Daughter of Riches (20 page)

Twin high spots of colour rose in Viv's creamy cheeks. ‘Damn.'

‘A little more than ‘‘damn'', I should say.' The doctor replaced the towel on its rail and turned to face her. ‘Have you confided in your parents about this?'

Viv shook her head. ‘I wanted to be sure first. No point advertising the fact I've been a naughty girl if there was no need.'

‘Hmm. Well I am afraid there
is
need. You're going to have to discuss this with them – and soon. And who is the father? Does he know?'

‘No, he doesn't know, and I don't want him to. I don't want anyone to know. Can't you do something for me, Dr Bodell?'

The doctor's eyes narrowed a shade. ‘‘What do you mean by that?'

‘Oh for goodness' sake, do I have to spell it out?'

‘Vivienne, I have to remind you abortion is illegal,' he said sternly.

‘I know that. I also know that it's done – and that I wouldn't be the first to ask you to arrange it for me.'

‘Vivienne …'

‘Diane Frayne,' Viv said meaningfully.

The doctor stiffened slightly and she knew he had understood her. Diane Frayne was a friend – and one of Dr Bodell's patients – who had disappeared conveniently for a few days earlier in the year for what had supposedly been an operation for grumbling appendix. Viv, who had heard whispers in their circle, had preferred the unofficial explanation – Diane had been ‘ in trouble' and Dr Bodell had got her out of it.

Looking now at his face, gone suddenly blank and expressionless, she knew she had been right.

‘Well?' she pressed him.

Dr Bodell sighed.

‘Vivienne – as you so rightly say operations that would be in the patient's interest are arranged from time to time. However, I think you need to be aware what you are asking me. This is not just some inconvenient illness. It is the beginning of a human life. You may not see it that way at the moment but I have known young women haunted by guilt to the end of their days because they felt they were responsible for murdering their own child.'

‘I'd never feel like that. I'm much too sensible.'

‘I'm not sure being sensible has anything to do with it, Vivienne.'

‘It has everything to do with it!' she exclaimed passionately. ‘The world is at war – anything could happen. My boyfriend is away fighting – he might never come back. And besides …' she laughed shortly, ‘my father would kill me.'

‘He is going to have to be told,' Francis Bodell said. ‘You are not yet twenty-one, Vivienne. You haven't reached the age when you can be responsible for yourself.'

‘How pathetic! But anyway, I don't suppose Daddy will mind half as much as long as nobody else has to know. He'll back me up over this, you need not worry – and he'll pay the bill.'

‘It's likely to be hefty.'

‘That won't worry Daddy. He doesn't mind how many cheques he signs as long as that is all he's expected to do.'

Francis Bodell said nothing. Though he was a friend of Adrian Moran he thought the assessment was not an unjust one.

‘There is one other thing, Vivienne. Sometimes – just sometimes – there might be complications. It is possible this sort of operation could leave you unable to have any more children.'

Viv slid down from the couch. ‘That's all right, Doctor. I guess it's a highly unlikely scenario and in any case it's a risk I'm prepared to take. I want an abortion and I'm quite sure my father will pay for it. So please, don't lecture me any more. Just arrange it – as soon as possible.'

By the time Vivienne Moran was admitted to a private hospital as an appendicitis patient in need of surgery the war had been going on for a little under four months and in many ways it seemed hardly to have begun at all. But the black-out and the host of regulations and the wondering if and when anything was going to happen was beginning to get on people's nerves and planning was almost impossible in this strange atmosphere that was neither war nor peace.

Only the Jersey Tourist Committee remained optimistic. The island would be an ideal resort for wartime holidays, they proclaimed – ‘far removed from the theatre of war with eternal sands, sea and sunshine' and just the place for war-weary main-landers to refresh themselves to carry on with the national war effort.

For this, Lola was grateful. Nicky had completed his period of training now and was somewhere in Belgium. Anything that would keep her busy was welcome – and there was nothing like a full guest house to occupy her mind and send her to bed too exhausted to lie awake worrying about where he was and the danger he might be in.

