The House of Flowers

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Marjorie agreed. ‘Well, I hope so far they would approve. We seem to have been pretty well behaved, haven’t lit fires in the ballroom or any of that kind of thing.’

  ‘Couldn’t have asked for a better crowd. Thank heavens the army didn’t take it over. They’d have completely wrecked the place. You’ve no idea what soldiers get up to in other folk’s homes. No, it doesn’t bear thinking about, the army at Eden.’

  ‘What about your friend – David, wasn’t it? The son.’

  ‘He was killed not so long ago.’ Anthony glanced away from her, remembering how the two of them had used to sit in front of the pub fire together. ‘We were in the same regiment. I got invalided out – a bullet in the back on manoeuvres – which is why I was sidelined to a desk, but David got sent to North Africa, poor chap. Now, I’m going to have one for the road – taking ruthless advantage of mine host because he said he doesn’t know when he’s going to get his next gin delivery. And you? But of course, if you would rather not . . . ?’

  ‘As long as you promise that if I fall off my bike on the way back you’ll help me back up.’

  ‘It’s a promise.’

  As he went to the bar Marjorie pretended to check her appearance in the compact she had taken out of her handbag. A drink with Major Folkestone was turning out to be a little different. He was obviously one of the many walking wounded.

  ‘Now shall we talk about Billy and his famous design for a bomber without a pilot?’

  Anthony sat down again, obviously determined to steer the conversation away from the past. Marjorie smiled as she always seemed to when Billy was mentioned.

  ‘Oh, Billy. He is such a strange boy. No one would think, from how he is now, at Eden Park, no one could imagine how he was as a child, timid and frightened, always seeing a shadow as a ghost, and a ghost as a tiger come to eat him. And yet now look at him. He’s become a sort of prodigy; never stops drawing and doodling, thinking of things, adding up figures before anyone can blink. I don’t know what’s going to become of him eventually, but he certainly has gone from one extreme state to another, bless his cotton socks.’

  ‘There’s some medical term or other for it,’ Anthony said thoughtfully, as they finally finished their drinks and started to wrap themselves well up in preparation for their bicycle ride home to Eden Park. ‘I can’t remember the exact official description, but I know there’s an acknowledged medical state which some children go into when they suffer shock early in life – sometimes some do say before they’re even born, though I don’t quite see how, but then that’s as maybe.’ He paused before continuing. ‘Apparently the child turns in on him or herself, and because they’re not say as normal in behaviour or appearance as their contemporaries, they’re inclined to get sidelined. And during this period in their young lives they develop all sorts of odd gifts and abilities. Interesting, isn’t it? My father’s a doctor, and he told me all about it. He specialises in children’s conditions, and for his sins got laughed at when he first put his theory forward, although I gather they’re not holding their sides quite as much now. He had retired, but now, of course, with the war on, he’s needed more than ever, alas.’

  ‘Do you think that might have happened to Billy?’

  ‘I think it could have done, or it might be that he was just born brilliant. Some people are, lucky devils.’

  As they cycled home in the bitter cold, keeping up a good pace, since it really was too cold to hold any sensible sort of conversation, Marjorie thought about the evening.

  On the one hand she knew she had spent most of the evening feeling oddly inadequate, yet now she felt more alive than she remembered feeling for a long time, and not just because the icy wind was stinging her eyes and freezing the tiny areas of cheek still exposed above the scarf in which she had muffled her face. She thought perhaps the reason why she felt different was because an older man had not only wanted to take her out, but ended up talking to her quite simply as a friend.

  In fact that was the last really cogent thought Marjorie had for the time being, for the next moment she found herself flat on her back on the heavily iced gravel driveway, having lost control of her bike as they turned into the entrance. In a moment Anthony was on his knees, his own bike discarded to lie on its side with the front wheel still spinning as he attended to his fallen companion.

  ‘Marjorie?’ He leaned over her, his expression a great deal more anxious than Marjorie could ever remember before, his breath hanging on the frozen air. ‘Are you all right? That was an awful fall. I do hope you haven’t hurt yourself – not broken anything?’

  Marjorie tried to sit up, shaking her head slowly. She had given it quite a bang when she had fallen off.

  ‘No, I’m fine, thank you, Anthony. At least I think so. Except I believe I might have hurt my wrist.’ She felt her right wrist gingerly, noting an apparent sprain.

  Anthony, still kneeling beside her, took her injured wrist in his hands and carefully felt for broken bones.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything broken. I think you might have sprained it – or at best given it a nasty twist.’

  ‘I’ve scraped my knees, though.’ Marjorie laughed, looking down at the damage. ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing – these were not only my best stockings, they were my very last pair. I took the corner too fast. It was entirely my fault.’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter whose fault it was.’ Anthony eased her gently up to her feet. ‘A nasty fall is a nasty fall. Now, do you think you can make it up the drive? Or shall I put you on my bike, and give you a push?’

  Marjorie laughed again and brushed some snow off her coat in order to try to cover the embarrassment she was feeling.

  ‘I’m fine, honestly. I just think I’ll walk for a while rather than ride. Until I stop seeing stars.’

