Something Dangerous

by Penny Vincenzi

  He sat looking at her for a moment in silence; then leaned forward, his hands folded, rather as if he were in prayer, she thought.

  ‘Barty,’ he said. ‘Please. Wait a little while. Do this for me. And for Celia. Please.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Three of our children are in grave danger. Kit is flying now, Giles is somewhere in France, Adele is in Paris, God knows what will become of her. There is nothing we can do about any of that.’ He sighed. ‘But – if you go as well, I fear for Celia.’

  ‘For Celia!’

  ‘Yes. She is afraid as I have never seen her. I would go so far indeed, as to say I’ve never seen her afraid at all. But this time, she is in danger of breaking. I hate to do this, Barty, but I’m going to. Ask you to stay here with us, at least for a while. She – we love you so much. Don’t give us further cause for fear.’

  ‘Wol I—’

  ‘Barty, I beg you.’ The voice was hollow with emotion. ‘I am literally begging you. Do it for us, Barty, please.’

  She turned away from him, looked out at the street. It was a slightly surreal scene, sandbags in every doorway, two ARP wardens walking along in tin hats, everyone else in normal clothes, but with the ubiquitous gas masks slung over their shoulders. The sun was shining, the skies were clear – of planes as well as clouds. It was a perfect English spring day. None of it quite added up.

  She turned and looked at Wol; his eyes were fixed on hers, pleading with her. It wasn’t fair; he had done this before, used this emotional blackmail many times, and she wasn’t going to give in this time. She had a task to perform, talents to offer, a love for her country and a desire to help defend it, far more important than the Lyttons and their demands.

  And then he reached out for his pen, and he couldn’t quite reach it, and nor could he get his wheelchair any closer to the desk, and he sat there, looking helplessly at it, biting his lip, refusing to ask any more of her, even so small a thing. And suddenly she knew she couldn’t do it, couldn’t hurt him any more: not now, not for a while. ‘All right Wol,’ she heard herself saying, to her own despair, moving forward, handing him the pen. ‘I will stay. For a little longer, anyway. You can tell Celia I won’t be going yet.’

  It was 18 May.

  ‘Luc, there is something I have to tell you. I – that is, I think I might be pregnant.’

  ‘Pregnant!’

  ‘Yes. I hope you will not be too cross with me. I—’

  ‘Have you seen the doctor?’ Panic gushed into his throat, he felt faint, he was going to be sick—

  ‘Not yet. I wanted to tell you. But – what do you think, Luc? Are you pleased?’

  ‘I don’t know what I feel, Suzette,’ he said, ‘I really don’t.’

  It was a beautiful spring. The dreadful cold was an ugly memory: the city was alive again, smiling in the sunshine. Adele, pushing the children down the Rue de Seine, felt suddenly fiercely happy. The chestnuts were out along the boulevards, the cafés were on the pavements again, pretty girls in flowered dresses sat sipping citron pressé or red wine, men pushed one another good-naturedly out of the way to sit with them.

  She crossed the Quai Malaquais, heaved the old pram up on to the new Pont des Beaux Arts and pushed it across the river; it shone, a blue and silver ribbon, in the sunshine. She stopped, pointed out a barge to the children; the bargee saw them, waved up at them.

  ‘He’s nice,’ said Noni, waving back, smiling. She spoke English to her mother, French to her father. Lucas still spoke very little of anything.

  ‘Everyone in Paris is nice,’ said Adele, foolish with optimism.

  Of course there was worrying news. The invasion of Holland and Belgium was not good, there was talk of the Germans making their way through the Ardennes – but that couldn’t be true, everyone said, they couldn’t possibly, the French line would hold.

