Camomile Lawn (3 page)

‘Richard,’ Helena laughed, ‘she’s only ten, she never wears knickers if it’s hot. What are you fussing about? She’s gone bathing with the others. A little girl of Sophy’s age can’t be indecent.’

Helena’s laughter infuriated Richard.

‘Your friend the General wants you to ring him.’ Helena always referred to the General as ‘your friend’.

‘What about, did he say?’

‘He’s going to put the hounds down, thought you ought to know as you are on the Hunt committee.’

‘Good God!’

‘He says if it’s war it’s total. No more hunting.’

‘Good God! So
he
thinks there will be a war?’ Richard was shaken.

‘Yes, my dear, he does.’

‘Helena—’ he took the hand she held out to him. ‘Helena, I am useless, useless.’

‘Nonsense, Richard. There will be masses of things for you to do.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Organizations, A.R.P., things like that.’

‘Answering the telephone? I ask you. I’m not a bloody clerk.’

‘Ring the General. Have a talk with him, he will be in the thick of things.’

‘I have only one leg.’

‘You don’t answer the telephone with your legs,’ Helena said brutally. ‘Now I must get on, if Cook and I are to feed your army of relations.’

‘What about Sophy’s knickers?’

‘There’s going to be a war. What the hell do Sophy’s knickers matter? If you are interested I don’t wear knickers in very hot weather. Knickers are a Victorian innovation.’ Helena picked up the flower scissors, brushed stalk ends into the wastepaper-basket and left the room. Oh, why must I be so awful to Richard? she asked herself. If Anthony had only lost a leg instead of being lost altogether would I be so beastly to him? Getting no answer to her hypothetical question Helena dismissed her first husband, whose bones lay somewhere in France, from her mind, and went to discuss meals in the kitchen. It was amazing what a lot of food Calypso, Walter, Polly and Oliver consumed; not only breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, but continual snacks from the larder. Remembering the last war she speculated on the return of food rationing, one of the chief topics of conversation among her friends and relations of that time. The shortage of potatoes. The occasion when one of her aunts had had her butter ration stolen on a bus, blown up into an epic, treated as a tragedy almost equal to the loss of a dear one in the trenches. Helena stood in the doorway leading to the kitchen, remembering the telegraph boy bringing the news, ‘killed in action’, and the physical shock in her chest. ‘Now all’s to do again.’

‘What, Madam?’ said Cook.

‘Oh, nothing, Cook. I was just thinking. What shall we feed the Major’s crowd on?’

‘Something filling.’ Cook said this every August. Helena was horribly aware of the end of the life to which she had grown used, afraid of what a drastic change might do to her uncertain equilibrium. Women entering what is euphemistically called ‘the change of life’ were not famous for making the passage of others’ lives pleasant.

I must, she told herself, speak to Mildred, she is a rock, and she smiled at Cook as she thought of Mildred Floyer, barely five feet tall but with the strength required to cope with a High Church parson husband in a parish which was essentially Chapel and Low.

‘Poor Mrs Floyer has two sons,’ she said.

‘Coming to lunch, are they?’

‘Going to war.’

‘Then we must see that they get a good lunch,’ said Cook, who had the talent of living in the moment.

‘W
HEN IS THE FULL
moon?’ Polly, lying on the rocks beside Oliver, watched him watching Calypso swim out from the cove with Walter. Oliver closed his eyes and lay back.

‘Thinking of the Run?’

‘Yes. Shall we let Sophy do it? She does so want to.’

‘I don’t see why not, if she practises a bit first.’

‘Will you tell her? It will fill her cup of happiness.’

‘A full moon ago,’ said Oliver, ‘I was on the Ebro.’ Polly said nothing.

‘One of my friends, a Czech, was killed, never made a sound, shot through the jugular. He and his friends burned a priest, made a bonfire and burnt him. What good did that do? The joke was it turned out he was one of us, or had been.’

‘Joke?’

‘Atrocities are jokes, you can’t survive otherwise. We all committed atrocities, their side and ours, made this pit, built a fire in it and pushed them in to frizzle.’

‘You did?’

‘I stood by. It comes to the same thing. I don’t remember whether I actually pushed anybody in but I think I helped.’

‘Think?’

‘We were all drunk, Polly. If it wasn’t wine it was fear or rage or just wanting some action. There’s an awful lot of waiting about. To fill the time you burn, rape, pillage.’

‘Rape?’

‘Yes. Well, actually she was more than willing and later I thought, oh God, I may get clap.’

‘Did you?’

‘No, I was lucky. I didn’t.’

