Last Telegram (8 page)

“I couldn't,” she said, blushing and nervously smoothing her skirt. “I haven't played for years.” She'd had a classical training, and though never a professional performer, she'd given piano lessons and played in local amateur concerts before marriage and children got in the way. When times at the mill had been hard and there was no extra cash for servants, her music had been sacrificed to housework and cooking.

“Come on, you can do it,” I said, going over to the piano stool and rifling through the piles of sheet music stored under its padded lid. I found what I was looking for, a score now dog-eared and falling apart at the seams:
Music
Hall
Favorites
.

“Here we are,” I said. I moved the knickknacks from the piano, propped it open, lifted out the music shelf, took her elbow, and led her to the piano stool. “Now all you have to do is play.”

“It's been so long.” She shook her head. “My fingers won't know what to do.”

It was Stefan who finally persuaded her. He was sitting on the arm of the sofa, leaning forward, watching intently. “Please, Mrs. Verner. Please play for us,” he said. “We like very much to hear the piano.”

As she started, everyone began to listen. Watching her fingers move over the keys with growing confidence, I remembered how she used to sit me on her knee as she played. With a child's selfishness, it seemed then that her music was just for me. Now, hearing her again after so long, I realized what a sacrifice she had made, giving up her music to meet the demands of the family.

She stopped to look through the battered old score. “Here's a good one. ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van.'” As she started into the familiar tune, John and I got up and stood beside her, reading the words over her shoulder. After a couple of verses, the boys came to join us, starting to hum along and sing the chorus with us.

When we sang the words
dillied
and
dallied, dallied and
dillied
, they started to giggle.

“What is
dilly
dally
, please?” Walter asked.

I struggled to find a polite explanation. “It means they spent a lot of time hanging around drinking, or talking, or…”

John interrupted, saying something in German, and they guffawed like schoolboys. Next time we repeated the chorus, they made cheeky kissing noises and Father frowned in gentle reproach.

After three more numbers, Mother declared she'd reached the end of her repertoire and went to make tea. As the others drifted back to the warmth of the fire, Stefan stayed by the piano, apparently lost in his own thoughts. Then he seemed to settle something in his mind and looked at me briefly with a slight smile before pulling out the stool and sitting down, tentatively spreading his hands over the keys. Something tugged in my heart as I noticed for the first time the perfect pink ovals of his nails at the end of each long, elegant finger.

He played a few scales and then, haltingly, started to pick out a tune I recognized as the opening bars of the
Moonlight
Sonata
. Muttering at his mistakes and pausing to remember each following phrase, Stefan stumbled on, but his arpeggios sounded more like a doleful trudge than the calm moonlit landscape Beethoven had intended.

After a few minutes, he took his hands from the piano and sighed, lowering his head. The untrimmed wisps of dark hair curled down his neck and over his collar, and I felt a surge of sadness for this strange boy, so far from home.

“Play us the jazz,” Kurt said.

Stefan looked up at me.

“This is okay for you?” he asked. “You like the jazz?”

“Very much,” I said, smiling encouragement.

Stefan turned back to the keyboard, took a deep breath, and launched into an exuberant ragtime piece. The solemn struggle with Beethoven was transformed into the joyful freedom of jazz. The fingers on Stefan's right hand moved so fast they became a blur, as the left hand stretched into successions of complex chord sequences.

Everyone in the room started to move, heads nodding, feet tapping; even Father's knee was jiggling. The rhythm was irresistible.

“Remember those swing steps, Lily?” John leaped up and took my hand as we clumsily tried to approximate the dance we'd learned on New Year's Eve. Kurt and Walter watched for a moment and then came to join us, doing their own wild version, waving arms and legs around without any regard for the rhythm.

From the piano, Stefan shouted, “
Swingjugend, swing. Swing heil!
” Kurt and Walter raised their arms in mock-Nazi salutes and repeated, “
Swing
heil! Swing heil!
”

Mother's eyebrows raised in alarm.

“What's that all about?” I shouted to Kurt.

“American jazz. Banned by the Nazis,” Kurt shouted back.

“Why is it banned?”

He shrugged. “Stefan plays it for—what do you say?”

Stefan stopped playing and swiveled around. In the sudden stillness, his voice was firm and clear, “We play it because it is not allowed.”

“Who's we, Stefan?” John asked.

“
Swingjugend
.”

“Until they were arrested,” Kurt said, almost under his breath.

