Goodnight from London

by Jennifer Robson

  And then an even more worrisome thought occurred to her. Perhaps Kaz hadn’t insisted. Perhaps it was all Bennett’s doing—a way for him to be kind to her.

  And if it were? What else could she do but accept?

  “Thank you,” she said, focusing on Uncle Harry alone. “I’m honored. I promise to do my very best.”

  “And that is all we can ask of you, my dear,” he said. “I for one am perfectly confident you are up to the task.”

  Nigel cleared his throat and made a show of rustling the papers before him. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Bennett, we still have this week’s issue to put to bed. Let’s all of us focus on that for now, and leave the glad-handing for another day. I’ll be in my office if any of you wish to speak with me.”

  Bennett spoke up now, addressing Ruby directly for the first time. “We’ve agreed you can use Kaz’s office while he’s away. Would you like to come along with me now?”

  She nodded, gathering up her bag and notebook, and followed him out of the main room and down the hall to Kaz’s office, which looked as if a brief but intense hurricane had set down only minutes before. It might be more trouble than it was worth to clear a space for her to work.

  Bennett closed the door behind them and turned to face her. “Say it. I could see the wheels turning in your head out there.”

  “Did you see Peter’s face? He couldn’t believe it. For that matter, neither can I.”

  “You will do a better job, Ruby. That’s all there is to it—that’s why you were asked. Even Nigel, when we pressed him on it, had to admit that your skills as an editor far surpass Peter’s.”

  “So this isn’t you looking out for a friend?”

  “Absolutely not,” he assured her. “This magazine is too important to Kaz to entrust the work of running it to someone who doesn’t know what he—or she—is doing. The better question isn’t whether you deserve the job, since we both know you do, but whether you actually want to do it.”

  “I do want it.” And she did, she truly did. It would be a challenge, though, not least because of the man for whom she’d be working, and she felt ill just thinking about the circumstances that had brought it to her door . . .

  “So?” Bennett prompted. “What is there to worry about?”

  “Nigel, to start with. You saw the look on his face.”

  “That was the look of a man who had just been told he couldn’t have his toady of an underling as his assistant editor. He’ll get over it,” Bennett promised, “and if he doesn’t, he’ll have me to deal with—and Kaz, too, when he’s recovered.” The expression on his face was sufficiently grim for her to almost feel sorry for Nigel.

  His next words nearly eroded her meager store of confidence. “I have to warn you, though, that one of Nigel’s conditions for taking on the role was that Harry and I remain at arm’s length. That we not interfere in the editorial content of the magazine.”

  “Oh,” she said, wishing she had something more worthwhile to offer than a single, feeble syllable.

  “Since his leaving would mean our having to close up shop, we felt we had to agree. I’m not happy about it, but I didn’t see any alternative. He’ll take the magazine to the right—that’s all but a certainty.”

  “I know. He’s always complaining in meetings that Kaz is too liberal in his approach to stories.”

  “Yes. I’m not thrilled at the prospect of PW becoming a mouthpiece of Nigel’s brand of last-stand, old-guard conservatism, but it won’t be for long. At least I hope not for long.”

  “Will Kaz . . . will he be all right?”

  “I hope so. I have to believe he will. Harry will take care of him, and Kaz has always loved the house in Edenbridge. He simply needs some time to heal. He will be back. I’m sure of it.”

  “Good. That should . . . well, that’ll make it easier. At least I hope it will.”

  “If you’re convinced Nigel is about to publish something truly objectionable, something that would ruin what Kaz has created here, you must let me know straightaway. Here’s my telephone number at work if you need me.” Bennett pressed a card into her hand.

  “I will.”

  “If I’m not there, leave a message with one of the secretaries, and I’ll ring you back as soon as I’m able.”

  “Thank you. For taking care of Kaz, and for—”

  “You’re very welcome. Now, unfortunately, I need to go—I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped. And you do have a magazine to edit.”

