by Barbara Vine
‘He came on leave that spring, darling, but then he was at the War House for a bit.’
I wanted to know how he had got home and why. When I was fourteen or fifteen, no one had told me these things. All I knew was that he had been in North Africa, then in Madagascar (thus missing the Battle of El Alamein) and early in 1943 he had come home. To fill in the gap I had looked up the Madagascar incident and found that the British had gone in there in May 1942 and captured a naval base called Diego Suarez. The hope was that the Vichy French governor would agree to a rapprochement and give up the remainder of the island but in fact he was only waiting until the rains would come in October. So the British attacked Antanarivo, the capital, and the pro-Vichy forces withdrew southwards. There was a further advance and further victories; in November hostilities ceased and the Governor was interned.
‘I think we must have got out of there altogether in the January or February,’ Helen said. ‘We put a Frenchman in as governor, one of de Gaulle's people. Bill Platt was in command of our troops – such a nice man, he used to dine.’ This, of course, is Helen's way of saying that General Sir William Platt used to come to dinner with her and her husband. ‘He sent Gerry home, you see, in a bomber. He was to report on the military situation there to someone very high up. It may have been Churchill for all I know. Or whoever the Minister of War was. If only the darling General were alive he could tell you so much better than I can. That business with poor Vera was the death of him, you know. I mean it literally killed him.’
Perhaps this is true. Helen and the General stuck it out in Stoke after Vera's death but it was hard for them. They were ostracized. The half-blood was of no account then. Generous Helen had called Vera her sister to the world, and now Vera had committed the worst of crimes and met with the worst of ends, she was not going to deny the relationship. It would have been little use to try anyway. Everyone knew. Everyone always does know in villages. The ostracism was not entirely due to a drawing aside of skirts, a not wanting to be associated with such people. A lot of it stemmed from diffidence and embarrassment, from simply not knowing what to say to Helen or Victor if you met them. I saw a lot of them in the years that followed, naturally I did, and I was actually in the house when the General had his first stroke. After that he was never really well again. Five years after Vera's death, he too died. In Helen's arms, as she liked to say, though I doubt if anyone ever actually does die in another person's arms.
‘Gerry was quite bright,’ Helen said. ‘The General always said he was. He was such a stick, you know, with not a word to say for himself. Imagine being married to a man who never made you laugh.’ I wouldn't have thought Victor Chatteriss any sparkling comedian but of course I didn't give a sign of what I felt.
‘A crashing bore, frankly, but the General always said there was more to Gerry than met the eye. I mean, there had to be, darling, when you think of what does meet the eye, that dreadful blank look and those sticky-out eyeballs like, what's it called, Bright's Disease. He was like one of those things they have in the West Indies. Well, they have in films. A bongo or a zobo or something.’
‘A zombie,’ I said.
‘That's it, a zombie. A zobo is a cross between a yak and a cow, we used to see them in India, but Gerry wasn't in the least like one of those. Anyway, as I said, he was quite bright in his way and that must have been why Bill picked him to carry back this important info. That must have been in January 1943 because Vera and Eden and Francis had all been with us for Christmas and Vera hadn't a clue he was coming then. Eden only spent one wartime Christmas with us and it couldn't have been the next one, could it? And '41 we weren't at home, we went to the General's sister in beastly Gleneagles.
‘Isn't it funny,’ Helen said, ‘how I can remember so perfectly what happened forty years ago but if you asked me what I did yesterday I couldn't begin to tell you? They say it's because of all those millions of brain cells being destroyed or falling out or whatever they do – like one's poor hair, you know – and uncovering the memory cells that have been obscured for years. It doesn't really matter, does it? One might just as well have old memories as new ones, better really. I'm sure I was having a nicer time then than yesterday. Well,’ she said, remembering, ‘up till you-know-what anyway.’
Helen always calls Vera's execution ‘you-know-what’. The pain of it is not to be expressed without euphemism. She told me once that not a day had passed without her thinking of it and wondering what being hanged was like, what happened to the mind and the body just before.
