‘Why ever not?’
He shrugged.
‘Ben, why not? I’m perfectly capable.’
‘You may be capable,’ he said, ‘but it’s not what you should be doing. It’s not a woman’s job.’
‘Oh Ben, honestly! When women have been half running this country for five years. What a stupid, old-fashioned thing to say.’
‘Yes, well, I am old-fashioned,’ he said, ‘and I don’t like to see women lugging spades and that about.’
Whereupon Grace said she had never heard anything so silly, and he said she was going to hear a lot of equally silly things in the future and she’d better get used to it.
‘Any minute now,’ she said, trying to make a joke of it, ‘you’ll start telling me women belong in the kitchen.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing,’ said Grace quickly.
‘Yes it does. You’re implying that’s the sort of thing working-class men say. Isn’t it? Not nice liberal upper-class chaps, like Charles and Jack.’
‘Charles wasn’t liberal, Ben, and don’t be ridiculous.’
‘If I can’t say something I believe in,’ he said suddenly, ‘without you relating it to my background, I don’t know quite what we’re doing together at all.’
‘Ben, you’re just being paranoid. It wasn’t what I meant at all. And you know it wasn’t. You’re just picking a quarrel, finding difficulties.’
‘I’m glad you can read my mind so well,’ he said, and went out into the garden and slammed the door.
Grace was shaking: with fright as much as rage. She had just finished clearing the table when he came back in. She thought he was going to apologize, but he said, ‘Look, I think I’d best go back to Tidworth.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re not going to have a good weekend. And I need to think a bit.’
Panic gripped her; she thought she was going to be sick. ‘Think about what?’
‘Us. What we’re going to do.’
She didn’t argue; she had at least too much self-respect for that. He left almost at once, giving her the briefest kiss, and she did not hear from him until Sunday evening. Then he phoned, and said he was sorry, that he needed more time to think, that although he loved her, he wasn’t sure they had really faced up to the situation properly. ‘I’ll write to you or something,’ he said. ‘Sorry about this. But we’ve got to be sure.’
She didn’t hear from him for a week, and then he came over to see her.
He sat in the study, his head bowed, and told her that much as he loved her, he thought they should postpone any decisions about their future for quite a long time, that things were even more difficult than he had first thought. Grace was not without pride; she told him she thought so too. He said he’d be over to see the boys in a couple of weeks, and until then it would be best not to have any contact with each other.
When he had gone, she went upstairs and lay awake on her bed all night, staring into the darkness, unable to believe such happiness could have arrived and left her again so swiftly. Against all odds, she expected to hear from him again within a few days, but she didn’t. The phone remained stubbornly silent. As stubborn as he was.
Misery, anxiety made her physically ill. She felt nauseated a lot of the time, had headaches, was lethargic, devoid of energy. She wanted to sleep a great deal, found herself heavy-eyed after lunch, dropping off on the sofa after supper.
‘You look rotten,’ said Florence, who was herself radiant, shining with happiness. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I think so. Just worried.’
‘What about?’
‘Ben,’ said Grace, ‘Ben, and what we’re going to do.’ She refused to discuss it further.
‘You ought to eat more,’ said David, watching her push her food round her plate. ‘You’re awfully thin.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ said Grace.
‘You look awful,’ said Daniel, ‘ever so pale. You all right?’
‘Yes, I’m all right. I’ve just been feeling a bit sick lately, that’s all.’
‘You ought to go to the doctor. S’pose it’s appendicitis like me.’
‘Oh don’t talk about appendicitis,’ said Grace, remembering the happiness of that night, after the sister had told them to go home to bed.
‘Why not?’
‘Just don’t,’ she said and burst into tears, rushed away upstairs.
David looked at Daniel. ‘I think she might have appendicitis,’ he said. ‘She’s scared it might be, that’s why she keeps crying. She was sick the other day, I heard her, just like you were.’
‘Should we tell Dad?’
‘Yeah. I’ll write him a note.’
Ben stood in his small room in the barracks at Tidworth, reading the letter from David that said Grace wasn’t well, that she kept being sick and didn’t want her food, and was terribly tired all the time and kept crying, and they thought it might be appendicitis and he ought to come and see her and make her go to the doctor, and an extraordinary series of emotions went through him. He was not surprised to find that when he tried to reread the letter, the lines were slightly blurred.