  He kissed her cheek, so gently she scarcely felt it, and was out of the office and down the hall before she had so much as blinked.

  The business card in her hand brought her back to the present. She looked down, curious as to what it would say.

  Capt. C. S. Bennett

  Inter-Services Research Bureau

  Welbeck 1966

  Nothing very enlightening, then, but she hadn’t expected to discover his secrets engraved on a rectangle of cardstock. Tucking it away in her handbag, she went back to her desk in the main office, sat herself down, and got back to work.

  NIGEL’S ASCENSION TO the editorship went pretty much as she had guessed, and rather worse, she suspected, than Uncle Harry and Bennett would have liked. Stories in the works that Nigel deemed too “soft” were canned, including one on female pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary that Ruby had been working on for several weeks. He brought in a monthly column on military affairs, written by a press relations officer from the War Office, and he revived the letters page, ignoring her protests that they could make far better use of the editorial space.

  Worst of all, he declined to pursue any of Ruby’s story ideas. Week after week, he rejected her proposals, limiting her writing to the women’s page he had instituted at the back of the magazine. As for her editorial contributions? Any substantive edits she made to his or Peter’s pieces, or those of the increasingly conservative contributors who filled their pages, were soundly rejected.

  “Now that we’re down to sixteen interior pages,” he was fond of saying at their editorial meetings, “we simply don’t have room for any of that lightweight stuff that Kaz loved.”

  “Where does the ‘women’s page’ fall in your estimation?” Ruby had asked the first time they discussed the subject. “I’d have thought you considered it far too insubstantial for our newly serious magazine.”

  “We’re holding on to it for the advertising, no more. I’d like nothing more than to can it—but then how would you and Nell fill your days?”

  He was especially nasty to Nell, who vowed again and again that she was about to resign. “The only thing holding me back is the fear of where I’ll end up. If I quit, the Ministry of Labor is sure to send me somewhere even worse. Sewing parachutes, most likely, or ladling explosives into shell casings.”

  They tried to laugh together, for Nigel’s antics could be amusing at times, particularly when he was shouting down the phone at some poor soul. “I’ve started marking off each day on my wall calendar at home,” Nell admitted toward the end of October. “We’ve already survived six weeks of this. If Kaz does come back at the beginning of December, that means we’re almost halfway there.”

  “And if it’s still just as bad once he does return?” Ruby asked.

  “Then I’m off to work in a munitions factory. But I’m sure he’ll be back before long, and when he does he’ll set everything to rights. Chin up, Ruby.”

  “Chin up, Nell.”

  Ruby did her level best to get on with Nigel. She kept her edits light. She tried her damnedest not to impose her point of view on the pieces that landed on her desk, some of them so shrill and unbalanced that they read more like satire than serious editorial content.

  By the end of October she’d resigned herself to her role as a glorified copy editor, trusted to pick out typographical errors but not much more. Nigel had flat-out refused to let her accompany him to the compositors or the printers, and when she had objected, pointing out that he had always gone along with Kaz, Nigel had inf
ormed her that women weren’t welcome, and that was that. For all she knew, it may have been true, but it stung just the same.

  The covers that Nigel chose were even more objectionable than the stories they ran. Kaz had insisted their cover image be attached to a story, and the photographs they used—always photographs and never illustrations—had been, under Kaz’s leadership, selected for visual impact but never for shock value.

  Their first issue with Nigel fully at the helm marked a sharp departure from their usual fare. The cover was a close-up of two dancers from the notorious Windmill Theatre, the women wearing exaggerated stage makeup; and the picture was cropped so as to show only their heads and upper torsos, with a generous amount of cleavage underpinning the bottom third of the cover. It gave the impression that both women were entirely nude—as they might indeed have been, since the Windmill was known for its risqué tableaux. The article that ran inside, by contrast, was scathingly critical of the theater and others like it, and proclaimed them an affront to “true British values.”

