by D. J. Taylor
He sealed the letter up in its envelope and began on another one—more formal and much less ironic—to a friend in the Ministry of Supply.
She woke up one morning with a curious conviction that something had changed. At first it was difficult to establish where the roots of this transformation lay. The room was the same as ever. The rocking horse’s ivory teeth were bared in contempt. There was a mouse scuttling across the carpet towards a hole in the wainscoting, but she was used to the mice.
After a second or two she realised that the change was to do with the house itself, that the radio downstairs was playing at what seemed a massively amplified volume and that there seemed to be footsteps running in all directions. Eventually one of the pairs of footsteps could be heard approaching along the corridor, the key creaked in the lock and Gladys, her face distended with emotion, more or less fell into the room.
‘What on earth is the matter, Gladys?’
‘It’s the Germans, miss.’
So that was it. ‘What have the Germans done?’
‘They’ve come round the end of the Maginot Line, miss.’
‘What? Invaded France?’
‘That’s what it said, miss.’
Cynthia found that she was interested in this information only insofar as it concerned her own immediate prospects.
‘Do you know where Mr Bannister is, Gladys?’
‘No, miss, I haven’t seen him. It was the mistress that told me just now, after she switched on the radio.’
Somewhere in the depths of the house the telephone bell was ringing. There were more footsteps, at first above her head, then further away. A feeling of intense exhilaration at the thought of Mr Bannister, Captain Ramsay, and Tyler Kent being proved wrong was swiftly anaesthetised by deep unease.
She had to get away from this. If the Germans really were going to invade, Mr Bannister had even more reason for keeping her prisoner. Would Gladys stop her? She had obligations to Gladys, debts to be repaid.
Meanwhile, Gladys was calming down. The colour was returning to her face. With it came an awareness of her responsibilities.
‘I’m sorry to rush in like that, miss. But I thought you’d want to know.’
‘It’s very kind of you, Gladys. Of course I should want to know.’
‘I daresay Eunice will be along soon with your breakfast.’
There was something very heartening about this. Continents might be in flame and Stukas descending on the Ardennes, but Eunice would still be along with her breakfast. The light was falling through the curtains in yellowish daggers.
When Gladys had gone, she got out of bed and put on her clothes. The news had had a galvanising effect. Suddenly there was purpose in dressing herself in Hermione’s cast-off jodhpurs and a jumper that smelled strongly of horse-liniment. As she got dressed she made plans: sharp, urgent plans.The contents of the room—the chair, the bedside table, the half-full water jug on its china plate—were her allies, each of them ripe to be chosen for the task she had in mind.
She had just finished dressing and was staring out of the window at the sodden grass when Eunice arrived in the room with the breakfast tray.
‘Here’s your things, miss.’
‘Thank you very much, Eunice.’
Continents in flame; dive-bombers over the Ardennes; machine-guns strafing the sleepy French towns. It was all the same to Eunice. She had plucked her eyebrows again and painted them over in the shape of a couple of circumflexes. Nasty little bitch, Cynthia thought, rather surprising herself with the intensity of her dislike, nasty little Lisle-stocking-wearing servant-girl bitch.
If it had been Gladys, she knew she would not have been able to do what she now did, which was to seize the water jug by its throat, swing it round in an arc and deliver a brisk but decisive blow to the back of Eunice’s head.
She had been prepared for the force of the blow, but not for the noise. Eunice screamed like a stuck pig, as her father would have said, and went down on her side. The breakfast tray clattered against the edge of the bed, sending a teaspoon leaping four feet in the air. The teapot broke in half. It was all so redolent of Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb, the two bad mice in the story book, that she almost laughed at the memory.
The key to the door was still in Eunice’s hand, clenched so tightly that she had to twist up the fingers one by one. As she did this Eunice groaned slightly. The blood lay around her head now in a good-sized pool and her Lisle-stockinged flanks lay wantonly askew. The steam from the spilled teapot rose off the carpet. Cynthia found that she did not care in the least about Eunice. She took a last glance around the room and stepped out into the corridor.
