‘You can’t! You’d be in the way! Extra mouths to feed … Trouble for the whole family.’
‘Why didn’t you think of that before? I don’t care what trouble I am. I’m not leaving you behind here. Oh ‒ I don’t doubt I could do my bit. There’ll be plenty for women to do. After all,’ she added with bitterness, ‘isn’t Aunt Margaret going to dig up the south lawn? Surely any fool can grow a few vegetables? Who knows, I might even learn to drive a tractor.’
‘Nicky, you’re being foolish. You can’t ‒’
‘Don’t you say can’t to me! Don’t you dare use that word! I can’t say it to you. You’re not even listening. If you can stay, then so can I. And I’ll stay and think it’s all a damn shame and a waste ‒ a stupid waste! You talk of being foolish. Well, I’ll leave you to write the letters to your brothers and sister in Boston. You can write the letters to the uncles and aunts. Try to explain to them why you’re staying ‒ why the boys and I are staying too. See what they think of their fine, level-headed brother. A man of such eminent good sense ‒ who’s suddenly gone mad. And what for? ‒ for England! England? I hate England!’
She was on her feet and running, running across that smooth green turf that would shortly be ploughed up, running towards the house that she had once thought the utter perfection of all houses laid like a jewel in its English setting. She brushed aside the angry, outraged tears that sprang to her eyes. Damn the Fentons! Damn England! And damn the impossible, inescapable love she felt for the man who had brought her back here.
3
Late that night they listened to the news bulletin which announced that the British Government had sent an ultimatum to Germany which would expire at 9 a.m. the next morning. When it was announced the next day that the Prime Minister would speak to the nation, all of the Fentons gathered at that time. Richard and Celia had come over from Potters; Joan and Allan had come also. Gavin pretended to read the newspaper while he waited; Judy was knitting. Nicole noticed that Margaret just stood by the window gazing at the south lawn. Whatever talk started between them died swiftly. There was nothing to do but wait. During this waiting period there was a sound of a car in the drive. Wilks hurriedly showed in Sir Charles Gowing. Nicole went swiftly to his side, and Margaret came forward to give him her hand. No one seemed surprised to see him there at that time; no one questioned his presence. All over the country friends were coming together to hear this message. It was spoken at last in Chamberlain’s dry, thin voice, the tones of a man who has seen the death of his own honour, and the beginning of physical death. ‘… my painful duty to declare that a state of war now exists between Great Britain and Germany …’
‘That’s it!’ Richard said when the speech was ended. It was like a cry of exaltation.
Both Margaret and Celia looked at him with eyes that reflected horror and hurt. And Nicole looked across the group towards Lloyd, and for him alone her lips soundlessly framed the words ‘I’m staying’.
Gavin, whom everyone knew was not given to sentiment, surprised them by bringing out a bottle of the malt whisky which Nicole and Lloyd had given to him. It occurred to Nicole that he had been very much prepared for this moment when he had come down from Cambridge. He poured the whisky and passed it around. No one refused.
‘Victory,’ he said.
‘Peace,’ Margaret countered.
They drank it, and Gavin said to Andrew, ‘If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll put the rest of the case in your cellar. We’ll drink again when it’s all over.’
To Nicole it tasted both bitter and fiery, as if it were a taste of the years to come.
Chapter Three
The dispersal of the Fentons began from that day. Afterwards Nicole grew angry once more at the speed with which Lloyd seemed to disappear from her life. The arrangements had all been made. He knew exactly whom he should go to, and he appeared three weeks later at Fenton Field in the uniform of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had a few days’ leave, and would go to training camp for only a few weeks more. ‘I suppose I have to learn a bit more about just being in the Army,’ he said. After that he would be posted to a special neurosurgical unit being set up at a military hospital near Maidstone, in Kent. ‘Of course we’ll be doing other things there. I’ll assist in general surgery, and when my kind of thing comes along, I’ll be leading the team.’ Nicole accepted him back and tried to still the bitter and scalding words of reproach which threatened. It was done now. There was no sense in driving Lloyd from her while she turned into a scold and a shrew. But her sense of resentment was real and deep, and when the leave was over, she viewed the present and the future with a distaste and fear that went with her through the days, and allowed her little rest at night.
