The Wardrobe Mistress_A heart-wrenching wartime love story

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘Did they swear?’

  ‘I’ll say! Not at us, not usually. Only when they were really in trouble. Engines crippled, a rear gunner dead, a fire on board or not enough fuel to get across the water . . . You could hear the fear in their voices. We took notes verbatim so if they didn’t make it back from an operation, we had a chance of knowing if they’d completed the mission or not and where they might have crashed.’ Talking and writing, ears full of crackle and echo, it had been hell at times. Reading the notes back when you knew a crew wouldn’t return had felt like eavesdropping on death.

  ‘I’d have liked to have been a WAAF plotter.’ Fern swung under her branch and they continued walking. ‘They were the glamour girls, weren’t they, leaning across the tables like croupiers at Monte Carlo.’

  ‘There was a little more to it than that. What stopped you?’

  ‘Marriage. It stops a lot of things.’ Fern became serious again. ‘Look, you know Alistair and I are a lost cause? I know Pops is distraught, but I can’t help that.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  Fern gave a defiant shrug. ‘I’m not the only woman who has discovered that six years’ conflict has reshaped her husband’s character. And sailors are notorious, aren’t they? Apparently, to some women, the Royal Navy uniform is a walking aphrodisiac.’

  Vanessa privately acknowledged that uniforms made some men heroic, or just honest-to-God desirable. She loitered to pick a handful of woodruff, burying her face in it as she relived assertive fingers slipping gloves on to her hands.

  Fern waited for her, saying, ‘An acquaintance who’s a barrister expects a surge of divorces this year. All those “Let’s marry because I might die tomorrow” unions grinding to a halt . . . Oh, God, sorry. That was tactless. I still speak first and think second.’

  ‘So you do.’ Vanessa softened the reproof with a smile. ‘How long will you stay?’

  ‘Here? A few days, then back to Ledbury Terrace.’

  ‘And Alistair?’

  ‘He’s inherited property of his own. A flat above shops, somewhere in central London. I can’t see how we could ever live together again.’ Panic showed, replaced just as quickly with pleasure. It was a habit Fern had displayed from childhood, trapping ideas in her expression as they flashed past. ‘Why don’t you come and stay?’

  ‘In London?’

  ‘Yes, and make it soon. I’ll be scooting back to Paris at some point. It’s a good place to hide.’

  Vanessa raised her eyebrows. Why must Fern hide? ‘Is there anyone else in your life?’

  ‘A man? Golly, dozens. I danced my way through the war. Oh, look. Poor house!’

  They’d come out from the wood. Across a meadow stood Stanshurst Hall, a Palladian building of buff stone. Its front windows were boarded and a scar on the roofline showed where a section of the pediment had gone, like a piece broken off a biscuit.

  Vanessa said, ‘It was a secondary casualty to Biggin Hill.’ Buildings in a five-mile radius of the airbase had felt the effects of German raids.

  ‘There’s a crack to the east flank shaped like a villainous smile, as if it knows how much money it’s going to gobble up in repairs!’ Fern used laughter like a rolled-up newspaper. If something disturbed her – swat! ‘Pops hoped the RAF would make us their permanent School of Navigation because they paid the electricity bill. Somebody else will have to pay it now.’

  ‘Who, Fern?’

  ‘The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. I’m glad you’re back. You belong here.’

  Did she? Vanessa stole a look towards another house, a diminutive version of the Hall which nestled among trees. Ash Lodge was the first home she’d ever known, where she’d lived with her mum and dad. She remembered herself and Ruth moving out on a summer’s day – not as hot as this one – everything piled on farm carts. Ruth defaming the husband whose selfishness had scythed down her world. Had her dad felt as trapped here as she, Vanessa, did? ‘Fern, I’m not planning—’

  But Fern was already away into the meadow, swinging her arms.

  At the door of the Hall, they were met by the butler, the last resident member of household staff.

  ‘A telephone message from Commander Redenhall, Madam.’

  ‘He’s not coming tomorrow?’ Fern sounded hopeful.

  ‘He’s coming tonight, Madam. He dealt with his London business quicker than anticipated.’

  Fern turned to Vanessa. ‘You’ll dine with us?’

