“No, not so far. Inconvenient and a bit frightening, but nothing worse than that. I went to London to see them the last time I had leave, and a house had been bombed out at the end of their street, but otherwise they’re fine.”
“Your father came to join General de Gaulle, I understand.”
“He left Los Angeles as soon as de Gaulle broadcast from London in June of 1940, and joined the Free French here. He’s working with Gustave Moutet and a group of journalists who’ve founded a daily newspaper called France. My mother’s working as an ambulance driver.… She’s on duty this weekend.”
“Good for her,” Lady Penelope said, careful not to ask for news of Delphine, for Jane had written that no one in the family was sure what had happened to her since Paris had been occupied. The car passed quickly through a small village and slowed down as it came to a large gate. “Well, my dears, welcome. Here we are.”
Lady Penelope drove up a long, oak-bordered driveway, and stopped in front of a house that seemed to have welled up out of the snowdrifts, so closely was it married to the bare but beautifully shaped trees and still-green yew hedges with which it was surrounded. The house was half-timbered, with thick walls made from stout oak beams and creamy brick, both materials native to the countryside with its chalky soil and wooded hills. No one had ever been able to count the various levels of roof of Longbridge Grange, nor the different styles of tiled and bricked gables and the ingeniously contrived multitude of its chimneys. The many and asymmetrical windows had rows of tiny panes of glass, most of it so old that it was lavender in color. The last time Lady Penelope had had some plaster removed in the smallest pantry, the workmen had found two coins minted in 1460. Time had been strictly selective at The Grange, preserving nothing that was not indescribably pleasant to the eye.
Longbridge Grange had five wings, all built in different periods, and reflecting the fortunes of the family. In spite of its size, nothing about the marvelously rambling building suggested the classic formality of a stately home. It had always been a manor house, and always the center of a large, prosperous group of farms owned by the Longbridges, possessing an important cider mill, a large stable block, a carriage house, a dovecot, and any number of outlying barns and buildings. As Freddy entered The Grange, she felt as if she were walking into a welcoming, fragrant forest. Branches of pine trees decorated each doorway and lay on the mantles of the many fireplaces, and Christmas mistletoe still hung in the entrance hall. Dogs barked and bounced everywhere, in welcome.
Jane Longbridge was the second oldest of seven children. Her two younger brothers were away at school, but the three youngest, all girls—twins of nine, and the baby of the family, who was seven—were still at school in a nearby village. They had been kept out of school today in honor of Freddy and Jane’s arrival, and they shyly shook Freddy’s hand before they climbed onto Jane, almost knocking her over in rapture.
“Come along, all of you. Lunch in the kitchen,” Lady Penelope interrupted, looking at her leaping offspring and animals with detachment, as if she couldn’t imagine how they happened to be there at all.
“The kitchen, Mummy?” Jane said, surprised.
“It’s the warmest room, darling. I’ve closed off most of the house and just left it to molder quietly away. When we’ve won the war there will be the devil’s own dusting to do, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
Jane and Freddy played with the little girls for much of the afternoon, reveling in their sweetly awed attentions. Finally, Freddy went to her room for a nap before dinner, first drawing the blackout curtains. She slept soundly for an hour, thinking gratefully as she drifted off that she had actually been almost, if not totally, warm since she’d entered The Grange. Five whole hours of comfort … or was it five hours and a half …?
A knock on her door woke her. Jane came in wearing a bathrobe and heavy socks and bedroom slippers. “I’ve drawn you a bath,” she said in a low, conspiratorial whisper.
“A bath?”
“A hot bath. A real bath. A prewar bath. Strictly illegal. I count on you to say nothing to anyone else. It must remain a secret, just between us.”
“You mean …”
“It has more than three and a half inches of water in the tub,” Jane announced solemnly.
“Oh, Jane, how could you?” Freddy cried. “You know you shouldn’t have. It’s against every regulation.”
“Don’t ask silly questions. Just follow me. Quietly … everyone’s busy in other parts of the house. I don’t want to hear a peep out of you.”
