‘Not Roberto at this time of night? No, no, no, please not Roberto,’ Edwina murmured, groaning and holding a cushion over her face. ‘Please, please not Roberto, please!’
Mr Fleming’s expression was serious.
‘Not Roberto, no, Miss Edwina. No, this person is maintaining he is a certain Robert …’
‘Oh, so he’s taken to anglicising himself now, has he?’ Edwina groaned, throwing the cushion into another chair. ‘Tell him I am sick and weary, and cannot receive anyone.’
Mr Fleming leaned forward and gave her a card.
‘Captain Robert Plume is what it says on this card. He’s waiting outside.’
Mr Fleming’s face was an unusual picture of innocence as Edwina’s expression changed from vaguely tight to utter incredulity as she stared at the card. She struggled up from her prone position and, shoeless, her hair streaming down her back, she ran out into the hall.
‘Robert? Robert? Is it really you?’
Seconds later, as he closed the drawing-room door behind the two lovers, Mr Fleming smiled for a second time that night.
Everything was quite tidy in there. He liked that.
Walter stared at the watercolour he had done of the Mulberry harbour. It was an odd little painting because really, when you thought about it, painting floating concrete was a strange thing to do, but the truth was that the floating islands that he had painted before they started on their journey held a mystery, a menace, and he hoped he had managed to get the feeling that they were about something so important, it was almost unimaginable.
Now, despite terrible losses, they all knew that victory in Europe was imminent, that Hitler was defeated, that the Allied armies had advanced and crushed the mighty forces of Germany. And yet still there was no announcement.
It was as if the authorities, in their wondrous ability to get everything wrong, imagined that by cheering up the battered people of Britain who had fought on the home front, given their all, including their loved ones, to the war effort, and were now so exhausted that they were hardly able to switch on their wirelesses for the news; it was as if they were reluctant to admit that there was a victory to hand, because it would mean that their power might be lessened.
‘You know they were all for suppressing poor old Vera Lynn singing the “White Cliffs of Dover”, don’t you?’ one of Walter’s old friends told him, when he was visiting Walter in the sanatorium.
He nodded towards an oil painting.
‘Who’s she when she’s at home? Someone special? Very beautiful indeed, very beautiful.’
Walter smiled.
‘Yes, she is beautiful, isn’t she?’ he agreed. ‘And yes, she is special, although not to me. She was staying along the way for a few weeks, and she used to come to see me work, so I used her ruthlessly as a model.’
‘Beautiful copper-coloured hair, beautiful colour, and that white skin – what a stunner.’
‘Oh, yes, she is a beauty, all right, and quite a handful, but her heart lies in the hands of another.’
‘Shame.’
Walter shook his head. ‘No, no, she would be too much for either you or me to handle, old boy, but truly.’
His friend left him soon after, and Walter stared at the painting he had done of Edwina. It was good. Even he had to admit that. It captured her restless provocative spirit, as well as her beauty.
He looked at his watch. Any minute now his lucky charm would be arriving. He went to the mirror and stared at himself. They hadn’t seen each other for so long, she thinking he was on convoys, he too afraid to tell her that he was holed up in a sanatorium, not wanting sympathy, not wanting to burden her either, only wanting to get better. And now, it seemed, he was. The sea air, the weeks spent outdoors, painting, had caught the bastard disease in its infancy, and whacked the life out of it, thank God.
He cleared his throat. No cough, not even a trace of it. He started to walk up and down. Perhaps she had met someone else? Perhaps that was why she was late? She had been to the wall and back waiting for him, thinking that he was on convoys, and now found that she was in love with someone else. It would not be surprising. Caro, after all, was an original. Maybe not a beauty like Edwina O’Brien, or Katherine Garland, but quite definitely not like anyone else. He would dearly have liked a cigarette. For the first time for months he could have smoked. He looked out at the gardens that ran down to the beach. Failing her arrival over the next five minutes, he would go for a walk to try to calm himself. He had written to her about everything, but it seemed she had been sent up North to sort out some personnel problems, and had, after many months, only just come back to London. She had written to him to say she would be down the following week, this afternoon. But she wasn’t. She was very much not down, and he was very much waiting for her, and it was driving him mad.
He flung himself through the French windows of his large bedsitting room, and walked off down the lawn, just as Caro’s car was drawing up outside the sanatorium.
She stepped out of it, and then stood looking about her. The house was a pleasant Edwardian country house of the sort that prosperous families would use for the summer holidays, and then shut up for the rest of the year. She walked up the steps, to find a nurse wheeling a patient out of the double doors.
‘I’m looking for Walter Beresford, could you direct me to his room?’
