Authors: Helen Macinnes
Richard tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth. “Yes, it’s difficult,” he said slowly. “I shan’t forget helping to dig trenches in the parks, or the paper tape on all the windows, or the towels we were told to keep beside a bucket of water. All the time I was digging I kept wondering whether the trenches
would be any good at all, and I knew they wouldn’t be. I didn’t think much of the towel idea either. But what else was there? And then bastards like von Aschenhausen come along all smiles and bows. And wonder why people are not enthusiastic about them. They blackmailed us with bombers one year, and go back on the agreement they had extorted out of us, and then expect to be welcomed as friends. All within nine months. All that, Frances, makes one of the reasons why I listened to Peter. If I could put a spoke of even the most microscopic size in the smallest Nazi wheel, I’d think it a pretty good effort.” He had risen, and was pacing up and down the study.
“I think this interruption is due. I see that ‘proposition look’ dawning in your eye. Don’t try, don’t you try to leave me at home. I’m coming.”
“I was afraid you were.”
“Richard, my dear, you know that whenever you imagine exciting things they always turn out duller than a wet day in Wigan. It’s the parties you don’t get excited about which turn out to be fun. Now here we are, both thinking of ourselves in terms of Sard Harker. What will happen? We’ll go to Paris, and then find that the man does not turn up. I’ll wear a red rose for three nights, and you’ll spill Cointreau for three nights, until the whole cafe is gaping at us. And then we’ll go on our holiday, wondering if Peter’s sense of humour has become over-developed since Bucharest.”
Richard laughed. “You sound almost convincing Frances. But I know that you know what I know. This is no bloody picnic.”
She rose from the floor, and went over to the window. It was wide open. She leaned forward to breathe in the dewy smell
of the earth. The lilac trees at the end of the garden had silver leaves. Richard came to her, and slipped an arm round her waist. They stood there in silence watching a garden moonlit. Frances glanced at him. He was lost in thought.
“If you want to know,” he said at last, reading her thoughts in the uncanny way two people living together learn to do, “I am thinking we should photograph this in our memory. We may need to remember it often for the next few years.”
Frances nodded. Around them were the other gardens, the mixed perfume of flowers. The walls hung heavy with roses and honeysuckle, their colours whitened in the strong moonlight. The deep shadows of trees, blurring the outline of the other houses, were pierced here and there with the lights from uncurtained windows. The giant elms in the Magdalen deer park stood sentinels of peace.
She said suddenly, “Richard, let’s go up the river; just for half an hour.”
“The dew is heavy. You had better wrap up well.”
“I shall. It won’t take five minutes.” She kissed him suddenly and left him. He heard her running upstairs, the banging of the wardrobe door in their bedroom. So Frances had this feeling too, this feeling of wanting to say goodbye.
She came downstairs in less than her five minutes dressed in a sweater and trousers, and with one of his silk handkerchiefs round her neck. They walked the short distance to the boathouse in silence. They got out the canoe in a matter-of-fact way, as if they were defying the moonlight to weaken them. They paddled swiftly up the narrow river. White mists were rising from the fields on either side of them, encircling the roots of the willows which edged the banks.
“When I used to read my Virgil this is what I thought the Styx might be like,” said Frances. Then suddenly, “Richard, what are you planning to do in Paris?”
“Water carries sound,” he reminded her. To prove his words, they heard low voices and the laugh of a girl, before they saw two punts drifting to meet them.
“You have your moments, don’t you, Richard? By the way, I think you will like the hat I bought yesterday in London. A little white sailor with no crown to speak of, yards of black cloud floating down the back, and a saucy red rose perched over one eye.” She heard Richard laugh behind her. “Practical, isn’t it?”
“Very,” he said, and laughed again. “Good Lord—trust a woman to think up something like that.”
Frances was serious again. “Richard, do you think there will really be war this summer?”
“It’s anyone’s guess. The President was lunching yesterday with Halifax. He said—”
“Halifax?”
“Yes. He said no one in the Cabinet knew. It all depended on one man.”
