by Rumer Godden
She had had some vague and Dick Whittingtonish idea of walking, of stowing away on a cross-Channel steamer or pleasure boat, then walking again through France, though she was vague about this, cadging lifts, with their food done up in a handkerchief, Hugh carrying a bundle. She blushed now to think how childish that had been; Hugh, once he had accepted her idea, became a master planner.
‘The plan was to leave the day we went to school,’ he told Fanny and Rob now on the terrace. ‘Luckily it was the same date for both of us.’ Piece by piece he had thought it out. ‘It didn’t all happen in five minutes, as I say it,’ he told them. Telling about it, Hugh had almost forgotten his sullenness, his headache, and pain. ‘I tell you, it took time.’
‘But not the telegrams,’ put in Caddie. ‘You thought of them in a minute.’
‘I think we should send telegrams,’ he had told her. ‘Writing is too risky. We could never make a letter sound like Father or Gran, or even look like them, even if we had it typed.’ Perhaps Hugh’s strength lay in knowing his limitations. He was seldom naïve. ‘Yes. We will send telegrams.’
‘Saying what?’ Caddie had asked, and Hugh had reeled it off: ‘“Regret Candida unable return today suspected measles writing signed Clavering”, the same for me, to Strode,’ said Hugh.
‘“Suspected” was clever,’ said Rob. ‘It kept them hanging about.’
‘Yes, I thought they would wait for news.’ Hugh caught himself back. He had almost called Rob, ‘sir’.
Gwyneth had played into their hands by asking Hugh to put Caddie on the train, ‘as you will be going off yourself, dear. She won’t want me to see her off,’ said Gwyneth. ‘Not in front of the other girls.’
Caddie’s school train went from Victoria. ‘It was awkward being in the same station,’ said Hugh. ‘One of the St Anne’s school might have seen Caddie and recognized her, even though our train left from another part. For Continental trains, one uses a different entrance,’ he explained to Rob. It had, too, been tight for time. ‘Caddie’s school train left at a quarter past two, ours at half past. I had to run.’
‘Does she count you?’ he had asked Caddie.
‘Who?’
‘The woman who takes you down to Bendry. There is a mistress with you?’
‘Usually Miss Prescott. She has a list and ticks us off.’
‘Hell!’ and Hugh exploded. ‘Girls’ schools! At Strode we can arrive any time, anyhow, as long as we are there for call-over in the evening. She may not have heard about the telegram and, if you are not there at the station, someone might telephone.’
‘Could you take a note?’ Caddie had asked, but a note held the same risks as a letter. ‘No. We will get to Victoria an hour early,’ Hugh had decided. He would deposit Caddie in the refreshment room on the Continental side. In the taxi, she was to put on a headscarf to hide her hair, ‘It’s so ginger anyone would recognize it’ – and hide her hat. She had to leave in her panama because of Gwyneth, ‘and anyone could see that ghastly emerald band right across the station.’ ‘Dark glasses,’ Hugh had said, enjoying himself, ‘and you can hold up a newspaper.’
He would leave her at a table – ‘You can have a drink and buy one or two sandwiches for us to eat on the train’ – and he himself would arrive breathless on the school train platform. ‘I can say Father sent me. Too late to telephone, and we’re a bit disorganized. They are sure to know all the dirt,’ said Hugh bitterly and he rehearsed: ‘“I’m Hugh Clavering. Caddie, Candida, my sister, is in bed. The doctor thinks it’s measles. She won’t be travelling.” I shall just have time to shoot back, and pick you up and get us on the train. And that’s how it was,’ he told Rob and Fanny; but Hugh did not know how it was, sitting in that refreshment room on the Continental side for half an hour. ‘Half an hour! Half eternity!’ Caddie might have said.
As Hugh had told her to, she held a newspaper up behind her glass of chemically brilliant orange squash, but she could neither drink nor read. She had more than a suspicion too that Hugh had overdone it; in the headscarf and dark glasses, crouched down in the chair and peering cautiously round the newspaper, she looked far more noticeable than a girl in a panama and school blazer, especially as the station was full of them, thought Caddie. Still, no one had looked at her or spoken; soon she almost wished that someone would, and could Hugh get back in time? What would she do if he didn’t?
