Song of the Skylark

by Erica James

  ‘Go on,’ Clarissa said, when he seemed to think that was sufficient information.

  ‘I was with Ellis Randall, and Effie Chase was on the ship, too, with her father and stepmother. We got friendly with another woman called Betty.’

  ‘Was I travelling alone?’

  ‘No. You were being chaperoned by an awful old dragon. You spent most of your time trying to avoid her.’

  ‘Marjorie!’ Clarissa blurted out. ‘Was her name Marjorie?’

  He smiled. He had such a lovely smile, she thought. ‘Yes. And you hated her. She was about as much fun as a raincloud on a sunny day.’

  Whether or not it was the distraction of his smile, but something else fell into place. ‘Marjorie was a friend of my Grandma Ethel, wasn’t she? Yes, yes, I remember! And I remember somebody with the most unusually green eyes. Who was that?’

  ‘That would be Ellis. Everybody always remembers his eyes; they’re very distinctive, as he is himself.’

  ‘Yes, I do remember him, but he was so very conceited!’ As soon as the words were out, Clarissa covered her mouth with a hand, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, that was perhaps rude of me. Is he a good friend of yours?’

  Artie laughed. ‘He is – and he is also an exceptionally conceited man. I shall bring your comment to his attention when I see him next.’

  As he was speaking, Clarissa watched the woman called Polly remove the hat she was wearing. Something roused itself inside her. ‘Do you have a pale grey hat,’ she asked, ‘one with a dent in the side of it?’

  ‘I’m afraid all my hats have dents in them,’ Polly said with a smile. ‘I’m forever dropping or sitting on them. But there you are, there’s something else we’ve helped you remember because I do indeed have a pale grey hat.’

  ‘You wore it when … when you met me at the station, didn’t you?’

  ‘And I was inexcusably late.’

  ‘I was anxious,’ Clarissa said with a frown. ‘I didn’t know whether to wait for you or look for a taxi. Oh, how strange that I should be able to recall something as inconsequential as your hat, and it then awakens other memories for me.’

  ‘The mind’s a complicated piece of machinery,’ Artie said. ‘You need to be patient with it. Everything will eventually fall into place for you. You’ve survived quite a serious accident, I’m surprised you’re not being cared for in hospital.’

  ‘A doctor’s seen me, so I suppose the Upwoods decided I wasn’t that badly hurt.’

  ‘Nothing that a good long rest won’t cure,’ joined in Polly. ‘I’m all for staying away from hospitals, ghastly places. No, take it from me; you’re better off here, so long as they’re looking after you well. Although if the state of this house is anything to go by, I have my doubts. Goodness, it could do with a good clean. I can’t remember seeing so many cobwebs. Now, far be it from me to get above myself, but I shall leave you here with Artie while I go in search of that maid and see if we can’t rustle up something to drink. I’m appalled she hasn’t offered something already. This really is the slackest of households. Or better still, maybe you should go, Artie, I’m sure you could charm her into providing us with some refreshments. No, better leave it to me; I suspect I’ll have more authority about me than you. You’re much too sweet a man to boss her about.’

  When Polly had sailed out of the room, Clarissa looked shyly at Artie. ‘I think she meant that as a compliment.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’d only been in Miss Sinclair’s company a few minutes before I realised what an extraordinarily energetic woman she is. I’m just glad I’d changed my plans and decided to leave France to come to London when I did.’ He leaned forward and fixed his kindly brown eyes intently on hers. ‘I was so worried about you when Miss Sinclair told me the news.’

  At the intensity of his expression, Clarissa felt an emotion stir within her. It made her wonder what sort of a friendship they had, if from what she understood they’d only met very recently. Had she, she wondered, fallen in love with him? He would be an easy man to love, she thought. ‘What do you and Polly actually know about the accident?’ she asked.

  He looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure I should tell you.’

  ‘You must! I need to know. Why should everybody else know but me? Where’s the fairness in that?’

