Harold had been gone some time when Jim came slamming into Number Twenty-Two. He had an appointment in chambers at Lincoln’s Inn and caught an earlier train, for old Mr. Stillman, his employer, was down with bronchitis, and there was so much to do at the office. Because of this break in his routine he arrived at Lincoln’s Inn without knowing of the landings and from then on, until past ten o’clock, he was closely occupied with the brief on which they were seeking counsel’s opinion.
It was a complicated brief and Harold was a conscientious man, otherwise he might have noticed the atmosphere of suppressed excitement in the comings and goings of Sir Henry Chipping’s staff. As it was he finished his work, noticed nothing unusual, handed the papers to an elderly clerk in the outer office, and went out into the Strand. He decided to treat himself to a cup of coffee and a roll, before returning to his own premises in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
At the entrance to the little café that he used whenever he was in the Law Courts area, he had to step smartly back on to the pavement, in order to avoid a recklessly driven taxi, and in so doing he cannoned into a young woman, immediately behind him.
“I say, I’m most frightfully sorry!” apologised Harold sweeping off his hat. Then he gasped and his eyes sparkled with pleasure. “Well bless my soul! If it isn’t Miss Redvers…Kay! It is, isn’t it?”
It was indeed, but a very different Miss Redvers from the plump and rather dowdy girl who had worked alongside him for so long and had embarrassed him so dreadfully on Old Year’s Night, eighteen months ago. She looked younger, livelier and altogether more sophisticated. She had lost weight, her figure had noticeably improved, and the clothes she was wearing looked far more expensive than the drab business costumes she had worn when she worked at Stillman and Vickers.
“This is remarkable, Miss Redvers! Fancy meeting you, like this!”
“Bumping into me would be a more accurate way of putting it, Mr. Godbeer,” she laughed, and he noticed at once that she seemed far more assured and at ease with him than she had been at any time in the past.
“You look splendid, absolutely splendid, Kay! What are you doing? Where are you working? I say, I was just about to have a coffee, why don’t you join me?”
“I’d love to,” said Kay, leading the way into the café.
He went to the counter and returned to their table with two coffees, two rolls, and a pat of butter the size of a marble.
“No sugar, thanks, I don’t want to put it all on again,” she told him, “and I can only stop a few minutes anyway, we’re terribly busy today as you can well imagine!”
“Where do you work? Didn’t you go to Heslopp’s, after you left us?”
“No,” she confessed, with a fleeting smile, “I didn’t even apply to Heslopp’s. I work for the Ministry of Information, in Bloomsbury.” She paused, then added, impressively, “I’m a private secretary to Marcus Wilmott!”
Harold gathered from her tone that he ought to know all about Marcus Wilmott but he did not and compromised with a polite nod. The new Miss Redvers, however, was far more observant than the old one and laughed outright.
“Why, you old fraud! You haven’t a clue who he is, now have you?”
“No,” he admitted ruefully, “I’m afraid I haven’t! Who is he?”
“He’s the big noise in Neutral Press Hand-outs,” she told him. “He was a well-known journalist before the war and wrote a lot of popular travel books, the ‘I-Spy’ series…remember? I Spy Bulgaria, I Spy Chile. He’s really quite famous!”
“Is he nice?” asked Harold, reproving a small imp of jealousy, for he found to his dismay that he was slightly intimidated by her poise and whiff of patronage.
“He certainly is,” said Kay, enthusiastically, and then, coyly, “as a matter of fact we’re engaged, look!”
She pulled off her glove, thrust her hand in his direction, and spread the fingers. He saw a large engagement ring, an opal set in diamonds.
“My word!” he exclaimed, biting back an impulse to remind her that opals were reputed to be unlucky. “That’s a corker! I say, I do congratulate you! The girls at the office will be terribly excited to hear about this! Do you mind if I tell them?”
“Not in the least,” said Kay, “but I expect they’ll have plenty else to gossip about today, won’t they?”
“Why should they?” he demanded, “what’s special today?”
