by Lizzie Page
‘I can understand that, Pearl,’ I say. I realise quickly that I must cover my feelings. It is my duty. This is what the adults do. ‘But London is not safe. Come and help me in the kitchen. Let’s make a nice stew.’
She chops and slices as she should, but her face is mutinous, and she refuses to speak.
* * *
The photographs in the newspaper make me shiver. The Nazis hate everything, but mostly they hate the Jews. You can see them at their massive meetings – rallies, they call them – with their arms out in a salute and their armbands. I think they look pathetic. And he’s such a little, horrible-looking man too, that Adolf Hitler. With his stabby voice and that shabby moustache – a horrible, spoilt little emperor. The Germans I met during the Great War– patients or prisoners – were well-mannered and so sensible somehow. They’d help you out if you were struggling to carry someone or if someone was having a nightmare. They wanted the war to be over as much as we did – and yet, look at that blighted country now! How have they fallen so hard for Hitler? What has he promised them? Sometimes when I read about the Nazis, I find it hard to breathe.
I try not to think about Sam. What would Sam be thinking now; how would he be feeling? I know one thing: he wouldn’t be that surprised.
* * *
That night, Pearl is inconsolable.
‘I don’t want you, I want my mummy.’
I stand by the door uncertainly. I don’t know how I am supposed to mend this.
‘I don’t want a stupid war!’ she shouts. She kicks the wardrobe – which I can understand – and then her own suitcase, which I can’t.
‘None of us do,’ I say, but that seems to make her worse.
‘Mummy said it was a holiday. She said. She SAID.’
I can’t think of anything to tell her, but that I’m sorry. I am. I truly am. She cries herself to sleep and I watch her, the most useless woman on earth.
6
1914 – Then
It was cooler in September and it rained little but often. I kept getting caught out. Pointless to worry about how to wear one’s hair when the drizzle turned your style to frizz, or a downpour plastered it to one’s head.
I thought often of dear Richard on the continent. Having him over there felt like we had a very personal link to the war. I knew our link was tenuous – other girls had brothers or husbands who had gone – but it was authentic. I pictured him repeatedly throwing that ball against the wall of his nursery. I would never complain about that never-ending thunk again. I thought of him in his uniform, how he had looked so different suddenly and how he came over all shy. He had chuckled and pulled at his epaulettes: ‘I’ll get used to it, girls, don’t you worry.’ Typical of him to want to reassure us above all else.
We loved Richard very much. I supposed it was natural that we were very worried about him.
Ever the good boy, Richard wrote to my father as well as to his own parents and to us. Olive suggested he had a lot of time to write letters – a good thing – but I didn’t think he did, I think he just prioritised us.
On the surface, his letters were chirpy and upbeat, but I sometimes detected fear and uncertainty in his words. He quoted the chaplain often and I wondered what Richard – a non-attender at our local church – would be seeing the chaplain for.
Richard promised to be home for Christmas – we spent most years at our aunt and uncle’s – yet he begged us for knitted socks that went up to the knees. It’s going to be a harsh winter.
‘Why, though,’ I pondered, ‘if he’s coming home for Christmas?’
‘Don’t fret,’ said Olive simply. She said I was reading too much into it. ‘If he says he’ll be home, he’ll be home.’
Richard wrote a lot about food too. He seemed quite obsessed. And just like the talk of chaplains, this seemed like a Richard I hadn’t met before. Cans, tins, biscuits, scones and clotted cream occupied his mind, and please, please, send some chocolate, anything to keep the cold at bay. He keeps mentioning the cold, I thought, startled. Well, of course it was cold, but… The nights are long. And my boys are suffering. Now he signed off his letters: if anything happens to me, I know you’ll look after Mother. You and Olive have always been like sisters to me, more than sisters.
But then he would be back to his cheery self:
Now, send me some news about Edmund and Christopher! What larks are those chaps getting up to? And Vivienne, do you have anything on the marriage question to report to your big cousin?
His letters meant the world to me.
