by Rachel Hore
‘Who are these exquisite young things? I don’t remember inviting them,’ Michael Wincanton said. Angie squealed delightedly. ‘Oh, Daddy, don’t be silly,’ she said, and leaned to kiss him. Over his daughter’s shoulder, Mr Wincanton looked Beatrice up and down with open appreciation. He reached to clap his son on the shoulder and to shake hands with Rafe.
They moved past Angie’s parents, further into the room, where they merged with the other younger visitors, the children Ed and Angie and latterly Beatrice had played tennis and shared dancing lessons with, whose birthday parties they’d won prizes at and who were now, many of them, at their first proper adult party, awkward, spotty and gangly, most shy and self-conscious. The girls grouped together in little giggling groups for safety, peeping at the boys, who squared up to one another like young bucks clashing antlers, ignoring the girls.
‘Beatrice, that’s such a clever dress,’ said Deirdre Garnett, large-framed and deep-voiced. ‘No one would guess about your poor legs.’ Everyone heard her and everyone immediately stared at Beatrice’s skirts, as though wondering if she wore callipers underneath.
‘My legs are completely fine, thank you,’ she said in her coldest tone. ‘The doctor says I’ll be perfectly all right.’ She’d liked to have added, ‘Which is more than I can say about you and your fat hips, Deirdre,’ but of course didn’t.
She wandered off crossly to where Rafe was standing by the fire, already deep in discussion with Ed, who loved talking politics. ‘I say we should stop him now, before he gets the idea anything goes.’
‘But we’re hardly prepared for a war,’ Rafe replied. ‘My uncle says we don’t have the weapons or the planes.’
‘We’re rearming like mad,’ Ed said. ‘My father reckons we’ll be ready for him.’
‘Oh, you’re not talking about war tonight, are you?’ Beatrice said. Rafe was glancing across the room and when she followed the line of his gaze she realized he was watching Angelina. Angie was whispering into the ear of a man Beatrice didn’t know, a rather obviously good-looking man in his forties, with a moustache and an overly familiar manner.
‘Who’s that?’ Beatrice asked.
‘Oh, some businessman my father knows from the local Party. He’s been coming to the house rather a lot recently to see my mother.’ Ed’s eyes were unreadable, but the undercurrent of his voice was disapproving. Whether this man came to see Oenone or her daughter, he clearly had what her father called ‘an eye for the ladies’. She remembered the tensions that Oenone’s previous admirer Rollo Treloar had once caused and hoped that there wouldn’t be another row between Angie’s parents.
‘I told Mother I’d see where Pete’s got to,’ Ed said, excusing himself.
‘Here, let’s find ourselves another drink,’ Rafe said, and they moved out into the hall where Bless filled their glasses, and from there to the library, cosy with its crackling fire, dark red curtains and old leather chairs. ‘I’m glad I’ve got you alone,’ Rafe said. ‘There’s something I must tell you. I had a letter. Mother’s on her way home.’
‘When? Oh, Rafe, surely that’s good news!’
‘She’ll arrive early in the New Year. Everybody’s so worried about the international situation it seems sensible. But the thing is, Bea, I’ll be spending the holidays in London from now on. That’s where my stepfather has a place, you see. I won’t be down here so often. That is, I’ll try to come, but it’s not going to be easy. We’ll still be friends, of course, won’t we?’
Beatrice felt all her energy draining. She would be away at school, then in Gloucestershire with her grandparents, or here. She wouldn’t see Rafe unless she went to London. Suddenly it was as though she was looking down a long, grim tunnel that wound she knew not where.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her anxiously.
‘Yes,’ she lied, but she felt the corners of her mouth turn down. ‘But I’ll miss you, Rafe.’ She couldn’t help herself. Her throat prickled.
He leant forward and with a finger lifted a tear from her cheek. ‘Bea,’ he said. ‘Oh, don’t cry. We’ll still see one another, I promise.’
She tried hard not to weep, but all the frustration and worry of the last months was surging to the surface. She’d felt so trapped. So bored. Sometimes she’d believed she’d be at home for ever, looking after her parents as they grew older and with her father getting more unwell and more tetchy. These were her thoughts, but instead she said, ‘I’ll miss our holidays together.’
