‘You too!’ Robert yelled to the warden. ‘In case the wretched ceiling falls in!’
‘What about you, sir?’ the warden called back. ‘Let me give you a hand down!’
At that moment the chair beneath Robert gave, leaving him swinging in space still holding on to the beam. He was just about to drop when the beam moved violently, jumping upwards as something heavy crashed from above onto the other end of it, causing Robert to all but disappear into the remains of the room above. He let go at once, hoping to fall, but whatever had caused the beam to upend so suddenly had also caused more masonry and timber to cascade from the floors above, all but filling in the hole where the child had hung suspended and now completely trapping Robert.
Below him through what was left of the hole he could just see the terrified face of the warden staring up at him.
‘Get out, man!’ he called. ‘This whole damn ceiling could collapse! Get out! And be quick about it!’
The face remained looking up at him aghast for a moment and then, as some more masonry collapsed, was gone. Robert struggled, carefully at first lest he should trigger another avalanche of masonry and timber, and then, when he realised he was completely caught, more violently. Both his arms were free, but it felt as if one of his legs was now well and truly stuck between boards and beams. Turning his body round as far as he could, he began to scrabble at the junk trapping his leg, clawing his way down to a heavy beam that was lying across his knee. After two or three good pushes and pulls, he felt the timber move, falling off his leg, and then he heard it crashing through what was left of the ceiling to fall far below on the floor.
He was free. Gently easing his leg back under him, he realised both legs now hung uninjured below him on the other side of the hole. All he had to do now was work the top half of his body free and then wriggle through and drop down. But he would have to hurry. The flames that had threatened the child were now only a matter of yards from his head.
He could feel the heat becoming more and more intense as he struggled harder and harder to free himself. If only someone would jump up and pull his legs from below he would probably just pop out like a cork from a bottle, but there was no one in the shop below.
Except there was. Now he could see two anxious faces peering up at him through the smoke and dust.
‘Jump!’ he yelled at them. ‘Jump up and catch hold of my legs! Quickly! Jump!’
The tallest of them jumped. Robert could feel his hands brush the bottom of his feet. Pushing him-self down with all his might he tried to force his body nearer to his rescuers but he couldn’t move himself an inch let alone six.
‘Hold on!’ he heard one of them shout up to him. ‘Pete’s gone to fetch a ladder!’
Pete would have to be quick, Robert realised, as with a loud whoosh! a ball of flame exploded on the other side of the room in which his top half was stuck, scorching his face like the sun even from that distance. Now he could barely breathe, so little oxygen was there left in the air – so closing his eyes as tightly as he could, he breathed in slowly and deeply through his nose, held the breath and gave one last mighty push downwards.
He felt the floor give way and sensed he was beginning to fall – but even as he did there was a huge explosion above him.
Meanwhile Lily sat on in the shelter. It was only when she realised that she was by now quite alone that it came to her that something must have happened.
Gas, they said later. It had to be one of the gas ovens in one of the flats above the shop, to go off like that. Or it could just have been combustion, one of the firemen reckoned, as they sorted through the rubble.
Whatever it was was of no consequence to Robert, who was killed instantly by the blast even as he fell through the hole from which he had rescued the jeweller’s little girl.
When they finally disinterred him from the massive pile of rubble that had collapsed on top of him, they found his tall, handsome body face down, arms spread out, barely covering, among many other pieces, a cluster of rings.
Kate stood staring at the dark rectangle in the ground. The nightmare was still running. She tried hurting herself again, surreptitiously bending her little finger back as far as she could until she could practically bear the pain no longer but refusing to cry out, hoping only that the self-inflicted agony would shake her sleeping mind into consciousness, and when it did she would be lying in her bed in the cottage at Eden Park looking out on the glorious landscape that lay beyond her window, with Marjorie asleep in her bed beside her, and Billy in the room next door – instead of standing at Robert’s grave. But the terrible event was not a nightmare. Robert was dead, tragedy had triumphed and grief was exultant.
