Goodnight Sweetheart

by Charlotte Bingham

  He stood up. ‘So there we are, you’ve done just the right thing, Miss Garland. I will make a note of what you have told me. Thank you for coming to see me. Not easy for you, given that it is your sister you are reporting. I hope you appreciate that I am most grateful to you?’

  He shook Caro’s gloved hand, and they walked together to the door, whereupon he excused himself and once more checked the corridor outside before letting her pass him, from where she hurried off to her car with a feeling that somehow she had betrayed her sister, who might be imprisoned, or worse, because of it. But since both Edwina and Robyn had said there was nothing else to be done, she felt that at least she had done her duty, if nothing else.

  When she reached what seemed like the safety of the Ritz where they were all intent on dining early, because both Eddie and Bill were on only twelve-hour leave, Caro firmly put all feelings of guilt away from her. It was too late anyway to regret what she had done, too late to go back to ‘Uncle Max’, or whatever his real or unreal name was, too late to wonder what would happen to Katherine and David. Now she must enjoy herself, because at last they really were at war, and besides, there was always the sole bonne femme to be appreciated, albeit perhaps for the last time.

  As Caro had predicted, Robyn and Eddie left the nightclub and drove off to somewhere or another, probably an old inn on the outskirts of London. Anyway, they certainly went somewhere other than back to the flat, leaving Bill and Caro, and Edwina and Tom – one of Edwina’s seemingly endless supply of escorts – to go back and carry on in whatever way they wished.

  With no streetlamps lighting their way, and no car lights allowed, actually getting back to the flat was an adventure in itself.

  ‘I think the blackout’s going to kill more people than the Germans will ever be able to!’

  Tom, who had had the foresight to bring a small torch, was gaily if a little erratically leading the way in the dark, everyone following. Once in the flat, Edwina went into the sitting room and kicked the door shut behind them both, which left a more than startled Caro and Bill staring at the closed door, and with nowhere to go except the kitchen.

  ‘Would you like a cup of Ovaltine?’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Would you be offended if I said a very firm “no” to that?’

  ‘No, of course not, but tell you what – why don’t we take a drink and go into my bedroom, but only, you know, just to drink and talk, if you know what I mean?’

  Caro looked helplessly at Bill. He was not handsome in the way that Eddie was handsome, but he was good looking. Best of all he exuded good humour.

  Despite being well dined, and certainly well wined, Bill gave Caro a brotherly look.

  ‘I know just what you mean, Caro. Lead the way!’

  Since there was no light coming from the kitchen, and no blackout material at the hall window, they were once more plunged into darkness, and obliged to feel their way towards the bedroom door, where Caro switched on a light, which she immediately draped with a scarf to dim its brightness.

  ‘Phew. I suppose we’ll get used to this.’

  Feeling only too grateful that she had tidied their bedroom, Caro ducked back to the kitchen to fetch a bottle of whisky, two glasses, and also a jug of water for herself, on a tray.

  When she returned, somewhat to her relief, Bill was not seated on either of the beds, but, having first removed the blackout, was standing at the window, staring out at the night sky.

  ‘Hang on,’ she protested, quickly switching off the light again.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘a beautiful moon tonight, no planes, no Germans.’ He turned back to Caro. ‘Do you mind?’

  By the light of the moon Caro placed the tray on a nearby table, and went to pour them both drinks, but Bill took the bottle of whisky from her.

  ‘No, no, just water for me!’

  ‘Come on! You can’t expect me to drink alone!’

  Bill splashed a little whisky into Caro’s glass, and rather more into his own. ‘Now let’s enjoy the night sky while we can, with not a Hun in sight.’

  Caro resolved not to drink, but stood firmly clutching her glass, because she really didn’t want to be a party pooper, while obediently staring at the night sky. Soon, they both knew, perhaps any minute, it would be filled with the enemy, but, until then, they could talk.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ Meriel sighed, indicating the blackout at the windows. ‘We have tried everything, but with stone ledges and stone around the windows, the blackout is just refusing to stick.’

  Anthony looked up briefly, and then went back to his accounts books. As far as he was concerned, blackout materials and the rest of it was women’s business.

