Summer House

by Nichols, Mary

  ‘It was and perhaps I should have written first, but Aunt Joyce gave me a right royal welcome.’ He stopped, wondering whether to mention it, but curiosity got the better of him. ‘Lady Barstairs seemed – how shall I say? – taken aback, a bit shocked.’

  So he had noticed it. ‘I suppose seeing you reminded her of the last war, when her parents and her husband were alive. He died in France, you know. Perhaps he and your father knew each other…’ She limped to a halt.

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘I’m only guessing.’

  ‘What is it with everyone round here, dropping hints, tapping their noses, playing guessing games?’

  ‘I don’t know, Captain. I’ve only lived in the village a year and by their standards, I’m a newcomer. I believe it takes at least a generation to become one of them.’

  ‘So, what are you asking me? That I shouldn’t visit again?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ She gave a light laugh. ‘It’s just that I want to protect Helen from memories that are painful, but we all have those, don’t we? We can’t shy away from them.’

  ‘You are very fond of her?’

  ‘Next to my mother, my son and my…’ She paused. ‘… my son’s father, God rest him, she is the dearest person in the world to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ he said, then waited. If she wanted to talk about him, he would listen, but it was up to her.

  ‘He wasn’t my husband,’ she told him, surprising herself. Why confess that now when she had been accepted by everyone as a widow? It was as if she couldn’t bear to have an untruth between them, as if they had always known each other and their lives were in tandem. ‘He was shot down on our wedding day.’

  ‘Gee, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. It must have been damn awful.’

  ‘It was. No one knows we weren’t married, except Helen and Steve Wainright. He was going to be best man.’

  ‘I shan’t say a word, but I’m privileged you told me.’

  ‘I don’t know why I did.’

  ‘Steve won’t say anything?’

  ‘No. He was Bob’s best friend, and now he’s mine. A rock if I need one.’

  ‘You’re not in love with him?’

  ‘How could I be? I loved Bob.’

  ‘Of course, but that shouldn’t mean denying yourself for the rest of your life. He would not have wanted that, would he?’

  ‘No. Perhaps in time…’ She laughed lightly. ‘Right now, I’m too busy keeping those airmen in order.’

  ‘Do you have any time off?’

  ‘I manage a few hours now and again.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Are you asking me out?’

  ‘Guess I am.’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘Anything. Whatever you like.’

  ‘Tuesday afternoon,’ she said. ‘We could go for a walk. There are some pretty walks hereabouts.’

  ‘It’s a date.’

  He left her and wandered down the lane to Beck Cottage. Ian had not come back.

  ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ Helen asked, trying to keep the panic from her voice. They were rolling bandages at a table at the end of one of the wards. One or two of the beds were empty but they would unfortunately soon be filled again. The day was warm and the windows were wide open and the soft breeze was lifting the curtains, making dancing patterns on the floor. Outside in the courtyard they could hear the muted voices of the nurses talking to those patients fit enough to be wheeled out to take the sun.

  ‘Why not? He’s at a loose end and it’s my afternoon off.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘I know enough to know he’s a gentleman and a long way from home. It doesn’t hurt to be friendly.’ She paused. ‘Unless you know something I do not.’

  ‘You know I don’t. Oh, Laura, I’m afraid for you.’

  ‘Afraid? What of?’

  ‘You might become too fond of him and—’

  ‘You’re afraid it’s like father, like son, is that it?’ Laura leant forward and touched the back of Helen’s hand in reassurance. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to fall head over heels in love with him.’

  ‘What if he falls for you?’

  ‘Oh, Helen, I’m sure such a thing has never entered his head.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘You know, you are nearly as transparent as Mum was. You’re afraid he’ll carry me off to Canada and you’ll lose me and Robby. Don’t think I don’t know how you dote on him. No granny could be more doting.’

