The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Even so, whenever you do, wherever you are, I will always come and help you out,’ Aurelia stated, her expression solemn. ‘But that is how devoted I am to you. I will do whatever you want, until the earth closes over me.’

  ‘That sounds just a little too Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, for my taste, dear Miss Smith-Jones. Could you take it again? Perhaps think of re-phrasing, making it a tiny bit lighter?’

  Aurelia frowned.

  ‘Well, I could, now I have made how I feel clear to you,’ she agreed. ‘So, to put it another way.’ She hesitated, before beginning again. ‘If I said I will always be loyal to you to the end of my days, would that be better?’

  ‘Yes, a great deal better, but not I hope, for your sake, true. Now it is time you went, and time I went in.’

  Aurelia stood up, and held out a slim hand.

  ‘Thank you very much for seeing me—’

  ‘Don’t you mean spotting you, as in – in the bushes?’

  ‘I daresay,’ Aurelia agreed, turning and making her way across the lawn to the bushes once more.

  ‘No, no need to go back that way, dear girl. I will call Clive and he can run you back to Twistleton.’

  ‘I can walk. I walked here.’

  ‘It is the least I can do after such a declaration of faith, and I think we can both agree that it will not be at all common.’

  He laughed lightly once more, before disappearing in a really rather magical manner through the French windows into the Big Room.

  Aurelia sat back in the smart car that Guy’s secretary Clive had brought round to the front, and stared ahead of her. She could not believe her own audacity, she could not believe what she had just done, and she certainly could not believe that Guy Athlone’s secretary, Clive Montfort, was running her back to Twistleton Court.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Mr Athlone’s secretary. He just ran me back.’

  Daisy stared at Aurelia in growing admiration.

  ‘Still waters run deep. Whatever was he running you back from?’

  ‘His house,’ Aurelia said, waving to the retreating car.

  ‘He was running you back from his house, for the reason of?’

  ‘Getting rid of me, really, that was the reason. He just didn’t want me around any more. He was in his dressing gown,’ she added, absently. ‘So he had to go in to change, although I think he had had breakfast, because the dining room was cleared.’

  Daisy sped after Aurelia, and turned her round.

  ‘No, you don’t, young lady,’ she murmured. ‘You tell all, or Daisy will give you a Chinese burn.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘I went over to the farmhouse early this morning, and I told Guy Athlone – I found him in the garden smoking a cigarette – that I would devote my life to him.’

  Daisy stared at Aurelia. She knew that Relia had always had a streak of hysteria in her, but really this was the kind of thing that you read about in newspapers, young girls with a ‘pash’ on famous men breaking into their houses and swearing everlasting devotion to them – one of them even did it to Hitler, for heaven’s sake.

  ‘Aren’t we a tiny bit old for crushes and pashes, Relia darling?’ Daisy asked her in as kind a voice as she could muster.

  ‘Yes, of course, but this is neither a crush nor a pash,’ Aurelia assured her, using just as kindly a tone as Daisy had used on her, and improving on it at the same time by putting out a hand and patting Daisy in a gentle and slightly patronising manner on the arm. ‘No, no, this is the real thing, and I really mean it. You will see, I will devote my life to Guy Athlone, in one way or another.’

  Daisy tried not to look as she felt, which was quite appalled.

  Later, when she was going in search of Miss Valentyne to tell her that, although they hadn’t finished the sandbagging, she, Daisy, would have to scoot back to the Hall to have lunch with Aunt Maude, she confided what Aurelia had said to Jessica.

  ‘I know I perhaps shouldn’t, but since he is a friend of yours, I just thought I should – I mean I don’t think Relia is likely to become dangerous or anything, but I do think she is very serious about Mr Athlone. Some people can become fixated, can’t they? And if we think about it, what with being an only child and so often on her own, and her parents being so social that she hardly saw them when she was growing up, well, it might make sense of her condition.’

  Jessica gave Daisy one of her penetrating looks, and as she did so it occurred to Daisy with a sudden sense of shock that Miss Valentyne was really very pretty, especially when she had just washed her hair, and put it up on top of her head in a rather raffish manner.

