A Fragile Peace

  ‘Of course it isn’t. It goes back to way before the war. I don’t deny that women have the brains, the capability, to do those jobs – they simply don’t have the experience, the know-how—’

  ‘How will they get it if they aren’t given the opportunity?’ Allie leaned forward intently. ‘And here’s a question: why did we have to have a war to bring about this conversation?’ She looked up, and stopped as she caught sight of Myra in the doorway. ‘Mother!’

  Myra held open her arms, smiling, and Allie ran to her and hugged her. ‘We thought you weren’t going to make it home tonight.’

  ‘I had my doubts myself once or twice. Stratford and Silvertown caught it really badly.’ Myra disentangled herself gently. Her dark green greatcoat was dusty and there was an uncharacteristic smear of dirt on her cheek. She walked across the room and lifted her face to her husband’s kiss.

  Allie said, her voice suddenly expressionless, ‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend first?’

  Sue had been watching Myra, wide-eyed. She scrambled to her feet.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Sue Miller. You’ve heard me speak of her. Sue, this is my mother—’ Allie’s voice stopped abruptly as, too late, Myra pulled back the hand that she had automatically put out to Sue – blood smeared the back of it. ‘Mother! You’re hurt!’

  ‘It’s nothing. A scratch. Flying glass. How do you do, Sue?’ Myra smiled her brilliant smile. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you. And yes, please, Allie, I should like a cup of tea.’

  ‘Let me make it,’ said Sue. ‘You and Allie have a lot to talk about.’

  ‘Thank you, my dear – ah, listen. Over for the night. That’s good.’ In the sudden stillness the single wailing note of one all-clear siren was joined by others. ‘They’ve packed up a bit earlier tonight.’

  On her way to the door, Sue suggested, ‘Perhaps the Führer’s stopped their overtime payments?’ and was rewarded by another smile.

  ‘Let me come and help you,’ Allie said to her mother. ‘That hand needs cleaning.’

  In the bathroom she bathed Myra’s hand and bound it up. ‘You should have gone to a first-aid post.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, darling. They had a lot worse than this to cope with. Thank you. That’s very much better. Come and talk to me while I change.’

  In the bedroom she climbed out of her WVS uniform and wrapped a brightly coloured silk housecoat around her slim body. ‘This is a luxury! I don’t allow myself to wear this very often. There won’t be many more where this came from for some time…’ Vigorously she began to brush the dust from her silky hair.

  Allie watched her, smiling. ‘You look marvellous. Young enough to be your own daughter!’

  Myra chuckled. ‘Well, thank you for that. But between you, me and the gatepost, tonight I feel old enough to be my own grandmother! Oh – talking of daughters…’ She reached into a drawer, pulled out a small silver pendant and tossed it to Allie. ‘Would you be a dear and take that to Libby’s with you tomorrow? I borrowed it ages ago and keep forgetting to give it back – Allie?’ Almost reflexively Allie had shaken her head. ‘Oh, don’t say you can’t go? Libby will be so disappointed. I thought you had a weekend pass?’

  ‘I have. It’s just – well – I hadn’t really made up my mind whether to go to Libby’s or not. I don’t know that I feel much like a party.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s exactly a party. Just a little get-together.’ Myra had turned and was studying her younger daughter’s face. Allie averted her eyes. ‘Allie? What is it?’

  Allie jumped up from the bed, walked to the dressing table and stood looking down, tinkering with her mother’s perfume bottles. Myra watched her.

  ‘I don’t think—’ Allie started, stopped, then blurted, ‘I don’t think that Libby should carry on the way she does. Not with Edward away and everything. It – isn’t right…’

  The silence behind her stretched to perhaps a minute. She looked round. Myra, who had been waiting for that, beckoned and patted the bed beside her. Allie crossed the room and sat down. Myra took her hand. ‘Listen to me, darling. And try to understand. We can’t all be the same – you know that. We all have to find our own way to cope with the things that make us unhappy. The things that frighten us.’

