A Gathering Storm (9 page)

The following Saturday, Beatrice’s mother said to her husband at breakfast, ‘I hear Michael Wincanton is coming down from London this weekend. That will be lovely for the children.’

‘Ah, our Honourable Member,’ Hugh Marlow said, folding his newspaper in order to read an article about Germany’s growing air force. ‘I’d like the chance to ask him what he believes this Herr Hitler is up to. I don’t think we can trust the fellow for a moment. What sort of a title is Führer anyway? Ridiculous nonsense.’

Beatrice said, ‘Why doesn’t Angie’s father live at Carlyon Manor?’

‘Don’t speak with food in your mouth,’ Delphine said. ‘He does, but he often has to be in London. When one governs the country, there is little time for holidays.’

At last August turned to September, and now when Beatrice visited the house there were big leather trunks gaping hungrily in the boys’ bedrooms, and Nanny and Brown sewing laundry labels on shirts or packing books and piles of ironed clothes. Whilst Ed practised kicking a rugby ball about the grounds, Peter went for walks on his own and grew listless. It wasn’t hard to work out that he didn’t enjoy school.

And suddenly, like the house martins that had nested under the eaves of Beatrice’s bedroom all summer, they were gone.

Lessons started the following Monday.

As Angie had confided to Beatrice, Miss Simpkins wasn’t a bad old stick, though plain of face and a little portly, it could not be denied, and her stockings tended to gather in frumpy folds on her thick ankles. She was kind, but her patience was not endless.

Angelina managed her well, making up for her own lamentable lack of interest in everything except drawing and music by being charming.

‘I wish I were as clever as Beatrice,’ she’d say, when their governess chided her for failing to rote learn her French verbs.

Angelina, it’s not cleverness, it’s application you lack.’

‘But I try and try and try. I
do.
And I think I’ve got them all in my head and they simply fly out again.’

‘I would suggest that you hadn’t learned them thoroughly the first time. Now try the written exercise again, and this time, remember what I told you. There’s a pattern to the endings if you take the trouble to look for it.’

‘It’s not as if we’ll ever need to speak Frog,’ Angelina muttered. ‘And it’s utterly unfair that Beatrice knows it already.’

‘Only the spoken language, dear, and she’s not quite perfect there. Remember, I studied the language in
Paris.
She needs to work as hard as you do on the grammar. Now, girls, poor Hetty has been waiting ages to read to me, so please continue the work by yourselves then try the reflexive verbs.’

‘They really aren’t hard,’ Beatrice told Angie at luncheon in the nursery. ‘
Je me suis couchée à huit heures.
It means I put myself to bed at eight.’

‘Do you? Well, who else would do it for you?’ Angie said sulkily. ‘Don’t you think it’s so silly?’

‘Angie, it doesn’t matter whether it’s silly or not, it just is like that. I’m only trying to help you.’

‘I know. Good old Bea. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me? It must be awful to have to put up with someone as stupid as me.’

She would look so sorrowful, Beatrice always forgave her. Immediately and fully. If Angelina didn’t smile at her, it was as though the sun had darkened.

And always there were the horses.

‘Here you are again, miz, like a bad penny,’ Harry, the weath-erbeaten old groom grumbled as he carried another straw bale into Jezebel’s stall and cut it open with his pocket-knife, but Beatrice saw he didn’t really mind.

So often was she to be found in the stables, feeding Cloud handfuls of sweet hay, stroking his nose, that sometimes Harry saddled up the pony and let her sit on the beast whilst he led them round the cobbled yard on a long rope.

‘Sit up, miz,’ he ordered her. ‘Grip him with your legs there. Don’t hold the reins all sloppy. Show him who’s boss.’

‘Oh! He is!’ Beatrice giggled, as Cloud bucked his head and she snatched at the saddle, thereby losing the reins, but after several of these sessions in the yard she learned confidence and how to control him with a gentle kick and the slightest tug of the bit in his soft mouth.

‘You’ll do, miz,’ was as good as a compliment from Harry. ‘We’ll try a trot next time if you’re ready.’

Beatrice nodded shyly, but Harry caught her happiness all right. ‘Get yourself a thicker pair o’ trousies or you’ll be sore,’ he told her, as he helped her dismount.

She often visited Cloud and Jezebel on her way home. She loved to watch Harry groom them, or was content to stand and stroke them in their stalls, seeing their muscles twitch and the way they flicked their tails against the flies, breathing in the sweet smell of their manure. She whispered secrets to them, satisfied that their snorts and whinnies passed for conversation.

