But as I stared at the sky I heard the drone of a German plane and knew it was the summer of destruction, the sundrenched days of 1940 when we stood in the dark on the very edge of the world.
The past fell away. I was at Mallingham on Monday, the twenty-seventh of May, 1940, and the hour of my victory was at hand.
I backed my car out of the stables and put my suitcase into the boot. I had just enough petrol left to get me to the nearest station.
As I walked back into the house the phone rang.
“Dinah?” I heard the tension in his voice at once.
“Geoffrey! What is it?”
“Haven’t you heard the news?”
“I haven’t had the wireless on for hours. What’s happened?”
“Just before seven o’clock last night they sent out word that Operation Dynamo was to commence. I’ve only just found out myself. It must mean that they’re evacuating the British army from the French coast.”
Earlier in the year the government had foreseen that private boats might be needed to supplement the Navy in certain circumstances, and on May the fourteenth during the BBC’s nine-o’clock news the owners of vessels of thirty feet and upwards were requested to provide details of their craft. My yacht was smaller than thirty feet, so I had not registered it with the Small Vessel Pool, but Geoffrey and I had discussed the possibility of using it just the same. We both had friends who had registered their boats.
“Word’s going around that they now want anything that can float,” Geoffrey was saying. “I’ve just spoken to a client in Dover and he says the whole southeast’s humming. Apparently Ramsgate’s the port to make for. That’s where the small boats are being assembled, fueled and dispatched.”
“Where’s the army?”
“God knows. Of course there’s nothing in the papers or on the wireless—everything’s top secret.”
“If the boats are assembling at Ramsgate, the target must be somewhere between Calais and Dunkirk.” I tried to think. “I can get the yacht ready in an hour, I think. How soon can you be here?”
“I can leave straightaway, but Dinah, go over your supplies now so that I can bring anything we need from Norwich. Have you got a pencil and paper? All right, let’s make a list.”
We talked for ten minutes until we were sure we had forgotten nothing, and after I had replaced the receiver I paused to amend my plans. Little amendment was necessary. What pleased me most was that I now had a cast-iron excuse for canceling my appointment with Cornelius without arousing his suspicions, and an even better story if I was later summoned to give evidence at an inquiry. I could say that in my haste to rush off to France I had forgotten to turn off the wireless. Nothing could have been more plausible.
Before I began to prepare the boat I telephoned Harriet again. We had spoken the previous day to arrange for George and Nanny to stay the night with her before they set off for her Devon cottage, and now I asked if she would telephone Cornelius’ solicitors at two o’clock to inform them I had unexpectedly been drawn into a top-secret war maneuver.
“Operation Dynamo!” Harriet was appalled but calm. “For God’s sake take care of yourself, Di. Good luck. I’ll pray for you,” she added—most unexpectedly, for she was an atheist.
“Well, I wouldn’t say no to a prayer or two,” I said. “Thanks.”
I rang off and glanced at my watch. I had little time and there was still plenty to do. Moving through the house, I opened all the doors to allow the fire to travel quickly and up in the sitting room I pulled the sofa close to the wireless so that the flex would brush the upholstery. Then I laid a casual trail of newspapers from the sofa to the tall wicker wastepaper basket which I placed beneath the curtains. I had decided it was best to start the fire upstairs because the thatch would catch fire sooner.
Geoffrey arrived at noon. I was dressed in my sailing clothes, my trousers and a heavy jersey.
“What’s your car doing outside?” he demanded. “Were you going anywhere?”
“To London, but I’ve canceled my plans.” I wondered whether to put the car away again. What would be the natural thing to do? Yes, I would definitely put it away. I wondered if the stables would catch fire and thought they probably would, for the roof was also thatched and sparks would be carried on the wind. After I had put the car away I quickly opened my suitcase, whipped out the two photographs and shoved them inside my jersey.
Geoffrey was loading the boat, but he paused to kiss me when I arrived breathlessly at the jetty. Neither of us spoke. For a moment I thought of the Dunkirk beaches which lay waiting for us, but before I could feel frightened my thoughts turned back to Cornelius. I saw then that my earlier passiveness towards him had mirrored England’s pacifism, that his mounting aggression had echoed Hitler’s goose step, that my determination to stand against him was a bizarre reflection of post-Munich England. It was unfortunate that the parallels now had to cease. With the British army in retreat I found it difficult to picture England beating Hitler, but I could already see my victory over Cornelius Van Zale.
The moment came half an hour later, when we had finished loading and were ready to leave. Pretending I had forgotten something, I left Geoffrey by the boat and entered the house for the last time.
The silence, deep, intense and moving, enveloped me. I started to cry but dashed the tears away. This was triumph, not tragedy. This was my finest hour.
I hesitated only once more and that was when I reached the top of the stairs and looked back at the medieval hall. I felt as if I were looking back into the past, towards Steve and beyond him to Paul, and I thought how odd it was that an obscure manor house in the remotest part of Norfolk should have played such a large part in their wealthy, sophisticated, cosmopolitan lives. A second later I saw I was misinterpreting the past. It wasn’t the house which had played the leading role. I had automatically assumed it was because I had always identified Mallingham with myself; I had been too young, as Paul had once said, to cut the umbilical cord which had tied me to Mallingham, and for years I had been too insecure to see my own identity. But I was insecure no longer. The journey to maturity which had begun when Geoffrey had wheeled the hamper into Paul’s office had ended at last, and now Geoffrey was with me again as I set out into a new life and a different world.
