The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  She had no sooner sat down than a familiar cloud of perfume plumped down opposite.

  ‘You’ve heard about Moira?’

  She looked across. Beatrix’s eyes were kind but wary. She seemed to be broadcasting a small warning, or perhaps she was worried that already she had said too much.

  Honey sipped her bitter tea.

  ‘We’re all very sorry for her,’ said Beatrix, ‘But it’s for the best.’

  Honey thought for a second about pulling out the payslips. Her guts had flipped when she thought about that headline, left on the lieutenant’s desk. Surely Moira wouldn’t have . . . but it was possible. Anything was possible when passions flamed.

  ‘Did you know that Poo is paid more than twice us? More than twice what Moira took home when she worked in the Cottage?’

  Beatrix tilted her head. ‘What? Of course the chaps earn more, that’s just the way it is. You didn’t . . . you didn’t think that was why she’s . . . Honey, what has Moira been saying to you?’

  Honey shook her head and looked down at her skirt. It had crumbs of foliage on it from the dash to the Park; it made her think of Moira, wading through the bluebells on her quest to cheer up the suicidal chef.

  ‘The thing is,’ Beatrix was saying, sipping her own black tea. ‘The thing is, you didn’t know about Rachel Mason, did you? I think she came and went before your time.’

  ‘I don’t know the name.’

  ‘No,’ Beatrix said. ‘No one tends to mention it.’ She readjusted her cardigan — a green one today – and gave a proud little toss of her set curls. ‘Well, you see the Head of Room back then was Lily Blackthorn. She’s gone to Hut 8 now. She was maths, Cambridge. So I don’t quite know the ins and outs of it. But you couldn’t help but gather the gist. There was no way of keeping it quiet. Think of it. Bletchley Park. We’re guarding the safety of the nation in secret and yet no one can quite disguise it when something that cruel happens on one’s doorstep.’ Beatrix sipped her tea again. Honey wondered about her, where her good sense had come from. Had it been drilled into her by a governess or boarding school? Or had she been born with the bossy blood, always so self-assured about what she was doing and saying? The pearls in her earrings rattled as she talked.

  ‘Christ knows how no one knew. But she was pregnant. Not, it seems, to one of the boys from the Park. I think an airman. An RAF man, who perhaps left her or perhaps he died. And who knows, maybe he would have married her. But when the baby was born, she hid it in a drawer. It was only discovered when the landlady’s cat—’

  ‘Please, don’t.’ Honey thought she might vomit into her tea.

  Beatrix reached across the table and seized her hand. ‘Don’t faint, dear. I’m only telling you because I want you to know that whatever happened to Moira – and I don’t know where she is, I only know what Mooden’s been told, she’s in hospital somewhere — wherever she is, it’s the safest place for her. Oh God, you’re so clammy, please don’t faint.’

  Honey found from somewhere the strength to croak a reply. ‘I’m all right.’ But she wasn’t. Moira had been so convinced. He would marry her. If there was a baby he would marry her.

  Beatrix clutched her knuckles and Honey became aware of the pressure of the ring on her pinky. She concentrated on the cutting sensation, fixed hold of it. Because the alternative was a drawer opening . . .

  ‘When one looks the way Moira does,’ Beatrix said slowly, ‘one has to be careful around chaps. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘But it’s hardly her—’

  ‘Keeping your head,’ Beatrix interrupted, ‘in a place like this is the only thing that matters. Whatever happens.’ She loosened her grip but kept hold of Honey’s hand. ‘When I think of what the alternative could be. Stitching boys with blown-open faces, standing by during amputations, driving ambulances. I really am grateful to be doing something. Like this.’ She stroked Honey’s fingers thoughtfully, one at a time. ‘No matter what happens, no matter what secrets you have to carry, keep your head.’ She downed the dregs of her tea and stood up.

  Honey watched the path of Beatrix’s footsteps back to the counter and heard the scatter of bright conversation she had with the woman behind the till. And she thought for the first time in her life how wretched it was to be a woman. War was ferocious to men. But when it was over the ones left would go back to their lives. For a woman, there would always be pillaged wages, affairs broken off, promises unfulfilled, family shame, babies to be hidden in unmarked graves, in wooden drawers.

