The Dust That Falls From Dreams
ALSO BY LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
Fiction
The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman
Corelli’s Mandolin
Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World
Red Dog
Birds Without Wings
A Partisan’s Daughter
Notwithstanding
Poetry
Imagining Alexandria
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Louis de Bernières
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2015.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
de Bernières, Louis.
The dust that falls from dreams : a novel / Louis de Bernières.
pages;
ISBN 978-1-101-94648-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-101-94649-7 (eBook).
I. Title.
PR6054.E132D87 2015 823′.914—DC23 2015011829
eBook ISBN 9781101946497
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design by Oliver Munday
v4.1
a
Dis Manibus; sit vobis terra levis
In memory of my grandmother’s first fiancé,
Pte Howell Ashbridge Godby HAC
Died of wounds received at Kemmel, 19/2/15
If not for his death, I would have had no life.
The Lad Out There
Oh, Powers of Love, if still you lean
Above a world so black with hate,
Where yet – as it has ever been –
The loving heart is desolate,
Look down upon the lad I love,
(My brave lad, tramping through the mire) –
I cannot light his welcoming fire,
Light Thou the stars for him above!
Now nights are dark and mornings dim,
Let him in his long watching know
That I too count the minutes slow
And light the lamp of love for him.
The sight of death, the sleep forlorn,
The old homesickness vast and dumb –
Amid these things, so bravely borne,
Let my long thoughts about him come.
I see him in the weary file;
So young he is, so dear to me,
With ever-ready sympathy
And wistful eyes and cheerful smile.
However far he travels on,
Thought follows, like the willow-wren
That flies the stormy seas again
To lands where her delight is gone.
Whatever he may be or do
While absent far beyond my call,
Bring him, the long day’s march being through,
Safe home to me some evenfall!
Mary Webb
Contents
Cover
Also by Louis de Bernières
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Coronation Party
2. Edwardians
3. Rosie Remembers
4. In Which Ashbridge Attempts to Comfort Rosie
5. Hamilton McCosh Holds Forth in the Athenaeum
6. Millicent (1)
7. Now God Be Thanked Who Has Matched us with His Hour
8. A Letter to His Majesty
9. A Letter from the Palace
10. Rosie Remembers the Gypsy
11. Ash Makes his Farewells
12. And the Worst Friend and Enemy Is But Death
13. Daniel Pitt to his Mother (1)
14. Rosie
15. Daniel Pitt to his Mother (2)
16. The Red Sweet Wine of Youth (1)
17. Rosie Waiting in Eltham (1)
18. Still May Time Hold Some Golden Space
19. Rosie Waiting in Eltham (2)
20. The Red Sweet Wine of Youth (2)
21. Rosie’s Poem, 6 February 1915, First Draft
22. The Red Sweet Wine of Youth (3)
23. One Morning
24. Naught Broken Save this Body (1)
25. Rosie in St John’s (1)
26. Naught Broken Save this Body (2)
27. Rosie in St John’s (2)
28. Safe Though All Safety’s Lost
29. I Have Need to Busy my Heart with Quietude
30. The Volunteer
31. Relics
32. The Clothes
33. Daniel Pitt to Rosie
34. Spikey
35. News
36. Hutch (1)
37. Millicent (2)
38. Two Paschal Letters
39. An Interruptor
40. Now that April’s Here
41. The Harmony of the Wires
42. The Telephone (1)
43. Autographs
44. The Metamorphosis of Mrs McCosh (1)
45. The Metamorphosis of Mrs McCosh (2)
46. The Metamorphosis of Mrs McCosh (3)
47. Daniel Pitt to his Mother (3)
48. Hutch (2)
49. Rosie Waiting for the Cats’ Meat Man
50. Daniel Makes an Impression
51. My Heart Is Sick with Memories
52. Captain Pitt’s Dream
53. Captain Fairhead Proposes an Outing
54. The Drunk
55. The Rescue
56. The Séance
57. Daniel and Ottilie
58. Christabel and Gaskell
59. The AC Six
60. Rosie and Fairhead
61. Rosie and Daniel at the Tarn
62. Gaskell and Christabel at the Tarn
63. The Interview
64. Madame Valentine
65. The Curate
66. The Proposal
67. Wondrous Things
68. Daniel in the Squadron Leader’s Den
69. The Telephone (2)
70. Ottilie and Mr McCosh
71. A Kindness
72. My Soul Calls to Yours
73. The Day
74. Nuptials
75. Archie’s Letter to Daniel
76. Consummation
77. Champignonne
78. A Lady Maid
79. Kalopsia
80. The Toasting
81. The Dancing
82. Millicent and Dusty Miller
83. The Troglodyte
84. Ultimatum
85. Conversation in the Pavilion
86. Daniel’s Last Binge
87. Here’s to the Boys
88. Henley Motorcycles
89. Gaskell and Daniel
90. Daniel at the Gates of Death
91. Millicent’s Interview
92. The Incident
93. Mr Hamilton McCosh Learns a Lesson
94. The Spring Clean
95. The Interview with Mr McCosh
96. Tea at the Fairhead’s
97. A Letter from Willy and Fritzl
98. The Letter to Mme Pitt
99. Daniel and Mme Pitt
100. The Intervention of Mme Pitt
101. Ottilie
102. The Clonking
103. A Letter to Gaskell
10
4. Young Edward
105. A New Beginning
106. Et in Arcadia Nos (1)
107. Et in Arcadia Nos (2)
Acknowledgements
1
The Coronation Party
This was the day that Daniel vaulted the wall.
