Bell Timson

by Marguerite Steen

  “Mummy darling.” Kay’s arm was round her neck. “Do you ever stop to remember how old we are, Jo and I, now? Jo’s thirty-four, and I’m going on for thirty-seven. We’re not a couple of children, torn from the schoolroom and hurled into the service of our country!”

  That’s just what you were, my darling, to all intents and purposes, when this war began, thought Bell as her hand closed tightly over Kay’s.

  “And you’ve always said Jo’s head was screwed on tighter than mine!

  “There’s nothing like a man for loosing a screw.”

  “Not Jo’s screws! And this man you’re talking about: I said I don’t remember him, and I don’t; but was there anything to remember? I got a sort of impression of some kind of a little clerk or something, in civilian life — and you can’t talk about the glamor of the Kings uniform to a girl who lives in it!”

  “You don’t think she’ll fall for him?” The tone betrayed her need of reassurance. Kay burst out laughing.

  “Really, Mummy! Considering the chances she has had — if Jo was going to ‘fall’ she would have done it before now; and that little man’s not the sort to make her alter her habits of mind.”

  “You’re a good girl, Katie,” sighed Bell after a pause. She swung round suddenly to face the girl on the arm of the chair. “There was a time I didn’t think I’d ever be able to depend on you —”

  “Well, can you now?”

  Bell’s eyes brimmed suddenly with tears; her hand gripped Kay’s arm, then she rose briskly.

  “It’s time we were getting your food.”

  Kay’s common sense, her coolness, her balance had succeeded in making Bell feel that she had made a fool of herself. Kay loved Jo as dearly as her mother did; Kay would be the first to worry if there was anything to worry about. Kay — so strangely and suddenly finding her equilibrium in a world that, apparently, had lost its own! What did Kay think about on nights when she drove her ambulance that the flames filled with their crimson dance — past buildings that dissolved into clouds of dust even as she was passing, along flat, familiar streets that had become rubble heaps, pitted with bomb craters? What did she think when shrapnel scattered itself on the roof of her cab, when blast spun the driving wheel out of her hand and gas from a blazing main shrieked up within feet of where she was waiting? Kay, who had never, before 1940, seen death or mutilation — how still was her face when they loaded her ambulance with fragments that had once been human, when she took her part next morning in cleaning away the dreadful traces of the night before? Once, unable to resist, Bell put a clumsy question.

  “Frightened, Mummy? I should say we are! Until we get properly going. Then there isn’t time to think of anything but getting there as fast as you can. But you should hear us swearing! I believe you’d have a fit if you heard my language.”

  “It seems a very long time,” said Bell one day of the late spring, “since Jo had a leave.”

  Her own days so full that she hardly marked the passage of time, it had come to her suddenly that all of four months had gone by without seeing Jo, except for the few hours afforded by her twenty-four-hour passes, most of which, since transport had become so difficult, she spent in the train. On these brief occasions Jo, now mounting her chevron and a service stripe, seemed more mature; her talk was less of “good times,” she allowed the work was hard and often tedious. The sense of novelty and adventure was replaced by the hard determination to carry on, and, although as healthy as ever and, if anything, a little stouter, she was evidently tired. She wanted very little but to sit, sleepily smiling and smoking, listening to the trivialities Bell and Susan collected for her: not “bomb stories.” By the summer of 1941 the subject of air raids as a conversational topic had passed into the category almost of solecism. Most people had accepted their harsh inevitability and turned for relief to wry little jests about food queues, about clothes rationing, about wartime restrictions on the civilian which were still novel enough to amuse rather than gall their victims. In the middle of such conversations Jo’s head would drop on her breast, she would fall asleep; and Bell, quietly moving a pillow to give her more ease, felt grateful for that honest sleep, result only of healthy fatigue. All London was tired in 1941: worn out by its disturbed nights, its day-and night-time tension, its unaccustomed difficulties of transport, and, most of all, perhaps, by the endless waste of time caused by damaged communications and the seeming impossibility of making plans. It had not yet got its second wind.

