by P. G. Glynn
“She’d have forty fits, wouldn’t she? Whereas that once wouldn’t have bothered me, now because of Hugo and Suzy – and Lucy to some degree – I have to tread more carefully. It’s one thing telling Hugo about you, quite another introducing you, especially at a time when we don’t know whether his father’s alive or dead.”
“That’s the big question,” Charles said. “How would you feel, my Marie, if you knew Otto had died and that you were free to be my wife?”
She thought hard before answering: “Sad in the sense that death inevitably brings sadness. Ecstatic in respect of finally being Marie Brodie!”
“Oh, my darling, that’s so good to hear!” After a lingering kiss he added: “So you’d have no doubts about marrying me, despite the fact that all I can offer you is virtually what you can see?”
She looked round the shabby, dimly lit room, then up at him. “I can see my world … my universe. What else do I need?”
+++++
Hugo said resentfully: “The only reason Mama keeps visiting is to see Suzy. She thinks of her as her daughter.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” said Helena as she washed the supper dishes in their tiny kitchen and he dried them. “Your mother just loves her and doesn’t want to miss too much of her babyhood. I can understand that. Why can’t you understand it too, Hugo, and be glad?”
“Because … because there’s something in the way she is with Suzy that disturbs me.”
“Disturbs you? How do you mean?”
“I don’t know exactly. It’s only a feeling.”
Helena took a deep breath before asking the question that had been forming in her head: “Are you sure you aren’t suffering from jealousy?”
Hugo sighed. “I might be. During Mama’s visits it sometimes feels as if I’m back in my boyhood, with all her attention focused on my sister instead of on me. Isn’t that silly?”
“Not a bit.” Helena had finished doing the dishes and now put her arms round him, noting how tense he was – how stiff his limbs. “It makes sense and will make all the more if we talk about it. Unresolved trauma has effects that persist unless they’re dealt with. Perhaps, together, we can look at this differently.”
Wondering how she became so wise and what he had done to deserve her, he queried: “You don’t think I’m being childish?”
Standing on tiptoe to kiss him, she then said: “No. You’re being yourself: the man I love and want to help. You are also the boy you once were, just as I’m the girl who once fell into the canal while doing handstands too near the bank.”
“I didn’t know about that!”
“I haven’t told you all my secrets,” she smiled, “just as you haven’t yet told me all yours. We’ve plenty of time to explore each other’s minds. As I see it, we have eternity.”
He heard her words and began to relax. “I can’t tell you how good that sounds to me. You’re a marvel, my darling, you truly are.”
“If I am, it’s only because of you and the way you make me feel. We’re so blessed, Hugo, to have found each other when we did and to have our whole lives ahead. Just imagine if we hadn’t found one another – or if you had married someone else before we met! What would we have done then?”
“It doesn’t bear imagining,” he said with a shudder. “Without you I’d be lost.”
Helena held him awhile in silence before suggesting gently: “As, perhaps, your mother was?”
“When she couldn’t marry Charles Brodie, although she was expecting his baby.” Hugo mused. “Yes, but as he was already married she shouldn’t have gone to bed with him, should she?”
“That’s as maybe. Have you never been tempted to do something that, technically, you shouldn’t have done – and have you never succumbed? Try putting yourself in your mother’s shoes and seeing things from her point of view. Destiny didn’t treat her too well, did it? She found Charles Brodie too late and not only lost him but also her place in theatrical history. After seeing Marie Howard perform at Clydach I rather share Aunt Madge’s view that it’s little short of tragic she was taken away from the stage. Then, to top everything else, your Mama lost her beloved baby. Is it any wonder she behaved as she did during your earliest years? I think I’d have gone demented, had I been her. I know that for you, as her son, it’s hard to accept she has met up with Charles again and is happy with him. I understand too how seeing her with Suzy is rekindling difficult childhood memories. But, taking a wider view, love is infinite Hugo. Mama’s love for others doesn’t diminish her feelings for you. Does some of what I’ve said make sense?”
“So much so that I feel ashamed of the way I’ve behaved,” he said. “I obviously complicate things, whereas you simplify them.”
“That’s because my life has been simple, compared with yours. My Ma and Pa were both born in Gilchrist and married here. They weren’t torn in opposite directions and, touch wood, have suffered no real tragedies. Our upbringings could hardly have been more different, my darling, which explains your complexity and my simplicity. Isn’t it wonderful that we complement each other so well?”
“It’s better than wonderful … and I’ll do my best to understand Mama from now on.”
+++++
Suzy had changed since her last visit from a baby to a toddler. How Marie’s heart lurched as the small girl, wearing a red Viyella dress her Aunt Lucy had made and smocked, progressed unsteadily towards her! “Nama?”
Scooping the precious child up in her arms, Marie answered: “Yes, my sweetheart – your Nama’s back and so happy to see you again! Tell me all you’ve been doing in my absence. You’ve certainly been growing. Let me look at you.”
Suzy was more interested in doing the looking. She had spotted something protruding from the big holdall that grandma had deposited over by the door and strained toward it, asking: “What is?”