  Anthony smiled back at her and together they walked slowly up the long driveway, pushing their bicycles. The wind seemed to have dropped now; it was certainly less cutting than when they had been cycling, and the parkland glimmered and glinted with frozen snow under a big pale full moon. The lakes were completely frozen over, and the great trees were still laden with heavy drapes of snow. Above them, high in the dark sky hung the real stars, millions of miles away in a heaven where there was no war raging, no death and famine, no murder and massacre – or at least none of which they knew – while underneath, shadowed in the nightlight, the outline of the great house stood in fine silhouette. There wasn’t a sound to be heard, other than the faint hooting of a hunting owl somewhere in the nearby darkened woods.

  ‘No wonder you all called it Eden,’ Marjorie sighed as she took in the beautiful landscape, and she turned to Anthony, but when she saw the look in his eyes she quickly turned back to the landscape once more.

  Chapter Three

  ‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’ Marjorie snapped as Kate dropped and broke not her first teacup that morning, but her second.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate replied, almost as grumpily. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’

  ‘I seemed to have developed butter fingers,’ Kate replied sorrowfully, bending down to clear away the debris.

  ‘You seem to have developed an inability to concentrate,’ Marjorie retorted, moving Kate out of her way as she set to with a dustpan and brush. ‘Not just here, either. It seems to be affecting your work as well.’

  ‘What does?’ Kate sat back on her haunches and stared angrily at her friend. ‘What does?’

  Marjorie simply looked up from her brushing, shook her head at Kate and then continued clearing up. Kate, about to pursue the matter, thought better of it. Instead of involving the two of them in an argument she took a deep breath, got to her feet, threw aside the cloth she had been using to wipe up the spill and walked off into the yard outside the cottage.

  Very well, teacups mattered, because nowadays they were almost irreplaceable, but Kate knew that what Marjorie was actually referring
to was not her clumsiness in the cottage, but her seemingly incurable moodiness both at work and at home. At first she had thought it was simply not knowing where Eugene was that upset her, but now whenever Eugene vanished, usually without a word of warning, with no time to say goodbye, the pit fell out of her stomach and she realised she went into what she could only describe as a state of mourning; as if she had already lost the man she loved. It became a question not of waiting for news of his return, but of waiting for the news of his non-return – to be taken aside by Cissie Lavington, or Anthony Folkestone, and gently but officially told of his loss.

  Every night she lost Eugene. Every night he fell victim to treachery and death, so that she began to dread going to bed and would stay up reading anything and everything in an effort to put off the inevitable. Finally she would stumble to her bed, usually managing to wake poor Marjorie with whom she shared one of the two tiny cottage bedrooms.

  Cissie Lavington called her into her office the following morning. After staring fleetingly at Kate’s exhausted face, she started to hunt in her bag for a cigarette.

  ‘Don’t know whether you realise it, but you’ve made quite a few bishes lately, and what with one thing and another, and most particularly the way the war is going, we can’t be doing with bishes, not at the moment. A bish can cost a life, many lives, and we can’t have that. Files left out, mistyped memos, failing to come to work on time – it won’t do.’

  ‘I just haven’t been sleeping.’

  Cissie nodded without interest and lit her cigarette, carefully putting it into the end of her cigarette holder and lighting it with the kind of regular, practised motion that a seamstress might use when threading a needle.

  ‘Look, dear. We know what’s up. It’s not easy, I know, and we don’t encourage fraternisation here, because it does so often interfere with work, but we don’t mind turning a blind eye to what goes on just so long as it does not lead to mistakes. You have been making too many, so I have to say . . .’ She paused, staring at Kate, who found her heart sinking. ‘I have to say that either you pulls yourself together, or you’ll have to buzz off to Baker Street, and you won’t want that, not at this time. So if I were you, I’d try to catch up on your kip, and improve your concentration.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Lavington.’

  ‘Good.’

  Cissie, cigarette holder now firmly back in her mouth, nodded for Kate to leave, picking up a file as she did so, and starting to read it. Kate remained where she was for a moment, before taking several deep breaths and turning on her heel to go back to her work.

  In order to achieve any part of his objective Eugene realised he was going to have to grab the initiative and force the play. Ever since he had taken up residence in his safe house in the tiny village of Escanti, hidden well away in the deep Sicilian countryside over thirty miles from Palermo, he had done nothing except wait and now he was both bored and impatient, a dangerous mix when it came to himself. He tried to control his growing restlessness by journeying daily into the nearby town of Putagia on the back of a hay cart to service and repair broken down and near clapped out farm machinery, as well as one or two of the very few private cars still running on the island. But since most of the machinery brought to him was beyond repair, owing to either age and infirmity or the non-existence of any spare parts, most days Eugene sat cleaning spark plugs or rebuilding primitive starting motors that he had cleaned or rebuilt the day before.

  ‘Patience,’ his friend and saviour Gianni kept advising him, every time he saw signs of increasing tension and irritation in the Irishman. ‘Things move more slowly here – we set our daily music to a slower beat, yes? If you start to move faster than the beat, they notice you.’

