Daisychain Summer

  ‘Ar, well …’ Tom was lost for words. It wasn’t five minutes since Daisy had been sitting in that big, shiny pram at another Keeper’s Cottage, with Morgan lying there and a three-year-old Keth never more than a stride away.

  But it had to be admitted that Daisy would be seventeen, next birthday, and the same age as her Mam had been when they’d met in Brattocks Wood and fallen deep in love.

  Daisy was no longer a child and more fool him for not seeing it ’til now. Daisy, he realized half amazed, was in love and the time was fast approaching when Alice and she would have to have a woman-to-woman talk about – well, things. And the sooner the better, if Keth loved Daisy as he’d loved Alice!

  ‘I’d best be off home.’ Keth rose to his feet, still uncomfortable about what had been said though glad, for all that, for its saying. ‘Goodnight, Mr Dwerryhouse.’

  ‘Goodnight, lad. And you’d better walk Keth to the gate, Daisy, though don’t take all night about it.’

  ‘I won’t, Dada.’ Mischievously, she planted a kiss on the top of her father’s head. ‘It’s much too cold to stand necking.’

  ‘Necking? What ever kind of a word is that!’ Tom exploded, then rubbed the back of his neck, biting on his lips to stop the smile that threatened. ‘Is that what they teach you at Grammar School, then?’

  The kitchen door slammed and from behind it he heard his daughter’s laugh. Something to tell him, indeed! He should have expected it, though. Daisy was a little beauty and a good catch for any man if you took that money of hers into account. Thank the Lord she’d had the sense to learn to live with it and not blab it to all and sundry. There’d be half the scroungers in the Riding at the door, otherwise.

  He gazed frowning at the glass-fronted, double-locked cabinet and the pair of Purdey shotguns it held.

  Did you have to leave her all that brass, Mr Hillier, he demanded silently. Wouldn’t it have been better if it hadn’t been quite so much …?

  Yet come to think of it, wasn’t it providential that it seemed it was Keth she had set her heart on and not some smooth-talking opportunist, or the penniless second son of a peer? He closed his eyes, setting his chair rocking, thinking all at once about Geordie Marshall and the Marchers who must be half-way to London, now.

  He had gone early to see him at the village hall to find he hadn’t changed. Geordie still carried himself arrogantly, was thin as ever, his wit as sharp, his grin as roguish. Only his eyes were different – without hope.

  When they parted, Tom had pressed two pound notes into his friend’s hand, begging him to take them. ‘For all the fags you offered me, Geordie lad …’

  ‘All the fags you didn’t take, Tom. You didn’t smoke.’

  ‘Yet you offered them, just the same. Take it?’ It was part of the rabbit-skin money he kept in a tin in the shed. ‘For old time’s sake?’

  But Geordie had refused, asking instead that it should be sent to his mother. ‘Ma needs it more’n I do …’

  So Tom had written the address on the back of a feed bill fished out of his pocket and promised he would do that, and tell her that her son was all right. That letter was on the mantelpiece, now, ready to be posted. It stood there, an accusation from his past, and tears rose in his throat for all those who lay in long, straight rows in cemeteries in France – aye, and in Germany, too. He had not wept since a morning when he and eleven others had snuffed out the life of a young frightened boy.

  Angrily, he dashed the tear away. The past was over and done with. Alice and Daisy were the only ones he’d be prepared to fight for and die for, now. It was just that last week the past had walked into his life, then walked out of it, straight-backed and proud. Near on twenty years, gone in a flash. It was a sobering thought.

  ‘I nearly stowed away, Sparrow. I didn’t half want to sail with that liner,’ Drew sighed. ‘I think if I didn’t know what I was going to do, I might have considered going to sea when I’m old enough.’

  ‘Now why a sailor, all of a sudden?’ Sparrow demanded. ‘You know you’ll have your work cut out seeing to Rowangarth. Rowangarth ain’t just any old house; it’s what you was born into – your inheritance. You have to look after it and the land and the farms, and suchlike. And the people who work there depend on you, and the tenants and the pensioners. Then you’ll hand it down, when you’re dead and gorn, to your own son.

  ‘That’s what they mean by landed gentry. You’re a gent and you’ve got land and you’ve got to see to it that nobody nicks it orf you and yours. So no more talk about going to sea, if you please!’

