by Helen Bryan
Gazing down at her sweaty jumper and stained corduroy breeches she wondered what idiot at the War Office thought describing Land Girls as “strong, sturdy, and weather-beaten” and giving them outfits to match would raise their morale. And now clothes rationing had been introduced, not that Frances could see it made a lot of difference in the country where clothes hardly mattered, because there was nowhere to go except the parish hall to watch a film once in a while or a dismal dance at the Land Girls’ hostel. Soon they would all resemble Alice, in the ghastly outfits her mother discarded and with the tatty head scarf tied on so tightly her head looked shrunken. Or give up altogether like Evangeline who was slim and would have been beautiful if she made any effort. But she didn’t seem to care how she looked, with Richard away.
Cleaning her nails with the point of a vegetable knife, Frances reminded herself the minute she came of age she could escape cows and digging potatoes. Evangeline had shown her how to set snares, and Frances had taken the little man his brace of pheasants. He said they would see her after her birthday.
Absently she washed her hands and dried them on the evil-smelling scullery towel that neither she nor Elsie had thought to wash since the housekeeper left. With a war on who minded about housework?
No, what Frances minded, and wouldn’t have admitted to a soul, was that she would turn twenty-one on Saturday without any celebration. Of course it was frivolous to think of a party with the war on, but it was too depressing for words to have nothing to mark her coming of age. Frances was a stranger to self-pity, but for a moment tears welled. She brushed them away. She jolly well would celebrate.
Why not have a little supper party on her birthday? It would give her and the other girls an excuse to be cheerful and dress up a bit.
But how did one give a party? She had never given a party. She had no cook, no staff to serve, no anything, and she couldn’t cook for toffee. But Frances was resourceful. If Evangeline would conjure up something special for a little supper, Frances would offer to look after Tommy, Maude, and Kipper when next Evangeline had to go up to London to see her doctor—the evacuees ran rings around Tanni. She would invite Elsie, of course, and Evangeline and Tanni—Alice too. For men there were Hugo and Oliver and, even though he was so young and cheeky, Bernie. He made it no secret that he thought Frances “a bit of all right.” And Frances, amused, thought he was rather a pet—although Alice considered him “not quite the thing,” Johnny, and consequently Tanni, adored him, and Elsie was smitten. There were Evangeline’s records to play on Penelope’s gramophone—perhaps they could dance a little.
And there was one thing she did have for her party: drink.
When she had been clearing her godmother’s silver and china into the farthest reaches of the cellar to store it before the workmen arrived to turn Glebe House into a convalescent home, Frances had made two discoveries. The first was a stock of dust-covered bottles that turned out to be claret, half a dozen bottles of brandy, and a stone bottle of something labeled “Genever.” She brought it all upstairs and cleaned off the dust. The wine and brandy had French labels. She wasn’t sure about the genever, but she didn’t care. These days drink was drink—a rare treat.
Frances’s second discovery had been even more surprising. When she had found the wine, she had stubbed her toe on something wedged under the rack holding the stash of brandy. She shone her torch down and saw brass hinges gleaming dully on a lacquered Chinese chest. She tugged it out from its hiding place and blew off the dust. There was a key in the lock. She turned it and opened the lid to reveal velvet jeweler’s boxes of different shapes and sizes. She opened the largest one and gasped. It contained a triple string of perfectly matched pearls with a large emerald and diamond clasp. It was the same one her aunt Muriel wore in the portrait over her desk. Then she found a set of bracelets to match, a pair of old-fashioned diamond clips, rings, brooches, and a man’s gold watch with a beautifully worked filigree case and chain, the Marchmont arms on the back. The missing jewelry! Her godmother must have hidden the box there and forgotten it.
Frances adored clothes but had never been fond of jewelry. However, she could see that the contents of the chest were worth a great deal of money. Especially the pearls. Hmmm…for her party Frances decided to fish out a favorite dress she had not worn for ages, an amber velvet tea gown that suited her coloring most becomingly and had little silk slippers to match. What fun to look her best for a change. Oliver had never seen her dressed up. She would even wear the pearls, just this once, in honor of the occasion. Then perhaps Bernie would know where she could sell them discreetly.
