by Mary Wesley
Should she set fire to one of their houses? Where were the matches? Why not set fire to both houses?
She felt her way to the kitchen and, reaching up to the shelf where the matches were habitually kept, found no matches; the bitches had tidied them away. They had lied, Francis and Jonty. They would come back. No, it was their mothers who had lied, their mothers who would invite girls to stay, more sophisticated, older girls than herself, girls with money, suitable girls, girls who, even though they might not practise it, would know about sex, worldly girls who would not get under the boys’ feet or tag behind them like puppies.
There was no point, really, in setting fire to their houses; no matches, anyway.
The wind was dying in the trees behind the house. A plane droned overhead; the siren wailed in far-away Reading. Juno picked up her suitcase, opened the cottage door, locked it and threw the key far into the dark.
SIX
THERE NOW AROSE THE immediate question of an overcoat.
The inside of the cottage had been pretty chilly; outside it was freezing with a knife-like wind and, thanks to her own perversity, she had no coat.
There had been an argument with her mother. There was the warm and lovely houndstooth tweed with satin lining which had used up all her clothes’ coupons, and the serviceable old overcoat worn every day in holidays and to school.
‘There is wear in it yet,’ she could hear her mother say. ‘This new one I shall pack so that in Canada, where you will really need it, you can start afresh.’
Starting afresh played a major part in her mother’s thoughts.
‘I shall want you to look your lovely best when beginning your new life.’
She had grumpily watched her parent fold the hounds-tooth tweed, lay it in the trunk, close the lid and lock it. She could have protested more vehemently had she not just uttered a slighting and derogatory remark about Jack Sonntag, a reference to thinning hair coupled somehow with his occupation, which was that of an arms manufacturer.
Wounded, her mother had spurted a tear and, shamed, Juno had capitulated.
‘Oh, all right, pack the bloody thing.’
She waited ungraciously for the usual protest, ‘No need to swear,’ or, ‘Where do you pick up such language?’ when she knew perfectly well, but her mother had held her tongue, tied a label on the trunk and moved smoothly to another task.
Juno had left the despised old coat accidentally-on-purpose in the room where she had spent the night with Francis and Jonty, an action she now regretted.
Pacing as briskly as was safe in the dark, Juno thought of her mother and did not blame her for wanting to flee to Canada, or for wanting the love and security offered by Jack Sonntag, who was large, rich, capable and kind, so different from her father, the frail irritable conscientious objector who had gone to prison and wrecked his health out of sheer perversity, her mother had once murmured, though he had, come to think of it, kept a thick thatch of hair right up to his premature death. Had he perhaps been a bit of a prig? The idea amused Juno. Had his particular form of morality got up her mother’s nose? Was his conscientious objecting some form of inverted snobbery? Might this account for her mother never having been quite able to disguise a certain awkwardness when the subject of her late husband’s past cropped up, as it sometimes did, in conversation with local friends whose husbands had won a Military Cross at Passchendaele, a DSO in the Dardanelles, lost a leg or a life at Loos. Then she would edge the talk towards some blander topic, make no mention of Pentonville or whatever prison had harboured her husband.
That her mother had loved her father Juno was sure, but due to this latent embarrassment she had tactfully refrained from asking her parent for details. The little she knew was gleaned from Aunt Violet’s derogatory remarks and a withered newspaper cutting discovered years after his death, when ferreting in a desk drawer for an elastic band.
Her mother, a parson’s daughter, should surely have sided with the peacemakers, but when Chamberlain came back from Munich she had vilified him, called him lily-livered. Left to herself, she would have ‘bombed Berlin to put a stop to Hitler’s cheek.’ Had her father been alive, Juno wondered, would her mother have been so outspoken? She had a sweet soft voice; remembering it, Juno chuckled.
So was it so very odd that when the war did come and she met Jack Sonntag, this bellicose woman should cleave to him? But to allow herself to be removed from the theatre of war? When they discussed her parent and Sonntag, Francis and Jonty had attributed her behaviour and actions to sex, a theory Juno had dismissed as absurd. It was inconceivable, she thought as she trudged along, that her mother could do with Jack Sonntag what she had done two nights before with Jonty and Francis, it was plain ridiculous.
