String of Pearls

by Madge Swindells

  A sudden idea hit her and she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before: Dad’s mother would know where he was, even if she hadn’t told Mum. They usually visited their grandmother on their rare visits to London. She was always pleasant, although a little forgetful. If she went to her grandmother, Dad would come and fetch her and perhaps he’d let her stay with him sometimes. They had never even said goodbye. The last time she saw Dad was in June, when he took her riding on the day before her birthday. He’d said, ‘See you next week, love,’ but she had not seen him since.

  Having made up her mind to go, she started planning. What to take was a major problem. Money was another. Her savings would just about get her there. She would leave very early on Monday morning while everyone was sleeping, she decided.

  Come Monday morning, stylishly dressed in bits and pieces begged and borrowed from friends, Daisy rapped her knuckles on the ticket clerk’s counter.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she voiced loud and clear. ‘I’ve been waiting here quite long enough.’

  ‘Oh yes, and where d’you think you’re going?’ The ticket clerk turned, looking pompous, frowning, king of his small patch. ‘Is your journey really necessary, miss? There’s a war on, you know.’

  ‘I know there’s a war on because of rationing, blitzes, blackout and interfering busybodies like you trying to take over our lives.’

  ‘None of your lip then. Where’re you off to and when are you returning?’

  ‘Victoria, London. I’m going to see my grandmother. I’ll stay a few days.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s likely to be a rough journey. For starters the train’s late. God knows when it will arrive. Platform one. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ He pushed the ticket and her change under the glass.

  ‘Whereabouts exactly?’ Now he was looking genuinely concerned. ‘They still get blitzed, mainly around the dock and city areas.’

  Gran lived in Clapham, but Daisy had no idea where that was. She shrugged, bit her lip and looked away.

  Low clouds hung over the grey chimneys compressing the moist September heatwave. Life had become a monochrome canvas, but one solitary, dark green tree stood alone and defiant in front of the pub across the road. The scene was well-balanced, she decided. Funny how nature always provided a good composition no matter where your stance happened to be. But on second thoughts.

  ‘Move along there, miss, you’re blocking the queue.’

  Flushing at her stupidity, Daisy grabbed her ticket and left. She lugged her suitcase to platform one, failed to find a seat and leaned against the wall, still composing her canvas in her mind’s eye. Passing men eyed her curiously. There were plenty of pretty blondes around, but her lovely face and her fierce expression caught their attention. She was something special, regal and stacked, too.

  Seeing their predatory stares, Daisy imagined that she was too fat, or her hair was wrong, or maybe they could sense that she was homeless, as from this morning. Almost all the reasonable clothes she possessed were crushed into her one large suitcase and her handbag. She’d had enough. She and Mum had been at loggerheads the past three months. As for Miro . . . he used to be her best friend, but he’d retreated into his shell and was acting even more remote than when he first joined the family. She could not bear either of them a moment longer.

  A loudspeaker startled her out of her misery.

  ‘The train about to depart from platform two is the seven-thirty a.m. service to London, Victoria.’

  Platform two! But that idiot had said one. Daisy grabbed her suitcase and ran . . . along the platform . . . up the steps . . . across the bridge . . . and down the steps, her heavy suitcase bruising her legs. She just made it.

  ‘Idiot . . . idiot . . .’ she muttered, trying to catch her breath as she pushed her way along the corridor. She managed to squeeze on to half a seat, next to a fat lady who’d had garlic for breakfast. The carriage was dirty, dust coated the windows and the air stank.

  At Basingstoke the train was held up for four hours by an electricity failure. Something to do with last night’s blitz, she gathered, although she only heard half of the announcement. She tried not to worry. Soon her thoughts returned to her father.

  Dad was the bravest man imaginable, he had a chest full of medals to prove it. He was known to be the best salvage expert in Britain. If she closed her eyes she could see her father clearly, his black hair slightly sprinkled with grey, his eyes as blue as forget-me-nots. Dad was lovely. Even her school friends said so. Once they’d set eyes on him, they were hooked, making silly excuses to pop round to the house. Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she imagined Dad galloping back from a morning ride, his cheeks glowing and Daunty, his magnificent black stallion, covered in foam. She always helped her father rub down Daunty. Her mother had wanted him to buy a gelding to save future trouble with their mares, all newly purchased for the riding school, but Dad was adamant. ‘Why do women want everything castrated,’ he’d shouted loud enough for Daisy to hear. And they were off again. She had never known her parents to fight, but this summer they had hardly ever stopped.

