The Wayward Wife (21 page)

It came as a great surprise when Basil's brother turned up at the wedding breakfast. It wasn't, strictly speaking, a breakfast at all but an intimate lunch in a side room in L'Étoile which – the restaurant not the side room – was conveniently situated for a quick sprint back to Broadcasting House where groom and bride would kiss and go their separate ways, Basil back to the office and Vivian off to the House of Commons to catch what promised to be a heated debate on the legality of the Home Secretary's unlimited powers of preventative detention.

In the past few weeks Vivian had spent much time in the gallery of the Commons and in meeting members of various bodies concerned with funding Czech and Slovak refugees, so much time, in fact, it was all Susan could do to drag her to a fitting for the suit that would substitute for a bridal gown and to the milliner's to pick a matching hat.

Vivian had never met anyone from Basil's family. His widowed mother lived in the wilds of Scotland – Troon, was it? – and his sister, her husband and children were ensconced somewhere near Penzance. Basil had informed them of his impending nuptials but had politely discouraged them from coming up to London for the event. Naturally, Vivian had dropped no hint to her black sheep brother and Susan's suggestion that she might invite one of her nieces to be a bridesmaid had been greeted with a snort of derision.

Susan had trimmed one of her old dresses for the occasion and Bob had stuffed himself into a rumpled three-piece suit. In old-fashioned morning dress, complete with topper, Basil looked decidedly out of place and the registrar's temporary confusion as to just which couple he was expected to unite in wedlock didn't help matters.

After the deed was done, bride and groom, accompanied by Bob and Susan, trudged round to L'Étoile in Charlotte Street. Here, rather to Basil's chagrin, a number of CBS correspondents were lunching and, swiftly putting two and two together, stood up and applauded the happy couple before the wedding party was shown into the side room where Commander Derek Willets, in full naval uniform, waited to greet them.

‘Good Lord!' Basil exclaimed. ‘I thought you were somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. How did you know where to find us?'

‘Intuition,' Derek Willets said. ‘Besides, you mentioned it in dispatches to Mother who mentioned it in dispatches to me. Now, please, introduce me to my brand-new sister-in-law.' He bowed to Vivian. ‘Mrs Willets, I assume? I'm the dreaded brother, in case you hadn't guessed. Welcome to the family.'

To Susan's surprise, Vivian blushed and the air of melancholy that had marked the proceedings vanished.

Commander Willets signalled an elderly waiter to wheel in the champagne, bride and groom were duly toasted and everyone sat down to tuck into mock turtle soup and whitebait and dispose of the two bottles of Chablis that the
maître d'
had been persuaded to produce from his dwindling stock.

‘By the bye,' Derek Willets said, ‘there's an account in your name in Heal's to which we all contributed. We'd no idea where you'd be setting up house so an open account seemed like the best solution.'

‘That's very kind of you, Commander,' Vivian said.

‘Derek, please.'

‘Very kind of you, Derek. In fact, we'll be living in my house in Salt Street and Basil will give up his flat. But, tell me, how did you contrive to be here today?'

‘Pure chance. My ship was damaged during an enemy raid and we put into Portsmouth for repairs. I wangled a day's leave on compassionate grounds.'

‘Compassionate grounds,' Basil said. ‘Very funny.'

‘Your ship, sir?' Bob asked.

‘A battered old rust bucket employed on convoy duty.'

‘Is it bad out there, Derek?' Basil asked.

‘Well, shall we say it's not too jolly.'

‘Invasion or blockade?' Bob Gaines said. ‘What's Adolf's game, do you think?'

‘Naval officers aren't really paid to think,' Derek Willets said. ‘But it's obvious that nuisance raids on London are a means of lowering morale and blitzkrieg bombing a way of testing the Luftwaffe's superiority.'

‘A battle upstairs you seem to be winning,' Bob said.

Derek Willets raised an eyebrow. ‘
You
seem to be winning? I rather thought you might have aligned yourself with our cause by now.'

‘He has,' Basil said. ‘He's only pretending to be neutral.'

‘Point taken, sir,' Bob said. ‘We're all in it together.'