“Arrested?” I repeated, failing for a moment to understand the full import of the word.

Stefan glowered at him. “They just gave us a beating. As a warning.”

It was such a shocking image, none of us knew what to say next. My mind whirled, trying to understand. How could the police—or was it soldiers?—be so violent against young boys, just for playing music? The sense of menace seemed to seep into the room like a poison.

Mother spoke carefully. “Are you saying that the police beat you and put you in prison, Stefan?”

Stefan nodded. “The SS,” he said. “But we were not in prison for long. It was just a warning.” He paused and then went on, “That is why I had to leave Germany.”

“You poor boy,” she murmured. “No wonder…”

“Were you all members…of this group?” I stuttered.

“Only Stefan,” Kurt said. “We do not know about it till he tell us.”

“There is no
Jugend
where we live,” Walter added.

“Perhaps we make our own group, here in Westbury?” Kurt smiled, and the tension in the room started to settle. “Can he play some more?”

Stefan looked at Father, who nodded.

This time we listened quietly. It didn't seem right to dance. Trying to make sense of what the boys had told us, I began to understand why this music was so important for Stefan. The baby grand had never known such spirited, emphatic playing. It was an act of protest and defiance, seeming to drive the menace out of the room.

After a few minutes, he stopped, and we all applauded and cheered. As Stefan straightened up from a mock-formal bow, I saw for the first time his face fully illuminated with happiness.

Finishing is the final procedure in the long and complex process of transforming the silkworm's gossamer into a perfect piece of woven silk. Dependent on the type of fabric required, finishing can include dyeing, boiling, tentering, drying, and pressing in a variety of ways to achieve an extraordinary range of characteristics: firmness, fullness, dullness, luster, softness, or draping quality. For certain technical applications, such as parachute silk, finishing is critical in determining the final porosity of the fabric.

—
The
History
of
Silk
by Harold Verner

I was sitting in a deck chair in the garden on that warm May evening, refreshing my tired feet in a bucket of cool water, a gin and tonic in my hand and reading the latest edition of
True
Romance
while horned stag beetles bumbled around me in dusk. I should have been content, but I wasn't. I was desperate for some romance of my own. Though fabled for having one pub for every thousand residents, Westbury offered few opportunities for meeting people, and John seemed to spend more and more time in London.

Robbie's intimately whispered promise to “see you very soon” rang hollowly in my ears. He hadn't been in touch for three long months, not since the meeting at the mill. I'd stopped trying to be first to the telephone each time it rang, and had given up rushing to meet the postman. I was lonely, and my social life was at a standstill.

So when I heard the raunchy toot-ti-toot of a car horn, I didn't waste any time putting my shoes on and sprinted around to the front of the house barefoot. John was already waiting on the front step.

“Nice motor,” I said, as a low-slung dark blue sports car drew up.

“It's a Morgan, spelled M-O-N-E-Y,” he whispered back.

The car scrunched to a halt on the gravel. Robbie looked just like a Hollywood leading man in his fur-lined flying jacket and a white scarf of what appeared to be parachute silk. His long absence was instantly forgiven. He pulled off his leather pilot's helmet, pushed himself up, and swung his legs over the door.

“My new baby. What do you think?” He seemed extremely pleased with himself.

“Beautiful,” we chorused.

He pumped John's hand. “How are you, old man? Long time no see.”

He lifted my fingers and kissed them with mock formality, eyes flirting, then looked down at my bare feet. My toes felt suddenly vulnerable.

“Hello, Lily. Love the red nail polish, terribly erotic—I mean exotic.” He grinned with easy familiarity. “How's tricks, one and all?”

“Not bad, not bad,” said John. “Like the Morgan.”

“Little beauty, isn't she? Fancy a spin? There's room for both of you, if Lily doesn't mind sitting sideways in the back.”

The smell of Castrol on the warm evening air promised adventure. As Robbie shimmied the car through the twisty lanes, each bend brought a new aroma: a greenstick bonfire, hay drying in the field, pungent piggeries, water mint, wild garlic, and the sweeter notes of bluebells and cow parsley.

We pulled up at the pub, and while Robbie went inside to get the drinks, John and I sat on a bench by the river, watching an anxious mother duck shepherding her ducklings and listening to the calls of coots settling in the reed beds.

“I wonder why he's popped up just now?” John said. “We're still waiting for him to sign that parachute silk contract, you know? It's been a while.”

“Are you going to ask him?”

