Lance closed his eyes, his blunt eyelashes blondtipped. She looked across at him, marvelling at how similar he was in physical looks to Toby and how dissimilar in personality. Where Toby had possessed an air of easy self-assurance, there was something permanently taut about Lance. Toby had constantly teased and joked with her. Lance rarely smiled. She picked up a handful of small pebbles, letting them trickle through her fingers. He had very little to smile about, of course, harrying German bombers month in and month out, but she couldn’t imagine him being light-hearted even in peacetime.
When he dropped her and a tired Daisy and Hector off in Magnolia Square early in the evening, she knew that he wanted to kiss her goodbye. Feeling slightly ashamed of herself, she lifted Daisy into her arms, making any such attempt impossible.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, opening the door of his sports car with her free hand, her voice friendly and nothing more. ‘Thank you for a lovely time, Lance.’
As she stood on the pavement, Daisy still in her arms, she saw his face tighten with disappointment and felt even more ashamed.
‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Take care.’
‘Goodbye.’ This time there was far more warmth in her voice, ‘Good luck.’
As he gunned his sports car into life and it roared out of Magnolia Square towards the Heath, she knew that he had read her unspoken message of sexual uninterest very clearly. Certain that he would never call on her again, she began to carry Daisy up the front path, Hector plodding wearily at her heels, sad that he had been unable to settle for the friendship she would willingly have given.
Half an hour later there was a knock at the door and she wondered if he had had second thoughts and had come back in the hope of finally parting from her on terms she would have found acceptable. Instead, when she opened the door, she found herself facing Carrie.
‘I hope you don’t mind . . . I know it’s a bit of a cheek when I haven’t spoken to you for so long . . . but I wondered how the baby was and why Mr Harvey had taken him away,’ Carrie said awkwardly.
‘Oh Carrie! Please come in!’ Kate’s voice was thick with relief and joy. Since the day she had set off with the intention of calling on Carrie and found herself instead at Mavis’s, she hadn’t stopped debating with herself as to whether or not she should make another attempt. Her difficulty had been that she no longer had Matthew with her and without Matthew she had no excuse for knocking on the door of a house she had been asked never to visit again.
Feeling almost sick with thankfulness that the dreadful silence between them had at last been broken, she said as she led the way into the kitchen, ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Carrie?’
Carrie, still in her bus conductress’s uniform after a long work-shift, said, ‘A cup of tea would be smashing. And have you one of those gingerbread men Billy and Beryl are so fond of?’
‘I’m afraid you’re out of luck,’ Kate said as Hector barked a greeting from his basket beneath the kitchen table. ‘We’ve just come back from a picnic at Brighton and eaten every last one.’
Carrie sat down in the rocking-chair, her awkwardness ebbing. Kate was making things easy for her. There had been no bitterness in her voice when she had greeted her; no resentment.
‘Who’s we?’ she asked, as the long months of estrangement began to slip away as if they had never been.
Kate put the kettle on, ‘Daisy and Hector and Lance Merton, an RAF chum of Toby’s. It was a bit chilly down there but it made a nice change and Daisy loved it.’
‘Is Daisy the little girl you’ve taken in? The little girl who was bombed out?’ Carrie asked, looking round for a sign of her.
‘Yes. She’s in bed now. She was asleep even before I got her in the house.’
‘How old is she?’ Carrie unpinned her hated bus conductress’s cap from her hair and rammed it in her pocket. ‘Mum’s seen her when the two of you have been out shopping and she says she can’t be much younger than Rose. Rose could do with a playmate. Beryl and Jenny are at school all day now and besides, being five-year-olds, they think Rose is still a baby and haven’t the patience to play with her.’
‘Daisy is three and she’d love to have a friend.’ As Kate sat down at the kitchen table an emotional thought struck her. ‘She and Rose are just the age we were when we first made friends.’
A spasm almost of pain crossed Carrie’s square-jawed face. ‘So they are,’ she said, her voice as thick as Kate’s had been when she had welcomed her into the house. She linked her fingers together tightly in her lap. ‘I’ve hated this last year, Kate,’ she said with typical frankness. ‘I never intended to stop speaking to you. It just . . . happened. I was so upset about Danny being taken prisoner . . . and Christina’s stories of what Jews are suffering in Germany and Eastern Europe were so terrible . . . I just couldn’t think straight.’
