‘Of course.’ The man nodded as if he had known this all along.
Diana looked around her more carefully. Nothing but Americans, most of them extraordinarily fat. You hardly ever see fat people in England any more, she thought abstractedly. Not enough food to go round.
There was no one in a hat, or a suit, come to that. She didn’t quite know why, but she was sure that the man – James – had been wearing a suit, a dark one. There had been the glimmer of a white shirt, too. But everyone around her was in holiday clothes – slacks and golf jackets for the men, billowing floral-print dresses on the women.
The bell-hop reappeared and spoke in rapid French to the receptionist before hurrying away again.
‘I am sorry, madame, but my boy says we have no one by the name of Blackwell in this hotel. The restaurant is empty after breakfast and there were only three people in the bar, two French and one American.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps your friend has gone to a different hotel?’
Diana stamped her foot in frustration. ‘He must be here! I heard him say so, just now!’
One of the American women glanced curiously over to them.
The receptionist spread his hands. ‘Madame, you must calm yourself. There is nothing more I can do.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ Diana’s shoulders dropped and she sighed. ‘You’ve done all you can.’
She stood there a moment longer, considering. Then she took a ten-franc note from her purse. The receptionist looked at the little leather pouch with approval: Chanel.
‘Would you give me change for this, please, in one-franc coins? I wish to use the telephone.’
‘Bien sûr.’
A minute later, Diana stepped inside one of the hotel’s beautiful polished wood-and-glass phone booths that lined the rear of the lobby. She slid the door closed behind her and picked up the delicate ivory handset. After a moment the earpiece crackled and she heard the voice of the operator.
‘I wish to place a call to England.’ Diana gave a number which she knew by heart.
‘How long do you wish to speak for, madame?’
Diana thought. ‘It might be five minutes – perhaps a little more.’
‘Then I suggest you put in three francs, madame.’
Diana did so, and as the last coin dropped through the slot, she heard the familiar double ringtone of a British telephone.
40
Oliver and Gwen’s marriage had survived the double hammer-blow of that terrible day, but only just.
They dealt with their grief in entirely different ways. For Mr Arnold, a kind of salvation and peace was to be found in ceaseless activity. After the first few weeks of deep mourning for his son – a period spent almost entirely in the Dower House and which he now struggled to recall with any clarity – he had compulsively taken on any responsibility which would distract his thoughts and prevent them from dwelling on what had happened.
But the dreadful reality broke through often enough. The senselessness of his son’s death caused him much pain. To some extent, he and Gwen had prepared themselves for the worst during Dunkirk, and as Mr Arnold watched the subsequent Battle of Britain unfold in the skies above him, he sometimes thought that John’s death would have been a little easier to bear if he had died in his cockpit defending his country, rather than in a random, meaningless road accident. At least James’s end had a degree of purpose to it. Heroism was conferred on the steadily rising number of pilots killed in battle; poor John had been denied even that.
His grief was mostly for his son, but like Gwen, his heart ached for Diana. He and Gwen hadn’t really had long enough to get to know James, but they were fully aware of how much their daughter had loved him.
In many ways, the double tragedy hit Diana hardest of the three of them. At a stroke, she had lost two men that she adored. Her grief for her husband and brother made her almost catatonic. She was indifferent to her developing pregnancy and lost interest entirely in her studies. Diana hadn’t returned to Girton.
Her parents had taken the news of the coming baby with initial enthusiasm, even atavistic relief that amid so much death, new life was growing. Diana had told them her news one evening over supper when she was quite sure of the matter, but her tone had been listless and resigned. She felt completely in the thrall of fate, powerless to shape her own destiny. After a few weeks her almost complete disinterest in the pregnancy infected her parents too, and they gradually abandoned their attempts to raise her spirits. Their own were low enough.
Sally had come down from Cambridge during the Christmas holidays to comfort Diana, and try to persuade her to return with her to Girton.
