‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
She shook her head.
‘Any aunts or uncles? Cousins?’
‘I have a great-aunt who lives in Bexhill, that’s all. I’m not sure if she’s still alive, though.’
The flight officer said kindly: ‘Would you like me to find out for you? You could go and stay with her for a few days, perhaps –’
Virginia thought of the gloomy, mothball-smelling house. ‘No, thank you.’
‘Are there any friends of your mother? Older people who might rally round?’
‘My mother had no friends.’
‘Oh. I see.’ The flight officer didn’t really see at all. A warm, outgoing person herself, she could not easily imagine someone having no friends. The one thing she did see clearly, though, was that Sergeant Stratton was now apparently completely alone in the world – so far as a family was concerned. It was very fortunate, she thought, that the girl had the WAAF. In her considerable experience, the service could sometimes fill that gap quite well.
She said gently: ‘We’ll do everything we can to help you, my dear.’
The house in Alfred Road had been almost flattened by the flying bomb. Only a small part of one wall remained standing; the rest was an uneven, towering mound of rubble. She saw that the houses on each side had been badly damaged, too, and all along the street windows had been shattered and tiles broken. The force of the explosion must have been enormous. Two small boys were picking through the ruins, clambering over piles of bricks. When they saw Virginia standing at what had once been the gateway, they ran away with their hands full of prized pieces of twisted metal.
She walked up the path and through the gap where the front door had been. The brown linoleum was still there on the hallway floor, covered in a thick layer of dust, and she could see the bottom part of the hat-stand sticking out from under debris. Horribly, one of her mother’s hats was lying close to it, covered in dust, too, but undamaged. She edged her way round the splintered wreckage of the staircase, trying to see into the rest of the flat. Part of the gas stove was visible where the kitchen had been and one of the blue and white checked curtains had draped itself over a fallen rafter. The sitting-room had been completely buried beneath its ceiling and the upstairs floor. The armchair with the tattered floral cover and the enamel-topped table with two legs missing must have come from Mrs Hickey’s flat above. One of the neighbours had stopped her and told her that Mrs Hickey had escaped because she had been out when the buzz bomb had fallen. Until that moment she hadn’t even thought about her. All she had been able to think about was that she had never really made up the quarrel with her mother, and now she would never be able to. My mother has no friends. Until now she had never considered what that meant. Now she saw that it must have meant many long hours of loneliness. She, Virginia, had been the only friend her mother had had and she had first deserted her and then rejected her. And she had died all alone.
The undertaker was grave-faced and kind. He took all the arrangements out of her hands; she had only to choose the coffin – what kind and what price. He turned the pages of a folder apologetically, murmuring about types of wood and different handles, and she sat staring blankly at the different pictures. Later he found her a cheap bed-and-breakfast place not far away.
The cemetery was vast. The graves stood in unending rows of sad grey stone and sombre black marble, decked discordantly with gaudy flowers. She had thought that she was the only mourner in the small chapel where the priest said prayers over her mother’s coffin, but when she turned to follow it out to the graveside, she saw a man and woman standing in the back pew – a middle-aged couple who were complete strangers to her. Relatives she had not known about? Friends, after all? The man stepped forward as she reached the pew.
‘Virginia?’
She paused. He had grey hair and a pepper and salt moustache, and he was dressed in a dark suit and wearing a black tie.
‘I’m your father . . .’ he gestured helplessly with one hand. ‘Forgive me for coming here like this. I wanted to pay my respects. To give you some support. To see if you were all right . . .’ He turned to the woman beside him. ‘This is Dorothy.’
She must be That Woman. She couldn’t be his wife because Mother had never agreed to a divorce. So long as I live I’ll make sure he can never marry that woman. She was nothing like the siren she had always imagined. She was rather overweight and her hair was grey, too. There was nothing glamorous about her at all.
The man took her arm gently – she could not yet think of him as her father. ‘We won’t trouble you. We’re only here to help.’
After the burial, when the coffin had been lowered into the deep, dark hole, they asked her if she would like to go back with them to have some tea.