The nurse indicated behind her. ‘Ground floor, number seven. Just follow the smell of paint and turpentine!’
They both laughed, and Caro’s pace quickened as she realised just how long it was since they had seen each other, just how long since they had kissed and held each other. Walter had said in his letter that he was better – but would he look the same?
She knocked on his door and called, but on not receiving an answer she pushed it gently open. No Walter, just paintings, lots of different paintings. She hurried past them, because in the distance she could see a familiar figure walking up the garden. She started to run towards it, as fast as you never run in a dream, although it might have been a dream, because coming towards her was Walter, not sick-looking or aged, but bronzed and well, and holding out his arms to her.
They kissed and kissed, and kissed some more, and then they walked up the lawn and into Walter’s room and it was only then that Caro saw the painting that Walter’s friend had so admired earlier.
Caro stared at it.
‘What is this?’ she asked tightly, turning back to him. ‘How did you do this, and when?’
Walter attempted to put his arm around her, but she stepped away from him, determined on the truth.
‘This is a painting I did of a young woman, one Edwina O’Brien, whom I happened to meet when the powers that be sent her down here on a sabbatical, to stay at Colonel Atkins’s cottage.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, oh really.’
Caro stared up at the painting, and as she did so her anger subsided. It was brilliant. The painter, quite evidently not in love with his subject, had captured the wild waywardness, the look of defiance in the eyes, the free spirit that was Edwina.
‘I seem to be doomed to be always seeing portraits of beautiful women by you,’ she complained, turning to Walter.
Walter took her in his arms.
‘I promise you that from now on I shall paint only you, and the sea,’ he told her.
Caro frowned. ‘That would be quite dull.’
‘Not to me.’
‘No, maybe not, but to me. How come I never knew that you and Edwina were—’
She stopped suddenly stepping back and away from him as she remembered that there was so much that neither of them knew, so much to catch up on. Most of all Walter didn’t know about Katherine.
‘I’m afraid we have had bad news of Katherine, and David,’ she confessed.
Walter’s expression immediately changed from happy and expansive to grave, and by the time Caro had finished telling him her news there were tears in his eyes, and in hers too.
‘We were
n’t to know, were we? We all keep saying “we weren’t to know”, although it doesn’t seem to do much good.’
‘No, of course we weren’t to know, but it doesn’t stop the feelings of guilt, of wishing to God we had known.’
Walter turned away, but Caro followed him, walking round so that they faced each other. In the distance there was the sound of the sea, and of the gulls, of the wind getting up, gradually seeming to invade the seashore, just as other feelings, feelings of uncertainty, and yes, shamingly, of jealousy, started to flood Caro’s mind.
‘Is it worse for you? Because you loved her?’ she asked, eventually. ‘Because you were in love with her?’
‘Good God, no. I wasn’t in love with Katherine as I am with you,’ Walter stated. ‘I fell in love with your sister, as all men fall in love with a beautiful woman, but I never knew her, I never even got to know her. Only ever painted the shell, really. And the ladybird, of course … Strange thing to have wanted painted on her.’
‘It was one of her code names that she had started to use, long before the war.’
‘She said it was one of her nicknames. I know she didn’t want Astley to see it.’
‘No, just because it was a code name. Typical of Katherine, to dare to ask you.’
Walter took Caro in his arms, and held her against him.
‘You’re the girl I love, my lucky charm. No one else. I know you – I never knew Katherine, only the person she was pretending to be. And if I had I would still not have loved her as I love you, believe me.’
They both turned towards the windows, and because sometimes that is the only thing to do, they went out for a long walk to try to make sense of things.
To begin with, the Astley and the Garland families were at a loss as to how to deal with their grief, and the inevitable guilt attached to their treatment of their young.
Finally, it was Aunt Cicely’s idea to bring the two families together and talk about a fitting memorial, although it was Caro who thought of the form it might take.
‘They always used to love to play together, ever since they were small,’ she told the assembled company, speaking hesitantly because all eyes were on her, and she was suddenly aware that she was the youngest. ‘Well, you know how it is, Katherine and David always had their favourite haunts, so I was thinking, how about instead of an actual memorial, we make a walk in their memory?’
The heads of the two families stared at her, their faces grave.
‘After all, our two family estates run so close to each other, we could make a beautiful walk, full of wild flowers on either side, and we could make quiet places with benches to sit upon where we could put quotations in both their memories, and there could be pieces of sculpture along the way – a nightingale, for instance, and a pair of swallows – which could be fashioned out of some of their favourite things. It could be beautiful, and different – like they were – beautiful, and different.’