Frances was silent for a space. When she spoke, her voice trembled with its intensity.
“I resent this man. Why should the happiness of the whole civilised world depend on him? Why, for instance, should I, an Englishwoman, have to look at my countryside and even as I look remember that last September I had planned to help to take the Brown children in this canoe up this river, to hide them under the willows until the air raids had passed? I had blankets and towels and tinned food and chocolate all packed
in a basket. A Hitler picnic indeed. There is not one of us who hasn’t had fear and horror creep into all our associations. As I pass these willows I keep wondering just which one of them might have been sheltering the Brown children, and whether it would have done its job. And all because of one man. Think of it, Richard, there wasn’t a farmer who didn’t look at his land and the farmhouse his great-great-grandfather had built and wonder. There wasn’t a townsman who didn’t look at his business or his home and everything he had earned for himself and wonder. There wasn’t a man or woman who did not look at the children and wonder. Richard, I resent this man and his kind of people.”
“You aren’t the only one.” Richard pointed the nose of the canoe back down the river. “You aren’t the only one. We have all had a year of brooding. And we have all come to the same decision. If anything does start the man who starts it will be sorry he ever thought of himself as a kind of god. But take it easy, Frances. Promise me you will stop worrying while we are on this holiday. It may be the last”—he paused—“for a long time, anyway. There is nothing more that rational beings can do, anyway, except wait and watch. And when it comes the Brown children will have better protection than the willows this September. And that’s something.”
“Yes, that’s something.” Frances’ voice was quieter. “But when I meet some of those armchair critics who sit beside their radio in a part of the world which can’t be bombed from Germany and hear them tell me how England should have fought I am liable to be very very rude.
And
I bet, if war does come, these same people will suddenly start talking about the greatness and glories of peace. Britain will then be just another
of those belligerent countries. That is how we will be dismissed, as if neutrality implied a special sanctity. There now, Richard, I’ve got it all out of my system. I shan’t mention it again.”
“That’s the girl. Remember this part of the river?”
Frances gave a shaky laugh. “Yes, darling. I was a sweet girl undergraduate, and you were in all the importance of your final year. Good bathes we had, too, in just this kind of moonlight. Look, there’s some more of us.” Some punts were moored under a bank and the wet figures as they balanced to dive gave a moment’s illusion of silver statues.
“I’ve found the difference between twenty and thirty,” said Richard. “At twenty you never think of rheumatics or a chill in the bladder.”
They guided the canoe back to the boathouse. They stood together on the landing-place in silence, looking at the river and the white mist rising.
They walked slowly home. At the gate they met Anni.
“Guten Abend, gnädige Frau, Herr Professor.”
She was a tall girl, with a pleasant, open face, and fair hair braided round her head.
“Good evening, Anni. Did you see your friends all right?”
Anni nodded. Her arms were full of small parcels. “We had cake, and tea, and then we sang. It was very
gemütlich.”
She looked down at the parcels. “They gave me these presents,” she added. She spoke the careful English which Frances had taught her. “I’ve had so much pleasure.”
“I’m glad, Anni. You should go to bed soon: you have a long journey tomorrow.”
Anni nodded again. “I wish you good night,
gnädige Frau
,
Herr Professor. Angenehme Ruh’.”
They walked round the garden after she had left them.
“It’s funny, Richard. I really am tired and there is a nice large bed waiting for me upstairs and yet I keep staying out here looking at the stars.”
“I hate to be unromantic, but I do think it is time we got some sleep. Tomorrow’s a bad day. It always is: you have a genius for finding last-minute things to do.” Frances smiled, and felt Richard’s arm round her waist guide her to the house. On the steps he stopped to kiss her.
“That’s to break the enchantment,” he said. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were the way Frances loved them most.
There was always a feeling of excitement after the unpleasantness of a Channel crossing, while the train waited patiently on the Dieppe siding, for the last passengers. They emerged, in straggling groups, from the customs and passport sheds. Frances, already comfortably settled in her corner, watched them with interest. She glanced at Richard opposite her, leaning back with his eyes closed. He was a bad sailor, but he managed things like customs officials very well indeed. Thank heaven for Richard, she thought, watching other wives followed by harassed husbands whose tempers didn’t improve under commiserating looks from unhurried bachelors. It was the stage in the journey when most people began to wonder if it all wasn’t more trouble than it was worth.
