Annie was doubled over, clinging to the back of an armchair, her face ashen. In a moment she straightened, breathing heavily, “Sorry love. It looks as if you were right. Ah!” she flinched again, her hand going to her back.
“Oh, Lord.”
Annie took a step, supporting herself still with the back of the chair. She leaned for a moment, the sweat running from a face that was pinched and sickly with pain. Then her body convulsed and she sank her teeth into her lip.
Molly ran to her, supporting her as best as she could. “They’re coming too fast. We’ll never be able to get you home. Oh, Annie—!”
“I know.” Annie tried a none-too-successful smile. “Prize idiot, eh? Leave it – a minute – p’raps they’ll – ease.”
Molly eyed her doubtfully. “It doesn’t look much like it.” She took her coat off and tossed it across a chair. “Come on, we’d better get you upstairs.”
“No.” For the first time panic sparked in the green eyes. “I’ve got – to get home. All the stuff’s there. And Charley—”
“It looks to me,” Molly said practically, “as if it’s going to be a damned sight easier to bring the stuff – and Charley – to you. Don’t I recall that you had young Michael in half an hour or something? We can’t risk it, Annie. Just look at the weather. Even if I could leave you there’s no telling how long it would take me to find transport. Be a good girl and come upstairs. I’ll telephone for the doctor. It may be a false alarm. If it is, then the minute the pains ease we’ll get you home. If not – well, we’ll manage, you’ll see. Come on, lean on me. Let’s get you to bed.”
And so it was that, just over an hour later, in the chaos of a household turned upside down by his unexpected arrival, Thomas James Benton bawled his way into the world, quite unaware that he had chosen the wrong address.
Chapter Forty-Four
Three nights later, Molly sat curled up in the big armchair in the parlour taking the first opportunity she had had to write to Jack. In the breezy night something clattered metallically in the street outside. She lifted her head to listen. The gate rattled again. She uncurled her legs from beneath her and ran to the window, opening the curtains a bare crack to peep through. The street was empty. The gate swung fiercely in the wind. She let the curtains drop. Where in heaven’s name was Danny? She looked at the clock that ticked on the mantelpiece. Midnight. He had never stayed out this late before.
Restlessly she poked the fire into a heap of quickly-cooling ashes.
Where was he?
She sat down again, picked up the letter, read through what she had written, picked up the pen and dipped it into the little glass inkwell, sat staring sightless at the paper.
Where was he?
The gate rattled again, but this time it clicked shut firmly and there came the clip of footsteps on the tiled path. Molly felt every tensed nerve relax as she heard her son’s key in the lock, and then, in reaction, felt a surge of anger the strength of which was in direct proportion to her relief. She slowly laid aside her letter and stood up.
“Danny?”
The quiet footfalls in the hall stilled. A moment later the door opened a little and Danny’s tousled head appeared around it. The curly, autumnal hair was wild, and the thin, fair skin had that pallid sheen of someone who had either just been sick or was just about to be. The picturesquely prominent bones promised his father’s good looks, but windblown and heavy-eyed as he was at the moment, Molly thought acidly, it took some imagination to see it.
The boy, clinging unsteadily to the door, did his best, with an obvious effort, to focus his eyes on her. “Mum? What are you doing up? I thought you’d be in bed.”
“I’ll bet you did.” Even from where she stood Molly could smell the alcohol and the stale reek of cigarette smoke. “What time do you call this? Where the devil have you been?”
“Out with my mates, that’s all. Look, Mum, it’s late – I’ve got to get up in the morning—”
“It’s a pity you didn’t think of that earlier. It seems a little late to realize it at—” with precise movements Molly consulted her little corsage watch “—four minutes past midnight? Will you come in for a moment, please? And shut the door behind you.”
For a rebellious second he stayed where he was, then with the graceless unco-ordination of belligerent adolescence he came into the room and stood looking at his mother in guilty defiance.
“I asked you where you’d been?”
He shrugged. “Up West. With some of me mates.”
“What? The West End?”
“Yes.” His mouth was sullen.
