Goodnight Sweetheart

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Goodnight Sweetheart Page 22

by Charlotte Bingham


  Katherine sat down opposite the General, trying frantically to assemble her thoughts. As she sipped her cognac the General talked on, the look in his eyes still understandably sombre, his conversation revolving again and again around the problem of an occupying army dealing with civilian resistance.

  ‘If the invading force takes too harsh a line, it inevitably leads to panic,’ he murmured disconsolately. ‘Rein in too tightly and your horse will start to fight you. People are the same.’

  Katherine stared at him, suddenly suspicious of his all too reasonable attitudes. Determined to keep up some pretence at polite conversation, she questioned him further about his ideas, but even as he began to talk, Katherine’s inner attention left him, as she suddenly remembered that day in London, just before the war really took off, when David and she had been flown in for one of those mad twelve-hour visits that Max sometimes insisted on, and how, out of the blue, she had seen Caro, wearing her suit, parking what had formerly been her car, and how David had mischievously untied Katherine’s scarf from her neck, and tied it around the steering wheel, and how they had watched Caro’s expression from afar, and then heartbreakingly, much later, found her message on the lamp post, her Mayfair number, then, ‘Please, please ring me.’

  It had been so like Caro to imagine that Katherine was around and to hope that she would telephone her. And also not to mind whether or not Katherine and David were marching behind Hitler or working for the Gestapo – to hope only that they could talk – probably, knowing Caro, in the hope that she could talk them out of whatever it was they were actually doing. Caro had always been behind Katherine, somewhere, all her childhood; walking behind, talking the hind leg off anyone and everyone, always cheerful, always happy, ‘a tomboy in petticoats’, their father called her, except in Caro’s case, her petticoats usually ended up bandaging some poor lame duck or other.

  The General finally left Katherine to attend a meeting, but he was back all too soon, knocking sharply on the front door, which Katherine once more opened to him.

  ‘You have to get out. You must come with me, leave the house within the hour. No, now, you must leave at once, take no risks,’ he told her urgently, and as he spoke he quickly turned the hall lights off. Then, making his way up the house, he switched off every light that was burning, before returning to her, so that finally the two of them were in the dark, talking in low voices. ‘The reprisals I predicted have begun. They have captured and interrogated some communists. One of them weakened when they went to work on him. They know who you are, or at least they hope they do. They are already celebrating with a large dinner, so confident are they.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’

  ‘The Gestapo.’

  Katherine’s heart missed two dozen beats.

  ‘So – who am I, General?’

  She knew he was looking down at her, and the hold on her arm tightened slightly, which frightened her, yet his voice became even lower, and his tone was suddenly gentle. ‘You are Elvira, but perhaps you are not just Elvira. Perhaps you are also –’ he started to push her ahead of him out of the room – ‘you are also, perhaps, someone else. Frankly, Elvira, I do not mind who you are. All I mind is that I do not let you fall into the hands of the Gestapo, even if it means the end for me too.’

  Katherine wrenched herself free.

  ‘How am I to believe you?’

  ‘You have no means of knowing how to believe me, but you must. And you know you can,’ he breathed, ‘because I am in love with you. You are the most beautiful creature. Indeed, you are the loveliest young woman that I have ever met, and I will love you all my life, and you must know it. I have thought of what to do as I came here. Leaving my car and my driver at the restaurant, I slipped out the back way, and I think I have found the perfect hiding place for you. We have time. The Gestapo are presently eating bouillabaisse. With large bibs around their necks to save their uniforms, they have the air of hideous babies. However, with bouillabaisse and many courses to come, they will be several hours before they reach the cheese and fruit.’

  ‘I can’t leave—’

  ‘You can, and you must.’ The General pulled Katherine after him. ‘Whatever you have here, believe me, will be useless to you now, and nothing is to be done about it.’

  Katherine thought quickly of her wireless, of her codes, and her gun, and then realising there was nothing she could do except hope for the best, she followed him into the street.

  He pushed the front door to behind her.

  ‘Don’t worry. I will take care of everything for you. I will bring you all your things.’

