The Consequences of War

by Betty Burton

‘Not as far as I know. At least, no more than anybody – but I’m getting on.’

  ‘I know, we all are. You are seventy-two, Georgia. And I am sixty. And we both look damn good and know it. Are those Markham’s famous centenarians? I can see they are. I must speak to the O’Neill widow. I have cornered the market in Niall O’Neill’s films – they are pure gold, irreplaceable, part of film history. Ha… and they’re all mine.’

  Georgia Honeycombe gave herself some more brandy and stood it to warm on the ingle shelf. Leonora did it beautifully, the glitterati bit. She was taller than most women, long-legged and sexual, as she had been at sixteen.

  Then the reception room door had opened and Nick’s great body had stood filling the space. As always when he entered a room, all faces had turned, and as always she had felt an erotic flicker at seeing him. He had stood there carrying Belle as he had carried Pete and Dixie and Tessa and in turn all of their children. This morning, under his weight, their bathroom scales had registered two hundred and thirty pounds and, when he remembered not to stoop, he was well over six foot tall. What did Leonora see? A weathered and white-maned man getting on in years, but still handsome, wearing his lion hair to his collar to cover the old burn scars? Or was she able still to see something of the younger Nick she had fantasized over in her developing years? He was still there for Georgia: intelligent, sensitive, caring eyes looking out from a weather-beaten face. As a gesture to the occasion he had dressed in his Harris tweed, and looked as though it and he were designed for each other. From the way he carried Belle, anyone could see that he was a family man who was at ease with children.

  ‘Leonora, you remember…?’

  ‘I know who it is… Nicholas.’ Her gaze had run appreciatively up and down. ‘Hello, Nick-long ages no see. I was going to marry you and you ran away.’ She laughed, and Giacopazzi – as she had become once Leonora appeared – remembered thinking that Leonora’s bridgework and porcelain capping were as beautiful and as expensive as her own. ‘Just look at you – you’re still one hell of a man, Nick. Perhaps it’s still not too late for us to elope.’ She had linked his arm and at once drew him towards the orangery. ‘Come where it’s quiet, I want to ask you everything.’

  Georgia Honeycombe had guessed that Leonora wanted to take him to where the sculptress was. When she had been writing Eye of the Storm she had wondered whether she had gone too far with Little-Lena’s burgeoning sexuality, when at sixteen she was unbuttoning her blouse so as to tie it at the midriff to show off her breasts to the soldiers billeted in Markham, and rolling up shorts till there was no leg left to them. Is she still putting her goods in the window, but not selling? But perhaps she had sold: after all she was only a teenager when she had married Waldemar Altzheiber and put her foot on the first rung of her particular ladder of success. At sixty, she’s got off the art of seduction in public better than anyone I ever saw do it.

  Now, the fumes of the warm brandy were relaxing. She did not try to order her impressions but let them take her over as she did when brain-storming ideas for a new novel. It was as well that she was not at present involved in writing anything, for when she was working on a novel she relied on being up and at her computer by five o’clock – drinking brandy always made her sleep on.

  She recalled how Eve had come in with much the same kind of flourish as Leonora, but with much less awareness of the interest she created.

  For Giacopazzi the novelist, the coming together of Tottie and Dixie was drama of a high order. For Georgia Honeycombe, mother to Dixie and great-grandmother to Belle, that event was fraught with danger, as was the meeting of Eve and Dorothy Partridge.

  The door of the reception room had opened and a sturdy little boy of Belle’s age with fair curls had raced into the room and stood staring. For a moment she had thought that it was Belle. When he had seen that he was the centre of attention, he had turned and run back to Eve and the group of people with her to whom he obviously belonged.

  ‘Eve! I was beginning to think you might not come after all.’

  ‘You said bring family – so I did.’

  ‘All of them?’ Georgia Giacopazzi quickly took in the family entourage who followed. Entourage is the apt word, she thought.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Absolutely not. At last I may satisfy my curiosity.’

  Eve’s family fussed her and Hildegard into armchairs. A family used to money and having things their way and oblivious to the attention their entrance had created.

