A Question of Trust

by Penny Vincenzi

  Tom looked up at her as he collapsed, breathing heavily, into the wheelchair. His eyes were huge and bright in his flushed face, and his smile, a huge, brilliant smile, was oddly unsteady.

  ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘oh, Sister, I love you.’

  Then it was Sister’s face that was flushed and almost shocked, but she smiled again as she said, ‘I don’t think the young lady would quite want to hear such nonsense. Now go along – and mind, they said you could only have ten minutes with her, she’s very tired.’

  And Tom, dizzy suddenly with shock, lack of food, and exhaustion, slumped back into the wheelchair and was borne by Nurse Molly to Ward F where lay his happiness, his future and his love.

  Chapter 8

  1944

  ‘There must be something I can do. I’m sick of being treated like a child, stuck away at school, when most girls my age are doing something useful for the war effort, working in factories and stuff like that, joining the forces …’

  ‘The forces! At your age! Don’t be so ridiculous, Alice. Quite apart from being far too young, you’ve no idea what life would be like, the sort of people you’d come up against.’

  ‘What do you mean? Oh, you think they’re common. For heaven’s sake! Even Princess Elizabeth is in the ATS, so it must be all right. Anyway, I don’t have to do that – I could work in a factory like I said. Please, please, Mummy. Couldn’t you and Daddy just consider letting me leave that stupid place, stuck away in the back of beyond? I hate it, I’ve always hated it.’

  ‘Of course you don’t hate it, Alice.’ If Jean Miller’s gentle face could have glared it would have done. The best she could manage was a deep frown. Her husband was very good at glaring. And scowling. And shouting. He would have dealt with this absurd nonsense. But he had gone to see a client in London – no doubt why Alice had chosen this moment to go on the attack. ‘It’s one of the best girls’ schools in the country, and you’re very lucky to be there …’

  ‘It’s not a fine school, and I’m very unlucky to be there. The girls are all such snobs, and all they think about is who they might marry, and how soon.’

  ‘Well, there are worse things to think about.’

  ‘Mummy! What about getting qualifications, a career? How can a husband compare with that? I want to do something – something useful.’

  ‘Alice, the most useful thing you can do is stay where you are so we don’t have to worry about you. And get on with studying for your exams, pass them well. You’re not even sixteen yet—’

  ‘I will be in three weeks. Anyway, Granny was married when she was fifteen!’

  ‘That was rather a long time ago. And I thought you despised marriage?’ said Jean, seeing a flaw in Alice’s argument, and able to make a point.

  ‘No, I despise people who think marrying the right man, by which they mean rich and not common, is the only thing they want to do.’

  ‘Alice, this is turning into a rather silly conversation. The answer’s no. Now I’m very busy. If you really want to help, you can sew the Cash’s name tapes onto your summer uniform, so that I can get on.’

  ‘With what? Going to the hospital, I suppose, pushing your trolley round. I’d quite like to do something like nursing. How old are the probationers? Sixteen? I thought so. But you wouldn’t even let me do that, I bet. Oh, it’s so unfair.’

  ‘Alice, listen to me. If you’re so keen to have a career – and I think nursing is an excellent one for a girl – then you should stay on at school and take your School Certificate and your Higher.’

  Whereupon Alice left the room, banging the door behind her.

  Her mother sighed. Alice was such a pretty girl, and she and her husband had high hopes for her; talented and popular, she attracted boys effortlessly, and was always the belle of the ball at the junior tennis club dances. The Millers weren’t quite in the league of those whose daughters were presented at court, but they moved in a well-heeled middle-class society and Alice’s prospects as the wife of a rich and successful man were, they felt, extremely good.

  Alice had been born in 1928, shortly after her parents’ first wedding anniversary. At thirty-five and thirty-two, Alec and Jean were a little old to be bride and bridegroom; and Jean, who was not a beautiful girl, had expected to remain a spinster. Being both bright and personable, she became a secretary to a firm of solicitors in Ascot. Her boss, one of the partners, who would have been on the brink of retirement had not the Great War removed two of the three younger partners, invited her and her widowed mother to a Christmas party at his home a year after she joined the firm and there she met Alec, his nephew. He was charmed by Jean, having had his heart broken by a girl who had chosen not to wait for his return from the front, and he had embarked on his long-postponed degree course in law at Durham University with a view to never exposing himself to a broken heart again. However, Jean, with her gentle ways and pleasant looks, so clearly the opposite of the girl who had jilted him, won his heart almost against his will. They were married in 1927, Alec taking up a position at his uncle’s firm.

  They settled in Sunningdale. Which, with its solid, aspirational respectability; large houses, many of them built in the newly fashionable mock-Tudor design; and close proximity to Ascot to lend it further class, suited them very well. With Jean as tireless hostess and a large circle of friends among the Sunningdale wives, very important to an ambitious man, he rose quite quickly to become one of the area’s leading solicitors.

  They had hoped that Alice would be the first of many children, but that was not to be. They bore their disappointments stoically, although after the fourth miscarriage Jean was so distressed that she told Alec she couldn’t face any more. They considered adoption, but neither of them was particularly keen. ‘The thing is,’ Jean said to her closest friend Mildred, who was the only person in the world she had confided in, ‘one never knows quite how the child might turn out. Some of these girls come from very doubtful backgrounds.’

