Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 (21 page)

Billy didn't move. He stood there as if fixed to the spot, breathing in and out deeply and slowly.

‘You have to believe me, Billy,' Marjorie repeated. ‘I can't make you come with me. You're too big for that. But you can't stay here. For a start
there are other people coming to live here so you won't have anywhere to go.'

‘They said we could go and live with them, the Watlings said we could go to them, remember?'

‘That isn't possible now, Billy. I told you the Watlings have had to change their plans, because of relatives. You remember.'

‘Changed their plans as far as we go, yeah. Soon as old Mrs Watling got sober again—'

‘That isn't fair, Billy. Things are different now. Now that everyone's certain there's going to be a war. They've got to think of themselves first. They can't afford to have two more people dependent on them.'

‘Well, Aunt Hester always did say Mrs Watling was a bit of a toper.'

Billy looked at Marjorie, despair still in his eyes.

‘We'll be all right, Billy, I promise you,' Marjorie assured him once more. ‘And we'll be together. And you'll really like the place. Wait till you see it.'

Kate was also on her way; although where precisely she was headed she only had the vaguest of notions. Her mother had made another of her secret arrangements, organising a friend to drive Kate to Eden Park, although for some reason this friend was not to be allowed to pick Kate up from the front of the house for fear of being spotted by Harold. Instead the arrangement was for Kate to take the train only to the next stop where she was to disembark and meet her mother's contact in the car park, from where she would be driven to her destination.

‘It's all a bit cloak and dagger, isn't it?' Kate
laughed. ‘I mean you know best, so I suppose it is absolutely necessary?'

‘You can go all the way by train if you'd prefer, but rather you than me, given the distance and trains,' her mother replied. ‘As it is, since this acquaintance also happens to be going to Eden Park I thought it would be preferable for you to travel in comfort. It also might be quite useful for you.'

‘Useful?'

‘Yes, useful.' Her mother smiled as she handed Kate her coat. ‘And take your tennis racket. There's bound to be a court there of some sort. Most of these large estates have their own tennis courts now. Lucky people.'

‘What else do you know about this place, Mum?'

‘I didn't say I knew there was a tennis court. I just said there's bound to be one.'

‘There's something else,' Kate insisted. ‘What kind of work do they do?'

‘How should I know, Kate? All I've been told is that it's government work, which is why it's probably better that you're driven there by someone in the know. You know all the rumours about spies at the moment? How they're everywhere? I read only this morning about two nuns being arrested yesterday who turned out to be spies. Nuns, I ask you. You simply don't know who you can trust and who you can't. Mr Underwood said that it was Ted Molton's boy who found the two of them walking in the woods for goodness' sake. Dressed as nuns. Having only just got out of their parachutes. The cheek of it – to think they wouldn't be arrested because they were dressed as
nuns. If it had been me, I'd have taken a shotgun to them. Would have blown their heads off.'

‘Oh yes?' Kate laughed. ‘You who can't even swat a wasp without having to go and have a lie down to recover.'

‘It's different now, Kate, very different. Once your country's under threat. It makes people behave and think quite differently, believe you me. I actually sit there now thinking of ways to kill the Nazis – if they invade us. Hiding from them and stabbing them in the eyes with my knitting needles. All sorts of things, you'd be surprised. And you may laugh – but just you wait. You'll find things exist in you that you never dreamed existed before. My parents said the same thing about the last war. How it changed them. For ever. All their friends gone, all killed in the trenches. Half the village gone. Not one of my father's class left. All those boys he grew up with in the village. Imagine.'

They both fell to silence, looking round to see if there was anything Kate had forgotten.

‘I'm going to miss you, Kate. We always have such fun together.'

Helen looked suddenly wistful, and took Kate's long-fingered hands in her own more roughened ones, and held them.

‘You've been gardening without your gloves, Mother.'

‘I'm going to join the WVS to take my mind off things,' Helen said. ‘Your father's against it. Of course. Says I'm a fool, and that they won't find anything for someone as useless as me to do, but that's not true.'

