The page was calling her name. But why? Why should he be calling her name. Who would know that she was here except Robert? But why would he be sending a telegram to her? Why would he not want to meet her? After all, he had been to Dunkirk and back, and back and back and back and back.
‘I’m Miss O’Brien.’
‘Miss Edwina O’Brien?’
‘The very same.’ She stared into the fresh face of the page boy. ‘I’m surprised you’re still here,’ she joked as she took the telegram. ‘Shouldn’t you be in the army?’
The page boy grinned. ‘I’m only fourteen, ma’am. Give me time.’ He nodded at the telegram, and then his grin grew wider as Edwina took a shilling from her evening bag and placed it in his palm.
‘Take my advice and stay fourteen, gossoon, you hear me?’
He saluted her. ‘Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am. For a shilling I’d stay anything!’
‘I bet you would, you rascal!’
Edwina opened the telegram. ‘Have been posted. Nothing to be done. Think of me. Love you always my Ginger Nut – ROBERT.’
Edwina stared at the telegram, and then folded it very carefully and put it into her evening bag.
‘Talk about all dressed up and nowhere to go,’ she remarked as the American officer passed by her once again.
‘Not bad news, I hope?’ he asked with genuine concern.
‘Not bad news, no, just not good news. My date’s been posted.’
He stared at her, allowing unadulterated admiration to flood his face as he took in her tall, slender figure, her vibrant hair, her pale skin, her green eyes with their vaguely promising look.
‘In that case, ma’am, may I have the privilege?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
Edwina flicked her cigarette into a nearby ashcan.
‘This is my lucky night, ma’am.’
‘And you are … ?’
‘Gene Hawtrey.’
‘I see. Well, I am Edwina O’Brien, and I am very hungry, so I hope you are too.’
He held out his arm. ‘Booked?’
‘Booked.’ Edwina slid her hand through his arm. ‘Since you are my date for tonight, I hope you can dance?’
‘All Americans can dance. You can’t become an officer unless you can dance.’
‘How very civilised.’
Edwina sashayed ahead of Gene down the Savoy steps, and as she did so, she put out of her head any more thought of Robert. It was the only thing to do. So he had meant a lot to her, so what would ‘a lot’ finally mean? He would probably be gone as soon as all the others. They all would be – she glanced back towards Gene Hawtrey – perhaps even him.
Only later did she take the telegram and lay it carefully under her pillow with her holy pictures, praying, ‘Are you there, God? Take care of him, bring him back to me. I’ll be so good if you will just do this one thing for me. Bring Robert back.’
Caro looked at herself very seriously in the mirror, leaning forward and staring into her eyes as if she was someone else, which just for a moment she imagined she might be.
Outside she could see the fires burning, the great searchlights sweeping the sky. At the beginning of the week an incendiary bomb had taken out two houses in the next street. Yesterday night had found her driving much-needed supplies to the East End, together with a few VIPs who had wanted to see for themselves the growing legend of what was now being called ‘the plucky spirit of the East End’.
What they had seen had indeed surprised and impressed them; the singing, the huddling together for cheer and warmth, the utter resignation of those who had lost everything that they had ever possessed.
‘These are ordinary folk, not trained for battle, as we have been. Nothing could have prepared them for what they are going through, and yet see how they are?’
The journey there and back had been tortuous, as nighttime London journeys now were, passing screaming fire engines, ambulances tearing through the narrow streets, stooped figures sorting through the rubble of their homes, their bent outlines lit by the vast fires of the burning buildings around.
The blanket bombing of London had begun at last. Yet, everyone seemed to agree, it was almost a relief. Nothing but nothing could have been worse than actually waiting for war to begin. Everything that you had ever dreaded in your imagination turned out to be less in reality. The duration of the ‘Phoney War’ – when all the children had been evacuated, the people trained by the Red Cross been put on alert, everyone waiting, waiting to start their new duties, from fire fighting to driving canteens, but then nothing, just more ominous waiting, everyone trying not to think too much – had been intolerable.
