The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  He nodded at Clive, who was busying himself in the office outside, one ear to the studio, one ear to the door in the eaves.

  ‘The members of this private organisation do not take an oath, although the fact that I do know you socially is entirely natural, of course. But in future if we meet in London, we will acknowledge each other in a very flippant or cursory manner, you understand, making a joke of your helping me from time to time, that sort of thing.’

  Aurelia nodded, thrilling to the whole idea that her life was becoming more and more like the movies.

  ‘I understand, Mr Athlone. And I will do everything you ask, and more.’

  Oh dear! Guy looked at her with sudden compassion. She was like every other actress that he met at cocktail parties. He just hoped that she would not start telling him how dedicated she was, for if there was one thing he dreaded more than sin itself, it was a dedicated actress. And then it came to him, in a really quite blinding flash. Of course! Smith-Jones! The name was now very clear to him, he could even see the relevant file at the office, see George going through all the society names, murmuring them, nodding, turning to the next file, both of them discussing the people concerned, and studying their photographs, which inevitably made them all look both mad and bad, and certainly not people that you would ever want to know.

  ‘So.’ Guy paused. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Miss Smith-Jones, and let’s have a little talk, “of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages—”’

  She finished the line for him and continued the verse, quite cheerfully, as they both sat down, and Guy smiled at her with sudden appreciation. He always did like people who knew their Alice in Wonderland. He looked dreamily past Aurelia, thinking of his happy childhood days, bicycling to get his comic and a banana chew from the village shop, lying in the long grass beside the stream immersed in the antics of his favourite cartoon heroes. After a short pause, he opened up again, on a completely different literary tack.

  ‘The Mole had been working very hard all the morning . . .’

  He paused, looking at Aurelia, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Spring-cleaning his little home,’ she continued, realising he was waiting. ‘First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs . . .’

  Guy appreciated people who knew their Wind in the Willows off by heart even more than those who knew their Alice in Wonderland.

  ‘I think we are going to get on very well indeed, Miss Smith-Jones, truly I do.’

  Aurelia smiled without realising that her smile was stunning, and that to his astonishment it made Guy’s heart turn over several times, because it was so heartbreaking in its innocent delight. It was the sun coming up in the morning in his garden. It was the light bouncing off the windscreen of his sports car as he drove back to Longbridge Farm. It was the warmth of someone’s arms, someone whom he had loved so completely as a young man, and who had loved him – and who had died.

  ‘I will do anything to help you, Mr Athlone, and your organisation. Do you wish me to sign anything?’

  Guy shook his head. No, that was not necessary, the Bros chose their people with great care. They would trust Guy’s judgement.

  After a pause Guy continued.

  ‘I wonder if you would do anything for me and the organisation. I mean, when you say anything, what would you mean by that? Would you mean anything at all?’

  ‘Of course!’ Aurelia sat forward to better emphasise her dedication. ‘Anything at all.’

  Guy lit a cigarette.

  ‘Very well.’ He blew out some smoke, and removed a small piece of stray tobacco from his lip, because he had misplaced his holder. ‘Will you therefore report to me everything that you know about your parents, their friends, and their activities?’

  Aurelia’s expression changed to shock. She loved her parents. They might be a bit too social, but she loved them, nevertheless. She loved them both as a dutiful daughter, and as an only child. She loved them in spite of the fact that they treated her as something to be taken care of by someone else, a bit like a favourite dog which, however lovable, will willy-nilly be thrown into kennels at the first opportunity.

  ‘I don’t think my parents are Hitler-lovers, Mr Athlone,’ she said, at last. ‘Truly, I don’t. They just socialise so much that they probably know lots of pro-Hitler people, but . . .’ her eyes widened as her resolve hardened, ‘if that is what you want, of course I will do whatever is necessary.’

  ‘Ah, there you are, Aurelia darling.’

