seen wooden toys, rattles, satchels and raincoats and then, later, it had seen evening clothes and beaded bags on thin chains left on the hall chairs as Clara and James, tired from their parties, went upstairs to bed.
Hal had seen Clara for the first time one weekend, in the first weeks of his training.
They had arrived after tea on a Saturday. James had been talking to his father about money, and Hal had thought he’d better go out into the garden for a smoke and to be out of the way.
There was a blueish dusk just settling and Clara was coming into the drawing room; she had her arms full of wet flowers, and Hal – avoiding a small table – had almost bumped into her. He had apologised and they had shaken hands awkwardly. Her hand was wet from the flowers. Hal said, ‘You must be James’s sister,’ and Clara answered, ‘Yes, I’m Clara.’
She said ‘Clara’ as her brother did – to rhyme with ‘dare’ or ‘fair’ – and then, ‘Are you Hal?’
‘Yes. Hal,’ and he had been silenced by her voice and the look of her, and had not known what to say.
They stepped around each other. He had gone out into the garden and had his cigarette; she had gone into the kitchen to put the flowers in water, but the picture of her stayed in his mind. She was pale and had dark brown hair, the colour of conkers or a bay horse, and her eyes were marine blue. She was seventeen then; he was nineteen.
Hal had set about seeing more of Clara with determination, and over the few months of his training he would come back with James whenever they were allowed a weekend.
His own parents’ house was near Warminster, in Somerset, not far from Stonehenge. It was faced with dark grey and had a well-proportioned front and other older and more complicated sections attached and interlocking behind. It bore the wind that came off Salisbury Plain stoically, with barely a rattle of its Victorian windows. Hal was always happy to be back in the big chilly rooms, with their familiar echoes; the gilt-framed paintings, the grim colours of the house, and its coldness, were nourishing to him. Although before visiting the Wards, he had never noticed the look of his own house before, he still felt more comfortable with its discomfort than he ever did in that light village house. He was happy with the silent mealtimes and bare boards of home, but he needed to be near Clara, and tolerated her jolly, messy family well enough to see her.
Hal and Clara had written to one another, letters more intimate than they ever were face to face. He called her his ‘red, white and blue girl’ – for her colouring – and when he asked her to come with him to the Sovereign’s Parade and ball it wasn’t surprising, but it was significant.
Clara stood with her parents and younger brother, trying to pick out Hal and James from the lines of cadets, straining up onto her toes to see over the people in front, while twenty feet away, Arthur and Jean Treherne, in the front row, watched too.
Arthur Treherne and George Ward could not have been more different. George was a kind, fastidious man, and smallish. His trousers had one soft crease at the ankle and his overcoats spoke of dim offices and hatstands in domestic hallways. James was the first of their family to go into the army as a professional soldier, and they had watched his absorption into that world with something like dread.
George was a civil servant; he had gone to work every day from the red-brick villa in Buckinghamshire, returning each night to Moira, Clara and their two sons. He had fought briefly in the First War. It had been – still was – the unequalled crisis of his life. He didn’t feel soldiering was anything one would choose to do, and was sharply aware that the greater part of his wish for continued peace in the world was so that his sons would not have to do the things he had done, and that his daughter would not have to be a soldier’s wife. And yet here he was, his powerful distate – and fear – mixing with a pride that was almost beyond his control.
Hal’s father, Arthur, was a soldier, had been a soldier, and would always, whatever he wore or wherever he went, be a soldier in