by Mary Wesley
‘Look, Nance! That girl—I call that disgusting,’ said a voice. ‘I mean. Look here. In the tube with people trying to sleep, taking shelter like decent …’ And other voices said other things. Her legs were not helpful, not managing the one foot in front of the other job, quite simple really.
‘Needs help,’ another voice, a young sailor. Then she was being wrapped in a blanket and was this a stretcher? Try everything once—and an ambulance, bright light, voices, ‘Don’t try to stand, just lie quietly, we’ll soon …’ and rumble, rumble on rubber wheels, very fast along a corridor. ‘The raid’s over, jolly good.’ And an icy swab on her arm, an injection and away roaring in her head, woom—womb—woom—womb. Those bills, what was he worrying about in his letter? The lovely smell of new books, oh, Hatchards, obviously Nicholas and Emily had been up to their usual tricks charging books to Ned’s account, rather comical, quite a joke. What or who else had they charged to his account? one wondered. She was talking out loud now. ‘I wonder what he’ll say, whether he’ll notice that last cheque cashed for eighty pounds. Did you put it on a horse?’ she gasped.
‘She’s coming round now. It’s all right, dear, all over, you’re okay now. Try a sip of water, bad luck, getting caught in a raid like that, poor dear. You’ve been nicely tidied up.’ Tidied up, is that what they call the baby who escaped life into the Underground, running down my legs in a slodge of blood? Tidied? That was my baby, his name was Tidy, funny name for a boy, well, perhaps it was a girl, it didn’t wait for me to see. (I was nearly born in the Piccadilly tube station.)
There was a grey-haired doctor in a white coat standing by the bed; he looked very tired (well, everybody does these days, it’s the war).
‘I am afraid you lost it, Mrs Peel.’ They knew her name, must have looked in her bag. ‘We did what we could, I’m very sorry.’
‘So am I.’ (Oh, so am I.)
‘We’ll keep you here for a few days just to be on the safe side.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Like us to get in touch with your husband? If you tell Sister, she …’
‘He’s in Egypt.’
‘Your mother?’
‘I haven’t got a mother.’ (How pat it came, but, no, enough’s enough, I could not bear to have her come to see me.) ‘I should love just to be quiet, please.’
The doctor smiled: ‘Being quiet in a London casualty hospital is a contradiction in terms,’ (what a lovely man) ‘but we’ll do our best.’
They let her go home after a few days.
Edwina Farthing folded her in her long bony arms and gave comfort, comfort, comfort.
Up in Scotland Flora Loftus said one night to Archibald, her husband, ‘I wonder, should I have asked the landgirl’s name?’
‘No, no, leave well alone,’ he answered.
A year later on her annual shopping foray, which even the war could not stop, meeting Edith Malone for lunch at the Cordon Bleu in Sloane Street, Flora asked, ‘How is Ned and Rose’s landgirl?’
‘They’ve never had a landgirl,’ said Edith. ‘It’s Rose who works on the farm.’
Flora Loftus stood corrected, held her peace.
41
WHEN PICOT CAME TO write his memoirs and attempted to explain his conversion from the anti-British feelings of a normal Frenchman to the Anglophile warmth of his latter years, he found himself describing an incident which took place in Occupied France in the middle of the war, en route to London. It had to do with the English taste for milk puddings, he wrote, a taste discovered for him by his guide Mylo Cooper, a brave man.
There had been the rendezvous in a small town where Mylo masqueraded as a plumber, occupying himself over a period of weeks with small jobs such as changing washers, checking cisterns, advising on drains. The local plumber had disappeared into the Resistance; Mylo had access to the man’s tools, thanks to a friendship with the plumber’s sister, a waitress in a café at the corner of the Place.
The morning after their rendezvous Picot sat with Mylo outside the café watching the va-et-vient of police and soldiery at an hotel along the square used by the Gestapo as their headquarters.
Picot was extremely nervous—he did not write this in his memoirs, taking it for granted that his readers would know that anyone engaged in the Resistance would inevitably be tense, to say the least—but on discovering that Mylo proposed to go on sitting around in the café flirting with the waitress instead of proceeding on their journey as they had on previous occasions, his nervousness turned to rage. He had never particularly liked Mylo; now he detested him.
