The Way to London

by Alix Rickloff

  “That’s ghastly.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened had I been on the committee overseeing evacuations, and so I informed Mrs. Stanley in no uncertain terms. A shoddy lack of leadership, if you ask me. As I’ve always said, if you want something done right, you must do it yourself.”

  Lucy caught Pidge’s stern eye over her cup of Darjeeling. No robe and slippers this morning. His servant’s dignity was ironclad, from the top of his sleek pomaded hair to the tips of his shiny patent-leather loafers, and then he ruined it all with a sly wink of amusement. Lucy winked back.

  Last night’s misery of indecision remained, but sunshine, hot coffee, and clean clothes always made everything better. She had risen to find her bag retrieved from the hotel and her wardrobe washed, pressed, and put away. Oh, to possess an army of such buttling efficiency.

  Now kitted out in something that didn’t look like a ragpicker’s bargain, she could almost pretend last night never happened.

  What if you found you could count on someone else?

  Almost.

  “I hope the people at the Connaught weren’t too beastly, Pidge,” she apologized as he offered her another cup of coffee.

  “Not at all, Miss Stanhope.”

  “Really, Lucy. The Connaught?” Aunt Cynthia chided. “It’s always been Claridge’s for our family and always will be.”

  “Cooee! Anybody up and decent?” The shout erupted from the entry hall. “Grand-mère? Pidge?”

  Bill’s head came up like a hound catching a scent. “It’s Miss Irene. She’s found my mam.”

  He shot from his chair, tricks forgotten, stampeding into the foyer to meet her and drag her half-resisting into the dining room. She was dressed for work, her felt hat covering a businesslike bun, her gas mask hanging at her shoulder. She pulled up short at seeing the crowd circling her grandmother’s table. “I’d not realized you had company, Grand-mère. How do you do, Lady Boxley?”

  “I do much better after a good night’s sleep, Irene dear.” Aunt Cynthia still played with the cards at her plate.

  “Pidge, fetch Irene a plate,” Lady Turnbull instructed. “You’ll join us for breakfast, my dear? Have a proper meal for once instead of living off beans on toast and leftover sandwiches?”

  As Irene took a seat, she slid a curious sideways stare toward Lucy.

  “Before you ask,” Lucy headed her off, “it’s a very long and muddled story, but your grandmother has been a peach about everything.”

  Irene relaxed into a relieved smile. “The more muddled the better if Grand-mère has any say in the matter. She thrives on confusion.”

  Bill joggled from foot to foot. “You’re here about my mam, ain’t you, Miss Irene? You found her like you said you would. I knew you was a real corker.”

  Pidge placed a plate in front of her. She fiddled with her fork. Rearranged her napkin.

  A lump crowded out the eggs and sausage Lucy had eaten for breakfast.

  “I did ask around, Bill,” Irene hedged. “And I put in more than a few calls.”

  Bill nearly danced with eagerness. “Will I see her today? I can’t wait to tell her about Lucy and the spanner and the bombing and the constable what I bruised. And Rufus. And sleeping in a shed. And the sheep.”

  Irene continued playing with her food. “I’m afraid I haven’t heard back yet, Bill. Everyone is doing all they can, but London is a big place and these are busy people.”

  His dancing stopped. Aunt Cynthia looked up from her cards, her face grim.

  “But you promised.” His lip wobbled.

  “No, Bill,” Lucy interceded. “Miss Turnbull didn’t promise. I did. She’s done what she can. Now it’s up to me.”

  “But you’re leaving. You’re going to America with Mr. Oliver.”

  Aunt Cynthia’s brows drew low, her lips compressing to a tight white line.

  “The arrangements aren’t settled, Bill,” Lucy explained, casting a wary eye down the table. This wasn’t exactly how she’d meant to broach the subject of her decision. She braced herself for the storm she knew was coming.

  “Nor will they be,” Aunt Cynthia declared right on cue. “You are not going anywhere with some rackety American panderer to be filmed for anyone and his brother to see.”

  “You sound like a Victorian spinster.”

  “I sound like your aunt and your guardian while your mother is abroad.”

  “My mother is dead.”