“Watch and learn, Sis,” he said, tapping the side of his nose.

Robbie arrived with the drinks, and for a while we made small talk. “Been doing much flying lately?” John asked.

“She is no more,” Robbie said, pulling a sorrowful face. “Had a bit of a prang.”

“Golly. You crashed it?”

“I'd been out for a spin—lovely evening, bit like this. I was just coming into land when out of nowhere comes this ruddy great removal van toddling along the edge of the field,” he said smoothly. “Managed to avoid it but the wheels clipped a hedge, and next thing I knew, we were doing a somersault. Fine in the air, that kind of thing, but not so clever at ground level. Ended up with her nose half-buried in a ploughed field and me hanging upside down in the straps.”

He demonstrated leaning out of his seat, chest parallel to the ground, arms gripping an imaginary joystick, mock terror on his face, making us laugh. It seemed like a bit of a lark. We expected a jokey punch line.

“What did you do?” John asked.

“I felt this wet in my hair. It was petrol, dripping out of the tank onto the engine block. So my mind got made up sharpish. I jumped for it and ran away across the field. There was a ruddy great whoomph and the whole thing went up. Guy Fawkes would have been proud. That was the end of the plane, though. Miss her terribly.” He jerked his thumb toward the Morgan glistening in the twilight, engine ticking as it cooled. “But the insurance paid for that little beauty.”

The story shocked me, much more than I'd expected. What if Robbie really had gone up in flames? I could imagine what John was thinking: we could have lost the contract too.

Robbie took a swig of his pint. “
C'est la vie
. Anyway, what's been happening in Westbury? How's business?”

“Not bad, not bad, considering,” John said.

“Tough times for us all,” Robbie said. “The harder old Chamberlain bargains for peace, the harder we seem to be working for war, don't you find?”

He offered us cigarettes from a slim monogrammed case and then, as he lit them for us with his gold Dunhill, added quite casually, “By the way, how's the finishing going? The parachute contract's yours, you know, just as soon as you're ready to meet the specifications.”

John didn't miss a beat. “The finishing plant's in and we're confident it'll be up and running in a week or so.” I sipped my shandy and smiled to myself at his bullishness. The truth, I knew, was less impressive.

For weeks now, John and Father had been preoccupied with installing the new equipment. By moving machinery around, they had managed to clear a section of the winding mill to create a self-contained room next to the boiler house with its own double doors leading directly into the yard, convenient for the plumbing, drainage, and hot water needed for the new plant. The equipment arrived from Switzerland on a lorry so long it had difficulty in negotiating the driveway. Each heavy section had to be lifted and rollered into the new finishing room before the machinery could be assembled. A team of engineers worked several days to construct it and link up the plumbing and wiring.

“You're very quiet, Lily,” Robbie said, turning to me. “I gather you're in charge of weaving the stuff? How's that going?”

“It's going fine.” I caught John's eye.
Just
watch
me
play
the
game
too
. “It's a plain taffeta in twelve
momme
habotai
, and to be honest, it's a doddle compared with some of the other things we have to weave. We should be able to get you some samples any day now, just as soon as the plant's up and running.”

Robbie nodded as if he knew what I was talking about and John suppressed a smile. I surprised myself too; it was a heady feeling, being an expert. Not what men usually expected of women, I thought smugly.

What I said wasn't far from the truth. Weaving parachute silk was straightforward: thread of equal weight for both warp and weft, with no patterns or color changes. Twist and tensions were clearly defined. The yarn we used was still “in the gum”—the sticky sericin the caterpillar exudes to make its cocoon—which made it easier to handle. It would be “degummed” by boiling the woven cloth as part of the finishing process.

Gwen had put me in charge of two looms weaving test runs with Stefan, so that he could take over two of his own once the contracts came in. As she predicted, he was already a good weaver, and I found myself looking forward to working beside him each day. At first, it was exciting to be developing a new material, but it was vital to be vigilant against broken threads, and these were tricky to detect against the blinding whiteness of the material. After hours of watching yards of plain white cloth emerging from the shuttle beam, our eyes burned and we begged Gwen to let us weave stripes or Jacquard designs to relieve the boredom. But she was immovable. “It's important work, has to be right. And you two are our experts now.”

After Robbie dropped us home, John said, “Very impressive,
schwester
, the way you talked that up. You're turning into a right little businesswoman.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I said, feeling quietly proud of myself, flattered that he'd noticed.

