Something Dangerous

by Penny Vincenzi

  Now what would he do? What could he do? A blind barrister: very successful. A blind priest: hugely practical. He couldn’t even finish his degree. He’d never have a job, never be able to do anything. He’d just sit and think; and go for walks, led by the hand, and hear people telling him what a lovely day it was.

  And then there was Catriona.

  She’d come down as soon as she’d heard, sat by his bed, holding his hand, telling him she’d always love him, she’d look after him, they could still have a life together. It had helped so much that: knowing that there was some hope, somewhere, at least one small slice of future safe.

  He couldn’t think quite how it would work, but just hearing her talking about it made him feel better.

  He’d said, of course, that she mustn’t feel she had to stay with him, that he wasn’t going to be much of a husband for her, that she’d be looking after him for the rest of their lives. He felt he had to do that, paint an honest picture for her. And she’d simply squeezed his hand and said she didn’t care, he was the husband she wanted, and she wanted to look after him.

  ‘And to prove it, I’m going to tell Mummy and Daddy I want to announce our engagement, make it official.’

  ‘Oh darling.’ Tears filled his eyes; his useless eyes. He wondered if they showed: yes, of course they did. ‘Darling Catriona, I love you so much. So very much. But I do worry that I won’t be—’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said kissing his hand, ‘I’ll do the worrying for both of us. From now on. Now you tell your parents, and I’ll tell mine. All right?’

  His parents had been sweet; even his mother. She had liked Catriona, he could tell. She actually said she was charming.

  Catriona’s parents had been more difficult. Advised her to wait before announcing it, that there was no hurry after all, there couldn’t be a wedding for a long time, they were both so young and, as her father put it, Kit had to re-establish himself.

  She’d written to tell him that; Izzie had read the letter to him. He preferred that to his mother doing it. After all, she was only a little girl, she wouldn’t understand or feel awkward about it.

  I would have come to see you again, but I couldn’t get away, and it’s so impossible to get on trains and things. I’m so sorry, darling Kit. Anyway, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to get engaged still, and I was very upset at first at their attitude, but I can see that in a way they’re right, I mean we really don’t know how or when we’re going to manage it, and there are all sorts of rules about nurses not being married, so I might have to think about doing something else. But I will, darling, I will, and you’re not to worry and I do love you so much and I’m going to be Mrs Kit Lytton, whether you like it or not.

  He’d been too embarrassed to ask Izzie to write a proper letter, he’d just sent a short note saying he understood and he’d look forward to hearing from her again, and signed it just ‘love Kit’.

  But he’d still believed her, even though he was – upset.

  She did come to see him once more; in October. She’d been sweet, loving, assured him that it would be all right one day for them both. But there was no mention of the engagement.

  After that, her letters got shorter, less intense; and it was difficult for him to write back.

  Finally she did write: to say that although she still loved him very much and she always would, she just didn’t think, after all, that they should think about getting married for a very long time.

  It’s so true, what Mummy and Daddy say, there really is no way I could look after you and work, and if I don’t work, then how would we manage? I know your people are quite well off, but they won’t want to keep us both, and possibly our family, for ever. Darling Kit, I will never forget you, I will always love you, but I am just trying to do the best thing for us both. And I think that is for us to just be friends. Loving friends. We’re so far apart, and meetings are almost impossible, certainly while the war is on, that I just can’t see how even in the longer term it could work. I so hate doing this, but I think I have to be brave and tell you, so that we can both face the future honestly. Please forgive me.

  I’ll always love you,

  Catriona.

  Izzie read this out to him in a voice which faltered from time to time. When she had finished she said very quietly, ‘Would you like me to write an answer?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, thank you, Izzie. I’d like to be on my own now, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said and he felt her lips on his cheek, kissing him very tenderly, and tasted the salt of her tears; and then she was gone. And then he started to cry himself, quietly at first, then more loudly until it was a roar, a dreadful, wracked roar; and Izzie, standing outside the door, biting her lip helplessly, listening to him, thought how exactly like her father he sounded.