‘We’re quite near,’ the woman told her. ‘I made some sandwiches – just in case.’
She felt that it would be rude to refuse or waste the food if she had gone to that trouble.
It was a pleasant house in a shady suburban avenue. The furniture was rather shabby and the sitting-room a bit untidy – a piece of knitting left out on a chair, a newspaper open on the table, a cardigan hanging over the arm of the sofa. Mother would never have countenanced any of those things. There was also, she noticed, a framed photograph of herself as a child on the mantelpiece, taken when she must have been about five.
Her father said, seeing her noticing it: ‘It’s the only one I have. You’re not so very different now.’
Dorothy had gone to the kitchen to make a pot of tea and fetch the sandwiches and she was left alone with him. He smiled ruefully and lifted his hands in another helpless gesture.
‘I don’t know much about you, sad to say. I didn’t even know you were in the WAAF. I’ve tried to find things out, but it wasn’t easy. Your mother never answered the questions I asked in my letters . . . would never tell me anything about you. I used to walk up and down Alfred Road, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. I only saw you twice. Once when you were coming home from school with your satchel on your back – from the high school – and another time, a few years ago, when you were grown-up. You were walking up that hill from the tube station – coming home from work, I think.’ He hesitated. ‘I wanted very much to stop you and say hallo and tell you who I was, but I knew it would cause trouble. Your mother always said I wasn’t fit to have anything to do with you . . . living in sin with another woman. She was probably quite right, though it’s never seemed like sin to me.’
‘I wish you had said hallo. I always thought you didn’t care about me.’
‘Oh, Ginny . . .’ he looked at her sadly. ‘I’ve always cared about you. But I thought it was best for you if I stayed away. There would have been terrible scenes with your mother that might have harmed you . . . She never forgave me, as you must know. She was full of bitterness, and I suppose I can’t blame her. I failed her when the firm collapsed and we lost all our money, and then I deserted her for someone else. Someone whom I love and who has never expected anything of me but that love . . . Oh, you won’t be able to understand all this. Why should you? You probably feel as letdown and deserted and bitter as she did.’
Virginia said slowly: ‘I let her down too and deserted her as well in the end. I joined the WAAF when she didn’t want me to go away, and then I quarrelled with her and didn’t go home for a year. We never really made it up.’
Her eyes filled with tears and he came over to her and put his hand on her arm.
‘Don’t blame yourself ever, Ginny,’ he told her in a quiet voice. ‘You were perfectly right to go and join up. I don’t know what the quarrel was about, but I do know what she was like. She was her own worst enemy, but I don’t think she ever realized that, or ever would have done. Sometime, when you feel like it, I want you to talk about it more and we’ll sort it all out together.’
Dorothy came in carrying a tray, followed by a large tortoise-shell cat that wound itself round Virginia’s ankles. The sandwiches were rather thic
k and she had left the crust on. She poured the tea and passed them with a sweet smile.
‘I do hope you’ll come and see us again, Virginia, whenever you feel like it. We’d like it so much, your father and me, if you’d try to think of this as a home. Somewhere to come to whenever you want. The door will always be open for you, won’t it, Harry?’
Her father looked across at her. ‘Always,’ he said.
‘So, you two want to get married?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
Virgil had answered the question easily and with confidence but the American major did not seem at all impressed. Winnie thought that he had hard, cold eyes and that his mouth, thin and tight, looked like a trap. The eyes moved sideways away from Virgil and settled on her.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-three, sir.’
‘British?’
‘Yes, sir.’ What else would she be?
‘Serving in the British Women’s Air Force?’
‘The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, sir.’
He said impatiently: ‘Whatever it is . . . what as?’
‘I’m ground crew, sir. A fitter, on engines.’
He looked taken aback for a moment. ‘You don’t say?’
I do say, she thought to herself indignantly. An’ I work on four-engined Lancs, doin’ major inspections, an’ engine an’ prop changes, an’ things like that. And I’ve been made corporal because they’re pleased with me – so there! Out loud, though, she said nothing. She looked down at her lap until his next question brought her head up again sharply.