‘Don’t, please,’ Rafe said. ‘Something will turn up, you’ll see.’ He put his arm round her and hugged her and she laid her head on his shoulder. His grip tightened. They stood together a moment or two, then he released her and said gently, ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t you go up and wash your face, then we’ll find a bit of supper.’
She nodded, unaccountably disappointed. She walked slowly up the stairs, unable to control her tears now, then blundered along the corridor to the bathroom, which mercifully was unoccupied. She dabbed cold water on her face, dried it on the wafer-cotton towel, quickly patted her hair into place, then sat on the side of the bath staring glumly into the distance. Rafe didn’t see her as anything but a friend. She couldn’t blame him, not really. He had the whole of his life before him, university and a career, maybe as a great doctor. And now she would be part of his past, not his future. To stop herself crying again, she pinched herself hard, then after one more look at her tragic face in the mirror, unlocked the door. By the stairs she paused, then turned back. She should fetch a spare handkerchief from her case.
As she opened the door to Angelina’s room, she caught a movement in the darkness further down the corridor. ‘Hetty, shouldn’t you be in bed, dear?’ she called. ‘Oh, it’s you.’
Peter moved out of the shadows.
‘What are you doing up here?’ Beatrice asked. ‘They’ve been looking for you.’
‘Have they? Not very hard then. I’ve been in my room all the time.’ He came and stood in the doorway, watching as she searched for the handkerchief. Angelina had left her bedside light on, and it cast strange shadows across the room.
‘Why don’t you go downstairs?’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I could ask the same of you.’ He followed her into the room and she pitied him his awkwardness, in an evening suit that was too big for him, the tie hanging awry. He knocked against the dressing-table, upsetting Angelina’s glass bottles. ‘Damn.’
‘Oh, I’ll see to it.’ She went over and started to put everything straight.
He pulled at his collar, irritated by its stiffness. They stared at each other in the dressing-table mirror. Two miserable faces.
‘You’re the same, aren’t you,’ he said finally. ‘They get to you, don’t they?’
‘Who?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘All of them. They’re so . . . self-absorbed, aren’t they? Ed’s not so bad, he can’t help having to be responsible, but Father and Mother and my bloody sisters.’ He looked around the room and now she saw it as through his eyes. Discarded clothes were strewn over the floor, a couple of fashion magazines lay open on the pink and white frilled eiderdown; Angie had spilt a box of face powder on the floor by the basin and not bothered to clear it up. Beatrice hadn’t thought about it before, how Angie moved through life assuming that someone else would always clear up after her. Was this what Peter meant? Her own little case and the box for her dress, she had set neatly against the wall, ready for when the Brookers’ driver came for her and Rafe at midnight.
‘Peter, what’s wrong?’ she asked. He had a wild look about him. ‘Why don’t you come down?’
He shrugged. ‘I’d rather be tortured on a rack. What would I say to all those people? I hardly know them.’ She saw he hated the whole idea of the party, the small talk, pretending to look as though he was enjoying himself. ‘And that man,’ he muttered. ‘How my mother has the nerve . . .’
‘Who do you mean?’ But again she read his mind. The bold-looking man with th
e moustache. It must be Oenone he came to visit. ‘How do you know, Peter?’ she asked him. ‘You might be wrong.’
‘I know, all right? I’ve seen them together, Brent Jarvis and my mother.’ And he uttered a word she didn’t know the meaning of, but it sounded horrid.
‘Don’t, Peter.’
‘Why are you defending her?’
‘She’s your mother. She loves you. And she’s always been kind to me.’
‘That’s what you think, is it? Bea, she’s just using you. They’re all using you. They use everybody, don’t you see?’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say, Peter. You must be ill or something.’
‘No, it’s the truth. They all want power in their own crooked little ways – my father in his Cabinet, my mother out here, doing whatever she likes, and Angelina’s worst of all. Watch out for Angelina. If she sees someone else wants something, she takes it. She can’t help it. She has a need to be the centre of attention.’