Paul Carteret had a wireless set. He had seen it in the window of Mollett's shop and by pooling the money he had been given for his birthday and Christmas along with every other penny he had been able to earn or scrounge he had managed to buy it. Now it had pride of place in his bedroom and he spent many happy hours fiddling with the dial to pick up different stations and broadcasts in various foreign languages.

On the second Friday in May he was at home suffering from a bad cold – and bored to tears. He had no one but himself to blame, he knew, for he had exaggerated his symptoms to get a few days' reprieve from his lessons, and Lola had insisted he stay in his room so as not to spread germs through the guest house. Deprived of his liberty and his friends he had read his
Beano
and
Dandy
comics and even his beloved wireless was beginning to bore him. But since he had nothing else to do he went on playing about with it and so it was that he was first to hear the news of the new German offensive. He rushed downstairs so fast that he almost tripped over his own feet and across to the main hotel building where Lola was working in her office.

She looked up in surprise as he came tearing in. ‘ Paul! What on earth is wrong?'

‘Mama – the Germans have attacked Holland and Belgium.'

A nerve jumped in Lola's throat. Suddenly she felt very sick.

‘Attacked? How do you mean, attacked?'

‘Bombed. ‘‘ Widespread raids'', it said on the wireless.'

‘I see,' Lola said quietly. In that instant she had reverted to being the daughter of a Russian Army Officer, proud, brave and perhaps blinkered too. ‘ Well, they can bomb all they like but they have the Allies to reckon with. I don't think they will get very far.'

Paul stared at her. ‘But what about Nicky?'

Her eyes narrowed and her fingers tightened convulsively on her pen but her voice was still quite level.

‘There is nothing we can do but pray it will be over quickly and Nicky will come home safely,' she said. ‘ Now, I have work to do, Paul. But why don't you go on listening to your wireless and let me know if there are any more developments.'

Over the next weeks Paul listened to his wireless whenever he could but the news he heard brought nothing but increasing gloom. Against all the odds Hitler's armies were thrusting their way across Europe in a seemingly unstoppable tide. By the middle of May they were occupying The Hague and six days later they had reached the Aisne River and Anviers on the Somme, just sixty miles away from Paris. Then at the end of the month came the worst news yet – King Leopold of the Belgians had surrendered and the British troops, with their backs to the sea, could do nothing but hold the line as long as possible to enable an evacuation to take place.

Paul's wireless was scarcely turned off during those anxious days and it was over the crackling air waves that Charles first heard the appeal for an armada of small boats to ferry the men from the beaches to the deeper water where the troop ships would be waiting.

‘I could go,' he said to Lola, and she nodded. She was under no illusions about how dangerous it would be. The Germans would stop at nothing to hammer home their advantage and finish off the Allies whilst they had the chance. And Charles' boat, though in quite a different class to the old rowing boat he had inherited from Grandpa Carteret all those years ago, was a small craft to pit against the notorious currents of the Channel and the heavy surf that would be running off the Normandy beaches. But she was filled with pride, all the same, and she was glad to know that beneath his quiet exterior Charles was still the same brave man she had married.

When he left the whole family went down to the harbour to see him off and were amazed at the ferment of activity. Every little boat that could sail was going, it seemed – fishing smacks and motor boats, pleasure craft and even old Joe le Feuvre, wrinkled as a bit of dried-up seaweed, in his battered old ketch
Flighty Lady
.

‘Mama?' Catherine said as the little boats moved, one by one, out into the sparkling water, ‘do you think Papa will bring Nicky home?'

Lola's mouth softened. She was wearing a vivid red scarf knotted over her hair in what looked like a gesture of defiance but her eyes were suspiciously bright.

‘I doubt it, darling,' she said, putting an arm around Catherine and pulling her firm little body close, ‘but God willing, someone else will.'

But there was a darkness inside her, a shadow on her heart that refused to go away.

