‘No,’ said Grace, ‘nothing at all.’
She had suggested Charles came back into their bedroom. There seemed no possible reason for delaying it, and it had to be done. The sooner she got over that particular hurdle the better. She went to the family-planning clinic and got her diaphragm checked; a new young doctor prescribed her a replacement, said she was lucky not to have got pregnant before.
‘Oh really?’ said Grace.
‘It’s showing its age,’ said the doctor, smiling, ‘looking tired, worn out, even. Mrs Bennett, are you all right? Here, wipe your eyes on this. Is there some problem you’d like to discuss with me?’
‘No,’ said Grace, ‘no, I’m fine. Thank you.’
She told Charles she didn’t want to even think about children for quite a long time.
‘No, all right, darling. I understand. Maybe next year—’
‘Maybe,’ said Grace.
Charles remained tersely reluctant to talk about his war. He would never discuss it with her, except in the broadest terms; he was tense, secretive about it all, it was his way of coping with it. She knew he had suffered horribly, knew it had been hard; he was often morose, silent where he had always been cheerful, bad-tempered where he had been merely irritable, given to sudden sweeping moods of depression, and suffered alternately from insomnia and nightmares. All those things she understood, sympathized with; she wished only that he would share them with her, talk about them, explain what he had been forced to endure. But he would not. And while other men told tales and swapped stories over the dinner table of battles, danger, imprisonment, escape (all carefully lightened and sanitized for the occasion and their audience), he remained silent, almost melancholy, the occasional story dragged unwillingly out of him.
One night he became the centre of attention; the talk turned to his great escape as they chose to call it, and the nightmare of being on his own and on the run for months. ‘How did you stay sane?’ said someone and ‘With great difficulty,’ said Charles shortly, and then, as the laughter faded, he said, ‘It was actually not too bad. When you got used to it. Peaceful at least.’
‘Why Spain though?’ said one woman. ‘What made you head for there? Surely Switzerland would have been nearer, easier.’
‘Border terribly heavily guarded,’ said a red-faced man called Mick Dunstan whose wife Grace especially disliked. ‘Isn’t that right, Charles?’
‘Yes,’ he said briefly, and then as the silence grew and they all sat listening to him, waiting for him to finish, he said, ‘I was heading for the embassy in Madrid. It was – unofficially – neutral. Or so we’d heard. There was a chance of being smuggled out down to Gib on the supply trucks.’
‘Yes, I knew about that one,’ said Dunstan. ‘Not many spare places, though. Based on rank, I heard. Colonels did pretty well, corporals left to play with themselves.’
‘Absolute rubbish,’ said Charles sharply. ‘Nothing to do with it whatsoever. Look, it’s getting late, I’ve got a heavy day tomorrow. Grace, perhaps we should –’ and ‘Yes,’ she said, standing up gratefully, sorry for him anyway, for their insensitivity when he so clearly didn’t want to talk.
Days later, she asked him, gently, why he wouldn’t talk about it, even to her. ‘Grace,’ he said, infinite weariness in his voice, ‘it was pretty good hell on the whole. Don’t you understand that? I don’t want to keep reliving it, I’m trying to forget.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course, but don’t you think it might help you to forget if you did talk about it, get it out of your system just a bit?’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘spare me that sort of claptrap, would you? You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, and I find it slightly offensive that you should try.’
‘Sorry,’ said Grace.
Sex with Charles was awful now. She never came. She didn’t want to. It would seem the ultimate disloyalty, the final betrayal of Ben. In any case, she couldn’t; the easy, mechanical response he had been able to produce before no longer took place. She just pretended, to keep him happy, and kept her mind blank.