  The room went silent. Pidge paused in the middle of pouring a cup of tea. Irene inspected her eggs. Bill drew and held a gasped breath. Only Lady Turnbull remained unfazed.

  “You can say it. You don’t have to pretend for my sake. Mother is dead.”

  Aunt Cynthia toyed with her rope of pearls, her fingers running up and down the strand in agitation. “We don’t know that for certain.”

  “I know that for certain.” Lucy shoved her chair back and stood in a rattle of dishes. Her heart thundered. Her flesh was cold and clammy. She couldn’t catch her breath as she escaped the closing walls of the dining room and all those damned pitying stares.

  She fled to the drawing room, where she stood, coiled and aching, her breath coming in snatching gasps. Staring at nothing. Seeing only the wave of a languid hand. The trailing end of a scarf. The car disappearing down the lane to be swallowed by the dusk. This time it would not be coming back.

  Loneliness bit deep into Lucy’s bones. Tears burned but did not fall.

  “You’ve spent your whole life trying to measure up to your mother. But be careful you don’t fall into the same trap as she did, Lucy.” She was so lost in her own thoughts, she hadn’t heard the click of Aunt Cynthia’s heels as she followed her, but now there she stood in her sensible tweed suit, the comfortable scent of her perfume mingling with the far fainter aromas of wind-salty air and musty old house in what Lucy could only think of as eau de Nanreath Hall. “Don’t turn your back on what you have in hopes of finding something better round the bend. Sometimes all you’ll find is just another bend.”

  “But what is there for me here?”

  “What is it you want?”

  Michael had asked her the same question. Lucy thought she’d known. It had been so clear. Her purpose unswerving. Now everything was muddled. Over and under. Back and forth. Stay or leave.

  “I want to go home.”

  “We can leave for Cornwall this morning.”

  “That’s not my home.”

  “Singapore is lost, Lucy. There is no going back.”

  “That wasn’t my home either. Not really.” She crushed her hands into her skirt, feeling the fabric wrinkle and bunch. Her knuckles were white, the veins blue. “It was just a place. Like everywhere I’ve lived. Just a stop along the way. Never a destination.”

  “Then where is it you want to go?”

  She thought of the little cottage by the millpond, the overgrown garden, the cowshed out the back. It made no sense, this dreaming. A ridiculous folly. A nonsensical lark of an impossibility. A cowshed, for heaven’s sake. Who dreams of a cowshed? Still it clung like a burr and could not be shaken. She imagined Parcheesi games and hot cocoa and knitted cardigans and—a happy family.

  “I thought I’d know it when I saw it, but I didn’t—and now it’s gone.”

  Lucy leaned her head against the glass of her bedroom window. In the washed-out glare of a pale morning sun, the park across the road revealed itself to be far less enchanting. The shrubs were a bit ragged and the weeds a bit encroaching. The most well-tended section was a corner beneath a spreading elm where someone had prepared the ground for a garden.

  She drew a deep breath. And then a second. Enough to forestall any humiliating tears and gather her scattered thoughts. Her mother might have been completely wrong about everything else, but she was right about the uselessness of weeping. Tears never solved a problem.

  And Lucy’s mounted by the hour. She withdrew the calling cards from her handbag, shuffling them between trembling fingers.

  Ho
me—she’d spoken the word aloud to Aunt Cynthia, but what did Lucy know of home? Aunt Cynthia had that great ancestral pile on the Cornish coast with roots that pushed deep into the past. Bill had the streets and alleys of Bethnal Green, where whole families lived in a few cluttered rooms and one could spend one’s whole life within a few congested city miles. Michael had a close-knit village where neighbors looked out for one another and life moved to the slow turn of the seasons.

  What did Lucy have?

  She turned from the window to pace the room, chewing a thumbnail in agitation.

  What did she want?

  Lady Turnbull, no matter how kind she’d been. Aunt Cynthia, no matter how forgiving she’d been. And Pidge . . . well . . . he was a positive dreamboat. Still, Lucy thought she might go bonkers if she spent one more minute quarantined inside the town house turning her life over with the same endless spin of those calling cards.

