by Tessa Arlen
Grable opened the door, and there, standing on the threshold with a bottle of red wine in his hand, was Sir Basil.
“I can’t stop for long,” he explained as he sauntered into the cottage, evidently quite at ease with three women in their dishabille, one of whom was brushing out gleaming hair that came down to her waist. If he was surprised to find me here, he covered it well. “Good evening, Miss Redfern.” He half bowed in the courteous way of an older generation. “What an unexpected pleasure. I thought you might have already left for London.”
I blushed as if I was guilty of overstaying my welcome. “Crown Films have decided to continue with the film, even though we lost its star.” I felt my blush deepen. I made it sound as if Edwina had wandered off into the landscape and was still trying to find her way back. “So, we are continuing with featuring”—I turned to the three women—“Annie, Grable, Zofia, and . . . and . . . the others.” He fixed me with a stern eye, his eyebrows raised, then slowly nodded, as if commending me on my wits by not including Letty as another lost star. Why on earth, I asked myself, haven’t they announced her death?
That’s not why he’s here, Ilona said. It’s Vera’s job to break the news, not her boyfriend’s.
He handed Grable the bottle of wine. “I’d pull the cork on that and let it breathe for a while.” He inhaled with appreciation. “Should be quite good with pork sausages.” Annie turned from the stove and started to lay another place at the table. “Not for me, Annie, thank you,” he said.
Without hesitation she turned to me. “Will you join us, Poppy, or perhaps you are having dinner with Captain O’Neal?”
I sought for a reasonable excuse and couldn’t come up with one. “Um . . . gosh, thanks! I’d . . . yes, thank you, I’d love to!” Drink and eat, in this house? I had spent the greater part of the afternoon convincing Griff to drive up to London on an errand he was reluctant to perform because I believed that the dead Attagirls might have been poisoned. And while Griff was speeding on his way to eat dinner with Uncle Ambrose and his pal at the Travellers, I had accepted an invitation to eat sausages with three potential poisoners.
“Dinner, Bess?” Annie said, and I nearly shrieked, No!
For heaven’s sake, darling, pull yourself together. She’s hardly going to poison a dog! Ilona’s voice stopped me from snatching up Bess and making for the door.
“How kind of you!” I said as Annie produced a sizable chunk of what looked like mutton bone. There was no hesitation from a dog who had eaten porridge for breakfast. Bessie stepped smartly forward, took the bone delicately in her jaws, and crawled under the kitchen table with it. After a quiet moment, a rhythmic gnawing sound began, and we all giggled.
Sir Basil looked at his watch. “Good Lord, would you look at the time. I must be on my way to Vera; can’t be late for dinner. Good night, ladies. Miss Redfern, when is it you’re leaving?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“If you have time I would be delighted to take you to lunch tomorrow. At the inn, say, one o’clock? Jolly good, well, good night.” He threw open the cottage door and stood on its threshold; clearly Sir Basil didn’t give a damn about blackout. I caught the gleam of his Bentley’s silver hood in the light from the cottage door.
“What a sweetie,” said Grable. “Always such a thoughtful old gent. How long ’til we eat, Annie? Is there time for a cocktail?” She was already shaking something up in a silver flask with ice. “Take a pew, Poppy, I’m making martinis. We’ve all had a very long couple of days.”
“How lovely!” I said, my eyes fixed on the flask as I moved to get a better view of her.
“Where’s Captain O’Neal off to? Didn’t he drop you just now?”
“Yes, but it’s been a long day for him too. He’s driven back to . . . back to the inn.”
Grable poured the contents of her flask into four glasses. We were all drinking from the same flask, so even if she was a dab hand with poisons I should be safe. “Olive?” She speared olives from a jar and put one in each glass.
“Annie?” she took a martini into the kitchen, which left me with a choice of three glasses. I handed a glass to Zofia and took one myself.
Bottom’s up. Ilona was laughing. Oops, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that!
“Cheers!” We raised our glasses. The martini was very dry and quite delicious, and I could feel the zing of alcohol singing through my veins.