  ‘But—’

  Myra lifted a finger, stilling the interruption. ‘I know that you and I – and everyone – are frightened and unhappy from time to time. Some of us don’t show it. Some of us do and rely upon the comfort provided by those closest to us. But we don’t – of course, we can’t – all react the same way. You and Richard have both chosen to take your part in this war, and you know how proud of you both I am.’ She squeezed her daughter’s hand gently and Allie gave her a small smile in return. ‘But Libby – poor Libby – is lost. Don’t you see that? She’s lost, and she’s frightened, and she’s desperately unhappy. In a way it’s my fault—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. Libby was given the kind of upbringing perfectly suited to her life as I envisaged it. As she envisaged it herself. In no way did it suit her to withstand the kind of pressure she is suffering at the moment.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known there’d be a war.’

  ‘Of course not. I’m not blaming myself. I’m simply explaining. Libby thinks that as long as she can pretend that things haven’t changed, they won’t—’

  ‘But isn’t that terribly childish?’

  ‘Of course it is. You and I know it. She probably knows it herself. But for Libby it works, and that, for the moment, is all that matters to her. She doesn’t mean any harm. It’s just her way of surviving.’

  Allie sat in silence for a moment. She recognized the truth of her mother’s words; her problem lay in her secret conviction that her mother did not guess just how far Libby’s obstinate rejection of reality sometimes took her.

  ‘She’ll be terribly upset if you don’t go tomorrow. She arranged it specially, knowing you’d be home. Richard’s driving down too, I think – he’d be disappointed if you aren’t there.’ Richard’s bomber squadron was stationed in Suffolk. ‘Don’t be too hard on Libby, my dear. Let her find her own way. I’m sure she will, sooner or later. For now – please, don’t disappoint her.’

  Allie kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘All right. I’ll go.’

  Myra held her at arm’s length for a moment, looking into the earnest young face. This was the daughter she had never understood. The difficult one. The problem. Self-deception had rarely been one of Myra’s failings. The one, she mentally amended, about whom, time and time again, she had been totally wrong. ‘Thank you, darling. And now – ’ she stood up, pulled Allie to her feet – let’s go and see if your friend’s managed to make tea with the heap of dust that was all that was left in the tea caddy!’

  In the morning, Allie walked Sue to the nearest tube station. ‘See you Sunday night. And Sue, for heaven’s sake do try to be on time.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Sue sketched a subversive salute, and Allie laughed.

  ‘I really liked your parents,’ Sue continued unexpectedly after a moment. ‘They’re terrific. Your dad’s a real gent, isn’t he? Understands things. You’re very lucky.’

  Allie did not answer. Sue rattled on, unnoticing. ‘They’re pretty brave too, you know. With their money they could be livin’ anywhere in the country. Just give me dad the chance – ’ she laughed outright ‘– he’d have run like a hare if me mum’d let him! But there you are – me mum won’t leave me gran, an’ me gran won’t leave her cats an’ her pint of mild-and-bitter down at the Dragon of a Saturday night. So that’s me dad snookered.’ She grinned up at Allie. ‘Other people’s problems, eh?’ They stopped outside the entrance to the station. A news placard proclaimed 43 ENEMY DOWN, RAF 15. ‘Look at that. They make it sound like a bloody cricket score. Well, here we are.’ People were still emerging, clutching blankets, pillows and sleepy small children. ‘Thanks for havin’ me, as they say – T.T.F
.N.’

  Allie watched as the bright head, cap at an illegally jaunty angle, bobbed through the crowd to the barrier. She stood for a moment, turning her greatcoat collar to her ears against the bitingly cold November wind. As she did so, a movement on a bombed site across the street caught her eye. In the ragged gap between two buildings, a woman was tending a small piece of painstakingly cleared ground that could only be a vegetable patch – an enterprising, lovingly cared-for fragment of sanity in the wilderness of weeds that had already overrun the fire- and blast-disfigured plot. To Allie, as she stood watching, it suddenly seemed that she was seeing, in the small, trousered and headscarfed figure who appeared equally oblivious of the passing traffic and of the towering, scarred walls above her, the personification of London under fire. Tonight the bombs would fall again. And the next night, and the next. But still the woman hoed and planted while above her in the bitter wind torn wallpaper flapped pathetically beside an exposed tiled fireplace. Strangely, it was somehow a comforting sight. Allie settled her collar high about her ears and turned for home.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The dim-lit, blacked-out flat at Rampton Court was, it seemed to Allie, full of uniforms: the khaki of the Army and the ATS, the neat, dark blue of the Navy and the Wrens and, predominantly, her own Air Force blue. Half of the Armed Forces in London must be here. Where on earth did Libby get to meet them all? She stood uncertainly by the front door, searching for a familiar face. The young airman who had let her in, and whom she had not recognized, had breezily placed a glass in her hand and disappeared into the crowded drawing room. She sniffed the glass. Whisky, or something approximating it. How did Libby do it?

