Something Dangerous

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘You shall know then,’ said Barty, ‘of course. And – John—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you like to stay now? For the rest of the night, I mean?’

  He looked at her, clearly astonished; then he flushed and was quiet for a moment. Finally, ‘I would love to,’ he said, ‘really I would. I can’t think of anything more wonderful. But I would prefer it to be when – if – I know. If that doesn’t sound too ungrateful.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound ungrateful at all,’ said Barty, ‘it sounds absolutely right.’

  He left quite soon after that; she kissed him goodbye and went up to bed, feeling surprisingly peaceful and calm. And happy. It was so wonderful, the effect he had on her. She wondered how there could be any doubt at all as to what her answer would be.

  Giles had come home on a few days’ leave: fit, lean, happily confident as Helena could never remember him. He was about to be sent away, he said; but he had an important bit of news. Very important. He thought she’d be pleased.

  ‘It’s too marvellous,’ said Celia to Oliver. ‘Giles has just phoned, he’s home for a few days, and he’s been commissioned. He’s a lieutenant. Isn’t that thrilling?’

  ‘It is very good news, yes,’ said Oliver quietly.

  ‘You don’t sound terribly pleased.’

  ‘Of course I’m pleased. But I don’t feel I could possibly be any more proud of him than I already was. In my view that was a far greater triumph.’

  ‘Well he’s thrilled,’ said Celia slightly crossly, ‘and Papa will be terribly excited. And so will Mama.’

  ‘Now that really is important,’ said Oliver.

  ‘There’s a letter from Daddy,’ said Venetia. She made a huge effort to smile, to sound pleased and excited; but the tone and content of the letter hurt her so much that she felt as if she had received some physical blow.

  ‘Let me see.’ Roo grabbed at it.

  ‘Roo, don’t,’ said Lady Beckenham, ‘that is your mother’s letter, there may be private information in it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Venetia cheerfully, hoping they would not see the tears standing so dangerously in her eyes, ‘nothing in the least private. In fact it’s for you children really. You can read it aloud, Roo, then Amy and Elspeth can enjoy it too.’

  ‘OK, thanks. Shut up, Elspeth, I’m reading it, Mummy said.

  ‘Dear Warwicks, I am very glad to tell you that the war is going well out here. It is like one enormous beach, sand everywhere, and awfully hot. So hot that you can fry an egg on the mudguard of a truck. Imagine that. The only really bad thing is the flies which are a dreadful nuisance. We wear special hats with sort of veil things to protect ourselves from them, and we look pretty silly, I can tell you, and the men have competitions to see who can swat the most flies. We play football a great deal and do a great deal of digging. Water is not too plentiful, and we only have a few cups a day for cleaning our teeth and shaving and so on. There is another hazard – or rather two – scorpions and vipers, but if you are careful – and I am very careful – you are perfectly all right.

  ‘We have had some very exciting battles, driving across the desert in our tanks, and have seen the enemy off several times. The other strange thing is a sandstorm; the air is literally a great mass of sand, and it gets very dark. You can’t possibly go out in it, so we just have to stay in our tents and wait for it to pass. The food is very dull, we have bully beef fried, bully beef broiled, bully beef stewed. All served up with something that looks and tastes like dog biscuits.

  ‘I think of you all so much. Henry will be enjoying Eton by now, and I hope Roo is behaving himself ’ – ‘of course I am,’ said Roo indignantly – ‘and that Amy has not broken anything yet, falling off her pony. Seriously, it’s all jolly good fun out here, and we are being very successful; you shouldn’t believe anything you might be reading in the papers, about the Germans’ victories under Rommel (who is known as the Desert Fox, incidentally, he’s so cunning). He might have won a few skirmishes’ – a few skirmishes, thought Venetia, when Rommel’s recapture of Tobruk in April had sent morale plummeting lower in England than it had been for months, and there had been reports of thousands of English dead. She had waited terrified for days for a telegram; it had not come.

  ‘I think that’s all for now. Love to everyone there, and all of you be good for your mother’s sake. Tell Great-grandpapa I could do with a few military tips and ask him if there’s any way he could get out here’ – ‘For heaven’s sake don’t,’ said Lady Beckenham, ‘or he’ll be chartering a plane’ – ‘and tell Great-grandmama that riding a camel is a lot less comfortable than a horse. I’ll write again soon, but as I have no idea how long these letters take to get to you, you must be patient. Certainly don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Just a bit warm.

  ‘Lots of love,

  ‘Daddy.’

  How could she possibly write and tell him he had a new baby, Venetia thought wretchedly, escaping to the safety of her room and able finally to cry, when he had not even written her a letter of her own, merely included her in a message to his children. It was absolutely impossible.

  Adele would have given anything for a letter however cool the tone. Six months now, since she had sent her message to Luc: and nothing. Excitement changed to anticipation, and then to disappointment and finally despair, she tried to fight away the despair. She had gone into the Citizens’ Advice Bureau several times; each time they had told her the same thing: that if there was a letter for her, she would have received it, that it could take many months for a message to reach its destination, travelling as it might a route of incredible complexity and then, of course, the same would apply to a returning one; and that there was of course a risk of a message being mislaid or delayed, but it was very rare, that from the United Kingdom alone countless thousands of messages had already been successfully sent and received. None of which was a great comfort to Adele. For some reason, it did not occur to her to ask what might happen if the address was incorrect.