‘You’re not going back tonight. You’ve done six nights driving the canteen. I’ll go in your place,’ her senior officer had told Caro, giving her an old-fashioned look as if to say she had her number all right. ‘Besides, doubtless it’s your night for fire watching, isn’t it?’
As a matter of fact it had been, which was why Caro now found herself staring at her red-lined eyes and grey expression in Aunt Cicely’s bathroom mirror. There was the sound of sirens, followed all too soon by the inevitable hum of approaching enemy bombers. She wanted to go down to the basement with whoever was also in the building, but she found she couldn’t. For some reason she seemed to be rooted to where she was standing, clinging to the basin, watching herself losing what remained of colour from her face, with vague fascination, as if she was someone else.
If only she weren’t alone. If Robyn was with her they would both have dived under the kitchen table with a bottle of gin, but Robyn was out driving some officer or another on a date. (Robyn kept complaining that she was fed up with driving officers back from nightclubs and trying not to watch them necking in the back of the Bentley.) Probably because she didn’t have to pretend to be calm in front of someone else, Caro now realised she was actually scared stiff. The apartment block was shaking so badly that she would not have been surprised to find herself, together with all the furniture, flying out of the side, as it crumbled. She shut her eyes. Please, please God, she would stop trembling soon.
It was the noise mostly, she kept telling herself, the incessant noise that seemed to get you down the most. That was why it was so much better to be doing something. No one would or could believe the noise that a bombing raid threw at you. And it did seem to have been actually thrown at you. While she was driving her car, or the canteen, she was fine. It was now, when she was just being ordinary, that the air raid became a nightmare and she felt herself longing with sudden passion for someone to grumble and be afraid with. She picked up her torch, her tin hat, and a blanket, and the notebook telling her where to clock in for fire watching on the roof, and made her way out into the now darkened city.
Sandbags sheltered the doorway of the flats, and rubble filled the pavement when she turned the corner, lighting her way gingerly past the silent, darkened houses. As usual the docks and the East End were taking the brunt of the bombardment, but there were always a few surprises in store. The night before last, making her way from the Underground where she had been taking much-needed succour of tea and blankets, she had stepped on a dead body. It was no good pretending that she had not been horrified, because she had, but happily, or unhappily, the sound of destruction all around her had drowned out her scream.
She was in dread of the same thing happening tonight, and it seemed that she would never find her way to the right door, but at last she found the stairway that led to the rooftop where she was to take up her duties. She climbed the hollow-sounding stairs, frightened now of meeting up with someone that she wouldn’t like. Stories of girls who had been raped in the blackout, or in some godforsaken bomb shelter, were now going the rounds, and the sight of figures stealing out with torches to search ruins for money and jewellery was now a commonplace. Rats would also creep in and out of abandoned buildings, stealing what remained from the human occupation left behind, as eager as so many humans to take advantage of the Nazi destruction.
There was someone else on the roof, torch in hand, a tall figure in a strangely old-fashioned hat. On hearing the door to the roof opening, which, in the weird lull of the aftermath of the raid, for some reason sounded firecracker loud, he turned at once and shone his torch in Caro’s face, just as she shone hers right back.
‘Good God!’
Betty too found herself staring in the mirror. She had taken a long time to choose her clothes, and the result was a navy-blue suit with pleated skirt, navy-blue shoes and matching handbag, gloves, of course, and a white blouse with a slight sailor-boy look to the cut.
‘You look as if you want to join the navy.’
‘Or I already have,’ Betty agreed, turning from the rust-marked mirror to Trixie. ‘The thing is, Trix, I have to look respectable, or they will not believe I can do the work, and I have to look as if I have class, the kind of class that a secretary should have, discreet, and trustworthy.
‘Oh, you look discreet all right,’ Trixie told her, packing up her own things before leaving for the blasted factory. ‘You look so discreet, Betty, that, quite honestly, if it were up to me I’d employ you in the Prime Minister’s office, really I would, or, seeing that you look so good in navy, put you to work in the Admiralty!’