* * *
At the end of every term at Goldsmiths they held exhibitions, and it was at the big end-of-year exhibition in year one where Olive had first met the Fords. She did tell me the story of how, but the tale was so long and meandering that I lost the thread of it, and even if I hadn’t, I felt sure she was missing out the more pertinent details. Apparently, Mrs Ford didn’t believe Olive had made her pictures herself. They were that good! And Olive didn’t believe Mrs Ford was the famous art collector. It seemed that unlikely! When they realised their mistakes, Oh, how they laughed!
Mrs Ford, her mother Mrs Brown and her adult son, Walter, lived all three generations of them together. Mrs Ford was divorced, something that I found quite shocking, but even more shocking perhaps was the fact that she would talk openly about it. Her ex-husband was a doctor, and ‘one hadn’t experienced boredom until one spent an hour in his company’. Mrs Ford had shiny black hair and glossy red lips. Her mother, Mrs Brown, was growing poorly with age, but Mrs Ford looked after her with good humour. And Walter, well, Walter was a good-time boy: he’d just come from the States and it was as though he were brimful of both California sunshine and New York literary events.
Right from the beginning, I presumed Olive had a ‘thing’ for twenty-one-year-old Walter. Not only was his hair like his mother’s, blacker than coal, and his lashes long and pretty, but he wore clothes with such panache, he ought surely to have worked in fashion. Yet there were many handsome young men at the Fords’ house. The Fords were the most sociable people I’d ever met – I didn’t know if it was because they were American or if it was just their style, but their house was always brimming over with guests. There was the piano player, David, and his charming wife; there was the trumpet player, Clive, and James who played the banjo. Rod who wrote something called ‘science fiction’ and Frank who wrote ghost stories. Johnny was a singer, over six foot three – an ogre, a giant, but when he sang, he could produce tenderness you would never believe someone like him would be capable of.
I visited on occasional Sundays with Olive and although everyone was unfailingly kind to me, I sometimes felt as though I were being handled with kid gloves. This was a very different social milieu to the one I was used to. Everyone was eccentric or glamorous or talented. Even if you weren’t, they’d encourage you to find a way in which you could be.
‘I help at my father’s business,’ I said, pretending to myself that Mrs Webster didn’t exist.
‘A beautiful girl like you?’
‘Well…’ Praise was given out freely at the Fords’, like confetti at a wedding.
‘I would have thought you were a goddess by trade.’
I chuckled.
‘Or an artist’s muse, maybe?’
I thought about muses in history. Didn’t they all come to a bad end?
‘Oy, she’s my muse,’ interrupted Olive possessively and everyone laughed.
Mrs Ford loved art, and she adored artists, but her own particular talent was for songwriting. She’d had a few minor successes in the past. She told me the titles of some of the songs but I didn’t recognise any of them. Now, she was hungry for more.
‘There’s nothing like it, Vivienne,’ she explained to me, ‘hearing people sing the words you wrote. No greater thrill! Nothing compares.’
She slapped a laughing Johnny on the knee. ‘Not even that!’
She was working with David on a song. That’s what they did virtually every single day: he’d come round wit
h his charming wife, and they’d be drinking and laughing and playing the piano.
Apparently, David was writing the music and Mrs Ford was doing the words.
One Sunday, after they’d been hammering at it for hours on end, David turned, and singled me out. ‘Vivienne, is it? Do you like it?’
Was it my imagination or did the room go silent? Everyone was waiting for my verdict.
And I felt in a flutter, because David was another one who was terribly handsome and dangerously bright. I croaked, ‘It’s a little like that song “Bleak Midwinter”, isn’t it?’
He clicked his fingers at me, then said loudly so everybody could hear: ‘Lady, you have a very good ear.’
‘And a very good face,’ murmured Johnny and I went as pink as the rose in his buttonhole.
* * *
One day, after some of the younger men had left to go to another party, and there weren’t many of us left, Olive said, ‘I think Johnny might be falling for you, Vivi.’
