The Colours of Love (18 page)

Theobald had been furious to find the Italians making little woven baskets and wooden toys for the local children and young women, when he had made a visit to the fields unannounced one day. And even Neil Harley’s explanation that the men were doing this in their lunch hour didn’t appease him. He would have worked them to death, if he could. Fortunately Neil appreciated the relaxed atmosphere the Italians brought with them, and the fact that they were an important part of the agricultural labour force, so he merely paid lip-service to Theobald’s ranting. If the POWs wanted to make toy tractors and trains out of ration cans and wood for the odd half-hour before they started work again, it was all right by him.

Neil was fully aware that German prisoners tended to be more productive and efficient than the Italians, and kept themselves to themselves and had little to do with the locals, but he’d lost two brothers since the war had begun, and the thought of Germans on the farm made his hackles rise. And so he continued to defy Theobald’s orders to make the Italians’ lives miserable, and the farm ticked along happily.

Theobald wasn’t thinking about his farm manager, and what he considered the man’s ridiculous weakness with the POWs, as he entered the house by way of a side door from the gardens. He refused to use the kitchen door – the more direct route from the stables – considering it beneath him. He was still smarting from his ignominious failure with the prostitute, and if he’d had a dog, he would have taken great pleasure from venting his anger and giving it a good kicking. As it was, he stormed across the hall towards his study door, yelling for Osborne.

He had the door knob in his hand when Osborne came hurrying from the direction of the kitchen, saying, ‘Mr Wynford-Grant is here, sir. I’ve just asked Cook to prepare him a light repast.’ Osborne was always very careful to use the double-barrelled surname, knowing it pleased his master.

Theobald swung round, visibly taken aback. Since the birth of the child he had written to Monty twice, expressing his outrage at Harriet’s deceitfulness, his understanding of his son-in-law’s actions and his desire that Monty would still consider him a friend and ally. He had even hinted that Monty’s place in his business was as secure as ever, once the war was over, should he choose to avail himself of the offer. He had received two short replies back, which had been non-committal. ‘Where is he?’

‘In the drawing room, sir. I thought it best to suggest he wait until you return, but he’s been here over two hours now and—’

Theobald cut off his butler’s words with a wave of his hand. ‘Bring me some coffee. Strong. Black. And something to eat too.’ He was already walking across the hall.

When he thrust open the door of the drawing room, his son-in-law rose to his feet. He had been sitting on a couch in front of the huge fireplace, which, even though the August day had been a hot one, had a wood fire burning in the elaborate iron basket.

Theobald stared at the young man who had left his house all those months ago, in the company of his furious mother. On that occasion Clarissa’s last words had been regarding the divorce, and they had been in the nature of a threat: the divorce would proceed exactly as she determined, she’d warned; and Theobald would see to it that Esther did as she was told. A few well-chosen words in the right quarter and Theobald could find himself in the position of a pariah socially, and she didn’t need to tell him the result that would have on his business interests, did she? No, she thought not. And so Monty’s solicitor would be in touch. But he never had been.

‘Hello, Theobald.’ Monty forced a smile as he looked at the man he had never liked. And, as he saw his father-in-law’s eyes move to his bandaged hands, he said quietly, ‘Burns.’

‘I’m sorry. Bad?’

Monty thought of the eleven operations that the third-degree burns had necessitated to date; the skin grafts taken from the inside of his thighs; the days and nights of what amounted to fiendish torture, when the stinking pulps of rotten flesh and oozing pus had made every minute seem like an hour. He shrugged. ‘Not compared to some.’ Which was true. He hadn’t had his hands amputated at the wrists, like a couple of the pilots he’d been with in hospital; and his face was unmarked. It had only been in the last few weeks that he could think like this, though, when the pain and misery had become bearable, and the beautiful surroundings of the cottage hospital in the soft Sussex countryside where he’d been sent for treatment had begun to heal his senses.

Theobald tried not to stare. Monty looked ten, twenty years older than he had when he had seen him last. The young, dashing lad was gone for good, and in his place stood a handsome man, but a man with deep lines carved around his mouth. Again he said, ‘I’m sorry. The war’s over for you then?’

Monty nodded. ‘You heard about my parents?’

‘Your parents?’

