Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (63 page)

Luc stayed to read one carefully; so that he knew everything he could, before he reached Adele.

Noni and Lucas were in the car now, Lucas still clutching the toy cow.

‘Lucas! Give that back, give it to Mme André.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. He can keep it. Here, Noni, take the book. Maman can read it to you tonight.’

‘Will you, maman?’

‘Of course.’

As if such a thing would be possible; probably they would still be sitting in the car, sleeping in the car. Well, that wouldn’t stop her reading a story. She started the car, put it into gear, smiled out of the window at Mme André, blew her a kiss. She smiled back, tears now rolling down her cheeks.

‘Wait! Take these.’ She took two apples from the pocket of her pinafore, pushed them through the window. ‘For the children.’

Behind them, in the Place St-Sulpice, Luc passed on the handbill and began to push his way through the ever-denser crowds; it was suffocating, like a nightmare. But – there it was, in front of him now, his street, his home, his children, Adele.

‘
Au revoir, chère
Mam’selle Adele. You are going home to England, I suppose?’

It was the first time she had asked.

‘Yes,’ said Adele, firmly wishing she believed it. ‘I am going home to England.’

CHAPTER 28

The trenches were quite deep: about six feet, and then covered in barbed wire. Any unauthorised person found in them was under threat of a firing squad.

‘That’s a bloody good defence we’ve got,’ said Lord Beckenham, gazing from the one at the front of the house across the land towards Oxford. ‘We can see the enemy coming from every direction. Well, I just hope they do, that’s all. Give them a damn good hiding. Our men are ready for anything.’

Lady Beckenham was about to say that the opportunity for Lord Beckenham and his Home Guard troop to give the Germans a hiding could hardly compensate for an enemy landing and then thought better of it; the whole thing was keeping him wonderfully busy.

‘Excellent,’ she said, ‘now have you spoken to the headmaster about making the trenches out of bounds? Because they really are quite dangerous.’

‘Of course. I told you. First chap in will be made an example of—’

‘Beckenham, I don’t think the boys believe you’re really going to shoot any of them in the trenches.’

‘Why on earth not?’ His fine old face was puzzled. ‘I would have, when I was a boy.’

‘Yes, well things were different then. What does the headmaster suggest as a punishment?’

‘Oh, some damn fool nonsense about detention. I said at least a thrashing, but they don’t even go in for that much these days. Anyway, I’m continuing to tell them it’s the firing squad.’

‘I think I’d better speak to them at my assembly.’

Her assembly had become a weekly occurrence; she spoke to all the boys after supper, usually on Sundays, about matters of discipline and other, more agreeable things. The boys loved them, looked forward to them even, she was such a game old trout, as Henry Warwick’s best friend remarked graciously to him, she always had some jolly new idea for them, and she enjoyed them too, they had become a crucial part of running the school at Ashingham.

Originally, she had told the headmaster, an ineffectually pleasant man called John Dawkins, promoted when the young, forceful head had joined the army, that discipline was his area, as long as certain guidelines which they would draw up between them were observed. But she very swiftly came to regret this: and, indeed, her offer to take in the school. Fifty small boys, a teaching staff of five plus two domestics, combined with extra members of her own family and staff added up to a lot of people. Of course Ashingham was big enough, it had been built for a household of at least a hundred, but the noise and administrative problems were considerable.

The boys were as good as could be expected and fairly well-disciplined; just the same, the heady delights of finding themselves in the middle of the country with unlimited trees to climb, streams to dam, livestock to get to know, had proved almost too much for several of them. The naughtiest ones – led inevitably by Henry and Roo Warwick who knew their way around – had already been severely punished for lighting fires, organising a (mercifully discovered) rabbit shoot, swimming in the river unsupervised, climbing up to the very top of the Home Farm barn and sliding down on the hay and, one dreadful night, indulging in a moonlit bareback riding session. It was this last that had almost resulted in an exodus back to Kent, such had been Lady Beckenham’s rage, and John Dawkins had expressed immense horror together with a fear that the boys might have broken their necks.

‘Their necks!’ said Lady Beckenham. ‘I’m not worried about their necks, much better broken if this goes on, I’d say. One of those horses is a mare in foal and the other is very nervy and inclined to break out. If he tried to clear that gate, God knows what might happen, last time one of them did that it broke its back, had to be put down. I think you’d better let me talk to the boys, Mr Dawkins. They don’t seem to take a great deal of notice of you.’

