Dorothy Eden (37 page)

“Who’s showing defeat?” Beatrice grumbled.

“You are, Mother, if you hang out flags because we’ve just lost the battle of the Somme. It’s too defensive. It’s too dreary.”

“Did we lose the Somme?” Beatrice asked uneasily.

“What do you think, with all those thousands killed? It could hardly be called a victory.”

Florence tapped briskly about on her high heels. She had very thin elegant ankles which she now showed. She seemed to be enjoying the challenge of the war, in a masochistic way. She had the knack of turning events to advantage, just as Beatrice had once had. Now Beatrice’s talent seemed to be static, or fading. It was simply that she was getting rather old, and she worried so much more. About William, about Edwin, even about Florence with her frighteningly competent and emotionless manner.

All the same Florence’s costly Treasures department had to close, simply because foreign goods were now almost unavailable. Still, it could be revived after the war. All the countries of Europe could not have been plundered.

Florence turned her energies instead to training the women who had taken the place of the departed men. In this, as in other things, she proved adept. Her frosty eye was now looked on with more awe than Miss Beatrice’s. Of course, Miss Beatrice, being elderly and a little too stout, and at times stiff with that annoying rheumatism, spent most of her time in the cash desk. She didn’t walk the floors as she had once done. Perched on her stool inside the polished gilt cage (like a moulting old thrush, she thought, with her pepper and salt hair, and her rounded bosom) none of the customers was aware of her stiff and halting walk.

Adam Cope knew about it, of course. But the war had done something odd to Adam. It had distressed him so much that all his long-repressed emotions had come embarrassingly to the surface. He frequently had tears in his eyes. As often as possible he took Beatrice’s arm (he would never have presumed, once), and escorted her out of the shop to the waiting Daimler. He had developed a tremor in his limbs that made him stumble and drop things. It was time, Florence said crisply, that Adam be retired.

This was one more point of contention between Beatrice and Florence. When it came to these heated battles between mother and daughter (who would ever have thought Florence would grow to be so strong-willed and inflexible?) Beatrice always won, simply because of her position.
She
was Bonnington’s. Florence undoubtedly would be, one day, but in the meantime, despite her bouts of rheumatism which made her so stiff and slow, Beatrice was absolutely in command. And would be so until her dying day.

In the same way Adam would stay. Loyalty must never be sacrificed to business. Looking into Florence’s large pale eyes, Beatrice had doubts that her daughter ever listened to these old-fashioned and profitless ideas. To Florence, everything came down to simple economy. Adam Cope was now quite uneconomic.

But he would stay, because Miss Beatrice said so.

However, as if he realised he was now an embarrassment to his beloved old friend, he quietly dropped dead in the basement where he had gone to check some stock. As if he had consciously chosen a place where customers would not be distressed.

Beatrice, again to Florence’s disgust, closed the shop on the day of Adam’s funeral. It was the least she could do. She shed some difficult tears in private. It was not easy to cry nowadays. Her tears had dried up.

After that she felt very alone, with Miss Brown and Adam gone and the younger generation pressing on her heels, William, with the old hungry pain in his eyes (he had used to look like that after Mary Medway’s death), and a growing obsession about all the letters from Daisy which he was sure were piled up in some uncaring Post Office, Edwin serving his long sentence, and Florence interested only in showing handsome profits in spite of the war.

What would old General Overton have said about the family that now inhabited his house? Would he have admitted he had made a mistake when he had thought that the spunky little Bonnington girl was the person to provide healthy new blood?

In the winter William was ill again, with his chronic bronchitis. He sat up in bed, a plaid shawl round his thin shoulders, and let the doctor tap his chest. They both laughed hollowly at the suggestion that a winter in a milder climate was to be recommended. Where, with the war raging?

“Well, make the best of it,” said the doctor. “You have a comfortable home and a devoted wife. That’s more than can be said for most of my patients.”

“Is he worrying about something?” he asked Beatrice downstairs.

“Yes. Our daughter Daisy in Russia. He frets all the time for news of her, especially now there is a revolution there. But everyone’s fretting for someone nowadays. It can’t be helped, can it?”

