The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ George drained his, and then added, quietly, ‘Keep up the good work, old boy.’

  ‘Will do, dear boy.’ Guy smiled. ‘You see, that’s the difference between us, George. You say “old boy” and I say “dear boy”!’

  He let George out of the ivy-covered door, and George free-wheeled quietly down the back drive, only starting the engine of his battered old motor car once he was well past the entrance to the main house. It wasn’t exactly necessary to do this, but old habits die hard, and secrecy was now second nature to him, as it was to Guy.

  When Guy summoned Aurelia to his study, she thought she had made a mess of laying out the canapés to go with the cocktails, or that the apron on her uniform was not as starched as it should be. Certainly, her heart sank as Clive beckoned to her to follow him, and all she could think about was what she might have done wrong. After all, they had only just arrived.

  ‘I think Relia’s in for it now,’ Daisy murmured, taking over her canapé duty. ‘I think Mr Athlone is going to have her washed and brought to his tent.’

  Freddie and Laura laughed, but then looked at each other, nervously. Aurelia’s disappointment when Guy had cancelled his Christmas party had been palpable.

  Daisy had been taken in by Jessica and allowed to live at the Court until she had finished her flying lessons, and had joined them once again at the flat above the stables. But it had been noticeable that their happy festive mood had not rubbed off on Aurelia, who could frequently be found sighing, making her passion for this famous man all too evident.

  ‘Well, at least he’s not married, Daisy,’ Freddie said, looking round at the other two for support. ‘I mean, that is something, surely?’ she went on, keeping her voice low so that the rest of the kitchen couldn’t hear them.

  ‘Hardly a comfort when you’re wandering the streets all alone, pushing a pram.’ Laura nudged the bottom of her maid’s cap further up her head. ‘Still, I don’t think anyone puts waitresses on casting couches these days, do they?’

  ‘If she’s not back in half an hour, I vote we get the secretary – Mr Montfort – and torture him, until he tells us where she is.’

  Unaware of the stir caused by her being hauled out of the kitchens and taken to see the boss, Aurelia grabbed her coat and followed Mr Montfort out into the garden. Much as she was determined to take everything in her stride, she was well aware that unless she was very careful she might well succumb to her nerves, and faint – and of course the secret nature of the door, the fact that she had no idea where she was being taken, or why, only added to her nervous state.

  As they went through to the studio, perhaps sensing this, Clive turned back to give her a reassuring smile.

  ‘I shan’t leave you, don’t worry,’ he told her in a low voice. ‘I’ll be around and about.’

  He ushered her into the studio, and then slipped into the kitchen.

  ‘Ah, there you are, pinny all starched, and maid’s shoes on, too. Commendably clumpy, I see,’ Guy joked as Aurelia walked into the middle of the room, and he turned back from an easel, where he was busy drawing something which was, perhaps happily, not yet discernible. ‘I always start a drawing before a party,’ he said, turning back to the easel to admire his work. ‘It keeps me going, you know. Either that or a new play, or a book, or a lyric, anything creative; that way I can let all the idle chatter wash over me, while thinking all the time of what I have left here. It means I can float above everything, detach my mind from the silliness, let the real me wander back here to sit beside the quiet stream of the imagination.’

  By the end of this speech Aurelia’s expression had gone from nervous to reverential. It was strange to think of the celebrated Guy Athlone having to employ mental tricks to get over his social boredom.

  ‘Sit down, please.’

  Aurelia looked around for a chair, but she need not have, for Clive was already behind her, chair placed.

  ‘I shan’t beat about the bush, Miss Smith-Jones – are you really called Miss Smith-Jones? It sounds so like something in a song. At any rate, I shan’t, as I say, beat about the bush.’ He gave her a long look. ‘I need your help. At least it’s not just myself, it’s many people, but for the moment it is Clive here and myself who both need your help.’ His expression changed to a grave one. ‘There are people coming here tonight, Miss Smith-Jones, who are a positive danger to this great country of ours. They are people who can help Hitler, and help him they will, the moment he lands. What I want you to do to help us is to listen in to their conversations, as often as you can. Hover with your plate of canapés, re-fill their drinks as soon as it is perfectly possible, and generally make a jolly good fist of being over-eager, while remembering what they are talking about. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, I will try.’