He arrived at the Mill House the next evening. Grace was sitting in the kitchen, trying to concentrate on a complicated letter from one of her land girls’ mothers. She looked up and flushed as he came in.
‘Hallo. What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to see you. That’s all.’
‘Oh.’ He looked odd, rather worked up, different from the heavy, hostile creature he had become. She was puzzled.
‘I shouldn’t really be here. Get into trouble if they knew. But I—’
‘Well, just let me finish this,’ she said as coolly as she could, determined not to let him see how disturbed she was by his arrival. ‘It’s rather complicated. And then I’ll get you a drink.’
‘I don’t want a drink,’ he said.
This was clearly it; the final announcement.
‘Come into the other room, will you?’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘All right.’ She followed him through, sat on the sofa beside him, feeling terrified. She took a deep breath, forcing down the panic, looked at him steadily. She was not going to make a fool of herself; she was not.
‘I had a letter from David,’ he said abruptly. ‘He seemed to think you might have appendicitis.’
‘Oh, that’s silly. Of course I haven’t.’
‘You sure? He said you’d not been eating, been feeling rotten.’
‘Yes. Yes I have. But it’s certainly not appendicitis.’
He put his hand on her belly. ‘Not tender here?’
‘No. No of course not.’
‘He said you’d actually been sick though.’
‘Yes, I have. But I’d know if it was my appendix. I’m not daft.’
‘I think you might be,’ he said, ‘daft, I mean.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘Grace, when did you last have a period?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said irritably, ‘about – about—’ Her voice trailed away, she stared at him, flushed, her eyes very bright. ‘Oh my God,’ she said finally, her voice an awed whisper, ‘it was Christmas Eve, I remember, remember thinking it was the last straw.’
‘And now it’s March.’ He felt her belly again. ‘It feels just a tiny bit swollen,’ he said, ‘fluid of course, that’s all it is.’
‘Why do you always have to be so bloody clever about everything?’ she said and burst into tears.
Suddenly, magically, everything was much better. Ben said they’d have to get married quickly, that he didn’t want any little bastards in the family. He smiled at her and kissed her as he said it; he was suddenly quietly, confidently happy.
He said he would still like to leave the Mill House, but he certainly didn’t want to live in a town, that children were much better in the country and anyway it was cheaper, and that as David was finally happily settled at the grammar school perhaps somewhere in a v
illage the other side of Salisbury might be a good idea. He also said he’d been doing a lot of thinking and that, for a family man, teaching did seem to be the ideal profession; if Grace was really prepared to sponsor him while he was at college, he’d take her on for the rest of his life. Grace said that would be perfectly all right.
She lay in bed and looked at him as he said all this, smiling, unable to believe her happiness. ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘I love you so much.’
‘I love you too. And I’m sorry I’ve been such a miserable bugger lately.’
‘Don’t say sorry,’ she said.
He smiled, put his hand out, caressed her breasts. She winced. ‘They’re awfully sore.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said, ‘what a lot of changes we’re going to have to make.’
‘But it’s worth it, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘very well worth it.’
Their baby – his baby – seemed to have worked a most remarkable change in him. It was as if everything had shifted, come back into focus, restored his self-respect. She could only suppose it had its roots in something primitive; that he felt now she was carrying his child she was clearly and indisputably his, his woman. She didn’t really care; whatever the explanation he was the old Ben again, gentle, caring, relaxed, and something else too, confident, because this was something he knew about, that he could tell her about. She was the novice, finding herself in unfamiliar territory, he leading the way, showing her what to do. It was at one and the same time very complicated and extremely simple; she knew only that she was perfectly happy.
‘I think we should have a party,’ said Grace, ‘just a family one, of course. But to tell everyone. And celebrate everything. All the happy endings. Ours, and Florence and Giles, and Muriel and Clifford, and Jack, he’s got into medical school – you see he’s not making all this silly fuss about his wife supporting him. Oh, and Jeannette – Ted Miller has finally popped the question, apparently. And according to Daniel, Charlotte’s pregnant again. I’m not much good at keeping her in, I’m afraid. I’m not sure that we ought to celebrate that, actually.’