  The island, while hardly crowded out with Germans, boasted a much larger alien population now that the Italian Marchettis had been joined by a large force of Junkers, Ju 87 and 88 bombers, so that as the remorseless build-up to the attack on Malta continued Eugene knew time was of the essence.

  The stumbling block had been his initial betrayal. Whoever had informed on him would seem to have ruined his chances both of sabotaging the bombers and of escape.

  ‘Look, Gianni,’ Eugene said one evening when the two men had shut themselves in the hayloft of the barn outside the safe house. ‘We will have to make some sort of contingency plan if I’m not to remain a mechanic all my life.’

  Gianni glanced at Eugene briefly, shrugged his shoulders, and went back to manufacturing a hand-rolled cigarette.

  ‘We know where the airfield is, how many aircraft there are, what sort of fences they have – how many guards.’

  Gianni shrugged again. ‘And there are two of us, my friend. With three guns, one grenade and two rosaries.’

  ‘Is there no one else we can trust?’

  ‘I can organise three others. But five cannot take on fifty-five or sixty-five Germans.’ Gianni paused briefly to spit contemptuously on the floor to show precisely what he thought of those Italians who had thrown in their lot with Hitler. ‘We have as much chance of getting you inside there as – as I have of becoming il Papa.’ This time Gianni paused to cross himself before sticking the drooping cigarette into his mouth under his equally drooping moustache and, finally, lighting it.

  ‘Then we have to think of some sort of alternative plan,’ Eugene muttered. ‘Apparently we have two days at most before their first trip to Malta, so I have to get into those hangars somehow – even if I only manage to take out a couple of their damn’ bombers.’

  ‘They will have little trouble in taking you out, my friend,’ Gianni observed. ‘Before you even manage to let down one airplane tyre. Would it not be possible to waste your life a little more profitably?’

  Eugene gave Gianni his best mock glare, drank deep from a bottle of rough red wine, tore off a hunk of staling bread to eat with his cheese and sat down on a hay bale to try to think out some sort of strategy.

  For once his imagination quite failed him, and had not luck decided to take a hand Eugene’s destiny might well have been sealed before he had even been given a chance to strike a blow. His fate arrived in the shape first of a superbly elegant, but obviously sick, dark blue Bugatti which spluttered its way into the centre of Putagia’s town square, and second in the even more elegant shape that decanted itself slowly and sinuously from the red leathered interior of the car.

  Eugene saw her long before she saw him, unremarkable given the fact that he was working in the dark of the tiny garage where he was employed, and she was standing in broad daylight in the town square. But even if Eugene had been standing outside his place of work it would have been doubtful if the tall, beautiful, slim woman wrapped in fox furs would have paid the slightest attention to a dirty-faced mechanic in oil-covered overalls. Yet the moment he saw the woman, despite her suspiciously over-glamorous appearance, he knew somehow his chance had arrived.

  This belief was confirmed when he picked up on the conversation she began to have with two men sitting on the edge of the broken water fountain that stood in the centre of the square. It seemed she was furious that her car had broken down at this particular moment since she was expected at the aerodrome. Since the aerodrome to which she referred was the place where the German bombers were gathered for the planned air raids on Malta, Eugene sensed this might well turn into not only a golden opportunity of gaining access to the heavily guarded airfield, but perhaps his only one.

  First he must make sure their glamorous visitor was directed to the garage where he was working. Despite the fact that times were hard and the region a poor one, such was the Italian obsession with cars that there was another mechanic working in the town whose reputation was considerably higher than that of the owner of the tiny workshop in which Eugene was now busy cleaning himself up, which was why Gianni had already been despatched, cap in hand, to enquire if there was anything they could do for the poor signorina.

  ‘You?’ Gianni had wondered, almost swallowing the remains of his cigarette. ‘You cannot even m
end a bicycle’s puncture!’

  ‘You’d be surprised what I can do, Gianni,’ Eugene assured him, desperately scrubbing at his oil-stained face and hands with a sliver of soap that felt more like sandpaper. ‘My uncle had a motor car of precisely that make, believe it or not. The only Bugatti in Ireland, they said, and since that was the case there was no one to fix it when it went phut – which it did more often than it did not. So by sticking around the old boy – because I was dying to drive the bucket, you see – you’d be amazed and astonished at what I picked up, me boy. And even if I can’t fix her motor, I shall blind the signorina with an extravagance of mechanical knowledge, most of which will be entirely fictitious.’

  Minutes later Gianni was signalling Eugene urgently to come and join the two of them in the square, the signorina now perched on one highly polished mudguard carefully smoking a cigarette, the top half of her face veiled against too much uninvited inspection.

  ‘Good day.’ Eugene introduced himself in his carefully rural Italian. ‘Ah – and what a beautiful car! This is the very car my dear uncle drives – and oh how he loves her! He loves her like a mistress.’

  He paid no attention to the beautiful woman, devoting his consideration to the car from under whose bonnet a steady stream of steam was still escaping. Remembering how the bonnet opened, he released the catch and gained careful access to the engine bay.