A Place Of Strangers (7 page)

Chapter Twelve

This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin
handed the German Government a final note, stating that unless we heard from
them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from
Poland, a state of war would exist between us...

The prime minister’s words come to Bea from the wireless in
her lounge. She is standing in the bath, drying herself with a soft white
towel. The room is full of steam condensing on the checker board tiles. Her
face is shroud grey in the mirror. It will be lunchtime soon. But she does not
feel like eating. Not today. She pulls the chain plug and makes to step out
onto the square yellow mat she bought last week at Liberty.

Her eye is caught by something in the eddying water – a thin
brush stroke of dilute crimson being drawn through the swirling bubbles towards
the drain. It seems to have no connection to her. Yet she feels something is
wrong. It makes her afraid and she does not know why.

Almost at once, a fierce pain detonates deep within her,
sudden and shocking like the blast of a bomb.

...I have to tell you now that no such undertaking
has been received and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany...

She stares down at her treacherous body. Blood drips from
her, exploding against the virgin enamel as the water empties away. Bea presses
the towel into herself. A vivid scarlet stain, wet and warm, spreads behind her
fingers.

She is overtaken by panic and runs naked from the bathroom.
A trail of bright red spatters marks her uncertain passage over the new mat,
down the woodblock hallway and across the green and white linoleum in the
kitchen.

Bea sinks to her haunches in the middle of the floor and
wraps her arms tight around her folded knees so she is small again, like a
child, moaning between the cycle of contractions ripping at her stomach.

Then it happens... a spasm so violent that she screams until
at last it ends. Maybe her neighbours will think murder is being committed here
but she does not care for she knows something is being done to death in this
place.

On the floor, in the sticky pool between her feet, she sees
the tiny creature her body refuses to nourish any longer.

She picks it up with such tenderness, as if it might break,
and holds it in her votive hands, pink and precious in its translucent sac with
fingers and toes, little arms and legs and a face that looks like a boy’s. And
in that head, what wisdom there would have been and in those sightless eyes,
what love might have shone.

It rests now, this child with no name, still and starved of
life so Bea will never know what it could have become, what it might have
achieved.

She squats, drained and helpless. Fatigue overwhelms her and
she crawls across the bloody floor on hands and knees to her bed where she
returns to the womb and everything goes dark.

When she wakes, Bea boils water and every trace of the son
she would have worshipped is scrubbed away so that he never happened... he
never was.

Just like his father must be.

Outside in the street, with eyes so full of tears it is like
walking under water, the faces of people and the noise of traffic distort and
bend and all the time, the parcel in her pocket weighs heavy though it is only
small, no bigger than a kitten and just as soft, wrapped in sheets of tissue
paper.

She passes through a narrow back entry behind a restaurant
where they bin their waste. No one sees her. It takes only a second or two.
Then it is over. But it will never be over. It will callous her heart for ever.

*

Even now, all these years later, those wormwood days were
with Bea still. Such loss she suffered, such pain at the duplicity of men. She
remembered Casserley’s clipped charm at besting a rival, her father’s glowering
face. Of Arie, there was to be no news, neither letter nor message. An
unbridgeable gulf had opened up between their lives. What happened in Bea’s
apartment was suffered alone, endured in secret.

Casserley’s team moved out of St Ermine’s. Someone said they
had gone to train under arms in Scotland. Maybe that was where Arie went to
learn the business of heroic death. Bea would not have dared ask her father.
They did not speak for months, not until after war broke out and he ordered her
to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

‘We must all do our duty, Beatrice. Our personal
feelings count for nothing at times like these.’

For the Air Marshal, the disgrace of that
Jew boy
was
a family scandal beyond forgiveness, mitigated only by her meeting Francis the
following year.

*

Bea parks the Hillman Minx opposite the officers’ mess.
Across the airfield, a dozen trainee pilots practise take-offs and landings in
flimsy Avro Tutors, all string and canvas like the flying coffins of the Great
War.

