Five Sisters by JAMES FOX

Author:JAMES FOX
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

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Phyllis crossed the Atlantic in January 1917, risks and all, bringing Winkie. Of Peter, left at school, she wrote, “I don’t like putting the ocean between us.” She had written ahead to Bob Brand, who was back in England working for the Ministry of Munitions, asking if they could “meet quite naturally and without constraint. My visit to England will be greatly marred if we could not do that.” She knew this was almost impossible for Bob; that he would propose again; that she would refuse and then apologize, and that despite this, they would not break off relations. In this, she was applying the Langhorne rule, first laid down by Irene, never to let a beau off the hook. What’s more, she had come over to England to get married. “I do value your friendship very much and should hate to have it step out of my life,” she wrote. “You see reserved people are usually lonely and need friends that understand them, as I think you do understand me.”

They met and he proposed. She said the difficulties were too great. This time, Bob said they should never meet again. Phyllis wrote in the middle of February, “I shan’t write to you again, but just let me say now how deeply it hurts me to give you pain, I only wish I could say all the things you would like to have me say. I know you would not want to hear them unless they were absolutely sincere.” She said she would quite understand if he would rather not see her, but then they went to a concert and on a few more outings. And one night, during a weekend at Cliveden toward the end of March 1917, as everyone was about to go to bed, Phyllis told Bob to come to her bedroom and, standing by the fireplace, she said she would marry him if he still wanted it. Bob thought his imagination was deceiving him. But she came to his office at the Ministry of Munitions the following Monday with her mind unchanged. “I knew then as I had always known,” he wrote later to his children, “that she had given me the greatest gift a man could have.”

There had been no preliminaries except for the fact that they had spent a great deal of time in each other’s company. Phyllis had decided, prompted by Nancy, that she couldn’t go back to Mirador and live alone again, that a deadline had come. Bob rightly surmised that Phyllis wasn’t in love with him and wasn’t certain of her happiness; that this was a tortured decision. All the unhappiness of the past years, she told him, had made her “gun shy.” “You ask if I can love you with all my heart and soul,” she wrote. “If I did not feel sure I could do that I shouldn’t for a moment contemplate marrying you. I believe it is best to have it come slowly but surely and percolate into one’s system—which is the way it seems to be doing with me.

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