The House of Flowers

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Need to know what I’m going to be first, sir,’ Harvey replied. ‘This is obviously not a uniform job. So what’s the plot and which character am I?’

  ‘Decommissioned,’ Jack replied. ‘You’ve got a visible wound – at least, a visible list – so temporarily DC and doing a bit of office work to keep the mind active.’

  ‘When I get to interview level?’

  ‘In camera, and strictly confidential. No relating chapter and verse afterwards. You’ll be covered by the OS Act anyway, so you’ll be able to work that phase in complete confidence. So what’s your starting point?’

  ‘I’m going through everyone’s file first, naturally,’ Harvey replied, carefully examining his fingernails. ‘Not that I expect to find the bastard that way – I doubt very much if that sort of information leaps off the page at one. But what I might find is some interconnection somewhere, or some lapse, some interruption in someone’s daily round and trivial task. Then I shall do what I like to think of as a house to house.’

  ‘Going to take some time, interviewing all and sundry.’

  ‘Has to be done. And I’m a fast worker. Always been known for it, know what I mean?’

  ‘We have to consider the possibility that it might not be someone within,’ Jack said, carefully and slowly as always in his beautifully modulated voice. ‘That is to say not actually here in the Park. It could be someone in another branch of the firm, but somehow I doubt it because so many of the disastrous missions were ordered up from here.’

  ‘And it’s much more likely too, old man, that it’s someone behind a desk rather than in the field. As we know, agents don’t have much access to HC info – they know who’s who often enough, and who’s meant to be doing what – although even that is pretty well classified – but not the really confidential stuff.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Jack nodded then narrowed his eyes as he regarded the bowl of his pipe, which had once more gone out. ‘Anyway – in order to get the ball rolling, so to speak, some of my bogies are busy laying false trails across Europe. Starting here, of course, then across and down through France. False drops, phoney names, dead post boxes, safe houses that aren’t – that sort of thing. Don’t know what it’s going to throw up. Point is it’ll distract ’em. If we can get ’em to take their eye off the ball for a second . . .’

  ‘Then they might drop it. Hear hear! The very thing. I need to buy a bit of time while I plough through the Social and Personals.’

  ‘The agents that have been blown out cover quite a territory. They’re not just in France – we’ve lost agents and contacts in Belgium and the Low Countries. Worse, quite a few of the escape routes organised by Black Wing have been blown as well. Which suggests that whoever is doing this is determined to do a good and proper job.’

  ‘That it?’ Harvey enquired, looking at his watch. ‘I’m as anxious as you to kick on – so if that’s it.’

  Jack nodded and tapped the unsmoked tobacco out of his pipe and back into his pouch. ‘I’m back off to town,’ he growled. ‘You know how to get hold of me.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ Harvey said, getting up and adjusting the cuffs of his uniform. ‘And for heaven’s sake while you’re up there, get yourself one of your spare pipes. Talk about a bear with a sore bonce. I mean to say.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Jack murmured, gazing ruefully at his damaged briar. ‘One should never have a favourite. Never have a favourite anything. You always end up disappointed that way. Never does to get too attached to any one thing. Or any one body, now I come to think of it.’

  Harvey half closed his eyes and nodded his agreement.

  ‘Arm’s length,’ Jack added. ‘Minimum distance for anything – or anybody. Keep it all at arm’s length,’ he finished, half to himself.

  Unable to sleep the hours she had slept in the old days, Poppy found herself getting up earlier and earlier each morning, and automatically cleaning her little house from top to toe, even though that was, all too often, the last thing she had done before she had gone to bed the night before.

  ‘You’re going mad, Poppy Meynell,’ she told herself one morning when she found herself rearranging a perfectly well arranged set of silver ornaments. ‘George?’ she called to her dog who was having a blissful roll on his back in the middle of the room. ‘George, I think I am perhaps going round the bend.’

