by Lizzie Page
With time stretching ahead of me, I took a stool at the kiosk, where I treated myself to a creamy coffee and a delicious fly biscuit. The coffee was gritty, but so delighted was I about imminently being with my girls that I swallowed it down with gusto and ordered a second.
It was going to be a good day.
* * *
Back in America, you have to travel a long way to see a change in the scenery. When my parents were busy, Grandma Leonora and I would cross the country and I would be allowed to meet her friends in restaurants with high ceilings and shiny chandeliers. They would usually have a candy in their pocket or a pinch for my cheek. I loved whiling away the hours on a steam train, my head on Grandma’s shoulder, my nose in a book. Occasionally, she would point out something for me to remark upon: a stretch of water here, a copse of trees there – and dutifully, I would comment, but mostly I liked just dreaming with her arm around me.
In England, the outlook altered every few hundred yards or so. You had flatlands, you had hills, you had slopes, you had fields. And there was a myriad of colours too: you had greens, then yellows, then browns, oranges, then green again. Sometimes, a train whooshed past on the other line and I might catch a glimpse of a woman at a window, travelling in the opposite direction. It felt strangely like a mirror was being held up to me: I would wonder where she was going, who she was going to see, or, simply, how was life working out for her?
I remembered the night before George and I got married: I still have the diary entry. I must be the most fortunate girl in the world. A handsome groom, money, travel, who could want for more?
Turns out that I could.
Two men in my carriage were discussing the assassination in the Balkans. The younger man, with a ridiculously tall hat, was what George would call a ‘gloom and doom merchant’. The government were ineffective. ‘It’s like the country is a horse without a rider,’ he said scathingly. I felt horrified – a runaway horse has always been one of my worst fears – but the older man disagreed. He’d seen this sort of thing umpteen times before and it would blow over. As if to prove the point, he blew on his pipe several times.
I readied my contribution to the debate. Although I was probably the younger man’s age, I inclined towards the older man’s perspective. I would also remind them about something I felt had been neglected – that the assassination was not just an international crisis but a tragedy on a personal scale. Franz Ferdinand and Sophia were parents. How terrible all this was for their children. Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the men didn’t invite me to share my riveting opinions, so I resolved to save them for my diary (which was always far more receptive). I peeled and sliced an apple (Mrs Crawford had told me it was an Orange Pippin, but disappointingly, I could hardly tell the difference), then offered it around. Tall hat accepted, but the older man declined.
Fine. I didn’t intend to force my apples on anyone.
At Leamington, I was delighted that automated cabs were available as well as the usual horse-drawn carriages. The driver, while a chatterbox, wasn’t interested in speculating about political developments. I wondered if the prospect of war was just a London obsession, like peacock feathers and shiny bead earrings. The driver and I discussed at length how it was, indeed, very warm.
* * *
There was a lake, tennis courts, a hockey field and an outdoor stage but it was the cool white columns at the very front of the girls’ school building that had sold the place to me. It had an air of Ancient Rome, or was it Ancient Greece? Wherever it was, I could imagine everyone floating around in togas, carting grapes and scrolls. (The pillars were, of course, artificial. I hadn’t known that when I first visited, I had thought everything in England was antique.)
I hadn’t wanted the girls to go to boarding school – it was something I had agreed to before Joy was born. But if there was one thing George was good at, it was being a stickler for someone else’s promise. But I was sixteen when I agreed – boarding school sounded fine to me. George was insistent: if our girls were to become companions to the right men, they would need the right education. I think he was afraid my American ideas would rub off on them. Joy was eight and Leona only seven when we sent them.
If my girls ever gave any signs of not liking school then I would have swept them away as fast as you could say ‘Leamington Young Ladies College’, but the heartbreaking thing was, from that moment two years ago when they set their patent boots on that marble floor, they adored it.
Here they were, coming out those ostentatious doors, making their way between the faux-antiquated pillars towards me. My daughters. My girls. How I adored them! They were the best of me and George. Joy saw me first, Leona was too busy chatting with her friends. Joy ran over. Her dark hair was conservatively clipped back. My eldest child: slender, long-limbed, serious-faced, arms crossed in front, her usual pose.
‘I thought you were coming at two,’ she said accusingly, sounding more like my mother than a ten-year-old girl.
‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ In fact, little pleased my inaptly named daughter.
Leona, however, was delighted. Miss lightness and breeze, with curls and baby-soft hair still on her forehead, Leona was always easy-going. She saw me, waved, trotted down and then gripped me round the waist, burrowing her face in my skirt like she used to when she was tiny. ‘Mummy, you’re so early!’
Nine years old last April, she was tanned and lightly freckled: they never stopped them from going out in the sun here. I examined her face and kissed her. If we were in Chicago, people in the streets would have stopped us to say she was a shoo-in for a beauty queen.
* * *
On the train back to London, the girls reeled off the events of the term: picnics forbidden, parties suspended. The Song of Hiawatha recited, nobody expelled, Christina moved away, Hester run away (recovered that same night), hockey practice cancelled due to waterlogged pitches. They wolfed down the bars of chocolate I had brought for them. Leona told us some excruciatingly bad jokes. An older lady leaned over. I thought she would scold us for noise, but she said: ‘Lovely to see such exuberance.’