“Doing what?”
“Nothing much. Kicking around.”
She looked at him searchingly. “Kicking around,” she repeated at last.
He flushed at her tone.
“Supposing there had been a raid?”
“There wouldn’t have been,” he said, on the edge of rudeness. “Not in this weather.”
“Let’s get something very clear, Danny Benton, right here and now,” she said, her voice quiet and ice-hard. “I will not have you staying out until all hours like this. I will not have you ‘kicking around’ the West End with the likes of Albie Duncan and the others. I will not have it. Nor will I have you drinking and smoking and God knows what else besides—” She passed a tired hand across her eyes. “Get to bed, for God’s sake, before you fall over.”
She did not look up until the door had closed behind him, and not until the sound of his footsteps had faded did she go upstairs herself.
Annie smiled sympathetically as Molly looked in round the bedroom door. The room was warm and cozy; a fire glowed in the hearth and the rosy light of one small lamp gilded Annie’s fiery halo of hair and gleamed on her bared breast where baby Tom was suckling contentedly. “They’re a lot easier at this age, aren’t they?” Annie said, nodding down at the suckling child.
Molly had to laugh. “There was a time when I’d never have believed it, but, yes, they are,” she said wryly.
* * *
It was less than a week before she clashed with her son again. On the evening before Annie and the baby were due to move back home, Danny announced at dinner with a studied casualness that immediately alerted his mother that he would be “going out later”.
“Going out where?”
There was a tell-tale moment’s thought. “Just out. I might go to the Electric Theatre. They’ve got Tess of the D‘Urbevilles on again at the Boleyn.”
“You’ve seen it once.”
“No law that says I can’t see it again, is there?” His voice was insolent.
“Danny.”
“What?”
“Where are you really going?”
He jumped up, making the crockery clatter on the table. Kitty was watching him with wide, distressed eyes. Meg shot her brother one sharp, exasperated look and went on eating.
“Will you stop treating me like an idiot five-year-old? I’ve told you where I’m going. Believe it or not. I don’t care.”
Kitty put a hand to her mouth. Meg did not look up until the sound of the front door slamming shook the house.
And this time the Zeppelins did come.
Molly was in the bedroom, helping Annie to pack, with the baby sleeping soundly in his cot when the first gun rumbled and the first whistle sounded. Annie lifted her head sharply and put her finger to her lips. Molly stood very still and listened with her. Very faintly, on the quiet night air, was carried the drone of an engine. As the two women stood so, looking at each other, the door burst open and the twins erupted into the room. Little Tom, disturbed, began to cry.
“It’s a Zep!” Meg cried excitedly. “Quick, turn the lights out, let’s have a look.”
“It probably won’t come this—” Molly’s words were drowned in the rumble of a big gun that rattled the window and shook the glass ornaments on her dressing table.
“There! That’s the gun at Wanstead!” Meg said triumphantly. “It is coming this way. Oh, come o
n, Mum, turn the lights out.”
“Shut the door then. And put the screen in front of the fire.” Another sound reached their straining ears now, lighter, a wasp-like buzz counterpointing the resonant hum of the airship engines.
Annie flew to the cot and picked up the baby, holding him high on her shoulder and rocking him, soothingly.
Molly checked around the room before reaching to the lamp. “All right?”
Annie nodded. Molly turned the lamp down and it died, guttering. In the darkness they crowded to the window and opened the curtains.
Apart from the uncertainly wavering beams of the searchlights there was nothing to be seen.
“Oh.” Meg was disappointed. “Can’t we go into the garden and look?”
“No,” Molly said sharply. “You stay here with us.”
Meg subsided.
“It’s coming closer,” Annie whispered. “Listen.”
The droning was much louder.
“There it is!” Meg shrieked, and then, “oh, no it isn’t It’s the searchlights on a cloud.”
Gunfire grumbled again, like the rolling thunder of a summer storm.
“Where’s Danny, do you think?” Kitty asked in a small voice, and was treated to a painful nudge and a withering look from her sister.