Angela Barlowe was very much afraid she was cracking up. She had always assumed herself to be a strong and level-headed person, indeed had proved herself to be so, right through the war, caring for her large house, her widowed mother and her four children, in between her voluntary work at the local hospital in Cirencester. She had remained calm and optimistic, even after hearing that her husband, Lieutenant-Colonel Barlowe, had been captured in Italy at the beginning of 1944, but the long wait at the end of the war, initially hopeful, increasingly anxious, and then finally opening the carefully regretful letter from the War Office (saying that it had not been possible to notify her earlier, due to a most unfortunate confusion of identity with another officer, but that it had now been established beyond all reasonable doubt that her husband had been killed escaping from a convoy in Italy), had almost defeated her. She was not given to bitterness, in fact she was a devout Christian and had a deep faith in the rightness of God’s will; but she found herself deeply disturbed by the unsatisfactory nature of the outcome, and the lack of proper information. She was trying to come to terms with it, but the awful, gnawing doubt about exactly how her beloved Colin had died and how much he might have suffered invaded her dreams and disturbed her days.
She decided that if she did not make some investigations on her own account, she would go quietly – or even noisily – mad.
Giles and Florence had been married, very quietly, in a registry office (it was either that or a ‘big do’ said Florence ‘which we couldn’t face’); he had got a job playing the piano and singing in a West End revue. Florence, fiercely proud, invited them all to go and see it.
‘You can stay here,’ she wrote to Grace, ‘it’ll be lovely to see you. Clarissa and Jack are coming, and I’ve asked Mother and Daddy. All news then. Give my love to Charles.’
‘Oh Lord,’ said Charles, ‘do we have to go? I hate that sort of show, and it’ll be so embarrassing if he’s no good.’
‘Yes we do,’ said Grace, ‘if I can go to the Darby-Smiths, you can come to your brother-in-law’s first night.’
‘That’s different. Quite different.’
‘Charles,’ said Grace, ‘it isn’t different at all.’
Clifford said he would like to go; Muriel said she couldn’t possibly get away. ‘Much too busy. I can’t imagine how you can find the time, Grace. With Charles trying to build up his practice again.’ But in the end Clifford persuaded her.
Florence and Giles had bought a very pretty house just off Walton Street. ‘Isn’t it nice?’ said Florence, kissing Grace, when they arrived just after lunch. ‘I’m so pleased to see you, Grace, but you do look absolutely awful.’
‘Thanks,’ said Grace laughing. ‘You don’t change, Florence, do you?’
Charles had business in town with Clifford, sorting out the remnants of the London office. Grace and Florence sat in the small garden, waiting for the new young nanny to bring Imogen back from school.
‘I had to give in on the nanny front,’ said Florence, ‘I couldn’t manage, not with my latest plan.’
‘What’s your latest plan?’
‘Politics. Don’t laugh.’
‘I wasn’t going to laugh,’ said Grace.
‘Well, you had that stupid half-smile on your face,’ said Florence. ‘Anyway, yes, I’m going to start with local politics, and then see. I know it’s not going to be easy, I don’t have any illusions, but I just think it’s a way I can use my talents. And do something useful. The thing is, the party’s going to have a real fight on its hands, to get back into power. It’s hard to believe that after all Churchill has done for this country they should’ve thrown him out, but still. So it’s a lot of hard slog, door-to-door campaigning. I can’t wait.’
‘It sounds wonderful,’ said Grace wistfully.
‘How about you?’
‘Oh – you know. Early days. I’m – we’re settling down.
I think.’
‘You don’t look as if you’re settling down,’ said Florence.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Grace.
Clarissa and Jack met them at the theatre. Clarissa was looking dazzling, in a black velvet dress with softly rounded shoulders and just a suggestion of a full skirt, and Florence wore a very chic, rather tight green jersey dress with swathed bodice and a wonder fully dramatic pre-war fox cape, complete with the fox’s head and tail. Grace felt painfully aware that she was looking the poor relation up from the country, in her old navy-blue crêpe dinner dress and woollen coat, and was upset by it until she saw people staring at Jack’s face, and him smiling cheerily and determinedly back at them. She might have thought he didn’t care, had she not noticed his fists clenched rather tightly in the pockets of his dinner jacket.
The show wasn’t really very good, but Giles was excellent. His charm as much as his talent sang out; when he was on stage the music seemed better, the lyrics less banal, even the other actors more gifted.
They had drinks in his dressing room after the show; then they all went back to Walton Street.