Her conscience had pricked. She ought to tell the solicitors she had found the jewelry. She suspected there might be tax to pay. She could ask Oliver what he thought. Then she decided not to. Oliver was so good, he would advise her to tell the solicitors at once. It could wait until after her party.
Next morning cycling off to the farm half an hour late, Frances stopped at the Fairfaxes’ to invite Evangeline and Tanni, who was hugely pregnant with her second baby and darning children’s jumpers on the sofa. Evangeline agreed to see what she could do in the way of food and said she would ask Margaret Rose Hawthorne to come over and keep Johnny and the evacuees out of trouble so that she and Tanni could enjoy the evening. Then Frances called at the infants’ school where Alice was busy putting up new posters in the classroom. “Coughs and sneezes/spread diseases/use your handkerchief!” warned one, and “Is your journey REALLY necessary?” admonished another.
“I wanted to put that one up at the station where Evangeline would see it next time she goes gadding off to London, but Albert Hawthorne says no. He’s already covered in posters,” said Alice. “But really, Evangeline is so thoughtless.” She sniffed.
Still, when Frances issued her invitation, even Alice cheered up and said she would bring Woolton fudge, the latest invention of the Ministry of Food. “Delicious! You’d never guess it’s made from carrots!”
“Fancy!” said Frances. All the Ministry of Food’s wartime recipes seemed to involve carrots, which Frances detested. How they could be turned into fudge didn’t bear thinking about. She suppressed a shudder and cycled away.
On their way to and from the farm that day and the next, Frances and Elsie scoured the damp fields for the last walnuts and chestnuts. All five girls had pooled their cheese rations so that Evangeline could make one of her cheese puddings. She would use real eggs in it instead of the powdered ones that left a peculiar aftertaste. Bliss!
Eggs from a household’s own hens were still not rationed, and thanks to Tanni’s sewing, Evangeline and she now had an elderly cockerel as well as the hens and a handful of pullets that pecked about in the back garden where the onions and cabbages and artichokes grew. The eggs were a godsend. Tanni adamantly refused to eat the odd-tasting corned beef, wouldn’t consider bits of ham or bacon on the rare occasions they were available, or the dubious “mince,” often the only meat available on rations. Neither would she feed any of it to Johnny. Sister Tucker clucked and remonstrated, but Tanni was firm so Sister saw they both received their full allocations, with a bit extra, of cod-liver oil and orange juice or rosehip syrup, and milk.
The evening before the party, Frances threw herself into the preparations. She retrieved some of her godmother’s pretty china and silver from where she had stored them in the cellar. “At finishing school we had to learn ‘table setting and placements,’” began Frances distractedly, hovering round the table with a basket of cutlery and monogrammed linen napkins, “but I can’t remember exactly what to do, I never paid much attention.”
“Why’d you learn it, then? So’s you could train the servants?” asked Elsie with a sarcasm that was lost on Frances.
“Well, actually yes, darling. They said it was frightfully important to be able to train servants when a girl married. What if she moved abroad somewhere and the servants weren’t used to doing things correctly? They would get the forks wrong way round or serve dinner in the wron
g order, not to mention the horrors of getting the seating wrong if someone important came to dine, and—”
“La di dah!” said Elsie, rolling her eyes. She had no idea Frances was so daft. Anyway, thanks to her brief housemaid’s training, she considered herself an expert on that sort of thing and enjoyed sitting on the sofa and instructing Frances on the best way to lay the fires in the morning room and dining room, how to polish glasses and iron damask table cloths. Later she got up to help her hide the worst of the mess they had made since the old lady’s death, shoving things into cupboards and behind furniture until the house was almost tidy.
“Too exhausting,” pronounced Frances finally, “but it looks rather nice, don’t you think? No need to actually dust, is there, darling? If we just have the candles and the fire for light, the dust won’t really show…”
17.
