The child seemed hot; only slightly anxious, Florence took her temperature, found to her horror it was almost 101. She phoned the doctor, who said it was probably just teeth, told her to give Imogen a lukewarm bath and keep her quiet and he’d look in later.
Later was six, by which time Imogen was worse, wailing fretfully and endlessly, her little face covered with a fine red rash.
‘Let’s look in her mouth,’ said the doctor. ‘Ah, yes, thought so. Measles. Nasty. Keep her quiet, in a darkened room, her eyes are at risk, sponge her down, the worst’ll be over in a few days.’
A few days! Florence’s heart lurched. How could she go to London now, how could she leave her baby, even to the undoubtedly excellent ministrations of Nanny Baines? On the other hand, she had to go: Giles would be waiting on the doorstep of the house, there was no way she could get a message to him, she had no idea where he was; there was no one in London she could entrust with such a task, or even send in her stead.
Frantic now, she phoned Nanny Baines: would it be possible for her to come to the Priory and look after Imogen there, just for twenty-four hours? She wasn’t too bad, it was only measles, her meeting in London was crucial. Nanny, making it clear that Imogen would be far better in her care anyway, said she would come over first thing. Half relieved, half guilt-ridden, Florence put the phone down, went back to Imogen. She was asleep now, albeit fitfully. Children did recover so quickly, she told herself; by the morning she’d probably be fine.
By two o’clock in the morning, Imogen was not fine. Her temperature had dipped briefly and then soared to 104, and she kept sitting up in bed and shouting, her eyes wide but unseeing. Terrified, Florence phoned the doctor again; he said hallucinations in the high fever of measles were alarming but not unusual and stressed again that Imogen must be kept in the dark.
‘Phone me again, if the temperature goes any higher. Otherwise just keep sponging her down.’
It was an endless night; Muriel slept mercifully on, but grateful for that as she was, alone in the darkness, with her fear and her acute anxiety about the next day, about Giles, ceaselessly sponging the dry, fevered little body, Florence thought she might go mad. Towards morning, the child slept briefly, but woke again, struggling to climb blindly out of her cot, calling out in a strange hoarse voice. Florence took her temperature again and found it was almost a hundred and five. She tried to give her water, but Imogen seemed unable to swallow, and screamed ever louder; frantic, Florence rang the doctor, who arrived in ten minutes.
‘Scarlet fever,’ he said briefly, ‘an acute form, by the look of her, which affects the throat. I’m sorry. She must be got to the hospital immediately. I’ll call an ambulance.’
Imogen was put in an isolation unit; Florence was not even allowed in. She stood on the other side of the glass, watching her suffer, hearing her screams, desperately struggling to keep calm. The nurses were sympathetic, but overworked and brisk, the hospital doctor impatient with her, with her demands for information, for attention, to be allowed to be with Imogen.
‘Mrs Grieg,’ he said finally, ‘I would advise you very strongly to go home. It would be far better for your child as well as everyone else if you did that, rather than being here, getting in our way, distracting me and my staff from our work.’
‘Go home!’ said Florence, ‘Go home! Of course I won’t go home. I wouldn’t dream of going home, I want to know what’s going on, that’s all, is it so much to ask? That’s my baby in there, looking as if she’s dying. You’ve got to tell me what’s happening, you’ve simply got to.’
The doctor sighed; his face was cold and filled with dislike. He was clearly not used to articulate, voluble mothers. ‘Very well. Your child has an acute form of an acute illness. It is called scarlatina cynanchica, which won’t mean anything to you, but which is characterized by a seriously infected throat with the additional risk of damage to her kidneys. Now then, has knowing that really made you feel any better? I thought not. It could be days before there is any change. You cannot expect to spend that sort of time here, and in any case it is a well-known fact that children are far better without their mothers in hospital, they settle and therefore relax and do better. Now kindly leave your child to us. I do assure you we are doing all we can.’
