‘And you – you will be all right?’
‘Why not?’ The words came out too forcefully and yet why wouldn’t they? ‘This is a place I love.’ This was a place they both loved, a place where they had spent long summers before the war. Marie-Christine went to speak again, but Katherine put a hand on her arm.
‘The Boche—’
‘The Boche will not come here. Besides, I will take care that the children stay in during the day, while I go to market. They can play games in the evenings in the old barn.’ She shrugged her shoulders a little helplessly. ‘Not even the postman comes here, not any more.’
‘It is good you know nothing.’
‘Of course. I know nothing.’
‘And whatever happens, I want you to know I’ll be all right. Really.’
Katherine turned on her heel, and at once became someone else, adopting a different walk, a frowning worried demeanour, her back a little stooped, her prop an ancient bicycle. Marie-Christine had worked hard to make Katherine look as close as possible to a photograph, which, together with new papers, Marie-Christine had found for her. Dark hair pulled back, a pair of tin spectacles, a woollen floral scarf tied in the French manner, a wide skirt – fashionable circa 1924 – and a pair of heavy walking shoes completed the spinster look. The new papers were of course forged, but then that had been Marie-Christine’s speciality. ‘And to think I used to want to be a great painter like Berthe Morisot!’ she had joked as she had completed the papers with her usual care.
Now she did not joke but watched her companion in arms, her friend of many years, walk off down the narrow grass path that led to the forest, pushing the old bike in front of her, head bent.
Mademoiselle Chantelle Thubron was on her way.
God go with her, and if not God, then at least her patron saint, Marie-Christine prayed.
She turned back to the house. It was time to start digging vegetables. Thanks to old Jacques they had enough growing around the place to make soup of every kind for many weeks. She should not think of what might happen, perhaps inevitably would happen, to Katherine. She must think only of the children in her charge. It was up to her to see that they remained safe at the farm, and that was going to be hard enough. Katherine she could only pray for.
Chapter Twelve
The elegantly dressed Italian gentleman was besotted with Miss O’Brien, but although he was anti Mussolini, and had a reputation for being more than trustworthy, he was fast becoming what Mr Fleming called ‘a social nuisance’ to his mistress, and neither Mr Fleming, nor Trixie, appreciated that.
The worry was that Miss Edwina, as they all now called her, had fallen into the habit of allowing him to stay too late. It was up to Trixie to make sure that he did finally leave, employing whatever ruse came to mind.
Trixie already knew that even if this Roberto creature had not, as yet, proved useful to their cause, the same could not be said of his chauffeur. Mr Fleming with his usual ruthlessness had already used the chauffeur to disseminate some really rather ripe little mistruths about the war situation – a rumour about cessation of night bombing over Germany, and many more similar lies – so for that reason alone it had been well worth entertaining the driver’s employer. What was not all right was that it was quite evident that Miss Edwina was now drinking too much, and staying up far too late – and far too often in the company of the said Italian gentleman.
Tonight when Trixie went to help her undress Edwina was once more half seas over, and Signor Roberto had only just been persuaded to leave the flat, by dint of his chauffeur’s joining forces with the staff to ship him off – not an easy task since he too was what Mr Fleming discreetly called ‘far from better’.
To Trixie’s irritation, she found Edwina, still fully dressed, lying on her vast bed, her copper-coloured hair spread about the stack of linen pillows, looking up at the ceiling, an expression of vague despair on her face.
‘Will the war never end? I’m getting tired, so tired.’
Trixie stared down at her. She would have liked to have thrown a glass of water at her, because that would sober her up all right. The only reason Trixie didn’t actually do that was because she didn’t want to stain the Chinese wallpaper behind the bed. She finally settled for pulling off Edwina’s evening shoes a little too roughly to be polite, but even that had no effect.
‘It’s the noise, and the news, and more noise, and more news.’
Trixie propped Edwina up in a sitting position and started to undo the buttons on her dress.
‘You’re not the only one in the war, you know, in case you hadn’t noticed, Miss Edwina? And war or no war, what you’re doing to yourself isn’t helping you – or, for that matter, the war either.’
‘What about you, dotey? Aren’t you feeling a mite banjaxed by the war, Trixie, dotey?’
‘I might be. On the other hand, I might not be,’ Trixie stated tersely. ‘If you ask me,’ she went on, at last whisking Edwina’s evening dress away, ‘most people have given up thinking about it at all. Most of us have taken to the idea that either our name is on a bomb or it’s not on it, and that’s all there is to it. Mr Fleming says that hardly anyone even bothers with their Anderson shelter any more, and the numbers down the Underground are halved. So, if that’s what you mean by being tired of the war, it’s true. People have got tired. They’ve got tired of feeling afraid. They know that it’s all about luck, and nothing else, just luck.’
She handed Edwina her wrap, while actually wanting to throw it at her. There was something so irritating about people when they were one over the eight, like her father at Christmas after he’d finished serving their lunch, or Cook at Chevrons on any Saturday evening after a hard week catering for everyone.