She turned to Marjorie, putting out a hand to place it on her arm, as Billy stood a little way behind her, hands folded in front of him, head tilted upwards, staring at the sky above him as if unable to face the reality of death. Robert’s father and mother stood at the head of the grave. Helen’s face was immobile, still as a statue, while at her side Harold stood in a black overcoat holding his homburg hat in front of him, seeming to glare down into the hole in the ground where his son’s coffin rested, its shining brass plaque now all but obscured by a handful of the earth thrown by the vicar. At the other end of the grave Lily stood apart from the family, a small, slender figure, her face concealed by the veil on her hat.
The ceremony ended, Kate turned to look at Lily, about to go and ask her to come back to the house with the family and closest friends and relatives, but Lily seemed unaware of Kate. Instead she took a step nearer the grave, dropped a white lily on the coffin, turned and stumbled hurriedly out of the graveyard.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ Kate asked Marjorie. ‘I’m just going after Lily.’
‘Lily?’ Marjorie said, staring at Kate. ‘What for? Why do you want to go after Lily?’
‘I think I ought to invite her back to the house.’
‘Why? Why should you think that?’
‘Marjorie.’ Kate took her friend aside. ‘Marjorie – Lily and Robert were engaged.’
‘Not officially.’
‘That doesn’t matter, Marjorie. Robert was mad about her and they were going to get married. So I think it’s only proper that I should ask her back.’
‘They weren’t engaged. Not officially.’
‘It really doesn’t matter, Marjorie. Really it doesn’t.’
But by the time Kate made it out into the lane by the church, Lily appeared to have vanished. Thinking she couldn’t have got very far, Kate began to hurry towards where the lane met the road, but as she reached the junction she heard the throaty roar of a car driving away. Looking to her left she saw Robert’s MG fast disappearing in a cloud of dust as Lily fled the burial ground.
‘You’ll be giving up that secretary stuff now I take it,’ Harold Maddox said to his daughter after the last of the guests had left the house. ‘You’ll be coming home to look after your mother.’
‘She’ll be doing no such thing,’ Helen replied, helping Kate and Marjorie begin to clear away.
‘Leave this please, Mum,’ Kate insisted. ‘We can manage this perfectly well.’
‘Just as I can manage perfectly well here on my own,’ Helen replied. ‘I’m not helpless. I can manage perfectly well on my own.’
‘Katherine will have to give up her work for a while, that’s all there is to it,’ Harold insisted. ‘I am not having you moping around the place on your own without any company.’
‘You can insist till you’re blue in the face, Harold,’ Helen replied. ‘Kate is not giving up her work.’
‘I can if you want me to, Mum. It’s all right.’
‘It is not all right. And I do not want you to. Robert wouldn’t have wanted you to – it’s no good looking like that, Harold. He told me several times how much Kate was enjoying her work, and more important how good she was at it.’
‘How on earth could he know?’ Harold snapped. ‘Her work’s meant to be hush-hush.’
&nbs
p; ‘Lily told him, if you want to know. They work in the same section and she told Robert how highly they thought of Kate. And what important work she’s doing, so I’m certainly not having her giving it up on my account, particularly since it is quite unnecessary.’
‘Well I say she does,’ Harold insisted. ‘And that is an end to it. Kate has not achieved the age of majority, so what I say still goes.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Helen turned round and confronted her husband face to face. ‘There’s a war on, Harold! We all have to do what we can to help fight it – as well as win it, please God! It’s bad enough fighting one dictator without having to take on another one in one’s household!’
‘I’m afraid I insist, Helen. Do you understand? These are my wishes.’
‘Then you know what you can do with your wishes, Harold! You insist once more and I shall walk out that front door! I mean it! And you can bet your last penny no one’s going to give up anything to stay at home looking after you!’
Her husband had no idea at all how to cope with this sudden display of emotion, with the fact that his wife was, for once, showing her feelings. Looking first to his daughter and then equally hopelessly to her friend, he was unable to do anything except shake his head and begin to hurry out of the room.
