The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘Honey, is it?’ Bugs sat peremptorily, letting Moira and Reuben MacCrae wiggle past. He patted the seat next to him. ‘You don’t look like a Honey, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘Say what you like.’

  ‘I mean you don’t act like one. Mind if I smoke?’ He took out a pipe.

  ‘How should Honeys act?’

  ‘Well.’ He waved his arms around as he lit his pipe. ‘Sweetly. I’d say you’re more like a cider. Or a milk, I’d say. Maybe a sherry.’ He didn’t explain what he meant, but he laughed until the first smoke made him cough.

  Lots of people told Honey she was not like a Honey. Carrot; she’d had that a lot. Tomato. You should be called Carrotina or Tomata. It was the colour of her hair, a very vivid ginger, mixed with auburn. Orange was the best description.

  ‘And Deschamps.’ He was getting a good puff going; the smoke smelled of vanilla. ‘I know the name Deschamps too. Your father’s called Henry.’

  ‘Stepfather.’

  ‘He’s a soap baron.’

  ‘Yes. Deschamps Soaps, of course.’

  ‘So your mother’s a singer and your father’s a soap baron. And Dickie Deschamps, the ballet dancer with the Vic-Wells, he’s Martha’s son, so that makes him . . . your brother.’

  It was always like this. People grasping details of her family and presenting them to her.

  On the stage, they had lit lanterns and a market street scene glowed to life. Three square-paned windows propped up against the backcloth burned golden. It looked warm and medieval, fragments of shadow-puppet living going on behind each window: the butcher’s, the blacksmith’s, the dairy. It reminded Honey that for over a year now she hadn’t seen lights in windows on market streets. The blackout was a strange thing, but you got used to it.

  ‘Of course, Honey’s not her real name. Her true name.’ Moira leaned across.

  ‘What is your true name?’ The man was smiling.

  Honey shot Moira a look. ‘Never mind.’

  The man was looking over the heads of the incomers, watching them all like counting off beads on an abacus. ‘So many gels,’ he said. ‘Do you know, Honey-that-is-not-your-true-name-Honey, one in three people at the Park’s now a woman? It’s amazing we’re managing to keep the secret from Jerry with all those gossiping tongues.’

  There was a single trumpet note from Katie Brewster dressed as Puss in Boots, and the show began.

  At the interval, there was a squash for the drinks table. One of the women from the beer hut – Dolly with the blue slacks – had been requisitioned to man it.

  ‘Gin and French or Gin and It?’

  ‘What’s the diff?’ Bugs asked.

  ‘French’s got an olive. It’s got a cherry. Both vermouth.’

  ‘Italian,’ Moira explained.

  ‘I say,’ said Bugs, ‘should we be drinking drinks with Italian in the title?’

  ‘Bit of a rum name,’ the woollen friend said.

  ‘It’s not rum, it’s gin.’ They both threw back their heads and guffawed. Dolly — who looked like a woman who ate her porridge every morning without fail, or sugar — pointed her eyes to the queue behind them and back. Honey looked over her shoulder to see Reuben and Moira. Moira kept inching closer to him in the queue but each time she did so he moved his shoulder very slightly away. Moira took out her cigarettes and looked about her, patting her hair. Reuben examined all the bottles on display on the table, very carefully.

  ‘So what’s it to be, Honey-not-Honey?’

  ‘Nothing, can’t stand gin,’ she murmured and moved away. Her mind had already begun swimming another route. Felix had been at the Park that afternoon. She had seen him in his overcoat, with his giant bag. And anyway why would she have thought him a liar? There had been nothing about the way he stood, nothing about his accent, his words — anything he had said or done — that would mark him as a liar. He was neat like the boys at the Park, awkward like the boys at the Park, young, soft-spoken. So why did she keep having to go over ground, to convince herself – like Joan Fontaine . . .

  ‘I said with hair like that I’d have put you down as a Scotch girl . . . is she listening?’ This last was addressed to Moira, and Honey realised she was staring at the beer mats on the drinks table.

  ‘Scotch as in place or as in drink?’ Reuben asked. They began squirming back along the row to their seats.

