The Bannister Girls (6 page)

‘It's such a long way, of course!' Ellen didn't believe her for a second. ‘Anyway, never mind all that. Did you mean what you said, about joining something?'

Angel pushed past her on the landing. ‘If you mean, am I going to join your lot, then forget it. Some of those strident women make me sick.'

‘They're not all like that. You haven't met Rose –' To Angel's horror, Ellen's square face suddenly crumpled. The vague suspicion of something ‘not quite nice' about some of those women flared into her mind. Oh no, not Ellen…

Her sister's next words were a relief, quickly squashed as she heard the tearful story.

‘You missed out on my big scene with the parents, Angel. All I want is for Rose to have a few weeks at Meadowcroft to get over her husband's death. He was blown to bits in France. Can you imagine that? She got a cold little letter from the War Office, and that was all. As far as they're concerned, Gunner Ronnie Morton no longer exists, and his poor widow can go hang.'

‘I'm so sorry, Ellen.' Angel didn't know what else to say. It sounded too ghastly.

That was what war did to people. Tore them apart, made
widows of young women on the brink of life, cut down virile young men … a frisson of gladness for last night swept through her, despite the pain of it all. She had known love. For a little while it had been perfect. And whether Jacques de Ville had been a rogue or not, she had sent him off to war happy. It was the only thing she had to cling on to now.

Ellen sniffed. ‘Oh well, it was what I expected of the parents. They think we're all queer, but it's simply not true. All we want is the right to be recognised as people. We exist, Angel. Women have always played their part in history, and someday they'll know our worth.'

‘Ellen, I'm sure you're right, but please don't give me a political lecture right now. I want a bath, and then I have to face the music again.' She tried desperately to get away.

‘All right. But I'll make a bargain with you. I'll stick up for your right to a bit of independence if you'll back me in getting Rose to stay at Meadowcroft.'

She held out her hand and Angel took it solemnly. It wouldn't make a scrap of difference if their mother had made up her mind, and she really didn't care whether Rose Morton stayed at Meadowcroft or not. It meant nothing to her. Except…

The memory of Ellen's terse words about her friend's husband stayed in Angel's mind while she soaped herself in a hot bath. Gunner Ronnie Morton, blown to bits in France … she never knew him, but the poignancy of those stark words wouldn't leave her. How awful. How simply and terribly awful. It could have been Jacques de Ville…

The words slid into her mind before she could stop them, and a sob tightened her throat. She couldn't forget him. He had been the most important person in her life. The man to whom a woman gave herself was surely that. They were bound together by something deeper than blood, stronger than hate.

She looked down at her own breasts, silky white with suds, and remembered Jacques' mouth on them, and it had been
the first time a man had touched them. She felt a tingling in them at the memory. She remembered with an almost exquisite bittersweet pain the moments when the warm secret part of her had opened up to him like a flower blossoming in the sun, and in remembering, she felt the dampness of tears on her cheeks.

It had been so beautiful. It had been love. Angel was sure of that. And love was like eternity. Intangible, but undeniable. It never ended, even after death. Rose Morton, whoever she was, was proof of that. Angel swallowed back the tears and let the bath water run out.

By the time she was ready to go downstairs again, she wore a sensible frock of grey-green stripes with a big floppy bow at the neck, and her hair was brushed out into a golden sheen. She was extremely nervous at seeing her parents again. Her mother's discovery had been a terrible shock, even though she knew little of what had really happened.

But Angel realised that a pact with Ellen might be useful. They could present a solid front if need be. And why not agree to help the poor woman whose husband had been killed? In doing so, Angel cherished a strange hope that her good deed might repay her in Jacques de Ville's safe deliverance. She sent up a little prayer to that effect.

Fred was finding the problem of two rebel daughters a little too much to take all at once. Clemence was not normally a nagging wife. She had had no need of it over the years, since Fred had always given in to her. But now Clemence was insisting on his support, and he was very much afraid he was finding her a bore. For God's sake, why not let Ellen and her friend go down to Meadowcroft? At least they would know where Ellen was. And what more could they say to Angel but to reprimand her and tell her to behave herself in future?