“There’s an aeroplane, look,” Meg said. “It must be searching for the Zep. Oh, please, Mum, can’t we go outside?”
“No.”
The little black-painted plane, a moving speck in the searchlight’s beam, buzzed overhead, very high, turned, banked into the cloud and disappeared.
“He can’t find it,” Meg said, disgustedly. “You wouldn’t think they could miss something that big, would you?”
“Quiet a minute, Meg.”
They stood in silence. The Wanstead gun had fallen silent, and in the quiet moment before the big guns closer to the river concussed the night, the sound of the enemy engines were suddenly very loud. Someone in a nearby street blew several sharp blasts on a whistle, and a man shouted.
Kitty’s hand crashed against the window. “There! There it is!” she shouted, pointing, as in a flickering finger of light a blunt-nosed monster emerged from a light-gilded cloud. The crack of rifle-fire greeted its appearance and a new explosion of noise from a big gun came very close behind. Other searchlights swept across the sky towards the prey, trying to pin it down in meshed shafts of light. In the sudden onslaught of sound the great ship seemed to be moving noiselessly; the enormous, shadowy shape slid across the night sky, lifted, and was gone. The beams of light frantically searched, probing, sweeping the clouds, finding nothing. Fiery shrapnel bursts marked the place where the menacing thing had been.
“Oh, they can’t have lost it!” Meg shrieked. “They can’t.”
“They bloody have,” Annie said.
“It was heading for the river from the look of it.” Molly was straining her eyes into the light-swept sky.
“The docks and the arsenal,” Annie said.
“You wouldn’t believe that they – what was that?” A violent explosion had shaken the window. Before they could move or speak there was another, and another.
“The bastards are unloading their bombs.” Annie rocked the crying baby. “There now, Tommy, love. There now.”
Over towards the Thames an ominous glow had appeared, reflecting sullenly onto low cloud. There was another crumping explosion, and another. Flames reared into the night, red and yellow tongues licking at roof and spire. There was no sign of the airship.
“Where’s that bloody plane?” Annie asked. There was a slight, worried crease between her arched brows as she looked towards the fire.
“That’s too close to be the docks burning, isn’t it?” Kitty asked very quietly. “It’s houses. They’ve bombed houses.”
“The guns got too close for comfort I expect. They’re just getting rid of their bombs so that they can get away.”
“It’s over our way, isn’t it?” Annie asked.
Molly dragged her mind from the thought of the absent Danny. “I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell.”
The guns further up the river in the heart of London were crashing now, and more searchlights wandered fruitlessly and blindly about the dark skies. There were more explosions, much further away. Flames lit the darkened streets. The City guns boomed. People were outside now, in nightshirts, pyjamas, dressing gowns, apparently oblivious of the cold, calling and pointing.
“It’s gone,” Molly said. Her eyes were on the ominous red glow, welded to the sheaves of sparks that lit the night air like a devil’s torch. “Back to bed girls.”
“Oh, Mum, you can’t make us go back yeti”
“Bed,” she said firmly. “I’ll make us all a hot drink, and you can have yours in bed.”
Where was Danny? Where?
Annie was still staring out of the bedroom window, the baby asleep across her shoulder. “Beats me how they can do it.”
“Who?”
“The fellers that fly them damned machines. Bombing civilians. Women and kids. Fine brave, soldierly thing to do, wouldn’t you say? How can they do it?”
“It’s war,” Molly said, bleakly.
“It’s cold-blooded bloody murder, that’s what it is. Whichever way you look at it.” Tom made a small, mewing sound.
“Put him to bed, Annie. I’ll bring you a drink.”
* * *
The commotion in the street had died. Molly busied herself in the kitchen, listening for the rattle of the gate. In the past minutes she had in her imagination seen her son injured, maimed, dead. She could not prevent the awful pictures forming and dissolving in her mind, fuelled by the darkness and the lonely silence. She rubbed her knuckles into her eyes, then stood up determinedly, the tray of hot drinks in her hands.
She was at the foot of the stairs when she heard the gate open. And then the knock on the door.