  ‘Put by any stores for the coming bad times yet, Missy?’

  Daisy shook her head.

  ‘Aunt Maude won’t hear of it – just won’t.’

  ‘Better if Aunt Maude did hear of it. Tell her from me, but ever so politely, of course, that now is the time to start storing everything from candles to bolts of cloth, wirelesses, cans of everything. You just must, or by this time next year there will be tears at bedtime, believe me.’

  ‘I won’t tell Aunt Maude, but I’ll make sure to do it myself.’

  ‘Good girl.’ Jessica dipped the pen she was using in the bottle of ink in front of her. ‘Lists, lists, lists, that is what we need for the coming evacuation of the cities. Because, believe me, without lists we shall be sunk. Whether we like it or not, we will soon have more evacuees thrust upon us any day now than even you and I have had hot dinners.’

  Daisy took this in, as she was meant to, as if she, and not Aunt Maude, was head of the household at the Hall – but as Freddie was driving her back home for luncheon, and they were chatting, it occurred to Daisy that if she didn’t get a car of her own soon, it would be the next century before she completed her flying lessons, or logged up the required number of hours. She needed a motor car, fast.

  ‘Where did you buy that?’ Laura stared at the brand-sparklingly-new motor car that stood, a few hours later, outside the stables at the Court.

  ‘In Wychford yesterday,’ Daisy told her proudly. ‘Freddie helped me choose it.’ She turned to the salesman who had brought it, and gave him her warmest smile. ‘I say, would you be an absolute ducky and show me how to drive this lovely thing?’

  Laura closed her eyes, and then quickly opened them again as Daisy hopped in beside the salesman, and the car started to move towards the back entrance of the small estate, and so on to the open road.

  ‘Do you think you should have encouraged Daisy to buy that motor car? I mean, she hasn’t even learned to drive yet. It’s really rather powerful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes, very,’ Freddie agreed cheerfully. ‘But she needs a powerful motor car with what she has in mind.’ A questioning look from Laura brought forth a further even more wide-eyed response. ‘She wants to go for flying lessons at that place outside Bramsfield!’

  ‘Flying lessons?’

  ‘Flying an aeroplane is the only way she will get away from the Hall, and Aunt Maude.’

  ‘Lord love a duck.’

  ‘And the Lord does love his ducks, Laura,’ Freddie told her in a pious voice. ‘What He does not love, I wouldn’t think, is war.’

  ‘Is it always men who make war, do you think?’

  ‘Oh yes indeedy, the males of the species will insist on killing each other, because of wanting to be top dog. Mark my words, there would be no more war if men started having babies. Mrs Budgie says they would die if they had to have babies, and she knows, she’s had six.’

  Laura stared at Freddie with something approaching admiration. She might look fifteen rather than seventeen, being small, brown-haired, freckle-faced, and still with a long braid of hair down her back, which she had the habit of tossing impatiently behind her, but she was always thoughtfully working things out. She was quite mature, as if she had an old head on her young shoulders, or as if she was used to looking out for herself, not having had parents for long, and not having been brought up by
anyone but a spinster aunt and a butler . . .

  ‘You should be a lady MP, like Nancy Astor, Freddie.’

  ‘Apparently, Aunt Jessica says, Nancy Astor is many things, but a lady is not one of them.’

  ‘Do you know they change the flowers in the vases at Cliveden every two hours?’

  ‘Have they nothing better to do?’

  ‘Apparently not, at least not until the war comes. Once it does, well, things will be different – for ever, won’t they?’ Laura asked over-brightly. The look in her eyes was sad, for to her mind things had already changed. Her mother had died so suddenly, leaving her in a world that to a young lonely girl was really rather confusing, particularly with a father going off the rails at what seemed like every and any opportunity, but then perhaps he always had, and it was only now that her mother was gone that it was noticeable.

  Jean was perfectly well aware that Joe Huggett was following her, why shouldn’t she be? He had followed her out of the ARP lecture at the village hall, assing about in the road with his gas mask on, as if it was quite a hoot to be given a gas mask, rather than a horrible shock.