Kate stretched out her hand, taking hold of one of Carrie’s hands. ‘I always understood, Carrie. I always knew how difficult it was for you . . . and I always knew that one day everything would be all right again between us.’
Carrie’s hand tightened on hers and then both she and Kate were on their feet, hugging each other, tears spilling down their cheeks.
‘Oh God, Kate! I’ve been so miserable not seeing you! I wanted to come up when the baby was born but I was scared that after the way I’d behaved you wouldn’t want anything to do with me!’
‘And I was scared of bringing Matthew down to see you, not knowing how you’d react!’
They began to laugh through their tears. ‘And what about the intriguingly attractive stranger who was lodging with you?’ Carrie asked, the old familiar teasing humour back in her voice. ‘Mum nearly had ten fits when Dad told her about him. Apparently he’d called on her, asking if she took in lodgers and she’d turned him down flat. According to Miss Helliwell, it was a very big mistake on Mum’s part. I must say I’m in agreement with Miss Helliwell. From what I saw of him he looked extremely fanciable.’
Kate wiped the tears from her cheeks, smiling radiantly. ‘He is.’ There was going to be lots of time to talk to Carrie about Leon. Meanwhile she wanted to know how Danny was and what the situation now was between Mavis and Ted.
‘Tell me about Danny,’ she said, beginning to pour freshly brewed tea into two mugs. ‘Do you hear from him regularly via the Red Cross? Do your letters reach him? And what’s the latest on Mavis and Ted? Has she heard from him since he stormed off after accusing her of having an affair with Jack Lomax?’
The next few hours were just like old times. With their hands comfortingly around hot mugs of tea, sweetened with Nestle’s milk, they caught up on months and months of gossip; Danny, Leon, Rose and Jenny and Matthew, Carrie’s war work on the buses, Kate’s decision to allow Joss Harvey to take Matthew to Somerset. It was only as Carrie was finally taking her leave that an edge of awkwardness again entered her voice.
‘I’d love to ask you to start calling at the house again,’ she said as she lingered on the doorstep, ‘only Mum still thinks that as your dad is German you must be a member of Hitler’s Youth Movement.’
Kate shrugged. She didn’t care too much what Miriam thought of her. All that mattered to her was that she and Carrie were friends again. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said philosophically. ‘She’ll think differently I expect when the war is over and our lives get back to normal again.’
Carrie’s thick dark hair swung loosely forward around her face. ‘Do you think that’s the way it will end?’ she asked tautly. ‘Do you think we will grind Hitler into the dust?’
Kate’s eyebrows rose in startled surprise. ‘Well of course I do. Don’t you?’
In the late night air Carrie shivered. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes, during a raid, I get so frightened. Dad thinks that now it’s spring Hitler will be preparing for a do-or-die attempt at invasion. He thinks I should have Rose evacuated, but when I think of what happened to Beryl and Billy I can’t bring myself to do it.’
Her green eyes flashed fire. ‘God, but I hate
this war!’ she said with sudden passion. ‘I hate what it’s done to us all. Danny in some God-awful prison-camp and Rose not even remembering him; your dad locked up as if he were a spy; Toby dead at twenty-six; Jenny and Daisy’s families blown to smithereens in their own homes; Ted brooding on what Mavis might be up to while he’s away, fighting. If I knew which way it was all going to end I could cope with it.’
She grinned suddenly, recovering her sense of humour. ‘Or I could if I knew it was going to end the way you think it’s going to end! At least the bloody Luftwaffe haven’t visited us yet tonight. With a bit of luck we might be able to sleep the night through instead of having to scurry down to the blasted shelter in our nighties!’
For the rest of the week, despite the fact that there were heavy raids on both Tuesday night and Thursday night, Kate felt as if she were walking on air. She and Carrie were friends again. Rose and Daisy had declared themselves to be ‘sisters’. Hettie Collins had stopped her in the street to ask after Matthew. And she was going to be with Matthew from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon.
‘I could always look after Daisy for you,’ Ellen said when Kate left Hector with her. ‘She wouldn’t be any trouble and . . .’
‘I appreciate the offer, Ellen, but Daisy is looking forward to seeing Matthew again nearly as much as I am. And she’ll be company for me on the train.’