Often, on her walk over the cliffs in the mornings, she would glimpse Oenone Wincanton on Jezebel, prancing along the beach, sometimes with the military man she’d heard the other children refer to as ‘Rollo’, or cantering across a field in the distance, woman and horse moving as one, and she yearned to be there, too.

Angelina, by her own admission, was a sack of potatoes on a pony, but she too loved Cloud and was sometimes to be seen riding away, Harry on Jezebel beside her, as Beatrice set off on foot for home.

There came a day when Beatrice was practising rising and falling to a trot that Mrs Wincanton appeared unexpectedly in the yard. Harry wheeled Cloud to a halt. Beatrice was worried that she was doing something she shouldn’t with her secret riding lessons, but she needn’t have been.

‘Oh, bravo!’ the woman cried, applauding. ‘You have a natural seat, Bea.’ All the family had caught this nickname. Only Miss Simpkins, the governess, persisted in calling her Beatrice, sometimes in an Italian accent –
Bayatrichay.
‘Like Dante’s lost love,’ she sighed, her eyes soulful, thinking perhaps of her own fiancé, buried far away in Belgium.

Mrs Wincanton had come to tell Harry to saddle up Jezebel at four. She wanted to ride across the next valley to see a friend who’d had a baby. Orders given, she said, ‘Don’t let me delay your lesson any longer,’ and strode away, hands in pockets, singing a gay little tune to herself.

Not long after this came the surprise. One afternoon Beatrice found Harry sweeping out an empty stall. ‘Wait until tomorrow,’ was all he’d say, winking at her, and the next day there was a third horse standing quietly there, a sturdy skewbald pony with a gentle face. Her name was Nutmeg. ‘She’s so you and Angelina can ride together,’ Mrs Wincanton told Beatrice. ‘And for Hetty to learn, too, when she’s older.’

Beatrice stumbled out her thanks. Nutmeg might not be white with a flowing mane, like the horses of her dreams, but with her black and brown patches she was still adorable.

‘Daddy’s coming today,’ was how Angelina greeted her one Friday morning in November. Her cheeks were even pinker than usual and her eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘Mummy’s driving to meet him at the station herself and he’s staying for a whole three days. I’ve told Mummy we must have no lessons on Monday but she said we should wait and see.’

‘Why doesn’t he live here, with you?’ Beatrice asked. ‘Does he have to work in London all the time?’

‘He’s in the government. He has to be in London because of running the country. It’s very important, Mummy says. You can’t always be going off in case the Prime Minister needs you to do something, like stop another war or pass a law . . .’ She waved her hand in a vague fashion.

Beatrice thought it sad that running the country meant you couldn’t be with your family. ‘Why don’t you all go and live in London then, with him?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, a rare frown creasing her brow. ‘We did before, but not any more. It’s something to do with here being Daddy’s um . . . consistency, and that’s why some of the time he’s here he’ll be going off to meetings with farmers and people. And there’s a dinner tomorrow night here with
thirty guests
coming and Mummy’s awfully busy and doesn’t want us getting under her feet.’

There was indeed an hysterical air about the household. All morning, as the older girls puzzled over long division and took turns reading from
Julius Caesar
, carts would arrive with vegetables, vans with meat or fish on ice. Doors slammed, Brown’s high-pitched voice was heard complaining, and Mrs Wincanton called out instructions about moving furniture. With the sound of each new visitor, little Hetty, who was supposed to be practising her handwriting, dropped her pen and ran to the window. Finally, she knocked over the inkwell.

‘Oh, you wretched child!’ cried Miss Simpkins. ‘You’ve got it all over you!’

Beatrice hoped against hope that there would be lessons on Monday, or she’d never meet the Hon. Michael Wincanton. Would he be tall and dark like Rollo Treloar, she wondered, the man who rode with Oenone Wincanton, or sturdy and fair like Edward?

‘Is Major Treloar coming to dinner tomorrow?’ she whispered to Angelina when Miss Simpkins was cleaning up Hetty’s spill. Did she imagine the way Miss Simpkins’s hand stilled for just a moment on the exercise book?

‘Rollo? I really don’t know.’ Angelina stared at William Shakespeare as though actually trying to commit the script to memory. ‘I’m not sure Daddy cares for him much.’ Beatrice wished she’d never asked the question. Angelina was hiding something from her again. Sometimes she couldn’t fathom this family.

‘We really should get on, girls.’ Miss Simpkins’s tone was granite. ‘Hetty, go at once and find Nanny and change your blouse. I’ve never known such a clumsy hoyden, in all my born days.’

