Homing (4 page)

“Happy birthday, Mab,” he said gently, and reached across the table to put the parcel in her hand.

It was heavy, like the solid, satin-lined cases with
spring-lids
where Virginia’s best pieces lived. Her fingers shook a little as she undid it, her heart was beating. Yes—it was—Asprey’s name was on the outer box, there was always something a little extra about Asprey’s—a flat blue leather case—the lid flew up—
a
watch.
They heard the incredulous childish gasp. A small bracelet watch, with gold hands, on a bed of white satin.

“Oh,
Jeff
!” said Mab, and simply sat gazing at it, making no move to put it on.

“Of course there may be some difficulty with the family about your accepting jewellery from strange men,” Jeff said with his straight-faced drollery.

He knew very well that it was not a gift for a child, and he had consulted no one, except of course Sylvia, who had at once said, Well, why not, everybody wanted a watch. But not even Sylvia had been there when he chose it, on the overcast, pregnant afternoon a fortnight ago with the blackout rehearsal scheduled for midnight. London had turned that grim exercise into a weird sort of carnival, gathering in holiday crowds to jeer at premises which had overlooked precautions or neglected to
conform
—singing songs with rude improvised verses about the A.R.P., frolicking in Piccadilly Circus and heckling the earnest Air Raid Wardens to whom it was so serious a business. But
underneath
the apparent frivolity, the implications were still there. And everybody knew they could never hide the river from enemy bombers….

Nobody said war nowadays. Emergency was the word.
In the event of an emergency
…. How long would Bond Street stand, Jeff wondered that afternoon with a long glance at Asprey’s glittering windows as he turned in at their door to buy Mab’s present. All that plate glass, he thought. Would London loot its shops when the glass broke under a raid? He would have wagered not. Meanwhile, Mab must have a watch, before it was too late. The first watch was always an event, and he wanted hers to come from him. Ticking out the days that were left of peace and safety in London. And he wanted no one else’s opinion or advice on his choice. This was between him and Mab—and
Asprey’s. He took his time, and made his decision before he asked the price. There was only one that seemed to him just the thing, and this was it.

“Well, really, Jeff, you did let go all holds,” Virginia
murmured
, but not with censure.

“Asprey?” said Dinah, and nodded her approval. “My first watch came from there, too. I’ll never forget it. I was sixteen when Bracken bought it for me, and I didn’t dare to wear it, because of the family—so he carried it for me, for months. It went all through the Cuban campaign with him. I didn’t have it for my own until—oh, much later,” she finished rather
suddenly
, conscious of their fascinated attention.

“Was it that one?” asked Mab, pointing to the diamonded trifle on Dinah’s wrist.

“No, it was on a chain,” said Dinah. “You remember, Virginia, we wore them round our necks.”

Virginia nodded, looking back. She had never heard about Dinah’s watch, though she knew that her brother had had to wait for Dinah to grow up enough to marry him. The things you don’t know about people you see every day, she was thinking. Like Bracken carrying Dinah’s watch up San Juan Hill as a talisman….

“One’s first watch is very special, it matters a lot who gives it,” said Dinah, and stopped again rather abruptly, wondering to her own surprise if perhaps she shouldn’t have said that just now, and felt Jeff’s eyes shift from her face to his plate.

“On our side we get a watch on our eighteenth birthday,” said Sylvia, unconscious of undercurrents. “This is mine—from Stevie.” She held out her wrist with pride.

“But we can’t be certain any more how things will be, by the time Mab is eighteen,” Jeff said quietly, looking at his plate. “I thought she might as well make sure of it.”

There was a pause. They all sat watching him, without
surprise
or actual alarm, but with a sort of—alertness?

“What did Bracken say?” Dinah asked then.

“Nothing much. Don’t—don’t get excited, it hasn’t
happened
.” Once again his eyes travelled lovingly from face to face. “We may know tonight,” he said.

“Know what?” That was Sylvia.

“There’s something in the wind again,” he said, almost as though he sniffed it. “Something brewing. A lot of activity here and there.” His grave, compassionate gaze came back to Mab’s
anxious silence across the table. “Bracken says to tell you to hold tight,” he said. “The party’s not off, by any means. He’ll be home for tea—he thinks.”