“Well, don’t sit up too much with him at nights, Mrs Overton. I’ll send a nurse, if necessary.”

“Oh, no, doctor. I always nurse my husband myself.”

The doctor pshawed impatiently.

“Burning the candle at both ends. You’re not young enough for that, don’t you know? I hope your husband appreciates how lucky he is.”

“I know he wouldn’t care for a strange nurse,” Beatrice said equably.

Neither he would. Because in the late hours of the night, when the room was shadowy in the light of the dying fire, he liked to hold her hand. And she knew he was perfectly aware that it was her hand and not that of some vanished ghost. There was just herself and him in the room. It was her deepest happiness.

At the end of that year a letter from Daisy arrived at last.

It had been written when she was ill, and it was full of a wild despair. If Beatrice had known its contents she would not have rushed excitedly upstairs, carrying it to William to give him pleasure, but would have quietly destroyed it and never told him of its arrival.

Papa, Papa, you always made me happy, you took me on private treats, and bought me lovely clothes—do you remember we went to Worth when I was only ten years old and you said this young lady must have a ball dress befitting her beauty—oh, Papa, make me happy now. Send Sergei back to me. We have only had each other for three years and now they tell me he is dead. But this is a cruel country, full of witches like Baba Yaga, and the snow is so thick that even I know that none of the wounded could survive. Except that Sergei would live for my sake.

Do you know that his eyes crinkled and shut tight when he laughed. It was comical and darling. And for a sober professor of languages he could do the most amazing
jetés.

There isn’t much food and Anna cries with the cold. When I am better—I have been ill for several weeks—I will have to work. They need women for everything, factories, farms, hospitals. Sergei’s mother will look after Anna. She says better a bit of hard work than the German guns, and I am as bad as the Grand Duchesses, with my uselessness and my tears. But I don’t know how to be a tough Russian woman.

Anna looks just like Sergei when she smiles. I can hardly bear it, and make her cry, just to stop her smiling.

I think of Sergei’s face with the snow falling on it. Pure and young. Young and pure. My dear dear Sir Gay…

William was in a frenzy. It was no use Beatrice pointing out that many young women were in this tragic position, their husbands killed at the front. He insisted that no one’s plight could be worse than Daisy’s, alone with a small child in a foreign country. Why, she sounded almost deranged. Beatrice agreed about the derangement. It was the only excuse one could make for Daisy’s behaviour, writing such a letter when she knew how desperately it would worry her father, who was helpless to do anything.

It would have been difficult enough to pull strings at the Foreign Office, with Moscow shrouded in clouds of war, but with Edwin’s shameful record still vividly remembered William was met with polite brush-offs or frosty silences. What was the life of one English girl in this maelstrom?

Anyway, women of Daisy’s type, pretty and volatile, usually survived. Daisy would eventually find a protector, they said cynically.

So William could do nothing but sit at his desk and write repeatedly, with sympathy and advice, never knowing if the letters reached their destination.

No other communication arrived from Daisy, and the war ground its way with increasing misery into the third, then the fourth year.

All the same, in spite of her anger with Daisy for that self-indulgent melodrama, the thought of the girl and her baby was in Beatrice’s mind too often for comfort. Austerity and hard work, even a little starvation, would do Daisy no harm. But a baby who was made to stop laughing because of her innocent likeness to her dead father—that was too painful to think about, and one could only hope such behaviour had been a temporary aspect of Daisy’s illness. Although it was not impossible that she had inherited some mental instability from her mother.

The war ended at last, but only six of the twenty young men who had left Bonnington’s to enlist returned. One of those, who came home, James Brush, was without a left arm. The others were all suffering in varying degrees from shell shock, and premature ageing. They were reinstated in their jobs, including James Brush although he had become petulant and unpredictable. He was a cross they must bear, said Beatrice firmly, while Florence congratulated herself that she had not married this thin clever vituperative man. She did not intend to be as patient with him as her mother was, even if he had fought for King and Country.

Profits were down, and Beatrice decided that the little Crome water colour she had wanted to buy William for Christmas had better wait another year. Although she hated denying him a pleasure. One never knew… His health would be better if, now that the war was over, news of Daisy arrived. It surely must do so soon in spite of the Russian revolution. Beatrice knew that he was haunted by the fear that, if Daisy had survived the war, she might not survive the revolution.