The hands of the refreshment-room clock crept round to a quarter past two. The school train would be moving off, the girls crowding the windows to wave as they were taken away to their safe enclosed world, as Caddie had been for three terms past, when the only ache had been leaving Stebbings and Topaz. Now the girls, Caddie herself in those days, seemed to her like children one sees in far-off, sunny pictures, unreal. This refreshment-room was real, horribly real. Where was Hugh? Had Miss Prescott believed him, or had she snatched him off to telephone – but there would not have been time. Had she turned him over to the police? Caddie felt sick with fear; Miss Prescott, Gwyneth, a gentle couple, had turned into hunters, enemies, and Caddie was sick at heart; the numbness of her loss was wearing off, as it wears off from an amputation when pain begins to set in; and hers was an amputation that left her no reason for living that she could see. ‘If we do get Mother back, what use will it be to me now?’ A terrible stifling lump was beginning to come in Caddie’s throat. She had to take off the dark glasses because they were blurred with wetness, and her eyes flinched from the hard white light. We shall miss the train, thought Caddie. I don’t care if we do. I shall never care about anything ever again. The lump was breaking into hurtful tearless sobs when Hugh’s impatient voice sounded across the table. ‘Hurry up, slow-coach. I have bagged two seats.’
‘But how did you know where Malcesine was?’ asked Fanny.
‘It was obvious,’ said Hugh. ‘We just worked backwards from the address. “Italy; Verona”.’
‘That’s a town.’ He had showed it to Caddie on the map. ‘Its province must be round it. Malcesine-sul-Garda; “sul” means “on”, I should guess, and Garda is that lake, see, near Verona, but Malcesine doesn’t seem to be big, probably almost a village, and the railway doesn’t seem to go there. We shall have to ask if we go to Verona or where.’
Here Caddie had been of some help. ‘Remember when we used to go to Hamley’s toyshop?’ she asked.
‘Hamley’s?’
‘When we collected trains.’ Like a Red Indian or an elephant, she remembered every least thing Hugh had ever done, and that always made him bad-tempered.
‘My good child, what has that to do with Italy?’
‘Only that opposite Hamley’s there was an Italian travelling place.’
‘So there was,’ said Hugh. ‘How did you remember that?’ Caddie had remembered it because in its windows were model painted carts drawn by little wooden horses with feathers on their heads. Every time they went to Hamley’s she used to cross over and look at them. ‘It was an office only for Italy,’ she said. ‘We could ask there.’
‘You will be travelling alone?’ They had stiffened. This is where we run into trouble, thought Hugh, and Caddie’s heart beat uncomfortably, but it seemed a routine question and when Hugh said, ‘Yes,’ in as chilly and grown-up a way as possible, the clerk had only gone on looking up the timetable. There was no need, as Hugh had told her afterwards, for Caddie to say, ‘We are going to our mother.’
‘I see,’ said the clerk. ‘For Malcesine you must go by train to Desenzano.’
‘Desin …’ That was a name that even Hugh had never heard of. ‘Would you write it down?’ he said.
‘Desenzano,’ the clerk wrote down and added, ‘It’s one of the only two railway stations on the lake. You can take the bus or ferry on from there.’
Hugh had nodded, as if this were only confirmation of what he knew already, but Caddie asked, ‘How do we get to Desenz … Desen …’
‘Desenzano? You can go by air to Milan; the tourist fare is twenty-three pounds thirteen shillings single. Or by air to Pari
s, nine pounds eleven shillings, and catch the night express, 10.44 from the Gare de Lyon.’
‘Isn’t there a through?’ Hugh had asked to Caddie’s admiration.
‘Ah, yes, but that is slow. You leave Victoria at half-past two in the afternoon, change at Paris. Leave there at midnight, arrive in Milan at one-thirty next day and on by the same train to Desenzano. You get there at three o’clock. The single fare is ten pounds four shillings. As Miss, I think, is not fourteen, she would be half.’
‘That will suit us,’ said Hugh, and the clerk asked, ‘You have passports?’
‘Naturally,’ said Hugh.
‘They are valid?’
‘Perfectly valid.’ As soon as Hugh had said that he knew it was the wrong answer, and Caddie once again had to blurt out, ‘Of course they are valid. They are new.’