Not many weeks previously the tiny Queen had begun to lose her appetite. In Marseilles, President Kruger of South Africa, fleeing into exile laden with wealth stolen from his own people, raised the rabble to new frenzies of anti-Britishness, and hotels where British travellers were thought to be staying were besieged.
The Queen grew drowsy. She had never before shown any lapse of energy or attention, but now she nodded off even at crucial moments. She received a letter from a boy bugler in the Devons, telling her how he had been the one to sound the charge at Waggon Hill, and she managed to reply to it.
The Queen travelled from London to Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. She loved it there, and had long considered it to be her real family home. She had her own little beach with a bathing hut, and there was a miniature house where her children, now scattered across Europe, used to play when Albert was still alive. Across the Solent she could visit the vast military hospital that she had set up at Netley, bringing the scarves that she liked to knit for the wounded soldiers.
The Queen found that she could not speak when the Brazilian ambassador came to present his credentials. She was forgetting how to talk. She failed to recognise Lord Roberts when he returned in triumph from South Africa in order to become the new Commander-in-Chief. He was bewildered and grief-stricken.
The Queen performed her last great imperial act, and proclaimed the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia. Her visit to the Riviera was cancelled, and the Keeper of the Privy Purse was obliged to pay out £800 in compensation to the Hotel Cimiez.
It had been so long since the death of a sovereign that no one knew what to say, or how to behave. Lord Salisbury refused to talk about the accession ceremonies because it was too upsetting. The well-to-do cancelled their dinner parties and balls, and the frivolous optimism that had accompanied the arrival of a new century evaporated. It was January, and the dark clouds that wept rain onto the land complemented the mood of the people beneath them.
The Queen’s relatives and descendants converged on Osborne from all over Europe. In South Africa the war that was supposed to have been won already was carried on by Botha, Smuts and de Wet. Money and young men continued to be expended. The British troops were killed mainly by enteric fever.
The tiny Queen died. The Lord Mayor of London was informed, and then the rest of the world. Whilst the nation lay stunned, the Great argued about what should be done next. Lord Acton announced that King Edward VII could not call himself Edward VII because he was not descended from previous Edwards. Did the Lord Mayor of London count as an ex-officio member of the Privy Council? He decided that he did, and gatecrashed it. Who was in charge of the funeral? Was it the Lord Chamberlain or the Duke of Norfolk, even though he was a Catholic? The Duke insisted on his historic right, and the King conceded. Lady Cadogan received an invitation to the interment that was intended for her husband, in which she was requested to come wearing trousers.
The Queen’s coffin was so minute that it might have been that of a child. King Edward and the Kaiser walked behind it as it was drawn through Cowes. It came across the Solent in a battleship, flanked by the greatest fleet in the world. In London the route from Victoria Station to Buckingham Palace then Paddington Station was blocked solid with mourners hoping to see the great procession of the gun carriage. Behind it rode King Edward, flanked by the Duke of Connaught and Kaiser Wilhelm, followed by the handsome and slim Crown Prince of Germany, the embodiment of hope for his nation, the guarantor of its great future as a beacon of civilisation.
The Queen’s body was laid to rest at Windsor. The grandmother of Europe had gone, and everyone knew as if by instinct that a momentous era had suddenly ended. She left behind railways that ran at sixty miles an hour, with carriages that nowadays had roofs on them. Vast liners crossed the Atlantic in two weeks. Bull-baiting had gone, and there was a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals and another for the prevention of cruelty to children. Swearing had become taboo in polite society, and aristocratic men no longer got so drunk at dinner parties that ladies had to make their escape through the windows. There were now aerated bread shops, and Lyons Corner Houses where one was served by ‘Nippies’ in white frilly aprons. Anybody these days could buy coffee. The River Fleet was no longer an open sewer. Many had electric light, and there was clean water laid on in the working-class districts for half an hour every day, except for Sundays, causing an awful elbowing on Saturdays. Motor cars no longer caught fire when you started them up. They had, however, spoiled the evening drive in hansoms through Hyde Park. The cult of respectability had introduced a blessed order into people’s lives, and at the same time opened the door for marvellous hypocrisy.
