The FitzOsbornes at War (15 page)

Well. ‘My type’ proved to be a stout young man with beady eyes and a lot of sleek brown hair. He reminded me of a guinea pig. I do try not to judge people on their looks – after all, I’m hardly Helen of Troy. And guinea pigs can be quite endearing. But Nigel’s appearance was the best thing about him. He didn’t like to dance. He didn’t like to laugh, smile or make eye contact, either. When I tried to engage him in conversation, he answered in monosyllables or not at all, meanwhile staring over my shoulder at the dance floor – that is, at Felicity, with whom he was clearly besotted.

‘
That’s
why you brought me along, isn’t it?’ I hissed at Felicity in the powder room, as she was repairing her lipstick. ‘To get him off your back!’

‘Oh, sweetie! It’s just that he’s doing that training course and staying with Mark for a month, and we can’t simply
abandon
the poor boy every time we go out, can we? Anyway, I thought you two would hit it off. He’s from the country, too, you know –
and
he collects stamps.’

‘So?’

‘Well, and you collect books.’

‘I don’t
collect
them. I read them.’ (She seemed to think reading was some sort of
hobby
, as opposed to being as necessary as breathing, sleeping and eating.)

‘He is a bit dull,’ admitted Anne. ‘But his father’s terrifically rich, Sophie . . . No?
Definitely
not?’

‘We’ll just have to find you someone else to dance with, then,’ said Felicity breezily. ‘There are hundreds of men here.’

There were, but nearly all of them had arrived with their glamorous girlfriends. Anyway, once I decided to disregard Nigel’s silently brooding presence, I found it quite enjoyable sitting there at our table, sipping my champagne, tapping my foot to the swing band and watching the couples swirl past. Most of the men were in uniform (the navy officers looked the most impressive, with their glinting buttons and gold lace), while the women wore a gorgeous array of floating chiffons and clinging satins. I could see that an evening at a nightclub would be awfully romantic with the right person. There aren’t many other social situations (actually, there aren’t
any
) where a man can press himself against a woman for hours on end, in very dim lighting. One couple were so entranced with each other that they’d long given up any pretence of dancing. They simply stood there, her arms locked around his neck, his hands at her waist, staring into each other’s eyes, until finally, he lowered his face to hers and their lips met. I looked away, half wanting to fall in love with someone myself. But then I saw the miserable intensity of Nigel’s gaze as he tracked Felicity around the dance floor, and considered I was far more likely to end up a Nigel than a Felicity, loving and yearning and aching without the other person even noticing, or caring much if they
did
notice. I suddenly felt dispirited and very, very tired. So I was glad when Anne’s boyfriend announced he was on duty at five the next morning and had to go.

‘You’ll see Sophie back to her flat, won’t you?’ said Felicity, batting her eyelashes at Nigel. Of course,
she
just wanted a taxi ride alone with her boyfriend.

‘Actually,’ I said, glaring at her, ‘I can see
myself
home –’

‘Of course I will, Felicity!’ interrupted Nigel, although she was already turning away. ‘Well, er, good night! See you soon, I hope . . . Felicity.’

She didn’t reply. She was too busy giggling with her boyfriend, who was taking a very long time to wrap her in her cloak.

Nigel handed me awkwardly into a taxi, then proceeded to ignore me for most of the journey. It was only as we neared the end of what seemed to be Kensington Road (it was rather difficult to tell in the blackout) that he turned to me and drew in a breath. I thought he was going to make some sort of clumsy apology for his behaviour. Instead, he
pounced
. There is no other word for it. I shoved him off fairly easily, and got the impression he was as relieved as I was. I wasn’t even sure which part of my body he’d been aiming for. Did he imagine this was the
usual
manner in which one concluded an evening out with a young lady? (Perhaps it
was
. How would I know?) Fortunately, it had all happened too fast for me to feel frightened.

‘Mostly, I was
baffled
,’ I told Veronica, ten minutes later. She was still up, writing a list of provisions for our air raid shelter. ‘He barely said a word to me the entire evening, and he’s obviously in love with Felicity. Why on Earth would he want to
kiss
me? Or whatever it was that he was trying to do.’

She shook her head and got up to pour out the cocoa she’d been warming for me on the stove.

‘Perhaps he wanted to make Felicity
jealous
?’ I mused aloud, wrapping my hands around the cup. ‘Or perhaps he wanted to get
over
his feelings for her, by kissing me?’

‘Perhaps he’s an obnoxious little worm,’ said Veronica. ‘Who cares what he was thinking? It doesn’t excuse his vile behaviour.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t
that
bad – not really. Nothing very terrible could have happened anyway, with the taxi driver sitting there.’

‘And he didn’t even apologise? The boy, I mean, not the taxi driver.’

‘He did mumble something as I got out, but I think it was just “Good night”. He might have been too embarrassed.’

‘So he ought to have been!’

‘I don’t think he’s used to girls,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have any sisters, and he went to a boys’ school, and he’s only twenty. He probably thinks of girls the same way I think of . . . of llamas.’