Beatrice stared at him, her mind working, suddenly remembering the way Angie had looked at her in the mirror, her behaviour with Rafe this evening. She put her hands over her face as if to shut away the image. Peter was twisting everything, that was all. His hatred was poisonous.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, her voice dull.
‘Yes, you do.’ She felt him come close. He pulled her hands away roughly. ‘Look at me,’ he said, and she did. The anguish on his face was dreadful to see. ‘Believe me.’
‘Peter,’ she said, desperate. ‘You’ve got it wrong. They love you and care for you. They’ve been worrying all evening where you were. Didn’t they find you?’
‘Ed came up, and Mother,’ he said. He chuckled. ‘They knocked and called a bit, then when I didn’t answer they went away. As I say, they didn’t try very hard. I don’t fit in, you see. Don’t play the games they play.’
‘That’s silly,’ she said. ‘Childish.’
‘Don’t be unkind!’ he cried. ‘Not you, too.’
‘No, of course I won’t be, Peter, don’t worry, it’s all right.’ But he was looking at her so tenderly now it frightened her. She’d always been wary of him – his moods, his cutting comments – and now it was as though he stood open before her, and she saw his unhappiness down to the core. Poor Peter, the misfit. He slumped suddenly on the bed beside her, rolled over and buried his face in the eiderdown. She put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him as Rafe had tried to comfort her only half an hour ago. She knew he was wrong about his family. They did love him. They were loyal. They loved her and had been kind to her. Angelina had her faults, of course she did, but that was understandable. She was vulnerable, too. Beatrice didn’t mind that Mrs Wincanton had made her Angie’s guardian angel, she was proud to do it. And now Peter needed her help, too.
She coaxed him to sit up and it helped her to be strong. ‘Peter, come on. Your tie’s all crooked – there. Let’s go down, then, well, maybe you would take me in to supper.’ She’d said she’d go with Rafe, but Rafe would surely understand.
When they got downstairs, it was as though someone had turned on a bright light and she saw everything more clearly. She realized that her hostess and Brent Jarvis Esquire kept a too deliberate distance from each other, that Mr Wincanton had disappeared altogether. As for Angie, Rafe came up, full of apologies. ‘I waited a bit for you, then Angie asked me to take her in for supper. I hope you don’t mind.’
Beatrice shook her head dumbly.
After supper, Peter drank glass after glass of wine and shadowed Beatrice like a silent black dog, though hanging back from the dancing and the carol-singing round the piano, which was played by Jarvis. She was glad when midnight came and the car arrived to take them home. In the back seat, Rafe held her hand all the way and talked about the Wincantons, how pretty Angie had grown and what a good chap Ed was. On and on. Beatrice could hardly bear to listen.
Everybody was going away. After Christmas, Rafe travelled to Southampton to meet his mother off the ship, then accompanied her to London. On the first day of 1939, Beatrice walked up to Carlyon Manor to say goodbye to the Wincantons. The household was in a flurry of packing up. Angie, after much debate, was to return to Paris for a short time at least, Peter was set for school, Ed for Oxford. Only ten-year-old Hetty and her mother would remain, and they, too, would be moving to London in March for the start of the season. Beatrice wandered through the untidy rooms, sensing that a whole era of her life was coming to an end.
There was her own packing up to do, her mother furiously sewing name-tapes on the blouses, tunics and cardigans that arrived in the post. Two days into January her father drove her to his parents in Gloucestershire – the first time she’d met them for several years. In their lovely house of golden stone also lived her uncle and aunt and three younger cousins. Her grandparents’ household was a formal one, Mr and Mrs Marlow growing elderly now, and Beatrice’s Uncle George, Hugh’s elder brother, had taken over the management of the estate. She liked the gentle rolling countryside and the villages of mellow stone, liked being part of a busy family household and being treated as a grown-up, dressing for dinner every night and being introduced to guests as though she were a young woman, no longer a child. The cousins were rather sweet, twin girls of eight and a younger brother of six. Their mother, Aunt Julia, was Uncle George’s much younger second wife, his first, Sylvia, having caught tuberculosis and died around the time Beatrice was born. Julia was a jolly, friendly woman with a passion for hats and days out. She immediately took Beatrice under her wing, taught her to style her hair more fashionably and gave her face powder and lipstick.