Grable perched on the arm of the sofa. “We all want to know how you met the gorgeous captain!”
I took another sip of my cocktail. “I met him earlier this year. My family’s house and some of our farmland were requisitioned by the War Office as an airfield for the American Air Force. That’s when I met Griff. I was an ARP warden for the area, and we sort of bumped into each other in the blackout.”
“Romantic.” Zofia had braided her long hair and pinned it at the base of her neck. She sat back in her chair and took a sip of her drink. Half-lit by firelight, in her crimson-and-black silk kimono she looked like a heroine from a novel: exotic and enigmatic. “And now he is your boyfriend.”
I felt my cheeks flush as I remembered our clumsy moment in the meadow above Elton and took another sip to buoy me. “Well, no, not really a boyfriend.”
Zofia laughed. “Ah yes, I forget how deceptively modest some of you English girls can be.” She glanced around the room. “Annie is the same way, aren’t you, darling? She loves to go to parties to dance with handsome men in uniform, but that is all. Am I not right, chérie?”
Annie turned over something in her frying pan. “Strangely enough I think most of us are pretty ‘modest,’ as you call it. And please do not forget I am a married woman with two little girls at home. My nights of partying are rare and usually spent catching up on gossip with my cousins.” I for one was glad to hear I wasn’t the only unworldly woman in the room.
“Waiting for Mister—or should I say Lieutenant—right?” Zofia purred. “Even lovely Grable dresses up in a gorgeous gown cut down to there and up to here, and then says a polite ‘good night’ at the door. Don’t you, kochanie?”
Grable laughed. “I’m not saying a word about my social life to you, Zofia. I am sure you were a modest little girl too, before you met the love of your life.”
Zofia shook her head. “Me, modest? Of course I was—with all the other young men in the region I grew up in. But not with my Aleksy. I was sixteen years old when I met my beautiful husband, and we became lovers that very night.”
I tried not to splutter into my martini. She had practically been a baby! I couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in me at that age: puppy fat and pimples was how I remembered my sixteenth year.
Ilona became quite eloquent, as she often does when I have a cocktail. Good Lord, would you listen to her? She sounds like an old crone reminiscing about her lost youth and she’s all of what, twenty?
Zofia picked up a poker and stirred the fire, gazing into its red embers. “You both escaped Poland when Germany invaded, didn’t you?” I asked to keep her on track.
“Ah, Miss Redfern, you wish to know my story!”
Grable snorted. “She only wants the heroic bits, Zofia, not the bedroom scenes.”
“My husband was the most perfect man I have ever met in my life,” Zofia began, and paused to sip from her glass. “He had come to my father’s house for, what do you call it? A celebration of summer—a picnic. Everyone had come from all over the region, and our house was packed to the rafters. It was a glorious afternoon: the meadows were full of wildflowers, with just the slightest breeze to cool us from the mountains. My father had arranged farm carts decorated with flowers to drive us out to the river. The servants had worked for three days to make everything ready for our party.” She shook her head as she remembered. “It makes me weak just to remember the food.” She took another sip. “Good martini, Grable. Did I ever tell you that we have sixty-two blends
of vodka in our province of Poland alone? Where was I? Ah yes, my father had sent cases of champagne and vodka ahead to the picnic ground in baths of ice.”
She had another go at the fire, and Grable tossed on two more logs and gently took the poker away from her.
“I will never forget that moment when I walked down into the courtyard: Aleksy rode in through the bell-tower gate and dismounted. He was tall, broad shouldered, and when he took off his hat to bow to my mother, his hair was the color of silver gilt. He looked like a young pagan god standing there in the sunlight.” I heard Grable clear her throat, but I had my eyes fixed firmly on her handsome profile as Zofia gazed into the fire.