I sometimes had to remind myself that not everyone was as miserable as George. I should not be so quick to judge.
‘Our maths teacher said there might be a war, Mummy,’ Joy said, looking closely at me.
I didn’t like this serious turn. Wanting to make it better for her, I put my hand over hers. ‘He should try concentrating on Pythagoras’ Theorem and not political theories.’
Joy’s expression remained anxious. It was the older lady who helped. ‘If it happens, it happens. Worrying won’t change a thing.’
* * *
Back home, the girls chased in and out of the rooms like puppies. I tried to tell myself their exuberance was lovely, but if George really did have a bad head it might make it worse – and if not, well, he wouldn’t like the noise anyway. However, when I dared to go up to his room I discovered he wasn’t there. Instead, there was a bowl of discarded nutshells on the floor next to his bed.
The girls were waiting for me when I came down.
‘Can we go to the tennis club?’
My daughters loved the Balham and Tooting North Tennis Club more than anywhere else on God’s earth. Unfortunately for me, it was open for most of the year (I found this blisteringly unfair, given how rarely the bathing lake was open to Elizabeth and me).
‘Please, Mummy, please!’
I have always loathed tennis. My mother used to play.
‘If we absolutely must,’ I said. ‘If there is simply nothing else that you can contemplate doing—’
They ran straight up to their rooms to change.
* * *
If the patrons of the Balham and Tooting North Tennis Club were concerned about the possibility of war, I didn’t catch wind of it. The women there talked about staff who cut corners, dressmakers who were never fast enough and untrustworthy chaperones. There was much discussion about a party at the weekend. It seemed everyone was anticipa
ting a most excellent disaster.
I wasn’t invited. I had never received an invitation from the ladies at the tennis club, not once. I once heard said that English women didn’t like American women coming over here and stealing their men. I don’t know if that was the problem they had with me, but I wasn’t sure what else it could be. How I longed for the friendliness of the Tooting Bathing Lake on a Thursday morning, where you couldn’t move for women calling: ‘You’ll get used to the cold,’ or ‘What a day for it!’.
One time a rogue tennis ball flew out of nowhere, whacking me in the stomach. I looked up, feeling, if not quite hearing, everyone laughing. I pretended it didn’t hurt; I smiled, hoping my tears wouldn’t be noticed. No one brought me tea or offered me a gin. No one said, ‘It’s a shock, that’s all.’
* * *
Around the third week of the holidays (and after approximately twenty-one days at tennis club), the girls were invited to visit their school friends in Suffolk. The Pilkingtons had a rambling house with rambling grounds, hidden tree houses, babbling brooks and paddling streams. The Pilkingtons were the friends everybody wants. The Pilkingtons had not met George or me and consequently, our correspondence was always warm and friendly. My heart said: do you have to go away? But I had to let them go, of course. Once again, the vast gaping abyss of nothingness lay ahead of me.
As I grew quiet at the prospect of being without them again, Leona placed herself on my knee, twirled my hair around her finger and enquired politely, ‘Won’t you be glad to get on with your own things, Mother?’
‘How do you mean?’
Joy was brushing her hair. Electricity made it fly. She stopped mid-motion and gazed at us as though about to say something important.
‘That’s what the other mothers say,’ continued Leona.
‘Well, I’m not like other mothers,’ I said tautly.
Joy looked over with a peculiar expression on her face. I guessed that she wished I was. Well, I wished I was too.
4
Joy and Leona returned from paradise at the Pilkingtons’ browner than ever, with bigger, bolder stories. Leona had been stung by a wasp the size of a bee, no, Mummy, the size of a butterfly! It had got her under the chin. Grandmother Pilkington thought she was having a heart attack, but Doctor Price said it was just constipation. The Pilkington brothers were so funny. And awfully good at cricket. Two kittens were living in the tree house; no one knew who they belonged to.
The girls had only been home an hour before they clamoured to go to the tennis club again, and we had only been at the tennis club for two and a half matches when Mr Mason came running in with a newspaper: he was trying to read as he ran, if you can imagine such a thing. Once he checked he had his audience, he yelled, ‘This is it, everyone!’
Everyone peered down at his outstretched newspaper as though it were a crystal ball. Pretending to be uninterested was not an option. I climbed out of my chair and smoothed down my skirt. My laces had a habit of becoming undone and although they weren’t undone at precisely that moment, I bent to fix them. Self-consciously, I walked over to the crowd.
‘What has happened exactly?’ I asked.
‘Germany has invaded Belgium!’ shouted Mr Mason, whose previous effort at conversations with me had extended no further than, ‘Is this chair taken?’
‘That’ll put the cat among the pigeons,’ Mr Frampton, the father of one of Leona’s friends, said hotly into my ear. He pressed his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I leaned away from him.
‘Does this mean war, do you think?’ someone else asked, gripping the pearls at her throat.
