‘She’s just fussing, Miss Robyn’s fussing. She’s got nothing better to do, all alone at Brookefield, just her and the dogs.’
‘Be that as it may, she has made her suggestions, and I have told Mrs Grant what will be wanted, and no more to be said.’
‘Oh, Smithy,’ Caro groaned. ‘Such a fuss.’ Even so she followed him out of the pantry. ‘You haven’t heard,’ she went on, enthusiastically. ‘You haven’t heard how fast we went.’
Smith stopped. ‘I don’t need to hear how fast you went, Miss Caro. I can see how fast you went.’
Caro shrugged her shoulders. She had to concede she was a bit battered and bruised, and covered in grass stains, and what not.
‘Yes, but what a peach of a drive, Smith.’ She smiled. ‘And just wait until I tell you—’
Smith too was forced to smile. It was Miss Caro all over.
‘Here’s Mrs Grant, Miss Caro, I think you’d better follow her instructions, because there’s no doubt about it, you’re going to have quite a shiner by morning. A piece of steak under the eye, I would think might help, Mrs Grant,’ he added, turning to the housekeeper.
Mrs Grant stared disapprovingly at Caro, who immediately smiled over-brightly at the housekeeper. Perhaps taking this to mean that she should get going Mrs Grant went quickly up the back stairs, and so on to the old-fashioned family bathroom where she ran Caro a bath and threw salts into it.
‘That will help the bruises. Meanwhile I will ask Cook for some steak for your cheek, which we can only hope will be something she will spare for such a very worthy cause,’ she added sarcastically, as she started to leave the room.
‘Thank you, Mrs Grant. And don’t worry about the steak, I can cover the bruise with some face powder.’
The housekeeper did not appear to have heard, because she merely closed the door behind her, which Caro promptly locked, before undressing, putting on a bath cap, and stepping into the welcoming warmth of the water. As she lay, allowing the water to soothe her bruises, she could not help feeling heroic. She had been through a much bigger adventure than she had ever had in the Angel, and she had come through it without feeling afraid. She sang a little as she soaped herself.
A moment later she stopped singing as she heard the sound of hurrying steps on the landing outside the bathroom, and then yet more hurrying steps above her on the third floor.
‘Mrs Grant’s parrot must have got out,’ she murmured, staring up at the bathroom ceiling high above her.
Now there was the sound of doors being opened and shut, as if everyone was indeed searching for something or someone.
Caro sighed and, stepping out of the bath on to the thick Victorian mat, she removed her cap, and towelled herself down, gingerly admiring the deepening colours of her bruises, before sallying forth to her bedroom to dress.
It was then that she noticed that Katherine’s bedroom door was open. She put her head around the door, and stared in.
‘Katherine?’ she called, feeling suddenly excited by the idea of telling her older sister about the adventure she had just enjoyed. She stopped. ‘Katherine … ?’
Her feeling of excitement was quickly replaced by something quite different.
Why call Katherine when it was very evident that she was not in the room? Not only that, but why call Katherine when again, quite evidently, the room, normally a safe refuge for Katherine and her seemingly endless supply of clothes, was now empty of her elder sister, and she now saw all too distinctly, her clothes.
The doors of the old wardrobe were open, the rails occupied by dozens of empty cushioned hangers. A glance round the room showed Caro that the dressing-table drawers were open, and there were no silk stockings, no silk underwear, really nothing left of Katherine’s belongings except her old worn felt riding hat, a yellow suit and a few other items – a brown evening dress with a sequinned jacket, and an old straw beach hat.
Caro quickly dressed in any old thing that she could put her hand on, and ran down the main staircase to the hall where half the household seemed to have gathered.
‘It’s your sister,’ her father said, as she stood looking at him. ‘Your mother has just discovered a letter that she left for us this morning, it seems, after she had sat to the painter. She slipped out of the house – must have been by the side entrance – taking all her clothes and effects with her.’
Anthony was ashen, his lips trembling even as he spoke, but determined as always to hold on to his feelings.
