The Moon Field

‘Thank you, I’m very comfortable,’ Violet said, and then felt confused all over again as she realised that she should really be protesting that she must go.

Edmund said, ‘I see you favour the classics. Do you read the newer works as well? Forster? H. G. Wells? I can recommend Wells; he has a knack of warning us of where our current follies may lead us.’

‘I prefer Forster,’ she said, considering. ‘Wells’s view of the future is a little too bleak for my taste.’

‘We have the latest Forster somewhere; I’ll look it out for you. Have you been enjoying your stay so far? I hope Elizabeth has been looking after you and showing you around?’ Edmund tried to make this beautiful girl with the serious face feel more at ease.

‘Oh, we’ve had the most marvellous time. We went to see La Traviata and we had a wonderful picnic by the sea at Cockermouth with your father and mother and some of Elizabeth’s friends, and the cousins of course …’

‘They’re a jolly lot, aren’t they? We usually see a fair bit of them in the summer. Are you able to stay for long?’

‘A month, I hope, as long as my mother keeps well and can spare me from home.’

‘Well, we must make the most of your stay,’ Edmund said sympathetically, remembering what Elizabeth had told him of Violet’s circumstances. ‘What do you like to do the most?’

Violet told him about her photography and he listened carefully, asking her questions about shutter speeds and coloured filters, and suggesting places of interest locally where they could picnic and she could take some photographs. The conversation moved easily along as he told her of his recent studies at Cambridge and how much he had enjoyed the Officers’ Training Corps with its outdoor life of riding, camping and shooting. He told her that he was applying for a commission and hoped that his uncle, who was in the local regiment, would be able to arrange something for him. Ideally, he said, he would have liked a cavalry commission but he would have to take what his uncle could get for him and the chances were that he would end up in the infantry. ‘Foot-slogger more likely than donkey-walloper,’ he said, making her laugh, which drew from him a broad smile in return.

As Violet began to ask him more, she heard someone approaching the room and stopped abruptly. A housemaid, holding a pile of tablecloths and napkins, stood uncertainly in the doorway looking from one of them to the other. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said to Edmund, ‘Cook said I was to lay for afternoon tea in here, sir, so’s we could open the French windows and have the draught.’

Violet, suddenly aware of how odd this must look: a lady visitor, unchaperoned, sitting knee to knee with the young gentleman of the house, got quickly to her feet.

Edmund stood too, saying, ‘Ah, yes, of course, Dolly. Miss Walter has just stepped in to find a book and I can see that I’m going to be in your way.’ He gave the girl a winning smile and she bobbed a curtsey. He turned back to Violet with a mischievous look in his eye and said, ‘I hope you’ll enjoy Mr Scott’s Ivanhoe, Miss Walter.’

‘Thank you. I’m sure I shall,’ Violet returned with equal formality and left the room. Behind her, she heard Edmund offering to open the French doors for Dolly, saying that they were rather stiff for her to manage. He engaged her in friendly conversation, distracting her with questions about the health of all below stairs and whether there had been any changes while he had been away.

Violet retired to her room and sat at the window with the book open before her. She had to admit herself charmed. She found herself recounting every step of their unconventional meeting and a strange sensation came over her once more as she thought of him helping her down from the steps and of his touch as he tucked the cushion behind her as carefully as if she were porcelain. She was not used to such attention, such cherishing, and certainly not to the way Edmund had made it so easy and natural to talk about herself. When Elizabeth put her head around her door an hour later to tell her that tea was served, she found that she had read two chapters of Ivanhoe without taking in a single word.

Entering the library once more, now freshened by a breeze from the garden, which sweetened the room with the scent of honeysuckle and fluttered the corners of the tablecloths, she was met by the sight of Mr and Mrs Lyne, Elizabeth, Edmund and three other houseguests. The party was assembled next to tea tables laden with sandwiches, ginger cake and a pale blue and gold tea service, while Dolly attended to a large urn on a side table.

‘Ah, Violet,’ Mrs Lyne said as the gentlemen rose, ‘let me introduce my son, Edmund.’