‘Last week. One of those damned doodlebugs. Direct hit on the London house. I’d told them to steer clear of the capital, but because they’d got the use of one of those new, purpose-built deep shelters – the ones for ticket-holders only – Mother wouldn’t listen. And of course Father went where she led. They never even got out of the house, let alone to the shelter.’

Theobald had read that the second mass wartime exodus of children from London had been under way for some weeks, as the Germans intensified their buzz-bomb attacks on the south-east, but they hadn’t seen much evidence of doodlebugs to date in the north. Churchill had declared, ‘London will never be conquered and will never fall’ at the start of the launch of the flying bombs, but people were beginning to wonder how much the beleaguered capital could take. For the third time in as many minutes, he said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ Personally, he considered Clarissa and Hubert Grant’s demise no loss; in fact, their deaths might well work to his advantage. Keeping any trace of his thoughts from showing, he gestured to the couch. ‘Sit down, lad. I’m glad you waited to see me. Can you stay the night?’

As he spoke, Osborne knocked and then opened the door. Mrs Norton and Cook’s sister brought in two trays, one holding a coffee pot and cups and saucers, along with cream, sugar and a decanter of brandy, and the other piled high with sandwiches, pastries and cakes.

Monty looked at the tray of food. Clearly rationing hadn’t bitten in this household, but then that was Theobald all over. If there was a way to get what he wanted, he’d find it. For a moment he was tempted to get up and walk straight out, but caution prevailed. He needed Theobald more than Theobald needed him – that was the crux of the matter; and if Esther’s father had meant what he’d intimated in his letters, then he needed to keep things sweet. ‘Yes, I can stay over, if it won’t inconvenience you?’ he said, accepting the plate Theobald passed him, as the servants walked out of the room after being dismissed. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’

‘You’re family, as far as I am concerned, Monty. You know that.’

The elephant in the room was too big to ignore any longer. ‘How are Esther and . . . and the child?’ Monty asked quietly.

‘You know as much as me. She’s been dead to me from the moment I found out the truth, lad. She and her brat.’

Inwardly Monty winced. ‘You must know where she’s living?’

‘Like I said, she’s dead to me.’

‘I wrote to her after . . . ’ Monty swallowed hard. ‘After the baby was born. At the farm. But the letters came back marked “Gone Away”.’

‘There you are then. She’d skedaddled somewhere or other.’

‘Or she didn’t want anything to do with me.’

‘By rights, the boot should have been on the other foot, Monty. She did the dirty on you, remember?’

‘But it wasn’t Esther’s fault, was it? I mean, it was . . . it was your wife who was to blame for everything. Esther was the innocent party. Harriet said so herself.’

Theobald had stuffed a ham sandwich in his mouth, and now he chewed and swallowed before he said, ‘Them two were as thick as thieves, lad, and if the Archangel Gabriel himself came down and told me Esther didn’t know about her beginnings, I wouldn’t believe him. She knew all right, and that mealy-mouthed nanny was in on it an’ all. Upped and left she did, once the funeral was over. Knew she’d been found out – that was the thing – but tried to dress it up as though it was my fault. I ask you. But I’d got her measure, sure enough.’

‘Rose left?’ Esther had thought the world of the woman. ‘Where did she go? To find Esther?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t care.’ Theobald had had enough of discussing the past. It was the future he was interested in. ‘Look, Monty, I think a bit of you – always have done. You know how I’m placed; when I thought you and Esther were going to make a go of it, I didn’t pull my punches, did I? Harriet took me for a fool, and Esther did the same to you, but I don’t see why we should fall out. What’s done is done; but, if nothing else, it’s been the means of joining our two names. Am I right?’

It was why he had come – to hear this – but now Monty wanted to shout at the swarthy little man in front of him that he wanted none of it. Instead he asked Theobald to go on.

‘I need someone I can trust to be my right-hand man, and I’d like it to be you. Simple as that.’