  ‘I’d better not. I’ll finish my typing, then go home.’ There had been a moment in the woods when Vanessa could have mentioned to Fern that she’d met Alistair Redenhall already. We bumped into each other when I intruded on a funeral. The moment had passed, and now she couldn’t admit to knowing him. Not with the butler standing by. ‘I’m here if you need advice, Fern, or even a slug of gin fetched from the Queen’s Head. But I won’t insert myself between you and your man. In fact, I’ll stay right away until he’s gone.’

  True to her word, Vanessa stayed home the following morning. Before leaving the previous evening, she’d left a note for the butler saying that she had a bad migraine, and would be off until it went away. In other words, she’d be ill until Alistair Redenhall had left again for London.

  Unused to idleness, however, she put on gloves and a straw hat and took secateurs to the climbing rose that smothered the front of Peach Cottage. There was an abundance of blooms this year, and their weight was pulling away the weatherboarding. She took an armful indoors, and offered to take the rest up to the church. ‘It’ll save you a toil uphill,’ she told her mother, whose habit was to traipse every day to St Anne’s to tend the family graves. ‘It’s stifling out there already.’

  ‘Be sure you give the stones a thorough wash, back and front,’ Ruth instructed.

  Vanessa arrived at the church gate with her blouse sticking to her. Putting down her bucket, she rested in a yew tree’s shade and stared up at the square tower. She’d been married in this pretty, Norman church whose tower had been a sight-marker for Spitfires and Hurricanes returning to Biggin Hill. Its leaden weather-cock was still missing its tail-feathers because ‘spinning the rooster’ had been a favourite pastime of the pilots. Leo had claimed the tail feathers as his own ‘kill’, boasting that he’d flown so low over the church that a man edging grass around the graves had thrown himself flat.

  That had sparked their first quarrel. Leo had seen it only as a prank that he, as a fighter pilot putting his life on the line, had the right to play while she’d viewed it as an act of disrespect. ‘How would you like it if some mad airman put the fear of God into your grandfather?’

  They were heroes, Leo and his brothers-in-arms, and through the critical summer and autumn of 1940, they’d died like flies. But . . . the danger and fatigue had blunted some of them to others’ pain.

  Vanessa filled her bucket at the outside tap. Her bright yellow-green blouse was attracting a plague of bugs. She slapped at them as she washed her grandparents’ gravestones and those of her Uncle Victor and Aunt Brenda, and put fresh roses in each pot. The water she tipped away was clean; her mother washed these graves obsessively. Collecting her tools and the remaining roses, she went to the south door where a memorial had been erected to the dead of Biggin Hill’s squadrons. Five squadrons were inscribed, though no individual names. There would have been too many. She ran her finger over ‘64 Squadron’ and for a chilling moment, was back in the Watch Room on a squally November afternoon.

  She was on duty at her wireless when Leo came thorugh screaming into her earphone. ‘I’m on fire, I’m burning!’

  Half out of her chair, she was shouting into her mic, ‘Bail, Leo, bail! Darling, ditch the bloody plane! We can start again. Darling, please!’

  Colleagues looked on in horror.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Leo.’ Vanessa fanned out the roses at the base of the plinth.

  After a silent vigil, she took respite inside the church where, in her mind’s eye, she saw two young people
in uniform making hurried vows. There had been four others at her wedding. The vicar, her mother, Leo’s best friend and one of her WAAF colleagues who’d been off-shift at the right time. Afterwards, they’d eaten a cold meat salad at the Queen’s Head, then walked back to Peach Cottage, where she and Leo had spent their wedding night while her mother slept over at a neighbour’s. The following morning, Vanessa had returned to base for the eight a.m. shift. Leo had been scrambled to action that afternoon and she hadn’t seen him for forty-eight hours. Her heart had spent every minute of it in her throat. Between her legs, she’d felt sore.

  She glanced through the visitors’ book and put a two-shilling bit in the collection box. Must she spend all day nursing an imaginary migraine? If she went home, her mother would nag her but she couldn’t hang about here. Humidity and sorrow exhausted her.

  As she closed the church’s mighty oak door behind her, she heard voices. Loud and very near.