Slightly reluctantly, Mr Dawkins allowed her to attend the next morning assembly, held each day in the ballroom; she stood up after prayers and told the boys that any more bad behaviour, ‘and you know what that is, the rules are perfectly clear,’ would result in expulsion from Ashingham.

‘I shall get your parents down here and tell them you’re going and why and that will be that. You’ll find yourself back in Dover at the mercy of the Germans.’

The more challenging spirits debated in whispers that night under the bedclothes whether she was within her rights to do this and, moreover, whether she meant it; it was generally agreed that she was and she did.

At the same time however, she did announce an impromptu games session every Sunday afternoon – ‘sack races and an obstacle course, that sort of thing, and if anyone wants to help with haymaking on the farm, they can come and see me. And if anyone wants to learn to ride properly, they can write and ask their parents. Mr Miller, my groom, has been kind enough to say he’ll organise that. Only don’t think you’ll be able to just arrive at the yard and mount; you’ll have to learn to groom and muck out, all part of riding, you know.’

Lord Beckenham had responded to Anthony Eden’s call on the radio for the formation of Local Defence Volunteers – later renamed the Home Guard – with great enthusiasm; within twenty-four hours the Ashingham Battalion had been formed, thirty-five men strong. He addressed them from the terrace of Ashingham wearing his rather elderly battle dress – ‘Far too big for him, I didn’t realise how thin he’d got, poor old chap,’ said Lady Beckenham – his medals pinned to his chest.

The younger ones leaned on their rifles, half amused, but the older men, many of them veterans of the First World War, Billy Miller included, found his speech moving and even distressing.

‘Looking at him standing there, telling us to fight off the invader, and that the safety and freedom of our land could depend on us, took me right back to Flanders,’ he said that night to Joan Barber in the village pub. ‘I felt quite – quite upset. It was like I could hear the screams again, feel the mud and the cold—’

Joan patted his hand and told him she could see that, especially with his leg and all, but it must be nice for him to feel he could do his bit for king and country as Lord Beckenham had said.

‘Don’t know about king,’ said Billy, ‘don’t have much of a feeling for all them, I’m with young Jay on that, but country yes. I’d die before I let one of those buggers – sorry, Joan – get on to Ashingham land. Pity about the holes in the ground, but there.’

The holes in the ground were a source of some contention with farmers; Churchill’s scientific adviser had recommended that in the event of a mass landing by air, now considered a serious possibility, large holes should be dug in the ground in all areas more than four hundred yards long and within five miles of an area of strategic importance. Even cropbearing fields were not exempt; furthermore, large stakes were to be driven into the ground to give the invading enemy further discomfort as he dropped to earth. All this was, of course, also hazardous to the small boys. It had become a separate and serious offence to play anywhere near the craters and another matter for serious discussion at Lady Beckenham’s assembly.

The Ashingham Battalion was rather more heavily drilled and disciplined than most – two sessions a week rather than one – and better equipped, admittedly with a rather odd armoury of weapons, ranging from Boer War rifles to Lord Beckenham’s own beloved Purdeys – ‘jolly good use for them, finishing off a few Germans’ – and even a pearlhandled pistol which Lady Beckenham’s mother had kept under her pillow all through her time in India. The neighbouring division was manned, it was said, with pitchforks and home-made clubs.

The Ashingham Battalion was also extremely zealous: in only its second week, a young courting couple found no less than three guns pointing at them as they lay in each other’s arms in the long grass by the river and were taken off to Ashingham where they were rigorously questioned in the kitchen.

Rather to everyone’s surprise, Lord Beckenham attended not only the requisite government course, but the two-day residential version organised by
Picture Post
magazine at Osterley Park, the home of the Earl of Jersey. He came back literally quivering with excitement from two days of crawling through smoke bombs, learning to explode anti-tank mines and firing at mock dive-bombers, and indeed begged so hard to be allowed to stay on that he was promised a further two days the following year.

‘There’s talk of the Home Guard taking over actual defensive duties if all the young chaps go to France,’ he said to Lady Beckenham, ‘think of that, being back in the front line. God, I hope those bastards arrive soon.’

He was all for forming a cadet squad with the boys from the school and indeed held a preliminary meeting; it was only Matron’s report that several of the boys had woken crying with nightmares, after Lord Beckenham’s extremely vivid accounts of what could be done with a pitchfork, wielded with sufficient skill against the enemy, that the idea had to be scrapped.

‘So tell me, what is your view of the chances of America coming into the war?’

