‘I shan’t guess, but I think I will probably be able to. No second language needed, I take it? No need for Baedecker’s guide to the ancient cities of Europe.’
‘I haven’t said a word …’
‘And I haven’t said yes yet, Colonel, dotey.’
‘Oh, but you will,’ the colonel told her in a firm voice. ‘I know you will. You’re too sensible not to.’
He was quite right, of course. Edwina was too sensible to say no to such a proposition. Besides, she had the feeling that she had grown so stale of late, all the time feeling as if she was some kind of smart shopping bag with the shop’s name emblazoned in gold on the side, and nothing inside. She needed to be somewhere else, somewhere quite different. She needed to feel different.
‘I wish you could come with me,’ she said to Trixie the following morning, as they packed a suitcase for her.
‘Oh no, you don’t,’ Trixie told her, smiling. ‘Besides, you need a clean break. You need new people around you, people who aren’t making the same old sound in the same old way. A good belt of sea air will do you the world of good.’
‘I will miss your snooty English ways, Beatrice Smith,’ Edwina said, for once quite serious, and she seized Trixie’s hands and shook them up and down as a child might before starting a game.
‘Get on with you.’
‘Get on with you too,’ Edwina rejoined, and she hugged Trixie because it was Trixie’s words that had brought Edwina back to life as it should be lived, in hope.
‘It’s very kind of you to think of me, but I don’t want to go anywhere at the moment. I want to stay here with Mr Fleming and Mrs Cherry. I want to be right here in London when we hear the news that Hitler’s been hanged, drawn and quartered, except that would be too good for him, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well, you’re probably right, but sitting by the sea with no one to boss me I shall feel like Sally No Friends, and that’s the truth.’
Edwina turned away, as Trixie picked up her suitcase, and then went to answer the door to the colonel, who had arrived to drive Edwina to Sussex.
‘Ah, good morning, Miss Smith.’ The colonel looked appreciatively at Trixie. ‘Do you know, every time I say that I feel as if I am using a pseudonym for you?’ he confessed.
‘Well, you would,’ Trixie agreed, smiling.
As he kicked his heels in the drawing room, waiting for Edwina to appear, the colonel found himself staring at Trixie, who was checking the flowers, the glasses and drinks on the side table, in fact just about everything in the room, to make sure it was as perfect as possible, something of which – since he had been the force motif behind the furnishing of it – the colonel could only approve.
He watched the young woman in a charmed kind of way as she moved about. Dark-haired and slim, in her own way Trixie Smith, although she did not possess the beauty of Edwina O’Brien, was a very pretty girl. Mentally he removed her maid’s uniform – in the nicest possible way, of course – and dressed her instead in the kind of wardrobe that he had provided for Edwina.
‘Miss Smith?’
Trixie turned as she went back to Edwina’s bedroom, where she knew she would be still dawdling in front of the mirror – keeping ‘Irish time’ as Trixie now called it, because Mr Fleming had told her that the Irish had a different sense of time from everyone else, based on thousands of years of playing music, listening to stories, and making sense of the world with a pint of Guinness and a pipe.
‘Yes, Colonel Atkins?’
‘I wonder if you would care to come and see me tomorrow?’
‘Certainly, Colonel, if that is what you want.’
He produced a card from his wallet.
‘Make it early, and then we can really get down to business.’
Trixie looked from the card to him, and back again. She had noted some time ago that the colonel was a very handsome man.
‘Will there be other people there?’ she asked, just a little sharply.
‘Of course. My colleagues will want to be there for your briefing,’ he said in a reassuring tone.
‘Really?’ Trixie managed to look innocent. ‘That’s a pity, then.’ She turned away.
‘We could have lunch afterwards, of course.’
She turned back. ‘That sounds more like it.’
Trixie left the room smiling. Really, men like Colonel Atkins were so easy to see through.
Inside the drawing room, the colonel too turned away and in doing so caught sight of himself in the mirror. He too was smiling.
