The Other Side of Love (28 page)

Araminta behaved and felt virginal. That German lapse was buried like a prehistoric shard beneath layer upon layer of lightly but determinedly fended-off passes made by numerous young men including the Honourable Peter Shawcross-Mortimer.

II

At the dinner-table, she reconsidered the invitation. Of course she would accept. Once at Mainwaring Court she would charm her host and hostess. Yes, she would win them both over. If they wanted ladylike, she would be ladylike; if they wanted vivacity, she would effervesce More important, they would see for themselves how essential she was to their son’s happiness.

Engrossed in her plans, she slowly became conscious of the rise and fall of Euan’s voice.

“Poland!”

he was shouting at Aubrey.

“Why listen to a pack of warlovers? Why not get it straight from the horse’s mouth? Herr Hitler states categorically that he has no interest whatsoever in Poland. Germany only wants the Free City of Danzig, which, as you might recall from your geography lessons, belonged to them in the first place!”

“Can’t you see it’s the same old story?”

Aubrey drew a calming breath.

“Hitler said he didn’t want Austria or Czechoslovakia. We should’ve stopped him then.”

“Thank God Chamberlain has the brains to keep the peace! That’s why England backs him solidly!”

“What about the movement to get the Prime Minister to resign in”

favour of Winston Churchill?”

Aubrey responded.

178

‘This Churchill of yours! Who is he? The crackpot voice for a pack of armament salesmen!”

“He’s”

“Please, Aubrey dear,”

Elizabeth interrupted anxiously, one hand on the decanter.

“You know your father hasn’t been … himself.”

Euan, as always when his wife brought up his heartattack, responded furiously.

“Stay out of this!”

Half-rising from his chair, he shouted at his son:

“The trouble with you, young man, is you’ve never lived through the trenches, never seen your friends slaughtered!”

His face was red and swollen.

Araminta, from a lifetime’s experience, knew that at this point anything Aubrey or Elizabeth said would inflame him further.

“Daddy darling, you old fraud,”

she cooed.

“When were you near a trench? You weren’t fool enough to let Kaiser Bill’s boys take pot shots at you.”

Elizabeth drained the glass.

“Neither of my brothers were fools,”

she said with a forcefulness that made them all turn to her end of the table in surprise.

They finished the raspberry tart in silence.

“What was all that about?”

Araminta asked her brother when they were alone in the shabby comfortable library.

Tm leaving Kingsmith’s.”

Araminta, who had been cutting Malaga grapes, dropped the dark cluster back into the fruit-bowl.

“You’re what?”

“I told him on the way down this was my last month.”

“Trying your hand at another novel?”

Aubrey glanced around the tiers of Frognall books with their small irregular-shaped wormholes.

“No. The Army.”

“You’re enlisting? No wonder poor Daddy was so keen on appeasement. Which regiment?”

“Seventh Artillery.”

“You shooting cannons? With your Kingsmith eyes?”

Her mouth pulled in shrewdly.

“I supposed you’d end up in some hush-hush planning job with that one-armed major of yours.”

“Surely you’ve heard of the Seventh Artillery’s famed guide-dog division?”

With a high pretty laugh, she began peeling a grape.

Seriously,”

he said.

“With my glasses I have perfect eyesight.”

“Another Oxford Union pacifist has heard the call to arms.”

“Peter?”

“Yes, Peter.”

“Tell me another.”

It’s not all that incredible. Those Nazis are a bit sick-making. Open

179

your mouth and close your eyes and see what God’ll send you.”

She popped the juicy grape in her brother’s mouth.

“Did you know he can fly a plane? I didn’t, either, until lunch this afternoon. He’s like you in that respect. He never toots his own horn.”

“I can’t get over it. Peter in the RAF?”

The belted earl and his countess are expressing their gratitude for his willingness to serve King and Country by allowing me within the sacred confines of Mainwaring Court. I’m going up there for a week.”