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘For richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others.’

  The lovely words of the marriage service sang in Barty’s head. As always on hearing them, her eyes filled with tears; only this time of course, the emotion was deeper, richer, sweeter. She longed more than she would have believed that her mother could have been here: to see her much-loved son, for whom life had seemed so hard and for whom it had now become so very rich, finally married to his beloved Joan.

  He stood at the altar gazing at her, unsmiling, his eyes filled with love; and she smiled up at him, her round, pretty face framed in white lace, fresh, pink roses in her blonde curls. She was dressed entirely in white: several of the villagers had given some clothing coupons so that she could buy the material, and she and her mother had been making the dress all through the summer, of parachute silk, tight-fitting over her fine bosom and slender waist and then flaring at the hips. The small bridesmaids – six of them, Elspeth and Amy Warwick, Noni Lieberman and Joan’s own three little nieces – were in pale blue and Izzie Brooke, grown tall and slender, her lovely golden brown hair put up for the first time and studded with roses like the bride’s, was chief bridesmaid in palest pink. Sebastian had come down for the wedding; as Izzie walked into the chapel, so suddenly grown-up, he smiled at her with such intense pride and love and at the same time terrible sorrow that Adele, standing next to him, felt tears in her own eyes, reached out, took his hand, and held it tightly.

  In the front pew stood both the Beckenhams. Lord Beckenham, blowing his nose repeatedly, Lady Beckenham, wearing her sternest face, lest some quiver of emotion might betray her. Next to them Celia, and in the aisle in his wheelchair, Oliver. Beside Billy, smiling valiantly, was Kit Lytton, who had most surprisingly a month earlier agreed not only to make the speech at Billy’s wedding but to be his best man, in the absence of his youngest brother who had suddenly announced that he would not after all be coming to the wedding. Billy had bee
n so distressed by this, had been so near to tears as he told Kit about it that Kit had heard himself almost against his will offering his own services and Billy, blowing his nose and pumping him by the hand at the same time, had accepted the offer so effusively that it was impossible to inflict further pain by withdrawing it again.

  The speeches made later at the reception (held in a marquee in the paddock, a happy compromise between the bride’s own tiny garden and the grandeur of the terrace at Ashingham, offered by Lady Beckenham), were all in their way splendid, Kit’s extremely amusing (there was none of the polite laughter he had been dreading), loud, joyful mirth filled the air and could be heard up at the house; Lord Beckenham’s was heartwarming, as he recalled Billy’s arrival at Ashingham and paid tribute to his skill and determination as potential husband, head groom, and recruiting officer of the Ashingham battalion, and Billy’s own touching as he thanked the Beckenhams for all they had done for him, the Barbers for producing Joan, and Joan herself for agreeing to take him on.

  As the late summer dusk fell, the dancing began, the music played first by local fiddlers, and later, as the older generation retired, by Venetia’s gramophone. Izzie, entrusted with playing the records, from a selection made by both Billy and Venetia, enjoyed herself so much that she quite forgot to worry about either Kit or her father, her major preoccupations for most of the time. They were both, in any case, perfectly happy, chatting and laughing together and perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening came when Sebastian suddenly rose to his feet and whirled his daughter round the floor to the strains of ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’.

  ‘Your mother was a wonderful dancer,’ he said to her, holding her away from him and studying her almost in surprise as she stood flushed and breathing heavily at the end, laughing up at him. ‘It’s a talent you seem to have inherited.’ And then gave her a kiss.

  It was a moment no one could have begun even to dream of five years earlier.

  It would all have been quite perfect, Barty thought, if John could have been there; she longed for him to meet her family, and her extended family and for them to meet him and approve of him as she knew they would. They would all love him, everyone loved him, for his gentle charm, his courtesy, his genuine interest in everything, his infinite capacity for making the best of everything. Even Celia, she thought, would like and approve of John; and he would of course find much to admire and like in her, while dismissing with dutiful care what he did not.

  She missed him a lot; it was not the savage, aching misery that had accompanied missing Laurence, it was a sweet, sad, but oddly comfortable emotion which had more to do with a basic happiness and contentment, mingled of course with anxiety and fear.

  She had made her decision – as she had known she would – to wait for him; ‘I cannot imagine doing anything else,’ she said, giving him her hand, smiling up at him, ‘There is simply no alternative. I shall wait and wait and hope and pray and when you come home again, I will be there for you.’

