The country needed his father, Ned thought, or rather, someone like him, dragging buried heads from the sand, forcing a realistic appraisal of what was happening. The nearest anybody seemed to have got to seriously defending the realm and its inhabitants at this stage had been in the issuing of gas masks. It was generally felt, learning from the lessons of the Great War, that the greatest danger would be from poisonous gas and roughly ninety per cent of the population of London had been given them: the shortest expedition to the corner shop was not supposed to be undertaken without one.
Well, there was nothing he could do about it; except continue to listen to his father. That would be his war effort for the time being. If war was declared, then he wasn’t sure what he would want to do.
The announcement looked so extremely splendid there on the court pages of The Times and the Telegraph; Diana still couldn’t quite believe it had happened. She kept smiling at the ring on her finger, which had been there for nearly a week, but she still hadn’t got used to the look of it, the feel of it, even. It was very beautiful, a row of five diamonds, catching and reflecting the light every time she moved her hand. Johnathan had had it in his pocket and he’d produced it after she’d said yes. It was all very romantic. He said he was sorry it wasn’t a family heirloom – with his being the third son they’d run out of those – so he’d chosen it and he hoped so much she’d like it. If she didn’t, they could change it; the shop in Hatton Garden had agreed to that and they could choose another. She didn’t want that, she loved the way he’d chosen it, it was so romantic, a bit unlike him really, and she told him it was perfect and she loved it and she loved him, which she did of course, so very much. She couldn’t imagine now how she could ever have thought she didn’t.
She knew when she had actually fallen in love with him. Looking back, it was that day they first went hunting together, the first weekend he’d been to stay, and thank goodness her mother had thought of asking him, otherwise she’d have been stuck with Ned Welles, and what a pain he’d turned out to be. Good-looking, and very amusing, of course, but far too pleased with himself. That father of his was just a joke – no wonder Ned’s mother, with her really ridiculous name, Persephone, had run away. It was quite a story, that: he was an artist who was painting her and she fell in love with him and Sir James was – or so Ned said – more upset about him taking the painting, which had cost the earth, than his wife.
Diana’d often wondered if Ned, who was spectacularly good-looking, took after the wicked and beautiful Persephone. She asked Michael if Ned ever saw his mother, and Michael said only about once a year, that Ned was still terribly hurt and couldn’t forgive her for abandoning him. It was no wonder really he wasn’t like any of the other men she knew, with that sort of thing in his background.
She wondered if he’d seen the announcement and what he’d thought. Not that she cared, of course. He just wasn’t her type, never had been, right from the beginning, and she’d been so happy when Johnathan told her he was in love with her.
Now they were engaged, officially, and his parents were coming down to stay with her parents to discuss Things with a capital T. They had decided already that it mustn’t be a long engagement, because of the state of the world, but if war was declared – and her father seemed to think it was inevitable – Johnathan would want to join his father’s old regiment. If he was going to do that and leave her and go away to France, she wanted a home of her own in London. She could decorate it to her own taste, and she and Johnathan could give smart parties and she could have her own life at last. Well, shared with him, of course. She couldn’t wait to be a good wife, look after him, and she thought she would learn to cook and entertain his clients and—‘Diana, darling!’ It was her mother. ‘Telephone. Johnathan.’
He rang a lot at the moment; it was lovely. He kept telling her how much he enjoyed just talking to her and they were going to start house-hunting next week. Oh, it was all so exciting.
She ran out to the hall, picked up the telephone. ‘Hello, darling,’ Diana said. ‘How are you today? Have you seen the announcement – isn’t it all too exciting?’
‘Come on, come on, pass pass pass – Rory, not down there, look out, come on, now, run run – Callum, that’s good, go on, Mick, you too.’
Tom stood still for a moment, looked at the football pitch covered with little boys, who were in their turn covered with mud, and thought how very happy he was. It was a good moment. Very good.