  ‘Just a thought, Sparrow, but the Queen Mary is such an unbelievable thing. You can’t call it a ship. It’s like a whole town! A purser came to grandmother’s cabin to see if she had all her wanted-on-voyage luggage and she asked him if I could go with him and have a look at things.

  ‘And he said, “Certainly, milady. A pleasure. I’ll have the young man back in good time for all-ashore.” They come round before they sail shouting, ‘All ashore that’s going ashore!” – for the visitors, you know. He showed me quite a lot of the ship but he said it would take a week to see it all.

  ‘Grandmother said she was going to feel guilty, living in such luxury for almost a week, but mother said she deserved it and that she was to enjoy it.’

  ‘Your mother is quite right, young sir. Your grandmother’s a dear, good lady. Imagine, though – her going all the way to America …’

  ‘Would you like to go to America, Sparrow?’ Drew turned the bread on the fork he held to the fire.

  ‘To America, to France – anywhere would suit me. I sometimes stand on Chelsea Bridge and look at that old river and wish I could be a leaf on it, and where I’d end up, if I was.’

  ‘Very wet, somewhere in the Channel, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Maybe so – and here’s where I’m happiest, looking after this little house for Mrs MacMalcolm. Haven’t been so content. Only wish Smith could see me, and Roland, my boy. But Smith got took with his stomach and my boy gave his all for king and country.’

  ‘Like mother’s husband did, and both her brothers,’ Drew said softly. ‘I wish I’d known my father – but who is Smith?’

  ‘Smith was Roland’s father, bless your life! Smith’s my name, see? Emily Smith I am though the doctor always called me Sparrow. Your mother inherited me, so to speak, when the doctor was took. Ar, but they were a lovely couple. I used to do for Doctor MacMalcolm when he lived in Little Britain, and one day he told me he’d just met the lady he intended marrying, and that lady was your mother.’

  ‘They met in Hyde Park, didn’t they? Mother tripped, and hit her head?’

  ‘Tripped! That wasn’t what the doctor told me! Said he’d been walking in the park and there at his feet all of a sudden, was this vision, laid all pale-faced and unconscious to the world.

  ‘Your mother, it was. She and Hawthorn – Mrs Dwerry-house as now is – had been to a Suffragette meeting and the coppers came and started a fight. Tripped, indeed!’

  ‘You mean mother was fighting in the Park?’ Drew grinned, not able to believe it, and all the time wishing he had been there, to cheer her on, or pitch in beside her.

  ‘Well, more like they was defendin’ themselves against them truncheons,’ Sparrow conceded. ‘But I did hear that your mother was kicking out like a mad thing. And if what I was told is to be believed, young Hawthorn threw herself at a great copper ten times her size and sent him flying.

  ‘But it was love at first sight, make no mistake about it. Mrs MacMalcolm’s grief was terrible to see when the doctor was killed. That old Kaiser had a lot to answer for, starting that fighting, but there’s no cause for you to worry,’ she hastened, seeing the sadness that all at once showed in his eyes. ‘There’ll be no more wars.’

  ‘Won’t there, Sparrow? Will Stubbs said the Germans are getting above themselves again. Will reads all the newspapers.’

  ‘Then take no notice of him! You can’t believe all you read in the papers. They prints
’em lurid, so they’ll sell. Best you listen to what die man on the wireless says when he reads out the News.

  ‘Now what if I butter that toast for you and, since your mother isn’t in, I don’t see why you shouldn’t stay up late. There’s a good play on the wireless, tonight. Doctor Fu Manchu – ever so creepy, I shouldn’t wonder.

  ‘And I think I must be getting old. Stay up late, indeed, and you seventeen, now, and almost a man. To think it’s all them years since you was born. Saved your mother’s reason, you coming like you did. There were times I’d fear for her state of mind, she took on so about the doctor.

  ‘But she’s survived and I reckon it was you, needing to be brought up, that helped pull her through. That house must’ve been a terrible sad place, at one time.’