  ‘I feel for you, I am sure, dearest, but at the moment I am trying to work out the accounts for last month, for what with getting the cottages ready for the evacuees, I have done nothing that I should have done for what seems now like weeks.’

  Meriel nodded. It was at times like this that she missed both her daughters, and the maids. In fact, she missed her whole family. If Jag and Francis were here they would be climbing up Mrs Grant’s ladders instead of her, and wielding tapes and scissors and ribbing everyone around, and it would all be such fun, the boys teasing her, and the girls protesting, and she knew not what. But with Mrs Grant and everyone gone to do much-needed factory work, and just Anthony and herself in this evening – Smith having today taken Trixie, and Betty too, up to London – there was no one with whom she could do such mundane tasks, no one with whom she could have a giggle.

  She climbed up the ladders, as once again Anthony prepared to tot up yet more sums in the long columns of figures in front of him, eyes down, brow creased in frowning concentration.

  He had just finished doing a complicated piece of multiplication of the kind that was fast becoming the dread of his life, when he heard a muted cracking sound, followed by a much louder one.

  ‘Seventeen hundred and eighty—’ He looked up reluctantly. ‘Seventeen hundred and eighty-four—’

  Meriel and the stepladders had parted company.

  ‘Oh my Lord, Meriel, Meriel!’ Seeing her crumpled body spread out on the dark old hard-wood floor, he ran from behind his desk, and without thinking, fatally, he kneeled, and taking her head and shoulders in his arms he managed to prop her. At once, and ominously, her head rolled sideways, and she made no sound.

  He laid her back, calling her name over and over again, and then he rose to his feet and fled the room, calling for Smith. But Smith was out at the village pub, wetting his whistle, as he called it, after his long journey to London and back, and everywhere else in the house was only darkness.

  Caro had never kissed anyone before and now that she was doing, she thought it was quite nice, but not as nice as she had always hoped that it might be.

  ‘I think I’ll stop now,’ she said matter-of-factly to Bill, which made him laugh.

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Well, I do,’ Caro told him in a voice that, had Walter Beresford been listening in, he would have added in a warning tone, ‘When you hear my lucky charm using that voice, take heed, young man.’

  ‘How about if we lie down on the bed, and just hold each other, and go to sleep?’

  Caro stared at Bill. ‘No, I don’t think so … not really.’

  ‘You could lie on that bed then, and I could lie on this one, and we could talk.’

  ‘What about?’ Caro demanded cautiously.

  ‘Shoes and ships and sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings? Well, we know that they do, and they’re called Hun-pigs and they most definitely have wings.’

  ‘Go on then, you lie on that one, and I’ll lie on this one, and we can talk.’

  ‘We could push the beds together and hold hands?’

  ‘We could. On the other hand, we could not.’

  But they did, and they talked for some time, before finally falling asleep.

  Bill must have been woken by the light coming in the unmasked window,
the curtains left undrawn, for when Caro was woken by Edwina shaking her gently by the shoulder, there was no Bill, just Edwina staring down at her.

  ‘Caro? It’s your brother, on the telephone. Your brother Jag. He needs to speak to you urgently.’ Edwina pushed a tangle of red hair from around her face. ‘Hope it’s not bad news, Shorty. But, well, I must warn you, he sounds just a tiny bit grim.’

  Caro knew at once from Jag’s tone, as people do, that it was not just going to be bad news, it was going to be very bad news. She tried to brace herself, and yet even as she listened intently to what he was saying, perhaps because his voice was so commandingly calm, she could not take in the reality. Anyway, why should she be able to? Their mother was both too young and too kind to die. Yet, it seemed, she had. How could she have? How could she?

  Chapter Six

  Even as Anthony’s elegant gold pen moved across the name, even as the line went through the words ‘Katherine Mary Elizabeth Sophia, 12 December 1918’, none of them could quite believe what was happening. In some ways it seemed more unreal than their mother’s death. Their mother had died in an accident; fate had decreed that their beautiful, kind, sensitive mother would be taken from them – ‘suddenly as a result of an accident at home’, as the obituary had read – whereas now that their father was taking his pen and crossing out Katherine’s name from the Family Bible, it appeared to them all that in some strange way he was killing her by his own hand. Indeed, so final did that black ink look, so determinedly did the pen strike through her name, not once, but twice, that had she been laid out in front of the three of them, she could not have seemed more dead.

