The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Mattie!’

  Mattie stood at the door. The house still smelled of a mixture of lavender polish, floor polish, and other cleaning materials, as it had done in her mother’s time. This surprised her since she knew that her father had no help, for the very good reason that there was no help available now that everyone was being urged to take up war work. Indeed everything was as clean as clean could be, and not a thing out of place.

  ‘How have you managed it, Daddy? It’s just like – well, it’s just like it’s always been.’ Mattie’s eyes took in everything from two precious oranges arranged in a bowl to wild flowers in a vase and some women’s magazines, Woman’s Weekly and so on, laid out carefully, as they had always been. ‘You are clever, really you are.’

  Lionel coloured. He had hardly had more than a few hours’ sleep for many nights now, but he had been determined, in between everything else, to make the very best of everything, make things look as near as possible as when Maude had been alive. To him, of course, the whole place was a shambles, nothing quite as it should be, but he saw now that to Mattie it was far from being so, and that thrilled him.

  ‘I wanted it to be nice for your birthday, Mattie.’

  ‘Nice? It’s wonderful, Daddy. You are such a poppet, doing all this for me.’

  ‘It is . . .’ Lionel paused again, ‘it is,’ he could not think of a better word, ‘it is nice that you could get back, on leave, be here with me, Mattie. We haven’t had a Sunday together for so long, have we?’ Lionel looked away, clearing his throat. ‘How’s London been?’

  ‘Well, you know London, always something on!’

  Mattie smiled, and Lionel laughed. It was something that Maude had always said when she got off the train after one of her trips to the West End, shopping and lunching with a girlfriend.

  ‘Now sit down, don’t move, this is your birthday, and I wanted it to be special for you. Kept my cheese ration for you, all two ounces, so we’ll be sitting down to up to five courses, if I have anything to do with it. But first – a gin.’

  ‘Er, Daddy – no gin, thank you.’

  ‘Come on, only a small one.’

  ‘Very small, Daddy. Don’t want to use up all your gin, really I don’t.’

  ‘Don’t you worry. Us old chaps in the Home Guard, we have an indefinite supply, thanks to the Three Tuns . . . oh, yes indeedy.’

  Her father hurried off to the drinks cabinet. The familiar tune of ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ started to play as he opened the cabinet doors to bring out the gin bottle, and the two dancing figures twirled endlessly in the reflecting mirror.

  Mattie looked round the room, inspecting it more closely. Everything was, as she had been anxious to reassure her father, just the same as it had always been. The long blue silk curtains, the material that her mother and herself had chosen at Peter Jones, what now seemed years ago. The cream covers, the flowered chintz cushions, the Chinese prints, the mock Chinese Chippendale cabinet, the spare piano stool covered with a tapestry that her mother had sewn in a rare fit of domesticity. It did not seem more than a matter of weeks since she had returned to Bexham by chance and received the news, and yet it was only now that she was viewing each object by turn that Mattie realised just how long it really must be, because, looking round the sitting room, of one thing Mattie was now completely sure. Maude was well and truly gone.

  At this realisation an overwhelming sadness filled her daughter, a sadness that she had never felt before, even when Maude had just been killed. She had never truly appreciated her mother until now. More than that, she had never really needed her. Now she felt the need of a mother more than ever before, but Maude had vanished, for ever.

  ‘Cheers, darling.’

  ‘Cheers, Daddy.’

  They clinked glasses and Lionel smiled happily at his daughter. She was looking very well, as well as he had ever seen her look.

  ‘Bottoms up!’

  ‘Up the Nazis!’

  Michael and Mattie had used to say that. Mattie turned away from the memory of her love affair, because at that moment it seemed as dim and distant as the memory of her mother did not.

  The roast beef that Lionel cooked was surprisingly excellent, the potatoes the same, and if the Yorkshire pudding made with dried egg came out exactly the same size as it had gone into the oven, that was not his fault. No one in Bexham had yet been able to make their batter puddings rise by using dried egg.