  ‘Yes, well…’ Helen stopped, realising what Laura had said. No granny could be more doting. But she was his granny. Oh, how she hated keeping that secret! Did the advent of Oliver’s son mean that it could no longer be kept quiet? She dreaded Laura’s reaction when she found out. She could guess most of it. Disbelief at first, then denial, then anger, and the result would be alienation. She would lose her then, and Robby too, and she didn’t know how she could go on living if that happened. If only there was a way of making it all right. Should she tell Wayne, warn him off, swear him to secrecy? How would he react? In the same way as Laura, she guessed. And how could she be sure he wouldn’t run with the tale to Joyce, or worse, tell his parents? It felt as if she was standing beside a ticking bomb. ‘I’m being silly, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘Meeting trouble halfway.’

  ‘Yes, I do believe you are. Cheer up, we’ve got work to do if I’m to get off on time. And when we come back, I’ll invite him in for tea and you can show him round like you promised.’

  Helen pretended to be satisfied. Trouble was coming, she could feel it in her bones and there was no need to meet it halfway, it was hurtling towards her.

  The clear moonlit sky was black with aircraft whichever way you looked. Steve didn’t need to be told that it was the biggest raid the air force had ever mounted. Their new boss, Air Marshall Harris, seemed to think he could bomb the enemy into submission, that they couldn’t ‘take it’ as Londoners had done. Whether he was right or not, Steve didn’t know, but his mouth had gone dry and it had been a job to stop his hands shaking as he settled himself in the cockpit. Once he’d gone through the familiar routine of taking the Lancaster into the air, he settled down to join the throng and take his aircraft and crew of seven over hundreds of miles of enemy countryside to drop his payload on Cologne. The raid was timed to take exactly ninety minutes and they had been ordered to set course for home after that time whether they had reached their objective or not. ‘We don’t want any stragglers left over the target when it gets light,’ they had been told at the briefing.

  The Lancaster had been in service since the previous September but already it was proving its worth. It was very different from flying a Hurricane or a Spitfire, being more cumbersome, especially with a full payload, but he liked flying it and he liked the comradeship, the feeling that he was not alone up there, although he was ultimately responsible for his crew and the rest of the squadron. They were good lads. He grinned a little to himself; lads! It made him feel a hundred. They were flying steadily over East Anglia and apart from keeping his distance from other aircraft, he could relax a little until they hit the Dutch coast.

  Beckbridge was somewhere below him. They could not fail to hear the aircraft going over and, as it was such a cloudless night, could probably see them too. Would they guess he was up here? His mother would worry and his father would tell her not to, which was a futile thing to say because she couldn’t help it. Would Laura be thinking of him or the fact that there were bound to be casualties who would need her nursing? He didn’t want to think of that; better to remember his last leave, the quiet understanding they had achieved. She hadn’t committed herself, but he was hopeful that the ghost of Bob might have been laid to rest. That is, if Wayne Donovan hadn’t turned her head and achieved in a week what had taken him over a year of treading on eggs to bring about.

  Everyone had a different view of the man. Mum had mentioned him in passing, Meg had written that he seemed
a friendly chap and popular in the village, though what he made of Joyce and Ian she could not be sure. Jenny was more forthcoming. She had been to a dance with him and to the pictures, and she obviously found him fascinating. He hoped that Laura didn’t think so too. It would be a tragedy for him if, having wooed her out of almost two years of mourning Bob, he was to lose her to someone else.

  He could see the coastline below him and then they were over the North Sea, over a thousand aircraft, swarming like a plague of locusts. ‘They say there’s safety in numbers.’ Ken’s voice came to him over the intercom.

  ‘Let’s hope so, though we can hardly keep our arrival a secret, can we? So keep your eyes peeled everyone. We’ll be dodging flak.’ He pushed thoughts of home from him to concentrate on trying to avoid the anti-aircraft fire without colliding with one of the other aircraft doing the same thing.

