The Bannister Girls (30 page)

People around them were beginning to whisper and to glance their way. Ellen finished her tea and bun, and picked up her gloves, sliding them onto her square fingers.

‘Margot, darling, I shall have to go. Will you be all right?'

Margot gave her a sunny smile, her mood changing like quicksilver.

‘Oh, of course! Why shouldn't I be? I have to go, anyway. Mother and I are seeing Eddie tomorrow, and we like to look our best and not be flustered.'

Ellen's mouth felt as if it was opening and shutting like a fish. She had to get away from this strange girl who didn't seem to know if her brother was dead or alive, and who seemed to epitomise all the terrible things that could happen to people in a war. Yet Ellen felt a swift shame as they parted company outside with a tiny peck on the cheek. All these others were so much braver and worldlier than she. They had seen it all, knew it all, while she knew nothing,
was
nothing.

She walked for hours until finally returning to Rose's house. The lover, unfit for war service, was upstairs with Rose. She could hear Rose's high-pitched giggling interspersed with the lover's deeper rumblings. She could hear the whine of bedsprings, and she felt an unjust, fierce dislike for the two of them. Rose, with her pious widowhood, and the lover, fornicating on Ronnie's bed with Ronnie's wife, clearly fit for something…

Quietly, Ellen went to her own room and packed her
things. The old days were gone for ever, and she didn't like the new ones. She should never have tried to resurrect a friendship that had died when Rose had screamed abuse at the poor dead image of Mr Roly-Poly Strube. She scrawled a note for Rose while the bedsprings reached a more feverish urgency, and slipped out of the house before consummation was complete.

She would make for Paddington railway station. There would be trains going to Bristol, and she didn't care how long she had to wait. She never stopped to consider going anywhere else. There would be refuge at Meadowcroft. Almost to her own surprise, Ellen realised that like the rest of her family, she sought its comfort when she needed it. Even when she hadn't been aware of her need, Meadowcroft was there, waiting to enclose her in its arms like a mother welcoming home an errant child.

Clemence gave her daughter a perfunctory kiss. She did not approve of anything Ellen did, though she was forced to admit it was good to see at least one of her daughters, since in her opinion they had all abandoned her.

‘Why on earth couldn't you have let me know you were coming, Ellen?' Clemence said with mild irritation. ‘The bed would have been properly aired, and arrangements made –'

‘What arrangements, Mother? I've come home, and you could at least look pleased to see me!'

Ellen was exhausted. There had been no train to Bristol last night, and she had had to wait until the early hours of the morning, huddled up in a most undignified way on the station platform with an assortment of dubious characters and soldiers. She was cold and tired, and she didn't want to be questioned until she had had at least a week's sleep…

‘Of course I'm pleased.' Clemence's huffed voice made a mockery of the words. ‘It's good to see anyone these days. Your father hardly ever comes home, and I rarely get a letter from Angel. Louise does write, and I suppose you might as well know that she and that Dougal fellow have been married. With indecent haste, without even a complete year's mourning for poor dear Stanley –'

‘Oh Mother, don't be so prissy. What do such things matter nowadays? Good for Louise!' She reversed her feelings over Rose's similar situation without a qualm. Louise hadn't loved Stanley.
Nobody
could have loved
Stanley
, so why shouldn't she begin a new life? Lucky Louise, to have found happiness at last.

‘Oh well, I might have known you'd approve of such an outrage. Louise wrote a long letter, saying she's perfectly happy living in Scotland, though it must be appallingly cold and miserable there right now –'

But surely not for Louise, warmed by her husband's love, Ellen thought enviously…

‘– and she's asked your father to organise the renting out of her London house, which keeps him away even more. If he's not in London, he's in Yorkshire. Really, one needs to be a saint these days, to deal with everything.'

‘Poor Mother.' Impulsively, Ellen put her arms around her and hugged her. She felt genuinely sorry for Clemence, unable to cope with this brave new world, where daughters left home and conducted their own lives, and husbands simply had too much to do to spend time with their wives.

