Candlelight

Fergus O'Connell

Description

If you’ve ever had a love affair – remember what it was like.

Autumn, 1914. Clara, a passionate young London wife and the mother of two small girls, is married to Henry, who she discovers is having an affair. Clara too has fallen in love with someone else – James, a divorced man who works at the Foreign Office. When both men enlist and go off to the front, Clara must wait fearfully to see which, if either of them, will return from the fighting.

 Meanwhile, the inept politicians who allowed the war to start are replaced by the inept generals, and so the war drags on with huge loss of life. It looks as though Clara has lost her chance for happiness. Can she find the courage for one last desperate attempt to make her dreams come true?

Sujets

• Literature
• Historical fiction
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783081899
• Langue: English

Extrait

CANDLELIGHT
CANDLELIGHT
Part 4 of The Four Lights Quartet
FERGUS O’CONNELL
Candlelight
THAMES RIVER PRESS An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC) Another imprint of WPC is Anthem Press ( www.anthempress.com ) First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by THAMES RIVER PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road London SE1 8HA
www.thamesriverpress.com
© Fergus O’Connell 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78308-201-8
This title is also available as an eBook
For Kim Shotola
“If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes”
—Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
Author’s Note
I n 1914 in Central Europe, there was a political entity known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today’s Austria was a part of that empire. For simplicity, throughout this book, I have referred to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as simply ‘Austria’ and anything related to it as being ‘Austrian’.
Chapter 1 Wednesday 23 December 1914
I t has been a hundred and seventy three days since Clara Kenton, née Jordan, last had sex. That’s if you mean sex with somebody other than herself – which is what she means.
She hurries through a dark, smoky, bitingly cold, November evening to her assignation. The bitter and acrid London air makes her eyes water. And that is not the only part of her that is wet. Clara is damp with excitement. She wears her heavy winter coat, a thick scarf, gloves and boots and these are just about enough to keep out the cold. She carries an overnight bag because she is going to stay at a hotel. She hasn’t stayed at a hotel since her honeymoon.
It has all been arranged very hurriedly. And messily. Not the way Clara likes her life to be, at all. She hopes it won’t come back to haunt her. James’ telegram arrived yesterday evening just after Mrs Parsons, the housekeeper, had left. It said that James would have a twenty four hour pass and asked if she could meet him. He could be in London by late afternoon.
Clara didn’t hesitate. She bundled up the girls in their coats and went round to Mrs Parsons. An old friend from Clara’s schooldays was going to be in London for just one night and Clara wanted to meet up with her, staying overnight in London. Could Mrs Parsons stay with the girls?
It was such a thin story. But mainly it was so out of character for Clara. She could see that Mrs Parsons didn’t believe her. But the older woman was happy to oblige nonetheless. Mrs Parsons loved the girls and took any opportunity to be with them.
A combination of guilt and trying to demonstrate that the story was true had kept Clara at home until the first smell of dusk was in the air but then she couldn’t restrain herself any longer. Kissing and hugging each of the girls and with a ‘see you in the morning’ to Mrs Parsons, Clara took her overnight bag and was soon walking down Horn Lane in the gathering gloom.
She feels a bit like a prostitute. There is something of a Jack the Ripperish air about what she is doing and this causes her to shiver and feel excited at the same time. She doesn’t know, but she imagines there must be prostitutes who do as she is doing right now. Of course she knows about the thousands of women who ply their trade on the streets but it has to be true, she reasons, that there is another class of woman. A sort-of upper class. These are women – she imagines – who charge an awful lot of money for their services and who are incredibly confident about what they do.
Clara reckons that she is incredibly competent at sex. Even though it has been such a long time and even though sex with her husband has been anything but extraordinary, Clara remembers how self-confident she was on her wedding night. It was as though all her assurance, her self-esteem, her view of herself got channelled down to that one act. To her surprise, rather than thrilling her new husband Henry, it unmanned him so much that it took him several months before he was able to achieve an erection.
She feels that same self-assurance now, and she has no fears about the effect it will have this time. She is confident about her lover, James. She has seen how joining the Army has brought that quiet self-confidence he always possessed out into the open. How she wishes with all her heart that there was no war and that he didn’t have to go. But she can’t help thinking how there seem to be very few things in life that are all bad – that don’t bring with them some element of good. Of course, Clara knows that it is because she is so happy that she would think this.
Clara has long loved the paintings of Atkinson Grimshaw and tonight, not for the first time, she feels she is the woman in such a painting. The dark cold air that she moves through feels almost liquid rather than gaseous. It is tobacco-coloured, so that the points or slabs of golden lamplight look warm and inviting. But nowhere near as inviting as what she pictures is waiting for her when she gets to Claridge’s.
James is in the lobby, eyes fixed on the front door and his face breaks into a smile when he sees her. He stubs out his cigarette in the nearest ashtray and hurries to her as she comes towards him. He had offered to meet her at the Bond Street Tube station but she hadn’t been sure what time she would get away and she didn’t want to miss him in the evening crowds. This had seemed like a more sensible choice.
James is about five foot ten with brown hair and green eyes. She thinks he looks terribly handsome in uniform.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asks.
She shakes her head. Her face and eyes are tingling from the cold.
‘I’m not that hungry,’ she replies. ‘Maybe later.’
Clara is hungry. But not for food.
She is quite overwhelmed by the sumptuous interior of the hotel, but doesn’t say anything, trying to give the impression that she is quite used to this kind of thing.
‘So let’s go upstairs and you can unpack,’ says James, catching her eye and smiling.
‘Unpack this ?’ she laughs, holding up the tiny weekend case that was part of a set her father gave her when she got married. Clara sometimes thinks ruefully about that present. He must have thought she’d travel the world.
Their room has a vast bed, a wardrobe and a dressing table. The gas lamps are turned low so that the room has a honey tinge. The yellow and coral of a fire burns brightly in the grate. All the fittings and furnishings look far more expensive than anything Clara has ever seen before. She had wondered what would happen once they got to the room and I too, have been wondering, dear reader – because it is my intention that this book begin – just as did its predecessor – with a sex scene.
There are a number of problems with this. The most obvious one is the number of bad sex scenes that get written. But there are other problems. A fairly standard approach is that the scene begins with the participants undressing each other. If the writer is a man – as in this case – the focus is generally on how the woman undresses or is undressed. And with a book set in modern times then, there is no great problem. To put it simply – everybody knows what lies beneath.
So – the outer clothing is generally dispensed with fairly quickly. It’s cursory – or is that perfunctory, as Clara wondered (and never successfully resolved) on the night of 27 June 1914? After that, the next decision to be made is probably whether there are stockings or no stockings. If it’s stockings, then they can stay on or come off à la Anne Bancroft in The Graduate . And then it’s a pretty straightforward bra first and then panties or (the slightly kinkier) leave the bra on and take the panties off.
With a story set in 1914, things are far less clear. Bras have only just been invented. That piece of brilliance is generally credited to Sigmund Lindauer, a German, who developed a bra for mass production in 1912 and patented it in 1913. Corsets had been the thing up until then but as soon as the First World War began, metal was needed for munitions and weapons and so Herr Lindauer was one of those lucky entrepreneurs who ‘caught the wave’. (And proving once again Clara’s theory: nothing is totally bad, not even World War One.)
Sorry – I digress. My digression could have been worse though. I could have also spoken about the myth that it was a man called Otto Titzling (’tit sling’ – gettit?) who developed the bra and who is commemorated in that great Bette Midler song in the movie, Beaches . However, I’m not going to do that because I really need to get back to the issues confronting both myself and Clara as she finds herself in the room that James has booked for their night together. (I would also hope