The Daisy Club (20 page)

Sitting listening to the rector was very dull, but daresay the poor man did his best, he just had very little to say of consequence. She was still furious with that wretched Jean Shaw for planting out those ugly fields of potatoes and cabbages, although now they were coming in useful in her kitchen, her anger, like her despair at having to face another war, had abated a little.

Of course she knew she should be making herself of some use, other than waiting to see if the Hall would become a nursing home for the wounded, but she really did not know whether she had much to offer any more. She could sew still, and she supposed she could nurse – perhaps that skill never went away. But what was missing from her, what she did not want to admit had gone, was the
will
to do her duty for God and the King.

She was still standing in the landscape of her recurring dream. Wherever she went, there was no one. Somehow, losing Daisy to her obsession with flying had been the last straw. The outcome would doubtless be the same as it had been before, and knowing this had taken away her last half-inch of optimism for the future. Maude knew it was sad, and yet she could not even be moved by her own plight. She knew she should never have treated Daisy as she had, turning her away like that, but she simply could not stand by and witness any more tragedy, could not watch as yet another person she loved was sacrificed to some new and ever more hideous war.

She sighed, and picked up the candlestick from the same table where the footmen used to place them ready for the family to take them to bed when she was a child. And then she made her way up the shallow oak stairs to the landing above. It was a dark, silent walk from there to her bedroom, where the shadows cast by the light from the single candle seemed strangely oversized, as if they were figures from the past coming towards her, as if they were determined to dance about her room, mocking her with their lack of substance, with their sense of life being really just like them, badly in need of light.

‘Stupid old woman,' Freddie said, shaking her head as she drove past the Hall. ‘First throwing Daisy out, and then refusing to take in any evacuees, as if there wasn't a war on, as if she couldn't put a hundred children up in that place.'

She and Aurelia were going to help out at the VAD centre. Aurelia had taken her one day off a week to do it.

‘What have we ahead of us, Freddie?' she asked, sounding nervous. ‘I am really not much of a person for blood and guts, as you know.'

Whether or not she would prove to be of any use, Aurelia was only too glad to be away from Longbridge Farm. It took her mind off the fact that her parents were, for reasons best known to them, still abroad enjoying themselves in some swanky skiing resort. Such idiots, going to Europe when they must know they were already at war. It made no sense.

A postcard from them had said it all: ‘
Phoney War still on, lots of friends out here, marvellous snow!
'

Certainly Guy and Clive themselves seemed to be spending a great deal of time flitting backwards and forwards to Paris on behalf of Operation Z, and had even managed to smuggle some delicious luxuries back for Aurelia – stockings, and scent, and a pair of beautiful gloves.

‘We didn't know all your sizes, so we had to guess a bit – couldn't bring you back some underpinnings until we knew better,' Guy told her in a detached voice, as if he was discussing something rather more ordinary, like tea towels, or dish cloths. ‘Clive here will take your measurements from you, and we will remedy that next time round. You're not exactly large, so I should be able to conceal any little silk items about my person.'

By the time he reached the end of this speech Aurelia had turned the colour of a ripe plum, and seeing this they had both burst out laughing.

It had occasioned a verse from Clive which Guy found and read aloud in his light baritone.

Miss Aurelia Smith-Jones is waiting for mee

To bring delicate items from gay Paree,

Nothing too big for this English pearl,

Nothing too brash for a shy little girl.

Suffice it to say, when I am away,

It's to Miss Smith-Jones that my thoughts often stray.

‘Just as well it's me and not you that's the writer or we would all be starving,' Guy told Clive, screwing up the verse and throwing it into the wastepaper basket. ‘But please be good enough to take Miss Smith-Jones's measurements, Clive. I fear she will be badly in need of a great deal of undies before the war is out, and no one does underwear for women better than the French.'

‘You should know better than most, Guy,' Clive murmured, but seeing Clive's look of hurt, Aurelia went to the wastepaper basket once Guy had left the room, and retrieved the piece of paper.

