‘And the very toughest of cheese to our enemies.’
‘Hear, hear, Miss Meggie.’
Meggie laughed and raised her glass to the other two. Richards carefully replaced the cork in the bottle, which he had then proceeded to seal with a copious amount of sealing wax.
‘May I enquire as to the purpose of this particular ceremony, Richards? We might have wanted another dram, myself and my granddaughter.’
‘This bottle is now out of bounds, réservé for when we have beaten the beastly Nazi housepainter,’ Richards told his mistress.
It was a sentiment with which Elinor Gore-Stewart must have concurred because she said nothing, but only continued to sip her cognac.
And now on the following morning, from the top of the bus taking her to Piccadilly where she was due to meet David Kinnersley for lunch at the Ritz, Meggie could see how inexorably fate was marching on. Bodies of men were busy sandbagging all the important buildings and digging trenches in the parks, while in the skies above the capital appeared not enemy aeroplanes but the first of the barrage balloons.
‘You’re very quiet,’ Meggie said to David as they sat at the downstairs bar. ‘For you, I mean. Very quiet. Mind you, given what’s going on outside, I suppose that’s hardly surprising.’
‘I failed my medical,’ David suddenly announced, nodding to the barman for two fresh drinks. ‘Would you believe it? A great hulking brute like me? Volunteered for my father’s old regiment – had my medical this morning. Blooming failed it. Hulking great brute like me.’
‘Hulking no, great – possibly. Brute – certainly. Which bit of you doesn’t work?’
‘That would be telling. Suffice it to say it is a common complaint to do with the chest area resulting from a childhood disease, hence why I was sent down to Bexham to spend my childhood gulping in great hunks of Sussex sea air.’
‘Sussex by the Seeeeeeee!’ of a sudden they both finished, singing the proud Sussex song always played by the Bexham brass band on the village green as a finisher of a Sunday afternoon.
‘Glad to hear there’s something common about you, Davey. The way you go on, you’d think you were the noblest of them all.’
‘Ha ha, very droll, Meggie Bore-Stewart.’
‘So what are you going to do? A hulking great brute like you can’t just sit around twiddling your hulking great thumbs when Your Country Needs You.’
‘I shall find something, never fear. But not behind a desk.’
‘I’m going to join up. In fact I am on my way to do so, once I’ve got tight with you.’
‘So Elinor told me. She telephoned to me last night. Said, “Meggie’s going to get tight with you, and then join up.” You don’t have to, you know.’
‘What? Get tight with you? It’s de rigueur, dear boy. How else does one prevent oneself falling asleep when one is with you?’
‘You don’t have to go so far as joining up.’ David smiled, and then deliberately adopting a patronising tone to annoy her he went on, ‘Lots of other things women can do.’
‘I know, but I’m not really a knitter, Davey. Nanny used to have to undo all my plains and purls, let alone my moss stitch. No, I am afraid the only pearls I have ever been interested in are usually to be found on a string around one’s neck. Nor am I cut out to work on the land. Besides, I think I’ll look quite fetching in a uniform. The severity of the cut, you know – it will show off my perfect profile.’
‘I think you’ll look absolutely the ticket. But I’d rather you didn’t stick your head over the parapet, soldiering, sailoring, and all that. Besides, it’s not really ultra-feminine.’
‘Oh, come on. You admire my grandmother for what she did in the last war.’
‘Only because she was doing a feminine thing. Nursing. That’s the sort of thing females do, not fighting with guns and so on.’
‘Being a nurse in the Great War was most definitely dangerous.’
‘It’s not the danger, Megs. It’s women in soldiers’ uniforms. It don’t fit together the way it should, not to my mind anyway.’
‘I’m thinking of going into the Wrens, actually. They’re very feminine, apparently, as long as you avoid the officer’s hat.’
‘Women in uniform. Full stop. Don’t like the idea at all.’
‘Nurses wear uniforms.’
‘Ah, now. Now that is different. You’d look very nice in a nurse’s uniform.’
