by Barbara Vine
Or perhaps he had known all along. It must have been someone's home, not a phone box, from which Francis made that call, disguising his voice or maybe not disguising it. Her son speaking warmly or pleasantly would have been disguise enough to deceive Vera. But I don't think Chad connived at it; I didn't then and I don't now. Basically he was kind. And if he was desperately in love, ill with love, so that all stratagems which seemed to further his love were permitted, he nevertheless stopped short at cruelty. For in his way I think he loved Vera too. Everyone associated with the object of his love came into its orbit and was lit by it.
Eventually we ate the roast rabbit. It was dried up and flaky by then and the carrots tasted as if arrested in a phase of wine-making. Many an agonized bearing down on clasped hands, many a twisting of facial muscles took place before that wretched meal came to an end. And afterwards everyone left rather quickly.
Francis made the truth known to Vera in the classic fashion of all such revelations, by uttering a sentence in the voice of the man he had impersonated:
‘I wouldn't expect luncheon in these hard times, Mrs Hillyard, rather not…’
Madagascar is a name that affords children much amusement. It is splendid for charades, for instance, if you don't mind making the game into a five-act play. I don't suppose Vera and Gerald had allowed for it in their code of possible war zones, though, so there must have been months during 1942 when Vera had no idea where he was.
British forces went in there in May in an endeavour to wrest it from the Vichy French. There was idea around that the Japanese might do so if they didn't and the Japanese would have had Vichy collaboration. We heard all about it when my Uncle Gerald eventually came home on leave the following spring but at the time we thought he was still in North Africa. Eden had leave that summer and came to stay a night with us, only one night, she explained, or Vera's feelings would be hurt.
She looked wonderful in uniform. Wrens wore hats, not caps, and Eden's hat particularly suited that thirties film-star face. She had lost weight, or ‘fined down’ as my mother put it. Her face would be too beautiful for today's taste, too flawless, with those perfectly regular features, large soulful eyes and dreamy look. It was the first time I had ever seen her out of her natural environment of Laurel Cottage and at first she was a little stiff with us, a little reserved and wary, sitting on our sofa with her knees and ankles pressed closely together. It had been a problem deciding where to put her for the night. Should she have one of our unused bedrooms or share the shelter in the hall with me? Our proximity in the latter case would have been almost embarrassing, a far cry from the bedroom at Laurel Cottage, for the shelter, an affair of sandbags and corrugated iron, measured only seven feet by four. Eden was a member of the armed forces and if not exactly on active service, my mother pointed out, at least accustomed to bombings and gunfire. Of course, my father could only see her as his little sister still. At last it was decided Eden should sleep upstairs but under strict instructions to get up and come down to the shelter if the sirens went.
My mother and I took her up to her room as soon as she arrived. It was not in my mother's nature to make rooms ‘nice’ for guests, she would not have known how to do this or understood the need for it. The sheets were clean, the carpet brushed and the surfaces dusted. What more was necessary? It was I who had put flowers in a vase, Woman magazine and Rebecca on the bedside table, and checked the bulb in the bedlamp. Eden said:
‘Oh dear, fancy you putting me up here while you're all snug and safe downstairs. Look at that great big window. I can just imagine the flying glass.’
‘It's weeks since we had a raid,’ my mother said.
‘Don't tempt Providence.’
Eden repeated her remark about my parents being safe downstairs while she and my father were settling down to the crossword. He said at once that in that case he and my mother would also sleep upstairs to give her confidence. The bed in their old room would be made up and aired and they would sleep in it.
‘You'll make it up and air it then,’ my mother said.
In fact she did do this herself, though with a bad grace. I think she genuinely wanted to make Eden's short stay pleasant but the adulation Eden got from my father and the deference she received annoyed her. Besides, she read into Eden's attitude to her over every small thing a subtle unspoken criticism, and sometimes her resentment was justified. The sausage left on Eden's plate, the strawberries she had queued for picked over and the slightest unripe bit cut out, the bread crumbled and left. If we wasted food, we would get from my father an admonition to think of the starving Romanians (or Greeks or Yugoslavians) but Eden was exempted from reproof.