Bea, smart in the pressed blue uniform of an Aircraft Woman
First Class, walks to the canteen. Her black hair is much shorter now, cropped
to regulation length. She wears regulation service knickers, too – grey like
the thick lisle stockings the girls all hate but have to wear.

She rooms with another ACW1 called Joan who is
waiting for her with a mug of tea. Four Harvard trainers just delivered from
America, roar over the canteen’s tin roof and they duck instinctively. But all
the new recruits crowd to the windows to watch them turn into the sun and wheel
over the placid Wiltshire countryside.

‘There’s a dance tonight, Bea. You are coming, aren’t you?’

‘Probably not.’

‘It’ll cheer you up. Come on, be a sport.’

Bea checks the time. She has to drive the Group Captain to
Andover Station. She feels herself being stripped naked by the would-be airmen.
The mature ones, those who have started shaving, call her the
Ice Maiden
.
She is not deliberately aloof but they are just boys who have never done
anything and probably won’t now... not with the way the everything is going.

That evening, Joan drags Bea to the mess. Orderlies in white
waistcoats serve schooners of sherry on trays. A raw-boned Flight Officer
called Maureen puts Jack Jackson’s big band records on the gramophone. It is
romantic dance music but that is all anyone wants. Joan says Bea should find
herself a nice young man.

‘Why should I?’

‘Because we might be at war but life’s for living. We’ve got
to carry on, Bea.’

Joan accepts an offer to dance from a gauche trainee pilot,
barely out of school. They join a circle of officers and wives and invited
local worthies, all done up in Sunday suits and party frocks. Bea watches from
a corner table, alone. A slushy Anne Shelton record is put on, all about losing
a lover.

Bea wants to leave now. The tobacco smoke is getting to her.
She steps outside to breathe clean air. A full moon is lighting the expanse of
Salisbury Plain, empty and desolate. Bea thinks only of Arie, what he is doing
at this exact moment under the stars of the vast, unknowable sky.

The blackout curtains cannot shut out the noise of people
laughing. The bar is doing great business. Everyone is wearing a brave face,
not wanting to think about what is in store. Bea should not have come. She
begins to walk back to her billet.

‘Not leaving, are you?’

Bea turns and tries to locate whoever had spoken to her from
between a row of poplars, silver against the inky blue night. It is a warm,
confident voice, full of authority and familiar with command. A man steps from
the shadows. He is an officer, a Flight Lieutenant, tall, open-faced and
smiling.

‘Stuffy in there, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Sir. It is rather.’

‘I was watching you. I was going to buy you a drink then you
left.’

‘I’m afraid it’s a little too crowded for me.’

‘And I bet you wanted to be on your own.’

‘Well, it is such a beautiful night.’

‘Missing him, are you?’

‘What do you mean, Sir?’

‘Come on, we’re all in the same boat.’

He offers a cigarette and lights it for her. They sit on a
slatted metal bench within earshot of the forced gaiety they had left behind.
Bea steals a glance at her admirer. He is older than the rest. Late twenties.
There is a look of battle about him... eyes never still, always waiting for the
next enemy.

‘You’re Beatrice Bowen, aren’t you?’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Your father’s a brass hat.’

‘What if he is?’

‘That puts the wind up some people round here.’

‘Well, it shouldn’t. And what’s your name, Sir?’

‘Francis Wrenn. I’m teaching these oiks how to fly. But not
for much longer.’

‘Why? Where are you going?’

‘Back to bombers, thank God. See some action.”

They return to the mess. Francis Wrenn dances embarrassingly
close. Joan gives Bea a leering thumbs up behind his back. The boy pilots look
on over their pint pots. They keep their mouths shut. That much they have
learned.

Bea asks Francis why he was watching her.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘I never saw you.’

‘You’ve never seen me for weeks.’

Bea senses something happening within her – a feeling of
being released from a kind of widowhood. She is suddenly young again. And
wanted. Most extraordinary of all, she is absolutely sure Arie would not mind.

