‘I like it,’ said Linda. ‘It’s my home, and I like to be in it. And besides, somebody might turn up, just for a few hours you know, and want to see me, and he knows where to find me here.’
‘You’ll be killed,’ I said, ‘and then he won’t know where to find you.’
‘Darling Fanny, don’t be so silly. There are seven million people living in London, do you really imagine they are all killed every night? Nobody is killed in air-raids, there is a great deal of noise and a great deal of mess, but people really don’t seem to get killed much.’
‘Don’t – don’t –’ I said. ‘Touch wood. Apart from being killed or not it doesn’t suit you. You look awful, Linda.’
‘Not so bad when I’m made up. I’m so fearfully sick, that’s the trouble, but it’s nothing to do with the raids, and that part will soon be over now and I shall be quite all right again.’
‘Well, think about it,’ I said, ‘it’s very nice at Alconleigh, wonderful food –’
‘Yes, so I hear. Merlin came to see me, and his stories of caramelized carrots swimming in cream made my mouth water. He said he was preparing to throw morality to the winds and bribe this Juan to go to Merlinford, but he found out it would mean having the Bolter too and he couldn’t quite face that.’
‘I must go,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I don’t like to leave you darling, I do wish you’d come back with me.’
‘Perhaps I will later on, we’ll see.’
I went down to the kitchen and found Mrs Hunt. I gave her some money in case of emergency, and the Alconleigh telephone number, and begged her to ring me up if she thought there was anything I could do.
‘She won’t budge,’ I said. ‘I’ve done all I can to make her, but it doesn’t seem to be any good, she’s as obstinate as a donkey.’
‘I know, ma’am. She won’t even leave the house for a breath of air, sits by that telephone day in day out playing cards with herself. It ain’t hardly right she should sleep here all alone in my opinion, either, but you can’t get her to listen to sense. Last night, ma’am, whew I it was terrible, walloping down all night, and those wretched guns never got a single one, what ever they may tell you in the papers. It’s my opinion they must have got women on those guns, and, if so, no wonder. Women!’
A week later Mrs Hunt rang me up at Alconleigh. Linda’s house had received a direct hit and they were still digging for her.
Aunt Sadie had gone on an early bus to Cheltenham to do some shopping, Uncle Matthew was nowhere to be found, so Davey and I simply took his car, full of Home Guard petrol, and drove to London, hell for leather. The little house was an absolute ruin, but Linda and her bulldog were unhurt, they had just been got out and put to bed in the house of a neighbour. Linda was flushed and excited, and couldn’t stop talking.
‘You see,’ she said. ‘What did I tell you, Fanny, about air-raids
not killing people. Here we are, right as rain. My bed simply went through the floor, Plon-plon and I went on it, most comfortable.’
Presently a doctor arrived and gave her a sedative. He told us she would probably go to sleep and that when she woke up we could drive her down to Alconleigh. I telephoned to Aunt Sadie and told her to have a room ready.
The rest of the day was spent by Davey in salvaging what he could of Linda’s things. Her house and furniture, her beautiful Renoir, and everything in her bedroom was completely wrecked, but he was able to rescue a few oddments from the splintered, twisted remains of her cupboards, and in the basement he found, untouched, the two trunks full of clothes which Fabrice had sent after her from Paris. He came out looking like a miller, covered with white dust from head to foot, and Mrs Hunt took us round to her own little house and gave us some food.
‘I suppose Linda may miscarry,’ I said to Davey, ‘and I’m sure it’s to be hoped she will. It’s most dangerous for her to have this child – my doctor is horrified.’
However, she did not, in fact she said that the experience had done her a great deal of good, and had quite stopped her from feeling sick. She demurred again at leaving London, but without much conviction. I pointed out that if anybody was looking for her and found the Cheyne Walk house a total wreck they would be certain at once to get into touch with Alconleigh. She saw that this was so, and agreed to come with us.