  He put a hand out to her. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘don’t upset yourself. I’ll tell you what I’ve been told if you insist, but only if you think it will help.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  30th April 1939, Hotel du Palais, Biarritz, France

  Clarissa, trust you to be so careless and have an accident within days of being in England.

  Get well soon, I don’t want to have dinner at the Ritz in London with an invalid, it would be very undignified!

  Ellis Randall

  1st May 1939, Hotel Negresco, Nice, France

  My dear Clarissa,

  I heard the news of your terrible accident from Effie, what rotten luck for you my dear girl. Is there anything I can do? Just say the word and I shall do whatever I can to make things better for you.

  If you were able to travel I’d suggest you come and join me in Nice – heavens to Betsy it’s such fun here!

  Take care and get well very soon,

  Betty

  While bored to tears with the regime of enforced daily bed rest, as laid down by a ruthlessly authoritarian Dr Rutherford, it did mean that Clarissa had been able to spend time getting to know her grandmother.

  In contrast, her grandfather was still no more than a distant figure that she saw little of. Lavinia had explained that the effort involved for her husband to climb the stairs was too much for him – only on exceptionally good days could he rely on his legs to support him. Ironically, the afternoon of Clarissa’s arrival had been a good day when he had, with assistance from his wife and Lily, the housemaid, managed the stairs and his cumbersome wheelchair was then carried up. Clarissa frequently heard him shouting to the dogs, or to Lily. He sounded a short-tempered man, but perhaps it was frustration that fuelled his temper.

  As the days passed, and as predicted, the amnesia cleared bit by bit until finally Clarissa’s memory was fully restored. She now remembered the days spent on board the Belle Etoile, as well as the dreadful Marjorie who, no doubt, would say Clarissa had brought the accident upon herself with her wilful behaviour. However, there were moments when Clarissa wondered how she would ever know if there remained any lost segments to her memory. What if she had forgotten some important detail about who she was?

  What had also returned to her was the full horror of the accident. She now knew that the calamitous screaming that had haunted her was the sound of Apollo, the horse, dying in agonising pain. Jimmy, who had been in the trap with her, had been thrown clear and had landed in the relative softness of the hawthorn hedgerow. Clarissa had not been so lucky; she had been jettisoned from the trap straight into the road, where she had narrowly missed being crushed by the horse as it fell to the ground. Mortified at what had happened, the driver of the tractor, with Jimmy’s help, and along with a man from the village who had been passing, had lifted her onto the back of his trailer and taken her to where she had now resided for two weeks.

  At Lavinia’s invitation Artie and Polly had stayed for several nights at Shillingbury Grange in the belief that their presence would help Clarissa recoup that much faster, and it was with some sadness that she had said goodbye to them. Polly had wanted to stay longer, but she was needed back in London – the agency for finding homes for Jewish children was working at full tilt and couldn’t do without her any more. She had spoken at length with Clarissa and Artie about her work with the Kindertransport, and with friends and relatives in Berlin, Prague and Vienna, Artie was keen to learn all he could. He had written to his friends entreating them to flee, but to his consternation they said they couldn’t leave their families or homes. He had
now returned to France to meet up with Ellis and Effie on the Riviera.

  Thankfully, the worst of Clarissa’s bruises had subsided and the stitches to the side of her head had been removed. Today she was enjoying her first full day out of bed and relished the freedom. It was wonderful to have a change of scene, other than the miserable four walls that had so far imprisoned her. Being able to move about meant that she now had a better idea of her surroundings.