Though Eden did not mention poor Michael Franklin, who was very likely dead by then anyway, she talked a lot about the people she had met in Portsmouth. Naval officers, of course, abounded and it was possible for any girl ‘who didn't look positively like the back of a bus’ to have a wonderful time. The Americans had entered the war by then – the attack on Pearl Harbor having been made the previous December – and Eden had been surprised to find the members of the US forces she had met so nice, so civilized.
‘Officers, of course,’ she said. ‘I can't speak for the other ranks and ratings. I know two girls who are engaged to American officers and really you can't blame them, considering the sort of future that's offered them.’
It was a new idea to me – outside the pages of Victorian fiction, that is – that women would get married for money, security and position; I had thought it was always for love. Eden talked a lot about money and security and what some friend of hers, engaged to a Major Wayne D. Lansky, had told her was in store for her in Norfolk, Virginia, when the war was over: a car of her own, hired help, an ocean-front home. My mother had not been in the room while this was discussed, so it was not bitchiness but genuine interest which made her inquire after Chad Hamner and ask when Eden would be seeing him. I, of course, had told my parents about Chad, not supposing there was any need for secrecy even in Longley terms. In 1942, the result of being in love was that you got married. A boyfriend invited home meant marriage was in the air. Marriages might be made on other foundations (such as cars and hired help and ocean-front houses) but it was still on the whole unthinkable that love could be consummated in any other way.
Eden looked very put out. She passed it off with a quick ‘Oh yes, I'm sure to see him. He will be bound to look in when he knows I'm home.’ Later on she had it out with me. Incongruously, this scolding took place in our air-raid shelter, for the inconsistencies of life being what they are, the Germans chose to bomb London that night – or at least deceived us into thinking they would do so. I can't recall hearing gunfire or the distant thunder of bombs, but the alert sounded at one in the morning, and everyone came down and woke me up.
Very soon my father went back to bed. My mother was in the kitchen making us all a cup of tea. Eden and I sat facing each other, I on my bunk, she on an upturned orange box with a cushion on top. Her beautiful face, an amalgam of those now forgotten film star faces, Veronica Lake, Annabella, Alice Faye, glistened with a skinfood not consigned to the obscurity of a drawer in Laurel Cottage. A pale blue chiffon scarf turbaned her head and she wore a dressing-gown of blue flowered cotton. Her manner of telling me off took a curious form.
‘I was very disappointed, Faith, to hear you'd been telling tales to your father.’
At that point I really didn't know what she meant and I said so.
‘Now don't pretend. You've been gossiping a little, I think, and now you want to wriggle out of it. What can have made you think Chad Hamner was my fiancé?’
‘I didn't say that.’
‘Chad of all people! Poor me, I should like to think I could do a wee bit better for myself than that. I'm quite sure Vera didn't tell you I was engaged to him. I don't wear an engagement ring, do I? Well, then. Chad is just a friend, a friend of the family, not me in particular. Have you got that straight?’
‘I'm sorry,’ I said. �
�He told me he was your friend.’
‘Oh, Faith, dear, one day you'll learn that what a man says in those circumstances and what is actually the case are two very different things. I expect Chad would like to be engaged to me. Don't you think he would?’
Humbly I agreed. I would have thought anyone from Gary Cooper to Lord Louis Mountbatten to General Montgomery would have liked to be engaged to her. She became confidential and sweet once more.
‘Frankly, I always knew I should have trouble in that quarter from Chad. We met at the Tregears', you know’ – George Tregear was the solicitor she had worked for – ‘at a cocktail party and he was making sheep's eyes across the room at me from the first. He pursued me with phone calls – Vera and I were in fits and really I think I only went out with him to put a stop to that everlasting ringing.’
