Park Lane

by Frances Osborne

  Then the thought comes to her. Good God, is he married? Bea imagines a wife and children, two or three of them. More? Could he have spent a year without mentioning them? It is Bea’s turn to flinch, even though why on earth, Beatrice Masters, should you care?

  Mr Campbell takes his hand away.

  ‘Good ladling hand,’ he says. ‘But no.’

  Weeks on, Mr Campbell’s ‘No’ is still irritating Bea as she drives over to Celeste’s, all the more so because he, somewhat of a sudden, signed up and vanished to France, and she can no longer retort. She couldn’t accuse him of a complete about-turn for he’s not raising a gun, just ferrying the wounded about. Though, thinks Bea, isn’t doing so somehow supporting the war, too? It’s certainly a darn sight better than what Bea is up to with the WEC and all its Good Show, Old Chaps – and that’s the closest she’s found to Lauderdale Mansions since Mrs Pankhurst did her bunk.

  The word now is that the Front’s coming to London any day. Not that it will be the real thing. Then she wonders about Edward. Surely he’s managing to find a bit of excitement, and that it’s good for him. While she quietly hopes to God that he’s not as scared as he was when he left.

  Back here half the city is walking around with their faces tilted to the clouds, scouring the sky for Zeppelins. Makes talking a walk along the pavement perilous. Bea imagines Curzon Street engulfed in flames with a sort of fascination. It’s still there, isn’t it, that yearning for the rush of excitement? Revving the motorcycle’s engine did it for her for a while, but it’s not the same. Is it a wholly wicked thought to want the Zeppelins to come? Well, if she had a chance to get out there good and proper, she wouldn’t have to be willing bombs to rain here. That’s no excuse, she tells herself, for there’s no getting around it, it is a terrible wish to have.

  Why, this afternoon she had gone around to Edie’s. There Edie was, sitting under her curving stone staircase in a billowing white dress and fanning her baby while fretting about sending him out of town to escape the bombs. ‘I can hardly bear to let him go, Bea, yet it’s so terribly selfish of me to think about what I feel when I should only be thinking of what’s best for him.’ Edie looked miserable, and Bea felt guilty enough over her desire for the war to come to London to be relieved when the conversation drifted into the pain of having to invite dull people to dinner. She even, in the course of it, agreed to come along. Which was certainly a mistake.

  The rest of the day, a rare day off, had been intended for errands and dressmaker’s. Apart from sweltering the two hundred yards to Edie’s house, the heat–blistering and rather unexpected for May – defeated all; especially the visit to the dressmaker’s, for she could hardly have muslin fitted with rivulets running down her back. Instead she had retreated to the cool of the museum at the rear of the house. It was tomb-stale. No sunlight or air, it seems, had entered for some time – one of the shrinkages in household duties since the footmen left. They were encouraged to go, Bea is sure, by Mother’s offer to continue paying them their full wages in addition to army pay. Poor boys. At least they’ve missed the refugees, though for Bea, collecting car-loads of Belgian refugees from Charing Cross in the Rolls and delivering them to boarding houses and private homes had been a lark. Mother, however, became utterly carried away with it all and Bea had to exercise some restraint over her. Even when they were already up to three families, with four or five children apiece, Mother was still asking around for more and Bea told her they simply had enough. It wasn’t Mother who was going to live with them. She had declared that now Edward was in France she would be spending most of her time down at Beauhurst, building up the dairy herd to feed the nation. She has, she announces to almost every visitor, already been milking the cows herself. Poor beasts, thinks Bea, will they ever recover?

  Just as Bea pulls up outside Celeste’s house, the sky above her cracks. Good God, that’s it, a Zeppelin! She feels a surge of excitement and leaps out of the car to see a streak of light cut across the clouds. Then nothing. No Germans yet, simply the chance of rain. Sleep, too, if the temperature drops enough afterwards. The air is hellishly muggy and she is so damp that she might as well have walked over. She’s a mind to beg an iced bath as soon as she’s in.

  She finds Celeste in her drawing room, standing by the fire, smoking, and floating in a cloud of lilac chiffon that looks as if it might combust with a single dropped ash. ‘Champagne?’ she asks Bea, waving her cigarette at the ice-bucket and a remaining glass beside it. ‘South Pole temperature. Only thing to cool a fellow down. Help yourself. How’s the cycle?’