It seemed that the colonel had found Edwina a cottage by the sea, on an old Edwardian estate, once frequented by crowned heads. It was small and cosy, and furnished with dark oak and bright fittings that owed everything to someone of taste.
‘How delightful, Colonel, dotey,’ Edwina said. ‘And how beautifully furnished, how tasteful, how perfect in every degree.’
‘Yes, it is pretty,’ he agreed. ‘Now you’ll be all right, because there’s a maid that comes every day, and she will bring you whatever you want. But meanwhile, there is a pie in the Frigidaire and gin on the drinks table, and so on. Everything you need for the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, at any rate.’
Edwina leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.
‘I never realised how tired I had become,’ she told him, suddenly serious. ‘But now I’m here, I do. I am so tired, I think I shall spend the whole of the next week sleeping.’
The colonel smiled. ‘You can drop me back at the station, and then take the car on from there. You have a special petrol allowance, which I don’t expect you to need. There are shops within walking distance, and what with the sea and the sun, you should be back to rights in no time.’
When Edwina returned from dropping the colonel at the station, in the old rented Morris, the cottage, with its holiday air, was such that, from the moment she entered it, she could have burst into tears from relief. Instead she lay back on the chintz sofa and stared out at the sea. It seemed never ending.
Edwina’s green eyes grew dreamy as she realised that somewhere Robert might be alive, and perhaps even well, maybe not even missing, and certainly not dead. She rearranged a cushion, and as she did so she saw it looked familiar. It was exactly the same tapestry pattern as the footstool cover the colonel had been stitching when she first drove him, and which was now in the apartment.
She frowned at it, and then shook her head disbelievingly. The cottage must belong to the colonel. Typical of Colonel Dotey to lend her what must be his own cottage by the sea, and not say as much. She started to inspect the rest of the oak-beamed rooms. Everything was just as it should be in such a place, but there were no photographs anywhere. Not that there needed to be, for Mr Fleming had told her that since the colonel became a widower, he lived only for his work, adding, ‘as the ancient saying goes’.
Edwina never knew whether Mr Fleming had quoted such phrases because he was posing as a butler, or whether they were his natural way of speaking.
She lay back against the cushions on the chintz sofa once more, half closing her eyes, not wanting to shut out the distant blue of the sea and the bright sunshine outside. She realised that by cutting herself off from nature, being in a city full of streets, buildings, people, more streets, more buildings, more people, bombs and bodies, suffering, she had been on the verge of a breakdown. Now, staring out at the beach, the water, the horizon, that poor bombed place that London had become seemed to have no reality at all, to be just a nightmare.
Edwina sighed a long shuddering sigh, as if she had just dropped something very heavy and was only now beginning to appreciate just what a burden it had been. For the next two or three weeks, at any rate, for as long as the colonel saw fit to leave her by the sea, she would try to reassure herself that only the beauty of the scene in front of her was real. Obviously the colonel had brought her to this place because he knew she had forgotten that there was a world outside of the war. Never mind the defences on the seashore, never mind the curls of barbe
d wire, the sea was still coming in and not even Hitler had been able to stop that. The sky was still blue, and he hadn’t been able to do anything about that either. And what was more … she couldn’t actually think of what was more and, quite suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter.
Even as Edwina rested and then slept, her head on the colonel’s hand-stitched cushion, Betty was woken by the first of many pains, intermittent, some strong, and some less so.
‘Oh gracious, oh dear, oh dear!’
She staggered to the door of her cottage. She had to fetch Mr Smith to take her to the hospital, but when she eventually managed to push open first the door of his cottage, and then the door of his snug in the house, where he liked to repair after lunch, there was no Mr Smith, and what was worse, although she called and called, she soon realised that there was no one in the house, not even the dogs, everyone had gone for walks or drives, and she was miles from the doctor’s surgery, and still more miles from the cottage hospital.
‘Oh, why did I come back here, when it’s so far from everywhere?’ she asked the swaying trees and garden plants, the clouds overhead, the sheep beyond the river. ‘Please, please, God, let someone come back to find me, before it’s too late.’