She looked at him with surprise. “You mean you haven’t heard about the invasion? I thought you were always up-to-the-minute with war news!”
“Invasion?” His jaw dropped and he whipped off his spectacles. “You mean THE invasion? Today?”
“Oh, Harold, you’re priceless!” she giggled. “You must be the only person in Europe who doesn’t know about it by now! We landed in France about six o’clock this morning!”
“God bless my soul!” said Harold, faintly. “Is that what everybody was so fidgety about in Sir Henry’s office? But this is magnificent! …You say we got ashore…? Was it very terrible? …Was it like Dieppe?”
“No,” she said, soothingly, “not a bit like Dieppe. It seems to have been a picnic so far, all except at one spot, where some of the Americans ran into trouble. It was brilliantly planned, and I suppose all our bluff came off so much better than we could have hoped. The major landings were at Avranches and it looks as though the idea to cut off the Cherbourg peninsula will work out just as they planned.”
“How do you know so much about it, Kay? Is it in the papers already?”
She laughed again and it struck him once more how very sure of herself she was, and what a remarkable transformation her personality had undergone in less than two years.
“Oh, I’ve been up to my neck in it for weeks,” she told him. “It was to have been yesterday but it was postponed, on account of weather. Look here, why don’t you come back to the office with me and meet Marcus? He’s sure to have all the latest handouts and you’ll learn a lot more from him than you’ll read in the late editions!”
He was elated by the proposal and he could not help thinking how much Jim would envy him this remarkable opportunity.
“I’d love to come, providing it’s not…well …not secret or anything,” he told her.
“Oh, you’re a very discreet person or I wouldn’t have asked you,” she said, and again he sensed patronage in her manner.
He was however, duly impressed by the bustle at the Ministry of Information, now housed, he discovered, in the London University, a building he had never previously entered.
File-bearing men and girls were running up and down staircases, office doors were opening and shutting, and everywhere along the corridors he could hear the tinkle of telephone bells.
Gravely she presented him to Marcus Wilmott, a thick-set, rather fruity man, about forty. Harold took an instant dislike to him, deciding that the fellow was far too conscious of his own importance, and very much inclined, thought Harold, to talk down to all the underlings who approached his desk, in the hope of impressing his visitor.
To Harold, however, whom Kay introduced as ‘her old boss and a real sweetie!’ he was cordial, and happy to ‘put him in the picture’ about the latest news from the Continent.
“It all seems to have gone fairly smoothly so far,” he told Harold, “but of course there’ll be a counter-attack as soon as Rommel sizes up the situation and regroups his armour! The thing is, will the weather hold? If it breaks up then Mulberry is sure to run into trouble.”
Kay must have noted the puzzled frown that crossed Harold’s face and at once took pity on him. She looked at Wilmott who smiled, wagged his finger and then appeared to relent.
“Mulberry,” he said, “is…er…well, something they’ll use for the build-up. It’s a code name, of course, like ‘Pluto’.”
“What’s ‘Pluto’?” asked Harold seeing that it was clearly expected of him.
“I’m afraid ‘Pluto’, like ‘Mulberry’ is still top secret, old chap,” said Marcus, with an irritati
ng smile, “but you’ll hear quite a bit about both, once we’ve consolidated!”
The ’phone rang and he snatched the receiver, just as Harold was asking himself why Wilmott spoke the pronoun “we,” as if Harold was a chance visitor from Siam, and not a fellow-countryman with a stake in the enterprise.
“Wilmott here! Right away? Yes…yes…naturally I will!”
He slammed down the receiver and stood up, extending a flabby hand.
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us right now, old chap. Top-level hand-out over at A.M.! I shall need you, Kay, and it looks as if we shall have to skip lunch!”
They shook hands and as Kay showed Harold to the lift he noticed that she seemed slightly subdued. It was the effect of a few minutes with Marcus Wilmott, he supposed, for he himself felt somewhat intimidated and was secretly grateful for the ’phone call that had cut short their interview.
