The House of Flowers

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I know next to nothing about horses,’ Miss Budge announced. ‘Other than that according to my mother they shy on the way out and do the other thing on the way home.’

  ‘I take it that’s intended to relieve the atmosphere, Budge dear, is it?’ Cissie asked with a look of disdain. ‘Because if so it hasn’t.’

  ‘Horses frighten me,’ Miss Budge continued, taking absolutely no notice. ‘I’m a dog person myself. I only really like dogs.’

  She fell quiet then, staring out of the front window with a deep frown on her face as if remembering something. Cissie regarded her, decided she could make nothing of her whatsoever, lit a fresh cigarette and turned her attention to scouring the landscape for the fallen rider.

  They found him within five minutes of leaving the house, Micky having seen which way Eugene had ridden away from the house, and knowing almost as well as his employer the best rides in the parkland. As soon as the great wall came into sight, Micky nodded at it and spun the wheel to the right to head for the adjacent gate.

  ‘His favourite jump,’ he said. ‘Or rather lepp as he calls it. His and his horse’s.’

  Seeing the gate open, Micky was sure now where they would find him, long before they saw the fallen body.

  Eugene heard their approach. He had come back to consciousness a few minutes earlier and he knew that the only thing he mustn’t do was move. It was ingrained in him, from the moment he had begun riding to the time when he had gone into training as an agent. If you fall forward from a horse or a moving vehicle, or even hit your head diving into the sea, and you lose consciousness, when you awake you do not move. It wasn’t a conscious decision – it was instinctive, going back to the time he was a gossoon in Ireland and seeing them fall out hunting. Don’t move ’em! the Master would bark. Don’t touch ’em – just make sure they don’t move and no one moves ’em till we get the quack!

  So Eugene lay still, noting that the sky above him, which had been that particular shade of pale winter blue, was now a jaundiced yellow – and that everything around and about him seemed very far away, including the rest of himself, including his very being.

  He was aware of someone beside him but they were drawn in pale yellow too, besides being well out of focus. He could also hear the clamour of distant voices, although the people to whom those voices belonged were standing no more than a foot or so from him.

  ‘Don’t move me,’ he whispered. ‘No one touch me even. Fetch a stretcher, splints, thick bandages – and a doctor. I think it’s my neck. I think I’ve broken me damn’ neck.’

  He was quite right. The X-rays showed his neck to be broken in two places, one fracture worse than the other, the damaged vertebra missing the spinal cord by the tiniest of possible fractions.

  ‘He’s lucky in two ways,’ Dr Brooke said at the hospital when Kate was finally allowed to visit, with Cissie and Anthony Folkestone also in attendance. ‘He’s lucky to be alive at all – he’s a strong man, and also a very sensible one because he didn’t move. If he’d moved an inch before a doctor had got there he’d be dead for sure. He’s also lucky in that it appears – and I use the word advisedly because there’s still an awful lot we don’t know about neck fractures – he’s lucky in that there seems to be no paralysis either. He has feelings in all limbs and extensions, so if we can keep him on an even keel there’s every chance of a recovery. A full recovery, just as long as we can first of all keep him immobilised and then he behaves himself once he leaves hospital.’

  ‘How long will that be?’ Kate asked. ‘Or don’t you know?’

  ‘We’ll know more in a week. But I don’t think he’ll be home in time for Christmas.’

  She was allowed five minutes, no more, and she was not to ask him anything that needed an answer. Kate had simply to sit by his bedside and do her best to smile at a man who could not look at her. After the first thirty seconds the smile was replaced by two lines of tears that ran silently down her face until, drying them away with her handkerchief, she stood at the end of Eugene’s bed and blew him a kiss of farewell.

  ‘Anything to report?’ Jack wondered, seating himself in the taxi that had stopped for him on the instructions of its passenger at the bottom of Wigmore Street.

  ‘I think I might have,’ Helen replied, as the taxi moved off.