  ‘Oh, fine, fine. Running well. At least it was yesterday. I haven’t been out on it today. Luckily, or its tyres might have melted. How are you?’ Bea walks over to the bottle of champagne and pours herself a glass.

  ‘Excellent. I’m up to nine refugees. And it’s a wonder what they can do. Everything from haute cuisine to the accounts, though most of them are after jobs in the munitions’, the men too, for which they are highly overqualified. I rather fear that they will desert me for the East End, poor buggers.’

  Bea walks over to the window and half looks out at the slow-moving street melting below. She speaks with her back to Celeste.

  ‘I think Mother is in competition with you.’

  ‘That is not news, Beatrice.’

  ‘Refugees.’ Outside is now darkening as a black cloud arrives overhead. The walkers below are looking up, and quickening their pace.

  ‘That’s noble of her. How many does she have? What are you looking at out there?’

  ‘Oh sorry, waiting for the rain. I rather enjoy it when the clouds burst; it always feels such a relief.’ Bea turns back to face Celeste, and walks over to the cigarette box sitting on a side table. ‘Anyhow, soon to be twenty-two refugees – if you count the small ones. Do you have a light?’ Celeste nods, and throws Bea a large silver lighter, which Bea catches, then lights a cigarette with it.

  ‘Good God, even in that house you can scarcely have room to breathe.’

  It is Bea who can’t breathe as she chokes on the cigarette she has taken. God, it’s one of Celeste’s Turkish ones. Quite disgusting. She stubs it out, and collapses back on to the sofa behind her. ‘And Mother has fled the situation. I’m not quite sure who’s in charge. Mrs Wainwright, I suppose.’

  ‘And what is Mrs Wainwright doing?’

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’

  ‘Many of them are extremely well educated. I should try having a conversation with them and find out what they want. I should think that French was probably the only thing that all those highly strung mam’selles taught you.’ Celeste is pointing at Bea with her cigarette.

  ‘Our refugees speak Flemish.’

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ says Celeste. ‘You can always improvise a sign language. Or you could teach them English. Better still, learn Flemish from them and get yourself out to Flanders. After all, a skirt didn’t stop Boadicea. Have some more champagne.’

  Bea nods, pulls herself up and refills her glass. She remains standing and takes a large swig, which, on top of what she has already drunk, goes straight to her head, and she gestures with her glass as she speaks.

  ‘It’s not as though we’re allowed to pick up a gun, Celeste. It’s all “We couldn’t do it without you” sort of work. I find it particularly condescending. And I’m not exactly cut out to be a nursing VAD who sits at a patient’s bedside for hours on end.’

  ‘Pretty weak excuse, old girl, and you know there’s a good deal more to it than that. Besides, look at the FANYs, they’re careering around on horseback, straight in the line of fire. And they’re all scared, Beatrice. You don’t imagine everyone over there is thinking that they quite fancy a good look at some wounds for a bit of entertainment. Where’s your mettle, girl? Rather sounds like you’re being a bit of a funk.’

  Bea bristles at this. Her a funk? Has Celeste forgotten what Bea did before the war? How many raids she went on? Hardly a funk. She crosses her arms, slightly spilling her cham
pagne as she does so, but she ignores it.

  ‘I don’t think you can call me that, Celeste. Look what I did, and I would do it again. Near gasping to. Oh blast Mrs Pankhurst for giving it all up for the war. It makes me livid. God, I really miss it. Don’t you?’ Bea suddenly needs to know she is not alone in feeling this.

  ‘We all miss it, but times have moved on.’

  ‘Not for the vote.’

  ‘There’s a war on, Beatrice …’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that …’

  ‘We have to do what we can. If we help win this war, we may have a chance of voting against the next one. Besides, suffrage raids will pale in comparison to what you will see out there. Even if you don’t lift a gun.’

  With that, the sky thunders again, this time right over their heads. Bea walks over to the window and peers outside.

  ‘I am sorry to disappoint you, but it is not the Zeppelins. You can’t say you’re as good as at the Front yet. You will need to go over for that. It will be the greatest thing you can do for the cause.’

  Celeste’s words are almost drowned out by the rattling of water on the window panes. The wood itself is shaking and the glass looks as if it might crack.