“I can’t tell you how nice it’s been seeing you again, Harold,” she said, as they shook hands.
“It’s been a wonderful experience for me,” said Harold, “not only meeting you like this, but coming here, on a day like this! My word, but won’t Jim Carver, my neighbour, be envious when I tell him!”
As he said this he felt a yearning to be with Jim and away from all these bustling, knowing people, and their self-conscious superiority. He distrusted their profundity. Each of them wore leeriness like a buttonhole. The people really engaged in this business, he told himself, were a long, long way from this marble rabbit warren, clambering ashore under fire most probably, and not making nearly so much fuss about it either! He was genuinely glad, however, to note the astonishing rehabilitation of Kay Redvers, for he had always had a bit of a conscience about her. He said, as they parted:
“I’m sure you’ll be very happy, Kay. When do you intend getting married? I ask because…well…I’d like to send you a little something!”
“Oh, as soon as Marcus gets his divorce,” she said airily and as the lift descended Harold reflected rather sadly that hardly anybody got engaged and married in the old-fashioned way nowadays, for they all seemed to hop on and off the bridal car as if they were changing ’buses. Then, as he walked out into the Square, he forgot Kay, and began to think about the Invasion, and what he was now in a position to tell Baskerville and Westerman if he met them on the 5.15 that night.
“I wonder,” he mused, as he walked briskly into Kingsway, “I wonder if Esme’s in it, or that jazzy sailor from over the road? It’s a pity about Jim’s boys, Berni and Boxer. They went through all the worst of it and now, when the great day arrives, one is out of the army altogether, and the other poor devil, will hear about it from the Germans!”
Esme did not take part in the invasion but he none the less spent a very busy day at the Headquarters of the Free French, decoding short-wave messages originating from places like Grenoble and Limoges.
He was so absorbed in his work that he did not even think of Judy, or remember that this was the end of her first week in Devon as a civilian once more, or that the invasion would certainly mean that he would not be seeing her for some considerable time, for the C.O. had already warned him that when the bridgehead expanded he would have to fly to France and make personal contact with the Free Forces of the Interior.
Down in Devonshire, in the riotously overgrown garden of ‘The Shillets’, the tumbledown house and small-holding they had leased the day after she had discovered that she was pregnant, Judy Fraser scarcely gave a thought to D-Day. Her whole mind and body was occupied with the business of making a home out of what had been a wilderness.
They had discovered ‘The Shillets’ during a spring ramble, while on a week’s leave at Maud Somerton’s home.
It was a ramshackle, two-storey house, part Elizabethan, part Georgian, part mid-Victorian, and had been, successively, a farm, a manor house, a timber-merchant’s depot, and then a farm again. Nobody appeared to have lived in it for several years and the only sound section of its structure was its red-pantiled roof, that seemed to have kept it from falling into hopeless decay.
It stood on a knoll, about fifty yards from the shallow River Otter, where the stream swept in a wide and final curve to the sea. The seventy acres attached to the house were mostly sterile orchard and coppice, with three or four steep fields that might, if resown, support a small herd.
There was plenty of stabling and a vast assortment of outbuildings at the side, but what had attracted them at the outset was the mellow, lichen-covered façade, with its bulging latticed panes, and high Doric portico, enclosed by a small forecourt that had once been paved, but was now broken up and waist high with dock and cow-parsley.
They explored it eagerly, passing through the low-ceilinged hall and across the vast kitchen into the walled garden behind the stables. Here the afternoon sun beat down on a wild tangle of plants and fruit bushes, all long since run to seed; beyond, in the direction of the birch coppice, where the ground dipped towards the fields, primroses grew in huge, straggling clumps, and the unkempt hedge was already gay with dog-violet, campion and convolvulus.
“It’s absolutely enchanting,” Judy had exclaimed, “I can’t think why it’s still empty at a time like this.”
“Take a look at the kitchen,” said Esme, “and then ask yourself if you’d like to work in it!”
They went back to the kitchen and paced out the forty-seven strides from rusted range to dining-room.
