Bell Timson

by Marguerite Steen

  “Well, what about the younger set?”

  “You don’t expect me to go cradle snatching, do you?” She laughed a little. “Poor little devils; they’re bold and they’re beautiful, and they give you a pain with their idiotic courage — my God, I wouldn’t be in love with one of them for anything in the world, in times like these.”

  “M’m. I guess we’ll both do better, for a bit, to lay off the men,” said Jo with the naive solemnity which at moments transformed her back to a schoolgirl. Kay stifled a smile. “Anyway, you’re a bit off them yourself, lately, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” A cold, cautionary note had crept into Kay’s voice.

  “Well, you seem to have done most of your gadding lately with Lydia Roden.”

  A pocket of silence had fallen into the room. Kay, about to move, stood arrested in a strange, sculptured attitude, her hand outstretched toward some object she had forgotten. It was a mere flash of time, yet, to Jo, filled suddenly with fear of she knew not what; it seemed like eternity: eternity broken by the tinkle of china and the parlormaid’s entrance with the tray.

  “Oh ... is Mother in?”

  “The cars just gone round to the garage, miss.”

  Kay was at the door.

  “Tell her I’ll be down in a minute. I must wash my hands.”

  When Bell came into the room she found her daughter Jo kneeling in front of the fire. She stood for a moment looking at the broad, white-coated back, the knitted stockings and, regrettably, the hobnailed soles of the shoes Jo could never remember to change when she came into the house. It was less like a woman than like a thickset youth kneeling there, unconscious of inspection. Funny little lout! And yet, for all her lack of grace, so much more feminine, in many ways, than her sister. Yes indeed, it was Jo who was all woman; while Kay ... That cool, baffling quality in her elder daughter was something which Bell had long given up efforts to define.

  Upright as ever, Bell’s once plump body had lost much of its thickness; she had begun to complain that her dresses were dropping in front, now that the proud bosom was no longer there to lift them. She wore glasses permanently, not only for reading, and still grumbled at the way her lashes pushed them down the bridge of her short, fine nose. The strong, columnar throat had kept its noble form, but the cheeks were thinner and their lively color faded to an ashen rose. For all that it was a still comely woman who advanced with the sure tread of authority toward the hearthrug, from which the spaniel Beecham rushed barking to defend his owner’s privacy.

  “Down, you little beggar! Well, deary; what’s all the moping in the dark about?” With a capable hand Bell switched on a lamp standard, while Jo jumped clumsily to her feet. “That’s a nice, gloomy welcome.” A quick look at Jo’s face checked her. “Anything the matter?” asked Bell crisply; at any rate Jo, thank goodness, was as transparent as the day.

  “Pooh, no — rather not!” Jo recovered herself to bestow the usual smacking embrace on her mother. “At least ...” She laughed a little shamefacedly. “Kays been putting the wind up me about the war — that’s all.”

  “Oh, has slier What about it?” Bell demanded on the slightly aggressive note with which she was in the habit of receiving any references to national events.

  “She says I ought to be looking out for a job in one of the services.

  Bell settled herself before the tea tray before she replied.

  “Well, so you ought,” was her unexpected response. “I’ve been meaning for the last few days to say something to you about it.”

  Jo’s jaw fell; it was the last reaction she had expected from her mother; it was the removal of the foundations which Kay had already disturbed.

  “But, Mummy — the dogs!”

  “Where’s Kay?” Bell sugared her own cup and Jo’s.

  “Upstairs, washing her hands ... But, Mummy, is it true — that we may have to give up Brockett?”

  Bell’s lips tightened; she altered the position of several cups and plates before replying.

  “I’ve been waiting to tell you. I’ve taken a flat in Pont Street, and I’m letting Brockett furnished from the first of April.”

  “It’s not an April fool, is it?” breathed Jo when she could speak. Bell laughed shortly.

  “Forty pounds a week isn’t an April fool, my girl!”

  Jo let out an involuntary whistle.

