The Bannister Girls (11 page)

‘If that doesn't beat all! Rose is more of a ninny than I took her for, if she can't see how Mother is patronising her. Experience in housewifery indeed! She was married for such a short time, Ronnie could hardly have got the knickers off her!'

‘Ellen!' Angel felt the ghost of a grin tug at her mouth despite herself.

She felt so damned responsible for Rose's outburst. She should never have let her get so interested in the goings-on at Mr Strube's shop, and she should have recognised that burning light in Rose's eyes when she heard what had happened. To her surprise, she felt Ellen's hand on her
shoulder, holding her tight for a moment.

‘Sorry, old thing. My tongue runs away with me at times. Don't go blaming yourself on Rose's account. Most of the women in the movement found her odd at times. Highly-strung, not to say teetering on the edge! You couldn't have foreseen what was coming. I mean, look at the way she carried on with old Hobbs. Probably scared him to death, if the truth was known.'

Angel let that pass.

‘Still. I suppose it was stupid of me to go on so about poor Mr Strube –'

‘Why? We'd known him for years. Why shouldn't we be sorry he'd been killed? It's not every day a murder occurs in the village, is it?'

Angel shuddered. It
was
murder, and someone would have to pay the price. Unless it was all hushed up, of course, and no criminal ever discovered. With her new-found wisdom, Angel wondered if it would be exactly like that.

‘What will they do?' she asked Ellen.

Ellen shrugged. ‘The police will make enquiries. No one will admit to anything. No one will have seen or heard anything. There will be no witnesses. Case unsolved. End of case.'

‘How wise you are about such things!'

Ellen half-smiled. ‘I haven't lived on the wrong side of London with some very dubious characters without learning more of life than I ever learned in the schoolroom, darling,' she said.

Her face suddenly drooped.

‘I shall miss Rose. We've been friends a long time. But when something's over, it's over.'

Angel looked at her sister, seeing the strength and the sorrow in her face. Impulsively, she hugged her.

‘I don't really know you at all, do I?'

The brittle mask came over Ellen's face again.

‘Did Rose know me? Am I really like she said? An
embittered old maid?' She pulled a crazy, cross-eyed face, which made Angel laugh against her will.

‘Of course not. The right partner just hasn't come along for you yet, that's all. When he does, you'll know it.'

‘Has he come along for you?' Ellen's voice was so quick and soft that Angel answered before she had time to think.

‘Oh yes. And if I never see him again, I'll always know how beautiful it was –'

She blushed furiously, knowing she had betrayed herself with her breathless words, but instead of Ellen's usual scoffing, her sister suddenly leaned over and kissed her, and her eyes were tender.

‘If it makes you look so starry-eyed, maybe the same sort of miracle should happen for me too,' she said. ‘Shall I risk taking a spin in the car with you, since Mother's taken Rose under her wing? Then you can tell me more.'

Angel laughed, her eyes dangerously close to tears.

‘We'll go for a spin, but I shan't tell you any more. This is
my
bit of independence, darling!'

As if to exasperate them further, they found that the car was out of petrol and the can was empty, and they would have to send down to the village hardware shop for someone to deliver it. Since the day was fine and warm and mellow, it was back to the bicycles, rather than spend the afternoon indoors with all its difficult undercurrents.

Better to be outside in the clean fresh air, with the country breezes wafting away the tension. The lanes were winding and empty, and they could almost forget that somewhere a war was raging, and men who were known to them were being blown to bits, or drowning in mud in the Flanders trenches.

They dismounted after a while, and stretched out in the corner of a field, squinting up at the sun through the leafy network of young green trees. The branches sighed as the wind whispered through them, and Angel remembered
another tree outside the window of a small hotel, and the memory was enough to make her give a small involuntary sigh.

