by Mary Mackie
* * *
I found King’s Lynn a charming town, boasting a wealth of ancient buildings, with modern shops and emporia. In the shelter of a huge church a market bustled busily and the central streets jostled with pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles both motorized and horse-drawn. Some of the roads were in the process of being metalled, to the stink of tar and the clang and chunter of steamrollers. When the work was complete, it would no doubt bring down the level of noise from clopping hooves and wheels on cobbles.
‘By the way,’ my uncle said as we mingled among shoppers. ‘I was given to understand you’d be using your English name while you were here.’
That set me on the defensive. ‘I’ve been known by my stepfather’s name for nearly ten years. I’m not going to change it, Uncle Frank.’
Frank gave me a wide-eyed look, shaking his head. ‘As you wish, girl. But on your own head be it. Oh—’ He paused in mid-stride to draw my attention to the shop we were passing. ‘Look there.’
The window of Lipton’s, the tea and grocery store, boasted a display of canned foods marked ‘CHEF’ in scarlet letters on a yellow background. ‘A boon to the overworked housewife’, declared a banner above the display.
‘That’s us,’ Frank said with a wry grin. ‘Chef Canned Foods – Fresh from the Fens.’
My oldest uncle, Harry, I had learned, managed the canning factory, which lay on the outskirts of Lynn. However, the main Rhys-Thomas fortune lay with Thorne-Thomas Engineering, based in Lincoln, which had prospered on steam and was now pioneering petrol-driven machines. Grandfather’s heirs would retain a major financial share in that industry.
Frank was saying, ‘They say Pater put all our initials into a hat and played Lexicon with them until he’d found his canning trademark – Clara, Harry, Emmet and me. What a way to be immortalized!’
‘I’m glad to know he included Mother.’
‘You think a tin of green peas is an appropriate epitaph?’
‘What would you prefer – one of the new tractors?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Anyway, better something useful and down-to-earth than a “Land Ironclad”, as Wells calls them.’
‘“Land Ironclad”?’ I queried, puzzled. ‘What’s that?’
‘Oh… newfangled machines. Still at the experimental stage.’ A gesture dismissed them as unimportant, then, ‘Haven’t you read any of Wells’s books?’
‘Books?’ I was confused. ‘I didn’t know he was a writer.’
‘Of course he is! Surely, even in Germany, you—’
‘I thought he was a lawyer.’
Frank peered at me as if I had turned blue, then a sudden blast of laughter exploded from him. ‘Not Oliver Wells, dunderhead! Herbert G. Wells. One of our greatest living authors – and a prophet of the horrors that science will bring, if we aren’t very careful. “The Time Machine”, “The Argonauts of the Air”, “The Land Ironclads”… No?’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Then it’s time you did! I have most of his books in my room. Remind me to lend them to you the moment we get home.’
Needing one or two purchases, we found our way to relevant shops, where he introduced me as: ‘My niece, Miss von Wurthe,’ and when the name caused momentary pause he added hastily, ‘My sister’s child. Her stepfather’s German but she herself is English.’
‘Ah!’ The polite smiles reappeared. ‘Of course, of course. Delighted to make your acquaintance, miss.’
The fourth time this happened, before Frank could add his speech of mitigation, I broke into a torrent of German: ‘Guten Tag! Wie geht’s? Haben Sie…’
Having left the shop in a hurry, Frank didn’t know whether to be exasperated or amused. ‘Look here, old girl, you can’t go around giving people shocks like that. This is provincial Lynn, where they believe what it says in the papers, and in the papers they’re warning about the dangers of the evil Hun who’s plotting to descend on our shores, pillaging and plundering, murdering babes in their beds…’
‘Oh, what nonsense!’ I scoffed. ‘Surely people don’t really believe…’
‘I’m afraid they do,’ he said sombrely, levity draining away. ‘And I’m even more afraid they may be right. So, please… easy does it, eh? If you go about deliberately antagonizing people it will upset the Mater.’
Grandmother. Of course.
‘Especially at this time,’ Frank added, appealing to my sympathy.