It was time to sever the umbilical cord.
The rafters of the hall soared above me. I stared, feasting on the sight for the last time as my heart blazed with the most passionate love, and then I walked with pride into the room where I had outwitted Cornelius Van Zale, and calmly turned the knob on Alan’s little wireless.
A Biography of Susan Howatch
Susan Howatch is a bestselling British novelist who has published twenty books ranging from murder mysteries to family sagas. Her work deals with complex relationships in a range of settings and explores themes revolving around sex, power, ambition, forgiveness, redemption, and love.
Howatch was born in a small town in Surrey, England, on July 14, 1940. Her father was a stockbroker who was killed in World War II. She grew up an only child in an era of post-war austerity, but had a happy childhood, particularly enjoying her time at Sutton High School in the London suburbs. In 1961, she obtained a law degree from King’s College London, then a part of London University, but dropped out of a law career in order to write. She had started writing novels when she was twelve and had been submitting manuscripts since the age of seventeen.
Eventually Howatch despaired of being published in England, and in 1963 she emigrated to New York, where—almost at once—her novel The Dark Shore was accepted for publication. In 1964, she met and married Joseph Howatch, an American artist and writer. (He passed away in 2011.) They had one daughter, Antonia, who was born in 1970.
The Dark Shore was followed by five other short novels, which, with one exception, were all twentieth-century whodunits or suspense stories. Then, in 1971, Howatch published Pennmaric, a family saga that became her first international bestseller. Using multiple narrat
ors, Howatch follows the fortunes of the Castallack family from 1890 to 1945 and shows what happens when a grand passion leads to dire results for all concerned. This novel was based on the true story of the early Plantagenet kings of England, a story that Howatch updates to modern times.
She took another Plantagenet slice of history for her second family saga, Cashelmara (updated to the mid-nineteenth century). This novel was followed by The Wheel of Fortune, based on the last Plantagenets and updated to the twentieth century. However, although the Plantagenet history concerns only one family, the three novels are not interrelated and describe different families in different settings and eras.
In contrast to these stories, Howatch’s novel The Rich Are Different is not a family saga. It tells a topical story about freewheeling cutthroat bankers in New York and London during the 1920s and 1930s, and is based on the life of Cleopatra, her love affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and her final battle with Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian. The sequel, Sins of the Fathers, describes what has happened to the survivors.
By the 1980s Howatch’s novels had sold millions of copies and had been translated into many languages. She had also returned to Europe. In 1975, she and her husband separated (they were never divorced) and she and Antonia lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before moving to England in 1980. Eventually, they spent three years in Salisbury and then settled in London, where Howatch lived from 1987 until 2010.
While in Salisbury, the cathedral inspired Howatch to write the Starbridge series, six related novels about three very different Church of England clergymen and their families. The novels explored many ideas—religious, mystical, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and psychological—and focused with a new intensity on the subjects of obsessive love, addiction to power, the evil of violence, and the redemptive nature of forgiveness and love. One of the books, Scandalous Risks, won a literary prize, and the launch of the final novel took place at Lambeth Palace in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury. Howatch used money from the Starbridge series to set up a lectureship at Cambridge University in theology and natural science, and is now a member of the Cambridge Guild of Benefactors as well as the Salisbury Cathedral Confraternity.
Her last three books, the St. Benet’s trilogy, form a spin-off from the Starbridge series and are set in London in the late twentieth century. They explore the borderlands where Christianity meets medicine, psychology, and the paranormal.
Howatch retired after publishing the final St. Benet’s novel, The Heartbreaker (2004), and now helps out with her family in Surrey.
Susan Howatch, age four, with a friend in 1944.
The first page of the penultimate draft of The Dark Shore, Howatch’s first published novel (printed in the United States in 1965). The final draft was typed. The Dark Shore was written in England, and Howatch sent for it after she immigrated to America in 1964.
Howatch in 1971, at the time of publication of her first international bestseller, Penmarric.
Howatch in 1977, around the time of publication of her bestseller The Rich Are Different. This photo was taken in Ireland, where she was living then.
Howatch in 1978 with her eight-year-old daughter, Antonia.
Howatch in the mid-1980s, at the time of publication of The Wheel of Fortune.
During a 1992 publicity tour, Howatch’s Mystical Paths took over the windows of a paperback shop in Oxford.
Howatch at a 1993 dinner party for fifty people at the Ritz Hotel London, given by Eddie Bell, then CEO and chairman of HarperCollins, to celebrate Howatch’s Starbridge novels. Bell is on the right; on the left is the Very Reverend Michael Mayne, who was then Dean of Westminster Abbey.
In 1999, Howatch was elected Fellow of King’s College London, from which she graduated with a law degree in 1961.
Four generations of Howatch’s family in 2006: Susan (standing, third from left), with her daughter Antonia (second from left), her mother (holding baby), and her three grandchildren.
Howatch in 2007 with her three best friends from high school—“the three sisters I never had,” says Howatch. They are celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of their first meeting. From left to right: Hazel, Susan, Gay, and Jan.
Certificate recording the Honorary Doctorate of letters conferred on Howatch in 2012 by Hope College, Holland, Michigan.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1977 by Susan Howatch
cover design by Linda McCarthy
978-1-4532-6343-3
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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