“‘Come, Zofia,’ my father called out to me. ‘I want you to meet our new neighbor, Count Aleksy Lukasiewicz.’ When Aleksy turned to me I thought I was going to faint. His eyes met mine: bright, clear eyes, the color of sea glass. It was as if we had known each other forever.” She laughed as she remembered. “Of course, he was extremely correct: his lips barely touched the back of my hand. In that moment it was as if he were the only man in the world—and it has remained that way for me ever since.” She bowed her head and Annie leaned forward, her eyes shining. Zofia’s reminiscences had the quality of a fairy story.
The countess was no longer sitting in a cramped cottage drinking inferior gin; she was in Poland again. “Our life that summer was—” She nodded into her martini glass. “We rode across meadows bright with the blue of cornflowers and made love in the cool of silver-birch woodlands. In October we were married. I was seventeen and he was twenty-four.” She held out her glass to Grable.
“Are you sure?” her friend asked as she shook up her flask.
“Then the Nazis came.” Zofia waited until her glass was replenished and took another sip. “The terrible things they did! The cold cruelty of those brute people.” She fell silent for a moment. “Aleksy and I, we fled in the November of that year, when we knew all was lost and that any resistance was impossible. It was already snowing heavily when we drove an old farm truck through the country into Romania. ‘Wear your furs under your warmest and oldest cloak,’ Aleksy told me, ‘and pray that the truck can make it.’ His plan was to fight the Germans from outside of Poland.”
She lifted a clenched fist and held it front of her and said something in Polish as she shook it. Then she looked up at me and translated. “I will return to Poland when those murderous bastards have been wiped from the face of the earth.” She made Scarlett O’Hara sound like a child bleating for her mama.
“So, we stayed in Bucharest through the coldest winter in memory. Aleksy was a pilot. He flew in the resistance and when he had time he taught me to fly an old Lublin that was practically falling apart.” She shook her head and smiled. “He had to walk around the bloody thing with a spanner before we took off and tighten everything up. Strangely enough, that long winter was the happiest for us. I learned to make ciorba: a peasant’s soup made from whatever vegetables you can find, and if you are lucky a bit of meat. It’s flavored with peppers to keep you warm.” We were no longer there with her in the cottage. Maybe, in her mind, Zofia was making pepper soup in a kitchen somewhere in Bucharest. “We made love every night—no need for modesty when the windows are covered in frost and the blankets are so thin you can see firelight through them!”
Grable waved her martini flask at me, and I shook my head.
“We stayed in Bucharest until the rise of the fascist Iron Guard made it unsafe for us Poles there. Again, we fled with the help of friends. This time to France, where Aleksy flew for the French Air Force and I drove an ambulance. We hardly saw each other, but we were doing our best to fight for the freedom of the world.” A deep sigh and another sip. “And then of course Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands were invaded by those bastards in the spring. The Italians marched over the Alps and took France, and that filthy coward Marshal Pétain welcomed the Nazis into Vichy, in the south, leaving de Gaulle to struggle in the north.” She shrugged and looked around at our intent faces. “France ‘fell’ to the Nazis and somehow in the chaos of Dunkirk, Aleksy and I found each other, and once again we were on the run. This time to Britain.” She kissed her hand to us. I noticed that her glass was empty.
“We hid out in Brittany until we could find someone to ferry us across the Channel to England. We bribed a fisherman with the last of our money and hid under old sacks in the bottom of a boat that reeked of mackerel. But we were free, free to continue the fight.” She looked at Grable and then to Annie and nodded. “Bravest country in the world, England. Bravest country in the world.” She waved her empty glass and Grable obediently filled it. How the recipient of her third martini was still upright I have no idea.
“And here we were, in England, in the clothes we stood up in. Aleksy joined the RAF, and a year later I met Basil at a cocktail party, and he persuaded me to join the ATA. I was the first Pole to join.” She smiled at me. “And in those days, my dear, all we ATA girls did was ferry those bloody Tiger Moths and Swordfishes all over the place.”
“I flew in one, on my first morning here,” I said, and Zofia laughed.
“No need for me to tell you, then, that an open cockpit means just that, in snow, sleet, or hail. But we Poles are tough: our climate is more frigid than the softness of your lovely island.”