Several days later, her father drove her to Larchmont, a girls’ school twenty miles from her grandparents’, and for the first time in her life she was left alone amongst strangers.
Larchmont was not one of those schools designed to teach genteel young ladies accomplishments. Rather, its Headmistress had founded it shortly after the Kaiser’s war to give girls who might need to earn a living an academic education.
Beatrice was relieved to find that although she was a little behind in geometry and algebra, Miss Simpkins had served her splendidly in all the other subjects she must take for her School Certificate. Lessons in a class of intelligent girls, mostly eager to learn, were a delightful new experience. The boarding, however, she hated.
The school was situated in a converted mill, and a very long narrow room under the eaves held the forty boarders in a single dormitory with no privacy but the blankets under which they slept. The bathrooms, too, were communal. Whilst in many ways enlightened, the Headmistress had no truck with individualism. Solitude, apart from the rule of silence in the library to foster private study, was deemed unhealthy, and once studies were over, the girls were expected to play team games in all weathers, or to join in the weekly cross-country runs. Beatrice, because of her illness, was excused all these, but since to be different at Larchmont meant social ostracism, she quickly became determined to drive the weakness from her limbs. This didn’t stop a small group of girls seeing her as odd and freezing her out of their activities. In time, she found her place, swimming in the middle of the shoal, determined to be no different from the other nervous fish swimming about her. It was to be another lesson in survival and she learnt it well.
She and Rafe wrote to one another regularly. He was happy that his mother was home, but the first surprise of the year was that he gave up Oxford, which seemed to be down to difficulties with money. My stepfather has arranged for my inclusion in the next intake at military college. There’s nothing I can do.
At the end of March, Beatrice went home to Cornwall. On the evening of 26 March, the family listened to the devastating news that Hitler’s troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. Beatrice’s father leant forward and turned off the wireless. ‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said, his eyes blazing with a strangely satisfied light. ‘Even Chamberlain can’t ignore that.’
‘What do you think he’ll do?’ Delphine asked, her dark eyes huge
in her pale face with its halo of prematurely greying hair. ‘There’s still a chance, isn’t there? He wouldn’t attack France or us. Why would he do that? Why should we have to fight him?’
Hugh Marlow took out his pipe and started to pack it with tobacco. ‘We can’t stand by and watch, my love, as he ravages other nations,’ he said. ‘It’s a moral principle, as simple as that. And it could be us next.’
Chapter 11
‘Never mind the people of Czechoslovakia,’ Beatrice Ashton told Lucy. ‘Never mind the inexorable road to war. For Angelina, it was as though nothing had happened.’ She rooted about in a shoebox and brought out a small packet of letters, one of which she extracted and passed to Lucy.
‘This was all she could think about when Prague fell under the jackboot.’
Lucy took the sheets of folded paper, the top one engraved with an address in Queen’s Gate, Kensington. The letter was written in her grandmother’s rounded hand, quite easy to read.
Darling Bea,
Two nights ago, I was presented!! It was the most exciting night of my life. You should have seen my dress – apricot and silver brocade with the most darling little buttons and a long shimmering train and a feather headdress that was a nightmare to put on. Aunt Alice lent me the lace gloves she wore when she was presented to Queen Mary. I really felt like a princess. We drove in the Hamiltons’ car to the Palace, and the crowds, dearest, they pressed up against the windows to look in – quite alarming it was, yet exciting at the same time. There were dozens of other girls and we all had to stand in a group in a huge echoing room, till the King and Queen arrived, then wait simply ages until our names were called. There was so much to remember to get right. I was terrified I’d make a mess of my curtsey – you know how clumsy I can be, and my dance teacher had quite despaired – but I don’t think I wobbled too badly. The King looked well enough, if a little stern, I thought, but the Queen was very sweet and gracious and asked about my father, whom she remembered meeting once at a dinner. And next Tuesday is my dance and I’m a bag of nerves. I wish you could be here, Bea, and not at your mouldy old school. It’s all so thrilling. I hardly think about Carlyon one bit, though of course I miss the dear horses and I miss you, my darling.