  Ruby had felt sick to her stomach when the first proofs had arrived. Rather than challenge Nigel in front of everyone else, she had followed him into his office and, tossing the proofs on his desk, had gathered together every scrap of her courage and faced him down.

  “This is the most hypocritical pile of crap I have ever seen, and you know it. How could you? Kaz will be mortified.”

  “Watch your language, Ruby.”

  “Oh, come on! This cover image is one of the most salacious photographs I’ve ever seen! Yet I wouldn’t mind it so much if you’d chosen to couple it with a decent article. Something that actually gets to the bottom of why the Windmill is popular. Or what it’s like to be a dancer there. Or any number of other subjects. But it’s a diatribe—it reads like Oswald Mosley wrote the first draft.”

  He didn’t even bother to look her in the eye, and instead was concentrating on extracting a speck of dirt from under his thumbnail. “Go ahead and resign, then.”

  “Not if it leaves this magazine in your hands. Kaz will be back soon, and everything will go back to how it used to be. You should be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage—”

  His face reddened, but still he didn’t look up. “What’s shameful about it? I’ve been given a chance to show what I’m made of, and I plan to make the most of it.”

  “You’ll be lucky if Kaz doesn’t show you the door when he sees what you’ve done to PW.”

  “I doubt it. He’ll see how well it’s been managed and be grateful. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some work to do. Shut the door behind you when you leave.”

  It didn’t help that she was right in her prediction that Nigel would run the magazine into the ground: advertising revenues plummeted, together with newsstand sales, and before long they were solidly in the red issue after issue. Nigel refused to discuss it with her, insisting that the war was pushing down profits everywhere, but Ruby was unconvinced.

  She knew Kaz was recovering well, for Uncle Harry’s letters to Vanessa arrived like clockwork every Monday morning and he invariably promised that their editor would be back to work by the end of December, if not earlier. But what if there was no magazine left by the time he returned?

  Nearly at breaking point, she shut herself into Kaz’s office one morning in late October and, fishing out the card Bennett had given her, dialed through to his work.

  “Good morning, Inter-Services Research Bureau, how may I direct your call?”

  “May I speak with Captain C. S. Bennett?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid he isn’t in the office today. May I take a message?”

  “Could you tell him . . .”

  “Yes, miss?”

  What could she tell him? Nigel had insisted on control of the magazine, and Bennett had given it to him. They’d published some awful stuff since then, but nothing so terrible that it would put Kaz in his grave. Surely, she reasoned, both Uncle Harry and Bennett had seen some of PW’s recent issues. If they truly hated what Nigel was doing, they would have acted by now.

  “Sorry. I’ll call back another time.”

  She would give it another month. If things got any worse, she would write to Uncle Harry and let him know. Kaz would be back before long, and the damage Nigel wrought could be undone. Surely all would be well in the end.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  November 1941

  It was Sunday morning, the only day of the week that Ruby didn’t wake up and instantly feel gloomy, for an entire day free of PW beckoned. She rose early, went for a walk to the river and back, and was finishing off the morning with some satisfyingly aimless work mending socks and turning cuffs. If only every day could be so pleasant.

  “Ruby!”

  She looked up from her darning and spied Vi in the front hall.

  “Hello to you. You’re early.”

  “I am. I was thinking of going through the trunks in the attic again. Nearly everything I have is threadbare.”

  “Do you want to take back any of your clothes? I hate to think you’ve gone without nice things because of me.”

  “No—I should have said I was looking for something to make over. A frock for evenings out. Even if I come across something that’s hopelessly out-of-date, it shouldn’t be too hard to have it altered. I’m sure I can find a tailor or seamstress to help.”

  “I can help,” Ruby offered. “I was taught to sew by nuns. If there’s one thing they’re good at teaching, it’s needlework. The rest of my education didn’t amount to all that much, but I do know how to sew.” In point of fact she hated to sew, but the look of delight on Vi’s face more than made up for any tedious moments she was bound to suffer.