His days of flying aeroplanes were over; Monty knew the air force would either invalid him out or give him a limited-capacity job, fit only for ground duties in the United Kingdom. It had been a shock when he’d learned the extent of his parents’ debts after the funeral, even though he had known for years that things were dire. His parents had been the epitome of a lost and dying age; aristocrats wasting away in the grand mausoleum of the ancestral home, which was decaying around them. When he sold everything, there would be nothing left for him, and the London town house was just a pile of rubble. He was suddenly church-mouse poor, and it terrified him. What was the use of being able to trace your ancestors back hundreds of years and having an old and illustrious name, when you didn’t have a penny to that name? If Esther had been beside him, it would have been different. He could have faced anything then. How could he have allowed his mother to browbeat him into leaving her? He’d had several women over the last year or so – he’d found the girls were falling over themselves to bed pilots; even nice girls, who before the war would have been asking for a ring on their finger before they went the whole hog. But everything, and everyone, had changed. However, none of the women he had been with could hold a candle to Esther, in bed or out of it. Always, though, when he had been tempted to search her out, the image of the child had stopped him. If she had looked like Esther, it would have been different.

‘Look, Monty.’ Theobald had paused and seemed to be weighing what he was about to say. ‘I don’t know quite how to put this, but do I take it you and Esther are still legally married? What I mean is: I haven’t heard anything about a divorce, and the last time we met, your mother seemed to suggest that any papers would come here, for me to forward on. Not that I could have done, of course, because like I said, I don’t know where—’

‘I’ve done nothing to date.’ Monty cut short his father-in-law, his voice terse. It had been a bone of contention with his mother that he was dragging his heels, as she’d put it, but the thought of explaining the whole sorry mess to a solicitor had been beyond him, in the early days. He’d used the excuse of the war to keep his mother at bay, promising her he would see to things in due course, but then he had been shot down and she had refrained from nagging him after that.

His heart began to pound as he remembered the impact of the first bang; crazy, but he couldn’t believe he had been hit. He had dodged so many near-misses that his fellow airmen had started to call him ‘Miss-’em Monty’, and he’d dared to believe he would get through the war without a scratch. Two more bangs had followed in quick succession, and as if by magic a frightening hole had suddenly appeared in his starboard wing. Unbelief had changed to terror in the next instant, when the gas tank behind the engine blew up and the cockpit became engulfed in flames.

He had heard that your whole life passed before you, when death was imminent, but it hadn’t been like that with him. Screaming, he’d thrown his head back to keep it away from the searing heat, as his burning right hand had groped for the release pin securing the restraining Sutton harness. That was all he had thought of: to get out of what had become his coffin.

And then suddenly he had done it, and he was out into the wonderfully cool sky, tumbling downwards as blissful fresh air flowed across his face. His training kicked in and he followed the instructions his brain was giving him – the lump of red meat at the end of his right arm searching for the chromium ring on the ripcord. Through the agony his mutilated, raw fingers grasped the life-giving ring and pulled, and with a jerk the silken canopy billowed out above him, mercifully undamaged by the flames. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful as that shining material.

He came back to the present, to his father-in-law saying, ‘Don’t get me wrong, Monty, but it might be better to leave things as they are, for the time being. If you’re up for coming in with me, that is. Being related through marriage oils the wheels businesswise, you know?’

Oh, he knew all right. Monty looked into Theobald’s flabby red face, one part of his mind thinking: he’s drinking too much and it shows; and the other part processing the fact that it was only really the Grant name that Theobald was interested in. Had the man ever genuinely cared for someone in his whole life? He doubted it. He was a truly obnoxious individual.

‘Well?’ Theobald tried and failed to keep the note of irritation out of his voice. ‘What do you say about taking up a position within the business? There’s plenty who’d jump at it, you know, especially with the way things are going to be once the war’s over. If folk think they’ve had it tough the last few years, it’ll get worse before it gets better. It was the same after the Great War.’

He would be selling his soul, if he took up Theobald’s offer; Monty had known that before he came, but he wasn’t a strong-willed individual, like his mother had been. He took after his father – he knew that now. And the thought of being poor terrified him. His mother might have turned up her nose at ‘new money’ and commercialism, but it was the future. To ignore that was virtual suicide. And Theobald had his thumb in so many pies that even if a couple of them turned bad, it wouldn’t matter. He looked down at his hands; he would never fly again, but bent and scarred as they were, they’d serve him in civilian life. But that was the rub. He didn’t have the faintest idea what he wanted to do or how to get started. He’d never really had to think about things like that.