There was no one about. Downstairs the radio was still blaring away. Somewhere a dog barked. She was surprised at how light-headed she felt. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to have eaten the breakfast before hitting Eunice on the head. She went quaking down the staircase with one hand on the rail, alert for trouble, but none came.
There were people in the house, but she could not see them. Several rooms away she could hear Mrs Bannister’s voice raised in complaint. Instead of making for the front door, which seemed too obvious a thing to do, she set off along the passage to the left, which led to the kitchen. The electric light had not been switched on and the photographs on the wall—photographs of old dead Bannisters in morning coats and picture hats—gleamed out of the murk. The noise of the radio, wherever it came from, was loud enough to pick out individual phrases.
At the entrance to the kitchen, in a little vestibule dominated by the portrait of some ancient Bannister dressed in the robes of a Cinque Port Warden, she came upon Hermione, still in her dressing gown, with a piece of toast in one hand and a strangely exalted glint in her eye.
‘Have you heard the news?’ Hermione said. The dense planes of her forehead made her look more than ever like a Cubist painting. ‘Isn’t it marvellous? Father says it’s a terrible tragedy, but I don’t think he does really believe that, do you?’
‘I’m going now, Hermione,’ Cynthia said firmly. ‘And if you try to stop me I shall hit you as hard as I possibly can. Do you understand?’
Whether it was that Hermione remembered the scuffle in Bishop’s Park or that she now occupied some spiritual plane where physical activity meant nothing to her, she meekly gave way. The kitchen was empty: no trouble there. It occurred to her that a really sharp operator—Anthea, say—would have made for Mr Bannister’s study to see if she could find the book. But she knew that she was not up to this, that her own preservation was a matter of profound importance to her, that even what happened to the Bannisters did not matter as long as she survived.
Instead she went out of the back door, along the edge of the kitchen garden and a jungular conservatory stuffed full of moribund tomato-vines, through a low wicker gate in the red-stone wall, and out into the wider landscape beyond.
The obvious thing was to get away: but where exactly? It was a warmish day, but her shoes were already taking in water from the sodden grass. The land at the back of Ashburton Grange went incrementally uphill, reaching a peak about half a mile away in what looked like some clumps of beech trees. She decided to make for the trees as a preliminary to circling the house and, potentially, getting back to the Arundel road.
There was still no one about. In the distance, towards the beech trees, a few sheep grazed. The ground at the foot of the hill was more or less level and littered with tiny obstructions—packing cases, a miniature rail or two—all arranged in an irregular circle, like a dwarfs’ gymkhana. Already exhausted by the effort of disabling Eunice, leaving the house, and dealing with Hermione, she sped past. Here there were other impediments: a bale of straw; a pile of flapping grey sacks; a hockey stick. The hockey stick troubled her, for it had Henry Bannister stencilled in ink on the handle.
She was seventy or eighty yards away from the kitchen garden now, but n
ear enough to hear the sound that the fastening on the wicker gate made as it snapped open and Mr Bannister came rapidly out onto the grass.
It was a myth that fat men moved slowly. The evidence of a dozen dance floors and football matches played on bare earth under the Eastern sun confirmed this. Mr Bannister seemed to fairly motor on up the hill. The shotgun clasped to his chest she was prepared to regard as a piece of bravado. There was a pain in her side now, the side where her ribs had been stove in back in Ceylon, and the beech wood looked further away than it had two minutes before. Briefly, she wondered whether to throw herself upon Mr Bannister’s mercy. But Anthea, she knew, would not have deigned to do this.
Red-faced, his eyebrows somehow furrier than usual, Mr Bannister was shouting something at her. One or two sheep looked interestedly on. If she could reach the wood she thought she would be safe. It would take more than Mr Bannister to catch her in there. Mr Bannister was shouting something else now: she could not make out the words. The ground, having risen sharply under her feet for a hundred yards, now levelled out sharply and the check to her momentum nearly tumbled her over. On the other hand, the beech wood was in sight: denser than she had imagined and a good quarter of a mile across, like one of the fairy-tale woods of childhood, whose bracken concealed imploring hands.
