The House of Flowers

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘So if it’s not a few extra titbits you’re after,’ Mrs Alderman said carefully, eyeing a young woman who in her opinion was now simply wasting away, ‘to what do I owe the pleasure?’

  Poppy shrugged, and nibbled a tiny bite of biscuit.

  ‘Kate’s got some leave, and everyone else is busy. And I was at a loose end, so I felt like a chat.’ She smiled. ‘And you’re always good for a wonderful chat, so I thought I’d dip on down to the kitchen.’

  ‘I could fix you a nice bacon and egg,’ Cook said as if it was nothing. ‘I keep a few eggs aside and a little portion of rashers for anyone I consider needs a bit of bolstering. So why don’t you let me do you a nice plateful?’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t eat it. It’s jolly kind of you, so don’t think I don’t appreciate it, but it would be wasted on me. I’m not hungry – and before you go pulling any more tragic faces, the reason I’m not hungry is that I ate a jolly good lunch of rabbit stew, cabbage and potatoes. Why don’t you treat yourself for once? You’re always worrying about everyone else, and the last person ever to come into your consideration is you.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Cook replied with a wave of a work-worn hand. ‘Tell you what I could do with, though – that’s putting the old feet up for a while. It’s the one thing that gets you about this job. Standing for hours on stone floors, I can’t tell you what it does to my feet. There,’ she exclaimed as she sat down opposite Poppy at the table. ‘Lord, that’s better, I can tell you.’

  She poured herself a cup of tea that looked a little more reasonable than usual and held the pot up on offer to Poppy, who raised an appreciative eyebrow and nodded.

  ‘This is the one perk I do allow myself,’ Cook said, pouring another cup. ‘When I get an ounce or so of decent tea – and I’m not saying from where’ – a statement she embellished with a wink – ‘I keep it for myself. After all, it’s only going to make a couple of pots, and that’s no use to all them upstairs. Only thing we’re short of is sugar today, dear. I’m afraid I’m having to save it for Sunday’s pudding.’

  ‘Any more news from John?’ Poppy wondered, sipping her tea.

  ‘Funny as you should ask,’ Mrs Alderman said, pulling a letter from her flowered apron pocket. ‘I haven’t heard from my boy since this last letter. Did I read you this one? When they were moving him to another camp?’

  Poppy frowned and shook her head. In all probability she had heard it not once but twice, such was the shortage of letters from Cook’s captured son, but then, such was the shortage of any direct news from abroad, Poppy was as happy to hear it reread as John’s mother was to reread it.

  ‘I just hope he’s not been taken sick,’ Mrs Alderman continued. ‘As he says in this letter here, he’s been lucky so far, but who’s to say his luck will hold? Particularly when winter comes round again. Last winter he said was atrocious, remember? The snow and frosts were something ’orrible – never known it so cold, he said – and some of his pals in the camp, they was so sick some of them they didn’t make it through. Proper epidemic it was, according to John. He says he’s still strong enough to survive anything – least that’s what he says here. “Don’t you go worrying yourself, Mum – I’m still strong enough to do two men’s work, and you won’t catch me going down with no flu or nothing. All you’ll catch me doing is hoping and praying this thing’ll be over soon and I can come home again and have a great big bowl of that smashing steak and kidney pie you does so well.”’ Cook stopped and smiled down at the letter in her hand. ‘His grammar’s as bad as young Billy’s,’ she said. ‘Mind you, the conditions he’s living under, last thing you’d worry about is the state of your grammar. Wouldn’t you say, dear?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Poppy nodded. ‘Couldn’t agree more.’

  ‘Even so, you have to wonder. He says here the hut he’s living and sleeping in measures only fifteen foot by fifteen, which don’t seem too blooming commodious to me – not once you realise there’s ten of ’em sharing. Fifteen be fifteen? Hardly bigger than his granddad’s garden shed, that is, and they go and pack ten men in it. Disgraceful I say. So much for the Genoa Convention.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Poppy agreed again. ‘Except I think it’s the Geneva Convention.’

  ‘You’re probably right, dear – not that it would make any difference to Jerry what it’s called, they’re so busy ignoring it.’