There were lessons on Monday, but Beatrice did not see Angelina’s father.

When Beatrice arrived it was to find Angelina almost wild with misery and Miss Simpkins could do nothing with her.

‘He’s gone back to London,’ Angie said at lunchtime in the stableyard, when Beatrice asked.

‘I thought he was going to be here today.’

‘So did I. I don’t want to talk about it.’ But after they’d been petting the horses for a bit she softened. ‘Daddy said something had come up. He came to say goodbye, very early. I was to tell goodbye to Mummy because she was still asleep. But when I gave her the message she looked upset. Then she went out riding.’

‘With Major Treloar?’

‘No, on her own. Rollo did come to the dinner – but I was right about Daddy not liking him. I heard him and Mummy arguing because she’d invited him.’

‘Did you go to the dinner?’

‘No, but Ed and I were allowed to greet the guests. There was one terribly amusing man, awfully flirty, and I’m afraid I lied and told him I was fifteen and Bea, you’ll never guess, but he said he didn’t believe me, that I looked at least seventeen. I laughed like a drain. He was awfully old, twenty-five or something, and then Mummy spoilt it by sending me up to bed.’

Beatrice found herself looking at Angie in a new light. The man had been right about her looks. Her figure was distinctly curvy, and when, almost unconsciously, she played with her hair, pushing it back off her face, it seemed an adult gesture. Beatrice’s was still the body of a child, but lately she’d noticed a tenderness about her nipples, one of several symptons of a sea change. Her mother had made embarrassed murmurings about something unpleasant being likely to happen and when it did she was to come at once and tell her. But it was Angie, pink-faced and self-important, who first whispered to her about ‘the curse’ and how much it made one’s belly ache.

October 1936

It was soon after Beatrice’s fourteenth birthday, and
The Times
was full of General Franco’s victories in Spain, when Hugh Marlow suffered a heart attack. The doctor, sent for in the middle of the night, arranged for his transferral to hospital in Truro where he remained for a week. Mrs Wincanton insisted that Beatrice come to stay at Carlyon. She also lent Mrs Marlow her driver every day so that she might visit the invalid.

Whilst troubled about her father, Beatrice enjoyed actually living at Carlyon. Everyone was particularly kind. Brown would call, ‘Chin up, miss,’ whenever she saw her, and the cook-housekeeper, Mrs Pargeter, pronounced her a ‘poor little lamb’ and turned out chocolate cake and toffee apples at regular intervals to ‘keep the spirits up’.

Above all she loved the ritual of breakfast, helping herself to porridge or boiled eggs or fresh toast from the array of silverware on the sideboard and sitting where she wanted at the big table with its fresh white cloth. Oenone Wincanton would come in late from riding, drop her gloves on a chair and eat her breakfast standing up, pacing the room. Then she’d be off for the morning or the day, often as not, on mysterious missions in her husband’s constituency that might involve taking enormous quantities of ribbon or something else for which she’d practise reading a typewritten speech as she drank her coffee. On one occasion they returned home after a nature walk on the cliffs with Miss Simpkins to find the house filled with ladies gossiping and drinking tea, some clustered about a leathery man in wire-framed spectacles, tweeds and facial whiskers. ‘This is Professor Stanley, girls,’ Oenone said, bringing Angie and Beatrice into the circle. ‘He’s given us a most affecting talk about the pagan temples of Ephesus, haven’t you, Professor?’ The girls took the first opportunity to escape upstairs in fits of giggles, Angie declaring, ‘It was like shaking hands with a bat.’

When she’d previously stayed overnight at Carlyon, Beatrice had been given a spare room, but this time she was glad to share Angie’s big bed. She’d never shared a bed before – and found that in the darkness, the confidences came easily.

‘Do you love your father?’ Angie asked.

‘Of course,’ was Beatrice’s automatic response. She’d never thought about it before, but now Angie had made her, she realized she didn’t know. What did love mean? She didn’t want him to die, of course, and she was used to his physical weakness, his demands for attention. Her mother was often explaining to her that her father had given the best of his strength for his country during the war. He had done his duty at great personal cost. The war must have been bad, she knew, because sometimes her father shouted out in the night and once her mother appeared in her room to reassure her that it was only a bad dream. But the result was that Hugh Marlow had little attention to spare for his daughter. He relied heavily on his wife, and the endlessly patient Delphine tried to meet his every need. Beatrice had never thought about her relationship with her father before. She only knew one thing for certain: she loved her mother.