‘Certainly,’ Mr Mason, self-appointed expert on international relations, said confidently. ‘We can’t weasel out of this.’
Cats. Pigeons. Weasels.
‘Where is Belgium anyway?’ I whispered to Mrs Frampton, not because she was someone I would, under normal circumstances, interact with, but because she was now standing next to me. She pulled her pale cardigan tightly over her chest even though it wasn’t cold and let out a sigh. ‘I am American,’ I reminded her defensively.
‘Frankly, we are all aware of that,’ she said huffily. ‘Belgium is not far away. Just across the Channel and then…’ Here, her geography seemed to have failed her. ‘Up a bit.’
I squinted at her, the way George did when he wanted to intimidate me. I thought of Elizabeth and her swimming plans. I hadn’t realised how ambitious they were. I couldn’t wait for her to come back from her trip.
‘How would one normally cross the Channel?’
She looked at me coolly, then fanned her jowls ineffectively. ‘By boat, my dear. Presumably you have heard of one of those?’
The children realised that something was going on. Some parents told them, ‘Go back to your games.’ Others squeezed their children’s shoulders. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
The thunk, thunk, thunk of balls flying across nets continued. Leona tucked her sweaty paw into mine.
‘What does it mean, Mummy?’ asked Joy. She was torn, as we all were, between excitement and anxiety but unlike the rest of us, she lacked the experience to cover up the excitement.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted.
Mr Mason looked at me, as though noticing me for the first time: ‘Mark my words, this is war.’
‘Go play,’ I said lightly, and both Joy and Leona obediently skipped away.
I don’t know if it’s a characteristic of all children, but my children were remarkably good at putting bad thoughts to the backs of their minds.
* * *
George was drunk; he could barely walk in a straight line. I sent the girls up to their rooms: they shouldn’t have to see him like this. I hadn’t seen him so discombobulated since the police insisted that fire at Weston-super-Mare pier wasn’t arson. Even though I no longer liked him, I still regarded my husband as an oracle of news from the outside world. That’s how it had been with us from the beginning on the cold sidewalk in Chicago, and it was a hard habit to break.
At the dinner table, listlessly spooning parsnip soup, I wondered what was happening in Elizabeth’s apartment right now, or in Percy’s. I would have given my hind teeth to be discussing political developments with either of them instead of my drunken husband.
George was as adamant that there wasn’t going to be a war as Mr Martin had been that there was.
‘But we have an agreement with Belgium. The British government promised them neutrality,’ I said in a voice quite unlike my own.
‘What’s that?’
Although I wasn’t quite sure of the details, I ploughed on regardless. ‘An agreement, I understand, that they are to remain free. We can’t allow the Germans to trample all over this. The Belgians have a right to our protection.’
‘It’s just a scrap of paper,’ he said, as indeed the German generals were already maintaining. ‘Who cares about that anymore?’
* * *
But then only four days later the church bells were making a deafening peal, quite unlike anything I had ever heard in England before. Shouts rang out in the street, and I hastened to the window, adrenaline coursing through me. The newspaper chap was surrounded by people talking animatedly. People didn’t usually talk to strangers here, but they did now. Everything was different today: Britain was at war.
For once, I could hardly wait for George to get home.
‘What is going to happen?’ I asked him at the front door. My heart was racing. This was it. Finally, change. I had been waiting for change and here it was.
George hung up his hat and his coat, he took off his shoes, before turning to me with his big crooked face. ‘Whatever it is, it won’t affect people like us, May.’
5
Despite the war, the girls were told they were to return to school after summer vacation just as usual. They squealed with delight at the news. ‘We didn’t want to miss school, Mummy!’ Leona explained, while Joy smirked into her suitcase.
‘I know, darlings,’ I said, whipping an unc
oncerned smile onto my face. ‘And that’s good.’
I was surprised George came up on the train to the school with us, but once we had dropped off the girls, he sprang it on me that he had business to attend to in Coventry. I remembered that Bella, our runaway maid, had family from Coventry and I was not impressed.
It was hot and dry that August. Two days after my girls left, I went back to working at Percy’s: he was pleased to see me. From his front window, you could see new recruits walking across Battersea Common. Lines and lines of men were snaking their way to the recruitment offices. They didn’t look much older than my girls.
‘Not tempted to join them, Percy?’
It was snide because I knew that, like George, Percy didn’t have plans to join up. I just wanted to hear what convoluted excuse he would come up with. Unlike George, Percy was not too old.
Percy rested his hand on the small of my back. He was often handling me recently – I hoped he didn’t have paint on his fingers.
‘Maybe.’ I turned in surprise and he added quickly: ‘I would need to know more.’
‘I wish I could contribute somehow,’ I mused.
‘But you’re a woman!’ He gazed at me as though it had never occurred to him that I might have feelings on the subject. Frustration with one’s lot was clearly a quality that belonged exclusively to men.
‘I still have dreams, Percy! I still want to make a difference.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Every day is an education with you, May!’
* * *
How delightful it was to be reunited with Elizabeth in her lovely house. She told me she had missed her dear little American friend terribly. I blushed.