A sigh escaped me. He was right – despite her apparent composure, Grandmother had just lost her husband of forty years. ‘Very well, I’ll try,’ I conceded. ‘But I’m beginning to wonder if there’s anywhere I can just be myself. In Berlin I was picked on for being English; here I’m not welcome because they think I’m German. Do you know that a woman on the train from Harwich accused me of being a spy?’
‘What?’ The word exploded out of him on a gust of laughter.
‘Well, almost.’
He commiserated, ‘My poor old Kate!’ but he was hugely amused as he flung an avuncular arm around me. ‘What you need is a cup of tea and some of Saffron’s lardy cake. Let’s find a cab and go and see if she’s at home, shall we?’
* * *
Harry and his wife lived in the new suburbs that were growing up around the town. Down a broad avenue planted with young trees, Hawthorn House stood detached behind low privet hedges, neatly trimmed, amid tree-shaded gardens laid down to lawns and shrubs. It presented a wide, double bay-fronted aspect behind a gravelled drive, with a half-circle of brick steps leading up to a front door panelled in patterned glass.
A pretty young maid answered the door and, flustered by Frank’s smile, went to see whether her mistress was able to entertain us. Returning, she told us to go to the breakfast room. Here, my aunt-by-marriage was sitting in a chaise-longue with her feet up, draped in a loose silk robe under a flowing, flouncy tea gown, with slippers on her feet and her long auburn-brown hair held loosely up by combs. Sunlight poured through open French windows and the breeze brought the sound of birds arguing.
‘Frank!’ Her face lit up and she held out her hand to him, revealing an arm which was not so much plump as puffy. Pregnancy had bloated her. Before it, she must have been quite a beauty, with her olive skin and that soft red-brown hair setting off wide hazel eyes.
‘Don’t get up.’ He bent to kiss her lifted cheek. ‘How are you today?’
‘Tired. Tired all the time. I shall be glad when the baby comes.’ As an afterthought, she added dutifully, ‘How’s the Mater?’
‘Bearing up stoically, as ever,’ Frank answered. ‘Look, I’ve brought Kate to see you. She was starting to go crinkled at the edges with being stuck in the house, though we’ve been out and about locally finding rooms for all the arrivees, haven’t we, Kate?’
Saffron was smiling at me, holding out her hand. ‘We hardly had a chance to meet the other night. What a rotten introduction to Denes Hill for you. I’m so sorry. Come and sit here by me. Shall we have some tea?’
‘Not for me,’ Frank demurred. ‘I asked the cab to wait. I need to see Harry. Is he at the factory?’
‘Isn’t he always? Yes, go and find him, Frank. Bring him home for lunch, if you can. Can you stay for lunch, both of you? I shall be glad of some different company.’
Left alone, my aunt and I made a start on polite conversation: she asked about Mother and my family in Berlin, and my journey, and I admired her house, which made her offer to show me round – ‘You’ll forgive my state of undress at this hour, I hope. I dress for comfort at present.’
The baby was due in three weeks, she told me as she led the way. She would be glad when it was over.
Contrasted with the heavy ornamentation and Victorian gloom of Denes Hill, Hawthorn House was light and airy, almost as large as our house in Berlin, four reception rooms and ample domestic offices downstairs, with the luxury of gas for heat and electricity for light. It was decorated in clear, pale colours with furnishings and ornaments of the latest art nouveau style
, printed fabrics and lots of coloured glass. Saffron seemed flattered that I admired her taste. Upstairs there were five large bedrooms, a nursery suite still smelling of fresh paint, ready for the baby, and a bathroom boasting both hot and cold running water, not to mention two lavatories – I sneaked a look round when Saffron sent me up to ‘take off your things and be comfortable’. I did so with relief, removing my hat and outer garments, tidying my hair and leaving myself cooler in lacy white blouse and black tunic skirt.
Saffron had returned to the breakfast room where she stood by the French windows enjoying the air. ‘That’s better,’ she approved. ‘I want you to feel at home here, Kate. If ever you feel the need to escape from the dragon, you’ll be welcome with us. You like the house, then? So do I. I sometimes have to tap wood to make sure I’m really here.’ Glancing about her with a smile of pleasure, she slid her arm through mine, partly in affection and partly for support. ‘Let’s go and sit in the garden, shall we? I’ve asked Maisie to bring us some gingerade.’
