‘Good evening, sir.’
They both laughed; the formality was a joke between them. Lieutenant-Commander Jerry Fortescue was based for a spell at Greenwich, champing (like Jack) to be back in action; he was amusing, she liked him. He was that rare but irresistible thing in a man, a happily married flirt; he and Clarissa suited one another very well, enjoyed a sexy, unthreatening friendship that was stimulating and fun.
‘Busy this evening?’
‘No. Not really.’
‘Like to have a drink then? At a pub. I’d quite like to get out of here for a bit. And there’s a party later, in the Officers’ Mess. It’d be fun if you came.’
‘Well,’ said Clarissa, ‘I’d love a drink, Jerry. But only a quick one. Then I must get back. I wasn’t very nice to my poor darling husband last night. I must try and ring him, make amends.’
‘Right-ho. I’ll work on changing your mind. Meet you in five minutes – I’ve got a car I can use.’
If anyone had told her before the war, Clarissa thought, that she would stand in an English pub amongst representatives of half the countries in the globe, Poles, Norwegians, Canadians, Czechs, Americans (black and white), French, even the odd Brazilian, she would not have believed them. It was more like the League of Nations than a bar. She stood, holding her watery beer, smiling determinedly, trying to hear what Jerry Fortescue was shouting above the hubbub; a couple more officers joined them, friends of his, and she gave up altogether. The smoke was thick, it made her eyes sting; she was just beginning to think she had made a mistake, to plan her excuses, when someone jogged her arm violently from behind and knocked the beer from her hand all down her uniform.
‘Damn,’ said Clarissa loudly. She was immensely irritated; she had just had her jacket cleaned.
‘Oh, I am so sorry, so terribly sorry, ma’am, here let me –’
And he was there in front of her, dabbing at her jacket with a handkerchief, clearly deeply embarrassed: Clarissa looked at him and felt her irritation draining rather swiftly away.
An American, in brand-new, perfectly pressed uniform, smooth, reddish-blond hair, freckles, blue eyes, fine features – he could have been English, she thought – he alternately smiled at her nervously and looked anxiously at the drenched jacket. He looked so upset she laughed, took the handkerchief from him, told him it didn’t matter; he was also, she thought, getting dangerously near, in his dabbing, to her breast.
‘Look,’ he said, and even his voice was almost English, ‘look, ma’am, can I give you a lift home, so that you can change? I have a truck outside, it would be no problem, it would make me feel better, I’d really like to do that—’
‘No, honestly,’ said Clarissa, ‘it’s quite all right –’ and then wondered why she was being so silly; she stank of beer, the wetness had got through to her skin, she was at least twenty minutes’ walk from Greenwich, Jerry wouldn’t want to leave. She smiled at him. ‘Yes, why not? Thank you.’
‘And then I’ll bring you back here to your friends. Would that be all right?’
‘Perfectly all right. Clarissa Compton Brown,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘How do you do.’
‘Mark Twynam. This way.’
He lived in Washington, he told her, his father was a lawyer, and indeed so was he, or had been and would be again. He was thirty-two, engaged to be married, had been educated at Yale; he was clearly, thought Clarissa, studying him interestedly, that species she had heard about: a WASP. In other words an upper-class American. He was in air-force intelligence, and based in London with the American attaché.
‘Goodness,’ said Clarissa, ‘sounds very grand. What on earth were you doing in the Queen Victoria, Greenwich?’
‘I’d been over to visit a unit at Blackheath. I rather like your British pubs, I thought I’d check a couple out on the way back to London.’
‘I see,’ said Clarissa. ‘Well, look, here we are. I’ll just go and change.’
‘I’ll wait,’ he said, ‘while you change. And then take you back.’ He smiled at her. He had a beautiful smile, slightly tentative but very warm; Clarissa set great store by nice smiles. Nice smiles and nice hands. She looked at Mark Twynam’s hands; they were large, but long-fingered and, she noticed, freckled. Like his face. Very nice.
‘Oh, there’s no –’ said Clarissa, and stopped. She had been going to say there was no need to wait, that she would stay at home, that she had to ring her husband; but the thought of an hour or so further of Mark Twynam’s company seemed suddenly preferable to her own, or that of a disgruntled Jack at the end of a telephone.
‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling. ‘Then I’ll introduce you to the British navy.’
She changed into a clean shirt and her other, shabbier jacket; she sometimes longed to get into civvies, but there was no doubt you got much better service in pubs and so on in uniform. Certainly Wren’s uniform. The Wrens were held in very special regard; twice she had eaten in restaurants with a group of other girls all in uniform and been told their bill had been taken care of, and the experience she knew was not unique. But the most quirkily famous fact about Wrens was that Lord Nuffield paid for all their sanitary towels; at first she had thought it was a joke, but she was assured it was the truth; it was his contribution to their war effort.
‘I love the uniform,’ said Mark Twynam as she got back into the truck. ‘So smart. You all look wonderful.’
‘Thank you,’ said Clarissa. She smiled at him. She had reapplied her make-up, and (a trick May had taught her) brushed fuller’s earth through her hair, to make it look fresher, bouncier, more recently washed. It really worked.
‘So tell me about you.’
‘Oh, not a lot to tell,’ said Clarissa carelessly, ‘married, frightfully happily. To a pilot—’
‘Where’s he based?’
‘In Scotland. Praying to be moved back into some action.’
‘And are you praying for that?’
‘Yes and no. I worry about him all the time when he’s flying. But he’s bored and miserable, I can’t help feeling sorry for him, poor angel.’
‘And where do you live, you and your husband, when there isn’t a war on?’
‘In London,’ said Clarissa, ‘in a sweet house I miss dreadfully.’
‘Family?’
‘Only a father up in Scotland. No sisters or brothers. Poor little orphan Annie, that’s me.’
‘You don’t seem too desperate,’ he said, grinning at her. ‘Do you have a job in peacetime?’
‘No,’ said Clarissa, surprised at the question. Did American girls all work? she wondered; she had heard they were very emancipated and independent. ‘Does your fiancée?’
‘No, she doesn’t. But you seem so – oh I don’t know. Organized. Competent. As if you were used to being in charge of things.’
‘Well, that’s the Wrens for you,’ said Clarissa, ‘and it’s funny you should say that because actually after the war I really am quite determined to work. I plan to take a secretarial course, and then maybe run a secretarial agency, something like that. I couldn’t bear to go back to doing the flowers and the table settings.’
‘So you’re enjoying the war?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’m enjoying the war.’
She and Mark had a drink, and then another; the pub was emptier now, they managed to find a seat. They talked easily, exchanging life stories, background, war anecdotes. He was immensely impressed by her experiences as a dispatch rider.
‘It sounds like a movie. You really are something, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Oh I don’t know,’ said Clarissa laughing. ‘It’s like everything else to do with this war, you do what you’re asked and worry about it afterwards.’
‘I suppose so. I haven’t been it in long enough to know.’
‘Are you homesick?’
‘A bit.’ He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Would you have dinner with me one night? Just to ease a guy’s homesickness?’
‘I might,’ said
Clarissa. ‘I can probably get a pass, I’m waiting to go down to Dartmouth anyway.’
She had dinner with him two nights later; he offered to send a driver for her, but she said she wouldn’t hear of it, she’d come on the tube.
‘Honestly, it’s as safe as houses, you have no idea. We all use it all the time. And if there’s a raid, which there never are any more, you’re in the best place. Where shall I meet you?’
‘I don’t know many places in London,’ he said rather hesitantly, ‘but would the Savoy be all right?’
‘Just about,’ said Clarissa.
The Savoy, along with most of the other luxury hotels in London, did not appear to know there was a war on: it was one of the scandals which the government had pledged to end. Clarissa and Mark dined on smoked salmon, chicken, fruit sorbet and some very fine claret. She had brought with her, in a holdall, one of her trousseau dresses from Molyneux that she had taken to Greenwich with her ‘just in case’, and changed in the ladies’ lavatory at the Savoy. It was a slither of black velvet over emerald satin, cut very low at the back, and for the first time for months she had painted her nails, sprayed herself endlessly with her precious last bottle of Chanel No. 5; the very fact of knowing she looked and smelt beautiful and expensive again made her feel sexy. Mark wore his uniform and looked very sexy too; after dinner they danced. She felt excited, reckless suddenly; he danced well, moved easily, held her with skill.
