Goodnight Sweetheart

by Charlotte Bingham

  Later when they repaired to their attic rooms on the fourth floor of the house, rooms that gave them a sweeping view over beautiful parkland towards the sea, Robyn helped Caro to unpack.

  ‘Please, please, please tell me you’ve brought some female furniture with you, because I only went and forgot it,’ Robyn murmured. ‘And apparently we’re about twenty miles from the nearest chemist, which in the event of the little visitor, is not going to be funny.’

  Caro coloured, but nodded towards a small suitcase, which she had not yet unpacked.

  ‘Before I left London, Mr Reading wrapped up enough for the whole army.’

  ‘Just as well, since you and I and half a dozen others, and most of them are in the kitchens, are the only females in the whole building.’

  ‘Gracious.’

  Robyn shook her head. ‘No, ducks, there’s going to be nothing gracious about our situation, I’m sorry to tell you. It is just us and about forty men, none of whom speaks English, and all of whom, I’m equally sorry to tell you, are suspects of His Majesty’s Government. While they are questioned, interrogated, and generally kept an eye on, on account of being very, very foreign indeed, it will be up to us to make sure they have clean hankies, stay in the grounds and, in the event of an invasion, apparently it will even be up to us to shoot them – if they’re naughty. This is undercover work of a really rather tame kind, unless we have to shoot them, of course, in which case it should cheer up matters no end.’

  Caro sat down on her bed.

  ‘I don’t really want to shoot anyone, at least not yet,’ she murmured. ‘Perhaps in a little while, when they’re crawling up the sides of the buildings with rape and pillage in mind, but not yet.’

  ‘Best if we change into civvies for after-supper activities. There’s a concert tonight, as it seems there has been most nights.’ Robyn rolled her eyes. ‘Just don’t try dancing to it; it’s not that kind of music. Go down like a cup of cold sick at the Grafton Galleries, believe me.’

  As Caro looked at her questioningly, Robyn shrugged and pulled a little face.

  ‘It seems at least a dozen of our suspects – I mean inmates – are professional violinists, and at least another dozen are cellists, and most of those are Austrian, bless them. Not fair really to coop them up here, but there, I expect they’ll be let out soon, at least as soon as the authorities find out they haven’t been parachuted into the grounds dressed as nuns. God, how I miss the dogs!’

  Caro looked sympathetic. The Cairns had been sent back down to Aunt Cicely for the duration, while the Garland dogs had retired with Smith to his cottage because Anthony had never taken quite the same interest in them as Meriel.

  A string quartet played for them after supper in the smallest of the large reception rooms. From the moment they began, Caro listened intently. Meriel had played the piano to a high standard, practising most mornings after breakfast, and while Caro was no musician, from the time she was small she had loved to be asked to sit in and listen. Her mother had often remarked that, of all her children, Caro was the one who fidgeted least, sitting happily still, watching and listening.

  Tonight, too, she sat still, watching and listening, the pieces familiar to her. Robyn, on the other hand, had twisted her legs together, and never stopped snapping the top of her handbag – click, click, click – until Caro put a restraining hand on the top of the small decorative evening bag, and gave her a ‘stopping this would be a good idea’ look, which made Robyn tighten her entwined legs ever more frantically.

  ‘What a martyrdom,’ she murmured to Caro as they all applauded. ‘Please don’t tell me we’re going to have this every evening. I never thought to say it, but how I long for my wireless. Aunt Cicely will have to have Carter Patterson or Trollopes send it to me toute suite, because this chamber music, or whatever it is, will drive me completely dotty, truly it will.’

  But Caro wasn’t listening to Robyn’s paean of protests, she was already making her way across to the group who were still bowing, or half-bowing to the warm applause. Caro waited until it ceased, and then stepped forward.

  ‘That was so good, thank you so much.’

  ‘Sank you,’ they all chorused and, bows still in hand, they bowed and smiled. ‘We luff to play for your audience. The English always so warm and appreciative.’

  ‘Yes, quite,’ Caro agreed, trying not to think of Robyn and her crossed legs. ‘I am Caro Garland,’ she went on. ‘How do you do?’