‘What can have possessed her?’ Meriel wrung her hands, and she stared frantically at all the faces around her, as if she half expected Katherine to bob up behind one of the maids. ‘It could all be just a wicked tease, couldn’t it? I mean I dare say she will come popping back any minute now, don’t you think?’ she asked of no one in particular.
At this everyone looked embarrassed for her. It was common knowledge in the house that Miss Katherine had been nothing but trouble over the past two years, that her parents had begun to despair of her, that she had changed character beyond belief.
‘I suppose there is hope, I mean that we can catch up with her, if she’s not yet twenty-one, wouldn’t you think?’ Caro asked of no one, at the same time staring round her as if she expected suddenly to spot Katherine’s beautiful face behind the people gathered in the old hall, perhaps with a finger to her lips indicating, as she used to say so often to Caro when she was young, ‘This is our secret.’
But no one was standing at the back of the little anxious group, and no one was whispering, ‘This is our secret.’ Katherine was gone, and deep down in her deepest heart Caro somehow knew that she would never see her, or David, at Chevrons again.
Chapter Three
The moment that Katherine vanished from Chevrons the world became little more than a dust bowl of worry to Meriel. Katherine might have ceased to love her mother, but her mother had never stopped loving her, hoping, always hoping, that she would somehow, some time soon, change back to the glorious, fun-loving, beautiful girl that she had been before wretched David Astley came into her life.
And now, of course, the person that Meriel missed was that girl, that daughter, not the young woman she had turned into once she fell in love with the Astley boy. The very helplessness of it all made her long to go out and do something – search for Katherine, not just leave it to the police, or to friends in high places, all of whom had so generously pledged to help the Garlands in any way that they could.
Of course, the Astleys were blamed, albeit silently, by everyone at Chevrons, and indeed, no one from the Astley family had called at Chevrons. It was as if, in their shame at what David had done, they did not dare even to telephone the Garlands, guessing, as they surely must, that what the Garlands might be feeling was unimaginable.
‘The Astleys have always been a strange lot, too idealistic, too in on themselves, too strait-laced, even too religious to be quite healthy. You have to allow children to breathe, not keep cramming their heads with ideas that they have no business thinking about until they’re older. Personally the Ten Commandments do it for me; it’s all there in the tablets. If all of us humans had stuck by the Ten Commandments we wouldn’t be in such a mess now,’ Anthony had been heard to mutter time and again over the passing years, and now it seemed he had been proved right, because, as in some much earlier age, a daughter of Chevrons had been carried off by one of the Astley sons, and that certainly was not in the Ten Commandments.
Ten Commandments or no Ten Commandments, Meriel, however, could not actually bring it on herself to hate poor David Astley. She could only feel sorry for him. He was young, he had come under the spell of extremists, and for what reason Meriel could only guess. Perhaps it had been foolish – it certainly seemed so now – but as parents, Meriel and Anthony had gone on and on hoping, with all their hearts and souls, that by tolerating David, by not banning him from seeing Katherine, the young man would come to realise that their way of life, their way of thinking, was the better way, that tolerance must rule
if people were to go on from day to day in any kind of harmony.
To demonstrate their ideals not by words but by their way of life was something to which Meriel and Anthony always aspired. When she looked at her sons, young Anthony, and his twin by five minutes, Francis, and of course Caro – and for some reason just the thought of Caro always made Meriel smile – and then at the people who came daily to the house to help them, Meriel tried to comfort herself that even if they could be said to have failed utterly with Katherine, they had not failed with everyone else.
Where Katherine and David had gone, no one knew; why they had gone was, if any of them dared to think about it, all too obvious.
‘On that particular subject, my deah,’ Caro stated to Walter a few weeks later, when there was still no news of the couple’s whereabouts, ‘no one, but no one, dares to utter the word beginning with G and ending with Y.’
‘Quite understandable,’ Walter called down to Caro from the top step of his ladder. ‘But do you think they might have gone abroad to G ending with Y?’