Clemence moved away from Ellen. Showing so much affection without good reason was bad form, and Clemence did so hate to be patronised by anyone thinking she needed sympathy. Clemence breathed deeply and resolutely, regaining her usual fortitude.

‘It's the war, of course. One does have to make sacrifices.'

‘Yes, Mother, one does,' Ellen said, poker-faced, trying not to remember the propaganda film of the Battle of the Somme, and Edward Lacey in particular.

It was strange to be back at Meadowcroft. Life in the country had its own soothing pattern, regardless of any ruffles within the house itself, and Ellen found herself responding to the tranquillity and comparative isolation, compared with the hectic pace of wartime London.

The war had touched everyone here too, she reminded herself. She was striding out one morning through the bare wintry lanes, needing time to herself as ever. The poor old German shopkeeper had been brutally killed. Many of the
young men of the village who had gone to war wouldn't be coming back. Their own country house knew a succession of billetted soldiers. Stanley had been blown up. And the lives of Ellen and her sisters had taken vastly different courses from those their mother had mapped out for them.

She was pensive, her head down as she walked, coat collar turned up against the crisp January morning, when she became aware of a shadow across her path. She had been so deep in thought that it startled her. Her head jerked up so fast it cricked her neck, and the blood rushed to her face when she realised Peter Chard was blocking her path in the narrow lane.

She hadn't seen him since that terrible day when he'd caught her in the barn with the Cornishman. The memory of it all was sharp and painful and acutely embarrassing, and the fleeting thought ran through Ellen's mind that the old standards were not so very far removed from her after all.

She took in Peter's appearance in that glance. He looked just the same. Dark and forceful, hunched into his country overcoat, breeches tucked into workmanlike boots. His hands were dug deep into his pockets, and he didn't take them out to shake Ellen's hand. For some reason, the omission made her swallow.

‘How are you, Peter?' Her voice was huskier than she would have wished. She seemed to have lost much of her aplomb, and the knowledge of it made her almost nervous. She could have laughed at herself for the feeling, if it wasn't so important to her that Peter Chard should respect her…

‘I'm well. And you?' He was polite, but his mouth was unsmiling. She ached to see it smile. She longed for the old camaraderie they had had when they were campaigning together. Like the easy elegance of pre-war life, the spark between them seemed to be quenched.

‘Oh, well enough.' She was brittle now, not wanting him to see how much his attitude was hurting her. ‘I thought I'd
come down and rusticate a bit. London's so tedious nowadays.'

‘Really?'

She could hear the sarcasm in his voice and couldn't blame him. Even to herself, she sounded appallingly snobbish and middle class. She sounded more like her mother, more like Louise while she had been married to Stanley.

She went to step sideways to get out of Peter's way, since there seemed no point in standing there not knowing what to say. He stepped to the same side at the same moment. Ellen gave a small nervous laugh.

‘I'm sorry. I do seem to be a nuisance to you, don't I? How's the farm?' It was an inane thing to say.
How was the farm
? Things grew. Cows grazed. Hens lay eggs for the Ministry Men to count and take away…

‘The farm's fine, Ellen. Rusticating nicely. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm sure you have plenty of we humble country folk to visit before you go back to London, so don't let me stop you. Remember me to your family.'

He moved past her, and tears stung her eyes at the snub. He was so stupid, she thought furiously! Couldn't he see how much she wanted to be friends with him? Didn't he know that she didn't look down on him, or anyone else, for that matter? Didn't he know that she loved him?

Ellen bit her trembling lower lip hard as the thought swept into her mind. She loved him. All that stuff about never letting herself get caught up in all that hearts and flowers nonsense was as meaningless as will-o'-the-wisp. She knew exactly how Angel had felt over Jacques. How Louise had been swept off her feet by Dougal.

She never thought it would happen to her, but it had, slowly and insidiously, and it was only when she came face to face with Peter again that she knew how badly she had been missing him. But Angel was wrong in one respect. It wasn't glorious at all. It was bloody painful.