  He had kissed her, gently at first, then with more passion; an hour later they were in bed. And that too had been exactly as she might have known it would be: tender, sweet, careful, infinitely loving. It was not, of course, emphasising the ‘of course’ repeatedly to herself afterwards, not sex as she had known it before; there had been no savagery, no turbulence, no calling out, no abandonment of herself to pleasure so violent that it was almost pain. This was different, and like the relationship itself, peaceful, gentle, deeply loving. And pleasurable – infinitely so, moving from one range of sensation to another, each of them richer and deeper than the one before. They shared everything that first and last night together, talked of their whole lives past and the one to come, if that was to be granted to them; only somehow Laurence became in the telling a brief, wild affair, a folly of her youth, a rite of passage. Of the fact that he had taken her over, in every single possible way, possessed her, led her into a knowledge and experience of herself and him that had shaken her beyond anything she could ever have imagined, of that fact she spoke so very little that it amounted to nothing at all.

  And now John was gone: to Italy, he had said, and for a long time. ‘I will write of course, and so will you, I know, but if you hear nothing, you mustn’t worry. I am told that the bad news always travels very fast; if letters are slow, then be grateful for it.’

  She was back at her post this time in Croydon; and like millions of people all over the world at that time, they waited and endured the waiting and learned to live constantly with fear.

  Grace and Favour was inevitably a great success despite being published several months late. There was an immediate demand for a reprint; in an agony of frustration, Celia struggled and failed to find enough paper for the three thousand copies she had orders for, and only managed to send out fifteen hundred. Lucy Galbraith was much fêted; there were not many new novels that winter, indeed not many books published at all. Readers were driven to the public libraries, where there were long waiting lists for books. The classics were most in demand: Trollope, Dickens, and the work of those very English poets, Tennyson, Shelley and Keats and, of course, Rupert Brooke, in a rush of patriotic sentimentalism. Against this background, Grace and Favour sat most charmingly; and the slight audacity of writing real people into a fictional framework made it much talked about. Lucy Galbraith was several times asked at readings in bookshops if she was related to the Duchess of Wiltshire herself; after a very short while, she said she was, which increased the demand for signed copies considerably. Oliver Lytton was distinctly shocked by this, and wanted it stopped, but both Celia and Venetia told him he should be grateful, Venetia adding briskly that as far as she could see, bookselling was increasingly a form of show business and this was a wonderful scenario.

  Lady Celia Lytton was not alone in struggling to keep a literary salon of a kind going. She was often to be found in the company of John Lehmann, editor of New Writing, in his exquisite deco flat in Carrington House, Mayfair, or of Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, in Chelsea, surrounded by such literary luminaries as the Sitwells and T.S. Eliot, engaged in the kind of conversation she liked best, a combination of gossip and books.

  She was also on the guest list of all the great London hostesses, and indeed remained one herself; in doing so she easily outdid most of her rivals. Emerald Cunard had been driven from her near-palace in Grosvenor Square to what her enemies described as lodgings at the Dorchester, and Lady Colefax was so hard up that although her Wednesday dinner parties continued, she was forced to make a small charge.

  Dinner parties at Cheyne Walk still retained a certain glamour, despite the food; somehow rabbit omelette (made with dried egg) became quite ambrosiac when eaten in the company of Edith Sitwell or Cecil Day Lewis, with Celia and Oliver Lytton at either end of the table, she as beautiful as ever, he as intellectually challenging and original – and the lovely and surprisingly brilliant Venetia Lytton, rumoured now to be her parents’ true choice as heir to their company, set among the guests, a newly discovered jewel in their crown.

  Lyttons had another potential literary success which it was agreed should be published in the spring – there being no paper available for the ideal time which was Christmas; a book of such charm and originality, written with so sure a touch, and endowed with so much humour that all those reading it were comparing it – in quality although most certainly not in style or content – with that other great contemporary classic, beloved by both adults and children, the Meridian saga.

  The new book, at once an intriguing and exciting children’s novel, and a study of an England, a peaceful England, leading the way to a peaceful world, was called – rather simplistically – Childsway. Every child and every adult who had so far been permitted to read it had been not only entertained and enchanted by it but uplifted as well; the adults reading it far into the night and the children doing the same thing, only under the bedclothes and by torchlight.

  Its author was a young pilot tragically blinded in the war call
ed Christopher Lytton.

  ‘Adele! Telephone.’

  She couldn’t help it of course: every time. Thinking, hoping, praying. Of course it wasn’t Luc. But it was the next best thing: Cedric’s lilting voice.

  ‘My darling, we need your help.’

  ‘Cedric, I’ve told you, I can’t—’

  ‘No, darling, not up here. Down there.’

  ‘Oh. Oh I see—’

  He was doing a shoot for Harpers: ‘I’m still no use to the hospital, with this wretched leg, so it’s back to normal work. The new tweed suits, darling, desperately dull, I just can’t put the girls in a studio. I remembered you telling me about your wonderful work as a farm labourer—’

  ‘Not quite accurate, Cedric,’ said Adele tetchily.

  ‘Oh darling, you’d look divine down a coal mine. Anyway, I want to get these girls into the fields and the woods, that sort of thing, mowing hay or whatever you do—’

  ‘The harvest’s in, Cedric, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But the fields are still there, surely. I just wondered if we could come down and shoot it there. And if you could get together a few rustic bits and pieces. A plough, that sort of thing.’

  Adele said she’d have to ask her grandmother, but she was sure she wouldn’t mind.

  ‘And I can’t think of anything more wonderful.’