  He was not the first to arrive over Cologne, others had been there before him and he could see the fires long before he arrived over the target. It reminded him of the sight he’d had of London on that last big raid just over a year ago. The memory stiffened him against feeling sorry for those on the ground. This was payback time. He flew over the target, listening to his bomb aimer’s calm voice guiding him in, and tried to ignore the gunfire coming up from the ground and the rat-tat as his rear gunner kept the fighters off their back.

  ‘Bombs away.’

  ‘Right, let’s go home.’

  After a minute or two, Ken’s voice came over the intercom with their course and they arrived back at base in one piece, though on inspection later Steve discovered a few holes in the fuselage. Over a thousand aircraft had set off to drop nearly fifteen hundred tons of bombs; forty-one of them had not returned, two of them having collided in mid-air. The fires were still burning the next day and dense smoke prevented the reconnaissance people from taking photographs, but they became available soon afterwards and made Steve wonder if anything could have survived; the destruction seemed total. Two nights later their target was Essen and at the end of June it was the submarine base at Bremen. Each time they scraped home, he found himself wondering how much longer his luck would hold. He was never more glad of seven days’ leave.

  He and Ken travelled home together. ‘I’ve heard about a new unit being formed,’ he told Steve as they settled in their seats on the train for Attlesham. ‘Thought I might give it a go.’

  ‘New unit?’

  ‘Yes. You know how difficult it is sometimes to find the target in the dark and you end up dropping your bombs just anywhere, which is a terrible waste if all they do is kill a few cows, not to mention the number of aircraft and men being put at risk for no strategic gain, so they’ve hit on the idea of being guided in. They are going to be called Pathfinders. They’ll go in low and quick to find the target, drop flares and incendiaries to light the way for the big boys coming on behind, and then get out again pronto. I thought I might fancy that.’

  ‘I shall miss you.’

  ‘Don’t have to. Come too. I reckon we’d stand a better chance of getting back in one piece…’

  Steve didn’t agree with that last statement, but he could see the sense of doing it. How many times had he cursed the fact that on a dark night it was almost impossible to pick things out on the ground and he could never be sure his bombs had been dropped in the right place. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Ken settled for that answer. ‘What are you going to do this leave?’

  ‘Nothing, if I can help it. Might help Dad, see Laura, go to a dance.’

  ‘Laura? You mean the nurse up at the Hall? Your girl, is she?’

  ‘I’d like to think so.’

  ‘I reckon she’s OK, though my gran keeps hinting at a mystery about her.’

  ‘Why?’ He remembered his own grandmother saying something of the sort.

  ‘Dunno. Gran said Lady Helen was a recluse for years and years, never went anywhere, never had anyone to stay, drove all the village kids away from the Hall grounds. That’s true because I remember her coming after me once ’cos I went for a swim in the lake—’

  ‘No doubt she was concerned she’d be blamed if you drowned.’

  ‘Maybe, but after years of being cantankerous, she suddenly produced an old friend no one’s ever heard of who was so close to her that when she died her ladyship took the daughter and the new baby under her wing and opened up the house to a bunch of injured airmen. It’s a monumental change for her, and according to Gran, very fishy.’

  Steve pretended to be amused. ‘So what’s her theory?’

  ‘She won’t say, just taps her nose and says it’ll all come out in the wash.’

  ‘Some people like to make a mystery out of nothing. I met Laura’s mother. She was a nice woman and she and Laura were as close as any mother and daughter could be. And Laura’s doing a grand job at the hospital.’

  ‘Too true. I just hope I never end up there.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Steve said with feeling.

  The train stopped at a station and he watched people getting on and off for a minute before the doors were slammed shut, the whistle blew and they were on their way again. ‘Did you meet your Canadian cousin?’

  ‘No, but he caused quite a stir, I believe. According to Mum, it was a case of “mothers, lock up your daughters”.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Ken laughed. ‘Mum’s biased. Gran even more so. He’s probably perfectly ordinary.’

  They lapsed into silence until the train drew in at Attlesham, when they collected up their kit and made their way out of the station to find a taxi. It dropped Ken off at the top of Beck Lane and continued on to Bridge Farm with Steve.

