A Gathering Storm

by Rachel Hore

  The cab drew up outside the house in Queen’s Gate.

  ‘I’ll wait here for you, shall I?’ Peter said. She hobbled up the steps, not needing to knock because the little maid had seen the cab and opened the door right away. She wore a curious expression on her sharp little face.

  ‘I’ll be going straight out again,’ Beatrice told the girl, keeping her coat, and on the way upstairs wondered whether the maid had been about to say something but then hadn’t.

  She went to the bathroom and dealt with her graze, which was more extensive than she’d thought, but at least had stopped bleeding, and she was lucky to find a roll of plaster in a cupboard. Her stocking looked as though it might be repairable so she washed it out and hung it on the chair in her bedroom, before finding a fresh one in her case. All the while she was dogged by an awful sense of unease.

  It was when she came downstairs that she noticed for the first time a military great-coat hanging on the stand behind the front door. She stopped still, her hand on the banister, thinking about this. Then, through the closed door of the drawing room she heard a man’s voice, low, followed by a woman’s careless laugh.

  At that moment the little maid appeared downstairs. She was clutching a dustpan and started in surprise when she saw Beatrice. ‘Sorry, miss, I didn’t know you were there.’

  ‘Is there a visitor?’ she asked the maid, and again, was shot that curious expression.

  ‘Yes, miss, didn’t I say?’ she replied. ‘That man you kept asking about if he’d called. Well, he’s here.’

  ‘Is he?’ Beatrice cried. Rafe was here! ‘Why didn’t you tell me? How long has he been here?’

  ‘Miss!’ the maid warned. But Beatrice, who’d been waiting so long, was down the last few stairs and across the hall, pausing only briefly to knock before walking in.

  Rafe and Angie were sitting together on the sofa facing the door. Angie was lying back, relaxing. Rafe sat on the edge of the seat, close to her, intimately close. His fingers were interlocked with hers. The pair looked up at Bea in surprise. Bea stared back at their intertwined hands. What were they doing?

  ‘Bea,’ Rafe said, loosing Angie’s hand and getting up. ‘I thought you were out. I mean—’

  ‘Well, I was. I’ve just come in. Actually, I’m going out again.’

  ‘How are you?’ Rafe asked.

  ‘I’m very well,’ she said.

  ‘Come and sit down, Bea,’ Angie said, almost purring. ‘What have you done with Peter?’

  ‘He’s outside in the cab.’ She explained what had happened. ‘I’ll tell him to come in, if you like,’ she said, getting up and going to the door, then hesitated. She still had that picture in mind of those hands, Rafe’s and Angie’s, intertwined. She didn’t quite understand, and yet she thought she ought to.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ she said to Rafe.

  Rafe said, ‘I’m sorry, I telephoned and only Angie was here. She said to come and wait, so I did.’

  She knew him too well. The slight blush, his look too steady. She wanted earnestly to believe him but couldn’t quite manage it. Angie knew I wasn’t due back till late afternoon. This fact was inescapable.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Rafe asked.

  ‘Yes, of course I am,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, this is silly. I’ll get Peter,’ Angie said, wrenching open the door and marching out. A moment later Bea heard the taxi move away and Peter followed Angie into the room.

  ‘Ashton,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’ He seemed nervous, as though the air were charged with a strange current.

  ‘I’ll order some tea,’ Angie said, stepping over to the bell. Later, Bea arrived at the exact word for the expression on her face. It was smug.

  Rafe left around six, soon after Mrs Wincanton arrived home, greeting him with enthusiasm. ‘I’m afraid I’m due back on duty,’ he told her. ‘I’d have loved to stay longer.’

  ‘I’ll write to you, I promise,’ he said to Beatrice when she saw him to the door. After he’d left she leant against the front door and tried not to cry When she returned to the drawing room, Oenone and Angie were arguing about Angie’s social arrangements. Peter muttered some excuse and disappeared past her upstairs.

  ‘I hope Peter looked after you today,’ Mrs Wincanton said, taking off her gloves. ‘Oh dear, obviously not. What have you done to your poor leg?’ Beatrice assured her that she was all right and Mrs Wincanton went off to change.