  One by one they introduced themselves, and shook hands with her, the last one holding her hand a little longer than was absolutely necessary.

  ‘Until we were put here we never knew each other, Miss Garland, but now that we enjoy so much fun together, we have teamed up. We are thinking of calling ourselves the Wiener Schnitzels. What are your thoughts, maybe, about this, Miss Garland?’

  As Robyn joined her, wearing a commendably appreciative expression, Caro considered the question.

  ‘The Wiener Schnitzels? Rather good,’ she replied, keeping a straight face. ‘Speaking for myself I would always book straight away to go to a concert featuring a quartet with that name. Not quite sure that the BBC would be so enthusiastic at this particular moment,’ she added.

  ‘Oh, surely, Miss Garland, you and your friend, both of you being so pretty, they could be persuaded, no?’

  They all laughed, and Carl, the youngest and tallest, put his violin under his chin and started to play once more, this time gypsy music. Faster and faster the music sang out, until finally he finished and they all laughed once more, knowing that his encore was a celebration of the moment.

  ‘You want to watch that Gypsy Ned and his wayward fiddle,’ Robyn teased her as they climbed the many stairs to bed. ‘He likes you. He lit up the moment you spoke.’

  ‘I hardly think so.’

  Quite suddenly Caro lay down on her bed, still clothed. She didn’t know why but all the time she had been listening to the music playing she had imagined she could smell her mother’s perfume and hear her laughter, most of all that, because Meriel had loved to laugh.

  When Katherine had disappeared she seemed to have taken all their mother’s loving laughter with her. It was that, more than anything, that Caro had so resented. If Katherine hadn’t taken up with fascism, if she hadn’t run off with David Astley, everything would be so different. Meriel might even be alive. Everything bad seemed to have started with Katherine’s disappearance. Tears poured down Caro’s face.

  Robyn sat down on her bed, and took her hand.

  ‘I wondered when this was going to happen,’ she murmured.

  * * *

  The factory to which Betty and Trixie now directed themselves was a long, low, single-storey building. It was not inviting in appearance, and even less so when entered. The noise was appalling, not just from the machines, but also the girls, in their headscarves and factory wear, who were all singing along to a radio blaring out some morning tune. Despite the autumn rain, or perhaps because of it, the heat inside the building was intense.

  Betty and Trixie exchanged looks. After Chevrons, where the sound of the ducks on the river, or Cook singing in the kitchen, or the distant whirring of the Hoover was about all that could have been heard of a morning, this noise was terrifying, literally sick-making, so that the girls instinctively moved nearer to each other. It was as if they were two wild birds who had been thrown into a cage filled with creatures of a very different kind.

  ‘I don’t think we can stay, really I don’t, Trixie,’ Betty murmured.

  ‘And I don’t think we have any choice, not for the moment, anyway,’ Trixie replied crisply. ‘The rumour is that there’s going to be conscription of one kind or another, and for everyone except nursing mothers, and you’re not one of those, are you?’

  ‘I don’t know what I am,’ Betty murmured, ‘but I’m not one of these kind of girls, that I do know, Trixie.’

  She looked down the room. She knew these kind of girls: hard as the materials they were so busy assembli
ng. She had been at the orphanage with a whole heap of them. They were harder and faster than anything you’d ever come across anywhere, except down at China Docks, perhaps.

  Betty nudged Trixie’s arm. ‘I’m leaving, Trixie, and if you’ve got any sense, you will too.’

  Before Trixie could come up with one of her spirited ripostes, a middle-aged woman, a great deal larger in width and height than either of them, came towards them with purposeful tread.

  ‘Follow me!’

  The noise inside the office where Mrs Ludgrove interviewed them was almost as deafening as that on the factory floor. Nevertheless she managed to take down the girls’ details before nodding towards a changing room some way down the main room.