  Particularly women of Bells and Susan’s age were tired; carrying on her profession and filling in such free time as she had with work for the Red Cross, Bell no longer had the Rolls to pop into, Judd to drive her in comfort home. An appointment in Hampstead or Ealing meant a long struggle with trains and busses, for taxis were already beginning to disappear, at any rate from outlying parts of the town. She had practically given up out-of-town work, for she found herself no longer equal to the long standing on crowded platforms while the troop trains and trucks of war material went trundling through.

  Yes, it was a different war from the last one. The sparkle of hectic gaiety that informed London in the years between 1914 and 1918 was conspicuous by its absence. Those who had “kept the home fires burning” last time were fled to the North and West; were finding their outlet in the corruption of little villages in the deep countryside. Mayfair stood empty, battered and shuttered; she looked up at the facades of houses she had known, often to see nothing but a charred and broken shell. None of her soft, luxury-seeking patrons remained; if they had done so she would have had no time for them. Her face often gray with fatigue, her lips compressed by the force of her effort, Bell went about her mission and wondered, sometimes, what to do with the money she was making. She put all she dared into War Loan, but there were no longer safe ways of getting money out of the country, and some strange reluctance prevented her from investing in armaments. So she carried ridiculous sums about with her: inside her corsets, pinned to her underclothing, in wash-leather bags suspended round her waist under her skirt. She felt sometimes as if she stank of money, and realized its uselessness; for already there was nothing of value to her that money would buy, and there was going to be less. The anticipated security and comfort of her old age had departed from her, and each day she felt her resilience grow less and less. The ribaldries still came from her lips, but she forced them there; they no longer rose spontaneously from what had seemed the inexhaustible well of her optimism.

  It was because of a sudden wish for Jo, for her stolid companion ship and cheerful endurance, that she got out her diary and found how long it was since she had had her at home for more than a few short hours.

  Eventually a letter came.

  DARLING MUMMY,

  I’ve got a confession to make. I did have my leave, and I went down to Falmouth. I wasn’t going to tell you, because I thought you would be hurt, but when I got your letter I felt there was nothing to do but make a clean breast of it. Bob doesn’t want me to, because he thinks you will misunderstand, but I think I know you better than that!

  You see, Bob got his discharge from the neurological place at the same time as I got my leave, and they gave him five days before rejoining his battalion. He hadn’t got anywhere to go and nobody in particular to spend it with. So I suggested we take it together. He’s due for overseas anyhow, and when he gets his embarkation leave I may not be free, so it seemed rather rotten he shouldn’t have one good time. Knowing the sort of ideas you get in your noddle (!), I may tell you that I stopped at the Greenbank and Bob got a room in the town. We had a grand time, Mummy: sailing and bathing and dancing nearly every day.

  Now I suppose you are wondering if there’s anything between Bob and me. Well, it’s no good saying until after the war. I don’t know. We’ve never talked about it. Neither of us is young — he’s four years younger than me — and I suppose we don’t either of us feel like tying the other up until we can see a little way ahead. I don’t suppose Bob is exactly the sort of per
son you have imagined as a son-in-law. Well, I don’t know that I’ve imagined marrying anyone like Bob either. But wartime, and living in a crowd like this, gives one a different set of ideas. I don’t know that one’s standards alter fundamentally; they just don’t seem so important. One is readier to accept other people’s values and to allow they’re just as good, in their way, as one’s own.

  I do want you thoroughly to understand, Mummy, that there’s no question of an engagement. Bob does not even know what his circumstances will be after the war. As a matter of fact he hardly ever speaks of the future; I haven’t ever met anybody who seems so determined to live in the present. I think he feels the past doesn’t bear thinking about — I still don’t know a thing about his home in Coventry — and that it isn’t worth while considering the future, which he may never live to see. I do so understand this point of view, and all I want is for him to feel that while we’re together we’re having a good time, and if we can’t make it work after the war, at any rate we’ll have this to remember. Of course I haven’t said anything to him about having money of my own, because I don’t think it would on down very well. I don’t think he’s pot anything at present but his Army pay. So if all this just peters out, like so many wartime friendships do, don’t blame anybody, will you, as we are quite old enough to know what we are doing and behave sensibly about it.