‘That was too wonderful,’ said Clarissa. ‘What a thrill in our drab lives, Giles.’
‘You know me,’ he said lightly, ‘one long thrill.’ He was very drunk; Grace felt edgy suddenly.
‘Oh Clarissa, really!’ said Clifford, laughing. ‘As if your life could by any stretch of the imagination be called drab.’
‘You have no idea,’ said Clarissa. ‘We spent the whole of today, May and I, scrubbing down the walls of this pigsty we call our office. Worth it, though, it’s going to be lovely.’
‘Who’s May?’ said Charles.
‘My business partner. A fellow Wren. We went through the whole war together. Hence the name of our agency: Marissa. Get it?’
‘Yes thank you,’ he said shortly, ‘I think I can just about manage that.’
‘And she brought me and Giles safely together again, don’t forget,’ said Florence. ‘We should have asked her tonight, Clarissa. I’d have loved that.’
‘Another time,’ said Clarissa quickly: just a bit too quickly, Grace thought, watching her.
‘I still can’t get over that,’ said Florence with a shudder, ‘how easily we might have missed one another.’
‘Oh no we wouldn’t,’ said Giles. ‘Do you really think I’d have left you, not tried again anyway?’
‘I still think it was amazing,’ said Florence. ‘May just meeting you out of the blue, remembering your name, thinking to ring Clarissa.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Charles, frowning slightly, ‘you’ve lost me completely. What happened?’
‘Oh, it was one of those strange coincidences,’ said Giles, ‘I’d docked at Dartmouth, and I just happened to meet May Potter in a pub. And we got chatting—’
‘And Giles can chat!’ said Florence fondly. ‘Like a girl he is, like Clarissa—’
‘Yes, lots of people said that,’ said Giles, ‘that we were like brother and sister.’
There was a sudden uneasy silence; then Florence said, rather slowly, ‘Lots of people couldn’t have said it surely, Giles. I mean lots of people didn’t ever see you together.’
Another silence; then into it came Grace’s voice, steady and clear. ‘Well, I said it for one,’ she said, ‘I said it the minute I met Giles, didn’t I? I couldn’t believe it. You even look alike. And’ – she looked over at Clifford, who was drooping, half asleep, into his whisky – ‘Clifford said it too. Didn’t you, Clifford?’
‘What’s that, my darling?’ he said, as she knew he would. ‘Oh yes, of course I did.’
‘Moo, darling,’ said Clarissa, startled at Grace’s unexpected deftness, ‘you should take the old love up to bed, he looks awfully sweet sitting there, but any minute now he’ll have to be carried, and no one’s sober enough. I’m quite tired myself, maybe we should hit the road, Jack. Giles, darling, it was too wonderful. Thank you again for asking us along. May I kiss you?’
And Grace, watching Florence watching Clarissa, knew that there was a darkness in her, a shadow on her happiness.
Later, as Grace was in the kitchen filling a glass of water, Florence came in. She looked tired and pale.
‘Grace,’ she said, ‘can I ask you something?’
‘Yes of course. But I’m awfully tired, may not make a lot of sense.’
‘Grace, don’t give me that. You always make sense,’ said Florence. Her voice was heavy. ‘That’s why I want to talk to you.’
‘Well, go on then.’
‘There’s something – well, I think there might be something between Giles and Clarissa. I thought I was imagining it before. But they’re just a bit – funny together. And then that thing he said tonight, about lots of people saying they were alike. I mean, it is jolly strange, May knowing his name, never having met him before. And they could have, down there, you know. What do you think, Grace? Because I don’t think I could bear it. I really don’t. I have to trust people, it’s the most important thing to me, being honest.’
‘I know it is,’ said Grace, who had suffered considerably from Florence’s honesty. ‘But—’
‘The thing is, I do trust you, Grace. I think you’re honest too. And I think you see things straight. So if you knew anything, anything at all—’
Grace shivered suddenly. Where had she heard that phrase before? Oh yes, on Robert’s lips, when he had been trying to trick her into telling him where Florence was. Evil, awful Robert, who had made Florence so wretched. And now she was happy, very happy, and Grace realized that she held in her hands the power to make her extremely unhappy, and that only by lying, and lying hard, could she save her from that. It was true what Florence had said; Grace was a basically honest person. She would probably – well, possibly – still be with Ben otherwise. She hated deception, deviousness, she too needed to trust people. And she lacked the skills, really, to follow lies and deception through; it wasn’t in her make-up. Whenever she told lies, they doubled back on her, refused to work. She could make things much, much worse with this one.