  There were still two and a half hours to go before she had to leave for work, and once again Poppy was at a loss to know what to do with her time. After she had taken a long bath, drunk a cup of terrible coffee and smoked a cigarette there was still an hour and a half to kill, half an hour of which could be taken up with walking George, although this was a complete waste of time since she took George to work with her. The distance to the house was a good half a mile, so George got plenty of exercise without being forced to take more.

  Before, when Scott had gone on his first mission without her, Poppy had filled her spare time with reading, playing the piano and gardening. Now she found she had neither the inclination nor indeed the energy to do any of the things she had so enjoyed previously. She was quite enervated, lacking enthusiasm for anything other than seeing her husband again, and even that filled her with a sense of dread lest Scott had in any way changed towards her as a result of his adventures – or, worse, as a result of his continuing intimacy with Lily, his now long-established partner.

  It was eating her up, this jealousy, she decided, a jealousy which was becoming obsessive and was without any real foundation. She had absolutely no reason to believe that Scott would be unfaithful – until she remembered the thrill of the chase, as he had called it, the intense excitement they had mutually experienced when working together to try to thwart those intent on assassinating the Prime Minister. When she thought about it, which she often did, Poppy swore she could feel the adrenalin rushing through her system all over again, just the way it had when she and Scott had found themselves face to face with the putative assassins, and most particularly when she had to see down her very own husband as the leader of the traitors. So, she thought, she could after all have real and very good grounds for her growing anxiety, since there was no reason to believe that Scott and Lily wouldn’t be sharing exactly the same sort of thrill, the kind of excitement that can well and truly open up a relationship.

  ‘Stop torturing yourself,’ Kate advised her. ‘People can just work together, you know, without anything like that happening.’

  ‘I know, Kate. But being in the field with another woman – an attractive woman – makes the chances of that something happening a little higher, particularly if the woman happens to be Lily Ormerod.’

  Worst of all, to add to anxieties that were already acute enough, Poppy found herself first resenting the officers in Eden Park and then actively disliking them, her old friend Jack Ward in particular, since she held him personally responsible first for separating her from Scott and then for sending him out in the field with another woman. Being Poppy she kept her feelings well under wraps, but possibly the fact that she was bottling everything up added to her physical deterioration.

  ‘Come along will you,’ Mrs Alderman said to her one morning as she caught her taking a short cut with George along one of the corridors in the staff quarters. ‘I don’t care what you say nor what you’re a-going to say, but we’re going to get some food into you if I have to sit you in a chair and hold your nose.’

  Privately appalled by Poppy’s pallor and wraithlike figure, Mrs Alderman marched her straight into the kitchen where sitting her down like a child at the table she immediately busied herself cooking a plate of bacon, eggs and sausages with provisions taken from what she called her emergency store. Poppy tried to make some feeble protest about being late for work, which Cook dismissed at once as poppycock, saying she had a good twenty minutes before she had to be in her office and even if she was late, Mrs Alderman would testify that getting food into Poppy had now become a medical necessity.

  Finally – and all too easily once the delicious smell
of grilling bacon filled her nostrils – Poppy submitted and waited patiently for the breakfast being so lovingly prepared for her.

  ‘I got another letter,’ Mrs Alderman said over her shoulder as she busied herself at the range. ‘At long last too. Like to read it?’

  Fishing the crumpled envelope out of her apron pocket, Mrs Alderman handed it backwards to Poppy as she skilfully flipped the fried egg over in the frying pan.

  ‘Tell you what, dear,’ she suggested. ‘Why don’t you read it out loud? I can never hear it too often.’

  Poppy unfolded the letter, pencil-written on thin lined paper, and laid it on the kitchen table in front of her.

  ‘“Dear Ma,”’ she read. ‘“Not much to tell except it was turnips and cabbage for lunch and supper most of last week. But nine thirty is the time we get up – I say, don’t tell old Bushell, will you? When I get back and start work for him again he will think I’m a rite lazy bones! The Red Cross do us proud, really, and we have some good things from them. Well, that’s all for now. All the lads send you best wishes and all that. Can’t wait to taste your steak and kidney pie. I told them all about it. They think I’m the luckiest devil alive having you for a mum. That’s all for now. Your son John.”’

