Female Friends (4 page)

His wife knows otherwise, but says nothing. Grace is Edwin’s only child. It is a source of sorrow to both of them that there are no more children, but they have reached, these past years, such a state of sexual deadlock, so how could there be?

As for Grace, standing on the platform, she is in a bad temper.

G
RACE DOES NOT WANT
to share her home with an evacuee. And she is disappointed in her father for so meekly succumbing to the authority which says this is what she must do. She had hoped, moreover, to be sent away to boarding school when she was twelve. Now, with the advent of the war, and her father’s inheritance even less likely to materialize, and his shares tumbling, it seems she will never be allowed to leave home.

And if she has to attend the village school—and it looks as if she will—her humiliation, she knows, will be profound. She doubts her own scholastic capabilities, not without reason, and suspects the grubby riff-raff may well do better than her at sums and spelling.

Grace is a lean, pretty, arrogant child, with a wide face, regular features, green eyes, silky red hair and the creamy matt complexion which sometimes goes with it. She resembles neither her father nor her mother. Nervousness makes her rude, and frustration makes her desperate, and for as long as she can remember, she has felt nervous and frustrated.

Thus the conversation goes that morning, at The Poplars, over a breakfast lovingly if clumsily prepared by Esther Songford, Grace’s mother, Edwin’s wife. Esther serves porridge, eggs, bacon, kidneys, toast, mushrooms—she was up early picking them so at least they are fresh, even though they are over-cooked—and Jackson’s Breakfast Tea.

Rationing, of course, so far, affects only the mass of the urban proletariat. The well-to-do find their eating habits unaffected. It takes more than a paper war to alter the servile habits of grocers. The real one, presently, is to turn them into all-powerful tyrants, only too happy to be revenged upon their once mean and arrogant betters. In the meantime, it is not shortage of food but short tempers which makes breakfast at The Poplars an uneasy affair. Grace is pink with fury.

Edwin
Stop sulking, Grace. We’re having an evacuee and that is that. We have to set an example.

Ester
She’s not sulking, Edwin. She’s just a little quiet. Please don’t shout at her. Grace dear, eat up your porridge and don’t aggravate your father.

Grace
It’s burnt.

Esther
Only a little bit, dear.

Edwin (Sneering)
Like the curate’s egg, I suppose. Good in parts.

Esther
I’m afraid it’s the saucepans, Edwin. They’ve worn so thin. They really must be replaced. I’m ashamed to ask Mrs Dover to clean them.

Esther has been asking for new saucepans for seven years, in vain. Edwin controls the household money flow with stringent care. He is not so much mean, as fearful of sudden penury; living in dread of military, social or natural cataclysms which will sweep away pension, profits and property overnight. He fears the working classes, and the creeping evil of socialism, seeping under the doors of privilege like flood water.

And as Edwin walks the country lanes, swinging his blackthorn cane, the very model of a healthy-minded Englishman, he is not raising his face to meet God’s good sun, as you might think, but sniffing the air for the first scent of the enemy’s Poison Gas—expected to envelop Britain at any moment.

Edwin
A bad workman blames his tools, Esther. I’m afraid new saucepans are out of the question now, of course. There’s a war on. The metal is needed for guns. I’m surprised you should be so unpatriotic as to suggest it.

Esther
Oh dear. I didn’t think of it like that. I’m so sorry. I’ll eat your porridge, Grace.

And Grace pushes her plate over, without gratitude. Mothers, in her view, are born to scavenge, to incorporate the evidence of their culinary shortcomings.

Grace
Me? Share with some snotty-nosed urchin from the East End! Molly (a friend) says they had evacuees at her aunt’s and they brought fleas and nits and wet the bed and never take off their vests at night and smell. You can’t, daddy. Not in my house.

Esther
Our house, Grace. We’ll manage somehow. Think how much you’ve got to teach them. You must pass on your good fortune. Poor little things, separated from their mothers. Some of them have never even seen a sheep or a cow, let alone a farmyard, in all their lives. Daddy’s quite right. We must all pull together, Grace dear, even the children.