‘I’ll stop interfering,’ said Florence, ‘but I’m not going. And you can’t make me.’
‘Mrs Grieg, this is my hospital and I can do what I wish.’
‘And that is my child, and you can’t. My father is a solicitor and I shall phone him and ask him precisely what my rights are—’
‘All right, all right,’ said the doctor sharply, ‘I really don’t have the time or the energy to argue with you. If you want to spend the next few days in the hospital waiting room, that is your prerogative. You will grow very tired and hungry, I fear, and be of no use to your child whatsoever. What I will not allow is for you to remain in this ward, where you are a physical obstacle and a barrier to its smooth running. And I do assure you that legally I am within my rights. Good day, Mrs Grieg. The waiting room is on the first floor.’
Florence turned, for a last anguished look at Imogen; she was now lying terrifyingly still in the small cot, her unseeing eyes staring into the dim ward. Florence felt desperate, as if she was wilfully abandoning the child to her death as she walked away, towards the lift and the uncertain sanctuary of the waiting room on the first floor. As she looked rather uncertainly along the corridors, she saw a sign, ‘To the Chapel’. She followed it; found a small, bare room with an altar and a few chairs. There was only one thing left for her to do and she did it: she sank onto her knees and prayed. She prayed and she prayed, for what seemed like hours, and as she had done on other occasions, in other crises, she made a bargain with God. If He spared Imogen, let her live, she would stay with Robert and never see or speak to Giles again.
Muriel was at the hospital with Florence that evening, sitting in the waiting room with her in a silent agony, as Imogen’s tiny frail body battled for life. At the Priory, as Cook slept peacefully under the influence of a couple of aspirin and two glasses of Muriel’s sherry, the phone rang unanswered with a series of trunk calls from London. Had Mrs Boscombe been on duty she would have been able to help, to pass on the information that Mrs Grieg was at the hospital with her baby, and to take a message to the effect that Lieutenant-Commander Henry’s three-week leave had been cancelled, that he had to report back to his ship the following evening. But Mrs Boscombe’s husband had a touch of influenza and she had taken the week off to nurse him back to health.
By midnight, the lieutenant-commander abandoned his post on the doorstep of the house in Sloane Avenue and stopped making calls from the telephone box on the corner of the street. He walked slowly and heavily back to the naval barracks, trying to persuade himself that Florence’s strange, distant response to his phone call and her failure to meet him, to get any kind of message to him, did not actually mean she no longer loved him, and failing utterly.
Chapter 18
Spring–Summer 1942
It was such a tiny thing that told Florence that God had answered her prayers; not the smile the sister gave her in place of a terse anxious nod as she arrived in the ward, nor the slight but un doubted improvement in Imogen’s breathing, not even the fact that her colour was better. It was the fact that she was resisting, in her own unique way, the attempts of the nurse to change her nappy. Until then she had lain listlessly, her head moving from side to side occasionally, her small body limp; now, as Florence watched, she suddenly clenched her fists, and tried – admittedly without success – to hit the arm that held up her skeletally thin legs. It was for Florence a moment of pure joy. She stood there watching her, her small tyrant, and laughed aloud. The nurse, exasperated, exhausted even, turned to look at her and managed to smile too; and when the hospital doctor arrived and told her the crisis was past, she simply said, ‘I know,’ and then, to her own enormous surprise (for she was not a demonstrative woman), threw her arms roun
d his neck and hugged him.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, plainly embarrassed, but he was pleased for her too, and a few days later, as Imogen’s health improved and her behaviour worsened, even allowed Florence to sit with her, feed her and bathe and change her.
She was not allowed home for another fortnight; as she grew stronger and Florence was able to think, to reassess her life, she recognized, even through her joy, the new and terrible pain that lay ahead of her. And it was terrible, truly terrible: the thought that she must spend the rest of her life without Giles, never seeing or hearing from him, never touching, holding him, feeling herself safe, cared for, loved. Time without him stretched before her, empty, cold, harsh, and all she could do was go into it, bravely, and not look back. She had to believe, indeed kept telling herself, that in time her unhappiness would ease; but most of the time she didn’t even want to believe it. While she suffered, while she hurt, there was still something of him in her; perversely she clung to the pain.
