Something Dangerous

by Penny Vincenzi

  She supposed it must be LM’s death; which had been one of the most painful experiences she could remember, along with her own mother’s death and the loss of Laurence. Life seemed darker, more tenuous, less secure, the thread of constancy slackened. She talked to Sebastian about it; he sighed and agreed.

  ‘LM was the old guard; and a very fine example of it. The opposite of self-seeking, whatever that might be. It’s a rare quality. And besides it is very dreadful when you lose someone who’s in the front line as it were. You feel yourself move forward into it.’

  Barty had not thought of that before; it made her feel worse.

  Of course she was terribly happy and excited about her engagement; and even more so about being married, although she and John had agreed they should wait until after the war.

  ‘Marriage to me is being together; while that is impossible, it is more than enough to know that you are there,’ he had said and she had, yet again, marvelled at how much they thought and felt the same way about everything, both great and small.

  They even shared culinary likes and dislikes; they both hated eggs—‘even fresh ones’—loved fish and had a passion for treacle tart which she had promised she would cook for him every Sunday when they were married.

  They seemed to have everyone’s blessing and approval: ‘Charming, Barty, charming, you’re a lucky girl,’ said Oliver; ‘Top-hole chap, darling, almost good enough for you,’ said Sebastian and even Celia had paid him the compliment of flirting with him.

  Billy too had given John the thumbs up; a family man himself now, with a large and bouncing son born in September and Joan already pregnant again, he had adopted a slightly superior attitude towards Barty.

  ‘It’s time you found someone to look after you,’ he said, as if he had been married for eighteen years rather than eighteen months, ‘and I think John is the man to do it. I like him very much; he seems a very genuine sort of a person.’

  ‘Jolly good chap,’ said Lord Beckenham, ‘enjoying the war he told me. That’s the way.’

  ‘He might not be quite out of the top drawer,’ said Lady Beckenham quietly to Celia, ‘but he seems very fond of Barty and one can’t help liking him. I think it’s a very suitable match for her.’

  Kit said John was a splendid chap, ‘he talks more sense than anyone I’ve met for a long time.’ Adele and Venetia were both sweetly and genuinely delighted for her (while agreeing privately how inevitable it was that Barty would have found someone to marry who was too good to be true): ‘Ten out of ten. He obviously adores you,’ said Venetia, ‘and he’s what I’d call truly charming.’ (Barty knew what that meant; that John had shown a great interest in her. Just the same, she was pleased.) ‘He’s so absolutely sweet,’ said Adele, giving her a kiss, ‘and you suit each other so well, I can’t imagine anyone being more right for you.’

  She had been worried about what he would make of the twins: in spite of all that had happened to them, they still, especially when together, had a great capacity for silliness; but he was enchanted and fascinated by them and told Barty he could have sat looking at them all day.

  She was pleased, of course: no, not just pleased, delighted, it was wonderful that they all liked him so much, all thought he was so right for her. It was, as everything to do with John was, too good to be true. But—that was exactly it. It was stupid, perverse, childish of her even, but she just couldn’t help feeling it might have been more interesting if someone had voiced just the slightest criticism of him. So that he wasn’t so ten out of ten, so absolutely right, so sensible, so genuine.

  And why, for heaven’s sake, should she want that? Knowing the answer, she crushed it firmly, ruthlessly into the bottom of her heart. And had a wonderful Christmas with John; they spent Christmas and Boxing Day at Ashingham, ‘we’d better get it over’, and then escaped to her own little house.

  And then he was gone; after a last, sad, tender night, full of promises and statements of love.

  She was so lucky; so, so lucky. And she did love him: very, very much. Maybe she wasn’t really depressed. Just—tired. That was it; weary. Of restrictions and rationing—stricter than ever now. People complained about tea rationing most—two ounces a week didn’t make many pots—and sugar: ‘Just as well you’re not getting married now, Miller,’ said Parfitt cheerfully when they met one night in London, ‘you’d have to have a cardboard wedding cake. That’s what all the brides are doing now, my mate had one last week. She was going to wait like you, but she got in the club. Not careful and sensible like you.’