The last nervous lady was helped into the train. The confusion along the corridors was subsiding. They were moving, very slowly, very carefully. Two young men had
halted at their compartment.
“This will do,” said one, after hardly seeming to glance in their direction. They swung their rucksacks on to the rack and threw their Burberries after them. Undergraduates, thought Frances, as she looked at a magazine. Like Richard, they wore dark-grey pin-stripe flannel suits, brown suede shoes well worn, collars which pointed carelessly, and the hieroglyphic tie of a college society.
The train travelled gently along the street, like a glorified tramcar. The children with thin legs and cropped hair and faded blue overalls halted in their games to watch the engine. Their older sisters, leaning on their elbows at the tall narrow windows, looked critically at the people travelling to Paris. The women, standing in the doorways or in front of the small shops, hardly bothered to interrupt their gossip. It was only a trainload, and a full one too. All the better for their men who worked on the piers: the arriving tourist tipped well. The old men, who sat reading the cafe newspapers at the marble-topped tables, looked peacefully bored. One of them pulled out a watch, looked at it, looked at the train, and shook his head. Frances smiled to herself. Things had been different when he worked in the sheds, no doubt.
She discarded her magazines. It was almost impossible to read on a foreign train. The differences in houses and people, in fields and gardens, fascinated her. She looked at Richard. He was staring gloomily at the fields, making up his mind to move.
As he caught her glance he roused himself.
“Come on, Frances, tea or something. You’ve eaten nothing since breakfast, and I haven’t even that now.” He rose, and steadied himself. “There’s nothing like being back on solid
ground, even if it does lurch at the moment.”
They negotiated the two pairs of long legs, with the usual “Not at all” following them. In the corridor Richard grinned and squeezed her arm.
“Excited?” he teased. “I believe you are.”
“I have two excitements inside me,” said Frances, and smiled back. It was like being a child again, when a deep secret (cross your lips and heart) churned in your stomach, and the intoxication of knowing you were important, even if no one else thought you were, made your eyes shine. Frances controlled her exhilaration and tried to look bored. She remembered Richard’s words last night. “Keep cool, don’t worry. Don’t talk about anything important, even when you think it’s safe. Don’t speak on impulse. Don’t show any alarm even when you’ve just had an attack of woman’s intuition. I can tell from your eyes when you are really worried. We can talk things over at night when we get to bed. We won’t lose by being careful.”
We won’t lose!
She had chased away the exhilaration, and now she knew it had been guarding her against fear.
We won’t lose.
The certainty of the words panicked her. She heard Richard order tea.
Won’t lose, won’t lose, won’t lose,
mocked the wheels of the train. She suddenly knew that Richard and she had never been so alone before, in all their lives.
“That’s better,” said Richard as he lit a cigarette. “The compartment was much too crowded. Now what do you want to see in Paris?”
It was strange, she thought, how people seemed to change in a foreign train. More than half in this coach were English, but already they seemed so different. She became aware that Richard was watching her carefully. She smiled to him and
calmed her imagination. Nice beginning, indeed, when every stout Swiss commercial traveller seemed to be a member of the Ogpu, or that pinched little governess looked like a German agent. I’ve seen too much Hitchcock lately, she thought; at this rate I’ll be worse than useless.
Richard was talking continuously as if he had sensed her stage fright. She concentrated on listening to him; he had helped her this way before. Like the time she had climbed her first mountain, and had got badly stuck, so badly that she accepted the fact that she was going to be killed, actually accepted it with a peculiar kind of resignation—but Richard had talked so calmly, had compelled her attention so thoroughly, that she forgot she was already dead at the bottom of a precipice, and her feet followed his to safety. He was talking now about the French peasants. A French peasant, he was proving, would not be able to understand
The Grapes of Wrath.