of his son’s name Gerald stumbled forward. His shoulders heaved, and the scream came out of his mouth at last as a low, stricken moan. He dropped to his knees in front of his wife’s chair, and the moan went on and on. Amy saw Isabel put her hands up to her ears, as if to shut the sound out. Her sister’s face had gone dead white, with her eyes dark holes in the whiteness.
‘Hush, my love,’ Adeline said. ‘Oh, Gerald.’
Lord Lovell rocked forward on his knees and put his head in his wife’s lap. The telegram fell on the grass and lay face upwards to the blank sky. Isabel got down from her chair, moving like a stiff-legged little doll. She leant over it, not touching it, and read the words.
2nd Lt The Hon’ble Airlie Lovell killed in action July 1. Deepest regrets. Lt Col. A. J. S. Warren, O/c 2nd Bn Kings Own Rifles.
At last the moaning stopped. ‘My son?’ Lord Lovell said. His head reared up again and he looked into his wife’s face. His tears had left a dark, irregular stain on the rose silk of her skirts.
‘My son,’ he repeated in bewilderment. Then he put his hands on either side of the mound of Adeline’s stomach. ‘Give me a son again,’ he begged her. ‘Give me my son back again.’
Sharply, Isabel turned away. She held out her hand to Amy. ‘Come on,’ she said, and when Amy didn’t respond she whispered urgently, ‘Please come.’
Obediently, even though she was puzzled and afraid, Amy slid off her chair and with Isabel pulling her onwards the two little girls ran hand in hand across the grass to the sun-warmed steps, and into the silent house. In the cool dimness of the long drawing room Isabel hesitated, wondering where to run to next, and in that instant Amy looked back.
The picture she saw was to stay with her for ever. She saw her parents still under the cedar tree, her father almost unrecognizable on his knees with the squareness gone from his shoulders and the line of his straight back bowed and defeated. His face was buried like a child’s in the folds of rose silk and her mother’s head was bent over his, seeing nothing else.
Amy wanted to run back to them and squeeze herself between them, telling them to make everything all right again, but Isabel’s grip on her hand was firm. She mustn’t go to them. Isabel seemed to understand something about this sudden cold in the sun that she couldn’t.
But now Isabel was saying ‘Where can we go?’ in a thin voice that suddenly sounded lost. ‘It’s Nanny’s day off, do you remember? And it’s after four o’clock, so we can’t see Miss May, and Cook doesn’t like us to go in the kitchen in the afternoon …’
Her voice trailed away.
‘Up to the nursery,’ Amy answered with conviction. ‘Everything will be all right there.’
Slowly now but still hand in hand they walked the length of the drawing room, past the sofa where their mother sat before dinner when they came down to kiss her good night on the evenings when there were no guests, through another salon hung with pictures and past spindly gilt furniture, and out into a great space where a wide staircase curved away above their heads. Isabel and Amy turned their backs on the cathedral-like quiet and slipped through a discreet door hidden in the shadows under the stairway. Beyond the door the corridor was narrow and stone-flagged. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of another door banging, hurrying footsteps and an urgently raised voice. They began to walk faster again, making for the stairs leading up to the sanctuary of the nursery wing.
The day nursery was on the west side of the house, and the blinds were half drawn against the light. Long bars of sunshine struck over the polished floor and the familiar worn rugs.
The last time he had been at home, Airlie had draped himself with them, playing bears on his hands and knees, laughing and puffing and telling the girls that the same rugs had been on the floor when he was a baby. When the game was over he had stood up and brushed the fluff from the new uniform he was so proud of. Amy remembered the smell of wool and leather, and the creak of his highly polished Sam Browne belt.
At first sight the nursery seemed empty, but then there was a rustle and the door of one of the tall cupboards swung to. A girl emerged from behind it, round-faced under a white cap, her arms full of folded linen. She saw their stricken faces and let the linen fall in a heap.
‘Miss Isabel, Miss Amy, what’s wrong then?’
Bethan Jones was the new nurserymaid. She was sixteen years old and had come to Chance from her home in the Welsh valleys only a month ago, and the little girls barely knew her except as a quick, aproned figure fetching and carrying for Nanny. Her soft Welsh accent sounded strange to them, but they heard the warmth in her voice now. Amy ran to her at once and Bethan’s arms wrapped round her.
‘There now. Tell Bethan, won’t you?’
Bethan pulled her closer, rocking her, and looked across at Isabel, still standing at the door.
‘What is it, lamb?’
Isabel was torn between what she believed was the right way to behave, and what she really wanted to do, which was to run like Amy and bury herself in Bethan’s arms. She took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and said formally, ‘I am afraid that a telegram came. My brother Airlie has been killed in France.’
Amy felt Bethan flinch as if from a blow, but still she didn’t fully take in the words.
‘The poor boy,’ Bethan said simply. ‘The poor, poor boy.’
She held out her hand and Isabel stopped trying to behave in the right way and ran to shelter beside her sister.
‘What does it mean about Airlie?’ Amy asked, and seeing Isabel’s wet, crumpled face she began dimly to understand that nothing at Chance would ever be the same again.
‘It means that a German soldier shot him with a bullet, and hurt him so much that he’s dead, and we won’t ever see him again,’ Isabel said. ‘Never, never, because they will bury him in the ground.’ Her voice rose, shrill with horror, and her fingers snatched at the blue cotton of the nurserymaid’s uniform skirt.
‘Hush, darling,’ Bethan soothed her. ‘Don’t talk about it like that. Amy, it means that your brother was a brave, brave man and you must be proud of him. It’s a terrible war, but we should be thankful for all the brave soldiers who are fighting for us and pray for it to be over so that they can come safe home again. Do you understand?’
But how could they? Bethan answered herself.
‘Listen,’ she said softly, ‘your brother wanted to go to war to fight for England, and all the things that he believed are right. All good men do. If I was a man, I’d go. My brothers went as soon as they could, and … and my fiancé is in France too. He’s a private in the Welsh Division, the 38th, and when he comes home we’ll be married. It’ll be hard at first, but we’ll manage a place of our own and then you can come and see me, wouldn’t you like that, to come to Wales and see the valleys? There’s nowhere like it, you know. Ah, it’s not beautiful country like this, all cornfields and great trees, but it’s the best place on earth.’ Bethan closed her eyes on the nursery and saw the ranks of tiny grey houses clinging to the steep valley sides, the black slag hills and the skeletal towers of the pit winding-gear, and the sudden moist flashes of green between the laced black fingers of the mine workings. ‘He was doing grand, Dai was, before the War came,’ Bethan whispered. ‘More tonnage out of his pit than ever before, and him with a job at the coal face. There’s none to beat Welsh steam
