“When will you have a uniform?” he said. “Will you be a colonel? My friend Walter’s father is a brigadier. Have you got a revolver yet?” Harry helped himself to more molasses tart.
“Will you go to France?” Teddy said, still chewing. “I’m really half French, of course, because my grandparents were French but it doesn’t show.” He darted a look at his mother. “Though all my grandparents are dead. Will you kill Germans, do you think?”
Isabelle raised her eyebrows, then said, calmly, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
She had been very controlled throughout the day. She was, Harry thought, well aware that the brevity of his stay was a conscious decision, not a necessity.
Abbotsgate looked well cared for despite a reduction in manpower, although the gardens had already been simplified, he noticed. He spent an hour with the agent in his small office in the stables, discussing national demands for wood and the Army’s requisition of horses. But it was like visiting the house of a good friend rather than one that was, rightfully, his own.
All in all, it had passed off better than he’d feared. When he came to say good-bye, Teddy had gone riding with a friend. After Phillips had put his case in the car, he and Isabelle were left alone in the great hall, which, despite the warmth outside, was cool. He kissed her on the cheek, his eyes moving inexorably to the portrait of his father, and then he turned, rather awkwardly, to go before looking back one last time.
“You’ll let me know… .”
“You’ll be busy,” she said, with a half-smile.
“Letters will get to me.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll take care of you both.”
She nodded.
He held her gaze for a second and stepped out into the sunlight. The car was on the gravel, Phillips at the wheel.
“Harry,” she said, stepping out with him and putting her hand on his arm, and, ridiculously, he drew back at the unexpected contact.
“No, it doesn’t matter,” she said, looking embarrassed. “But go safely.”
“Of course.”
With immaculate timing, Phillips got out, opened the door, and said “Good afternoon, Sir Harry.”
“Isabelle,” he said, suddenly without words.
“Harry.”
He settled into his seat and looked out of the rear window, his eyes not on Abbotsgate but on the slender figure in gray who stood motionless on the steps, her hand raised in a frozen wave. Eventually his neck ached too much, and he turned to face forward.
“Trowbridge, sir?” said Phillips, out of courtesy. He knew perfectly well where they were going and why. The car gleamed, fit to pass a sergeant major’s scrutiny.
“Bad news from Turkey,” Phillips said, as if they were talking about a day’s racing. “Wouldn’t fancy my chances there. Never been one for hot weather. And the Turks are devils when they’re roused.”
Somewhere between Abbotsgate and Taunton, as Phillips chattered on and the car brushed through narrow lanes, both his earlier lives were ending. The layers of what he had been—a son, a brother, an only partly honest husband, a selfishly happy exile, an absent landowner—were all stripped away now, and he was left just as a man like any other.
All the skills and weaknesses that he had known or discovered in himself, used or hidden, all the advantages he’d been born to and the deceits he had pursued, meant nothing, faced with the unknown question of what kind of man, what kind of soldier, he would be. But then he reflected that it was much more likely, now that he had made his grand gesture, that the war would be over in six months, and he would be stuck in a Whitehall office in the country he had worked so hard to leave, stamping requisition forms eight hours a day.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Frank, Huntingdon,
Winter 1915
THE ARMY HAS MORE FORMS than it does bullets. Forms to say you haven’t got a squint or a crooked spine or an undescended whatnot. Forms for next of kin, forms for summer uniforms (other ranks, cotton, medium), and, eventually, when they’d taken Hercules from me, regulations having changed, a form for Machine, Folding, General Service, Twenty-four-inch, Frame No. 211567. I called her Nora.
I set off to a new life in September 1915—my second new life, really, London having been my first. Hercules went in the luggage compartment. There was nothing to see from the train: good flat cycling country north of London, but not much else. So my mind turned on this and that, including a bit of guilt that I hadn’t gone home to see the old man, but I told myself it was only training, there was no actual fighting yet.
I arrived feeling tired and a bit blue, and a bit of a civilian when I saw all the lads in khaki drilling on the square. But then a soldier approached and you could have knocked me down with a feather. It was Isaac, holding his cycle upright and firmly, not clutching it as I did, saluting the sergeant in the approved manner. I had yet to learn this, and it took me a while. Hercules would always wobble the minute I held him with one hand and raised the other. Nora was worse. The more senior the officer, the greater the wobble.