There was a good deal more of this in the same vein until my mother came in with the tea, crawled in, rather, through a gap in the sandbags. It had struck me from the beginning that Vera's story and Eden's of how she and Chad had first met did not match. Vera had said in court but according to Eden it was at a party. Probably it wasn't important. I was upset that Eden had reproved me, gratified that I had been received back into favour.
Next morning, Eden left, not to go straight back to Great Sindon, that would have to wait till late afternoon. First she would be having lunch in the West End with some American army officer. The way she talked about it at breakfast made it sound as if this were a business meeting, an important ‘liaising’ between representatives of the British and the US forces, and my father, forgetting Eden was a wireless telegraphist, seemed to swallow this. But Eden, to my surprise, while maintaining a serious expression, slightly touched my foot with her toe under the table as she mentioned the American's name for the second time.
After she had gone, my mother went into Eden's bedroom to take off the sheets. Being my mother and the way she was, she was very likely speculating as to whether, rather than go into the wash, they could be used on the bed shared by herself and my father. She saw things in that bedroom that made her very angry. It had been cleaned. You might think that a woman who does not keep her house spotless neglects to do so because she is oblivious of dirt but this isn't always so. Sometimes she simply can't be bothered. Moderate cleanliness is enough. Every spot of dust need not be scoured away even if it is more than visible to the naked eye. There had been a little fluffy dust round the legs of Eden's bed where they touched the floor. This had been cleaned off, apparently with a damp cloth. The lampshade on the central hanging lamp, a parchment affair, which my mother said she had been meaning to ‘give a wipe to’ for weeks, had been carefully washed with soap and water. And in the bathroom things were even worse. Unlike most guests, who leave a ring on the bath, Eden had not only cleaned off her own ring and dried basin and bath, but had removed from the half-hidden tangle of pipes behind basin and lavatory the accumulated cobwebby grey fur of years and left it in a neat little heap on one of my father's squares of shaving-soap newspaper.
It was this, not something Vera did – I remember now – which sparked off in my mother the telling of the Kathleen March story. Of course Eden was in no way involved, she wasn't even born, but I think my mother wanted only to make an attack on the Longley women generally, to illustrate their imperfections, their clay feet, if you like.
‘No one is saying she did anything to that child,’ I remember she said, ‘but she must have just abandoned it. She can't have been looking after it, she was indifferent. They're like that, self, self, self, and making an impression. It's all outward show and surface. I suppose she was there by that river or wherever it was and this friend came along and started flattering her, telling her how wonderful she was or something, buttering her up, and she forgot the little baby in her care. She was too wrapped up in herself to see some madman come along and snatch it away.’
I was learning tact. I was beginning to understand the small satisfactions and the influx of trouble attendant upon ‘stirring it’. So I said nothing about Vera's remarks to Helen on the subject of babies. But my mother, by some exercise of a sixth sense or by the telepathy which often operated between us, said she wouldn't be surprised if Vera had more children after the war was over.
‘She'll want to add to her family, you'll see. Now Eden's gone, she'll want at least another one. A girl preferably. Too bad we can't choose these things.’
‘Won't she be too old?’ I said.
My mother was indignant. ‘She's younger than me!’
The sheets were taken off and thrown into the wash, my mother's reason being that ‘some of that muck she plasters her face with’ had got on to the pillowcase. She and my father had a nice little thank-you note from Eden by the morning's post – she must have written it in the train. The next time I saw her was in Helen's garden where she told me how Vera had saved her life.
Yesterday Helen came to tea with me. A cup of tea and a biscuit each it was really, ten minutes' pause, and then on to the drinks. That is what Helen likes. She calls it ‘staying for cocktails’ and drinks sherry or likes me to make her just two dry martinis, stirred not shaken, with green olives not lemon, and the mild joke must always be repeated that the nearest the vermouth gets is to show the bottle to the gin. Jamie had a job in a bar in Half Moon Street between leaving school and going to Bologna – in the circumstances Oxford wouldn't quite have done, they said – and the day after he started, an American came in and asked for a dry martini. Jamie hadn't the faintest idea how to make it but he knew Martini was vermouth so he did his best. In a little while, the American brought it back to him and asked if he had put any gin in it.