  ‘Can’t you find anything else to do, Joe Huggett? Surely there must be a tank or a gun somewhere that you could go and amuse yourself with? Or in your case an RAF aeroplane.’

  Jean turned briefly from staring ahead of her, waiting for the bus with every show of impatience, to look at him. Joe managed to smile his wicked smile before she turned back once again, staring ahead of her at the mackintosh of the lady in front of them, at the curve in the road where the country bus should at any minute appear.

  ‘It just so happens that our journeys over the last twenty-four hours have taken us in the same direction.’

  ‘Isn’t that a coincidence?’ Jean murmured, at the same time tossing back her mane of black curly hair.

  ‘I, like you, am intent on – on going to Bramsfield.’

  ‘As it happens I am going to Wychford—’

  ‘Wychford, then Bramsfield.’

  Jean turned back to stare at him once again.

  ‘At this moment you are carrying on more like the village idiot than a recent recruit to His Majesty’s army, but I daresay you know that?’

  ‘I shall be gone tomorrow, to training school somewhere in England. Take pity, fair maiden, on a poor airman, take pity!’ Joe seemed to be dancing in front of her now, his blond hair – too long for the RAF, surely – tousled, unkempt, but somehow delightful against his uniform. ‘I shall be training through the snow and the ice, with no food and little sleep. Remember that in the weeks ahead.’ He leant forward and whispered in her ear, ‘And you will be sorry that you were not more kind to me while waiting for our bus, do you know that?’

  Jean pulled her beret further on to her thick head of curls. It was true, he would be gone for some sort of training, and she would be sorry if she was not kinder to him. Although war had not yet been declared, everyone all over the country was sitting on a pin, knowing that one way or another it would be along soon. Jean knew that the village schoolteacher had long ago laid contingency plans for dealing with the evacuation of city children, and that Twistleton village school, with its eight pupils – as well as the village itself – had long ago been marked out by the authorities. She hated to admit it, but in some ways, now that poor Czechoslovakia had been thrown to the Nazi wolves, she, as well as everyone else in Twistleton, was actually impatient to be getting on with everything. All this hanging about waiting for the inevitable was as bad as hanging about waiting for the village bus, and there was not very much to be said for it.

  ‘I’ll take you to The Pantry for lunch, if you’re nice to me on the bus.’

  Jean turned and stared at Joe. Lunch at The Pantry was delicious, and they both knew it: chicken pie and home-grown peas, new potatoes smothered in butter and chopped parsley, lovely soft meringues filled with local cream.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ she conceded, more because she had skipped breakfast than for any other reason.

  ‘Sit at the back and hold hands?’ Joe asked, leaning forward and lowering his voice.

  Jean shook her head.

  ‘Sit at the back and keep your hands to yourself,’ she murmured, above the sound of the bus arriving.

  Joe smiled down at her, knowing that he was half-way there already. His eldest brother had told him there was nothing quite like seducing girls with the thought of food.

  ‘You will be mine by the end of lunch, Miss Shaw,’ he told her gaily.

  Jean sat back and stared ahead. She would be no one’s by the end of anything, but lunch at The Pantry would be just dandy.

  Once again the silence of the dining room at the Hall seemed to be weighing down on Daisy, a heavy old eiderdown of a silence that felt as if it was smothering her. A fly was buzzing about around the window, a maid was hovering at the sideboard, and Aunt Maude was toying lightly with a piece of white fish, while all over England people were wondering when and if the war would begin. Daisy thought morosely that if Jessica Valentyne was right in her thinking, the fly could be as useless as Chamberlain’s government, and the white fish on Aunt Maude’s plate as lifeless as his policies.

  ‘I see you have bought yourself a motor car, Daisy?’

  Daisy nodded. It was pretty useless to deny it, since it was standing in the drive, outside the Hall’s double front doors. She had intended to have the salesman hide it for her in the stables, when he helped her drive over from the Court. Only for a short time, though, time in which she had also intended to learn to drive so well, that before Aunt Maude could protest she would have had her whizzing down the drive and out on to the country road beyond, a road which would take them to Wychford, where she would have treated Aunt Maude to a triumphant lunch at The Pantry.