There seemed a thousand small annoyances. People were in a hurry. Ration books were new things to learn to juggle with. There was an issue of gas masks, and instructions about how to construct air-raid shelters. Surprising people appeared in uniform. Ross was already settled with his regiment near Lincoln; Allan was on an officer’s training course in Wiltshire. Richard had his place, as though it had been carefully prepared, in a fighter squadron of the Royal Air Force. Gavin had also made his plans, or they had been made for him. He had been swiftly inducted into something that was described as Intelligence, but was really a research group wearing uniforms. Judy closed the house in Cambridge and moved with the children back to Fenton Field. ‘I’ll be of more use here,’ she said. Her nanny, Tomlin, who had had one year in nurse’s training, went back to Bart’s Hospital as a trainee nurse again. Mrs Fenton told her she could come to Fenton Field whenever she had leave; she had no family of her own. That left Henson in charge of Dan and Timmy, and Judy’s Alistair and Fiona. She did not keep her feelings to herself. Her complaints were vocal and loud. ‘We shouldn’t be here, Miss Nicole. When I think of that lovely house back in Boston … and these children here exposed to this risk. Why, we might all be killed …’
‘We might, Henson, we might,’ Nicole agreed wearily because she was tired of trying to explain Lloyd’s decision, and refused even to discuss her own reasons for staying. Henson had surprised her, though, in the strength of her desire to return to America. ‘Things aren’t going to be very comfortable here. I don’t see why we can’t go back where we belong.’
This most English of Englishwomen had suffered a sea change during her years away. Suddenly everything she had ever complained about in America was changed. She could only see that she was in an old and draughty house, that the nurseries lacked the facilities of those in Boston, that the help had vanished from the kitchen, that the days of careless abundance were over. The Boston house glowed brighter in her memory. ‘Oh, it was always so warm in that house, Miss Nicole,’ she said, as the days of autumn grew colder, and only a thin trickle of heat was allowed into the radiators at Fenton Field. ‘And now Mrs Fenton says that they really can’t spare the coal to get the hot water to the nursery bathroom. Everyone’s to use the same bathroom. Well ‒ it isn’t what I expected.’
‘It isn’t what any of us expected,’ Nicole admitted. ‘But there’s really nothing to stop you going, Henson. I’m sure there’s some way of getting you a passage back. I know Dr Fenton’s sister would love to have you look after her children, and help out.’
Henson had looked at her in astonishment. ‘You really don’t think I’d leave you, Miss Nicole. What I can’t understand is why we don’t all go back. Plenty of people are …’
Nicole didn’t know either, but she dared not voice her complaints as Henson did. But Henson stopped talking of a new sailing date as the news came that during that September German U-boats had sunk 26 British merchant ships. The dullness of the first months of the war wore on Nicole’s nerves as no kind of action would have. It all seemed so pointless to be going through this exercise in preparing for a fight which did not come. The south lawn was indeed ploughed up, and she helped plant the vegetables. She hated the sight of the stark posts and wire to keep out the rabbits. She hated most thing
s, she admitted to herself. There was the boredom of learning first-aid, of studying to pass the St John Ambulance test. She felt so much less effective than Margaret and Judy, clumsy and muddling, where they were efficient. Joan was running her own house now with no help at all, and without complaint. She was also, as Margaret was, getting rooms ready for evacuee children from London which they had been told to expect. ‘More trouble,’ Henson said darkly. ‘There’s just no knowing what sort of children they’ll send to us. Dirty hands and no table manners, I expect.’ Nicole silently agreed with her, but dragged out every cot bed and extra mattress from the loaded attics of Fenton Field, tried to find blankets for them all, and stifled the desire to wonder aloud if it was all of any use.
‘I’m so frightened,’ Celia whispered to her one day as they stacked dishes and carried them into the kitchen for washing. Celia had offered Potters to the Red Cross, and it had been accepted. It was being prepared as a convalescent centre for the wounded that were expected. But it was empty at the moment, staffed by a skeleton team. There were, as yet, no wounded.