  The train shuddered and seconds later they were moving forward.

  On the outskirts of London the train stopped for another two hours while workers battled to remove debris from the lines after another air raid. Daisy stood in the corridor watching the passing scene. She could never have imagined such desolation – like a Russian painting from the First World War she’d seen at the Tate, miles of rubble with a solitary, jagged ruin pointing accusingly at the sky. It was half past three by the time she reached Victoria Station, only to find that the underground to Clapham was closed. She stood in the taxi queue for half an hour, wondering if she had enough cash to pay for the ride. Eventually her turn came and she had just enough. Would Granny be there? she wondered for the first time as the driver took numerous detours to avoid roads blocked by debris. The air smelled of dust and smoke and her eyes burned. They passed children playing in ruined buildings, flowers bursting through rubble, cats perched on broken walls and birds in shattered trees. Life goes on, she thought wonderingly as she filed the scenes in her memory bank. She would paint them one day.

  The driver pulled up in a blitzed street. Gran’s house was still standing, but the windows were shattered and boarded up, the door padlocked, several tiles were missing on the roof and the tiny front garden was buried in dust and rubble, probably from the ruins further along. Only a few houses were left standing. Asking the driver to wait, she ran to the first house still intact. A woman was sweeping debris from the front passage.

  ‘I came to see my gran, Mrs Conroy who lived just down there. Is she all right?’

  ‘Don’t fret love. She was fine last time I saw her . . . three days before our raid. She had a premonition, she said. She took her cat and went to Wales. She’s got friends there.’

  Dazed and confused, Daisy hurried back to the cab. What a fool she had been, but how could she possibly have known?

  ‘Sorry about this, love,’ the driver said when she told him what had happened. ‘This bloody war has turned every family upside down. I’ve got one daughter and her kids in Scotland, another in Wales, and the wife’s at home pining. I can’t leave you here. Where d’you want to go?’

  Daisy looked in her purse. ‘Thanks, but I’ll walk,’ she said.

  ‘Listen. I’ll drop you anywhere you want to go that’s on my way home. It won’t cost you a penny. I live near the station.’

  Her concern about her grandmother’s whereabouts had brought a lump to her throat. She couldn’t think straight. ‘I’ll hitch home. Take me some place where I can get a lift . . . if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘Where d’you live then?’

  ‘Near the New Forest.’

  ‘OK, I know a cafe near my home. Lorry drivers use it because it’s just off the main road.’

  The cafe was a friendly place with an enticing smell of fish and chips with vinegar and noisy music in the background. Daisy was too broke to eat.
She ordered a pot of tea and waited. When drivers walked in, she asked them if they were going to Dorset, but she was unlucky.

  Two hours passed while Daisy sat and worried about the changes at home. Why hadn’t Dad come to see them? Why hadn’t Gran told them she was going away? Why was Mum so different? She used to be such fun until Dad left, but since then she’d acted like she had stomach ache, all drawn into herself and unable to think of anything but her pain.

  ‘We’re closing in half an hour, miss,’ the waitress said, looking sorry. ‘You’d stand a better chance of getting a lift up at the main road.’

  Daisy glanced at her watch. It was after seven p.m. Tired and forlorn, dragging her heavy suitcase, she trudged up the steep slope to the main road, still hanging on to hope. Someone must surely give her a lift. Dusk was spreading over the land. Birds twittered as they gathered in the trees, a plane droned overhead and in the distance a dog barked. Clouds were gathering fast. Then came a spatter of rain. Oh God! What a bloody awful day. What a fool I’ve been.

  It started to pour and in next to no time she was soaked. How was she going to get home? What if she was still waiting when it got dark? Her entire life had gone wrong, culminating in this frightful moment.

  A jeep drew up beside her with screeching brakes and a spray of water, but who cares, she was already drenched. A young GI jumped out and ran towards her.