  ‘It’s the Flood,’ shouts Bea. ‘Come to wash away the war.’

  ‘And it’ll be taking the cowards with it,’ mouths Celeste in return.

  1916

  19

  GRACE IS IN THE SERVANTS’ HALL WITH HER BEST summer frock on. The boot boy is trying not to look at her but Susan and Sarah, they’re peeping all right, just pretending not to. They’ve all been waiting to see Joseph come for her this evening before he takes the train back. He called round more than a week ago and Grace wasn’t in. Wasn’t in, out just for an hour or so on an errand for Miss Beatrice. Fancy the luck of that. He couldn’t wait, his note said, he knew he’d said it would be today in his letter but he had to go straight up to see his ma on the next train. Didn’t know how long he’d be caught there, what there’d be to do. Harvest, he said, needs bringing in. He is sorry for letting her down.

  Cheeky, thinks Grace. Let her down? He isn’t the only thing she has to worry about. But that’s not true, is it, Grace Campbell? Joseph and his big warm blondness are what’s given her hope in the past year. It’s strange, being so free to choose her own life now. She can go where she likes – but there’s a nothingness to that, as though wherever she puts her feet, the ground beneath might slide away.

  Not that she’s seen him, it’s all been in words, speaking out plain about the adventures he’s been having but how all he’s looking forward to, he writes, is his Grace, and her laugh and pretty face again. When she reads his letters, they make her feel that there’s somebody who wants to look after her and she doesn’t have to worry him about going off to marry somebody else. Joseph will hold her in his arms and tell her how much he likes her. It also makes her think that, even what with all that’s happened, there is good somewhere, and her wickedness might not stop it coming to her.

  Even though the world and his wife have now been in and out of the library and there’s been not a flicker of notice about the book that is missing, Grace can’t help but sometimes lay her head on the pillow and think she can still feel it under the mattress. At least she’s as good as stopped the lying, for there’s nobody left to lie to. And after Michael went to France she wrote to him to say that she’s now working as a maid for her employer. Though she said that it’s only because the business has shut, for there’s not much trade overseas you can do with those U-boats skulking around. She told him that she’d rather be working in a nice house than a munitions factory, and it keeps her in place to go back to her old job as secretary when the war is over.

  The war’s changed now. It’s not being all proud of our boys any more, it’s worrying sick, and it makes Grace’s insides tremble whenever her thoughts go there. This week the news has been so frightful: sixty thousand wounded in just one day, and a third of those dead. She can’t not think of all those dead boys, and wondering whether it’ll be Michael, Joseph, James even, next.

  There are more in the newspaper every day. At least sweeping and cleaning you have to keep your eyes open and find the dirt; it’s the jobs you don’t need to think about that let your mind wander. So she’s careful, Grace, when she’s polishing silver and falling into a rhythm, for it’s then that the pictures grow in her head. Young men, as far as she can see, lying there with bits blown off them, covered in other people’s parts, too. That’s Michael’s job now, fetching the ones that aren’t quite dead, and that’s not a thought to have. Not just what it’s like out there, turning them over to see what still moves, it’s the guns, too. ‘Conchie’ they call him, Conscientious Objector it says on the forms. Won’t fire a gun but will run in to pick up the dead and not an idea if it’s safe. She hadn’t wanted him to go, he had just told her he was leaving, now that the rest of the family was gone.

  She can remember the last time they were together, before he left. More than a year ago, it was; they were sitting in Kensington Gardens, the sun warm on their faces and neither of them saying a word. Michael wasn’t even tapping his feet on the ground, and Grace, well, she was far from sure she believed in God any more. Not after. No, not after …

  Even though they were all to come by breakfast time that May morning, Aunt Ethel had done teacakes for Peggy and Jenny and Alice – a treat for Ma and Da too, for eggs, now, they weren’t easy to find. When her lodger came back with the evening paper, she’d seen it, that three trains had come together on the line from Carlisle. The two of them looked at the teacakes and all the dinner gone cold, and she knew. She wrote to Michael in London. He hadn’t had her letter until he was back from work on the Wednesday, then he’d written on to Grace. He was running, he wrote, to catch the evening train north, he’d find them, he promised. Then he’d send word, no, he’d come around to tell her it was all right. Even with everything, the thought of Michael turning up at the house and finding out how long she’d been in an apron and cap had given her a fright.