  ‘Let her name never more be mentioned in this house,’ Anthony said, and the words were so sonorous that they sounded to them all as if they were a quotation from that same Bible at which they were all staring, mesmerised. ‘She is no longer my daughter, nor will she ever be again.’ He looked across at Caro. ‘From now on I have only one daughter.’ He glanced down at the Bible, as if he needed to remind himself who his one daughter might be. ‘Caroline Elysia Constance, you are my daughter. I have two sons, and a daughter.’ He stood up. ‘Now I shall be grateful if you would all leave me alone.’

  Jag turned at once, very much in a newly acquired military style, and headed the small sad group out of Anthony Garland’s study, and Caro quietly closed the door behind them, after which Francis and Caro stared at Jag, much as they had as children when they were waiting for him to announce what game he had decided they were going to play on some rainy afternoon in the holidays.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s go to the den.’

  The den was a long room above the stables. They hadn’t been there for years, and it was reached only by a long run of very old steps. The other two climbed up after Jag, hoping against hope that he would have some fresh words of comfort to offer them.

  ‘I thought we’d better come up here because this is the only place where Smith has finished the blackout,’ he explained, and then, from behind the hay stacks, he produced two bottles of wine. ‘Pinched them from the old man’s cellar,’ he said, but he didn’t smile. ‘Thought we might need them after all. He’s not very good at provisions, as you saw from the funeral tea.’

  The funeral had been sad enough, but the catering had been even sadder, for with Meriel and all the female staff gone, and the estate workers and the village to be provided for, it was soon obvious that Smith and Anthony had sadly underestimated how much tea and sandwiches and even cake was needed.

  ‘Family Hold Back was very much the order of the day, wasn’t it?’ Jag muttered as he drew the cork from the first of the bottles. ‘Caro,’ he jerked his head backwards, ‘you’ll find some provender behind that sack of oats over there.’

  Caro could not help feeling delighted when she saw what Jag had hidden: a whole seed cake, some cream crackers, half a pound of butter, some cheese, and even a couple of tins of corned beef, all of it tidily put together with picnic knives and plates, and as well as teacups and saucers.

  They were all silent as they ate their repast, and drank their wine from the teacups.

  ‘Do you know, these last few days I have actually found myself happy that Mamma’s gone, that she won’t see what we’re going to see, won’t have to go through it all again? Not only that, I’m glad we’re at war so I don’t have to be here cooped up with Papa.’ As his brother and sister stared at him, Jag went on, determined to be honest, ‘No, it’s true. With Katherine gone, with you both gone, with everyone going – Miss Berenger, Trixie, Betty – I know it’s shocking, but lately I’ve been really glad that I have a reason to leave too. If there wasn’t a war, I wouldn’t have. I’d have had to stay and farm, and you, Caro, well, you’d probably be just cooped up here too, an old maid with only the dogs and Smith for company.’

  ‘I know what you mean, but I don’t think you should be glad for war, Jag, really I don’t. It’s as if the war is getting us out of having to be normal, and as if normal is somehow more difficult than war, which of course it isn’t, but that’s how it seems.’

  Caro stared ahead of her, silent, still disbelieving of everything that was happening. She had always been so close to her mother, and had never really considered leaving Chevrons, at least not for long, but now that Jag had said he was glad to be leaving, perhaps it was true of all of them. Perhaps if everything had stayed the same, she would, as Jag had just said, have become an old maid, stuck at home with Smith and the dogs.

  Now she remembered how reasonable her mother had been when she’d overheard Trixie talking about leaving Chevrons, and how bravely she had borne her suffering when Katherine had disappeared, seemingly into thin air. Their mother had always been at such pains not to let her feelings show; so Jag was right in a way: perhaps it was just as well that Meriel had gone, because now she wouldn’t have to worry. There would be nothing more to be brave about, nothing more to pretend about.