‘I’m sorry, Sal, I know you mean it for the best, but the thought of going back to college just seems pointless,’ Diana told her after listening to her arguments. ‘James is dead, my brother’s dead, I’m nearly six months’ gone now . . . everything’s utterly changed. Anyway, how would I manage university with a baby in tow?’
‘You could leave it here with your parents, Di,’ Sally said. ‘You’ve only a few months left to do now. I’ll help you catch up on everything you’ve missed this autumn.’
Diana shook her head. ‘It’s no good, Sal, really it isn’t. I don’t even want to come back. I feel utterly miserable, and the thought of opening my books again makes me slightly sick. Anyway, you know neither of us will get a degree; none of us girls will. It’s ridiculous. I can’t think why I ever got involved in the whole absurd process in the first place.’
It was a difficult weekend and Sally departed, defeated, promising to write.
Gwen withdrew into her own world after the deaths. She was distressed beyond measure to see how her daughter was suffering, but felt helpless to alleviate it. She was in so much pain herself.
Gwen experienced terrible guilt over her son’s death. She knew she was being irrational, even superstitious, but she couldn’t help believing that if only she had finished the portrait of John she had begun when he was fighting above Dunkirk, he wouldn’t have been taken from them.
‘It was because I was lazy and didn’t finish his painting,’ she repeatedly told Oliver. ‘I said I would paint something special, just for him, and give it to him when he came back to us. But I didn’t, did I? I didn’t keep my side of the bargain.’
What bargain? Mr Arnold silently screamed at his wife. He seethed with anger and resentment, and one awful afternoon a month after John and James were killed, he vented his rage in a terrible scene after Gwen again blamed her unfinished portrait.
‘What possible bloody difference would one of your stupid paintings have made, Gwen? What are you talking about? Can you hear yourself? How typical of you to put your damned painting at the heart of the situation, any damned situation, let alone one as wretched and God-awful as this . . . dear Christ, the vanity of it! Do you seriously believe your oils and brushes and canvases have the slightest bearing on how the universe functions? Even unto the power of life and death? Your . . . your conceit . . . well, it takes my breath away.’
Utterly crushed, Gwen left the room without a word. When her husband tried to apologise later, she covered her ears with her hands, and when he persisted, she walked out of the house. She wandered the surrounding lanes for hours before returning. Neither of them exchanged a remark of any kind for weeks.
It was at this time that Mr Arnold began an almost manic phase of activity. He took on far more work at his chambers than he needed, and was one of the first men in line at his local police station to sign up for the newly formed Local Defence Volunteers, which would later become the Home Guard. He was scarcely at the Dower House at all and the three of them could have been on different continents, so seldom did they speak to each other.
The Christmas of 1940 passed almost unnoticed in this bleakest midwinter for the Arnolds. Oliver volunteered for Christmas Day guard duty at the local electricity sub-station (‘someone’s got to do it’) and Gwen and Diana spent most of the day in their rooms. Lucy the maid went home to her mother an
d brother who had made it safely back from Dunkirk. She was gone for a week.
The dam holding back the lake of suffering had to be breached at some point, though, and with almost biblical resonance, it did so the day Diana’s waters broke. Her parents, galvanised by one of nature’s unstoppable events, drove her into Tunbridge Wells Hospital and stayed with her there – Gwen holding her daughter’s hand, Mr Arnold patrolling the corridor outside – until, just after dawn on a frosty March morning, Stella Blackwell was brought into a world at war.
The impact of the birth overwhelmed all three of them. Diana felt a wave of intense, maternal love and possessiveness wash over her from the first moment her baby was placed on her breast.
For Gwen and Oliver, it was as if a glorious, roaring fire had suddenly been lit in a vast, freezing room. Their interior worlds were transformed, and unified, by the arrival of new life.
Smiling shyly at each other for the first time in almost a year, the Arnolds could scarcely credit their newfound happiness.