  At morning break on the Friday, Michael’s letter in her pocket, Grace had asked for the newspaper. Susan whispered to her in a way that is pretending to be on your side because it is a whisper, but puts you down. ‘Mr Bellows has it. You’ll wait your turn.’ And, for the first time since Grace arrived, and, my word, it was something that she hadn’t let them out before, tears were rolling down her face. She sniffed them up, kept breathing so as she could answer their questioning, but all that came out was: Michael, the letter being from him, even that he was in the law, and Gretna, and that all of them, the family, had been on one of those trains. Her voice ran out.

  All of a sudden there was a fuss, and she thinks Mr Bellows said he’d look for her, and Summers was going through the old newspapers they used for lighting fires. ‘It was Monday,’ said Susan, ‘that’s when we first saw it, not that it’d happened then, Saturday it was. Thank the Lord none of us are Scots, I said.’ Well Thursday’s and Wednesday’s had been burnt, and Tuesday’s too, but Monday’s Times was still there. Then Mrs Wainwright said, ‘Let me,’ and, ‘For heaven’s sake, someone give the girl a cup of tea.’

  Mrs Wainwright opened the newspaper on the table and picked her spectacles up from the chain around her neck. She folded through the pages and then stopped, smoothing down the creases as though it were a dress. Grace could see her scanning the lines and she thought of Miss Sand and learning to read the Lesson out aloud. Read it through first, Miss Sand had said, so as you don’t stumble on your words. Mrs Wainwright went on reading, more than just the first few lines. Then she looked up, took her glasses off and said, ‘My dear, I can’t read this out to you. I don’t think you should read it, either.’

  Grace’s head was spinning with not wanting ever to see and wanting to read it right away. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind, I’d like to look now.’ They couldn’t stop her, could they? The teacups were cleared and space made and the newspaper moved and folded out an
d pressed down in front of her and they all sat round her, as though ready to catch her if she fell.

  She couldn’t take it all in, just fragments like worst ever, and more than a hundred dead. And to think they’d been talking about it all week, Grace too. It had made her come over a little queer even then, before she knew. What with it being so close to Carlisle, the fire might creep all the way along the track to home.

  ‘They’ll be all right,’ Mrs Wainwright was speaking dead soft, ‘there are survivors, plenty of them, it’ll just take a while for them to find their way home. Your brother’s up there now and he’ll find them in a trice. And some jumped clear.’ Grace wasn’t sure how far a nine-, ten- and twelve-year-old could jump.

  Troop Train Disaster, five trains were in it, including the local one her family was on, she knows now. Her head was stew, words leapt out at her as she tried to read it. Heavy death toll. Stated last night to be 158. The King has sent a telegram, she read. Well, that’s all right then, a telegram from the King must make things all right, but what’s she thinking? It’s the words that came after that which made her choke. More words. Burnt alive. Scorched and charred. Little bundles of blackened bones and flesh. And she turned to the side, right where Susan was beside her, and felt the contents of her stomach rising.

  Grace was put to bed for the rest of that day, and told to stay there for the next. Yet when she woke up proper on that same afternoon, she dressed ever so carefully and went downstairs. She found Mrs Wainwright, who started to give her a telling-off for being up, not resting, but Grace begged to be given something to do. ‘It’ll keep those thoughts, Mrs Wainwright, from running all over my mind.’ ‘You’re dressed for the morning, Grace,’ Mrs Wainwright replied. ‘Go and change before anyone sees you, and then you can sit down at the table and polish knives and forks.’ Grace looked down at her skirt, blue print she’d put on, not black.

  The following week the newspaper stopped mentioning it. Instead there were just lists of names of Mr Asquith’s new Coalition Government, and the servants’ hall changed to chatter about the politicians who came to the house. The Prime Minister of course. Mr Lloyd George too, with Mr Lansbury, even though he went to jail for women to vote. Lord Kitchener, that moustache, well, you couldn’t miss him, not when he’s on all those posters up and down the land, telling men to join up. Mr Bellows says she has them from all sides, Lady Masters. Grace took in not even half of it all. She couldn’t think about Lady Masters’ guests.