‘They came to see us in London,’ I said. ‘Not to stay though. They stayed in one of those hotels that used to make people laugh and look knowing – the Strand Palace or the Regent Palace. Gerry told my mother they were having a second honeymoon.’
‘They were mating, my dear. That's what they were doing, or poor Vera was doing. She was using the poor chap to get another child, I fear.’
I got up and started mixing our dry martinis. Helen eyed the Cinzano Secco warily.
‘Just show the bottle to the gin, I beg. That summer he went off to Sicily with the Eighth Army. Well, he'd been with the Eighth Army before Madagascar. The Americans were in on that too, their Seventh and our Eighth. I'm afraid I can't come up with the date, darling. I know it was before old Musso stepped down.’
‘It was July the ninth,’ I said. ‘July the ninth, 1943. I looked it up. He didn't come home again till the war was over.’
My husband came in. He went up to Helen and kissed her and asked if there was enough dry martini for him to have a small one. I rejoice that he and she get on, that they are friends when, the situation being what it is, they might so easily not be.
‘We are talking about Gerald,’ I said.
‘This isn't your day for visiting him, is it?’
I shook my head. Gerald lives, and has lived for years, in a home for retired officers at Baron's Court and Helen and I sometimes go to see him. He is stone deaf and though younger than Helen, seems older.
‘We were talking about what he would have called “his” war,’ I said.
‘The General,’ said Helen, ‘used to say Gerry had had a good war, all things considered, and I said jolly good show because he never had a very good peace. And, my dear, I nearly forgot to tell you – who do you think I met at Lucy's the other day?’
Lucy is her granddaughter. She is married to a diplomat and gives large parties in one of those flats in Hyde Park Gardens that have roof terraces. I said I couldn't guess. My husband gave Helen the second of the two martinis to which she rationed herself.
‘Lady Glennon! What do you think of that?’
Nothing. It meant nothing. ‘We don't move in these exalted circles, Helen,’ my husband said.
‘Well, you remember Michael Franklin, I suppose? She's his sister-in-law. His brother inherited after he went down with his ship. You must remember that dreadful day and poor Vera's roast rabbits and our dawning conviction that absolutely no Honourable Michael was going to breeze in. He would have been Viscount Glennon but for a German torpedo and things would all have been different and maybe it would have been darling Eden I met as Lady Glennon at Lucy's.’
‘She never knew him,’ I said, ‘except to say “I've got the message in triplicate for you, sir.”’
‘I do wonder if you're right. Vera seemed so sure. Sometimes I think I mix him up with that other naval officer of Eden's. You're not going to say he wasn't real, are you, darling?’
I said I didn't know. How would I know?
‘That would have been in September 1943, somewhere off Ireland.’
‘What a memory you have, Helen,’ said my husband. ‘You're an example to us all.’
‘Ah, but you could tell me what you had for breakfast this morning, darling, which is more than I could. Apropos of which, Mrs Anstruther in the flat below went on the wireless, on Woman's Hour, talking about some diary of her grandmother's that's been published. She's as old as me actually, Mrs Anstruther I mean, not the grand
mother who would naturally be aeons older if she were alive which she's not. Before they started whatever they call it, recording, they said they'd test for sound and to say something into the microphone. Well, naturally, Mrs Anstruther didn't know what to say – you don't, do you, in a case like that? – so the interviewer said, “Just say what you had for breakfast this morning.” But Mrs Anstruther couldn't. She couldn't remember. She said, “I can't remember what I had for breakfast” into the microphone, “I'm too old,” and they all laughed, though of course she hadn't meant it to be funny.
‘Eden was in Londonderry then,’ Helen went on. ‘They'd transferred her to Londonderry in the spring. The ship came in for a refit or some such thing, and then off she went to Goose or Gander or one of those bird places but she never got there. Londonderry was full of Americans that summer. I've still got a letter from Eden somewhere telling me all about the lovely Americans, so rich, you know, and dripping with presents. The General used to say “Beware of the Americans bearing gifts.” He said it to Patricia when she brought a girl friend of hers to Walbrooks on leave. It came from Virgil, he said, which he'd done at Eton, but I always had my doubts on account of America not being invented in those Roman times don't you feel?’
