by Dominic Luke
Mrs Mansell got to her feet and began to wash the dishes, clattering and banging and muttering under her breath. The kitchen was a gloomy place now. Clive had put boards over most of the windows because of the danger of flying glass. A safety-conscious lad, Clive. Too safety-conscious, in Letitia’s opinion. He’ll worry himself silly if he’s not careful, as Mrs Mansell put it.
Sitting in her old carver, Letitia tilted her head back and closed her eyes, taking a quick catnap before she went out for her daily dose of fresh air. One had to work up to it. Even a short walk didn’t come easy these days. But, as she snoozed, she found herself back in the days when she didn’t need a stick, when she could grab her coat and her hat and dash out of the house in the blink of an eye. And look! Here she was passing through Green Park already, turning right into Piccadilly – except that in her dream there were no trenches and no moorings for barrage balloons in Green Park, and there was not a uniform in sight on the pavements of Piccadilly. On she walked, through the straggling suburbs and out to places where the buses were green instead of red and fields receded endlessly. How quick and easy it was to reach the countryside on foot! Why had she never thought of doing it before? It would not take her long to reach Chanderton (she was going to Chanderton, she remembered that now); indeed, she was almost there, the spire of the cathedral unmistakable, sharp as a needle against the sky. And here was the meadow she’d known as a girl. It looked exactly the same, even after seventy years: the tireless bees dusted with pollen, buzzing from flower to flower; the butterflies dancing in the sunlight, mounting higher and higher before fading into the overarching blue; and was that the sound of a skylark? But her eyes were drawn to the far corner of the meadow where a man was busy with his scythe, making hay. It couldn’t be, after all this time; but it looked very much like—
‘Tom! Tom!’
‘What was that?’
Letitia’s eyes jerked open. The gloom in the kitchen seemed thicker than ever after the bright sun of the meadow. Ah, but of course, she’d been dreaming….
Mrs Mansell was standing by the table, a dishcloth in her hand. ‘Did you say something just then, Mrs Warner?’
‘No. Nothing. I was just … just … I was miles away.’
The dishcloth hovered, dripping, over the table. Mrs Mansell knitted her brows. ‘I thought I heard you say a name. I thought I heard you say Tom. Now that wouldn’t be your husband’s name, would it, Mrs Warner? He was a lot older than you, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes. He was. A lot older.’ Letitia buttoned her lips, keeping her husband locked away.
Mrs Mansell waited, as if hoping for more. One had to take care at times: her curiosity could be cunning. But Letitia was experienced enough now not to be taken in.
Mrs Mansell sighed – sensing, perhaps, that she had been thwarted. As she began to scrub the table, she returned to the well-worn theme of her own husband.
‘Mansell, now: Mansell is nothing but a nuisance. Ned would have been different. He was not handsome in looks, my Ned, but he was handsome enough in his deeds.’ She straightened up, unusually thoughtful. The dishcloth, dangling in her hand, now dripped onto the flagstones. ‘Doctor Kramer says that women are put upon, and I can’t argue with her there. She says we ought to stand up for ourselves.’
‘Does she indeed?’ Letitia looked with interest at this new version of Mrs Mansell. The old one would not have given Megan the time of day. ‘I expect she is right; but it will take a long time for things to change.’
‘Ah, but everything is different now, Mrs Warner. Where I work, for a start. That’s nearly all women. And nowadays you see women posties and clickers, women in uniform, even women bus drivers.’
‘It was the same in the last war. Afterwards – when the men came back – women had to return meekly to their allotted place in the home.’
‘Maybe so. But this time things will be different, you mark my words. Folk ain’t going to go back to how things was before. We ain’t fought this bleeding war just to keep Winnie in brandy and cigars.’
Letitia wondered if Mrs Mansell might have a point. She had her doubts, but one had to admit that things did change – albeit slowly. Women had the vote now, for one thing. Her father must have turned in his grave when that happened.
She closed her eyes again, but the meadow was gone, Tom no longer there: Mrs Mansell’s talk had driven it all away. In the back of her mind now a shadow lurked, barely discernible but disconcertingly real: not her father, but that carbon copy whose name had been William Warner.