  ‘Good, eh?’ Mrs Alderman said as she put down the plate of food in front of Poppy. But she was referring more to the letter than to the fried breakfast. After all, Mrs Alderman saw food every day in some shape or another, but it was only every so often that she got a letter from her adored and captive son.

  ‘You’d never have thought it if you knew John to think he was such a good letter writer. But there you are. Appearances can be very deceptive. He’s got a good hand, too, see? Well taught he was at his writing. I always made sure of that. A good hand makes the man, I always say, and John’s got a very good hand.’

  ‘He certainly has,’ Poppy agreed, looking at the large, heavily looped handwriting. ‘It’s a whole lot easier to read than mine.’

  ‘We’ve always paid the greatest attention to handwriting in my family. My father used to make sure we all had a good hand. Gives you a proper start in life he used to maintain. And how about that?’ Mrs Alderman picked up the letter and tapped the relevant bit. ‘Not getting up till nine thirty, if you please. And there was I thinking he was slaving from dawn to dusk. Nine thirty, indeed. What a laugh I had over that, I can say.’

  As Poppy ate her way through a breakfast that she could only describe as delicious, Cook stood at her shoulder reading through her son’s latest letter all over again, saying the words over in a barely audible whisper. Poppy smiled to herself, suddenly feeling better about life than she had for a long time.

  ‘I think I’ve just discovered what’s meant by someone saving your bacon, Mrs A,’ she said, setting her knife and fork down on a perfectly clean plate.

  ‘I should think so too,’ Mrs Alderman said, removing the plate with a told-you-so nod. ‘Can’t imagine what you’ve been doing to yourself these past weeks. Trying to starve yourself, were you?’

  ‘Not trying to, Mrs A, not really. Succeeding, though I suppose. Silly, really. Can’t think what came over me.’

  ‘It’s the war, dear,’ Cook said, putting the plate in the sink. ‘Does funny things to us all. Personally speaking I haven’t been able to think straight since September – what is it? Goodness gracious – since September four years ago! Who’d credit it? Four years ago come September. No wonder we’re all going a bit doolally.’

  Cissie Lavington wanted to see Poppy the moment she arrived up in the office.

  ‘Now then, my dear,’ she said, shutting the door behind them. ‘Come in and sit down. I have some news for you.’

  ‘Good, I hope?’ Poppy said as she did as bidden, glancing quickly but anxiously at her superior.

  ‘I think so,’ Cissie replied, lighting a cigarette. ‘Looks as though your grounding is about to come to an end. Not that you’ve been sidelined for any reason, y’understand me, but you have been inactive for a good while now, through no fault of your own—’

  ‘You mean—’ Poppy interrupted, retracting as soon as she caught the look in Cissie’s eyes. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Word has it that things are falling into place where they were not falling into place before. Plan is to send you off to meddle with some of Jerry’s toys – but ’fore you do, goin’ to have to go and get a few lessons in the noble art of sabotage. Learn a thing or three about finding your way round engines and the like. Aero engines, that sort of thing. We’ve been having a great deal of fun grounding Jerry at certain prime times, and what we’ve learned is they’re planning a bit of a special party for us – London especially – and we’d quite like to get in first. There’ll be a group of you – small but select – but when it comes to it, the sharp end of the business will be done by singletons. So.’

  ‘Good,’ Poppy said with a deep sigh. ‘I can’t tell you how I needed this.’

  ‘You make it sound as if we’re sending you on hols, dearie!’ Cissie laughed through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Not going to be much of a holiday, I assure you. Anyway – here’s all you need to know for the moment. Pack your bag this evening and toddle off there tomorrow. And by the way, you’re allowed to take the doggie. Seems dogs are more than tolerated.’