Becoming a school governor had expanded into being football coach on Saturday afternoons. He would have liked to do so after school as well, but he couldn’t get away from Pemberton’s early enough. It didn’t seem to matter; he was a good coach, and the boys loved him. Him and the sessions. He had changed football at St Joseph’s Primary from being little better than an excuse for the boys to run up and down into a game that was to be given serious consideration and effort.
‘Don’t come and waste my time – I don’t mind about yours,’ he said to them after the very first session. The boys took it seriously, worked hard, and now were divided into two teams who played each other, and winning a game was a prize worthy of exaltation. Tom’s next ambition was to form a school team and set up a competition between other primary schools; this happened at secondary-school level, but not enough at primary, and he was trying to convince governors and masters from other schools in the district. It wasn’t easy, but he was making progress and a couple of fixtures were set towards the end of term.
He had expanded the role of a school governor into being the lover of the deputy headmistress. This had proved easier than setting up the football league. Laura was one of the new breed of women; a couple of decades earlier, she would have been a suffragette. As well as belonging to the Labour Party, she was heavily involved in the local branch of the Co-operative Women’s Guild (motto ‘Of a whole heart cometh hope’) and held passionate views on female equality. She believed that women had the right not only to equal opportunities and equal pay, but equal lives; and that, in her view, meant taking sexual pleasure for themselves should they desire it while refusing to cooperate on demand with their husbands. Men should give the time and attention to wooing their wives in bed each and every time they wanted them, being sensitive to their needs and generally behaving in a way to which they were not accustomed, or even prepared to be accustomed.
Tom had not had the opportunity before to behave either sensitively or insensitively in bed and was an enthusiastic pupil, which meant doing exactly what she wanted – at first, anyway.
It had been a complete shock the first time she had made clear her availability to him; nice girls, he had always been told – primarily by Angela, but also his parents, by implication, and by the joshing confidences shared with his friends – didn’t go to bed with men until they had rings on their fingers. Not only was it hugely dangerous, in that they might become pregnant; it also meant they were cheap, their most precious possession given away to be talked, boasted and even sniggered about by the recipient, the right to a respectable life, a white wedding, an honourable husband gone for ever.
So it was that sitting by the fire one night, quite early on in their relationship – which had moved swiftly from the purely professional to the personal, cool friendship, to warm interest, to attraction, and thence to a mutual desire – and after an excellent supper cooked by Laura, in the tiny flat she rented, she suddenly removed his hand from her thigh (a new development) and proposed that they might actually go next door to her bedroom and into her bed. Tom was fairly shocked, completely terrified and absolutely overwhelmed.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘come along. Or don’t you want to?’
‘Yes, of course I do!’ he said.
‘Well, then. We don’t want to go off the boil, do we?’
‘No. No, we don’t. But—’
‘Oh, I know you haven’t done it before,’ she said, standing up, plumping the cushions and carrying the coffee cups over to the sink, for all the world as if he wou
ld now kiss her goodnight and start on the long cycle ride home. ‘Never mind, I have. And don’t worry about getting me in the family way either, I can deal with that. Oh, come on, Tom Knelston,’ she added impatiently. ‘You’re the most gorgeous man I’ve ever set eyes on and I can’t quite believe my luck, so you can’t let me down now.’
And he didn’t.
Laura was like no one he had ever known. She and her younger sister, Babs, had been brought up virtually single-handed by their mother, a formidable woman, also a teacher. Her husband was unable to work after losing a leg in the First World War, depression overtaking him entirely, his pension pitifully inadequate. She worked all the hours God sent her, putting Laura in charge of the household from the age of eight, when Mr Leonard’s feeble efforts at caring for it and the girls failed altogether and he took to his bed for the remaining five years of his life. She never gave up on him; she had an understanding of mental illness that was decades before her time and brought the girls up to be of the same persuasion. Babs married young and already had two children, but Laura was her mother reborn, tough, determined and idealistic, with an equal capacity for hard work. Nothing fazed her; she drove through obstacles scarcely acknowledging them. She had risen from junior teacher to deputy headmistress in three years, seizing opportunities when they arose and then doing whatever was necessary to capitalise on them. Her pupils loved her, for she inspired as well as taught them; she had already inaugurated an annual storytelling prize among all the schools in the area, against the wishes of many of the headmasters, who said it would be too much work. She looked at them witheringly and told them she was prepared to do whatever was necessary herself if they were not. She was pretty, charming – and very sexy. If Tom had been asked to create his perfect woman, it would have been Laura Leonard who stood before him, holding out her hand and inviting him into her bed.