She put her fingers to her lips and, handing Freddy a toweling robe, led the way down a corridor to the door of a large bathroom in which a vast Victorian tub mounted on brass lion’s feet held pride of place. Freddy tiptoed to the tub, looked in and gasped. There must have been fully fifteen inches of water steaming in its depths. She hadn’t seen a bathtub with that much water in it since war had been declared. At their digs, she and Jane were allowed, by their complaining landlady, one tepid weekly bath of the required three and a half inches. All other bathing was done bit by bit in front of the basin in their room. Here were riches!
Freddy stripped naked and quickly lowered herself into the water, finding that it came just above her waist. She took the bar of soap that Jane held out to her, lathered her hair and scrubbed and rinsed it thoroughly before she started to scour herself with a huge sponge that sat on a chair placed alongside of the tub.
“Oh God, that’s good. Good, good, good! I’m going to stay in here until it gets cold. Until it freezes over. Nothing will ever get me out!”
“Is the water cooling off, pet?” Jane asked anxiously.
“Well … actually … yes. Just a bit. No, Jane, whatever you do, don’t turn on the tap. It isn’t fair to the others. I feel terribly guilty enough about this already. How can I ever face your mother?” Her wet hair was slicked back from a face suffused with pleasure. Her body was pink from rubbing.
“Don’t be silly. Mummy still has mountains of wood.” Abruptly, Jane went to the bathroom door and threw it open.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” came a chorus of voices, and Jane’s three little sisters marched in, each one of them carrying a steaming kettle of hot water. They were followed by Lady Penelope, smiling broadly, lugging a huge kettle from which more steam rose. They surrounded the tub and, led by Jane, sang a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” while they ceremoniously poured more hot water into the tub. As the last line, “Happy birthday, dear Freddy, happy birthday to you,” began to fade away, a male voice joined in the singing. “Stand up, stand up, stand up and show us your face,” the voice rang out and all the five female Longbridges dropped their empty kettles with a clatter and shouted, “Tony!” forgetting their guest as they wrapped themselves around their older brother.
Cowering under the water, almost bent in half, Freddy watched the scene, shaking with giggles. Had Jane planned this too? Could anything so typically Jane be an accident?
“Tony, come over here and say hello,” Jane commanded. “Second Officer Marie-Frédérique de Lancel, may I present my brother, Squadron Leader the Honorable Antony Wilmot Alistair Longbridge. Freddy, Tony.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Freddy asked her friend suspiciously, her arms securely tucked over her breasts.
“Oh, quite. I remember him well,” Jane said.
“Good evening, Squadron Leader Longbridge.” Freddy managed to nod graciously, without lifting her head.
“Good evening, Second Officer. Out of uniform, I see.”
“On leave, sir.”
“They always say that.”
“I assure you, sir, it’s true.”
“Can you prove it?”
“No.”
“Then I shall have to take your word.”
“Thank you, sire.”
“No need to go so far. A simple ‘sir’ will do. At ease.”
“Antony, come out of the bathroom this minute!” Lady Penelope said. “Let Freddy finish her
bath in peace.”
“But it’s her birthday, Mum, don’t you think she wants company? I’ll just sit down here and chat with her. Jane, you may leave us. Kiddies, go get the second officer more hot water.”
“Antony, you try my patience,” his mother said warningly.
“Oh, all right, me old Mum, since you insist,” he said reluctantly, not moving away from the edge of the tub. “You do know there’s a war on, don’t you? Old standards must make way for new, and all that. Now, Mum, no need to pinch me, damn it. I’m coming.”
Muttering what sounded like Druid incantations, Jane rummaged through her closet, picking through her rows of prewar evening dresses.
“I didn’t think people still dressed for dinner,” Freddy said as she watched.
“Did you imagine that you were going to be allowed to eat your birthday dinner in your uniform?”
“Since my public bathing exhibition, I don’t know what I thought … or what to expect.” Freddy brushed her hair, trying to make it lie down, but today, because of the snapping cold air it had more of a mind of its own than usual, and although she kept it cut to standard ATA length, so that it cleared her uniform collar, she could hear it crackle and feel it sparking up so vigorously that it tickled the backs of her hands.