  “That would be lovely—thank you. And I think we still have Mama’s old sewing machine up in the attic.”

  They trooped upstairs and began sorting through a trunk of Vi’s old things, most of them fancier dresses that had been packed away for the duration. They were gorgeous things, for the most part, but the change in fashions over the past couple of years hadn’t been kind to them. Everything they pulled out was awash in excess fabric, the skirts too full and long, the bodices too unstructured and voluminous.

  “These will be easy to fix,” Ruby promised. “They just need a more, well, military cut. It’s really a case of removing material. If it were the other way around, we’d be in trouble.”

  “What do you think of this frock?” Vi asked. “Do you think we can save it?”

  She held up a dress—a gown, really—made of silk chiffon, each layer a steadily lighter shade of blue. It was swoony and romantic and almost comically dated.

  “I think so. Just hold it up so I can see. Yes, yes . . . I think we can do something with it. I’ll unpick the waistband, flatten out the layers in the skirt, and take out enough to straighten the lines. I can add in a few darts, too, so everything fits properly. And I’ll do the same to the bodice. See how the sleeves are so full here? I just have to unpick them, take out the excess, and sew them back on. It’s the work of an afternoon, no more.”

  Vi hugged her suddenly, crushing the dress between them. “You’re a genius, Ruby. I’d never be able to do this.”

  “Oh, it’s easy enough once you know how. Do you want to try it on? I’ll find some pins—I think I see your mother’s sewing things over there.”

  Vi took off her skirt and blouse and slipped on the gown, which, considerations of current fashion aside, really was beautiful. As she was changing, Ruby rummaged through Vanessa’s old sewing box and found a pincushion, its pins still sharp and rust-free.

  “This looks like something you’d wear to a ball,” she said as she got to work.

  “It was. I wore it to a ball in Oxford, at the college where Hugh was an undergraduate, the summer before the war. It was a magical night. I hardly knew him—I was only eighteen, and he wasn’t much older—but I’d already decided I was in love with him.”

  “What was he like?”

  “So very handsome. A bit like
Ronald Colman, only without that silly little mustache. Ever so funny and kind. I know it happens that sometimes you lose someone, and before long you start to realize they weren’t as wonderful as you’d believed. That they had feet of clay like everyone else. But Hugh was different. He really was just as perfect as I imagined him to be.”

  Ruby knelt by her friend, busily pinning back layer after layer of chiffon. “I’m sorry I never got to meet him.”

  “He’d have liked you very much. He’d been to America with his family when he was younger, and he loved it. He promised me we would go there after the war. He was so certain I’d become a movie star in Hollywood.”

  Ruby kept pinning, methodically, gently, taking care not to scratch Vi’s skin. She was so close to her friend that she couldn’t fail to notice how Vi was trembling.

  “He signed up straightaway. I knew he would. He’d joined a flying club when he started at Oxford. It was a sort of lark to him and his friends, you know. They all signed up. They’re all . . . they’re all dead now.”

  “Oh, Vi.”

  “There were five of them, and they were killed last summer. Hugh was the oldest, and he was only twenty-one. It was before I knew you, of course. Were you living in England then?”

  “I’d only just arrived. I was still learning my way around. Finding my feet, I guess you could say. I didn’t realize, then, what they were doing. How they were saving all of us.”

  Vi nodded, just the once, and breathed in deeply. “It was such a beautiful day. The sky was so blue that it hurt my eyes to look at it. He was . . . Hugh was on his third sortie of the afternoon. He hadn’t slept properly in weeks, so he must have been terribly tired. There were so few of them, you know, and each day there were fewer. He went out and he never returned. I didn’t find out until the next day. His parents had been sent a telegram, and his sister drove through the night so she might tell me, face-to-face, and spare me the shock of a telephone call or telegram. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.”