by Tessa Arlen
“Something to drink?” George asked, but the line for the bar was long. I fanned my cheeks with my hand. “I don’t think there’s a scrap of air left in this room,” I suggested.
George nodded to the terrace door standing open to the night. We hesitated on the threshold, greeted by the sound of overexcited laughter and squeals of pretended modesty from the darkness of the shrubbery.
“Let’s sit over there.” George led me to an open window with a deep seat at the far end of the room, away from queues for food and drink, and before the band, refreshed with a pint, picked up their instruments again.
Quite suddenly I felt nervous: my throat was tight, my knees quivered, and it wasn’t from the exertion of dancing. Surely he would ask me to go walking with him after church tomorrow: the Dunfermline version of an evening at the cinema watching the latest American film, which I enjoyed with the occasional boyfriend in Edinburgh.
“Marion, there is something I want to tell you.” George sat down next to me.
Tell me? My heart started to beat like a bird caught in a net. I swallowed and looked at the empty dance floor so I wouldn’t have to see his face.
“I joined up yesterday.” I turned what I hoped was a face free of any expectations back to him. “Of course, I’m too old for combat—but they want me as an instructor for officer training at Catterick, until they decide what to do with me.” He raised his eyebrows, and his dark eyes shone, not with pride but amusement. “Who would have thought that a forty-two-year-old bank manager might be useful in war? Someone even mentioned India!”
“India?” My mind stuttered on white men with ginger whiskers wearing pith helmets and barking orders on the hot stamped-clay earth of a maidan surrounded by natives dressed in white saris and dhotis. “Which part of India? Will there by fighting there?” I asked as I waited for him to take my hand and promise me that he would be safe from rabid dogs, disease, and failing drains.
He cleared his throat. “Maybe—India belongs to us, so it’s possible.”
The horror at the thought of real war must have shown itself on my face. “It’s the Officer Training Corps, Marion. I doubt we’ll see any action. But it is important to me to do my bit.” His eyes, fastened on mine, were earnest, asking me to understand.
I nodded and let the silence fall between us, forcing him to explain.
“I should get my papers any day now . . . so it will be goodbye for a while, but Catterick is in Yorkshire, so not that far away.”
If I was so at ease with this man, so comfortable being myself around him, then why couldn’t I ask him to spend time with me before he left for training? But I couldn’t: the right words didn’t seem to come easily, and I thanked God that the awkward, clumsy ones stuck in my throat unuttered. All I could do was blithely nod encouragement, a stiff smile on my lips as I held back selfish tears. How my throat had throbbed with pain, longing, and despair.
George’s face was rigid with tension. He licked his lips, and then, as if plucking up courage, he asked, “Marion, I was wondering . . . do you think you’ll have time to write to me?”
Write to you? Here I am, sitting here in front of you now! What on earth is wrong with now? I felt tears of embarrassment and pain sting my eyelids. The effort of keeping them in was agony. He did not take my hand or move closer. He just sat there his white starched collar, still crisp at his throat for all the dancing he had done.
So, we were going to part as good friends. I was to be his pen pal, not his fiancée, or even his wife, waiting for him to come home at the end of the war. The delight of dancing with him vanished, the flounces of my dress were stuck to the backs of my legs, and I wished I was anywhere than in this hot room, now empty of couples, who were all locked in each other’s arms outside under the cover of the dark.
“Of course I’ll write, George,” I managed to force out, even though my throat felt rigid, as if it were made of cardboard. “When did you say you were going?”
“Probably by the end of the week.” His eyes held a despairing light as they gazed steadfastly into mine, or so it seemed to me. Perhaps I had been wrong in believing that I understood George’s silent method of communicating—perhaps I read what I wanted to see in his expressive eyes when he was thinking of something quite mundane, like the base rate of interest at the Bank of England.
The train slowed to pass through another lonely village station. I pulled the last page of my mother’s letter from my handbag and read it through carefully, trying to make out if George was single or married to a nurse from a British Army hospital in Bombay or Calcutta.
George returned a month ago from India! A bit on the thin side, but he looks fit and well. He’s been taken back by Drummonds Bank and made senior manager. We talked of old friends and when the war would end with Japan, but he was only waiting to ask one question: “How is Marion?” When I told him that you would be up in Dunfermline within the week, he didn’t hide his smiles!
I pushed the blind to one side and looked out into the dark, shadowless world of night. The blurred lights of a village, off in the distance, streamed past the windows. In wartime I had made this journey through an implacably black, endless night. Now once again there was light in our world.
Chapter Eleven
Summer 1945
Limekiln Cottage, Dunfermline, Scotland
The clear air smelled of pine sap and pollen from the wildflowers that crowded the ditch along the lane to our house. I rounded the corner and there she was, waiting for me, at her garden gate.
“Only staying for the night, Marion?” my mother said when she saw my little bag. I smiled, put my arms around her tiny frame, and gave her a long hug. Is she thinner than she was in January? I inhaled her clean scrubbed skin: the faint aroma of beeswax and carbolic. The palace, with its rigorous schedules, formality, and never-ending list of must-dos, evaporated into the gritty air of London, to be replaced by weeks of weeding the rich earth of the vegetable garden, searching the henhouse for eggs, and long, leisurely walks by the river’s edge.
