‘Betty will be pleased to have a boy,’ Caro stated with some satisfaction.
‘And why not a girl, pray?’
‘Because he can help on the farm, that’s why,’ Caro said, yawning.
They both lay back in their car seats, heads lolling, caps forward.
‘Who’d be a midwife? I’ve had more sleep in the Blitz than I had last night,’ Caro grumbled.
It was Robyn’s turn to yawn. ‘It is not easy to deliver babies,’ she agreed eventually. ‘Much worse to have one, though. I think I might have been put off for ever. It all seems to take so long. It would be so much better if you just got a pain and it shot out.’
Caro looked appalled at this notion, then she too yawned.
‘And I mean to say, have you ever seen so many pregnant women?’ Robyn continued.
‘Apparently nowadays pregnant women are more or less banned from cities, so they bus the poor creatures out to country areas and just offload them anywhere and everywhere. It seems no one wants to know about you if you’re a pregnant evacuee.’
‘Mmm, I know. Poor Sister. She doesn’t flap easily, but she was flapping like a tent door in a desert storm last night.’
‘Oh dear, what a thought, Sister as tent and door.’
They started to laugh.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, here we are talking tosh about babies when we haven’t even touched on the subject. I mean, what about what Betty was on about in her delirium?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What do you mean, how do I mean?’
Caro looked mulish. Robyn knew the look. She turned the engine over, and put the car into gear.
‘I understand. You need a bit of time to absorb what we heard.’
Caro put her feet up on the dashboard, and as a favour Robyn let her leave them there. It had been quite a night, and if what Betty had muttered in her delirium was true, then there was almost too much to think about, particularly for Caro – well, particularly for all the Garlands, and all the Astleys. She turned to say something to Caro, but she was fast asleep.
Betty’s little boy was underweight, but she was able to feed him straight away.
‘I expect you would like to call him after his father, wouldn’t you?’ Smith asked when he called at the cottage hospital a couple of days later.
Betty was still so tired, and so traumatised by the baby’s arrival, she could only smile weakly. For the life of her, for a few seconds she couldn’t even remember what her late husband’s name was meant to be.
She nodded and smiled at Smith in a vague way.
‘It was a dreadful shame that the baby should decide to arrive when there was no one else in the house,’ Smith said in a shocked voice. It was as if protocol had been broken. ‘No one at Chevrons to drive you here. I don’t know who to blame, but it shouldn’t have happened. It certainly wouldn’t have happened in Mrs Garland’s day, I know that. That’s a woman’s touch, you know. Remembering details, that’s what women are so good at. Let’s see the little chap.’
Betty pushed the small cot towards him. Smith stared in.
‘He looks very like that photograph of your late husband in your cottage, I would say,’ he said at last. ‘Not at all like Winston Churchill,’ he finished.
Betty nodded, pleased.
‘I shall call him David, after the late— after the … Bible, and then his father’s names, Mr Smith,’ she told Smith. ‘And I would be thrilled if you would stand as his godfather.’
Raymond frowned, and his cheeks reddened.
‘That is a very nice thought, Betty, and although some might consider me too old for the responsibility, I accept, gladly, really I do.’
They both smiled, and then looked down at the baby.
‘David can help on the farm, when he gets older, of course. But until then I’ll make sure he always has a place at Chevrons, that I will, Betty. My godson will have the run of the place, of that you can be sure.’
They both looked pleased and shy at the same time, and were oddly glad when Nurse Collingwood came bustling into the room and removed the flowers that Smith had brought to put them in a vase, and Smith was able to take his leave without too much embarrassment on either side.
He walked back down the hospital corridor. There was nothing quite like a new life – nothing to beat it.
Aunt Cicely’s face was grave. She had arranged for Robyn to come back on compassionate leave, not on her own account, not on account of her father, but because of their neighbour, David Astley Senior.