  Angelina was reading the Bystander and smoking a cigarette as though nothing had happened. Beatrice looked for signs of guilt or anxiety in her, anything that would give reality to the scene she’d broken in on that afternoon. Perhaps it was all some sort of dream, she thought wildly, or perhaps the whole thing meant nothing at all. Maybe it hadn’t to Angie, that would be typical, but she knew in her bones that Rafe would not have been acting lightly.

  Just now, Angelina seemed more bothered by the fact that her mother had forbidden the outing to Quaglino’s. She threw her magazine on the floor with a sigh.

  ‘I’m quite sure Richard Bestbridge is not the kind of companion Mrs Marlow would regard as suitable for her daughter,’ Angie said, mimicking her mother. In fact, as Beatrice understood it, the reason was more complicated. Her mother had bought tickets for the Priestley play and booked a table for them all to have supper out first.

  Angie yawned. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I can’t think why I’m quite so tired. Must be the thought of Music at Night. How did you get on with Pete earlier? Did he bore you to death?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Beatrice replied, a little stiffly. ‘He knows so much. It makes one feel very humble.’

  She walked upstairs in a trance. Normally she’d have been enchanted to see a show, but not tonight. They got to the theatre somehow, but she hardly concentrated on a word. Her mind’s eye was on a more dramatic tableau. Angie, Rafe, those clasped hands, the adoring expression on Rafe’s face – yes, it had been adoring, she knew that now. Round and round in her head the picture went. She felt sick.

  ‘Are you all right, Beatrice?’ Oenone Wincanton asked her in the interval. ‘You look a little peaky to me.’

  ‘Just tired, thank you,’ she lied. ‘I’m really enjoying it.’

  When she went to bed she locked the door again. The last thing she wanted was Angelina, coming in with her questions and her confidences. She lay awake for some time. Downstairs, doors opened and closed. There were footsteps and deep male voices, then Oenone’s laughter. She must have drowsed, for when she awoke, she heard the front door bang with a solid, final sound. More footsteps, people going to bed, then just darkness and silence. No, there was the slightest sound. There, again. Someone was trying the door of her room. ‘Beatrice?’ A male voice. Low. She said nothing and waited fearfully for whoever it was to go away. Eventually the floorboards creaked, and somewhere nearby a door closed. It was a long time before Beatrice slept, and then, it was fitfully.

  She rose early, packed, and departed before breakfast. The letter she left Mrs Wincanton was brief but polite, her excuse admittedly a weak one, that she felt she ought to get home as she hadn’t seen her parents for months.

  There were recriminations. Mrs Wincanton wrote her mother a hurt letter, saying she hoped they hadn’t offended Beatrice. Mrs Marlow wrote back apologizing for Beatrice’s rudeness and blaming her daughter’s being out of sorts on exhaustion.

  Then, the day before Christmas, a letter arrived for Beatrice from Rafe. She took it upstairs and read it in her bedroom, her tears splashing onto the paper.

  Chapter 13

  All Christmas she was not herself. Christmas Day passed in St Florian with the usual rituals, her mother attending early Mass before accompanying her husband and daughter to the Anglican service, then the fussing over a pair of pheasants Mr Marlow had been given by Colonel Brooker, and which he insisted that his wife carve carefully to pick out the shot. Beatrice pinched the palm of her hand, listening to his whining voice with a rising anger. How c
ould she care about food when her world had come to an end?

  ‘Cheer up, won’t you?’ her father remarked as he served himself his wife’s famed duchesse potatoes and she rose, threw back her chair and ran out of the room. A few minutes later her mother found her sitting on her bed, staring dully at the floor.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’ she asked Beatrice. ‘You won’t say why you came home from London early and you’ve been rude and miserable ever since.’ The girl did not reply so she went back downstairs. Delphine didn’t know that her daughter held a letter hidden behind her back, the letter from Rafe. The phrases floated in Bea’s head. It was wonderful to see you, but also, I realized when I saw Angie again the depth of my feelings for her. It was like a light going on in my head. Bea, I will always value you as my dear, dear friend who saved my life and has been saving it ever since with your friendship and reassurance . . .