What was done was done, and unless the girl had got herself in trouble, then no harm was done. Fred suddenly went cold at the thought, and refused to think about it. There
was no point in meeting that kind of trouble halfway.

‘Are you going to give me your support or not, Fred? You seem to be in a world of your own these days. I think you should stop going to Yorkshire so often. You're not as young as you were, and these long journeys do tire you out. Either that, or let Charles drive you as he's paid to do.'

Fred became alert at once.

‘Nonsense. I'm perfectly capable of driving myself anywhere I want to go,' he said tartly. ‘Besides, how would you get in and out of town without Charles driving you in the Sunbeam? I'd much rather leave you in his capable hands, old girl, than have you in and out of taxi-cabs all the time. One hears such odd things at times about the driver fellows.'

He didn't need to look at her face to know that she would agree with him instantly. Clemence really was a dreadful snob. She had passed it down to their eldest daughter, Louise, and sometimes the two of them were insufferable. At least his other girls were more down to earth, even if one of them had progressive ideas, and the other one was growing up and away from him at the same time.

He felt a swift sorrow, knowing that it was bound to happen, and in his heart he wouldn't want to stop it. But Angel was no longer his little girl. In one swift exchange of glances earlier that day, he had seen that she was a woman.

And later that afternoon, two things happened that were to make the decision for the future crystal clear.

Louise Bannister Crabb drove herself to her parents' house that same afternoon, braking the car with a screech of tyres that could only forebode bad news. Louise was normally a sedate and slightly nervous driver, and her husband Stanley rarely agreed to her taking out the car alone.

Fred frequently compared the two of them with Siamese twins rather than husband and wife. He doubted that the Hon. Stanley did much in the marital bedding department either, but if Louise was anything like her mother, she wouldn't be too bothered on that account.

He and Clemence were ostensibly reading the daily newspapers, each still wondering what to do about Ellen and Angel, when Louise burst in on them like a whirlwind.

‘Stanley's volunteered!' Her eyes were brilliant, her voice as shocked as that of a spoilt child deprived of its favourite plaything. Which on reflection, Fred thought, was exactly what she was.

Clemence jumped up at once, and put her arms round her eldest daughter.

‘Oh, darling, how wonderful. You must be very proud!'

Louise looked furious.

‘Mother, I thought you'd understand! Oh well, yes, I suppose I am a bit proud. I mean, King and Country, and all that. But I want him home! I don't want him in the trenches in France or wherever it is they're sending them –'

‘But darling, he'll be an officer, surely? He'll be in some
command or other. They won't put such a clever and well-connected young man in any danger!'

Fred wanted to fetch up. He listened to the two of them, extolling the virtues of his inept son-in-law, whose qualifications for brilliance centred mainly around his father's money, horse breeding in his Hertfordshire home, and putting his horses to stud.

Which was possibly why he seemed to have no energy for what Fred suspected was an infrequent sex life of his own.

‘Is there anyone we can talk to about it, Mummy? Do you know anyone, Daddy?'

‘No, I do not,' Fred said shortly. ‘If Stanley's volunteered, then it's the finest day's work of his life, and it's not up to us to interfere and make him seem a Mummy's boy.'

‘Really, Fred,' Clemence said sharply, as Louise began to wail in a most undignified manner.

‘But I shall be all alone!'

‘Of course you won't, darling,' Clemence said soothingly. ‘You'll move right back here with us, won't she, Frederick? Your old room is the same as when you left it.'

Fred groaned inwardly. They were two of a kind. He loved them both, but together they would be insufferable.

‘Perhaps Louise would rather stay in her own home,' he said as casually as he could.

She shook her head vigorously.

‘I hate the smell of horses all the time. I can stand it when Stanley's there, because he loves them so much, but it will be perfectly beastly without him. But London's so dangerous now, isn't it? Everyone says so.'

