Camomile Lawn (29 page)

‘Any news?’ Helena asked, not caring in her happiness whether there was news or not.

‘George had a letter from Oliver. He read it to me. He says Hector—’

At that moment the telephone in the drawing room rang and its news blotted out any news Sarah might have.

Richard, answering the telephone, exclaimed: ‘Mildred old thing, you all right? Your voice sounds—’ The telephone crackled and Richard held it away from his ear with an expression of unbelief.

‘She wants to speak to you.’ He handed the receiver to Max. ‘Called me maladroit. I ask you, what’s got into her? Says Monika—’

Max took the receiver. ‘Max
hier.’
Everyone in the room listened, trying to make sense of Max’s responses. ‘When—where? The cliff—’ow did she? What pigs? We never eat pigs. The General he say
that’?
Crazy old
Dummkopf!
Where is she now? The coastguard—I come at once to kill that man. I get the first train.’ He replaced the receiver, eyes blazing. ‘She threw herself over the cliff,’ Max shouted, ‘my lovely Monika. Why have you left her so long?’ he yelled at Richard. ‘I have to work, you are my friend, you should look after her.’

‘Is she dead?’ asked Helena, bravely asking the question on everyone’s mind.

Irena burst into stormy weeping and threw herself into Ludwig’s arms. ‘Monika is
tot.’

‘No,’ cried Max, ‘but I kill that swine General, that mother-fucking Nazi.’

‘What happened? Stop shouting Max, tell us.’ Helena peered up into his face, gripping his hands.

‘You bloody English!’ Max shouted, distraught.

Helena smacked his face, reaching up on tiptoe. ‘Tell us what happened instead of abusing us, you great oaf.’

‘It is your hampers, your
verdammt
hampers of food. She puts in pigs.’

‘Are you mad?’ cried Helena, getting excited. ‘Chickens, rabbits, butter, eggs: you know perfectly well she has no pigs.’

‘Guinea pigs, my Phlegm, she has been breeding guinea pigs. We have been eating them and your swine General says Monika is a spy, a foreigner, a Jew, and eating habits in England do not permit guinea pigs—’

‘I kept guinea pigs as a boy,’ Richard broke in. ‘Charming little—’

‘Shut up,’ said Helena.

‘Wogs eat songbirds,’ Richard continued.

‘Shut up,’ said Helena. ‘Max, try to be calm and tell us.’

Max sat down suddenly on the sofa, clutching his head.

‘And the Frogs eat frogs, but guinea pigs, I ask you, that’s a bit steep,’ Richard carried on.

‘Shut up, I tell you.’ Helena silenced him. ‘Now Max, please, try and tell us what Mildred—’

‘She said—’ Max took a deep breath. ‘She said some fool gave Sophy those pigs. She gives them to Monika,
ja, und
Monika breeds them with her rabbits which we eat, probably we eat them tonight?’ He looked round the room.

‘Delicious,’ said Ludwig calmly, stroking Irena’s shoulder, holding her as tenderly as he held his cello. ‘Delicious and original.’

‘And?’ Helena resented Ludwig’s interruption.

‘She gives this
schrecklich
old man supper. He asks what it is he eats, so gourmet, so unlike the filthy rations. Monika tells him and then—’ Max’s voice rose again, ‘this disgusting old man abuses her and Monika cracks, runs out and throws herself over the cliff.’

‘Oh no, no, no,’ moaned Irena and another girl, ‘oh, no, no, no,’ in chorus.

‘But,’ said Max slowly, ‘she sticks on a ledge and the Floyers and the coastguards they pull her up.’

‘Is she hurt?’

‘How do I know? Mildred says she has the breakdown.’

‘We’d better catch the midnight train. Quick—somebody go and find a taxi, hurry. Max, I will come with you.’ Helena, suddenly calm, British and practical, took charge.

‘I’ll come along too.’ Richard limped out of the room. ‘Won’t take a minute to pack. Most of my stuff is ready, I—’

But nobody listened. Sarah, aghast at the whole scene, took her leave and started back to Polly’s house, not wishing to get involved in such foreign turmoil. As she reached the corner of the street Irena and Ludwig were waylaying a taxi which was disgorging its passengers.

‘Sorry, luv,’ said the taximan. ‘I’m shot to bits, dead tired, going ’ome.’

‘This is
sehr important,’
begged Irena.

‘Sorry, luv, not tonight.’

‘It is only to Paddington,’ pleaded Irena.