Caro and Robyn had thirty-six-hour passes, courtesy, they both suspected, of Aunt Cicely pulling strings for them.
‘Unheard of, quite unheard of. When they called me in to tell me – well, you can imagine,’ Robyn said as she made her way towards the garage where she kept the Bentley. ‘And to give us enough petrol to get us home and back! I nearly passed out.’
Caro could imagine.
‘Did they say why we’ve been given all this?’
‘No, but you know that friend of Aunt Cicely? Well, she just said that she knew that it was necessary. That was all. Talk about strings being pulled. Ours not to reason why, old thing. Ours just to jump into the great beast, and thank God for Aunt Cicely and her friends, for a sunny day, and for a great clear road where no one but us will be motoring – well, next to no one but us.’
In fact there were a great many vehicles on the road back to Brookefield and Chevrons that day, and since they were all military, and the dear old Bentley was far from being so, each time they sped past them, Robyn and Caro kissed their fingers to them and waved.
The men in the crowded vehicles, seeing a couple of uniformed beauties, waved and cheered in return. Caro, because she wasn’t driving, constantly found herself looking back at the smiling faces, and each time, for a few seconds it seemed to her that she saw Jag and Francis or Tom and Eddie, or others she knew, so that she seemed to be passing all of her friends, all waving and cheering to her.
She finally stopped looking back, determinedly shaking off the idea that she was somehow passing the missing, the untraced, those that she had not yet heard from, might never hear from again.
It started to rain as they were nearing home, and the woods and fields were taking on a familiar look, so that Caro felt her spirits lifting at the old sights and sounds, even the uneven roads taking on a soothing familiarity as Robyn steered the heavy car between the potholes, at the same time trying to avoid the banks of mud and the fallen branches at the side of the roads.
‘Oh my God! Look! Look! Stop! Stop! Stop!’
The Bentley being the Bentley, it just was not possible for Robyn to pull up as suddenly as Caro was now begging her.
‘Turn, you must turn, and go back!’
‘Sorry, old thing, the Bentley is not a horse. We cannot rein in and turn on a sixpence.’
Robyn shoved the gear stick in and out of the appropriate settings turning slowly, and then made her way back down the now rain-soaked road.
‘What? What are we now stopping for?’ she asked.
‘We are stopping for – that!’
Caro leaped out of the car and started to run back.
‘If this is another of your blessed fox cub rescue outings, I will wring your neck, young Caro,’ Robyn muttered as she shut the Bentley door, and bending her head against the rising wind, she battled her way to where Caro was now standing, her arm around a stooped female figure who, in her turn, was leaning against a tree.
‘It’s Betty!’ Caro said. ‘I thought it was. It’s Betty, and … and …’ she nodded to Robyn, ‘and she’s you know!’
They both looked at Betty’s baby bump, which, even to their unversed eyes, appeared as if it might be going to turn into a baby any time now.
Robyn swallowed hard, and pulled her cap further down on her nose. Babies were just not her.
‘What are you doing here, Betty?’ Caro demanded. ‘Why are you walking alone in the rain?’
‘No one at home. Everyone’s out. No one in any of the cottages, no transport. I couldn’t stay there alone, had to try to make it to the road and get a lift!’
‘Well, I’m not surprised. Really, leave a bunch of men in charge of a pregnant woman, and this is what happens.’
Had it not been raining so hard Caro would have raised her eyes to heaven.
‘We’d better put her on the back seat and drive like the clappers to the hospital,’ Robyn told Caro quietly.
Caro extricated her arm from round the stooped and groaning figure, and walked Robyn a little way away from the tree and Betty.
‘You can’t drive too much like the clappers, Robyn,’ Caro begged. ‘I mean, one large crater in the road, and we could be left holding the baby. Don’t worry,’ she added, before turning back to Betty, ‘if the worse comes to the worst I have some scissors in my handbag.’