‘You haven’t heard the last of this, Katherine,’ he muttered as he reached the door.
‘Oh – oh, go to hell, Harold, will you!’ Helen cried at him from behind her hands. ‘Just go to hell!’
Kate sat comforting her mother while Marjorie and Billy continued to clear up the funeral tea with the aid of Helen’s daily help.
‘As if it’s not enough to have lost Robert,’ Helen said quietly, twisting her handkerchief round her fingers. ‘God knows it’s bad enough losing our son – but then to have him trying to wreck your life.’
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Kate comforted her. ‘He’s not going to wreck my life on top of it all. And, you know, if you want me here, there’s no problem in me getting some compassionate leave, really there isn’t.’
‘I don’t want you to, Kate – and for two good reasons. First of all, I don’t need it. I am working twenty-four hours a day with the WVS, and heaven only knows what else.’ Helen patted Kate’s hand and smiled bravely at her. ‘And secondly I don’t think you should leave your post at a time like this. And anyway, if you did come home to help out, I’d only get so used to you being here again I wouldn’t want you to go back. Particularly now.’
‘That’s three things, Mum,’ Kate tried to joke. ‘Not two.’
‘Me all over,’ Helen said, wiping her eyes with her hankie. ‘I was never any good at maths. Now don’t you worry about a thing – I can take care of your father, believe me.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to go and try to make myself look a bit more presentable.’ She got up, kissed Kate and left to go upstairs.
‘You can stay here tonight, Marjorie,’ Kate said as finally all the clearing up was done. ‘You don’t have to go back tonight. Mum said it would be fine and it really is a bit of a trek back to Eden Park.’
‘I don’t know that we should,’ Marjorie demurred. ‘I mean, where would we sleep?’
‘There’s a spare bed in my room,’ Kate replied, knowing Robert’s room was strictly off limits. ‘And perhaps Billy wouldn’t mind sleeping on the sofa?’
‘Course not,’ Billy replied gruffly. ‘I don’t mind where I sleep, Kate.’
No one had any appetite for supper, so everyone retired to bed early. Having settled Billy down on the sofa, Kate and Marjorie took themselves off upstairs. As she got into bed Kate dreaded the night, thinking she would never fall asleep, but due no doubt to the terrible strains and the emotion of the day she soon and suddenly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, only to find herself being awoken in the smallest of the hours by the sound of terrible sobbing.
‘Marjorie?’ she said quietly. ‘Marjorie, what is it?’
Kate knew perfectly well.
‘I feel bereft. I loved your brother so much.’
‘You were not alone, Marjorie,’ Kate whispered, and she pulled the bedclothes over her head in order to prevent herself from saying, ‘You only met him once. I knew him all my life.’
Downstairs her mother stared into the lifeless sitting room fire, as if willing it to spring once more into a blaze. Meanwhile, outside, walking the now silent, dark streets, while fires from another town lit up the skies, and not knowing quite where he was headed, Robert’s father started to face bitter despair.
Chapter Sixteen
Any sense of shame Poppy might have felt she had buried the day Jack Ward commissioned her to see her first task through to the end. She knew she was going to be asked to do things she would never before have imagined doing, to be a person she could never have imagined being, and to make intimate friends of people she despised. Of course she had suffered many moments of doubt at the thought of what might lie in store for her, but the moment she had to resume her dreadful new persona publicly Poppy found she was able to forget all about her old self.
So far at least she had been successful. The new set seemed to harbour no suspicions about her, taking her into their outer circle almost at once and very shortly into their inner one. Scott had been a great help, since he sowed all the correct sort of propaganda about Poppy to her newfound admirers, tempering his information with the impression that he himself was none too keen on her as a woman since she had not only turned him down, not once but twice, but was if anything too extreme in her views.
‘And that is saying something. I mean even the Führer’s talent scouts thought I was ideal material until they met Miss de Donnet. Just imagine, if Miss de Donnet played the right sort of cards in the right sort of order, she could well be the next Mrs Hitler.’