  Someone was shouting, ‘No! You will not,’ while a deeper one contradicted, ‘There’s no going back.’

  The first voice had been Fern’s. Vanessa was pushing back against the church door, intending to retreat inside, when the smack of a hand against flesh and a sharp cry sent her racing forward. She found Fern with her back to the porch wall, her palms flat as if drawing protection from the stones. A man stood beside the Biggin Hill memorial, his hand pressed to his face. Blood leached between his fingers, on to his white cotton shirt. Vanessa’s scalp prickled. She’d walked around this man too often in her night-time fantasies not to recognise the muscular neck with its wind-bitten texture. And the hair, dark with an auburn gloss. He’d cast a stubborn shadow across her life. Seeing ‘her captain’ blooded and primitively angry ignited a need in her to appease, to comfort – until she saw that he was standing on the roses at the base of the memorial.

  Fern noticed her then. ‘Vanessa! Stay and witness. My husband lost control! Vanessa?’

  ‘Your husband hit you?’ Vanessa saw no mark on Fern. ‘Or you hit him?’

  ‘He went for me first!’

  Alistair Redenhall lowered his hand, unveiling a red streak from the corner of his eye to the hollow of his cheek. He stared at Vanessa. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Alistair!’ Fern snarled his name. ‘You’re in a churchyard, not on board ship.’

  Alistair ignored her. His eyes burned cold at Vanessa. ‘I can accept the occasional coincidence, but you’re like a postage stamp stuck to my shoe.’ He turned to Fern. ‘Why is this woman lurking here? What’s going on?’

  ‘Vanessa lives here. She works for my father. What d’you mean, “stuck to your shoe”? Have you met already?’

  Vanessa said, ‘Not really,’ as Alistair said, ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘At a funeral,’ Vanessa stammered. ‘Um – Mr Bovary’s.’

  ‘Bo’s? I didn’t realise.’ Something in Fern’s expression warned that she’d question Alistair about it later.

  Alistair gave Vanessa a succinct once-over. She’d put on her coolest clothes that morning, but her blouse, which had once been white, had been accidentally put into soak with a yellow duster, which explained its bilious colour. Nobody threw away clothes these days. Her gypsy skirt was homemade from handkerchief cotton. The chip-straw hat and rope-soled sandals must add to the impression that she’d wandered out of a rustic watercolour. He said, ‘You’re going to claim you were polishing the brasses in the church?’

  ‘I have my reasons for being here, Captain Redenhall.’

  ‘“Commander”,’ Fern corrected. ‘He never made the rank of Captain. It’s why he’s chucked in the towel. It’s why he’s planning to ruin his life and mine.’

  ‘Commander Redenhall,’ Vanessa amended. The bitter looks that passed between the couple roused a searing anger. Had they nothing better to do with their lives than inflict pain on each other? She couldn’t shout at both of them, however, and Fern had stuck up for her. So she directed everything at Alistair. ‘I might ask why you’re bullying your wife in a churchyard. And would you kindly move your feet.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Move your bloody feet!’

  Even Fern looked shocked. Vanessa pointed to the bruised roses. Alistair instantly stepped away. As she bent to recover them, Vanessa knew he was reading the citation carved on the stone. She heard Fern say quietly, ‘Oh, Nessie, what must you think of us? You’ll let us replace the roses? There are stacks in the garden.’

  ‘No, thank you, Fern.’ Vanessa fluffed up the petals and removed one broken pink head. Rosa ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’. They looked bruised but they wouldn’t have outlasted the day’s heat anyway. As she straightened up to go, she felt a firm touch on her arm.

  ‘I hadn’t noticed the memorial, but that’s hardly an excuse. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Anger blinds us, but you’re right, it’s no excuse.’ She walked away, chalking up a victory. She’d shut them both up.

  At home, Vanessa found her mother hemming dishcloths, when not swiping at flies. In place of ‘hello’ Ruth said, ‘Borthwick called.’ Borthwick was Lord Stanshurst’s butler. ‘His Lordship’s anxious about you, but I said you looked perfectly well this morning.’

  ‘That’s my cover blown!’ Vanessa changed into something more formal and went to the Hall. She could turn out a cupboard or two and with luck, nobody would know she was there.