Derek Willets was a model naval officer, Susan thought. Eight or ten years younger than his brother, he was tall, lean, tanned and had the most piercing blue eyes she had ever seen. How easy it would be to fall for him. And how foolish. Even so, she couldn't help but wonder if he had a wife tucked away somewhere. The thought had apparently crossed Viv's mind too.

She put the question bluntly. ‘And you, Derek, have you never been tempted to marry?'

He laughed, not at all offended. ‘I'm biding my time and waiting for the right girl to come along.'

‘Best not bide too long,' Basil said. ‘You're not getting any younger, you know. Whatever happened to that Wren you were so keen on last summer?'

‘Grace? I haven't seen her in ages.'

‘Where is she these days?' Basil persisted.

‘Gibraltar, last I heard.'

‘The Rock?' Bob said. ‘God help her!'

‘Have you been there?' Susan asked.

‘On my way back from Spain, yeah,' Bob answered. ‘Your friend, what's she doing in Gib?'

‘I really couldn't say,' said Derek Willets and promptly changed the subject.

At a little after
10
p.m. Deutschlandsender, Germany's main radio station, abruptly went off air. Medium-wave stations soon followed suit and even talks in English from Hamburg and Bremen petered out.

Kate and the other German monitors were quick to summon the supervisor, Mr Gregory, who put through a telephone call to London and returned, smiling slyly, to inform them that RAF bombers were out in force and, choosing his words with care, that the raids were not entirely confined to military targets.

‘In other words,' Griff said over the breakfast table next morning, ‘deniability is a two-way street. If Hitler wants the gloves off then he can't expect Churchill to fight by the Queensberry Rules.'

‘Kate,' Mr Pell said, ‘what do you have to say? Is your boyfriend right?'

Danny, more asleep than awake, cocked an ear and waited for Kate to deny that Silwyn Griffiths was her boyfriend.

She said, ‘I think the stations went off early last night because the German Ministry of Propaganda got caught out. There was one bulletin only and it concerned itself with changes to the type of siren to be used in air-raid warnings. After that – dead air.'

It was only just light outside. Summer was fading into autumn and quite soon no one in the Pell household would see much daylight. Mr Pell was used to early rising. He worked in a factory that had once produced parts for industrial washing machines but now turned out something – Mr P wasn't saying what – more appropriate to the war effort.

‘It won't be in the papers yet, will it?' Mr Pell said. ‘I mean, they won't give us the gory details. They seldom do.'

‘Oh, they might,' Griff said. ‘You can bet the wires are humming in the Press Association offices. The Americans will have it well covered. If there was a big raid on Berlin we'll hear about it one way or another.'

Griff was in a jaunty mood which, Danny thought, was odd for someone who'd just finished a twelve-hour shift.

No one seemed in any hurry to rush off, Mr Pell to work, Griff, Kate and he to bed. He dripped marmalade on to a piece of toast and nibbled it. He was so tired he could barely chew, so tired that he missed all the subtle signals that might have warned him what was in the wind.

Mrs Pell appeared from the kitchen bearing a fresh pot of tea. Griff cleared his throat and said, ‘Oh, by the way, Mrs P, we'll be away for a couple of days, Saturday through to Monday.'

‘Taking some leave?' said Mr Pell.

‘While the going's good,' said Griff.

‘Going somewhere nice?' said Mrs Pell.

‘Home to Brecon,' Griff said, ‘to see my folks.'

‘We?' Danny sat up. ‘Who's we?'

‘Kate's coming with me,' Griff said. ‘Dad can always use an extra hand dipping sheep.'

‘Dipping sheep,' said Mr Pell, frowning. ‘Bit late in the year for that. Bit smelly too.'

‘I don't think Silwyn meant it literally,' Kate said.

‘Don't be too sure,' Griff said. ‘Anyhow, it's high time you had a taste of farming given that I might inherit the blasted place some day.'

‘You?' Mr Pell said. ‘A farmer?'

‘A true son of the soil, that's me,' Griff said.

‘I can't see you as a farmer's wife, Kate,' Mr Pell said, ‘not with your education.'

‘She can call in the cows in German,' said Mrs Pell.

And everyone laughed, everyone except Danny.

