The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  Jean gasped. The sound seemed to ring through the kitchen, and Branscombe and Alec found themselves standing in a little ring around the old kitchen chair as Freddie, now changed, bolted back down to the kitchen.

  ‘Oh God, Jean, you’ve only started!’ Freddie stated, rather too obviously for everyone else present. She threw back her long plait of brown hair, and stared down at Jean, trying to suppress an overwhelming urge to shout at her, ‘You can’t have it now! Not when I have just heard about Aunt Jessie and Blossom. You can’t start it now, it’s just not – fair.’

  But when was life fair, and why should it be fair to her?

  She leaned forward, and taking the tea towel, she carefully wiped Jean’s forehead with it, then went to the kitchen tap and wrung it through with fresh cold water.

  ‘Don’t worry, kid,’ she said, suddenly putting on a perfectly terrible American accent. ‘We’ll get through this together, see if we don’t.’

  Jean looked up at her and tried to smile.

  ‘No need to take me to hospital just yet, eh?’

  Freddie shook her head, placing careful hands on Jean’s stomach.

  ‘Well, love,’ she said, now giving a passable imitation of one of the ward sisters. ‘If it was me, I think I’d get my skates on! Come on, chuck! No harm done to get you to the hospital, and then if things are not too busy, they can give you the once-over, and if things are just how they should be, send you right home with us!’

  The truth was that Freddie was using different voices simply to hide the fact that she was petrified. She had stood by, helping to deliver a number of evacuee mothers, poor souls who had been sent from one hospital to another, until they finally ended up at Wychford, for want of anywhere else to go. Alone and terrified, the poor young women had always been so far from home that there was never anyone to visit them, or indeed take any interest in them, or their babies. Each time the babies she had attended had arrived normally, so normally that she could now feel, from placing tender hands on Jean’s stomach, that her baby was by no means the right way up. Little that she knew of childbirth, she did at least know that feet first was not a way to arrive in this world.

  Freddie knew she could deliver a baby normally, she also knew she was not capable of coping with a breech birth. She had heard that obstetricians, even very capable nurses, had managed to turn babies, but that once the mother’s water was broken, it was impossible.

  ‘Come on, kid!’ Freddie smiled. ‘Time for us to get into the car and make for Wychford and the hospital.’

  ‘Just put me in a cow byre, I can have it in the straw,’ Jean said, protesting as Freddie and Branscombe pulled her to her feet.

  Branscombe turned to Alec and muttered, ‘Fetch a spade, a blanket, a bottle of water, and a bottle of brandy, and bring them to the car.’

  The car. That was all they had now. One car, one set of tyres, one set of brakes, one can of petrol left, until Monday. One can was enough until Monday, enough to get them to the hospital. Branscombe’s mouth tightened as he thought of all the ruddy receptacles, all the Kilner jars, and God alone knew what, that he had filled with wretched petrol, and how it had all come in so useful, and yet, now, when he really needed it, he had only one can left.

  If one thing happened to stop them on their journey, would the car start up again? What if the brakes gave? Oh, shut up, he told himself sharply, as he helped to wrap Miss Jean in a large pink woollen blanket. Shut up and don’t trouble trouble until trouble troubles you, see? He had got through the Great War, he was going to get through to the hospital, and if the baby insisted on arriving – well, Miss Freddie was a nurse, wasn’t she? Except. He glanced over at Miss Freddie. Except Miss Freddie had just had the most dreadful shock, well, they all had – but there was something else about that pretty face with its tiny rounded chin, and its bright, albeit at that moment reddened, eyes that gave him cause to worry. Miss Freddie and he, well, they had developed a kind of telepathy, which happened with troops in the trenches, with cooks in a kitchen, and with two people trying to cope with a large house, and a great many and very varied sets of personalities, all with their own different demands. This meant that he and Miss Freddie could look at each other and know, without speaking, what the other was thinking. It was just a fact. Now the fact was that Miss Freddie was not looking at him, so he knew that she did not want him to know something, that she was hiding something. Branscombe’s heart sank. Heaven only knew what it was, but he had the feeling that all was not well with Miss Jean.