  ‘Hop in, ma’am?’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she said, and then she sneezed.

  ‘Sounds to me like you’ve caught a bad cold. No wonder, standing around here in the rain. You’re wet through. Where’re do you want to go?’

  ‘To Mowbray, it’s a village five miles from Christchurch, past the New Forest.’

  ‘I’m heading that way. Let’s go.’

  Stiff with cold, Daisy swayed and found herself being caught by one elbow and pushed towards the jeep. The Yank picked up her bag as if it weighed next to nothing and tossed it in the back.

  ‘Jesus, you’re shivering badly.’ He put one hand on her arm. ‘And freezing. Hang on a minute.’ He rifled in the back and produced a khaki jersey and a cape. ‘Put these on.’

  ‘I can’t wear your clothes, I’ll make them wet. I have a coat in my suitcase. I’m all right. Don’t bother about me. It’s just that everything has gone wrong today and I wouldn’t care if I did die of cold.’

  He looked at her and laughed. ‘That bad, huh? Just put them on. Who cares if they get wet.’ He switched on the engine. For a while they drove in silence. The clouds moved away and the sun came out.

  ‘When I see a sunset like this, it reminds me of home. I get pretty homesick most of the time, although when I was there I was dying to get off the place and see a bit of the world.’

  He had a lovely voice, deep and musical. His profile was OK. Not many people had a good profile. His was quite regular. His neck was muscular, his nose a bit too blunt, his lips a bit too full, otherwise he might have modelled for the Grecian statues in her book on ancient art. He looked strong and dependable.

  ‘Off the “place”?’ she queried.

  ‘Our family owns a ranch eighty miles west of Denver. Mainly cattle. Except for the equipment suppliers, almost everyone around has a ranch. We meet up in groups for horse shows and barbecues and there are all kinds of fetes and fairs at the weekends. During the week it can be pretty lonely, but it’s always beautiful.’

  With his black hair and blue eyes he looked a bit like her father. Not too much, but there were certain similarities: his thick black eyebrows, for instance and his wide cheek bones, but she would not tell him that.

  She said, ‘Thanks for picking me up. I was silly to be so upset, but I thought I’d never get a lift. I’ve had an unlucky day. Everything went wrong. It hasn’t rained for two weeks, but finally, when I got to the side of the road to hitch a lift, there was a deluge.’

  ‘A deluge, was it!’ He was laughing at her, she realized. ‘Back home when it rains you know all about it.’ The Yank groped in the cubbyhole for his sunglasses and put them on.

  ‘Sunglasses spoil the colours. Look! It’s lovely. All those pale greens and violets and that wonderful creamy shade higher up,’ she exclaimed. The light was muted and the trees ahead were darkly silhouetted against the western sky which was a kaleidoscope of subtle shades changing as she watched.

  ‘I have to look at the road, not the sky. We have beautiful skies and sunsets, too, especially when it’s windy. They say it’s caused by pollution, but I’m not sure I believe that. The sky’s OK here, but for the rest . . . let’s just say it’s not my kind of nature. All this green . . .’ He shrugged apologetically.

  Daisy was warming up and feeling safe in the knowledge that she was on the way home. ‘So tell me about your home,’ she said, since that seemed to be uppermost in his mind.

  ‘It’s about as different from England as you could possibly imagine. Space. It’s all about space . . . just as far as you can see . . . not cluttered up with trees and houses.’ He broke off. ‘You must think I’m crazy, all this talk about home.’

  After a while he said, ‘I’m looking straight into the sun . . . it’s resting bang on the road. Are you in a hurry? There’s a pub I found half a mile further on. I came this way a week back and stopped there for lunch. The food isn’t bad by your English standards, although they don’t give you much. How about it?’

  Daisy smirked and cleared her throat. She had never been in a pub, but she longed to go. The trouble was, she didn’t have enough cash to pay for her meal. She said, ‘You go ahead, I’m not in a hurry. I’ll wait in the jeep.’

  ‘No, please come. I won’t go in without you.’

  ‘The truth is, I don’t have any money,’ she said shyly.

  ‘Who asked you for money? I only asked you to supper. I’ve got plenty. Uncle Sam is pretty good to us.’