  In all other ways, however, things went well for them: when Alec’s uncle retired, he became the firm’s senior partner. They acquired a larger house (still Tudor style) with a big rhododendron-filled garden, a maid, a part-time gardener and a cook. Jean continued to play the perfect wife; her only failure indeed had been to produce the longed-for boy, but Alec was so proud of his daughter that he managed to overcome his disappointment and his pride in her was enormous. She was a pretty little girl, with shining fair curls, very large blue eyes, amazing dimples and a rosebud mouth; she was also, being sweet natured and generous, very popular with other little girls, and her social life was hectic from her earliest years.

  The Millers had at first thought themselves safe from the worst excesses of Mr Hitler’s efforts, and in many ways Sunningdale life appeared largely unchanged to the casual observer, apart from an absence of any young men; its older residents continued to run their businesses, and everyone played golf, tennis and bridge as they always had done. The main problem, endlessly bewailed over bridge and supper tables, was that so much of the domestic help was no longer available; the females had gone to work in factories, and the only gardeners to be found were rather elderly and unsuited to heavy work. Food was on the plain side, and making palatable meals from powdered eggs and Spam a challenge, but there was a war on, the women all kept reminding one another, and one had to do one’s bit.

  There were very few cars on the roads, largely because of petrol rationing, and Alice and her friends could cycle about in perfect safety, often into Bagshot almost five miles away, where they even bought that unimaginable luxury, ice cream. The only serious traffic, and an indication that all was not as it had been, was the long convoys of army tanks and lorries, packed with soldiers who would wave and shout at the children as they travelled to the southern ports to be shipped into war.

  But it proved not so safe after all. There was a munitions factory at nearby Longcross, which was a target for bombing, and one afternoon during the summer of 1940, a squadron of bombers had flown over the
golf courses and manicured gardens of Sunningdale and been attacked by Spitfires.

  The Millers were badly shaken by this, and agreed that while it wasn’t dangerous enough for the whole family to move, Alice’s life must not be endangered. She was sent to board at a famous cradle for well-bred young ladies, St Catherine’s, near Taunton in the depths of Somerset, where she missed home and her friends dreadfully.

  * * *

  When the war was over, Johnathan read about the Battle of Monte Cassino and marvelled that he was still alive to do so. Fifty thousand men dead; how war diminished the meaning of those numbers.

  His greatest fear was of becoming brutalised; and he knew, of course, that to a degree he had been. No one could fight as he had done, see the things he had seen, and emerge unscathed. He knew he was desensitised to a degree, less susceptible, far from the gentle young man he had been. But he had clung to a determination not to be entirely hardened as if to a religion, to believe in the rightness of the cause he was fighting for, and to see that as the justification for all that he had been asked to do. He had to remain true to himself. But it was never easy, and often seemed impossible.

  He would never forget, and was glad that he would not, the morning after the bombing of the abbey, crowning as it did the lovely town of Monte Cassino, all reduced to a stark dead rubble. Only about forty people remained in the town: six monks, sheltering in the vaults of the abbey, a handful of tenant farmers, orphaned and abandoned children, and some badly wounded and dying. The old abbot led them down the path, reciting his rosary as they came; Johnathan found it impossible not to weep. That it was a great victory – for the abbey was not an isolated fortress, but part of the great Gustav Line stretching from the mountains to the sea – seemed at that moment irrelevant.

  He had arrived in Italy towards the end of 1943 having been heavily involved in the fighting in North Africa; but he had got the sand out of his shoes, as he put it, and had been part of the successful invasion of Sicily. One of his happier memories had been the landing in the Bay of Salerno near Naples. The villagers had treated them with sheer joy, cheering when they saw the Allied flag. It was Christmas time; he ate tinned turkey, and tried not to think about Christmases past at Guildford Park, the vast tree in the hall, the Christmas dinner table laden with goodies – obscenely now, it seemed to him – midnight service in the village church, Boxing Day shoots. Some of his fellow officers, and indeed his men, took comfort from their happy memories; Johnathan found them tantalising and hurtful. He tried and entirely failed to even find any kind of reality in Diana and her place in his past or his future. That frightened him more than anything.

  But there were good things: and one of them was the incredible mishmash of nationalities who formed the Allied troops. Americans, Indians, New Zealanders, Canadians, French and the Gurkhas. Archetypal Englishman that he was, inclined to be awkward when confronted by any foreigner, he found an entirely new form of easy camaraderie: epitomised just before the worst of the fighting began, by a football match, followed by tea parties, a concert, a great deal of wine and a film at the camp cinema. He could never remember afterwards what the film was – some kind of absurd comedy – but the whole day somehow stood out for them all, a beacon of cheerful common sense, shining against the insanity of war.

  The run-up to the fighting was incredibly difficult; they could do nothing by day without drawing enemy fire, so resupplying was all done at night; there was a problem with the water and few of the wells contained anything fit to drink, which didn’t help.