‘I think it's lovely,' she told Clive in a light voice, and more to make him feel better than for any real desire for French underwear she laughingly scribbled her measurements on a piece of paper and gave it to him.

Once she had left the room, Clive kissed the piece of paper and put it into his wallet with a look of solemn reverence, before slipping the wallet into his inside pocket, next to his heart.

‘Well, here we are,' Freddie announced in a firm voice as they arrived at the local hospital. ‘Time to roll up our sleeves and jump in.'

Aurelia felt herself paling. Despite the fact that Freddie had persuaded her to do a very rudimentary first-aid course, which so many people from Twistleton had done, she still felt sick at the idea of even going near someone who was ailing in any way. It was something she knew she would have to overcome, but she had hoped that the challenge would not present itself so soon. She had actually put together a uniform of a kind, but as both Freddie and she had agreed, it made her look rather more like a nanny than a nurse. This might well have been the reason why, soon after they arrived, she was promptly dispatched to the children's ward, where she made the rounds with Sister, and then stayed behind to help with nappy changing and reading to a little boy who was about to have his eighth operation.

All in all, by the time she was dropped back at Longbridge Farm and her day off was over, Aurelia felt properly humbled, which was just as well because she had hardly bathed and changed when the telephone rang.

It was Laura, and she was in tears.

It seemed she had been in London for the day to attend a luncheon party in aid of Polish refugees, when, on coming out of the hotel, she had passed the billboards shouting out their hourly alarms and scandals. Normally she would have rushed by them without buying a newspaper, but today she found she was forced to actually get one.

‘They've been arrested, Relia. Your mother and father were arrested as soon as they arrived home. It's all over the evening papers, screaming headlines, them and goodness knows how many others have been taken off to prison for the duration of the war. Your parents have been arrested as being a danger to this country. I can't believe it.'

Aurelia sat down. She had known that something was going to happen, and possibly something pretty awful, when Guy and Clive had suggested it might be better if she simply called herself ‘Miss Jones', and dropped the ‘Smith' bit. Of course she hadn't asked, wouldn't ask, but she had known it must be to do with the information about her parents given to Operation Z, information with which she and Jessica and Guy had been able to supply them after going through all their papers. She could still see Guy's intense expression in her parents' house – he had been unusually deft and quick at searching for hidden documents, and more importantly, replacing them exactly where they had been.

‘Did you hear me, Relia? Did you hear what I said? It's your mother and father, your parents: the authorities have taken them off, for questioning or something. They are going to put them in gaol. Too awful for them, and for you.'

Aurelia knew she
should
be crying, and yet she couldn't even pretend to burst into tears, not even to Laura. She had long ago known that her parents would probably be punished for their stupid ideas, and that it could only be a matter of time before something happened to them. Now they were into what some people had started to call the ‘Phoney War' the truth was that with everyone in security kicking their heels, waiting for something to happen, for Winston to take over – they were bound to turn their attention to sweeping up all the loose ends, and goodness knows people like her parents certainly were that – hanging around the outskirts of society, waiting, always waiting for their hero Hitler to tidy up Europe for them, turn their little island into a Fascist paradise . . .

‘It was bound to happen, Laura,' Aurelia said, at last. ‘You know my parents have always been politically so right wing, hating everyone who didn't think like they do. It's the eighth wonder of the world that they haven't yet fallen off the globe.'

‘Yes, but what are you going to do, Relia? I mean, this is really serious. They could be shot, or something.'

‘No, I don't think they will be shot or something, Laura, but I do think I will have to pack a few picnic baskets, fill them up with dainties, and visit them behind their prison bars.' Aurelia could hear Laura making a sound between a gasp and a laugh, and quickly realised that she was sounding just a little too flippant, too like Guy Athlone, or someone in one of his plays. ‘It's all a bit too real, isn't it, sweetie? But war is real, very real, and heaven only knows what will happen next. The only thing of which I am sure is that in a few months' time we will think that my parents being taken away for questioning is really too trivial to talk about. We will look back and think: why did we imagine that was something serious?'