  Maybe that’s what she should do, Barty thought: get in the club. So that everyone would think John wasn’t quite such a fine fellow. Or fine in a rather different way.

  God, what was the matter with her? What on earth was the matter?

  Izzie was growing up; everyone noticed it. She was thirteen now, tall and slender, her figure developing, her face no longer a child’s. Sebastian’s attitude towards her was interesting; at once proud and fiercely defensive, he tried to deny her maturing, glaring at her small high bosom, tutting when she loosed her lovely hair from its plait, reprimanding her fiercely when she came down to supper one night at Ashingham in a silk cocktail dress she had borrowed from Adele.

  ‘What do you think you’ve got on? You look ridiculous. You’re still a child, you’ve no business dressing up like that.’

  ‘Sebastian, that was beastly,’ said Adele, when Izzie had fled the room, flushed with misery, ‘she’s thirteen years old, of course she wants to look pretty and a little bit grown up.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want her to. And she is exactly that, thirteen. A child. And I don’t like you encouraging it either.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Sebastian,’ said Lady Beckenham. ‘You’re living in the dark ages. Or rather you’re not,’ she added with a grin. ‘My grandmother was married at fourteen. I think it’s lovely that Izzie’s growing up so charmingly.’

  ‘Well I see it as precocity,’ said Sebastian, ‘and I’d prefer you didn’t interfere. Isabella is my child and she has no mother to guide her. I have to do it instead.’

  ‘Well, I would say you’re not making a very good job of it,’ said Lady Beckenham, and she went to look for Izzie. Whom she found sobbing on a window seat in the library, with Kit beside her, one arm around her, his other hand tenderly stroking her cheek.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Lady Beckenham, retreating into the corridor, her face oddly concerned: and then again, ‘Oh dear.’

  Giles had been injured: quite seriously. He was in a field hospital just north of Naples, waiting for a hospital ship to take him home to England. He had been involved in some very heavy fighting at the Garigliano river, and his company commander had been killed; Giles was extremely lucky to be alive. Helena felt almost relieved; if he was in hospital, he was safe. She had no real idea what his injuries were, or indeed their extent, information was extremely sparse, and she waited for further news in a mixture of hope and dread, but at least the state of permanent fear she lived in was eased.

  Adele would have given anything to know Luc was coming home or was safe in some hospital: the messages, arriving at roughly six-month intervals, were an agonising form of torture. Knowing that they meant nothing, except that when they had been written he had been safe, and that the very next day, the next hour indeed he could have been in terrible danger.

  She thanked God for her work; she couldn’t imagine now how she had survived before without it. It distracted her when she was most afraid, soothed her when she felt most panicked; she knew it was absurd that such acute fear could be eased by the contemplation of frocks and models, lighting and background, colour and style, and indeed she was almost ashamed that it was. She only knew that she felt lighter-hearted, braver, more hopeful.

  She went to London at least once a week, usually staying overnight at Cheyne Walk, for meetings with fashion editors and models, art directors and designers; at first she worked in her old capacity of stylist as well as taking photographs, bu
t her sure eye, her capacity for directing as well as recording a shot, the swift rapport she established with the models, thereby enabling her to persuade them to do difficult and unexpected things, and in particular her skill with lighting, ensured her more work than she was willing to do. One of the most famous shots in her portfolio was of a girl wearing a fur coat, picking her way delicately through the giant vegetable patch and smallholding that Hyde Park had become in the effort to feed London; it became a classic, well known among art directors, and she was constantly asked for ‘another allotment shot, darling’.

  She had no desire to move back to London full time, she knew her children, more vulnerable than most, still needed her badly; but a few days each week without her did them no harm.