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she wanted to shout at him. ‘She doesn’t really care, she just wants you to be in love with her. She needs adoration.’ It seemed so clear to Bea now. She hated Angelina for casually reaching out and plucking Rafe. Because she could. Because it was easy. Did she really despise Beatrice so much, or care so little for her? What could Beatrice do or say? Nothing, without losing her dignity. Nothing.

  After a while she recovered herself sufficiently to go back downstairs. She resumed her seat under her father’s baleful glare and muttered, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Our dinner’s getting cold, young lady,’ was all he said. ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

  They had been invited to the Brookers’ for tea and party games. Beatrice tried hiding behind the excuse of a headache but her mother, who was worried about her, insisted she come and be cheered up by Charades and Consequences. She wasn’t. After tea came the reading of a poem entitled ‘Bombers over Bethlehem’, written by another guest, Mr Cyril Thatcher, St Florian’s resident poet, which really proved the limit.

  ‘Much more of this, is there?’ Beatrice heard her father whisper to her mother and was relieved when they left shortly afterwards to walk home under the wintry stars.

  In January she returned to school a different girl to the one who’d left full of bright-eyed expectancy before the holidays. Everybody noticed how withdrawn she was, how she took no interest in her work or anything.

  ‘Beatrice Marlow, we hardly hear from you.’ Her science teacher dragged her out of her thoughts. ‘Will you tell us the four types of Arthropod, if you please.’ Brought back to the reality of the chalk-dusty classroom, and the inquisitive eyes of the dozen other girls in black pinafores, she stuttered out an answer that was more or less correct, and the lesson moved on. But when the bell went, Miss Hardwick held her back and asked, ‘Is there anything wrong, dear? Such dark shadows under your eyes. Are you sleeping properly?’

  Beatrice was not sleeping at all well. Her dreams revolved around memories of Rafe and Angelina, the jagged nightmare snapshot of them sitting together on the sofa, or sometimes another, that she was searching for him in the dark, howling, stormy sea, and this time not finding him.

  ‘You’re talking in your sleep again, Marlow Do shut up,’ Hilary Vickers drawled one morning, not unkindly. Hilary, an earl’s grand-daughter, possessed a natural air of authority. She considered the other girls at Larchmont beneath her in the social scale – she was probably right – and effortlessly assumed charge. But Beatrice was grateful to her, for in her desire for control, Hilary had stamped out some of the culture of cattiness, and this year the others seemed to respect the aura of ‘keep your distance’ that Beatrice had woven round herself.

  Winter gave way to spring, but she hardly noticed through her blur of misery. Another letter arrived from Rafe, extoling Angie’s sweetness and she couldn’t bring herself to reply – did he really not understand how deeply he had hurt her?

  Just before Easter, there was a letter from Angelina. When she read it, Beatrice felt nothing. Part of her had been expecting it all along. Rafe’s regiment had gone abroad, Angelina wrote – to France, she thought. Before he embarked he’d asked her to marry him. She had told him she would, but hadn’t finally decided.

  Slowly, Beatrice’s anger grew. Angie seemed to be treating something as serious as a proposal of marriage as lightly as an invitation to tea. Worse was the knowledge that Rafe was possibly in the front line and there was nothing she could do but hope and pray that he’d be all right. She considered writing to him via his regiment, indeed twice started letters, but found she couldn’t keep her anger off the page. He wouldn’t need that from her at the moment.

  Two weeks after Easter, important news began to arrive from Europe. The war had finally got underway and it wasn’t going well for the Allies.

  Hitler invaded Norway. In May his troops swarmed into Belgium and Holland. Allied troops fled to Dunkirk and were rescued by a heroic flotilla of little boats. France lay open to the enemy, her borders inadequately defended. In the end they were easily breached. On 22 June 1940, France surrendered to the enemy.

  Delphine’s anguish was terrible. Her letters to Beatrice became long, distracted scrawls, betraying anxiety for her family, distress at the lack of news. Beatrice, too, was troubled, thinking not only of Rafe, wherever he might be, but of the vulnerable elderly couple, her grandparents, in their isolated Normandy farmhouse. Pappi was known to be excitable and, as her mother wrote, quite capable of resorting to his rifle if upset. He wouldn’t have a chance against German soldiers. At least his sons, Delphine’s brothers, were nearby.