Sebastian looked at Barty over the spectacles that he now wore. They aged him, made him less spectacularly good-looking, and he had resisted them for years: finally giving in after a rather painfully frank session with Celia when he returned the proofs of the latest Meridian virtually uncorrected, with the comment that typesetters were clearly becoming increasingly skilled as the years went by.

He had taken Barty out to lunch, telling her she looked pale and tired: ‘and I know women don’t like being told that sort of thing, but it’s true.’

She felt pale and tired, she was sleeping badly and she knew the reason; not overwork, not the ache in her heart which still caught her by surprise at the most unlikely moments – when she saw a couple sitting, heads together, engaged in some intense conversation, when an American accent caught her ear – not even the news from France, which was very bad. It was a sense of resentment and injustice at having been emotionally blackmailed by Oliver; and of distaste with herself for having given in. She hated it, every day, the safe, dull safe backwater she found herself in; and it didn’t suit her. It wasn’t just the war and not being part of it; she had grown accustomed in New York, all through her time with Laurence, to living on the edge, every day a difficult ongoing challenge. And she missed that, as much as she missed Laurence himself, the difficulty and the danger. A new, tough challenge, a different sort of danger was what she needed, indeed longed for; and besides, she had not been brought up by Celia, been Billy’s sister without developing a fierce desire to help defend her country.

She had been deeply moved by Churchill’s speeches, his exhortation to courage, to duty; she longed to respond and every day she resolved to tell Oliver that she couldn’t stay any longer, that she was going to enlist, and every day she looked at him, so frail and aged, so clearly fearful for Kit and Giles, and put it off a little longer. Celia could have borne her absence, she knew; Celia, with her huge courage could bear anything; it had actually been on his own behalf that Oliver had made his plea. And she loved him too much to refuse it; but it was making her very unhappy.

It was still surprisingly easy to imagine the war away: in London that summer of 1940 the Houses of Parliament might be surrounded in barbed wire, there might be sandbags in every doorway, and large signs saying ‘Shelter’ dotted about the city, there might be food rationing and talk of clothing coupons, and a sense of intense patriotism everywhere, but within the reassuringly unchanged inner sanctums of the Mirabelle and the Caprice, the Dorchester and the Savoy, there were few clues. The waiters were all rather elderly to be sure, and a lot of the male clientele were in uniform, but you could still order gulls’ eggs, salmon trout, lobster and ‘Oysters!’ said Barty joyfully. ‘Oh Sebastian, how lovely.’

‘I’m surprised you like them. With your rather conservative tastes.’

‘I became a bit more adventurous in New York,’ she said, ‘I learned to like all sorts of things.’

‘Well, that’s the first good thing I’ve heard about that young man. If he could corrupt your purist tendencies . . .’

She was silent, thinking of other corruptions, other delights Laurence had led her into; then, ‘Why talk to me about the Americans?’ she said.

‘Oh – simply because you were there quite a long time, you must have got a feel for the psyche. And how pro- or anti-British they might feel. It would be marvellous to have them on our side.’

‘I don’t really know. I mean, I left two years ago, don’t forget. But – I’d say the East Coast people, the old-money set, they had a strong pro-British inclination. An upper-class American is terribly like an upper-class Englishman.’

‘I don’t think you’d find Celia agreeing with you,’ said Sebastian laughing.

‘No, I know. But you’d be surprised, they’re bothered with all the same things, traditions, marrying into the right families, keeping up standards at all costs. Anyway, they might be on our side, but I know Roosevelt isn’t in favour. And I’m very much afraid most of America wouldn’t be.’

‘And of course that slimy bastard Joe Kennedy, he’s a well-known admirer of the Nazis. Nasty piece of work, if you ask me, how he got to be Ambassador to Britain, I’ll never know. Well it says a lot about the Americans – sorry, Barty.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said smiling, ‘I can cope with it now. I’m really beginning to be over it. I think.’

‘Really?’ he said, his fierce eyes probing hers.

‘Well – I said beginning. Actually more than beginning.’

‘Good. Now I want to ask your advice about something. I really think I might send Isabella down to Ashingham. She can go to that school there, well, Lady Beckenham says she can, and as far as I can make out, the headmaster does what she says, poor chap. I don’t envy him. And she’d be safe, I worry about her being up here. The bombing is bound to start soon. And she’s too young to go to boarding school. What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a wonderful idea,’ said Barty truthfully. ‘Really wonderful.’