And so it was decided that this was what they would do, and then both families knew that the feelings of guilt and sorrow would eventually be replaced by something more joyous. The idea came that the Garlands and the Astleys would make the walk together once a year in the memory of their brave young, who had lived and died for freedom.
Certainly, hardly had the meeting finished than Jag and Francis, back from the war without a scratch – ‘Well, isn’t that the twins all over?’ Mr Smith remarked to Betty – at once set about mowing and planting, felling and seeding, to make the necessary grass paths and flowered ways, while Anthony Garland and David Astley Senior commissioned Walter to make a sculpture of Katherine and David, walking hand in hand, as they had always used to do in the happy days before the war.
Once finished the sculpture which had the words ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ engraved on the bottom, was placed at the end of the woodland walk, in the hope that everyone would carry away with them the lasting impression of a young couple moving towards the fields beyond, larks above them singing, the lush grass of their homeland beneath their feet.
Epilogue
After a suitable delay, during which, inevitably, Edwina called off her wedding several times, she and Robert were married in Ireland. The occasion kept its promise to be riotous, if only because there was food in Ireland – ice cream and butter, and yards of beef and lamb, and chickens and … well, food.
Once the little group of friends had returned and duly recovered from the week-long celebrations, Walter and Caro too were married on a sunny summer day at Chevrons. But for them there was not quite such plenty, because of rationing, except in affection, and lasting good wishes.
Not long after that Robyn and Bill too were married. Robyn was given in marriage from Brookefield House, by her father, while Aunt Cicely, to everyone’s astonishment, rolled up her sleeves and made the wedding cake herself.
Trixie and Colonel Atkins married too, but very quietly, because, as Trixie said, ‘He’s a bit shy, you know.’
The colonel was fed up with London, so they settled happily in his cottage by the sea, which suited both of them admirably.
‘Well, I think that’s quite enough weddings for the moment, don’t you?’ Aunt Cicely remarked crisply to no one except the Cairn dogs, a few days after her niece had driven off in Bill’s Austin for a very prolonged honeymoon. ‘Any more festivities, and really this piece of borrowed veiling will have quite given out.’
She wrapped the old lace up in tissue paper and put it in an old and dusty trunk. She herself had never had any desire to be married, which was probably why she had kept her own mother’s veil so carefully. It was the only wedding veil she would ever have, and a reminder of her mother.
Having completed this task, she and the dogs went out of the house and stood on the steps waiting for Mr Smith, who, after a short pause, arrived driving, of all things, Robyn’s Bentley.
‘Well, there we are, Miss Harding, all ready for you!’
They both smiled as Mr Smith handed first the dogs up, placing them on the back seat, and then, carefully, reverentially, he handed Aunt Cicely into the driver’s seat.
‘Now the great thing about driving, Miss Harding, is that you need to know how to …’
Half an hour later Aunt Cicely, her face beaming with the kind of contentment that it is impossible to quite capture, steered the Bentley out of the drive and on to the open road.
‘Gracious heavens, Mr Smith, there’s only one thing one can say at a moment like this – and that is “Poop, poop!”’
She rammed her hat further down her head.
‘What an adventure! Just you and I and the open road. I’m sorry to tell you, but I have a mind to think that this is what life is all about!’
Mr Smith, one hand poised carefully over the handbrake, could only agree. And of one thing he was particularly certain, and that was when he got back to Chevrons, he would have a great story to tell Betty.
* * *
Back at Chevrons, only Betty ever went into the Long Room. Walter’s painting still being a sad reminder of the happy days before the war, the family still could not bear to go in. When Betty did go in, she was careful that it was when none of the family was around, and she would hold up her little son and go through the names of everyone there depicted.
‘That’s Mummy, and that’s Aunt Trixie, and that’s Uncle Raymond – and that’s Mr Anthony, and that’s Mr Jag and Mr Francis.’
She always left Miss Katherine until the last, always stopped in front of the beautiful dark-haired Katherine Garland, in her blue dress, and stared up at her in silent worship. For some reason, over the weeks and months it seemed to Betty that Miss Katherine’s beauty seemed to have grown. Not just her face, and her lovely dark hair, but the expression of haunting sadness in her eyes, and the fact that she was holding out her left hand with the tiny ladybird painted on it, where in happier times, she would have had a wedding ring, meant so much to someone who had once decoded her increasingly desperate messages from France.
‘Ladybird,’ Bet
ty would murmur for her little boy to repeat. ‘Ladybird.’
Eventually she did not have to repeat the word. The moment that he went into the room he would point up at it first because, in common with his mother, he appeared to think that it was the centrepiece of the painting. Finally, it seemed, the Ladybird had come home, and that perhaps, was her final message.
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 34