk of falling off the shelf from sheer terror. Nor had he actually put the slugs on her legs. And there had been, at least in retrospect, something almost pleasurable in being so utterly powerless and so utterly terrified.
It was true that Marcus had examined what Nanny used to call her ‘front bottom’. Lydia had known for as long as she had known anything that this part of her anatomy was something to be ashamed of, which it was best to cover up and pretend did not exist. But Marcus clearly thought it was not something to be ashamed of: on the contrary, it was something he found profoundly fascinating. That was rather flattering, if anything. He examined it for what seemed like hours and probably was at least a couple of minutes, moving her legs this way and that, so he could get a better view. Finally he touched her, very gently, at the point where the crack was, the very epicentre of all that shame.
When he had finished his inspection, he had lifted her down and they had walked on, hand in hand, as far as the lake. He said in a casual voice on the way back that what she had shown him in the shed was of course a secret. She had to promise that she would tell no one. Otherwise he would not be able to stop the slugs tracking her down and eating her. She had sucked the first two fingers of her right hand and nodded vigorously.
During the war, Lydia had had a recurring nightmare that Marcus had become a soldier and been killed. She never told anybody about this, even Marcus when the war was over, but she prayed every night that the fighting would end before he was old enough to join up. Her prayers were answered but, as is so often the case, there was a catch. Marcus lied about his age and tried to join up in 1916 but he was rejected as unfit because of flat feet. Marcus’s elder brother was not so lucky.
The Cassingtons were staying in Upper Mount Street when they heard the news. Her stepfather saw it in
‘Poor Wilfred Langstone,’ he said heavily, setting down his coffee cup.
‘Oh dear,’ Lady Cassington said.
Lydia’s stepsister Pamela, who was spoilt by everyone including Lydia and allowed to get away with murder, continued banging the top of her boiled egg with a spoon.
‘Died of wounds, poor chap. I didn’t know he’d transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.’
‘I must write to his mother. Poor Maud.’
Lydia stared at her plate. Pamela continued to hit her egg. The saucer around her egg cup was now a mass of shell fragments.
‘This frightful slaughter.’ Lord Cassington put his elbows on the table, leant forwards and turned down the corners of his mouth; he looked like a gnome with indigestion. ‘We can’t carry on like this. There will be a revolution. You mark my words.’
Lady Cassington was pursuing a different line of thought. ‘At least she has another son. That must be some consolation. Thank heavens they wouldn’t take him.’
Pamela dug the tip of the spoon violently into the top of her egg. Yolk spurted out and a few drops fell on the tablecloth.
‘Marcus?’ Lord Cassington said. ‘Yes. What’s he doing now?’
‘According to Maud, he’s running errands for Charlie Verschoyle at the War Office. Pammy darling, don’t do that. Either eat it or leave it. Fin, could you cut off Pammy’s crusts?’
Lord Cassington obeyed. He was called Fin within the family because of a long-standing joke so old that its
