The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  Looking back on it now, with the benefit of hindsight, Maude realised that she had only wanted to marry Lionel in order to get away from her parents, who since she was the last daughter in a long line of children had been quite transparent in their determination that Maude was going to stay at home and look after both of them in their old age.

  Marrying Lionel Eastcott had been infinitely more appealing than spending her life fetching and carrying for her parents. Yet life with the acknowledged local dullard had seemed vastly preferable to looking after her somewhat selfish and self-willed parents until, with an increasingly sinking heart, she had come to realise that she had simply swapped one form of slavery for another. It was now more than likely that instead of looking after her parents in their old age, she would be looking after her husband in his old age.

  What a thought! Maude sighed as she closed her library book, marking the chapter-end with her exlibris tag, a passage which she had greatly enjoyed as she had reached the moment in the love story where the hero had at last gathered the heroine into his arms preparatory to kissing her passionately. Maude wished she liked kissing Lionel, but alas she never had. Dancing with him – yes, that had been tolerable, albeit nothing to write home about, but kissing him, no. Like his conversation Lionel’s kisses had been dull and dry, and had failed to excite or arouse her from the first, something – like so much in their marriage – that she hoped he had never noticed.

  Now she must go downstairs and see what her daughter and her friend wanted, if anything. She sighed as she went, hoping that her Mattie would, one day, meet and marry someone a little more exciting than her own ineffably dull and pompous husband.

  On Sunday morning at breakfast she reminded her husband and daughter that they were expected for drinks at the Meltons’ after church. Since Virginia’s one night stay had now turned into a weekend invitation, Maude said she would ring her hosts to ask them if it would be all right to bring her along as well, since Virginia’s mother had also been asked.

  That morning, rather to her own astonishment, Maude found herself hoping that Gloria would turn up at the drinks party. As she bathed and dressed herself, of a sudden she realised she did not care whether Gloria Bishop that was had been either dreadfully fast or abysmally slow, because the truth was she did not care much about anything any more, not even the idea of Gloria Morrison flirting anew with Lionel.

  Must be the thought of a war coming, she told herself, as she carefully arranged her hair, finding herself inexplicably excited by the thought. If in fact there was to be a war, she determined, then and there, that rather than shoring herself up in Bexham she would find herself an occupation.

  No more sitting around waiting to hear Lionel moan about the lack of plums for his custard, or sugar for his peaches, or anything else for that matter. No more wondering if there was going to be enough marmalade in the cellar to last them. Maude was going to be free. She was going to go to the front door and walk out, not to go to the hairdresser’s, or the grocer’s, or to buy some darning wool for Lionel’s wretched socks, but to go to work.

  I shall learn to drive, that’s what I shall do! So what if Lionel laughs at me? I heard people saying only the other day in the ironmonger’s that there could well be a shortage of drivers – and I’ve always wanted to learn. And since Lionel won’t teach me I shall volunteer as a trainee! Lionel can laugh all he may, but I shall – I will – drive. And once I can drive, I can go anywhere, without Lionel, without anyone, just me – myself, all by myself, no one to make fun of me any more, no one to pity me – as Mattie always pities me – for being older, for being more foolish, for being old-fashioned, for being behind the times, or anything else. It will just be me against the world. Me Maude, not Mummy Maude, not Maude My Wife, just me MAUDE!

  Not surprisingly, as she rose from her dressing table Maude felt more than elated, she felt euphoric. Unused to making anything more than minor decisions, having taken a major one she now felt as if she had taken over a government, which indeed in many ways she had. She had taken over the government of herself.

  And so what if she ended up getting killed in an air raid, or shot during the predicted invasion? At least she would die doing something.

  Who knows? She gave herself one last look in her dressing mirror. I might even have my hair tinted.