But what was conceivable, she thought with a jolt, was that in some horrible way she resembled their mothers, Margery and Susan. Juno drew in her breath. Out loud she said, ‘Oh God!’, remembering her mother.
‘You will love Canada. Quite a lot of people have sent their children, quite a lot of people have gone. Not only the poor Jews, the Princess of the Netherlands is there, for instance. You will love it, you will meet lovely people, it’s a wonderful country to grow up in. There will be so many new friends for you—’ and so on.
Had she noticed her friends’ objection to her hanging around their sons like a puppy, being ‘always under their feet’? Had that weighed the balance, made her decide to go to Canada? Had she not also said, ‘I am doing this largely for you’? She had.
‘Damn her,’ Juno whispered in the frosty night. ‘I love her, but I will not go,’ and then cheeringly it occurred to her that now she understood something which had long puzzled her. Jonty’s father, watching the taxi driving off to the station taking Francis and Jonty to catch the train back to school, would rub his hands together and say, ‘Distance lends enchantment.’
The fact remained, though, that she had no coat; the houndstooth tweed was probably in Canada by now. And it was freezing cold.
SEVEN
WALKING FROM THE STATION in her hopeless, high-heeled shoes it had been necessary to stick to the road, but returning sensibly shod Juno did what came naturally, she took short cuts. First she walked across the rectory paddock, then through the churchyard at an angle, weaving between the headstones to the rectory lane which she followed as far as the inn, cutting through its backyard to the Johnsons’ boundary wall, where she turned left into their kitchen garden and across that to rejoin the main road and on, for another quarter-mile, to reach the Murrays’ back drive, where she paused to consider the feasibility of the final lap.
Short cuts had been a speciality of Francis’s and Jonty’s, a game they had taught her. Any new short cut had to be proven and tested. The distance concerned must really be shorter than the accepted route before it counted on their list. Short cuts could lead across country, through woods and fields. In towns it was permissible to navigate through buildings as well as streets and alley-ways; a simple example was to cut through Harrods from the Brompton Road into Hans Place or Basil Street, or through Fortnum and Mason from Piccadilly into Jermyn Street. Three days ago they had taught her that from Berkeley Street one could walk through the Berkeley Hotel, cross Piccadilly and zigzag through the Ritz into Arlington Street, so saving several hundred yards.
Another such route through a building was all too familiar, but Juno hesitated before taking it. This was to enter the Murrays’ house by the conservatory, cut past the pantry to the kitchen, cross the kitchen into the corridor leading to the gun-room, walk along that and let oneself out by the side door into the rose garden, cross the rose garden and rejoin the road by the gardener’s lodge.
Although the doors in the Murrays’ house were usually locked at night, Juno knew where to find the keys, knowledge gained, she thought sourly, during the years she had spent doing what Francis’s and Jonty’s mothers referred to as ‘hanging about’ and ‘following like a puppy’. To walk round the Murrays’ house by the road would add mileage to her
journey, and the arm which carried the suitcase would ache worse. Besides, there was something she wanted hanging on the row of hooks outside the gunroom. Juno ceased to hesitate, walked swiftly across the Murrays’ lawn and let herself in. The conservatory door was not even locked.
The air in the conservatory was still. She listened and heard nothing except a tap drip into the tank from which Mrs Murray drew water for her plants. Holding the suitcase up against her chest for fear of knocking into a flowerpot, Juno stepped forward and, reaching the passage, tiptoed past the pantry towards the kitchen. Through the baize door into the front hall she could hear the tock of a long-case clock and, listening, heard it make its preliminary grinding noise before striking the hour. It struck twice and resumed its ticking. She opened the kitchen door very quietly and went in, closing it behind her. Her arms were aching from the weight of the case. She rested it on the floor.
From his basket near the Aga stove an old labrador heaved himself up and padded towards her, mumbling a greeting. His flailing tail rapped smartly against a table leg.
She whispered, ‘Oh, shush, my lovely old boy, shush, please shush.’ She stroked the dog, crouching down to feel his cold nose thrust against her cheek and caress his stout flanks. ‘Go back to your basket, you naughty old thing, or you will rouse the house.’ The dog wagged its tail harder, whimpered with pleasure at the interruption of a tedious night, barked.