‘Grace!’ said Florence, ‘Grace, you do know something, don’t you? You’ve got to tell me.’
Silence: then Grace said, ‘No, Florence, of course I don’t. You’re being silly. I answered the phone to May that morning, and she wanted Clarissa, and Clarissa hadn’t arrived, she was between houses, so I took the message. And there is absolutely no doubt that she and Giles had only just met. She went on and on about the coincidence, even asked me if I knew his name, so she could check it. So there you are. Stop making yourself miserable. Enjoy Giles, and what you’ve got.’
As she spoke a great lump rose in her throat, at the thought of Ben, and what she had not got. She tried not to cry, but she couldn’t help it; the double strain of the evening and the lie she had just told defeated her and she broke down, sat at the kitchen table and burst into tears.
‘Oh God,’ said Florence, ‘oh God, Grace, don’t, don’t, I’m sorry, here, let me give you a drink, have a hanky, oh I’m so sorry.’
‘You’d better not give me a drink,’ said Grace, her voice cracking with tears. ‘Last time you did that late at night I was puking till dawn.’
‘So you were. Well, what about a cup of tea? Oh dear—’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Grace, ‘I’ll be all right. I’d better get upstairs or Charles will be down. Oh God, I don’t think I can face him yet.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Florence. ‘You go and have a bath. In the nursery bathroom. And sleep up there if you like. There’s a tiny little room with a bed. I’ll tell Charles you’ve got a terrible headache and he’s to leave you alone. He’ll do that if I say so.’
‘But Florence,’ said Grace, thinking longingly of the tiny room, being alone in the bed, smiling through her tears, ‘that wouldn’t be true.’
‘No, I know,’ said Florence, ‘but even I tell tiny lies sometimes. Oh Grace, thank you so much for talking to me. You’ve
no idea how much better I feel.’
‘Good,’ said Grace.
Lying in the small bed, she reflected on what she had done. She had lied (with alarming competence, not once but twice), had taken control of a situation, decided what should be done. In the morning she would somehow have to brief Clarissa and Giles on the lie. And pray that Florence would ask no more questions. It was all very much out of character. Or perhaps it wasn’t. The changes in her over the past few years had been profound. She really hardly knew who she was at all any more. And certainly not who she was supposed to be.
At breakfast Charles was silent; cross that she hadn’t slept with him, physically miserable with a bad hangover. Florence and Giles on the other hand seemed very happy, smiling at one another across the table, occasionally reaching out for one another’s hands. This made Charles patently more uncomfortable.
‘What about your music, Grace?’ said Giles suddenly, ‘I seem to remember you telling me you wanted to do a music teacher’s course.’
‘That was before I came home,’ said Charles. ‘She won’t have time now, will—’
‘Yes, Giles,’ said Grace, ignoring this, ‘yes I do. I’ve applied, actually. I’m waiting to hear exactly what it entails. But there’s a very good music school in Salisbury which might suit me rather well.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ said Giles. ‘All that talent, much too good to waste, don’t you think, Charles?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Charles.
He and Clifford had a meeting in Lincoln’s Inn. ‘Why don’t you go shopping?’ he said to Grace. ‘Get a couple of new dresses. Your wardrobe could do with a bit of a boost.’
‘Thanks,’ said Grace. She felt the easy tears stinging behind her eyes.
‘Now, darling, I—’
‘Charles,’ said Florence briskly, ‘why don’t you just go? I think Grace can manage to look after herself for a couple of hours. Pig,’ she added when they’d gone. ‘Oh Grace, do you really—’
‘Shut up, Florence,’ said Grace fiercely, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Look, I want to go to the War Office. How do I get there?’
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