‘Wish me luck, Trixie, please. I am awfully nervous.’
Trixie gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘Gumption, Betty Thomas, not nerves, that’s what’s needed. Never let them see you’re nervous or they think you’ve got something to be nervous about that you’re hiding from them, which wouldn’t be good, would it? Unless, of course, you have?’
Betty reddened. ‘I have nothing to hide, Trixie, you know that.’
‘Oh, I don’t know …’ Trixie gave her a sly look. ‘What about seven hours at the factory bench? Now that is something to hide all right, seeing that it’s brought you into disrepute, Miss Thomas.’
Betty pulled a face. Trixie was not taking her interview seriously.
‘No, really, wish me luck, won’t you?’
‘Nope! No, I will do no such thing.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I know you’ll get the job, that’s for why.’
Of course, what Betty did not know was that the old grapevine that ran from Chevrons to London had, it now seemed, done its really rather efficient magic.
Trixie had already written to Caro that Betty was about to be lynched. Caro, as she was meant to, had casually mentioned this to Edwina, who, while at dinner with Colonel Atkins, had mentioned the name of Betty Thomas not so casually to him, recommending her as trustworthy and with a known provenance at Chevrons.
Colonel Atkins, recognising a good, sound recommendation when he heard one, contacted his old colleague Max, now at Baker Street, who told his old colleague at the Park, as it was now known. The colleague requested Colonel Atkins to conduct an interview on his behalf, under the guise of being a colleague of the man at the War Office who had, albeit with some regret, turned down Betty Thomas in the first place.
‘It’s quite simple work, really. By that I mean a bright girl like you will cotton on straight away, but it is also very, very high on the security list.’ Colonel Atkins looked pensive. ‘In fact, it is top, top security, but you have come recommended, despite the fact that you are not, as it were, in uniform.’
Miss Thomas certainly looked as though she was in uniform.
‘If you are offered the post it will mean signing the Act, and living out of town. Not much nightlife at the Park, you know. In fact there is no nightlife at the Park. You might be better joining the WAAC, wouldn’t you say?’
‘No, sir.’
‘So you wouldn’t mind no nightlife?’
‘No, sir. I have never been fond of nightlife.’
Betty hoped what she was feeling, which was not just nervous, but actually hopeless, was not showing itself. Certainly she was speaking nothing but the truth when she said she had no fondness for nightlife, since she had never actually experienced it.
‘These Fanys, you know, they drive all day and dance all night. Nothing stops them.’ Colonel Atkins shook his head and the look in his eyes was so admiring that Betty found herself wishing that she did have a penchant for nightlife after all, if only to be able to see that same appreciative light in the colonel’s blue eyes, for he was a handsome man, almost absurdly so, with thick wavy blond hair, and perfect features.
‘I think what we will have to do first is to get you to sign the Official Secrets Act, not that it amounts to much; except now, of course, it amounts to a little more, because if you disobeyed anything in it, you would, of course, receive the death penalty.’
For a second, Betty wondered if she had heard right, because the colonel made everything sound so casual, as if signing the Official Secrets Act was no different from passing a driving test – and that too, it seemed, was on the curriculum.
‘You should learn to drive while at the Park, in case of invasion, you know. Very useful in that kind of circumstance, if you’re fleeing the enemy, having first burned everything interesting, of course. That is always the first duty in times of invasion, to set fire to everything. So now, first things first, you must sign the old Act, and then I’ll pass you on to a Wren, who will kit you out in WAAC or, more probably, WRNS uniform. In case of invasion, a service uniform is obligatory, or the Nazis will treat you as a spy. They will not believe you have an official role if you are in mufti, and will just go ahead and shoot you. So here we are, sign along the line, and then on we go.’
It was not until Betty had uncapped her fountain pen and was signing the Official Secrets Act that it came to her that if she was signing this piece of paper, and if Colonel Atkins was talking about passing her on to a Wren to kit her out in some kind of uniform, she surely must have the job. But she didn’t dare ask. Instead she meekly signed the Act, and replaced the cap on her fountain pen.