In the front hall the outer door slammed shut and a light went on, Francis’s father returning from his night shift at the ARP post. Juno skittered across the kitchen into the passage to the gun-room and dived in among a row of coats and mackintoshes hanging bulkily on hooks.
In the kitchen Francis’s father spoke to his dog, ‘Go back to your basket, you old rogue.’ He dumped something heavy onto the kitchen table and yawned loudly. ‘God, I’m tired. Basket, I said basket.’ The dog barked. ‘Shut up. Basket, you’ll wake the whole house.’
Juno listened as the dog’s claws clicked across the floor and the wicker creaked as it obediently lay.
Margery Murray’s voice called from upstairs, ‘Is that you, darling? I heard Bonzo bark.’
Francis’s father answered loudly, ‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘You are very late, what happened?’
‘Old Perdue was late on duty.’
‘Oh! Are you coming to bed?’
Francis’s father shouted, ‘Of course I’m coming to bed. Shan’t be a minute.’
Juno listened as he left the kitchen, went back to the hall and into the downstairs lavatory. There was a pause, then the lavatory flushed and his steps came back to the kitchen. Next Francis’s father pushed open the door into the passage, letting in a stream of light as he hung a heavy overcoat onto a hook, brushing past Juno’s chin. As he did so he farted loudly, then he went out, closing the door.
A beautifully mannered and courteous man, Juno had never heard him fart. Her heart beat violently. She breathed in and out several times to steady her nerves, then, reaching up among the jumble of coats and mackintoshes, she found what she was looking for.
The coat brought back from their trip to Hungary in 1937 had been a joint present for their mothers. They had only been able to afford the one, Francis and Jonty said. Their mothers wouldn’t mind sharing, would they? So often they shared their dresses, borrowing and lending, they could do that with this coat, couldn’t they? Wasn’t it lovely? Were their mothers not pleased? They were themselves delighted by the originality of their present. It was sumptuous, rather grand, not like those awful embroidered peasant blouses everybody else had bought.
The coat was of dark brown sheepskin leather, the fleece on the inside. It had black frogged buttons from waist to chin, a bell-like skirt. There were deep pockets and an astrakhan collar. Jonty and Francis had been tickled to death.
Margery and Susan had not been so pleased. They concealed their feelings, of course, affected pleasure, but the coat had a nipped-in waist which did not meet round their ample figures and, unbuttoned, it looked ridiculous. And the skirt was too long, they were neither of them tall. With their sons out of earshot they murmured, ‘What a waste of their money,’ ‘It’s sort of fancy dress,’ ‘I suppose one could use it as a car rug, Susan,’ and Susan echoed, ‘… a car rug, yes.’ And one of them said, ‘Well, we can’t leave it just lying about, hang it up,’ and, hanging on the row of hooks in the passage outside the gun-room, it had gradually been worked to the back and forgotten.
As Juno felt among the fleet of Burberrys, jackets, tweed coats and mackintoshes, they rustled and protested. One fell off its hook but she caught it as it fell. She was sweating when she eventually freed the sheepskin coat, carried it into the kitchen and put it on a chair by the suitcase, which Francis’s father had miraculously not seemed to notice.
Breathing deeply to still her fear, Juno became aware that she was ragingly hungry. The air in the kitchen was rich with the memories of meals past. When had she last eaten? In London Aunt Violet had offered an egg, but she had refused and gulped coffee. There had been whisky in that man’s house, but she had refused soup. She would give much for that egg now, or that soup. ‘Let’s just have a little look,’ she whispered to the dog in its basket. The dog twitched its tail.
Juno felt her way to the larder door, switched the light on briefly, taking in the content of the shelves, switched it off. Carefully she took a cold potato and ate it, then a meat rissole, rearranging its mates on their dish. Bolder now, she tore the legs off a cold pheasant, ate, gave a bit of skin to the dog, who had followed her, licked her fingers. She drank deeply from a jug of milk, then backed quietly out, closing the door. She could not give the pheasant bones to the dog, they might splinter inside him. She gripped them between her teeth.