They had all three been given passports when they went to Switzerland for that Christmas holiday. Most children under sixteen travelled on their mother’s, but for the reason that had not been divulged to them then, they were not on Fanny’s. They had had their passport photographs taken; even one of those could not make Hugh look plain, though he was squinting, but Caddie’s face looked lumpy and glowering. ‘Well, I didn’t want to go to Switzerland. I wanted to stay at Stebbings and get on.’ She did not have to say ‘get on with what’. Her hair was parted in a way that gave her an enormous forehead and she had hunched one shoulder up; ‘and that passport doesn’t expire for another ten years!’ said Caddie.
‘But didn’t anyone stop you? Ask you?’ asked Fanny. ‘I thought children were not allowed to leave the country.’
‘They go backwards and forwards so much, to schools, service families, UN,’ said Rob, ‘that long ago they ceased to be remarkable. Children think nothing of it now.’
‘Some children,’ Caddie would have corrected him, but this time Hugh could not help looking at him appreciatively. Here was one person who did not treat grown-up children ‘as morons,’ said Hugh.
The passports were kept in a pigeon-hole in Darrell’s desk. Here, too, were what Hugh had his eye on: envelopes in which Darrell kept his bits and pieces of foreign currency left over from his travels, not large sums but odd coins and small notes. ‘If we watched we could always know where Father was going by what money he takes,’ said Hugh.
When Darrell was away, he gave the key of the desk to Gwyneth, because it was here too that she kept the housekeeping money, the weekly cheques he gave her to cash, money for the children’s school clothes, travelling money. Gwyneth was so afraid of losing the key, or having it stolen in this London she did not trust, that she wore the key on a cord round her neck day and night. How to get it without her knowing? The answer, with anyone as careful and staunch as Gwyneth, was nohow. ‘Though she would never suspect us,’ said Hugh.
That seemed to make it more their duty to protect Gwyneth and, ‘We must do it when the desk is open,’ said Hugh. ‘After all, it’s only our passports and some currency we want.’
Dear Gwyneth! It was a shame to trick her, ‘But we had to,’ said Hugh.
It turned out to be only too easy, which made Caddie ache for Gwyneth again. Easy and a little diabolical.
‘I must pay the butcher,’ Gwyneth had said and went to the desk, Hugh and Caddie at her heels. Gwyneth unlocked the top and took out a small thickness of notes. ‘I cashed ten pounds,’ she said and carefully counted out three pound notes and put the rest on the table. ‘Three pounds, four shillings,’ she said, peering at the book. ‘It’s much too dear, but there it is. That’s London,’ and she took up her purse to find the silver. Hugh, standing behind Caddie, put his hand round, peeled off three more pound notes, and slid them under the blotter. The next morning Caddie began to count what was left. ‘Did you say ten pounds?’ she asked, not very steadily – ‘You are lousy as an actor,’ Hugh told her later. ‘You took three,’ called Caddie, ‘that should leave seven. There are only four here.’
‘Four!’ Gwyneth’s face turned mottled, then red. She snatched the notes from Caddie. ‘Four! But I’m certain. Look! Look in the drawer.’
‘Only a cheque,’ said Hugh, looking. ‘They must have fallen on the floor.’ As Gwyneth bent to look, Caddie saw him take the first envelope – each was labelled in Darrell’s neat writing, French francs, pesetas, marks, kronen, and so on; Caddie lifted up the blotter for Gwyneth to search the desk top and lifted the three notes with it.
‘Must be in my purse.’ Gwyneth was almost incoherent. She rushed to the kitchen, leaving the desk open. It was only a moment before Caddie again sang out, ‘Gwyneth, they are here. I have found them. Look. Under the blotter.’ Gwyneth came running back, her agitated steps shaking the flat, as Hugh, his pockets heavy, two flat shapes under his jacket, walked out of the study, whistling, but there had been no Italian small money, only the ten thousand lire note. Darrell must have put it there by mistake. ‘Ten thousand lire?’ asked Caddie.
‘It’s only about six pounds.’
‘Then why couldn’t they say so?’ These thousands and hundreds that whirled round them in Italy – two hundred lire for an apple, a hundred and fifty for a roll with ham – seemed part of this twopence-coloured exaggeration that Caddie distrusted. ‘As much as Darrell would have done,’ Fanny said afterwards. Ten thousand lire, but ‘It wasn’t stealing,’ Caddie said now to Rob and Fanny. ‘We put our school money in to make it even. Hugh had four pounds, and I had two, which made it nearly right.’