‘Are you pregnant?’
She felt Virgil tense angrily beside her and answered quickly before he could. ‘No, I’m not, sir.’ Her face was red with embarrassment, her indignation growing by the minute. The American officer was looking at her as though he thought she might be no better than a tart. Then he looked away again.
‘You got another girl back home, Gillies? An American girl waiting for you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘A lot of people back there would say you ought to wait ’til you get home and marry one of your own kind. They’ve been writing to the newspapers all over the US protesting about the way you young men are marrying other girls overseas.’
‘I reckon that’s up to me, sir. I’m willin’ to fight for the folks back home an’ risk my neck for them, but I ain’t willin’ to have them tell me who I ought to marry. I figure that’s my business, not theirs.’
‘Well, what do your own folks think of you wanting to marry a foreigner?’
Virgil said levelly: ‘They’re pleased, sir. They’re sendin’ a ring for her. See, I’ve written them a lot ’bout Winnie. She’s from a farm, same as me. Her folks have one too, round here. She’s my kind all right.’
The cold eyes moved back to her again. ‘The farmer’s daughter, huh? And what do your folks think of you wanting to marry an American?’
She hesitated. The truth, if she told it to him, was that Mum and Dad didn’t much want her to because it would mean going so far away – even though they liked Virgil, specially Mum. Gran was the only one who’d been really pleased. Gran liked Virgil a lot, and not just because he brought her cigarettes and gum and things. It was because he was strong and Gran liked strong men. Strong in mind as well as body. Gran would have been like one of those women in films who went across America in a covered wagon out West.
‘They don’t mind, sir.’
‘But they’re not jumping for joy?’
‘America’s a long way from England, sir.’
‘It sure is . . . and not only in distance. Ever been there?’
‘No, sir.’ He might as well have asked her if she’d ever been to the moon. It was about as likely.
‘I guess you think it’s just like you’ve seen in the movies?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Well, some of it is and some of it isn’t. But we’ve got the highest standard of living in the world. It’s a great country.’
‘So’s England, sir,’ she said stoutly.
He stared at her. ‘England’s gotten pretty tired and beat. Lots of people over here would give their eye teeth to go and live in America because they know it’s a real good place to be. Some of them would do anything to get there.’
She didn’t like this man one bit. She didn’t like what he’d said about England, and was he trying to say that she was only marrying Virgil so she could go and live in America?
She looked him straight in the eye. ‘I don’t want to leave England at all, sir, but if I marry Virgil I have to go wherever he goes. I don’t care about America havin’ the highest standard of livin’ in the world, or about all those big cars an’ modern houses with refrigerators an’ things like that. I want to marry Virgil because I love him, not ’cos I want to go an’ live in America.’
She stopped, appalled at her outburst. She’d sounded angry and defiant, and she’d probably gone and spoiled their chances. He’d never give them permission now.
The major looked at her in silence for a moment. ‘I guess that’s so,’ he said and his thin lips moved in what might have been a sort of smile. He turned away.
‘You going to be able to support her, Gillies?’
‘We’ll live on my folks’ farm to start with, sir. Goin’ to build ourselves a place of our own there. Soon as I can I’m goin’ to buy more land next door, an’ one day I’ll take over from my pa –’
‘OK. OK. You realize being married won’t give you any special privileges, or special living arrangements? That when you go back to the US she won’t be allowed to go with you? She’d have to wait over here ’til it’s peacetime before she can sail?’
‘Yes, sir. We know that.’
The major leaned back in his chair and propped his chin on his clasped hands. ‘You were wounded recently, Gillies. And got your fingers frostbitten. You’ve been off flying status for a couple of months as a result. How did you get frostbite? Take your gloves off, or something? Only a fool does that in those temperatures, or a guy whose mind’s not on the job . . . thinking of other things. That’s one reason we don’t like servicemen marrying – they get distracted. Make mistakes. Worry more about their wives and kids than their buddies.’