  In the drawing room, sitting by the French doors, she watched Charles Upwood being pushed across the lawn by Jimmy. To give him his full name, he was Jimmy Pharr and was one of Lily’s many uncles. Apparently, and in Lily’s own words, you couldn’t move in Shillingbury for tripping over members of the Pharr family. Clarissa had grown quite fond of the girl, perhaps because Lily was just two years younger than she was. She was also quite a spirited girl beneath her thin veneer of polite duty and wasn’t afraid to say what she thought when provoked. On one occasion, when yet again she presented a tray of unappetising food to Clarissa, she had apologised for it and told her that cook, Mrs Kent, was a fearsome tyrant in the kitchen and no matter how bad the meals were that she produced, Mrs Upwood never dared criticise her, knowing as she did that she would never find anybody else to work for such poor wages.

  It was an echo of what Polly had said during her brief stay. ‘Standards have certainly slipped since I stayed here as a young girl,’ she had told Clarissa. ‘Time was when this was one of the smartest houses in the area with a whole army of staff running about the place. It’s a shadow of its former self. Too depressing for words.’

  The house was uncompromisingly large and set in grounds that spoke of years of neglect – the tennis court was full of weeds, the kitchen garden wildly overgrown and the lawns home to rabbits and moles. Many of the rooms were closed off, their doors shut, the furniture covered with dustsheets, and although it was spring and the sun was shining, little warmth penetrated the walls.

  From conversations with Lavinia, Clarissa had learned that in recent years Charles’s investments had not been soundly made and they were now paying the price of a combination of poor judgement and the far-reaching effects of the Depression. It would have been easy for Clarissa to say that it served her grandparents right, that this was their punishment for their cruelty towards Fran. But she believed that guilt, and the subsequent shame of losing their standing within the community, had punished them enough without her wishing to further compound their pain. And they were in pain; that much was obvious to Clarissa. Every time she looked into Lavinia’s heavily lined face and watched her habitually wringing her hands, her thin shoulders hunched, she saw sadness and regret.

  ‘Never could I have foreseen that our lives would become so dismal, or that we’d be reduced to such an impecunious state,’ Lavinia confessed to Clarissa. The raw honesty of this admission touched Clarissa, and more and more she found herself wanting to do something that would improve their lot. But what? What could she do?

  The next day the postman brought two letters for Clarissa, one from Polly and another from Artie. She opened his first.

  He was still on the Riviera, he wrote, but would soon be leaving to return to London, where he hoped to secure a job with Reuters as a news correspondent.

  I cannot in all conscience accompany Ellis and Effie with their plans to continue travelling in Europe when catastrophe is about to strike. I don’t say this lightly; I believe it with all my being, the clouds of war are gathering pace and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. The menace of Hitler’s Germany is becoming ever more threatening and it’s time people acted.

  Which brings me to the main point of my letter. Polly will be writing to you shortly with a formal request, and though I know I should leave matters to her, I cannot help but add my weight to her request. I have known you for so short a time and therefore have no right to ask anything of you, but I know you to have a good and generous heart, so if you could find a way to persuade your grandparents to agree to what Polly will ask of them, I would forever be in your debt.

  Here is something else I don’t say lightly, and really I should have stated this at the top of my letter, but you are in my thoughts daily and I sincerely hope that you are now feeling more like the delightful girl I met on board the Belle Etoile. We never know who we are going to meet next, or indeed what the consequences of that meeting will be, but I’m convinced our paths were meant to cross, and in that I consider myself the most fortunate of men to have made your acquaintance.

  Oh, dear God, I sound so absurdly archaic! So before I say anything else foolish, I shall sign off.

  Yours affectionately,

  Artie

  PS I’m mailing this to Shillingbury in the hope you’re still recuperating there.

  Clarissa hurriedly read the letter through one more time, then opened the one from Polly, intuitively knowing what it would be about. No sooner had she absorbed the information, than she heard Lavinia calling to her.

  ‘Is this your doing?’ her grandmother demanded when she entered the drawing room and handed her a piece of typewritten paper.

  ‘Not at all,’ Clarissa replied after reading the letter. She then explained about her own letter from Polly.

  ‘Well, whoever concocted this ill-conceived plan, it’s out of the question,’ Lavinia said emphatically. ‘We simply wouldn’t be able to cope. Charles certainly won’t stand for it, not for one second. He needs peace and quiet, not the chaos of an army of foreign children invading the house.’