She was rushing on still, quite oblivious to where she put her feet: one of her shoes was twenty yards behind her on the hill. Mr Bannister was not moving quite so fast now, but shouting rather more. On the whole, this was preferable. Someone else had emerged out of the wicker gate now, but they were too far away to make out. She had a vision of Mrs Bannister, her mad-terrier’s face alive with anxiety, bicycling after them.
At the top of the hill the Bannisters’ domain ended in a barbed-wire fence, measured out by stanchions five yards apart. There was a stile halfway along and she dashed towards it, her heart pounding so fast that it seemed the only part of her that really existed. There was a hollow beneath the stile full of deliquescing leaves, which disguised its full extent, and she misjudged her jump, fell awkwardly on one leg, felt her ankle turn, and then crawled away on her hands and knees, just as Mr Bannister reached the stile and reared up over its saddle.
Time, which had been passing very rapidly, suddenly seemed to slow to such an extent that she became aware of her surroundings again. A jay which had been surveying her from a fallen log took flight and went screaming away into the heavens. The blue sky overhead lurched as she twisted round to see what Mr Bannister was up to.
Henry’s face was there somewhere in the grass, and the heaps of piled-up sticks in the forest’s undergrowth and the evil-eyed monkey at the temple door. Later she could never remember exactly what had happened, and in what order, whether Mr Bannister had dropped the shotgun as he rose up over the stile or whether it had caught on the wire. All she knew was that one moment the furious, juddering outline of his face with its caterpillar eyebrows was looming over her and the next the gun was lying on the ground between them and they were both straining after it.
Her hatred of Mr Bannister, she realised, was terrifyingly intense. She could not bear to see him rolling around on the wet turf a yard or so away from her; she would do anything not to have him there. Her hand was on the gun’s stock now, rough but consoling, and bringing back Henry again, blithe, red-faced Henry teaching her to shoot on the moor in Northumberland and telling her that it was a skill that would undoubtedly come in useful. Mr Bannister seemed to register what she was up to now and was making piteous little jabbering noises.
Of the shot, which sent every bird in the wood flying into the bright blue air in terror, she had no memory at all.
She lay on her back in the wet grass for what seemed like hours, staring up at the pale sky with the gun pressed against her thigh and no idea of what might have happened to her or to Mr Bannister. A little sighing noise not far away pulsed on for a bit and then disappeared. The water was soaking into the backs of Hermione’s jodhpurs, and she remembered the blood streaming over her dress in the jungle thicket in Ceylon.
Another noise started up somewhere in the dense air above her head and she raised her shoulders an inch or two and stared anxiously towards it, but the figures making it shied away and seemed as frightened of her as she was of them, and so she lay back in the wet grass again, not anxious now but curiously detached and isolated, damp and disheartened, waiting for something to happen.
It had been a disappointing war so far at Lonsdale House. One or two of the girls had brothers serving with the BEF who sent occasional letters, and the local vicar had come to lecture them about a walking holiday he had once taken in the vicinity of the Maginot Line, but that was all. On the other hand, if war had been low on excitement, it offered substantial opportunities for malingering.
Just now the school seemed to spend most of its time digging for victory at a series of allotments that had been coaxed into being at the back of the lacrosse pitch. Supervision was not all it might have been. Keen girls tended to labour on strenuously. The more dégagée occupied themselves with long walks. It was in this spirit, emboldened by the news that had been conveyed to them over the breakfast table, well wrapped up against an uncertain spring, that Daphne and Marigold had set off in the direction of the Forty Acre Wood.
‘I suppose it’ll be a long war now.’
‘I suppose it will.’
‘Mummy says it will probably go on so long that by the time it’s over there won’t be anyone left for a girl to marry.’
‘That was what happened to my aunt in the last war. Her young man got killed at Ypres. But Daddy said it was rather a relief, and she’d never wanted to get married in the first place.’