  For a second Katherine felt reassured. Then the thought came to her. She was standing out on the pavement, in France, at ten o’clock at night, trusting a German officer not to deliver her into the hands of the Gestapo. Where were her brains?

  Chapter Nine

  Edwina was smoking. Caro stared at her, frowning.

  ‘You’re smoking too much.’

  ‘Of course,’ Edwina told her, her voice flat. ‘And to think I once hated smoking worse than sin, but now I find it stops me feeling hungry, and so on and so forth, dotey dear. And anyway, what is the point of giving up, tell me do?’

  Caro looked away. She knew what Edwina meant. Every day something awful happened, and because there were so many reasons to despair, it seemed to her that they had to find an equal number not to do so, although she had to admit it was tiring.

  Robert had been posted. Everyone knew that Edwina of the carefree heart had flirted with Tom and Ben, but had fallen for dashing Robert, waited for him to return from Dunkirk, made love with him, waited for him to take her on a date to the Savoy, been stood up, and had then gone off and made love with someone else – Gene someone or another – and was now, it seemed, rather regretting it.

  ‘How can smoking stop you feeling hungry when you haven’t eaten for days?’

  ‘That’s why I haven’t eaten for days, dotey dear, because I am smoking. I want to keep my figure.’

  ‘Let me make you a dried egg omelette. I have a secret recipe. It is truly brilliant.’ As Edwina turned to look at her, Caro went on, ‘Walter gave me the recipe.’

  ‘Ah, Walter, the painter who believes he loves the elder sister, who in her turn has eyes only for the Nazi?’

  ‘The very same one. But never mind all that, the recipe is better than you could hope, truly it is.’

  Edwina’s eyes slid sideways to watch Caro’s retreating back. Shorty was being very maternal towards her. It was almost alarming.

  ‘I’m not sure I can eat an omelette at four in the afternoon, Shorty, really I’m not.’

  ‘And I’m not sure you can go on living on air. Your skin is suffering.’

  Edwina quickly stubbed out her cigarette.

  ‘How so, dotey?’

  She went to the mirror and stared at herself. It was true, her skin was suffering. She looked like something the cat would leave on the doorstep.

  ‘You’re right. I have gone a kind of greyish fawn, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ Caro called cheerfully from the kitchen. ‘And what is more, having nothing to eat for so long will do little for your figure either. You will only look gaunt, and gaunt is so unattractive to men, my deah.’

  Edwina sat back down again.

  ‘Oh, blow men,’ she told the cushions on the sofa. ‘And blow everything else too.’

  She sat back listening to the sounds from the small kitchen. Caro was turning into a proper little mother to everyone. Only yesterday Edwina had found her cooking some recipe of Marguerite Patten’s, which she had taken down from the wireless. Nowadays it was nothing to hear her muttering about how to make scones without butter, or rice pudding without rice, or something equally disturbingly unusual.

  Caro put down a tray in front of her. Edwina looked from the tray with the dried egg omelette, to her friend, and back to the tray again.

  ‘It looks like an omelette, Shorty. I have to at least congratulate you on that
. But will it taste like an omelette, I am asking the gods above us?’

  ‘No, but it will taste of something perfectly all right. It’s got a secret ingredient, you see, as well as those mushroom stalks that Trixie brought us up from her factory.’

  ‘Is Trixie making mushroom stalks in her factory? I thought it was aeroplane parts,’ Edwina asked without curiosity, as she began to tackle the omelette with all the enthusiasm of a young woman who is convinced she is about to die from food poisoning.

  ‘Yes, she is making aero parts, but now that Betty’s gone, Trixie’s been able to make friends with someone who is growing mushrooms in her free time. The factory is so near to the countryside, they get more of a go at food stuffs than we do here. Trixie wrote me that she gets real eggs, and tomatoes, and bacon too, and no hanky-panky needed. They just leave it at the back door of her digs, and she shares it with the other lodgers. So I told her to bring us up anything she can spare, and she did – so here we have, mushroom stalks.’

  Edwina looked up. ‘This has got a funny taste, Shorty.’

