Camomile Lawn

  ‘Polly, there was a girl here—’

  ‘Elizabeth. He left a note. Elizabeth who? Did she say?’

  ‘No, she ran off crying.’

  ‘In love with him, I suppose. Several girls were, I shall have to tell them.’

  ‘Why him? Why Walter? Why not Hector or Oliver or the twins?’

  ‘Not the twins.’ Polly gave a gasp, glancing at Calypso. ‘Why are you here, anyway?’

  ‘I came to see you. I wanted to talk to you. Then I saw the telegram and read it and thought I’d wait. You’d be all alone—’

  ‘Kind of you. What did you want to see me about?’

  ‘I’m having a baby. I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘Hector’s?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘That’s all right, then. I guessed you had morning sickness not food poisoning, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you told him? He’ll be terribly pleased, won’t he?’

  ‘I’ve written. He should know by now. He wants an heir. I’ve got one of his people to be its nurse. I’ve been up in Scotland. Hector said if I had a child Catherine must look after it. She’s small, lame, plain and reliable. I went up there to see her. She will come when I’m ready, she can look after it.’

  Polly listened to Calypso, holding the telegram in her sunburned fingers.

  ‘Perhaps it will make you happy.’

  ‘But I am happy.’

  ‘That’s not happiness that’s money.’ Polly’s voice was bitterly nasty. She recovered herself quickly. ‘Sorry, Calypso. I must have a bath. D’you think you could ring them up in Cornwall, and Helena and Aunt Sarah?’ She put the telegram on the table by Calypso. ‘I don’t think I can do it, so will you?’

  ‘Of course.’ Calypso shook herself free of the blankets. ‘I’ll just give Fling a run. You go and have your bath.’

  Standing on the doorstep watching her dog trot to and fro in the early morning street, Calypso found herself weeping, tears splashing on to the pavement. In the house Polly would be lying in the bath, her sobs drowned by the sound of the water taps. Presently she would appear puff-eyed and grim, refusing to discuss her loss, insist that she was all right and go off to work and snap at anybody who showed her sympathy. Calypso went in to telephone.

  ‘Aunt Helena, it’s Calypso. Aunt Helena, Walter’s dead. Yes, a telegram. Yes, quite sure. Yes, she knows. No, she’s in the bath—well, you know Polly. Yes, I was here. Actually I opened the telegram. What? Not open people’s telegrams? Let her read it herself. She did read it herself. I fell asleep and she came home and found it. What has Uncle Richard got to do with it? Oh, your first husband—sorry. It helped to open the telegram yourself? Really? Well, it’s too late now. Yes, I’ll tell her, she’s in the bath. Aunt Helena, I must go now, I have to ring Aunt Sarah. Yes, yes, I will, of course I will. Yes, I’m sure she will. Yes. Goodbye.’

  Calypso dialled trunks and asked for Sarah’s number in Bath.

  ‘Aunt Sarah? Calypso here. Aunt Sarah, Walter’s been killed. Yes, quite sure—a telegram from the Admiralty. Well, you know Polly, she’s crying in the bath. Yes, I’m crying here—oh, and you are crying there. In Bath. I suppose that’s funny. Well, not funny. Why Walter, why him? Why not someone who could be spared? Yes, I’ll tell her. Yes, I’m sure she would like it if you came up. Yes, I’ve told Aunt Helena, she was angry that I’d opened the telegram. What? I found it and read it, Polly was away. Aunt Helena carried on about opening the telegram about her husband. I’d forgotten she had one. Oh God! Three minutes! Goodbye—’

  Calypso slammed down the receiver, wiped her eyes and went down to the kitchen to give Fling some milk. From upstairs she heard the rush of water as Polly pulled the plug in the bath. Hurriedly she dialled trunks on the kitchen extension and asked for the Cornish number.

  ‘Sophy? Is Uncle Richard there? Well, is Monika there? When will they be back? Not till late. Oh God! Sophy, listen, there’s bad news. No, no, not Oliver, it’s Walter. Walter’s dead. Yes. What did you say?’

  ‘He was the sweetest,’ Sophy’s clear voice all the way from Cornwall.

  ‘Well, darling, will you tell them? Yes, please, Sophy. Yes, of course I will kiss her for you. She’s—yes, she’s in the bath, actually. I heard the water running away just now so—yes—well, goodbye.’