‘No, it's not. Firstly you're not a fool, Mother—'

‘I know that.' Helen smiled. ‘And you know that. But your father doesn't.'

‘Then why do you let him say you are?'

‘Because it's a whole lot easier, Kate. Why do you think? Now – just one word of advice – before you go. Whatever happens, I want you to promise me something, Kate dear.'

‘All right,' Kate agreed cautiously, the way people do when asked in advance to vouch for something unknown. ‘What do you want me to promise?'

‘It's not so much of a promise – more of a recommendation. Don't be like me. Don't marry unless you're absolutely sure, and above all don't give up doing anything that matters to you for the sake of your family.'

‘Is that what you did?' Kate wondered, watching her mother as she carefully folded all the clothes Kate had rejected to put them in the charity box they kept for such purposes. ‘I know you've given up a lot for Robert and me – but that's not really what you mean, is it?'

Helen shook her head, closing the wardrobe doors to look round a room that all at once seemed deserted, with no dressing gown hanging up behind the door, the small bookshelf all but empty of her daughter's favourite books, the bed no longer to be slept in. Everything that identified her daughter was gone, packed away in the small light blue suitcase that lay closed on the bed.

Helen looked from the case to Kate and then sat down on the edge of the bed. The house was quiet now, with Harold gone to his work, and only some
orchestral music playing on the wireless that had been left on in the sitting room.

‘I was meant – to go to art school. To learn how to sculpt.'

‘To sculpt?'

‘Don't sound so surprised. There are quite a few lady sculptors as it happens.'

‘It's not that. It's because I had no idea.'

‘You wouldn't have. I never mentioned it. And your father certainly wouldn't. He's probably forgotten anyway.'

‘So why didn't you go to art school?'

‘Oh, because I got married instead. I got married because my parents wanted me to get married. It was all my parents wanted, particularly my father. Girls are terrible burdens to their parents if they don't get married, and by the time I was twenty-three my father was convinced I was going to be an old maid. I was an albatross around their neck. They'd survived a terrible war, somehow – and now they wanted to travel. Having me at home cost money – and so I got married. I met your father at a dance, he asked me out a couple of times, my parents were in awe of his brilliance, and the next thing I knew I found myself married. Once I was married, of course, I could say goodbye to any idea of pursuing my art. Not only would it cost money but your father considered the sort of art I was interested in absurd. As for the notion of a woman actually sculpting – you can imagine. So there you are. I buried what I wanted to do, and got on with being married to your father.'

‘Why are you telling me this now, Mother? It's hard enough leaving home.'

‘I'm telling you – why do you
think
I'm telling you, Kate?'

Kate simply did not know what to say. Such was the look of hopeless despair in her mother's eyes that even if she had been twenty years older she still would not have known what to say.

Her mother couldn't come with her to the station since she had to attend an interview at the local Women's Voluntary Service, and although she tried to maintain her appointment wasn't that important, and she could easily change it, Kate knew better and insisted that they said their goodbyes at the house.

They stood in silence in the hall waiting for the station taxi to arrive, the grandfather clock ticking loudly behind them, and time seeming to stand quite still, until her mother became suddenly galvanised into action, deciding to run yet another full and totally unnecessary check on her daughter's luggage and belongings.

‘It's all right, Mother.' Kate laughed. ‘I'm only going to Gloucester, not Timbuctoo.'

‘It might as well be Timbuctoo,' her mother replied, slipping another ten shilling note into Kate's purse. ‘You will write as soon as you get there now, won't you?'

‘Course,' Kate nodded. ‘Say goodbye to Father for me. And explain to Bobby when he comes home on leave that I had to leave quickly and that I'll write to him. And be sure to send him my love.'

Helen nodded again, not quite looking at Kate, trying her best to look efficient and businesslike.

‘Of course, Kate dear. Now here comes the taxi – and not before time.'

Kate smiled and kissed her mother lightly on the cheek.