  Chapter Three

  Meggie stared out of the window disconsolately and cursed David Kinnersley and everything to do with him. He was about as constant as the English climate. Had he not promised hand on heart – well, practically – to take her dancing to the Savoy, and now where was he? Nowhere, and over an hour and a half late on top of it all.

  Blow you anyway, Davey K, she thought as she put a cigarette in her long holder and lit it. I should have said no, forgotten all about you and gone to the Savoy with Raymond St George when he asked me. He might be dull but he’s a heck of a sight more dependable.

  She blew a long stream of cigarette smoke out of the open window and thought enviously of Judy down at Bexham with the Tates. Judy had asked her if she would like to come and stay with her family that weekend if she had nothing better to do, but, remembering Judy had mentioned that she thought Walter might actually propose to her, rather than crowd her style Meggie had pretended that she had a firm date to go dancing with David Kinnersley when all the time it was only a possibility.

  If I can, dearest girl, Davey had said on the telephone, as he had countless times before, if it is at all possible I shall be there. Who could possibly resist yet another opportunity to spend an evening with you in his arms?

  Now left stranded high and dry, Meggie wished passionately that she had accepted her best friend’s invitation to Bexham, for yet another glorious weekend by the seaside with all that marvellous food and fun, as well as the company of the three Tate boys, not to mention the dashing captain himself. She envied Judy not only for her way of life but also for the fact that it was an odds on certainty that Judy was about to marry into such an attractive family.

  Of course Walter Tate still had to get past Judy’s mother. But now that the war seemed inevitable, Meggie could not imagine anyone really objecting to their daughter’s marrying him, particularly since he had already joined up. She had even discussed the subject with her divinely madcap grandmother, someone with whom Meggie had always liked to talk over everything in her young life.

  It’s only good sense, Meggie darlin’, her grandmother had said. For people not to marry in wartime, you see. Perfectly all right for them to wish to be together – for however brief a time – but when peace comes it causes emotional chaos, believe me. I have seen it. It is the reason why so many of my generation resorted to drugs and so on during the Twenties. The pain of it all, and then to be in pain and find yourself living your life with a stranger, or rather living a lie with a stranger. Unlike a martini cocktail, not a good mix, darling.

  It was only common sense, Meggie remembered, as she smoked her cigarette and watched London life passing her by below her window. War had so many repercussions. And so it would go on, doubtless, with women giving endless birth to an equally endless number of children, only to see their sons slaughtered in yet another war.

  Meggie reached over and stubbed out her cigarette in a small round silver ashtray, her thoughts returning to her present predicament. It was now well past nine thirty and she had not even had a call from Davey to explain why he had failed to turn up. By the time she had helped herself to a large gin and Italian, Meggie was no longer feeling mildly irritated but practically murderous. She could not stand to be treated like this. Even if Mr David Kinnersley was her oldest friend, devastatingly handsome and mesmerising company, she, Meggie, simply would not stand for it, not for a single second. She was far too pretty and popular to be stood up by anyone. She would simply forget all about him and take herself out, go and join her crowd who she knew were dancing the night away at the Savoy, even if by doing so she would unbalance the numbers. Having made her decision, Meggie promptly ra
ng for her Portuguese maid, and, bestowing on the poor woman the angry frown she had actually reserved for her errant escort, informed her that she was out for the evening and if anyone called – anyone at all – to say that she had no idea, at all, of where Miss Gore-Stewart could possibly be.

  ‘Not even Mr Kinnersley, should he bother to call,’ she announced, almost as an afterthought as she swept out of her apartment. ‘Least of all Mr Kinnersley in fact.’

  But having flagged down a taxi, Meggie found herself giving the cabbie her grandmother’s address in Brook Street instead of the Savoy, a change of mood brought about she realised by the sight of the sandbag barricades in the streets and the black criss-crosses of tape on seemingly every windowpane she could see. The thought of war, even though it was very much to the forefront of her mind, had seemed until recently to be more of a possibility than a probability, particularly since the newspapers and the radio bulletins had been so generally optimistic about the Prime Minister’s renewed attempts to secure a lasting peace. Now, however, seeing the increased activity in the preparations for civil defence, it came to Meggie, even in her furious state, that time was actually running out, for her, as it was for everyone. Hardly surprising therefore that all at once Meggie felt the need not to go dancing, but to visit an older member of the family, someone wiser who had been through it all before.

