Goodnight Sweetheart

by Charlotte Bingham

  She put the matter quite out of her mind, which was understandable, since the next officer she drove was Captain Robert Plume.

  ‘Terrific day for a spin,’ was his opening remark as Edwina held the rear door open for him.

  The day before, if asked, Edwina would have thought that it would take a great deal for dear Ben, the latest of her adoring tribe of beaux, to be driven from her mind, but the moment that she caught Robert’s sparkling eyes underneath his naval cap, it seemed to her that she could hardly remember much about Ben, except that he was very eager, and in the RAF.

  For the rest of the drive to Portsmouth, she tried silently repeating to herself, ‘Never give all the heart for love,’ but found to her confusion that somehow the words were not making the same good old sense any more, and that the seemingly sound advice she had dished out to Caro about keeping emotion at bay, about loving, but not falling in love, about how to behave in war, simply did not pertain to herself.

  A few days later, having driven down to Portsmouth yet again, only this time not on official business, Robert and Edwina had dinner, and unsurprisingly to her, made love in a hotel suite, which he had booked.

  ‘The funny thing is,’ Edwina told him, just a little crossly a few hours later, when she lay in his arms staring up at the old beamed ceiling, ‘I am not usually like this. I don’t usually sleep with people on a first date.’

  ‘It’s war.’ Robert kissed the top of her titian head and sighed with contentment. ‘We can only blame the war for our behaviour—’

  ‘Because we certainly don’t want to blame ourselves. I should have kept myself for – after the war, don’t you think, dotey?’

  ‘Too late for that!’

  They laughed, and Edwina propped herself up on her elbows, and stared down at Robert’s head lying on the pillow beside her.

  ‘And to think I was determined on taking Mr William Butler Yeats’s advice.’

  ‘Which was?’

  Edwina hesitated, frowning. ‘Never you mind. As my wise old Irish nanny used to say, “There’s a time and a place, Miss Edwina,” and this is not it, Master Robert,’ she told him, before once more sinking back into the delights of lovemaking.

  After all, if the words had been ignored, and she had indeed given her heart for love, what was the point of dwelling on it? And, as she had advised Caro Garland, this was war, no time to think too hard about the heart, only to love when you could. Yet if Robert had not been in the navy, but a gentleman farmer, living in his native Norfolk, and she a carefree young girl, living perhaps in a flat in Mayfair, staying with a friend for a few days, would they not have said they loved each other? So what was the difference? Everything was the difference, and nothing was the difference.

  When she lay back against the pillows again, but this time out of reach of Robert’s arms, and he brought a rose from the hotel vase and placed it carefully on the pillow beside her, Edwina found she had changed her mind. After all, life was too short not to be honest.

  ‘I love you, Robert,’ she stated, looking from him to the rose and back again.

  He kissed her hand, his eyes sad.

  ‘I would love to marry you, if there wasn’t a war.’

  Edwina smiled ruefully. ‘Of course. And I would love to marry you, if there wasn’t a war.’

  She stared ahead of her, wondering how many times she was going to hear that said.

  PART TWO

  ‘So this is war!’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘… I don’t have the right qualities to deal with homesick Frenchmen, and cooped-up Polish gents,’ Robyn finished in briskly unrepentant tones.

  ‘A pity, but understandable.’ Aunt Cicely’s great friend and Robyn’s commanding officer replied, looking unsurprised, just as a junior officer put something on her desk marked ‘Urgent’.

  ‘I’ve stuck with it for months, but the cool hand that calms the fevered brow is not my forte, I’m afraid,’ Robyn added, and her eyes too strayed to the piece of paper. ‘To be honest, I found it a bit much when the Free French kept complaining that since they’d arrived they hadn’t once been taken to the cinema. I felt like boxing their ears, not lending them a hanky to wipe their tears.’

  ‘Horses for courses,’ came the vague reply as Captain Agnes Hastings’ focus was still on the piece of paper in front of her. ‘Your family have a beach house in Sussex, I seem to remember, so you’re familiar with the route. In view of this news,’ she tapped the piece of paper and looked up at Robyn, ‘it is just as well you’re here. You can take your car, and drive like the clappers to the coast. All hands are needed. It seems our army’s stranded at Dunkirk, sitting ducks on the beaches, being strafed by the enemy at every turn.’

  Aunt Cicely had always emphasised that Fanys were independent, proud, daring, and now, as one of them, thank God, Robyn realised, active!

  ‘I’ve gone,’ Robyn told Captain Hastings, her eyes alight. She saluted and was out of the door before either of them had time to say any more.

  Caro too had been only too relieved to return to London. Not that she did not care for looking after the refugees, but once the Poles and the Czechs had all been cleared for active service with the RAF – their experience in aerial fighting now being second to none – the Fanys had been left with a nucleus of Austrian suspects and grumbling French, which was an unhappy mix, to say the least.

  ‘You’re better off sticking to what you love, motor cars and driving,’ Robyn had told her affectionately. ‘The art of winning a war is to follow the WVS rule: use every person for what they’re best at, and then, little by little, you will find, against all the odds, you will win. You have to. It makes sense.’

