‘Do you like them?’ Edmund asked. ‘I thought we’d never get them all up.’
‘They’re beautiful,’ Violet said.
‘Would you like to light them? Here, look, I have tapers.’ He picked up a long thin stick, struck a match in a splutter of flame and a smell of saltpetre and lit the end of it, which glowed a soft orange. He handed it to her and steadied her as she climbed on to the crooked roots and reached up to guide the flame carefully inside the lantern to the candle within. The flame caught and grew, filling the sphere with light that cast a pool of radiance over their upturned faces and the gnarled and shining roots below, and faded into shadows beyond them.
‘I made a wish,’ Violet said, smiling, but didn’t tell him what it was.
They moved silently between the lanterns, sometimes separating and lighting them simultaneously, sometimes steadying each other on the slippery wood and guiding each other’s hands. They went from tree to tree, cedar to elm, as the crowd danced on, oblivious. At the last tree, they stopped and looked back at their handiwork.
‘They’re like captured fireflies,’ Violet said.
‘Or little moons caught up in the branches,’ Edmund said, and it was true: in the elms, twigs and leaves laced the globes with dark patterns.
‘“The silver apples of the moon,”’ Violet said dreamily, remembering the ending of the Yeats poem.
‘Exactly,’ Edmund said. ‘Shall we walk?’ He gave her his arm. ‘I don’t think anyone will miss us from the general mêlée.’
They slipped away across the lawn behind the trees. Dew had formed and underfoot the short grass was cool and damp, scattered with the closed eyes of daisies. The sun was now a mere line of gold on the horizon, a last gash in the twilit sky. Edmund pointed out the papery disc of a full moon, slowly gaining brightness and substance, ‘As if one of our lanterns has escaped and floated away,’ he said whimsically.
They came to the walled garden with its deep borders and turned along the walk towards the arbour. Violet was aware of every small thing around her: the shapes of peonies and larkspur; the smell of sweet peas; the faint strains of music; the warm solidity of Edmund’s arm under her gloved hand. Every now and then, she felt that he glanced at her but didn’t break his silence. They reached the arbour and sat down on the stone seat beneath a wrought-iron arch weighted down with a mass of balsam and roses. In the fading light, the garden had faded to monochrome, the flowers becoming pale, their beauty transformed to form and scent rather than colour.
‘You look incredibly lovely tonight,’ Edmund said, gazing at her.
Violet, unused to compliments, looked down at the flower pinned at her bosom. ‘Thank you for the beautiful corsage,’ she said, as if her appearance lay only in the adornment of her dress. She touched the flower self-consciously and he gently took her hand.
Slowly, without letting his gaze slip for a moment from hers, he took each finger of her glove in turn, pulling until he had freed it and could twine his fingers with hers and place warm palm to warm palm. ‘Dearest,’ he said, ‘you must know how I feel about you. I realise that we can’t be together straightaway, that I need something more behind me before I can offer you the kind of future you deserve …’
Violet looked into his dear eyes, hardly daring to breathe, her heart beating like a ragtime band.
‘But only say you’ll be mine,’ Edmund said softly, bending towards her, ‘and anything will be possible, because I shall be the happiest man on earth.’
Violet, moving into Edmund’s embrace, closed her eyes and without speaking let her lips say their tender ‘Yes’.
When Violet had opened Edmund’s letter to say that he was being sent abroad she had felt all her hopes shrink, just as Edmund and the family had grown smaller as the motor had carried her away down the long drive at the end of her stay, receding to a dark dot against the stucco house. She had struggled, not entirely successfully, to compose herself in front of George but as he rode away, she felt panic at the hopelessness that threatened to engulf her.
She remained perfectly still as George rounded the bend. She felt that she should call after him but her throat was closed and tight with misery and she couldn’t speak. She tried to get a grip on herself; she must make sure she asked him tomorrow about what he’d wanted to show her; it was thoughtless of her to have disappointed him through being so overcome by her news. The sound of the bicycle wheels clattering over the ruts receded and left only the hot, heavy silence of the summer afternoon. After a few moments, she turned and began to walk away. Instead of returning to the house, however, she veered into the wood and took the path that ran alongside the beck, although she was barely aware of its trickling and gurgling or the smell of greenness and fresh water. She walked slowly amongst the huge Scots pines, sun slanting on their tawny red trunks, the canopy high above her. Shafts of light fell on glossy rhododendron leaves and the white trumpets of yellow-stamened flowers, their petals with a bruised look this late in the summer, as if thinned by heavy rain, and the vivid green moss growing thick and soft as carpet on the trunks and branches of coppiced trees.
Thank God I have an hour or so before Mother will miss me, she thought. Her mother knew nothing of all this. Violet had kept her own counsel about meeting Edmund, afraid that her mother would not react well to the news. Even though Edmund had understood that they would have to make a home for Mother with them, Violet knew that Mother would fret dreadfully at the prospect of ‘losing’ her to a marriage and she didn’t want to burden her with worry any sooner than was necessary. So she had said nothing of the talks she and Edmund had shared on country picnics, at the park, at the garden party. She had been non-committal when answering her mother’s questions about the people she’d met during her stay. Instead, she had offered descriptions of the garden, the decor and the food in minute detail, to satisfy her mother’s curiosity and take her to a place, any place, other than the house that her mother now hardly ever left.
In secret, she thought about the feel of Edmund’s hand in the small of her back as they danced, or the way his moustache tickled when they kissed. Such things were private – no, sacred moments which could not, in any case, be unwrapped in the stuffy sickroom among her mother’s bottles and potions. The very air, heavy with the knowledge of her father’s neglect, would dull and tarnish them.
She and Edmund had stored up every minute that they could snatch together, knowing that there would be time apart to follow, as Edmund would be sent away to an officers’ training camp. They had planned that once Edmund had finished the first leg, he would apply for leave and they would find some way to meet.
It’s so unfair! she thought. Now he would have to go abroad and even if the whole conflict were short-lived, as people said it would be, it would be months before he was in barracks at Carlisle again. She tried to stifle these selfish thoughts, and think instead of troubled Belgium, threatened France, honour and the King. Over the past few months, the whole country had been speculating on German expansionist policies and the likelihood of war; it should be no surprise that now it was here it was going to affect everyone’s life, even hers.
War. The word reverberated through her mind as if it were a cold gust shaking the little wood and rattling like a dry shiver through its leaves.
What if he were hurt? It had not been until she had fallen so headily in love that she had realised that it was possible to feel the same tenderness and care towards the body of another that she felt towards her own. She thought of the way the outdoor summer life had browned his forearms and tanned a V at his throat; of how she imagined the rest of his skin, pale beneath his clothes; and of the vulnerability of the body that she loved. She squeezed the letter even harder in her hand and quickened her step. She would go to the little church at the lakeside where she could be private and alone.
She reached the edge of the wood, swung open the iron gate and stepped out into the brightness. The beck ran on through the parkland, rushing and gurgling beside the path, on its way down to the wide sheet of water. Before her was an open