  Her grandmother having always been the most loving and attentive relative in her young life, due to her parents’ peripatetic existence in the Colonies, it was only natural that, when in doubt, it was to her that Meggie always turned. Most of all Meggie knew that whatever time of night or day she called she was always assured of a welcome, regardless of what else might be happening in her grandmother’s elegant house in Mayfair. For Meggie the door was always wide open, the champagne chilled.

  I shouldn’t say this, her grandmother used to say, but we’re kindred spirits, you and I. You’re such a little skylark, just as I was at your age. And you certainly don’t get it from your papa, darlin’. Much as I am devoted to my son, sometimes I cannot see how he can be your father. He’s such a stuffy person, but you, darlin’ Meggie – you have the restless Gore-Stewart spirit.

  As a result of spending so much of her infant life with her grandmother while her parents were abroad on foreign postings, unsurprisingly Meggie had grown up feeling closer to her father’s mother than she did to her own. Old Mrs Gore-Stewart had taught her little granddaughter everything that she thought might matter: how to speak French and German without an English accent, how to both waltz and Charleston, and not least how to mix a lethal cocktail that would wake the dead. The end result of this was that by the time she was sixteen Meggie Gore-Stewart was one of the most poised and socially precocious young ladies in Mayfair society.

  The other consequence of so much exposure to her grandmother’s sophisticated ways was that young Meggie Gore-Stewart became the despair of her straitlaced parents, a fact which needless to say delighted her grandmother.

  Just think what might have happened to you if you hadn’t come here to live with me when you were little, darlin’. Meggie heard her grandmother’s voice in her head as she paid the taxi off outside the deep red painted front door in Brook Street. Your dear mama would probably have married you off to some frightful chump of an equerry. Or even worse, the governor of some tin-pot province in goodness-knows-where-land. Condemned to a life of sipping medium dry sherries and dancing endless valetas! My! My! Just think of it!

  Meggie found herself starting to smile in pleasant anticipation as she waited for Richards to open the front door to her. There was always something delightful about to happen, or already happening, in the Gore-Stewart house, despite the age of its owner. It was just a fact.

  But not tonight apparently. As soon as her grandmother’s butler opened the door Meggie could see from his face that something was wrong.

  ‘Madame Gran is a mite upset en ce moment, Miss Meggie,’ Richards sighed as he took Meggie’s evening cloak. ‘Bad news from abroad, it would seem. Madame Gran was expecting the arrival of more of our musical friends from abroad? But so far – no show. Come along upstairs even so, because if anyone can lift Madame Gran’s spirits, we know who that is.’

  With another small sigh, the portly but pokerfaced Richards stood aside and bowed his head to indicate that Meggie was to precede him.

  ‘I thought my grandmother’s visitors arrived at the weekend, Richards,’ Meggie murmured over her shoulder, as they climbed the stairs. ‘Least that’s what she told me on the telephone.’

  ‘Fresh lot, Miss Meggie. Bit of a crisis. Madame Gran was warned that they might be going to have a visit from a band of jackbooters. But we do not dwell on it, Miss Meggie. You know how Madame Gran is, she likes to keep her emotions hidden under her camisole, as it were. Or perhaps next to her heart is what I mean.’

  Meggie nodded. And even though Richards purported to make a joke out of it they both knew not only that it was true, but why it was true.

  Elinor Gore-Stewart had been famous not only for her blond patrician beauty but for her courage. Despite having a horror of sickrooms, and most of all blood, she had insisted on joining the Red Cross in the Great War and had driven ambulances behind the Front Line. Not that she ever referred to it once the war was over. It just was not done.