  Chapter 13

  She thought that the walk to town to collect the household ration herself might steady her. Mrs Steadman was suspicious but counted off the coupons for butter, sugar, milk, soap, tea, margarine into her palm.

  Beatrix was right. She had to keep her head. There was no use falling apart. And perhaps it was true Moira was in the best place. Honey pictured serene lady doctors in white coats with their hair pinned up — lady doctors who had not been sent to the front line. Ambulance drivers in blue slacks with kind faces. A bed and morphine and rest, good food, unrationed food, to patch her mind back together.

  Still she felt shivers in her torso as she passed the Home Guard, marching in their slack uniforms. She felt queasy as she saw an ambulance parked up idle beside the doctor’s surgery in town, and even sicker when she caught sight of a motor hearse pulling away from the church. Everything seemed to be a sign to her, everything, even the trees waving their winter talons seemed to scream that something was wrong.

  She passed the postwoman, and her stomach dipped. ‘Has the second post come?’ she asked. On hearing it had, she hurried back to the Steadmans’. But there was nothing, no reply from Dickie. The post, Mrs Steadman said, was slow. ‘It would be easier to send a pigeon,’ she went on. ‘You should tie your letters to the collar of a hare, that’s what you should do. Then set a greyhound after it and send it in the direction you want the message to go, for all the good the bloody Royal Mail does.’

  Honey climbed the stairs to her bedroom feeling lead in each step.

  Her room felt like a prison, the air suffocating with secrets. In the pallid grey light she took out the pieces of amber. They didn’t glow like they had done in the bronze of her gaslamps. Now, in the cool day, they stole the light and reflected nothing back, a network of ugly bubbles and thread veins, the thousand-year-old tree’s blood no more special than cracked and scratched Bakelite. They seemed to take the warmth right out of her palms. All except the firebird. When she picked it up, its eyes still caught a glow, its wings were still poised half-open, half-embracing, as if they might take off.

  She lay down on her bed and stared at the hard drips of plaster in the ceiling, watching as the pattern probed textured claws towards her, then suddenly popped inwards when she stared at it for too long. She sat up and switched the wireless on, crackling between stations to see if she could find some music that suited her mood. But there was only the one o’clock news. Air raids on the south coast. She knew already. The intercepted Luftwaffe signals had come through the day before. It was like seeing the headlines before they happened. Sometimes there was time to do something about it. Sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes Churchill wanted to act, and sometimes he didn’t. That was the problem with secrets. You had to be careful with them. You had to know what to do with them.

  Sitting up she reached across her bedside table to the bureau and scraped open the drawer. Inside was a stack of biros. She pulled one out along with a notebook and began to look at Moira’s notes and the carvings.

  But it was beyond her. It was something only Dickie would know. He had told her the story after all, he must have known the full extent of it. It was Dickie who showed her the code book, Dickie who knew about Stravinsky. Dickie with his ballet legs and his ambition. Nothing her mother had ever said . . .

  Exhausted from doodling, eventually she fell asleep, still clutching the amber firebird.

  When she woke up her room had the strange static tinge that said someo
ne had been in. She looked across at the bureau and saw a tea tray, gold-edged and patterned with gaudy flowers. Some fruit scones and a smear of jam and marge lay on the side of the plate. A glass of water and a cup of tea with real milk, stewed to gunmetal, sat cold beside it. Honey looked at her bedside clock. Ten past five.

  Outside the sun had sunk and she felt goosebumps of cold on her arms. Her fingers were frozen. She looked down and saw that in them she still had the amber.

  Groggy and feeling as if the day had been a dream, she ate a few bites then crept down the stairs. There was a pile of evening post in the hallway. She riffled through it and found a short postcard from her mother. She was performing for naval troops in Hastings for the Christmas season. Honey was welcome to come, and the winter sea breeze was fine and on and on it went in tiny, messy handwriting. The card was dated two weeks ago.

