The Other Side of Love (40 page)

“Seeing you. Oops! Sorry,”

Wyatt said. He had been sneaking rum into her Coca-Cola, his right hand awkward as a paw because of heavy bandaging and the unusable thumb. He’d already suffered two lengthy painful operations on the tendons of each hand, and in a couple of days would go under the knife again.

“A few drops won’t show with this pattern,”

she said, brushing at her skirt.

She was visiting him at an American military hospital, a renovated Victorian mansion not far from Hampton Court. They sat in deckchairs on the lawn, he in pyjamas and hospital robe, she in a blouse with a pink checkered cotton skirt. Her legs, gleaming with the Coty make-up she’d bought the previous Christmas, attracted a foursome of convalescent bombardiers: they kept looking up from their poker game to ogle her.

“Darling, aren’t you going to tell me how it happened?”

“This is a warning. Never, never try feeding those damn ducks in Hyde Park.”

She laughed.

“Whatever it was, you’re extremely chipper about it.”

“I behaved OK,”

he said quietly.

“I surprised myself.”

“What rubbish. You’re the very stuff heroes are made of. A true man of action.”

She added in a whisper:

“My feminine intuition tells me you were somehow connected to that big commando raid.”

He looked at her, startled.

“I’m as secret as a tomb,”

she murmured.

“But what I can’t understand is why you were with the commandos.”

“An American observer,”

he said quietly.

“And you did more than observe?”

“Nothing much.”

“Don’t be modest. You Americans are born to swagger - that’s your charm.”

“I helped a few guys to get to the boats”

He stopped.

A one-legged poker-player who appeared about seventeen was struggling over on his crutches.

“My buddies’ve staked ten bucks that you’re not Rita Hayworth’s sister.”

“You Yanks,”

she said, fluttering her eyelashes.

“How you do lead a poor girl on.”

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‘Win me my bet. Come over and make like you’re her English sister.”

Wyatt watched Araminta chaff with the wounded boys. There was a hectic edge to her flirtatiousness. He knew this antic gaiety. It had been his when his heart had sent out messages to weep.

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255

At slightly past one on 7 July, Wyatt pressed the bell of Euan’s flat. His plan was to read and relax here, then before tea-time, when Araminta’s trip at the fire station ended, take a long stroll to Basil Street in Knightsbridge and pick her up. He buzzed again, expecting the tough diminutive charlady, Mrs Hawkins, to let him in.

To his surprise, Araminta answered the door. In her crumpled pink Viyella bathrobe, her tangle of red curls draining all colour from her face, she looked weary if not downright ill - but, then, again, he’d never seen her without any make-up whatsoever.

“I figured you’d be on duty,”

he said.

“A touch under the weather. What’s the time?”

He glanced at his watch.

“Five past one.”

“That late?”

Araminta glimpsed herself in the hall mirror.

“Good Lord, what a fright!”

Her vivacity cancelled out her look of sickness.

“Let me primp. You find out what evil Mrs Hawkins hath wrought on that lovely coffee Aunt Rossie sent.”

Used grounds had been put in the top of the percolator, wartime style. Wyatt dumped them in the rubbish-bin, measuring out three tablespoons of fresh Chase & Sanborn. His palms were a bright pink, but the tendons worked again, albeit rustily: he was able to saw a few slices from the heavy brown loaf - this past April, white bread had gone the way of other peacetime delicacies.

“Did you bring along a paper?”

Araminta called from the bedroom corridor.

“Daddy takes ours to work.”

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Til run down and grab one for you.”

The placard leaning outside the corner tobacconist was chalked, TRIUMPH AT EL ALAMEiN. Glancing at the front page, he saw that the Allies had continued their sweep around Rommel’s forces. When he returned, Araminta had on make-up, a short-sleeved white blouse and well-fitted slacks; her hair was tamed by a bright blue snood.

“I see you made breakfast,”

she said, chuckling at the sloppily set table.

“Lunch, you mean.”

He went to the kitchen for the jar of peanut butter. Of his gifts from the PX, peanut butter was the only one universally rejected by the British Kingsmiths.

On his return Araminta, too vain to wear her reading-glasses with any member of the opposite sex, stood at the window, taking advantage of the June brilliance.

Suddenly she gave a breathy whisper. The Times rustled to the floor, but her elbows remained bent as though she continued to hold the pages. Brightly painted mouth curved down, eyes staring, she might have been the model for a Greek mask of tragedy.

“

“Minta, what is it?”

She stared blankly at him, then closed her eyes, swaying.

Wyatt took three rapid strides, gripping her round white arms, which were rough with gooseflesh.

Glancing down, he saw a photograph: even the blurred grainy newsprint could not disguise the matinee-idol features.

Captain the Honourable Peter Reginald Gervase Shawcross-Mortimer, third son of the Earl and Countess of Mainwaring.

It was the obituary page. A”

“Come on,

“Minta, you better lie dowrr

“I must talk to them. His parents.”

“

“Minta dearest, it’s in the paper; it’s true.”

“They lost their eldest son. And now Peter. Don’t you see, I must tell them how most dreadfully sorry I am.”

That’s not necessary.”

She was going unsteadily to her room. She returned with a little silk telephone-book. Her hands were trembling, and she couldn’t open it. Wyatt fumbled to the page lettered M, finding two of the five residences, Mainwaring Court and Mortimer House near Marble Arch. He dialled the London number for Araminta.

A woman with a breathy upper-class accent answered. She was, she said, the Countess of Mainwaring’s secretary.

“Whom might I say wishes to speak?”

“Miss Kingsmith.”

Araminta breathed shallowly. Wyatt tried to put consoling arms around her, but she pushed him away.

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‘Miss Kingsmith,”

said the secretary.