  The farm was his bolt-hole, his safety net, the place to unwind and forget the sound of aircraft engines, the searchlights and flak, the noisy banter of other airmen pretending they weren’t scared out of their wits, the tight feeling in his gut and the dry mouth, the sheer weight of being responsible for a squadron of men and aeroplanes. His mother could spoil him all she liked and he would wander about the village, lend a hand on the farm and see Laura. He smiled at the prospect as he made his way across the yard to the back door; she was becoming more and more important to him. And then he was in the kitchen with everyone talking at once and he knew he was home.

  Ian was sitting over a breakfast of bacon and eggs when Joyce came into the kitchen at the end of her round of delivering the mail to snatch a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich before going back to the shop for the rest of her day’s work. ‘There’s a letter for you,’ she said, throwing a brown envelope down in front of him. OHMS, it had stamped on it. He knew what it was and was reluctant to open it.

  ‘Go on, it won’t bite.’

  He wiped his greasy fingers on his corduroys and slit it open. A single sheet of paper fluttered out. This was it, this was his call-up. He’d been expecting it ever since men up to forty-five had been required to register. He’d asked Bill Wainright to certify that he was an agricultural labourer whose skills were needed and therefore made him exempt, but he had turned him down on the grounds he did not employ him, except on a casual basis when he was short-handed. He had even laughed and said a spell in the army might do him good. Damn the man! Sitting on his thousand-acre farm, he could afford to scoff. He didn’t have to try and make a living out of half a dozen acres, nor was he expected to turn up for a medical in less than a week.

  Could he find some ailment that might make him fail that? Flat feet? A persistent cough? He didn’t want to fight, the whole idea was abhorrent to him, and Joyce didn’t seem to care that he might be killed. Serve her right if he was. And there was a whole hoard of black market stuff buried under the trough in that old hut which he could not abandon. He’d have to get young Donny to help him dispose of it. The boy knew the ropes by now and was proving himself useful. He would wander about the village, his hands in his pockets, socks round his ankles, kicking stones with his sandals and looking for all the world as if he had nothing better to do, when al
l the time he was acting as look out while deals were being struck and goods delivered. The boy didn’t know where the stuff came from and Ian didn’t propose to tell him, but there was a certain quartermaster up at the airfield who wasn’t averse to earning a bob or two.

  Everyone had hoped the arrival of the Americans would mark a turning point in the war but he had seen little evidence of it. Still, he couldn’t complain; their appearance had been a stroke of luck for him. They had everything, stuff people in Britain hadn’t seen for years and would pay almost anything to get. Tinned fruit; oranges; stockings called nylons which didn’t run into ladders as soon as you looked at them; coffee; cigarettes which tasted foul but you got used to that after a time; booze, stacks of it, and now it looked as though it was all coming to an end.

  ‘When do you go?’ Joyce’s voice broke in on his reverie.

  ‘Medical next Wednesday. After that…’ He shrugged.

  ‘Good, you’ll be able to spend some time with Ken while he’s here.’

  ‘The lazy bugger is still in his bed and I’ve got work to do.’ He stood up. ‘I promised to help Wainright with his haymaking.’

  He didn’t go anywhere near Bridge Farm, but made his way up to Beckbridge Hall. There was a good market up there, young fellows kicking their heels, tongues hanging out for a drink, with wives and sweethearts who wouldn’t say no to chocolates or perfume or stockings. That chap Grant was back and now he had a new nose, he looked almost human again. He had met him in the pub a few days before and he was looking forward to going home to his wife and little boy. He would want presents to take with him. He’d have to run the gauntlet of Lady Barstairs and the Drummond woman, but he wasn’t worried about them. He’d spent a profitable hour with his mother-in-law, who had explained, amid much chuckling and innuendo, why, in her opinion, Laura Drummond looked so much like Lady Helen. Ma had a long and accurate memory when it came to dates. It was only conjecture but it made him look at the old battleaxe in a different light, almost admiration.