There was really no need, Basil said, to go diving downstairs to the underground shelter every time a warning sounded. Most alarms were precautionary and only lasted ten or fifteen minutes. You wouldn't, he claimed, find a CBS or NBC broadcaster cowering in the basement of Broadcasting House. The American corporations' mistrust of recorded material had their reporters chasing round bomb-sites and holding mikes up to the sky when, that is, they weren't flying sorties with Bomber Command or clinging to the deck of a minesweeper.

The
Union Post
's London office, which had once been not much more than a guy, a gal and a telephone, was now home to an assortment of footloose European correspondents that Slocum had pulled together to supply New York with news.

From this source Bob Gaines, with Basil's encouragement, poached writers and reporters to enliven the output of
Speaking Up
which, in Bob's opinion, was in danger of becoming too stuffy for a show whose purpose was to sell the war to uncommitted Americans.

On that late August night the lion's share of the programme was given over to Morley Richards, the
Daily Express
military correspondent, who Basil had personally buttonholed at lunch in the London Press Club.

At Basil's request Mr Richards had agreed to address the question of how Britain would turn defence into attack and just when this reversal might take place.

A consummate professional, Mr Richards had timed his essay to the second and was in process of delivering it in a voice crisp enough to suggest not optimism but inevitability when the first warning siren sounded.

At first no one in the control booth turned a hair.

Mr Richards, at the mike, raised the volume but not the tempo of his delivery.

Sharing the studio table, Bob lit a cigarette. He had before him a sheaf of questions culled from listeners' letters from home and abroad but when a blast of high explosive shook the building it seemed that Joe Soap of Glen Falls and ‘Outraged' of Tunbridge Wells might have to wait for answers.

The ‘On Air' light flickered, Larry, the sound controller, uttered a colourful oath, and Basil Willets, in a voice that would have done his brother proud, growled, ‘Steady, lads, steady.'

‘For all these coming campaigns,' Mr Richards went on smoothly, ‘we need newer weapons, new methods. We must have troop-carrying planes, paratroopers to man them and …'

From just outside the door of the booth came the sound of running feet and faint and far off the fairy-music of a fire bell.

Basil ticked off the final seconds of Mr Richards's talk.

Bob put the first of the listeners' questions.

The clock's silent second hand swiftly counted the programme down. Bob thanked Mr Richards, delivered his closing and as soon as the wall light changed from red to green switched off the studio microphones.

And, as Elgar played them out, Basil blew out his cheeks and said, ‘Christ, do I need a drink.'

Although it was well after three the tearoom at the rear of the Greenhill was crowded with BBC wallahs partaking of late lunch. The lid of the piano in the lounge was closed, the stool unoccupied but Griffiths was not in a musical mood, it seemed, particularly as his colleagues were either stuffing themselves with salad or hovering in the vicinity of the wireless set in the billiard room to catch the latest bulletins.

It was a hot, humid afternoon. Blinds had been raised and windows thrown open and a faint breeze sifted through the empty lounge and ruffled the pages of the newspaper that Griff was reading. He was seated alone on a wicker chair in an alcove with a pint of beer and a half-eaten ham sandwich on the glass-topped table before him.

As soon as Danny appeared, he tossed the newspaper aside and got to his feet.

‘What'll it be?' he said.

‘I don't need you tae buy me drink,' Danny said.

‘Oh, dear,' Griff said. ‘We're about to have a showdown, are we? I can't say I'm surprised.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘Tell you what?'

‘About you an' Kate.'

‘Kate asked me not to.'

‘You bloody liar.'

‘Where is Kate, by the way?'

‘Shoppin' with Mrs Pell, I think.'

‘You think?' said Griffiths.

‘
I'm
not her bloody fiancé.'

‘All right, all right,' Griff said. ‘No need to fly off the handle. Park your bum, sup a pint and we'll talk about it like—'

‘Gentlemen?' Danny said. ‘You're no bloody gentleman, Griffiths, takin' advantage of an innocent girl.'

‘Oh, is that what you think?' Griff jumped in. ‘You think I lured Katie off the straight and narrow to have my wicked way with her.' He paused. ‘For God's sake, Danny, sit down.'

Danny dragged a chair from against the wall and swung it into position at the little table. Two men from the monitoring unit, one puffing a huge meerschaum pipe, strolled past and nodded, rather patronisingly, to Griffiths before going on into the tearoom, leaving a trail of smoke behind them.