“The meal might conceivably have been hot when it started,” said Esme, “but it would be a dam’ cold roast by the time you sat down to it!”
“I wouldn’t have a kitchen here at all,” Judy told him. “I’d make a new kitchen out of the butler’s pantry, and use this for a washroom and drying room. I’d have the hall relaid with wooden blocks and use rugs, instead of this awful linoleum that some vandal has laid down! I’d make an inner glass door, so that the beauty of the old one was preserved, but the draughts were excluded. I’d take out that dreadful modern fireplace and expose the old one, the great big one that you could burn half a tree on! I’d have it looking wonderful if I had a thousand or so to spend on doing it!”
He was very quiet after that and left her to wander about upstairs. She heard his footfalls echoing as she sat in the sunny window seat and looked out across the ruined flower garden to the gleaming curve of the little river.
Presently he came down and stood quietly behind her.
“Are you glad about the baby, Judy?”
“Terribly glad, you know I am.”
“How long will it take you to get your ticket?”
“Oh, about three weeks. I’ve got girls out in less!”
“Then supposing we did take this place?”
She turned and caught his hand. “You mean it? You mean that you like it as well?”
“I know that this is what I want to do after the war, to live in a place like this, and try and make something out of it, but I wouldn’t want it if you didn’t. It would be terribly hard going for a while, Judy, and one way and another we should have to stake pretty well everything we’ve got!”
“Oh, Esme, let’s do it, let’s do it!” she cried, leaping up and embracing him. “I know I’d like it but I was never quite sure that you would, in spite of all you said about wanting to farm. We could make this place live again! It would be like…like…”
She broke off, noting that his eyes were smiling.
“Like the old Manor,” he completed.
“Yes, and I thought of that the moment I saw it! Did you, Esme?”
He nodded, squeezing her hand.
“Let’s go and tell Maud and see what she has to say about it. I’ll wager she knows more about it than the local agent.”
He was quite right. Maud knew all about ‘The Shillets’ and its long record of failure. It was owned by the Markover Estate and could be had on a long repairing lease. Everyone, it seemed, had gone broke at ‘The Shillets’, possibly because it was too big to run as a private house and too small to
pay as a farm.
“You can’t farm seventy acres,” she told them, “it’s neither one thing nor the other. You could do chickens and pigs there, I imagine, there’s quite enough land for that, and maybe keep a cow for your own use, but you’d have to supplement your income somehow…take summer visitors, or run a riding-school.”
“I couldn’t do that,” said Judy, “it wouldn’t be fair on you, Maud.”
“I don’t see why,” said Maud, slowly, “seeing that I’m giving up in a year or so. Maybe we could do some sort of deal and I could stay on as a sleeping partner—no, no, wait….” As Judy began to exclaim, “First I’d have to go out there and have a good look at the stabling and lofts. How about tomorrow?”
And so, miraculously, it was settled in a matter of days, and Judy went down to stay with Maud as soon as she was discharged, while Esme set about getting estimates from local builders for the extensive renovations that were necessary.
By D-Day some progress had been made, although the house was still far from habitable. Judy rode out there every day, encouraged by the local doctor’s pronouncement that gentle horse-exercise, far from being dangerous to a woman in the early stages of pregnancy, was the best way of keeping her muscles relaxed and ‘letting Nature get on with the job in her own way.’
She was here now, using the trowel on the forget-me-not bed, and pouring cans of weed-killer between the cracked paving stones of the forecourt. She was so happy, and so absorbed throughout the day, that when Maud came for her, leading a quiet cob for the ride home, she did not even remember about the invasion until Maud said:
“Trot on, trot on! I want to hear the six o’clock bulletin, gel!”
Then Judy remembered that there was a war on, and that she had promised to be in for Esme’s bi-weekly ’phone call.
“That’s odd,” she said, “I’d completely forgotten it was D-Day! That fireplace is coming along nicely but there’s so many idiotic restrictions about building. Mr. Perry says we’ll have to apply for a supplementary license if we’re going to rebuild the sties!”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 55