‘What about my things?’ she finally did ask as he ushered her towards the door.
‘Your things?’ The colonel looked confused. It was as if he thought there was no more to Betty than Betty herself, her handbag, her navy-blue skirt and jacket, and her shining navy-blue shoes.
‘Yes, my things, Colonel Atkins. Back at my place I share with Trixie Smith, where we are working, at the factory, and so on. I have left all my things there.’
‘Oh, I see, your things. Oh, don’t worry about your things, Miss Thomas. They’re all taken care of. They’ll be at the Park already.’
Betty felt suddenly both shocked and indignant. Of all the cheek! Supposing she had said no to the job?
‘You’re wondering how I knew you would be suitable, Miss Thomas?’ The colonel did not smile, but indicated for her to go through the door. ‘You came strongly recommended, by trustworthy sources. How else do you think we get the right people? Certainly not by advertising for them.’ He gave a short humourless laugh, and Betty walked quickly ahead of him. ‘Life in wartime moves very fast, Miss Thomas,’ he murmured, as they went back down what seemed to be endlessly grey corridors, passing a sea of navy and army personnel, all hurrying purposefully. ‘It has to move fast, or else we will never win the accursed thing.’
Caro thought she was going to faint when she saw the torch suddenly lighting the familiar features of Walter Beresford under his tin hat.
‘I thought you were –’ she paused, frowning, looking up from under hers – ‘I had thought you were, well, somewhere or another. I think it was France, yes, I think my father said you were in France. You and he quarrelled, didn’t you? That’s why you left suddenly, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there some sort of dispute over the mural?’
Walter kissed her briefly on the cheek. It was a brotherly kiss, the kiss of someone who was preoccupied with matters about which he wouldn’t care to speak, the kiss of someone who might have been physically present, but was certainly not spiritually present.
‘I do have an idea that I was in France,’ he agreed. ‘But a little thing called the G
erman Army, and then Dunkirk, stopped short my enjoyment of life over there.’
‘I wondered what had happened to you,’ Caro lied, probably because she hadn’t at all, although she had gone on wearing her lucky golden mole, which she now pulled out by its gold chain and showed Walter. ‘Still wearing my lucky charm. See?’
The truth was that despite his present to her that day at Chevrons, so much had happened in the months between her leaving home and their present meeting, she had most determinedly not given him a thought.
‘How have you been?’ Walter’s tone was one of a man who, after their last meeting, had also not given his companion another thought.
‘Dunkirk was pretty beastly, wasn’t it?’ she asked as they both fell to the ground, bombs dropping on buildings all around them.
‘Yes, yes, it was. But guess who I met up with there?’ Walter raised his voice above the shattering sounds of a building being hit.
‘Shan’t, can’t, won’t. Quite apart from anything else I’m rotten at pretending to guess at things about which I haven’t a clue,’ Caro answered, also raising her voice.
‘I’ll give you a hint. Someone you used to know.’
Caro frowned. ‘Someone nice?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. Someone not at all nice – David Astley.’
‘Good gracious.’
‘Funny thing was, he was dressed as a staff officer and helping our lot, which led me to wonder if he has seen sense after all. Or do you think he was just busying himself, preparatory to making beckoning signs to his friends the Nazis, who were bombing us defenceless creatures?’
The mention of David was a blow to Caro’s normally buoyant self-confidence. The disappearance of David and Katherine was for her somehow inextricably linked with her mother’s sudden death.
‘I don’t know anything about David, or Katherine, for that matter.’
Caro’s voice must have reflected her perturbed state more than she would have wanted. It had been bad enough having to find her way to that chap Max’s place in Dolphin Square to do her patriotic bit and report finding Katherine’s scarf in her car, God knows. As she had left him, she had felt like some sort of traitor, not at all patriotic, just shabby, telling on her sister to someone who might throw her in prison, but now the thought of David at Dunkirk was more disturbing.
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 20