The Consequences of War

by Betty Burton

  Old and present times touched. Then she had found him to be an absorbing youth – now she found him to be an exhilarating man. He began buttoning his uniform jacket.

  ‘I wish…’ She hesitated.

  ‘Wish then.’

  ‘I wish things had turned out differently.’

  In the hallway he suddenly bent and kissed her gently, just missing her mouth. As the coarse serge cloth of his uniform brushed her bare arms, it was touch and go whether she returned the kiss.

  But, instead of drawing Nick in, as she desired, she opened the front door and let him out, helped by her mother, Hugh and the thou shalt nots of her schooldays, for she was well aware that she could not kiss him frivolously – nor might it end there.

  * * *

  Whilst Europe was fast slipping towards war, Eve Hardy was driving out of Scotland where she had ostensibly been making a carefully manoeuvred visit to a girlfriend whose parents owned a hotel on the west coast.

  Only Mont Iremonger, who had delivered letters with a Scottish stamp, might have guessed that she had other fish to fry in Scotland.

  Late afternoon now, and she had been sitting and gazing at a signpost indicating that this village was Balmoral, after writing a view postcard to send home. At least, she thought, they can tell that I’ve been here. And then thought that they had no reason to believe otherwise. They trusted her. Guilt flushed over her. But it was their fault for being so snobbish, making her devious because she wanted to be with her boyfriend.

  She had the car hood folded down. The day was so still and quiet that she could hear the sound of leaves as they fluttered their way through the twiggy trees and, although only just into September, she smelt autumn in the woodlands at the side of the road. An occasional car passed.

  A game-bird gobbled, and then another. Oh come on, David, you’re almost an hour late already.

  She considered getting out to stretch her legs, but did not like to wander far from the car in case he should miss her. There was a telephone kiosk back up the road; perhaps she should ring his base. She longed to see him. But what if he has changed? What if I have? Perhaps he has found somebody else. Somebody he doesn’t have to meet secretly. In a moment of panic, she could easily have turned on the engine and driven away. Instead, she opened up her wallet and looked at a small photo of him. Oh, he was so attractive, so smart and neat.

  Kate, the girlfriend with whom she had been staying, had asked, ‘How many serious men have you had, Eve?’

  Eve had shown her the snapshot of David.

  Kate had blown a smoky whistle. ‘Go-to-bed eyes and a come-to-bed mouth. He’s nice. Is he serious?’

  ‘I met him when I was about sixteen. We were in the local carnival parade.’

  Kate, still sounding like the girl she had been at their ladies college, shrilled, ‘A carnival parade? Eve Hardy, I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Believe it. Everybody in Markham turns out for the carnival – the local hospital would close without that money.’

  ‘All right, I believe you… so you were in the parade… ?’

  ‘As the Gainsborough Lady – you know, the one who bows at the beginning of a Gainsborough film…’

  Sophisticated. Amused. ‘I said I believe you…’

  ‘I was only sixteen, do you want to know about David or not? What happened was that the vehicle I was riding bust its radiator and I was stuck, and along came this beautiful young man on a big white horse – yes, a man on a white horse – there had been four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but David had got separated…’

  ‘So he swept you up on to his steed and you rode together as Arthur and Guinevere.’

  ‘You don’t know how wonderfully romantic it was. It was like The Sheik. Kate Thompson! You have no sense of romance; you always did want to hear about dirty deeds.’

  ‘You’re a dark horse, Eve. An ice queen with a Latin temperament.’

  Kate was nice, which made Eve feel very underhand at having used her as an excuse for this secret tryst with David.

  Hearing the drone of a heavy motor, she started momentarily thinking it was the RN Stores lorry in which David was getting a lift, but it proved to be only a cattle lorry. They had arranged to meet here from where they could drive into Aberdeen. This entire holiday with Kate, with its half-truths and pretence, was centred around the climax in Aberdeen. Twenty-one and never slept with a man. It could be no other man but David: all her fantasies were focused upon him. For Eve Hardy, he was probably the most forbidden fruit in Markham – an ordinary seaman from the Station End of town. A local schoolboy, an uncultured accent and, according to her father, probably a Communist. He was, too, very good-looking, intelligent and most frankly masculine and sexual. It had been agonizing to have been sightseeing in Scotland, knowing that he was so near yet so far.