  ‘That’s the secret ingredient – toadstool. Very fortifying in a war.’

  ‘Ah, yes, we have that in Ireland. My mother’s cook did it – it was called bye-bye potato pie.’ Edwina polished off the omelette as quickly as anything, and then she sat back.

  ‘Now I think I’ll have a gin.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Caro agreed, her spirits lifting as she saw some colour coming into Edwina’s cheeks. ‘A gin it shall be.’

  She hurried over to the drinks table, poured each of them a large gin, to which she added some tonic, then hurried back to Edwina.

  ‘You must be feeling better if you want a gin.’

  Edwina nodded. She was feeling much better.

  ‘I’ve been a damn fool, Shorty, dotey, do you know that?’

  Caro knew that this was true, so of course she said ‘no’, but she said it too quickly for comfort – at any rate, for Edwina’s comfort – which meant that Edwina nodded, staring ahead of her, not at Caro.

  ‘I knew you would agree with me,’ she went on, slowly sipping her gin. ‘First of all I tell you we mustn’t get our hearts involved, and then, not two seconds later, I ignore my own advice. What a fool I’ve been, what a silly, silly fool.’

  ‘Oh, but we all have, some time or another,’ Caro told her with a little too much enthusiasm. ‘Even Robyn. I only just stopped her falling for an absolute shocker, after Eddie was shot down, and she imagined that … well, she thought that … well, you know how it is. It sometimes seems better to think that someone isn’t coming back, rather than cling on to a tatty bit of hope.’

  There was a small silence as they both remembered the news coming through, and then how they had all made up their minds to think of Eddie as dead, until they had a postcard from him from a prisoner of war camp.

  ‘Of course, now he’s been taken prisoner, it’s not so bad. And Bill’s taking her out whenever he can.’

  Caro fell silent, remembering when she and Robyn had been newly arrived in London and had met Eddie for the first time, and how they had pretended that they had been to the Grafton Galleries before, when in reality they had never set eyes on the place.

  ‘Bill’s all right. Did I tell you? Bill’s fine. He’s notched up, I think he said it was ten and a half kills, because he agreed to share one kill with someone else.’ She sat back, sipping her own gin and tonic. It was still really only tea-time, but who cared, really? ‘I hope Bill keeps on going the way he has been. He says if you don’t think you’ll be killed, you won’t be. It’s the chaps who think their number’s up who cop it, apparently.’

  Edwina nodded in a desultory way, still staring ahead of her rather than at Caro. Her father had said the same thing about the Great War.

  ‘I’ve had an offer, a bit ago,’ she suddenly announced, a little too loudly considering that Caro was sitting close by her. ‘Yes, I’ve had an offer from Colonel Atkins.’ She turned to Caro. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Not a legal one, since he’s married, isn’t he?’ Caro joked.

  ‘Well, actually, since you mention it, he is a widower, I think. No, apparently, he and others are of the opinion that I am some kind of a loose type.’

  ‘You should have kicked him in the shins for even thinking such a thing.’

  ‘No, no, he means as in loose cannon. Anyway, it seems he would like to set me up in sumptuous style in a large apartment, in competition with that well-known lady our Prime Minister’s dear daughter-in-law.’

  ‘Oh, her.’

  ‘Yes, her. I would have a maid, a chauffeur, plenty of food and drink, a large wardrobe of clothes, everything, except I must not get personally involved with anyone that comes to the flat whom I have to entertain. That, apparently, is just not on.’

  ‘I should take up the offer at once, Edwina. If you don’t, I will!’ Caro drained her gin. ‘Gracious heavens, if I’d had an offer like that from Colonel Atkins you would not see my heels for dust.’

  ‘Do you really think – but I mean, what about personal feelings? Supposing I have some, dotey? Supposing I fall for a Free Frenchman?’

  Caro pulled Edwina to her feet. ‘Edwina, all Frenchmen are free – you know that!’

  ‘No, but seriously, dotey, supposing I fall for one of the people I’m meant to be spying on, or entertaining, or whatever it is I’m meant to be doing?’