  Poppy smiled at Mrs Alderman as she watched her staring at the precious letter from her son, her finger moving slowly across the page as if the paper might carry some small reminder of her son’s very essence.

  ‘They got a vegetable patch, mind,’ she added. ‘So things can’t be all bad. John just says he wishes Jerry’d thought of throwing in a bit of manure and all, because the ground’s so bad, of course. Taking all their will and ways to grow anything at all.’

  She sighed and looked up from a letter Poppy knew she could recite by heart, and shook her head slowly.

  ‘Least we know how to treat our POWs. Them that came here only last week, we haven’t put them behind barbed wire, have we? No – they’re out free as birds helping in the gardens here. They got a uniform, of course they have, but that’s all. We put our POWs on trust – give ’em the same food we’re having ourselves and don’t go crushing them into no huts fifteen by fifteen.’

  ‘Someone said there might be a bunch of Italians going to be housed in the old dairy house, and in some of the flats above the garages.’

  Mrs Alderman nodded. ‘No hut fifteen by fifteen for them neither,’ she noted. ‘Mind you, the way they’ve been carrying on I’d say the Eye-Ties need locking up more than the Germans. Mr Hackett was down here the other evening – he’s a funny man, Mr Hackett. Always manages to raise a laugh somehow, so he does. Anyway, he was saying – and it did make us all laugh. He was saying the Italians build their tanks with one gear. Reverse!’

  Mrs Alderman shook her head once more but this time with joy as she laughed all over again. Having finished her tea she glanced at the big kitchen clock hanging on the wall before getting up with a sigh to resume her duties.

  ‘I’d better get going as well,’ Poppy said, letting George down off her knee. ‘I didn’t realise it was that late.’

  ‘Not working you too hard, are they?’

  ‘Not hard enough.’ Poppy smiled. ‘No, I’ve got to get back to the house – because I was in such a rush this morning I didn’t manage to clean through.’

  ‘Off you pop then, dear – and you drop in any time for a cup of something. I’ll try and save you some tea when I gets some more – or maybe next time I’ll get you to eat some bacon and eggs.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Poppy said, without much conviction, the very thought of a fry-up making her feel queasy immediately. ‘And here’s hoping the post brings you another letter from John very soon.’

  Poppy wandered back across the sun-bathed parkland towards her house high up in the woodlands, in no real hurry to get back and start her housework, a task that had become an all but compulsive one, so obsessed had she grown with keeping their precious home spotless and tidy until Scott’s return. She knew perfectly well that she had allowed it to become an obsession simply to keep her mind off her main and very real anxieties, namely what was happening to Scott, where and with whom – but this late summer afternoon, as she made her way slowly home with her ever faithful dog at her heel, her mind was dwelling on quite different things.

  As always, when she had spent time with people as down to earth, and what she would term utterly decent, as Mrs Alderman, she immediately took stock of herself and her own problems, and as always she found herself coming up short. Scott was doing what he had chosen to do. She had married Scott in the full knowledge that this would be their life for the foreseeable future, and once she had been parted from him professionally she knew that he might well be working with someone else. Scott liked to work if not in a team then at the very least in tandem, so Poppy could not pretend that this had come as much of a surprise either. So in on
e way she had absolutely no reason to feel hard done by, let alone sorry for herself. Mrs Alderman’s son was a prisoner of war, living in the most atrocious conditions, not knowing whether he was even going to survive until the end of hostilities, let alone get home again. If the war continued the way it had been going the year before, with Germany running rings round the Allied armies in North Africa and the Japanese seemingly doing as they willed in the East and the Pacific, then not only might John Alderman never get home but no one might any longer have anything they could call a home, let alone their own.

  So the more Poppy walked the more determined she became to keep both her body and her soul together, yet the more she tried the more she watched herself slowly but surely beginning to disappear before her own eyes. She tried to eat everything that was put in front of her in the canteen, and she tried to cook herself small but nourishing meals at home, but her appetite had gone – and not, she discovered, just for food and drink. It seemed increasingly obvious the longer Scott was away from her, doing his bit for the country in tandem with whoever it was who was working alongside him, that Poppy had lost her appetite for life itself.