  She slammed out of the bedroom and clattered down the stairs into the drawing room, where Lady Turnbull and Aunt Cynthia sat over a pot of coffee.

  “. . . a telephone call to Lady Reading.”

  “Or a formal inquiry with the Ministry of Health.”

  “I’ve already sent a note round to the JWO. Lord Bournville sits on a committee there and is a close friend of my late husband’s.”

  “Like the candy bar?” Bill looked up from his deck of cards. Solitaire, she was relieved to see.

  “What’s that, child?”

  “Funny. That name reminds me of something.” He scratched his head. “Darned if I can remember what, though.” He shrugged and returned to his cards.

  “As I was saying,” Lady Turnbull resumed, “we should hear anytime. Good old Borny said he’d leave no stone unturned in the hunt.”

  “Are you talking about Bill’s mother?” Lucy interrupted.

  Aunt Cynthia added cream to her cup. “She needs to be found.”

  “And I said I would do it.”

  The women exchanged a swift glance. The tick of the clock seemed to meet and match Lucy’s heart. “We’re going out.”

  “We are?”

  “You are?” Both Lady Turnbull and Aunt Cynthia stiffened in their seats. Pidge paused in his dusting. His gaze followed her speculatively as she took up her handbag and Bill snatched an apple from the front hall table.

  Bypassing the tepid joys to be found in the park, they left behind the quiet leafy square for the busy thoroughfare of Kensington High Street, passing the great domed façade of Royal Albert Hall, windows boarded up for the duration and sandbags stacked along the curb, but still advertising Sunday concerts, still imposing. Across the way, a group of American GIs were getting their picture taken in front of the Albert Memorial, the prince consort staring down from his pigeon-crowded perch. “Where we going, Lucy?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. I needed to think, and I can’t do that with those three watching me as if I might pop off like an unexploded bomb.”

  “Your aunt is spiffing. Not anything like I thought she’d be.”

  “She surprised me too.”

  “She said I reminded her of her son, Hugh, when he was my age. Imagine me being like a real lord. The boys at the Lion—”

  “Bill?” she warned, scowling dangerously.

  “They won’t never know ’cause I don’t hang about with them no more.” He grinned.

  “No one can say I didn’t try,” she muttered.

  Into Hyde Park. Across the Serpentine, where couples wandered arm in arm and children threw bread to the ducks that clustered along the shore. No destination in mind. No route planned. Only the need to move, to run, to outpace her thoughts and escape the round and round.

  Move. Run. Escape.

  Was Aunt Cynthia right? Was she in danger of becoming like Amelia? Was that what ran in her blood? Cowardice?

  Good-bye was familiar.

  Good-bye was safe.

  It meant never having to try too hard, never having to risk, never having to change.

  Aunt Cynthia said her mother chased happiness. Mason Oliver said she chased love. Lucy chased belonging. And perhaps—just perhaps, mind you—that could only be found by standing still.

  They emerged from the park at Marble Arch. A bus poured smoke from a makeshift coal-fired engine. A fire truck clanged its way past. A knot of gentlemen, American by the cut of their suits and the twang in their voices, argued the state of the war as they strolled Park Lane toward Upper Grosvenor and the embassy.

  “What are we doing here?” Bill asked, tugging Lucy from her thoughts.

  The Dorchester stood across the way; a doorman rolled back and forth on the balls of his feet. Two officers strolled past. A woman emerged from a taxi in a fashionable pencil skirt and a jacket adorned with a handsome fox stole. A stylish hat framed perfectly arranged auburn hair.

  She promised.

  Lucy froze, the air crushed from her lungs. It couldn’t be . . .

  Then the woman turned to pay the driver, and it was no one Lucy recognized. A stranger’s face.

  Her breath returned with a small sob that scraped her throat raw.

  Her mother was truly gone, and with her, any desire for a glamorous life in Hollywood.

  “We should be getting back, Lucy.”

  “Yes,” she replied, only half-listening. “Yes, we will.”

  “Her ladyship might have heard from that bloke what’s her husband’s friend.”

  “You mean Lord Bournville?”

  “That’s it! That’s where I know that name from.”

  Lucy came back to the present with a metaphorical clap of thunder. “What name?”