  ‘I’m sure it wouldn’t be like that,’ Clarissa said, although in truth she had no idea what it would be like. ‘It won’t be an army of children, only one or two,’ she went on, ‘and they might not be here for long.’

  Lavinia tugged on the cardigan draped around her shoulders. ‘Please don’t think I don’t have sympathy for the poor wretches, but is it really our problem? We have difficulties enough of our own. Besides,’ she went on, wringing her hands, ‘we’re not equipped here for children. So that’s an end to it. I shall reply to that letter accordingly. Polly Sinclair always did go chasing after some cause or other. If she’d married and had a family of her own she wouldn’t have time for all this nonsense.’

  ‘I don’t consider her work nonsense,’ Clarissa said quietly. ‘But can we really stand back and do nothing? Would we ever forgive ourselves if the situation worsened for these people?’

  ‘We?’ Lavinia repeated stiffly. ‘Where do you come into this?’

  ‘I’d like to stay on and help if you’ll let me,’ Clarissa said. It was suddenly clear to her that she wasn’t meant to go back to London. She had been led here for a specific reason and it was now staring her full square in the face. Never could she have imagined that this would be the consequence of her travelling across the Atlantic, but never had she felt more certain that this was where she was meant to be. This was her being the new, confident person she had planned to become when she stepped off the Belle Etoile, the confident young woman who would do something worthwhile with her life.

  Slowly rising to her feet, and with the zeal and instinct of one possessed of the righteous belief, as prompted by Polly in her letter, that this act of generosity would in some way atone for what Lavinia and Charles Upwood had done to their daughter, she set about convincing her grandmother that Shillingbury Grange should be a temporary home for no more than two children in need of a safe haven from the Nazis. Hardly drawing breath, she systematically dismissed every objection put forward – the house was in no fit state to take in children; cook wouldn’t like it and would resign on the spot; Lily would leave as well at the extra work; Charles would never get any rest; and the children wouldn’t speak English and would run amok and create endless havoc. Then Clarissa produced the trump card she had kept up her sleeve, saying she would not only stay and help, but she would use some of the money her mother had left her to absorb the additional cost of looking after the children.<
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  ‘I suppose this is how you Americans do things, isn’t it,’ Lavinia said with a weary shake of her head, ‘you bulldoze your way through until you get what you want.’

  ‘I suppose we do,’ Clarissa said happily, then to be absolutely sure of removing every last trace of doubt and potential argument, and knowing that her grandmother had taken to Artie, she explained that it would be a personal favour to Artie for Lavinia and Charles to take the children in, that their plight troubled him profoundly.

  ‘If it’s that important to Artie, why doesn’t he help by arranging to send them to America?’ asked Lavinia.

  ‘Because their parents don’t want them so far away,’ Clarissa replied, and without thinking she added: ‘As a mother you can understand that, surely?’

  At the stricken expression on Lavinia’s face, Clarissa feared she had inadvertently gone too far. She was about to apologise when her grandmother straightened her shoulders. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I can see that you’re every inch your mother’s daughter and not prepared to give ground one iota. I shall discuss the matter with my husband and reply to Miss Sinclair that we shall take in two children. No more, mind. I don’t want you, or her, running away with the idea that just because this is a large house we can accommodate every ragtag and bobtail that’s going.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Clarissa said. ‘Thank you so much.’ And in a rush of delighted spontaneity she hugged her grandmother. It was the first time she had done so since arriving. Initially Lavinia froze at her touch, as though repulsed by it, but then the stiffness went from her body and she hugged Clarissa back.

  ‘And for the record, I’m not wholly American,’ Clarissa said when she let go of her grandmother, ‘I’m half English, and my mother never let me forget that.’

  A hint of a smile lifted the downward slope of Lavinia’s mouth. ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’