‘So important, dancing,’ she said to Mark as they sat down, leaning forward so that he could both light her cigarette and get a clear view of her cleavage.
‘Why important?’
‘Because,’ she said smiling, cupping his hand with hers, then sitting back, studying his face, ‘because nobody who’s bad at dancing can possibly be good at making love.’
‘I find you quite extraordinary,’ he said, smiling back, directly ignoring her remark.
‘Why?’
‘I always heard the English were so – reserved.’
‘Frigid you mean,’ said Clarissa lightly, ‘everybody does, and no, we’re not. Nothing like a lusty English maiden, Mark, nothing at all. If I wasn’t a respectable married woman,’ she added hastily, realizing with a slight shock how very drunk she was, ‘I’d prove it to you.’
‘No need,’ he said and his eyes on hers were very serious now, intense, disturbing, ‘no need. I can see you’re not frigid, Clarissa, see it and feel it. You’re a very lovely, exciting woman.’
There was a silence; Clarissa wrenched her eyes away from his with a huge effort. It was a long time since she had felt so shaken within herself, so at once emotionally and physically aroused. The band struck up again, with ‘Bewitched’; he held out his hand to her, stood up. She followed him onto the dance floor and moved into his arms.
Two nights later she had dinner with him again, this time at the Deep Shelter Restaurant at Grosvenor House. It was one of the few nights of the summer when there was a small raid on London and they spent the night there, albeit quite innocently with several dozen other people.
But Jack Compton Brown, phoning Greenwich endlessly until well after midnight and then first thing in the morning, trying to get a message to her, to tell her he had finally and suddenly been posted, knew only that she had not returned, and he left for North Africa without being able to say goodbye.
Grace often thought how strange it was that both Ben and Charles should be in the same place; reading between the brave lines from both of them, it was clearly utterly ghastly. Quite apart from the acute physical discomfort of the desert, it seemed to be one long defeat and retreat. Along with the rest of the country she felt that the war might not yet be lost, but it was increasingly hard to believe it would ever be won, or even end; the fall of Tobruk had been the latest and heaviest of a very large series of straws.
Looking back afterwards, she wondered at how she had grown half used to the worry, the fear, to constantly expecting that harbinger of death, the telegram from the War Office. The fear was always there, all the time, but it was like everything else now, like rationing and discomfort and boredom and loneliness, a sort of background noise, omnipresent but not unbearable. Her greatest worry indeed, which she found hard to admit even to herself, was that she wasn’t more frightened, that she didn’t lie awake hour after hour, night after night, dreading the bad, the worst news. She missed Charles terribly, of course she did, but it had been so long now since she had seen him, heard his voice even, he had taken on an unreal quality. Which made her feel guilty, guilty and ill-at-ease, as if she was in some way shallow, unfeeling. And then she would tell herself that if they had been married longer, perhaps if she had had a child, if their lives had become properly one, it would have been different, and she would switch her mind determinedly away from it. It would all change, she knew, when the war was over, when he came home.
She finished clearing up the breakfast things, went out to feed Flossie and her adorable, silky-haired billy-kid, and settled down to write to Ben. She loved writing to him, loved raking her mind and her life for funny stories, warming news, tales about the boys, her thoughts and feelings about them. It made her feel happy and warm, as if she was doing something important. Letters to Charles were rather more difficult, with all the restrictions on news – nothing about the boys, nothing about Clifford, not a lot about her farmers for he had told her he didn’t think she should get too friendly with them as it could be awkward after the war. She sometimes felt herself confined to reports on the garden, and Imogen’s growth and development. It wasn’t what she would have thought of as proper communication, not how she had imagined a marriage to be.
‘I feel so terrible,’ said Clarissa to May.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yes. Yes I do. Don’t look at me like that. I was only in a shelter, for God’s sake.’
‘Some shelter,’ said May.
‘But if there hadn’t been a raid I would have been back at Greenwich. Oh May, what must he have thought, what could he have thought?’