They both returned home. Florence was exhausted now, drained of anything but the most minimal energy. Where Imogen’s recovery had been swift and easy, her own was slow and difficult; she couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to eat, she found life impossible, almost unendurable. Imogen was tirelessly naughty and demanding, Muriel increasingly critical and querulous, and she felt totally and horribly alone. On the other hand, if Giles himself had telephoned, she thought wearily, and asked her to walk half a mile down the road to meet him, she would have difficulty persuading herself to do so. Only there was no question of him doing so, because he thought she didn’t love him any more. The short terse note that had arrived three days after she got home from the hospital made that very clear. And there had been no point in answering it, disabusing him of the notion, because of the promise she had made to God. That had been solemn, holy and binding and she was not going to break it; a primitive superstition about it possessed her, convincing her that if she did her baby would even now be snatched from her, transported back to the jaws of death.
She sat one morning, trying to persuade Imogen to eat some cereal, to get some nourishment into her emaciated body, her head aching almost intolerably, half listening to Muriel who was as usual denouncing something or other as outrageous.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked Florence.
‘No, I’m afraid I didn’t,’ said Florence. ‘Come on, darling, one more spoonful, there’s a good girl. Then you can have your nice orange juice.’
Cereal was not one of Imogen’s favourite foods. ‘No,’ she said. Florence held the spoon nearer the small closed mouth; Imogen raised her fist and hit it. The cereal spattered Florence, the wall and Cook, who was trying to clear the table. Imogen laughed.
‘Imogen, that was very naughty,’ said Florence feebly. ‘Sorry, Mother, what is outrageous?’
‘Bombing Bath,’ said Muriel. ‘London is one thing, it’s the capital, it should be expected, but Bath – They’re destroying our national heritage. It’s totally out of order.’
‘Mother, the whole point of war is out of order,’ said Florence, ‘and destroying anything they can is precisely what the Germans have in mind.’ Imogen was now smearing her small fists into the cereal and then rubbing them all over her face and into her hair.
Muriel looked at her with distaste. ‘Florence, that child should be in the care of a good nanny. She’s absolutely out of control.’
‘Oh don’t be ridiculous,’ said Florence. ‘Of course she’s not. Anyway, I’ve nearly lost her once, and if you think I’m going to give her up to some antediluvian old battle-axe, you’re very much mistaken.’
‘Molly Baines is not a battle-axe,’ said Muriel firmly, ‘and she could do a great deal more for Imogen than you are managing at the moment.’
Florence looked at her mother, feeling an almost overpowering inclination to shake her, and thought that if she had the strength she would.
Robert had been home to see Imogen while she was still in the hospital, had arranged forty-eight hours’ compassionate leave. Florence was intrigued as well as frightened by his visit, still unsure as to whether his apparent acceptance of the child was genuine, or a hideously cunning trap set for her. He had phoned the Priory from Scotland one evening, been told by Muriel that Florence was at the hospital with Imogen, and had arrived two days later, anxious and supportive, had stood gazing at Imogen through the glass of her small cubicle, had pressed Florence to go home and let him stay so that she could go and have some rest. She had refused, so deep was her terror of him, of his manipulative talents, of what he might manage against all odds to do: inveigle his way into the cubicle, hurt Imogen there, kidnap her even; but she had against all logic been impressed by his apparent devotion, by the long hours he spent sitting with her in the waiting room, or standing in the corridor of the isolation ward. It added to the nightmare of her fear and exhaustion, of not knowing where reality ended and delusion began; she longed to trust him, longed to believe there was hope for them all, but she could not, dared not, so great were the risks, so hideous the dangers.