But it wasn’t just the sex; their interests and passions – mostly political – bound them as closely. Deeply socialist, horrified by the long years of unemployment endured by the working class during the dreadful recession of the thirties, they listened in an agony of disbelief to Laura’s little wireless breaking the news that the Tory candidate, one Quintin Hogg, had won the first by-election after Munich.
Tom, largely as a result of a talk held at one of the Labour Party meetings, was becoming fiercely and angrily focused on the lack of medical provision for the poor and the constant dread of illness in the millions of families who simply could not afford a doctor. He told Laura of a dreadful night when his little brother Arthur had developed a temperature of a hundred and four. Scarlet fever was feared, with its inevitable hospitalisation and high death rate; the family weren’t on the panel of the local GP (whereby a small weekly fee ensured treatment if genuinely required) and were afraid to call him. Many long hours of spongeing down and homespun medicines saw him through; but it had been a night that had burrowed deep into Tom’s soul.
All these things and more bound him and Laura together in fierce and crusading zeal; they would see things put right, they told one another, they would work for justice and equality and rights for all. They weren’t sure how, except via the somewhat unsatisfactory aegis of the local Labour Party – although the Women’s Guild provided a more satisfactory outlet for Laura’s energies and ideals – but they were absolutely united in the clear vision of what should be done. It was a strong tie.
Ending the relationship with Angela had been awful; she had cried and cried. Tom had done the honourable thing, and not let things drag on.
‘But I don’t see what I’ve done wrong,’ she kept saying. ‘We’re always so happy together.’
Useless to say that the happiness had been a counterfeit, the togetherness no more than a sweet illusion; she would not have understood. And simpler, if crueller, to say he had found someone else and he could not therefore carry on seeing Angela, and he was very, very sorry and it had been wonderful, but it would be wrong of him to allow things to continue.
Once she had stopped crying, she became angry, telling him he was a rotter, that he had no business to abandon her after all she had done for him, ‘listening to you going on and on about your work, it was so boring, and sitting through films I hated, and cycling out when it was almost raining, and coming back early from outings so you could listen to the six o’clock news with my father, and those picnics, all those picnics I made. You enjoyed them, didn’t you?’
Tom said she had indeed been the perfect girlfriend, and he was sorry he’d bored her and the picnics had been wonderful, but it had to end now.
It had taken Angela a long time to get over it. She was not to be seen at village dances, or the cinema, or indeed anywhere at all, apart from Parsons; and this made Tom feel truly terrible. Then his godmother told him that Angela had taken up with the head of Home Furnishings and was very taken with him, and he with her, and Tom relaxed and was able to fully enjoy Laura – in every sense of the word – and contemplate from such unlikely places as muddy football pitches how extremely happy he was. If it hadn’t been for the shadow of war hanging over everything, he would have said he was perfectly happy. If war was declared, which everybody said it wouldn’t be – even the politicians couldn’t be that stupid – he would clearly go and fight, along with all his friends and colleagues. Meanwhile, they could all only wait and trust and pray they were in good hands.
Then, at the dentist one evening, nursing a nasty toothache, he picked up a rather dog-eared copy of The Times; it was open at the Court Circular and he was about to turn it over quickly, in search of some news that mattered, when he saw a familiar name and learned that Diana Southcott had become engaged to some titled creature from Yorkshire. No doubt they deserved one another: two toffs with a single purpose – to breed more toffs. While not wishing Diana ill, but remembering the way she’d looked down on him, literally as well as figuratively, as he stood in the drain, he couldn’t wish her well either. She was very beautiful though, no one could deny that, and sexy too, even at sixteen.