  I don’t think I am what most people would call “in love,” but I feel Bob wants looking after, and ...

  “Oh, my God!”

  Kay, off duty for the day and patching the torn belt of an overall, looked up startled at her mother’s groan.

  “I knew it!” Bell spoke passionately.

  Kay came and took the letter from her hand. Having read it, she laid it down thoughtfully on the table.

  “Well, Mummy, I seem to have been wrong.”

  “Of course you were wrong! And I knew it at the time,” snapped Bell.

  “Well — I suppose, if Jo wants to marry him —”

  “Marry! They’re living together — of course!”

  Kay slowly shook her head.

  “No, Mummy. I don’t think so. In fact I’m sure Jo wanted to make it clear they aren’t, when she put in that bit about the Greenbank Hotel.”

  “Don’t be idiotic! A fellow doesn’t go away with a girl unless he means to sleep with her — and if he does I don’t think much of him,” Bell was goaded to reply. “What do you take them for? A couple of pansies?”

  “No, but, for one thing, I don’t think Jo would do it. She’s almost — prim, about that sort of thing.”

  “Human nature’s human nature, my girl,” was the grim retort. “And I’ve never marked any lack of humanity about Jo.”

  “Would you really mind it very much, Mummy,” said Kay quietly, “if either of us had lived with a man we weren’t married to?”

  “Of course I’d mind it! I haven’t brought you up that way, Kay, and you know it.”

  “Lots of people do, and it seems to work all right. Not that I think it would with Jo. Yes, with Jo it would be marriage or nothing. I shouldn’t worry, Mummy: except about whether Jo will be happy or not. It’s funny to think of Jo — married!”

  “Married! You saw him; I ask you, is that the sort of man to make a husband for Jo?”

  “I suppose we all have our own tastes. You thought I’d got pretty funny taste sometimes!”

  “And so you had. But at least you’d got enough common sense not to marry them. I don’t know what’s wrong with you two!” Bell leaned back in her chair, exasperated. “You’ve both had every advantage; neither of you is bad-looking; you, in particular, have met all sorts of people — and you’re an old maid at thirty-seven, and Jo waits until she’s thirty-five to make a fool of herself over a bit of chewed string in trousers that she thinks ‘wants looking after’!” “Well, Mummy, it’s what we ought to have expected from Jo! The only wonder is it didn’t happen before.”

  “I’d have seen it didn’t happen before! It wouldn’t have happened now if she had been at home with me to look after her,” said Bell bitterly.

  “It’s just — war,” Kay answered.

  “Damn the war!”

  “I shouldn’t upset yourself, Mummy dear, until we’ve seen Jo. I believe you’ll find it’s all right.”

  “Do you think she’d tell me if it wasn’t?”

  “No,” said Kay quietly. “But she might tell me.”

  But Jo, when she arrived home, was not at all averse to discussing the matter.

  “I know Bob didn’t show up very well the night he spent here.” She looked at Bell straightly. “He was tired, and I expect we made him shy. He’s very diffident with strangers. And you can’t blame him for being shot away after all he’d been through.”

  “I’m not talking about blame. I’m talking about you, at your age, thinking of marrying a little neurotic, undersized nobody —”

  The crimson crept darkly up Jo’s cheek; she bit her lip while Bell finished the sentence.

  “I thought your dog breeding would have taught you better than that! Whatever sort of children you think you’ll get from —”

  “Mummy! I’ve told you, we aren’t thinking about marrying.

  Whether you believe it or not, Bobs never even mentioned marriage to me.”

  “I thought as much!”

  “Or anything else either!” Jo defied her. “It’s simply a very good friendship, and I wish you wouldn’t spoil it by — by accusing us of things —”

  “Jo,” said Bell, “are you telling me the truth?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Well,” said Bell, and brought her hands down on the table. “All I can say is, I don’t understand young people nowadays.”

  Despite her hurt a laugh broke from Jo.