  Hotty Smith-Jones stood in the door of her daughter’s bedroom, all ready to go out to a cocktail party. As always, she looked stunning. Jewelled cocktail hat wrapped around her face, girlish figure hiding behind a silk evening jacket, the edge of which was decorated by garlands of tiny roses. The effect was adorable, and Hotty knew it. But then that was what Hotty Smith-Jones was all about. She was about presenting a picture that everyone, but everyone would want to see.

  ‘You look stunning, Mummy, truly you do.’

  Aurelia’s mouth felt dry. For some reason, although they were not close, she was always sure that her mother could read her thoughts.

  ‘I hardly think I look stunning, darling. I think you must be exaggerating, but I must say I am pleased with this jacket. It makes just the right statement for autumn, don’t you think?’

  Aurelia had never thought of autumn as needing a statement.

  ‘We will not be very late, Aurelia. Possibly back about midnight, but don’t wait up for us, will you? We have given the maids the night off. Help yourself to something from the larder, won’t you, darling? But not the smoked salmon, please, that is for tomorrow’s luncheon.’ She paused. ‘One other thing, sweetie. How long will you be with us, do you think, before you have to return to Twistleton?’

  ‘I will probably be returning tomorrow,’ Aurelia told her, but Hotty’s eyes had already drifted to the clock on the mantelpiece.

  For a second Aurelia wished that her mother was just a little more of an actress, a little better at pretending that she might miss Aurelia from her life, but after she left, drifting off in a cloud of expensive scent, Aurelia realised that it made it a great deal easier for her that Hotty wasn’t good at pretending, that really it was only incumbent on Aurelia to do the acting. She waited, impatiently, until she heard her parents leave the house, heard the great heavy mahogany door swing shut, before opening it again, and listening to their chatter as they walked to their motor car. Then she shut the door once more, and turned back, with every intention of rifling through their belongings.

  She had hardly started to go through the small bureau in her mother’s dressing room when she heard a key in the front door again. Terrified, she turned round, expecting her mother was returning for something she had forgotten. She bolted out of the alien room, and into the corridor outside. But the person she confronted was someone so surprising that she found herself covering her own mouth so as not to yell out, even as he covered his lips with two fingers to indicate silence.

  ‘Hush!’ he whispered. ‘Whisper who dares. Mummy and Daddy might still be downstairs.’

  There was no doubt about it, Freddie was fast losing interest in the navy. Perhaps it was all the talk of gassing, and all the underlying fear that everyone was feeling, but all of a sudden it seemed wrong for her to go into either or any of the armed services.

  ‘It’s the fact that they are called the armed services,’ she told Jessica, half-apologetically. ‘I really think, much as I hate Hitler, I couldn’t be responsible for killing someone else, at least not directly.’

  Jessica looked unsurprised, which actually surprised Freddie.

  ‘Well, dearest, I would say that is hardly a shock, coming as it does from you. So you want to nurse, I daresay.’

  Jessica turned from counting the stores in the cupboard under the kitchen stairs.

  ‘How do you know that’s what I want?’

  Jessica stuck her pencil in her ear, like old Budgie at Twistleton Meads Station when he
was busy collecting tickets. She smiled, and sighed humorously.

  ‘Who was it I seem to remember had an animal hospital in the stables round the back of here? Who was it who mended an owl’s leg? And who was visited by that same owl for weeks afterwards, if not months, if not years? Who found a pair of old cricket gloves and nursed the old ram that bit everyone else? Not Blossom, and certainly not me. No, I think if my memory serves me right, that it was someone called Freddie Valentyne.’ Jessica smiled, and walked up the back stairs to the main part of the house, Freddie following her. ‘Come on, let’s go to the library and have a sherry.’

  Going to the library and having a sherry, despite its being only eleven o’clock in the morning, was Jessica’s way of telling Freddie that as far as nursing was concerned, she had her blessing, and they both knew it.

  ‘Are you quite sure, now?’ Jessica handed Freddie a beautiful old engraved glass, the last of a set. It was a great compliment.