Grace
Why?

Esther
To defeat Mr Hitler.

Grace
Well I hope he wins.

Has she gone too far? Yes.

Edwin
Grace, go to your room.

Grace
But I haven’t finished my breakfast.

She goes, all the same. She is frightened of her choleric father, especially at breakfast time. So’s Esther.

Edwin
Esther, you have let that girl get totally out of control. Let’s hope an evacuee brings her down a peg or two. I’ve put your name down for a girl.

Esther
Oh. I was rather hoping for a boy to help with the garden.

Edwin
Garden! There isn’t going to be a garden from now on. There’s going to be a vegetable patch. I’m afraid this war’s put paid to your flower shows and your prizes, Esther. No time for your frills and fancies any more.

Esther reels.

For Esther, having more sense of future than her husband, spends much time working in the garden, which flourishes in her care. The soft lawns, the neat flower-beds, the many roses—which make Edwin wheezy—have been her concern, her territory, for many years. Now it seems that Edwin feels at liberty to invade it.

Invasion is most surely in the air. And indeed, throughout the war years, the battle is to rage to and fro across the garden, sometimes Edwin’s onions and carrots winning, sometimes Esther’s herbaceous borders.

Esther, this first morning of declared hostilities, is most upset. She goes into the kitchen and tries not to cry into the washing-up water as she scrapes the burnt porridge saucepan clean.

Who is this Esther, Edwin’s undoubted wife, Grace’s alleged mother, Marjorie and Chloe’s second mama? She is a vicar’s daughter. She has a sense of service, and the feeling that for the children’s sake, at least, she should remain brave, cheerful and uncomplaining. And like her husband she suffers from a sense of loss. He lost his pride and his career. She lost her faith, waking up one morning to the dour sense of her father’s dislike of her, the knowledge of his preference for his sons, and the feeling that God, even if He did exist, was certainly not good. These days it is Edwin, and only Edwin, who makes her unhappy, but he, like her father, is the fact of her existence, and she has become used to it.

She married late, at thirty, after her parents died and left her a little money. She has a faded prettiness, rather large, rather popping eyes, a lot of rather wispy hair, a lax skin. She works unceasingly, and inefficiently, about the house.

She sleeps apart from her husband because after Grace was born (and it was a difficult birth and she had hoped for a boy) intercourse was painful. Their physical union had been, at the best of times, distasteful to her, and difficult for him.

These days, just sometimes, when Edwin has drunk rather more than usual at the Rose and Crown, he will come into her bedroom and face both her distaste and his own probable inadequacy, and despise himself afterwards for his animal nature, and hardly be able to look her in the eye in the morning; the mother of his child so abused and debased, and he himself responsible for it. He would knock himself down, if he could, for the cad he is, and failing that, is ruder than ever to her.

Such a morning is this, and he hates her, and will grow carrots in her flower-beds, yes he will.

And she will not fight him, she will merely weep into the washing-up water. There is such a virtuous obstinacy about her, such a gentility in her bulky tweed skirts and shapeless twin sets, such an unawakened beauty in the body beneath them. This sense of his wife, so unused, drives him to great heights of irritation. He is apopleptic, sometimes. He thinks his heart will stop. As for her, she knows perfectly well that she wrongs him with her niceness, her sweetness and her moral supremacy. But what can she do? Sink to his crude masculine level? Never. She is too angry with him on such mornings.

She will grow roses and make him sneeze and wheeze.

So the day does not start well for Grace, or Edwin, or Esther. Now, at the station, Grace holds her father’s hand—not because she has forgiven him, but because, amongst so many milling women and children, any male is valuable and must be seen to belong to her.

U
LDEN STATION IS USUALLY
a quiet and orderly place. It seldom sees more than five passengers at a time, and the station master, Mr Fell, a patient and domestic man, has both time and inclination to cherish it. The platform is clean and tidy, the name of the station is spelt out in flowers against a well-trimmed, grassy bank, and the Victorian waiting-room is lit by gas and warmed by a coal fire. Technically, the waiting-room is for the convenience of First Class passengers only, but in the winter months Mr Fell opens it to Third Class passengers as well.