She stuck her head in the air and trudged on down to the
village, making small talk with one and another of folk that she knew, and trying all the time not to notice that her heart was breaking. And gradually her own feelings receded into the background as she encountered one and another family who had lost someone at the Somme. The whole village was a sadder place than it had been when she left it.

Ellen wanted to weep to see how crushed many of the women appeared. Women without men … and she felt bitterly ashamed of the little glad feeling that at least Peter would never have to go to war. A feeling that was at the same time completely hollow, because he had made it plain that he cared nothing for her.

It was a relief to turn back towards Meadowcroft again. The lovely old house seemed to Ellen to be a symbol of other days, when their lives were frothy and untroubled. How little any of them had appreciated it then. England itself was so lovely, in all its moods, all its seasons, from the biggest mansion to the lowliest dwelling.

The scent of woodsmoke drifted across the bare fields from the directions of the outlying farms. Peter's farm was out there. The big old kitchen with its flagstone floor, the homely furnishings and brass ornaments, the leaping flames of a log fire in the parlour … her nostalgia was so great that for a moment, Ellen was tempted to go marching there to see him, to demand that he stop treating her as a wanton hussy, and try to regain some of their old friendship again. But she was bedevilled by too much pride. And her mother would be scandalised if she even guessed at Ellen's thoughts.

Clemence scolded her as soon as she went indoors.

‘You'll catch your death of cold, walking about in this weather, Ellen. What can you have been doing all this time?'

Wishing that my would-be lover would sweep me in his arms and ask me to stay, Mother
…

For a second, Ellen wondered if she had said the words out loud, but one glance at Clemence's face assured her that she had not. If she had spoken aloud, Clemence would surely
have fainted right off by now. She gave a tight smile.

‘I've been paying my respects to the village women, Mother. Poor things. So many of them on their own now. I suppose there'll be a stone erected to the fallen once the war's over. That's the correct phrase, isn't it? As if the poor devils were all propped up like a pack of cards and somebody pushed the one at the end –'

‘Ellen, will you ever learn respect? I do despair of you,' Clemence snapped. ‘I blame it partly on your choice of companions –'

‘Do you, Mother? Can't you even give me credit for being bloody-minded? I do have a mind of my own. Anyway, I thought you'd be pleased I was offering sympathy to the bereaved.' At her mother's dubious look, Ellen gave her a quick embarrassed hug.

‘I was, truly! Don't look so doubting. I'm not as beastly as you sometimes seem to think. I can be quite nice when I want to be!'

Clemence commented that they had better have some tea, feeling somehow inadequate as always in her daughter's presence. Ellen gave a shrug, knowing that any closeness between the two of them was as remote as ever. They did care for one another, she thought defiantly. The tragedy of it was, they could never seem to show it with any sincerity.

‘By the way, your father's coming home this weekend,' Clemence said as she rang the bell for afternoon tea. ‘He's decided he can spare the time away from his wretched factory to spend a week with his wife, so please try not to upset him, Ellen.'

Ellen opened her mouth to protest, and closed it again, deciding that it wasn't worth it. It would be good to see her father again. It seemed ages. And she ignored her mother's irritating little dig at Fred's frequent absences. If it wasn't for the war, the factory wouldn't be working at full stretch, producing uniforms and blankets, so as usual, everything could be blamed on the war. It was becoming
extraordinarily useful, Ellen thought without humour.

Fred didn't really want to come south, but it was hardly fair on poor old Clemence to spend so much time without any of her family around, and he could hardly expect her to suffer the billetted soldiers' company on her own without ever being at Meadowcroft himself. It was perfectly true that business had never been so brisk at Bannister Textiles, although it certainly wasn't the kind of business he wanted. Producing uniforms that would be in tatters within days or hours after they reached the Front, according to all the grim reports, and blankets that would be blown to smithereens almost as soon as they were packed, was a sorry end to the toil of his industrious workers.

He needed to be on hand constantly, and Clemence must realise this. Even more, he needed to be with Harriet. Not only for the comfort and pleasure they drew from each other, but because of the worrying way she seemed less robust of late. Fred constantly worried about her.