“Well, in that case there’s plenty of time to go shopping,” Virginia said briskly.

“Aren’t you going to put it on?” Jeff asked, for the open case was still in Mab’s hand.

“You should put it on for her,” Sylvia advised, as the first course came in. “That makes it legal.”

Mab, who sat between Virginia and Dinah, pushed back her chair and carried the watch round the table to Jeff, holding out her left arm solemnly for him to slip the bracelet into place. His hands were long and bony and very deft.

Quite suddenly, while his fingers were still on the bracelet, she had a surging impulse to bend and kiss them. An even swifter panic repressed it, and then, with the maids going round the table behind him and the others falling to on the food, Jeff raised her wrist and set his lips lightly on the watch where it lay, and turned away at once to help himself from the dish which appeared at his other elbow. Such tiny bones Mab had, he thought, giving his attention to the servers. Like a bird’s.

“Thank you, Jeff,” she whispered, and returned to her chair without looking into his face.

“If there’s going to be a war—that is to say, a State of
Emergency
,” Virginia was saying as she put butter on her roll, for she never had to think twice about gaining weight, “I fancy one of the things we should lay in is woollies, because we’re sure to be short of heat again, like last time. So Mab and I will skip round to Fortnum’s this afternoon and run amuck on Cashmere jumpers and skirts. We can also bring back something special from there for tea. Bracken will need it.”

“I’ll tell him,” Jeff promised. “I’m going down to the Shop after lunch, so I can fetch him back here bodily if nothing—if there’s no more news by four o’clock.”

“
If
,” cried Virginia, and struck the table unexpectedly with a small exasperated fist, so that they all stared at her, astonished, and even the dishes jumped. “Was there ever a time when we made a simple plan without saying
if
? How long has it been since we accepted an invitation a week ahead without wondering if the state of the world would permit? I’m sick of living like this, from hour to hour! I’m sick of Hitler, they’ve got to settle him once and for all!”

“Il
faut
en finir,”
Jeff murmured, for that was what they were saying in Paris last month when he was there.

“And let’s hope they mean it,” added Virginia grimly. “Because if they don’t we’ll have to do it alone. And don’t think we couldn’t, either. Hitler,” said Virginia, erect and furious, “has got to go!”

“I guess that makes it unanimous,” said Jeff, impressed. “Unless maybe the Russians.”

“Temper,” said Virginia by way of apology for her outburst, and shrugged. “It was thinking back that got me down all of a sudden—back to when Dinah got her watch to keep, and married Bracken—and I married Archie the same year. The
peace
,”
said Virginia, marvelling at it. “Not just—no war. The peace of
mind,
the not
wondering
about anything, not trying to outguess anything—the feeling that it would all go on forever, like a summer afternoon. Before 1914, I mean—we had those dozen wonderful years before the war. But even in the twenties, after the war, even with all the conferences and the running to and fro to Stresa and Locarno and all that—even then, you knew where you were for a week at a time—” She looked with compassion at Jeff and Sylvia—and at Mab. “You can’t
remember
,” she said sadly. “Dinah knows what I mean. But you can’t any of you remember what it was like, before Hitler.”

“Well, I suppose I can in a way,” Sylvia said sensibly. “Because he never mattered much to us in Williamsburg—not till after I married Jeff, anyway. Just lately that seems a thousand years ago. Jeff, did Bracken say anything just now about the Russians?”

“Oh, hell,” said Jeff, begging off. “It’s Mab’s birthday!”

“Did he?”

“Well, maybe he did. Something’s up.”

“Our military mission is up,” said Dinah. “Trying to get Russia to come in on our side if—Have we failed? Have they refused?”

“We don’t know. But we will soon.”

“By tea time?”

“Maybe.”

Meanwhile for Mab there was a white cake with fourteen candles, and shopping at Fortnum’s with Virginia. And there was the watch with little gold hands, which Jeff had kissed into place.