  The train journey Poppy had to make up to the Midlands was one of the longest she remembered, not for distance but for the time it consumed. The train kept stopping, or being shunted back and forth, or parked in a siding without apparent reason, full of weary passengers packed like sardines into the carriages without the relief of food or water until night finally fell and still they had not reached their destination. Then, during the later part of the evening, when darkness had finally fallen, everyone was ordered off the train at an unidentified railway station from where they were expected to travel onward, either by waiting for another as yet unscheduled train or by taking one of the buses that occasionally turned up at the blacked-out halt on its way into the nearest town, which might still be miles from their final target.

  Poppy was one of the unlucky ones, forced to find a bed for the night in a small, characterless town where about fifty or so other people were looking for accommodation, many of them not averse to following those in the know to their lodgings and immediately jumping the queue by use of elbows and shoulders in order to make sure of a place. Having suffered at the shoulders and elbows of two lots of queue-bargers, Poppy was about to give in when a kindly soul took pity on the pretty young woman traipsing down the street with her little dog at her heels. Hurrying after her, the woman took her by the arm with a finger to her own lips, and led Poppy back to a small but immaculately kept terraced house.

  Here Poppy managed to get her bearings, discovered she was still a good fifteen miles from her final destination, a large complex that stood in the middle of an even larger patch of seemingly uninhabited countryside in the flatlands. The woman who had taken her in knew of it only vaguely, hinting that it was some sort of place where a lot of hush-hush work went on. More to the point was that she did know a way of getting Poppy out there since one of her neighbours made deliveries to its aerodrome, which was used for training pilots, and she was quite sure that tomorrow was the day when he normally went. By the time Poppy had turned in, her hostess had even gone and checked with her neighbour, returning with the news that Poppy indeed had a lift to where she was required to go.

  Far from being surrounded by security fences and guards, as she was half expecting, as soon as Poppy was decanted from the van that had ferried her out she was faced with a range of ramshackle buildings, a couple of what looked as if they had once been runways, but had now been reduced to a series of bomb craters, and a large tower above which blew a ragged windsock.

  Clutching her letter of introduction in her hand, Poppy looked around the desolate landscape, seeing nothing but fens and flatlands for miles. Then she made her way to the building that looked the most likely to be offices of some sort. A notice on the door that
announced No point in knocking – just barge straight on in indicated that she had made the correct choice, so as requested Poppy and George made their way inside the glorified Nissen hut, passing through a series of deserted rooms with the odd item of broken furniture until finally they reached a room at the end with a glass door and a light on within. She could hear the sound of men talking and laughing, so, after taking a deep breath, Poppy knocked on the door and waited.

  A curly-haired blond man wearing a dirty fur-lined flying jacket and with a cigarette stuck between his teeth flung open the door.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked rudely, checking himself the moment he saw the apparition in front of him. ‘Hey – sorry!’ he said, mending his manners. ‘I had no idea they were making a film up here!’

  At once three or four other young men appeared behind him to stare wide-eyed at their visitor.

  ‘Down, boys!’ the blond young man cried, in what Poppy now recognised as an Australian accent. ‘I saw her first!’

  ‘I wonder if you could help me actually,’ Poppy said coolly. ‘I’m looking for . . .’ She consulted the piece of paper in her hand. ‘I’m looking for a Mr Perkins.’

  ‘Mr Perkins?’ the young man said with a quick look at his friends.

  ‘A Mr Trafford Perkins. He’s expecting me.’

  ‘I doubt that very much, Miss . . . er?’

  ‘Meynell. Mrs actually. Mrs Scott Meynell.’

  ‘Beg your pard, Mrs Meynell,’ the flier grinned, managing to make Poppy’s name rhyme with kennel. ‘So you’re expecting to see a Mr Perkins, mmm? Then we had better take you to the right place, because one thing Mr Perkins don’t like is people being late.’

  ‘I’m not late. In fact I’m early if anything.’

  ‘In that case you shall live to see another day. Come along, sweetheart – let me show you the way.’

  As he began to lead Poppy away all his friends surged forward to accompany him, only to be prevented from doing so by the flier’s shutting the office door in their faces and locking it from the outside.