  ‘You’ll have no difficulty with the work. I’ll put a foreman on to you and you’ll pick it up in no time. Meanwhile, you’ll find everything you need in there,’ she said with some satisfaction. ‘Scarves, boiler suits, and flat shoes – scarves for safety, boiler suits to save your clothes, and flat shoes, because without them your feet will kill you. Well, they will anyway, but never mind that.’

  Betty followed Trixie down past the rows and rows and rows of women, and so into the room that the manageress – if that was what you called her – had indicated.

  ‘We can’t stay here, Trixie, truly we can’t.’

  ‘We stay here until we find something better, Betty Boo Hoo.’

  Betty knew what Trixie meant. They were down to their last few shillings, they had left Chevrons on a wave of patriotism; there really was no going back. Besides, there were only the men and the London evacuees in the cottages now, apart from Mr Smith. Mr Garland was moving into new quarters in the wing, and the main house was being prepared to take in badly wounded officers and the like. The girls would not be wanted back at the old place now. Quite apart from anything else, there would be no room for them.

  Betty started to put up her hair in the scarf provided, and turning to a large pile of boiler suits she took the top one off.

  ‘Quite glam, dear, don’t you think?’ Trixie sashayed up and down the floor. Betty smiled, and then they both looked across at the shoe basket.

  ‘Oh God.’ Trixie’s face fell. ‘They’ve all been worn before.’

  ‘Put your best foot forward.’

  Trixie shook her head. ‘Not in those shoes I’m not. We’ll catch verrucas. I believe in being like the Garland sheep and looking after my feet. No, definitely not going to be seen in those, dear. In those it will be worst foot forward and no mistake; we could catch anything.’

  She sat down on the side of the bench and, taking one of her own shoes, started to knock it against the side.

  ‘What are you doing now, Trixie?’

  ‘Taking the heels off my shoes, and if you’ve any sense you’ll do the same.’

  Betty sat down beside her. The din was terrible, and the ventilation so bad that the damp in the air was palpable. She felt faint, but she found herself following Trixie, and they began the first of what would seem like endless days and nights learning to put pieces of aircraft together.

  Dear Father,

  Betty and I have landed ourselves on our feet all right – all day, and all night too, sometimes. Anyway it seems like that! We’re doing something we can’t tell anyone else about, same as everyone in this war, if you ask me. But we have nice digs with a lady who usually takes in theatricals, but they’ve all gone to be soldiers, and such like, so she has to take in the dregs, and make do with us instead! It is hard work, Father, but we know that we must do it for our country, and please God, there will be an end to it all soon.

  Please send all our best to Mr Garland, and to Mavis, if she’s still there, and the fox hasn’t got her. I hope she behaves herself and doesn’t go broody on you. Betty sends her best too. She has done some drawings of us in the factory which she is putting in the envelope along with this. I hope you keep well, Father, really I do. Well, must stop now, my eyes are shutting. Lots of love and kisses to you, and Mavis too, Father. XXXXXXXXX

  Trixie

  Trixie put down her pen, and stared out at the night sky. It seemed that the war had begun in earnest, but if so, where was it? It was nowhere near them, it was nowhere near Father and Chevrons, it was nowhere near London. The lads that they’d met at the pub that last night in town had said they thought it might never begin, and there would be no war, ever, and they were off to Catterick or somewhere to have themselves a bit of fun with guns and such like. The Phoney War, they were calling it all over London, and the South-East, the lads had said.

  And yet there was so much going on. Why else would they be working so hard to make all this weaponry except to wage war against Hitler?

  She pulled the rough bed sheet and blankets up to her face, and slid one sly finger out to pull back a tiny bit of the blackout at the window below which she lay.

  Betty was still at the factory trying to beat her record of five consecutive hours. Trixie had just completed six. They had a bet on, a pair of nylons to the winner who did the most hours, but judging from the expressions of the other women, no good would come of their enthusiasm. All the others seemed to care about was staying within their union rules. Working to time, they called it – or something like that – but it was more as if they didn’t want to cooperate, as if they thought the government was taking advantage of them, not trying to build up arms so they wouldn’t all end up being shot, or put in prison camps.