‘Frightened of what?’
‘Of Richard’s being killed.’ She said it in a dull voice, as if she had long ago accepted the fact. ‘I don’t know that I can just spend the war here at Fenton Field, just waiting. I’ve been thinking of joining the WAAF. Daddy says there’s lots to do, and perhaps I should have a go. He’s at Biggin Hill. There was where I met Richard … Daddy said Richard was a brilliant pilot. I remember the day we met …’ Nicole then remembered what she had forgotten, that Celia’s father was Air Vice-Marshal Hastings.
So Celia went off to training camp. On her first leave back she wore her uniform with a sharp authority that she had lacked before. ‘It’s pretty grim, really,’ she confessed to Nicole. ‘I hate being stuck into those big barracks with hundreds of other girls. No place to wash properly, no place for clothes, or any of that sort of thing. Some of the girls are pretty awful too. I’ll never be much good at whatever they decide to do with me, but I have to do something. I mean Richard would despise me … If I just wait out the war for him, I really doubt he’ll come back to me.’
‘Celia!’
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘He’s so free now. Plenty of women available. The sort of women he admires. Doing things. I have to try. And yet I have the feeling that it’s no use. He’s either going to get killed, or he’s not coming back to me.’
‘That’s absurd! Why do you imagine such things? Any rate, at this moment there seems to be no chance of anyone fighting ‒ in the air or anywhere else. The French are just sitting on the Maginot Line, and a few British battalions are in trenches in France and they’re doing nothing.’
Celia looked at her and shook her head. ‘It’s no use pretending even to yourself, Nicole. That’s what’s got us into all this trouble. Since September Germany and Russia have neatly parcelled up Poland between them, and Russia’s having a nice bit of Finland. When they’ve got it all straightened out, do you think they won’t turn their attention to us?’
Nicole looked at her with a new respect. Even the few weeks away from Fenton Field and Richard had worked a difference. Nicole was reminded once again that Celia was the daughter of an Air Vice-Marshal. But the very calmness of Celia’s acceptance of the storm to come in all their lives, and her own personal anguish, shook Nicole almost as no other event up to that time had done. ‘I’m not trying to scaremonger,’ Celia added, perhaps seeing the fear reflected in Nicole’s face. ‘I’m just telling you not to be surprised …’
Richard came home for Christmas, but it was Celia who could not get leave. Lloyd came on Christmas Eve; Ross was still in Lincoln, and Allan had no hope of leave. He telephoned Joan and his mother with Christmas messages, and then had a discussion with his father about the crops they were to plant in the late winter. There were still enough toys left in the shops that year to make a normal Christmas for the children. Andrew sacrificed a spruce tree from the small plantation of conifers they had on a patch of poor land at Potters. The same decorations which had served the Fentons since they had been children came out. Nicole and Lloyd helped trim the tree, watched and listened as Margaret and Andrew served hot punch to the carolers who came each year to Fenton Field to sing. This year there were a number in uniform, and all the others seemed either too old or too young for uniforms. A house like Fenton Field, with its laid-down cellar, and its well-stocked pantry of summer fruits, its own cured hams, could still put on a spread for the carolers, and Margaret insisted, over Judy’s objections, that they do. ‘If we don’t keep things up, who will? As long as there’s a spare half-pound of sugar, I won’t hoard. When the time comes, we may all have to do without.’