Annie interrupted her. “Zofia delivered more Tiger Moths than any other pilot in the winter months of 1940. Please don’t tell the rest of your story, darling, if it will distress.” Annie’s usually severe expression softened. As a mother of two, she was enjoying Zofia’s love story just as much as Grable and I.
“It should distress,” Zofia answered. She lifted her head and stared at us. If we didn’t care to hear the rest, it was too bad. “It should distress us all, for years to come, to know what one deranged man and his pack of cowardly animals did to my country and is trying to do to the world.” She drank from her glass. “Death to tyrants,” she muttered, and turning to me, she said, “I tell you my story to use as you see fit for your film. The more women who join the ATA, the quicker planes will be delivered to the military, and the quicker we will finish off the Hun.
“Now, where was I? Ah yes, the summer of 1940 and the start of the Battle of Britain. Young men had come from all over the world to fly for the RAF: Australia, Canada, Africa, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, India, and Poland.” She rotated her free hand as she peeled off the names of the countries that had joined us in the battle for Britain. “It was an international air force of courage and conviction. And like all brave young warriors, some of them died before their time.
“I saw Aleksy twice after he joined the RAF: once in September and then again in October the night before he was killed.” She kept her voice even, almost matter-of-fact, and a cold finger ran up my spine and lifted the hair in my neck.
We English have made ourselves publicly and often privately silent in our grief; perhaps it is the only way we have managed to carry on. But Zofia’s proud story of love and courage made me feel deeply honored that she had shared it with us. I glanced at Grable and Annie as they listened. Their solemn faces were rosy in the firelight, like those of little girls being given a lesson on the horror of war—except of course for the martini glasses.
“We won that battle of the air over the Luftwaffe, who had more aircraft than we did. Aleksy had come to Britain to be in that fight. When Poland fell he had made the conquest of Germany his destiny.” She got slowly to her feet, as if telling her story had drained her. “I should call it a night before I say something I will regret, eh, Grable?”
Her friend shook her head. “You have taught us to say ‘no regrets,’ isn’t that right, Zofia?”
She nodded and pulled her kimono tightly around her thin body. “I have no appetite for dinner, my dear Annie. I think it is bedtime for me.” She turned to me and rested her hand on my shoulder. “Miss Redfern, good night. It was a pleasure to meet you. Please tell th
e story of Count Aleksy Wladyslaw Lukasiewicz in your film—he was only twenty-seven years old on the day he died. From the day that Poland was invaded, his only desire was to rescue freedom from tyranny.”
Holding on to my shoulder, she raised her nearly empty glass. “And here is to another brave pilot.” She was slurring ever so slightly. “Here is to my dear friend, the kindest woman in England: to Edwina!”
We joined in her toast.
“Sleep well, Zofia,” Annie said, but she walked past us as if we simply weren’t there.
We were silent as we listened to her tread the stairs to her room, and I prepared myself for an observation or two from Ilona. Not quite the victim type I first thought. More like Boadicea riding out on her shaggy pony to vanquish the invading Romans. A door in the landing above opened and then closed and Grable got to her feet. “No more cocktails until we have had dinner. Is it ready, Annie?”
* * *
* * *
THE THREE OF US—Grable, Annie, and I—gathered around the kitchen table for generous helpings of bubble and squeak and pork sausages that were sadly a little overcooked.
I closed my eyes and inhaled with blissful appreciation as Annie put a large dark sausage in front of me. “One each—no need to share! I am keeping Zofia’s for her breakfast. She’ll need it.” Her gray eyes were red-rimmed and her mouth drawn in, in its usual tired lines of disapproval.
“How old are your girls?” I asked her.
“Fanny is four, and Linda will be three next month. They live with my mum just outside Winchester.” And she shut her mouth in a tight line again.
“Lovely! Winchester is so near, so you see them often?”
She shook her head, and her fine, straight, bay-brown hair flicked over her shoulder and fell back into place. “As often as I can, of course. Now, eat up, before it gets cold.” I felt chastised, as if Annie found my prying unacceptable. I hoped that the girls’ granny was as warm and as kindhearted as my own.