  “Who on earth’s the sucker, Mummy?”

  “Cowards, of course. They’re pouring out of town already — the phony alert last September did that for us! They’re all convinced London’s going to be bombed to blue blazes.”

  “What rot!”

  “Maybe so, maybe not. I expect they’ll go for the docks; but nobody seems to think they’ll do much on the West End ... Well, now you see what you’ve got ahead of you. I’m sorry about the kennels, Jo.” She laid her firm hand over Jo’s brown fist, resting on the arm of the chair. “I believe I’m just as upset about it as you. However — that’s war.”

  “Damn the Germans.” Tears glistened in Jo’s eyes; she jerked her head away.

  “Yes; damn them to hell,” echoed Bell softly. “Let ’em call themselves Nazis — they’re plain Germans, the lot of them. Well, what do you want to do, Jo?”

  “I don’t know — I haven’t begun to think. I suppose I could be a rider of some sort — they’ll want motor bikes, won’t they, for dispatch riding?”

  “Of course you would go in for something you can break your neck at,” said Bell resignedly; but the protest was more mechanical than sincere. Bless her heart, Jo could look after herself.

  “What about Kay?”

  “Oh, I’ve got her fixed up,” Bell was saying as Kay came into the room. Kay came smiling toward the table and held out her hand for her cup.

  “Who’ve you been fixing up now, Mummy?”

  “You.”

  Their eyes met. There was a short silence.

  “Oh?” said Kay.

  “I’ve just been telling Jo: like other people, we’ve got to make changes. I’m moving up to town, and, from the things one hears, I think you two had better not wait for conscription.”

  “Just what you were saying, Kay,” put in Jo. “But, Mummy, what about your clinic?”

  “Oh, that’ll run itself now.” She spoke with the superb confidence of the born organizer. “I bet they’ll have all they can handle, with prenatal work; there’s nothing like a war for making people breed. That’ll suit old Mother Hammerton!” Bell snorted. “Silly old cow! If that woman had had to bear twelve children against her will in eight years, instead of being the Countess of Hammer-

  “Do you mind telling me what you’ve been settling on my account, Mother?” came in icy tones from Kay. Bell turned.

  “Yes, I will. We’ve got Avenue House moved down to Buckinghamshire now, and the War Office is taking over our building as a military hospital —”

  “Then you can’t run it for your civvy casualties! Mummy, you’ll be out of a job!”

  “I won’t be looking for jobs in wartime,” said Bell proudly. “‘They’ll be looking for me.”

  “I suppose Alice is going down to Buckingham?”

  “She’ll carry on as well as she can, but there’s going to be an awful staff shortage. Remmy will have to be in town most of the time — he’s on an advisory panel or something — and I expect we’ll all be at sixes or sevens for a while, until we get things straightened out.” To Bell’s daughters it was amply evident that she was looking forward to the straightening process. Jo lowered an eyelid at Kay, which the latter ignored.

  “Well, Mother?”

  “Oh well — I’ve spoken to Alice, and she says she’ll be very glad to have you.”

  “To have me?”

  “In Buckingham of course.” Bell spoke sharply, alert to that note in Kay’s voice. “Now, Katie, don’t start arguing; there was a time when you never let me alone about taking up nursing.”

  “But it’s ludicrous!” Kay’s thin cheek
s were stained with a resentful red. “I’ve never had anything to do with a sick person in my life!

  “That’s what hundreds of women said at the beginning of the last war. They didn’t make a bad job of it all the same!” retorted Bell, and bit her lip: remembering that she, a trained nurse, had not taken her share in the last war. It was this deviation of her thoughts that accounted for the mistake she made in her next sentence. “You’ll soon get in the way of it, deary; and I shall be glad to think of you in a nice, safe place, well out of the way —”

  “But I don’t want to be in a nice, safe place, Mother!”

  Bell sat very still.