Under an old apple tree where hard green fruit waited to ripen, she sank down on a rustic bench, a Japanese parasol protecting her from dappled sunlight. I sat on the grass nearby, idly plucking daisies as she talked about herself.
‘When we were first married,’ she said, ‘we lived at Denes Hill and Harry came in to the factory by train every day. Not very satisfactory. Well… it wasn’t so much the travelling as…’ She let out a little breath as she spread her hands. ‘Living with in-laws is not easy, Kate. Especially when you’re not quite what your mother-in-law had hoped for, d’you know what I mean?’ Letting her smile go lopsided, she touched my arm. ‘No woman will ever be good enough for any of Lady Vi’s sons. She adores her boys, as you may have gathered. But she doesn’t have much opinion of her own sex. Not even her own daughters. Your poor mother must have told you that, and now Vicky’s discovering it, too.’
‘Actually…’ I ventured, ‘Mother doesn’t speak much about the past. I assumed she had her reasons, but now I’m beginning to wonder.’
As I discovered, Saffron loved to talk, especially if she herself was a protagonist in the action. She had been an onlooker at Denes Hill, coming late into the family picture, and she had her own biases – her habit of referring to Grandmother as ‘Lady Vi’, for instance, was not complimentary.
Like Alice, she had to begin at the beginning, with ‘Your mother and John were the oldest of the children – twins, of course.’
‘Yes, I know. But she was born first – seven minutes before John.’
‘Quite, dear, though John always counted as first, being the boy.’
‘Oh?’ Mother had never told me that.
After the older twins came Harry; then Frank; then another daughter, Pearl, who had died in infancy.
‘Then comes the Great Gap,’ Saffron said, hazel eyes sparking with a touch of malice. ‘According to Lady Vi, that was caused by her being so upset over losing little Pearl. But I’ve also heard it said that the old man went astray, for which she banned him from her bed. Whatever the reason, it was ten years before Emmet and Tom were born.’
Sadly, something had gone wrong with the birth of the younger twins: Emmet had arrived normally, but poor Tom emerged feet first, with his cord wrapped round his neck. Thinking of it, Saffron laid a hand protectively on her own bloated stomach. ‘I lie awake at night and wonder what I should do if something happened to my baby. D’you know what I mean? I think I’d rather it was born dead than… Well, Tom’s a dear and everyone loves him and he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he’s not normal, is he? He’ll be twenty-one in January, but he still behaves like a little boy. Sometimes I look at him and Emmet, and I just can’t believe… What was I saying?’
‘You were recounting the family tree. Vicky’s the last of them. She’s only six months older than I am. So Mother must have married my father before that.’ It was Mother’s story that interested me.
‘That’s right. Clara was sent away to stay with relatives in Cumbria. She’d been growing a bit restless, I believe, so—’
‘Restless?’
‘Growing up. You know what I mean. We all go through it.’ But she couldn’t meet my eye; she was pleating her tea gown with plump fingers. ‘It may have had something to do with her being so jealous of John. I don’t know! All this happened before I met John.’
Surely she meant Harry? ‘John?’
‘Yes, John.’ Hazel eyes clouded, she looked down at her distended body, stroking the bulge with a slow, tender hand. ‘It was John I knew first. It was John I was going to marry.’ I had been going to pursue my questions about Mother, but this new development had me intrigued. If Saffron had been in love with John, how was she now married to Harry?
‘I was terribly young,’ she said. ‘About your age. Oh, I didn’t have any real hope that John would marry me. Not at first. He was so far above me. My mother was widowed young; she had a struggle to manage, so I took work in a shop – a good shop – a hatter’s. That’s how I met John. He must have bought half a dozen hats he didn’t really want. Then we ran into each other on the beach – I’d gone on an excursion with some friends and, well… you know what I mean. You somehow know, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Chin on knees, I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Oh, when would Carl-Heinz write? Soon. Please, soon!
