War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  Alice had done her best to help without interfering. She had offered Mr. Hammet tactful but timely hints about the Mothers’ Union, the Dorcas Society, and the Sunday school classes and had mentioned her father’s twenty-minute sermon limit. He had thanked her profusely, seeming genuinely grateful for her help, but Alice’s efforts hadn’t made much impact on his chaotic habits. At the vicarage he lived in a muddle of misplaced objects—sermons scribbled on the backs of envelopes, his list of parish-council meetings forever missing. She and Nell had found a lost box of hymn­books propping up the leaky cistern of the downstairs cloakroom; they were soaked.

  After that, Nell had knocked on his study door and told him firmly that he would be wanting someone to keep the vicarage in order and she would see to it. In his mild way, Oliver Hammet had said, “Of course, quite, yes please, most grateful, really, Mrs. Hawthorne, quite happy, whatever you charge” and waved a despairing hand at his study.

  Nell told Alice that she had never seen the like: it looked as if a tidal wave of books and papers, church pamphlets, schedules, and hymnals had struck. It overflowed the study and the parlor and was gradually creeping across the dining room into the kitchen. She was always unearthing biscuit tins, half-drunk cups of tea, clerical collars, apple cores, and odd socks. Mice had made a comfortable home in the pantry.

  “The state of it!” she exclaimed now, clattering into the vestry with her bucket and rolling her eyes. “I gave it a good bottoming last week, everything dusted, polished, and tidy as you please, and in no time it’s a heathen mess again. It wouldn’t half give your mother the vapors. It’s a blessing she can’t see her old home. It’s a wife he needs, and the sooner the better.” She rinsed her bucket, shaking her head.

  This was becoming a sore point with Alice. People in the village kept dropping broad hints about Oliver Hammet’s bachelor state and hinting that perhaps she would soon be back at the vicarage, eh? It made her feel quite desperate. She could hardly follow Nell’s example and tell him he needed a wife to keep him in order and she was the one for the job. Fortunately Mr. Hammet was absentminded at the best of times, and if he noticed his parishioners’ matchmaking hints he gave no sign.

  Nell stowed her bucket, mop, and cleaning basket in a cupboard, took off her apron, and hung it on a peg. “As for that garden, it wants weeding. You used to keep it so lovely.” She left an opening for Alice to say that perhaps she could spare an hour or two. “Right under his study window, where he has to see it every time he looks up.” Alice kept determinedly silent.

  Mind you, thought Nell, it was no good getting Alice in the vicar’s line of vision these days. She wondered if she dared suggest that the girl’s hair could do with a good wash. Or something. It was peculiarly flat today. But Alice looked so dismal that Nell sensed friendly advice would only depress her more. “Here,” Nell said instead, handing over a basket, “I’ve taken some of the windfalls. Your father always said if they were left to rot they’d attract wasps and anyone who wanted them was welcome to them, especially seeing as how your poor mother was never up to using them, not so much as making a bit of jelly. I don’t think Mr. Hammet had noticed the apple tree before I mentioned it, but he said, ‘Oh, of course, very good of you, Mrs. Hawthorne, please help yourself.’ So I did.”

  “Thank you,” said Alice warily, wishing Nell would go home.

  Studiedly casual, Nell continued, “Loads this year, never seen so many, and this morning Albert says to me, he says, ‘Why not take some to the Osbournes, Miss Alice has a fine way with pastry, always makes such tarts for the Harvest Home, her bein’ such a practical young lady. Maybe she could make an extra tart for the young vicar, seein’ as how he’s got no one else to do it for him.’”

  “Thank you, Nell, you’re very kind but…”

  “Mind, it’s the way to their hearts, my girl. My Albert’s a devil for pastry. All men are.”

  Alice gritted her teeth. She wished Nell and Albert and everyone else in the village would mind their own business. She had no more intention of taking apple tarts to the vicarage than she had of sprouting wings and flying over the downs.

  “Cheerio then,” Nell said and left Alice to her polishing.

  Alice wondered how she could convince Nell she wasn’t in the vestry to catch Oliver Hammet’s eye. It was just so nice—after the bustle of the infants’ school all week, then looking after Mummy and listening to her complaints, trying to keep her cheerful at home—to be on her own with the soothing tasks that reminded her of happier times.