Caro was sitting in what she now thought of as her ‘morning’ position, namely on the bottom rung of the set of steps at the top of which Walter was busy working. She knew he liked to have her nearby to chat to him, but also to keep quiet when necessary, and to keep herself ready to hand up what was needed, when it was needed.
The fact that Walter had fallen in love with Katherine the way (and really it was almost tedious) that every man who came within her orbit always seemed to had not worried Caro at first, but now Katherine had disappeared, she guessed that Mr Painter must be feeling Katherine’s absence, feeling just a little more heartsore than he would have perhaps liked to admit, especially when he looked at how he had painted her, with the blue of the dress exactly reflected in the blue of her eyes, her beauty seeming to leap off the wall to the onlooker.
‘My deah,’ Caro said, once more deliberately using an over-bred County voice to make Walter laugh, ‘my deah, whooo knows? They could be anywhere.’
Walter smiled at the tree he was busy outlining. Caro and he had now established a great many private jokes between them. The exaggerated way the ‘County’ spoke, not to mention their innate snobbishness, had become a source of much-needed fun, because unfortunately no one could be unaware of the change in atmosphere at Chevrons. Everyone was becoming tense and wary, as if the outer world, with all its particular horrors, could not now be kept at bay; as if they knew that with Katherine missing, believed lost to them, anything might now happen; as if they all sensed that everything was about to change for ever, and none of them would ever see her again.
It was for this reason that Walter had spent the last days encouraging Caro in her irreverence, allowing her to stay around the Long Room, even when he had what they both now referred to as one of his ‘victims’ sitting to him.
Caro somehow managed to make everyone laugh, even, of all people, Mrs Grant the housekeeper, and that was saying something. She also made Walter laugh, and that too went some way to help soothe his sense of failure over Katherine Garland.
‘How can someone as beautiful as you hold such insane views?’
He had actually said that to her at the end of one morning’s sitting, but she had merely looked away, shrugging her shoulders as if to say, ‘Everyone says that.’
Once or twice, when she laughed, Walter had flattered himself into thinking that he was getting back the Katherine that she must have been before she became besotted with this godlike creature David Astley, but then the look in her eyes would change, and seconds later the hardened expression would return as if, like someone ill who can momentarily be distracted into thinking that they are well, Katherine had suddenly remembered the person she had once been, but then quickly reverted to the current reality.
All the time Walter had been painting Katherine, rather than anyone else, Caro had made sure to absent herself from the Long Room.
‘If anyone can talk her out of her silly views, you can, you know, Walter,’ Caro had confided, ‘because I think, although you certainly wouldn’t know it, she really quite likes you.’
‘How do you know?’ Walter had countered, turning away so that Caro could not see his face.
‘Because I do. I am her sister.’
But evidently, and palpably, Walter had failed to talk her round. Now, looking back, he realised that his failure had probably been entirely due to the fact that he had fallen in love with her. Nowadays he found himself lying awake at night wondering, over and over again, why he, who loved and admired women to distraction, had not been able to charm her out of what had increasingly appealed to him as her trancelike state.
Over and over again, he had tried continually to make Katherine see that Hitler and the Nazis were nothing short of the devil incarnate. Yet, despite his increasing sense of failure, every day that Katherine Garland had sat to him he reapplied himself to the task of saving her, longing to pull her back from the brink of that horrendous darkness in which fascism revels and grows.
But he had failed, and now, most mornings, the Long Room was empty of everyone except himself and Caro. He was happy that it was so, because lately he had noticed that, alone but for young Caro in silent attendance, he could paint well and quickly.
‘You know what you are, Caro Garland?’ He looked down at the top of her head.
‘No,’ she said, sounding momentarily distracted, because one of the many Garland dogs had wandered into the room to find her.
‘You are my lucky charm.’
There was a short silence during which Caro considered this statement, as she stroked the long-haired dog.
‘When are you going to paint Dickie? He wants to be in the painting, don’t you, Dickie?’ she asked, as if Walter had not spoken, or as if she had no interest in being his lucky charm, or indeed anything else.