  ‘Where to now, missis?’ the cabbie called backwards through the intercommunicating window.

  Jack took charge, leaning forward and giving the driver the address of a small, insignificant hotel that was in fact a safe house.

  ‘So, good lady – tell me all,’ Jack said, with a sideways smile at Helen, tapping a Players cigarette on his old silver case. ‘I trust your living has not been in vain and all that.’

  He had taken Helen out of Baker Street for a while, allotting her the job of working behind the tea bar at Charing Cross Station, the terminus for all lines from the southeast including the line that served Eden Park. He had long ago become convinced that railway stations were not only the epicentres of illicit love affairs but also places where classified information might easily and often be exchanged. The idea had become fixed in his mind when in the middle Thirties he had been in the same railway carriage as two German tourists, who were busy noting down military installations along the route the train was taking. He had also learned another useful fact at the same time, that however hard Germans tried to disguise themselves they still looked like Germans.

  ‘I have to confess, sir,’ Helen said, always careful to use formalities in working situations, regardless of the state of any relationship. ‘I have to say I did not think this was one of your best ideas – working behind the bar in the hotel. But I’m beginning to see what you mean. People don’t ever just come and go – there’s always some set purpose that only becomes obvious if you start looking for it.’

  Jack was sitting with his back to the driver, having made sure the intercommunicating window was tightly shut.

  ‘What in particular have you been looking at?’

  ‘I have one or two regulars that might be worth a second glance.’

  ‘Jolly good.’ Jack drew on his cigarette, then looked out of the window to see where they were. ‘Let’s save that for that drink we’re both looking forward to, shall we?’

  He half smiled and nodded at her, then produced an early edition of the Evening News and began to read, blotting out Helen’s existence all but completely.

  Jack was very good at blotting things out. He had learned how to do this for himself some five years previously when Juliet, his wife, died giving birth to a son. He never understood the full medical reasons. Something had gone wrong at the moment of delivery and both lives were lost in a matter of a few seconds. He seemed to remember one of the nurses trying to explain about umbilical cords and strangulation, but what he couldn’t understand was why Juliet had died as well, and so suddenly. Jack being Jack he had more than a suspicion that the doctors didn’t know either, or else they were covering up someone’s atrocious error, because the cause of death on his wife’s certificate was massive haemorrhaging, and to the best of Jack Ward’s knowledge no one died from massive haemorrhaging without due cause.

  But he had not pursued the matter. There was no bringing Juliet and their dead son back. They were lost and gone for ever, and whatever Jack might have unearthed – and he suspected there was plenty there to be unearthed – it would be an academic and pointless exercise. Juliet, his adored Juliet, his childhood sweetheart, the romance of his life, his wonderfully funny, adorable and bouncy young wife was removed from his existence in one terrible sweeping moment, along with the child they had both so wanted – and that was the moment when Jack Ward learned, as he called it, to blot stuff out. He knew Helen had a life, and because he knew Helen so well, he knew the sort of life she had once enjoyed and the sort of life she was living now. But he didn’t go up that path. He stayed at the gate, occasionally waving at the woman in the house before passing on by. What he must do – and most particularly now –
was not cross the line. Helen, attractive woman though she might be, was to stay one side of that gate and Jack Ward firmly the other.

  Helen knew nothing about Jack’s past life. All she knew was that he had always been nothing but kind to her, and she appreciated more than she could say his offer that she should come back and work for him. Sometimes she tried to guess at his past life, but found herself getting absolutely nowhere since there were no clues on the particular patch of ground he was occupying. Sometimes she would try to ease some information out of him, but she was dealing with an expert, as she soon realised. Jack was gone and running long before she got round to asking the first leading question.

  She smiled at the newspaper that was facing her, wondering what he might think of her; how much he knew, and how much he had guessed. She reckoned that because of the way both their friendship and her career were developing he was taking her at face value, which was what she wanted.