‘Of course we should,’ said Ben, ‘it was Charlotte’s first confinement that brought us together. Yes, you go ahead and have your party if you want to. The whole country’ll be partying soon, anyway.’
She was surprised she felt well enough; but suddenly, miraculously, she did. Filled with energy, no longer sick. ‘I told you,’ said Ben complacently, ‘thirteen weeks almost to the day.’
He continued to be filled with a proprietorial happiness about her pregnancy, clearly regarding it as rather more his province than hers. She didn’t mind. She didn’t mind anything. ‘What about Easter Monday?’ she said, and started planning in earnest. They could all be there: for Clarissa, who had finally left her beloved Dartmouth and been posted back to Greenwich, leave was easy; Jack was in Norfolk but said nothing would keep him away; Giles could get down from Liverpool; Clifford said it would be delightful.
She asked her parents; Betty looked doubtful. ‘Is there some special reason for it, dear?’
Grace hesitated; she knew she must do it, get it over with, it wasn’t fair to spring it on them in public, but she had been dreading it nonetheless.
‘Yes,’ she said finally, ‘yes, there is.’
They took it very well; Frank seemed genuinely pleased, said he had always liked Ben, that he was a fine young chap, and one of nature’s gentlemen, and that he would be very happy to put his daughter in his care. Betty had a little cry, and said rather more doubtfully that she supposed it would be all right, and that she did like Ben, but ‘it just still seems a little – well, a little – odd, dear,’ she said.
Grace didn’t point out that her engagement to Charles had been at least a little odd, that Charles’s friends and family had certainly seen it as so; she just said she was very happy indeed, and that at long last Betty would be a grandmother. ‘You’ve been very patient, Mother,’ she said, kissing her. ‘It’ll be lovely, and if we moved to Salisbury, you’ll be even nearer.’
‘I certainly think it’s very sensible to move,’ said Betty unexpectedly. ‘That is Charles’s house and always would have been. I wouldn’t have respected Ben if he’d stayed there.’
Grace said it had been Ben’s idea entirely to leave the Mill House, not hers, indeed she had tried to resist it, whereupon Betty’s graciousness towards Ben visibly increased.
The advance on Berlin, Hitler’s increasing physical and mental instability, the public hanging from lamp posts of German deserters all too aware of the final outcome of the war, the bloody fighting the length of Germany, the appalling desecration of the northern German cities and countryside, the slow-growing perception of the full horror of the Holocaust: all seemed very far away from the sleepy charm of Shaftesbury, the peace and loveliness of Thorpe St Andrews as Grace prepared for her party that Easter weekend.
She had filled the house with flowers, had picked basketfuls of primroses and primulas and daffodils, and even a few early bluebells, cut great sheaths of forsythia and branches of apple blossom from the garden. Mrs Babbage had been in for what she called a special, ‘something between a spring clean and an ordinary,’ she explained, had waxed the golden wooden floors, polished the lovely windows, and scrubbed the stone flags in the kitchen. The house was full of dappled light, of pale, pure colour; the garden lush, lovely, rich with birdsong. Jeannette had come down from the Priory to bake, and the kitchen gave out wonderful warm, luscious smells, of baking bread and simmering soups, chives and parsley and garlic (‘Jeannette should go down in history as the person who brought garlic to south Wiltshire,’ said Florence proudly). She liked to have a musical background while she worked, and when the wireless failed her, she would create her own, warbling ‘Accentuate the Positive’ and ‘If I Loved You’ and sundry Vera Lynn classics in a surprisingly true and powerful voice.
The night before the party, Grace rang the Priory and asked to speak to Clarissa. She came onto the phone, her voice light, easy as always.
‘Darling! Lovely to hear from you. Everything all right?’
‘Yes. Yes, thank you. Clarissa, I’d really like to see you for a minute. Could we – well, go for a walk or something?’
‘Of course. Lovely idea. I’ll pop down, shall I? In about half an hour?’
‘Yes, that’d be nice,’ said Grace.
‘I just wanted to apologize,’ she said, as they wandered across the meadow, ‘for being so – arrogant that day. It was wrong of me. I – well, I talked to Ben about it, and he made me see it wasn’t really nearly as bad as I thought.’