  From being bored, anxious and restless, she changed, became her old self, confident, witty, happily absorbed in what she was doing; and she began to see her old friends again, to have a social life, albeit limited, to take an interest in her own clothes, to look pretty and even chic again; Venetia was delighted, took her everywhere she could with her: ‘The Lytton twins are back,’ someone had said to them as they lunched together at the Ritz one day, and they looked at one another and laughed and agreed that yes, indeed, it was true.

  And then it came, on one lovely spring day, when she had been playing in the garden with the children: the now familiar Red Cross envelope.

  The message was in English. She sat outside in the sunshine, reading it, and felt the morning grow dark and chill: ‘My darling, I may not write again for a while. Don’t be afraid for me, I am quite, quite safe. I love you. Luc.’

  Somehow, reading those brave words, she knew they might well be the last.

  Venetia came down to the dining room at Cheyne Walk, ready for her journey to work. She cycled to work these days; it was the easiest and quickest way and she enjoyed it, unless it was raining, her expensive handbag thrust into her bicycle basket, her briefcase strapped on to a carrier on her back mudguard. But it did mean you arrived with your hair in a mess, and your stockings often laddered—not that she wore them often, she had resorted long ago to colouring her legs with make-up, and drawing seams up her calves with an eyebrow pencil, a piece of ingenuity brought in by the factory girls but seeming, to both her and Adele, hugely sensible. Celia said it was extremely common.

  London was full of bicycles: they were lots of people’s preferred mode of transport. It was one of the many things which had changed the appearance of the city. The poet Charles Graves had remarked that ‘apart from the uniforms you see in the streets, London might be at peace with the world’. Venetia would not have agreed. London might have been patched up, the worst of the rubble cleared away, but everywhere was dreadfully shabby and decayed. The windows of the bombed buildings were boarded up, their fronts looking somehow like so many toothless smiles; the beautiful terraces in places like Regents Park were for the most part empty and seemed to be literally rotting away, the grass in places like Leicester Square had been worn to dust, and buses were no longer uniformly red, but brown or green, many of them borrowed from the provinces.

  More acceptable but even odder was the profusion of flowers and trees; many bombed churches had been turned into gardens, the ruins around St Paul’s—where Lytton House had been—were covered by London rocket, and someone had counted four different types of willow and a poplar tree growing on a bomb site on the corner of Bond and Bruton Street. Butterflies fluttered round the heart of the city, and a friend of Venetia’s, who lived in Thurloe Square, reported a Peruvian plant growing which ‘everyone presumes has been blown here from Kew’.

  There were allotments everywhere; in the great parks, the residential squares, the forecourt of the British Museum, even in window boxes; and strangest of all, perhaps, there was wheat growing on the roof of New Zealand House.

  There was very little to eat: nobody went hungry, but there was hardship. Two ounces of butter a week, four ounces of bacon, ham and cheese: mealtimes were not bountiful occasions. Food was an obsession, everyone complained about it all the time. The rich did better than the poor by the simple process of eating out. ‘You can still have a very good four-course meal at the Berkeley,’ Celia Lytton was heard to remark, ‘or, of course, at the dear old Dorch’ (‘Let them eat cake,’ Adele murmured to Venetia with a nudge). The government sought to regulate this by putting a maximum charge of five shillings on a meal; but all the big hotels simply instituted a charge of six shillings over that for the privilege of dining on their premises, an extra five shillings and sixpence for smoked salmon, and two shillings and sixpence for dancing.

  And then there were American servicemen, many of them black, all over the city, in their neatly pressed, fine-wool khaki uniforms. Their wonderful rich accents, only ever heard before, by most people, in the cinema and a seemingly endless supply of money to spend in bars and restaurants and ballrooms gave them an automatic glamour.

  There were women everywhere: driving buses, delivering milk, manning ARP stations, delivering letters, driving ambulances. And running companies, Venetia thought, as she flicked through her diary that morning, checking on the day ahead. The war had done considerable good to the female sex in general; and had also succeeded where Venetia’s mother had failed, teaching her that there was a great deal more to be got out of life than what her friend Bunty called Domestic Prostitution.