‘He has just had confirmation that young David is as previously presumed – dead. The news came from a contact in the War Office, or was it the Foreign Office? At any rate they have heard that he is dead, although not killed in battle.’ She paused. ‘Apparently he was not a Nazi, he was just posing as a Nazi all this time, while acting on behalf of his country.’
Robyn tried to look amazed, and then realised she had failed, because Aunt Cicely said, ‘You knew something of this, did you?’
Robyn shook her head. ‘I didn’t know about David, but we did hear, in a rather roundabout way, that Katherine might – well, that she might have been an agent, in France.’
‘Yes. She was.’
Aunt Cicely looked away. She had known young Katherine since she was born. ‘She too, you know, is no longer with us … so brave.’
Robyn dropped her eyes to the floor. She had never seen Aunt Cicely upset. It didn’t seem fair that the old lady had had to live through so many wars, and that now she had to face yet more bad news, and such bad news too. Robyn put out a hand and touched her arm.
‘Why don’t we both sit down?’
‘Why were you so late back on your leave?’ Aunt Cicely asked suddenly, after a long silence during which Robyn saw her willing herself to take control of her feelings. ‘I have been waiting and waiting.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, Aunt Cicely, but you know, it was Betty. Well, at least you don’t know Betty. She was a maid at Chevrons, and she married and had a baby, and we found her in the woods, or rather beside the road, and we had to take her to hospital, and it all took rather a long time – having the baby, I mean – because we had to stay with her until the end, there was no one else, the hospital being so crowded.’
Aunt Cicely nodded, it was so difficult to know what to say, but her feelings were in such a tangle, she had to find a way. It was just not good enough to brush it all under the carpet. For once she would have her say.
‘We have all been so hard on those two young people.’ She stood up again, and started to walk up and down. ‘So hard on them, and yet all the time they were being so brave, risking their lives in the most terrible way, risking everything so they could help the war, and long, long before it happened.’
‘We weren’t to know. None of us knew, how could we?’
‘Yes, but now we do, we must make reparation in every way we can.’
Robyn nodded, and now she too stood up.
‘I must go and talk to Caro. Really, the Astleys and the Garlands should meet. It is the only way.’
‘You can only have a few more hours of your leave left.’
‘Just enough to get a little done.’
Robyn’s tone was sad and sober. She knew that neither David nor Katherine’s names had been allowed to be mentioned in either household. Now they would probably still not be allowed to be mentioned, but for really very different reasons. The guilt of both households, the grief, the feelings of regret – they would all be so hard to bear, and yet that was war.
She turned back to say something to her aunt, but the old lady had left the room, wanting to be alone with her feelings, which was only understandable.
Robyn sighed. She would go and see her father and tell him that Bill wanted to speak to him. It would not be what he would want to hear, but there it was. Bill wanted to marry her. Now that they had heard that poor Eddie had died of pneumonia in one of those utterly wretched prisoner of war camps, Robyn wanted to be married to Bill as quickly
as possible, before everything changed, as things had a habit of doing nowadays, before either one of them was taken, before something else happened.
‘Father is going to write Katherine’s name back in the Bible,’ Caro announced, when they returned to London later that day.
It seemed that was all she had to say on the matter of her beloved sister, and really, for the moment, perhaps it was quite enough. The misery of what they had all said about Katherine, about what they had wished on her, had hit them both hard, almost more than the news of her death.
No point in saying to each other ‘we weren’t to know’ and all that kind of drivel. No point at all. But later, when they had had a bath, changed and opened a bottle of gin, Robyn noticed that Caro’s face was more heavily made up than usual, her mascara too thickly applied, her nose heavily powdered, and that around her neck she was wearing Katherine’s green scarf.
Chapter Thirteen
Mr Fleming was looking inscrutable.
‘The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet,’ he murmured.
‘Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, was there anything he didn’t say first?’
Mrs Cherry stubbed out her cigarette preparatory to getting up and starting to make the hors d’oeuvres for that evening. There was to be a large and grand dinner party, a party at which much had to be accomplished in a very few hours.