‘Don't
worry
. I can take care of myself. I am eighteen, you know.'

Helen followed Kate down the garden path to the waiting taxi.

‘Sorry if I'm a little late for you,' George Grosvenor, the town's oldest taxi driver, said, touching his cap. ‘Seems the world and his wife all want taxis today. You'd think war had broken out already.' He took Kate's suitcase and put it in the boot of his car.

‘Not going to be easy when it does, George,' Helen replied, clasping her hands tightly behind her back. ‘They say petrol will be the first thing to be rationed.'

‘They'll be a-measuring it out in teaspoons, as soon as likely, ma'am.' George grinned, revealing a breath-catching lack of upper teeth. ‘Unless you're doing war work, course.' Having shut Kate in the back of the taxi he winked at Helen. ‘So guess what George here's volunteering for?'

Both women laughed at George, grateful for his cheery manner, for, given the times, it was a lot better to look on the bright side.

‘You take care now, Kate,' Helen said, bending down to the window Kate had wound open. She kept a hand on the taxi until it began to move away, when she waved it frantically instead.

After a short pause during which she watched it disappear into the distance with such attention it was as if she had never seen a car before, she went back into the house and quietly closed the front door behind her. She had imagined she
would be calmer in the daytime, once she had made up her mind to carry her plan through and make sure Kate flew the nest before her father ruined her life. Yet now her fears seemed to have grown worse, so much so that it was all she could do to stop herself telephoning George Grosvenor once he had arrived home, and asking him to come back for her, to take her away, anywhere – to Ireland, or the north of Scotland or the most rugged part of Wales – anywhere as long as she got away from Harold and the ice house that their home would now become. If she remained all she could expect was misery, and that was before she had to make over her children's rooms to the myriad strangers that, rumour had it, might be billeted on them at any minute.

As she climbed the stairs to shut the door on Kate's room, the past seemed to be drifting back to her. Children's voices laughing and talking in the early morning. The feel of their arms tight around her neck when she kissed them goodnight.
Night night, sleep tight, don't let the bugs bite!
She drifted aimlessly towards her own bedroom, trying to avoid the memories, trying to pull herself together, finally collecting her diary from its hiding place on top of her wardrobe, and taking it downstairs to the kitchen where sitting at the table with a freshly made pot of tea in front of her she prepared to bring it up to date.

Said goodbye to Katherine, the second goodbye to one of my children in a week. Robert is off to the Navy, and now Kate has left us to work as some sort of secretary for some hush-hush government body housed
in some great estate. JW told me about it, knowing what a bright spark Kate is – said it would be just the ticket for her and that she'd be just the ticket for them, so rather than have H go on ruining her life I worked out a plan to get her up there ‘officially' as it were. Everything was fine until we came to say goodbye – but then that's how it always is with people you love (I think). But this was a little different, because with the war coming, who knows what will happen? It took all I had to let Kate go, not to give way, particularly when I saw her little face at the taxi window, waving as the car disappeared from view. God speed her. I hope she can call when she gets there – if not I hope she writes as soon as she can. I can't call her – and as yet I can't write because I don't know the full address. I can't imagine not being in constant touch, but then with the way things are in the world, I might as well start as I mean to go on – and get used to it
.

In the absence of her mother Kate decided to be dashing and spurn the Ladies Only carriage, preferring to sit in second class where she found a seat in a compartment among service men and women who were all chatting merrily as if they were off to a dance rather than preparing for war. Kate took a book out of her bag and pretended to read, while all the time watching the faces and listening to the banter of the men and women barely older than herself, some of them she guessed being precisely the same age.

Out of the window the countryside they were passing through looked as green, pleasant and ordered as ever, with no hint of any mayhem
and confusion to come. She tried to imagine the sky filled with enemy planes, and the fields below with defending artillery, but failed because it just seemed far too unimaginable. The farms and villages through which the stopping train chugged looked less than real and more like the toy villages and farms she and Robert used to create in their garden or playroom, down to the half sleeping cows, and the grazing sheep and horses.