Megan popped in and produced from her bag a gift: a bottle of whisky.
‘It’s the real thing, too,’ she said. ‘Proper Scotch. I thought you’d prefer it to the cheaper alternative of tinted methylated spirits.’
‘You are a marvel!’ exclaimed Letitia, fetching glasses from a cupboard. The bottle of whisky seemed to glow in the gloom of the kitchen. ‘You must stay and sample it, and afterwards help me find a hiding place that even Mr Mansell will fail to discover.’
Megan’s eyes were on her as she poured, but for once her hand did not betray her, was steady as a rock. The smell of the whisky seemed invigorating in itself.
Megan protested. ‘Enough, enough! I shall fall off my bicycle if I drink all that!’
‘Oh, tush. It’s no more than an eyeful. Drink it down. It will do you good.’
As Letitia savoured the half-forgotten taste, Megan said, ‘There’s more. I may be able to get my hands on an old bath chair. It’s rather ramshackle but still serviceable.’
‘I should feel like an old crock, wheeled around in a contraption like that. And who will have the time to push me?’
‘I don’t think you will be short of volunteers, if you can bear the indignity.’
‘Anything to get me out of the house.’ The whisky coursed through Letitia’s veins and she had visions of Oxford Street, Hyde Park, the River. The whole of London awaited her. She would no longer be confined to her little square. ‘Bless you, my dear. I don’t know what I should do without you – though I don’t know why you should take so much trouble over an aged specimen like me.’
‘There are many reasons. You are Hugh’s aunt, for one thing.’ But at the mention of Hugh, Megan’s smile seemed to falter. She took a sip of whisky, pulled a face as she swallowed, so that her expression of a moment before was erased and Letitia began to wonder if she’d read too much into it.
I hate loose ends, that is the problem, said Letitia to herself, raising her glass to sniff again the smell she had missed for so long. The war was a loose end that was beyond her power to do anything about; but when it came to Hugh and Megan, the temptation to interfere was becoming overwhelming. She had to remind herself of the harm she had already caused by her meddling, not forwarding Megan’s letter in 1915. This situation might have been resolved years ago but for that. There might have been no Cynthia, Letitia might have had a great-niece of whom she could be truly fond.
But was she getting ahead of herself?
‘I feel that so much time has been wasted,’ she ventured to say: not interfering, merely seeing how the land lay. ‘We ought to have been friends for years.’
‘I was not always quite as respectable as I am now – if I am respectable even now. You might not have approved of me back then.’
‘Fiddlesticks! I am not some dyed-in-the-wool snob like Connie Lambton.’
Megan looked at her curiously. ‘What was Mrs Lambton’s real opinion of me? I’ve often wondered.’
‘Connie thought that suffragettes were the handmaidens of the devil.’
Megan laughed. ‘I can well believe it.’
But Letitia was annoyed with herself. Mentioning Connie Lambton had been a slip of the tongue brought about by thoughts of that letter. To compound that mistake by mentioning suffragettes was unforgivable. It might suggest to Megan that she was being talked about in Binley long after her one and only visit. It might raise awkward questions. It might smack of prying and meddling.
&nb
sp; Whatever happened, Letitia was determined to draw a veil over her conversation with Connie Lambton in the blue drawing room twenty-nine years ago.
On her way out, Megan bumped into Mrs Mansell at the top of the area steps. Mrs Mansell, dour in her headscarf and threadbare cardigan, nodded curtly, which Megan had come to recognize as a munificent gesture of camaraderie.
‘Those bags look heavy, Mrs Mansell.’
‘Huh. Not heavy enough. And how is Mrs Warner today, Doctor Kramer?’
‘In fine fettle.’
‘I have noted,’ said Mrs Mansell, picking over her words as Megan imagined she would pick over produce at market, ‘that she seems at times to be preoccupied with the past.’
‘It is hardly surprising. One must have so many memories at ninety-five.’