‘You are risking both our lives,’ he said. ‘We sit here and if we sit much longer someone will remark and inform on us.’ (In his memoirs Picot had earlier explained that his guide whose job it was to get him safely to England had in mind to help a woman at present in the hands of the Gestapo.)
Mylo answered, ‘It’s possible.’ Sipped his acorn coffee and exchanged looks with the waitress lolling against the bar counter.
‘You know they have her? You have yourself checked?’ Picot queried. He had asked this before. Mylo nodded, shifted the bag of tools at his feet to let a customer pass, winked at the waitress who tossed her head.
‘How you dare be so foolhardy when so many of us are at risk when she talks,’ said Picot.
‘She won’t talk.’ Mylo rubbed the scar on his leg through the heavy cotton of his trousers.
Picot laughed. ‘Everybody talks. If not sooner, then later. We should be on our way.’ Then, since Mylo said nothing, ‘Is she so special?’
‘She is my aunt,’ Mylo murmured. (She had been so gentle and kind to Rose that morning, made jokes, jollied her up.)
Picot lit his miserable wartime cigarette. ‘Now you tell me.’ He sighed.
‘Jewish. My mother’s sister.’
‘They all go to the camps,’ muttered Picot.
‘Not this one,’ said Mylo.
‘So where does she go?’
‘With us. England.’
‘Jesu. Holy Mother. Optimist.’ In his fear and nervous state Picot would remember later that he was tempted to leap up, shout out loud to the people in the café, for all those passing in the street, ‘This man is English. This man risks my life, arrest this man.’ Sometimes he dreamed that he had done this, woke screaming, upset his mistress (his wife never woke, she slept like a rock). He debated whether to include this temptation in his memoirs, did not, regretted it later, liking to be thought human.
‘If you are so impatient,’ Mylo had teased, ‘go on on your own.’
‘You have the contacts. All in that mad head of yours,’ said Picot.
‘Two, at most three more days,’ said Mylo.
‘Then what?’
‘They,’ Mylo nodded imperceptibly towards the hotel, ‘move out.’
‘They move out? You crazy?’ Picot, ever suspicious of his masters, wondered whether they had deliberately entrusted him to a lunatic. It was whispered in London that Colonel P. was not above arranging the disappearance of communist party members. He put this in his memoirs in another context, a later chapter.
‘Then she—er—um—joins us and we go on our way,’ said Mylo, grinning.
‘And what is this way? We have missed the boat thanks to your auntie, there is no other boat for a month, the tides …’
‘Bugger the tides. We walk,’ said Mylo.
‘Over the Pyrenees, I suppose.’
‘Right.’
‘And are taken prisoner by Franco’s lot on the other side?’
‘It’s probable.’
‘Merde.’
‘Better than being handled by our friends in there.’ Mylo picked his teeth with a match.
‘Handled …?’
‘I am partial to euphemisms.’
Picot sighed. ‘All right. Explain the situation with your aunt. How did she get herself arrested?’
‘Who knows? A tip-off? She’s in there is all that matters.’ Mylo’s eyes were half closed. He scraped the match
along his jaw, he had not shaved for a week. ‘She’s my mother’s sister. She has a perfectly good house in Bayswater.’ He sighed, remembering how Aunt Louise had given them a splendid breakfast (he could smell the coffee). She had lent Rose the train fare home, comforted her after her own aunt’s coarse accusations. ‘She’s daft,’ he said with affection. ‘Reminds me of Mother.’
‘Bayswater? London?’ Picot let smoke trickle from his open mouth. ‘And she came back here?’ He couldn’t believe the idiocy.
‘Volunteered. We are a heroic family.’ Mylo pretended to look modestly down his nose.
‘There are heroes in mine, but we are not also fools,’ said Picot, sneering.
‘Mademoiselle, deux cafés, s’il vous plaît.’ Mylo caught the waitress’ eye.
Watching the girl move away, swinging her hips, Picot said gloomily, ‘One wonders what it does to one’s guts, this coffee.’
‘What I did to monsieur the proprietor’s drains.’