She didn’t add that Daisy might also prove to be company for her once she reached her destination. As she left Ellen’s elegant terraced house in West Greenwich, she wondered, not for the first time, exactly what sort of situation would greet her at her journey’s end. Would she be treated as a guest or as an unwelcome intruder? Would Joss Harvey treat her with curt politeness or would he be cantankerously rude to her? Would Joss Harvey even be there or would it only be Ruth Fairbairn?
‘Will there be a seaside like there was at Brighton?’ Daisy asked, wriggling into a comfortable position on the rough moquette of the train seat, her little legs sticking out in front of her.
‘No.’ Kate swung their overnight bag and gas-mask canisters on to the rack above Daisy’s head. ‘Matthew’s living in the country, Daisy. There’ll be fields and cows and sheep and maybe horses.’
As she sat down next to Daisy she hoped she wasn’t misleading her. All she had was the address. Tumblers, East Monkton, Taunton. It sounded comfortable and ‘cottagey’, but remembering the large and dignified Harvey home in Blackheath Kate doubted if Joss Harvey’s temporary country residence would be as unpretentious as its name.
At Taunton station they were met by Joss Harvey’s chauffeured Bentley. Kate’s heart sank. If the Bentley was in Somerset, then so was Joss Harvey.
Daisy scampered eagerly onto the backseat. ‘Does the King have a car like this?’ she asked, round-eyed. ‘Are we going to a palace, Auntie Kate?’
Kate didn’t answer her, she merely squeezed her hand. This kind of lifestyle was the lifestyle Toby had grown up with. It was a fact she had always known but it was a fact which, until now, she had never really comprehended.
As the Bentley eased its way into Taunton’s main street she realized for the first time how little she had known about the circumstances in which Toby had been brought up. The knowledge carried with it a pang of heartache. Had he really, in some ways, been a stranger to her?
For the first time another thought occurred to her, chilling her to the bone. Joss Harvey had made his intentions of maintaining contact with Matthew abundantly clear. Which meant that on visits to his great-grandfather, Matthew, too, would become accustomed to a life far different to the modest one enjoyed in Magnolia Square. Would he one day become dissatisfied with what she could offer? She knew enough of Joss Harvey to know that if there was even the faintest chance of such a thing happening he would exploit it to the full.
As the Bentley purred through Taunton’s mellowed stone suburbs her stomach muscles tightened. The battle between herself and Joss Harvey, where Matthew was concerned, had not been won when she had adamantly refused his demand that he adopt Matthew. That incident had only been an opening skirmish. The real battle lay ahead and would probably be ongoing for years.
‘The dried milk and bottles are kept in this cupboard here,’ Ruth said to her as she showed her round a large, airy nursery. ‘You quite obviously don’t want me around for the next twenty-four hours and so Mr Harvey has agreed to my having this evening and tomorrow off. I’m going to visit my parents in Yeovil, public transport permitting.’
Kate felt a rush of warmth towards her, grateful for her sensitivity. ‘Is Mr Harvey in the house?’ she asked, hugging Matthew close to her breast, unable to take her eyes from the perfection of his little face.
‘Yes, he spends every weekend here. He’s not a very courteous man,’ she added wryly, ‘I wouldn’t take offence at the fact that he didn’t trouble to greet you when you arrived.’
Kate hadn’t taken offence. She had been vastly relieved. Later, when Ruth had left for Yeovil and when Matthew had fallen contentedly to sleep in her arms, she had carried him down the stairs to the hall and laid him in his quite magnificent pram.
‘Are we going for a walk?’ Daisy had asked hopefully. ‘Are we going to see cows and sheep and horses?’
‘We most certainly are.’ During the car ride to the house Kate had been relieved to see that her promise to Daisy, that she would see fields and sheep and cows and even horses, was going to be easy to keep.
Tumblers was set deep in the countryside, so deep that if the chauffeured car hadn’t been waiting for her and Daisy at the station, Kate knew they would never have been able to reach it.
As she tucked a fine wool blanket around Matthew, a door opened and a young girl in a maid’s uniform walked out of what appeared to be a sitting-room. She kept her eyes carefully averted from Kate, not speaking.
‘Good afternoon,’ Kate said, refusing to be treated as if she didn’t exist. ‘It’s lovely weather, isn’t it?’