‘So I found myself being invited over to Denes Hill,’ Saffron went on, ‘to tea parties and cricket matches. That’s when I met your mother, after she was widowed and brought you home. John was the one thing we had in common. When they were children, so she said, he could do no wrong and she could do no right. He got the pony, and the first bicycle, and the chance to escape, to go to school…’ Misty-eyed, she gazed into the distance, as if seeing pictures projected against the far hedge. ‘I’m sure she loved him, really. Everybody did. I mean, he never asked for privileges, he just took them because it was his due, as the boy, d’you know what I mean? That’s how he was. Clara didn’t understand that. Dear John… he would never have hurt anyone. Not intentionally. But Clara… she said he caused hurt because he didn’t understand that other people had feelings.’
‘Some men are like that,’ I said, thinking darkly of Willi von Sturm, conniving to separate me from Carl-Heinz.
Saffron misinterpreted my expression. ‘Appealing, aren’t they?’
‘Not to me! I hate arrogance.’
‘I thought… Forgive me, but I thought… Some young man you’ve had to leave behind? Well, now,’ she answered my cautious look, ‘it wouldn’t be so strange. Do you want to tell me about him?’
‘There’s nothing to say,’ I denied. ‘Please, go on – about Uncle John.’
‘Well… to cut a long story short, we decided to get married. My mother was delighted, but his mother…’ She made an eloquent face. ‘Lady Vi tried to stop us, said we must wait six months before we could even announce our engagement, and then she said we couldn’t be married until John was thirty. Delay, delay… But of course he didn’t live to be thirty. He was drowned, that very summer.’
Moved by the sadness in her eyes, I blurted, ‘It must have been frightful! I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to…’
Smiling, she reached to stroke my cheek. ‘If you lost him, you’d go on, Kate. I did. Had to. And, for me, there was Harry…
‘He was away when I met John. Fighting the Boers, you know? He was terribly injured, poor boy. Like a skeleton when he came home. He missed John, and he liked to talk about him. So he came to see me, and we became friends, and then it started to be more than that. But we didn’t speak of it until my mother died, quite suddenly. Harry was so sweet to me then. But I was terrified of what Lady Vi would say, so… we went away and got married in secret. It caused a bit of a stinko at the time, d’you know what I mean? But I’m not the first to fall in love with two brothers. It happened to the new Queen – when she was Princess May, she was engaged to King George’s older brother, but he died before they could be married, so she
married the younger boy and they’ve been as happy as larks. Not that Lady Vi would ever admit it was the same. She thinks I’m a fortune-hunter, nasty-minded old…’ With another grimace, she stopped herself. ‘Thing is, you see, I happen to love old Harry. He’s probably better for me than John would have been. He needs me, d’you know what I mean?’
How lucky she was, I thought.
Saffron cocked her head like a bird, bright eyes probing deep. ‘Does your chap need you?’
‘I…’ I began and, to my own surprise, couldn’t go on for tears.
It was almost a week since I had left Berlin and been carted across Europe in a daze. Only now did reality seem to catch up with me. Why had I agreed, so meekly, to come? How long would it be before I saw my family again? Would I go to college in London, or remain in Norfolk? Would Grandmother forgive me for whatever it was Mother had done? Where was my real home now, here or in Germany? And what if there should be a war – what then, with both Fritzi and Carl-Heinz in the army? And – worst pain of all for a lonely girl of eighteen – why hadn’t Carl-Heinz written to me? Why had he let me go with only that cold letter for my heart’s ease?
These uncertainties poured out of me, all over poor Saffron. I found myself with my head against her knee while I wept, telling her my whole story, and she stroked my hair, saying soothing things.
‘Of course he cares, you dear goose. Why… he probably only meant that you ought to be patient and wait a while. You’ll see – he’ll write to you soon and beg you to go back to him. I can feel it in my bones.’
* * *
When Frank and Harry came in for lunch, we enjoyed a cold collation at a table set in the garden, where a breeze toyed with a green tablecloth and with the big straw hat Saffron had donned to shade her face. Frank kept the party lively. Harry was quieter, suiting his status as the oldest man of the family now. His hair was fair but thinning at the crown and receding from his temples, and his face was hollow-cheeked, with not an ounce of spare flesh on his body. He ate very slowly, small quantities at a time – I presumed because of the injury which had left him with only part of his stomach. But he was friendly enough and joined in the laughter, especially when Saffron explained to me about her name.