Because Mab and Virginia had skipped round to Fortnum and Mason’s in Dinah’s Rolls with a chauffeur to drive it, they were not much inconvenienced by the grandfather of all
thunderstorms
which broke without warning over London that
afternoon
. They arrived back home at tea time and spread out their purchases on the beds in Virginia’s room for Dinah and Sylvia to admire—though the sultry heat which the storm had not dissipated made Cashmere seem somewhat farfetched.

When they had waited tea for half an hour, pretending that it could be only the storm which delayed the menfolk, they began rather defiantly to stuff themselves anyway with the goodies provided by Fortnum’s, and there was a certain comfort in it, at that. The tea was still hot in the pot, however, when Jeff and Bracken came in, damp from having had to run down a taxi in Fleet Street. The headlines in the evening paper they carried were innocuous—another peace move, this time by Belgium.

Bracken was tall and dark and lean, with the squared-off chin and hooded eyes of all the Murray men. He met his wife’s anxious gaze with the deliberate blandness he assumed when things were not good, and which exasperated everybody and deceived nobody, dropped into a chair beside her and announced that his tongue was hanging out and could he have some tea.

“Mmm,” said Jeff greedily, coming to anchor on the other side of Dinah at the tea table. “Macaroons.” He reached for one.

Dinah attended to their refreshment in a rather marked silence, noting once more that whereas in books people always lost their appetites under stress and strain, the worse things got the more her family wanted to eat, out of sheer nerves.

As soon as Bracken had entered the room Mab had said the right thing about his gift, and was waiting to show him the rest of her birthday loot. For ten minutes he devoted himself to her as though he had no other concern in the world, and reminded them that everyone must be dressed tonight at seven sharp so they could linger over dinner and listen to the orchestra before the film went on. Relaxed and charming in the big chair, having his tea, he finally glanced round with amusement at his
attentive
family.

“Let us be gay,” he said, with the slanted, quizzical eyebrow they knew so well.

And they were, after that, because once Bracken had appeared
in their midst it was always difficult not to believe that
everything
was under control. Mab had a glass of hock at dinner, and the roving violinist played to her, and the film made her cry a little, and altogether the evening was a pronounced success.

The telephone in the hall was ringing when they entered the house, and Bracken snatched it up, with Jeff standing beside him, while the others flowed past him towards the drawing room.

“Almighty God,” they heard him say quietly after a moment, and then there was a long silence while he listened, and Virginia’s mind flashed back uneasily to an evening in New York long ago when Bracken’s father had answered a ringing telephone which announced the sinking of the
Maine.

Frozen in their tracks, they stood staring at each other, as though by their very immobility they could divine what was being said in the receiver in Bracken’s hand. He had tilted it so that Jeff could hear too, but a slight crackling was all that reached the rest of them in the drawing room doorway. They knew it was Jackson’s voice from the office—Jackson the watchdog, who slept on a cot among the telephones and tickers and shortwave radios.

And Virginia was thinking, I must get Mab out of London before the bombers come over, Dinah will lend me the car in the morning. And Dinah was thinking. Well, here we go again. And Sylvia was thinking, The radio—we’ve missed the late news. And Mab was thinking, Oh, don’t let Jeff leave England now, he can do the war from here!

When Bracken finally set down the telephone his eyes held Jeff’s in a long, significant stare.

“We’d better go right back down there and watch this,” he said, and Jeff nodded, his hat still in his hand.

“What is it
now
?” Virginia asked, with an impatience which almost blamed Bracken for whatever it was.

“At it again,” said Bracken wearily, and slid an arm round Dinah’s waist and moved them all into the drawing room, though he did not sit down. “Jeff, let’s have a quick one before we go.”

Jeff went towards the tray which had been left on the
sideboard
with assorted bottles and crystal and cold food, and began measuring out Scotch and soda into tall glasses.

“Bracken—” Dinah appealed to his better nature, not to keep them longer in suspense.

“Well, I’d tell you if I knew,” he said defensively. “All Jackson said was that Berlin is negotiating behind our backs for a non-aggression pact with Russia—well, we all know what their
pacts are!—but the thing about this one is,
Ribbentrop
is
flying
to
Moscow
to
sign
it!
”

They all stared at him as though he had made it up to scare them.