Eileen looked at her quizzically.
‘Well, if she wasn’t pregnant then she couldn’t possibly have died as the result of a botched abortion, could she? And it was her appendix, so she wasn’t pregnant, was she? How is the boy anyway?’
Eileen shrugged. ‘Pretty much as you’d expect,’ she said.
It had all gone, Daisy thought, all her supposed ability to cope. Somehow she had lost any control over what was going on around her, and yet the more she thought about it, the less she understood how it had happened. Daisy had everything worked out, that’s what everyone said, and what she herself had thought, yet in the past couple of months it had all gone wrong and now there was a hint of panic in her mind. For some reason her carefully constructed cover was collapsing and she didn’t know how or why.
She’d felt something slip when Lady Groundhog hadn’t come back. There had been real grief where there should have been simple sorrow for lost boys from her squadron. They had got through the outer shell she had created and she should have been aware of that at the time. She missed them as people, not just as ‘some of our boys’, and found it hard to picture Bruiser without her eyes filling up. Dear, silly, affectionate Bruiser, who punched people yet didn’t have an unkind bone in his body. Once that crack in her armour had appeared others ran off it in different directions, so many that she was finding it almost impossible to hold the facade together.
Two weeks at Rose Cottage should have done the trick, but then Mar, who hadn’t known how much Daisy needed the rest, had suggested the disastrous trip to London, culminating in the scene with Frank and her dreadful attempted seduction of poor, sick Hal. And all the while Celia had been in Langar and in a panic that would cost her her life.
Why hadn’t she taken more notice of Celia’s problems instead of just comforting her? ‘There, there,’ she’d said, when bright red flares should have been going off in her mind – had she been paying attention, that was, and she hadn’t. She had let so many people down. Now Celia was another one to be mentioned in sad tones around the stove on domestic nights, another casualty of the war.
For weeks afterwards Daisy had dreams of trying to hold a cracked jug together as the water came out in drops before inevitably exploding in a great flood that she chased after. The jug dream took its place with the others, of Dessie coming to find her, of the sound of her mother’s breathing.
No one had breakdowns in those days. It wasn’t the done thing, and even Molly, who had been removed from Langar in total secrecy and silence, was regarded as weak, somehow. You coped any way you could without bending, far less buckling; whatever it took, the stiff upper lip had to be maintained. In a bid to cope, Daisy had become this other Daisy, the one who knew everything, who supported everyone, who could withstand whatever life threw at her, her own life as well as everyone else’s, and if she wasn’t that Daisy, then who was she?
The war had dictated that coping was all that mattered and, like millions of other people, Daisy was doing that and had been doing it throughout her life. In her early twenties that was more than enough to break anyone’s resolve, and she was just a girl herself when all was said and done, a girl with no one of her own to turn to.
As if to underline Daisy’s failures, Eileen confided that she, too, was pregnant and was about to marry the dreaded childhood sweetheart, though the child wasn’t his, it was Calli’s.
‘You won’t think I’m a good girl now,’ she confided in Daisy.
‘You want to keep Calli’s baby and so you have to marry somebody,’ Daisy said simply. ‘Why not? He thinks it was him anyway, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Eileen wept.
The childhood sweetheart had been drinking to give himself courage on their night in London and Eileen had put him to bed. When he woke up the next morning he thought they must have slept together, so he was doing the decent thing in marrying Eileen before he went abroad on active service, as he had wanted to anyway, even before finding out she was pregnant.
‘It’s not fair, though, is it?’ Eileen asked sadly.
‘Nothing’s fair, Eileen,’ Daisy said, hugging her. ‘Losing Calli wasn’t fair, neither was losing Bruiser; the war isn’t fair and neither is life. You just do what you have to do.’
Well, that was that loose end safely tied up, but she should have seen, and once would have, that the relationship between Eileen and Calli had been deep and sincere. So she had let Eileen down, too, left her to deal with her grief because she hadn’t realised it was there.