“My bag will be sent up from the station this afternoon.”
“And you walked all the way from Dunfermline?”
“Yes, all the way. I wanted to stretch my legs, and the air here is glorious after London!”
“Aye, well, come on in and take your rest. I know how hard they work you.”
We walked into her immaculate house: a jug of wildflowers on the kitchen table and the sweet astringent aroma of well-polished wood. Home again!
“You look so well, Ma.” There was a plate of shortbread, another of oatmeal biscuits. “Mm, you made my favorites.”
“Well, I don’t have much to do now that I am retired. Though I do still take on the odd pupil for piano lessons, just to keep my hand in. Betty came over and helped with the heavy work. I am quite sure she will be back again tomorrow morning, to hear all your news.” She shook her head at her neighbor and old friend’s garrulous nature. “Took me longer to get your room ready, what with all her gossip, but ne’er mind, Betty means well.”
I took off my smart city hat and hung it on the peg by the door; it would be the last time I wore it until I caught the train back to London.
Ma put the kettle on the hob. “Your young man is coming over to lunch after church tomorrow.”
“I hope he doesn’t know that you call him that. Because he isn’t my young man, however much you want him to be.”
“No need to get into a flap. Of course he wants to be your young man, Marion, who wouldn’t? He never married, you know.”
Unlike my mother, I didn’t see this as a particularly hopeful sign. “He’s forty-seven, hardly a young bachelor.”
“Well, he’s my young bachelor, then, since I am twenty years his senior.”
If the war hadn’t come along, would George have asked, or would I still be waiting for him to invite me out for tea? Haven’t I
learned by now to accept that he’s not a marrying man, as much as I am destined to continue life as a spinster?
“I’m glad that George has returned safe and well from India, but I am not interested in him in that way, Ma.” She started to shake her head. “No, really, I’m not.”
She looked up at the ceiling and laughed, as if I was being particularly dense. “Just the fact that he leapt at my invitation to lunch is surely an indication that he is very fond of you, Marion. He’s been made senior manager at Drummonds; did I tell you?”
“Yes, you did, in your last letter.” She gave me one of her nods, her I’m-serious-don’t-mess-me-about one. “Doing very well is George. And he particularly impressed on me how much he was looking forward to seeing you.”
I took her by her shoulders and looked down into her lined, laughing face. “I really came home to see you,” I said. She reached up and cupped her palm around my cheek. “My dear, sweet girl, it is possible to love more than just one person at the same time. Now, drink your tea, and let’s go for a nice walk before we make dinner.”
* * *
• • •
George and I did the washing-up together after Sunday lunch. He with mop and suds, and me drying and putting dishes away. He was a methodical washer-up and even in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, with one of my mother’s cheerful red paisley pinafores wrapped around him, he looked dignified, like a bank manager doing the washing-up.
“I was wondering if you were free next Sunday. We could take a picnic to Blackness Castle: the views of the Firth are supposed to be magnificent from the old ramparts.” George handed me a plate to dry. An invitation to a walk: I was so astonished by his question that I dried it over and over, too stunned to reply.
“That would be nice.” I tried for nonchalance and failed.
“Good. Next Sunday it is.” A silence fell that I did not rush to fill: I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
George applied himself to washing the pattern off my mother’s best china. “So, what is it like, working for the King and Queen of England?”
He didn’t look up but gave the plate he was washing all his attention. He carefully rinsed it and handed it to me to dry.
I opened a drawer to put away knives and forks. Why this question now? I was quite sure that Ma had warned him that it was dinned into us by palace courtiers that we should never discuss the family.
I leaned up against the wooden draining board to answer this new, talkative George. “Well, it took a lot of getting used to, after the abdication,” I said. “And the war, coming as quickly as it did, didn’t help things.” Those days were a world away now, but I could still remember how sad we had been to say goodbye to Royal Lodge. “We moved to Buckingham Palace: it is a great barn of a place, miles of corridors, hundreds of rooms, and an army of staff to keep it. The move was very hard on the princesses—well, everyone, really. The children hated the palace, the queen hated Wallis Simpson, and the king seemed to . . .” I was going to say, “dwindle before our eyes,” but I kept it impersonal. “. . . work far too hard.” I wondered how best to describe the loyal, wholly decent man, driven by duty, who was our monarch, and decided that I had said enough.
George nodded. “But what is it like for you, working for them?”
“Oh, it’s all right. I am very fond of the princesses; they are sweet-natured, good-hearted girls. Lilibet is very conscientious about things like obligation and doing her best, and Margaret . . .” I laughed—I simply couldn’t help myself. “Well . . . Margaret is full of life and remarkably bright. I often worry that she outstripped my abilities as a teacher long ago. If she was from an ordinary background, she would probably go on the stage, or better yet to university.” He had stopped washing dishes and was listening carefully. “I like to think I have brought some sort of ordinariness into their lives, some sense of how it is to be one of us.”