‘I only hope our Edwina has got it right,’ she murmured to Mr Fleming, who said nothing, only breathing on a glass and polishing it to glistening perfection.
He would not say, he could not say, that the two dates Mrs Cherry’s old school friend from convent days had been given, were both wrong, as wrong as wrong could be, and that Colonel Atkins and he were counting on her to get both wrong, or to get both right, it really didn’t matter, just so long as she made a good entrance to the dinner gathering – late and, most of all, reliably drunk.
Edwina now entered the kitchen, looking moody. She surveyed its occupants with a resentful expression. She plucked one of Mrs Cherry’s cigarettes from its packet and lit it without so much as a by-your-leave. They waited, watching her, as she smoked, too quickly and without any sign of enjoyment.
‘Why is it so difficult to pretend to be drunk?’ she asked no one in particular, after a short pause. ‘It should be easy to pretend to be drunk, but I swear to goodness, it’s more difficult than pretending to be sober when you’re drunk, and that is a fact.’
‘You could get drunk, if you wanted?’ Mrs Cherry murmured, quickly hiding what was left of her cigarettes.
‘No, I can’t get drunk, I must appear drunk, those are my instructions,’ Edwina replied.
‘Oh, well, you know best, dear,’ Mrs Cherry told her in a nannying tone.
‘I don’t know best. If I knew best, I wouldn’t be here with you, here, would I?’ Edwina stubbed out Mrs Cherry’s cigarette halfway down, then left the kitchen as abruptly as she had entered it.
‘She was always a bit nervy, even at school. As I remember it, she was one of those girls that used to swell up before exams,’ Mrs Cherry stated, picking up the cigarette and straightening it out, before replacing it carefully in her packet.
‘Let’s hope she doesn’t swell up until after the dinner party,’ Mr Fleming stated, his cold grey eyes staring after her.
In the bathroom Edwina studied her reflection. Despite Trixie’s really quite expert touch with the cosmetics, Edwina looked deathly pale, as if she had not spent most of the last weeks at the seaside. It was nerves, nerves, nerves. She leaned her head against the mirror. It was cool and calming. She straightened up, and stared at herself: still pale, but not looking quite so much like death warmed up. She pinched her cheeks hard, and watched with some interest as colour returned to them.
‘I am in command of information, I disseminate it, in a drunken manner, while remaining sober. It is quite simple.’
And yet the simplest tasks always seemed to be the hardest. Her guest list, carefully chosen, was made up of at least two known double agents, and one suspect traitor. Never mind their nationality, Edwina was aware that they were in constant contact with the enemy. She sighed, before leaving the bathroom, and issuing forth to the drawing room where Mr Fleming would make sure that she was given water, not gin, and where she would begin acting out her role.
‘Did you put any gin in this, Fleming?’ she asked him, as the first guest was announced. ‘I don’t think you put any gin in this, really I don’t. I think this is water, in fact I’m sure of it. What a thing,’ she went on gaily, ‘when one’s butler mistakes one’s poison and gives one water instead of gin.’
Edwina had always thought the world of the double agent was terrible, playing both sides against each other, never knowing quite who to trust, or quite who trusted you. Most particularly tonight, through narrowed and splendidly feigned drunken eyes, she watched the two suspects pretending to find her amusing while listening, always listening, to what she was saying. The date of the reinvasion of France, she had been told, unofficially of course, was to be …
‘My dear we have so enjoyed ourselves!’
The first to leave, a balding civilian, was all too well known to Mr Fleming. Fleming had been watching him since long before the war; now he watched him with minute interest, silently saying to himself, ‘Off you go, traitor. Off you go to your Nazi masters. Enjoy yourself while you can because, believe me, you are not long for this world.’
‘Strangling’s too good for their kind, wouldn’t you say, Mr Fleming?’ Mrs Cherry asked him, sotto voce, a few minutes later, as the party continued apace.
Mr Fleming held up a glass to the light. He liked a perfectly polished glass. In fact he liked everything what he called ‘tidy’. He would make sure that the gentlemen in question would, quite soon, be ‘tidied up’. He would see to it himself.