  ‘It must. I’ve often thought about how it was. That’s why I don’t want there to be any more wars, Sparrow. And I’ve often wished mother wasn’t so alone. I wish there could be someone for her. People do marry again. My mother – my first mother – did, and she’s very happy. Well, you know she is, don’t you? But would you think Mr Townsend is sweet on mother?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know, young Drew!’ Sparrow bristled. ‘But if he is, then he’s wasting his time. It’s just that he was once your great-aunt Anne Lavinia’s solicitor and your mother took him on. But mark my words, she ain’t sweet on him!’

  No, indeed! Sparrow brooded. But every time Mrs MacMalcolm came to the mews house, that Townsend chappie was on the phone for her, though how he managed it with such uncanny accuracy, she couldn’t for the life of her tell. On the phone or on the doorstep before she’d hardly had time to hang her coat behind the door! Sparrow did not hold with Mark Townsend. Dotty about Mrs MacMalcolm he was, though the girl could never see it.

  ‘Come to think of it, I don’t know why your mother should want to go out on a night like this. Fog coming off the river when him and her went orf, and cold with it, too. Far better if she’d stayed at home like you and me, keeping the fire warm.

  ‘Now – do you want more toast or would you like a slice of chocolate cake? I made one special when I knew you’d be coming,’ she smiled, conspiratorily.

  And let them as had no more sense, she brooded darkly, silently, go out on a night like this, for much good would it do them if they got that fog on their chests and turned bronchial with it!

  ‘Now build up that fire for me if you’ve finished toasting and I’ll cut some cake. Then we’ll switch on the wireless, eh?’

  Sweet on Mrs MacMalcolm, indeed. Cheeky fellow!

  It had come to something, Cook sighed mournfully, when the royal family was being made a laughing stock of by a divorced woman. And a foreigner, at that!

  ‘But our royalty always marries foreigners,’ Mary Strong reasoned. Leastways, they had done until the old king thought it politic to get some new blood into the family – good Scottish blood, as it happened.

  ‘We-e-ll, not foreign, exactly – more commoners, I was meaning.’

  ‘But the Duchess of York and the Duchess of Gloucester were both commoners,’ Tilda protested.

  ‘You know what I’m trying to say, girl!’ Cook clucked tetchily. Tilda Tewk had the knack, still, of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, even if there was almost always a grain of truth in it. ‘Them two are ladies, through and through. I was talking about common commoners – and she’s one of them, all right!’ Cook refused to have Mrs Simpson’s name spoken, now, in Rowangarth kitchen. ‘Miss Clitherow says we can’t have a divorced woman as queen – not even as consort. I’ll tell you this for nothing – you wouldn’t find me curtseying to her!’

  ‘She’s a twice divorced woman, now,’ Tilda, who had once loved a younger King Edward with all her romantic heart, said with relish. ‘She’s got her divorce, remember. Only got to wait six months, now, then it’ll be proper.’

  ‘Absolute,’ Mary corrected, stabbing her needle into the tablecloth she was embroidering for her bulging bottom drawer. ‘Three husbands she’ll have had if she manages to land the King!’

  It wasn’t right, not three men, when she, Mary brooded, hadn’t been able to land one, in spite of the many last chances and verbal warnings she had given to Will Stubbs!

  ‘Well, she’ll not get him! Mr Baldwin won’t stand for it, nor Parliament.’ Nor any God-fearing woman, neither!

  ‘He could marry her – morganatic.’ Mary knew all about it. Will had told her. Morganatic meant the King could marry her but she could never be crowned queen, nor considered royal. That would be one in the eye for her!

  ‘He can’t even marry her – not divorced, he can’t. The Archbishop would never allow it. They couldn’t marry in church, much less Westminster Abbey – has she thought of that, eh?’

  ‘She’s given up her Ipswich house, now she’s got that divorce. She’s back in London, again. It said in the paper that a man in the street tried to throw vitriol in her face and there’s been ever so many bricks thrown through her front windows. I believe she’s going to Fort Belvedere. They won’t be able to get at her there, will they?’

  ‘Well, the King is going to have to make up his mind before he’s crowned. It’s going to be a choice of the throne or her! It’s so shaming, us that’s always been looked up to in the world!’

  The chair in which Cook sat began to rock furiously and Tilda was quick to recognize the signs. Any minute now, Cook’s apron would go over her face and she’d start boo-hooing.

  ‘Never you mind, Mrs Shaw. Don’t take on, so,’ she soothed. ‘I’ll make us a sup of tea.’