My husband put her into a taxi to drive her round the corner. Daniel Stewart would want that letter, I thought. I sat drinking my very dry martini, the last of it, and thinking about that summer, the only one in ten summers I did not go to Sindon for my holidays. I was due to go, I was packed ready to go, but my mother had an emergency hysterectomy, a very major operation in those days, and for weeks afterwards she was frail and unable to do much. I stayed at home to look after her. Vera and Francis must have been alone at Laurel Cottage for all that long holiday between the summer and the autumn school terms. Still, it was the last long holiday they were ever destined to spend together without additional company.
The letter Vera wrote to my father in the autumn of 1943 is lost. Perhaps it came too early in the year for us to have had a fire. That it once existed I know very well. I remember it or bits of it being read at breakfast. The date must have been some time in October. When I saw Vera's writing on the envelope I resigned myself to the reproaches directed at me I was sure it would contain. That August I hadn't been to Sindon and though my mother's illness was excuse enough and Vera knew it, I thought it likely she would mention my defection, asking, for example, why I couldn't have come during my mother's stay in hospital if not during her convalescence. ‘Faith couldn't put herself out to come down here’, and ‘I don't suppose Faith could be bothered now Eden is away’ were the sort of thing I feared and which my father would deal with by asking me to write Vera ‘a nice letter’. But in fact there were no reproaches and I was mentioned only along with my mother as a recipient of her love. My father said:
‘Vera is expecting a baby.’
This announcement had the effect of making me blush. I suppose it embarrassed me. Luckily, there was no Francis present to point it out.
‘Well, goodness,’ said my mother, ‘she's left it a long time. Francis must be – what?’
‘Francis was sixteen last January,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, she says so here. “Francis will be seventeen in January so I am afraid there will be a big gap when the new baby comes along in April. I should dearly love a little girl this time but shall be happy with whatever comes…”’
My father began worrying about Vera. Her husband was away – in Italy, their code told her – and he was on active service in considerable danger. Her son was at school and I think my father knew as well as I did that he could in any case have been of no help or comfort to her. Eden was now in Londonderry from which port the North Atlantic convoy escorts set out. Vera was alone, pregnant, and likely to be alone – unless the war miraculously ended – until the baby was born and beyond that. So he worried about her and fretted and finally made up his mind to go and see her. He would go and see her and invite her to come and make her home with us. A while back that would have been unthinkable but 1943 had been the quietest year of the war. Once more we were all sleeping upstairs. And it was suggested that those people who still spent the nights in the London tubes did so more for the company, ‘the light and gaiety’, than in the interests of safety. There were still a couple of months to go before the ‘Little Blitz’ of the spring of 1944. In our suburb, Vera, it seemed, would be in scarcely more danger than in Great Sindon and she would be a lot less lonely.
Of course the idea did not appeal to my mother. Presumably this baby was not an accident, she said, presumably it was planned. Vera knew what she was letting herself in for. What my father said to her in private I don't know. He said very little in front of me. He was not the sort of man to discuss the possibility of pregnancies being accidents or otherwise in front of his fifteen-year-old daughter. My mother eventually agreed, with a bad grace, that Vera should be asked. She wasn't going to Sindon with him, though, not she. He and I talked a little in the train.
‘From the tone of her letter,’ he said, ‘I wouldn't say she was – well, how shall I put it? – blissfully happy.’
‘I once heard her telling Helen she longed for another baby.’
‘Did you now?’ He seemed to cheer up at this. ‘That's a comfort then. When you were going to be born, we were so thrilled, we were so excited.’ He shook his head. ‘We were very young, of course. So you think Vera's happy?’