‘Sorry, luv—’

‘It is for the exiled King of Greece,’ cried Ludwig. ‘He lives here. It’s of vital importance he catch the train—’

‘King of Greece?’ The taximan was incredulous.

‘Top secret,’ said Irena, lowering her voice. ‘So urgent. So secret.’

The taxi driver opened the door. Irena and Ludwig sprang into the taxi and waved to Sarah as they drove past with gleeful faces. Sarah, while disapproving, was impressed by their ingenuity.

Driving with Hamish to Max’s funeral, Helena remembered her dinner party.

‘Did you ever hear the saga of the guinea pigs?’ she asked Hamish.

‘Yes. That is one aspect of your war which has impressed me.’ By his tone Hamish made clear the impression was not a good one.

‘When you consider the horrors of war, it’s remarkable that it was guinea pigs which gave Monika a breakdown. Max blamed me. He wasn’t really loyal over those guinea pigs and yet it was during that period I became really fond of Monika.’

‘How was that?’

‘If you really love somebody,’ said Helena in her steady old voice, ‘you see the people they love through their eyes. Monika would have bought him flowers if she were here and I not.’

‘Would she?’

‘Yes. He hated chrysanthemums. I can’t buy those. They made him sneeze.’

‘Me too.’

‘Lilies? A bit banal. Why not violets? On the way to the night train he saw a flower barrow being trundled along the street, stopped the taxi and bought a basket of violets for Monika. Nearly made us miss the train.’

‘Oh.’

‘Silly really,’ Helena chortled, ‘when you think they’d been grown in Cornwall. Come to think of it, they may have been grown by the old idiot who had upset Monika, made her try to kill herself.’

Hamish was silent, visualizing the scene.

‘We were pretty crazy that night. We were in such a rush to catch the night train we left the door unlocked.’

‘Were you robbed?’

‘No. Sometime during the night Sophy turned up. She’d run away from school. We never found out why.’

‘Poor kid.’ Hamish’s experience of Sophy was of a later date. ‘She doesn’t strike me as the running away kind,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘How well do you know her?’ Helena enquired, glancing at Hamish’s profile, finding him handsome. I may be old, she thought, but I dearly love a good-looking man.

‘I wouldn’t say well, not well at all.’ He thought back to the year he was sixteen when, in the South of France, in a mutual friend’s house, Sophy had gathered him into her bed and relieved him tenderly of his virginity, setting him a standard for the future. He had thought himself in love with her. There had been no pain in their relations. ‘Was she unhappy?’ he asked Helena. ‘Was she in pain?’

‘Waste of time worrying about what that child felt. I never asked her. She’s just the same now, doesn’t have any feelings. People say she is enigmatic but I wonder whether there is anything there.’

Disliking his passenger Hamish said: ‘Perhaps you never bothered to find out.’

Helena was silent, rebuked by Calypso’s son. She liked men to approve of her. Max had given her this luxury; from now on she must live with less approval, less of everything. ‘It would be nice if I could find violets,’ she said. ‘He loved violets.’

‘Wrong time of year,’ said Hamish, hoping to hurt, thinking of Sophy. ‘No violets.’

Sophy’s flight was unpremeditated. Suddenly she could bear no more. The insidious horror had begun towards the end of the previous term, started again on her return to school, grown over the weeks to unbearable proportions. If she had known what it was about she might have fought back, but she could do nothing about sniggers from her peers, nothing to protect herself from the sarcastic innuendoes of mistresses, nothing against the prick of snide remarks, nothing against the incomprehensible envy, disgust and veiled accusation which wrapped her in a frightening fog. Instead of doing history prep she took her pocket money, put on her outdoor shoes and overcoat and caught a bus to the station. Her money bought a single ticket to Liverpool Street and from there she walked, arriving outside Polly’s house in the early hours footsore, hungry, elated at having escaped her prison. She looked forward to telling Polly how she had crossed London through the blackout, alone.

No one answered the bell. She stepped back in the street to look up at the windows. The ground floor was shuttered; she could see by the light of the moon that the upper floors had curtains drawn. She remembered Polly writing, ‘Sometimes I go to Bletchley.’ This must be one of those times. Her elation evaporated. She was too exhausted to walk on to Calypso in Westminster. Helena was only round the corner. She made her way to Helena’s house. She hoped Richard or Max would open the door, be there to protect her from Helena’s disapproval. Arriving, she stood hesitating to ring the bell. How could she explain to Helena a mystery with undertones of indecency and disgustingness? She pressed the bell. She was poised for flight should Helena appear, but as at Polly’s nobody answered, nobody came. She leant against the door in defeat. It swung open.