Edwina pulled on her wrap slowly, oh so slowly. Whether or not Trixie was right, and the people had stopped being afraid and become resigned, everyone she knew was moving about London, either from St James’s to Chelsea, or from Chelsea to Belgravia, in a kind of mad dance to get away from the gaping windows, the shrapnel marks on the buildings, the sight of twisted car wrecks in the middle of streets.
Horror stories abounded, of course. She tried not to listen, but somehow, between the sirens, and the fires, and the crump, crump, crump of the guns, they got through to her. People who you’d been having a jolly with the night before, blown to extinction, nothing left of them except an earring or a cap. The hall porter downstairs – gone to visit his mother, her house blown out and nothing left of anything.
‘Let’s get our makeup off now, shall we, Miss Edwina?’
Edwina nodded. Standing up, she went obediently to her dressing table and sat down in front of the mirror.
‘I look terrible,’ she complained.
‘You’ll look better for a good night’s sleep,’ Trixie told her, without changing the brisk tone she had chosen to adopt.
‘Yes, you’re right, Smith, dotey.’
Shortly afterwards Edwina climbed into bed, and Trixie tucked her up tightly as if she were a child and she wanted to make sure she felt secure.
‘Goodnight,’ she called from the door, switching off the light.
‘Goodnight,’ came a small voice from the bed.
Trixie closed the door, and then waited, as she had recently become accustomed to doing. A few seconds later came the sound of sobbing. Trixie shook her head and sighed. It had been the same every night for the past weeks, ever since Captain Robert had been posted missing.
The following night, Roberto-the-all-too-eager, as he was known in the kitchen, stayed so late, and there was such a long silence in the drawing room, that Trixie went through to Mr Fleming.
‘What shall I do?’ Trixie whispered, taking him aside.
‘Cause an upset,’ Mr Fleming told her, in a low voice.
‘Telephone call?’
‘Anything.’
He crossed his eyes at Trixie behind the chauffeur’s back.
Trixie managed to keep a straight face, and went out of the room to
the hall where there was a cupboard fitted with a number of different telephones, official and unofficial, while Mr Fleming turned back to the chauffeur.
‘I say, old boy, I’ve suddenly remembered that tomorrow is your birthday, isn’t it? I’m sure you want to get back to your wife, don’t you?’
The chauffeur put out his cigarette and nodded, surprised.
‘Signor Fleming! ’Ow did you know it was my birthday?’
Mr Fleming managed to look both patronising and benevolent at the same time. It was a ridiculous question. Of course he knew it was the chauffeur’s birthday. He didn’t just look up someone’s personal file, he memorised it too. He made it his business to know everything about everyone who came to the flat, even the delivery men – most especially the delivery men, most especially if they were new delivery men, however old, and however tired from the bombing and the lack of sleep.
‘Scribble your master something to the effect that you have just heard that there is someone coming round to see him at midnight – on urgent business,’ Mr Fleming, at his most dangerously benevolent, instructed the chauffeur.
‘And when there is no one there, when the boss discovers I am making a false excuse, I am a dead man, no?’
Mr Fleming smiled. ‘There will be someone there,’ he stated.
Trixie, who had returned to witness the last part of the conversation never really liked it when Mr Fleming smiled. Mr Fleming was not a man to cross, Mrs Cherry always said, but then Mrs Cherry was not a woman to cross either. Miss Edwina had once confided to Trixie that Mrs Cherry had told her that she knew more about poisons than Trixie knew about herself. Trixie remembered this, especially when the cook was in a bad mood and making some of her foreign-sounding sauces.
‘It was a pity Roberto had to go so early,’ Edwina moaned later, if anything, even more drunkenly than the night before, as Trixie once more set about helping her undress.
Trixie raised her eyes to heaven. Women, and men, her father had told her many times, so often fell for the same name. You would think it would occur to them at some point that someone of the same name was not the same person – but no, apparently not. So Captain Robert Plume had been substituted in Edwina’s affections by a Roberto – although the two men must have been as unalike as it was possible to imagine.
‘You’re getting like the gamekeeper at Chevrons,’ Trixie told Edwina, as she hung up her dress for her.
‘And what was wrong with him? Did he also drink too much?’
Before she climbed into bed Edwina drained the glass of water by the side. Trixie replenished the glass from the water carafe, before going back to the dressing table, and taking all the necessaries to remove Edwina’s makeup. Then she sat on the side of the bed and tried to apply cream to Edwina’s face, which was not easy, since she kept sliding down the pillows.
‘Sit up.’
‘No …’
‘Sit up.’
‘No, why?’
‘I don’t want you getting lipstick on that pillowcase, Miss Edwina. It’ll never come out.’
Edwina finally lay back against the pillows, cleansed but not sober, and Trixie sighed inwardly. Miss Edwina was getting like this far too often. She needed to brace up, and shut up. Or, if that were not possible, she needed to have a change. Something must be done.
Edwina opened her eyes and stared myopically at Trixie.
‘What was it that you were saying that I was like, did you say, Smith?’
‘I said you’ve got … you have become like the gamekeeper at Chevrons,’ Trixie told her, her voice raised, as if she was talking to a child. ‘He had seven different dogs, but they were all called Mike.’
Edwina frowned.