They would need, Hugh said, French and Swiss francs, Italian lire. ‘We had a few of our own Swiss from Christmas.’
‘How much did you have altogether?’ asked Rob now.
‘Nineteen French new francs.’
‘And sixteen centimes,’ said Caddie.
‘… in bits and pieces. Twelve Swiss francs.’
‘And seventy Swiss centimes.’
‘And we had some English,’ but Caddie was silent about the English money.
‘Do we go through all those countries?’ she had asked with dismay. Caddie, as Hugh said, had no sense of adventure. To her the many different countries only magnified her dread of going, and moments of that journey stayed with her for ever. At Folkestone, for instance, when the long crocodile of passengers went down the covered way to the quay – it was a quarter-of-a-mile walk to the boat – they had had to pass the barrier of a man checking passports. In his tweed overcoat and string gloves, he looked, to Caddie’s imagination, like a detective and she had flinched. Hugh gave her a sharp blow in the back. ‘Go on, donkey,’ and, ‘If you look like that someone will think something is wrong and stop us.’
On board the boat Hugh took Caddie to the cafeteria and gave her a cup of tea. He had a cup cake and she had a fruit pie. It was disappointing, purple juice oozing through pastry that was grey; and inside it were hard cherries and chips of apple. The cafeteria smelled of rubber, steam, and wet people. Its decks seemed to swell and lift. ‘It’s the sea,’ said Caddie.
‘Yes. We have left.’
‘I wish I hadn’t had that fruit pie,’ said Caddie suddenly, and suddenly too, ‘Oh, I wish, wish Mother was here.’
When they had docked at Calais – which did not look very different from England – the loudspeaker blared: ‘Passengers for train thirty-two.’ ‘That’s us,’ said Hugh, appearing beside her. He had their tickets, two pieces of pink paper in a folder. ‘Train thirty-two, and all passengers for Paris turn right at the bottom of the gangway,’ said the loudspeaker. ‘For these passengers, passports and customs will be on the train.’ ‘Which is where they may find us,’ said Hugh. He only said it to frighten Caddie and thrill himself. It had the desired effect.
Then there were the porters, terrifyingly big men in blue blouses and black caps, pushing through the crowd, shouting in French. On the quayside French notices had hung all along the big shed: DOUANE, PASSPORTS ICI, CALAIS DEPART 7.40, but in the train the notices were in four languages:
DO NOT LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW.
NE PAS SE PE
NCHER AU DEHORS.
PERICOLOSO SPORGESI.
NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN.
‘We shall have to say “pericoloso sporgesi”,’ Caddie whispered to Hugh, ‘and “vietato fumare”.’ That was exciting, but as the evening came the journey had taken on a strange loneliness.
Outside the carriage windows the light grew blue. The little lonely French farms had made Caddie think of Topaz, so that for a moment she forgot she was looking at France and not at England, but crépuscule, which Hugh told her was the French for twilight, seemed to suit the dusk that was creeping across the fields, such wide fields; they made the villages seem far apart; now and again there was a solitary spire, a chateau. Even in the carriage it was crépuscule, then a man in the corner took out his travelling radio and a raucous French voice shattered the quiet.
There was a scene in the dining-car which even now made her hot to remember. A man had come down the corridor ringing a little bell. Caddie had known at once what it was, ‘By instinct,’ said Hugh, ‘Dinner’, and they had followed the other passengers down the long train, past couchettes where whole families had seemed to be encamped, and luxurious wagon-lits, but when Hugh saw the dining-car he had stopped short, looking at the white ornamented ceiling, red carpet, red plush chairs, the white table-cloths, white-coated waiters and, ‘It’s terribly expensive,’ he had whispered.
Caddie was too hungry to care. ‘Ask how much it is.’
‘I can’t. You can see it’s too expensive,’ but the head waiter had already come and motioned them to a table, whisked their napkins to their lap, handed them the menus, and vanished to the next people.
‘Présenté par le chef de Brigade Atlas,’ they read in gold letters. The rest was equally impressive: ‘Potage cressonnière.’
‘Suprème de colinelino Eloise …’ but they got no further. ‘Prix fixe,’ read Hugh. ‘18 N.F.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means we don’t have any dinner.’
‘But … oh Hugh!’
‘Eighteen new francs, eighteen hundred old. More than thirty shillings each.’