  ‘Scotch is only ever a drink,’ Honey said, sitting. Her coat lay folded on her lap. Through the lining she picked idly at the shape beneath the brown paper.

  ‘If you have such an arty family,’ said Bugs, ‘perhaps you’d best help me with a little puzzle I’m having at the moment. Do you like paintings?’

  Honey watched the stage transform before them, aided by men in Home Guard uniforms, into a battleship’s deck. They draped blue netting where the glowing street-scene windows had been. In between it had been a Victorian drawing room, complete with doors.

  ‘I don’t like painting myself, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m asking. There’s a chap who’s offered me a charcoal Dali. It’s a good deal but I’m damned if I know an original Dali from something drawn by the local drunk. Would you mind having a look? Perhaps you could . . . swing by my billet?’ Beyond him, the man in brown wool was making a show of not listening, filling his pipe, packing it tightly, reading the bottom of the box of matches.

  Honey looked back at Bugs. He was taking a sip of his drink. Before his lips touched the rim of the glass his tongue hung out a little, cupping the fluid as he poured it backwards.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’ She stood up. ‘I have to make a telephone call’

  ‘Now?’ Moira leaned across the row and pulled on the hem of her skirt.

  ‘I’ll be back before it starts.’ She picked her friend’s fingers off and squeezed out of the row, out of the room, until she was back in the hall.

  In the cooler air she made towards the telephone kiosk in the lobby, and dialled seven. ‘Trunks? Can I place a call to London?’ If she could catch Dickie before the second act there might be time to explain. Or at least to ask what he knew. ‘Sadler’s Wells. It’s for one of the Vic-Wells ballet members. Dickie—’

  The operator cut her off. ‘Sorry, my apologies. No trunk calls from this line.’ The woman hung up. A lifeless buzzing replaced the bustle of the background exchange. Honey waited for a second with the smooth receiver in her hand, weathering a sigh. Then she dumped it back on the hook and returned to her seat.

  There were rationing jokes. An ogre wore a squander-bug costume with a swastika armband. When Woolton Pie was mentioned he shook and cowered and wept, and the audience roared. Afterwards came invitations to the American base.

  ‘Can’t. I’m tired.’ Honey rubbed her eyes to back up the lie.

  ‘That’s the problem with the Hut 6 gels,’ said Bugs, leading the way outside into the cold blackout. ‘Brains like pie meat after a day’s work. The men give you too much to do.’

  Honey drew her coat around her and dodged her way through cheek kisses from Bugs and the woollen man. In the end it was the woollen man whose hand tried to ambush her buttocks as she said goodbye.

  As she waved to the Military Police on the gate she thought again about the glowing windows on the stage set and wondered what her mother and Henry Deschamps were doing right now. Were they in their London house, listening to the hornets dropping their incendiaries, counting to ten when the shadow came overhead and the noise stopped, in case finally the blow was about to strike? Or were they down on the coast? She could never keep track.

  ‘Honey, wait!’ Moira’s voice rang out in the dark. Footsteps came hammering from somewhere, the skidding of grit and a squeal. ‘What do you think of him?’ She took Honey’s arm. ‘Ooh, your coat feels funny. Do you need the lining fixed?’

  ‘Probably.’ Honey hurried to tighten her belt.

  ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Bugs. Verb, is it?’

  Moira lau
ghed. ‘Sorry about him. I don’t think Reuben knows him. I don’t know where they got him from.’

  ‘Never mind my mother, I’d like to have a word with his mother.’

  ‘But Reuben . . .’

  ‘I didn’t speak to him.’

  Moira’s silence said this was not the answer she wanted. ‘He likes Shakespeare. I think revue was a bit beneath him.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘He’s from North Carolina. He has a horse at home.’ Honey nodded but the gesture was lost in the dark. ‘Who’s looking after it?’

  But Moira had already begun to say, ‘The scruffball . . .?’

  ‘He’s not my sweetheart.’

  ‘Have you ever had a sweetheart?’