  She had now been waiting an hour and forty-five minutes for him. She could never ring David direct, but he had a friend on the stores switchboard who passed messages. Again she was tempted to ring.

  I will wait thirty more minutes. As soon as the time was up, she switched on the ignition and drove to the telephone kiosk.

  It seemed ages as she waited for the burr-burring to be answered. The sun burned the glass of the box and heated the film of stale cigarette smoke upon it. The smell was sickening, so she leaned against the door to keep it open whilst she was passed from switchboard to various extensions, until at last she heard the cheerful voice of David’s friend.

  ‘Eve, lass, I’ve been hoping you’d ring before I go off duty. I’m that sorry. All leave’s been cancelled. Davey’s real upset, he wanted me to get a message to you, but you’d already left your hotel. Eh, lass, I’m sorry, Davey was so looking forward to seeing you. Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’ Disappointment and the smell of the kiosk turned her stomach. ‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, lass. I’m sorry, more than I dare do.’

  ‘Can you get a message to him?’

  ‘Aye, I can that.’

  ‘Tell him to write to me care of Mrs Kennedy’s office. He’ll know where.’

  Instead of going to Aberdeen to spend the night with her first lover, Eve Hardy turned her car south and drove right through the evening and the night.

  * * *

  Whilst she was driving south, Eve’s father was supervising the storing of a cache of drums of petrol and oil in an old ruined cottage on the borders of his land.

  ‘Freddy, don’t you think that it is unpatriotic to hoard like that?’

  ‘Unpatriotic my foot, Connie. I’m a long-sighted business man. Before this war’s over, you’ll be glad you’re married to a man with foresight… friends in the right places.’

  1989

  Before the Boeing touched down at Palma, the young Afrikaner steward came to Georgia Giacopazzi holding her new paperback, Flying High, and asked her to sign it.

  ‘Any message?’

  ‘It’s for my girl, Nel.’

  It always was – always for my girl… for my wife… for my Mom.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Piet.’

  She wrote, conscious of the age spots on her hands, ‘For Piet, Eerste Offisie bediende who flew Giacopazzi ply na. With love – Giacopazzi.’

  ‘I have signed it for you. You must write the message for your girl.’

  If it really was for his girl, then he could tell her that the message, ‘First-class officer who flew Giacopazzi like an arrow, with love’, was simply a personalized message. If not, then he would probably show the boys. The name Giacopazzi still meant something.

  He read the message and looked pleased.

  She said, ‘My Afrikaans is not good, I’m afraid. Does it make sense?’

  ‘I must tell my girl about your Afrikaans, or she might get the wrong idea.’

  Georgia smiled up at him, ‘turning on the Giacopazzi’ as her agent put it. ‘That would never do would it, Piet?’

  In the waiting
area at Palma, Mrs Giacopazzi, not wishing to strike up conversation with anyone and break her mood, drank iced bottled water and focused her attention upon a magazine.

  Where had the Giacopazzi-ing sprung from? When I was young I was never conscious of turning on to anybody. Was I ever anybody but myself? Giacopazzi came after the first book. That had been a good, steady, readable tale. It had got enough reviews in places like Melbourne and Dublin for her publishers to find something to say on the jacket of her second. It was the second book, wasn’t it, that had started the Giacopazzi legend?

  Put the Blame on Eve.

  Early Giacopazzi eroticism was to be found in Blame. Her publishers had hyped it up on the jacket with a pair of respectable though naked lovers, mouth to mouth at the remains of an apple. Undeservedly, Blame’s reputation for sexiness grew from a number of double meanings the author had not intended – at the time she had never heard of touching up, except in the restoration of paintwork context – and some Freudian images which she had. There were also a few typographical errors that were bizarre and funny. It was still read, but in the Eighties it was only a very mildly erotic book.