“Such luck, Tony showing up,” Jane chortled. “I think he rather liked you.”
“I hope that with all that steam he couldn’t really see me. I certainly couldn’t look at him.”
“Are all Americans so proper?”
“Are all Brits so fresh?”
“Tony? He’s absolutely harmless,” Jane replied, over her shoulder, with the judicious air of a younger sister’s appraisal of her twenty-five-year-old brother. “He didn’t climb in with you, did he? Now that might have been fresh, or impudent, possibly rude—it might even have indicated a lack of basic good manners. He was just hoping to make a new friend. Our Tony’s a gregarious chap, good-hearted, salt of the earth. He’ll give you no trouble, poppet. Unless you’re looking for it … or unless you’re a German pilot stooging around upstairs in a Messerschmitt or a Junkers 88, in which case you have indeed found trouble, serious trouble. Ah-ha! Here it is. I was wondering where it had got to.”
Jane emerged from the closet holding up a hanger on which was suspended a dress of cloth of silver, a strapless dress that splintered the light in the room with darting arrows of brightness. It had a skirt so full that it looked as if it could take off and waltz by itself. Its waistline was marked by a wide black velvet sash with a bow on one side, from which streamers of velvet almost touched the ground. On another hanger there was a black velvet wrap in the form of a huge draped bow, bordered with silver. “Festive enough, I think,” Jane said, holding out the hangers, “and, should you feel chilly, there’s the wrap. Try this on and see if it fits.”
“It will, it will! Nothing will stop me from wearing that dress.” Freddy was breathless with a sense of almost incommunicable delight. Everything that had happened since she had walked into Longbridge Grange seemed like a picnic on the grass, impromptu, spur-of-the-moment, and so gloriously inappropriate to the realities of England at war. She felt giddy, indecently excited, inadmissibly pleased with herself. Even her chilblains didn’t hurt.
“Shoes!” Jane said, slapping her forehead, and darted back into the closet, returning with silver shoes and a handful of filmy chiffon underthings. “What else have I forgotten?”
“No tiara?”
“Not absolutely necessary for dinner. Although … although …”
“I was kidding.”
“They’re in a vault anyway. No tiaras for the duration. Pity, that … We’d better dress. Papa should be home by now, and if he doesn’t get his drink before dinner he’s apt to grumble. Shout if you need any help. Otherwise, downstairs in half an hour?”
“Oh yes. Thank you for finding that dress, Jane.”
“I was proposed to five times in it … a lucky dress … but, of course, not for them, poor things. I do feel sorry for them.”
“That was their hard luck,” Freddy said, whirling around and around, watching the skirt of the silver dress billow. “Screw them, Jane.”
“I did, poppet, I did.”
By the time Freddy had managed to dress herself in the unfamiliar garments, put on her lipstick and make a fruitless attempt to tame her shiningly clean red hair, which foamed back from her face in celebratory disorder, the adult Longbridges had just gathered in the library in front of a large fire, all of them talking quickly and, it seemed, simultaneously, while Lord Gerald, armed with a silver cocktail shaker, had started to make martinis.
Freddy hesitated just outside the door, unseen, feeling a confusing combination of emotions. They were a family, she was an outsider, yet she had been welcomed today as she had never been welcomed before by any group of strangers. She felt that she knew Jane better than she’d ever known her own sister, but she’d never met Jane’s father and she’d only glimpsed Tony as a looming figure in an RAF uniform. She felt unquestionably shy—an emotion she hadn’t felt for years—but she couldn’t feel timid, not in this dress of sublime theatricality that, as she had known it would, fit her perfectly. This was her twenty-first birthday. She was the guest of honor. And, dear Lord, they were all waiting for her.
That thought—Jane’s father was shaking the gin and vermouth and she could tell from the sound alone that in a second he’d be ready to pour—propelled her into the room in one long, fluid step. Then she stopped, shyness again gaining the upper hand, because all four people in the room had stopped talking and had turned to look at her. There was a moment of utter, stunned silence that Freddy didn’t realize was an ultimate tribute to her loveliness, and then Lord Gerald Longbridge put down the cocktail shaker and advanced toward her.