  Polly came into the kitchen puffy-eyed.

  ‘Have you told them?’

  ‘Yes. Sophy said he was the sweetest.’

  ‘He was.’ Polly tightened her dressing gown belt. ‘I must have some coffee and then rush or I will be late for work.’

  ‘I’ll get it while you dress.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’ll make you late.’

  ‘My office doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Mine does. My boss isn’t at all obliging.’

  ‘But surely today he—’

  ‘You aren’t suggesting I should tell him, are you?’ Polly suddenly spat at Calypso, then, seeing her expression, said, ‘Right, then. Come to supper tonight and tell me about your baby.’

  ‘Hector’s.’

  ‘All right, Hector’s.’ Polly’s face was pinched with misery; she looked almost ugly. ‘Not that Hector’s baby is much of a replacement.’

  ‘Nobody could replace Walter!’ Calypso put her arms round her cousin, feeling her stiff with reserve. ‘I would give myself, darling, if it would do any good, but who am I? I love money and a good time, I’m enjoying the war, I find it exciting and frightening. I enjoy the raids, I like all the men taking me out. I like being a grass widow, at least I think I do.’ She felt Polly relaxing in her arms. ‘But when something like this happens I hate it, Polly, I hate it, and now I shall stop having a good time and blow up into an awful balloon and nobody will want to sleep with me for months and months. D’you think I’ll ever get my figure back? Polly, what are you laughing at?’

  ‘You.’ Polly pulled away from Calypso, took her face between her hands. ‘You’re so utterly selfish.’ She kissed Calypso gently. ‘There. Don’t worry. Whatever shape you are all the men will want you. Walter only gave up trying because he thought it was a waste of time. He didn’t think he was attractive enough. Think of Oliver—’ She kissed her cousin. ‘I must go, I hate being late.’ She turned and ran upstairs to dress. Calypso followed slowly.

  ‘Can I come this evening? You are so comforting, though I thought I would comfort you.’

  ‘Of course.’ Polly was pulling on her stockings. ‘Of course you must come. I want to hear all about the baby. What shall you call it?’

  ‘I haven’t thought,’ Calypso lied, feeling protective towards Hector, who must be the first to know. I’m only a vehicle, she told herself. This boring child is his.

  Twenty-five

  ‘WHY THE FUSS?’ EXCLAIMED Max. ‘What does it matter? A telegram is not private like a letter. Anyway, it was not for you.’

  ‘It’s the principle of the thing. When Anthony was killed I saw the telegraph boy coming. I opened the telegram myself. The message was for me. Anthony was my husband, Calypso had no business—’ Helena was excited.

  Max put his arms round her. ‘Helena, where is your calm? The girls do not worry. Calypso has not behaved badly, she—’

  ‘She always behaves badly. I hear she is having affairs all over the place since Hector went overseas. She—’

  ‘Opening the telegram and having affairs are two different things. Maybe she thought she was doing right to open the telegram. You are old-fashioned, my Phlegm, you—’

  ‘Old-fashioned?’

  ‘No, darling, it is my bad English. I am Continental. I do not think poor Calypso behaved—’

  ‘Poor! That girl’s rich, not only Hector’s money, she’s rich in gall. You be careful of her, Max. Before you know where you are she’ll be scrambling into bed with you.’

  ‘Ach, Helena.’ He stroked her hair, thinking of Calypso’s peach-coloured body, relaxed and cheerful before rehearsals. ‘She will not make a scramble, as you call
it.’ No such luck, thought Max. ‘What can we do for Polly?’ he said, regretfully remembering Calypso’s recent refusal to sleep with him any more. ‘We should do something. Go and see her, telephone first, she was not thrilled to see us when her parents had been killed.’

  ‘That was different. Poor Polly. What a lovely time we had, the taxi full of flowers. I shall never forget that morning in Covent Garden.’ Helena kissed him as she had learned, open-mouthed.

  ‘We telephone presently, my darling.’ He pushed her back on the bed. ‘We telephone later.’ He ran his tongue along her teeth.

  ‘We’ve only just had breakfast,’ said Helena, yielding.

  ‘You still think love is only for between ten thirty p.m. and midnight?’

