The Second-last Woman in England (20 page)

Christmas Day and they had had the city to themselves.

Had there been snow? He couldn’t remember. When one looked back at any Christmas, it was always snowing. On this Christmas Day the snow must have been thick and fresh and bright on the ground. Their footsteps must have squeaked and crunched and left a trail. How could it have been otherwise?

They had gone to her father’s flat in Belgravia.

It was hard to recall the flat as it had been then when the old man was still alive; they had only visited a handful of times. Cecil had had an impression of tiger-skin rugs, romanticised Victorian landscapes crowded on the walls showing Indian scenes of men pigsticking or troops of red-coated soldiers defending some mountain pass. There had been a hideous elephant’s foot umbrella stand. And the whole flat heated to such an unbearable temperature that he had felt he was suffocating. Old Mr Paget had been well into his seventies by then, brown as a walnut from all those years in India, but frail and querulous, bitter with the way his life had ended. He’d been dead within the year.

They had gone to the flat at lunchtime on Christmas Day; no way out of it, really. His own father was gone, but hers was still alive. And the visit would not cut into their day too much: just a light lunch prepared by the woman who did for him, nothing too rich, nothing too strenuous, a sherry or two and then they would be off. The rest of the afternoon, the evening, was still theirs.

Freddie had been there.

Always Freddie. Even then. Had they known he was going to be there? But why wouldn’t he be—it was Christmas Day, after all—though Cecil was fairly certain Simon hadn’t been there. And there had been a suggestion, even before this, that Freddie and the old man didn’t get on. Freddie would have been twenty-two or thereabouts, and recently come down from University College. Lord, Mr Paget must have been into his fifties when he fathered the boy. No wonder they didn’t see eye to eye, they were separated by two generations. And University College—not Cambridge like his father and elder brother. Not even Oxford, but University College, London.

Freddie had been a good-looking fellow, perhaps a little cocksure, not as bad as some, but worse than others. And there was something—what? How did one characterise it?

But no, that was absurd. People didn’t have signs on their foreheads marking them out as deserters. And Freddie wasn’t a deserter, not then. It was the war that had made him a deserter.

There had been barbed comments, he recalled, over the sherries. Why had the boy gone to
that
university? Why had he studied modern subjects, literature, the arts? Why had he come down
six months ago
and yet failed to secure a place in a firm? In a law office? In a Ministry? In the armed forces?

Harriet had become increasingly restless and Cecil had thought, perhaps we will leave soon? She had snapped at the old man, at her own father, and Cecil had been surprised. Freddie had been unconcerned, both by the old man’s jibes and by Harriet’s increasing annoyance. And Cecil had thought, perhaps this was how such things played themselves out in this household. He only had his own household to compare it to and there no one had said anything of consequence, good or bad.

‘
India
, my boy!’ the old man had said, practically shouting the words and it had seemed as though he had been leading up to this point throughout the whole unpleasant visit.

Harriet had got up and walked away.

‘It’s still the best option, boy! It’s still the jewel in our diminishing crown! It will be the making of you. It’s been the making of better men than you.’

Meaning himself, presumably, Cecil had thought, a little uncharitably. Really, the old boy was quite insufferable.

‘If there’s going to be a war, one hardly wants to be shuffling paper in Calcutta, does one?’ Freddie had replied laconically, which had only infuriated the old man further.

‘There isn’t going to
be
a war!’

Mr Paget had spoken and Herr Hitler had jolly well better listen.

‘You can still get into the Civil Service, despite having a second-rate degree,’ he had insisted. ‘I still have some influence, you know. These old hands can still pull a few strings.’

The old hands he was referring to were curled, claw-like, around the top of a knobbly cane planted on the ground between his knees. They were wizened things, the fingers narrow and dried up, the knuckles swollen, the nails an unpleasant yellow. Like dragon’s claws from some childhood fairytale.

‘No, thanks,’ Freddie had replied, unwinding his long legs and reaching for the sherry decanter. ‘Refill, anyone?’

‘Thirty-five years of my life I gave to India!’ the old man had shouted, thumping the floor with his cane, and Cecil had shifted uneasily.

‘And Mother gave her life,’ Harriet had said, reappearing at his elbow. Cecil remembered flinching at that. But the old man had not heard, or had chosen not to hear.

‘And it was a wild place back then. By God, you’ve no idea. The natives were little more than savages in some places. Head-hunters, cannibals, uprisings, mutinies. Butchered, we were, whole families, whole
settlements
. And we had come to
save
them!’

‘There’s ingratitude for you!’ Freddie had remarked, refilling his glass and putting the stopper back in the decanter.

Increasingly agitated, the old man had lifted his cane and pointed it angrily, almost violently, at his young son.

‘I was glad to serve my country, my Queen. And some of the men who went out there never came back. They never returned!’

This was clearly Freddie’s fault.

‘I remember one young man, about your age. Fresh out from Chatham. Bright future ahead of him. Only been out a few weeks.
Just a few weeks
.
Butchered
. In broad daylight. Not in the jungle, in a park in the middle of a city. Struck down in broad daylight.’

Harriet, quite suddenly, had become almost hysterical.

‘
He’s not going to India!
He’s
not
! Don’t you under
stand
? There’s nothing there for us,
nothing
! It’s dead.
Gone
!’

Her words had rebounded off the walls of the small, over-furnished flat and echoed around them like a cannon shot. They had all sat there in horrid silence, Freddie staring wordlessly at the floor, his jaws clenched tightly; the old man, his face purple, his mouth opening and closing like a great, stupid carp in a pond; and Cecil, clutching the arms of his chair and hearing his heart beating too loudly.