  ‘Yes, quite sure. It came to me when I was trying to go to sleep last night that I actually am not the right material to be in a regiment, or in the navy, and I certainly wouldn’t want to fly an aeroplane. I want to make people better, not worse, no matter what their nationality. Does that seem frightfully unpatriotic, and not at all Twistleton?’

  ‘It seems frightfully Freddie Valentyne, and that is frightfully all right with me,’ Jessica told her, smiling, and she raised her own sherry glass. ‘Good luck, Freddie dearest. Now, where shall we start? You have plans, haven’t you?’

  Of course Freddie had plans. She had been up in the night looking up all sorts of things, making her way from the stable yard where they were all still housed, back to the library, where she had found what she wanted.

  ‘I thought I might start by going to help out at the children’s hospital at Bramsfield.’

  ‘Good idea. VAD stuff needed there, I am sure, but of course you do know that the Hall will probably be turned back to its Great War duties, as soon as the balloon goes up? Nursing wounded officers is quite a skill.’

  ‘I don’t really want to go to the Hall, not after what has happened to Daisy.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Once more the unspoken silence between the Hall and the Court hovered in the air, and Freddie, not knowing what to say to add to what she had already said, was only too glad to escape in order to fetch Aurelia from Twistleton Meads Station.

  The train was on time. Budgie blew his whistle, and the little station with its ladies’ waiting room, and its flower-filled boxes, soon bustled with passengers.

  ‘This place is getting more like Piccadilly Circus every day,’ Budgie announced to no one in particular, as he took the sixth and last ticket of the evening.

  ‘How was London, then?’ Freddie asked, and then regretted asking such a banal question, for Aurelia was looking so pale and anxious. It was obvious that it could not have been much fun.

  ‘London was full of people either trying to ignore the growing crisis in Europe, or people determined on leaving it as soon as perfectly possible,’ Aurelia announced, after a considered pause.

  ‘And which have you become?’

  ‘I have become the second.’ She sighed. ‘Your aunt has been ever so kind, saying that I may stay at the Court for a few more days.’

  Freddie frowned. It was all very strange. Jessica had less help than ever, everything was in quite a flux, and yet here she was happily asking Aurelia down to the Court, as if nothing else was going on and as if Blossom was still in the kitchen. Surely Aurelia, who quite evidently still had a crush on Guy Athlone, should be encouraged to stay as far away as possible from their neck of the woods? Whatever was the truth of the matter, it would have to wait until after they had finished trying to help Jessica and Branscombe cook supper, which in the absence of the redoubtable Blossom was an interesting experience if ever there was one – the result being even more curious.

  ‘The thing is, Relia, I have decided to take up nursing, and I was wondering if you would like to, as well?’

  It was late evening, and they were standing by the gate to the field at the back of the house, and staring up in awe at the night sky above them, as they always used to do when they first met. The light from their torches showed up the colours in the frost, a myriad of sparkling colours, and their breath as they spoke was making pretty little patterns in the air, and somehow the situation in Czechoslovakia, and the coming war, seemed, momentarily at least, as frozen as the ground.

  ‘I am sure you will make a wonderful nurse, Freddie, you were always the first to rush to the first-aid box when any of us were hurt. Remember when Daisy pushed me in the stream, and I broke my wrist? You knew just what to do.’

  Freddie threw her long plait of brown hair over her back, and frowned up at the sky. Everyone seemed to be remembering her healing ways a great deal better than she did herself.

  ‘I just don’t want to kill anybody, not even a German. Someone else’s son, maybe someone who didn’t want to fight a war any more than we did. I couldn’t do it, I suddenly realised, just couldn’t.’

  ‘And I couldn’t go in for nursing, I’m afraid,’ Aurelia told her sadly. ‘I faint at the sight of blood. Besides, I always think if only people would try harder they could get better in a minute. I’ve no patience with sick people – as a matter of fact, I only ever want to shake them!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘I already know what I will do, Freddie.’