  ‘You sleep with them, and in return you get board, lodging and, if you’re lucky, a few nice frocks.’

  Venetia could not now imagine what she would do without her job: nor why she had refused to do one for so long. She was also rather painfully aware of the vapid, aimless creature who had been married to Boy: and how extremely unsatisfactory he must have found her. She buttered herself a piece of toast and went to see if there were any letters for her. There was one: from Boy. Telling her that he was coming home on a fortnight’s leave in ‘roughly a month’ and saying that no doubt they should meet to discuss various matters, including the ongoing care and welfare of their children.

  Venetia read it twice, which didn’t take her very long since it was so extremely brief, and then put it down on the table and burst into tears.

  Barty was on sentry duty; she absolutely hated it. She felt such an idiot, standing outside the gate with her rifle and its bayonet; she had five rounds in her pocket but was forbidden to load the rifle in case she shot someone. The whole thing was such a nonsense. And every time she said ‘who goes there’ she felt an insane desire to giggle; in fact, the first few times she had giggled and had been severely reprimanded for it by her commanding officer. She was actually doomed as a sentry; she had once waved a dispatch rider through, without demanding his ID, thinking she recognised him; he was actually doing a security check. She had been put on a charge for that; she often said she would not be surprised to be confronted by the first invading German of the war, disguised as Winston Churchill, and to find herself waving him through as well.

  Now it was raining, dripping steadily through the collar of her rubber raincoat, and although it was April, it was cold; she had a headache and her feet ached. And she was tired, so tired, she felt in danger of falling asleep as she stood.

  Still, after this, she was off duty for forty-eight hours; she was going to go home. It was the marvellous thing about being stationed at Croydon; she could go home even for the shortest leave.

  A letter had come that morning from John; she had it in her pocket, was saving it until she got home. His letters were always so long, and so amusing, as well as loving; he had a great talent for observation. It was odd; he wasn’t exactly witty but he could make a funny story out of anything.

  This was very tedious; very tedious indeed. She looked at her watch; still twenty minutes to go. Her head hurt dreadfully; she thought longingly of her kitchen and a cup of strong, sweet tea. Workman’s tea, Celia called it; she drank her own tea—usually Earl Grey—very weak with lemon. And no sugar.

  A car pulled up at the gates; she straightened, said, ‘W
ho goes there?’ and tried to ignore the icy water now dripping off the bottom of her mackintosh and running into her shoes.

  She didn’t get home until after ten; she felt dreadful. Shivery and hot at the same time. Maybe she had flu. A hot bath would help. She boiled the kettle, swallowed two aspirins and made the tea; then she carried it into the bathroom, together with her letter from John, and settled into the bath. Oh for a pre-war bath, deeper than the regulation five inches. It was such a measly depth, hardly covered your legs; there was no possible opportunity for wallowing in hot water. Even the King had announced that he had had a line painted five inches from the bottom of his bath, as a discipline.

  She settled into the bath, splashing herself repeatedly with the hot water to keep warm—her house was very cold—and leaned back against the bath pillow that Venetia had given her for Christmas—‘they’re heaven, you’ve no idea, for reading in the bath’—and pulled John’s letter out of its envelope. She felt warmer, happier, better, straight away.

  My dearest,

  I wonder what you are doing as I write this. (He would be amused, Barty thought, if he knew; the last night he had been home they had tried to share a bath as a romantic gesture, and the five inches of water had proved so inadequate they had given up, laughing; he had stayed in, and by the time it was her turn the water was cooling fast.) I am sitting in a highly uncomfortable truck, stuck in an endless line of such things, on the road to somewhere or other. A small dog has just lifted its leg against the feet of a man standing at the side of the road, watching us (this is a local sport); he has not yet realised the fact and the dog has made off, clearly feeling there might be some retribution. I like dogs; I think perhaps when we are married and have our house, garden and apple tree (last discussed on 1 / 1/43 at 0300 hours, you know how I like to be as precise as possible), a nice golden labrador might make a most welcome addition to the family. What do you think?