A Gathering Storm (29 page)

Angie was playing Patience, for which she was ill-suited. She laid down a jack and said, ‘Gerald? Oh don’t worry, Bea. So what if I do? He likes it.’

‘But you shouldn’t play with people’s feelings.’

Angie was silent for a moment, then said, ‘But perhaps I’m not. Though frankly, I don’t think it’s any of your business. Damn, no more aces. This stupid game never works out.’ She slammed down the remaining cards on the table.

Beatrice was so hurt by this rudeness she couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment. Angie went on, ‘I hope you’re not going to be a dull old matron now you’re due to be married. Don’t go getting stout, will you?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Beatrice snapped. Through the window, she saw a little family passing, an exhausted woman trundling a pram full of possessions, the baby carried by one of the two skinny children who were trailing behind. It was awful how one was becoming inured to such sights. At least they were still alive. Someone, somewhere would probably look after them.

And now I’ve made you cross, Bea,’ Angie said. ‘I’m so sorry I’m such a wretch. Do come and sit down and I promise I’ll be nice.’

‘I ought to be going,’ Beatrice said, which was true. She was on duty in Mile End later in the morning, and she had some errands to do on the way.

‘But you’ll come again soon?’

Angie looked so pleading that Beatrice gave in. ‘If you want me to.’

‘I do,’ Angie said gravely. ‘You’re the only one I can really talk to.’

‘There’s Gerald,’ Beatrice was unable to resist saying.

‘Oh, you know what I mean.’

‘When does the doctor think you can go back?’

‘To the Wrens? Next week maybe.’ She made a face, then said, ‘It is very boring being an invalid. It’ll be more fun back in Dover.’

It was the last week of March 1941 that Sandra Williams, Beatrice’s Commanding Officer, looked up with a smile as Beatrice arrived at the First Aid Post.

‘Well, you’re a one,’ Williams said. She waved an official-looking letter. ‘Who’ve you been making up to, in high places? You’ll get us ordinary folk into trouble.’

‘What do you mean?’ Beatrice hastily reviewed the last couple of days for what she might have done wrong. For one thing she’d forgotten to demobilize the canteen on her return the night before last; she’d been so tired lately, draggingly tired. Perhaps last night’s crew had complained.

‘It’s an awful nuisance, you realize. I’ll have to find someone else to do your shifts.’

‘Oh, Williams, I’m so sorry about the blasted rotor arm. It won’t happen again, I promise.’

‘You really don’t understand, do you? It’s nothing you’ve done wrong – well, at least I don’t think it is. Someone’s obviously asked for you. You’re being transferred.’

‘Transferred where?’

Williams passed her the letter. ‘An R. Newton at Senate House wants to see you at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. He’ll tell you your new duties. Here, read it and wonder.’

She became a driver for the Ministry of Information, and quickly established that one of her regular passengers would be Michael Wincanton. Being only a Junior Minister he was, she knew, supposed to take whichever driver was available when he needed one, but that didn’t stop him from requesting her.

‘You know the way, do you?’ he asked the first time. He’d told her to take him to an address in Knightsbridge.

‘Of course,’ she replied, ‘though it would be useful if you could point out the building.’

He settled back in his seat. ‘I expect you were surprised to be transferred. There was a vacancy and I merely suggested your name.’

‘I just do what I’m told, sir,’ she said, trying to keep her voice as neutral as possible, but he didn’t seem satisfied with this answer.

‘Most commendable. Still, people work best when they’re happy.’

‘I was very happy driving the canteen,’ she told him, trying to turn off the car heater. It was a lovely spring day and the heater, probably stuck at the ‘on’ position all winter, was suddenly redundant. She couldn’t get the lever to budge. ‘It felt like helping people – you know, ordinary people.’

‘Well, this is important war work. Very important.’

‘I didn’t say it wasn’t,’ she told him. The truth was that she didn’t like the thought of being under his eye. She felt there was something he wanted of her.

After driving a canteen through the back streets of the East End in the middle of the night with bombs falling around her, the actual mechanics of this job were easy. Other aspects were not.