I looked up; surely he was bored to tears listening to all this chatter about a very conventional family. But he nodded me on. “The war was a blessing in its own bleak way. We lived at Windsor, and I had full rein, so I tried to introduce everyday things into their existence among the bowing and scraping that all palace officials and servants effect. It is so bad for young children—well, for anyone, really. Lilibet is gracious and thoughtful to those who serve, but Margaret can be . . . well, she can be queenly enough for both.” I stopped, aware that I was prattling. His invitation to go to Blackness Castle had thrown me completely, and I was babbling on, trying to cover how flustered I was by his invitation.
He smiled his solemn smile. “You care for them very much, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do—as if they are my own children.”
“Surely Elizabeth doesn’t need a governess any longer. How old is she now, nineteen, twenty?”
I couldn’t look at him because his simple inquiry was so unexpected that the tips of my ears began to burn. Is he wondering how much longer I will be needed as governess to the princesses? I had been down this road before; interpreting the thoughts of others was a dangerous business.
I cleared my throat and concentrated on drying a saucepan lid. “Lilibet is too old for a governess, but Margaret needs a strong influence in her life. She runs circles around the nannies, and now we are back in the palace . . .”
I didn’t say that I had thought about leaving and returning to Scotland because I had packed that idea away for another day. Lilibet needed someone to stand with her in her crusade to marry Philip. But the pulse beat in my ears at his question, and I hoped that he would ask more of them.
Chapter Twelve
Summer 1945
Dunfermline, Scotland
We could hear George’s arrival long before he pulled up outside our kitchen door.
“Marion, Marion! George is here,” my mother called up the stairs. “Did you hear me? It’s George!”
I walked out of the kitchen door. Could this possibly be Major Buthlay, senior manager of Drummonds Bank, standing astride this machine?
“The bike belongs to my cousin,” he explained as he saw my gaping surprise. “Er . . . both the bike and the jacket—he was a fighter pilot during the war.”
“A pilot?” I laughed. “You never told me you had one of those in your family.”
“Mac was always a tearaway as a boy. His war was nothing like mine: he was in the Battle of Britain when he was only twenty. Told me that they drank brandy for breakfast before they flew off to fight the Hun. He’s in civil aviation now, so I expect he finds life pretty dull these days.” He held out a leather helmet and a pair of goggles for me. “Better put these on; it can be blowy even on the back.”
“But your first war was pretty hair-raising too, wasn’t it? You were certainly in the thick of it.” I made a business of tucking my hair up into the helmet to give him time to answer. If our friendship was to go forward, the only way I could think of accomplishing it would be if he trusted himself to unfold a bit more.
There was a long pause as he looked down at the dust of the lane. He put his hands in his pockets.
The sweat broke out on my palms. I’ve gone too far: I have reminded him of a place that holds such dread he had to isolate himself in the Outer Hebrides for ten years. I clenched my hands until my fingernails bit into my palms.
He lifted his head, his eyebrows slightly raised, mouth down at the corners. I couldn’t tell if he was angry . . . or if he would simply ignore my question.
Well done, Marion, you’ve only messed up what promised to be a perfect day. I racked my brains for something to say that would steer us away from the pain of death and loss. He leaned up against the side of the bike. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right, the first war was hair-raising.” He paused as he pulled off his gloves and laid them on top of the bike’s handlebars. “Though not quite in the way that Mac means when he tells us tales of derring-do.” He shrugged and half squinted at me in the s
unlight. “Actually, it was hell . . . hell for every one of us caught up in that nightmare. And I’m sure it was hell for most of us in this one too.”
I fixed my eyes on his face. He would either talk to me or turn away to start up the bike.
He turned his head to look up into the shade of the tree and then back to me, and to my relief, I saw the corners of his mouth lift. “I was very young, that first time. And I could certainly have done with a bit more than brandy for breakfast on a cold morning in the Somme, before we went over the top with only half our strength. I can tell you that!”
He must have seen the anxiety in my face. “It’s all right, Marion. That time doesn’t frighten me anymore. It’s gone—exorcised. But when Chamberlain made that speech announcing that we were at war with Germany again, after all the hemming and hawing of appeasement, I knew I had to put my civilian life on hold until it was all over. We ended it badly the first time.” He rotated his right hand. “Reparations . . . making Germany pay for what they had done . . . well, everything.” He picked up his gloves and slapped them against the engine cover. “We even called the first war ‘The War to End All Wars.’ How ironic was that, eh? I don’t know how many nights I woke up when I came home to Scotland, scared to death and drenched with sweat—reliving . . .” He shrugged away the burdens of a generation. “It had to be done; I had to do it.” He started to put on his gloves. “Despite the whole wicked waste that first time around, it all had to be done again.”
My eyes swam with tears, and I looked down at my feet to blink them away, when all I wanted was to step into him and put my mouth against his.
“I hope that is enough of an explanation for you, Marion . . . why I just signed up and went off . . . without saying anything more than . . . or committing to—” He cleared his throat, and his quiet eyes sought mine. “You see, I had to be sure that I could last it out a second time. I didn’t want you waiting for . . . a broken-down crock to come home. Not when you had such a wonderful job . . . and a fine, independent life in London.”