  From the drawing room came the sound of an infectiously swinging dance band, the unmistakable sound of Tommy Dorsey. With an unpleasant jolt she remembered suddenly that other evening – Christmas Eve, 1938 – when the world had been a different place, and none of them had known what was to come. She hitched her leather bag firmly onto her shoulder, tilted her head, drank half the whisky in one gulp and battled for breath and composure as the fiery liquid went down, taking the skin off her throat as it went.

  ‘If I didn’t remember too well the consequences of saying the same thing once before,’ said a pleasant voice at her elbow, ‘I’d say that you knocked that back as if you needed it.’

  She turned. Tom Robinson, in RAF uniform, a pair of wings above his breast pocket, smiled blandly. For the first time in her life, she was glad to see him – would indeed have been glad to see the devil himself if his face had been familiar. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello yourself.’ His eyes flickered over her neat uniform.

  ‘I did need it, actually.’

  ‘Welcome to the club. Follow me. With luck we’ll find some more.’ He led the way through the noisy crowd to the kitchen. ‘Libby – look who I found on the front door mat.’

  ‘Allie! Darling, how lovely to see you!’ Libby looked spectacular in a creation of glinting silver and blue that shimmered as she moved. Allie remembered the dress from before the war, but like so many other things, she thought wryly, it had been altered, and now there was a lot less of it…She allowed herself to be swept into her sister’s sweet-smelling embrace, survived several garbled introductions, managed not to wince as Libby informed everyone within earshot of how proud she was of her baby sister in uniform. Then she caught Tom’s eyes on her and knew from the abrasive spark of laughter she detected in them that, so far as one person there was concerned, her acting ability was no better now than it had ever been.

  Across the shadowed room, she caught sight of Celia Hinton’s dark red head. Celia was standing a little apart from the crowd, apparently totally absorbed in the conversation of a tall, chunkily built, square-faced young woman who wore the same uniform as she did. Allie, curious, caught Libby’s arm. ‘Who’s that with Celia Hinton?’

  Libby pulled a face. ‘Well might you ask. Name’s Stanton. She’s an Aussie. Shares a flat with Celia – you do know that the Transport Corps doesn’t live in barracks and parade up and down like the rest of you?’

  Allie nodded.

  ‘Stanton and Celia live in Pimlico, or somewhere else outlandish. Can’t stand her myself. She’s got absolutely no style. I can’t think what Celia sees in her.’ There was, her sister suspected, a mild touch of pique in the words.

  ‘Stanton? Is that her first name?’

  Libby made a theatrical gesture. ‘Who knows? Something Stanton, Stanton something, who cares, darling? I never much liked our antipodean friends myself. That accent! Now, be a dear and help me hand round the sandwiches…’

  It was a full hour later that Allie cornered Libby to ask about Richard. ‘I thought he’d be here before me. Couldn’t he get away after all?’

  Her sister regarded her with provokingly blank surprise. ‘Richard? Good heavens, I’d quite forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten what?’

  ‘He’s here. Been here for ages. Arrived with Tom—’

  ‘What?’ Allie looked around the crowded room. ‘Well, where is he then?’

  Libby flicked her head and her fair hair swung around her shoulders. ‘He’s being dreadfully tiresome…’

  ‘Libby, where is he? I haven’t seen him for weeks! Why didn’t you tell me he was here?’

  ‘Well, I’m trying to, aren’t I, darling? You won’t let me get a word in edgeways.’

  Allie held her breath and her temper.

