by Rachel Hore
Beatrice stared at Oenone in disbelief and then horror. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘That can’t be true!’
‘It is true.’
‘I don’t believe you. It’s not possible to do that, is it? To take a child from his mother?’
Oenone was silent, but Beatrice read the truth in her face. In war all sorts of things happened in response to extraordinary situations. Michael had made this particular one possible. There was a whooshing noise in her ears and her legs buckled under her. When she came round she was lying with her head in Angelina’s lap and there was a smell of burning.
‘Tommy,’ she said, in a distant voice.
Angie said, ‘He does feel a little hot, but Nanny says he’ll be fine.’
Beatrice sat up. ‘You haven’t really done that, have you, Angie? Have you?’
‘Done what? Oh, Mummy, you haven’t told her?’
Oenone stood up to rescue her cigarette, tapped the ash into the fireplace and took a long drag. ‘I thought it sensible,’ she said finally. ‘It makes things plain.’
‘Show me,’ Beatrice said wildly. ‘Show me the evidence.’
‘We don’t have the document here,’ Angie said. ‘It’s with Daddy’s lawyers. Oh, Bea, Tommy will be all right. We love him to bits. And he’ll see lots of you, I promise. We’re so pleased that you’re safe. And Rafe as well. You’ve seen Rafe, of course.’
‘Yes.’ Rafe must have seen how things were with Tommy and Angelina.
‘He didn’t know about . . . what you’ve done?’ she burst out.
‘No,’ Angie said. She reached out and tried to hug Beatrice, but Beatrice pushed her away and stood up.
‘I have to go,’ she said, ‘but I’ll be back tomorrow to see Tommy, and I’ll get to know him again, and no matter how many days and weeks it takes, I’ll win him back.’
But when she left she carried with her the memory of Angelina’s face. It was a mask of serene triumph.
She stayed with her father for several days and felt a stranger to him.
‘Beatrice,’ he’d said, in mild surprise, when he opened the door. He leaned on a stick, and it was something of an effort for him to reach forward and give her a dry kiss. His hair was completely grey now, and thin, but he was neatly dressed and, she saw, looking round, the house was as clean and tidy as ever. Part of her kept expecting to see her mother come down the stairs, to hear her light, foreign voice, and the silence mocked her.
Her father asked practically nothing about what had happened to Beatrice. He was mourning her mother, she could see that, but he was wrapping himself up in routine. Cook still came, cleaned, cooked a hot lunch, left him a cold supper. In the mornings he wrote. Someone had suggested to him before her mother died that he write a children’s book, and he told her, to her amazement, that it had recently been accepted by a publisher, and they wanted another. A children’s book! What did her father know about children? She supposed he’d been one himself once. In the afternoons he played bridge or took a little exercise, though not with a dog. Dear old Jinx had died of old age shortly before Delphine’s accident.
That first evening, she walked about the house, remembering, mourning her mother, whose clothes hung in the wardrobe still, and the memory of whose touch lay in the placing of every ornament, and she wondered what to do about Tommy.
The next day she walked up to Carlyon and spent the day there. Nothing had changed from the day before and the air was charged with tension. Angie referred to her in front of Tommy as ‘Auntie Beatrice’. Tommy called Angie ‘Mummy’ and did not stray far from her side. When they took a walk down around the grounds, it was Angie’s hand he held, and he wouldn’t take Beatrice’s at all when she suggested playing ‘swing’.
‘It’s time for his nap now,’ Angie said after lunch, and Nanny led him away upstairs.
Beatrice looked after him longingly. She sat in the drawing room to wait for him to wake, whilst Angie wrote letters, but she sensed Angie’s watchfulness. If she left the room, Angie followed her. She was allowed to see Tommy after his tea, and then, because of the hints Angie dropped about receiving neighbours in the evening, there was nothing for it but to go back alone to her father’s for dinner. She couldn’t try to snatch Tommy away because he’d be upset. She couldn’t leave him, because Angie would think she’d won. It was like a war of attrition.