  ‘This then is great-grandson Joshua.’ Still holding Belle, Georgia picked up the little boy, who was obviously quite used to attention. ‘You are beautiful.’

  She heard Eve draw in a short breath ‘Oh! It’s…’ and was about to add something but changed her mind. ‘Don’t tell him, Georgia, he knows it. It’s true of course.’ She went to take the baby, but was beaten to it by Hildegard. ‘And this is his Papa, Fergus.’ Eve’s hand stretched towards the young man she obviously adored, ‘…and my daughter, Melanie – whom you once met as a small bump.’

  ‘I remember you well,’ Georgia said. ‘But you were called Tottie in those days.’ Melanie was exactly as Georgia had always imagined she would look, a lot like Dixie – very like Harry. Would Dolly see it?

  Melanie’s English was Americanized. ‘I am still called Tottie quite often, but Hildegard doesn’t like it, do you, Hildy? Thinks it rather common.’ She was swish and urbane, but there was something about her that Georgia Honeycombe liked. That she carried the likeness of Harry Partridge perhaps?

  Suddenly, Nick was beside her, carrying a tray of drinks, having apparently escaped from Leonora Altzheiber.

  ‘Nick doesn’t recognize me, Georgia,’ Eve said.

  Nick Crockford looked blankly at the regal old woman, but quickly recovered his composure. ‘Of course I recognize you – Eve.’

  She had held out her hand to be helped to her arthritic feet by Nick Crockford, who kissed her offered cheek. ‘Nick, come, you must be the one to take me over to meet Mrs Partridge again. How I love to have a large man to lean on (arthritic ankles, Nick – for my sins, I dare say. How on earth does Georgia move so easily?) I say! Can you imagine… one hundred years old. I hope that I can make it.’

  Still deep in thought, Georgia Honeycombe automatically turned the last glowing log and added another, pleased to find that it was aromatic applewood. She recalled that there had come a moment at lunch-time when, as Eve had been sitting with Dorothy Partridge and Ursula O’Neill, she had looked around the reception room and thought, ‘Thank God the young people came; it would have been too ghastly without their chatter.’ As she had looked on at the incongruous coming together of the two old Markham families of Partridge and Hardy, Georgia Honeycombe had observed something of the same hardness still in Eve as there had been during the time when she was nursing. Imperious and elegant as she had become as a titled lady she probably still enjoyed shocking people.

  The five women sat together, demonstrating by their grouping and manner that they were for the moment excluding the other people in the room. Leonora Altzheiber joined them.

  Eve said, ‘So, Mrs Partridge, now you know that Freddy Hardy’s daughter was Harry Partridge’s whore, what have you got to say to her?’ She smiled, showing that she still had her own teeth.

  The old lady did not return the smile. ‘He’d have probably ended up living on Longmile Hill if he hadn’t been killed, perhaps even somewhere better – Longmile isn’t much cop these days. What I’ve got to say is, I never did think over-much of the lot that lived up there. If he wanted to have a posh whore… well that was up to him. And seeing you got family that’s got Partridge blood, then I say it won’t do them any harm.’ Mrs Partridge was a match for Eve, who flicked a look at Georgia and said nothing.

  Dorothy Partridge continued, ‘Only thing I want to know is, did you love my Harry?’

  At once Eve said, ‘Good Lord, no. He liked women, but I don’t think he was mature enough for a woman, not to marry – c
ertainly not for me to marry, if that’s what you were wondering. But he was pretty good fun, and he looked good in uniform.’

  Mrs Partridge turned to Georgia Honeycombe. ‘Did you?’

  ‘I… don’t know. When I began writing, I did wonder whether I might find out… and if so, I wondered how I would feel about him. I guess that if I did love him, it’s all gone. I do know that I love Nick. I did then and I still do – seventy though we are. I loved being with Harry, he was very physical and full of dreams about what life would be like in the future – I loved that.’