  “For God’s sake!” cried Kay. “If I’ve got to take part in this bloody war let me be in it and of it — not some sort of pampered looker-on: the sort of thing I’ve been all my life!”

  Bell moistened her lips before saying very quietly, “What do you want to do?”

  “Anything — anything real! Drive an ambulance, or something —”

  “I suppose you got that notion from your friend Lydia Roden?”

  “Why should you suppose anything of the sort?”

  “Oh, I happened to meet her father in town, and he said Lydia had joined the Ambulance. So, considering that you two have been going about for the last six months like a pair of Siamese twins, I guessed what it would be. Don t be a fool, Katie. They’d never accept you. A delicate girl like you!”

  “Mother, how can I be delicate, when you think of the things I’ve done in the last ten years? The hours I’ve gone riding, the golf I’ve played: Wimbledon the last three summers, and then the winter sports? Oh, Mummy darling, there can’t be one standard of health for peace and another for war!”

  Bell sat petrified, her heart, which had lately been making her a little uneasy, pounding against her breastbone. She knew it was true; she knew she had no reasonable or honorable factor to dispose against the forces which were claiming her beloved Kay. The color drained itself from her lips, and she felt very faint.

  This time — she knew it — there was no argument. At the bidding of a maniac in Berlin all the warmth, security, material safety, and comfort she had, over torturous years, built up for her girls — especially for Kay — were blasted into a pinch of dust. There was nowhere — no one to whom she could turn for support; no conceivable trickery by which she could cheat her children into safety; no machinery she could set in action to procure for them privileges denied to the rest of the nation’s women. Accustomed as she had grown to commanding favors, her brain refused for a while to take in the fact of her helplessness. Among all the influential people she knew, people indebted to her in ways no money could settle, people who had told her she had only to go to them if she were ever in trouble, there must be someone, someone, who would find a way of sparing her this agony!

  And Kay — Kay herself: was there no way of making her understand — of making her accept what, after all, was a perfectly decent and honest solution of her mother’s problem? There might be lack of adventure, but there was no shame in the work offered to her; and surely, at thirty-five, a girl — a woman — might be expected to look at it in a levelheaded fashion — not in the romantic, excitable way of one in her twenties athirst for drama!

  “Katie ...”

  Kay stood before her, looking down on her mother with a curious calm tenderness, as though knowledge of her own power had drained all bitterness from her heart.

  Chapter II

  DURING THE AUTUMN OF 1940 Bell Timson went through her gethsemane. Beneath every bomb that descended, through the crash of every falling block of masonry, she saw and heard Kay; visualized the frail body buried under piles of rubble or consumed in one of the pyres that flamed in the West End. Characteristically, she confided in no one, going through her daily and nightly torture in a kind of magnificence of loneliness: her back straighter than ever, the ribald quip as quick as ever to her tongue. But, to the few who knew her well, her looks betrayed her — terribly. Bell was now sixty-two and her face had become a mask; above the flash of her smile, that pushed the fine skin into wrinkles on either side of her mouth, her eyes were those of one who burns in hell. During the raids she was not known to bat an eyelash, her hand was as steady as a rock, she willed courage into whatever company she was in. But between the Alert and the All Clear she would consume, with a petrifying steadiness, the greater part of a bottle of whisky. It had not the least effect on her, mentally or physically; she drank it mechanically, unconscious of the times she filled her glass, her palate registering nothing but the sensation of a liquid.

  She seldom went down to the air-raid shelter beneath the block of flats; apart from the slight feeling of claustrophobia it gave her, she felt that she lost touch with Kay immediately she passed underground. Up on her third floor, with the throb of enemy planes, the rattle of anti-aircraft guns, the scream and thud of bombs and sharp crack of incendiaries, she was, in some sense, with Kay, sharing her experiences. She had at least one consolation: Kay, when not on duty, lived and slept at home. She had the satisfaction, sometimes, of seeing Kay off to her post, slight and straight in her dark uniform; they would exchange a laconic kiss on the threshold — neither of them making reference to that which had been or was to come.