‘Think of
what
?’ Veronica stopped washing out the cocoa pan to stare at me.

‘Well, I
like
llamas, from what I’ve seen of them, but I don’t understand the way they think or how they’re likely to act, so I might make a mess of things if I were to –’

‘Catch a taxi with one,’ said Veronica, with a snort. ‘Firstly, llamas are a different species to you. Secondly, they’re native to the Andes, not London, and you aren’t a zoologist, so one wouldn’t
expect
you to be familiar with their ways. Thirdly . . .’

She went on to make several more – very logical – points. I drank the rest of my cocoa, thinking that men might as
well
be a different species. Even Toby, whom I’d known all my life and most of his, could behave in strange and unpredictable ways. And as for Simon – he was a complete enigma.

13th May, 1940

T
HE TROUBLE WITH KEEPING A
record of the war is that either nothing whatsoever is happening in the world, which makes one’s journal entries very boring, or else so
much
is going on that one doesn’t have time to comprehend it, let alone write it down. It’s the latter situation at the moment. However, I have the day off work today, and I think writing things down will help me make some sense of it all.

First, Norway. Well, what a
disaster
– not that Chamberlain would admit it. He gave a pathetic speech in Parliament informing us that we must not ‘exaggerate’ the losses.

‘There were no large forces involved,’ he claimed. ‘Not much more than a single division.’

Such
a comfort to all the British soldiers who were wounded or killed, I’m sure! And Simon, who came over for dinner last week, said things were even worse for the RAF squadron sent over there. The pilots were told to use an ice lake near Trondheim as their base, but the promised fuel supplies and communication equipment didn’t arrive. Then they discovered that their planes’ wheels had frozen to the ground overnight and all their controls were iced over, so when the Luftwaffe turned up, every single RAF plane was bombed to smithereens exactly where it sat, stuck to the lake. Simon said the only consolation was that the planes were ancient and probably wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in battle anyway, and at least the navy managed to rescue the pilots. The awful part is that they are sending those same pilots back there, and probably others, as well. (Not Toby, though, Simon assured us. Otherwise Toby would have been posted to Scotland instead of Sussex. But it’s still worrying that Anthony is stationed up there. What if they send
him
?)

Anyway, as Chamberlain clearly didn’t have any grasp of the situation at
all
, even his own Conservative Members of Parliament became fed up with him. During a ferocious debate in the House of Commons, one of them said:

‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’

Veronica especially enjoyed that bit, because it was what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament, and she likes politicians to have a sense of history. But then, while Chamberlain was dithering about whether to resign or not, the Nazis
invaded
Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands! The poor little Low Countries, who hadn’t even declared war on Germany, or on anyone else! Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her family have already been rescued by a British ship, and the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg is meant to be coming to London, too. (Very soon, one won’t be able to walk five steps down Piccadilly without bumping into an exiled royal.) The French and British have sent troops and planes to help the Low Countries, but things aren’t going very well for the Allies so far, which doesn’t actually surprise me, given the Norway fiasco.

At long last, Chamberlain resigned, and now the British have a coalition government, which means they can choose the best people from each political party to be in the War Cabinet. That sounds very sensible to me. Winston Churchill is their Prime Minister, but I don’t know what to think about that. We had tea with him a couple of years ago during our Montmaray campaign, and he was a very generous host, but didn’t seem terribly good at listening to other people. I suppose if one
were
marvellous at oration, then one
would
want to talk a lot, rather than listen. He gave a speech today about how he had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, which was more uplifting than it might seem (written down, it actually sounds quite revolting). He reminds me of Lady Bosworth’s fat, charming but rather temperamental bulldog. Chamberlain is a droopy old basset hound, so we’re probably better off with Mr Churchill.

I asked the Colonel, who paid one of his whirlwind visits yesterday, for his opinion on all this, because he’s Winston Churchill’s cousin. He said Mr Churchill was ‘mad as a March hare’ and ‘drank like a fish’, but that at least he’d wake up the Civil Service and keep the general population entertained while we lost the war.

‘We’re not going to lose the
war
!’ I said.

‘Perhaps just this battle then,’ the Colonel said. He thinks the French army and air force are in a total shambles, and that it’s only a matter of time before the Germans occupy the whole of France. Then he asked me if I’d ever met, at the American Embassy, a Member of Parliament called Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’d remember a name like that.’

‘Or a Russian lady named Anna Wolkova? Or Anna de Wolkoff?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone from the Italian Embassy?’

I shook my head ruefully.

‘Never mind,’ he said.

I didn’t even bother asking what
that
was all about.

‘Oh, and by the way,’ he said, as he was leaving, ‘do you recall that page of Kernetin you wrote down for me? Well, I gave it to a friend of mine, one of our best cryptographers, and he couldn’t make head or tail of it.’

‘Really?’ I said. Either I was cleverer than I’d imagined, or the British Secret Service employed some very incompetent cryptographers.