‘Why was that?’
‘Because…’ She sighed. ‘Because my grandmother didn’t particularly like me. We had nothing in common.’
‘But you seem very likeable to me.’
‘She disliked my mother, really, and so she disliked me too, by extension. My mother was from a very different… walk of life.’ Louisa had never really confided this to anyone before, but it seemed completely natural to tell him. ‘My father’s parents were wealthy – from an old French family. They owned a chateau near Clermont L’Hérault. My mother’s family, on the other hand, were just simple farm workers from the South Downs. My French grandmother never got over the shame of it. She used to call them les péquenauds. It means serfs.’
‘She sounds delightful.’
‘She was disappointed in her ambitions. She’d envisaged a far more illustrious match for my father. And someone far more glamorous and self-assured for a granddaughter.’
Robert stumbled and she put out a hand to steady him.
‘Sorry! I’m not paying attention properly,’ she said. ‘Are you all right? Perhaps we should stop.’
‘No, this is heavenly.’
They went on, she taking extra care to warn him of the low branches: he startled by any unexpected contact or sound.
‘What do you look like?’ he asked.
‘I‘ve got red hair and grey eyes. My granny had red hair too, but mine’s darker. People say I look Scottish or Irish. I’m nothing like my father – he’s dark. Perhaps his mother didn’t believe I was really his, and that’s why she didn’t take to me. At any rate I think she found my red hair a bit of an impertinence, not quite dignified.’
He laughed. ‘It’s curious,’ he said. ‘All the people I’ve met since going blind have no faces,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to feel one can ever really connect with them and know them. Except for you, somehow…’
She felt her heart falter.
‘You must miss your granny awfully,’ he said.
‘I do.’
They walked along in silence for a while, then:
‘There’s a folly!’ she cried as they emerged into a clearing. ‘It’s covered in ivy. It’s meant to be a temple, I think – Greek or Roman. It has columns and there’s moss all around it.’ It must have been knocked down to make way for the recycling plant. What a pity, she thought.
‘Are the columns just at the front or all the way around?’ he asked.
She investigated. ‘Four columns at the front.’
‘Roman, then.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ she laughed.
‘Years of Latin and Greek drummed into me by crusty old schoolmasters with coffin breath. It’s one of the downsides of being a chap. I say, you wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?’
‘I don’t smoke. And neither should you. It isn’t good for you. You’ll get cancer.’
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘I… I just heard that somewhere,’ she said, seeing again that she would have to be careful what she said. For how could she possibly tell him the truth? He’d suffered enough already, and she wanted to help him, not burden him with even more insane things. He’d think she was crazy and never let her come near him again.
‘I don’t believe it. And anyway, the good old British Tommy wouldn’t be able to make it through this war without his smokes.’
She led him to the stone steps of the folly, and they sat down.
‘How much can you see?’ she asked.
‘I can tell it’s lighter just here. And there’s sort of a rippling over there.’ He pointed with a shaky hand. ‘It must be where the light is catching the leaves.’
‘Exactly right. You still have your artist’s eye.’
‘You haven’t told me why you’re at Coldbrook Hall,’ he said. ‘Would it be terribly rude of me to ask?’
‘I fell and dented my head.’
‘That sounds jolly painful.’
‘It was a bit. But I’m recovering now.’
‘Will you go back to studying medicine?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely. Being a doctor is all I’ve ever wanted.’
‘To follow in your father’s footsteps?’
She paused. ‘Partly, although I wouldn’t have admitted that even to myself until quite recently. I hoped he would be proud of me, I suppose.’
‘And he isn’t?’
She scratched around on the ground with a stick. ‘No. It doesn’t mean a thing to him.’
‘Well it ought to. It’s clear you’re going to make a fine doctor; you have a passion for it. Of course, it’s difficult for men of your father’s generation to accept women in the professions, and I know that many – probably most – of my contemporaries would feel the same way. But the war’s changing things. Women are keeping the entire country going. I never did support Mrs Pankhurst’s suffragette mob, what with all their window smashing and arson, but I wholeheartedly support votes for women. How can women possibly be denied the vote now?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s inevitable. And about time.’
He pulled at a plant growing nearby. ‘I say, you will come back, won’t you? To see me, I mean. Even if they discharge you?’
‘Of course I will,’ she said. ‘There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.’
He smiled. ‘Nor I.’
She tried to probe gently about his experiences in the war, hoping to discover something of what had led to his breakdown, but he clammed up, attempted to turn the conversation back to her, or asked her to describe to him the things around them.
‘Next time we’ll have to bring a picnic,’ he said, later on. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Me too. There’s a blackberry bush just over there. Some look ripe enough to eat. Stay there and I’ll pick us some.’
But before she could even get up, there was the sudden sound of feet and two women emerged from between the bushes – a nurse in white, and a younger woman in a light-blue dress, white apron and headdress. Louisa froze.
‘Here you are, lieutenant! Thank goodness. We’ve been searching everywhere,’ said the older, and presumably more senior, of the two. ‘What in heaven’s name are you doing all the way out here?’