Much as the people had loved their tiny Queen, there had been something dull about all that respectability, and the grief and stupefaction that had engulfed her subjects was tempered by the anticipation of something that might be more entertaining. The new King was a bon viveur. He loved France rather than Germany. He consorted with actresses. For the last ten years, in any case, the Victorian age had already been slipping away. Fast girls smoked, and wore the most shocking bloomers when they went out on their bicycles. Businesswomen of dubious morality were getting jobs in the City. Saddlers who specialised in sidesaddles found their orders drying up. Crowds filled the music halls to hear smutty songs rendered by cheeky chappies and saucy doxies.
The new King, kept strictly in the dark about state matters during his mother’s reign, grew impatient with precedent and forged a new path. He upset everyone at court. He gave the right to organise his coronation to the Catholic Duke of Norfolk and not to the Anglican Lord Chamberlain. There was a long and bitter dispute about whether the Lords should be robed, and the decision was changed four times. He sent Lord Carrington, a notorious liberal, as his personal envoy to France, Spain and Portugal. This was the same Lord Carrington who had once, as one of a panel of magistrates that had tried him, scandalously paid the fine of a newly released convict, caught sleeping rough when he had not been able to walk to High Wycombe before darkness fell. The alternative had been several more months in prison, and Carrington had resigned from the bench immediately afterwards, saying that if this was justice he wanted nothing more to do with it.
The King dragged Lord Wolsey from retirement, and sent him abroad, with sashes and medals to present to foreign potentates, even the Shah of Iran, who thereby became the first Muslim to become a member of the Christian Order of the Garter. He cleared out his mother’s immense accumulation of bric-a-brac, updated his plumbing, filled his court with men who were interesting rather than important, and with women who were both interesting and beautiful.
In Court Road, Eltham, on 9 August 1902, Mr and Mrs Hamilton McCosh held a coronation party, postponed from June. It was to be a kind of elaborate high tea. They borrowed long trestles from several firms of wallpaperers, covered them with beautiful damask cloths, and, at greatly inflated prices, hired enough plain china plates and silver-plated cutlery to see them through the day. The servants set up two long tables in the garden, to accommodate the buffet, and laid out rugs all over the lawn and in the orchard in order to create a grand déjeuner sur l’herbe. Chairs were brought out of the house for the elderly or stiff of limb. From the kitchen there appeared plates of ham and tongue, elaborate salads in the French style, Normandy cheeses, and fabulous heaps of fresh Kentish strawberries and Devon cream. For the children there was lemonade, and for the adults jugs of potent fruit cup with sprigs of mint floating on the surface. Chilled champagne would be brought out in time for a toast to the King after Mr McCosh had made his speech.
This was the beginning of the age when riches would finally come to count as much as rank. Court Road co
nsisted of very large detached houses with substantial gardens at the rear. Most had two gateways connected by a small semicircular driveway out in the front so that carriages could arrive and leave without any awkward manoeuvring. The McCosh entrance and exit had impressive brick pillars with THE GRAMPIANS set into them in Portland stone. Between them ran a low wall, just the right height for children to walk along. Mr McCosh had planted a small walnut tree just behind it, because he loved the way the leaves turned yellow in autumn, and was convinced that walnut was the hardwood of the future, without thought to the possibility that long after his death the tree’s roots would topple the pillars and wall altogether, so that by the end of the century there would be no memory of the house ever having had a name at all.
Inside were large rooms with high ceilings and small coal fires. On the top floor were crudely furnished rooms with washstands for the servants, but on the floor below that there was a proper bathroom with a real lion-footed cast-iron bath that gave hot water from a boiler house attached to the side of the kitchen. In this boiler house was often to be found the boilerman, dozing in the warmth, or rolling cigarettes, and occasionally getting up to shovel in a new dose of coal. His was a life of bucolic idleness, disrupted only by the occasional breakdown of the whole system, which worked on the thermosyphon principle, without any need of a pump at all.
In general one could gauge the success of the householders of Court Road by the elaborateness of their cornices. Mr McCosh was an intelligent, charming, humane, ambitious, hard-working man with an eye to anything whatsoever that might turn a profit, and The Grampians had by far the most elaborate, extensive and delicate cornices of any house in Court Road. His chief weakness, which he was able to turn to profit even so, was an addiction to golf. He was often to be found playing rounds at the Blackheath when he was supposed to be in his London office.
One disadvantage of his speculations was that he might veer from fabulous riches to abject penury in the blink of an eye. He was accustomed to avoiding paying bills until such time as he recouped his wealth. This he always did, but it remained a sore point to the local tradesmen, who never knew when it was wise to accept his custom or decline it. Their one consolation was that he scrupulously calculated the interest on any debt he owed, and paid it in full.
On 9 August 1902 Mr Hamilton McCosh had plenty of money, it seemed unlikely that it was going to rain, and he was rejoicing in the pleasure of his own largesse.