  The day was so warm that she flung open the window. The late-October sun slanted in from the west, across the fields and the downs beyond. A wasp buzzed somewhere. No children shoved and fought and cried “Miss! Miss!” for her attention, no querulous voice demanded a handkerchief, her comfits, lost glasses, lavender water, a cushion. There was no small, ugly house piled with boxes of Father’s papers waiting to be put away. Alice shut her eyes and imagined that she and her father were about to set out for their Saturday walk.

  In her mind’s eye they had just reached the first stile when the heavy oak door to the church creaked open, then slammed, jolting Alice out of her reverie. Perhaps whoever it was wanted the vicar and would go away. Then her heart sank. She heard the thud of a cane, the unmistakably firm footsteps of authority. A moment later Lady Marchmont burst into the vestry holding a wilting green bundle. “Alice, my dear! Knew I’d find you here. I’ve brought the last of the Michaelmas daisies for the altar. You might as well put down that candlestick and find some vases at once. I told Gifford to wrap the stems in damp newspaper, but she hasn’t the foggiest notion about flowers.”

  “How kind. They’ll look lovely,” said Alice, putting down the brass and dutifully producing two tall vases from a cupboard. She held them under the tap, then stuffed in the straggly stems.

  “Take them round to your mother after evensong tomorrow. Cheer her up, I expect. No sense leaving them for the vicar to look at. Wouldn’t know one end of a flower from another.” Lady Marchmont lowered herself heavily into a chair. Oh dear. “And how is your poor mother today?”

  Alice smiled thinly. “As well as can be expected, thank you.”

  “Humph! You’re looking tired, my dear. All that teaching—children can be so fatiguing. And for what? Children should either be taught at home by a governess as I was or, if they’re of the lower orders, be put to an apprenticeship to learn a useful trade. What they’re expected to do with all this arithmetic and geography and whatnot when it’s becoming impossible to engage a decent housemaid I do not pretend to know. Now, Alice, I’ve something serious to say to you.”

  Lady Marchmont leaned forward, both hands on her cane. Alice wondered what would happen if she leaped out of the window and ran—far from her mother and Lady Marchmont, the Hawthornes, the infants’ school, the village matchmakers, apple tarts, everyone and everything. Instead, trapped, she cleared her throat and waited for the onslaught. Oh dear, oh dear. Lady Marchmont, please don’t say anything at all. Please go away and let me have a little peace and quiet in the one place where I’m perfectly happy just doing what I’m doing. If I concentrate on missing Father I won’t have to remember how it felt to be happy, when Richard kissed me, or how we stood with his arm round my shoulders looking out to sea, and him asking how soon we could be married when he returned.

  She longed to scream at the top of her voice, “I don’t want to remember that Richard married someone else!” Instead she snatched up the gleaming wafer plate, which she had just finished, and pushed a polish-soaked cloth hard against it. Round and round. Harder and harder.

  Lady Marchmont didn’t notice. “I’ll come straight to the point. I very much admire the way you’ve behaved over this wretched business. You’ve behaved admirably. Admirably! Who could have believed it of Richard! To marry that hussy! No better than she should be, I daresay, being American. And Roman Catholic, Penelope tells me—far worse. But what’s done is done. Water under the bridge! Alice, you will m
arry someone else and be perfectly happy. You’ll make an excellent wife for someone, and you simply must buck up and stop moping.

  “Your mother, of course, has her health to worry about, and perhaps she’s not entirely able to deal with things, but one always feels an interest in a deserving young gel. So I have a piece of news that will interest you. Young Hugo de Balfort is back at the Hall from his travels at last—for good, so Mrs. Gifford tells me, and she had it from the butcher’s boy who…well, never mind. Poor Leander de Balfort’s health is failing, you know, has been for some time. Naturally he wants his son at home to see to things before they fall into rack and ruin. Anyway, the boy will inherit a handsome property, a shambles now, of course, but nothing that can’t be put right provided he does his duty and marries money. Entailed, of course, and as he’s the last of the de Balforts, he’ll need to marry soon and provide an heir.”