Laura put the telephone receiver back, and stared at it. It was the first time she had realised just how hard Aurelia had become. She never used to be like that. Was it because she was so ashamed of her parents, or perhaps the shock of the news? Or was it something to do with her crush on Guy Athlone? For a moment, on the telephone, it seemed to Laura that she had even sounded like him.

Laura stood up. She was due to go and visit David. She was driving miles and miles just to be near him. Longing to be near him. She'd never thought she'd feel like this about anyone. She straightened her uniform jacket, but first she had to go on duty. Duty, stern duty, always waiting around, waiting for someone somewhere, waiting to assuage the guilt by helping others. Soon she knew she would be driving about London, being outwardly busy, while in reality only waiting for the bombs to start dropping, waiting for the smell of gas. She picked up her gas-mask case, but not before she had slipped her lipstick into it. After all, a girl had to be prepared.

The cold of that winter was so terrible, so biting, it froze so hard, that not only did Laura not get to see David, not even meet him half-way, but neither could Jean join up with Joe Huggett.

Guy Athlone and Clive became temporarily marooned in Paris, and it became impossible for Aurelia to visit Hotty or her father in their separate gaols.

At Twistleton Court Jessica and Freddie, not to mention Branscombe, having burnt everything they could to keep themselves warm and the boiler going, each took to staring at the various staircases around the house and wondering, privately, when they might have to start burning them. The water in the taps was frozen, so each drop, when they could draw it, had to be quickly conserved, and boiled up – not just for drink, but for everything else.

The Lindsay brothers were miserable, which was only understandable, but at least they were clean. It had taken desperate measures to get them into any kind of hygienic state, but it was at last arrived at – not without cost. They might look scrubbed-up, and fit to be presented to the King, clean clothes, shoes shining bright. They might warm the cockles of Jessica and Freddie's, not to mention Branscombe's, hearts, but all they themselves wanted to do was to go home to the East End.

‘If I could send you home, I would,' Jessica told them, but as she spoke she could not help feeling both hurt, and relieved. Hurt that they preferred the East End and its tough conditions to being at Twistleton, and yet relieved at the thought that they wanted to go back, and if they did she would be freed from worrying about them. ‘At this moment in time it is taking, not hours for people to complete their journeys, but days, and I mean that, whole days.'

‘I still want to go home, dun care how long it took,' Johnny murmured. ‘I want to see my nan, and my mum. I don't want to see my dad, but I want to see my nan and my mum.'

‘You can want away, I'm afraid, Johnny dear,' Jessica told him. ‘And so can I, but there is no train, and no bus, not even a car that can get you home at this moment. There will be soon, don't you worry, when the thaw comes, and as soon as there is, you will be on it, or in it, or whatever is appropriate, and it will whoosh you home to your dear ones. Meanwhile, why not come and help crack some ice and bring it in to melt in the kitchen? Plenty to do. Or else you can walk the dogs around the grounds with me, if you prefer?'

As Johnny slipped his rough little hand into Jessica's and went downstairs to put on muffler and coat and go walking with her and the dogs, something which Jessica found always seemed to calm him when he was upset, it occurred to her that there was nothing more touching than a small homesick boy.

‘You know we have to fight a war, Johnny, and that being so we all have to make what is called
sacrifices
. We have to do something, or be somewhere, or with someone we don't like. That is a way of defeating the enemy, being somewhere we don't like.'

‘You're not,' came the succinct riposte.

Jessica looked ahead, a little ruefully.

‘True enough, but I won't always be here at the Court, not always, Johnny. I have to go off one of these days, when the weather gets better. I shall have to go off and help out in the hospital here, or do some other work, and leave Branscombe to cope, but by that time you will be back home with your nan and your mum, and everything will be to rights. So just try to be cheerful, that's all, try to think of some nice things about being here at Twistleton, if you can, things like the dogs and Branscombe playing ping-pong with you. Just try to think of nice things.'