  As she checked her looks in the compact she had taken from her handbag she very much hoped this would be the case. It was very important for Jack Ward to see her as ordinary straightforward Helen Maddox, deserted wife and still grieving mother. She would not want it any other way. She could not have it any other way.

  ‘So,’ Jack said finally, after he had settled them both into a secluded corner of the utterly unprepossessing hotel. ‘You think you have some news, eh?’

  He now lit his pipe in preference to another cigarette, slowly drawing the flame of the match down into the bowl with each inhalation as he got the tobacco burning. ‘What I’d really like you to find out for me is where to get some decent baccy – but I suppose that’ll have to wait.’

  Helen smiled, opened her bag and produced a tin of Balkan Sobranie. Jack frowned for once in open astonishment as he looked first at the tin and then at Helen.

  ‘Railway stations are useful places to be in more ways than one,’ she said. ‘I can’t promise a regular supply, but every now and then—’

  ‘I imagine this isn’t exactly altogether correct,’ Jack replied, lifting the tin and turning it round and round in his hand as if it were some sort of valuable antique. ‘But then on the other hand there is a war on. Much obliged,’ he added in the slightly facetious tone he used to cover up his shyness. ‘Very much obliged, I must say.’

  Helen concealed her pleasure, happy to believe that this would be a very positive point in her favour, if push ever came to shove.

  ‘There are two people in particular who meet regularly in the tea bar, sir,’ she said, returning to business but keeping her voice good and low. ‘She comes up on the Hastings line, so possibly even from the target station, same day, same time. Always a Thursday, always early afternoon, arriving at the station at two fifty, and leaving on the down line on the three thirty-three, which is never at three thirty-three but there or thereabouts.’

  ‘The man?’

  Helen shrugged. ‘Nondescript, like her. Middle-aged, thin, average height, grey raincoat, grey trilby – large beak-like nose,’ she recalled, ‘but no other distinguishing characteristics. She’s early middle age, I’d say. Slightly plump, average height, perhaps no more than five four, five five, but always wears a hat, which I think is unusual, seeing that hardly anyone wears a hat nowadays – women, that is – because you can’t get hats, and everyone’s saving the hats they do have for something special, rather than day to day wear—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Jack interrupted. ‘I get the point. Do they talk, or what? What attracted your attention? Besides the famous hat.’

  ‘The fact they don’t talk, I suppose. She has a cup of tea, he reads the paper. She smokes one cigarette, then gets up and leaves.’

  ‘They’re certainly not having an affair then. What else?’

  ‘Well, when she goes – usually with quarter of an hour to kill before she has to get her train back – he picks something up she’s left on the table. Usually a magazine. In fact I think it’s always a magazine, which he then folds up, slips in his pocket and goes. He always pays, incidentally, never her. When he arrives he calls over a waitress, orders for her without asking her, then pays. And she goes back and catches her train.’

  ‘Wonder what’s in the magazine,’ Jack mused. ‘Could be money, of course. Could be information.’

  ‘She doesn’t look like the sort of woman who’d be blackmailed.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘I’d have thought someone more glamorous. This woman – from what I can see of her – certainly isn’t glamorous.’

  ‘She could be a murderer. Most unlikely-looking females murder their spouses – poison usually. Women love poison as their MO. Modus operandi,’ he explained in answer to her look. ‘What colour is this famous hat, as a matter of interest?’

  ‘Peacock blue.’

  ‘Always the same hat?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Just curious. How close have you got to them?’

  ‘Not close enough. They always sit by the door and my station is behind the bar.’

  ‘Can you get to serve them?’

  ‘Not without permission, which I won’t get, because the manageress doesn’t like me. Thinks I’m too posh, would you believe?’ Helen laughed. ‘And if I break ranks to get closer I’ll arouse their suspicions because I’ll have Brünnhilde on my heels.’

  ‘She isn’t someone known to you, obviously. What I’m saying is no one from Baker Street?’