‘I don’t have any dogs, and I don’t know any Mikes, not any more, anyway. Except I did know Mike Darlington, but he was killed in North Africa; and I knew Mike Partridge, but he was shot down over France, right at the beginning of the war. So I can’t be like whoever it is that you think I’m like, this person who likes Mikes, because all mine are dead.’
Trixie wanted to say, ‘Oh, do shut up and go to sleep’ but instead she merely put out the pink-shaded lights on the dressing table, and carried on lecturing Edwina as if she hadn’t spoken, because that was the effect drunkards had on you: you kept on talking at them, and in a raised voice, as if they were deaf.
‘No, what I am saying, Miss Edwina, is that you’ve got yourself in a contusion over this missing Captain Robert, and now you’re convincing yourself that you should fall for this Signor Roberto, but only because he has the same name – except it’s in Italian, of course. What you need to do is to realise that a name is only a name, the way the gamekeeper at Chevrons never did, if you know what I mean? You need to understand that Captain Robert and this Signor Roberto are nothing like each other, any more than the gamekeeper’s dogs were alike. Anyway, who’s to say that Captain Robert isn’t going to come back to you? He’s only been reported missing, not dead, Miss Edwina.’
Trixie sighed and started neatly to replace the precious makeup removal items in their small basket. So many of the items were impossible to get now, unless you were lucky enough to know a smuggler, or a black marketer.
She looked down at Edwina, and a very beautiful sight she was, even when she was tight. Judging from the amount she had drunk, she would soon be asleep, and would not wake until morning, thank the Lord, and pass the butter – if you could find any.
Trixie tottered off to her own room, a pristine little place, set quite apart from the rest of the flat, hidden behind the kitchens. She shut the door, leaned against it and sighed with gratitude. She was always glad to enter her little kingdom, for with its flowered wallpaper and old oak furniture, it had a strangely countrified air. It reminded her of her room at her father’s cottage, what with its framed picture of The Light of the World, and its patchwork quilt of many colours. She undressed, brushed out her thick curly hair, and climbed thankfully into the narrow bed.
Trixie was wrong about Edwina. Drunk or not, this particular night she did not fall asleep straight after Trixie had turned out the lights. She lay staring into the darkness. Trixie’s words had been said without either rancour or sentiment. They had been plain words, crisp words, words that had not pierced her heart, but given her hope. It was true. Robert had only been posted missing. He might not be dead.
What was it they all said nowadays when they parted? ‘Expect you when I see you.’ That’s what she had to say to herself. She must expect to see Robert, not expect not to see him.
She turned over on her pillow and, after giving a large and heartfelt sigh, she, like Trixie, was soon fast asleep.
Colonel Atkins looked across the table at Edwina.
‘You’ve done well, O’Brien,’ he said kindly, ‘so well, that the powers that be,’ by which of course he meant himself and Max, ‘think it would do you good to have a change for a few weeks.’
Edwina frowned. She liked her apartment, and she liked all the people she had met, most particularly Roberto, though for some reason he had not telephoned her the morning after he had left her, and not the morning after that. Not that she had found that she was missing him in the least, for with the thought that Robert might still be in the world came the thought that Roberto was not what she wanted. A person could have enough of flattery.
‘Where were you thinking of sending me, you and the powers that be, Colonel, dotey?’
‘We were thinking somewhere quite different, a complete change of scene.’
‘So you just said, but may I know my fate?’ Edwina leaned forward and whispered dramatically, ‘Could you not write it on the napkin and I will swallow the information with my rissole?’
‘We were thinking a few weeks in the country first of all, but then we thought by the sea would make a nice change. Somewhere you can rest up a little, put the war behind you. It’s been non-stop for you, after all, a bit of a jazz-age rhythm to your life, which might need to be set aside for a couple of weeks.’
‘I know. You must feel sorry for me! Everyone must drip tears at my predicament.’ Edwina’s laugh was just a little shrill. ‘Non-stop food and drink, non-stop entertaining, nonstop cocktails and laughter. Dear, oh dear, and to think I could be out there having fun, and more fun on the convoys! Or in Italy. Saach fun, the hills beyond Rome, doncher know?’
Colonel Atkins smiled. ‘My dear, you can mock my concern for you, but one of the most important moments in the war is about to occur, not just the turning point, but the actual point, and you will have your part to play in the drama. For this I want you fit and well, not tired. You have to be fit, fit, fit for battle, for upon you and a few others will rest the outcome of something so big that if we last for a thousand years, the world will say not that this was our finest hour, but our most dangerous. If this fails, fighting this war will have been for nothing.’
Edwina stared at him.
‘Am I to be dropped into France?’ she asked, a little flippantly but also a little fearfully. ‘Because if I am, I think you should know, Colonel, dotey, that parachuting is not quite my métier.’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Of course not. No, what we are going to do is to give out to all your contacts – everyone who has ever been entertained at the flat – that you are going to the country for a few weeks of fresh air. You have a nasty cough, which needs ozone, sea air, that sort of thing. When you come back the party will resume, of course, and by that time you will be as fresh as the proverbial daisy.’ He smiled. ‘As a matter of fact I envy you, going where you’re going.’
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 30