  Cissie Lavington was surprised to find herself face to face again with Harvey Constable, her old acquaintance and partner in arms – or rather partner in crime, ducky, as Harvey liked to say – since she had imagined him still to be working for Special Ops/Europe, which meant dropping regularly and frequently into Europe to set up contacts in Brussels and lines of communication across France. The last place she would have expected to see him was in the semi-wild of Eden Park, for Harvey was anything but a countryman. Harvey Constable claimed to have been born in Brook Street – which all his friends knew was a whopper – but there was no doubt that the way he lived and dressed for his life thereafter was designed to be seen at its best in a Mayfair environment. Harvey Constable was not happy to get mud on his spats – yet here he was, immaculate in his army uniform and sitting on a plain and uncomfortable little wooden office chair in front of Cissie’s famously untidy desk deep in the very heart of the English countryside.

  ‘You’re going to stick out a bit here, Harvey darling,’ she said, getting straight to the point as usual. ‘You are going to appear – shall we say? As a little bit of a wild flower.’

  ‘Then I should repair to the meadows at once, ducky,’ Harvey sighed, brushing a tiny and totally imaginary piece of lint off his immaculately pressed khaki trousers. ‘My appearance will do them nothing but good. Even the buttercups look as though they’re rationed.’

  Cissie smiled and lit yet another cigarette. ‘Thank you for these, by the way,’ she said, tapping the tin of Markowitz Black and White cigarettes he had brought her as a present. ‘One had no idea one could still obtain such luxuries.’

  ‘If one knows under which stone to look, one can obtain absolutely one’s heart’s desire. This is a dullish hellhole, is it not? And as for your Major Folkestone – bit of a school prefect, isn’t he?’

  ‘I will not hear a word said against our gallant major,’ Cissie retorted. ‘If it’s possible for a major to do so, he runs a very tight ship. And you still haven’t told me what on earth you are doing here.’

  ‘Sustained a little ding to the right knee, alas,’ Harvey replied, arching his eyebrows. ‘Jumping out of a plane. Makes certain pastimes of mine a little difficult, as you can imagine. Thus came down the decree from on high that Harvey Constable is to do no more bobbing and weaving in the name of his country until said small ding is quite better. As a result, and oh so very sweetly of the Head Prefects, they bought me a desk to sit behind, where I am ordered to stay until the knee is himself again. Unfortunately, they would not let me choose where to put said desk, which is how I came to end up here in Deadwood Gulch. I just hope there is a good and regular supply of whoopee water, otherwise I might take to wearing green orchids and very funny clothes.’

  Cissie drew on her cigarette and did her best to keep her face straight. In return, holding her dead-pan look, Harvey smiled his usual smile, a mixture of arrogance and insouciance, of mockery and defiance, chin stuck slightly out, and the corners of his mouth curled very slightly upwards. He had first known Cissie when he was a small boy running errands for his mother from her workrooms above the shop in Bond Street, his mother at that time being a couturier and hat maker to the gentry, aristocracy and minor royalty.

  ‘I have to say you look really quite passable in uniform, Harvey.’

  ‘Passable?’ Harvey opened his eyes wide in mock horror. ‘I trust I look more than passable, Duchess. I took the whole damn’ thing to pieces and remade it, so that, unlike most of the military, my uniform actually fits. Have you seen the Yanks in theirs? They look positively gorgeous – so why oh why cannot we?’ He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. ‘Did you know I helped Digby design the WVS uniform?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Cissie replied, having never given the matter the slightest thought.

  ‘Well I did, indeed.’ Harvey blew a perfect smoke ring and watched it lazily drifting towards the heavily blacked-out window behind Cissie. ‘I do think that the success of the WVS is in great part due to the design of that uniform, and the colour. So flattering, that deep cherry colour, wouldn’t you agree? Unlike yakky khaki that makes everyone look jaundiced. I have yet to see anyone wearing the WVS jersey whom it makes look ugly – and that is the absolute truth.’