  In her office, the latest issue of The Stage was waiting for her. She put it to one side, thinking she might as well cancel her subscription. The cupboard she turned to first was stuffed with leather-bound wage books going back to before the Great War.

  She opened one that started in September 1925, knowing it would cross into the year when her father left.

  There he was: ‘Sept 25th Quinnell, C J. £14.8s.’

  Fourteen pounds and eight shillings per month had been a high wage, back then. The estate’s employees had been paid on the last Friday of every month, as they still were. The entry for the 28th May 1926, eight months later, showed that ‘C J Quinnell’ had received his salary as usual. The following day, the 29th, had been Vanessa’s sixth birthday. As she’d lain recovering from the effects of ethylene and surgery in Beckenham Cottage Hospital, Clive had left home.

  The following month, Ruth appeared in the records. Prior to that, there’d been no mention of her, presumably because her salary as Lady Stanshurst’s secretary had come from another source. From June 1926 onwards half her husband’s wage, seven pounds and four shillings, had been paid to ‘Mrs R Quinnell, ex gratia’. Out of kindness.

  Seven pounds a month back then had been no bad sum, and Lady Stanshurst had paid for Vanessa’s schooling and medical care. It still was a better wage than many of Ruth’s neighbours had to rely on, yet Ruth sliced her bread no thicker than her little finger. She spread on margarine and scraped it off again. Vanessa suspected her mother’s addiction to poverty was rooted in disappointment. Ruth had hoped for a substantial bequest when Lady Stanshurst died but a bedspread and her Ladyship’s treasured Staffordshire porcelain dogs were all that had come her way. Ruth had subsequently instilled in Vanessa an obligation to support her.

  Turning the ledger back to May 1926, Vanessa spotted a margin note recording that C J Quinnell had been paid five hundred pounds. A rush of anger threatened to choke her. Five hundred pounds? For what – for bolting to London?

  Emotion left her parched and she went to fetch a jug of water from the kitchen. She returned to find that the desk she’d left covered with old ledgers was now strewn with saffron-yellow roses. ‘Fern?’ she called, mystified.

  It wasn’t Fern who answered.

  Chapter 7

  Alistair sat in the window seat. She jumped; she hadn’t seen him there when she walked in. He’d opened the sash to its highest extent and a breeze was lipping at papers on her desk.

  He said, ‘Fern told me about your husband. Is his the face you see as you fall asleep and the first you see when you wake?’

  Take
n off guard, she answered with the unvarnished truth. ‘It was, for a year. When I started seeing somebody else’s face, I was mortified.’

  ‘Whose face replaced your husband’s?’

  ‘Ray Pocklington’s. Rear gunner, Lancasters. We met at Waddington, my third posting. He was terribly persistent, very sweet and stole a corner of my heart until . . . would you like a glass of water?’

  She’d noticed perspiration on his upper lip, and on the spearhead of skin where his throat disappeared into his open collar. ‘Yes, thanks,’ he said.

  She handed him her glass, shaking pencils out of a tin mug for herself. After gulping her water down, she said, ‘For almost five years, men’s faces have haunted me. If I can claim any courage, it’s that I’ve dared to love over and over. Loss doesn’t seem to put me off, I don’t know why. What about you? Is it Fern’s face you see?’

  ‘I see too many to count.’ As he got up, she saw a deep welt running from the side of his nose to his cheek. He gave a spare smile. ‘The roses are a peace offering. Fern advised that if I were to ask pardon for trespassing on you this morning, you’d forgive me out of good manners. I prefer to be forgiven freely.’

  The roses came from a bush in the tangled parterre where Vanessa often sat during her lunch hour. The Hall’s rose beds had once been renowned throughout the county but these days they had a more Shakespearian tone: Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds. ‘It was kind of Fern to pick them.’

  ‘I picked them. Fern’s gone back to London.’

  ‘Oh.’ Vanessa retired to her desk, wishing she hadn’t closed the door behind her. She’d sworn to have no contact with this man!

  He came to sit opposite her. ‘I didn’t hit her.’

  ‘She looked petrified.’

  ‘She did, didn’t she? I will only say this once more. I did not strike her.’