  ‘Not any more. Come, ruin my make-up. What time is your rehearsal?’

  ‘Shush, meine Kleine—’

  Later Helena told Sarah on the telephone: ‘We rang up but she did not answer. I think she must have gone to work. How much do you think she cares, Sarah?’

  ‘Terribly, I should think. Let’s let her be. I offered to come up but she put me off for a few days, said the Floyer twins are coming on leave for two nights. I shall come when they are gone; perhaps it’s better for the young to be together. She said Calypso’s being very helpful.’

  ‘That will be the day,’ said Helena. ‘Calypso never helps anyone but herself.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sarah, remembering that Calypso had made Oliver telephone when he returned from Norway. ‘She’s a dark horse. I’ve known her unselfish.’

  Helena, repairing her make-up, wondered whether Sarah had been giving her a small dig. Nobody could call me unselfish these days, she thought, creaming her face. Here am I, making up for lost time, so happy. I must go to Hatchards, she thought, and choose some books for Richard and send something nice to Monika, who looks after him as I should be doing, cares for Sophy in a way I could never manage. How extraordinary it is, thought Helena, wiping the cream off and starting again, that with all the dreadful news from the Middle East, with Walter dead, with the war spreading all over the world, I should be so happy and Calypso, so different from me, looks as though she is thoroughly enjoying herself. Were it not for Hitler I should never have met Max, were it not for the war Hector would not have decided to marry again. The Jews may be enslaved, thought Helena, powdering her nose, but I am free of boring, boring Richard. If the telegraph boy had not brought me the telegram to say Anthony was killed, what sort of woman would I have become? Certainly not Max’s mistress. I still think, Helena told herself, that Calypso was wrong to open that telegram. It was addressed to Polly. Carefully applying lipstick, Helena tried to recall her feelings in 1917 when she grieved for her young husband. She had been wearing a grey herringbone tweed skirt, a white blouse and a woolly cardigan which dipped where she overloaded her pockets. She remembered that she had a cold which weeping made worse, that her period had started the night before she got the news. She remembered being thankful that she was not pregnant. That her mother-in-law wept, exclaiming, ‘He was the flower of the flock’, she being left with two other sons, both black sheep. Helena stared at her present-day face in the glass. After Anthony’s death she had met Richard. A bit unfair when the Great War had left three million surplus women that she should find another husband and now have a lover; a fresh lease in this new war.

  A little later, stepping out into the street, Helena met the postman. A bill and a letter in Richard’s writing for herself. She put the bill on the hall table then opened Richard’s envelope. Richard wrote that, things being what they were and clothes rationed, he was coming to London to visit his tailor and would be staying with Helena in her new house while he had his fittings. This would not take more than a few weeks. He was sure, wrote Richard, that Helena would agree it was wise to buy the best and make the most sensible and lasting use of one’s coupons. Also, wrote Richard, it would be nice, while he was in London to see a few shows. He hoped Helena would accompany him. It would be an excellent opportunity to attend one of Max’s concerts. Since Monika was reluctant to leave Cornwall—there was really no one she could entrust with the cow and the hens—she was giving him her list of shopping and ‘I’ve told her that of course you will be only too delighted to help me with it’.

  Helena stood in her hall with the street door open, feeling a fog of intolerable boredom engulf her. How dared he enter her new world? She knew she could not stop him. She re-read the letter. There was no escape. There was a postscript: ‘I thought we might go down and take Sophy out from school.’ Helena crushed the letter in both hands. ‘You might,’ she muttered resentfully, ‘I won’t.’ That afternoon she telephoned Sarah again.

  ‘Sarah, could you not come and spend a few nights? You can visit Polly and help me at the same time.’

  ‘What help do you need?’ Sarah sounded harassed.

  ‘Richard is proposing himself to stay for weeks. Don’t laugh, it’s not funny.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, how long I can be spared.’

  ‘I shall be so grateful,’ said Helena. ‘He could, he may—’

  ‘I’ll come. He won’t spoil anything for you, I’ll see to that.’

  Helena, conscious of the fragility of her happiness, felt a rush of gratitude.

  Driving down the motorway with Hamish all those years later she said: ‘One did not feel safe at that time.’

  ‘When was that then?’

  ‘During the war.’