  There were certain signs of change in the city; Cartier had removed a picture of King Leopold of the Belgians to mark French displeasure at the Belgian surrender and had inserted one of Queen Mary instead; large numbers of people were admittedly leaving Paris and moving south although the general view held by those who stayed was that there was no good reason for it, with no real place to go; there were a great many refugees arriving in the city every day from Belgium and Holland and then being moved on in their turn to the Loire district, and there were three meatless days a week in restaurants, three days when only wine could be served, nothing stronger, and three days without pastries. But food was still plentiful in the markets, the theatres were full, there was a new Cocteau comedy at the Bouffes which was a smash hit, a new production of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Comédie Française and chic audiences still went for champagne at the Ritz before curtain-up.

  A hugely glamorous English and American colony lived at the Ritz: Mrs Reginald Fellowes and her family; Mrs Corrigan, the millionaire socialite (so rich that she put real Cartier lighters and cigarette cases in her party tombolas); Lady Mendl; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were frequent visitors from their permanent residence in Antibes; Noël Coward attended the Molyneux Spring collection and Vogue itself had reported in its May issue that Paris was ‘an attractive, comfortable, normal city’.

  Adele clung to all this, along with most of Paris, and allowed herself to feel safe.

  There were two new gardens of flowers on the embankments, filled with tulips; wonderful brilliant colours. Adele lifted Noni out of the pram, let her run over and admire them. She was such a good child, she would never try and pick them or pull the petals off; it was touching, her goodness, especially in the tiny flat, as if she knew it was required of her, that she be as quiet and as untroublesome as possible.

  Luc had been – odd lately. Not quite himself. Distracted, worried – he said it was about the war – but gentler, better tempered. He still kept urging her to go home, but she wasn’t taking any notice. They were happier, doing better together; she wasn’t going to be panicked out of her marriage – well, that’s what it was really – by anyone. Certainly not Adolf Hitler.

  ‘Mother? Mother, it’s me. Kit.’

  ‘Kit? Oh, my darling, how are you what are you—’

  ‘Absolutely splendid, thanks. Enjoying myself tremendously.’

  ‘You really are? And not – not wounded, haven’t been shot at or anything?’

  ‘Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re giving them hell. Don’t worry about a thing. Least of all me. Oh – got to go. Bye, Mother. Love to Father.’

  The fact that 206 of 474 British planes had already been lost, seemed absolutely irrelevant.

  A telegram from the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud had been sent to Churchill: ‘The way to Paris is open. Send all the troops and planes you can.’

  It was 20 May.

  ‘These people are pathetic,’ said Celia scornfully. ‘Can you imagine our people behaving like this? Queen Wilhelmina, the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, the government of Belgium, all running away, going into exile. While our Queen won’t even send her own children away, says they must all stay with the King, and quite right too. They’re an example to us all, the royal family. We’re lucky to have them: them and Churchill of course.’

  Oliver looked at her. She read the look.

  ‘I know. I know, Oliver. You don’t have to say anything.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. Except that I see Tom Mosley has been imprisoned.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and her voice was low. ‘Yes. I know. Yesterday. It was this article in Action, that did it, I’ve got it here, he offered to lead people into peace by cooperation. Well, prison is where he should be. It’s appalling. Terrifying. And you know they say the Duke of Windsor was of the same mind. Which is worse, supposing he were still King.’

  ‘Well, we must all thank God that he is not. Tell me what does your friend Lord Arden think about it all now?’

  ‘Oh—’ she looked back intently at the magazine, ‘I don’t really know, Oliver. I haven’t spoken to him for months.’

&n
bsp; ‘I see,’ said Oliver.

  It was 23 May.

  ‘Do you – do you think Giles might be there?’ said Helena.

  She was working at Guys Hospital and had gone into Lyttons on her way home, to see if Celia or Oliver had any news, her fear for him overcoming any other emotion; they were in Celia’s office, staring at the paper, at photographs of men on the beach at Dunkirk – an aerial photograph, the men looking like so many flies. Defenceless flies. Being dive-bombed by German planes. The report was of the men cut off from the rear, of a long route march from Belgium, of abandoned vehicles, of the absolute unthinkable, the British Army in defeat.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Celia and she did another equally unthinkable thing, and gripped Helena’s hand. ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  It was 27 May.