“Let’s see,” said Marie, extracting the fluffy rabbit that Maggie had fashioned from an old coat of Nell’s. New toys were few and far between currently. “What could this be – and, more importantly, who is it for?”
“Suzy!” She struggled to be put back down on the floor. Then, clasping the rabbit in her arms and gazing up at Nama, she said solemnly: “He’s my Bobo, isn’t he?”
Marie was so startled that she gasped: “Oh, Carla!”
There was a stunned silence in the room until Hugo said coolly: “We’ve adopted a kitten and called it Bobo, Mama. So Suzy thinks the name fits everything. Don’t go misinterpreting.”
Gathering her wits, Marie asked him: “Why did you call the kitten that?”
“We didn’t,” Helena put in instantly. “Suzy did. She took one look and … and christened him. I suppose it’s an easy word for her.”
“I suppose it is,” Marie said, holding onto herself with difficulty. “Has Hugo not told you of the dog that was his sister’s and then his?”
“No, he hasn’t.” Helena looked at him in surprise. “The dog had the same name, then, did it?”
“He did,” said Marie. “Carla chose it.”
“What-say?” asked Suzy.
This was another expression of Carla’s. Marie well remembered teaching her to substitute ‘Pardon?’ She automatically responded: “Do we say ‘what-say’, or do we say … ”
Suzy obliged with: “Pardon?”
Later, when they were alone in their bedroom, Helena said to Hugo: “Fancy you never telling me that you once had a dog called Bobo!”
“I didn’t,” he told her.
“I thought Mama said … ”
“The dog was Carla’s. After she died he was banished from the castle. I had to visit him at the farm. So I could hardly call him mine, could I?”
She saw his bleak expression and said: “There’s a pity! What kind of dog was he?”
“An Alsatian.”
“I expect he lived for your visits.”
Hugo’s brows knitted. “I liked to think he did.”
Helena chose her next words carefully: “It’s just a coinc
idence.”
“What is?”
“The fact that Suzy chose the same name for her kitten as Carla chose for her dog all those years ago. I could have told you that sooner if you’d confided in me about your fears.”
He shrugged. “It’s sheer stupidity to feel fearful. I don’t even believe that people are born more than once. As far as I’m concerned they die and stay dead, except in spirit.”
“There you are, then.” Her arms went round him and soon he was helping her undress. “Let’s forget all about it.”
“I can forget if Mama can,” Hugo said as they got into bed. “The trouble is, I can’t see her letting it rest.”
+++++
The letter temporarily drove all else from Marie’s head. Addressed to her at Beulah, it awaited her there when she went next morning to visit Mam and Lucy. She had hoped to bring Suzy but Hugo had stepped in saying that Helena was expecting her mother over. Marie couldn’t see what that had to do with anything. Beatrice Gwyn had all year in which to be with her granddaughter. The trouble with Hugo was that he saw Suzy as his property and felt threatened by her obvious bond with Marie. Clearly he perceived Mrs Gwyn as non-threatening.
“Who could be writing to you here?” asked Janet, indicating the letter on the kitchen table. “Surely everybody knows by now that you divide your time between London and Hugo’s cottage over at Brynusk, hardly bothering with us.”
Marie stared at the buff-coloured envelope. It bore a stamp with King George’s head on it and a London postmark. But the spidery handwriting was foreign … and there was no mistaking the fact that it was Otto’s.
Holding the envelope and not attempting to open it, Marie sat down. She had turned so pale that Lucy asked with concern: “Is something wrong?”
“Not necessarily,” said Marie. “It’s just a shock … hearing from Otto after so long.”
At Lucy’s and Mam’s anxious instigation she slit the envelope and extracted a single sheet of flimsy paper on which was written:
‘My dearest one
I don’t know where you are, nor whether you will ever receive my letter so I shall keep it brief. How I miss you and our son! I hope and pray that you are both safe. I’m no longer with my brother’s lot. Nor am I in the place where this will be posted. Fortunately I now have friends who can move more freely than the rest of us. I think of you constantly and long for our overdue reunion.
Ever your loving husband’
Lucy, who had been reading over her sister’s shoulder, clasped her hands together and said with a big sigh: “So he’s alive! How wonderful! We’d best tell Hugo immediately, hadn’t we? I know how worried about his father he’s been.”
“Has he?” asked Marie absently, re-reading Otto’s letter and wondering where he had written it from. Her guess would be Belgium or France. The friends who could move freely were probably resistants in a position to smuggle things into this country. All the same, sending a letter from behind enemy lines wasn’t so very clever. These days there was danger everywhere – and he could have endangered her and Hugo by writing, if it became known that he had written. “We’ll tell him and Helena, of course, but nobody else.”
“Why ever not?” asked Janet.
“Because it’s safest that way.”
“We can tell Alice.”
“Who’d tell Stan. No, Mam – we can’t tell Alice, besides which she wouldn’t be interested.”
“Rubbish! She’s your sister.”
“As I’m hers – and I have no interest whatsoever in her or her doings.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Terrible maybe, but true. Come on, Lucy, let’s go and find Hugo.”