  Honey paused for a moment and thought briefly about the sailor she’d met in Kent last year when the train got diverted on the way back to Bletchley. They were chatting in the carriage one minute, the next spending the night above a restaurant, pretending to the landlady they were engaged, covering her ring finger craftily when she signed the guest book. It had felt extravagantly naughty although he was two years younger than her and his timid fumblings hadn’t really constituted sweetheartdom. Come to think of it, she didn’t even know if he was still alive. But there hadn’t been anyone else, ever. ‘How is there time for a sweetheart?’ She knew this was a silly question.

  ‘I sometimes wish this war would go on forever.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘But what else would we be doing? I’d be a bloody cleaner like my granny was. Or married.’

  ‘You have an Oxford degree.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Moira was silent for a second. ‘Did they approach you through the university?’

  ‘No. I studied languages in London.’

  ‘It was your mother, wasn’t it?’

  ‘My father. Stepfather. One of his friends in the club was asking around. I think the Park get their typists that way.’

  Moira made her funny ‘hmmm’ noise again. ‘Don’t worry about what Bugs said. About you just being a secretary.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with being a secretary.’ Winman liked to tell them from time to time that they were the country’s brightest minds, handpicked, each and every one. Sometimes he’d write it out in coloured pencil and pin it to the noticeboard.

  Moira began to hum a little tune as they walked. Honey had never asked her about her time at the Research Cottage. But sometimes she wondered what that breakthrough was. Who were the boys on that ship, who would one day go to their graves never knowing that they had a guardian angel with a chestnut set who liked to mend clothing and say ‘hmmm’?

  ‘I really mean it. Your coat looks odd, Honey. Even in the blackout I can see it’s lumpy on one side. It’s probably frayed a thread. Turn around.’

  ‘I’ve got stuff in my pockets.’ She moved a pace away. Then half a pace back.

  ‘Beauty is your duty,’ Moira mused. She sounded distant, sort of sincere. ‘I mean if you really love someone, it’ll go on beyond the war, won’t it? It’ll have to.’

  They stopped walking. They had reached the corner of Wilton Avenue. At least it felt like Wilton Avenue, only it was impossible to really know because the street signs had been removed. ‘See you tomorrow.’ She squeezed Honey’s arm. ‘Fix your coat, love.’

  ‘Think you’ll marry him?’

  The voice came quietly out of the dark. ‘I might have to.’

  And then Honey was alone, with the moon and her thoughts. That was when the day began to crystallise. Its twists and veins hardened.

  How many times she had idealised, demonised that man, through childhood? Her mother refused to talk about him; she’d had to learn everything from Dickie. Henry Deschamps – her stepfather, the soap baron – sometimes let slip remarks in the middle of fights: ‘There’s some men fine for a fancy but leave you when the wind changes’. That was how Honey from her earliest memories had the impression her father must have left her mother. She must have been seven or eight when Dickie changed her mind. Dickie would have been eleven or twelve.

  There had been no marriage, of the official, legal kind. Their mother and he were bohemians – there was nothing to keep them together but their own love. But she had used his name, Dickie said. Only on Honey’s birth certificate, which she had seen when she needed it for matriculation at university, it had said something different.

  Dickie said he had been a musician. He had come from St Petersburg, as it was back then. He had worked at the Russian Imperial court before the revolution, but he had been a rebel, he was one of the reds under his fine clothes. His family were artists and they had been itinerant too. They were the real bohemians, the real ones, Dickie said, though he never explained who the false ones were. Her father had conducted the orchestra for the Ballets Russes in 1910 at Paris in an opera house so important Dickie said it was haunted. He loved Stravinsky, and they were great friends. He was a renaissance man, and as well as composing music and conducting orchestras, he was a great painter, a collector of art. This came in handy after the revolution, Dickie said. After his escape back to Russia he became a custodian of all that was beautiful, all that was important, Dickie said, in the world. His mother — Honey’s and Dickie’s Russian grandmother — had been a cherished prima ballerina of a golden age. Her slippers hung in a museum, somewhere.