They went through the motions, going to London for the marriage, with Daisy as the bridesmaid, and she was almost happy to discover how much she disliked the bridegroom. She had never reckoned much for childhood sweethearts and, as far as she could see, this one was typical of the breed, though Eileen insisted that he was a nice chap. Still, at least he would serve the purpose of giving Calli’s child a father, though not the father he or she should have had.
It was a quick service in a Registry Office with the bridal party in uniform, as so many were these days, then back to a local pub for a ‘celebration’. Every now and again she and Eileen would make eye contact, both thinking of Calli, and Bruiser too, who would have been best man, and they had to look away to stop breaking down.
Daisy imagined Bruiser’s silly delight at being a real couple with her, and at a wedding of all occasions, and felt deeply sad. As it was, the best man had been unable to take his eyes off her breasts all day. At one point she wondered if he would have rather shaken hands with them than her, then realised she was being silly – of course he would.
As they sat in the pub being desperately bright and happy, Daisy quietly picked out a beer bottle in case she should need it. Finally, under cover of being drunk, the best man made the fatal mistake of trying to stick his hand down the front of her blouse, and in one gloriously graceful movement Daisy lifted the bottle and broke it over his nose, broke his nose, too.
At least it made Eileen laugh, genuinely laugh, for the first time that day. The groom thought Eileen’s sadness was because he had to leave immediately and there would be no wedding night to make the earth move, so Daisy also got a wry smile out of the proceedings.
Then, the happy event over, the groom and his blood-stained best man made their way back to their ship and the bride and bridesmaid went back to Langar.
Three months later Eileen ‘discovered’ she was pregnant and left the service for home, to become a lady-in-waiting, both for the child and the return of her husband, the ‘father’ of her child. Daisy missed her desperately.
And there was the Frank situation, or lack of it. It had finally been brought to an end. He no longer wrote to her, which was what she had wanted, and yet she was bereft, suddenly feeling his loss on top of all the others. She recalled a conversation she had had many, many years ago it now seemed, with Joan Johnstone and Mrs Armstrong in Fenwicks. ‘Don’t let the love of your life get away from you,’ Mrs Armstrong had told her, ‘no matter what anyone else thinks or says.’ And now, when it was too late, she wondered if that was what she had done.
Long walks in the countryside as autumn turned to early winter were Daisy’s only solace. She tried to think of the past months as a wound that was healing and setting into a scar. All she had to do was calm herself and move on as she had done before, but there were times when a voice in her head would ask, ‘Move on where?’
Still, there she was, all these terrible things had happened; things she would once have spotted and nipped in the bud; things, further more, that she had caused to happen. Now all she could do was try to recover and not dwell on the past, because dwelling on the past might well cause the floodgates to open completely and she would drown. Close those doors, Daisy, close the doors. Don’t think about it; get on with life. Things could have been worse, there were successes. Look at Eileen.
18
One of the good things about friends moving on during wartime was that there were new ones always being recruited to fill the gaps. In
Daisy’s case, Pearl was one of her new friends. And you didn’t always lose the old ones. Edith was frequently at Langar because of her Australian.
‘You always call him my “Aussie”,’ Edith laughed. ‘Can’t you use his name? I mean, surely he’s proved himself a non-bastard by now, Daisy. No secret wife and children, no other notches on his joystick?’
‘Other notches?’ Daisy said, faking shock.
‘Forget I said that!’ Edith said quietly. ‘It was a slip of the tongue.’
‘A slip of something, I’ll grant you,’ Daisy said, looking at Pearl beside them. ‘And since when does clever, serious Edith make slips of the tongue anyway? The security of the realm depends on you and you make slips of the tongue?’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Edith said, embarrassed. ‘Anyway, his name’s Doug, I want you to call him that, OK?’
‘Seems, Pearl,’ Daisy said archly, ‘that we are being presented with a true romance here.’
Edith pushed her and they all laughed. ‘He’ll be here tonight,’ she said, ‘and I want you to be nice to him. You remember nice, Daisy, it’s when you bare your teeth without biting!’