  ‘I am afraid I ate my egg, last week. If I’d known you were coming . . .’ he turned back and nodded at the pudding lying on the sideboard, ‘it might have turned out a bit better.’

  ‘You’ve turned into a splendid cook, Daddy, better than Mummy. That would make her laugh, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Lionel got to his feet and began to tidy away the plates, but as Mattie started to follow suit, he pushed her back into her chair.

  ‘No, no, you stay there, darling. I’ve got you a present, and I have to go and get it.’

  He hurried off, leaving Mattie to stare round the dining room this time. This too was the same as when her mother had been alive, but less touched by her absence, perhaps because the dining room is always something of a male preserve. The sepia tints of India before the Great War, the furniture, heavy and oaken, the decanters, cut glass, Waterford. A very pretty claret jug decorated with a delicate silver top, its lid engraved with some unknown cipher belonging to its original owner. The room in which she sat was very much more Lionel than Maude, and that in a strange way was comforting.

  ‘There.’

  Lionel placed a brown paper parcel in front of Mattie. He had hand-painted flowers in bright watercolours on the paper, and Mattie recognised the ribbon doing up the parcel, giving it an air of both gaiety and decorum – it was from one of her mother’s summer nightdresses.

  Unwrapping it, Mattie naturally wondered at the contents, all the more so since it had always been her mother who had chosen Mattie’s birthday presents, while her father had contented himself with looking on and frowning at her extravagance. Furthermore, it was wartime, and there were no luxuries – no, as it were, presents – in the shops, no frivolities, no lace, no ribbons, no sugar, no clothes, no hats – especially not hats. Everything was rationed, rationed, rationed, and not just her father’s beloved cheese, and weekly egg. Everything was in short supply; even orangeade came marked simply orangeade with no maker’s name on it.

  Of course as soon as she saw what he had bought for her Mattie tried to smile, but she failed. It was a beautiful dress. Where her father had managed to find it she had no idea, but as soon as she saw the look of pride in his eyes, and heard him saying, ‘Go on, try it on, try it on – do, you will look wonderful in it,’ she could not help herself.

  Far from plucking the dress from the box and rushing off to try it on, to Lionel’s consternation his daughter burst into tears.

  Virginia was busy cutting the top off a stocking, and at the same time staring at Rusty’s head as if it was some part of their factory work, instead of just Rusty’s hair, long, thick, red and curly.

  ‘You’re a very pretty girl, Rusty, but you haven’t made the best of yourself. I mean, a fabulous film star like Veronica Lake you will never be, ducky, but we can make you look a bit better than you are now.’

  This was Virginia all over, and if Rusty had not previously made her acquaintance in Bexham, if they had not, for the last few years anyway, stopped to greet each other as they shopped in the High Street or queued for cinema seats or – nowadays – ration books, she did not suppose she would have accepted such condescension from Virginia. But after five days of a twelve-hour shift in the factory, quite frankly Rusty could not have cared if Virginia had decided to shave her head, so willing did she feel to trust her new friend’s taste. Now she lay staring up at the ceiling wondering what their two days off together in Plimpton would bring, for in her heart of hearts she really rather dreaded going dancing and such like with Virginia. Virginia was obviously
nothing if not fast. What worried Rusty more than anything was that Virginia thought nothing of earning her nylons, as she euphemistically called it.

  ‘What we do now, Rusty Todd, is put this on your head. Sit up, come here, that’s right. We put this stocking top on your head, and we curl the hair upwards, and don’t ask where I got all the hairpins and Kirby grips, and I won’t tell you a lie!’

  Rusty sat on Mrs Grady’s shabby dressing table stool and stared straight ahead of her. She did not care what Virginia made her look like; she just adored someone paying attention to her. It was probably because she had never had it before. Her mother and father had always treated her as either just another boy, or a spare pair of hands. For Rusty, to be treated as a potential woman was something quite new.

  ‘You doing me a Victory Roll?’