  ‘I should imagine not, the bombing must have been pretty frightening.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mind the bombing, it was my husband—’

  ‘I never knew him.’ Hamish was puzzled as he drove fast, pushing a button to squirt water on his windscreen, switching on the wipers to clear the dust. What had been wrong with this old creature’s husband? Come to think of it, had she not had two?

  ‘What?’ said Hamish, trying to find something to say. ‘Why?’

  ‘He barged in at a delicate period. Of course later on nothing mattered. Max and I were as established as H. G. Wells and Rebecca West—’

  ‘Didn’t he keep trotting off with other ladies?’

  ‘Of course he did. So did Max, but he always came back to me and Monika.’

  ‘Who was Monika?’

  ‘Monika was his wife, she died. You must have met her.’

  ‘Of course. What did your husband do?’ I must get these relationships straight, thought Hamish. They are of historical interest.

  ‘He bored,’ said Helena in her old voice, sitting beside him. ‘He was handicapped by being a bore. Now Max, with all his faults, never bored anyone.’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Hamish, grinning at the road ahead. ‘I never knew him well but I found him a very lively person, also very courageous.’

  ‘That’s what your mother said. She maintained Max was extremely brave, that he could have taken himself and Monika off to America and been safe. Extraordinary of her to think that. After all, they were perfectly safe in England.’

  ‘Jews,’ said Hamish.

  ‘Of course they were Jews, but we won the war. There was no need for them to bother once they were here.’

  ‘We might have lost it.’ Hamish had read history. ‘Very nearly did.’

  ‘It never occurred to me that we would.’ Helena stuck out her jaw. ‘Never. People like your father called Dunkirk a disaster and talked of touch and go in the Middle East, and Oliver used to carry on about Norway, I believe. That was a bit of a set-back but apart from the occasional losses—’

  ‘Singapore? Burma?’

  ‘We got them back. There was no need for the Jews to fuss. Max was no braver than anyone else.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Your mother showed courage, I realize that now. At the time we all thought she was being tiresome and selfish.’

  ‘What did she do that was so special?’ Hamish was ever ready to talk about his mother, with whom he had never achieved intimacy.

  ‘At a time when
children and pregnant women were being sent to the country she sat tight in London. She refused to go to her parents, she refused to go to Scotland, she paid no heed to anybody, she stayed in the London house quite alone apart from a daily woman, alone except for that dog. She wouldn’t budge, said the country in wartime frightened her. She thought Max brave and she ganged up with Polly and called Richard heroic.’

  ‘How interesting. Was he some special kind of boffin, risking his life and limb? Secret war work? That sort of thing?’

  ‘Richard was no boffin.’ Helena gave a cackle of laughter which ended in a fit of coughing. As she grew mauve in the face Hamish slowed the car and drew on to the hard shoulder. Stopping the car, he patted Helena gently on the back until her wheezes subsided.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better have another swig,’ he suggested, and helped her unscrew her flask. Still rather choky she took a swallow.

  ‘Ah, that’s better, much. It’s comical now but I was angry at the time—yes.’

  ‘I find it very interesting how the English all pulled together in the war and worked.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call Richard’s behaviour work.’ Still chuckling, Helena put the flask back in her bag. ‘You’d better drive on, we shall be late for the funeral.’

  Twenty-six

  USING THE KEY THE girl Elizabeth had left, Calypso let herself into Polly’s house. She let Fling off the lead and went into the dining room to take a sheet of writing paper from the desk.

  ‘Darling Polly,’ she wrote. ‘I haven’t told Pa and Ma that I am pregnant. They will want me to go home and I could not bear it. The fuss. The boredom. Help me. Tell them London’s safe, that I need to be near my doctor, something plausible. Love. C.’ She stuck the note in an envelope and put it on the hall table. ‘Come on,’ she said to the dog, who was sniffing at a pile of coats on a chair. She looked closer. R.A.F. caps, overcoats, gas masks. ‘The twins must be here, how lovely.’ She started up the stairs. Outside Polly’s room the dog pressed his nose to the door and snuffled. Calypso picked him up and walked in. Dim light slanted through the cracks in the blackout curtains. In the bed Polly slept, her dark hair covering one cheek, her face serene, long lashes on sunburned cheeks, sad mouth relaxed; on either side of her lay David and Paul, each with an arm across her body.