‘How very clever of him,’ said Clarissa, her voice just slightly tart, ‘especially as he didn’t really know what had happened.’
‘No, but he pointed out what a lot you’d been through with Jack, and that you both thought it was over with Florence, and – well, I, was a bit priggish about it. I’m sorry. And I shouldn’t have hit you.’
Clarissa smiled at her, took her arm. ‘Darling, don’t give it another thought. Sweet of you to apologize. Anyway, it was naughty of me, whatever Ben, the darling, might find in the way of excuses. Lovely, lovely man. Ben, I mean. But no harm done, and Florence is never going to know. So let’s just put it all out of our minds, and concentrate on you and your blissful baby. What did you think you might call her? It’s got to be a girl, hasn’t it? And you know, what I’d like best in the entire world would be to be godmother. What would you think about that?’
‘I’d think it was a lovely idea,’ said Grace, surprised to find she meant it. ‘But I’ll have to ask Ben,’ she added dutifully.
Grace woke early next morning, slithered out of bed so as not to disturb Ben and decided to indulge herself by having a bath in the first and indeed only really warm water of the day. She was lying staring in some awe at her considerably enlarged veined breasts, so far the only visible signs of her pregnancy, when Ben came in rubbing his eyes sleepily.
‘You look lo
vely,’ he said.
‘I wonder if you’ll be saying that in five months’ time,’ said Grace, ‘when I’m huge and hideous.’
‘You won’t be huge and hideous, you’ll be huge and beautiful,’ he said, bending to kiss her.
Jeannette arrived an hour later with Imogen and Mamie, both already hopelessly overexcited. ‘Ted’s comin’ down for ’em in a while,’ she said, ‘taking ’em for a walk, to keep ’em occupied.’
‘That’s very kind of him,’ said Grace.
‘Yeah, well, I said ’e’d got to start as I mean ’im to go on,’ said Jeannette cheerfully, ‘otherwise it’s over before it’s begun.’
‘Very wise,’ said Ben. ‘Good tactics.’ Grace made a face at him.
At eleven Clarissa and Jack suddenly appeared. ‘We couldn’t stand it up there any longer,’ said Clarissa. ‘Moo’s discovered blight on her early roses, and somehow it’s Clifford’s fault, he’s in the most terrible disgrace. How he could have left this wonderful haven, Grace darling, I cannot imagine. Now do tell us what we can do, we haven’t come to just sit around, have we, Jack? Ben darling, how lovely to see you, I swear you’ve got taller than ever. Give me a kiss. Now listen, I hear you and Jack are both going to be students, I think it’s simply too wonderful—’
Grace left Clarissa, laughing, to put the glasses out and take the champagne she and Jack had brought (‘Don’t thank us, it was from my wicked, wicked friend Bunty,’) into the larder. One of the things she was determined to have, in her new house, was a refrigerator.
Florence and Giles and Clifford and Muriel arrived together, Clifford clearly already having shipped in a fair bit of Dutch courage. Muriel passed Ben her coat and hat. ‘You may put these away,’ she said to him graciously, ‘and I’d like a drink immediately. It has been the most dreadful morning. I am quite exhausted.’
‘In what way dreadful?’ asked Ben.
‘Oh, to do with the garden. You probably wouldn’t understand, it’s very complex. Anyway, it’s all Clifford’s fault.’
Ben caught Clifford’s eye and winked at him. ‘I’ll get you a drink as well,’ he said.
They had agreed, Grace and Ben, to make their announcement just before lunch, when the ice was broken and everyone had had a drink or two; so perfect a day was it that everyone was in the garden. ‘I wish we could freeze this moment, keep it for ever and ever,’ said Grace quietly to Ben, looking at them all from where they stood by the French windows, just within the drawing room, looking at all the people she cared about, close to her, Imogen and Mamie chasing Puppy, the boys sitting on the paddock fence, Ted and Jeannette laughing together under the willow tree. Giles and Florence were sitting on the grass, his arm round her shoulders; Jack was talking earnestly to Muriel; Clarissa’s arm was through Clifford’s, making him laugh with some no doubt scurrilous story.
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