  “Quite,” murmured Alice, vastly relieved there was no question of her penniless self featuring in any matchmaking scheme Lady Marchmont had for Hugo de Balfort, who, in any case, she barely knew.

  “The boy should have buckled down immediately after university, getting the place back on its feet, but Leander had old-fashioned notions about the Grand Tour, insisted that in his day, no gentleman could call himself educated unless he’d done it. De Balfort tradition, he said. Humph! If you ask me it was the foreign ideas he picked up on his own Grand Tour that convinced Leander he could improve Gracecourt with cockeyed schemes—Chinese pagodas and such nonsense. Poor Venetia saw her fortune evaporate with his extravagance. Continentals think one must always be improving things to make them pretty, they’ve no sense of solid English.”

  Alice murmured something that sounded like agreement and stopped listening altogether. Lady Marchmont was off on one of her tirades about foreigners. Alice decided that when she finished at the vestry she would walk to the de Balforts’ home farm for a small pot of cream to go with the scones she had planned for her mother’s teatime treat.

  Lady Marchmont had hardly paused for breath. “Naturally I did warn him…but to get back to the point, some young friends of Hugo’s are staying, down from London for the shooting, though one can’t imagine there’s much shooting left—the gamekeeper must be nearly eighty. A few pheasants hanging on, I daresay. There’s to be a luncheon party next Saturday, after the morning shoot. Naturally one is invited. Since Leander is such an old friend, I said I should like to bring a young companion—so much easier at my time of life—and he of course remembered your father and they will be delighted to see you…”

  Alice was horrified. She could think of nothing more humiliating in her present situation as a jilted fiancée than the prospect of being dangled in front of Hugo de Balfort’s friends like bait on a fishing line. “You are too kind, Lady Marchmont, but I really don’t think—”

  “Nonsense! They’re several girls short.”

  “But Mummy will—”

  “Mrs. Gifford will stay with your mother and see she doesn’t need anything. So that’s settled.”

  “But I hardly know Hugo de Balfort, and anyway, they’re rather a smart set at the Hall, all cocktails and tennis and fast motors, Lord this and Count that and some Italian artist, not to mention that German singer. I should be absolutely terrified!”

  Lady Marchmont waved a hand dismissively. “One need never mind foreigners, my dear. And the clergy are considered as quite the equal of the landed gentry, and your dear father was on friendly terms with Leander; he could hardly avoid knowing the de Balforts because the church is on their land and they were his parishioners, so he wouldn’t disapprove of his daughter having lunch at the Hall. A gel will never get married if she doesn’t meet any suitable men.”

  “Still, I would much rather not.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” puffed Lady Marchmont, rising imperiously to her feet. “Your father would insist on your going if he were here. And so do I. Gels need to be out and about, seeing other young people, meeting young men, not moping about in the gloom or running themselves off their feet at their mothers’ beck and call. I intend to call for you in the motor at a quarter to one next Saturday.”

  “But I’ve nothing to wear,” Alice wailed, nearly in tears of frustration and anger.

  “And,” Lady Marchmont continued, ignoring the look on Alice’s face to turn a critical eye on her dull skirt and jumper under the pinny, “for goodness sake put on something blue. It suits your eyes. And perhaps you ought to rinse your hair with vinegar. It does wonders for light brown hair like yours, that one hardly notices otherwise. Just wash it, even. It seems to have gone rather…flat. And one more word of advice, Alice. Remember to stand up straight, my dear. You tall girls forget the importance of posture. Posture, Alice! Posture!” She patted Alice firmly on the back for emphasis. “Good day to you, my dear. I’ll see myself out.”

  The vestry door slammed. The daisies drooped dispiritedly over the necks of the vases. In the silence Alice picked up the brass candlestick she had been polishing earlier. The polish had dried to a film. “Bother and damnation!” She stamped her foot. “Hell! Oh bloody bother! Bloody hell!” She rubbed the candlestick furiously. Her elbow hit the basket of windfalls and knocked it off the shelf. A cascade of overripe apples hit the floor, to roll and bounce squashily at her feet.

  It was the last straw.