‘It’s as if James has sent her to me from wherever he is now,’ Diana said, staring at the tiny face that lay in the crook of her arm. ‘He’s saying, “It’s all right . . . you can start again, start again with our little girl.” Can you feel it, Mummy and Daddy? I’m not being ridiculous, am I? This is real. This feeling is real.’
And it was. It was elemental and unmistakable and irresistible. Much later, lying in the bed next to his wife where they had been sleeping like two strangers, back to back, for so long, Mr Arnold was astonished to find tears suddenly coursing down his cheeks. He had not once been able to weep for his boy but now grief and pain and loss poured unstoppably from him. Gwen lay holding him tightly for what seemed like hours, until the torrent gradually subsided.
‘I’m so sorry, Gwen,’ he finally managed to say.
She knew he wasn’t speaking of his tears.
‘So am I, Oliver,’ she whispered. ‘We haven’t been much use to each other, have we?’
He shook his head in the darkness. ‘No. We haven’t. I wasn’t. I was just so . . . angry. I took it out on you. I’ve behaved appallingly.’
Gwen held him tighter. ‘I don’t think either of us had any choice in how we behaved, did we? I know I didn’t. It was like being possessed, I think. Possessed, utterly and completely, by a monstrous shadow.’
He stroked her head as they lay silent for a while.
‘Stella won’t cure everything, you know,’ he said eventually.
‘I know,’ Gwen replied. ‘But look at us now. She’s given us a start, hasn’t she? We’ve made a start.’
Mr Arnold heard the phone ringing in the hall from where he sat in the breakfast room, reading an air-mailed letter that had arrived that morning from California. It was from Lucy. Immediately after the war she had married an American army sergeant and was now living in Los Angeles, from where she wrote the Arnolds frequent letters extolling the virtues of life on ‘the coast’ as she had taken to calling it. In her latest letter she was describing her father-in-law’s orange groves that her husband had returned home to tend, after surviving unscathed the carnage of the American D-Day landings on Omaha Beach.
Everywhere seemed sunnier, warmer and more prosperous than England, Mr Arnold thought grumpily to himself as he tossed down Lucy’s letter. He was sick of hearing about oranges, be they Californian or Provençal. Maybe it was time he and Gwen took a cruise somewhere hot. They could certainly afford to.
He moved quickly towards the jangling telephone. Considering that he was now the wrong side of fifty-five, Mr Arnold was in good shape. Five years’ service in the Home Guard had a lot to do with that. In the years after James’s death, Mr Arnold had thrown himself vigorously into his part-time military life, volunteering for the more demanding training courses and assignments. By the time the service was stood down at the end of the war, he felt fitter and healthier than he had when he returned home from France in 1918. Hardly surprising, given his gruelling years on the Western Front.
He’d ended up as Area Commander, after getting off to a chequered start on day one in the LDV. Like many former World War One officers, Mr Arnold had ‘forgotten’ to return his service revolver and ammunition to stores after the Armistice, and rather nervously produced them, complete with leather holster, on the evening of the first LDV roll-call and parade. He knew it gave him a certain cachet, even authority, amongst the other men, but there had been a sticky moment.
The local police sergeant, who was signing volunteers into a register, gave Oliver a measured look.
‘Have a permit for that, do you, sir?’
Mr Arnold felt slightly clammy. ‘Er . . . no. No, Sergeant, I’m afraid not.’
‘Hmm. Well, see about it, would you? Let’s do everything right and proper from the start, shall we?’
Mr Arnold nodded with relief. ‘Right you are, Sergeant.’
But the other wasn’t finished. ‘Army property, I take it, sir?’
Mr Arnold felt his queasiness return. ‘Um . . . yes. Yes, I s’pose it is, really.’
The policeman nodded slowly. ‘Then just you be sure to return it when we’ve won the war, sir.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
He reached the telephone on the fifth ring. The hairline crack in the Bakelite was still there, a mute reminder of Diana’s excitement on the day her brother rang to tell them all to come and watch him fly his Spitfire.
‘Sevenoaks two-three-six.’
‘Daddy!’