“Araminta, don’t pin your hopes on the invitation.”

“Am I that transparent?”

“Only to me.”

He gripped her hand.

“Neither of us has much luck in love, do we?”

“Once inside Mainwaring Court,”

she said, Til make my own luck.”

IV

With its hundreds of peaks, gables, oriel windows and fantastically clumped Tudor chimneys floating above centuries-old trees, Mainwaring Court deserved its reputation as one of England’s most beautiful country houses. Ancestral portraits by Romney and Gainsborough hung along the length of the lead-glass-windowed gallery. A pair of gold salt-cellars made in the reign of Charles I graced the Sheraton dining-table, as did a vast Ming-dynasty bowl.

But when it came to creature comforts, little Quarles won hands down. 4

Though the week that started on 25 August was exceptionally fine, Araminta’s bedroom was so dank that she bought a hot-water bottle in the village to pop surreptitiously into her curtained Tudor bed. Only half-jokingly she told Peter that she needed to drop breadcrumbs along the bewildering maze of corridors that led to the loo. The nearest bathroom (there were only two in the vast structure) was miles away down another drafty labyrinth. By night mice and rats scurried within handsome wainscoting. By day she could see the water stains that brought the perpetual chill to the room.

The thirteenth Earl of Mainwaring, short, thickset, with the bulbous pink nose and receding chin of the Hanoverian kings to whom he was somehow related, spent most of his waking hours astride a massive roan stallion. He spoke mildly enough to Araminta, but roused her hackles by barking at Peter as if his youngest son were a dimwitted tenant farmer. His countess, from whom Peter had inherited his dark dramatic good looks, wore her magnificently fitted Paris summer frocks with an assortment of floppy straw hats apparently left over from a local jumble sale. She chatted with her other guests - three titled couples whose families quite literally nad

180

known the Mainwarings for centuries her expression animated. But the skin around her melting brown eyes grew taut when she addressed either Peter or Araminta; the most common remark Araminta heard from her hostess was a vaguely irritable

“You don’t want us old fogies casting a blight on your fun. Do run along.”

The first evening Araminta remained demurely quiet, but when she realized Aubrey was right - as far as her host and hostess were concerned it didn’t make any difference what she did - she reverted to her usual vivacious self. The table laughed heartily at her jokes before drifting back into conversations about mutual friends. Peter gazed through candle-flames down twenty-odd feet of table to her.

V

“But what about new toys?”

Araminta asked.

“Never got any.”

“Not even at Christmas?”

It was the third day of her visit, and by now she had a place rubbed raw in her heart for the child Peter had been. They were in the day nursery. On this glorious August day, the narrow windows, sheltered as they were by ancient oaks, threw such a wan light that she’d needed to go over to the corner toy-case to inspect its contents one battered squad of wooden hussars and a dented metal train from Victoria’s reign.

“Books,”

he said shrugging.

“I remember Westward Ho! in unspeakably tiny print.”

She touched her lips to his cheek, gently rubbing away the lipstick mark.

“We bourgeois are sensible about our creature comforts, including our toys.”

Til remember that,”

he said, holdin Aier hand to his cheek.

“Araminta, listen. We do get along rather vell, don’t you think?”

“When we’re not battling.”

Peter kissed her palm.

“Oh, I rather like our fights, especially the making-up part,”

he said, his lips moving up to the veins in her wrist.

Hoping he couldn’t feel the violent leap of her pulses, she said:

“What would Nanny Hogwood say of this sort of behaviour in her nursery?”

Earlier today they had ridden over to one of Mainwaring Court’s grace-and-favour cottages where the whiskered nurse pattered around preparing elevenses.

“

“I do rather fancy your young lady, Master Peter,”

“

he quavered in a close approximation of the old woman’s voice.

“Oh, how I adore you!”

Araminta said, laughing.

“Good,”

Peter said earnestly.

“Good.”

