Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (84 page)

It was a long night; Celia spent it in the parlour in case Gordon fell asleep. The doctor came at the nurse’s urgent call at midnight: prescribed extra morphine, told Gordon that LM was unlikely to see the morning.

Three times they thought they had lost her; three times she rallied, grasping Gordon’s hand, almost visibly hauling herself back to life through his strength and her own willpower.

She was waiting for Jay; Jay who arrived at six in the morning, just as the sun rose, and despite the shock, despite his own exhaustion, despite the almost unbearable strain of his journey from Dover, he came into her room with his wide grin, sat down on her bed, kissed her, and said, ‘Hallo, Mother. I’m here. Safe and sound. Didn’t I always tell you I was lucky?’

He sat and held her hand with his dark blue eyes, Jago’s eyes, fixed on her face, and she raised his hand to her lips and kissed it very gently and said, suddenly lucid, her voice quite strong, ‘Yes you did. And your father always said the same.’

‘Well, there you are. Runs in the blood.’

‘It does – seem so,’ she said. And then reached up for his face and touched it, her dark eyes suddenly very bright, a smile curving on her lips; and then her hand fell again, her eyes closed and she gave a little faltering sigh.

Jay had come safely home; and so she could go.

Part Three

1943 – 1946

CHAPTER 38

Barty had known they were there of course. Everyone did. You could hardly open a paper without a photograph of them, the Americans, usually surrounded by a crowd of pretty girls, or the endless stories about the nylon stockings and chewing gum they handed out as bounty, or the resentment they were causing our boys, on account of being paid four times as much as they were and therefore being able to steal our boys’ girls. Overpaid, over-sexed and over here was the expression on everyone’s lips. But—somehow she didn’t think any more about their arrival than that.

Barty was low: quite low. She was tired, of course, everyone was; but there had been a lot of good things. The tide of the war was turning; and after the great Battle of El Alamein the victory bells had rung out through England for the first time; and then John had come home on leave at Christmas quite unexpectedly, for a time of extraordinary love and happiness, their engagement officially acknowledged, with everyone’s blessing and approval; Kit’s children’s book was a triumph, selling as many copies as they could get paper for, with interviews with him in all the papers and magazines (for it was a wonderful story, the dashing flying Ace and his courage in defeating not only the enemy but his own blindness and despair; initially embarrassed by such mawkishness, Kit had become first resigned to it and then rather reluctantly pleased); and then Barty’s own war work had been recognised and even rewarded by her promotion to sergeant, something of which she was inordinately proud; so with all these good things in her life, why did she feel—depressed?

She supposed it must be LM’s death; which had been one of the most painful experiences she could remember, along with her own mother’s death and the loss of Laurence. Life seemed darker, more tenuous, less secure, the thread of constancy slackened. She talked to Sebastian about it; he sighed and agreed.

‘LM was the old guard; and a very fine example of it. The opposite of self-seeking, whatever that might be. It’s a rare quality. And besides it is very dreadful when you lose someone who’s in the front line as it were. You feel yourself move forward into it.’

Barty had not thought of that before; it made her feel worse.

Of course she was terribly happy and excited about her engagement; and even more so about being married, although she and John had agreed they should wait until after the war.

‘Marriage to me is being together; while that is impossible, it is more than enough to know that you are there,’ he had said and she had, yet again, marvelled at how much they thought and felt the same way about everything, both great and small.

They even shared culinary likes and dislikes; they both hated eggs—‘even fresh ones’—loved fish and had a passion for treacle tart which she had promised she would cook for him every Sunday when they were married.

They seemed to have everyone’s blessing and approval: ‘Charming, Barty, charming, you’re a lucky girl,’ said Oliver; ‘Top-hole chap, darling, almost good enough for you,’ said Sebastian and even Celia had paid him the compliment of flirting with him.

Billy too had given John the thumbs up; a family man himself now, with a large and bouncing son born in September and Joan already pregnant again, he had adopted a slightly superior attitude towards Barty.

‘It’s time you found someone to look after you,’ he said, as if he had been married for eighteen years rather than eighteen months, ‘and I think John is the man to do it. I like him very much; he seems a very genuine sort of a person.’

‘Jolly good chap,’ said Lord Beckenham, ‘enjoying the war he told me. That’s the way.’

‘He might not be quite out of the top drawer,’ said Lady Beckenham quietly to Celia, ‘but he seems very fond of Barty and one can’t help liking him. I think it’s a very suitable match for her.’