  ‘No, no, Miss Smith-Jones, trying is not what is wanted. Success is.’

  Aurelia wanted to say that she would eat poisoned canapés every five minutes, if that is what her idol wished.

  ‘I will listen and report,’ she affirmed, in a tone that – it seemed to both Guy and Clive – she had probably used when vowing to be loyal to God and the King when, as a little girl, she was being enrolled as a Girl Guide.

  Clive cleared his throat to stop himself laughing, because, following Aurelia’s words, as he turned away from her, Guy had bossed his eyes and made a bunny mouth at him, which he usually only did when he was with his accountants.

  Aurelia hurried off, accompanied by Clive.

  ‘Well, and what did the great man want from you? Did he try to get his wicked way?’

  Aurelia nodded. She didn’t know why she did. She couldn’t help herself. Perhaps it was the secrecy thing, perhaps, dimly, she thought that this would be the best way to put the others off the scent. She was so flattered that she had been the chosen one.

  ‘He did try to get his wicked way?’

  They all turned as Aurelia nodded again.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I turned him down, of course.’

  The other three looked momentarily reassured.

  ‘What is it about you, Relia, that you always seem to attract married men and unsuitables?’

  Aurelia shook her head.

  ‘It’s OK, he perfectly understood. He’s a gentleman.’

  ‘I should think so, too.’

  Freddie gave Daisy the nearest she could manage to a grim look. Just wait until she told Aunt Jessica what she had just heard! But then she realised that if she did Jessica might stop them coming to help out at Guy’s parties, and that would affect her so far all-too-meagre savings. Instead, she contented herself with the fact that Aurelia had returned within half an hour, and, it seemed, completely unscathed. Men were men, after all, particularly the older ones.

  For her part, Aurelia was now quite certain that she knew what she wanted to do, and it had nothing to do with flying lessons, or joining the Wrens if they started up again, or the army, or even becoming a nurse. It was something more dangerous, and even more exciting.

  Chapter Five

  Jean never really found out what had happened to make Miss Beresford so angry with her, because with the rumours of war becoming more and more heated, life at The Cottages had accelerated to such a degree that she hardly had time to go to bed or wake up, before someone was knocking at the door with a new piece of news. Either about the expected gassing of civilians, or about shortages that were soon to happen, or evacuees soon to arrive.

  This morning her close neighbour Dan Short had paid an unexpected and not wholly welcome visit, plagued by the idea of the coming of the ‘Germs’, as he called the Nazis.

  ‘I’m told I’m going to have to paint me windows black against the Germs seeing me candlelight, but I don’t use no candlelight. I go to bed with the light, and I get up with it, too,’ Dan kept repeating, while staring round at the winter sky, which had barely become dawn.

  Jean liked to get up early all right, but Dan’s idea of early and her i
dea of early were, even so, just a little different.

  She had long known that Dan was the salt of the earth, but seeing him so bewildered by what was happening – or, more importantly, what he thought might be going to happen – was unsettling, to say the least.

  ‘It’s all right, Dan, you just settle back, and let the others paint their windows, or put up whatever they have to when the time comes. If you don’t use candles or oil lamps, there will be no need, will there?’

  Dan sat down suddenly and heavily on Jean’s old oak settle without being asked, which was normally all right by Jean, but not this morning, since Joe, on a glorious twenty-four-hour pass, was upstairs in her bed.

  ‘I had such an attack of nerves in the night I ’ad to give meself a dose of bromide kept over from the last one, from the trenches. Kept it in me haversack all this time, but I never thought to have recourse to it.’

  Jean had little idea of what a bromide might possibly be. She imagined it must be some sort of laxative. She therefore gave Dan an understandably nervous look.

  ‘No, well, there is a good reason for all these things in war, I do agree, Dan, but surely you should save it up, in case you need it when the war comes, whatever it is – this medicine . . .’

