Clay replied, “My father was a banker, not a farmer. He had no stomach for this kind of thing either, the coward.”
Lady Anne exchanged a few words with one of the hands. The worker nodded and led her along the shed. We followed to a lambing pen, where another farmhand was tending to a ewe. He clucked and stroked the ewe’s head.
Lady Anne said, “May we watch, Bart?”
“Of course, ma’am.” Bart was about sixty years old and was wearing suspenders and pants tucked into his boots. “She’s about ready to drop. Just a few moments now.”
The ewe was on her side, her head in Bart’s hand. A rear leg was raised slightly. The animal lowered her head to lick herself, then returned it to Bart’s ministrations. She bleated feebly.
“What’s going on here?” the general demanded.
“Here it comes,” Bart said. He reached down, prepared to help if needed.
“There’s the lamb’s head,” Lady Anne said. “Look, its eyes are already open.”
“You’re doing just fine,” Bart cooed. “There’s a doll.”
Fascinated, I leaned against a post at the edge of the pen. I had seen kittens being born, but nothing else. No mistake, it is a bizarre process. Out came this wet and slimy wad, not recognizable as anything alive or cherished.
Lady Anne said, “I visit the sheep station every season, and love to watch…” Her voice wavered. She touched away a tear. “And every time I recall chances lost, of how my life might have been different, perhaps children.”
Lady Anne Percival as a mother was not an image that easily formed.
The lamb lay on the straw. Already it was raising its head and trying to lift a front leg. The ewe stroked her newborn with her tongue, cleaning and nudging it. Bart beamed.
Lady Anne pursued her theme. “I’ve often thought that had I been born into a commoner’s family, or had my schooling been less rigid, or had I not chased off to the Continent, my life would have been more fulfilling.” She exhaled slowly. “Wilson, do you ever have second thoughts? Do you ever wonder about another life, one you chose not to live?” She turned away from the ewe and lamb, searching for his eyes.
General Clay had disappeared. I turned with her, looking for him, a bit alarmed. I seldom had him out of my sight and was not comfortable when he was. I followed her down the aisle, looking left and right. Our pace quickened.
We found him sitting on a bale, his face as white as the ewe’s wool. His mouth was slack and his eyes were fogged. He was panting. His voice was a weak tremolo. “Jack, it’s your goddamn job to make sure I don’t see things like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
He stood unsteadily, bracing himself against a pen gate. “I mean, Jesus, I signed up as a general, not an obstetrician.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lady Anne put her hand under his arm to support him. He leaned into her and let her lead him out of the sheep station. I walked after them, but I stepped in a pile of sheep dung and had to stop and scrape it off my shoe using a pen slat.
I caught up to them at the door. She was still holding his arm and was gazing up at him. Neither spoke. She smiled at him in a proprietary way. When he turned to her, I could see the chagrin on his face.
As we neared her car, she said, as sweetly as I ever heard her say anything, “What a big baby you are.”
So the sheep shed may have been where she began to love him. Or it may have been at the country home of Arthur Stedman, who was hosting a reception for General Alfred Alexander, commander in chief of Joint Army Operations. The home was Isselhurst Castle in Kent. Two red brick turrets rose above a random array of Elizabethan and Tudor buildings. The estate was surrounded by apple and cobnut trees and by one of the premier gardens in southern England.
The garden was strictly formal, with geometric enclosures and axial paths. The areas were named the East Courtyard, the Nuttery, the Spring Garden, and the Rose Garden and were planted so that each area was particularly resplendent during one season. At that time of year the Spring Garden was filled with hellebores, peonies, lilies, and pots of blue clematis. The finest in Kent, the gardens offered a reprieve from thoughts of the coming battle.
Lady Anne must have thought them competitors. My clearest memory of her startling beauty is from that evening. She had gone to extraordinary lengths, it seemed to me, to eclipse her surroundings, both the gardens and the other guests. Because of the war shortages of soap and perfumes and cosmetics, many English women thought it unpatriotic to bother with one’s appearance. Lady Anne defied that notion altogether.
That evening at General Alexander’s home she wore a black silk dress that flared in even a slight breeze, its folds marking her passage by languorously wafting behind her. The dress was gathered around her waist by a black eelskin belt. Suspended from her neck was a diamond that Alexander’s ADC told me was named the Christiana Star. She carried a clutch ornamented with black beads and a spray of diamonds. Her sable hair was pulled behind her neck by a black ribbon. Her shimmering green eyes stole the Christiana Star’s glory.
She and Generals Clay and Stedman had gathered at the bar in the Spring Garden. Stedman sipped a highball. Clay spoke with his hands behind his back. Across a narrow table from them, a bartender arranged glasses and utensils and bottles of liquor and seltzer, occasionally mixing a drink for a guest who approached and made a request.
Talking with Alexander’s ADC, I had wandered too far from General Clay. I crossed the grass toward them, passing Clement Attlee and Lord Lindley and his wife. General Sutton of Fighter Command and his American counterpart General Ward Wallace were talking in another corner of the Spring Garden.
This next happened quickly. As I neared General Clay, I heard him say, “I never lose an argument. My rank of general assures that.”
She smiled and said, “You lose quite every argument you have with me, Wilson.”
General Stedman pulled a pipe and a packet of tobacco from his jacket pocket. He chuckled, “Wilson, you don’t have the strength to win an argument with Lady Anne. I doubt anyone in the kingdom does.”
She nodded at Stedman for the compliment and persisted, “Doubtless you have an easy time with most people you meet, Wilson, because your rank allows you to dominate. I dare say that a quarrel among equals daunts you.”
“Such as this quarrel?” Clay asked, an edge in his voice.
“You have not had the need to develop wit or humor or the art of the polemic, not when you can yell at your inferiors, and thus end all discussion.”
Stedman’s eyebrows rose. This was an uncomfortable spat. He had just joined Lady Anne and General Clay and had not heard how it began. Neither had I. Stedman looked around for a gracious escape.
Clay lifted himself on his toes. “Lady Anne, your ignorance of battle tactics assures you will lose this argument.”
“Changing the subject is a desperate ploy on our bumbling American friend’s part, don’t you think, Arthur?”
Clay said, “Every commander knows there can never be too many projectiles in battle or in an argument.”
With that, General Clay swiftly reached across the table for a bottle of seltzer. He brought it up, aimed it by tilting it back, then squeezed the handle.
A jet of foaming seltzer shot out of the bottle’s spigot and instantly crossed to Lady Anne. Water surged onto her, entirely hiding her face, then cascading down over her dress and shoes. Clay kept his finger on the trigger, and the torrent flowed and flowed, drenching her and falling over her clothing to the lawn. Droplets splashed away, a few landing on General Stedman’s uniform sleeve. The bottle finally hissed, and the stream sputtered and bubbled to an end.
Lady Anne’s mouth was open and her hands were held away from her hips. Her hair was plastered flat against her skull. Water trickled off her cheeks and her nose and ears. Her makeup ran down her face. Her silk dress looked like a damp washrag, a shapeless mess. Her handbag was on the grass. She could not utter a word.