  Recalling it now in the familiarity of her own study, she saw that it had been a tricky moment. What would she have said if either herself or Eve had said that they did love him. In deference to the old lady, Giacopazzi had left out of Eye of the Storm the great anger she had felt when she discovered that she was pregnant. And that Harry Partridge – the great expert on love-making, the lover who was always prepared and wouldn’t ever get a woman pregnant – had, from what he had once confessed, probably impregnated one girl before he joined the forces, and had certainly managed to do so to two more. Thank the pill for small mercies; a pity it hadn’t been discovered before.

  The situation had been changed by Belle hurling herself on to Georgia’s lap.

  ‘Have you met this bit of nonsense?’ she had said to no one in particular. ‘She is my great-grandchild, known as Belle.’ Georgia tickled her belly, which she loved; Belle wriggled her sturdy legs. ‘She belongs to my granddaughter, Tess, and her man, but I claim her on the grounds that I’m addicted to her and that Dixie’s too young at forty-four to be a grandmother.’ Having had her petting, Belle had wriggled down to be with her new-found playmate, Joshua.

  The atmosphere eased. A waiter topped up their glasses. Then Ursula O’Neill had asked, ‘Why did you write the book?’

  ‘Why?’ She considered for a few moments, as she did when being interviewed on camera. ‘I don’t know really; perhaps because what happened during those six years was so important to the rest of my life… probably all of our lives. What happened then has had consequences for me for the rest of my life.’

  Eve, gazing into space, rather tipsy and flushed, nodded. ‘David was killed. Our house burnt down. My Pa ran off with a girlie. My Ma got a wheelchair. I got Tottie. Harry was killed… and I made friends with a famous writer of detective books.’

  Leonora did not take her eyes off Georgia, who continued, ‘I had wanted to write something about the war years, for once to get away from what I always do. I wanted to tell a story about a group of people who met during the war, but not one full of battle-scenes and Spitfires and blitzes. I wanted to write a love story, and when I began to think about it, I realized that I had lived one.’

  ‘You mean about my Harry?’

  ‘No. It was about love. Not romance… about the discovery of all sorts of love.’

  ‘You said it wasn’t a romance, Ursula, didn’t you?’

  ‘For nearly six years didn’t we women love one another? You can’t call it anything else, can you? I loved Eve for defying the Markham gossip-mongers and turning out to be so strong after so many awful things had happened to her. I loved you, Mrs Partridge, and Marie and Bonnie and all your family for what you were… nice, decent Markham people. And Ursula for always being so supportive and unshakeable: she was the centre of our lives, we poured our troubles over her and she never drowned in them. In a way I even loved Eve’s mother for having the guts to get out and do what she did. None of that was romance… but it was love.’

  Ursula prodded, ‘But why did you write it using real names and events? You could have made it more fictional.’

  ‘I did try doing that, but I couldn’t manage it. I needed to call you Mrs Farr, and to call Mrs Partridge Dolly – because she actually thought of herself as Dolly. No way could I have written about how I felt about the Dolly Partridge, or how she looked or how she spoke – not if I had called her Beryl Chapman or Edith Mitchell.’

  Leonora Altzheiber blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘You use a word-processor, don’t you? It would have been easy enough to change the names when you had finished. No one would have been any the wiser… except us.’

  ‘I tried that too but… it was like… killing you all off. So I decided to do it in the way that I have. There is nothing in the book that I didn’t see, hear, or wasn’t told by the people concerned. It will be called a good many things – but nobody can say that it isn’t the truth.’

  Leonora dragged on her cigarette. ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help you God?’

  The women looked at the two children who had become part of the circle. Seated on the floor, sharing a plate, head to head, they were totally absorbed in picking out bits that took their fancy and stuffing them, flat handed, into their mouths.

  ‘Proper little pigeon pair,’ Dorothy Partridge said, and immediately looked across the room to where Dixie and Melanie were standing side by side, absorbed in watching the group of old women seated together.

  And Giacopazzi the novelist saw dawning in Dorothy Partridge’s eye that which she had expected to see earlier when Dixie and Melanie had met for the first time, but had not. It had been the babies who had revealed the truth.

  ‘I remember my Harry as though it was yesterday, all fat and blond, just like that.’

  Georgia Honeycombe rose from her ingle seat and stretched her shoulders as Leonora had done that lunchtime.