  Cissie sat back and also attempted to blow a smoke ring, which she succeeded in doing, although on a much smaller scale than Harvey. He, noticing the size of it, stuck one hand slowly up and pierced her effort with one long elegant index finger.

  ‘You want to leave that sort of thing to the men, ducky,’ he said. ‘We do that sort of thing so much better.’

  Cissie, while sometimes wishing that Harvey didn’t make her laugh inside so much, was usually very glad that he did, since whatever her front, and her apparently unflappable manner, Cissie needed cheering up like the rest and the best of them. He really was such an odd mix, she thought to herself, as she stubbed out her cigarette. If she hadn’t known him as well as she did, she would never possibly have guessed that he was held in high esteem both at Baker Street and at other Intelligence HQs. Harvey Constable was a contradiction in anybody’s terms: effete, artistic and immensely intelligent, capable of speaking three languages fluently, he was also a tremendous athlete, and therefore both extremely fit and strong, a top ranking skier, horseman and swimmer of near Olympic standards.

  Even so, she could not help wondering what kind of ill-assorted pair Eugene Hackett and Harvey Constable must have made wandering across France together disguised as first one thing and then another. It could have been a laughing matter, until one looked into Harvey’s eyes and saw the steel in the bright blue orbs, and the look of utter determination behind them. These were the times when those who did not know him would suddenly feel a surge of gratitude that he was on their side and not in opposition. It would always be a far, far better thing to have Harvey Constable on your side than fighting against you. Harvey Constable was, in essence, the very best and most brilliant of secret weapons, a piece of lethal armament most beautifully concealed, the classic iron fist in a velvet glove, even though the glove might not be quite the colour required by the Establishment.

  ‘Now then,’ Cissie said, pretending to rifle through some papers on her desk as she realised yet again how absurd it was that she should still find Harvey so attractive. ‘This famous new desk of yours. Have they put anything of interest on it as yet?’

  ‘I’ll say,’ Harvey mocked. ‘It would appear you have someone working away within. This is what I’m doing sitting here the other side of your desk, Duchess. I’m to work with you in H Section to ferret out what I understand is called a caochán.’ Harvey stopped and frowned over-deliberately. ‘I imagine that is some sort of bogspeak, yes? Ye Gaelic or some such?’

  ‘It’s the Gaelic, Harvey. For whatever. For this mythical creature that—’

  ‘Go no further.’
Harvey held up a perfectly manicured hand as if to stop traffic. ‘I cannot abide Celtic whimsy. They always – all of them – have these quite unpronounceable creatures, sprites and spirits bansheeing all over the place stealing your shoes and putting crocks of gold in their place. I shall have none of it.’

  ‘You’ve no doubt heard about our wild-goose chase? That’s not too Celtic for you, I hope?’

  Harvey carefully cut the end of his nearly finished cigarette with a pair of nail scissors he produced from his breast pocket, letting the hot end fall into the ashtray before the rest.

  ‘I’d forgotten that little habit of yours,’ Cissie said.

  ‘You shouldn’t. It avoids all horrible ashtray smells if one follows my procedure. As well as avoiding that awful-looking mess of squished up smokies. To get back to your wild goose,’ he said in a stage Irish voice. ‘Am I right in thinking someone planted what I understand some people call a falsie about the wretched girl? The Colonel’s godchild?’

  ‘A totally false file. Very well done, too. Had the Colonel running round in circles, doncher know.’

  ‘No I don’t, ducky. Can’t begin to imagine the Colonel running anywhere, let alone round in circles.’

  Harvey raised his eyebrows once again at Cissie, as if to pull rank and remind her that he had known Jack Ward even longer than she. They were in fact the closest of friends, if Jack Ward could ever be said to have close friends, that is. But whatever the differences in their characters, they each appreciated the other in a way that only true originals can.

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean about the Colonel,’ Cissie said edgily, getting the nuance. ‘But the truth of the matter is it got under his skin. And, for him, he raised quite a stink – because quite simply he was furious when he realised he’d been taken in. Don’t blame him either – what a waste of precious time. And then of course the knowledge of what the poor wretched innocent girl had gone through.’