  ‘No, Jean, I need it now. Calm me down, truly it will.’

  ‘Oh, I daresay you are calm enough, aren’t you, Dan?’

  Jean looked at the old man, unshaven white stubble on his chin, his striped shirt collarless, leather patches not just on the elbows of his much-worn jacket, but on the knees of his thick worsted trousers. And all of it set off by a splendid pair of clogs, which he was never without when walking through the village, or pottering in his garden.

  ‘I can’t believe we’s to go through it all again, Jean, that’s the trouble, when all is said and done, just can’t believe it . . . S’posing they send me back to the trenches, I couldn’t take that! I’d rather stay here and hang meself with me own belt, if I can find one.’

  Jean patted him on the shoulder, while pointedly holding out a hand to help him to his feet again.

  ‘There won’t be any trenches this time, not to my way of thinking, Dan, no trenches this time round.’

  ‘But gas – there’ll be gas! And that gives me the collie-wobbles, see what gas did last time, Jean? What’ll happen to me hens?’

  ‘Well, yes, but that’s why we have been given gas masks to take everywhere, Dan. We’re lucky this time round, that’s the way we should look at it, that we’re lucky.’

  Dan stopped by the door as there was a sudden sound from up the steep cottage stairs. Dan stared at the ceiling, immediately curious.

  ‘You got company, then, Jean?’

  Jean pushed him out of the door. Dan was a typical Twistleton nosy parker. She suspected he wasn’t frightened of being called up at all, he just wanted to poke his nose where it wasn’t wanted, and next thing the news would be all round the village.

  She closed the front door behind him and shot up the stairs to Joe.

  ‘What’s he doing poking his nose around my cottage door, and talking laxatives, and I know not what?’

  Joe burst out laughing.

  ‘A bromide, you silly girl, is something you put in people’s tea to keep them calm, it’s not a laxative!’

  Jean shook her head.

  ‘I couldn’t care what it is, but you will have to slip out the back way, because sure as eggs are eggs it’s going to be all round the village that I have someone staying, and then I’ll be the one to need a thingamabob – bromide for my tea.’

  ‘Come here, and let me calm you.’

  ‘What you have in mind, Joe Huggett, is far from calming. Besides, have you seen the time? You must be on your way, soldier boy, on your way back to your barracks, while I must to my early potatoes. As it is, since you arrived at midnight you have only ten hours left before your pass runs out and your mufti turns back to khaki.’

  It was all too true, and Joe, passionate though he was about his gypsy Jean, now realised that he must start for the station. As he dressed, he only hoped that no one in the village would tell his parents that he had been back on a twenty-four-hour pass – that really would mean trouble.

  The party at Longbridge Farm had gone with a swing, so much so that for a short time even Guy forgot that he was meant to be keeping his eyes and ears out for George and the Bros at Operation Z, and found himself, in post-influenza form, as horridly witty as ever.

  Aurelia, however, had taken her role as his ‘eyes and ears’ very seriously indeed. She had hovered with the canapés, she had listened as she poured wine, and she had sat up that night noting everything down in a small notebook, which she put under her pillow.

  The following morning, as she slipped the same precious notebook into her handbag, she realised she was faced with a problem: how to get the information she had gathered to her new boss. Would she be able to give it to him before he went back to London? Should she telephone Clive Montfort and ask him what to do? Aurelia had always known that she was not over-imaginative, but finally it seemed to her that she would have to do the last, making some silly excuse to Jessica Valentyne, so that she could use the telephone. But then someone might be listening in. In other words, in the language of the movies – she might ‘blow her cover’.

  ‘Just going for a walk. Shan’t be long,’ she told Freddie, who, busy helping Jessica, hardly heard her.

  Aurelia started to hurry towards the village, towards the telephone box, the change in her handbag at the ready, her notebook the same. As soon as the telephone was picked up the other end, she heard, not Clive Montfort’s voice, as she had assumed that she would, but the beautiful rounded baritone of Guy Athlone himself. For the second before she announced herself she felt quite dizzy, but then she pulled herself together. She would be no use to him if she went all silly.