  It was around 1910 that their mother Martha had been peddled over the sea from London to Paris by her agents. She had, going by the photographs, been a striking cat-eyed woman even back then. ‘Born to play Carmen!’ the Evening Standard screamed of her in the twenties. Some of the older photographs had been tinted, but you didn’t need colour to see the drapes, the patterns, the textures all layered on her, all worn like skin, like she grew them branch-and-leaf style from her shoulders and hips, and the beads and her dark round eyes. In some photographs, she looked like a little wooden doll. She was always smiling the same smile. The earliest commercially available postcard of her was dated 1911. She was still calling herself by her maiden name back then.

  The stories varied depending on Dickie’s mood as to when exactly they had met. There was an empty houseboat on the Seine where they paid a watchman to turn the other way. There were cakes in Vienna. The unofficial wedding was a gypsy affair in Budapest, presided over by an ancient woman who was their great-great-aunt. Martha kept a beautiful embroidered skirt in her wardrobe that she would sometimes let Honey play in as a child, and Honey had decided without consulting Dickie that this must have been the skirt their mother wore at her wedding.

  Dickie had been four years old, he said, when they came for his father. Honey was in the womb. In some early accounts he was a Conscientious Objector. Other times Dickie had him as a spy. The one time her mother had spoken about it — tearfully, after a row, through the locked bathroom door when Honey was threatening to throw herself from the window into Bloomsbury – she said he had left in the middle of the night accompanied by two English men and she never saw him again.

  She wouldn’t say any more because by that point Honey had decided not to throw herself from the window. Dickie always said their father had fled back to Russia, that he had been given sanctuary with the Red Army. Leningrad was the final place he ended up. Occasionally he would show her a newspaper article from the stand in Soho that sold Russian papers. He said, there was his name, there it was, curator of the Detskoye Selo, the museum created for the public in 1918 after the revolution, keeper of the country’s most precious public art, pianist, conductor, bon vivant, ballet lover. Ivan Korichnev; custodian of the famous Amber Room.

  She walked with an uneasy gait, torchless on the cloudy night. Sometimes slatted blue headlights from passing vehicles made strange ripples of objects come in and out of focus: now a pile of brown wet leaves banked on the path; now a cat; now a red telephone box. It was easy to forget there was a war on, on a country lane, in the dark. She almost smacked into the corner of the Eight Bells but the sensation of cold stone and the malt smell from inside
stopped her in time.

  When she reached the squat little cottage that looked like a hay barn, just outside the churchyard, she thought she heard laughter. It was an odd place in daylight, a little like Yew Tree Cottage and its sisters, a relic from a time when Bletchley village was another thing entirely.

  ‘Mother of bumpkins. No wonder they picked here. It’s the last place you’d bother to bomb if you were a Jerry,’ Beatrix had said once, when they were out on a bicycle ride.

  Honey listened out for the laughter again, but the building was quiet. Smoke was pumping out of the chimneys on both sides. She walked on, drinking in the smell, enjoying it. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to imagine what the lane might have looked like lamplit, a few years ago. Then she heard the soft crack of a car moving slowly over pebbles, and if she hadn’t been frightened of being caught in a smash, she might not have opened them again quite so soon.

  But she did. Brightness brushed on her lids, her eyes snapped open, and the scene that greeted her through the cottage window was as strange as anything she had seen before or since the war began. The blackout curtain inside the pane was halfway through falling down. But even before the thump reverberated through the old thin glass, she saw what was inside.

  From the light in the room the whole front of the white building was lit up. The wash on the stone that had been blacked out before now turned creamy gold while the window itself blazed bright, leaking light round the edges, a stage curtain lifted and brought to life. Through it Honey saw a table full of people. There were at least ten of them gathered round a very grand old dark-panelled dining room. Candles stood in the centre of the spread. Dishes steamed; a ham, crystal glasses full of port or wine. Paintings lined the wall behind, crammed and hooked onto every inch of space, leaning against the mantelpiece, jumbled one on top of another in some places. The faint, rich colours blurred together and faces from captured moments in various centuries were frozen.

  At the table, though, there were no faces. Every single person seated round it had a bright white napkin draped over their head. It looked like a banquet of upright corpses, all motionless, all waiting for something to happen.