Occasionally she’d be required to report first thing to the house at Queen’s Gate, to take Michael Wincanton to offices in Westminster or Whitehall, where presumably meetings were going on, though naturally he never spoke of what.

One evening, however, she received a message at the hostel, instructing her to pick him up early the next morning from an address in Cadogan Gardens. ‘Stay in the car,’ she was told. ‘He’ll look out for you and come down.’ She didn’t know who lived there, but when she was searching for the house, she noticed a woman’s pale face watching from a top window. The woman turned as if to speak to someone and moments later the street door opened and Michael emerged. When he thanked her for coming so promptly she replied, ‘I merely follow my orders,’ in her coldest tone, feeling a rush of loyalty for Oenone. He appeared gently amused by this rather than cowed by her disapproval.

‘It doesn’t suit you to look sour, you know,’ he said.

‘My expression is neither intended to please or displease you,’ she snapped back.

‘I would hope that was the case.’ His voice was hard now, and contained a warning. ‘After all, you’re not paid to express your opinion.’ It was the only time he was ever curt to her and she felt her face flame as though he’d struck her.

Late one evening, soon after this, she was summoned to pick him up from a restaurant in South Kensington in a lull after a raid. The woman was with him. She was expensively dressed and the car filled with her musky fragrance. She spoke only once, ‘Michael, you’ll telephone to me about Friday?’ in a light voice with an upper-class accent, when Beatrice stopped outside the flats in Cadogan Square. She was to take him on to Parliament Square. It was, she supposed, some emergency meeting.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you so late, Beatrice. There were no taxis,’ was his only explanation but she would not speak to him, only nodded.

Usually when she drove him, he’d sit in the back and look through papers for whatever engagement he was on his way to, and they wouldn’t talk, but sometimes, especially in the evening, they’d converse quite companionably. He had that coaxing way with him; it was difficult not to respond.

‘Have you heard from your fiancé lately?’ he asked once, in May when the news in all the papers was the evacuation of the British from Crete. She was so surprised, she almost drove into a truck parked on the road.

‘No,’ she said and then twigged. ‘Why, was Guy’s regiment going to Crete? I thought it was Egypt.’

‘No good asking me for details,’ was his mysterious answer. ‘It’s not my area,’ but this was enough to brood on. British casualties had been heavy in Crete and it was true, she hadn’t heard from him for some weeks. Since Guy had first embarked, there had been two letters, with some phrases blacked out by the censor’s pen, and three postcards: one a view of Cape Town with Table Mountain rising out of the mist behind, and two sepia scenes of camels in the desert and a souk. They’d been enough to assure her that he was alive and well, and she’d been able to imagine his ship sailing down the west coast of Africa and up the other side to Egypt.

She’d thought of contacting his parents to ask if they’d heard anything, but she’d never even spoken to them and didn’t know how they’d respond. She assumed that they must know about her – Guy wasn’t a secretive person – but she wasn’t sure what he’d told them about her.

As for Michael, she couldn’t discern what his ‘area’ was, though she tried to do so from the passengers he brought with him. He seemed to have a wide web of contacts. Once or twice he had Free French officers with him and on one occasion when he was dropped off first and she was by herself with two of them, she was amused by their light-hearted attempts to flirt with her, delighting them by answering in their own language.

Once, accompanying Michael, was a stocky Scottish soldier in his mid-forties with a moustache and bright eyes that seemed to take in everything. Beatrice’s interest was piqued when they started to discuss none other than Peter Wincanton.

‘He’s a sharp boy, that lad of yours, very useful. I must thank you for pushing him my way.’

‘Glad he’s of use to you. He’s been something of a square peg up to now.’

‘He’s certainly not that with us. Or if he is, well, our department’s the right shape for him. You know the new division. Bunch of square-pegs. We need to be.’

Michael Wincanton laughed uproariously at that.

Beatrice wondered what they were talking about. She hadn’t seen Peter Wincanton since he’d taken her to look at paintings at Christmas, 1939. She wondered what his job was, but knew there was no point asking. Her duty was only to drive.