  The house was curiously quiet, and unsettling because of it. She could hear a distant scrabbling in the garden and a small squealing sound, and she knew with a sickness she had never got used to that it was rabbit for supper. She retreated up the stairs as the back door banged open into the scullery.

  From the glass on the tray she splashed her eyes with cold water, and the shock made her feel more alive. Still seven hours until her shift. She remembered there was a Hitchcock at the Ritzy tonight and thought it might help to keep her awake.

  She considered for a moment, then stuffed the carved amber and her sketchings into a hatbox and placed it, not under the bed this time, but in the bottom drawer of the bureau. It was only as she was returning the drawer on its runners that she remembered Beatrix’s story.

  She straightened the creases out of her skirt, chose a hat from the wardrobe and her electric torch, and headed out.

  Alfred Hitchcock had made a film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. And there was Joan Fontaine again with another murderous man. But Honey disliked the film. Mrs Danvers wasn’t skull-like enough. Her face was too human. For a cinema in wartime she wanted her villains drawn in black and white lines, visible. She was fed up of the hidden ones. She went to the cinema to see evil outlined, easy to spot.

  Although she had missed the beginning she made up her mind not to stay for a second round. Before the final chord sounded she had climbed to her feet, and was picking a path through the cigarette smoke. The silver light from the projector cast a haze, and she felt for a second like Mrs de Winter herself, scrabbling through a Manderley sea mist. Her foot collided with something on the ground, a metal claw from the base of one of the cinema rows. The trip sent a shock up her spine. But when she steadied herself, clutching the hard velvet of the chair back, she noticed it was not cold metal at all that had made her trip but something warm. A peppermint-sugar and cigarette scent drifted up in front, and she felt the hard edge of a brogue on the instep of her cork shoes.

  I’ve got you.’

  ‘Felix.’ Her elbow was compressed into a man’s grip and she laughed uneasily. ‘Are you following me?’

  The shadowy figure took so long to answer that Honey thought she might have made a mistake. Was it him?

  ‘You said you were going to wait and come to the next Hitchcock with me.’

  She breathed out. ‘I said Shadow of a Doubt. That’s next week.’

  ‘What do you think of Mrs de Winter?’

  ‘Which one, the first or second?’ She hesitated. ‘Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d like to be either.’ She smiled hard as she spoke, to make lightness creep into her voice, to take the shake out of it. For some reason she did not want Felix to know she was bothered, or shocked, or afraid, or whatever it was she was feeling at the sight of him. But the more buoyant she tried to be, the harder the day pushed in on her. They moved into the foyer where blue electric bulbs had replaced the regular golden ones. The insides of the glass doors out to the street were tacked with sheets of black sugar paper, and half-covered in a thick moth-eaten velvet curtain.

  The light gave Felix’s face an odd hard tinge. He seemed stiffer than the night before. She thought about the three W’s of conversation: war, weather and work, then looking at the blacked-out doors said impulsively, ‘Don’t you long for the golden light again? I love a cinema foyer. But the thrill isn’t the same in this strange blue. Makes me feel like we’re part of the movie. It’s unsettling.’

  He had paused next to the kiosk; he leaned his arm on the empty counter top. It smelled faintly of butter, scents ingrained into the fabric and metal before rationing.

  ‘I just long for the winter to be over,’ he said. ‘All those Monte Carlo drives and Manderley walks. Makes me want to have a picnic. Did you say you were on the night shift?’

  ‘Starting midnight.’ She caught herself beginning to yawn and raised her hand to her mouth. Then she remembered something, a fact she had once come across about giving someone your yawn. She had read somewhere it was a sign of empathy, being able to catch a person’s yawn, and she thought it might be funny to try to make Felix catch hers. She let her mouth fall right back and her hand drop. He continued to stare, but he didn’t yawn.

  ‘You look tired. Do you want me to take you for supper?’

  ‘That’s a fine way to ask. You make it sound like a chore.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be.’

  For a second she felt that she was the callow Mrs de Winter and he the passionless Laurence Olivier. Then he leaned over and, as casually as if he was picking up a dropped pen, he took a strand of her hair from nearest her ear and tucked it into the deep red fringe that hung curling on her left side. It was impulsive; as soon as he’d done it he dropped his hand.