  The car made its careful way, Branscombe driving, Alec sitting up beside him through the narrow country roads. Leaving Twistleton was not as easy as it used to be. Now they were stopped by guards, and had to show their identity cards.

  ‘Jean’s left hers behind!’

  ‘Can’t let you through, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I can vouch for her. I’ve lived here all my life,’ Freddie protested from the back of the car.

  ‘No, sorry, miss, rules is rules.’ The snow was piling on top of the guard’s cap as he peered through the window at Branscombe.

  Branscombe stared up at him, infuriated, and then he pushed the car door open, careful to keep the engine running, and stood up outside. Pointing at the back seat he said, trying to control his temper, ‘That girl in the back is about to have a baby. Now, do you want to deliver it, or do you want the hospital to deliver it?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, so sorry. Of course.’

  The soldier waved them through, looking appalled.

  ‘Identity cards! They’ll be asking for them for unborn babies soon, they will. They’ll be asking for them for unborn babies.’

  Jean gasped again, this time clinging to Freddie, her hands digging into Freddie’s clothes, holding them tightly.

  ‘Oh God, oh God!’

  ‘Don’t worry, kid, we’ll be there soon.’

  Alec glanced at Branscombe, who was driving as fast as he dared.

  They both knew that ‘soon’ was a little bit optimistic. Alec also knew from Branscombe’s expression that he would probably rather be back in the trenches than driving a young woman in childbirth through a snowstorm to a hospital that suddenly seemed to all of them to be a thousand miles away.

  Jean gave another gasp, and then another, and then the gasp seemed to be turning more to a scream, and Alec wished to God he could get out of the car and run off, as he had done when his mother was having his brothers. But he couldn’t.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to get through, not without you walking in front and digging a path for us, Alec,’ Branscombe muttered.

  In the back, Jean looked up through pain-filled eyes at Freddie.

  ‘Will you look after my baby for me, Freddie?’ she asked in a pitiful voice. ‘Will you look after him?’

  Freddie shook her head.

  ‘No, I will not,’ she said in firm tones, as Branscombe stopped the car to let Alec get out and fetch the spade from the boot to clear the deepening snow. ‘No, I will not: you’re its mother, his mother, or her mother. You will look after him or her, not me.’ Freddie wiped Jean’s sweat-filled forehead tenderly.

  Jean shook her head.

  ‘No, Freddie, I shan’t be here. I know it. I dreamed last night I saw him christened, and you were holding him, not me. I wasn’t there! I wasn’t there!’

  Now Freddie found herself wiping Jean’s eyes.

  ‘Hush, hush, it was only a dream,’ she said, seeking to reassure her, but even as she did her blood was running colder than the snow outside the windows, and the sound of Alec’s spade scraping at the snow on the road in front of the car seemed not optimistic, but sinister.

  The sight of German uniforms was somehow so shocking that Aurelia, dressed as Mademoiselle Yolande Marie Charbonne, and smilingly surrendering her papers to be examined, thought for one moment she was going to disgrace herself and faint. Happily she had, even though she said so herself, very pretty legs, and the guards were so busy appreciating her very pretty legs that she was
able to control her desire to run off, and continue on her way, slowly and gracefully – Miss Valentyne would be proud of her – to the inn where she would be staying until such time as her contact decided to fetch up there.

  The second sight that nearly caused her to faint again was the food at the inn – oh, and the smells! Coming from wartime Britain, those chips, that steak, that sauce! But again, to seize on the food and scoff it would be appalling. It would mean that she was unnecessarily hungry, and as she was meant to be staying with her uncle, a Normandy farmer who kept a good table, and was known to be married to a splendid cook, someone might notice her unhealthily large appetite and report it as being sinister. So, with her tummy rumbling to beat the band, she sat up at the bar, and ordered a Cassis, and read the paper that her ‘uncle’ had provided her with, and waited for her contact.

