I Ordered a Table for Six

by Noel Streatfeild

  “I suppose your father’s very proud of you?”

  Gardiner had his eyes fastened on Andrew. His answer to that question should be one of the little things he could memorize and carry home to Millicent.

  “Well, not yet, of course.” Andrew was shy again. “I mean, I’ve not done anything to make him proud.”

  “Millicent will like this boy,” thought Gardiner. “My, in the R.A.F., and nothing to be proud of!” Out loud he said to Andrew:

  “All your adventures starting to-morrow.”

  Meggie and Noel came back to the table. Andrew was glad to cease to be the centre of attention. That was a nice thing the old boy had said. “All your adventures starting to-morrow.” It gave you a kick.

  “Have you had a good dance?” Gardiner asked, beaming at Meggie’s radiant face.

  “Simply gorgeous.” Adela looked at Meggie disapprovingly. She really must have her in London and shape her a little. Such exuberance was tiresome. Meggie caught her mother’s look, and her face changed. “Mummy, you look ill. Are you feeling all right?”

  Adela opened her bag, and, biting back a snubbing reply, took out her mirror. She did look rather patchy, she noticed. She used her powder puff, patting it over her cheeks. She spoke to Noel as the most sophisticated person present.

  “Meggie hasn’t yet learnt to be tactful.”

  “Sorry,” said Meggie. “I meant it nicely. I like people to be sorry when I feel ill.”

  “But I don’t feel ill, dear. Only a little tired.” Adela looked at her watch. “It’s nearly time for the cabaret.”

  “Where’s Claire?” Meggie asked.

  Adela’s voice showed what she thought of that blunt question.

  “She’s got a cough and gone for some water.”

  Meggie flushed.

  “Well, I knew she couldn’t have wanted . . .”

  Adela turned to Gardiner.

  “Sydney Sand is singing. He can be very amusing.”

  Andrew saw that Meggie had put her foot in it. The music was just starting. He got up.

  “Will you dance?”

  On the floor Meggie said ruefully:

  “I’m not being a success with Mummy to-night. I mean well, but saying what comes into my head is a terrible fault of mine.”

  “It’s better than mine, of sitting round like a dumb ox.”

  “I expect we’ll both get better as we grow older.” Meggie threw back her head. “Anyway, nothing can spoil this lovely night. It’s been fun, hasn’t it?”

  To Andrew it had been less awful than he had anticipated, and Meggie’s gaiety was infectious.

  “Rather!”

  “While we’re dancing,” said Meggie, “let’s pretend we’re perfect. I’m a grown-up lady who never makes a mistake, and you’re a man who’s marvellous at talking, one of those people they call the life and soul of the party.” The band were playing a chorus. Andrew and Meggie, laughing, joined in:

  “And the skies are always blue,

  Over the Hill,

  You will find content and rest,

  For you’ll be an honoured guest

  In the place that you love best,

  Over the Hill.”

  Noel took out his elephant and stood it on the table.

  “Your elephant still thirsty?” asked Gardiner.

  Adela, though entirely uninterested, leant across the table and held out her hand.

  “Let me look.”

  Noel gave the elephant to her.

  “It’s Chinese. It brings luck to any one who has it.”

  “Such nonsense!” Adela passed the elephant to Gardiner. “Beautifully carved, isn’t it?”

  Gardiner examined it.

  “Nice piece of jade. Do you believe in luck, Mr. Deeves?”

  Claire, in the ladies’ room, struggled with her tears. Such a fool she was making of herself, and it was unlike her. She must be tired; usually she had perfect control. It was luck she had been dancing with that rather dumb Andrew Bishop. That sharp-eyed Noel Deeves would never be deceived by talk of a tickle. She went to the dressing-table and examined her eyes. She had removed some tears, and all that was left was redness round the rims. The attendant was looking at her. Claire had some of the green paint she used for her lids in her bag. She applied a little.

  “So tiresome! I’ve got a tickling cough. It ruins one’s face.”

  “Had the ’flu, have you?” said the attendant. “Been very tiresome this year. Nothing much to start with, but you’re always queer. One day up, and one day down, but never with the heart back in you.”

  “It’s been mild though.”

  “That’s what the papers say, but I know different. Been a lot of deaths, if you ask me.”

  “There always are in the winter.” Claire took out her powder. “But, honestly, I think it’s been less bad than usual.”

  There was a rush of air. The ground rocked, the lights went out, then, after an appreciable pause, there was a roar, followed by cascading crashes.

  “Lie down,” Claire called, but it was force of habit, for both she and the attendant had been thrown flat.

  “Oh, Gawd! Oh, Gawd!” the attendant moaned.

  Claire’s bag was still in her hand. She opened it and found her pencil torch. She turned it on and saw with relief that it was not broken. She threw its beam round the room. The mirrors were cracked, and there was some broken glass on the floor, and part of the ceiling was hanging down, otherwise everything was all right. She went over to the attendant.

  “You hurt?”

  The attendant got up.

  “No, miss. Has it hit the building?”

  “I think so. You’d better stop here. If anybody’s hurt they may bring them in. You’ll be all right?”