‘Better than you would behind a desk.’
‘I am not going to sit behind a desk.’
‘And I am not going to be a nurse.’
David contemplated their conversation while he ate some salmon.
‘Won’t be eating this delicacy for very much longer,’ he said sadly, taking a draught of cold Chablis. ‘Or drinking this kind of vino. Sardines and brown ale, more like.’
‘You could try being an air raid warden,’ Meggie told him, poker-faced. ‘After all, you’re very good at bossing people about.’
‘You could try being a nice young lady,’ David replied, with a mock black look. ‘And stay at home and learn to tat and knit better than you did with Nanny.’
‘Why all the concern all of a sudden, Mr Kinnersley? And from Mr Devil May Care himself.’
‘Call me old-fashioned, Miss Gore-Stewart, but I just happen to think a woman’s place is not on the ramparts.’
‘Where is it then? Home, hearth and kitchen? You’re not going to dissuade me, you know. My mind is quite and utterly made up.’
‘I know of a way to dissuade you,’ David replied, looking her in the eye. ‘I could marry you.’
‘Only if I said yes, surely?’
‘And will you? Will you marry me, Meggie?’
‘No, absolutely not.’
‘You won’t? Why ever not? I’m one of the most eligible fellows around, for heaven’s sake. We have everything in common, your grandmother is one of my greatest fans, and we have known each other in Bexham since – well, since we were knee high to the proverbial grasshopper.’
‘I will not marry you, Davey, because I don’t want you to be a war widower. Besides, I happen to know why you are asking me. You are asking me simply and only because you are determined to stop me joining the Navy and enjoying myself. You are a spoilsport. You don’t wish to see anyone having as good a time as you are, or were, determined on, until the medical board found out you wheeze like a pair of old bellows.’
David stared back at her, trying not to laugh, but finally unable to contain himself.
‘You are just too much, Miss Gore-Stewart, and what is worse, I think you really mean it.’
‘I do, David. Besides, I simply could not bear the thought of you sitting behind your desk, sad and miserable while I die a noble death in the field, or rather at sea. Leaving behind a war widower is not my idea of what I should do to you. You might never find another woman, and after the war, just think, you would be one of thousands.’
‘If you’d say you’ll marry me, Meggie darling, I should be so awfully happy, really I would.’
‘If I thought you meant it—’
‘Of course I mean it, Meggie! I always mean what I say.’
‘But you hardly ever say what you mean. You – get married? And break practically every heart in town? I don’t think you would find that particular marriage would last very long, Davey, do you?’
‘And there was I thinking that you loved me.’
‘That has nothing to do with my marrying you.’
‘So you do love me, Meggie?’
‘Of course I love you, Davey, I always have, and possibly I always will. But this is war, and the outbreak of war is no time to marry. We might wake up and find ourselves strangers once all the excitement died down, which is what kept happening after the last one. Besides, it’s a bit ordinary, don’t you think, to marry just because everyone else is. And you know me, I hate being ordinary, and like everyone else.’
They both looked at each other without saying anything for a moment. Meggie was wonde
ring whether it was just the threat of war that was making her feel the way she did, as if she could see everything very clearly, not as she did normally, through a looking glass held over her shoulder. Everyone was getting married – daily, and almost hourly; it was a feature in most of the newspapers – and pretty soon everyone would be getting pregnant. It all seemed so wrong, as if they were all doing everything for the wrong reasons. The fact was that David would not be proposing to her if there was no war, and he knew it, and so did Meggie.
And David, probably because he was so used to getting his own way with women, was amazing himself by discovering what he really thought about Meggie Gore-Stewart of the impish, if crooked, smile.
He had always seen Meggie quite simply as one of his favourite flirtations, funny, attractive and original. Now, what with the barrage balloons and the sandbags, and her talk of joining up, he was finding out that he had other feelings for her. Of a sudden the thought of possibly never seeing her again, the thought that she might be killed in an air raid, was quite simply unbearable. He put his sea-bronzed hand over Meggie’s pale-skinned one, and stared into her eyes.