  ‘He’s getting drunk, I think,’ her sister said imperturbably, ‘all by himself in the bedroom. I ask you – all by himself. In the bedroom.’ She emphasized the words caustically, her tone still light. ‘I meant to mention it before. It slipped my mind. The wobbler’s gone off, by the way, in case you didn’t hear it.’ She moved off into the crowd, talking over her shoulder: ‘All ashore that’s going ashore and all that. The shelter’s thataway.’ She turned her curved thumb down and jerked it at the floor before being swallowed by a newly arrived crowd of revellers who swept her to them noisily.

  Allie turned away and, trying to curb her irritation, began to push her way towards the door. Music blared. Couples, unable to dance because of the crush, jigged up and down or clung to each other unashamedly in the blacked-out gloom. Faintly, above the noise, she could hear the lifting sound of the siren still wailing. She was almost at the door when Tom Robinson collided with her.

  ‘Well, well. If it isn’t everyone’s favourite little sister. Come and dance.’ His fingers caught her wrist and drew her firmly back towards the crowded room.

  She pulled away. ‘Not now, Tom. I’m looking for Richard.’ Across the hallway she could see Libby’s bedroom door standing a little open.

  To her surprise the grip on her wrist did not slacken. ‘But I insist.’

  ‘Tom—’ Really angry, she tried to disengage her wrist, glaring up into his face. The long fingers tightened. At the same time, both remembered. Tom smiled, only half apologetically.

  ‘We do seem to make a habit of things, don’t we?’

  She did not reply as she waited for him to release her. Instead, she found herself drawn gently but with constraining strength into his arms and propelled into the darkness of the room among the dancing couples. Furious now, she tried to wrench away from him. She might as well have tried to uproot a tree. Smiling, he moved, and willy-nilly she followed.

  ‘Tom Robinson!’ she hissed. ‘Will you let me go! I want to find Richard—’

  ‘But suppose, my dear,’ he whispered softly into her hair, his arms like steel bands around her, ‘Richard doesn’t actually want to be found at the moment? Least of all by you?’

  For the space of half a dozen heartbeats, she stood still, her eyes turned up to his thin face in the gloom. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Why wouldn’t he want to see me?’

  ‘I’m not saying he doesn’t want to see you.’ His voice was enragingly patient. ‘I’m simply suggesting that you might like to leave it for a while. I thought you liked to dance?’ he added, raising one injured
eyebrow.

  ‘And I thought you didn’t?’ she snapped.

  ‘And, as usual, we’re both right.’ His long mouth twitched; one very strong hand cradled her head none too gently and forced it onto his shoulder. She could feel his laughter. ‘There. Isn’t that nice?’

  This time, in rage, she really struggled, and it took him by surprise. As she wrenched away from him, he caught her quickly by her shoulders. ‘Allie—’

  She glared at him, eyes blazing; she was trembling with fury. ‘Let me go!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re always bloody sorry. Always bloody laughing. Always know bloody well best…’ Her voice had risen. The obvious illogicality of her own words served simply to make her angrier. People around them glanced curiously, half-smiling at what looked like a lovers’ quarrel. She caught her breath, fought fiercely for self-control. He watched her with that shuttered lack of expression that she detested more than anything else about him. It showed on her face. Very slowly she felt his hands release their pressure on her shoulders. Then, unexpectedly, his eyes flicked over her head at someone pushing his way through the crowd towards them, and he smiled, wide and welcoming, turning Allie forcefully to face the newcomer – almost indeed pushing her into the stranger’s arms.

  ‘Tom! Hello – and Allie! Good Lord, it is Allie, isn’t it?’ The voice of the young man in army uniform was totally unfamiliar. He threw his arm about Allie and kissed her enthusiastically, pumped Tom’s hand. ‘Libby told me you were here.’ He turned back to Allie, grinned at her confused expression. ‘You’ve forgotten me.’

  ‘No, I – yes, I’m sorry, I have.’

  ‘Charles Philips. I was at Libby’s and Edward’s wedding. Old school pal. Aren’t we all?’

  ‘Oh – of course.’ She still did not remember him from Adam.

  ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’ She could hardly hear him above the noise. From outside the building came a distant concussion. The windows rattled. Almost imperceptibly conversation in the room died and then resumed again.