‘What he did think, I expect,’ said May, and then seeing tears in Clarissa’s great brown eyes put her hand out, patted Clarissa’s arm rather awkwardly. ‘Don’t upset yourself, Duchess. You’ve written and explained, he knows now. It’s not as if you was doing anything. Was you?’ she added sternly.
‘Were you,’ said Clarissa automatically, ‘and no, I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t. I love Jack, he’s my husband, I’d never be unfaithful to him.’
‘Well then,’ said May, ‘that’s all right. And anyway, if he ’adn’t been such a miserable old sod the last few months you’d not’ve been out with this Yank chap anyway, would you?’
‘No of course I wouldn’t,’ said Clarissa, brightening up. ‘No, May, you’re quite right. Absolutely right. Now look, he’s asked me to have dinner with him again next week, Mark has, but I think I’d better say no, don’t you? In view of what’s happened.’
‘Whatever for?’ said May. ‘Not going to do the squadron leader any good now, is it? You sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself. And what he won’t know won’t hurt him. I should carry on as normal, Duchess, if I was you.’
‘Goodness, May,’ said Clarissa, ‘whatever would I do without you? Now listen, I think you should apply for a transfer to Dartmouth. And I’ll support your request. How would that be?’
‘Be fun I should think,’ said May.
That August Robert came home on a week’s leave. The day before he went back to Scotland, he phoned Grace and asked her if he might come and see her.
‘I’ve never had a chance,’ he said, ‘to thank you properly for what you did for Florence that night. I want to do it in person.’
Pleased because she liked him, flattered that he should want to come and see her, Grace invited him for tea.
She was in the garden when he arrived; it was a beautiful day, golden and still. It was almost impossible to believe that all over the rest of Europe and indeed much of the world a desperate conflict was raging, that men wer
e being slaughtered hourly, that people were being killed in their homes by great bolts of flame from the sky. The news was terrible: things seemed to get worse and worse, the whole of Europe was under Nazi domination, there was still serious talk of invasion, and the beaches of England were lined with endless rows of barbed wire. But here in Wiltshire the grass in the meadows was thick and high, the hedges filled with cow parsley and honeysuckle, the corn studded with poppies.
Somewhere far above her she could hear a lark, its song pouring and tossing through the air, and nearer her the lovely liquid sound of a thrush; she looked round and saw it, in one of the apple trees, its speckled breast thrust out importantly. Charlotte lay in a patch of the very hottest sun, panting hard. ‘You silly creature,’ said Grace, smiling at her fondly, ‘will you never learn to look for shade?’ One of the cats scuttled past her, a small, helpless field mouse dangling in its mouth. Grace had spent her entire life in the country, had grown up accepting totally the logic and rhythms of its life, the careful raising of farm animals in order that they might then be killed and eaten, the preying of one wild animal on another, the inevitable wastage and cruelty of nature, but she never failed to feel pity for the cat’s victims, the long torture inflicted on them in their increasingly helpless misery.
‘Hallo, Grace.’ It was Robert, looking relaxed and cheerful, and really, she thought, rather handsome.
He had walked through the house; Clifford, knowing he was coming, had slightly pointedly taken both the boys out fishing. He was at a complete loss to understand Florence’s continuing tolerance, her reacceptance of Robert; having witnessed her terror of him at first hand, having given her protection from him, he had told her repeatedly that she should petition for a divorce. He was unsure about Imogen’s parentage; his innate fastidiousness in such matters, his own requirements for privacy, prevented him from questioning Florence about any past or indeed future relationship. But common sense, an ability to count, and the evidence of his own eyes told him that it was unlikely that Robert was indeed Imogen’s father. What he did know was that he disliked him more strongly than he had ever disliked anybody, and that left alone with him, he would have felt an almost overpowering urge to hit him. On the other hand, Grace had made it plain that she wanted to see Robert. Her liking for him, her clearly conveyed disapproval of Florence’s behaviour in the past, her unwillingness to believe that Robert was in truth violent, was one of the few areas she and Clifford had agreed tacitly to differ on; and thus the fishing expedition had seemed the best idea.
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