‘Which was?’ Picot watched the Germans down the street, alert, bored, alien.
‘Scoured them out,’ said Mylo, ‘but our friends in the hotel had a faulty ballcock; the noise of the cistern kept the gentlemen awake when they wished to nap between bouts of interrogation.’
‘They believe you to be a plumber?’
‘They do.’ Mylo bent to pat his bag of tools.
‘How many more days?’ Picot was resigned.
‘We should notice some unease tomorrow. Two days later, exodus.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ asked Picot.
‘I put sago down all the lavatories, sinks and washbasins. The guard who watched me thought it was soda.’
‘And?’
‘Sago swells,’ said Mylo.
Telling the story Picot would say, ‘Of course, I recommended him to the General for the Croix de Guerre,’ and roar with laughter. In his book he wrote that he had been instrumental in getting a gallant friend decorated for acts of supreme courage and sacrifice, which was re-writing history but more dignified than the truth.
42
AS TIME WENT ALONG without news of Mylo, unbearable pain dulled to an ache. It became reasonable to be grateful that fate had robbed Rose of Mylo’s child (it had probably disposed of Mylo as well). Her hope ebbed low. The child, she told herself, would have grown up cleverer and more attractive than Christopher, her loyalties would have divided. She told herself harshly that she should thank God for small mercies; she had been spared an embarrassment she was well without.
She surprised herself and used an unexpected fund of common sense, taking pleasure in the predictable and mundane, admitting to a taste for the security and convention she had hitherto despised as evidence of her unloved parental background. With a mix of grief and relief she put her true nature into reverse. She was still too young to know that it is possible to operate on several planes at once.
During the months between the miscarriage and Ned’s return she consolidated her defences, teaching herself to manipulate life at Slepe to her own ends, the work among the vegetables and on the farm. The role of mother, host and housewife which up to now had been mere camouflage became, she persuaded herself, her true persona.
When she looked at the Bonnard she saw a picture she liked; it no longer spelled the image of Mylo putting his arms around her preparatory to some delicious act of erotica. In some lights, such as when she was dressing on chill winter mornings, the couple’s lack of sensible clothes made her chilly body shiver as she pulled on woolly vest and longjohns. If she looked closely at the girl she could perhaps be disagreeing with the boy, drawing away from him. But more often she dressed in such haste she did not notice the picture at all. Her days were crammed with Christopher’s needs. The constant stream of foreign visitors. Instead of country solitude, mooning about dreaming of love, she made friends with the people who worked in the Ministry office in the back wing: at meals she absorbed homesick accounts of life back home in Australia, Poland, the USA, Holland, and even France without necessarily making any connection with Mylo. How was she to know he was really there, or even alive?
When her visitors flirted with her, she encouraged them, boosting their egos and her own, stopping short of going to bed with them, for was she not faithful wife to absent husband? She even stopped discouraging Emily and Nicholas who came to Slepe often, bringing infant Laura, making blatant use of the facilities of Slepe when they wished to economise on their own (they had not had the forethought to stock up for the war like Ned; they had mocked him at the time). Should her visitors’ randiness become unbearable Emily could, indeed would, oblige.
Rose was at that time so busy growing a scab over her wound she felt no sense of disloyalty. If there was an occasional mad longing for Mylo, she scotched it.
When Ned did arrive home (wearing Major’s tabs now and a red band around his hat), he was delighted to find that the wife whose capability he had previously questioned had a firm grip on his estate. He was miffed as well as amused to discover that even after his return Hadley continued to consult Rose about milk yields and pig production, that she was hand in glove with Farthing. He did not say so. (Perhaps it was then he decided that when the war was over he would switch to sheep and cereals about which Hadley knew nothing and get rid of Rose’s precious pigs and dewy-eyed jerseys.) Meanwhile he praised her care of Christopher, laughed at her losing battle with the draughts, promised central heating when the war was over, and applauded her talent for manipulating the guests into helping with the washing-up, tinkering with the innards of the bishop’s car and refilling the log baskets.
It was Rose who brought up the subject of money. ‘You hurt my feelings when you wrote accusing me of extravagance,’ she said. ‘As you see for yourself, I have not done too badly.’