Kit said John was a splendid chap, ‘he talks more sense than anyone I’ve met for a long time.’ Adele and Venetia were both sweetly and genuinely delighted for her (while agreeing privately how inevitable it was that Barty would have found someone to marry who was too good to be true): ‘Ten out of ten. He obviously adores you,’ said Venetia, ‘and he’s what I’d call truly charming.’ (Barty knew what that meant; that John had shown a great interest in her. Just the same, she was pleased.) ‘He’s so absolutely sweet,’ said Adele, giving her a kiss, ‘and you suit each other so well, I can’t imagine anyone being more right for you.’

She had been worried about what he would make of the twins: in spite of all that had happened to them, they still, especially when together, had a great capacity for silliness; but he was enchanted and fascinated by them and told Barty he could have sat looking at them all day.

She was pleased, of course: no, not just pleased, delighted, it was wonderful that they all liked him so much, all thought he was so right for her. It was, as everything to do with John was, too good to be true. But—that was exactly it. It was stupid, perverse, childish of her even, but she just couldn’t help feeling it might have been more interesting if someone had voiced just the slightest criticism of him. So that he wasn’t so ten out of ten, so absolutely right, so sensible, so genuine.

And why, for heaven’s sake, should she want that? Knowing the answer, she crushed it firmly, ruthlessly into the bottom of her heart. And had a wonderful Christmas with John; they spent Christmas and Boxing Day at Ashingham, ‘we’d better get it over’, and then escaped to her own little house.

And then he was gone; after a last, sad, tender night, full of promises and statements of love.

She was so lucky; so, so lucky. And she did love him: very, very much. Maybe she wasn’t really depressed. Just—tired. That was it; weary. Of restrictions and rationing—stricter than ever now. People complained about tea rationing most—two ounces a week didn’t make many pots—and sugar: ‘Just as well you’re not getting married now, Miller,’ said Parfitt cheerfully when they met one night in London, ‘you’d have to have a cardboard wedding cake. That’s what all the brides are doing now, my mate had one last week. She was going to wait like you, but she got in the club. Not careful and sensible like you.’

Maybe that’s what she should do, Barty thought: get in the club. So that everyone would think John wasn’t quite such a fine fellow. Or fine in a rather different way.

God, what was the matter with her? What on earth was the matter?

Izzie was growing up; everyone noticed it. She was thirteen now, tall and slender, her figure developing, her face no longer a child’s. Sebastian’s attitude towards her was interesting; at once proud and fiercely defensive, he tried to deny her maturing, glaring at her small high bosom, tutting when she loosed her lovely hair from its plait, reprimanding her fiercely when she came down to supper one night at Ashingham in a silk cocktail dress she had borrowed from Adele.

‘What do you think you’ve got on? You look ridiculous. You’re still a child, you’ve no business dressing up like that.’

‘Sebastian, that was beastly,’ said Adele, when Izzie had fled the room, flushed with misery, ‘she’s thirteen years old, of course she wants to look pretty and a little bit grown up.’

‘Well, I don’t want her to. And she is exactly that, thirteen. A child. And I don’t like you encouraging it either.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Sebastian,’ said Lady Beckenham. ‘You’re living in the dark ages. Or rather you’re not,’ she added with a grin. ‘My grandmother was married at fourteen. I think it’s lovely that Izzie’s growing up so charmingly.’

‘Well I see it as precocity,’ said Sebastian, ‘and I’d prefer you didn’t interfere. Isabella is my child and she has no mother to guide her. I have to do it instead.’

‘Well, I would say you’re not making a very good job of it,’ said Lady Beckenham, and she went to look for Izzie. Whom she found sobbing on a window seat in the library, with Kit beside her, one arm around her, his other hand tenderly stroking her cheek.

‘Oh dear,’ said Lady Beckenham, retreating into the corridor, her face oddly concerned: and then again, ‘Oh dear.’

Giles had been injured: quite seriously. He was in a field hospital just north of Naples, waiting for a hospital ship to take him home to England. He had been involved in some very heavy fighting at the Garigliano river, and his company commander had been killed; Giles was extremely lucky to be alive. Helena felt almost relieved; if he was in hospital, he was safe. She had no real idea what his injuries were, or indeed their extent, information was extremely sparse, and she waited for further news in a mixture of hope and dread, but at least the state of permanent fear she lived in was eased.

Adele would have given anything to know Luc was coming home or was safe in some hospital: the messages, arriving at roughly six-month intervals, were an agonising form of torture. Knowing that they meant nothing, except that when they had been written he had been safe, and that the very next day, the next hour indeed he could have been in terrible danger.