  ‘That’s the ticket.’ Virginia nodded at both their reflections in the three-sided maple dressing table mirror. ‘I pin this up all round the roll made by the stocking, which is very flattering. Leave you a bit of a fringe, or bangs as the GI Joes always call them. The good thing about the Victory Roll is it saves putting your hair in curlers at night, see?’

  Rusty nodded. She did not like to tell Virginia that she had never, not once, put her hair in curlers at night. That she had never done more than just wash her thick Titian locks, dry them, and shake them out like a dog after a dip.

  ‘I’ve never slept in curlers,’ was all she said.

  ‘No one ever sleeps in curlers, Rusty Todd,’ Virginia laughed. ‘The only thing you can do in curlers at night is stay awake. Why do you think so many of the girls at the factory come to work with the blessed things under their headscarves? Because it’s better than sleeping in them, and not only that, it’s a great deal easier to brush ’em out when you do get home.’

  ‘I hate my curly hair. I wish I had straight hair like yours.’ Rusty glanced up at Virginia’s classic pageboy hairstyle. It looked as though it had grown on her head unaided, so natural did it appear.

  ‘You wish you had straight hair like mine like you wish yourself a head of lice, Miss Todd,’ Virginia told her, handing her a powder compact and lipstick to try out without any reference to the fact that Rusty never wore make-up. ‘Thanks to your natural curls you will never have to have a Marcel perm or a Eugene wave, think of that. Besides,’ she looked at Rusty in the mirror, and her eyes glinted with the thought, ‘besides, just wait until you’ve been out on the town with me, Miss Rusty Todd. Now come on – time to go to work and turn back what Mrs Grady thinks passes as carpet and jitterbug, jitterbug, jitterbug.’

  Having finished powdering her nose and putting on lipstick Rusty looked at herself in the mirror. It would seem that Virginia had indeed performed miracles on her. She leaned forward and stared intently at her own image. She looked, well, she looked really rather girlish, not at all like Rusty Todd, more like – well, more like Virginia, a red-haired Virginia. For a second she wondered what her father and mother would say, but then, remembering how sad everything was back home in Bexham, she winked at herself. Nothing could be worse than how she had been, half boy, not wholly girl. Not even David Kinnersley had treated her as a girl. She turned back to the room and Virginia’s chatter.

  ‘Come on, ducky, time to dance!’ Virginia caught her hand, and of a sudden it seemed that Rusty really was dancing, just like people on newsreels in London. War it seemed was not all patriotic duty.

  For Judy, that night, though, it was. Driving for the WVS she had clocked up many, many miles around Sussex, sometimes not returning to Owl Cottage for several days at a time, as she found herself in demand for everything from hospital services to transporting much needed forage for livestock. The call for help had come to her late this particular evening, just as she had sat down for the first time for what seemed like weeks and, turning on the wireless, had started to eat a small pie that a grateful passenger had given her earlier in the day.

  ‘Raid on the dance hall at Churchester, many hurt.’

  Arriving there a scant half hour later Judy had never seen so much carnage in one small location, and yet like other more experienced members of the rescue teams she realised that it was the sort of civilian disaster that they had all been told to expect, but had not yet experienced. Dozens of young girls and servicemen of all nationalities dancing and enjoying themselves in one small area meant that they did not have a chance against a direct hit. The task of identifying the bodies of the victims was made virtually impossible by the thick cake of burnt dust that had been seared on the skin of their faces by the sheer force of the explosion. In the company of both fire and ambulance services Judy and her team worked ceaselessly, comforting the bereaved and helping the uncertain, feeding and sustaining.

  But as she said later to John Tate when they met by previous arrangement at the Three Tuns in Bexham, ‘What do you say to a woman who has just lost all her children in such an appalling way? And there are so many who are unidentified at this moment, so very, very many. People at home, quite unknowing, thinking their children are all right, not knowing, because they can’t identify the bodies. What do we tell them, and how?’