  God bless tea, Tilda sighed inside her, and drat that Simpson woman for making a fool of the man Tilda Tewk had loved with a pure heart ever since he’d been a dashing young prince. The mess the King had got himself into didn’t bear thinking about. It really didn’t.

  As soon as they left the brightly-lit foyer of the theatre in Drury Lane, Julia knew they had been foolish ever to set out from Montpelier Mews.

  ‘We-e-ll!’ she gasped. The fog outside was thick and yellow and dense, wrapping them in a strange, silent blanket. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, Mark!’

  ‘What we call a pea-souper. Everything stops …’

  He didn’t seem at all dismayed, she thought, irritated. But then he rarely showed emotion of any kind.

  ‘What are we to do?’ The silence was uncanny.

  ‘Try to get a taxi, I suppose. Thank goodness we didn’t drive in.’

  ‘You’ll not get a cab,’ offered a man in the same predicament as themselves. ‘Not a taxi on the streets – well, stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I think it’s disgraceful,’ the woman beside him said petulantly. ‘How could they even think of clearing off when people most need them?’

  ‘Because they wouldn’t be a lot of use to anybody if they’d stayed. Can’t see their hand in front of their face. Be reasonable, old dear …’

  There were many stranded theatregoers. A taxi driver, had one magically appeared, could have named his own price.

  ‘Could we try the Underground?’ Julia hesitated. ‘If we could make it part of the way, perhaps we could sort of feel our way back to Montpelier. The fog mightn’t be so dense, farther out.’

  ‘No chance. The Tube will be disrupted, I shouldn’t wonder. It usually is when there’s sudden fog like this. Not all of it runs underground, Julia. There could be trains at a standstill all over the place.’

  ‘Then what are we to do?’ She had never seen such fog, such thick, acrid, frightening fog. ‘If only we could get somewhere near Hyde Park, it mightn’t be so bad, there.’ After all, she reasoned, shivering, it was probably the concentration of coal smoke that made London fogs so chokingly thick.

  ‘No. There’s only one thing we can do.’ Mark dropped his voice almost to a whisper. ‘We can surely find our way to the Waldorf from here? They’re sure to have rooms, there. We’re going to have to stay put, I’m afraid, ’til this lot lifts, and in my experience it can last all night.’
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  ‘But what will Sparrow think? She’ll be worried half out of her mind – Drew, too!’

  ‘Fog doesn’t affect telephones, Julia. We can let them know you’re all right.’

  ‘We-e-ll – if you’re sure, then?’ It wasn’t right, Julia fretted. Not stopping out all night. But then, whispered the voice of reason, Mark lived here, knew all about London fogs. Perhaps he really did know best.

  ‘I’m sure,’ he said firmly, taking her arm. ‘Now, take it easy. I think we can make the hotel, if we’re careful. Best get a move on.’

  The hotel, when eventually they reached it, had no rooms available, the desk clerk said. Unusual circumstances, he sympathized politely. Suddenly everyone was looking for a room for the night.

  ‘So what now?’ Julia sighed. She was very cold, Her sandals were thin and not intended for walking London streets; her hair clung damply to her head and she would have given anything for a mug of Sparrow’s scalding tea to wrap her fingers around.

  It took them almost an hour to find refuge in a small hotel in a side street, though neither of them knew where exactly it was, nor how far they had come from the theatre.

  ‘Is there a telephone I can use?’ Julia asked the receptionist who wasn’t used to late rushes. One more room, then she could put up the No Vacancies sign and get off to her bed. But it was always the same, when the fog came down.

  ‘I’ll get you the number if you’ll write it down for me. You can take it on the extension in the lounge. If you’d like to go there and wait, I’ll get it as soon as I can,’ she grumbled. ‘I’m just about run off my feet!’

  ‘I could take it in my room?’ Julia smiled.

  ‘No telephones in rooms, Mrs Townsend.’ Did the woman think this was the Ritz, then?

  ‘Mrs Townsend?’ Julia hissed when they were out of earshot of the desk. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because we got the last room they had. Don’t be so stuffy, Julia. Nobody asks questions in places like this.’

  ‘Asks questions? Just what are you playing at, Mark? Why didn’t you ask for separate rooms? I’m going, now, to ask her for another!’