The Dangerous Years (41 page)

She’d never really been out of his mind and he was also conscious that they were now both free agents again. Smart’s house, full of warmth of a woman’s touches, made him long for something for himself. For all Biddy’s earnest efforts, Thakeham remained cold and empty, with no one there to whom it meant home. As he left, he decided it was time to go and see her.

He was taking no chances this time and in his pocket was the ruby the Grand Duchess Evgenia had given him in Malta after
Mordant
had lifted her out of Russia. Because he’d always intended it for Charley, he’d never offered it to Christina.

He found the house without difficulty. It was small and in need of paint and, in the fading light, had a lost look about it. Studying it from the shadows at the other side of the road for a moment to pluck up his courage, he was caught by a dreadful panic. Suppose she told him she wasn’t interested any longer? Suppose some other man were there? Suppose she blamed him for Kimister?

Drawing a deep breath, he walked across the road and knocked on the door. A light came on in the hall and as the door opened a woman appeared. With the light behind her he thought at first it was Charley, then he saw it was Mabel. She didn’t recognise him at first, then her face lit up. ‘Kelly Maguire!’ she said. ‘By all that’s wonderful!’

She looked harder, sharper, much more painted than he remembered her, with heavy lipstick and rouge on her cheeks, and he was startled to see there was grey in her hair. Good God, he thought,
we’re not young any more!

She seemed glad to see him and, ushering him inside, offered him a drink.

‘I came to see Charley,’ he said.

She gave him an odd look. ‘I suppose you did,’ she agreed. ‘And you were surprised to see me open the door, eh? Well, I occasionally stayed with her and that’s why I’m here. I’m not badly off again now, you see, because the fashion trade’s picked up a lot in the last year or so.’ She shrugged. ‘All the same, I’m damned if I want to spend all my life in it and it seems to me time I got out. I’m getting married and I’m here to collect a few things.’

He grinned, delighted for her. Their relationship had never been one of enmity. ‘I thought you’d land someone as long ago as 1914,’ he said.

‘So did I. I ought to have done.’ She smiled at him, tough-minded, self-reliant and cheerful, a new Mabel who seemed to have lost her chances but found her senses. ‘I had all the attributes. Damn it, I was even willing – a damn sight more willing than most girls! – but it didn’t work. The men I chose seemed to have a depressing habit of getting themselves killed. First, that chap in the dragoons – I’ve even forgotten his name now – then the RFC man. There were a few others as well, but they all seemed to disappear to France and vanish. When the war ended I found I was twenty-seven, and still not fixed up.’

‘Who is it, Mabel?’

Mabel smiled. ‘Met him in Shanghai,’ she said. ‘I thought at the time it might be James Verschoyle, but he was too cagey and always slipped through my fingers. Then I met George. He was a captain in the Devons. When I went down to Hong Kong, he followed me. We made a good foursome, me and George, and Charley and Albert Kimister.’ She paused and frowned. ‘
That
was a disaster, Kelly, you know.’

Kelly pulled a face. ‘It wasn’t the only disaster that came out of China,’ he said. He glanced round for some sign of Charley but could see nothing of hers that he remembered. ‘Go on about George,’ he urged, chiefly because he needed something to say and was afraid of mentioning Charley. ‘Which George?’

‘George Dunbar. He’s retiring as a lieutenant-colonel. He’s a bit of a boozer but he’s a good-hearted soul and he needs someone.’

‘To keep him sober?’

‘Good God, no!’ She gave a hoot of laughter. ‘If George wants to get drunk, he can get drunk. I don’t mind. He doesn’t become maudlin and he doesn’t sing or fight. He just grows a little more dignified, that’s all. He’s perfectly house-trained and he has money. For years he had to dance attendance on Mummy and perhaps that’s why he got drunk. Now she’s dead and he won’t have to any more. We’re doing it at Aldershot in May.’

She lit a cigarette and Kelly waited. She offered him another drink and he found she was looking curiously at him.

‘I bet you didn’t come here to hear about George,’ she said suddenly.

‘No, I didn’t,’ he admitted, and he was just about to ask where Charley was when she spoke again.

‘How’s Christina?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve heard she and James Verschoyle are contemplating getting hitched.’

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘It fits.’