  It was actually quite a simple job, she told herself for the thousandth time. She simply had to take the relevant information provided in yet another newspaper, exchange it for the newspaper she had been given – she hoped to God that her contact would have the same newspaper, with, more importantly, the same date on it, or else she would be well and truly scuppered, and that comforting little pill in her inside pocket would be in her mouth before she could say – she turned as someone arrived at her shoulder.

  ‘Bonjour,’ the voice said in perfect, educated French. ‘Is this seat taken?’

  Aurelia had not been told who to expect, not the name, nor the sex of her contact – in case of being captured and tortured. All she knew was how to answer the relevant questions.

  ‘No, this seat is not taken,’ Aurelia answered in her sturdy country accent. ‘But I daresay it will be soon, given that the food and wine in this auberge is so good!’

  She smiled, and her contact smiled back at her, and, careful not to look at each other, she – because it was a she – slipped on to the seat beside Aurelia.

  The barman smiled at the two pretty girls seated opposite him.

  ‘It is my lucky day, huh?’ he asked, as the room started to fill up with hungry German soldiers, accompanied by some of their French girlfriends, local lasses – shame on them – determined on fraternising, doubtless for the sake of the men’s wallets. ‘Not one, but two pretty girls.’

  Aurelia smiled, and sipped her drink, which was, all of a sudden, all too necessary, for she found that her mouth had gone so dry her tongue might have been made of sandpaper.

  ‘There is almost too much choice on the menu, do you not find?’

  This was the second phrase arrived at, less than originally, by their people.

  Aurelia nodded, folding her newspaper, so that it sat neatly beside the other newspaper. The two were identical, she was quick to note.

  ‘I do find there is too much choice, but as it happens, I must be careful. I have a condition that limits my choice to fish, which happily is well represented.’

  Aurelia had actually protested at this line because, as she kept saying to the chaps instructing her, ‘Supposing there’s no fish?’

  But the chaps had just laughed and said that the sea would have to dry up for there to be no fish on the menu in an auberge near the French coast.

  ‘I am luckier, I can eat steak, and some of Monsieur’s wonderful chips.’

  Aurelia nodded.

  ‘That is good.’

  They had got through the ridiculous dialogue all right, but happily neither young woman had looked at each other, because if they had, Aurelia was quite sure that she and Laura would have had to have been carried out, they would have laughed so much. Their cover would have been blown, and everything would have been finished, especially them.

  Happily, their orders were taken, and the newspapers were exchanged with a deftness that, in less dangerous circumstances, would have made them feel proud, and they were able to start talking in the kind of code that only girls who know each other very well can employ.

  ‘How come you are here, too?’ Aurelia asked.

  ‘Oh, I live just up the coast, now. Besides, my family are round here and I would like to see them. It is some time since I saw my father.’

  ‘Of course. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘No, I do not know his whereabouts at present. My father and his wife are holidaying, so they would not tell me. They have been holidaying for some time.’

  Aurelia lowered her fork into the fish that had just arrived. So difficult not to eat it too quickly. Oh, and the smell of the chips! But even her overpowering, if stifled, greed was losing out to the memory of Laura’s father being taken off to be – as her Normandy host had told her in an understandably gleeful tone – shot. His body had been fed to the pigs – apparently a very efficient way of disposing of double agents who had had a hand in some nasty reprisals.

  ‘I think many of the people holidaying here have now gone back to Paris.’

  Laura looked at Aurelia, her own fork poised.

  ‘Yes, perhaps they have,’ she agreed. ‘But since I am here to enjoy my own holiday in the Normandy countryside, it does not really matter if I do not see my father for a little while.’