  Exams loomed. Somehow, Beatrice mustered some spirit and got through. Two and a half weeks to the summer holidays. Still she did not know what she was going to do with herself. Her parents expected her to return home to St Florian for the holidays, but to what? Their suffocating lives, locked into the roles of invalid and nurse? The knowledge that up the road lay Carlyon Manor with all its memories and dashed hopes? Going home meant going backwards. A whole summer of this, then back to Larchmont for the final year. For what, when the future was so bleak, uncertain? She badly wanted to do something useful now, not least something that would occupy her thoughts.

  It was two weeks before they broke up that news came, in a letter from Angelina. Beatrice took it outside and sat in the sun on the sloped roof of the air-raid shelter to read it, but was unable at first to take in what it said.

  I thought you’d want to know at once, Angelina had written. Rafe is missing.

  At once she was plunged into further misery. No one knew if Rafe was alive or dead. In the confusion after the Fall of France it was difficult to gauge what had happened to many stranded troops. There was nothing anyone could do except wait for more news.

  Waiting. As Germany sealed off Europe to the Allies, and Italian troops surged into Northern Africa, Britain was isolated. Fear of invasion clouded everyone’s thoughts. As for Beatrice, what could a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl possibly do about anything?

  It was Hilary Vickers, the earl’s grand-daughter, who saved her, telling her about the horses.

  ‘My cousin’s working there. They take horses and ponies that have been brought in for Army use, dozens of them, and train them to pull wagons or carriages for ceremonial duties, then most are sent abroad. Some are fine animals – it’s awful to think of, actually. All Daddy’s lovely hunters are gone. It was the first thing he did after war was declared. “I’m too old to fight Hitler,” he told us, “but by God my horses will do it instead”.’

  The place in question was a remount depot in Leicestershire. Beatrice wrote to them before she could have second thoughts, outlining her experience at Carlyon’s stables and asking if they’d have her. A week passed without any word. Then came a letter from a Captain Browning, a contact of Hilary’s cousin.

  You are required to present yourself at the Superintendent’s Office at 0800 hours on 7th July. Since there is no accommodation for females on site, I have arranged for you to lodge with a Miss Catherin
e Warrender, The Poplars, George Street. She expects you the evening before.

  Bea read this with a mixture of excitement and dismay. What had she done? She wrote at once to her parents, and the letter resulted in a summons to the Headmistress’s study.

  Miss Pettifer, a tall, thin woman with an imperious air, folded her hands in her lap and regarded Beatrice thoughtfully.

  ‘I received a telephone call from your mother this morning,’ she said. ‘She was in a state of some agitation, and when she read me out the letter you’d sent her, I understood her disquiet. You’re only seventeen, Beatrice. I was imagining that we would have the pleasure of your company at Larchmont for another year, and that you’d take your Higher Certificate, but it appears that you have other plans.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Pettifer, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do explain yourself. It appears that you, an educated young woman, wish to work with, er, horses?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her gaze slipped past the Headmistress, to the tranquil country garden outside. Somewhere nearby, the comforting sounds of a tennis game could be heard.

  ‘I want to be useful,’ she told Miss Pettifer. ‘I can’t stay here. I just can’t.’ She couldn’t find the words to explain that she felt enclosed, trapped by boarding school, but that nor did she want to go home. In all honesty she didn’t see where her future lay. All she knew was that she wanted to get out, to go somewhere and do something.

  Miss Pettifer studied her for a long moment. Finally she said, ‘Beatrice Marlow, you’re an able girl, very able. In normal times I’d have said that you should try for university. But these are not normal times. And I detect that for some reason, you are not happy. What makes you think you’d feel better doing what is only likely to be rough, manual work?’

  ‘I don’t know that I’d be happier. But I love horses and it would be doing something. Not being stuck here – I mean, sometimes I feel I’m going mad.’

  Miss Pettifer smiled. ‘I hope we aren’t so terrible a place.’