  In fact it was from Richards that Meggie had learned how her grandmother had begged, borrowed or stolen a horse – Richards could never remember which – and ridden by herself behind the lines, to search out the worst casualties. From her devoted butler Meggie had learned how the young Elinor had talked the Normandy farmers into helping with the loan of barns and sometimes even cattle sheds for use as hospitals and shelters. How, often under fire, she had helped to bring the wounded back to those very shelters. And how Richards and she had met during one of those same forays.

  ‘Very good with a bandage, Madame Grandmère is,’ Richards would often murmur. ‘She saved my leg when I ran away to the war. Under age, of course, but she saved my young leg, did Madame Gran.’

  But now, seeing the expression in her grandmother’s eyes, Meggie sensed suddenly that Madame Gran felt she was getting older, that she doubted she could cope as she had once done, that she was feeling her years at the idea of losing yet another generation of young people.

  ‘Meggie, darling girl. Come in – come in at once – come and cheer me up. Where are you off to, darlin’? Going dancin’? How wonderful. Some nice young man, I so hope. Anyone we know? Richards – some champagne, I really think. Some champagne, and quickly now, before the bubbles burst and we all go flat.’

  ‘There is some beside you, Madame Gran,’ Richards replied, raising his big round eyes to heaven.

  ‘More needed, Richards.’ Elinor pointed at the bottle. ‘You have finished it.’ She gave Meggie a conspiratorial look.

  ‘Fine thing indeed,’ she whispered, offering Meggie a cigarette from a large old silver box. ‘Fine thing when one is reduced to making merry with one’s butler, indeed,’ she went on, not meaning it, since she and Richards were inseparable. ‘So where are you off to, my angel?’

  ‘I was going to the Savoy, darling, but then—’

  ‘But then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Meggie lit her cigarette and tossed back her hair, the diamond star set in it catching the light. ‘I thought I’d come and see you instead.’

  ‘Good. I need cheering up. Need someone young to invigorate me.’

  ‘Don’t we all, madame. Do not we all!’

  ‘Oh dear, Richards and his glums. Any minute now his leg will start playing up.’ Elinor raised her eyes to heaven. ‘What a pretty dress. Is that new?’

  ‘Hardly, darling. You bought it for me last year.’

  ‘Even I recognised that dress, madame. You bought it for her birthday.’

  Richards, having refused to leave the room in answer to a look from his mistress, was now dusting the grand piano with a handkerchief he had just produced like a conjuror from his
top pocket.

  ‘Something worrying you, Grandmother?’ Meggie wondered, coming to sit beside her on the sofa. ‘You look a teeny bit serious, pour vous.’

  ‘Some guests one was expecting are just a little late. Tarsome indeed, when one is expecting them. And so urgently.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve forgotten?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Meggie darling. The person who – the person they are staying with wouldn’t allow that. No, they wouldn’t have forgotten. Too important.’

  ‘I should say,’ Richards observed, sitting himself down at the piano.

  ‘Champagne, Richards! I told you, more champagne before you start your cocktail piano routine. Please.’

  With a pointed lift of his eyebrows, the butler rose slowly from the piano and went to get the wine.

  ‘I do not know how I put up with him, Meggie. He is getting worse by the minute.’

  ‘You put up with him because he makes you laugh.’

  ‘You know what I mean, darlin’. Oh, where is Richards with the champagne?’

  As Richards returned Elinor nodded to him to pour the wine, while she busied herself lighting another cigarette.

  ‘Why don’t you play me something, darlin’?’ she pleaded. ‘Something cheery. Some jazz. I do so love jazz. Yes, some jazz would be fine.’

  ‘I’ll play you something, darling, of course,’ Meggie agreed, going over to the boudoir grand piano with her champagne glass. ‘But I’m not sure I’m quite in the mood for jazz.’