  ‘There are an awful lot of us at Baker Street, sir.’

  ‘Worth a try. You never know. Point is you’re going to have to get close enough to get an ID, just in case. Same goes for him,’ Jack said as he finished his drink. ‘That’s an order.’

  He went out ahead of her, as was prearranged, making sure as always never to be seen arriving and leaving with the same person, just in case there was someone watching.

  As indeed there was – a tall, elegant man well hidden in the dark of the doorway of a bombed-out building opposite. When he saw Jack leaving he noted the time down in his notebook and waited for the imminent departure of Jack’s guest, which would also be duly noted, just for the record. In the meantime, in what little light there was, he checked the state of his carefully manicured nails.

  * * *

  Within her first week at the aerodrome, which was all anyone ever called it, Poppy could dismantle a six-cylinder engine, name all the parts and reassemble it, leaving it in perfect running order. Trafford assured her such a depth of knowledge was not altogether necessary if all she was going to do was – as she called it – budger them up, but agreed with Poppy’s assertion that while a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot wouldn’t ever come amiss.

  ‘Anyway, who knows?’ Poppy said. ‘One might be asked to pose as an engineer – in fact one probably will – which would require a full knowledge of working engines.’

  ‘A female engineer?’ Trafford wondered, cutting a small black cheroot into halves and offering one to Poppy. ‘Yes, of course, Jerry does like to put the female of the species to work, doesn’t he?’ So they might well drop you out of a plane disguised as a femmy oilhand, eh? Yes, yes – see what you’re getting at, and very good too – if one’s going to do a job, do the fudging thing proper like, right? Now then, day’s work done, time to recreate. What’d you like to do? Get blotto? Get even more blotto? Or get totally blotto?’

  Poppy laughed with delight as always at her new friend’s outrageousness. Even though they had done nothing but work hard, the week had been endless fun, since Trafford managed to turn everything and everyone on their heads and back to front, yet still teach them what they had come to learn. Early on in the week Poppy had learned to her astonishment that the gang of Australians she had met when she first arrived had all been sent to Trafford to learn how to fly. Far from being the aces they had professed themselves the first evening Poppy had spent in their company, it emerged that they were all complete greenhorns who had been given up on by their flying instructor down south as totally unsuitable mat
erial. Five days in Trafford’s company and they were all flying like air show experts.

  ‘How come?’ Poppy had asked Trafford when she had learned the truth.

  ‘Only one way to teach someone how to fly,’ Trafford had answered obliquely. ‘And that’s to put ’em up there.’

  ‘Yes, of course. With an instructor.’

  ‘Nonsense. To hell with instructors yelling in your ear. Only way you learn to fly is when you blotting well have to! Want to learn?’

  ‘If I had the time I wouldn’t mind,’ an emboldened Poppy had replied. ‘Might come in useful one day.’

  ‘When we’ve a day off, I’ll teach you.’

  ‘A day?’

  ‘Tell you what!’ Trafford had said with a grin, picking her pug up and cuddling him. ‘Take the manual for your bedtime reading. Read it, mark it, learn it and all that sort of claptrap – and I bet you’ll be in the air solo by day two!’

  Normally it wasn’t the sort of challenge Poppy would have dreamed of accepting, not being the kind of person ever to be rushed or dared into anything. Poppy far preferred to approach things pragmatically, to view things coolly, to make her judgements in her own time and arrive at any decisions once everything had been properly considered. But there was something entirely unrealistic and preposterous in Trafford Perkins’s wager that made her pick up the gauntlet she had thrown down.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon as done,’ Trafford had replied. ‘Day after you finish your course, we’ll have you up in the air.’

  Now that day had dawned, Poppy no longer felt quite so sure. For a start it was good and wintry, with a strong northeasterly blowing hard across the Fens, sharp and cold enough to bring tears to the eyes, and second there was the matter of the machine that was sitting out on the tarmac waiting for them – a single-seater yellow Tiger Moth.