  “But I keep telling you, Mummy! We’re not young people. I’m thirty-five, which people used to consider middle-aged not so long ago. Bob’s thirty-one. If we haven’t got some sort of sense of responsibility now we never will!”

  “And what’s this Bob — oh, for goodness’ sake, what’s his other name? I won’t call him Bob!”

  “Jones,” said Jo calmly.

  Bell stared, then burst into ironic laughter.

  “Jo Jones! Oh, don’t be silly.”

  “I was christened Josephine,” answered Jo with dignity. “Not that it would matter. If you can’t get over thinking about us in terms of white satin and orange blossoms and ‘Voice that breath’d o’er Eden’ (you’d never get Bob into striped pants), it’s no use going on talking about it. I don’t really know why we are anyhow; it’s my business, not anyone else’s.”

  “What’s this Bob Jones do when he’s not in the Army?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” was the cool reply. “I don’t suppose you’ll understand it; but that’s the way we are friends. The Army kind of — blots out everything that’s gone before and makes everybody equal. I tell him about my past sometimes, because it was jolly, and I like talking about it; but I sort of gather that Bob’s wasn’t very happy. Generally we talk about what is going on around us; Bob is interested in scenery and — and in historical monuments. He quite likes animals —”

  “My — God!” Bell leaned back and looked at Jo as if she had come to the conclusion that the latter had taken leave of her senses.

  Actually she had come very near the point of believing that there was nothing in the thing after all; that Jo, who, after all, as she said, was thirty-five, was indulging in some exaggeration, some sentimental illusion such as was not uncommon in spinsters who had never had a love affair. It was better, she consoled herself, than striking up some red-hot friendship with a woman — the usual alternative.

  “Oh well,” she was obliged to content herself with saying. “I suppose you know your own business, and there’s nothing for me to do but let it alone.”

  “I’d be very glad if you would, Mummy.”

  A little more than a month later Jo wrote that Bob had had his embarkation
leave and gone to the Middle East.

  “She doesn’t say if she spent it with him or not!”

  “How could she?” Kay pointed out. “She hadn’t got any leave.” “I bet she wangled something.”

  “Oh, I expect they saw each other. But wangling isn’t so easy unless you have a proper excuse. They aren’t engaged.”

  “Thank God! Well, let’s hope that’s the end of that.”

  “Poor Jo,” said Kay quietly.

  Chapter III

  IN THE WINTER OF 1941, the third winter of the war, Kay had bronchitis and a long sick leave, part of which she spent at Cissie’s down at Sunningdale. She saw only glimpses of Cissie, who was away most of the time on long provincial tours, giving troupe concerts, doing an occasional turn on the B.B.C. Her trouper’s spirit carried her over the discomforts of wartime traveling, for she would never spare herself for the “boys” — the new generation of “boys” who, not having known Cissie in the glories of her prime, were first skeptical, then puzzled, and ended by surrendering completely to the time-honored technique she flung at them with the same splendid assurance with which she had flung it at their fathers and grand-lathers. Among revue stars, torch singers, and “pin up girls” Cissie more than held her place, but it was a tired old woman who, when her journeys allowed, dragged herself back to Sunningdale, as she expressed it, “to lick her wounds” and to gather fresh resources of the courage which, more than physical strength, now carried her through her public appearances.

  Propped up on her lace-covered pillows, her hair netted in silver, her hands emerging like tiny jeweled claws from the ruffled sleeves of her bed jacket, the wise old woman let Kay talk — a privilege for which the latter was grateful, for during the enforced idleness of her illness she had felt the crumbling of the defenses she had raised against the world of nightmare in which she had had her being during the years 1940-41. It was the sweetest relief to talk it all out with Cissie; to watch the wise, dark eyes and the almost imperceptible nod with which, from time to time, Cissie affirmed her understanding. It was like getting rid of a dose of poison; and one felt none of the sense of guilt, of “spreading fear and despondency” one had in talking to almost any other person; for Cissie’s moral strength was such that she flung it off, and one knew there was no horror within human conception that had power to bruise that lofty and courageous spirit.