W
INTER
now set in with its usual severity on those Cotswold uplands. The air was sharp and bracing, like cold water; most agreeable if one only goes out for short brisk walks or rides, and if there is a warm house to go back to. But the central-heating apparatus at Alconleigh had never been really satisfactory
and I suppose that by now the pipes, through old age, had become thoroughly furred up – in any case they were hardly more than tepid. On coming into the hall from the bitter outside air one did feel a momentary glow of warmth; this soon lessened, and gradually, as circulation died down, one’s body became pervaded by a cruel numbness. The men on the estate, the old ones that is, who were not in the army, had no time to chop up logs for the fires; they were occupied from morning till night, under the leadership of Uncle Matthew, in drilling, constructing barricades and blockhouses, and otherwise preparing to make themselves a nuisance to the German army before ending up as cannon-fodder.
‘I reckon,’ Uncle Matthew would say proudly, ‘that we shall be able to stop them for two hours – possibly three – before we are all killed. Not bad for such a little place.’
We made our children go out and collect wood, Davey became an assiduous and surprisingly efficient woodman (he had refused to join the Home Guard, he said he always fought better out of uniform), but, somehow, they produced only enough to keep the nursery fire going, and the one in the brown sitting-room, if it was lit after tea, and, as the wood was pretty wet, this really got warm only just when it was time to tear oneself away and go up the freezing stairs to bed. After dinner the two armchairs on each side of the fire were always occupied by Davey and my mother. Davey pointed out that it would be more trouble for everybody in the end if he got one of his chills; the Bolter just dumped herself down. The rest of us sat in a semicircle well beyond the limits of any real warmth, and looked longingly at the little flickering yellow flames, which often subsided into sulky smoke. Linda had an evening coat, a sort of robe from head to foot, of white fox lined with white ermine. She wrapped herself in this for dinner, and suffered less than we others did. In the daytime she either wore her sable coat and a pair of black velvet boots lined with sable to match, or lay on the sofa tucked up in an enormous mink bedspread lined with white velvet quilting.
‘It used to make me so laugh when Fabrice said he was getting me all these things because they would be useful in
the war, the war would be fearfully cold he always said, but I see now how right he was.’
Linda’s possessions filled the other females in the house with a sort of furious admiration.
‘It does seem rather unfair,’ Louisa said to me one afternoon when we were pushing our two youngest children out in their prams together. We were both dressed in stiff Scotch tweeds, so different from supple flattering French ones, in woollen stockings, brogues, and jerseys, knitted by ourselves, of shades carefully chosen to ‘go with’ though not ‘to match’ our coats and skirts. ‘Linda goes off and has this glorious time in Paris, and comes back covered with rich furs, while you and I – what do we get for sticking all our lives to the same dreary old husbands? Three-quarter-length shorn lamb.’
‘Alfred isn’t a dreary old husband,’ I said loyally. But of course I knew exactly what she meant.
Aunt Sadie thought Linda’s clothes too pretty.
‘What lovely taste, darling,’ she would say when another ravishing garment was brought out. ‘Did that come from Paris too? It’s really wonderful what you can get there, on no money, if you’re clever.’
At this my mother would give tremendous winks in the direction of anybody whose eye she might happen to catch, including Linda herself. Linda’s face would then become absolutely stony. She could not bear my mother; she felt that, before she met Fabrice, she had been heading down the same road herself, and she was appalled to see what lay at the end of it. My mother started off by trying a ‘let’s face it, dear, we are nothing but two fallen women’ method of approach to Linda, which was most unsuccessful. Linda became not only stiff and cold, but positively rude to the poor Bolter, who, unable to see what she could have done to offend, was at first very much hurt. Then she began to be on her dignity, and said it was great nonsense for Linda to go on like this; in fact, considering she was nothing but a high-class tart, it was most pretentious and hypocritical of her. I tried to explain Linda’s intensely romantic attitude towards Fabrice and the months she had spent with him, but the Bolter’s own feelings had been dulled by
time, and she either could not or would not understand.