Some women like to have men tripping all over themselves for them. I didn’t. And I certainly wasn’t interested in Johnny, or any singer, artist or writer. I wanted a regular, conventional man. A man from a good family, and who would make a good family. The kind of man who was seeking a role in the Indian Civil Service. I remembered Edmund’s hot hand in mine at the piano and the sweet strokes he gave my back when no one was looking. Poor Edmund – he didn’t know what to do about the war.
Mrs Ford lit her cigarette and exhaled. It felt like an age passed before she gave her verdict. ‘Johnny is a nice chap.’
‘I’m not interested,’ I said more firmly. I felt they were ganging up on me.
‘Oh, that’s right,’ said Mrs Ford in her amused tone that left the younger men breathless. ‘You have someone, don’t you, Vivienne? Edward, is it?’
‘Edmund.’ I was embarrassed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Loyal girl.’
Olive said to Mrs Ford in a strangely jolly voice, ‘Vivienne is loyal to Edmund, but is Edmund loyal to Vivienne?’
‘How do you mean?’ I snapped.
‘Good God, Vivi!’ she retorted. ‘It was a joke.’ She raised her eyebrows: ‘Sensitive subject.’
Mrs Ford was a diplomat, unlike my bandit sister. ‘Bring your Edmund here some time, Vivi,’ she drawled. ‘Let me have a look at him. I’m a good judge of people.’
I couldn’t for a moment imagine Edmund mixing here, but I said I would. To do otherwise would have been rude.
* * *
As the war continued relentlessly towards October, it began to gradually dawn on us – to dawn on everyone, I suppose – that we were in it for the long haul. The newspaper reports were not as positive as they had been in August. Victory seemed to be moving further and further away. People were dying horribly in Belgium and France. Villagers were fleeing. The Germans were massacring civilians. It wasn’t what anyone expected. Antwerp fell and we dug in and hardened. We were going to have to get used to this. Even the musicians and entertainers at Mrs Ford’s were in a quandary about what to do. Some days, Johnny said he wanted to fight the Bosch. Other days, he wanted to go out and entertain the troops.
‘Better than being the troops, eh?’ said Olive archly.
He winked at me. ‘We can all help the war effort in different ways, right, Vivienne?’
Yet it was always a gay atmosphere at the Fords’. To be on the winning side is not a terrible place to be – and despite the dark clouds gathering, that’s where we thought we were. We were so puffed up with our own self-righteousness and importance that we couldn’t see the wood for the trees. The piano kept playing, the drinks kept being poured and the guests kept coming. On any given Sunday, Olive could be found pontificating about the artist Percy Millhouse – her most recent obsession; Mrs Ford might be laughing about the politician David Lloyd George and Walter could be arguing about men’s breeches.
Sometimes, I would sit there among them, and just watch and wonder.
It was clear that Olive was, inexplicably, trying to wean me off Edmund. Yet the more she tried, the less I wanted to. I knew Edmund didn’t have talents or ‘mystery’ like so many of these characters, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was as dull as Olive suggested he was. On our latest visit to Aunt Cecily’s and Uncle Toby’s, he had played footsie with me under the table, all the while expounding on why the Belgian and the French armies weren’t half as good as ours.
One day, a new gentleman came to visit the Fords. Olive took his elbow and made a beeline for me. This man was thin, curly-haired and handsome, but I felt instantly he was not for me and I was not for him. He sat by me though, and chatted contentedly about his little sister, Mairi, who was out nursing in France – no, Belgium, oh, he couldn’t remember where she’d bloody got to – but anyway, she was a fearless trooper. ‘She’s only eighteen,’ he said admiringly, ‘but what a daredevil! You should see her ride a motorbike. Not like me,’ he went on, rubbing his chin, embarrassed. ‘I don’t know what the heck I should do with myself.’
He got out a silver coin. ‘Heads I go to the Caribbean and become a sugar farmer, tails I join up?’
He threw the coin up in the air: It came back tails. He shuddered and looked at me beseechingly. He had lovely wet eyes.
‘Best of three?’ he suggested.