‘Just the once?’

‘No, sweet, every time I got the chance.’ Oliver laughed.

‘So that’s why you say we are all capable of killing. You’ve changed.’

‘Who would you like to kill?’ Oliver leant on one elbow, looking at Polly stretched beside him, her body nearly as beautiful as Calypso’s.

Looking down her nose at the bobbing heads in the cove, Polly said, ‘I don’t think I know anyone I want to kill, but I’d like to have the power to make people suffer,’ she lied, speaking lightly, for there were times when it would be nice to have Calypso out of the way. ‘What’s your killing game to be?’

‘It’s just an idea. I must plan it. Look how far out the twins are. They’ve got Sophy with them.’

‘They won’t drown her. D’you know, Olly, their father was a stretcher-bearer in the war?’

‘Jolly brave. He’s never talked about it. He’s not a war bore.’

‘Poor Uncle. I hope none of us will become like him.’

‘The Somme, the Marne, Wipers, the B.E.F., General Haig, General French, trenches, conchies, war profiteers, yankees, comradeship and what does it produce? Cotton poppies and two minutes’ silence. Christ Almighty!’

‘I don’t feel, somehow,’ Polly was laughing, ‘that he’d call you officer material if he heard you now.’

‘Too true. I’m for the ranks.’

‘Really? After all that O.T.C. at school?’ Polly was intrigued. ‘I should have thought you’d go straight into the Guards as an officer.’

‘Not after the International Brigade.’

‘I suppose not. Was there comradeship there?’

‘Lots of comradeship.’

‘Making bonfires?’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Now let’s plan the new game. Sophy!’ Oliver shouted through cupped hands towards the twins who were swimming to shore, Sophy between them, a hand on each twin’s shoulder. ‘Like to join the Terror Run this year?’

‘What?’ The child scrambled up the rocks. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said would you like to join the Terror Run this year?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘You’ll have to practise.’

‘I know the path. I know it better than any of you.’

‘Not in the dark, not by moonlight.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Well, you must let me see you run it so that I’m sure.’

‘I’m sure. There’s a man with a snake on it. Will you watch the whole way?’

‘Yes. We’ll watch both ends and the middle and see how you do.’

‘Oh, thanks, Oliver.’

‘See what it is to give happiness.’

Calypso sat beside the twins, who watched Oliver, who watched the drops of water run down her legs into her groin.

‘Will you run?’ Polly invited the twins.

‘Yes,’ they said. ‘When is it?’

‘Full moon, whenever that is.’

‘And the Killing Game?’ Calypso looked round. ‘You both in on that?’

‘Yes,’ they said, surprising the cousins.

‘That makes six of us,’ said Walter.

‘Seven,’ said Sophy. ‘It’s me, too.’

‘Oh, Sophy, you’re too small to kill anyone.’

‘Oliver said, he said.’ Sophy looked from face to face, distressed. ‘Besides, I shall grow up.’

‘Oh, let her.’ Calypso wiped the salt water from her arms with fastidious movements. ‘I think we should include Aunt Helena and Uncle and Betty and Cook and the Rector; make it more of a lottery.’

‘Not Father,’ said the twins.

‘All right. Aunt and Uncle then, not Betty or Cook.’

‘Why not? Because they’re village, not our class?’ Walter jabbed at Oliver. ‘I thought all you Comrades were classless.’

‘Far from it,’ said Oliver, laughing, ‘as you’d know if you’d been there. No, Betty and Cook might get ideas.’

‘Above their station?’

‘No, you fool. They might easily go full tilt, might take it seriously.’

‘Go to the police?’ Polly grinned.

‘Oh, forget it. Just don’t include them.’

‘I thought the whole idea was that it
is
serious.’ Calypso stared at Oliver maliciously. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘May I do my practice run soon? Will you watch me?’ Sophy put her pale face close to Oliver’s so that he squinted into her large black eyes. He put up a hand and pushed back her hair, black too like a cat’s and silky.

‘Puss.’ He caressed her as he would an animal. Calypso and Polly watched, amused.

‘Why not this afternoon? How would that be?’ Oliver patted the pale cheek dismissively.

‘We shall have to see that she doesn’t cheat.’ Walter stretched his arms to the sky.

‘It’s so hot.’ Polly turned over on to her stomach.

‘It won’t be hot if we line along the top of the cliffs. We will get the breeze. It’s Sophy who will get hot.’ Calypso closed her eyes, lifting her face to the sun. ‘Is my nose getting red?’

‘Put a leaf over it.’ The twins spoke in chorus.