  It was several months before Helena heard the full story of Giles’s experiences at Dunkirk; not from him, he gave her a rather modestly brief account, but from one of his men. In one of life’s more determined coincidences Private Collins had arrived at Guys with a head injury; he was in one of the wards she worked on with her Red Cross trolley, a nice young man, and as he was there rather a long time, she got to know him. Once he had recovered from the shock of the coincidence – ‘Blow me down, that is, well, fancy you being Private Lytton’s wife, blow me down, I can’t ruddy believe it’ – he gave her in close detail the story of the four dreadful days they had spent there.

  ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without your husband, Lits we used to call him, and that’s the truth. Bloody marvellous he was, pardon my French, Mrs Lytton. Him and Sergeant Collingham kept us all sane. You know Sergeant Collingham, do you Mrs Lytton?’

  ‘I do now, yes,’ said Helena.

  It was Tom Collingham, one of the farmboys at Ashingham whom Giles had played with as a child, and who had later taught him to shoot rabbits, who had done much to ease his way into the difficult world of being an ex-Etonian private in the Wiltshires at the beginning of the war.

  ‘Commanding officer, absolutely ruddy useless, young chap, one of the real toffs, still wet behind the ears, not much older than me. No end of airs and graces we had from him. OK when things was all right, used to come and give us pep talks, go on about king and country and all that baloney, but when it all began to go wrong – well, worse than blinking useless he was. I mean your husband, Mrs Lytton, obviously he’s a gentleman, what he was doing as a private, heaven only knows, but we didn’t get none of that from him. Things had been pretty bad for days, while we were still supposed to be on the attack, we got the sense of no one knowing what they were doing, just wandering about, we seemed to be. Lits was pretty good then, Mrs Lytton, always cheerful, always brave, couple of times I saw him really taking one of the German soldiers on, face to face. Anyway, then came the order to abandon our vehicles and damage our weapons and dump them in the canal. We were retreating and it was bloody awful I can tell you. Pardon my French again—’

  ‘Corporal, I don’t mind,’ said Helena gently.

  ‘Well, anyway, we were marching at night, not knowing where we were going, and morale was dreadful, you can imagine. A lot of the platoons seemed to have lost it altogether, no sense of order, but not ours. Sergeant Collingham was always there with us, bullying us if needs be, keeping us in line, talking to us, listening to us, making sure we ate what there was, telling us not to think about the tanks we could hear – we never knew if they was enemy or ours, you see. And your husband was one of the most cheerful, never down, used to organise little sing-songs, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘When we got to the beaches – well it was hell. Not too strong a word, hell. The fire, the smoke, the noise, the noise of the planes and the bombs, men being hit, screaming with pain, nowhere to hide, just nowhere except in the sand and a fat lot of good that did. And we was hungry and thirsty too, after a bit. And the CO, he just went to bloody pieces. Started drinking, he was drunk all the four days, wandering about, talking rubbish. And our captain wasn’t much better, we found ’im sitting in the sand dunes, hugging his teddy bear, crying. Well, Sergeant Collingham wasn’t having that.

  ‘“That’s not doing anyone any good, sir,” was all he said, but he really lost his temper, it was the only time I ever saw him do that. “Pull yourself together, sir,” he said, and he snatched the teddy bear from him and hurled it away. It went on for days, four days we was there, I can’t tell you what it was like; no food, precious little water, you heard awful stories of soldiers shooting one another for water; wouldn’t have happened in our platoon, I can tell you. Each night, we’d ask Lits to organise one of his sing-songs, and after it we’d say the Lord’s Prayer. That was him started that, he was just saying it to himself quite quietly one night and a couple of us joined in, and after that it got to be quite a habit.

  ‘Another time I saw him with one of the men, he was was real bad, poor chap, had the shakes and he sat down really gentle with him, put his arm round him and talked to him like he was his mother or something.’

  ‘His mother?’ said Helena. ‘Well, good heavens.’