‘It was Sauveterre she was living with, wasn’t it?’ my mother said to me, soon after Linda arrived at Alconleigh.
‘How do you know?’
‘Everybody knew on the Riviera. One always knew about Sauveterre somehow. And it was rather a thing, because he seemed to have settled down for life with that boring Lamballe woman; then she had to go to England on business and clever little Linda nabbed him. A very good cop for her, dulling, but I don’t see why she has to be so high-hat about it. Sadie doesn’t know, I quite realize that, and of course wild horses wouldn’t make me tell her, I’m not that kind of a girl, but I do think, when we’re all together, Linda might be a tiny bit more jolly.’
The Alconleighs still believed that Linda was the devoted wife of Christian, who was now in Cairo, and, of course, it had never occurred to them for a moment that the child might not be his. They had quite forgiven her for leaving Tony, though they thought themselves distinctly broadminded for having done so. They would ask her from time to time what Christian was doing, not because they were interested, but so that Linda shouldn’t feel out of it when Louisa and I talked about our husbands. She would then be obliged to invent bits of news out of imaginary letters from Christian.
‘He doesn’t like his Brigadier very much,’ or,
‘He says Cairo is great fun, but one can have enough of it.’
In point of fact Linda never got any letters at all. She had not seen her English friends now for so long, they were scattered in the war to the ends of the earth, and, though they might not have forgotten about Linda, she was no longer in their lives. But, of course, there was only one thing she wanted, a letter, a line even, from Fabrice. Just after Christmas it came. It was forwarded in a typewritten envelope from Carlton Gardens with General de Gaulle’s stamp on it. Linda, when she saw it lying on the hall table, became perfectly white. She seized it and rushed up to her bedroom.
About an hour later she came to find me.
‘Oh, darling,’ she said, her eyes full of tears. I’ve been all
this time and I can’t read one word. Isn’t it torture? Could you have a look?’
She gave me a sheet of the thinnest paper I ever saw, on which were scratched, apparently with a rusty pin, a series of perfectly incomprehensible hieroglyphics. I could not make out one single word either, it seemed to bear no relation to handwriting, the marks in no way resembled letters.
‘What can I do?’ said poor Linda. ‘Oh, Fanny.’
‘Let’s ask Davey,’ I said.
She hesitated a little over this, but feeling that it would be better, however intimate the message, to share it with Davey than not to have it all, she finally agreed.
Davey said she was quite right to ask him.
‘I am very good at French handwriting.’
‘Only you wouldn’t laugh at it?’ Linda said, in a breathless voice like a child.
‘No, Linda, I don’t regard it as a laughing matter any longer,’ Davey replied, looking with love and anxiety at her face, which had become very drawn of late. But when he had studied the paper for some time, he too was obliged to confess himself absolutely stumped by it.
‘I’ve seen a lot of difficult French writing in my life,’ he said, ‘and this beats them all.’
In the end Linda had to give up. She went about with the piece of paper, like a talisman, in her pocket, but never knew what Fabrice had written to her on it. It was cruelly tantalizing. She wrote to him at Carlton Gardens, but this letter came back with a note regretting that it could not be forwarded.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘One day the telephone bell will ring again and he’ll be there.’
*
Louisa and I were busy from morning to night. We now had one Nanny (mine) between eight children. Fortunately they were not at home all the time. Louisa’s two eldest were at a private school, and two of hers and two of mine went for lessons to a convent Lord Merlin had most providentially found for us at Merlinford. Louisa got a little petrol for this, and she
and I or Davey drove them there in Aunt Sadie’s car every day. It can be imagined what Uncle Matthew thought of their arrangement He ground his teeth, flashed his eyes, and always referred to the poor good nuns as ‘those damned parachutists’. He was absolutely convinced that whatever time they could spare from making machine-gun nests for other nuns, who would presently descend from the skies, like birds, to occupy the nests, was given to the seduction of the souls of his grandchildren and great nieces.
‘They get a prize you know for anybody they can catch – of course you can see they are men, you’ve only got to look at their boots.’