  Aurelia’s tone was very serious.

  ‘Oh well, then, that’s all right.’ Freddie dropped her gaze from the night sky and stared at Aurelia. ‘Hang on, I’ve suddenly twigged. There’s a war coming on, you’re going to marry Guy Athlone, aren’t you?’

  Aurelia shook her head.

  ‘No, I shall never marry Mr Athlone, Freddie. No, I am not his type. No, but I am going to work for him. I shall be going from here to Longbridge Farm, and I will be put up in a flat above the garage, where I will help him with his work, part-secretary, part-dogsbody.’

  ‘But you can’t even type.’

  ‘There won’t be much typing,’ Aurelia told her with absolute truth. ‘But quite a lot of other things. Of course I shan’t always be at Longbridge, some of my time will be spent in London until the outbreak of war, after which I probably shall be there far more.’ She, too, dropped her gaze from the sky. ‘The thing is, I can’t go back home to my parents. It’s just not possible.’

  Freddie understood from her tone that it was not possible for her to say another word on the subject and, what was more, she didn’t want to.

  ‘I see. So why did you come here first?’

  Aurelia couldn’t say. She couldn’t explain that she had come down to the Court bringing information to Jessica, who had known Hotty very well before she married, so she could be the first to scrutinise and decode the information that Aurelia had brought to her.

  Not that an actual code had been used. It was more a social code, its source being, of course, Hotty’s diary, littered with the names of pro-Nazi friends, and notes of meetings that they had all attended in each other’s country houses. It had been most unpleasant having to copy it all out – she had felt as if she was thieving from her mother – but it had also been a turning point. Never again would she be able to live at home, knowing what she did, realising just how many people known to her parents had helped the Nazi cause.

  It was Guy, who had let himself into the house only minutes after her parents had left for the evening. Of course, his sudden appearance had given Aurelia the fright to end all frights. So much so, that after stopping herself from screaming when she found him in the corridor outside her mother’s room, she had then had the most terrible attack of giggles.

  ‘Nerves, Miss Smith-Jones, pure and not very simple. Now, do remind me to make sure that you are supplied with a skeleton key like this one—’

  He had fetched her a glass of water and told her to pull herself together, after
which he had shown her the professional way to rifle through everything in the flat, and taught her how to copy out the most crucial details from her parents’ diaries and address books. Finally, he had left the place as beautifully tidy as ever, slipping out of the flat again with not a hair out of place.

  ‘Your aunt is so kind,’ Aurelia told Freddie once more, out of the blue, which, following on Freddie’s question, was meant to distract her. ‘She puts us all up without a murmur, as if we were all still at finishing school here. Ah, here’s Daisy, back from her ARP meeting and bristling with indignation as usual, I daresay.’

  It was a great relief to find Daisy making her way towards them.

  ‘Hardly a person in the village is willing to go on guard duty when the time comes. I truly think they are imagining that someone from the Hall or the Court can be left to do it, and there’s no need for them, they have other fish to fry.’

  ‘Perhaps if they had something to defend themselves on duty with, besides broom handles and frying pans, they would understand the necessity a little better?’

  But Freddie’s light sarcasm was lost on Daisy, who in her turn was staring up at the night sky, wondering if she would ever find herself flying through the dark, even above the stars, or past the moon? She was due to make her first solo flight the following morning, but when the day dawned there was such low cloud and heavy rain that she could do nothing but help Jessica and Freddie, for it had been decided that the front hall of the Court should become a first-aid post.

  ‘So all that rolling of bandages will not have been for nothing,’ Daisy commented as Jessica went out to see Aurelia off to Longbridge Farm.

  ‘It certainly will not,’ Freddie told her, giving the heap of bandages an approving look. ‘However, let’s hope that we still might not have cause to use them, shall we? Not that I’m an appeaser, you understand, I just can’t look forward to seeing all these bandages being used. Oh, good, the rain’s stopped: best if we go and help Branscombe with some double-digging.’