  Mass-market readers began to expect Georgia Giacopazzi herself to be a femme fatale, seductress, sex symbol. And, to achieve her ambition to be rich, she had publicly become such. Even after she had turned fifty, the myths that surrounded her did not diminish. Nowadays, she had come to the conclusion that her age did not matter. Women loved her for the myth of agelessness that had grown up around her, and her assertion that it was good for women to express lust and desire, whilst men were aroused by her reputed extreme wealth and strings of young lovers: Giacopazzi at whatever age was a challenge-like Dietrich, Lenya, Collins.

  The call to resume the flight to London roused her.

  What in Hell’s name will they make of me? ‘They’ being those women still alive, whose lives she had ransacked for Eye of the Storm; the women who had known her before she became Giacopazzi.

  ‘Allow me.’

  A too helpful arm encircled her waist to give her unnecessary and unwanted help up the steps of the aircraft.

  ‘How sweet of you.’

  ‘You’re Georgia Giacopazzi, aren’t you? My wife has read every one of your books.’

  Until Eye of the Storm was in the bookshops, it was necessary to smile.

  Momentarily, she was weary of the years of the hike, the hype and false front. For the first time since she had left, she longed for Markham, longed to turn the clock back to the eve of War, and leave it stopped at the time when she and Nick Crockford had sat on the grass in the garden of the old house in Station Avenue.

  1939

  3rd September

  It is past midnight. The last day of peace in Britain is over.

  Georgia Kennedy has left her bed where the pillow is wet with the tears that have released some of the stress of the eventful day. Resting her arms on the sill at the open window, she looks at Station Avenue where, until now, gaslights made yellow pools at night. Now, not a crack of light is permitted. The air is dry and hot, and the dark sky is lit very occasionally by the merest flicker of lightning, which is so far distant that the sound of thunder never does reach Markham.

  As she has done for as long as she can remember, she tells herself a kind of story of what has happened during the day, keeps a kind of mental diary. She thinks of the coaches streaming out of London and wonders about the children who were in them, now in strange, frightening surroundings, sleeping in strangers’ bedrooms where there are new night-time shadows in the cupboards. She tries to make order out of her experience – the drawn-faced parents on Waterloo Station evacuating their children privately. Middle-class voices, men in Anthony Eden hats, children in little clumps of grey and navy-blue serge. Why had those parents added stuffy school uniforms to their children’s discomfiture? To create a good impression on the fostering parents? Would they give less care to children who travelled in cotton shorts or thin dresses? Mothers wearing straw plate hats, plenty of rouge and scarlet lipstick that had seemed to emphasize the false cheerfulness of their smiles. Children, labelled like game-hampers, being told lies.

  ‘You will be quite all right, Deborah. Nanny Barnes will not forget to meet you.’

  ‘I envy you, old chap. Lot of fun living in the country; you will simply love it – and Mama will visit. Chin up, we men don’t cry, do we?’

  ‘Just think how exciting it will be, Jack – Uncle Rollo says he will let you choose a pony if you’re a real little man about this.’

  Those children – hen-eyed with the knowledge of what happened to Hansel and Gretel, to the Babes in the Wood, and to the Princes in the Tower-were apprehensive of their parents’ long smiles. Snow White’s wicked stepmother had been as beautiful as their own smiling mother, hadn’t she? Mrs Darling had left her children in the care of a dog; and the Water Babies… ?

  Georgia feels, once again, Little-Lena and Roy clutching her hand tightly and that, seeing how the other children are being disposed of, they are now verging on the unthinkable – how do they know that Mrs Kennedy is not kidnapping them? Even so they cling to her because to be parted from that one familiar face amongst all those crowds would be worse. Waiting on the platform, Little-Lena asks Georgia, ‘Mrs Kennedy? You know those mothers whose babies were killed by King Herod? Do you think that they ever had any other babies?’

  A mine-field of a question. Georgia sees herself giving them coins to buy Nestle’s chocolate discs from the red machine on the platform. Now she wonders. Did they have other babies? And is Little-Lena reassured? And wonders too why she has taken so little notice of Little-Lena before yesterday.

  Now that she has thought about the experience of London, she can allow herself to think of Nick.