  Only this time there was no comfort she could offer; she knew that.

  ‘No more news from that wretched girl?’ Celia’s voice down the telephone to her mother was terse.

  ‘No. Izzie’s been watching the post for it like a little hawk. No sign.

  ‘Little beast. How can she do this to him, when he needs her so much? It’s – it’s inhuman.’

  ‘Celia, she’s very young. She probably just doesn’t know how to cope, what to say or do. And from what Izzie told me, I rather gather her parents have put a big spoke in things. Well, who could blame them? They’re both children, helpless children. There really can be no future for them.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Mama. Of course there can. Well, certainly for Kit. He has a future. I know he does. I believe it as much as I believe anything. It’s just a question of – of—’

  ‘Of what?’ Lady Beckenham’s voice was unusually gentle.

  ‘Of finding it. Finding the way.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So – is he terribly down?’

  ‘Terribly. We all do our best, but he’s so – angry. Of course. As he would be. It’s impossible to say anything that isn’t trite or maudlin. Or both.’

  ‘Oh God. Well – maybe he should be up here. It’s hardly fair on you. But I can’t cope with two invalids.’

  ‘No, no, he might as well be here. And he’s no trouble. He just sits there all day, staring – or rather not staring – into space. I’ve tried him with the radio, but he doesn’t seem interested even in that. The only person who can get through to him at all is Izzie, bless her. And she doesn’t get much change from him. I found her crying yesterday, she said she didn’t seem to be helping at all. I told her she was, of course, but—’

  ‘Poor Izzie.’ There was a silence; then, ‘Sebastian’s coming down this weekend again. On the train, he can’t get any petrol. Could someone meet him?’

  ‘I will. Of course. Tell him he won’t get much of a greeting from Kit, though; he just won’t make the slightest effort for anyone. Poor chap.’ She sighed. ‘I can remember Billy being like this, you know. With possibly just slightly less to be depressed about. It’s dreadful what war does to young men. All those years ahead of them. I sometimes think—’ There was a silence; then she said, ‘How are things up there?’

  ‘Awful. Bombs absolutely every night. We sleep down in the cellar, it’s more sensible. Terribly difficult getting Oliver down, Brunson and I carry him between us. I do wish he’d come down to you, but he won’t, says Lyttons needs him. He’s a frightful liability, can’t be left anywhere, in case there’s a raid.’

  ‘Which there is every night, you say.’

  ‘Yes. The other night I got caught on my way home when the sirens went, had to sleep in one of the underground stations. It was vile. The stench, I can’t tell you. No lavatories, of course. But it was quite amusing in its own way, there was someone singing and someone else telling jokes, and everyone was sitting in deckchairs, facing the line, rather as if they were on the beach.’

  ‘Did you have a deckchair?’

  ‘Of course not. But there were some camp beds and so on. I managed to get one of those.
They don’t like people using the underground as shelters apparently, but there’s nothing they can do to stop them. London looks so frightful, Mama, you’ve no idea. Every day more streets reduced to rubble, shops with the front blasted off, you suddenly see a bus upended, animals running about looking for their owners, it’s tragic. Mappin & Webbs is quite funny, they put a great grille over the windows before ushering everyone down to the shelter: not to protect the glass, but to stop looting.’

  ‘Very sensible.’

  ‘I suppose so. The manager told me. I got caught there the other day, spent a raid in their cellars, very fine indeed, shelves of treasures all carefully stored. The House of Commons has been hit, not too badly, and Buckingham Palace but you’ll know all that, and the East End is just rubble – oh it’s utterly dreadful. Dear old St Paul’s is still standing, somehow it just goes on and on surviving. As it’s so near us, I find that rather comforting.’

  ‘I hope you’re being sensible. Looking after yourself. I worry about you, you know.’