  Daisy had become increasingly sure that Aunt Maude had not left the grounds of the Hall since about 1920, when Daisy’s parents had been killed. In many ways there was no reason why she should leave the grounds of her little kingdom – after all, the place was sufficient unto itself, as Shakespeare had said about England – but even so, even so, surely there must be a world beyond the blue horizon that could arouse Aunt Maude’s curiosity? Now, of course, the whole plan had blown up in Daisy’s face, and she had been left not taking Aunt Maude for a surprise ride in her new motor car, but waiting for that dear little mechanic to arrive and tell her what to do to get it working.

  ‘Spit in the petrol tank.’

  Daisy looked up suddenly, shocked. In fact she almost found herself looking round to see who had spoken, except for the fact that the words had definitely been spoken in Aunt Maude’s voice. She could have sworn they had come from someone else.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Daisy stared at her aunt.

  ‘If she won’t crank up, spit in the petrol tank, that is what my brothers used to say. They always said it worked like a dream.’

  Daisy just had time to stare at Aunt Maude in some astonishment before she heard the dining-room door opening and, turning at the sound, saw a maid beckoning to her.

  ‘Mr Russell from the garage in Wychford, here to help get the car started, as I understand it, Miss Daisy.’

  Daisy stared back down the dining room. Aunt Maude flapped her napkin at her, so suddenly that all three pugs under her chair woke up and barked excitedly.

  ‘Go, child, go. Get the thing going, for goodness’ sake, or we shall all be sitting on a pin until dinner time.’

  Daisy shot out of the door, but she paused as she stood in the hall. Could this be the same aunt with whom she had been living for the past seventeen and a half years? Then a thought struck her, and it did seem literally to strike her almost dumb. Gracious, could it be possible, could it perhaps mean that Aunt Maude had once driven a motor car herself? Surely not? She made a mental note to ask her, and then ran to the front doors and down the steps, hand outstretched to greet Mr Russell.

  ‘It’s just a question of newness,’ Mr Russell told Daisy in a pleasantly instructional v
oice.

  ‘Oh, I see. Do all new motor cars act up in this way, Mr Russell?’

  ‘No, not the newness of the motor car, Miss Beresford – the newness of you to the art of driving, and it is an art, believe me. Good drivers are hard to come by, and brilliant ones are even rarer.’

  He looked serious, priest-like, before opening the door of the motor car and beckoning to her to sit in beside him in the passenger seat, as he went on speaking.

  ‘She’ll start all right for you, Miss Beresford, if you do what I tell you. This is what you do. First you turn on the ignition, pull out the choke, and press the starter button. When the engine fires allow it to run on half-choke until running smoothly, and then close the choke. If you wouldn’t mind climbing in beside me, I can demonstrate it to you again. Depress the clutch, engage first gear, press the accelerator to generate some power, release the handbrake and at the same time let the clutch out, and then slowly drive forward.’

  ‘Crikey, Mr Russell, I am so dim! I never realised it was all so complicated. I am afraid in the excitement I clean forgot everything you told me. Please continue.’

  The motor car moved slowly and surely down the drive before Mr Russell stopped it, and reversed back to the same spot, and then he and Daisy changed positions, and Daisy started the exciting exercise known in the manual as ‘Starting Your Motor Car’.

  Aunt Maude had long abandoned her piece of white fish to stare out into the drive. She could not help feeling excited by the idea of a motor car being in the drive again. It reminded her of her brothers and herself before the First World War, of their father arriving with their mother sitting up beside him, wrapped in driving veils and large coats with fur collars. Those had really been the days, and perhaps they might soon return?

  Lunch at Wychford with Joe was proving interesting to Jean Shaw.

  She and Joe had known each other, off and on, all their lives, growing up in Twistleton, going to the same village school, until time and age parted them, and Joe was sent on somewhere else, and Jean was taken on at the Hall to help out as under-housekeeper, or that at least was how Miss Maude Beresford always described Jean, much to everyone’s, including Jean’s, amusement – since there was no actual housekeeper Jean could be ‘under’.