+++++
Following Helena’s directions they found him shepherding some sheep. His spirits lifted as he saw the familiar handwriting and started reading his father’s letter. Then he reached the end, where a reunion was mentioned, and they sank again. “I’m so glad to know that Papa’s alive and well,” he said. “Though it might be better for him if he were dead.”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked Lucy incredulously.
“Has Mama not told you about Charles Brodie? I trust she doesn’t have secrets from her sister as well as from her son. While Papa is fighting for his life and dreaming of her day and night, she’s playing the part of someone else’s wife and planning to break his heart.”
Marie smiled wryly. “You think, do you Hugo, that your father has been faithful to me? If you do, you’re deceiving yourself for he wouldn’t know how to be. He’s probably been breaking the hearts of half the women in France.”
“That isn’t true. You’ve no idea what he’s been doing … or what he’s been through.”
“And nor have you. So don’t assume that he’s suffering or that I’ve wronged him. You don’t know your father as I do … and you haven’t a clue how it feels to stand in my shoes.”
Helena had suggested standing in Mama’s shoes and he had meant to do so but his intentions hadn’t yet met with too much success. Hugo said: “I know how Papa will feel when the war ends and you tell him that you no longer want him.”
“Another assumption!”
“So you won’t be telling him that?”
“Until I speak to your father I can’t possibly forecast what we’ll be saying to each other or how either of us will feel. The war has to end before any of us can know where we are. And that’s when your real worries will start – in terms of working out how to reclaim your castle from the Nazis.”
“Once I’ve done that and uprooted my family from here,” Hugo said, wanting his words to hurt her, “at least Suzy will grow up knowing who she is. If you’re in London with Charles there’ll be no risk of your calling her Carla.”
53
The doodle bugs had been bad enough, but it was generally agreed that V2s were even worse. These long-range liquid-fuelled rockets were totally silent as they flew in from France and hit their targets. So there was no warning of the ballistic missile’s arrival until it had arrived and done Hitler’s bidding. V2 stood for ‘Vergeltungswaffe zwei’ – German for ‘retaliation weapon two’ – and Marie considered it a misnomer in that the Fuehrer had started the war, causing Britain and the other Allies to retaliate.
Along with the majority of Britons she also considered this to be Hitler’s last offensive. The Yalta Conference on 12 February – when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin decided to partition Germany and make her pay dearly for her transgressions – had surely marked the beginning of the war’s end. Their decision was somewhat harder to implement than to agree on paper but it was in the process of implementation and, now that the Red Army had defeated German troops in the Baltic and allied tanks had crossed the Oder, things looked bleak indeed for Germany.
So the end was in sight, which made the V2s seem less threatening than they might otherwise have seemed. But it was still difficult to believe that Hitler was in retreat and that at long last there was a strong possibility of peace.
Marie’s feelings were mixed. Oh, she wanted the war to end – of course she did! Nobody in their right mind could wish for hostilities to continue longer than they had to. She felt cocooned, though, at present in a personal world that would inevitably change once the war was over and the likely nature of these changes troubled her.
She wished she could take her own advice and live in the moment rather than looking ahead. This, Marie knew, was the right way to live. So why couldn’t she do it? And why had she blurted that out to Hugo, about reclaiming the castle? It was her own fault that he had retaliated with his remark about Suzy and Carla.
Hugo and Helena were settled in Monmouthshire and she suspected that it was not only Helena who had reservations about living in Czechoslovakia. Hugo had been so glad to leave Bohemia, and was so happy as a shepherd, that it would probably just be a sense of duty that would draw him back to his heritage: dutifulness or his mother sowing seeds in his head!
Marie did not think she could bear i
t were Suzy to be uprooted and taken beyond her reach. That would be like losing Carla all over again, except not with the same finality. Suzy would still exist, but visiting her in Herrlichbach would be incredibly expensive and involve long partings from Charles, who’d find the journey to Bohemia too demanding even in the unlikely event that he would ever be welcome in the castle. Marie expected that Otto would return there eventually – and so would see far more of Suzy than she did.
Yes, this war had its merits in the sense that living in a cocoon was preferable to facing up to an uncertain future!
One current certainty was that she was disillusioned with the film industry … and running out of jewellery. Having just sold a brooch for fifteen pounds, eleven shillings and sixpence, Marie was acutely conscious of her need for a regular income. Filming was too spasmodic to rely on, besides which she didn’t honestly enjoy it. The truth, she supposed, was that her heart wasn’t in acting any longer – or not in film-acting. She didn’t have the same drive and ambition and willingness to fight that she once did. Fulfilment now lay with Charles and with Suzy – with Hugo, too, but it had to be admitted to a lesser degree – and in finding ways to be with them as often as possible.
Reaching her bus-stop in New Bond Street and still wondering whether the pawn-broker had paid her enough, Marie did not notice the man standing in front of her until he doffed his hat and said: “Unless I’m mistaken, it’s Miss Howard … Miss Marie Howard?”
Startled, she looked up. Tall and dignified, with white hair and wearing a navy great coat, he had hardly changed since headier days. There were a few extra lines on his face but the smile was the same … and to be standing here he had not needed to walk far from his work-place. “Herbert!” she exclaimed. “Fancy seeing you … and out of your uniform, too!”