Remarks like this, designed to raise an easy laugh at cocktail hour, also more than served their purpose, since Poppy then had to do or say very little more to convince her new circle of friends that she was the sort of woman all the men admired and all the women feared – apparently devoid of warmth, displaying emotion only when something unfortunate or untoward happened, when she would be seen to smile to herself in private satisfaction.
‘Hard as nails,’ Elizabeth would mutter behind her back. ‘No, harder actually. But you have to give it to her, she is not just frightening, she is fascinating too.’
Far from frightening Henry Lypton, however, the more disdainful and uninterested Poppy appeared to be in his company the more he pursued her. Having decided that she was not only indispensable company at the piano, he now determined she was to be his constant social companion for as many hours per day as he could persuade her to be, with an eye obviously on extending their friendship well into the hours of the night.
The moment Poppy realised that this was his all too obvious design was the closest she found herself coming to running away to ring Jack Ward from the nearest telephone and telling him that becoming Lord Lypton’s mistress was taking everything a step too far.
They lunched or dined together at least once every two or three days, as their so-called friendship developed. Despite wartime restrictions Henry Lypton seemed to know any number of places where they could eat and drink quite adequately. They would also dine at friends’ houses where again the war seemed to be taking place elsewhere. The more houses Poppy was invited to the more well-known and influential people she met, the more she heard, and the more she was able to carefully jot down in the privacy of her hotel bedroom to pass on to HQ via her usual post box, the cigarette kiosk in the hotel foyer.
One evening when she and Henry were dining in a private room in a small, extremely exclusive restaurant in Mayfair, Poppy decided to take the initiative a little more than usual, having been advised by her masters that they were getting every indication that whatever was being planned was now imminent, and therefore it was essential that as much information as possible should be collected qu
ickly but still as discreetly as ever if a successful counter-strike was going to be organised in time.
‘Sometimes one wonders, you know,’ she drawled, sipping her gin and It, ‘whether everyone one knows is just perfectly content to sit on their more than ample British backside hoping for the best – which is to say that someone else manages to knock a few heads together – or whether anyone one knows is actually going to have the spunk to do something. Frankly, Henry, I don’t know about you, but I am getting most dreadfully bored waiting.’
‘Moi aussi, my pet,’ Henry replied, hooding his reptile eyes at her. ‘Being bored is dull enough, but being dreadfully bored is positively narcotic.’
‘I am trying to be serious, Henry.’
‘The on dit – for what it is worth – is that the fat is in the fire.’
‘The fat has been in the fire, Henry, for years. First of all everyone went around saying Neville C was going to come up trumps – then it was Halifax – then it was that funny little mob of muddleheaded aristos who thought all they had to do was have a word in the right ear and everything would be hunky-doo. Then there were all the rumours that Herr H was doing all sorts of stuff backstage so that we could sign a quick and sure-thing treaty with him that would protect our interests after he’d finished sticking Swastikas all over Europe – yet here we are at the end of year one still at war. It’s all the little Fat Man’s fault, I do swear. If the Fat Man hadn’t barged his way into office and started banging on about how great we are and how we’ll fight everywhere to the last drop of blood et cetera et-boring-blasted-cetera we would not be having to endure this dreadful bombardment that is simply wrecking one’s social life.’
Henry smiled slowly, amused as always at his Diona’s cold-blooded egoism and her utter contempt for what the British public considered the rights and wrongs of this particular war, warming to her more than ever. Lord Lypton was absolutely on the side of Hitler and the Third Reich. He belived in everything the Führer said, thought and wrote, and was at a complete loss when it came to understanding how anyone of any proper education could not see the brilliance of the Nazi political values, military ambition and ethnic ideals. But most of all he smiled because he knew what was in hand, just as he knew that if they were able to pull off the coup that was planned, then one enormous obstacle would be removed from their path at one fell swoop, leaving the way to an early truce with Germany considerably clearer.
Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 Page 35