‘Ah, but it’s as if something is troubling her. I have heard her mentioning someone called Tom.’ Mrs Mansell pursed her lips, brows jutting. ‘You might think as it is none of my business—’
I wouldn’t dare say anything of the kind, thought Megan, wondering if perhaps there was a part of Mrs Mansell who still resented her – who saw her as trespassing on the territory of others.
‘—but I’m only looking out for her,’ Mrs Mansell continued. ‘I have her best interests at heart. I owe her a lot, when all is said and done.’
Megan – who liked Mrs Mansell, who rather admired her, who saw her as a soldier on the front line of a different war – made an attempt to allay suspicions and curry favour, without making it too obvious. ‘Who was Tom? Was he Mrs Warner’s husband? You would know, Mrs Mansell; she will have spoken to you about her husband.’
‘She has. But now I come to think on it, I don’t believe as she’s ever mentioned him by name. I do recall as she once said he was something of a bully; yet when she spoke this Tom’s name she had a smile on her lips.’ Mrs Mansell sniffed. ‘I suppose you think I’m being nosy.’
‘Not at all. As you said, we have her best interest at heart, you and me.’
‘That we do.’
‘And I know I can rely on you to take care of her.’
‘You can.’
Mrs Mansell trudged down the area steps with her shopping bags. Watching her go, Megan felt that some rapprochement had been achieved.
She climbed onto her bicycle – a man’s bicycle, inherited from Letitia’s regular doctor along with his patients – and pedalled off, winging her way through streets where destruction wrought in the far-off days of the blitz had been added to of late by the deadly doodlebugs. Swooping through the summer sunshine, Megan went over her conversation with Letitia and began to wonder just how much the old lady knew about her. How much had Hugh told his great-aunt? What had Connie Lambton said in Binley long ago? Letitia had dropped the word suffragette into their talk, a hint perhaps that she knew more than she let on. Letitia might have learned from Hugh of Megan’s suffrage activities, but Megan had got the impression that he had never gone into details about their meeting in London in 1912. Perhaps, then, the information had come from Connie Lambton. Perhaps that was why Letitia had become suddenly vague. Perhaps she did not want to go into details of what Mrs Lambton might or might not have said.
Not that it matters, Megan said to herself, pushing down hard on the pedals, flowing with the traffic, whizzing past pedestrians: people who, like the streets, looked worn and threadbare in this fifth year of the war. Not that it mattered, but what else had Connie Lambton said? What had Hugh heard? There had been a moment in Hyde Park in 1941 when she had headed him off, changed the direction of the conversation, because it had been so painful to see the doubt in his eyes. It’s so strange that you’re a doctor…. What, then, had he expected? That she’d been no better than she ought to be, that she’d earned a living by nefarious means?
As it happens, Megan said, speeding along with the breeze behind her, as it happens, I dodged all that, never sank so low.
But it had been touch and go, she admitted. In the latter stages of the first war she had been alone and penniless, had struggled to stay afloat, had been desperate enough to try anything. And then, out of the blue, entirely unlooked-for, luck had smiled on her – luck had come to her rescue even as she was sliding slowly into the mire.
Luck was all it was, too, said Megan, wondering if, without it, she would ever have found the strength to haul herself back to respectability when it was so much easier to sink still lower. There were others who had never had her good fortune. She did not presume to judge them. She was not one to throw the first stone – unlike Mrs Lambton, whose stones, deserved or not, had always hit their mark.
Joining the dots in her mind, Megan wondered if Mrs Lambton had gained knowledge of her suffragette activities through her eldest son, Julian.
He called me a suffragette on many an occasion, he called me a lot worse, too. He insulted me to my face, flung those words at me, as I flung words at him: snob, hypocrite, pompous pig. She smiled, remembering the words they had used, words which had become terms of endearment as they tried – and failed – to fight against the mutual attraction that bound them.
Megan rang her bell to alert some careless pedestrians as she swept along Kings Road towards Sloane Square, her joyous smile tinged with sadness as she thought with fond remembrance of her long-dead lover, Julian Lambton.
Chapter Nine
‘LOOK AT THOSE trees,’ said Letitia. ‘The leaves have fallen already. Autumn has come early this year.’