‘No,’ Meggie said before he could say anything at all.
‘Did I ask you something?’
‘Didn’t you just ask to marry me?’
‘As a matter of fact the last thing I asked you was whether or not you loved me,’ David said, offering her a Passing Cloud cigarette.
‘Then the answer is Pending,’ Meggie replied, taking the oval-shaped cigarette and lighting it from David’s proffered match. ‘After we’ve had coffee let’s walk down to the river and along the Embankment.’
‘If we do that we could end up at Cheyne Walk. And have tea chez moi. And maybe some ultra-stiff whisky sours.’
‘Perhaps we could. Yes. Let’s go for a long and lovely walk, then end up having huge cocktails at Cheyne Walk.’
They walked through Burlington Arcade with Meggie daring her companion to whistle and David telling her in return that having been caught as a boy illegally doing so in the famous walkway it was a case of once bitten. In return Meggie called him yellow, made sure the Beadle was looking the other way, handed David her shoes, double-checked on the actions of the Watchdog, and then silently and successfully sprinted the length of the Arcade to the equally silent astonishment of the other pedestrians.
‘You know what the punishment for that misdemeanour is, young lady,’ David stated, once he had caught her up. ‘The Tower.’
‘I shouldn’t mind. Once you’re safely locked away, there’s an end to harm.’
‘Very Shakespearean.’
They walked arm in arm through the streets at the lower end of Mayfair, silent now as they watched the populace continuing their preparations for war. Blacking out the windows of a large showroom on the corner of Stratton Street, sandbagging a large anonymous-looking building in Curzon Street, digging deeper and deeper trenches in the parks.
Moving on they made their way down an equally preoccupied Sloane Street, past the site where what seemed like only a split second ago Meggie and Judy had pretended to be casualties in the mock air raid, and along the King’s Road where for a while they stood and watched men on ladders painting out a department store’s name emblazoned high on the side of a building. Finally, they found themselves on the Embankment leaning over the parapet and watching the river fast flowing out to sea.
‘I think even the Thames is deserting London, Davey,’ Meggie said, slipping her hand into his. ‘Look – it’s flowing out – never to come back in on the tide.’
‘You and that imagination of yours. It’ll be the death of you.’
‘I don’t think I want to die. Not yet anyway.’
‘Don’t worry, Meggie darling. I shan’t let anything happen to you. Not anything terrible, that is.’
He kissed her just as a troop of soldiers marched by, earning them both a cacophony of wolf whistles and cheers.
‘Cheerio, chaps!’ David called after them. ‘Good luck!’
Meggie waved, suddenly feeling strangely elated and desperately sad all at the same time.
‘Can we go inside, David?’ she wondered, clasping his hand tightly with both of hers. ‘Before it all starts? Can we go inside?’
They went into David’s house on Cheyne Walk, closing the door on the overcast August day.
Chapter Six
When Rusty and her brothers returned home from the afternoon showing of The Lady Vanishes at the Odeon in Bognor at the beginning of September they found their father and mother sitting silently either side of the wireless. The young people’s generally cheerful mood was immediately dispelled by the look on their parents’ faces.
‘What is it? Is it war then?’
‘All but. Now quiet, the lot of you.’ Their father waved at them all to be quiet, at which they sat round the table to listen to the end of the news bulletin, while Mrs Todd took up her knitting, her mouth set.
‘The government are evacuating the cities? That can’t be everybody, surely?’
‘Children mainly, Rusty. Mothers where possible.’
Mrs Todd frowned at her four needles and re-applied herself to the thick wool sock, trying to hide the pain she felt from the arthritis in her hands.
‘They said this doesn’t mean war is inevitable—’
‘Like heck.’
Mrs Todd clicked her tongue in time with her needles. ‘—but since they just announced the mobilisation of the Fleet and the RAF and the Navy have ordered their reservists to report for duty, I think we can take it all as good as read,’ she finished, with quiet finality.