  ‘Anyway, finally it was our turn. You had to line up on the beach then start wading out to the little boats. We was so tired, so hungry, you can’t think. And then there was a lot of fighting over those little boats, people trying to get too many in each one. Sergeant Collingham wasn’t having any of that of course: “You try that once more,” he said to one chap, who was pushing to the front, “and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

  ‘Your husband was standing right by him, waiting for his turn. It was awful standing there, you were being shot at and bombed all the time, and some of the men were so tired they couldn’t even climb in the boats, had to be heaved in, and that was happening out at sea as well, the men were too weak to climb up the ropes into the big boats, and their clothes were so heavy with the water, they just fell down again. Anyway, just as we was nearly all in, into our little boat, a Stuka comes and strafes the beach. Sergeant Collingham got hit in the shoulder with a bit of shrapnel and goes under the water; he’d have drowned if it hadn’t been for Lits. Still under fire, and weighed down with his rifle and pack, he dives under the water and drags Sergeant Collingham to the surface, heaves him into the boat in front of him, stands there calm and patient as anything while they settle him as best they can before getting in himself. I did hear he was recommended for the Military Medal for that; bloody shame he didn’t get it. There’s no justice in war, I can tell you that. But you should be real proud of him, Mrs Lytton, really proud.’

  ‘I am,’ said Helena, ‘really very proud.’

  Giles was still in England; the regiment had been posted to Salisbury to retrain. He had been made up to Corporal to his immense pride, and was involved in training the new troops; that meant more to him than his (unsuccessful) recommendation for the Military Medal.

  ‘Very sorry about that, Lytton,’ his commanding officer had said, ‘you should have got it. Typical of those bloody desk wallahs in London. Anyway, all the Dunkirk veterans think no end of you. Your day will come, I’m sure of it. Well done.’

  When he came home now on leave, he was different, Helena noticed; less diffident, calmer, more authoritative even. She often reflected that if he had got his commission, he would have found it hard to cope, certainly at first, and the vicious circle of failure and fear of failure would have gone on. Their marriage was much better too; she felt a new admiration and respect for him.

  How very ironic life was.

  ‘Venetia? Venetia, it’s me, Adele.’

  ‘Adele – oh, God, are you all right, what’s happening over there, why don’t you come home, please, please Dell, come home while you can—’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m sorry I haven’t phoned much lately, but it’s so difficult, even to book a call, and you have to wait hours and then there are terrible delays on the line. This is awfully crackly, can you hear me?’

  ‘Pretty well. Now will you come home
?’

  ‘No, I can’t. Honestly, I’m fine. Don’t believe any of the nonsense you hear. Paris is going on just the same, it’s perfectly peaceful, a few people are leaving, well quite a lot actually, but everyone says it’s madness, they don’t know where they’re going or why—’

  ‘But Adele, you’d know, you’d be coming home to England.’

  ‘Not very safe there from all accounts. Is Giles all right, do you know? And Kit?’

  ‘Both fine. Giles was at Dunkirk, but he was all right, Kit’s flying Spitfires and is winning the war single-handed.’

  ‘And Boy?’

  ‘Somewhere in Scotland. Adele please – what does Luc say, surely he wants you out of Paris—’

  ‘He – did seem a bit more keen. But the thing is, Venetia, we’re getting on so much better, everything’s fine, I just don’t want to leave him or take the children away. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but this is my home now and I honestly feel perfectly safe.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be for ever. Just till the war’s over. What’s the official story on the war, what are you advised to do?’

  ‘There isn’t an official story. There isn’t a story at all. That’s what makes us all feel so calm. The news bulletins are all the same, nothing to worry about, the Army’s holding its own. Hallo, hallo—’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here.’

  ‘It’s a bit crackly. Might get cut off. But I’m sure the Government would warn us if there was a real danger. They’re all still here, you know. I wish you could see Paris, it’s all so normal, nothing’s changed, well except for a few sandbags. Everyone’s just getting on with their lives. Hallo – hallo! It’s going. Give my love to everyone, don’t worry, I’ll be—’