‘Clever. Find me one.’ Calypso lay with a leaf shading her nose while they all cooked gently on the rocks.

The only flaw in her looks, thought Polly, observing her cousin, was that both sides of her face were symmetrical, her expression masklike. Most people had two sides to a varying degree, good and evil, happy and sad. Walter was particularly varied, as though he had been sat on at birth, and she herself had a slightly bent nose, while Oliver had the trace of a squint.

They lined the cliff that afternoon, Walter and Polly starting Sophy off from the headland under the coastguard station, the twins stationed above the path half-way along the course, Calypso and Oliver waiting at the finish. For most of the course Sophy would be visible, only out of sight where the path ran through dense thorn or at one point just above the sea, where it twisted sharply round high granite boulders.

Up on the cliff that afternoon the twins sat with their backs to the fence which prevented straying cattle from falling over.

‘She’s off. Walter’s unleashed her.’ They looked down at Sophy leaving Walter at a run to tear along the path.

‘I wonder what it will look like from the air.’

‘We’ve never flown. D’you think they will let us keep together?’

‘Surely they won’t separate us?’ Paul looked at David aghast.

‘It may happen.’

‘My God, I hope not.’

‘Death may.’

‘Not us. We shan’t get killed.’

‘Hi, we’ve forgotten Sophy. I can’t see her.’

‘She must be among the thorns.’

‘Or the boulders. She was going lickety spit. You don’t really think we can get split up, do you?’

‘Father says the authorities are bound to. He may be right. Think of the confusion at school.’

The other twin laughed. ‘Whatever happens we’ve had fun.’

‘If you die, I die.’

‘Oh, gloom! It hasn’t started yet. Where the hell is Sophy?’

‘She may have hurt herself. We’d better follow her. Remember Walter’s ankle.’

They scrambled down through the gorse and heather to the path, unusually tall young men, loose-limbed as puppies, their maize-coloured hair flopping over brown eyes fringed with feathery lashes, their looks the more noticeable because duplicated. They brushed their hair back from brows untouched by experience and ambled along the path.

‘Where are Walter and Polly?’

‘They must have gone back by the short cut.’

At the finish Calypso sat with Oliver, holding his hand.

‘I tell you what, Olly, even if I won’t marry you I’ll sleep with you. Have you ever done it?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Is it nice?’

‘Nice.’ Oliver looked at Calypso and repeated ‘nice’. How could ‘nice’ be a word applied to Calypso? ‘I want to have you to myself. I’ll wait.’

‘If there’s a war I’ll sleep with you before you get killed. That’s what maidens did in books and I am a maiden.’

‘How you carry on about your virginity. Virginity’s nothing. You can lose it riding a bicycle.’

‘I never knew that. I must be careful. I’m going to ride a bicycle in London. Pa says petrol will be rationed.’

‘And virginity not. How shall you find your rich prince from a bicycle? It’s so bourgeois.’

‘I will find him. If you want something hard enough you get it, and I want a very rich husband, always have.’

‘Oh, Calypso, don’t.’ Oliver put his arms round her. ‘Oh, my love, I will get rich, very rich. Then you will marry me.’

‘What’s that?’ Calypso drew away from him and sprang up. ‘Somebody screamed. Sophy.’

‘Something’s wrong.’ They ran down the path to meet Sophy, who approached them in a rush, hurling herself into Calypso’s arms, sobbing wildly.

‘What is it? What happened? Are you hurt? What’s the matter? Stop it, Sophy, stop it.’ But Sophy, clinging to Calypso, could not stop. Her sobs turned to screams, her fingers dug painfully into Calypso’s neck.

‘Sophy, you are hurting.’ Oliver pulled the child away and smacked her face. ‘Stop, Sophy. What happened?’

Through white lips the child said, gasping, ‘Pink, pink snake.’

‘What?’ Oliver stared at the child, her tears splashing white cheeks. ‘Speak up.’ But Sophy neither could nor would.

‘Did it bite you? She said “snake”.’ Calypso looked anxiously at Oliver. Sophy, silent now, said no more.

‘Our word, you made good time. What’s happened?’ The twins came trotting up the cliff path out of breath, flushed.

‘She’s been frightened, something about a snake. Did you see anything?’

‘No,’ they said. ‘Let’s see if she has been bitten.’ The twins examined Sophy’s legs as she lay across Oliver’s lap, giving an occasional exhausted hiccup. ‘Nothing, not even scratched. Let’s see your arms.’ They examined the child. ‘Surely you ought to wear knickers,’ they said, pulling down her skirt.