On the third day when she went up to Carlyon, determined to talk seriously to Angie again, no one answered the door when she rang. She walked around the house, trying all the doors. Every one was locked. There was no sign of anyone, no car either. Deeply distressed, she turned to go. All the way back down the drive it was as though the house was watching her, hostile, waiting for her to leave.
When she returned later in the day, it was to find a padlock on the gates. The Wincantons had gone, and Tommy with them.
There was nothing for it but to take the train back to Paddington. When she saw Rafe waiting on the platform, she cried out and hurried towards him.
‘Darling,’ he said, and she was caught up in his arms.
‘Rafe, it’s all so awful.’ The statutory three-minute phone call hadn’t been long enough to explain clearly last night.
‘Come on, let’s get you home.’
Cornwall, 2011
‘I told him everything, Lucy,’ Beatrice said, ‘and he tried to comfort me, but I was beyond comfort. I’d been betrayed by the family I’d trusted, the deepest betrayal possible.
‘ “We’ll get him back, Bea,” Rafe kept saying, “we’ll get him back.” And we tried so hard. The police wouldn’t do anything. They told us it was a matter for the courts, and so I started legal proceedings, but there was such a backlog of cases and everything moved so slowly. It turned out that Angie had gone to Scotland, to her godmother’s place, and whenever I asked if I could go up and visit Tommy, I was refused. Rafe stopped me from turning up unannounced; he said it would make matters worse. He was probably right.
‘I sometimes wonder if things would have been different if I’d just gone along with Angie’s plans without objection. We could have remained friends and I’d have seen Tommy, been his loving “auntie”. But something in me couldn’t do that – I just couldn’t. He was mine and I wanted him back – that thought consumed me.
‘Something wonderful did happen: Rafe asked me to marry him, and what else could I say but yes? I’d loved him from the moment I’d set eyes on him; as I said before, that might sound ridiculous to a modern young thing like you, Lucy, but there it was. Guy, your grandfather, had been very special and I’d loved him, too, but not in the way I loved Rafe.
‘We had a quiet wedding in London in December 1944. My father came up on the train to give me away, combining this rare journey with a visit to his publisher. Aunt Julia and Uncle George were there, and Rafe’s mother and stepfather, a few friends, oh, and marvellous Miss Warrender with whom I’d lodged when I’d worked at the remount depot and who’d got me into the FANY. She and I had exchanged letters from time to time; in fact, I kept in touch with her until she died.’
‘But what happened about Tommy?’ Lucy prompted.
‘I’m coming to that,’ Beatrice said. ‘By the autumn of 1945 I hadn’t seen Tommy for a year. Angie had well and truly taken care of that. My case had not proceeded much in my favour, Michael’s lawyers having argued that I had been an unfit mother who hadn’t even been married to Tommy’s father and who had then left him whilst I pursued my own path. Since I was now respectably married, I might have countered some of this successfully, but where their case held water was in respect of the fact that Tommy could not remember any other mother but Angie. Maybe if I had continued the case, despite the considerable expense, I might eventually have won, but I was coming to see that there were other sides to this situation.
‘Suppose I did win and Tommy was returned to me. What would that do to him, being sent from familiar people to a couple of strangers? I kept thinking and thinking, trying to see it from his point of view.
/> ‘And there was Rafe to think of. Rafe was supportive of me all the way about Tommy, though it had split his own family, and I could see that the strain was beginning to tell. I was obsessed about getting Tommy back and it must have been very hard for him to be newly married to a wife who was not focused on her husband. He’d have tried to be a good father to Tommy, I know he would, but the fact remained that he wasn’t Tommy’s father and, what’s more, he had a bad experience of fathering himself and had never got along with his own stepfather.
‘In September 1945, we moved into a flat in Regent’s Park, quite near to where I’d lived with Dinah. Because of his experience, Rafe had been given a job in Military Intelligence, which meant occasionally returning to France, but by the summer he’d come home for good. One thing he’d managed was to contact my mother’s family in Normandy. My grandmother and Cousin Thérèse were, it turned out, quite unharmed, and never had been imprisoned, though the Gestapo had paid a visit in 1943 and had ransacked the house. One of my uncles, it seemed, was keeping the farm going.