“Of course, it helps that he's pretty sweet on you. Better keep it that way—we're going to depend on him in the next little while.”

“He's not
sweet
on me. You're just imagining it,” I snapped. “Besides, just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I have to simper at any chap with a checkbook.”

John backed away, palms up. “Steady on, old thing. I just meant keep on the right side of him, nothing more or less. But mark my words, he'll ask you for a date within the week. I'd bet my hat on it.”

• • •

“It's that charming Mr. Cameron on the blower. Wishes to speak to my beautiful daughter,” Father said, exchanging approving glances with Mother.

“I'll keep my hat, then,” John said, making triumphant nudge-nudge gestures as I went to the telephone, cheeks burning.

The days till Saturday dragged slowly by. I was so excited at the prospect of my first proper date, I could barely sit still. I emptied my wardrobe and chest of drawers, trying on a dozen combinations of outfits, eventually settling on a tartan skirt and baby-blue cashmere twinset that felt both casual but also flatteringly feminine. My new silk stockings, fresh out of the pack, felt sleek and sexy. At last the evening arrived.

As I sat in the cinema with Robbie's arm around my shoulders, I realized with a little thrill of excitement that he bore more than a passing resemblance to the star of the film, James Stewart. Being in the company of this handsome man felt deliciously glamorous.

Afterward, we went for a drink in the pub, and it was past eleven by the time we returned home. Robbie offered his hand and I climbed with as much elegance as I could muster out of the low-slung car. He wrapped an arm around my waist, and with his other hand turned my face to his and kissed me. At first it was demure, like before, but then I felt him push my lips apart with his tongue, exploring my mouth with it. I felt myself in the hands of a skilled operator, closed my eyes, and tried to lose myself in the moment.

But the sensation wasn't what I expected, not swoony, like in the movies. All I could think of was that he tasted of cigarettes and beer. I was glad when he stopped.

“You dear sweet thing,” he said, stroking my hair. “We must do this again. We could have some serious fun together. Tell you what, I've got a friend who has a cottage in the Peaks. I could borrow a friend's plane and fly you there for a weekend. What do you think?”

“That sounds…cracking,” I stuttered. I could hardly concentrate as he kissed me good-bye, my head was in such a spin. Whatever did he mean? Was he really suggesting we should have a dirty weekend? That was a bit fast, even for James Stewart.

• • •

“You were back late last night. Have a nice time, dear?” Mother enquired as we cleared the breakfast dishes.

“Lovely. The film was a laugh,” I mumbled. “James Stewart's a great actor.”

“Charming young man, isn't he? Your father's quite taken with him,” she said distractedly.

Robbie was ideal boyfriend material. I was sure that I was falling in love. But how could I know for certain? What was I supposed to feel? Vera had been promised a weekend off soon, and I couldn't wait to tell her everything.

• • •

A few days later, Mother, John, and I were eating supper informally at the kitchen table. Father had stayed over in London. Out of the window, I could see the mill in darkness, except for the lights of the new finishing plant casting bright stripes across the empty yard.

John pushed the ham and potato salad around his plate.

“Not hungry, dear?” Mother asked.

“I'm fine,” he snapped.

“Sorry it's only a cold meal tonight, but I thought, with this weather.”

“I said I'm fine.” Like the slam of a shuttle.

Another silence, then he banged down his knife and fork. “It's that ruddy vat in the finishing plant. I just can't get the thermostat and timer to work properly. I've tried and tried. We've wasted God knows how much silk by overboiling it. Now it's useless for parachutes and no one else is going to want it. We've spent thousands on this kit but unless we can get the silk right sharpish, we'll never get the contracts to pay off the debt.”

He sighed, rubbing his stubbly cheek. “I'll just have to go back after supper and have another go.”

“Do you have to? You look all done in,” Mother murmured.

“Shall I come and help?” I said, surprising myself.

“Why should you? You've done a day's work already.”

“It's important to me too, you know, the future of the mill and all that.” He raised his eyebrows. I barely understood how it had happened, but my apprenticeship no longer felt like filling in time until something better came along. I was starting to care.

“Come on then,” he said, pushing away his chair and getting up from the table. “A pair of fresh eyes won't do any harm.”

Unlike the weaving shed, with its oily smells and dark looms, the finishing plant was dazzling—brightly lit and newly whitewashed, with shiny stainless steel vats and tubes, steamy and clean-smelling like a laundry.