She did, of course. She was not only alive, but remarried, and a princess!

How she fell for these Russians! Her Georgian prince was a White Russian, of course, and, successfully escaping from war-torn Russia with his new wife and family, was now an emigré in Spain. Daisy wrote gaily that they were living on the proceeds of Vladimir’s family jewels. There had been a great many, so they were not likely to starve. One magnificent ruby pendant he had promised never to sell, because it became Daisy so well. She wore it to parties in Madrid, and it was always a sensation. It was such
heaven
to be properly dressed and looked after again. Vladimir had literally saved her reason. And why hadn’t Papa answered all those letters she had written when she was in such despair, frozen and starving, and trying to support Anna on the pittance she earned from teaching English to small Bolsheviks. That was how she had met Vladimir. He had brought his ten-year-old daughter (he was a widower) to her class. Unfortunately Olga and Anna didn’t get on very well. Olga had exquisite patrician manners, but Anna had become very naughty and stubborn, and in addition had no looks to speak of. Vladimir called her a little brown sparrow.

And why hadn’t Papa or Mamma answered any of her hundreds of letters? Had they quite forgotten her? It was a pity that Vladimir disliked England. They might come to Paris, but it was doubtful if Daisy could ever persuade him to cross the channel.

Excitement brought spots of colour to William’s thin cheeks. He sat up in bed waving the letter and declaring that he must get ready to leave for Madrid immediately.

“Don’t be mad!” Beatrice said. She seldom spoke sharply to William, but the contents of Daisy’s letter had shocked and dismayed her. She should have been as delighted as William at the essential information, that Daisy had survived the war, and was apparently well and happy. (But where was the deranged and grief-stricken girl who had written that moving letter about the death of Sergei?)

“If you want to see her, she must come to you.”

“But this new husband, this Prince Vladimir, refuses to come to England. Now I wonder how he got that stupid prejudice against this country.”

“He must be a stupid man, and I wouldn’t be taken in by his title. They say that anyone owning a bit of land and a few yaks, or whatever they have, in Georgia, can be a prince.”

“Not with all that jewellery, surely. And don’t be so cynical, Bea. It isn’t like you. Our little Daisy is alive and has found a new life. Doesn’t that make you happy?”

“She sounds so worldly.”

“She’s been through a great deal. She’s also several years older, as we all are. She’s a long way from that child bride in Paris with her bunch of daisies.”

“That’s clear enough. Wearing flashy ruby pendants. And I don’t like her saying her child is so plain, when once she told us Anna looked so like Sergei.”

“Well, he was an odd-looking fish if ever there was one. You can’t think of those Mongolian looks in a little girl.”

“We can’t. But Daisy happened to love Sergei, and his appearance. Well, it’s lucky she has an instinct for survival. Now lie down, my dear. It’s time for your broth.”

“Bea—where’s your heart, for God’s sake? A letter from our lost child, from the dead, almost—”

“She was never my child,” Beatrice interrupted calmly. “You know very well that the doctor won’t permit you to make a journey to Madrid. If you are to see Daisy, she must come here. Write and tell her so. And don’t mince words. Tell her about your heart condition.”

“That’s nothing. A mere murmur.”

“Enough to worry the doctor. And me.”

“Today,” William grumbled, “you sound just like Florence.”

But he lay down, and allowed his pillows to be smoothed and his brow to be kissed. Later he would get up and put on his brocade dressing-gown and come down to the library where he might do a little work. He was making an extensive catalogue of his butterfly collection, which was now remarkable. It was to be left to the British Museum on his death. He enjoyed pulling the trays out of the cabinets and poring over the beautiful shimmering creatures, recollecting the circumstances of their capture. Sunny days on the Heath in the company of loved companions. Was Beatrice, for instance, forever associated with a rare Swallowtail, and Daisy with a Peacock. That seemed apt enough for Daisy now, peacocking about with her rich Byzantine jewellery. What was associated with Mary Medway? Nothing, nothing, nothing…