‘Certainly not!’ Jamie said, quite indignant.
The American laughed and showed him how to make a dry martini and when he left he gave Jamie ten shillings, which was an enormous tip in 1962.
When the General died, Helen gave up Walbrooks to her son who had married for the second time by then and had a little girl. It is a beautiful house and the grounds are lovely, and it amuses me to think how nearly it was mine. But about that I have no regrets. She came to London, to a flat in Bina Gardens, just off the Old Brompton Road. I think she expected London to be much the same as when she had last spent much time there. That had been in 1918 when she had a single London season under the wing of a cousin of old Mrs Richardson's. Helen found it different but behaved as if it were the same, dressing much as she had done in those days, going everywhere in taxis, furnishing her flat in a mixture of art deco and Anglo-Indian, lumpy white furniture and Benares brass, with a touch of the Syrie Maughams. Every day she has tea at five and makes herself a cocktail at six: every other evening she phones her daughter and the alternate ones she phones her son. They often come to Bina Gardens to see her and her grandchildren come. She takes them to Claridges Brasserie for the cut-rate smorgasbord lunch. And she has me, living a stone's throw away in Vicarage Road.
Helen is my aunt, of course, my half-aunt. But that half-blood, which Vera was all too happy to forget and call Helen her sister, somehow in my eyes deprives Helen entirely of aunthood. I have never called her aunt (by her own wish) and when I introduce her to people I say only her name, occasionally, though rarely, prefixing this with ‘my friend’. I have never thought of her as my aunt, still less by that other title I once had the right to use.
She is eighty-nine, thin still, willowy even, but the willow tree is rheumaticky with creaking joints. Chiffon and other clinging diaphanous materials are still favourites of hers and she still invariably wears a hat. But she has given up those twenties styles at last and now dresses very much like the Queen Mother, in pale blue and with big hats. The gilt hair is snow-white but still done like Gertrude Lawrence did hers for the first production of Private Lives.
I had considered also asking Daniel Stewart. Helen put a stop to this with a very adamant negative when I asked her what she thought. She calls him the ‘bookmaker’ though she knows very well what a bookmaker is and what it is no
t.
‘I don't mind talking to the bookmaker tête-à-tête,’ she said, sitting down but keeping her hat on as she always does. ‘Well, I do mind, of course I'd prefer not to, it's no joke having to talk in that way about poor Vera, but what I mean is I can stand it when it's just the bookmaker and me but a third person present, even darling you, would make it so dreadfully public.’
Perhaps later on, I suggested. She could prepare herself for such a confrontation, come along armed with Valium, for instance. And when Stewart's book came out she needn't read it. She gave me that wry look of hers she offers her companions when they speak of the future, of next year even. It means that the chances are there will be no next year for her.
I made tea and we each had what was described on the packet as a muesli biscuit. Helen nibbled hers under the shadow of a blue silk brim laden with nylon delphiniums. It is rare for us to talk about family at these meetings of ours, either on the occasions when she comes for tea and a drink or when we go together to visit Gerald. One way and another family is a sore point with both of us and we feel we are friends in spite of our family, not because of it. But there seemed nothing else to talk about. Besides, it was Vera's birthday. Had she lived, she would have been seventy-eight.
As people grow old they lose their good looks. This is a commonplace, a cliché. Losing beauty though is only the beginning of a chain. The next link in the chain is the loss of sex. At a certain age, perhaps the late seventies, old women can only be distinguished from old men by their clothes, by skirts and style of hair. And then there comes a point, from which good Lord deliver us, when humanity itself is gone and old apes sit in human clothes…
It is true that Helen, with her flat chest and her gnarled hands, might have been an old man but there is plenty of humanity left there. The cracked voice is full of life. The blue eyes sparkle, unwearied. And she smells wonderful, of something called Magie Noire, the way no old man ever smells. I wanted to move on with Stewart to 1943, so I asked her about Gerald's return.