The girl flushed scarlet, still not speaking.
Kate shrugged. It had been obvious from the moment Ruth Fairbairn had greeted her that the household staff knew who she was and that they also knew her status as a guest was ambiguous.
Wryly, Kate wondered where she and Daisy were to eat. She hadn’t thought to ask Ruth and it was too late to do so now. Presumably they would eat in the nursery, off trays. That would solve Joss Harvey’s problem admirably.
As she pushed the pram out onto the gravelled drive, she thought of how different it would have been if Toby had lived only a few weeks longer and they had married. She would then have been Mrs Harvey and her status at Tumblers couldn’t possibly have been ambiguous.
‘It’s very quiet, isn’t it?’ Daisy said a little nervously, breaking in on her thoughts. ‘Is it always so quiet in the country?’
Kate paused. They had reached the narrow road at the bottom of the short drive and on either side of them fields, interspersed by occasional copses of trees, stretched out as far as the eye could see.
‘It is quiet,’ Kate agreed, discovering to her surprise that, like Daisy, she found the stillness unnerving. ‘I suppose the cows and sheep wouldn’t like it if there were milk-carts and coal-carts and bicycles everywhere.’
‘There’s nowhere to go for a cup of tea, is there?’ Daisy said a little while later as they stood by a dry-stone wall, regarding a flock of morose-looking sheep. ‘And there’s no sweet shops or fish and chip shops or pie and mash shops.’ She tucked her hand into Kate’s. ‘I don’t think I like the countryside,’ she said confidingly. ‘There’s too much of it and it’s too empty.’
Kate, too, found herself hankering after the familiar sight of a Lyons tearoom. She wondered how on earth city-bred mothers, who had been evacuated with their young families, coped. No wonder so many of them had returned home, preferring to brave Hitler’s bombs rather than the strangeness of a way of life totally alien to them. Smiling wryly to herself, she turned the pram and began to walk back to the house. Living so ne
ar to the gorse-covered expanse of Blackheath, it had never previously occurred to her that she was just as much a city-girl as if she had been brought up in Bermondsey or Deptford. It was quite a revelation. Almost as much of a revelation as the realization of how different Toby’s lifestyle had been from her own.
‘If Mr Matthew is settled for the night, Mr Harvey would appreciate you coming downstairs to have a few words with him,’ the maid who had earlier scurried past her in the hall without speaking said, standing in the nursery doorway to deliver the message.
Kate’s stomach muscles tightened. She had begun to optimistically think her visit was going to pass without such a summons being issued.
‘Thank you,’ she said politely, wondering where on earth in the large house Joss Harvey would be waiting for her. The sitting-room? The dining-room? A study? She didn’t ask the maid. Such a show of ignorance would only have emphasized how out of her depth she felt. Why on earth did Joss Harvey insist on his household staff being uniformed? And how could anyone seriously preface a three-month-old baby’s name with the prefix ‘Mr’?
‘I have to go downstairs for a little while to speak with Matthew’s great-grandad,’ she said to Daisy as she tucked her into the camp bed that had been put in the pleasantly furnished bedroom adjoining the nursery. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very long.’
Daisy had nodded sleepily, trusting her completely. She didn’t like the countryside but she liked the pretty bedroom and Matthew’s nursery. There was a rose-pink nightlight and pictures of Humpty Dumpty and Little Bo Peep and Tom, the piper’s son, on the walls. She had had an egg for her tea and chocolate blancmange. Her eyes closed. It had been a real egg, not a make-pretend egg made out of powder. Maybe she would be able to have another one in the morning, for her breakfast. Maybe she would even be able to take one home with her for Rose.
Kate coiled her heavy braid of hair into a discreet roll in the nape of her neck. She had worn a neat olive-green two-piece to travel to Somerset in. The colour wasn’t one she would normally have chosen but clothing coupons and shortages meant there was only ‘utility’ material available. When she had bought the olive-green serge she had suspected it had originally been woven for some type of uniform. She lifted the collar of her white blouse out over the collar of the nip-waisted jacket in an attempt to make it look a little more chic. It still looked suspiciously like a uniform. Reflecting wryly that she looked almost like a member of Joss Harvey’s staff, she made her way down the wide staircase, wondering what the ‘few words’ were he wished to have with her.
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