‘Anyway, I stayed, for there was nowhere else to go. Not long after, Sally too was looking around for somewhere else to live.
‘That began one morning with the arrival of Sally’s parents, Geneviève in a good pre-war suit, Harry looking worn out. I could see there was going to be trouble so I left the sitting room and went into the kitchen where I started to read the paper. Sally, with a gloomy face, followed me in to make some tea. “Storm clouds overhead,” she said, picking up the tray. Later, I could hear voices in the living room.
‘“Sally. Something really must be done,” her father said.
‘Then Geneviève. “It’s too much, now Nanny’s left, with all the shortages. Only an unpleasant girl from the village—”
‘Then came Harry Jackson-Bowles’s rumble again. “Too much for your mother,” and Genevieve’s, “Gisela’s out of hand.”
‘Sally said something about the bombing and was rapidly interrupted by her mother more loudly. “Sally, we’ve done our best, but this can’t go on for ever. What about the child’s father? Can’t he do anything? You’ve got to think of her future.”
‘Sally seemed to be pleading for time. I heard Geneviève say, “No, no, Sally. This must be settled now. What are you going to do?”
‘Then her father’s voice and then Sally’s, rising, “I can’t come home.”
‘Feet came upstairs, Briggs’s step, which went past the kitchen door. The living-room door opened, and I heard Sally’s father’s voice, which broke off. Sally must have pleaded, silently, with Briggs, for somehow he was invited to dinner at the Connaught, where the Jackson-Bowleses were staying, to serve as the buffer between them and Sally, I suppose.
‘He came in later in the evening, took off his hat and neatly put his gloves in it. “My God, Bruno,” he exclaimed, “Geneviève Jackson-Bowles is a bitch of the first water. I really can’t understand why Sally puts up with it. How sweetly Geneviève denigrates her. ‘Poor Clothilde,’” he mimicked, “‘she’s so ill. Sally wouldn’t care, Mr Briggs. Family means so little to these modern girls, don’t you agree? But, forgive me, I can’t expect you to understand a mother’s feelings when she sees a daughter so.’ What a dreadful woman. I wonder why she doesn’t like Sally?”
‘“You ought to know,” I said. “You dislike her enough yourself.”
‘“I detest her sloppy habits and her sloppy emotions. ‘Theo – the only man I’ve ever really loved,’” he mimicked again, with cruel accuracy. “I can’t bear her stockings in the bathroom, her muddles and messes. Well, I’ve never liked women, you know that, Bruno.”
‘“You’ve never liked anybody. You can’t stand the disorder,” I dared to tell him.
‘He laughed. “The Jackson-Bowleses are determined to get rid of the child,” he told me. “Well, Sally can’t bring it here. Even she sees that. Of course,” he added, “what Sally doesn’t know is that Theo’s on his way back from Washington. They want him for the Balkans. He’s trying to wriggle out of it, but I don’t think he’ll be successful. Poor old Fitzpatrick’s coming from the bright lights to London.” And Briggs laughed again. “Woman trouble. Eleanor Roosevelt took a dislike to him. Curtains for Fitzpatrick. I wonder what Sally’ll make of that?”
‘Well, we all wondered,’ said Bruno.
Chapter 46
Sally was at Vi’s flat in Pimlico. Washing was stretched across a corner of the room, Vi’s bed, neatly made up, was in another corner. Vi was putting carrots and potatoes into an enamel dish.
‘I’m sorry, Sally,’ she was saying, ‘but I can’t see any way. Ted’s patched the roof and the landlord’s let the upstairs flat again to some friends of Ted who got bombed out just last week. It’s a mate of his from the docks, his wife and three kids under six. They’d been bombed out once before. They had to move in with her mum and dad and the wife began to go round the bend – I mean it, sitting on the edge of the bed all day, crying and ignoring the kids. Here they’ve only got two attic rooms, but to her it’s Paradise. You know what it’s like, Sal. There’s nowhere to rent.’
Sally sighed.
‘Look,’ Vi said, ‘They can’t just bring Gisela down here and dump her, like an unwanted dog.’
‘Trot’s had to go down to Folkestone to look after her sister who was a nurse in London, but she’s collapsed under the strain. She’s terribly ill. Mother says she can’t manage and if Gisela doesn’t come here I’ll have to go back to take care of her.’