  ‘That’s why you wrote the book, Georgia.’ She laughed and downed the last of her wine. ‘And it’s why you’ve gathered us all together here… it’s exactly like the ending of a classic Giacopazzi mystery, except that there is no detective as you usually have. No corpse. Just two cute children who are standing in for a skeleton in your cupboard. Did you chicken out when you wrote the book? Or did you want to see what happened here today so that you could write your last chapter?’

  Georgia Honeycombe said, ‘The fifty years since we met have flashed by. I simply wanted to be with you all once more, Lena… in the little time that’s left before we are gone.’

  Giacopazzi wanted to be back in her study, facing the blue screen of her VDU.

  1989

  Towards the end of the writing of the novel which she thought of as her war book, Georgia Kennedy had still not decided whether or not it would be wise to include the revelation that Harry Partridge had been careless enough to father not only Tottie, but Dixie also.

  Her editor had wanted it left out on the grounds that although such coincidences may be quite common in real life, nevertheless Eye of the Storm would appear in the fiction list. The hassock and cassock schooling of Georgia Honeycombe was, at times, apt to be a bit strong for the laid-back Giacopazzi. The Honeycombe part of her wanted to be honest, and fair to Eve. Now, again in a doubtful mood, she imagined the reviewers’ criticism: Giacopazzi’s propensity for drama and surprise is now so necessary to the seasoning of her books that she cannot write without that extra shake and pinch, even in a book that purports to be based upon fact…

  She recalled Eve’s words when they had met in London, back in the summer. ‘It was not much of a surprise to me, Georgia,’ she had said. ‘When you left Markham without so much as a word, I guessed that you were probably pregnant, and I worked out that it couldn’t have been Nick’s little bun.’

  It was September of the long hot summer of 1989, the day of a reunion with some of the women. Georgia carried the last of her drink to the window. The sky was clear again, this summer seemed to be going on and on. For years to come, English people would remember it as they remembered the summer of ’76, and people as old as herself remembered the summers of ’39, ’40 and ’41.

  The floodlights that were left on all night to deter any possible rustlers of their valuable breeding stock lit up the yards that were close to Pete’s house.

  She thought of Pete, reliable and intelligent, as good and caring a farmer as one would find anywhere. She saw the bathroom light go on i
n Pete’s house. At last, probably reluctantly, Pete would leave the farm alone for five or six hours. Pete had gradually become her son. In the early days, when he was bewildered and lost, Georgia had given him some affection, and he had returned it with a lifetime of love. She had grown to love Pete a great deal – ‘This is our son, Pete. He’s the best farmer in Hampshire.’ She knew that he sometimes found her sudden demonstrations of affection embarrassing, but she knew equally that he would not want her to alter.

  Pete had been eight years old when she had brought him here, and now he was a man who had reached the age when he needed to put on glasses to read. How angry Georgia Kennedy had been at the time, and with what difficulty did she hide her frustration.

  She had worked out what she must do so that, once the war ended, she need never again return to the domestic role she had filled at the beginning.

  Hugh’s love affair with Floozie had freed her of a bad marriage, her parents’ legacy had freed her of the necessity of going out to work for a year or two, the women at the Town Restaurant had freed her of her own stereotyped ideas of a woman’s place, and Harry Partridge had freed her of her inhibitions about sex. She was ready to travel the world and write novels. Footloose and fancy free described precisely what she expected for herself in the future.

  But, as she felt the bonds which had restrained her ever since she had become a woman loosen, so, during the last months of the war, did others tighten. A four months pregnancy from an accident with a man who died a hero. A feeling of responsibility towards Pete who had nowhere to go except back to his mother’s violent marriage. A feeling of duty to Nick who loved and needed her.

  When she had arrived here at the farm, she had been so angry. Her bright and footloose future she now saw as a long and reluctant Lenten denial. It was a wonder that Dixie hadn’t come into the world red and screaming.

  ‘Why did you write the book?’ Ursula O’Neill asked.

  ‘Because I wanted to write something about the war. Something but not about Spitfires and Blitz and men machine-gunning and going into battle. I wanted to tell a love story. When I came to do it, I found that I had lived one.’