‘It was a pretty rough mission, sir,’ Virgil said coolly. ‘The Merseburg raid, July seventh. A lot of FWs attacked us on the way into the target. We took a cannon hit in the waist and my buddy was hurt pretty bad in the leg. He was lyin’ on the floor an’ bleedin’ a lot. I got the bleedin’ stopped with a tourniquet, but I had to take my gloves off to inject the morphine syrette. You can’t handle them little things with your flyin’ gloves on.’
‘Hmm. How did you manage to get yourself wounded?’
‘Later on, during the run, sir. The Krauts were puttin’ up a pretty good box barrage an’ we took a near miss. Some of the shrapnel came through the roof an’ got me in the arm an’ side an’ broke a coupla ribs.’
Winnie felt like jumping to her feet and telling the major just what she thought of him for talking as though it was Virgil’s fault that he’d got frostbitten and wounded. He wasn’t looking a bit sorry about it. He was still leaning back in his chair, tipped on its legs against the wall. He’d clasped his hands behind his head now and was staring hard. She clenched her fists in her lap.
At last he let the chair fall forward and dropped his hands onto his desk.
‘All right, Gillies. I’m going to give you permission to marry this young lady, but not until you finish your tour. You’ve got to do that first.’ He gave the same sort of dry half-smile in Winnie’s direction again. ‘I hope you’re good enough for her. And I sure hope you make it.’
Twenty-Seven
ON THE EIGHTH of September, 1944, the first of the German V-2 rockets fell on London. Unlike the V-i flying bombs, they gave no warning, arriving like a bolt from the blue with the sound of a distant express train that culminated in a shattering explosion. There was no defence against them and
their destructive power was greater than any weapon before.
Because of this new menace, David Palmer had expected his wife to be out of London, either in Gloucestershire or staying with one of her country friends. Her war work for the Red Cross seemed infinitely flexible. However, when he let himself into the hallway of the house in Knightsbridge he heard the sound of voices and laughter coming from the drawing-room above. For a moment he contemplated leaving and finding a hotel to stay the night in instead, but, as he hesitated, Caroline appeared at the top of the staircase.
‘David! What a surprise! I thought you were in the wilds of Middlesex.’
There was a glass in her hand and he could tell, even from a distance, that she was slightly drunk. And he knew that she was far from pleased to see him. She was entertaining and he was a kill-joy, a party spoiler. Her friends upstairs would be equally dismayed by his arrival. It was too late to turn and go, though. He climbed the staircase slowly and reached her.
‘Hallo, Caroline.’ He removed his cap and brushed her cheek quickly with his.
‘Hallo, stranger.’
He had not seen her for several months. She had cut her hair much shorter and was wearing an emerald green cocktail gown that he remembered from years ago. Even Caroline had to make-do-and-mend.
‘You’re putting on weight, David.’
‘Am I?’ He probably was. He was getting on for fifty now. The middle of middle-aged. He didn’t much care.
‘Actually,’ she was looking at him with her head on one side, ‘it rather suits you. So does the grey hair. And all that gold braid. You’re quite the distinguished top brass now, aren’t you, darling?’ She slid her arm through his. ‘Come and meet everyone.’
He went, reluctantly, into the drawing-room where five other people were gathered – two more women and three men, neatly paired, he saw. The women were similarly dressed to Caroline, the men all in uniform. There was a naval lieutenant, an RAF squadron leader who was looking considerably embarrassed, and a tall, good-looking American Air Force colonel – very likely the donor of the nylon stockings that Caroline was wearing. By the look of them, they were at least four or five drinks ahead of him. He shook hands with them in turn. The American colonel eyed him speculatively. One of the women started giggling and spilled some of her gin and tonic over the carpet. The squadron leader’s face was flushed, though whether from gin or nervousness, he wasn’t sure. He supposed that he must present a fairly intimidating figure . . . the unsmiling Air Commodore, and stone cold sober. He went to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a whisky. In spite of the shortages, it was, as usual, well-stocked. He never asked Caroline where it all came from – preferred not to think about it.
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