Charles came for the carol-singing on Christmas Eve, and afterwards went straight back to London. ‘I must be with Iris,’ he said. ‘Though she’s so busy now, we hardly glimpse each other. But still, it’s Christmas …’ Charles was back in uniform, and looked happier for it. ‘I fiddle papers on a desk,’ he said. ‘About all the use I am to them is that I do know Army Regulations. When they can’t spare anyone more important, I go and inspect anti-aircraft installations and all that sort of thing. All supposed to do with morale, but all these boys know I’m a pretty worn-out old war-horse. It isn’t easy to face them and know that we really never finished the last war. And know they know it. Iris is marvellous, of course. She’s become a very big-wig in the Red Cross. And she’s volunteered as an air-raid warden for the area just around Elgin Square. Heaven knows how she’ll find time for everything. All the secretaries have gone. Most of the staff has gone. She’s bullied and coached Adams until he’s passed the St John Ambulance test. He’s a warden too. We’re having a mixed bag of young soldiers and airmen for Christmas dinner, and Iris is helping to cook it. We may all be laid up with acute indigestion this time tomorrow, but Iris will have done her bit. Well … must be going. Don’t know when I’ll be able to get down in future … Petrol’s getting so short …’
They saw him off, and went back and mingled with the rest of the family. But when the others had gone up to bed, leaving them by the fire near the Christmas tree, Lloyd leaned over and touched Nicole’s knee.
‘Hey ‒ feeling it a bit rough? Sorry ‒ it just can’t be helped. Sorry you and the kids are still here, Nicky, and yet ‒ so glad, so glad, my darling …’ And then he gave her the little velvet box. It contained a single spray of gold, with a leaf of diamonds, and a rose-bud in rubies.
‘I never promised you roses,’ he said. ‘But at this moment jewellery isn’t rationed.’
‘Nor is my love,’ she answered. ‘You fool ‒ you silly, wonderful fool. Did you think I needed jewellery?’
‘No, but perhaps I need to give it to you. Nicky, at times when I think that you might be hurt … or the boys ‒’
‘Shut up!’ she said fiercely, simultaneously hugging him and trying to pin on the brooch, and pricking her finger so that the blood smeared the tiny diamonds. ‘I won’t get hurt. Nor will the boys. Nor you. I’m lucky, Lloyd. I’ve got a special sort of luck. It’s going to take us right through this … you’ll see.’
She went to the mirror to see how the brooch looked against her grey sweater. She fingered it and smiled back at Lloyd’s reflection behind her. But the fingers with which she touched the glowing rose-bud were hard and cracked from housework and the vegetable garden; her supply of hand cream had run out, and she hadn’t had an hour at the piano in the last month.
2
That winter they waited for what everyone said must come ‒ bombardment from the air. And yet nothing happened. At Fenton Field Andrew moved the map which until Christmas he had had on the wall of the small room he used as a farm office, into the kitchen. The whole of Europe was spread there before them, and they traced the boundaries of places whose names they had never before thought about ‒ Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. There, in the room that had now become the hub of the whole house, they learned about ice-free ports, and Sweden’s iron ore, about t
he Karelian Peninsula and Russians learning to fight on skis as their stubborn Finnish enemy did, holding the Russians for what seemed an unendurable length of time that frozen winter. There was now no question at Fenton Field that the family was invading Wilks’s territory by taking over the kitchen. It was a huge, bright room, old-fashioned enough to have retained a solid fuel burning stove when the modern electric ranges had been introduced. It was to this place they all gathered, whoever was there, and Wilks was part of the family in a new way. Even Henson overcame her horror at this erosion of social barriers. The kitchen was warm, there was no help to be had, and it made more sense for the family to gather around the big, scrubbed table, to eat at whatever hours were convenient to their activities, instead of the old fixed times. Wilks’s silver pantry was locked, and the key put away in Margaret’s desk. The dining-room was unused and often dusty, as was the drawing-room. The sitting-room of the family became the small room that they had once called the library or the study ‒ a room easier to heat than the others, and closer to the kitchen. It was an untidy, much-used room, littered with sewing, newspapers, children’s toys. There was a radio there and in the kitchen, and neither room was ever uninhabited, and certainly not at the hours of the news bulletins. Fenton Field became noisy with the cries and tussles of the six evacuee children who arrived and then drifted away as their mothers decided that, after all, there was going to be no bombing. Henson sighed with relief, and more than once wanted to complain that even with the evacuees gone, four young children were too much for her to look after. But people had developed a way of clamping their mouths shut when such things threatened to come out. On the surface it was still a serene and well-enough run house, and underneath the tension grew.
The Lynmara Legacy Page 37