‘I had not seen any of the Wincantons since going to Carlyon the September before. No, I tell a lie, because in June 1945 I bumped into Peter when I got out of a taxi by Claridge’s one lunchtime. He was with a tall, scholarly looking man, but as soon as he saw me he came across. He was in civilian dress, and his face still bore that bitter, unhappy look. I wonder if he ever lost it?
‘ “So you got the man you wanted,” ’ Peter said. He’d obviously kept up with the family gossip. “I’m very happy for you.”
‘ “Thank you,” I said.
‘ “But I’m sorry for all the other stuff.” He meant Tommy, I imagined.
‘I muttered something about it not being his fault. It wasn’t, of course. He was the one who had alerted me to the Wincantons’ dangerous allure. He was an outsider, too, and I felt sorry for him.
‘ “You’ll have heard about Gerald,” he said.
‘I had – from Rafe, of course – and was very sorry. Gerald had been returning to England the month before when his boat hit a mine. A piece of flying metal had caught him in the face, slicing it open to the bone. It was the most dreadful injury. Though the doctors had done their best he had lost an eye and he was in constant pain.
‘I asked Peter what he was doing now, and he explained that he had recently started work at Sotheby’s. “It’ll be an interesting time,” he said, and now, of course, we can see what he meant. So much looted art was to be tracked down and identified, and that became Peter’s speciality.
‘We’d only been in our new place for two weeks when Michael Wincanton came to visit us. I thought he looked much older, and this wasn’t surprising considering the pressure that he must have been under, though we didn’t yet know about this. The woman he’d been seeing during much of the course of the war, the one whom I’d had to drive to Cadogan Square, hadn’t, it turned out, been quite the thing. I forget the exact circumstances, but she’d lived in Russia before the war and become the mistress of one of Stalin’s henchmen. Nobody knew much about what she’d done there or whether she had contact with her lover during the war, but you can imagine the scandal when the news eventually broke, and after that, his political career was effectively over.
‘Michael enquired after my father, and then he said, as if we hadn’t guessed, “I’ve come about Tommy.” Angie wanted a truce. If Tommy was allowed to remain with her and Gerald, then I would be allowed to see him regularly. The idea was that I should drop all legal proceedings and we’d all try to be friends.
‘I was terribly upset about this and I’m afraid I lost my temper and it all came out in a jumble, all the resentments I’d been storing up. He must have thought I was mad. I accused him of all sorts of things, some of which I later realized he couldn’t possibly have been responsible for – of using me in various ways and sending me to France and not caring about what happened to me. Rafe did his best to calm me down; even he was shocked.
‘Michael just sat listening to me, rather white-faced. I don’t know what he’d expected, but not this raving madwoman. He left soon afterwards.
‘We talked about it for a long time, Rafe and I, and eventually I agreed to do what Angie wanted. It seemed the best thing for Tommy, and that it, after all, a mother’s most important duty. But Angie did not keep her side of the bargain. I did see Tommy several times more, but as Auntie Beatrice, and Angie was very guarded. Probably my outburst to her father had not helped me. He was such a lovely little boy, Tommy, if a little shy and uncertain. Such a sweet face that reminded me of Guy. But soon after that, Gerald’s regiment sent him to Hong Kong for three years, and, of course, Angie and Tommy joined him. And then I finally did what I saw to be in Tommy’s best interests. I signed papers for his adoption. I did not know that after that I would not see him again until the day of Angie’s funeral.’
Beatrice was silent now, her thoughts far away. After a while, Lucy said, ‘I don’t think I remember you at the funeral. When we first met, here, I thought you looked familiar, but I suppose that is because you are family. You are my real grandmother, after all.’
‘You were very young, dear, only about sixteen, and I imagine very caught up in the drama of the occasion.’
‘It was awful. I hadn’t been to a funeral before, not even Grandad Gerald’s. So many things took me unawares.’ She recalled the electric curtain that moved round the coffin, separating the living from the dead; the morbid wreaths with their elevated messages in florists’ round handwriting.