  “I don’t know. I feel queer now I’m standing up.”

  Claire patted her shoulder.

  “Stick your head between your knees. You’ll manage. I must go and see what’s happened to my party.”

  There were people in the passage, moving out to the street. They were pulling each other along, not panicking but surging in a sheep-like movement away from the horror behind them. Claire squeezed past them and into the restaurant, through where the door had been. She turned her torch round. The room was full of smoke and dust; it was a merciful pall. She had become used to horrible sights, but what little she saw as she stumbled forward turned her cold. As she got near where their table had been, progress became more difficult; in one place she had to clamber over a pile of ceiling. She felt a brute not to stop and try to help some of the moaning, screaming shapes lying round her, but help was arriving. She could hear a warden calling orders to his men, and stretchers would be on their way. She could do more good by sorting out her own party.

  The table was overturned, and Adela lay across it. Noel was on his back on the floor, the table pinning him down. Claire turned Adela over. She, like all the other dead and wounded, was black from blast. Claire ran her torch over her. She was bleeding from a head wound and unconscious, but she was not dead. Claire had some difficulty in getting round the table to Noel, there was so much debris in the way, but she succeeded, and turned her light on him. His eyes opened.

  “The American has got my elephant, blast him.”

  “All right, I’ll find it.” She knelt down by him. “Who was at the table? Can you remember?”

  Noel seemed not to hear, so she repeated her question. After a time he said: “I was showing my elephant to the American and your aunt.”

  With the aid of her torch she found a warden.

  “I say, can you come here a moment?”

  He climbed over to her.

  “There’s this man who was with our party. I can’t get at him to see how badly he’s hurt, because of the table.”

  “Is that part of you
r party too?” the warden asked, pointing his torch at Adela.

  “My aunt. She’s unconscious and got a head wound.”

  “You lift the table and I’ll pull him out.”

  Claire put her hands beneath the table. With Adela’s weight it was hard to get it to move, but she had the additional strength of urgent need. The warden slipped his hands under Noel’s armpits.

  “Just going to shift you, old man.”

  At the first movement Noel screamed. The warden let him alone. He touched Claire.

  “There’s been a general call for ambulances. Leave him for the moment; we’ll shift him when we can get help. There’ll be doctors here in a minute or two with morphia. Are there any more of your party?”

  “Three. From what I could make out from him there ought to be one more at the table. An American. He would have been sitting here.”

  The warden ran his torch round. Even obscured by soot, a quite horrifying object came under the beam.

  “Was that him?”

  “No. He hadn’t red hair.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “They’d have been dancing. I’ll go and look.”

  “Right. Leave these two to me. I’ll see to them. Just give me their names, and the names of the ones that are missing, and then report when you find them.”

  Claire found her way to the dance floor. Practically every dancer who could move had gone. “Queer what thoughts run in and out of your head at a moment like this,” she thought, “but I really do feel like Edith of the swan neck, looking for Harold on the battlefield of Hastings. She was lucky to belong to a bow and arrow date. I suppose people were mostly in one piece.” She found Andrew first. He was unconscious. He was almost unrecognizable, black, half his uniform torn off. She saw in a glance that he was in far too bad a way for her to help; he had a ghastly stomach wound. She looked round for Meggie. If the two were dancing together they could surely not be far apart.

  Meggie lay on her back. Blast had stripped her naked. Some champagne had fallen off a table. Claire soaked her handkerchief in it and washed the child’s face.

  A stretcher-bearer came along.

  “Can we help?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, she’s dead.”

  *

  The canteen had finished its round. As the workers were packing up, Claire said to Bill:

  “Would you come down to the feeding centre? I’ve something I want to say to you.”

  Bill had watched Claire all the evening. He wanted to say something, but she was difficult to approach; it was hard for him to be sure of the right words.

  “I’ll be glad.”

  In the portion of the feeding centre set aside for civil defence, Claire with a cup of coffee and Bill with a sandwich, faced each other across an oilcloth-topped table. Claire looked over her shoulder to see if they were within earshot of anybody. There were two stretcher-bearers in the far corner, and a party of wardens three tables away, otherwise the room was empty. She took a cigarette and offered her case to Bill.

  “It’s rather a long story, but I must tell it to you.”

  Bill lit both their cigarettes.

  “I’m in no hurry.”

  “You remember when we were alone on the canteen last week I told you I didn’t believe in another world; afterwards I was sorry, and you said it didn’t matter, I couldn’t shake you, and then you said that it was me who would be shaken. Well, I have been.”

  “By that incident at that West End restaurant.”

  “Not by it exactly.”

  “I didn’t like to say anything about it to you; must have been pretty terrible from what I hear.”