‘Mr Knelston, do come in, the dentist will see you now.’ And all thoughts of Diana Southcott, her beauty and her sexiness, were wiped out by half an hour of excruciating pain followed by an evening of excruciating pleasure with Laura Leonard.
Chapter 6
1940
He should have gone into the Air Force, Johnathan thought. It would have eased the guilt he felt to have risked that almost certain death. A lot of his friends had chosen that path, and many, many of them were gone, their planes shot down. Piers, his beloved eldest brother, so handsome, so dashing, had been one of them, one of the Few, the fighter pilots taking to the skies in their crazily tiny Spitfire planes, and into open warfare with the German Luftwaffe. ‘Never,’ said Winston Churchill – now, thank God, in charge of the country and the war – his rumbling, roaring tones spilling out of the wireless, ‘was so much owed by so many to so few.’ And Piers had been among them, grinning out of photographs taken before he was sent up, complete with the statutory accessories of dangling cigarette, fur-collared flying jacket and parachute. They were the bravest of the brave, all of them: it was like facing a firing squad, day after day, going up, coming back, seemingly inviolate.
Only finally Piers wasn’t; stalking one German plane he was spotted by another which opened fire on him and his plane went down into the sea. Everyone said death must have been instant, but Johnathan was very much of the opinion that everyone could be wrong; there was the hell of being engulfed in flames, the terror, the waiting for the end as he plunged down. Nothing very instant about any of it.
The pain of losing Piers was appalling. He tried to find comfort in Diana but although she made an effort to console him, he sensed that her emotions lacked substance. She had not known Piers very well, and Johnathan tried to make excuses for her on that basis, but that was not the point; it was his grief that he expected her to understand, and she did not. She had never experienced any serious loss herself and seemed incapable of imagining it. He wa
s discovering, not for the first time, that she lacked emotional imagination.
He finally despaired when she said that of course it was dreadful, but it had been a hero’s death and he must be so proud of Piers, as if that made the loss less savage. Angry with her, and trying to conceal it, he went to see his parents and his brother Timothy without her. They were all devastated, their father particularly so. His mother had somehow prepared herself for it, and Timothy was distracted from the worst excesses of his grief by an imminent naval posting to Norway, but Sir Hilary seemed completely inconsolable. He wandered around the house like a shadow, and could often be heard weeping behind closed doors. Years later he explained to Johnathan that it had been made far worse by having seen so many young men die in the trenches in the First World War, but for now he withdrew into himself, unable to share how he felt even with his wife. Piers had been his firstborn and his heir, the love of his life to a great extent. Hilary had married Vanessa out of duty, pressed by his own father to continue the line. He was fond of her, of course, and she was a wonderful consort, but in no way was she a soulmate and never less of one than now. Johnathan, recognising Diana’s failure in this regard, only to a far lesser degree, realised that his father, like him, felt absolutely alone. He was just a little able to convey this to him, and could see it was some kind of comfort.
He stayed at Guildford Park for longer than he had planned; two weeks went past, and he would have extended them had he not been ordered back to his regiment. He had joined the Welsh Guards, his father and grandfather’s regiment, without waiting for call-up as had his brothers. His regiment was still in training in Scotland and he went straight up there without going to see Diana. She was living with her parents in Hampshire again, since London was so dangerous, and he had no desire to see them, without being quite sure why. A psychiatrist could have told him it was in part at least because both their sons were still unscathed and on a subconscious level he saw this as a piece of injustice. The fact that it could change any moment didn’t help very much. Michael was at Barts, caring nightly for the casualties of the Blitz, and Richard, the younger boy, had joined his father’s regiment and was, like Johnathan, awaiting a posting.
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