‘I think it does,’ he agreed. ‘Perhaps he did me a good turn even, because the marriage never worked.’

‘Neither did Charley’s.’

Her voice was unexpectedly sharp and accusing, but it was something he’d known all the time.

‘Albert Kimister was wet,’ Mabel said firmly. ‘Wet as a winter Sunday afternoon. And after spending all her life expecting to marry you, being married to him came as an awful shock to her.’

He could find nothing to say and Mabel reached for her drink. ‘It was your fault entirely,’ she went on. ‘All you had to do during those years when she was waiting for you was stick an engagement ring on her finger and she’d have waited until the Last Trump. Did you know that ?’

‘I ought to have done.’

‘She went on waiting. Like me. But in my case it was because I couldn’t make up my mind. And look what I got – George Dunbar. He’s not at all what I expected, bless him, but I’m too old now to quibble and I intend to make a good job of it if I can.’ She finished her drink and stared him squarely in the face. ‘But you’re no George, Kelly, and Charley’s no Mabel. That sister of mine has the most faithful of hearts.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’ Kelly was growing puzzled, wondering where Charley was and why Mabel was so anxious to talk.

‘I often thought you were a dirty dog, Kelly,’ she went on. ‘Especially when I came to stay with her in this ghastly little house which was all her precious Albert could manage to leave her. I expect you’re wondering where she is.’

At last they seemed to have reached the point he’d been waiting for.

‘I’ve even got a ring in my pocket, Mabel,’ he admitted uncertainly. ‘A Russian grand duchess gave it to me and I always intended it for Charley. I heard about Kimister just before I left for the Mediterranean. It turned out to be rather a long trip and I’ve only just got back.’ He found he was talking because he was uncomfortable in front of her.

She gazed at him. ‘She got over Albert Kimister,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘There wasn’t much to get over.’ It was an illuminating comment and he shifted restlessly.

‘I think I was a bit of a fool some years ago.’

‘I think you both were.’

‘I’ve come to try to make up for it. I’m not much of a hand at making speeches, Mabel, but five years isn’t a lifetime and it ought not to have left an indelible mark on either of us. I want to do what I ought to have done years ago. I want to ask Charley to marry me. As soon as possible.’

There was a long silence as she stared at him and, with a curious sense of foreboding, he felt his heart sink. When she spoke, however, her voice was sympathetic. ‘You know why I’m collecting my things, Kelly?’ she said gently. ‘It’s because the house is up for sale.’

Kelly’s heart dropped to his stomach.

‘She’s gone, Kelly, my love. You’re too late. She left for New York in the
Mauretania
on Monday. She got a job there – a good one, with some British export firm – and it was so sudden she asked me to look after everything for her.’

Kelly drew a deep breath. It seemed painful in his chest. Charley was heading one way and, as usual, he was heading in the other. ‘Perhaps I can write to her?’ he offered. ‘I meant what I said, Mabel.’

She shook her head. ‘Oh, no, Kelly,’ she smiled. ‘Not again! She’s had enough. Besides, there’s someone interested in her. An American. That’s why she took the job. She met him while he was here on business. I’m sorry for you, Kelly, because you seem to have found your senses at last, but I’m damned if
I’m
going to give you her address when she’s got a chance of pulling something out of the fire. She’s still young and, unlike yours truly, she doesn’t look jaded. What’s more, he’s no Willie Kimister. He’s a hell of a nice man and I hope she marries him and has lots of good American kids covered all over with stars and stripes.’ She looked at him sadly. ‘You may be hell on wheels as a sailor, Kelly, but as a hearts and flowers type you’re an absolute dead loss.’

Two weeks later,
Actaeon
led
Adroit
and
Glendower
out of Portsmouth harbour en route for Gibraltar. A large crowd of relatives and friends had been given special permission to enter the yard and wave their farewells from the jetty and, as the last wire fell away and
Actaeon’
s stern came out for her turn for the harbourmouth, Kelly saw the handkerchiefs appear at once in a fluttering rash of white.

He was beginning to get over Mabel’s news a little by this time. The sense of loss had staggered him. He hadn’t been able to accept it at first and had gone to a Southsea hotel and quietly got drunk. He was feeling better now, however, occupied as he had been over the last two weeks with the thousand and one things of his command that needed his attention. Perhaps in the end, he had decided, it was as well. For naval wives, marriage was only an endless routine of pack and follow, something they did for the rest of their husband’s career, living a nomadic life, dragging the trunks from the garage on their own, and emptying their lives into them without turning a hair, ready always, like a desert Arab, for instant departure.