  They were relieved at one point at night by a troop of men from the Royal Fusiliers who moved in silently, boots wrapped in sandbags, the only sound the croaking of frogs. In the marshes. Incredibly, Johnathan found himself at breakfast staring at one of his greatest friends from Eton, found himself greeted with a clap on the back and, ‘Good Lord, Gunners, nice to see you. How are you, old chap?’ It was almost in the Dr Livingstone league of British understatement.

  The bloody, savage fighting finished in victory on 18 May when the long battle was over; exhausted, they learned of the fall of Rome on 4 June.

  Now what? he thought.

  One thing was settling into firm resolution in his mind: he could not return, if he ever got home, to his rather pointless job in the City. He wanted, indeed needed, to go home to Guildford Park, to work on the farm and the estate, to build a more satisfactory future for himself than one based on the rise in value of the stock exchange, a growing client list, and an annual increase in salary. How Diana would fit into that future, he could not begin to imagine. Or even think about.

  * * *

  ‘Just listen to this.’ Laura looked up from the Daily Mirror. ‘Fortnum and Mason are stocking grapes, peaches – at seven and six each, I might say – and chocolates! Oh, it’s disgusting. And did you know, the Dorchester is packed every night with its own extra-deep shelter, lest the poor toffs get caught out by an air raid. How can this still be happening? When ordinary people are homeless and often hungry. Oh, it makes me so angry. How can it be allowed?’

  Tom said rather feebly he didn’t know; in truth, at that moment neither did he care. He was too depressed.

  Both of them had finally been released from hospital, Tom invalided out of the army, Laura returning to school part-time until the spring term. They were both living at her little flat, while he tried to come to terms with his new, empty situation and what he might do: even with the small diamond on her finger, this could never have happened before the war, a young couple, unmarried, living under the same roof. Tom’s parents were shocked and Laura’s headmaster was very vocal on the subject.

  ‘It’s a bad example for the children, and the parents won’t like it. If the wedding isn’t very soon, Laura, I shall have to consider my position.’

  Laura knew that his wasn’t a strong position, as half the staff had been called up, and she was an excellent deputy headmistress; but just the same it all added to Tom’s general unhappiness and sense of uselessness. He sat about a great deal, feeling wretched.

  Laura, working extremely hard, finally ran out of sympathy, ordering him one afternoon to go and see Mr Pemberton. ‘He’d be pleased anyway and you never know, he might want you back …’

  ‘Even if he did, I can’t keep a wife on what he pays me, and—’

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ said Laura, and her face took on the expression that he knew there was no arguing with. ‘Your wife, as you call her, is working, and earning a decent wage, and we can perfectly manage between us, so I don’t see the point of not going. In fact, I want you to go and if you don’t, I shall be quite annoyed, and you know you don’t like that.’

  Tom didn’t, and so it was that he went to see Mr Pemberton that very afternoon.

  Laura walked into the flat to find the table laid, a delicious smell of cooking in the air, and even a bottle of cider chilling in cold water in the sink.

  And Tom actually smiling.

  ‘So – what’s this about then?’ she said, and he told her. Mr Pemberton had indeed been pleased to see him; but Betty had told him the dreadful news before he went in: that Nigel had been killed two years earlier, in action in Italy.

  ‘He’s been very down ever since, Tom, can’t seem to come to terms with it, and Mrs Pemberton’s been quite ill with it, so that must be dreadful for him too.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said Tom, ‘and don’t think I don’t feel really sorry for him, Laura – he was so proud of Nigel, and he was going to take over the business, of course.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you’ve told me many times,’ said Laura, taking off her hat and looking at him. She found Tom’s admiration for Mr Pemberton and his unquestioning acceptance that Nigel should automatically inherit the business hugely irritating.

  ‘Laura, he’d been shot and they didn’t hear for several weeks, imagine how dreadful—’

  ‘Happens to everybody,’ said Laura briskly.

  ‘Yes, I know but … There was a letter from his commanding office
r, saying all the usual things, praising Nigel’s courage and his leadership qualities, and assuring them that he had died instantly. He asked me what I thought about that,’ Tom added, ‘if it was true. He said I’d know, having been in the army, if they all said that. I hadn’t an idea, of course, but I said I was sure it was. True, I mean.’

  ‘That was the right thing to say,’ said Laura.

  ‘I hope so. “I’ve found it very difficult to bear, Tom,” he said. “At times, I – well, never mind.” I knew what he meant – he’d wanted to die himself. And he said, and this was the worst thing, that he’d loved him, more than he’d ever loved anyone. And now he’d gone, the world seemed very empty. Empty and dark, he said. It was so dreadful, Laura, so sad.

  ‘Then he said he wanted to help me as much as he could with passing my article exams and then maybe one day – well, he said, “I’m very fond of you, Tom. I always have been.” And then he said that with Nigel gone, and no one else to take his place, if I worked really hard and I became a partner – a partner, me! – who knows what might happen? “I’m not young any more,” he said, and then he stopped talking and I don’t even dare think what he might have meant.’

  ‘Well, I do,’ said Laura. ‘He was saying he saw you as his heir. And quite right too. Why not?’