Ellen leaned up on one elbow, looking down at her sister, lovely in her lemon-coloured dress, tied low at the waist in a frivolous bow. Angel's green eyes were closed, the crescents of her lashes caressing her cheeks. Her soft fair hair, unrestricted by the smart Mayfair salon's torturing now, was feathered against her forehead. Angel could seem so distant at times, as if she was somewhere else, and not with the rest of them at all, but here and now, Ellen felt extraordinarily close to her.

‘When do you think it will all end?' Ellen said slowly.

‘What? The war, you mean?'

‘The war. The killing. The way people are tearing one another apart.'

‘It can't last long,' Angel spoke with a desperate hope.

‘They said that last year. It was all going to be over by Christmas. The opposing soldiers in the trenches had that ridiculous truce. Waving at each other and wishing each other a merry Christmas, and sharing cigarettes across land that had been hastily cleared of bodies. And the next day, shooting all hell out of one another again. Can you make any sense out of that?' Her voice was bitter and bewildered.

‘I can't make any sense out of war at all.'

Ellen looked thoughtful, a grass blade held tightly between her teeth. She lay back on the grass again, wanting to know something, having to ask the question that had been burning inside her ever since Angel's indiscretion had been discovered, the subject since becoming a taboo one within the family. Now seemed as good a moment as any.

‘Angel, what's it like to lie with a man? You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but I'm dying with curiosity, and it was never something I could ask Rose. Not before Ronnie died, and certainly not after. Louise would never discuss such things, even if I cared to bring up the subject. Besides, I
can't imagine that Stanley's the most scintillating lover. I know that you know all about it, and I really wish you'd tell me.'

Her voice stopped abruptly, and Angel's first feeling of acute embarrassment gave way to surprise as she caught the uncertainty in Ellen's voice. Why, her sister really was curious, and a little afraid. It was the way Angel herself had been before she was thrust into the situation with Jacques almost before she had time to think.

Until now, she hadn't ever considered that she had a knowledge of which her superior and clever sister was totally ignorant, and the flippant retort to Ellen to mind her own business died on her lips. They lay side by side, not looking at one another, and Angel's voice was soft and dreamy.

‘It's like being led to the edge of a precipice and finding that the fall is a delight and not terrifying after all. It's like floating somewhere in space. It's like touching the stars. It's exciting, and humbling, and being a part of someone else, and wanting him so badly that you ache for him every minute of the day. And it's a feeling that can only happen when two people are right for one another. When you're so much in love that the thought of sin never enters your head. It's – it's like being in heaven for every second that you're together, and once you've found that heaven, it's sheer misery to be apart.'

Neither of them said anything when she finished speaking, and the words seemed to hang in the air between them. Then Angel felt Ellen's hand give hers a squeeze.

‘Thank-you,' she whispered. ‘That was the most moving thing I ever heard. I'll respect your confidence, Angel.'

The sound of an engine broke in on their closeness. For a moment, Angel thought it was an aircraft, and sat up quickly, gazing into the sky, her heart pounding. Jacques had seemed so near while she was talking. It was almost as though she had conjured him up … instead, it was a car on its way to the village, its occupant giving no more than a
glance at the two bicycles thrown down on the grass beside the field. But Ellen's instincts were alerted by her sister's movement.

‘Is he an aviator, your man?' she guessed.

Angel gave a short laugh.

‘Yes. My man is an aviator. And that's all I'm going to tell you. What you don't know, the parents can't get out of you, and Mother would still dearly like to know all about the scandalous affair! She thinks I'm quite a scarlet woman now.'

‘Instead of which, you're just a woman in love,' Ellen concluded with more perception than usual.

‘That's right.' She gave a little shiver. ‘I'm cold. Let's go down to the village and see if we can find out any more about Mr Strube.'

Ellen jumped up at once, all remorse.

‘How awful! I'd forgotten about him already.'

Clearly, the villagers hadn't forgotten, and weren't likely to for some time. As the Bannister girls pedalled through the long winding street of the sleepy village, with the public house at one end and the church at the other, and the hotch-potch of cottages and shops in between, there seemed more activity than usual in the place.