Mr Todd leaned forward to turn the wireless off but paused to listen to an extra announcement that the BBC would be broadcasting a special service of intercession later that night.
‘Fat lot of good that’ll do,’ he said, finally switching off the set. ‘As if all we have to do is pray. Fine thing.’
‘There’s a letter come for you, Tom,’ Mrs Todd said, getting up from her chair and gritting her teeth as her arthritis caught her. ‘On His Majesty’s Service. It’s there on the mantle. Dad?’
Mr Todd glanced at his wife as he fished his tobacco tin from his jacket pocket.
‘Pass it down to him, Dad. It’ll not answer itself.’
‘It’s all right, Ma,’ Tom said gamely, taking the envelope down himself. ‘I was expecting this. Seeing as how I’m the eldest.’
‘Mine not arrived as well then?’ asked Mickey, joking.
‘Don’t know why you don’t just put a pistol to your head,’ his father muttered. ‘You’re that keen to get yourself killed, putting in for bomb disposal, is it? I don’t know where you get these ideas. You can’t shoot a rabbit, let alone dispose of a bomb, our Tom.’
Rusty watched as her eldest brother carefully slit open the official brown envelope and took out his call-up papers. Even on the bus back from Bognor what talk there was had been about nothing but the war, so why did she feel so shocked at Tom’s being called up?
‘I’m not to start my training till the summer, it seems,’ Tom looked up, ‘being that I’m not quite nineteen. I put in early hoping they’d take me anyway. Can’t wait to have a go at Jerry, really can’t.’
Rusty followed her mother out to the kitchen to help prepare the family’s supper.
‘There’s no point in saying anything, Rusty,’ her mother said, as she began to peel the potatoes. ‘There’s no point in saying anything, nor in worrying about it. It’s just the way things are. The way things have to be. The way things have always been.’
‘He’s still a kid.’
‘Your dad was seventeen when he joined up and went to war. In case you’ve not noticed, war’s no respecter of age. And don’t just stand there. You can do them carrots.’
‘If there is a war—’
‘Don’t be daft. If indeed.’
‘I’d like to do something.’
‘Yes, well you can. Like I said, you can do the carrots.’
�
��I meant in the war. When it starts.’
‘Any time now.’
‘I’d like to do something.’
‘There’ll be plenty to do, don’t you worry.’
‘If the men are all going to get called up—’
‘We’re going to have to keep hearth and home. If men aren’t here, we must be.’
‘Not younger women. Not them that’s not married – like me. Must be something useful I could do.’
‘I’d like to know what. All you can do is mess about in boats. And I can’t see them taking you into the Navy, girl. Even if they did, your father wouldn’t have it.’
‘Wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, Mum. Not after my birthday. Not in another year when I’m twenty-one.’
‘Talk sense, Rusty. I’m going to need you at home. I can’t manage too well with this – with the way I am, you know that.’
Rusty looked at her mother who was bent over the sink trying to peel the vegetables with a small knife. With a little sigh Rusty took the knife from her mother and her place at the sink.
‘Dad’s still hale and hearty. I mean, if I did find something useful to do—’
‘Your dad’s going to have his hands full in the boatyard, I imagine. He’s also in the Local Defence Volunteers, remember.’
‘Seems daft.’ Rusty stared out of the window at the surrounding countryside. ‘Millions of able young women with nothing useful to do. For the country, I mean. Except sit and wait to see if everyone will come home again. But that’s governments.’
From behind Rusty her mother glanced up at her, before continuing with her preparations.
‘As a matter of fact I’d like to help myself – but with this arthritis I dare say all I’m good for is socks and knitting. And even that’s slow now.’
‘It’s only manual things, Mum. Fiddly things you’re not too good at – like opening things, threading needles, scraping carrots.’ Rusty dropped some perfectly scraped and portioned carrots into the saucepan her mother had put on the draining board. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your head. Nothing to say you can’t use your grey matter.’
‘What for, child? What sort of useful brainwork can someone like me do, eh?’
The Chestnut Tree Page 9