“The countess has requested that I explain. Her son was killed in action two days ago. Neither she nor the earl are taking calls.”

“Two days …

“

Araminta responded dazedly.

“Peter’s been dead two whole days … and I didn’t even know …

“

Wyatt, who had heard everything, muttered,

“Bastards,”

and pressed down on the telephone. Leading Araminta to her room, he helped her on to the rumpled bed, coaxing her to take a sip of brandy.

She choked and turned her head away.

“Leave me alone,”

she said in a grating whisper.

“Let me have my weep.”

He telephoned Kingsmith’s, then succeeded in getting a trunk call through to Quarles. As an afterthought, he flipped through Araminta’s small silk telephone-book for the number of the artillery school in Scotland. Before Euan and Porteous could arrive, a Major Downes, who spoke with a Canadian accent, was on the telephone. Downes said he was Aubrey’s superior officer. Wyatt explained about Peter’s death.

“Please convey my sympathy to Miss Kingsmith,”

the Canadian said.

“I’ll arrange a leave. Lieutenant Kingsmith should be in London first thing tomorrow.”

“Words seem idiotic and small,”

Aubrey said.

“He was my friend,

“Minta.”

“I do appreciate you coming down, darling,”

Araminta said in a hollowed tired voice. Shoes off but otherwise fully dressed, propped by pillows, she lay staring at her wardrobe.

“Of course I’m here. Come on,

“Minta, this is me. Practically your twin.”

Aubrey patted her hand, which was clenched around a handkerchief.

“Let me help you.”

She turned on the pillow, looking at him with puffy reddened eyes.

“Would you? Help me?”

“Anything.”

“I need money. I can’t ask Daddy. It’s not certain yet, but I might need pots and pots of money.”

“I won’t ask why,”

he said softly.

“You can guess, though.”

“Maybe there’s a better answer to the problem.”

“There isn’t. I’ve done nothing but think about this.”

She blew her nose, sighing.

“Aubrey, I’m not ethical like you. I never was. I’m too blindly self-centred. As long as I get my own way, I’m not too horrible, but basically I’ve never been a good person”

“Stop it. You’re brave, generous and”

“And astonishingly lacking in Christian morality. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. She’s doing away with Peter’s baby. But it’s also a bastard. And having people point their fingers at me and the child

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for the rest of our lives requires more stamina than I possess. Believe me, there’s only one solution: a quick operation of the illegal type.”

“

“Minta”

“There’s no point arguing. Nothing you say will change my mind.”

“It can be dangerous unless you know a good man.”

Til find one.”

He stroked back her hair.

She shrugged off his hand.

“Stop gentling me like a Shetland pony!”

Her voice rose.

“If you’re too morally upright to give me the money, just come out and say so.”

Til transfer all there is in my bank savings,”

he said.

“The cash’ll be in your account, waiting.”

“Thank you. Oh, damn Peter, damn him! How dare he go and get himself killed?”

Rolling over, she began to sob.

Aubrey sat by her bed. From his quiet empathy, nobody would guess he was grieving for the old friend with whom - oh, supreme irony - he had signed the Oxford Pledge never to fight for Crown and Country. Certainly none of the long-faced visitors to the Mayfair flat had suspected Aubrey’s stomach was twitching with nerves. Tomorrow night he would take the passenger-plane that flew on a rough schedule between Scotland and Sweden. In Stockholm he would briefly contact the CI4 agents (one was Kathe’s

“Ulla-Britt Onslager’), then make his way to German-occupied Denmark and across the border to the Reich: in Kiel he would contact a naval officer in the Schwarze Kapelle, the espionage system buried deep within the Third Reich’s military.

It was damn decent ofDownes to let me coitfto London, he told himself. But the decency of his superior didn’t nrake it any easier to leave his sister. In his entire life he had never seen her brought low like this. must find somebody to help her.

Ill

That evening after dinner, while Elizabeth sat napping over her mending and Euan glared angrily at the evening paper, Aubrey edged Wyatt to the kitchen. Crockery had been piled in the sink for the charlady to wash up the following morning. Aubrey tried to speak but, as always when it came to asking a favour, he grew tongue-tied.

Wyatt spoke first.

“What gets me is the shitty way she found out. His parents knew how much they meant to each other. Why the hell couldn’t they have had the decency to telephone her?”

From what Peter told me up at Oxford, they were of the old-school aristocracy. Common folk have no feelings.”

Peter wasn’t like that, not at all. A special kind of guy.”

Behind the

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blackout blinds there was a faraway buzz of RAF planes: recently the Allies had beefed up their raids over Germany, Americans by day, British by night. Both men listened, then Wyatt went on:

“Aubrey, the thing is he was spooked. On that last leave, I spent an evening with them. He got loaded to the gills and when

“Minta went to the head he started in about grouse and hunters and no birds making it through the season. Fatalistic bullshit.”

“Fatalistic maybe but, given the odds for a Spitfire pilot on his fourth tour of duty, fatalism is reality.”

“He said he’d intended to marry Araminta this leave, then decided it wasn’t fair to her.”

“It would have been better if he had,”

Aubrey said.

“Come again?”

“He should have married her.”

The planes were overhead now, and the kitchen light vibrated, casting a flicker on Aubrey’s moist high forehead.

“So that’s how it is,”

Wyatt said softly.

“She says she’s not positive yet but, knowing my sister, she’s quite sure.”

“Jesus, what a mess.”

“I’ve had money transferred, but I have to be back in Scotland tomorrow. Would you keep an eye out for her?”

“Peter asked the same thing”

He broke off as the door swung open.

“Ah, here you two are,”

Euan said, glaring at his son.

“What are you boys so secretive about?”