‘What’s now? I could swear I just heard Miss Edwina ring, Mr Fleming.’
‘So you did, Mrs Cherry. The guests must be ready to leave.’
There had been another air raid while the dinner party was taking place, and now, as the all clear sounded, Mr Fleming hung his tea towel carefully, straightened his tie, removed his service apron, and put on his black jacket once more.
The last of the guests had to be seen out into the noisy night, the light of the fires from the bombs should be enough to see them all home. He held the door for them, his expression, once his two suspects had gone, phlegmatic. Soon it would really be the beginning of the end of the war, and these people, whom it had been his job to use ruthlessly and heartlessly – sometimes for their own good, sometimes not – would be able to return to their own countries. But before then all that was on anyone’s mind was this last great push across that narrow strip of water known as the English Channel.
‘Well, thank God that is over!’ Edwina rolled her eyes at Mr Fleming. ‘I never ever want to have to do something like that again.’
‘Bit of a strain, was it, Miss Edwina?’ Mr Fleming managed to look both sanguine and polite at the same time.
‘At least now I can have a drink! Bring me a whisky, for pity’s sake, Mr Fleming. Half a vat of whisky in a large glass, for the love of everything.’
Mr Fleming handed her a double Scotch in a Waterford crystal glass. Edwina glanced up at him briefly, and it was then that a very strange thing happened, so strange indeed that if she hadn’t been raising a glass to her lips, Edwina’s mouth would have dropped open.
Mr Fleming smiled.
‘Well done, Miss Edwina,’ he said gravely. ‘You acted drunk better than Sarah Bernhardt could have done, better than Duse, and certainly better than anyone on the West End stage of today, and that is my considered opinion.’
‘That from you, Mr Fleming, dotey, is as good as a diamond bracelet, and that is for certain.’
Edwina took a very generous sip of her Scotch.
‘Now I can get tight!’ she said. ‘I can get as tight as several ticks. Sit down and have one with me, do, Mr Fleming.’
&nbs
p; Mr Fleming removed his black jacket, went to the drinks tray and poured himself a generous whisky.
‘Let’s ask Trixie and Mrs C to join us. Let’s all celebrate together just for a little. Since the all clear has sounded, both inside the flat and out, surely we should have some craic, as we say in Ireland.’
A party broke out as soon as the others arrived, and pretty soon the drawing room resounded to genuine gaiety and, as is so often the case with impromptu parties, it turned out to be a great deal better than anything of a more formal nature that had been held in that room before. The four of them clinked glasses, and laughed and talked all at once, and then clinked glasses again and drank some more. There was so much to drink to, most of all the hope of victory in Europe.
‘I feel quite sober, so I must be tight!’ Edwina joked, just as Mr Fleming raised his arm.
‘Ssh.’
They listened.
‘I’m very much afraid it was the doorbell.’
They all looked at one another with resigned expressions, and Trixie and Mrs Cherry immediately hurried off to the safety of the kitchen, clutching their drinks.
‘It’s probably someone who has left something behind, Miss Edwina,’ Mr Fleming murmured. ‘More than likely.’
‘Well, tell them to go away. Miss O’Brien has had it,’ Edwina muttered as she slid further down the sofa into the cushions.
Mr Fleming quickly put his jacket back on, checking the inner pocket for the reassuring feel of his gun.
‘You stay there,’ he said quietly to Edwina, who gave him a droll look.
‘Feeling the way I do, I have no choice, Mr Fleming, dotey,’ she returned. ‘I can honestly … er … no, I don’t think I can say anything honestly, as a matter of fact, but I can tell you, categorically, Mr Fleming, that should you require me to appear sober within the next half an hour, or even the next half a day, I doubt very much that I could oblige.’
‘You stay just where you are, Miss Edwina. You have had quite enough to do tonight.’
After a minute or two Mr Fleming was back.
‘It’s a visitor for you, Miss Edwina,’ he told her.
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 33