‘You mean all these country experts who know everything about the city, do you?' her father retorted. ‘Perhaps you'd better go down to Meadowcroft with Ellen and her friend, then.'

‘Nothing's been decided about that yet,' Clemence said sharply.

‘If you all think London's so dangerous, and you don't
like the idea of Meadowcroft, we could always go north to Yorkshire. It would be handy for me for the mill –' and for Harriet too, Fred thought, though knowing he was on perfectly safe ground.

If there was one place Clemence hated it was cold and windy Yorkshire, as she called it. She knew nothing of its beauties, the rolling dales and clean fresh moors … and it was as well that she knew nothing of Harriet either…

‘Thank-you, Fred,' Clemence said tightly. ‘You know very well that if we go anywhere at all, it will be to Meadowcroft.'

Fred congratulated himself on trapping her so neatly.

Louise had a faraway look in her eyes.

‘Meadowcroft. It's so lovely there, and I haven't seen it for simply ages. I don't have to decide right away, do I?'

She dithered as usual. For a young married woman of twenty-four, she took an interminable time to make up her mind about anything, Fred realised. She relied on someone else to do her thinking whenever she could, which was probably why she was so hot and bothered about Stanley volunteering. Neither of the other two girls was so indecisive. Ellen knew exactly what she wanted to do, and Angel … Angel always said she could make a snap decision whenever something felt right.

There was a tap on the drawing room door while Fred was still ruminating over whether or not something had felt very right to Angel last night.

One of the maids bobbed a curtsey, her eyes bright with speculation. In her arms she held a great sheaf of spring flowers enclosed in tissue paper. Printed all over the tissue was the name of Simone's, London's most exclusive florist. The bouquet consisted of tiny white mignonette and freesias, budding jonquils and tiny, outrageously expensive hothouse forced pink tea roses. They were all bound together with a flamboyant pink ribbon, and there was a card attached.

‘Someone's just delivered these for Miss Angel, m'lady,' the maid said excitedly. ‘They came in a big florist's van, ever so posh –'

‘Thank-you, Sophie,' Clemence said irritably. She took the flowers from the girl's hand, looking immediately at the card. She gave a strangled gasp.

‘To my Angel,' she read out. ‘Until we see the lights of London together.'

‘Is that all? No signature?' Fred demanded as she stopped.

‘None,' Clemence said furiously. ‘Now will you believe me when I say that something's got to be done about that girl, Frederick?'

‘I say. Has Angel got a beau?' Louise forgot her troubles for a second and stared at the flowers.

Stanley was a darling, but he usually forgot the little niceties of life, leaving things like birthdays and anniversaries for his secretary to remind him, and often to make the necessary purchases. Louise's envy of Angel soared.

‘That's just what I'd like to know.' Clemence told Louise rapidly what little they knew of Angel's movements of the previous night, while Louise's eyes grew round as she listened. There was nothing of the rebel in Louise, but all the same, she could suddenly identify with the excitement Angel must have felt, unexpectedly having the freedom to do as she wished for one night in her life, and being daring enough to act on it.

‘Is she in her room? Shall I take the flowers up to her?' Louise said eagerly, dying to find out more.

‘Certainly not. I want to see her face when she reads the card,' Clemence said. ‘You may call her down, Louise, but please don't mention the flowers.'

Dutifully, Louise left the room. Fred hid a little sigh. If Clemence told Louise to throw herself off Tower Bridge, she would probably do it without question. There must be a happy medium somewhere between the cloying obedience of one daughter, and the out-and-out contrariness of
another. And Ellen, his middle girl, was certainly not it.

Angel and Ellen were talking together when Louise went upstairs, and the three girls came into the drawing room together. They were not often here en masse, and as if for the first time since they had grown up, Fred was struck by the differences and yet the similarities in them.

Louise stood above the other two by a few inches, though none of them could be called tall. They were all fair, with Angel having the softest honey-coloured hair of all. They all had Clemence's green eyes. In shape, they were very different.