‘That has made me feel so much better about the whole situation, really it has,’ Robyn said, rolling her eyes. She raised her voice. ‘Now come along, young Betty, let’s get you to the hospital.’
They laid Betty across the back seat of the car, Caro bundling up her military coat for Betty to rest her feet on, keeping her legs higher than her head, in the hope that the baby would be induced to stay where he or she was, while Caro also found herself praying, possibly harder than she had ever prayed, that the main event would not start until they got poor Betty to the hospital.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’
Each time Betty groaned, Robyn glanced at Caro, who glanced back at Betty.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Betty,’ Robyn finally called to her. ‘Have a good swear; we’re all girls here!’
‘Bloody bluebottles,’ finally came from the back seat.
Robyn sighed with relief, not at Betty’s more than feeble attempt at swearing, but because, bluebottles or no bluebottles, and after driving at what seemed like nought miles an hour, they had at long, long last reached the blasted hospital.
Afraid that they might damage the baby if they tried to carry Betty between them, and rather than wait for a stretcher, Caro and Robyn half carried, half dragged the luckless Betty through the cottage hospital doors, and slowly made their way to the sister’s office.
Sister, still as large, bonny-faced and starchly pretty as the last time they had seen her, many years ago, smiled at them, looking from one anxious face to the other.
‘Hello, Miss Harding, and you too, Miss Garland. Why, we haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you since Miss Garland pushed Miss Harding out of a tree, have we?’
‘I didn’t push her!’ Caro protested. ‘I fell on top of her, and then she fell, we both fell, at the same time.’
‘Well, well, you were a couple of tomboys, at any rate, and so what have we here?’ Sister went on. ‘A young lady in the last throes of producing a lovely new life, is it?’
She pressed a bell, and two young nurses hurried to the office door. Sister beckoned them in.
‘Wheelchair, and into a side ward with this young lady, please, Nurse Bennett and Nurse Collingwood.’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Don’t keep a book on what time this baby arrives, will you, Nurse Collingwood? It does distress some mothers so if you keep shouting out one more push and I’ll h
ave won the jackpot.’
‘But you won five shill—’
‘Thank you, Nurse Collingwood, that will be all.’
‘We are lucky here,’ the sister said, with some satisfaction. ‘We do have gas and air for our mothers for the end, and that is not always the case, at the moment, I’m afraid. Mind you, we have been very frugal. Country girls, taking plenty of exercise as they do, tend to deliver quite easily, which is how the maternity ward came to be nicknamed The Byre, but we don’t tell them that. Gracious, not another mother, and another?’ She raised her eyes to heaven. ‘There must be something in the air this afternoon.’ They all looked round as she stared past them into the car park beyond the little hospital. A charabanc had been parked, out of which were now streaming a host of pregnant women. ‘Oh, not another influx from Westington on Sea,’ Sister sighed. ‘They will not keep pregnant evacuees there, just won’t have anything to do with them. It’s the old people, you know. They hate the sight of fecundity, I’m afraid. Can’t take it, won’t take it. Dear, oh dear, we can’t have this. There must be forty of them. Some will have to go on to Brewham General, really they will.’ Sister started to move with surprising agility. ‘Stop the driver, stop the driver! He must take some on.’
As Betty was wheeled off, Caro and Robyn stared with some fascination as Sister placed herself firmly in front of the charabanc.
‘Now that is a battle of the giants all right,’ Robyn stated with some satisfaction. ‘Sister versus a charabanc. The charabanc has no chance at all, but how long until the driver discovers as much?’
‘I don’t like the sound of that cough,’ the medical officer said sharply.
Walter looked down, uncomfortably aware of the man’s fierce look. The cough was only sporadic, but Caro too had noticed it getting worse.
‘Where’ve you been lately, Mr Beresford?’ The way he said ‘Mister’ was despising, and Walter knew it. The MO obviously had little time for artists. ‘I have to ask you – have you been down the Underground, or down the East End? Where? That cough is not good.’
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 31