Sitting in her ramshackle bath chair with a rug over her knees, being pushed through the streets of Chelsea, Letitia was at leisure to look around and see things properly, not having to worry about her unsteady legs, uneven pavements, unexpected kerbs. Clive Mansell was puffing and panting behind her. The chair was quite a weight, and he was not exactly a brawny lad.
‘It’s the doodlebugs what do that, Mrs Warner,’ he said. ‘The leaves are blown off the trees when they explode.’
‘How extraordinary!’ said Letitia, looking up as they passed beneath the stark, bare branches.
The doodlebugs had become commonplace, falling on London in an endless swarm; but one never quite got used to them. Just the opposite, in fact. Their sheer number magnified their awe and terror. People got more and more jumpy, were always on the alert, listening out for the stuttering, buzzing sound of their engines. It gave everyone a distracted mien, as if they were only ever half-listening when one talked to them. And so the fifth summer of the war wore away and victory – which had seemed within touching distance in June – receded into the future.
Down by the river, Clive took a breather, taking off his hand-me-down jacket with the elbow patches and mopping his brow as Letitia looked out towards Battersea Park, the wind in her face, the rippling grey water flowing unabated, the sky a patchwork of cloud. Being by the timeless Thames gave her a sense of perspective. The river, she thought, had been here long before Chelsea Embankment had come into being. It had been here when London was just a few huts within a wooden palisade on the terraces of a wide flood plain; and it would still be here when all this was forgotten. It would be flowing serene through a city of the future when doodlebugs would be a thing of the past, if remembered at all. Everyone now living – all the people fighting and dying, sheltering from bombs, scratching out an existence in the ruins: they would be nothing but dust by then. It was somehow comforting to think of time marching implacably onwards – to realize the insignificance of a human life. Nothing endured forever. Even the war would end one day.
Letitia closed her eyes, enjoying a moment of calm, the breeze caressing her face, the hum of the city faint and soothing.
And then the siren sounded.
Letitia listened, eyes shut, as the wailing of the alert rose and fell and rose again, its effect undiminished even now: one felt suddenly queasy, as if the ground beneath one’s feet had begun to pitch and toss like the deck of a ship.
She opened her eyes as the sound tailed away to find Clive leaning over her wringing his hands, his past
y face creased with anxiety. ‘It’s the alert, Mrs Warner. The alert. We didn’t ought to have come so far from home. We didn’t ought to have come so far.’
His fear bolstered her, reminding her, oddly enough, of Hugh sitting in her basement in 1940, experiencing his first raid. He, too, had needed reassurance.
She reached out a steadying hand, laid it on Clive’s arm. ‘It will be all right, Clive. There’s no sign of danger yet.’
But even as she spoke the faint sound of a flying bomb was carried on a gust of wind from across the river. Clive ran round and tried to move the chair – but it seemed to be stuck.
‘It won’t budge, Mrs Warner! It won’t budge!’
‘Steady, my dear. Steady. No need to panic.’
A wheel had jammed. Clive knelt to try and free it. His knuckles were white as he wrestled with it, beads of sweat on his face, his breathing rapid and uneven.
The sound of the doodlebug became more and more distinct – then suddenly cut out. There was an ominous silence. Letitia heard Clive counting under his breath. ‘One … two … three….’
The explosion came after ten. It was a long way away: to the south and east on the other side of the river. After a moment, a distant plume of dust rose above the rooftops and slowly mingled with the grey of the sky. Someone had caught it hot, as Mrs Mansell would say.
Clive let out a shuddering breath. A little calmer now, he was able to free the wheel and face the journey home. He pushed the ponderous chair as fast as his scrawny frame would allow. He was all flesh and bone, his mother often said disapprovingly. Like Hugh, thought Letitia: Hugh as a boy, coming to her on brief visits during holidays from school.
They had not gone far when the unmistakable buzzing noise started up again, growing rapidly louder. It was not unexpected. The infernal things seemed to travel in flocks: where one led, others followed. As Clive struggled with the chair, bumping her up and down pavements, dashing along the straights, Letitia watched people all round her, some diving for shelter, others braving it out, all with glazed expressions: their ears were attuned to the noise in the sky.