181

VI

That warm August, while non-aggression and mutualassistance pacts were signed across the map of non-Axis Europe, Hitler remained determined to gather up Poland. Aware that a majority of his people were dead set against another war, he ensured their loyalty with an incident code-named Konserven -

“Canned Goods’. As cynically planned as it was named, Konserven was carried out when night fell on 31 August. SS stormtroopers dressed in Polish uniforms attacked the German radio station at Gleiwitz, shooting drugged concentrationcamp prisoners dressed in German uniforms, photographing the blood-soaked corpses as evidence of Polish bestiality. But already a million and a half troops were streaming across the Polish borders while sixteen hundred Luftwaffe planes with laden bomb-bays headed towards the sleeping cities of Warsaw and Cracow. The darkness that had descended upon Europe that night would last six blood-soaked years.

“Araminta? Aubrey here.”

“What’s up?”

she asked into the mouthpiece. Her voice echoed in the bare seldom-used little antechamber off the great hall. The Mainwarings, like their corps of friends, clung to the leisurely habit of communicating via the post. Til be home tomorrow evening. Is it Daddy?”

*

“Haven’t you heard the wireless?”

“Not since I arrived. Who knows if there is one? Aubrey, this place is firmly mired in the Tudor age.”

“German tank divisions are well into Poland.”

Aubrey’s voice was rapid.

“Whitehall’s sent an ultimatum telling them to get out.”

“Is it any of our business?”

“It seems we signed a mutualassistance treaty with the Poles on August the twenty-fifth. I’m in London, and the stations are madhouses. Children are being evacuated. The Irish and the Germans are heading home. Men’re everywhere - the radio’s been announcing that Army, Navy and RAF reservists are called up.”

“Oh my God.”

Araminta leaned against the panelling.

“Do you think the Germans will listen to reason?”

“The Germans might. Hitler won’t.”

VII

“Are you positive Aubrey said we’d issued an ultimatum?”

‘Eh?”

she said, cupping her hand to her ear.

“What was that?”

‘You’re not deaf, darling, but you might have misunderstood”

There was a loud tap. Araminta darted into a corner, standing discreetly out of sight as a footman opened the door to tell

182

Peter he was wanted on the telephone. Alone, she moved to the window, where heavy hand-made lace curtains made her invisible from outside. She watched one of the maids moving around the terrace to retrieve whisky-glasses. Mainwaring Court had fortyseven inside servants, exactly half the number there had been before the Great War.

War…

War brought change even to aristocrats … The old order changeth The Mainwarings would come to accept her. A thread of excitement wound through her. The door opened. Peter’s eyes held a gleam that matched her own.

“Aubrey was right,”

he said.

“That was my orders. I’m to report to training-camp tomorrow morning. I won’t be there long.”

“Why not?”

“I already have my pilot’s licence.”

“You’ve never flown a combat plane.”

“The RAF has damn few qualified pilots.”

“But Peter … you could be … hurt.”

War … Suddenly she thought of the sepia photographs of those eternally boyish young officers, her uncles, whose bleached white bones lay beneath fertile French soil near Chateau Thierry. Running across the creaking magnificent Elizabethan parquet, she clasped Peter. The tightness of her embrace had much in common with her binding grip that summer night three years earlier (0 banned memory) when after that speeding tipsily through Berlin with Jiirgen von und su Gilsa, she had awoken in a ditch to the irrefutable fact of humankind’s mortality. Jiirgen was in the Luftwaffe, she thought. Maybe one day he’ll down Peter.

Before this she had not allowed Peter to caress her below the waist. Now she abandoned herself to him.

“Araminta …

“

His hot whisper against her ear aroused her yet more.

“Darling, sweetest…

“

While Peter locked the door, she yanked off the heavy worn tapestry that served him as a bedspread. The late-afternoon sun dappling them with the lacy patterns of the curtains, they made love on the Tudor four-poster bed.