  ‘Just don’t tell Colonel Atkins. But just now, do go and tell Colonel Atkins that you have changed your mind and you will accept his offer to set you up in a sumptuous apartment. Except, just a minute, what do you actually have to do?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, nothing too much, You know, be nice to the right people, have what they used to call a “salon” where every kind of person can come, where there is always some kind of party going on, and people of all types drop in, and then you know …’ she shrugged. ‘Then I have to tell him about them. What they like to drink, how they dress, what their preferred type of lover is – all that. Simple really, and no strings attached, which is good, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s not a job, that’s a sinecure. Run to the telephone and say “yes” before he changes his mind.’

  ‘No, no, he said to tell him when I’d made up my mind.’

  ‘No, no, yes, yes, ring him now.’ Caro smiled, and reached for the telephone. ‘Is it to be me, or you?’

  Edwina stood up, walked across and snatched the telephone receiver from her.

  ‘Buzz off, dotey, this is woman’s business. You don’t qualify; you are still not yet a woman.’

  Caro turned away. Everyone was always teasing her about that, about It, but there it was: if you don’t want to do something, you shouldn’t do it, or at least that is what her mother had always said – or was it Trixie? Someone at any rate, someone from the old days at Chevrons, when such subjects did not really come up, thank goodness. Conversations in the days when she was growing up revolved around whether or not to go fishing, or have your hair cut, all really beautifully important, and in the scheme of things, delightfully unimportant.

  ‘Not everyone wants to be a woman, at least not until they’re ready, you know, Edwina,’ Caro murmured, but because Edwina was now on the telephone busily rotting up ‘Colonel Dotey’, as she called Colonel Atkins, she did not hear her. Anyway there was another distraction just at that moment when Robyn emerged, dressed and ready to go out, from the bathroom where she had been soaking in a statutory six inches of tepid bath water.

  ‘Oh, for the days when the water was allowed to cover your body, and not just your little toe,’ she said to Caro in a distant voice, while inspecting her makeup in the hall mirror.

  ‘Oh, for the days when sleep was something one thought necessary,’ Caro responded. She paused before going on. ‘Did I tell you, last night I met Walter Beresford, fire watching?’

  Robyn turned to Caro. She knew they both had black lines under their eyes that were not makeup. She also knew that they were both busil
y burning the candle at both ends, and in the middle too, but what else was there to do?

  When not driving, they were fire watching, when not fire watching they were driving, and when not doing either of those things it was straight to a nightclub, or somewhere like the Savoy for dinner and dancing, all the while knowing that the young man you were dancing with, or you, or both of you, or all of you, might not be there tomorrow. So no wonder no one thought about tomorrow, only of today. Indeed, the statutory toast at the flat had become ‘Here’s to now, and let the next minute take care of itself.’

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me you saw Walter Beresford again. Was he still interesting?’

  ‘Yes.’ Caro frowned, turning over the question in her mind, concentrating on it. ‘Yes, yes, he was,’ she said, sounding vaguely surprised. ‘He’s going to paint the war, you know.’

  ‘Makes a change from painting your father’s wall, I suppose.’

  Caro was silent for a minute. She knew that Robyn didn’t really mean to sound disparaging about Walter painting rather than joining the Blues and Royals, or even the Pioneer Corps, but it certainly sounded slightly sarcastic.

  ‘He never finished the wall, you know?’ she said, after a short pause. ‘As a matter of fact, he fell out with my father before he could finish it, but that’s another matter. Apparently he’s going down the Underground tonight, to paint the crowds sheltering from the bombs.’

  But Robyn wasn’t listening. She hardly knew Walter, and anyway, she was looking disapproving.

  ‘My dear, did you hear about Bill’s narrow escape?’

  ‘No, tell me. He’s always having them,’ Caro replied, and this time it was her who turned away.

  She had quite put Bill out of her mind, as she put aside the thought of every young man once he wasn’t actually in the room. It was the only way. Nowadays everyone had one phrase and one phrase alone engraved on their hearts and that was ‘you assume the best until you hear different’.

 

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