  Daisy puzzled over Uncle Sam, but then the penny dropped. ‘Yes, I’ve heard you’re much better off than our boys, so if you mean that, then thanks, I accept.’ Calling the soldiers ‘boys’, as her mother and grandfather did, made her feel more adult. Her confidence was seeping back and she was ravenously hungry.

  He drove into the half-empty car park, drew to a halt beside an oak tree and jumped out. Frowning, he scanned the cars. ‘Our commander has a mission in life to make sure we and you Brits remain apart, but I reckon no one will see us here.’

  ‘I can’t go in like this. I’ll get my coat out,’ Daisy said. Her beautiful, blue, cashmere coat had taken most of her mother’s clothing coupons for the past year. It was the first non-school coat she had ever owned. It had cost the earth and it was a reward from Gramps and Mum for winning a scholarship to a London art school where she would go next year. At least she hoped she would. Mum wanted her to take off a year for a boring secretarial course because she was considered too young to live away from home.

  Daisy leaned over the seat, rummaged in the suitcase for her coat and put it on. Taking a comb out of her handbag, she ran it through her hair and draped her long, damp curls over one shoulder. Should she risk using Mum’s discarded lipstick? Why not? She gazed into her hand mirror and smoothed it over her lips.

  ‘Hey, you’re beautiful,’ he told her, seeming surprised. It was more of a remark than a compliment. ‘I guess everyone tells you that.’

  ‘No. Actually no one has. My friends go way back. They’re not likely to say such a thing to me. I’m just Daisy.’

  ‘Daisy! That’s nice. Daisy who?’

  ‘Conroy.’

  ‘Mike Lawson,’ he said, shaking her hand.

  The crow in the branch overhead let out a piercing, raucous cry. Daisy looked up and laughed. ‘He’s introduced us.’

  Mike grinned. ‘I could do with a drink. How about you?’

  Daisy hesitated. She didn’t want to look a fool. ‘I’m thirsty, too,’ she said. Mike shot her a doubtful glance and Daisy frowned. Had she said the wrong thing? But what harm could it do? She’d probably never see him again and
no one would ever know.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, squaring her shoulders.

  Five

  The long summer evenings were over and lately it was dark by nine. From his window Miro could not see the driveway because of the trees, but he could see the road. He had been trying to concentrate on his studies all evening, but without much success. Everyone was confused and upset by Daisy’s sudden flight and no one knew what to think, but they all had their own theories. Miro’s theory was a GI. It was too much of a coincidence that Daisy should go off a week after the American troops arrived on their doorstep. There had to be a connection. His suspicions had brought with them a dozen different tension symptoms, worst of which were stomach cramps.

  Early that morning, Helen had found Daisy’s note propped against the kettle telling them she had gone to London to see her grandmother and to get news of her father. John had criticized Helen for not telling Daisy the truth, and he had listened in unashamedly. ‘She blames you for the break and that’s absurd.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  Helen cancelled her war work and spent the day scrubbing and polishing, her face screwed with tension, shoulders hunched, listening for the sound of a taxi, or Daisy’s footsteps in the driveway. Gramps had been on the telephone most of the day. The Metropolitan police had called on Daisy’s grandmother, they told him eventually, only to find that the house was boarded up. Mrs Conroy had gone to Wales, a neighbour claimed. Daisy had already been there, but she had left in a taxi. ‘Presumably she is on the way home,’ the police suggested. ‘If she’s not back by midnight call us again and we’ll open a missing person’s file.’

  So she had been to her grandmother’s after all. That surprised Miro and lessened his pain, but he was convinced that a Yank was involved. He was aware of the GIs’ athletic appearance, set off by their superbly casual uniforms and he longed to possess a fraction of their easy self-confidence.

  At ten that evening he saw headlights flashing as a vehicle turned the corner. A jeep turned into their road and drew up at the gate. The driver jumped out and ran around to the other side to open the door, but Daisy pushed him away. ‘I can manage, thanks,’ she said clearly, sounding hurt and angry. He lifted out her suitcase, but she caught hold of it and a tug of war ensued. ‘Leave it. Please . . . go . . . I can manage.’