‘Diana! To what do I owe the pleasure? We only spoke last night. Don’t tell me there’s some problem with the oranges down there? A freak frost, perhaps, that has overnight withered them on the trees?’
‘Daddy, stop. Listen to me. Something’s just happened. Something so peculiar I truly don’t know what to think.’
Mr Arnold dropped his bantering tone and sat down on the little wicker chair next to the telephone table.
‘Where are you calling from?’
‘The Negresco – the big hotel on the promenade in Nice. It’s—’
‘Yes, yes, I’ve heard of the Negresco. Why are you there at this time of day?’
There was a silence at the other end.
‘Diana? Are you still there?’
‘Yes. Just give me a moment to collect myself, Daddy. This is incredibly difficult for me.’
Mr Arnold waited, giving his daughter time. He listened to the occasional pop and crackle of static on the copper line that stretched, continuously and unbroken, from the Mediterranean, over the Alps, across the great plains of France, under the English Channel and all the way to the Dower House.
He heard her sigh before she finally spoke again.
‘Right. Oh dear, this is going to sound insane. It’s about James . . . he is dead, isn’t he?’
Mr Arnold pulled the receiver away from his ear and stared at it for a moment. Then he put it back, and said very gently, ‘Yes. James is dead. You know he is. What is this?’
‘It’s just that something so strange has just happened here. About twenty minutes ago, if that. I hardly know where to begin. I’m wondering if I am not going mad, to be honest.’
‘You don’t sound mad to me, Diana, but you do sound upset. Start from the beginning, darling. Take your time.’
And so, shakily to begin with, but in a voice increasing in confidence, Diana described her experience outside the café that morning. Her father listened patiently, and with growing understanding.
‘They said he isn’t here,’ Diana finished, ‘but I heard him tell the taxi driver to bring him here and I know it was James. But of course he’s dead; of course he is . . . I can’t think straight. I keep feeling I’m going to be sick, and back at the flower-market I nearly fainted on the spot. What’s happening to me, Daddy?’
‘I can tell you exactly what it all means,’ Mr Arnold said. ‘You’ve just had a very, very common experience, my dear. It happens all the time; it’s happened to me too, more than once, since John was killed.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘Part of you never stops looking for the person that’s gone,’ Oliver continued. ‘Your rational mind knows they’re never coming back, but sometimes the heart seizes the moment and rules the head.’ He cleared his throat before going on.
‘A few months after your brother was killed, I could have sworn I saw him striding towards me from the ticket barrier at Victoria. He was in his uniform, smiling and waving at me. Just remembering it now brings back some of the pleasure and shock I felt – but it turned out to be another young, fair-haired pilot; in fact, when we passed each other, he didn’t even look particularly like John. And of course, he’d been waving at someone behind me – his girlfriend.’
Diana burst in. ‘No, no, Daddy, it wasn’t like that at all. I’ve had moments like the one you described. Remember that evening we were in the crush bar at Her Majesty’s during the interval? I was guarding the drinks while you and Mummy were in the watchamacallits, you know, and I suddenly saw James coming into the bar with a woman. For a few moments I was certain it was him, but as he came closer the illusion disappeared.
‘The same thing’s happened to me at other times, Daddy, so honestly, I know what you mean – but understand this: I heard his voice. It was unmistakable, and . . .’
‘But you didn’t actually see him,’ her father interrupted in his turn. ‘You said that.’
‘But I sort of did, though. When the taxi was at the end of the road I saw his silhouette clearly through the open window. It’s hard to put into words, but everything about the way he moved his head, the way he tilted it back as he spoke to the driver, the way he tapped on the back of the man’s seat, it was typical James. And although he was much too far away for me to hear him, I knew he was telling the man off, telling him to get a move on and stop fannying about.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Mr Arnold after a thoughtful pause. ‘I’m going to light a cigarette.’
‘Good idea – me too.’
After a few moments he spoke again, smoke billowing from his mouth and nose. ‘Still there?’
Some Day I'll Find You Page 14