‘Where is the Caribbean anyway?’ I asked.
‘The other side of the world…’
‘Best of three,’ I agreed.
* * *
The living room, where we all gathered, had a large open fireplace, and as the weather grew cooler, Mrs Ford would send the men out to the garden for some wood-cutting. It was all great fun: everyone had such a zest for life. They all wanted to try out their strength, but you couldn’t help but note that Walter, with his cape flying around his broad shoulders and his strong arms, was the best chopper of them all.
‘Be careful!’ we’d call out, especially after one of the men had a near miss on the out motion, almost embedding the axe in his nose.
Then we’d bring in the logs and Mrs Ford would light the fire. Gorgeous it was to watch the flames dance, heating up the room.
Sometimes, Walter Ford would appear with an actress or a singer with a face full of make-up. I would always look over to see if Olive was watching. If it were me, and if it had been Edmund, say, I didn’t know how I would bear it, but Olive seemed accepting to the point of oblivion.
And sometimes, she would drink too much and stay over, and one time I did say to her, ‘Should you, Olive? it’s not seemly.’ I couldn’t imagine what Edmund’s mother would say if she knew what went on. Olive thought that was hilarious, which wasn’t my intention. ‘Oh, Vivi, you can be so bourgeoise sometimes.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means don’t worry about me, darling.’
* * *
Edmund refused to come to Mrs Ford’s Sundays. ‘It’s just not for me,’ he told me at Aunt Cecily’s, and although it was irritating, I admired his steadfastness. Edmund was solid and unwavering. He didn’t have to conform with the nonconformists, did he? The Lowes were known around town, and one time someone at the Fords’ said to me, ‘Oh, you know the Lowes? Well, I never! Top-class family, aren’t they? Very flush,’ and I felt a burst of pleasure that we were such close associates. I could see I went up in people’s esteem, just because of the connection.
Another time though, I was in the garden as the men were chopping wood and I don’t think they knew I was there. Someone said, ‘I saw that Edmund Lowe again at the Windmill. I know they’re rich, but how he affords it night after night, I will never know…’
‘What’s the Windmill?’ I whispered to Olive.
But she just steered me away inside – pretended she was cold or had a cold or something.
‘They’re just being sillys. Ignore them.’
‘But what is it?’
‘It’s nothing,’
I persisted until she admitted, ‘Oh, Vivi, it’s just a men�
��s club…’
‘And?’
‘Where they watch ladies dance with tassels on their you-know-whats…’
‘It wasn’t Edmund,’ I said bluntly.
‘I’m sure it wasn’t,’ she said but her expression wasn’t as confident as her words.
She began talking about what she had been working on at college that week. ‘It’s awfully hard, it’s all lines and triangles this term, not really my thing,’ she said.
She was trying to distract me, I knew it. She was great at lines and triangles.
‘Poor Edmund is extremely conflicted about the war question,’ I went on. ‘He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.’ I was determined not to let this slide.
‘I can imagine,’ she replied.
* * *
The song that Mrs Ford and David were working on together grew better each time I heard it. One Sunday, David thumped it out on the keys and Johnny took it seriously for once and sang earnestly this time, with the actual words that Mrs Ford had written. We all stood around, the wine flowing.
David stopped playing suddenly. He looked around at us all and said, ‘It’s coming along nicely.’
Bizarrely, Johnny burst into tears. He said he’d never sung anything so lovely, and what a privilege! Everyone made a big fuss of him – it’s the stress of the war, see.
While cuddling him, Mrs Ford looked around over his shoulder, then charged me with a responsibility. She wanted me to copy the lyrics out, ten, maybe twelve times, if I wouldn’t mind, that is? I was always delighted to be charged with a task and availed myself of the study, where I could fulfil my work in silence. It was a lovely job and I was as careful and neat with the writing as I could be. The sun was low in the sky when I had finished. I re-entered the living room boldly, feeling, I imagine, like St Nicholas delivering all the treats at Christmas. ‘Here, I have it, everyone!’