  Until tonight, Georgia Kennedy has shed few tears. From the window, she can see the pattern of a constellation and wishes that she knew which one it was. She knows that today was the end of her girlhood, end of that life which was given its expectations by her parents, by Hollywood movies, by Hugh’s perfect tango and his Wolsey car, and by novels from Boots Library. Happy Ever After. The sunny housewife in her pretty green kitchen with its sprigged curtains, the golden-haired young wife of the cricket captain, the gins sipped in a summer garden surrounded by the scent of roses and philadelphus.

  Until this evening, her cockleshell marriage to Hugh has kept afloat because the waters on which it sailed were calm. Nick’s visit has whipped up white horses. Feeling the danger of being capsized, she longs to reach out to Nick and wonders now how she could have thought that marriage to Hugh and the sophistication of the Sports Club set was preferable to a haphazard life as Nick’s woman.

  Hugh had offered her his house, his status, his ability to tango and to come up with ace serves at tennis. Perhaps she should have looked up the true definition of sophistication before she discovered it from experience. Eighteen was no age for making life-long decisions about marriage.

  Had she been only twenty, she would never for a moment have supposed that she was suited to the battle-loving Hugh Kennedy, after she had spent her youth knocking around with Nick Crockford, drifting in and out of romances with him. There were times during those youthful summers when she had felt that, had he said the word, she would have gone with him into the New Forest and lived rough and been a charcoal-burner or hurdle-maker and lived with him on birds’ eggs and hedgehogs like the gypsies.

  Now it’s too late.

  Before dawn, there came the first rattle of large raindrops followed soon by a steady downpour, cleaning and softening foliage, soaking into cracked and sun-baked fields, greening up tawny meadow-grass and sending up to open bedroom windows the scent of roses and wetted pavements. The chain of long, hot, dry weeks, when men’s sinews have been dried and become tight thongs, and women have felt that their scalps were shrunken with the drought, was broken.

  Georgia listens to the guttering rainwater, and wonders how she can bear to go on being married to Hugh, knowing now t
hat she loves Nick and has never loved anyone else. But she will have to bear it, she is steeped in the thou shall nots and the solemnity of Christian marriage.

  And you’ve only got to look at his father, Georgia.

  1939

  Sunday 3rd September

  The abbey clock shows twelve-fifteen. Little-Lena Wiltshire walks slowly back from Greenaway’s shop with the bag of sugar she has been sent for. Although she is only ten years old, she knows that, when she is an old lady like Grandma Gertie, she will be able to remember every detail of this day. It is Sunday morning and she has not slept since she awakened in Grandma Gertie’s flat yesterday morning.

  Mr Chamberlain, on the wireless, said that he had sent a note to the German Government and if they didn’t answer it by eleven o’clock then ‘a state of war would exist between us’. It was twelve o’clock and the Germans had not answered.

  In her mind, Little-Lena saw Dad as he had been half an hour ago, his leg in plaster resting on a camping stool, and Mum leaning forward looking into the hole in the wireless where the sound came out, and Roy under the table fiddling with a magnet fishing-set Grandma Gertie had given him, sucking his thumb like a baby. She had herself sat rigidly aware of her father’s words: ‘Don’t send her down to Greenaway’s yet, Mary, she’s old enough to understand what’s going on. This is a bit of world history. It’s the Prime Minister going to speak, Litt, so sit down and listen.’

  The Prime Minister, he had sounded as he looked in photos, as though he had long teeth, like the School Doctor.

  A State of War. Suddenly, with that phrase, Little-Lena makes sense of what has been going on all around her this summer. There had gathered in her head midge-cloud images. Of picnics, of summer-games, fishing and trekking, of half-heard conversations at home and half-understood talk on her Grandma Gertie’s balcony, of seeing brick air-raid shelters being built on spare ground, and her mother saying, ‘Oh, not Hitler again, Dick, not in front of the children, we don’t want to hear any more about Germany’; of the one hundred and thirty-four coachloads of children, of the lost children at Waterloo Station and the terrible train-journey with Mrs Kennedy when they had had to stand in the corridor, Little-Lena thirsty from chocolate and bursting to go to the toilet until in the end she had had to tell Mrs Kennedy. And Mrs Kennedy being different from what she always had seemed.