The women’s eyes were on
Actaeon
and her consorts as they passed, the grey ships that were their rivals for the affections of their men, the ships that would always come first and break their hearts every time they vanished over the horizon. They had looked on in silence as the kitbags and suitcases and tin trunks went off, the place where they lived already wearing a stripped look; and now they were watching the slow diminishing of their lives as their husbands vanished from sight. Their eyes were fixed on the sailors lined up on deck, printing their faces in their minds in a way they hoped would last throughout the empty months ahead, and there was a little quiet weeping going on, he knew, behind the brave waves, and more than one hard lump in the throat. Some of the men wouldn’t see their wives for three years and it was always hard to keep a home together at a distance of a thousand miles, especially where a shortage of money made a lodger necessary to make ends meet.

He picked out Smart’s wife. In her breast would be the quickening fear that every woman felt as she watched her husband’s ship leave, and he saw her lift her head a little higher as the wind tugged at her hair. Thank God I didn’t inflict this on Charley, he thought.

But in the next breath, he knew he was lying to himself. Knowing you left someone behind waiting for you, longing for your return, always made departure easier, and he suddenly realised how over the years, when he’d seen other men receiving letters from their wives, how empty his life had been.

‘God bless this ship and all who sail in her,’ he murmured to himself. ‘And God bless the wives who wait at home.’

Slowly, with the ship at the Still, they passed
Vernon
to port and Fort Blockhouse to starboard. He heard the bosuns’ pipes as he stood at the salute then quietly they slipped past Southsea Pier and into the chop of the Channel where a fresh blustery breeze was blowing. The gulls mewed round the mast as he smelled the chill salt tang of the sea and caught the faint hint of spray on his face. Beyond the Isle of Wight, the water was grey and hazy and the horizon was blurred by rain squalls.

Smart appeared alongside. ‘Forecastle secured for sea, sir,’ he announced.

‘Thank you, Number One.’

Kelly nodded and tugged the gold-laced peak of his cap down over his eyes. The ache in his heart was growing easier now, the sense of disappointment and loss fading slowly. Life wasn’t always as kind as you expected it to be but it
was
possible – it had to be – to get over the fact that the woman you loved preferred someone else. Fortunately the Navy had to come first. If it didn’t, it couldn’t exist. And that, in a way, was a sort of consolation prize, because not far round the corner was war, which would make parting even harder. Of that he was as certain as he had been in 1914. Indeed, it would really be the same war they’d fought then with only an interval for half-time and a suck at a lemon.

It might take a year to arrive, he decided. Or five, or ten. But it was coming, because already in Germany there were ambitious men rattling their sabres in their scabbards, while in the rest of Europe there were only the unimaginative politicians who had failed again and again yet always seemed to be in office, bewildered, tired men, devoid of both guts and ideas. When it came, he thought, men would die and women would go through agonies, so if they were all heading for self-immolation what in God’s name did love and tenderness matter in the end?

He drew a deep breath that was almost a sigh and decided he was becoming as cynical as Verschoyle, because love and tenderness
always
mattered.

The familiar outline of Portsmouth drew into a thin blue-grey line. No one spoke very much. Nobody could fail to be touched by the poignancy of parting and the knowledge that they wouldn’t be seeing their homes and families for another two or three years. They all had a hard knot in their chests as the Horse Sand Fort came up, and the navigator began to exchange information on course, speed and weather with the officer of the watch in a way that seemed to indicate that his thoughts hadn’t yet quite parted from the girl he’d left behind.

The navigator turned to Kelly. ‘Horse Sand Fort abeam, sir,’ he reported.

‘Thank you, Pilot.’ The interruption broke into Kelly’s thoughts so that the parting from the land became complete.

The wind was from the south-west and the ship began to feel the first of the open sea as they left the shelter of the Isle of Wight, digging her nose into the waves and lifting water over the bow to be blown by the salty gust into glittering fans of rainbow hues. The deck canted and Kelly’s heart suddenly and unexpectedly began to sing as he felt the fresh clean air dance in his lungs.