Crowmarsh Priors,
Frances’s Birthday
When Frances finished at the farm on Saturday she cycled home as fast as she could. She was alone because Elsie had stayed behind. After work, through gritted teeth, the team leader had demanded “a quiet word” with Elsie, who had been driving the tractor too fast and nearly run her over. Steeling herself against the cold, Frances took a hasty bath in the tepid four inches of water the War Office allowed. As she watched the filthy water gurgle down the drain, she had a short battle with her conscience, then had another bath. This time the water was more or less clean when she let it out. Shivering, she washed her hair and rinsed it with some flat beer she and Elsie kept in a bottle for that purpose.
By the time Elsie came home and clattered into the kitchen to make sandwiches, her one culinary accomplishment, Frances was wrapped in a dressing gown, with a towel round her head, smelling of hops. She drew the blackout curtains, lit the fires, tipped the last bottle of her godmother’s sherry into a decanter, then opened several bottles of claret and left them on the hearth to breathe and warm a little. For good measure she opened the genever and drew the cork on a bottle of brandy. Frances had a swig of the genever to taste it while she huddled close to the fire to dry her hair. The pungent herbal smell and strange taste made her shudder, but it was nicely warming.
The blaze crackled merrily and she had another sip. Then another. She poured some into a glass and drank that too. Her cheeks tingled and she felt much warmer, quite cheerful really. Would Oliver think she looked pretty tonight? she wondered as she tripped back up the stairs. She slipped into the tea gown, which was cut on the bias and swirled gracefully round her hips, making her small waist look even slimmer, then the matching slippers. She peered critically into the wavy old mirror in her bedroom to pin up her hair and fasten the pearls round her neck. She finished by putting on scent and lipstick, thinking how delightful it was to be wearing a pretty dress. Her reflection in the mirror reassured her that she looked like her old self, at least in the dim light. She gave a little twirl and the skirt swished round her ankles.
Someone knocked on the door.
Oliver!
Hurrying downstairs she felt a little dizzy. She clutched the door for support as she swung it open. It wasn’t Oliver, but Hugo, in evening dress and a white silk scarf, with a bouquet of roses and a bottle of champagne. “Happy birthday, Frances! How lovely you look! Somehow one forgets Land Girls are, well, girls.”
Embarrassed, Frances exclaimed at the size of the bouquet and buried her nose in the fragrant blooms. “Oh, Hugo, roses! They’re my favorite. Wherever did you get them in November?” She kissed his cheek rather more warmly than she might have done had she not had the genever, then led him into the morning room, gaily explaining she and Elsie had planned to use the drawing room, then decided everyone would freeze. The morning room was easier to warm with a small fire. “With Alice coming we daren’t light one big enough to thaw the drawing room—you can imagine the scolding she’d give us for wasting fuel. You know what she’s like.”
Hugo gave her a conspiratorial smile, and Frances went off to the larder for a vase.
When she came back with the tallest crystal one she could find, Hugo was standing with his back to the fire and his hands in his pockets. She began to arrange the roses in water, thinking how lovely they smelled, when Hugo cleared his throat and said, “Frances, I’ve come early because I’ve something particular to say.”
She looked up from the roses. In her slightly inebriated state, his profile seemed wonderfully handsome in the firelight, and it was like old times to see a man in a dinner jacket. Hugo was the sort of man she was used to.
“Frances, I want to ask you…will you marry me? You must have seen how I feel about you—I haven’t made much of a secret of it, hanging about whenever you’re working. Even the other Land Girls have noticed. I intended to ask you sooner, but then your godmother died, and I felt it wasn’t quite the thing. But now that you’re of age…”
“Oh, Hugo!”
“Darling Frances, if you say yes you’d make me the happiest man alive. And we suit each other so well—surely you’ve seen that? I believe we should be very happy together. I’m to tell you from Father that he would be almost as pleased as I, if you did me the honor. It’s high time Gracecourt had a new Lady de Balfort and a young family growing up to carry things on. And with the war there doesn’t seem to be much point waiting. If you’ll have me, that is.”
“Oh, Hugo!” said Frances again. She was surprised and flattered. Lady de Balfort! She saw herself by Hugo’s side in procession at Westminster Abbey, attending the next coronation, both of them in ermine-trimmed robes and the family tiara on her head! “You’ve taken me by surprise!”