  ‘I don’t think Father would ever have crossed Katherine’s name from the Family Bible if … if Mamma was alive,’ Caro stated suddenly, out of nowhere.

  Jag gave his sister a vaguely patronising look. ‘Yes, Caro, we know that, for the very good reason that if Mamma was still alive Katherine wouldn’t have missed turning up for her funeral.’ He drained his cup of wine, and then promptly refilled it. ‘That was the last straw really. You can’t blame the old man. I mean she must know; someone must have told her. She must have been told.’

  Caro too held out her teacup for more wine. Jag was right: Katherine must know. She must still be around London somewhere, because of the scarf left tied around the Blue Angel’s steering wheel. But although he hadn’t said as much, she guessed that ‘Uncle Max’ would not want her telling even Jag and Francis about the scarf. So she sat on, listening to her brothers talking, holding her cup, and wondering what their father might think if he heard them. He would not think much of them, of that she was quite sure.

  ‘I quite understand,’ her father told Caro, while his eyes were saying ‘Not you too?’ ‘You must go where you feel your duty will take you; must go where you hope to be of most help. Smith and I can manage. Mrs Warburton will still be coming from the village to clean, and she thinks her daughter might help out with the evacuees because two of the mothers have already gone back to London.’ He gave a flicker of a smile. ‘Apparently, like Beatrix Potter’s Johnny Town-mouse, they have already found Chevrons too quiet.’

  Caro had decided to don her uniform for what she realised might turn out to be the most awkward interview of her life, in the hope that if she appeared in the library in full fig, her father would guess at once where her determination might lie.

  ‘I quite understand really, I do.’

  As always Anthony found it easier to look down at his eternal accounts books.

  ‘The thing is, Papa, I know with Mamma gone I should perhaps stay behind with you here, that I should stay behind, and help with everything, but I feel I will be of better use in London.’


  ‘Of course you do, Caro. It’s only natural that you should want to be with young people, at this time. Young men visiting London will be wanting to take you out, and you will be driving young officers who will naturally also want to take you out, and so on. You want to be where the gaiety is. It is quite understandable.’

  Anthony looked up at Caro, who was standing almost to attention in front of his desk. It seemed to her that her father had quite deliberately not asked her to sit down. It also seemed to her that he was not just hinting but suggesting that he had expected her not only to be selfish, but fast.

  ‘No, it is quite understandable, quite understandable,’ he repeated, his eyes once more returning to his columns of figures.

  Caro decided to ignore what might be his insinuations, and begin her defence afresh.

  Her father was admirable in many ways, a good father, but he had it in him to be subtly unkind, which meant that unless you took care you could become indignant, and that was no good.

  Once you became indignant, as she had been moved to be once or twice when she was growing up, then on realising this he would immediately move in for the kill.

  ‘I asked Smith about the household arrangements, and he says that he knows that you can both manage. He says that you will probably be moving into the wing, so there will be less on his shoulders. And he says that being a widower he has begun to get used to foraging for himself, and that, after all, all the trade vans still visit; they can bring him whatever he wants,’ Caro stated in as calm a voice as she could muster.

  Her father dropped his finger at the bottom of one of the columns of figures, which he had obviously been mentally adding up, and looked up at her with an irritated expression on his face.

  ‘Look, do as you wish, Caro, really do as you wish, because you are obviously going to anyway. In the end, in this life, we all have to get on with it. Believe me, I perfectly understand that you do not want to stay cooped up at Chevrons while you can be in London having a good time, and behaving just as you wish. With the war on there’ll be no chaperones, and it’ll be laissez-faire everywhere. With Jag and Francis at Catterick Camp, and you and I, and of course Smith, here alone in this house, alone without your mother, what possible use could you be to me anyhow?’ He stopped, his eyes going back to his columns of figures. ‘You never were particularly domesticated. Your mother used to despair of your cooking and sewing, your dress sense, everything about you, now I come to think of it.’ He sighed sadly. ‘As I remember it she always used to say, “Caro’s such a tomboy, she should have been a boy, really she should.”’