From her bag she took a comb and combed her hair. Could she risk the lavatory? She could and did, using the servants’ wash-place but not pulling the plug. Only then did she put on the sheepskin coat. It fitted beautifully, as she had known it would. She buttoned it from waist to chin and turned up the collar. She picked up her bag and the suitcase and, letting herself out, whispered goodbye to the dog. When she reached the road she threw the pheasant bones into the ditch and began walking.
She was warm and fed and her conscience had never felt better.
EIGHT
IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS, later she would not remember how many, to recover the rebate on the ticket to Canada. People desperate for a passage must be contacted, people who would surrender their eye-teeth for her place on the ship, for the shared cabins and the risk of torpedoes, but, ‘There’s a war on,’ the man in the travel agent said. ‘There are forms to fill in, I have to work by the book. Can you prove your identity? Have you a passport? An identity card? We have to be careful. Let me see your documents.’ Haste was not a word of which his vocabulary was aware.
Juno said, ‘It’s all on the ticket.’
The man raised his eyebrows and fingered the ticket while staring at Juno through wire-framed glasses. ‘I have an uncle in Canada,’ he said, ‘my mother’s brother went there to live. He seems to like it. He used to work on the railway, coast to coast. I wouldn’t care for it myself, don’t know what he does now. We lost touch.’ He looked down at the ticket. ‘How d’you spell Marlowe?’
‘As it’s spelt on my passport.’ She pushed the passport closer to his hand.
‘Ah! And Juno? Funny name.’
‘That’s on the passport, too, and on the carte d’identité.’
‘The what?’
‘My identity card, French, a joke.’
‘Foreign? You foreign?’
‘She was a Greek goddess.’
‘As I said, foreign, huh.’ Slowly he filled in the form. ‘Sign here.’ He pushed the form towards her. ‘There, in that space.’ Juno signed. ‘Come back in a couple of days.’
‘But—’
The man shook his head. ‘As I said, there’s a—’
Juno said, ‘Oh God!’
‘You get in touc
h with him then, or the Greek tart. It was Greek, you said? Next. Yes, sir?’
‘It is unwise to hurry them,’ a man who had been standing behind Juno muttered from the corner of his mouth as he took her place. ‘I am trying to get a passage to Canada for my wife,’ he said to the man who was conscious that there was a war on. ‘I don’t suppose there is much that you can do to help me, but—’
Juno stood back. Why can’t I speak like that? she wondered as she listened to the mix of friendliness and authority. He speaks like Jonty’s and Francis’s fathers. He knows perfectly well there is a passage, he has been listening; there is a passage, mine. He is pandering to the man’s power and frightening him at the same time. How does he manage without being ingratiating, irritating or humble? As she turned to go the man behind the desk was smiling at the man who had taken her place, looking positively anxious to tackle his dilemma even, she suspected, saying, ‘Let’s see what we can do,’ though she was by now out of earshot. She was startled when he called out loudly, ‘Miss!’
‘Yes?’ She turned back.
‘Left your passport and identity card.’ He handed them to her. ‘You should be careful of those, got your ration book?’
Juno said, ‘Of course. Thanks,’ as she ungratefully thrust the passport and identity card into her bag.
The man said, ‘See you Thursday, then,’ and smiled complicitly at the man who wanted to get his wife to Canada. ‘Where were we, sir?’
In the street Juno checked her bag to see whether she actually did have her ration book. She did; it nestled against the envelope Evelyn Copplestone had given her. His arm lying across her body had been cold, she imagined, though through his sleeve she had not exactly felt it so and now, thanks to the coat, she was warm and must keep warm until Thursday. She would go to the cinema, it was cheap and would be heated. They were showing Laurel and Hardy; she had seen the film, sitting between Jonty and Francis. They had laughed a lot but not as hysterically as at the Marx brothers, who were their favourites. She bought the cheapest ticket and went in. The film was halfway through; she watched it to the end and then watched the News, which showed the bomb damage in London and the king and queen walking about in the rubble, being caring and at the same time not stopping people getting on with their jobs. They obviously had the right touch, as had the man who had stood behind her in the queue.