‘You don’t want to bring her back to the bombing. But going home doesn’t sound too good.’ Vi had her own opinion of Sally’s mother. ‘Can’t you get Sir Peveril to wangle something?’
‘I doubt it.’
Vi put the vegetable stew in the oven and turned on the gas. ‘That’ll have to do for Ted and Jack when they get in. I wish I could’ve got a sausage or two to go with it. Jack’s downstairs with Mrs Brown. Ted’ll be going to pick him up when he gets off shift. I think he’s getting sweet on the woman downstairs, her with the kid and the husband with Monty in North Africa. Her husband hasn’t seen the boy since he was tiny, hasn’t had leave for a year. That’ll be a nice surprise for him, finding his wife in love with another man when he gets back, won’t it?’
‘What are you going to eat, Vi?’ asked Sally.
‘A cup of tea and a fag, as usual,’ said Vi.
‘You’ll cave in,’ Sally said.
‘We can’t all afford to eat out in restaurants,’ Vi told her.
‘What’ve you got?’
‘Two bob, till Cora pays me.’
‘I’ve got a shilling. Let’s go to Lyon’s quickly.’
‘You’re on,’ said Vi.
They hurried out, Vi carrying her flimsy evening-dress in her gas mask case while Sally’s contained a torch and Vi’s make-up and shoes. In the street, there was a strong gust of wind and some leaves blew in their faces. ‘Another winter coming on,’ Vi remarked.
‘Any news from Archie?’ asked Sally, as they turned to the bus stop.
Vi’s boyfriend’s ship had been sunk off Norway en route to Russia and there was no news. ‘It’s so bloody long since I’ve seen him,’ Vi confessed. ‘Of course I want him to be OK, but who’ll come back, eh? The same old Archie? To the same old Vi?’
There was a silence.
Then, across the road, Sally spotted two American uniforms, and Vi, noticing, said, ‘You still haven’t got over that darkie, have you?’
‘There wasn’t much in it,’ Sally told her.
‘No?’ said Vi, sceptical.
‘No,’ Sally said. ‘Are my eyes deceiving me or is that a bus coming?’
‘It must be a mirage.’
Once on the parked bus Vi said, ‘If this is winning, I wonder what losing’s like?’
‘A bloody sight worse,’ Sally said.
Chapter 47
Stretched out in a chair in the flat, with a glass of brandy in his hand, Bruno said, ‘Theo got back just after the Jackson-Bowleses’ visit. Geneviève had been ringing Sally regularly every Sunday morning, early, so as to disturb us all, to ask how Sally’s search for a flat for herself and Gisela was going and Sally, for some reason, did not evade these phone calls. Each Sunday morning we’d hear her saying, “Yes, maman. No, maman. I’ll do as you say, maman.” When she’d put the phone down she’d head for the gin.
‘Then one Sunday she turned round and there was Theo, in the doorway with his suitcase. She launched herself towards him and he embraced her. They went upstairs without a word. Julia, Briggs and Pym were all there, drinking coffee and reading.
‘Julia looked up and said, “Oh, God, not again.”
‘Pym, bare-chested, in a pair of very dirty trousers, asked, “I wonder what our boy’s playing at now?”
‘Briggs just shook his head. “Whatever it is there’ll be an ace up his sleeve as usual.”
‘“And he’ll have his eye on the pot.”
‘“Sally’s got no money,” said Julia. “She’s just borrowed ten bob from me.”
But Pym was right,’ said Bruno. ‘Money was involved. Although we didn’t know it, that was why Theo married Sally.’
Bruno held out his glass for more brandy and Greg leaped to his feet. ‘What?’
‘Yes,’ said Bruno. ‘Theo’s confidence must have gone in Washington. The Menckens threw him over and something shocking must have happened to set Eleanor Roosevelt against him. Well, I suppose in his way Theo loved Sally – and she certainly loved him. And then,’ said Bruno, ‘there was the money.’
‘Well, Bruno,’ Greg said steadily, ‘it might have helped if you’d said earlier that Sally had married, that her name became Fitzpatrick. But when I checked him out he was married to someone else.’
‘That was later.’
‘At least she got her baby’s father on board, just for a time.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Bruno. ‘She didn’t.’ He finished his brandy and said, ‘I’d better go, I think, it’s late.’