  Now they practically collided as they raced for their car keys, and then for their cars, both shouting out ‘Goodbye’ as they shot off to pick up their very different transport.

  As Robyn started up the Bentley, thanking the gods that by dint of her special pass from MI5 she had managed to fill the car up with petrol, she set about calculating how long it would take her to get to the coast to pick up the men detailed in her orders. She had to hurry, to do her bit in her country’s hour of need. Apart from anything else, she knew that this was what Eddie would expect. Should she fail, she could never look him in the eyes again. Even as she backed the car out, she knew he would be taking off in his Spitfire.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ she urged the Bentley, and the magnificent car seemed to understand and respond, as if she too wanted to do her bit. ‘We’ve got to give Hitler a bloody nose. We’ve got to get our army back,’ Robyn shouted over the sound of the rushing wind.

  As Caro too drove towards the coast, probably faster than she had ever driven, she was not thinking of giving Hitler, or anybody else, a bloody nose; she was thinking of the mass evacuation of the troops, and she could not suppress the idea that among them might be her brothers, or someone they knew, sitting on those beaches, waiting and waiting, while the Germans picked them off at their leisure. Even as she tried to think in a more positive fashion, another thought would keep coming back to her, and would not be blanked out.

  It was because of Katherine and David, and people like them, that they were all in this spot. How she hated them. She hated them in the same measure as they loved Hitler. Damn them, damn them both for ever and a day. She hoped she would never set eyes on either of them ever again.

  The town in which Katherine had found herself after her long journey was beautiful. Black and white buildings, a great river running past, an old château with fortifications on the hill above – everything about it exuded prosperity and tradition. A glance down its main streets suggested worthy city burghers and their wives strolling on a Sunday, nurses pushing prams with exuberant offspring lying back contentedly against lace cushions. It was a town that spelled ease, good food, wine harvested and bottled – not war. For these reasons, just before the outbreak of hostilities, David and Katherine had thought it ideal for their purposes, and rented a house in one of its calm bac
kstreets.

  David soon left her to go on Nazi business, so that Katherine, for the first time in her life, was left to cope on her own. They had both agreed on their plan, and it was up to her to implement it, get to know who the neighbours were, observe the townspeople, to understand the life that was about to be invaded. Indeed, they had hardly put their key in the door before it seemed that the fall of France had begun, her army dropping back from the advancing Nazis.

  The house they had chosen to live in belonged to a Swiss businessman into whose numbered account the monthly rental was paid. The building was tall and thin, and the front door opened out on to the street. It was normally a quiet street, lit by faded eighteenth-century lamps, which at night gave a faint glamour to the figures that walked with feigned ease up to the house next door before knocking on the door – two raps only. With her first-floor sitting-room window open on summer evenings, Katherine was interested to note those two sharp knocks, and then to hear the old, narrow, eighteenth-century door opening and shutting with almost equal rapidity. With David away it was up to her to watch, make notes, but, above all, to keep herself to herself.

  For this reason she made sure never to leave the house for the marketplace except at dawn, nor to make friends with any of the local concierges, nor employ a daily bonne for the cleaning, or the shopping. Concierges could never be trusted not to talk, and everyone in France knew that the daily bonne was a source of information second to none.

  Not a day went by when Katherine didn’t find herself feeling thankful that, on being sent to learn a second language, and quite against her parents’ wishes, she had insisted on living in France with French people, rather than settling for some smart Parisian finishing school. There she had not just learned French, she had learned the French way of life. If the devil was in the detail then from that time onwards she would cross her sevens, dip her bread in her early morning chocolate, and use her hands to gesture, as naturally as any citoyenne of the French Republic.

  Not that the people who had placed her where she was imagined for one moment that she was French. She was there to work for them, and the last thing they wanted was for her to be exposed as a Nazi before the war began. They had made sure that she understood this, just as she, and David of course, had made sure to leave England before they aroused suspicion, and well before the first siren had sounded the previous September. Now, a year later, it seemed to her that her dreams of living with David in an old house under an English heaven were as absurd as those people who had spent so many years refusing to take Hitler seriously.

  All through the previous scorching French summer, Katherine had tried not to think of English rain washing warmly through the streams of home, of English meadows swaying in an English breeze, most of all of a distant figure, walking his dogs between tall grass, making his happy way down to a meandering river where he would watch the fish rise, and listen to the larks overhead singing of the gentle delights of the season.

  An unusually loud sound on her neighbour’s narrow door drew her cautiously to the window. The streetlamps had been lit, and the sky had darkened, but still distinguishable was the large, open-topped Mercedes motor car outside, a military figure holding the passenger’s door open for a tall officer, who stepped out of the car and walked straight up to the door, which was already opening in response to his driver’s sharp knock. An exchange of greetings in German and French followed.

  Katherine’s curtains having fluttered momentarily in the warm breeze, she withdrew quickly, but not before the driver had looked up to the house.