They were on their way to an ENSA concert, one of the entertainments put on for service personnel, though things didn’t always work out for the artistes who thought they were doing their bit for the war effort by performing for those actually involved in it.
It was here that ‘Edith’s Aussie’ truly became Doug. He earned his stripes as far as Daisy was concerned, though she already half-approved of him because Edith had asked her to. He was a solid little man, dark eyes and fair hair and quiet, it seemed, until during the variety show a conjurer by the name of the Great Walendo asked for a volunteer from the audience and Doug got up and joined him on stage. When he was asked to pick a card he chose the wrong one, only to produce the right one from his pocket. The conjuror looked confused. Next was the hidden bottle trick, or it was hidden until Doug stepped forward and uncovered a whole collection of different bottles all hidden under each other, until the hapless conjurer’s table was covered in them.
The audience roared with laughter and Doug gazed back in complete innocence, as though completely unaware of what he was doing. The Great Walendo decided to go for broke and brought on one of the leggy dancers from the show, a real trick, knowing that the attention of the males in the audience would be on her as he sawed her in half.
‘Which half would you like to take back to base with you tonight, gentlemen?’ he asked, thereby unwittingly losing the female section of his audience.
‘Oh, get on with it, sunshine!’ Daisy called out wearily. ‘There’s a war on, you know, or there was when we came in here!’
‘Is that the one you took back last night?’ the conjuror asked, addressing the males once again.
‘Heard it all before,’ Pearl shouted at him, adding for good measure, ‘you erk!’
Now that the audience was taunting him the conjuror decided to get on with the act, and with a great flourish he pulled the trick cabinet apart to reveal two distinct halves of the lady in question. Doug didn’t need a flourish, he just pulled a compartment door and revealed her real legs, still attached to her body.
The audience were now engaged in a contest. It was their boy or the Great Walendo, and their boy was willing, though he appeared to be unaware of being in the competition. In desperation the magician brought on a cabinet, enticed another leggy lady of the company to enter it, went through a diverting performance of locking the door, then unlocked it and revealed an empty cabinet. Doug stood applauding. Then another beauty was ‘disappeared’, and another, till the Great Walendo was visibly growing in confidence and stature. That’s when Doug struck again. As the Great Walendo was taking extravagant bows at the front of the stage, Doug walked to the magic cabinet and pulled a curtain at the back, uncovering another door, from where the leggy lovelies had escaped behind stage. The Great Walendo departed to catcalls and opinions that he had misspelt his name – ‘The Great Wally, mate, that’s who you are!’ – sweating profusely and glaring at the straight-faced Doug.
The show comic, Tony Hancock, was rushed on stage to save the night and quell the audience. He pulled it off by appearing before them wearing a tutu and army boots, but it had been a close-run thing.
Afterwards the girls wanted to know how Doug had managed to upstage the Great Walendo so effectively.
‘I did a bit of conjuring back home,’ he said quietly, ‘and he was so sloppy I couldn’t let him get away with it. I hate sloppiness. If we were as sloppy as that in our jobs we’d never get through a mission. As far as I’m concerned that applies to his war effort, too.’
From that moment Edith’s Aussie was Doug.
Six months after Eileen’s departure as a respectably married mother-to-be, word had come through that she had given birth to a daughter. More than anything Daisy wanted to see the two of them, but that would have to wait till after the war.
Meanwhile there was Rose Cottage. Freddy, Dotty’s pilot brother, was there, insisting she come down to London with him for a party. By now this was a rare occurrence for Daisy. She was very choosy these days, much preferring to stay at Rose Cottage.
‘Who’ll be there?’ she asked calmly.
‘It’s to welcome a crowd of Americans,’ Freddy explained, ‘so the usual crowd plus the Yanks.’
‘Will Dotty and Frank be there?’
‘No,’ he replied sadly. ‘Little sis is too busy attending to the sick these days, can’t drag her away from the hospital, and poor old Frank is stuck in some God-awful wilderness off the map to the north.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ Daisy lied. ‘It would’ve been good to see them both.’