At the hostel, life was much as before, but without Judy. Mary had been moved to other duties and wrote to say she was being sent abroad. A Yorkshire girl named Christina had taken Judy’s bunk. Everybody talked obsessively about food. The girls fantasized about it. Successful U-boat attacks on convoys in the North Atlantic were having significant effects on supplies. Christina, being a country girl with a healthy appetite, was finding it hard to adapt to margarine, and the tiny portions of fatty roast and watery sausages Matron was able to get out of the meat ration. At least they were all sleeping better. The night air raids had largely abated now, though there had been lulls like it before, so no one dared quite relax, and the mobile canteens still did their nightly round of the shelters.

On evenings off, she went out with some of the other girls, but mindful of her engaged status she avoided the wilder parties. Even with a ring on her finger she could not escape men’s attention. None made much of an impression on her. And recently, there was another reason more important than all the others. Beatrice strongly suspected she might be pregnant.

Her periods had always been irregular, and when she missed one in March she thought nothing of it. A slight spotting of blood in April reassured her, though the tiredness, and the tingling in her breasts was disturbing. Guy had assured her that he’d dealt with that side of things, that there was nothing to worry about, and she continued to believe this. June came and she carried on as normal, though the waistband of her skirt began to dig in and her jacket felt tight.

One evening, when she was changing, Christina was lounging on her bunk, turning the pages of a magazine and watching her in a way that was a tad too curious.

‘Is there something you’re not telling, love?’ the girl said, not unkindly. ‘You look like my married sister does when she’s starting a bairn.’

The Army doctor, perhaps unused to women patients, was neither gentle nor a gentleman. He probed her most private places with unnecessary roughness, so she felt invaded, and though she’d turned the stone of her engagement ring inwards to make him believe she was married, he saw through the ruse easily and spoke to her without meeting her eye. The baby was probably due in November, he said as he washed his hands. She looked healthy enough to him, but should come again in a few weeks’ time. Meanwhile, she might like to be thinking how on earth she’d support a child in wartime unless her fiancé was able to make an honest woman of her. Good morning – next, please!

The receptionist was kinder and told her how she should present her medical certificate to claim a green ration book in addition to her ordinary one and explained how she could book into a state maternity home. Beatrice thanked her, thrust the certificate into her bag, and pushed her way out of the waiting room into the sunshine. Her thoughts were so confused, she didn’t know what to do or where to go, and a short while later, she found herself in a little park edged with flowerbeds that someone was still managing to tend amidst the general chaos. She sat down on a rickety bench, stared at a statue of a cherub holding a birdbath, and tried to calm her rising panic.

Another person was growing inside her. This baby was part of Guy, and, whatever happened, she knew she cared about it passionately. She would write to Guy at once and tell him, and he’d make it all right. There would be explanations to the authorities and to both their parents. Her imagination failed her there, as to what all the parents would say. Anyway, he’d come back as soon as he could and they’d be married and life would blossom. Differently to how she’d imagined – somehow the mental pictures of the country cottage and the children had been set in some golden future after the war, not during it – but she’d raise the child as best she could. She placed one hand on her abdomen, in the place where she imagined the baby was growing, and said a little prayer, a prayer that was half a promise.

She wrote to Guy that very evening. As she slipped the envelope into the postbox, addressed to that official catch-all address in Whitehall, she wondered again where he could possibly be. Michael Wincanton had hinted Crete, but the British had been heavily defeated there and so she hoped he was wrong. Or maybe he had been, but he’d escaped back to Egypt. If so, she wondered how long the letter would take to reach him there.

The next thing was the most difficult – to find somewhere of her own to live. She couldn’t imagine how she’d pay for it once the baby came, but she’d think about that later. The hostel, full of prying eyes, simply wouldn’t do any more.

‘Angie? It’s Beatrice.’ She had telephoned Angelina at her Wrennerie in Dover, intending to suggest that they meet. It seemed important to tell Angelina face to face about the baby. She wanted her support. But Beatrice and her secret were swept away by the tide of Angelina’s news.

‘Bea, darling, I’m so glad you’ve telephoned. I’m so excited I have to tell you straight away. I’m getting married.’

‘Married? Who to?’ Part of her still believed that Angie was faithful to Rafe.