Her wretchedness over Giles seemed to have little to do with her relationship with Robert, she had no kind of sense that as her love affair died so might her marriage be healed; the two things were impossibly and brutally distanced from, bore no possible relation to, one another. One day, perhaps, she would get a per spec tive on them; for now she could only struggle mindlessly on.
She scooped Imogen out of her high chair and carried her into the garden before she actually started to scream. She did that all too easily these days and it irritated Muriel, usually provoking yet another in their long series of rows. Life, she thought, gazing at the lyrically lovely morning, was pretty bloody awful altogether.
‘Good morning, ma’am. Lovely morning, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is,’ said Clarissa, smiling. ‘A very lovely morning.’
She liked the Americans who were filling the country now, officially allies, with their easy manners, their smiles – and their money. Overpaid, oversexed and over here was the tag bestowed upon them, and all three suited them very well. They were fun to flirt with, dine with, be with; men regarded them with well-founded dislike – jealousy really, she thought, but she had yet to meet a woman who felt that way. And at this lowest-of-the-low point of the war, when it seemed to have been going on for ever and they didn’t appear to be getting anywhere at all, when it was hard even to remember how it felt to have money, clothes, decent food, when excitement and patriotism lacked any kind of novelty, to put it mildly, it was very nice to spend time with people with so much more of an upbeat attitude to life.
Which Jack hardly had at the moment; if she heard once more how fed up and bored he was, she thought she would scream. She had spoken to him the night before, and of the ten minutes they had been on the phone he had moaned for eight – she had timed him. The remaining two had been taken up with her trying to tell him she was about to be posted to Dartmouth, a fact in which he had shown outrageously little interest.
She had enjoyed her spell at Greenwich as an officer cadet; apart from anything else, the sheer beauty of the place, the grandeur, made a wonderful respite from the drabness of so much of wartime life. The Wrens dined every night in the great Painted Hall, spent their days in the fine lofty rooms and long, light corridors; the only thing she didn’t like was sleeping in the cellars. They were safe from the bombs, but Clarissa found it stuffy and claustrophobic.
And life was such fun, the steady flow of naval officers into their lives, endless parties, endless flirtations; she felt much of the time (and she was not sure HM Navy would have approved of this) as if she was a young girl again, enjoying grown-up life for the first time.
She had finally, after lengthy discussions with her superior officer, settled for the administrative category; she would be posted to Dartmouth and be responsible for the practical organization of a Wrennery there. She knew she would be good at that; her talents for organization, for communication, would be
very well employed. Several of the girls had put in for overseas postings; volunteers were required for Singapore, Ceylon, India.
If she wasn’t a married woman, she would have applied for such a posting herself – but she was. Unfortunately, she thought irreverently, and then crushed the thought. God, who would have imagined that the joyful passion and friendship she had felt for Jack only two years earlier would have turned in the direction of weariness and near disinterest. And was that the war, or was it just the relentless progress of marriage? Clarissa wondered. Probably both. She had noticed an alarmingly increased awareness of all the attractive men around her lately, and an increasing desire to flirt with them.
She missed May, she thought, more than Jack; dear May, with her cheerful irreverence, her sharp honesty, her tireless quest for fun. Clarissa was due to meet her in a couple of weeks in London; she could hardly wait.
‘I’d tell you it was bloody awful here without you,’ May had written, ‘if it wouldn’t make your head even bigger. Oh, what the hell. It’s bloody awful here without you. Only good thing is the GIs. Do I enjoy them! Now an evening with them really does make me forget about you, Duchess. And can they dance – especially the coloured ones. They’re better than Fred Astaire. Anyway, I don’t suppose Fred could jitterbug.’
She wondered if there was any chance she could wangle May down to Dartmouth. She was a very competent driver.
She was just leaving her little office that evening when a head came round her door.
‘Evening, Third Officer Compton Brown.’
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