One or two lambs had begun moving tentatively around the fields through which they passed, and there was bright sunshine illumining the entrance to the wood. Neither of these attractions had any charms for Daphne and Marigold. They were essentially fireside girls.
‘Isn’t it frightfully cold?’
‘Frightfully… . Do you think we ought to go back soon? We could call in at the sickbay and cheer up Mademoiselle.’
‘Do you know, I think Mademoiselle is a fifth columnist? There’s a look of absolute scorn on her face when Miss McGinley says the Victory Prayer… . What on earth was that noise?’
‘The farmer shooting rabbits, I expect. Let’s go round here.’
It was sodden underfoot and the shrivelled beech leaves stuck to the soles of their shoes. In the aftermath of the gunshot, the wood was unexpectedly silent. Then, turning a corner, on the margin of a spinney flanked by dense undergrowth, they came upon something quite unprecedented.
‘Heavens! Isn’t that somebody lying in the bracken?’
‘I expect it’s Miss Jeavons been out on the tiles.’
It was not Miss Jeavons, but a thin-faced and immensely pale girl only a few years older than themselves who had done something to her ankle and was on the verge of hysterics. The girls were used to hysterics. They had also been instructed in the rudiments of first aid.
They squatted on their heels and comforted her, and when she showed no interest in getting up or pulling herself together, promptly returned to the allotment to summon help, a mission which, as the headmistress later remarked, was highly creditable both to them and the school as a whole.
Johnson and Hegarty went south along the Brighton Road, through nondescript suburbs. The streets were remarkably free of traffic in the circumstances, but here and there gangs of Local Defence Volunteers lurked behind makeshift checkpoints. As none of these extended more than a few yards beyond the pavement, it was a comparatively simple task to drive round them.
‘What are they waiting for, I wonder?’ Hegarty said. ‘Hitler’s got his work cut out on the Marne. He can’t possibly be expected to invade Croydon.’
‘I don’t think logistics mean very much at a time like this,’ Johnson told him. ‘It’s symbolis
m that counts.’
‘Symbolism,’ Hegarty said bitterly. He had not quite decided if the morning’s excursion appealed to him or not. ‘That’s one of the reasons I hate driving through Croydon. It always reminds me of one of the worst symbolic moments of my career.’
‘What was that, then?’ It was about half-past nine: with any luck they would reach Arundel by eleven.
‘You won’t believe me, but it was only two streets away from here that Mary Beaver decided to leave me at precisely the moment the poulterer delivered the dead duck we were going to eat for supper.’
Johnson had heard this before. It was a good story, but not really in keeping with the paraphernalia of the day: passing checkpoints, the angry faces of the Local Defence Volunteers—quite unappeased by the cheery salutes that Hegarty gave them out of the car’s nearside window—and the memory of the early morning radio reports.
‘Remind me,’ Hegarty said, ‘exactly what we are supposed to be accomplishing today?’ He had clearly taken against the Arundel mission.
‘I thought you saw Shillito’s memorandum. It was certainly addressed to you.’
‘If I read every piece of paper that arrives on my desk I don’t suppose I should ever leave it. And Nancy Oglethorpe could go back to her husband every night unmolested. But you don’t seriously expect Bannister to be there, do you? I expect he’s in the north of Scotland or somewhere by now. Or with some Silk in Gray’s Inn preparing his defence. The girl too, if it comes to that.’
‘Shillito says the surveillance report reckons they’re both still on the premises. Not to mention the membership book. But there’s more than that. According to Anthea Carey the girl found a letter to Bannister from Ribbentrop.’
‘I’ll believe that exists when I see it. Really, though, I will. What’s she like, this Miss Kirkpatrick?’
‘I really have no idea,’ Johnson said. ‘But Anthea Carey absolutely told Shillito that if he didn’t have this Miss Kirkpatrick released instanter it would go all the way to Downing Street. I believe she’s the Prime Minister’s second cousin or something.’