  On those nights of duty Kay’s face was strange to her mother; it wore a white look, a look almost, Bell thought, puzzled by it, of rapture: a dedicated look. Was Kay afraid? Bell never knew. Honor kept her from inquiring, and honor kept Kay silent — the honor of the initiate, guarding the sacred mysteries of her cult. To Bell’s credit, from the moment when she accepted the inevitability of Kay’s task — how she had prayed that Kay might fail to pass her medical, might fail in her tests! — no word of protest or personal anxiety had crossed her lips. She allowed no comment to pass her lips when a weary figure dragged itself in from duty, face blackened with smoke and coat soaked from a fireman’s hose: once, even, with a bloody bandage round its head.

  “Caught something deary?”

  “Only a chip of ack-ack, Mummy.”

  No one knew what her self-denial cost Bell: how she fought the temptation to “fuss,” to ask questions, to demonstrate her relief when another period of mental torment was over. Instinct told her that coolness was the best contribution she could make to the girl’s courage, the surest way of expelling recent horror from her mind. To come home and find everything “just ordinary” — this was the antidote to the hysteria which, once or twice, Bell suspected lurking in the background. And never, never had she felt so close to Kay, so much part of her inner self, as she did through her very silence. Where words had often failed, silence, she discovered, was really the key to that mysterious, hidden Kay who had evaded her for so long. A look, a smile, a careless gesture, some jesting folly thrown casually across the table — and a unison, at which Bell humbly marveled, seemed to be established. She was too scared, too wary of the fragile thing, to threaten it with familiarities; but she felt sometimes that her anguish of relief and anguish of anxiety, one following on the other, would be too much for her, that she could not last long against the double strain.

  One morning Kay brought Lydia Roden home with her. It had been what they both described as an “easy” night: only two calls on their post, and neither of them serious. Bell, in and out of the room — she could never, on these mornings when Kay came off duty, depute the service to Susan — watched the pair of them as they sat hunched in their chairs, the marks of the night still on them, exchanging brevities in an intimacy from which she knew herself excluded. She had never liked Lydia, never approved Kay’s friendship with her. Some ten years older than Kay, Lydia had, Bell knew, gained the influence over her which is easily established by a certain type on a younger, more yielding nature: Lydia, who prided herself on being taken, on occasion, for a man, who aped masculine tricks, such as striking her matches with her thumbnail, who affected a man’s haircut, and whose sallow, hard-bitten face was that of a vicious youth. Bell had done all she could, by ridic
ule, to kill this friendship and for a time believed she had succeeded, for Lydia came no more to the house, well aware of the antagonism with which she was received.

  But the time for such antagonisms was gone. Bell accepted it as she had learned to accept many things. If she wondered still what so feminine a creature as Kay could have in common with her companion, she set the thought aside. What good could come of wandering down those dark sidetracks of conjecture toward which, inevitably, the mind was bound to turn? It was Katie’s life; and she — Bell — must be content with her place on the periphery.

  Often she had to crush back the unworthy impulse to question them about their experiences. Like many people who have followed the nursing profession, she had, if not precisely a taste for horrors, a lively interest in them. “My word, Tim, your girl must have had some tales to tell you after last night!” She became used to that approach and found in time a strange, unexpected dignity in parrying it. “Oh, Kathleen doesn’t talk about it. When she comes home she wants to get away from the horrors.” But she sometimes wondered whether the things Kay went through were as bad as those with which her (Bell’s) imagination, aided by the sights which had become a commonplace in the streets of the West End, provided her. She wondered if the time would come when Kay would have to talk, to void herself of those scenes of nightmare which must surely be piling up behind that quiet, white brow.

  Jo came on leave, immense in her ATS uniform; to her deep chagrin, she had failed to qualify as a dispatch rider and had flopped into the ATS as casually as she went into anything which happened to engage her attention. She brought with her a young, pale, scared-looking soldier, to explain whom she drew her mother aside.