Today the station is noisy, crowded and confused, and Mr Fell is suffering from an attack of asthma and gasping for breath in his office. The church bell rings out a kindly and welcoming peal—the last one for some time, since the Government is the next day to ban all bell ringing in case it assists the Germans in some way; the train which should never have stopped (as only Mr Fell knows, and he is too breathless to say), lets off steam; the Evacuation Officer reads out, undaunted, the names of children who do not exist.

Children cry, adults protest, dogs bark.

Edwin Songford, as is his custom, takes over. He silences the Evacuation Officer, the bells and the steam. He administers brandy from a hip flask (silver and leather, lined with glass) to Mr Fell, and establishes what is long since obvious, that either the train has stopped at the wrong station or contains the wrong children.

Evacuees had been expected from Hackney, in the East End. These children come from Kilburn, in West London.

Undaunted, indeed encouraged—for the reputation of the East End evacuees, who cannot tell an armchair from a WC, and who are followed everywhere by cunning, foul-mouthed, ferocious mothers, whom neither manners, lack of a bed, nor Government decree can keep away, has already spread amongst the more respectable classes of England—Edwin instructs the assembled villagers and gentry to select their own West London children according to taste. There is a rush for the strongest boys, and the most domestic looking girls.

Marjorie is left.

Grace, looking at her, sees the child most likely to depress her mother and irritate her father. She tugs Edwin’s arm.

‘Let’s have that one,’ says Grace.

‘We’ll have to,’ says Edwin. ‘It’s the only one left.’

And wham, bam, so our lives are ordered.

But perhaps, if we look deeper, people are nicer and fate is kinder than we at first assume. Perhaps Grace did not choose Marjorie from spite, but because she perceived a child who expressed outwardly what she herself felt inwardly, and she wanted to help.

And perhaps it was not cupboard love which drove Chloe to choose The Poplars as her second home, and Esther as a second mother, and Grace and Marjorie as her friends, but her recognition of their grief, and their inner homelessness. It was not that she used them, or that they used each other, but simply that they all clung together for comfort. Well.

U
LDEN STATION IS CLOSED
now, axed by Dr Beeching’s axe. The railway track is used by ramblers. An amazing collection of wild and garden flowers grows along it, memorial of that long dead eccentric who once travelled the length and breadth of England’s railways, scattering flower seeds by sackfuls, feeding them out of the carriage window into the rushing Edwardian wind.

Egden station, down the line, remains. Here Inigo leaves the adult Chloe, and she catches the train to London with two minutes to spare.

Inigo said she would.

Chloe arrives punctually at the Italiano. Marjorie does not. Marjorie is late, having, no doubt, important matters to delay her. Chloe is not sure whether to be glad for Marjorie, or irritated on her own behalf.

Marjorie, as a child, is all too anxious to please. If she is brave and good, she thinks, and does not complain, and is unfailingly helpful, her mother, whom she loves, will come and take her back home. It is a direct challenge to God, but God does not appear to notice, although Marjorie goes to church with Esther on both Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings. (Grace, an early atheist, refuses to go to church: or at any rate faints whenever she does, which comes to the same thing.)

And still Helen does not come, to claim her child and take her home.

Marjorie, it is soon acknowledged by all, and whatever her motives, proves a better daughter to Esther than Grace, her natural daughter, ever was.

Marjorie makes the beds, appreciates the cooking, runs Edwin’s bath, skips in and out of rooms prattling and eager, learns the piano, comes top in examinations, buries her head in Esther’s lap when she is miserable, brings her wild flowers when she is happy, asks for advice about what to wear and what to say.

And still Helen her real mother does not even write a letter, let alone come to take her away.

Marjorie is frightened of Edwin, but masters her fear sufficiently to learn the disposition of the allied and enemy forces, and so be his companion as, year in year out, he follows the progress of the war through Europe. Africa, Asia on the maps on the library table.