  ‘Eight Bells?’ she asked, quickly to stave off embarrassment, on whose part she didn’t know. ‘Mind, it would almost be dancing girls time. I mean, I have a cold supper waiting at home, which I shouldn’t waste. And we’re fed at the canteen on night shift.’ The thought of Spam sandwiches in the middle of the night made her want to retch. ‘But . . . fish and chips? Only you have to bring your own newspaper to the place on the high street and I haven’t got any, have you?’

  ‘I thought perhaps . . .’ He was smiling slyly. ‘I thought we could each do with a reasonable meal.’

  ‘Suet pudding, canned sprouts and perhaps chipped potatoes. Come on, then.’

  He extended his arm. Looking sidelong at him in the blue light, she caught the asymmetry of his face; from this angle his cheekbone seemed almost askew, his eyeline harder. Every time she looked at him there was something a little bit different that she noticed, and she couldn’t store all of these bits in her head at once, try as she might. He glanced suddenly down at her. His eyes had taken on a very beautiful gleaming grey. She took his arm and as she did so she felt his body soften a little, as if he might almost be relieved.

  God only knew how they found so many things to talk about. Later when she tried to recall it she could barely remember a sentence. But the conversation was easy. Felix talked about where he had been when the war broke out; in a theatre in London, watching a dress rehearsal for a Noel Coward play. The stage manager had interrupted it to break the news and the actors had worked harder at their jokes afterwards. He talked about his favourite paintings. The Nazis, he said, were looting art by the truckful. Huge altar-pieces, Catholic statues. All gone to their German castles and underground vaults and who knew if they would see the light of day ever again. It was on the tip of her tongue to say ‘the Amber Room too’ but she bit it. She told him instead about Dickie, about his ballet dancing. She didn’t say that he had been a Conscientious Objector and spent five weeks up in Wakefield, only that he now did firewatching and worked for ENSA.

  He caught her looking at her watch.

  ‘I’m sorry. But you see, I sort of have the impression he might come to visit me, and maybe it will be tonight.’

  An odd, quizzical frown was on his face. He stared at her and tilted his head. ‘You have the impression?’

  ‘It’s just that I invited him. But I don’t know if he’ll have got the
letter yet and . . . oh, it’s probably too late anyhow.’

  Half past eleven crept up swiftly and they realised they were the only ones left in the restaurant alongside a bonneted, rather old-fashioned woman behind the counter, a man in a greatcoat who seemed to want somewhere to bed down for the night, and an anxious-looking woman in silver monkey fur. The fur woman kept rushing to the bar to ask questions, then retreating to her seat into endless cups of tea.

  The proprietress began to mop the floor with hot disinfectant and the anxious lady rose again. This time Honey and Felix were close enough to hear. ‘You say it still hasn’t come in? The eight twenty-four from London. I mean, are you really very sure? I did go to the lavatory about an hour ago, and it would be awfully late if it hasn’t.’

  ‘Duckie,’ the woman said with some effort. ‘You’d have seen it, I’d have seen it, they’d bleedin’ well have seen it and he certainly would.’ She nodded at the tramp. ‘Whoever he is, he’ll be here. The trains have been late for two years now. If this is the first – and the worst – you’ve had of it you’re doing well for the war, my girl.’

  The anxious woman pulled back her large monkey fur and looked at a wristwatch. She seemed like a little frightened animal in that coat, with her tiny pinched face. ‘You’re really sure?’

  ‘As sure as powdered eggs are not really eggs,’ the proprietress muttered. ‘Station master said he had one in at three last week. Seven hours delayed but they get filled up with the Tommies. No station signs so sometimes they get the track changes wrong. Don’t panic.’ This seemed to give the woman some comfort and she sat back again with her empty cup and nursed the porcelain to her lips. ‘Hope he’s bloody worth it.’

  Felix held the door open and Honey passed through, dipping under his warm arm. ‘I’ll walk you to the Park, shall I?’

  In the distance they heard the sound of grinding on the tracks. The smell of coal lifted towards them in a faint cloud.