Walter looked down at the engaging black and white dog, with his tightly furled tail, and his habit of putting out his paw to be stroked, in which Caro was only too happy to oblige him.
‘Tomorrow, perhaps. I might paint Dickie tomorrow. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. It’s just that if you are going to start painting Dickie pretty soon, I’ll bath him tonight after the maids have finished.’
‘Good idea.’
‘You know old Miss Berenger’s not come back, so she won’t be able to be in your painting?’
‘Miss Berenger?’
‘She was the Belgian sort of maid person to my mother, but she was more than that really: she did all the sewing jobs, all the mending and making covers – oh, everything really to do with the needle. Made scarves for everyone every Christmas. But there you are, she’s gone. We’re all wondering if she’s gone to help Katherine and David in whatever they’re doing. Or just run back to Belgium before the war breaks out. The parents don’t talk about it, but it’s strange that she didn’t even telephone or write. And when the parents reported her absence to the police no one seemed to care, Mrs Grant says. She also said she thought it was because Miss Berenger was foreign that the English police don’t really care what’s happened to her, which I suppose is understandable. Poor Miss Berenger, I keep thinking about her and wondering, but then I keep thinking about a whole lot of people and worrying, though really, there’s no point. Worrying is quite, quite pointless. And if I take up worrying when there is a war, I will be no use to anyone. At any rate that is what I tell myself every night, before I fall asleep.’
Yet another short silence followed, during which Walter imagined that he could hear Caro thinking up her next question.
‘What are you going to do when the wall is finished here, Mr Painter? Are you going to join the Guards or something, or the Artists’ Rifles, or whatever they are called? Everyone round here is already making plans to take off for Salisbury Plain or Catterick, all stations east and west, even though nothing at all has really happened yet.’
‘What am I going to do?’ Walter paused. ‘Well, I have a commission in Hertfordshire, from the Smyt
hsons, as a matter of fact, to paint them in their drawing room – a large oil.’
‘What about when the war comes, though, which everyone thinks it must – what will you do then?’
‘Oh, I expect I will paint that too,’ Walter replied, too readily and certainly too flippantly.
Caro was silent for a minute.
‘No, but really. What will you do?’
Walter glanced down at her for a few seconds.
‘I will do as my country requires, and since there is sure to be some sort of conscription, all will be made clear pretty soon, I should have thought.’
‘Yes, Robyn Harding thinks they will bring in conscription for everyone, even for girls. She’s joining up anyway. She can’t wait.’
‘She can’t wait because she likes a fight?’
‘No, no, she is actually really quite quiet by temperament, except when she’s behind a wheel. No, it’s because she feels a bit hemmed in at home, and because she doesn’t want to be a débutante. If she joins the FANYs she will get out of all that. She will get out of everything, and just drive about in her Bentley, taking officers to lunch and dinner and mysterious meetings in the country.’
‘Well I’ve heard of worse ways of defending your country.’
Caro stood up. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I think I’m going to go and bath Dickie now. It’s a good time because Mrs Grant will have gone home. ’Bye. See you tomorrow.’
Walter heard the door shut. Then he climbed down the ladder and, because the light was beginning to fade, switched on the lights of the Long Room.
He viewed the whole mural with critical eyes before going up close to look at the figure of Katherine Garland. Caro had said nothing about his painting of her sister when he had finished it, which had puzzled him, because in every other way his lucky charm had proved more than generous in her appreciation of what he was doing; but not, it seemed, when it came to her sister.
At first Walter had wondered if Caro was jealous of Katherine, which, given that Katherine was by far the more beautiful of the two, would have been only natural, but then, as the days fled by and he peopled the Long Room wall with family and servants, with sheep and deer and dogs, he had realised it was something else that was preventing Caro from commenting on his portrait of her sister; tantalisingly it had gradually become clear that it was something that she thought she could see in his portrait, which he could not. It irritated him when he saw her eyes travelling over the mural, but always stopping when they rested on Katherine.
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 7