“Happy birthday, Miss de Lancel,” he said, taking both of her hands in his and looking, startled, into the victorious blue of her untamable eyes. “My son tells me that I missed the high spot of the day, indeed of the year. I call that downright unfair. I don’t know how you’re ever going to get on my good side after such wretched treatment. I suppose I’m going to have to make an exception for you, or, better yet, you could repeat the performance tomorrow, but give me fair warning so I won’t be left out again. I wonder if, by any chance, you happen to drink martinis?”
“Yes, please, Lord Gerald. And will you call me Freddy?” she laughed, shyness banished by the gray-haired, handsome charmer whose eyes were as wicked as Jane’s.
“Freddy it is,” he replied, offering her his arm. “Now come over to the fire. I must pour those drinks before they get watery.” He led her across the large, dim, high-ceilinged room to Jane, far from demure in sweeping scarlet satin, and Lady Penelope, magnificent in brown velvet and old-ivory lace. Tony had retreated, rapidly and unnoticed by the women, to the ornament-frosted Christmas tree in the corner, and pretended to fiddle with a string of lights, so that he could watch Freddy before she greeted him.
From the moment she entered the room, it had seemed to him that she walked within a nimbus of light. There was something almost celestial in her sudden, silent, silver apparition in the doorway, something that made him think of the first, always surprising, always somehow dangerous, always heart-stabbing glimpse of the evening star. Could she be the larky, joky seal of a girl in the tub? Was metamorphosis so easy? Would she turn into a glade of flowering trees before dinner was over?
“Tony, give me a hand,” his father asked. “Take Freddy a martini, would you?”
As he carried the chilled glass over to the fireplace, Squadron Leader Antony Longbridge almost tripped over his feet on a rug that had been in the same place for five generations before he’d been born. Freddy looked up. “Good evening again, Squadron Leader,” she said. “Out of uniform, I see.”
“Oh, this.” He looked down at his dinner jacket. “I thought … well, a special occasion … my tunic needed pressing … this seemed, well, more comfortable … after all, at home … on l
eave …”
“They always manage to have an excuse, don’t they, Jane?” Freddy shook her head disparagingly.
“Shocking. No morale, these RAF types. Dress like billy goats. Think spit and polish is for everybody else. He probably didn’t even shave before dinner,” Jane agreed.
Freddy stopped herself from lifting her hand to find out. She’d have known Tony had to be English if she’d so much as caught a split-second glance at him in Sumatra or Antarctica, she thought, as she accepted her drink. He had that unmistakable fine, clean facial structure, that unmuddled sweep of bone, that clean, long, almost knifelike purposefulness that permitted no neutrality of feature. His forehead was high and his plain brown hair, parted sternly on the side, swept straight backward with a slight wave. His eyes were pale, pale blue under light brows, his nose as pointed and distinct as a Crusader s, his mouth wide, firm and thin, his cheeks flat and ruddy, his ears big and set close to his head. There was nothing relaxed, nothing frivolous to his lean, imposing head. Tony was big-boned, yet he seemed, for all his height, almost slender. He bore himself with the habit of authority and the presence of command. No British overbreeding here, Freddy decided, and smiled at him as she had smiled at no man in almost three years.
“I did manage to shave,” Tony said, ignoring his sister, “although the water was not as hot as it might have been.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Freddy replied lightly, and, inspired by the most totally calculated flirtatious move of her life, turned away from him so that she could ask Lady Penelope a question about the provenance of her lace.
Dinner, in a room warmed by two huge fireplaces, was served by an elderly woman assisted by a fourteen-year-old boy, both of whom lived in the nearby village and were still available to assist the cook on special occasions. This odd assortment of domestic help was the only reminder, throughout the blithe and playful meal, that England was at war. Everyone at the table blessed the crushing freeze that had brought hostilities to a temporary halt, but no one mentioned the weather, as if to notice it would be to break the spell.
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