  “Bournville. I knew it sounded like a name what I’d heard before. I just couldn’t bring my mind to it, but now I remember. That’s the name of the gent Mam worked for before the war.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Course I’m certain. Mr. Bournville—it’s the same name as the candy bar. That’s how I can remember it so well. Mam always said it was a shame the gent wasn’t sweet like the chocolate. ’Stead he was a miserly old tosser what was always coming along behind her to check she’d done her work properly.”

  “Do you think your mother would still be working there?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “Come on.” Lucy grabbed him by the hand.

  “Where are we going now?”

  “To find your mother.”

  “Really?”

  Sometimes doing what was best wasn’t doing what was right. And if you wanted it done right, you did it yourself. “I promised, didn’t I?”

  They arrived back at the house to find Lady Turnbull out delivering honey to Mr. and Mrs. Fleischer, compliments of Lower Stokenoor’s bees.

  Aunt Cynthia had taken the opportunity of her unanticipated trip to the city to make a formal complaint with the War Damage Commission over a graffitied fresco in Nanreath Hall’s blue saloon.

  Pidge was in the kitchen polishing the silver.

  No one to witness the teeny-weeniest of deceptions. “Canning Town, you said? Thank you very much for your assistance, Mr. Bournville,” Lucy said, mimicking Aunt Cynthia in severity of tone and regality of accent. “Lord Gainsborough’s solicitors will be most grateful. Mrs. Smedley has been difficult to locate.”

  Bill giggled.

  Lucy shushed him. “Yes, I understand there’s a war on.”

  There was a rap at the door. A ringing of the doorbell. Another knock, louder and more insistent. She heard Pidge enter the hall.

  “I’m sure Lord Gainsborough’s bequest won’t affect Mrs. Smedley’s continued employment with you, sir. Yes, I understand. A good dependable maid is hard to find.”

  There was a murmur of voices. Footsteps heading this way.

  “Got to run”—in her haste she stumbled over her drawled vowels and clipped consonants—“that is”—she recovered with twice the ice in her accent—“thank you again, Mr. Bournville. My place of birth? My age? Why, you sly dog. I’m flattered, b
ut really . . .” Lucy made to hang up the phone. “Yes.” She faltered. “Yes, of course.” By now, she sounded more picture palace than Buckingham Palace. “Cheerio and pip pip! See ya!” she shouted into the receiver as the drawing room door opened.

  “A married woman” were the last tinny words she heard before she slammed the receiver down.

  Bill gripped his stomach in a belly laugh as a fit of giggles overtook him. “Lord Gainsborough,” he guffawed in a series of gasped snorts. “Cheerio and pip pip. You’re a corker, Lucy.”

  “That’s one word for her.”

  Lucy’s heart stopped for a moment as Bill looked up from where he’d ended prostrate on the floor. “Michael!”

  “Good to see you in one piece, lad.” His eyes shifted to meet hers. “Both of you.”

  Bill leapt up. “We found my mam! Lucy did anyway. She rang up Mr. Bournville and pretended to be a secretary for Lord Gainsborough’s solicitors asking after Mrs. Smedley’s whereabouts as she’d been left a hundred pounds in the old duffer’s will.”

  Michael lifted a brow in question. Pidge managed to remain impervious, though his eye did stray to the inspiring landscape painting hanging over the fireplace.

  “I didn’t think he would be as forthcoming if I told him the truth,” Lucy explained sheepishly. “It was the first name that popped into my head.”

  “You always manage to get what you want, don’t you?” Michael said with one of those shrewd stares that always left her feeling off balance and underdressed.

  She flushed, tightness banding her chest. “Not everything I want.”

  His eyes flared, but it wasn’t with amusement. That was anger burning in those guileless blue depths. “If you weren’t a female, Lucy Stanhope, I’d punch you straight in the mouth for running off like that and scaring the shit out of me. What were you thinking? You could have been killed, you great harebrained nincompoop.”

  Her aunt had grown a heart and Michael had grown a temper. The world really had turned itself inside out.

  “You let me go.” Even as she said it, she wondered if she was talking about their fight or their kiss. And why it mattered so much in either case.