  John was home on leave from a desk job in Yorkshire, and although he was sympathetic, because he had so little time to spend with Judy he really did not want to talk about her work. Besides, she was looking so pretty, her dark hair loose for once, not bundled in a workaday wartime scarf, just caught up in slides on either side of a middle parting. Quite simple, but also feminine and appealing because her hair was long and shining. It was particularly appealing to John, after the really very married, very, very permed ladies who shared his military office in Yorkshire. So appealing that he found himself wanting to lean forward and stroke Judy’s hair, but he lit a cigarette instead.

  ‘For some reason it is always me whom they choose to break the bad news to the bereaved,’ Judy went on, staring out of the window towards the water outside. The rain had come too late to put out the terrible fire she had witnessed; the mist had come too late to put off the German bomber. It had all come too late – perhaps, she wondered, just like her and Walter. ‘The powers that be seem to think that I have a sympathetic face. Little do they know! Walter used to say that large brown eyes always make a person seem as if they are a good listener.’

  She smiled and turned her own large, brown eyes once more towards the darkness outside the window, towards the water that lapped the steps of the Three Tuns when the tide was in, towards the places where they had all kept boats as children, sailing off into the wide blue yonder with picnics tucked into the hold, or under seats, towards little coves where they could swim and run about without a thought for anything.

  ‘Mother told me that you heard from Walter, a few weeks ago?’

  ‘Yes. But you know. No leave, all leave cancelled. I suppose he’s too valuable, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’ll be home soon, Judy, I’m sure.’

  Judy stared at John suddenly. Are you sure, she wanted to ask him, are you quite sure, because I’m not. I have a definite feeling that I may never see Walter again.

  ‘It’s almost as if I was actually married into the Tate family without having a husband,’ she had said some days earlier to Mattie Eastcott, now back living with her father in Bexham, for reasons that the village thought they all knew, but still only guessed at. ‘And I can’t divorce myself from them, because I am so terribly fond of them all, but, you know, none of them are Walter. I married Walter.’

  ‘But John?’ Mattie had wondered. ‘He’s nice, isn’t he? You like John.’

  ‘John is not Walter, Mattie. Although he is very kind; and I know that I haven’t been very fair on him. As a matter of fact John is so utterly nice, it is almost embarrassing. He’s utterly, utterly nice, completely and utterly decent.’

  ‘And?’

  Judy had looked quizzical. ‘John is just not Walter, Mattie.’

  Now Judy thought fleetingly of her conversation with Mattie as she sat opposite John in the crowded pub.
Due to the noise of the other drinkers, most of whom seemed to be naval officers and sailors on leave, it was difficult to have a sustained conversation, but that was a relief in a way, because she could see that John really was not that interested in her WVS work, any more than she was fascinated by his desk job in the north, which was just as well, since it was top secret.

  ‘You’ll find my mother’s changed a bit, Judy,’ John said to her as they walked the mile back to Shelborne from the pub. ‘She says there’s nothing the matter with her, but actually we’re all a bit concerned.’

  ‘What is it?’ Judy asked anxiously. ‘Has she seen Dr Adams?’

  ‘You know my mother.’ John smiled. ‘Doesn’t think a lot of doctors.’

  ‘She likes Dr Adams.’

  ‘She likes to play bridge with Dr Adams. As a physician she thinks he’s a complete quack.’

  ‘What exactly seems to be the matter?’

  ‘You’ll see for yourself. She seems to have lost her famous zest. If only she could get involved in the WI or the WVS or the cottage hospital again, but – and we none of us know why – about a fortnight ago, she suddenly stopped all her usual activities and took to her bed; only comes down now in the evenings. Dad is not allowed to play his piano, nothing like that. The house has to remain quite silent. She says it’s in case of bombs, that we must listen out for bombs, but it’s not that at all. I’ve watched her; she seems to flinch if someone so much as shuts a door. It’s as if everything hurts her, or as if she thinks everything is going to hurt her.’

  ‘Or as if someone turned off a switch in her somewhere,’ Hugh said to Judy later, after Loopy had retired to bed having hardly uttered to Judy, or anyone else.