Question answered, she was safe, so she agreed to go, with nothing more than the vague prospect of a little diverting fun in mind. There she was approached by an American Major – she was sure he had said his name, but she hadn’t taken much notice. Why bother when she wouldn’t see him again?
‘Well,’ the little man drawled, ‘I’m glad I stayed single, this is the gal I’ve been looking for all my life!’
Her heart sank. She wasn’t fooled for a minute, there was undoubtedly a Mrs Major stateside, as they liked to call America. Daisy had rarely seen a more married man. He was around forty, short and dumpy with a dark moustache and a swarthy complexion, of Italian extraction, at a guess. He probably imagined he looked like Clark Gable, though he’d have to stand on a box for a start, even before you got down to comparing the features, and he did not fare well there either. At best, a very bargain-basement Clark Gable, she thought. He looked the kind of man who was used to his shirts being freshly ironed and laid out for him every morning by Mrs Major, and more fool her for marrying him in the first place.
Still, presumably Mrs Major had been an innocent girl once herself and hadn’t known what she was getting into. She was probably sitting at home now, maybe with a couple of swarthy kids who didn’t look like Clark Gable either, being loyal and true, worrying about him and praying that he would come home safely at the end of the war. It was something she had noticed before, the tendency among the biggest prats to marry decent little women who doted on them and, more importantly, trusted them, so maybe she was right. More fool Mrs Major, she should’ve known better.
It was part of a universal male arrogance that made men think they knew women, and there was no reason why Yanks overseas with the Forces shouldn’t believe it, too. Men were men, after all. All females want to get married, that’s what they thought, and with some reason. Most unmarried females were regarded – and regarded themselves – as failures if they hadn’t been graciously picked off the shelf and their lives legitimised by marriage by the time they were in their twenties.
But not all, Daisy thought, definitely not all, as she tuned out of the Major’s pitch. He was saying something about dinner sometime and she smiled distantly.
‘I work in the Langar tower and I don’t get leave that often,’ she replied, emp
loying her tried and tested looking-for-someone gaze about the room.
‘I can always get transport,’ he suggested, ‘and come up there.’
Her mind was only vaguely on him. She was thinking about that other Yank absolute: that the plucky little Brit variety of female, or dame – she cringed at that; no one ever called her ‘dame’, well, not twice, anyway – having endured years of drab existence before America entered the war, and who would doubtless have to endure years more when it had finished, wanted desperately to marry Americans and have access to the great American dream. It had become a joke with the WAAFs once she’d knocked them into shape. They’d return from a weekend leave in the fleshpots of London and announce, ‘Guess what, girls? I’m off stateside next week, Beauregarde is having a mansion built for me beside his oilfields in Brooklyn.’ The others would immediately chip in with news of their engagements to a host of similar oilmen and cattle ranchers from deepest Manhattan. ‘Ah, but,’ the first one would ask, ‘do you have one of each variety? I think this one’s my fourth this week!’ Every American male knew this fervent desire of the plucky little Brit female to be whisked off stateside was carved in stone, so that’s what they offered to get what they wanted, and the Major was no exception.
‘Oh,’ she said, still not concentrating on his conversation, plus she had found that ‘Oh’ worked pretty well in these situations for a while.
‘In fact I can take you anywhere you want to go, little lady,’ he boasted.
Suddenly a plan formed in her mind. Anywhere? Did he say anywhere? ‘I’m sure you’re just saying that,’ she said in a flirty voice.
‘No, no, I mean it, name your destination,’ he said, delighted by her change in tone.
‘Well … no, it’s too much to ask,’ she smiled, gazing at him over the rim of her glass.
‘Say it,’ he said excitedly, ‘just say it and it’s yours!’
‘Well, it is far away,’ she said, ‘and please say if you can’t do it, I won’t think any less of you,’ meaning, of course, that she would. ‘I have this friend in Glasgow that I’m just dying to see, a girlfriend.’
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