Folk stood on doorsteps chattering and nodding together. The village bobby leaned on his cycle, taking notes from anyone willing to make a comment. As they rode along slowly, the sight of Mr Strube's hastily boarded-up shop was a sober reminder of how people could take matters into their own hands, and to Angel it was suddenly frightening.

‘I don't think we should stay,' she muttered. ‘We're outsiders as much as Mr Strube was –'

‘Of course we aren't. We've been coming down here since we were children.'

But Ellen realised that what Angel said was true. A small community could close its doors on those who didn't belong,
and they had enough to contend with without the daughters of the smart London folk from the big house poking their noses in.

‘We could call at the tea room for a drink of lemonade. It's a hot day, and what could be more natural?' Ellen went on, still reluctant to be forced out.

Angel agreed, but it became clear that neither the plump tea room owner nor her few other customers were going to talk about the unfortunate incident at the greengrocer's shop. Not to the two of them, anyway. They were kept politely but firmly in their place.

‘I wouldn't have believed it,' Angel said in amazement as they pedalled back through the lanes. ‘Even Miss Norton seemed to want us out of there, and we've known her for years!'

‘They want to keep their stories correct without any awkward questions cropping up,' Ellen said shrewdly. ‘The whole village could be involved in poor old roly-poly's death, and the truth of it will probably never come out.'

‘I don't want to think about it any more.' Angel leaned over her handlebars, upset at the very thought of such injustice.

‘You can't close your eyes and ears to every nasty thing that comes your way, Angel. That's being chicken-livered.'

‘I don't care.' Angel's voice floated back to her as she rode ahead furiously. ‘There's no law that says I have to keep imagining Mr Strube's head being bashed in, is there?'

Ellen guessed instantly that it was Angel's way of saying that she did keep imagining it. That because she was so sensitive and finely-tuned, there was no way she could keep the atrocity out of her mind, any more than she could forget what had obviously been a very deep and emotional experience for her with the unknown aviator.

Ellen didn't have much room in her make-up for envy, but in those shared moments when Angel had bared her innermost thoughts to her sister, Ellen had envied Angel
with a fervour that had stunned her.

They didn't talk much for the rest of the journey back to Meadowcroft. Each was concerned with her own thoughts, each wishing vaguely that the earlier closeness wasn't evaporating, and not really knowing how to recapture it.

The house was beautiful in the late afternoon sun. Angel wondered with a catch in her throat just how many lovely buildings across the English Channel were at this moment being blown into fragments, to be left as smoking ruins. The war was definitely worming its way into her. She hated it, but without any conscious effort, she couldn't escape it. It was as though she was becoming a part of it, and it was part of her. It was as potent a factor in her life as love.

They left their bicycles in the out-house and walked towards the house together, linking arms. It was the nearest either of them could come to putting into words how they felt. They were met in the hallway by their mother, who was looking sorely put out.

‘Your friend has gone,' she announced accusingly to Ellen, as though it was her fault. ‘After all we've done for her, and my efforts this afternoon to find her a place of work, she's packed her things and left. Cook said she telephoned for a taxi, and went as soon as our backs were turned. I knew it was a mistake to bring her here. Didn't I say so from the beginning?'

‘Yes, Mother, you did.' Ellen breathed a long sigh of relief, allowing Clemence to have her say. What did it matter? The fact was, Rose could only have been an embarrassment from now on, and she had saved them all the problem of what they were going to do with her.

She caught sight of Angel, who was trying hard not to smile, and blatantly grinned back at her. And then the two of them were suddenly holding on to one another and doubling up with laughter, while Clemence stared at them in disbelief.

Such a display! It was good riddance to Rose Morton if she could have this kind of influence on her girls, and the
sooner they were all back to normal, the better. Mercifully, they seemed to have forgotten for the moment the upsetting incident of the little German shopkeeper's death, and as she went out of the room with her head held high, Clemence completely failed to discern the desperation in her daughters' laughter.