  It was so unlike her to express any maternal concern, Celia was quite startled.

  ‘Of course. One has to spend the night in the shelter, but the cellar at Cheyne Walk is pretty solid. We’ve got sandbags round the door, and there’s a sort of reinforced bit, a Morrison, you know, but as there’s not room for all of us in it, we don’t bother. We’re a bit short of sleep, that’s the worst thing.’

  ‘Of course. And how’s Venetia?’

  ‘Oh – all right. Getting bigger by the day, but insists on working still.

  So ridiculous all this, she’s absolutely forbidden me to speak to Boy about it, and I have to respect that, but – anyway, working is a godsend for her. Keeps her mind off – things.’

  ‘I don’t actually suppose it does,’ said Lady Beckenham.

  Celia had thought she knew grief well; now she could see it had hardly entered her life. And even now it entered it slowly, insidiously, and was the uglier for it, for when she had first heard about Kit, had been told his plane had come down, but that he was not dead, not even disfigured, a sweet relief had swept her.

  ‘He’s all right, he’s all right,’ she had said to Sebastian, over and over again, ‘he’s alive, he’s not burned, he’s all right.’

  And even as she said the words, as she saw Sebastian’s eyes on hers, doubtful, incredulous even, she heard their own stupidity and fell into the abyss.

  Kit was blind: her beautiful, brilliant, courageous Kit, blind, sightless, helpless, his apparently charmed life not over but stunted, maimed hopelessly almost before it had begun. All the things that had seemed his birthright, taken most carelessly for granted, a brilliant degree, a dazzling career, social accomplishment; admiration, popularity, fun, all snatched from him in one, dark, vengeful moment.

  She grieved, she wept, she raged; for the first time in her life nothing could alleviate her misery.

  ‘It’s so cruel, so desperately cruel,’ she said to Oliver, pacing their room, far into that first night, ‘how could that have happened to him, to Kit of all people?’

  He was hers, he was at the very heart of her life, she cared about him more than anyone or anything in the world: he was so especially loved, especially precious to her. He was still all those things, but changed, dreadfully and most sadly changed, moved from his place in the sun into a dark, chill solitude that no one seemed able to enter.

  She had gone straight away to visit him, had thought – absurdly – that she must look nice for him, he cared so much about such things and then, in the first of a hundred, a thousand moments, had realised there was no point. He was sitting in a chair by the window of his hospital room, staring in front of him: his head erect, his face set in the new heaviness they would all come to dread.

  She had kissed him gently, had fatally wept as she did so, and he had felt her tears, and brushed them impatiently away.

  He was wretched, she had expected that, she had sat with him all day, trying to break into it, into his misery, but had failed totally. He had been numbed, silenced by it, not only by his blindness but his own reaction to it; he was frightened by his own grief. He refused to talk, answered her questions in monosyllables, responded to a conversation that became increasingly banal with terse nods, indifferent shrugs. After two hours she was exhausted; expecting to be able to ease his misery with tenderness, with gentleness, with love, she felt useless, rejected and by the end of her visit, felt a despair of her own.

  It would ease, the withdrawal, she told herself, he was in shock, when he was home, when he was with people he knew and loved he would feel safe, more relaxed, would start to talk, but he did not, he sat in his own room as he had in the one at the hospital, remote, silent, discouraging visitors. Later the anger began, an all-encompassing sweep of rage that spared nothing and no one; all of them, Oliver, Sebastian, Barty, the twins, Celia herself, were subjected to it, to violent outbursts, railing against the cruelty and injustice of what had befallen him and his life.

  Celia talked to him, wept with him, sat silent while he shouted at her, allowed him to blame her, as he blamed everyone, not for what had happened but for being able to see.

  For three weeks he stayed there, in his room; she tried everything, she read aloud until her throat hurt, played music, talked endlessly. She met nothing but rejection; she had lost him it seemed, lost him and his love as he had lost his sight.