As the German Me 110 swooped over, Nicholas Carteret threw himself face down on the beach, automatically covering his head with his hands as the staccato gunfire began and the sand flew up in a cloudy but strangely neat line just a few feet from him.

He was half-expecting to be hit, half-expecting the sharp penetrating pain followed by agony or oblivion, but somehow he was too tired to be frightened any more. For two days and two nights he and half a dozen others of the remnants of his unit had marched towards the sea, forcing themselves into some sort of discipline though their feet were swollen, bruised and blistered and their stomachs aching from hunger. What had become of the rest of their battalion they did not know. They had become separated from them in the hellish confusion that had broken out when the German army had swept through the gap in the French and British lines, cutting off their retreat. Their only course of action, they knew, was to make for the sea. There they would be shipped out to regroup and continue the fight. So they had plodded along the lanes, busy with refugees, feeling almost guilty because they still had homes to go to when they could cross the Channel whilst these poor souls were fleeing from theirs. Nicky's tender heart bled for them; a year's soldiering had done nothing to brutalise his essential compassion though the sights he had seen and the grief and anger he had felt in the last weeks had hardened him in other ways. When he looked at the old folk, trudging along with all the belongings they could carry thrust into handcarts; when he saw children not as old as Catherine digging with their bare hands in the fields in the hope of finding a turnip or swede to eat; when they overtook women pushing prams full of bags and children whilst those who were big enough to walk dragged behind holding onto their mother's skirts; then he hated the Germans so much that he knew if he came face to face with one he could kill without compunction. But for the moment there was no chance of that. The most important thing was getting out of France alive to fight another day.

At times Nicky had been convinced that he and the others would never make the sea and when the first tangy whiffs of salt and seaweed had reached them on the wind he had been wildly euphoric. But he had soon realised that though the sea might be in sight, just over the ridge of dunes, home and safety were as far away as ever. For the beaches were jam packed with men, trapped between the approaching enemy and the sea, and the low-flying fighters of the Luftwaffe were using them for target practice.

‘We'll never get out of here!' Des Collins, Nicky's best pal, said, and there was a note of panic in his voice. ‘We're trapped!'

‘We'll get out,' Nicky said. But he was not sure if he believed it and with each German plane that came sweeping over, machine-gunning and strafing, he believed it less.

The boats were out there, a whole flotilla of little craft which could get into the beaches where the big ships could not. But what chance did they stand with the Luftwaffe controlling the skies?

Nicky raised his head as the Me 110 went away down the beach and the splutter of gun fire and flying sand became fainter.

‘Christ, that was close!'

Des sat up, spitting out sand. ‘Too bloody close! We'd better find some shelter in the dunes until it's dark. Then we might stand a chance.'

They crawled from shell-hole to shell-hole until they were back in the dunes where they found themselves a dent beneath a few tufts of stringy grass. With their hands they dug deeper, then they crouched in the rat hole they had made, eating the remains of their emergency supply of chocolate and singing to keep their spirits up whilst they waited for dark.

Presently a pattern began to emerge. For about ten minutes the beach and the water's edge would be under fire, then for an equal amount of time the German attack would be concentrated on some buildings just above on the coast road and soon the little boats were taking advantage of the lulls to come in. But there were so many men to be taken off – the surf was full of them, wading and shouting, hoping the water would protect them, and there was a smell of death in the air.

Suddenly it seemed Des had had enough. His fevered eyes saw boats at the water's edge as a man in the desert may see an oasis.

‘Come on!' he shouted, jumping out of the shell-hole and running down the beach.

He never saw the shadow of the Me 110, never heard the drone of its engines. Too late Nicky yelled a warning. The air split with an orange arrow of gunfire. One moment Des was running, the next his arms spread wide and he arched back as if he too intended to take to the skies. For a moment he seemed to hang there motionless, silhouetted against the sky, then he took one pace forward and another, his legs buckling more with each step until he pitched forward on to his knees in the sand.