Violet, taken by surprise, almost said, ‘Thank you but we’ve already met.’ She bit back the words as they formed in her mind and hesitated, casting around desperately for the phrase that she needed.

Edmund, now buttoned into waistcoat and jacket, stepped quickly forward, saying with a deadpan expression, ‘Miss Walter, I’m so very pleased to meet you,’ and shook her hand, while Dolly looked round sharply from the tea urn with an expression that clearly said, ‘Whatever next?’

Violet subsided gratefully into her seat and Elizabeth began to tell her that she still felt a little muzzy and wondered about bridge tonight rather than an excursion. Edmund caught her eye over Elizabeth’s head and raised his eyebrows, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. As she asked distractedly for Elizabeth to repeat herself, she couldn’t help but smile back and in the moment’s complicity, she knew that her heart was lost.

Over the following weeks, Edmund joined Violet and Elizabeth in their outings with cousins and friends, Mrs Lyne accepting their plans as long as the young people were in a large group, thereby playing chaperone to each other.

‘Mother goes on the principle of “safety in numbers”.’ Elizabeth said, drawing up yet another long list of guests to join them for a country walk and picnic. Violet had noticed that however much the list varied, one name, Titus Emory, was always included, and that Elizabeth and he would often conspire to sit next to each other when dining or to share a boat when on the river. Far from feeling abandoned by her friend, Violet rejoiced in the opportunities it gave her to talk relatively privately with Edmund. They had become easy in each other’s company at home, as the family played cards together or entertained one another at the piano in the evenings; but the conversation then was light and general and Violet longed for the more personal discussions that she and Edmund shared when they could. They had exchanged opinions on music and books, Edmund playing her Chopin’s nocturnes and lending her his well-thumbed copy of poems by Yeats, which she loved and discussed with him at length. They had moved through personal anecdotes about school and university to confidences on deeper matters. Edmund told her of his belief that the old order must change, and his interest in the law as an instrument of reform to deal with working-class poverty, before social turmoil should get out of hand. Violet confided her worry about her mother and her frustration at being powerless to use her education or to affect anything beyond her own home.

For the latest outing, Elizabeth had invited a mixed group of ten and decided that they should motor out into the countryside. Violet, hopeful of some good views, took her camera with her. After parking and walking half a mile, the men carrying the wicker hampers and the ladies the rugs, they settled on a spot under an ash tree overlooking pasture, with a small stream leading into woods and in the distance the glitter of the sea. After picnicking, some of the party wanted to walk further and some to simply loll and enjoy the view. Elizabeth and Titus stayed behind for a few minutes and then strolled down to the stream; Violet and Edmund sat on, chatting, surrounded by rumpled rugs and tablecloths strewn with spirit lamp and kettle, hard-boiled eggs and Dundee cake.

‘If you could do anything at all with your life,’ Edmund said, lying back with his hands behind his head, ‘what would you do?’

‘Anything at all? Do you mean regardless of the fact that I’m a woman?’ Violet asked dryly.

Edmund looked up into the green and blue of leaves and sky above him. ‘Anything.’

‘Travel,’ Violet said, hugging her knees and looking out at the distant line of the sea. ‘I’d explore and take wonderful pictures of Alps and ice floes and … Oh, I don’t know … temples and pyramids, desert sands … I’d like to capture it all and bring it back for others to see.’

Edmund sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her with interest. ‘What would you do with all the pictures?’

‘Publish them,’ Violet said seriously. ‘Sell them to magazines like the National Geographic.’ She paused and fiddled with the fringe of the rug, waiting for Edmund to laugh. ‘I suppose you’ll think me a suffragette now,’ she made light of it. ‘Just a silly dream, I know.’

‘Not silly at all,’ Edmund said. ‘I think it’s rather admirable,’ and he leant across and took her hand. He said in a low voice, ‘I wish we could see them together,’ and lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.