  It was totally exhausting; after a while she went back to work, but he would remain with her all day, a dark, painful presence. She telephoned him several times a day at first, she had had a phone installed in his room, but he discouraged her calls, saying they seemed pointless. ‘I’m perfectly all right here, and I’ve nothing to say after all.’

  She would arrive home at first, with books, newspapers, flowers – ‘I thought it would be nice for you to smell them’ – but he would shrug off her offers to read, and disliked the flowers.

  ‘I find the smell sickly, I’d really rather not have them, if you don’t mind.’

  She began to dread going up to him; entering his room was a dark, hopeless experience, comparable, she supposed, to his own life. She remained determinedly cheerful when she was with him, but alone or with Oliver she wept and raged helplessly.

  Finally, exhausted and in despair, she asked her mother if she would have him at Ashingham for a few weeks: ‘He always loved it there and I think the change might help.’

  ‘It might help you as well,’ said Lady Beckenham, ‘you sound absolutely exhausted. Of course he can come down here, at least it will spread the load a bit. Poor chap,’ she added, a tenderness in her voice that was very seldom heard.

  Kit submitted to the suggestion with a shrug of disinterest, and said it made no difference to him where he was, after all. His only expressed interest was Catriona, in those early days when he had still thought she loved him, that he had a future of sorts with her; her letters were the only things that could reach into his apathy.

  Nevertheless, there was one other person who he seemed at least willing to tolerate: and that person was Izzie. She took up the role of his companion with a willingness and joy that touched everyone. She and she alone was allowed to chat to him, to tell him things that had happened that day, without being rebuffed and asked to leave his room; she and she alone was actually encouraged to read to him. Indeed Cook had reported seeing him smile one morning as they sat, the two of them, on the terrace; that this deserved mention was testimony to the absolute despair in which he lived.

  But not even Izzie could ease him out of his new grief, that of losing his Catriona.

  Life had settled down again: to a surprising degree. Really a very surprising degree. Paris was still Paris. It might be overrun with Germans, German signs might be on all the street corners, the swastika might be flying on the much-loved landmarks: but at least it was intact, not being bombed like so many other great cities. Two weeks after they had arrived, the city was behaving remarkably normally. Restaurants, theatres, cinemas, schools
were all reopening. Especially restaurants. The Germans particularly liked French food, indeed Simone de Beauvoir herself had remarked nobody had ever seen people swallow such prodigious quantities.

  They were everywhere, of course, that was to be expected: but somehow no one had expected them to become part of the city. They were on the buses, at the theatre (in the best seats), in the restaurants (at the best tables), to be found photographing one another against famous French landmarks, chatting to pretty girls, sitting at the pavement cafés, drinking wine: and they were, moreover, polite and courteous. There was the curfew, of course, which meant that theatres and cinemas all started early, at about six; and there were other regulations, such as an obligation to carry a carte d’identité at all times. The clocks had been moved forward an hour to coincide with the time of the Greater Reich, there was food rationing, everyone had their carte d’alimentation in which there was a brisk black market trade, but so far nothing terrible had occurred.

  The only thing that had caused Luc a sense of serious anxiety had been the publication of the First Ordinance on 27 September 1940, stating the exact definition of a Jew: ‘all those who belong or used to belong to the Jewish religion or who have more than two grandparents that are Jewish’. And an announcement that a census of such Jews was to be taken, by 20 October.

  Those who owned businesses were required to put up a sign in their premises indicating Jewish ownership. But – no more. It was not so terrible. Everyone kept saying that: it was not so terrible.

  Far worse was the fact that he was unemployed. He managed to do a little freelance work for other houses, some editing, and write the occasional article for a periodical; but it didn’t amount to very much money. Suzette was very far from pleased; having regained her comparatively well-paid husband, she found herself required to keep him on the salary she earned at Balenciaga.