What a question! Had I ever known her happy? What form would Vera-happiness take? I had seen her busy, bustling, hysterical, panic-stricken, jubilant, triumphant, frustrated, petulant, angry, but I had never seen her happy.
I said firmly: ‘She loves children. She was longing for a baby. Of course she's happy. You can't tell from letters.’
That calmed him. He sighed. The train was late, the bus had gone, and we waited hours, it seemed, for the next. Vera was there, hanging over the gate, scanning the street, this way and that, the way she used to look for Francis when he wouldn't come in at bedtime.
‘I'd given you up, I thought you were never coming. What held you up? I've got two pheasants, Richard Morrell shot them, but I expect they're spoilt by now, they'll be done to a crisp.’
Pregnancy had not changed her – that is, her character was unaltered. Physically, she looked ill. There was a greenish look about her and her hair was exactly the colour of barley in the fields a month before they harvest it. She was yellowish-pale. The pregnancy, which even then I had observed does not show itself in most women before five months, had already swollen out her waist. With clothes rationing in full swing, a topcoat costing eighteen points and a dress eleven out of a possible sixty-six for fifteen months, no one was going to squander coupons on maternity clothes. Still, Vera, once so clothes-conscious, could surely, I thought, have done better than she had. She wore an old georgette dress with a small red and white pattern on it, the belt necessarily removed but the tabs through which the belt had passed still there, the hem uneven, a green cardigan over it, bedroom slippers and no stockings though it was November and cold.
We were rushed to the table. The pheasants – the first I had ever eaten – were wonderful, not overdone at all. Vera remained an excellent cook, quite in Mrs Marshall's class. All through the meal she talked about Eden, her promotion – she had become a Leading Wren – her friends, all high-ranking officers, British and American, the beautiful photograph she had sent her. Hadn't we had one? Eden had promised to send one to my father. Still, she, Vera, had two. And that is how I happen to have had in ‘the box’ the portrait of Eden with the Veronica Lake hair that the Londonderry photographer took.
‘We want you to think about coming to stay with us at least until the child is born,’ my father said.
‘I don't need to think about it. It's out of the question. I couldn't possibly. I wouldn't dream of it.’ Vera's yellowed face was flushed with colour so adamant was she. She remembered her manners. She said, ‘It's very sweet of you, John, I do appreciate it,’ and added, �
��I can't imagine Vranni would be too keen on that idea.’
‘Oh yes, she would. Vranni feels just as I do. You shouldn't be alone here. Not in your condition.’
‘I've got my friends. Eden will have some leave. Helen isn't far away.’
We tried to persuade her, or my father did. I backed him up rather half-heartedly. Now it had come to the crunch, as they didn't say in those days, I wasn't all that keen on having Vera a permanent guest. After lunch she settled down to an inevitable task – making baby clothes. To this end she was painstakingly unpicking an old white jumper of Eden's, carding the wool preparatory to washing it to get the kinks out. Yesterday's washed wool had to be wound into a ball. I held the skein for her while she wound away. Francis was coming home on half-term tomorrow. Why didn't I stay on to see him?
This invitation I managed to decline politely. I walked up the village street to see the Cambuses. Anne and I had one of those friendships that I believe are common among adolescents. My friends at home were my permanent companions, she was my occasional friend, but nonetheless needed for that, having a peculiar and special place in my affections as she was always to have and still has after forty years. Such friendships were even more usual then, in those days of the constant movement of children from refuge to refuge and back again, than they are today. We seemed always to pick up the reins where, six months or a year before, we had let them fall. Our absences gave us much to talk about. Anne told me a curious thing.
One morning in September she had been on her way to school, which necessitated passing Laurel Cottage, when she had seen Vera come rushing out, her face contorted, the tears streaming down her cheeks, and run across the road towards the Rectory. Anne knew the Morrells were not there. Richard Morrell's mother had died and they were both in Norwich for the funeral. Sure enough, Vera came stumbling back – Anne was waiting at the bus stop by now – and returned to the house, still crying, her hands up to her face.