  Aurelia sighed inwardly, with relief, and at the same time her thoughts raced back to SOE or whoever had sent Laura to France. Why in God’s name did they think it was all right to start using FANYs? Laura was a FANY, she did not work for what was euphemistically always known as the ‘War Office’ or the ‘Foreign Office’. Then she remembered how many of those little pegs had been taken off the map of France, and she realised that, like the aeroplanes, like the food, like the petrol, the clothing, everything – they must be running short of agents, too. They must just be grabbing who they could, or whoever was mad enough to volunteer, and knowing Laura, with her father and stepmother still missing somewhere in France, she would not have stepped forward, but jumped forward, because that was Laura.

  Freddie sat slumped on a bench outside the delivery room. All she could hear was Jean’s voice, and her own voice, insisting that Jean would live.

  But Jean had been right, and her dream had been correct, she had died, and doubtless Freddie would be holding the little boy at the christening. As the corridors filled up with people covered in dust and blood, luckless people fleeing from the latest bombing raid, Freddie sat on, wondering dully about the reality of dreams.

  Could someone dream of something that then took place? She shook herself mentally, and then shook herself physically.

  ‘Can you take the baby on, Nurse Valentyne?’ It was the friendly northern sister. ‘The gentlemen over there have both indicated that it was the wish of his poor mother.’

  Freddie shook her head, and then, seeing the look of astonishment in Sister’s eyes, she realised she was shaking her head instead of nodding, which was what she was really meant to do.

  ‘Yes, yes, whatever you wish. Yes, his mother did wish it,’ she agreed. ‘We can take him back to the Hall.’

  ‘He’s a good weight, love, a good big bouncing boy.’

  Freddie stood up, and then as she suddenly swayed, Sister caught her, and put her own arm around Freddie’s shoulders.

  ‘Come on, love, I’ll make you a cup of tea, and after that we can get on with everything. It’s been a bad night, and likely to get worse, but we both deserve a few minutes out before going back to the fray. No point in getting in a worse condition than your patients, I always say.’

  The black tea was indeed comforting, so comforting that it gave Freddie the strength to say, ‘Could we have saved her, Sister Andrews?’

  Sister shook her head.

  ‘No, love, not the most experienced obstetrician could have saved the poor girl. She haemorrhaged. It sometimes happens in childbirth, and once it does, there is nothing to be done. Had she been here when she first went into labour, maybe we could have prevented it happening, but as it was, by the time she arrived, as you know, it was all we could do to save the little fella, let alone his mum.’

  Sister walked towards Freddie, who had turned away, her lip
far from stiff.

  ‘Here, give you a quick hug, and then back to our duties, eh?’

  Freddie found herself clutching this suddenly maternal figure. She had never been hugged before, let alone by anyone older. It had just not been what had happened when she was growing up.

  She pulled away from her.

  ‘Don’t be too nice to me, Sister, or I’ll be useless to you!’ Freddie protested, wiping her eyes.

  They both laughed a little hysterically, and then, straightening their aprons and their caps, they went back into the fray.

  Chapter Eleven

  Gervaise stared at his goddaughter.

  ‘I have no idea, Daisy, none at all, and no – I can’t pull strings for you, truly I can’t.’

  Daisy looked, and felt, miserable.

  ‘It’s just that, you know – we were all at Twistleton Court together, absolute friends; and nothing has been heard about her, or from her, for such a long time. Not for nine months, as a matter of fact.’

  Gervaise wanted to say ‘I have rather more important things to do than help you find out about one of your finishing-school friends’ but he didn’t. Instead he plumped for looking sympathetic, which he didn’t feel.

  ‘All I can do is, if, or when, I hear something of interest from France, I will contact you at once.’

  Daisy nodded. She knew Gervaise could not wait for her to skidaddle out of there, and so, rather than hang about, she did just that, bolting back down to her basement flat, and shutting the door behind her. She had to get back to the war, must get back to the war, but she had promised Aurelia at least to ask Gervaise – who knew everyone, but everyone in government – to see if it was known what had happened to Laura Hambleton. For, despite being very much at the centre of certain things, Aurelia could find out nothing, or perhaps because of being at the centre of things, she was not telling?