  Through her tiny gap in the blackout Trixie watched wisps of what looked like smoke drifting across the moon, and for a few minutes it seemed to her that she was back at Chevrons in their cottage, and Father was out at the pub playing cribbage, and she could hear a fox crying somewhere, and an owl hooting.

  In what she now thought of as the old days, she had, of a summer evening, been able to sit at her open bedroom window and listen to the sound of the grass swaying and rustling, as real a sound as any human step; as real as the moon above the factory was now real, but just now, also as far away from her present reality as that same moon.

  Although she was left alone in Robyn’s Aunt Cicely’s flat, and she missed them, Edwina did not envy Robyn and Caro being seconded to a secret address more than an hour from London. She too had her own car, and although not as swanky as Robyn’s Bentley, and not as elegant as Caro’s Fraser Nash, nevertheless she loved her Morris, almost as much as she thought she might love her new job, driving the tall, handsome Colonel Atkins wherever he wanted.

  Colonel Atkins was, at any rate to Edwina’s mind, an unlikely man for the military, not least because from the moment he stepped into the car, he applied himself to his embroidery, at which he was most surprisingly talented, stitching swiftly and without pause even as he chatted to her; and that was all before she dropped him off at his flat for his after-lunch snooze, for which he informed her, without the slightest embarrassment, it was his habit to take off all his clothes to allow his body to breathe.

  ‘Doesn’t sewing in the car make you feel a little unwell, sir?’ Edwina finally asked him one afternoon as they sped out of London towards the same ‘secret address’, that they had been to half a dozen times in the past fortnight, the secret address belonging to someone whom the colonel had no hesitation in referring to as ‘the next PM’.

  ‘No, never felt sick when stitching, probably because I learned to sew on the journey back from India to go to boarding school. Rough passage took my mind off it, that was why Nanny set us all to do it, I should have thought. Had to stop when we got to prep school, though, as you may imagine. Not the kind of thing headmasters and matrons understand. Start getting put down as a pillow chewer if you sew.’

  Edwina, who never had much idea what the good colonel was talking about on their drives, certainly had no idea of what he might mean by ‘pillow chewer’.

  They arrived at the secret address, where she planned to stay by the car, avoiding all eye contact, looking as anonymous as possible.

  ‘Still driving the good Colonel Atkins,
are you, Miss Carrots?’

  Edwina straightened up and saluted the next PM, smartly, crisply, thank God, but she did not move from the side of the car.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘If there are any more developments, Miss Carrots, I think I’ll put in for you to drive this old body, I do, really. Just remember that, mademoiselle.’

  Edwina did not know whether to nod or smile, so she merely stared ahead. The next PM’s French accent was comfortingly atrocious.

  ‘I will, of course, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  He turned back and smiled. ‘Ah, just a touch of the Irish in the voice, I hear. Mmm. Interesting. I have Red Indian blood, you know, as well as Jewish, my mother being of that noble race. It’s good to be a mongrel, gives you a sound mix of ancestral memories.’

  He was gone, leaving behind him a strong smell of the best kind of cigar on the English air.

  Not very much later Colonel Atkins climbed back into the rear seat. They had hardly rejoined the main road when he started to pluck once more at his tapestry.

  ‘So, I saw you caught the old man’s eye.’

  Edwina said nothing, avoiding looking at her passenger in her mirror.

  ‘No good will come of that, be warned. I’ll lose you as my driver, sure as eggs are eggs.’

  Edwina reduced her speed as rain started to fling itself against the windscreen. She had the habit of rain, having been brought up in Ireland, but nevertheless she always dreaded having to brake hard, in case Colonel Atkins’s needle caused him some kind of damage. As she chugged demurely back into the capital she considered Colonel Atkins’s words. Why would he think that Winston Churchill MP might cause him to lose her as a driver? After all, Mr Churchill, although by no means popular in Ireland, was known for his marital fidelity, for which he was admired, it being so very rare among those in power, so that could not be the reason for Colonel Atkins’s remark. Would she be wanted to drive him? He’d surely rather be driven by a man, especially if he became Prime Minister. Why therefore had the colonel noted the old man singling her out?