She froze. Not Danny – he had a key. The knocker rose and fell again, a discordant sound, inordinately loud in the night-silence of the house.
As she opened the door, the sight of the burly policeman who stood waiting, silhouetted against the red, smoke-smudged night, almost stopped her heart completely.
“Yes?”
He cleared his throat. Behind him another, younger man, also in uniform, shuffled his feet, his head bowed. “Er – Mrs Benton?” the burly policeman asked, “Mrs Molly Benton?”
“Yes.” It was Danny, then. Her mouth was dry as ash. She could barely breathe.
“You’ve got a Mrs Annie Benton staying in the house with you?”
Taken aback, she stared. Annie?
“Mrs Benton?” he reiterated, gently.
“Oh, yes. She’s here.” Something awful was happening to her stomach. She leaned on the doorjamb to steady herself.
The policeman put out a hand to help her. “I think perhaps we’d better come in, Mrs Benton,” he said gruffly. “As I can see you’ve guessed we’ve got some bad news. Some very bad news indeed. I have to see Mrs Annie Benton—”
“The bombs?” Molly whispered.
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
She did not move. “Charley?” she asked, incredulously. “Not Charley? And the children—?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Hurt? Badly hurt?”
The man’s good-natured face mirrored the distress that she knew must be written upon her own. But he hesitated too long. She knew the answer before he spoke. “It was a direct hit, Mrs Benton. No one in the house survived.”
From upstairs Tom let out an indignant yell as his mother laid him down and came to the top of the stairs.
“Molly?” Annie called softly, “is something wrong?”
* * *
The shock of the deaths of Charley and the children was numbing for everyone and overwhelming for Annie. Molly found it took weeks for the reality of the tragedy to make itself truly felt. She discovered, too, that, perhaps not surprisingly, a new dread of those aerial monsters and their night-time a
ttacks had been instilled in her. Though she never admitted it to anyone, and never betrayed her fear before Danny or the twins, the already nerve-racking “Zep nights” became for her the worst terror she had ever endured.
Jack’s first leave after his brother’s death came in August. Neither he nor Nancy, who had been stationed at Ypres now for several months, had been able to get home for the funerals. He stood by the graves, granite-faced. Small bunches of fresh flowers showed that Annie and probably Sarah, with whom she and Tom were now living, had been there before them.
“Bastards,” he said. “Murdering bastards. Isn’t it enough for them, what’s happening over there? Must the whole world rot before were finished?”
Molly knelt and laid their own small offering upon the short, green grass. She had learned long ago that there were no words of comfort to offer that could be anything but empty.
In fact, these much-anticipated five days of Jack’s leave were not unclouded, and the reason could not be said to be entirely due to the tragic circumstances of his brother’s death. Months under fire, months of living with fear and with death, had taken an obvious toll of him. He was withdrawn and quiet, grim lines marked his face. He slept badly, spoke little. There was exhaustion in his eyes, which no amount of rest could ease. Often Molly caught him staring into space, as if listening for something, a strange, intent look on his face. They made love with a kind of violence, as though to fill a desperate vacuum with their passion. But though Molly felt that these were perhaps the only times she truly came close to him she could not pretend to herself that their lovemaking was a success for either of them.
On the day Jack was to return to France he and Molly stood together in the acrid-smelling bustle of the vast station hall almost wordless in the deafening commotion, their ears assaulted by bawled, unintelligible orders, the stamp of marching, booted feet, the shriek and hiss of escaping steam. Around them were piled seemingly endless rows of stacked rifles and kitbags. Uniformed men and women hurried past. Molly found herself going through the motions of farewell in a kind of haze. It seemed to her, and she was certain to Jack too, that he had already gone from her, back to that alien world of which she had no real knowledge and in which she could have no possible part. In truth, she thought, bleakly, perhaps he had never left it. As the train departed in a flurry of brave smiles and fluttered handkerchiefs she recognized beneath the quite genuine misery an awful edge of relief. And pondered, as she journeyed home, on the effect such a war as this might have on nations if it could so divide those who loved and cared for each other.
Molly Page 53