‘He spoke so well. I admired your father for that.’ Yet it was a shock seeing Tommy at nearly sixty, when in my imagination he was still a little boy. ‘And, Lucy, it’s strange. Hearing what he said about Angie, and talking to you about her, it’s made me think. I can’t forgive her exactly . . . but I can understand her, I suppose. And there is something I’m pleased about, which is that he and Angie loved each other. Your father was very loyal to Angelina and I think he must always have thought of her as his real mother. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t ever want to meet me. But that was hard, terribly hard.’
‘I wish he could have met you,’ Lucy said, ‘and heard the story, too. I can’t say that I’m not finding the whole thing very difficult to accept. That my father was your son. That Granny wasn’t ever really Granny.’
‘Did you really not know?’
‘No, I didn’t. He never said anything. Do you think she told him?’
‘I sometimes wonder whether she said something, but never explained properly. How it all came about. I wish more than anything that I’d had the opportunity to tell him the story I’ve just told you.’
‘In some ways, though, it’s not totally a shock. I think part of me guessed a long time ago that there was some secret. And this is it. Why couldn’t he have told me? Even Mum didn’t know, I’m sure she didn’t. Or my stepmother.’
‘I’m so sorry that it’s been an awful shock. I still can’t accept that he’s . . . gone. I always held him in my mind, you know. When he was young I sent him birthday cards and presents and wrote him letters.’
Lucy had found nothing like that amongst his things and wondered if he’d ever got them. Perhaps he hadn’t.
Instead she told Beatrice about how she’d been thinking about Tommy ever since Beatrice first mentioned having him, that it had gradually been dawning on her who he was. ‘I see now that Dad and Granny were so unlike each other. I don’t mean just physically, but the kind of people they were, their personalities.’
‘That’s not so unusual in families, is it?’
‘And Granny was never very relaxed with Dad. There was always anxiety. But there was love, I’m sure of it.’
‘I would hope that there was. That would have been the worst thing of all, if they hadn’t loved each other.’
They were both quiet for a moment, then Lucy said, ‘Tell me what happened next with you and Rafe.’
And here Beatrice smiled. ‘Rafe and I had a wonderful marriage,’ she said. ‘He was
a most marvellous husband, not that we didn’t have our little ups and downs like everyone else, but we were very happy together. We had a daughter, Sara. Look, here she is.’
Beatrice stood up and fetched a photograph that Lucy hadn’t noticed before because it was on a shelf behind the chair. It was of a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman with a clever, lively face, standing on the steps of what looked like an office building.
‘Sara is a Professor of Marine Biology in Maine,’ Beatrice said proudly. ‘She’s due to retire next year and she’s promised to come here on an extended visit. She has two grown-up sons and I’ve just become a great-grandmother!’ She brought out more photographs now in a plastic album, of a dark-haired couple with a tiny baby girl.
‘She’s so sweet,’ said Lucy, delighted at these new-found cousins.
‘Catriona, they’ve called her.’ The old lady stood gazing at the album a moment, a faint smile on her face.
‘Do they know about Dad?’ Lucy thought to ask.
‘They know I had a child that I had to give away, yes,’ said Beatrice. ‘Lucy, I don’t expect anything of you, dear,’ she added. ‘Angelina and Gerald don’t stop being your grandparents.’
‘No, of course not, but . . .’
‘You can go away and never see me again. I respected your father’s decision not to talk to me, you know. Nothing that happened was his fault. He was the victim.’
‘But it wasn’t completely your fault either, or – and you might disagree with me here – Granny’s. And yet I can’t suddenly pretend . . . well, I’ve got to get used to it all.’
‘You’ve lived all your life without me, without knowing about me. But the strangest thing is that I recognize you, Lucy. I can see things about you that are like me. I don’t mean your appearance, but your . . . well, the way you look at the world, your yearning for something.’
‘I do want to get to know you,’ Lucy said gently. ‘What would you like me to call you? It doesn’t feel right to say Granny or Grandma or Nan. Could I go on calling you Beatrice?’