“You needn’t answer at once,” said Hugo, leaving the fire and coming closer to put his arms round her. He had never tried to kiss her before.
Instinctively she pulled away. “I don’t know what to say.” She moved toward the fire and pretended to warm her hands. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting…I must think.” The vision of herself in the abbey began to fade.
“It’s a lady’s prerogative to take her time, I believe,” Hugo said smoothly. He didn’t seem too distressed by her reaction. In fact, he smiled complacently and glanced at his watch. “I found another old hunting piece for the Home Guard, promised to deliver it to Harry Smith. I’ll come back later with Oliver. I hope you’ll say you’ll make me a happy man so that everyone can drink to our engagement. Father said I was to give you special love from him and ask if you can come to lunch on your next free Sunday.”
“Delighted,” murmured Frances. Her engagement!
The front door shut. Marry Hugo? Doing exactly as Aunt Muriel had wished? Her father would be thrilled.
Frances stood up, took the vase of roses into the dining room, and put them on the table. They made an arresting centerpiece. A new thought reached her addled brain. What if Hugo decided to confide in Oliver? “Congratulate me, old boy. Finally popped the question to Frances, waiting for an answer, you know how girls are, but I’m rather optimistic, hope you’ll marry us when the time comes—quite soon, I expect. Trust you’ll be called upon to baptize an heir too, before long.”
“Oliver! Whatever will he think? Oh, hell!” Frances whispered, suddenly sober.
She heard the knocker again.
This time it was Evangeline with food and Tanni with Johnny, whom Tanni refused to leave behind with Margaret Rose and the other children. Tanni, Frances thought, with a start, looked awful, white and drawn despite her bulk. She handed Frances a thin round apple cake that smelled of cinnamon and admired Frances’s dress. Then she settled on the sofa with her feet up while Evangeline laid a sleepy Johnny beside her and covered him with his ABC quilt.
As usual Frances was starving. She followed Evangeline into the kitchen, hovering and admiring the food her friend unpacked and set on the range to keep warm. “In honor of your birthday I sacrificed one of the fowls,” Evangeline drawled, unwrapping a clean tea towel to reveal a handsome pie. It gave off a fragrance of chicken and herbs and field mushrooms and had a pa
stry rose on top.
“Mmmmm,” Frances sniffed appreciatively. Next to it was the cheese pudding, golden on top. Tanni had made her special dish, red cabbage with onions and apples, sharpened with vinegar and cloves and garlic, and sweetened with a little honey. It was nothing like its horrible boiled cousin, which cropped up everywhere. For pudding, besides Tanni’s apple cake, there was a special treat: two tins of raspberries, discovered in the depths of Penelope’s larder. Frances poured them into a glass bowl, the closest she had come to cooking anything. “And what’s that?” asked Frances, peeking under the cover of the last steaming dish.
Evangeline grinned. “Dirty rice.”
“Oh, darling, how very…thrilling and clever and…um, exotic!” Frances recognized bits of onions and celery, but, “What are those little black bits?”
“Chicken gizzards. It’s a New Orleans dish,” Evangeline said.
“Gizzards?” repeated Frances faintly, wondering what unmentionable bit of the chicken that might be.
“We used to eat this in New Orleans every Saturday night. Inez, my grandmother’s cook, taught me how to make it. My cousin Laurent and I used to hang around the kitchen and Inez would let us help her.” There was a sudden catch in her voice.
“Evangeline, you must miss your home. Here you are in England in the middle of a war, and who knows what will happen if the Germans invade. You could be safely home in America with a nice American husband and automobiles and chocolate and no war or rationing or evacuees who wet their beds—”
“But then I wouldn’t be married to Richard, would I? And no, I don’t wish I was back in New Orleans. Not at all. Never.”
She was very definite about it. It made Frances wonder if she could feel as devoted to Hugo as Evangeline was to Richard, putting up with a war and everything for his sake. She tried to imagine it. Perhaps it was the sex? “Shame Richard doesn’t get leave more often, you’ve only seen him three or four times.”