Coming off duty from his fire station, looking forward to a few hours’ sleep, Tony Wood, passing Helena’s house, noticed the front door open and a light showing. He went to investigate.

‘Hullo? Hullo? Helena? You there? Your front door’s open, anything wrong?’ There was no answer. Puzzled, he put his tin hat and gas mask on the hall table, shut the door, investigated. Strong smell of cigarettes and liquor, signs of a party, cushions crushed, chairs awry, music sheets loosely stacked on a side table, no people. He went down to the kitchen, found Sophy standing petrified with terror, a glass of milk in one hand, a piece of meat in the other.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what the hell are you doing here? Where’s Helena?’

Sophy leapt into his arms, clutching him round the neck, gasping incomprehensible sentences. ‘Couldn’t stand any more—nobody here—hungry—walked from Liverpool Street—they said—I can’t—it was horrible—I’ll never go back—please, Tony—please help—I won’t—I can’t—I had to run away.’ Her thin arms clutching him in a vice reminded him of a terrified cat up a tree.

‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, calm down, let a chap breathe.’ He tried to prise her from his neck but she clung tighter, her face pressed into his neck, her hair stuffed up his nose. He held her taut body, patting her back, stroking her. ‘Calm down, try and tell me what it’s about.’ He managed to free his face from her hair. ‘There, now, let’s find somewhere to sit.’ He led her to the drawing room, sat her on the sofa, put his arm round her. ‘Try and tell me what happened, poor child, tell now—’ But she’s not a child, he thought, she’s a girl and a bloody attractive one. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘been in trouble with some man, been writing notes to a boy? My sister had that trouble at her school. Is that it?’

‘No!’ Sophy screamed, pulling away from him. ‘No. They said—they thought—they—they—it wasn’t men, they said—they said I was—I was in love with Miss Stevens.’

‘A woman? One of the mistresses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Silly cows.’ Light glimmered in Tony’s perplexed brain. A schoolgirl pash.

‘How could I be in love with a
woman?
She looked up at him, her eyes enormous in her white face, her expression one of profound disgust.

‘It happens.’

‘A woman in love with a woman? I can’t believe it.’ She looked incredulous.

‘Perhaps she fancied you?’ Tony suggested.

‘Oh God.’ Sophy shuddered. ‘Revolting.’

‘Men love men,’ Tony found himself saying.

‘That’s different.’ Sophy pulled away from him. ‘That’s all right, I know that happens, but women, ugh.’

Tony laughed, pulling her towards him. ‘Try and forget it, it’s over now.’

‘Not if they send me back.’

‘I don’t suppose they will.’ But Tony thought: They probably will. Helena wants her out from under her feet.

‘Oh God,’ Sophy began to cry. ‘Oh God, if they knew what it’s been like.’

Tony kept quiet, holding her against him, letting her cry, handing her his handkerchief to mop the tears which spilled the fear of the indefinable from her system. He guessed she would tell him no more, that probably she couldn’t.

‘It’s not against the law,’ he said, ‘what women do. Chaps, that’s different. Found out and you go to prison.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve often wondered,’ said Tony, who frequently found his own sex attractive. ‘The laws of sex are rather obfusc.’

‘I wish I knew about sex. Nobody tells one anything and what the girls at school say is patently untrue.’

‘I long to know.’

‘I shan’t tell you, you’d laugh. Oh God,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’m so tired.’

‘Bed then.’ He took her hand and led her upstairs. ‘You’d better get into Helena’s bed. She’s vanished somewhere, and Max too.’

‘Don’t leave me.’ Panic sounded again.

‘OK, but go and wash and get undressed.’ He yawned, fatigue catching up with him from long hours on duty. Sophy took off her school jersey and skirt and laid them on a chair. He watched her as she stood with her back to him, thin legs in black lisle stockings protruding from grey school bloomers. He counted the knobs on her spine before she turned round, breasts showing small under her wool vest.

‘D’you think I could borrow one of Aunt Helena’s nighties?’

‘Sure.’ He yawned again.

She searched in a chest of drawers. ‘Gosh!’ she exclaimed. ‘What undies, silk, look!’ She held up a pair of pink camiknickers. ‘Wow, what a change falling in love with Max has made. She used to wear liberty bodices and, oh, look at this.’ She held up a brassiere.

‘Buck up, find a nightdress.’

‘D’you think I could borrow this?’ Sophy whispered as though in church as she held up a white satin nightdress trimmed with lace. ‘It’s awfully bridal.’ She began to giggle. ‘Aunt Helena, of all people. She’s so old.’