The music fades. The evening ends. Francis walks her back to
her room. He does not kiss her that night. But from then on, they spend every
available minute together.

*

They get weekend leave and drive to the Wrenn family home in
Shropshire in Francis’s little brown and cream Austin 10. He asks if she is
happy.

‘You know I am.’

That is the truth. He is not Arie... but who could be?

It is a long journey. Cows lie drowsy with heat in the
shadows of orchards grown heavy with fruit. Fields have burnt yellow under the
parching sun and the beds of rivers run dry.

Francis turns off the road at last and onto a grassy track
between stands of beeches, thick with olive-green leaves, motionless in the
warm evening air. They bump along by hedges of hawthorn then cross a cattle
grid to a gravelled drive.

And there is Bea’s first sight of Garth Hall, washed in the
golden light of the dying day. Soft pink roses climb on wires strung across its
great oak frame and a wisteria with a trunk thicker than a man’s thigh, twists
out of the earth by the front porch. A piano is being played. Bats fall and
flit from under the eaves and all the windows are open to catch whatever breeze
night may bring.

Bea can only gaze and smile. For her, nothing about Garth is
new or unexpected. It all feels so familiar... just as the embassy courtyard in
Prague had done.

This is a place she was born to find on a path only she could
tread. A calm comes over her. To Bea, the spirit of this house is real but
intangible, like the scent of a flower. She feels herself being welcomed by
those who had gone before. They bid her to stay awhile, as they had done in
their time.

‘Bea? Where are you? Come and meet my family.’

They are greeted by Lavinia, his father’s sister,
prematurely grey and in a beige stockinette frock showing a neck reddened by
the day’s sun.

‘You are most welcome. Francis wrote to say how wonderful
you were.’

Bea feigns embarrassment. His father, the old judge,
approaches and bows his white head, darkened by a black cap at many an assize.
He shakes Bea’s hand with judicial formality and examines her with unblinking
eyes. Bea knows she is already on trial. Later, at supper in the drawing room
lit by oil lamps and candles in polished pewter sconces, the talk is of war.
Nothing else is on anyone’s mind.

Francis Wrenn is the family’s last hope of continuity, a
young life wagered against a single pull of a German trigger. His father wants
to know if Hitler will invade.

‘Looks like it. The French ports are solid with German
barges all stuffed to the gunnels with military equipment.’

Lavinia says the Germans have already started bombing
England.

‘Somewhere in Surrey was hit only last week and they say
there are German planes flying over us to spy out the docks in Liverpool.’

The judge knows Bea’s father is high up in the Air Ministry.

‘What is his opinion of what’s happening?’

‘I’ve never known him this worried. The situation must be
very bad.’

It has been a tiring day. Bea is excused with a slight
headache. Lavinia shows her to a guest room off a long landing. Bea lies naked
on an iron bed. The drapes hang unmoving by the open window. The night is lit
by moon and stars. She cannot sleep. She thinks of Prague and guns and planes
with bellies full of bombs. But most of all, she sees the face of a child whose
blood was on her hands.

Francis is walking across the lawn with his father. Their
words carry like cigar smoke.

‘Have you asked her, my boy?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Don’t you think you’d better get a move on?’

Do they talk of her? Is it her life being mapped out? Does
she mind... does she care? No one has a future anymore. There is only now.

*

After breakfast next day, Francis walks Bea through the
shaded rides of Garth Woods. The birds are silent and the black pebbles in
Pigs’ Brook are scarcely damp. Francis leads her up to St Mary and All Angels,
through grass dried to straw in the relentless heat. But it is cool and quiet
inside the church. His warrior ancestors lie in vaults beneath their feet.
Those who did not come back from the Crimea or France are remembered in white
marble tablets on the unadorned walls. Bea sits in the Wrenn family pew. Light
filters through the stained glass window above her and spreads like a rainbow
across the aisle.

‘If the Nazis invade, we’re finished Francis. I’ve seen what
they do.’