‘I did not accuse. When I wrote I was warning you to be careful, thinking of the future …’ Ned said touchily.
‘I have been careful. Since you complained, I no longer pay the wages in cash; the change hasn’t pleased people, who distrust cheques.’
‘Why not?’
‘Never heard of fiddling income tax?’ Rose laughed. ‘It’s such a joy to people like the Hadleys. The shopkeepers, too.’
‘I can’t approve. I don’t see anything funny.’
‘No. Well. I stopped your accounts with Hatchards, Penhaligons and Trumpers.’
‘Good God.’
‘I thought you would prefer to deal with your tailors yourself—why do you have two?’
‘Aren’t you being rather …?’
‘Bossy?’ Rose met his eye. ‘Interfering?’
‘Yes.’ He had not expected her to turn out bossy.
‘It was you who complained. I acted as I thought best.’ (Is she teasing me? Ned wondered.) ‘Perhaps you had better tackle Emily and Nicholas yourself.’
‘What have they got to do with it? What do you mean?’ Ned bristled, this was no child wife.
‘Wake up, Ned. Nicholas uses your accounts; he’s a great reader, and look how nicely cut his hair is. He’s a dodger, you must have known.’
‘If it’s true, I’ll put a stop to it,’ cried Ned, angry now.
‘And Emily?’ asked Rose mildly.
‘What about Emily?’ Ned took a step backward.
‘Oh, well … you know … I wouldn’t blame … I wouldn’t put it past … I …’ Rose let her gaze sweep out across the dark fields. She would be gentle with Ned, as he would not perhaps have been with her if he had asked what a cheque cashed for eighty pounds had been used for and she stupid enough to tell him. Ned did not ask what Rose was insinuating; he had already studied infant Laura’s physiognomy with trepidation; he watched Rose with respect, undecided on what line to take, then she said, ‘I should just take it a bit easy if I were you,’ on a closing note.
‘Rose, I …’
‘It doesn’t matter all that much, does it?’
‘If you are thinking what I think you are thinking …’ Ned began.
‘I think not
hing,’ and I care less, she thought; if I was in love with Ned it would be different. ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ Mylo did not intrude in Ned’s embrace. Rose congratulated herself. I shall yet become like Edith Malone, she thought, or Ned’s Aunt Flora. I have regained my balance, I should be happy.
But standing near the top of the hill in old age, looking out at the view, she remembered that she had nearly lost that balance when a much-censored letter arrived from Spain. What was left of the message read: ‘Stuck here playing bridge stop je n’oublierai jamais les lilas et les roses stop.’ Never having heard of Aragon, she had not recognised the quotation. She passed the letter to Ned, who was watching her curiously. He turned it this way and that, and guessed, ‘One of your guests, d’you think? Shot down and brought out along the escape route? Have you had many Free French to stay?’
‘Lots.’
‘The address on the back is Miranda, that’s a prison camp; I’ve heard of it, chap in my club told me. They get caught coming over the Pyrenees, put in jug, then the military attaché in Madrid sets about extracting them via Gibraltar. Did any of your visitors play bridge?’
She said, ‘There were several who were keen on cards.’
‘That would be it, then. Chap must be bored, so he writes to you.’ Then, ‘You didn’t have an …’
‘Don’t be silly, Ned, I don’t have affairs with the visitors. Try not to be idiotic.’ She had spoken quite harshly to hide the lurch her heart had made, to still its hammering, crush hope, stifle her feeling of guilt and disloyalty to Mylo, who was, she supposed, dead, must be.
How wobbly and wavery her faith had been, Rose thought in old age. Oh, the swings and roundabouts of hope.
It had been about that time, she remembered, that Ned, catching her on a low, weeping at the loss of one of Comrade’s puppies, shot by a neighbour’s gamekeeper hunting his pheasants, had shown his nicest side. He had telephoned the neighbour in furious rage (he could not bear to see Rose cry), threatened never to invite him to a Slepe shoot, told the crusty squire to bloody fuck off, banged down the receiver. Emily, imposing herself for an unrationed meal, had shrieked with laughter, been rounded on, told to remove herself and her bastard brat from Ned’s house, to cease darkening his doors.