  ‘Come round at once,’ he said, crisp as ever.

  ‘I have no transport.’

  ‘I will send Clive for you . . .’

  Freddie stared at the motor car coming up the drive.

  ‘Golly, Aunt Jessica, look who’s coming up the drive!’

  Jessica took her glasses off the top of her head, and stared out at the drive beyond the window, while at the same time flapping her hand at the dachshunds, who were running around them both, barking excitedly.

  ‘Not Clive again, is it?’ she asked in a deliberately vague voice.

  ‘Yes, it is, and look, Aurelia’s getting in beside him . . .’

  Freddie turned round and stared, but not at Aunt Jessica, at Daisy, who raised her eyebrows as far as they would go, which was really quite far since she had a good broad forehead. Neither of them needed reminding of the night before, of the fact that Aurelia had said that Guy Athlone had made a pass at her. They had joked that he was having her washed and brought to his tent, but the truth was that she really actually might be having to, as it were, go to his tent. Or she might even be about to go there willingly.

  ‘I really think she might have come and told us where she was going,’ Freddie said, in an effort to prompt her aunt to do something to save her friend from a fate worse than death.

  ‘Oh, no, I hardly think so,’ Jessica murmured, turning away. ‘Clive is entirely to be trusted, as is Guy. No, no – it is perfectly in order for him to come and pick her up. I daresay he was passing by our gates, anyway. Besides, Relia told me that she had left her face compact behind, or was it her cigarette case? At any rate, now I come to think of it – so much on my mind, you know – they already told me they were coming to collect her. Longbridge Farm telephoned earlier. Yes, I seem to remember that is what happened.’

  This at least was true. Jessica had been telephoned by Guy Athlone, not only that, but she had perfectly understood the need for Aurelia to return to the farm, that it was utterly necessary, and of course it was also unspoken that Jessica’s discretion was guaranteed. It was not her business to question why Guy needed to have one of his ‘little talks’ with
Aurelia, nor would she ever question anything that Guy asked of her. He and Jessica had been working away since the late twenties trying to prevent the war that was now all too inevitable. And as for fearing for Aurelia’s virtue, everyone knew that Guy was currently having a raging affair – she paused, wondering to herself why affairs were always ‘raging’ – yes, it was the talk of London that he had started having an affair with his leading lady Gloria Martine, having ditched a society beauty by the name of Desirée Hamilton. And Gloria was a creature of such stunning looks that dear little Aurelia of the wispy Pre-Raphaelite locks would not stand a cat’s chance of even attracting his momentary interest. Guy Athlone had exquisite taste, and when it came to women he had always taken care to love the best. He chose from the top drawer, or nothing.

  Of course Aurelia knew none of this, she merely felt important, excited, and naturally quite passionate about what she now saw as The Cause. She had wanted to devote herself to Guy Athlone, and now she could. From this moment on, her life would be quite simple. She would do whatever he wanted, spy on whoever he wanted, pose as a waitress, or a hat-check girl, cloakroom attendant, anything. She was in love for the first time, and she knew it, but more than that she was needed. After a childhood and youth spent alone in flats and houses, in an endless succession of rooms empty of everyone except herself while her parents socialised all over Europe, she was now a person in her own right, not just ‘the Smith-Jones gel’ left at school by her parents, always waiting for someone else to take her out for the day, befriended by the servants at home, but needed and loved by no one.

  ‘You have done very well.’

  Guy’s expression was serious. From what she had been able to tell him of overheard remarks, this slip of a girl had done very well indeed, but something stirred in his mind – her name was ringing the wrong kind of bells.

  ‘Miss Smith-Jones – I am going to have to cross-examine you now, not on behalf of the government, but on behalf of the private organisation to whom I supply information. You must understand that the name over the door is mine, and so if you let me down, it will be very, very serious indeed. The organisation has underground connections all over Europe and America, and so serious are these that if you let me down it might have pretty vile consequences for both of us, not to mention Clive out there.’