‘Come, Cecil. It’s time we were off,’ Harriet had announced, and even though they had not even eaten lunch and he had been horribly, horribly embarrassed at the thought of simply getting up and leaving, he’d been relieved and had jumped up, too quickly, to join her.

Afterwards—what? They must have returned home. Had they walked or taken a cab? Did they talk about it? He couldn’t remember.

By the following Christmas they had had Julius, and a nanny of course, and that dreadful woman, Mrs Flowers, Mrs Thompson’s predecessor, who had cooked and kept house for them. By the following Christmas the spell had been broken. He had made one of the rooms his study, another was the day nursery, another the night nursery. No one roamed from room to room anymore. And by the end of the war Harriet had her own bedroom.

Inside the house all was silent.

Mrs Thompson did not stir before dawn for anyone, Christmas or no Christmas, and Julius and Anne had never been the sort of children to rise before dawn on Christmas Day, even when they were very small. Would Harriet be up? What time did she awaken usually? She had been a late riser in the early years of their marriage, had resented the dawn. But now? Did she lie in bed for a time, reading, smoking, thinking? Did she stand at the window and look out at the world? He realised he didn’t know.

He sat up, wondered whether to venture as far as the window, decided it was too early yet. His toes pushed against the cold hot-water bottle and it slid out of the bottom of the bed and fell with a sloppy thud onto the floor. A draft of cold air shot in through the gap in the sheets and he pulled them more closely about his legs. In the old house in the days before the Great War they had required a housemaid to start a fire in each of the bedrooms and to pour hot water into a large enamel washing bowl on the dressing table before they would even think of getting up, and still the cold had chilled the bones. He shivered. The past was always colder than the present.

And yet still one wanted to return there.

The tolling of the church bell had given way to a peal. He got out of bed, thrusting his feet into slippers and reaching quickly for his dressing gown. It really was bitterly cold; even the carpet seemed icy. It got colder still as he crossed to the window and drew the curtains aside. Had it snowed?

It hadn’t. The dawn was hidden in the greyish-yellow smog. Frost laced the windows and glistened wetly on the lawn below.

From down the hallway a door opened. A muffled voice could be heard—Julius? Then a reply, in a higher voice—Anne, presumably. A thump followed, then silence. The children were up, discovering their stockings. He sighed. He had carefully wrapped the presents the night before, sometime after midnight, and had silently entered their rooms and placed one bulging stocking at the end of each bed. The task ought to have brought pleasure but it had saddened him.

The bells ceased suddenly and silence fell. It was Christmas morning—it hadn’t snowed and once again Father Christmas had not come.

Chapter Fourteen

DECEMBER 1952

She could have sat in the same pew as the family but Jean chose the pew behind, from where she stared at the back of Mr Wallis’s head for the duration of the Christmas morning service. No one had asked her to move. No one had said, ‘Nanny, why are you sitting there? Why don’t you sit with us?’ Instead, Anne had said, ‘But Mummy, I don’t
want
to keep my gloves on, it’s too
hot
!’ And Julius had said, ‘Oh, look what some wag’s drawn on the front of this hymn book!’ Mr Wallis had pretended not to hear and Mrs Wallis had sat down looking cross and announced in an aside, ‘Really, the hypocrisy of it all makes me sick.’

And that appeared to sum up Christmas for the Wallises.

Jean closed her eyes. She did not hold out much hope that the Church of England Christmas morning service, nor the fresh-faced and eager-looking rector who was going to deliver it, would provide the sort of nourishment her soul craved on such an important day.

The pews had cushions on them: red lipstick-coloured cushions of a velvety material tied to the wooden pews with lengths of gold cord. In her own Chapel in Stepney the pews were pews: long wooden benches, and Dad used to say if you sat on them for an hour you remembered God’s grace and that Christ had died for you on the Cross. Here, you thought about Christmas dinner and the presents in your stocking and how much your neighbour earned and what hat his wife was wearing.

Sometimes it was hard to love your neighbour.

In the pew in front of her, Mr Wallis sat very straight, his hymn book resting in his lap, an attentive look on his face as the rector spoke of the three wise men. The bringing of gifts, of course, appealed to this congregation. The gold, the frankincense, the myrrh—the children sat up on their cushions imagining the wonders that such words implied; imagining the presents that were awaiting them in their homes. How the service dragged on when there was a splendid dinner to consume and splendid presents in brightly coloured paper to unwrap!

A child dropped her hymn book with a loud thud and everyone turned to look—a congregation so easily distracted from the word of God. Mr Wallis did not turn, he continued to stare at the eager-faced rector, but the rector’s words surely did not penetrate; it seemed his attentiveness was on his own thoughts, with no room left for God’s word.

She could have gone to her own Chapel for the Christmas service; Mrs Wallis had said as much, had seemed surprised that Jean had not wanted to take the day off. But why would she, when she had no family to go home to? She had gone to Chapel last Christmas eager for the word of God to fill her as it had always done on this holy day. But instead the ghosts of Mum and Dad and Gladys and Nerys and Edward and little Bertie had surrounded her and she had left before the final prayer. She had craved their presence, sought their spirits every day for seven years, and yet when she had found them—when
they
had found
her
—she had fled.

And now another year had passed; it was eight years since that final Christmas and sometimes she found she could not remember a face, could no longer hear their voices in her head.

‘Oh
what
an occasion it must have
been
!’ sang out the rector, clapping his hands enthusiastically as he related the story of Christ’s birth to his once-a-year captive audience. ‘A saviour is born! A
king
is born! And Jesus had no coronation, remember. No golden carriage with horses and footmen to transport him to his throne; no crown studded with jewels awaiting him; no adoring crowds cheering him on.’