  “It was. There were six of us there, my aunt, her daughter Meggie, a boy in the Air Force, a young man called Noel—he’s in the Army—and an American, the husband of a friend of my aunt’s. Meggie was sixteen; she was killed.” She broke off. “My word, she looked lovely, Bill. She wasn’t scratched, just the breath sucked out of her. Not a stitch on. Poor little devil! The American wasn’t found for two days, and then only enough to identify him. He was next to my aunt, but she only got the hell of a cut on her head. Noel was the other side of the table; he got some broken bones, and shock of course. The air boy lived on a bit. He died this morning. I was in the cloakroom and never got a scratch.” Claire sipped her coffee. “It’s not the people who died. Their deaths seemed just the bloody pointless business they always do. I didn’t know my cousin, Meggie, well, but she was one of those kids that seem born to be happy, she enjoyed everything so much. You know the type. I had to go down to my uncle and aunt, she’s been living with them, and break the news.” She shivered. “God! As I say, it seems to me a cruel and pointless end to somebody born to be happy. I knew nothing about the Air Force boy at all. He seemed to me rather nice, but shy, but he must have been crazy on his job. He’s got a sister who was sent for. I saw her for a minute and she said: ‘He was very happy because he thought he’d been in an air fight and brought down an enemy plane.’ Letty Smithson, my aunt’s secretary, told me that the nurse in charge of him said the father and mother played up well, and though the boy had to be kept continually under drugs, whenever he was conscious it was quite true he was awfully happy, harping on this fight. The American was an old pet, bit of a dreamer, full of a scheme for building clubs to take the place of the shelters after the war. Very high-falutin’ and impracticable.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. There’s many will miss the shelters. I’ve always said so. Do you suppose he left the idea with anybody?”

  “I don’t know. Probably talked to people about it, and one of them might carry on. His was an equally pointless death, rich, happily married, philanthropic. The Air Force boy’s father turned up trumps over him, so Letty Smithson told me. When they did find whatever they found of him, he made all the arrangements about cremation, and did all the telegraphing and telephoning to his wife in America. I call that pretty good when your only son’s dying; but, as I say, it’s not the killed I’m interested in at the moment; it’s we who lived.”

  “Why?”

  “My aunt, Mrs. Framley, is the mother of that Paul Framley who got five years for robbery with violence. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he comes out next month. She used to dote on him, but from the time he was arrested she wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t send him a letter. They said it was shock. Well, he comes out of prison next month. I’d take a bet that if that bomb had killed her, and she could have got detached and looked back at her dead self, her first thought would have been: ‘Well, there’s a bit of luck. I needn’t do anything about Paul.’”

  “And she’s going to get all right?”

  “Yes. Of course I know you’ll keep all this under your hat, Bill.”

  “Of course.”

  “I knew less than nothing about Noel, the soldier, except that he looked rather a nasty piece of work, but I know something now. Letty Smithson went to see him. He was terribly shocked and crying all the time; he told her he was in some hell of a jam. He’d taken two hundred quid belonging to some army fund, and some frightful story about my aunt paying it for him if he’d do something for her. I needn’t go into that, but Letty Smithson had to tell me in case I could help, and that’s how I learnt a bit more than I’d known before about my aunt. Of course I couldn’t help. The best I could do for him was to buy him a mascot; he lost a jade elephant and was fussing about it. I don’t suppose the one I got will fool him when he’s well, but he’s too ill at present to know. Anyway, the point about him is that he said over and over again to Letty Smithson, ‘I wish it had killed me!’”

  “And you?”

  “Every air raid I’ve hoped to be killed, and on Friday a bomb falls and wipes out half the party I’m with, and I’m left.”

  Bill suddenly understood her mood in a r
aid.

  “That’s what you want, is it. Why?”

  “My husband. There’s all the difference between living and just filling in the hours. That’s what I’ve been doing. Lin was all my life.”

  Bill looked away from her to the bare distempered walls and oil-cloth covered tables. There was comfort in their homeliness.

  “It’s bad when you feel like that.”

  “Yes.” Claire took another cigarette, but she did not light it, she played with it as if looking at it cleared her thoughts. “But if I see what I think I see, then it’s less bad than it was, Bill. Doesn’t it look to you as if there were some sort of reason in things, as if we were not just tumbling around all anyhow? As if we were moved on purpose? I’m not nearly clear enough what I mean to make myself understood, but it does look as if someone, or something said: ‘Not you. Death is not just an easy way out.’ You see, for the three of us who lived, it would have been escape. We mightn’t know it, but it’s what we wanted. That’s why I’m shaken, Bill.”

  “You still aren’t shaken enough to say God. You only say someone, or something.”

  “That’s as far as I’ve got. It’s a hell of a way considering where I was.”

  “Well, if this something or someone saved you, what d’you think it was for?”

  Claire lit her cigarette. In the match light her face was very tired, but had a calmness that Bill had never seen on it. She spoke with confidence.

  “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  ebreak

  Noel Streatfeild

  Mary Noel Streatfeild was born in Sussex in 1895. She was one of five children born to the Anglican Bishop of Lewes and found vicarage life very restricting. During World War One, Noel and her siblings volunteered in hospital kitchens and put on plays to support war charities, which is where she discovered her talent on stage. She studied at RADA to pursue a career in the theatre and after ten years as an actress turned her attention to writing adult and children’s fiction. Her experiences in the arts heavily influenced her writing, most notably her famous children’s story Ballet Shoes which won a Carnegie Medal and was awarded an OBE in 1983. Noel Streatfeild died in 1986.