Violet, her heart quickening, looked into his eyes and saw that he was regarding her tenderly. What did he mean? Surely he couldn’t be toying with her; his expression was full of hope, as though he had spoken from the heart and now waited for her reply. The sound of voices reached them as Titus and Elizabeth made their way back, Elizabeth teasing Titus about his unending appetite for tea and cake.

‘I … I should like that,’ Violet said quickly as he relinquished her hand. Then, made bold by a heady rush of joy, she said, ‘And you, what would you do with your life if you could do anything at all?’

Elizabeth was calling to her, ‘Do we have more matches for the spirit lamp? Titus says I’ve talked at him so much I’ve made him thirsty.’ Violet held up the matches, knelt up and smoothed out the cloth and started setting out the tea things.

As the others reached them and flopped down, Edmund leant close to her and said, ‘I would take you to all of those places,’ and Violet bent her head to measure tea from the caddy into the pot, to hide her face from the others.

Elizabeth took off her hat and fanned herself with it. ‘Do you think the weather’s set fair for a few days, Titus?’ she asked.

‘Mmm, I should say so,’ Titus said, cutting himself a good wedge of fruitcake. ‘For the rest of the week at least.’

‘Then our garden party will be on Saturday,’ Elizabeth announced. ‘We can invite everybody: the cousins, our set from school, Edmund’s set of officer types.’ She lit the spirit lamp under the kettle.

‘Hold on, old girl, don’t go overboard with the numbers – in particular no need for too many officer types,’ Titus said. ‘Your mother might not want too much brouhaha.’

‘Nonsense, Mother’s a dear and you know I wouldn’t choose any other tennis partner than you.’

Titus said, ‘Ah, well, in that case …’ and looked mollified.

‘If it stays fine we can have dancing in the open air in the evening as we did last year. What do you think, Edmund?’

‘I think that would be perfectly splendid,’ Edmund said, looking straight at Violet.

On Saturday, the long sloping lawns beneath the cedars and elms were mowed and rolled. The horse pulling the contraptions had its hooves clad in leather overshoes to achieve a smooth, undented finish, although, as Edmund pointed out, the undulating nature of the ground always added an interesting dimension to ball sports, however much one rolled it. The formal gardens were tidied: hedges neatened, paths raked, the rambling roses around the arbour trimmed. Tables and chairs were brought outside and placed in groups under bright awnings and trestle tables with starched white cloths were laden with lemonade and ginger beer.

By four o’clock, the party was in full swing. Older guests, aunts and mothers chatted in the shade or strolled sedately around the grounds while children chased hoops or stood in line to climb through the great split trunk of the oldest cedar tree to jump down into the arms of obliging uncles. The young people had voted for tennis rather than croquet and the grass court on the least bumpy stretch of ground beside the shrubbery had been newly marked out and the net strung up. Despite Lucien Hilliard, a boisterous but conversationally inept young man, importuning Violet to partner him, Violet had sat out for the first few games, pleading the heat as an excuse. Edmund, as host, had held back until all the guests who wanted a game had played, but then, in the late afternoon, deftly suggested that the heat was waning and swept Violet into a game before Lucien could say anything more.

Violet and Edmund were playing Elizabeth and Titus, who were winning with panache: Titus having a powerful serve and Elizabeth a fiercely competitive streak.

‘You’re not trying hard enough, Edmund!’ she called out to her brother as the ball hit a bump in the ground and flew off at an impossible angle.

‘Oh come on, ’Lizbeth, no one could have reached that.’

Elizabeth smirked.

‘Forty-love,’ Titus said loudly, sweating and red in the face. He positioned himself to serve again and bounced the ball impatiently in front of him.

Edmund and Violet exchanged a smile. Violet settled her hat more firmly on her head and gathered her skirts in one hand, ready to return the serve. Titus threw high and hit the ball with such force that Violet had to duck. She turned to see Edmund running backwards in an effort to keep the ball in play. Swiping wildly at it, he missed his footing on the uneven ground, scrambled backwards, and finally sat down with a thump, pulling a clownish expression. Violet, overcome by laughter, subsided to her knees and the ball bounced away into the shrubbery behind them.