Greg looked at him in despair. ‘Bruno, you must be the meanest, most annoying person I have ever met.’
‘I hope so, I hope so,’ said the old man. ‘Help me down the stairs, dear boy.’
Greg assisted him into his coat and down to the street where he flagged down a taxi. ‘I’ll see you after Christmas,’ Bruno said.
Immediately after the meeting with Bruno, Greg visited Somerset House to see if Sally’s death had been recorded under her married name. It hadn’t. But then, he thought, she might have married again after the divorce – if there had been one, but as yet he didn’t even know that.
And now he must wait until after Christmas to hear more.
Chapter 48
Greg and Katherine sped down the motorway, past fields full of freezing fog on either side, then turned off on to a narrow hedge-overhung road. Two miles further on they reached the village of Norfield Fitzcrewe.
On its outskirts stood the traditional enclave of council housing, low red-brick houses with dustbins and bicycles in the front gardens, cars and motorbikes parked outside. Then they entered the old village. There was a green, covered in frost-spiked grass, with a frozen pond and a great chestnut tree. On one side of the green was a church; around it lay old houses, well tended and preserved, a shop, a post office and a pub.
Beside the church they took a road leading through trees for half a mile, then turned up a drive. In front of the house, a low, Georgian building of old red brick, was a half-circle, also of red brick, and there Greg left the car. As he got their luggage from the boot he heard Katherine cry, ‘Mrs Chambers – so glad to see you’re still here.’
He turned round to see her greet a short, plump woman in an overall. He got the bags and followed them in.
‘Would you mind taking them straight up?’ Mrs Chambers asked him. ‘Mr Ledbetter’s put you in your old room, Katherine.’
‘Oh, goody,’ said Katherine, ‘the green room. At the top of the stairs, Greg. We’ll be in the drawing room – that way,’ and she pointed.
Greg struggled upstairs to a long landing with many doors and arched windows at either end. He opened the heavy, varnished door opposite him. He found a bright, spacious room, papered in green, containing a broad double bed with a carved modern headboard. Another door revealed a bathroom in what presumably had once been a dressing room. The windows looked out over the garden, with a line of trees at its end. Inside the room, radiators flung out warmth. Greg, who had suspected that Chapel Manor Farm might be a cold, run-down farmhouse inhabited by an elderly madman, was cheered. He put down the bags and went to meet his host.
In the drawing room Simon Ledbetter sat in a big chair in the long, bright room beside a roaring fire. Beside him stood an electric wheelchair. He was a thin, heavily lined man, with a shock of thick white hair. He wore a blue polo-necked sweater, and brown corduroy trousers covered his skinny legs. Katherine stood at a large window, which overlooked the garden.
Simon raised a hand in greeting. ‘Greg,’ he said, ‘Kate will get you a drink. Lunch will be ready soon.’
Katherine went to a sideboard on which bottles stood on a tray and asked, ‘Whisky, Uncle Simon?’
‘Good to meet you,’ said Greg, crossing the room and shaking hands.
He sat down opposite Simon.
‘It’s good to have you here,’ Simon said to them. ‘You’ve saved me from a long, lonely Christmas. It’ll probably be rather quiet for you as I haven’t arranged anything.’
‘We can go to the pub this evening, then,’ Katherine said.
‘If you don’t mind Julia Wells,’ he said.
‘Is she still after you?’ Katherine asked.
‘I’m afraid so. She seems undeterred at the prospect of marrying a cripple. Can you imagine us, her overweight in a bridal gown, and me in my wheelchair, advancing up the aisle at St Tim’s? What a spectacle. She’s always telling me how lonely I must feel. Of course, she’s usually a bit drunk – been married three times already. You’d think she’d have learned.’ He turned to Greg. ‘Life’s so hectic in the country, one way and another. I often think it would be more peaceful to return to London.’
‘You’d never do that,’ Katherine told him.
‘I suppose not. I’m too comfortable. Potty old Adie Robinson and his wife have moved down here. They’re coming to Christmas lunch. It’s rather a bore but I owe them a meal and you know what it’s like in the country. You have to get on with neighbours,’ he explained to Greg. ‘If you can’t get the company you like you have to like the company you’ve got.’