  She hurried upstairs to take a bath, and go to bed. Being on her own, she was always waiting – for messages, for someone whom she had never seen before to arrive with a parcel that had to be taken on to some new address. In between her sending messages on her radio and her other duties, her bed had become both a refuge and an escape, a place where she read uneasily.

  Tonight she had hardly fallen asleep before she was awoken by a knock on the downstairs door that seemed to echo through the tall house, with its bare wooden stairs and its empty rooms. She pulled on a wrap and some slippers, and ran down to answer it, hoping as always that it was David.

  To see him again would be bliss. On the other hand, given next door’s evening visitor, given the Mercedes, and the black-gloved driver, a much larger part of her hoped to God it wasn’t him.

  It should have been a relief to open the door and find the German officer whose cap she had seen disappearing into the house next door, but somehow it wasn’t, because she was not so indoctrinated that she found the sight of a German uniform reassuring. He removed his cap to reveal that he was not just blond, but, it had to be admitted, handsome to a fault, something that Katherine was able to appreciate to the full as he smiled slowly, showing a set of perfect white teeth.

  ‘Mademoiselle de Messadiere?’

  He bowed slightly, and as he did so Katherine curtsied, because she had quickly sensed that he was that kind of Nazi, the old guard who liked old-fashioned customs, liked his women to be clinging vines, dependent on him for everything, eyeing him always with adoring eyes. Besides, he had a very educated accent.

  Katherine smiled. ‘How can I help you, General?’

  He smiled at her upgrading his rank, realising from her droll look that they both knew that in reality he was several notches down from a general.

  ‘Might I come in?’

  Katherine hesitated. To say ‘no’ would be a mistake, to say ‘yes’ might be taken as the wrong kind of invitation. However, remembering that he had already been next door, she opened the door wider to let him in.

  ‘Please come up, yes.’ She paused on the stairs, smiling down at him. ‘I will change, if you will give me a moment or two, after which we can perhaps enjoy une petite coupe, no?’

  He followed her up to the first-floor drawing room and she left him, returning within a few minutes wearing a stunning red dress, her hair up, scent behind her ears, a pair of high-heeled shoes showing off her slender, shapely legs.

  ‘How can I help you?’

  He turned, smiling.

  ‘You can allow me to sit down and appreciate your beauty,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Yes, please do.’

  They sat looking at each other, and as they did so it occurred to Katherine that the two of them would make a good painting. The young woman in the scarlet frock with the black stockings, and the red and black shoes, and the German officer with his tall boots and magnificently cut uniform.

  She wondered fleetingly what a painter might call it, and could not help smiling inwardly and thinking that if Walter Beresford chose them for a subject he would probably call it The Ladybird, because Katherine was wearing red and black. It was just one of many nicknames that David had given her; now it was just one of many code names that she used – some for the British, some for the Nazis.

  ‘So – so you are “Elvira”?’ the officer said a little later as they sat sipping some superb cognac, with which David had stocked their little wine cellar. ‘You are just how I imagined you, Fräulein, just; and how often can one say that of someone?’

  ‘This is our fourth lift!’ the naval officer announced proudly to Robyn as she beckoned him and his companions to the Bentley. ‘And seeing that it’s a Bentley motor car, I think, with your permission we will make it our last, eh, boys?’

  She laughed. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Pompey for us all, please, miss.’

  ‘Portsmouth it is then. Hold on to your stripes, gentlemen, we are on our way.’

  The car shot forward, but not before Robyn had time to take in the sparkling eyes of the uniformed young man seated beside her.

  ‘Robyn Harding.’

  ‘Robert Plume.’

  He closed his eyes for a second as they appeared to be going round a hairpin bend on fewer wheels than was perhaps normal.

  ‘And the two in the back are Tony Marston, and Julian Love.’

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen. Now I suggest b
efore we reach our destination—’

  ‘You mean Dunkirk?’

  ‘If you like, yes, although I’m not sure how useful this car is on water. But, as I was saying, before we get to Pompey I really think we should stop off to wet our whistles, because I don’t know about you three, but, personally, I am parched.’

  Robert smiled, and turned to the other two in the back.

  ‘I agree with the officer here. After all, this might be the last time we can take a pull before we reach France.’

  Tony Marston started to whistle something to which he had been dancing the night before. It didn’t seem quite right to him, stopping at a pub when the others were God knew where, or God knew how. But he was outvoted.

  When he eventually boarded a powerful motor boat, and steered it across the Channel, the day being sunny and clear, he reached France in a much shorter time than expected. And as the boat started to grind across the shallower waters, and a Stuka seemed to be making it its business to dive towards him and his boarding party, Tony found he was really rather glad that he had stopped at the Spread Eagle, and that was all before, the orderly line of soldiers having crowded in, the boat was found to be too heavy to move.

  On hearing the news that the British Army were marooned on the beaches at Dunkirk and being picked off by the Germans from the air, and on the pretence that he had been robbed of his radio equipment, now happily dressed as a French farm worker, David made his way to Belgium. Here he immediately changed disguises and assumed the uniform of a now, alas, dead staff officer of the Royal Fusiliers. Unfortunately he was just in time to witness the German bombing of the refugee camps, a sight far worse than any battle.