‘Game!’ Titus and Elizabeth shouted at the same time. Titus raised his fists in a ridiculous overplayed gesture of triumph and Elizabeth threw her racquet in the air and caught it, which made Violet turn to Edmund and laugh even more. She got up and ran to help him look for the lost ball. They pushed through the thick stand of bushes and trees and moved deeper into the gloom, Edmund sweeping away the twiggy undergrowth and last year’s fallen leaves with his racquet. Spotting the ball at the same time, they both stooped to retrieve it and bumped into one another. Edmund put out his hand to help her up and mumbled an awkward apology but as they rose, his eyes were already searching hers. Violet knew with sudden certainty that he wanted to kiss her and, even more disturbingly, that she wanted to be kissed. From the court beyond, the sound of slow hand-clapping and calls of ‘Play on!’ and ‘New game!’ reached them. Her hand trembling, she picked up the ball and gave it to Edmund.

As they turned to go back to the game, Edmund said urgently, ‘I need to be able to talk to you alone, properly. Sometime this evening do you think we could slip away?’

Violet barely had time to nod before they broke free of the bushes and out into view of the cheering audience.

As they played on, she felt aware of her body in a new way: how it moved, the strength of her muscles, her youth and vigour, and of Edmund: sensing exactly where he stood behind her, the degree of closeness as he moved forwards and back with the play, as if they were each surrounded by force fields that fizzed and sizzled as they touched. When the game finally ended, she and Edmund had made up ground and Elizabeth congratulated them on ‘a much more creditable third set’ as hands were shaken over the net. They retired to deck chairs to watch others playing. Lucien appeared at Violet’s elbow bearing a tray with elderflower jellies and lemonade so that she was obliged to listen to a long and tiresome commentary on further games until she could decently withdraw with the other ladies to rest for an hour before dressing for the evening.

‘I shan’t let you go before you promise me the first dance,’ Lucien insisted, and Violet had to agree gracefully.

Later, when Violet had rested and bathed, instead of ringing for Elizabeth’s maid, she dressed herself with great care, choosing her pale lilac, an evening frock with tiered layers of flimsy lawn. She turned back and forth in front of the cheval mirror by the window to see how it would accentuate her movements when she danced. Tonight, she wanted everything to be perfect.

As she opened the domed lid of her Noah’s Ark trunk to search for her best ivory evening comb, there was the tiniest tap on the door. Thinking it was Elizabeth, and with her head in the depths of the trunk, she called out, ‘Come in,’ but no one entered. She found the comb and put it on her dressing table; then she went to the door. There was nobody there. A row of closed doors stretched the length of the landing and the sweeping stairs at the end were deserted. From other rooms, faint noises of girlish voices, running water and clinking china suggested that others were rising but there was no sign of the person who had knocked, not even the distant footsteps of a disappearing maid in the hall below. As she stepped back to close the door, she glanced down and saw on the floor, pale against the rich reds and blues of the silk hall runner, a beautiful corsage: a perfect cream rose and two tiny buds against a wisp of maidenhair fern. Delicately, she picked it up and took it inside. Turning it in her hands, she found that there was a tiny scrap of paper behind the pin. She took it to the window to decipher the minute lettering and read:

For a glimmering girl …

She instantly recognised it as Yeats and knew it was from Edmund. She called to mind the verse from the mysterious poem:

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Flushing with pleasure, she hid the note in her jewellery case and pinned the flower carefully to her dress, the heady champagne of hope rising in her that Edmund meant this as a precursor to a declaration. Her heart quickened; it must be tonight. He knew that she was to stay with the family only a few days longer. He had said that he wanted to speak to her alone …

There was a brisk knock at the door and Elizabeth bustled in, resplendent in pale blue silk. ‘Are you nearly ready? Didn’t Mary come to do your hair? Shall I help you with it?’ She was fizzing with excitement. ‘Aha,’ she said, noticing Violet’s corsage, ‘I see you have an admirer.’