  Alice bent down, picked one up, and hurled it through the open window as hard and as far as she could. “Damn Lady Marchmont!” she cried. She picked up another and flung it after the first. “Bother bloody Hugo de Balfort!” The rest followed. “Bother his friends! Bother Nell Hawthorne and her apple tarts! Pastry be damned! Bloody bloody bloody bother!”

  As the last apple flew outside Alice burst into tears. “Damn New Orleans, damn Richard, damn his new wife, bloody damn everything to hell!”

  4.

  Austria, November 1938

  With her long legs tucked under her skirt and a little girl snuggled on either side, sixteen-year-old Antoinette Joseph settled back in the cushions of her bedroom window seat, opened a worn but beautifully illustrated Fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, and began to read aloud to her younger sisters. The book had belonged to their mother when she was a child. She put one arm around four-year-old Klara, the other around Klara’s twin, Lili. Tanni, as the family called Antoinette, had read “The Sleeping Beauty” to the twins so many times she could have recited it by heart. She let Klara turn the pages for the pictures.

  The autumn sun streaming through the window was warm on their backs, and as the princess “fell into a deep, deep sleep,” Lili dozed off, sucking her thumb. Tanni put her finger to her lips, winked conspiratorially at Klara, then shifted Lili until the child’s head lay more comfortably in her lap. Klara tightened her arm round Tanni’s waist and her eyelids drooped too. They often dozed during the day, because none of the three slept properly at night.

  Tanni often lay awake with her goose-down quilt pulled up to her chin, listening to her father pacing in his disordered library on the floor below. If she heard her mother sobbing from her parents’ bedroom down the hall, she put a pillow over her ears. She always took it off again, because in the room next to hers, Klara had nightmares and Lili had begun to wet her bed. When they cried out Tanni would get up, wake Klara or change Lili’s sheets before they could disturb their mother. Then she took them back to her own bed, where she reassured them they were safe at home, safe with Tanni, and hummed lullabies until they slept again. Then she would lie awake, thinking.

  Her father was anxious and preoccupied these days. He never played with the twins the way he once had done with Tanni. They never had any fun. Tanni thought wistfully of visits to the cinema or the zoo, or strolls with her parents along the river promenade where an orchestra played in good weather, followed by a visit to the konditorei, a magical place of gold mirrors, marble-topped tables, case after case of glistening cakes, and cream-topped ices in tall glasses. The twins had never been inside. The konditorei had been the
first place in the town to post a “Jews not welcome” sign in the window. Now these signs were up on all the shops and restaurants, and at the cinema and the zoo. Judenrein.

  Lili and Klara did not understand what being Jewish had to do with ices, walking in the park, or looking at animals. “But why can’t we go?” they would wail. Tanni didn’t understand the why of it either, but the town’s hostility was palpable. Not only did it keep them away from all the nice things in town, it now oozed like an evil smell under the solid front door of the Josephs’ house, once a happy home, beneath the windows, and over the garden wall.

  Her father’s wealthy patients no longer came to his surgery, and the few people who still sought treatment did so furtively because they could not pay. Dr. Joseph’s consulting room was in upheaval, the heavy curtains down, the shelves empty, his precious collection of instruments and medical texts tossed anyhow. Throughout the house packing cases stood open, partly filled, waiting for china, books, and paintings that had been taken down and leaned against the walls. The Persian carpets were rolled up and tied with stout twine. Dr. Joseph’s chess set was scattered. The heavy silver on the dining room sideboard had grown dark with tarnish, and dust balls gathered in the corners. The two maids had left, taking Frau Joseph’s pearls, her scent, and a gold bracelet. Her father had refused to call the police, even though the jewelry had been part of his own mother’s trousseau.

  Tanni’s mother no longer sang or played the piano. Neither was she “at home” to her friends on Thursdays. She no longer had her hair washed and dressed each week at the salon. Now she was short-tempered and anxious, her hair dull and straggly, and her pretty Viennese frocks hung unworn on their padded hangers. Lace-trimmed boudoir robes had been crammed into drawers, out of the way, and the once tidy rows of shoes handmade to Frau Joseph’s own last were jumbled. Their owner dressed hastily each morning, in old skirts and frayed blouses, and sometimes, Tanni was astonished to notice, her stockings were laddered.