She thanked God for her work; she couldn’t imagine now how she had survived before without it. It distracted her when she was most afraid, soothed her when she felt most panicked; she knew it was absurd that such acute fear could be eased by the contemplation of frocks and models, lighting and background, colour and style, and indeed she was almost ashamed that it was. She only knew that she felt lighter-hearted, braver, more hopeful.

She went to London at least once a week, usually staying overnight at Cheyne Walk, for meetings with fashion editors and models, art directors and designers; at first she worked in her old capacity of stylist as well as taking photographs, but her sure eye, her capacity for directing as well as recording a shot, the swift rapport she established with the models, thereby enabling her to persuade them to do difficult and unexpected things, and in particular her skill with lighting, ensured her more work than she was willing to do. One of the most famous shots in her portfolio was of a girl wearing a fur coat, picking her way delicately through the giant vegetable patch and smallholding that Hyde Park had become in the effort to feed London; it became a classic, well known among art directors, and she was constantly asked for ‘another allotment shot, darling’.

She had no desire to move back to London full time, she knew her children, more vulnerable than most, still needed her badly; but a few days each week without her did them no harm.

From being bored, anxious and restless, she changed, became her old self, confident, witty, happily absorbed in what she was doing; and she began to see her old friends again, to have a social life, albeit limited, to take an interest in her own clothes, to look pretty and even chic again; Venetia was delighted, took her everywhere she could with her: ‘The Lytton twins are back,’ someone had said to them as they lunched together at the Ritz one day, and they looked at one another and laughed and agreed that yes, indeed, it was true.

And then it came, on one lovely spring day, when she had been playing in the garden with the children: the now familiar Red Cross envelope.

The message was in English. She sat outside in the sunshine, reading it, and felt the morning grow dark and chill: ‘My darling, I may not write again for a while. Don’t be afraid for me, I am quite, quite safe. I love you. Luc.’

Somehow, reading those brave words, she knew they might well be the last.

Venetia came down to the dining room at Cheyne Walk, ready for her journey to work. She cycled to work these days; it was the easiest and quickest way and she enjoyed it, unless it was raining, her expensive handbag thrust into her bicycle basket, her briefcase strapped on to a carrier on her back mudguard. But it did mean you arrived with your hair in a mess, and your stockings often laddered—not that she wore them often, she had resorted long ago to colouring her legs with make-up, and drawing seams up her calves with an eyebrow pencil, a piece of ingenuity brought in by the factory girls but seeming, to both her and Adele, hugely sensible. Celia said it was extremely common.

London was full of bicycles: they were lots of people’s preferred mode of transport. It was one of the many things which had changed the appearance of the city. The poet Charles Graves had remarked that ‘apart from the uniforms you see in the streets, London might be at peace with the world’. Venetia would not have agreed. London might have been patched up, the worst of the rubble cleared away, but everywhere was dreadfully shabby and decayed. The windows of the bombed buildings were boarded up, their fronts looking somehow like so many toothless smiles; the beautiful terraces in places like Regents Park were for the most part empty and seemed to be literally rotting away, the grass in places like Leicester Square had been worn to dust, and buses were no longer uniformly red, but brown or green, many of them borrowed from the provinces.

More acceptable but even odder was the profusion of flowers and trees; many bombed churches had been turned into gardens, the ruins around St Paul’s—where Lytton House had been—were covered by London rocket, and someone had counted four different types of willow and a poplar tree growing on a bomb site on the corner of Bond and Bruton Street. Butterflies fluttered round the heart of the city, and a friend of Venetia’s, who lived in Thurloe Square, reported a Peruvian plant growing which ‘everyone presumes has been blown here from Kew’.

There were allotments everywhere; in the great parks, the residential squares, the forecourt of the British Museum, even in window boxes; and strangest of all, perhaps, there was wheat growing on the roof of New Zealand House.

There was very little to eat: nobody went hungry, but there was hardship. Two ounces of butter a week, four ounces of bacon, ham and cheese: mealtimes were not bountiful occasions. Food was an obsession, everyone complained about it all the time. The rich did better than the poor by the simple process of eating out. ‘You can still have a very good four-course meal at the Berkeley,’ Celia Lytton was heard to remark, ‘or, of course, at the dear old Dorch’ (‘Let them eat cake,’ Adele murmured to Venetia with a nudge). The government sought to regulate this by putting a maximum charge of five shillings on a meal; but all the big hotels simply instituted a charge of six shillings over that for the privilege of dining on their premises, an extra five shillings and sixpence for smoked salmon, and two shillings and sixpence for dancing.