Violet, still half in her dream world of anticipation, visibly jumped in alarm. ‘Sorry?’

‘I see Lucien continues to pursue you at every turn,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes, Lucien,’ Violet said faintly. ‘He’s a little overwhelming, don’t you think?’ She sat obediently at the dressing table and let Elizabeth tackle her hair.

Elizabeth brushed it smartly until it became flyaway and static, talking nineteen to the dozen all the time. ‘Lucien is rather pressing, I must admit, and when it comes to dancing he’s got two left feet, but he’s clearly rather taken with you so don’t be too hard on him, poor boy. He was positively dogging your heels this afternoon, wasn’t he?’ She wound and pinned strands of Violet’s hair up into a soft arrangement of piled twists, and held it there while Violet anchored it in place with the ivory comb. ‘If he gets too much for you, Edmund or I can always rescue you,’ she said. ‘Edmund’s quite a good dancer. Well, I taught him actually, so at least he can waltz without tripping you up or standing on your dress.’ She teased out a wisp or two at Violet’s temples. ‘There, you’ll do,’ she said, picking up her gloves and handing them to her. ‘Shall we go down?’

As they passed through the hallway, thumps and male voices came from the music room where some of the young men were rolling back the carpet in case it should rain and the party be forced to come indoors. Outside, Edmund and his young cousin, Samuel, were carrying the gramophone between them. Violet, suddenly shy, hung back behind Elizabeth. The men set the machine down on a table, its brass trumpet gleaming in the hazy evening light. Immediately, the young men and women gathered round, pulling out records from leather carrying cases, peering at titles and exclaiming over their favourites. Edmund took charge, winding the handle and carefully placing the needle. The strains of ‘Dreaming’ wavered into the still air, the tenor voice lifting over the sweet sound of the strings as the music poured out and over the velvet lawns to lose itself in the trees and formal gardens beyond.

‘This is for our hostess,’ Edmund said. His mother looked pleased as his father stepped out and took her hand to lead the first dance. For the first few bars they danced alone, Mr Lyne ramrod straight with his chin held high, Mrs Lyne with a long-fringed shawl elegantly draped around her shoulders. Then others followed and the space between the great trees filled with moving figures, chattering voices and bursts of laughter as the twirling couples circled in a river of pale silks and evening suits.

Edmund was explaining the operation of the gramophone to Samuel so that he could take over. Violet hovered at the edge of the dancing crowd, beginning to despair as, one after another, friends of Elizabeth asked her to write their names on her dance card. She saw Edmund look towards her and his expression softened but then Lucien was beside her, saying, ‘I trust you wrote me in for this first one as promised?’ and whisking her into the dance.

As she danced with a succession of young men who led her rather over-enthusiastically and asked her the same set of predictable questions, to which she gave polite but less enthusiastic answers, she looked for Edmund. She feared that, as the son of the household, he might feel obliged to dance with every relative who was left sitting out a while but there was no sign of him among the dancers. He was no longer at the gramophone; neither could she see him in the groups gathered around the tables where refreshments were laid out: poached salmon and game terrine, cordials and champagne.

By the time Lucien returned and claimed his second dance, the shadows were deepening under the trees, stretching across the lawns like the fingers of long black evening gloves, and Violet felt taut with anxiety.

In the middle of the throng, Edmund suddenly appeared and tapped Lucien on the arm. He pointed over to the trees, saying, ‘Do excuse me, but as Miss Walter is interested in matters of illumination, through her photography, I think she might enjoy lighting-up time.’ Before Lucien could remonstrate, he had taken Violet in his arms and danced her away, moving lightly and swiftly with the flow of the crowd but guiding her expertly between the dancers so that as the music finished they found themselves at the edge and stepped out as if alighting from a carousel.

He placed her hand on his arm and walked her away from the milling crowd and over to the nearest cedar where Violet saw that under the spreading hands of the branches Chinese lanterns had been tied: white papery spheres, waiting to be lit, they hung like huge fruits.

‘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.