The Flight of the Maidens
Page 30
‘Everything in F seems to be for you,’ said Lieselotte.
‘It’ll be the Lonsdale. They are so terribly kind. Mum’s friends . . . ’
‘I hope they’re from friends of your own,’ said Una.
‘Oh no,’ said Hetty sententiously. ‘Ma was the one with friends.’
Una looked stony and said, ‘Well, thanks.’
The porter approached. He looked like somebody’s butler. ‘Ladies? Ah yes, Miss Fallowes. Your haversack has been forwarded from the Lake District and your trunk has been here for some time. They are up in your room. Will you follow me a moment, please? You are Miss Fallowes?’
‘Yes. I’m Hetty Fallowes. Hester Fallowes. Hestah,’ and she disappeared with him into his office and Una and Lieselotte stood stalwart outside, watching a procession of assorted women still marching as to war, some others, still schoolgirls, queuing beside a phone on the wall to ring home. There were yet other ones from the previous year, reuniting with shrieks.
‘Nice building,’ said Una. ‘Good as Cambridge. Parquet flooring and central heating. She’ll be cosy. If she stays.’
‘But what’s happened to her? Where’s she gone? Mrs. Feldman wants to fit me for a dress. It’s yellow satin: just the thing, she says, for Cambridge. I wonder. Look, we must go,’ said Lieselotte.
Then Hetty came out of the porter’s office carrying an enormous bunch of flowers and her face was very still.
‘It must be Eustace again,’ said Una. ‘Oh God. I thought she’d got away.’
‘Maybe it’s from someone she’s met since.’
‘There wasn’t anyone in Cumberland. I saw the place. Nobody under ninety. All she did was read books in a peasant dwelling and go off for one weekend playing tennis with some nobs.’
Hetty walked up to them and held out the flowers. ‘They’re from my mother.’
Una and Lieselotte took three steps back. Students rushed around them, calling and squawking like birds.
‘Could you take them? I don’t want them. There’ve been so many flowers.’
Una and Lieselotte took another step back.
‘She ordered them from Moyses Stevens in Oxford Street last month. To be delivered today, with a note she wrote.’
(The note had said: ‘Always in good time, darling!! Welcome to your new life. I’ll never stop thinking about you’, but Hetty didn’t tell them this.)
‘I could give them to Mrs. Feldman if you like,’ said Lieselotte. ‘She’d love them.’
‘Yes, do. Thanks. Now, I’ll see you to the gates.’
‘Hetty, are you sure? Shall we come and see your room?’
‘No, thanks. I’m sure. Come on.’
When they all reached the urns, though, Hetty stopped and said goodbye. They looked back up at her nervously as she stood on the top step, hands on hips.
‘Macabre, wasn’t it?’ said Hetty. ‘I won’t come down to the gates with you, on second thoughts, if you don’t mind. I’ll have to change for dinner and that, though God knows what into. Can you see your way through the trees? It’s going to be foggy.’
The two looked down the avenue of planes and then back up at Hetty. They didn’t move.
‘Oh, go!’ said Hetty. ‘I’m fine. I’m staying. Go. I haven’t your phone numbers, so you’ll have to ring me. If you’ve time. I’ll tell you something, in case you don’t know. In the end things get hosed out. O.K.?’
Still they stood.
‘We’ll ring tomorrow.’
Still they looked anxious. Still they wouldn’t move.
‘Go!’ said Hetty. ‘I love you both very much, but go. There’s a lot to be seen to.’
She watched them moving uncertainly between the trees, Una, Lieselotte and the huge bouquet. The bouquet was dried-up goldenrod and joyless asters. I’ll bet she never ordered asters, thought Hetty. Oh, poor old Ma.
She turned from the trees to the College buildings behind her, where all the lights were blazing. Young people were running and shouting and laughing inside. Above the roofs, the London sky was rosy, not with sunset but with the lights of the great city.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With grateful thanks to Anthony Lucking for his researches into transatlantic passenger transport after the War, on my behalf; to Professor Andrew Taylor for information about Cambridge terms in 1946; and most of all to Hannele Zürndorfer for information on the Kindertransport of Jewish refugees in 1939 and their lives in Britain afterwards, for her autobiography, The Ninth of November (Quartet Books), and for her long friendship.
J. G., Swaledale, 1999
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year. She is winner of the David Higham Prize, the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and the Silver Pen Award from PEN. Her novels include: God on the Rocks, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Old Filth, a finalist for the Orange Prize; The Man in the Wooden Hat, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Last Friends, finalist for the Folio Award. She lives in the south of England near the sea.