‘Has his wife still got those sheepdogs?’ Katherine asked.
‘Worse than that. She’s breeding them. They won’t bring them, though. I’ve explained I’m allergic to furry animals. I don’t think she believes me but she has to accept it in case I swell up and choke. They do make me swell up and choke, as it happens, but with rage – noisy, brainless things. You must go up to the tor after lunch. It’s an Ancient Britons’ burial mound,’ he explained to Greg. ‘They’re planning to excavate it next year.’
‘Do you want them to?’ asked Katherine.
‘Not particularly. I’ve lived here for twenty years and never felt the slightest curiosity about it. Not my thing, really. I hear you’re a bit of an historian,’ he said to Greg.
‘I don’t go as far back as that,’ Greg informed him. ‘I’m only in the Second World War at the moment.’
‘It’s far more dangerous to dig about in the near-present,’ remarked Simon. ‘At least if one excavates old mounds all one finds are some bones, a torque and some mysterious cult objects which may never be understood properly.’
‘Your interest must be more in art, sir,’ said Greg, who had been looking about him and seen what he thought were paintings by Sidney Nolan and Lucian Freud. There were also some Chinese pots, one on a table, one on a long sideboard, and a glass cabinet containing smaller oriental items, some plates, a figurine.
‘I have got one or two things,’ his host told him, in a way that discouraged further comment.
Mrs Chambers came in and told them lunch was ready. Simon deftly shifted himself into his electric chair and set off through the door, across the hall and into the dining room. Mrs Chambers served cold salmon, hot potatoes and salad. A dessert and cheese lay on a side table. Then she said goodbye.
‘Chambers died, caught something from one of his animals, they believe,’ Simon said, after she had left. ‘It makes you think.’
‘Oh dear. Who does the garden now?’ Katherine asked.
‘Contractors,’ he told her. ‘They send round burly boys in shorts, and it all works rather well. They do exactly as you say because they don’t know anything about it. I feel rather guilty, but I prefer it to having Chambers bossing me about. The roses have never been better. Now, tell me what you’re doing, Kate.’
‘Muddling on. I’ve got extra work next year. They’ve had to get rid of somebody, Peggy Corrigan, early retirement, so I’m taking on all her work.’
‘Can you manage?’
&n
bsp; ‘Got to,’ she said.
‘What about your research?’
‘I’ll have to keep it up somehow,’ Katherine said, not very hopefully.
‘Now I can see what’s going on I’m glad I got out,’ Simon said.
‘What was your—’ Greg asked.
‘Medical research. I was working on enzymes when a relative left this place to me with enough to keep it up. I hesitated about giving up the job. I was at Churchill and only in my forties, but by that time this was happening,’ he gestured below the table, at his legs, ‘so I resigned.’ He paused. ‘It’s a decision I’m still not sure about,’ he said.
‘It’s the if-onlys that get to you,’ Greg observed.
‘I doubt if you’ve accumulated many of those yet.’
‘He may be in the middle of one,’ interjected Katherine, with a disloyal laugh. Her manner changed in the presence of her uncle, Greg noticed. He’d met her parents, a solid couple who lived near Birmingham, her father a doctor. With them she was meek and slightly subdued; with her uncle her tone was sharper, more worldly.
That afternoon they walked up a footpath to the tor, which stood in an empty field about a mile from the house. They paused, looking down at a composed vista of fields, hedgerows and trees. A small river ran peacefully through it.
‘Is this part of your uncle’s land?’ asked Greg.
‘It ends there. The boundary’s the riverbank,’ she replied. ‘He’s so lucky to have it.’
‘Who was the relative who left it to him?’
‘It was some kind of cousin,’ she said.
‘You said it was a lover.’
‘Well, we thought he might have been both.’
‘Ah,’ said Greg.
‘If we go back that way,’ Katherine said, gesturing towards the river, ‘we can stop for tea in Merricombe.’
They strolled along the banks, by willows. ‘Was the reorganisation that bad?’ asked Greg. ‘Does it really mean a problem with your research?’
‘Oh yes,’ she assured him. ‘I’m pretty sure the post we lost might easily have been mine. ‘It’s an arena. Be grateful you’re in a system where money counts, publication is a measure of your work and everybody knows the rules.’
After the Cabaret Page 19
