Camomile Lawn

  ‘Oh no, no, no,’ moaned Irena and another girl, ‘oh, no, no, no,’ in chorus.

  ‘But,’ said Max slowly, ‘she sticks on a ledge and the Floyers and the coastguards they pull her up.’

  ‘Is she hurt?’

  ‘How do I know? Mildred says she has the breakdown.’

  ‘We’d better catch the midnight train. Quick—somebody go and find a taxi, hurry. Max, I will come with you.’ Helena, suddenly calm, British and practical, took charge.

  ‘I’ll come along too.’ Richard limped out of the room. ‘Won’t take a minute to pack. Most of my stuff is ready, I—’

  But nobody listened. Sarah, aghast at the whole scene, took her leave and started back to Polly’s house, not wishing to get involved in such foreign turmoil. As she reached the corner of the street Irena and Ludwig were waylaying a taxi which was disgorging its passengers.

  ‘Sorry, luv,’ said the taximan. ‘I’m shot to bits, dead tired, going ’ome.’

  ‘This is sehr important,’ begged Irena.

  ‘Sorry, luv, not tonight.’

  ‘It is only to Paddington,’ pleaded Irena.

  ‘Sorry, luv—’

  ‘It is for the exiled King of Greece,’ cried Ludwig. ‘He lives here. It’s of vital importance he catch the train—’

  ‘King of Greece?’ The taximan was incredulous.

  ‘Top secret,’ said Irena, lowering her voice. ‘So urgent. So secret.’

  The taxi driver opened the door. Irena and Ludwig sprang into the taxi and waved to Sarah as they drove past with gleeful faces. Sarah, while disapproving, was impressed by their ingenuity.

  Driving with Hamish to Max’s funeral, Helena remembered her dinner party.

  ‘Did you ever hear the saga of the guinea pigs?’ she asked Hamish.

  ‘Yes. That is one aspect of your war which has impressed me.’ By his tone Hamish made clear the impression was not a good one.

  ‘When you consider the horrors of war, it’s remarkable that it was guinea pigs which gave Monika a breakdown. Max blamed me. He wasn’t really loyal over those guinea pigs and yet it was during that period I became really fond of Monika.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘If you really love somebody,’ said Helena in her steady old voice, ‘you see the people they love through their eyes. Monika would have bought him flowers if she were here and I not.’

  ‘Would she?’

  ‘Yes. He hated chrysanthemums. I can’t buy those. They made him sneeze.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Lilies? A bit banal. Why not violets? On the way to the night train he saw a flower barrow being trundled along the street, stopped the taxi and bought a basket of violets for Monika. Nearly made us miss the train.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Silly really,’ Helena chortled, ‘when you think they’d been grown in Cornwall. Come to think of it, they may have been grown by the old idiot who had upset Monika, made her try to kill herself.’

  Hamish was silent, visualizing the scene.

  ‘We were pretty crazy that night. We were in such a rush to catch the night train we left the door unlocked.’

  ‘Were you robbed?’

  ‘No. Sometime during the night Sophy turned up. She’d run away from school. We never found out why.’

  ‘Poor kid.’ Hamish’s experience of Sophy was of a later date. ‘She doesn’t strike me as the running away kind,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘How well do you know her?’ Helena enquired, glancing at Hamish’s profile, finding him handsome. I may be old, she thought, but I dearly love a good-looking man.

  ‘I wouldn’t say well, not well at all.’ He thought back to the year he was sixteen when, in the South of France, in a mutual friend’s house, Sophy had gathered him into her bed and relieved him tenderly of his virginity, setting him a standard for the future. He had thought himself in love with her. There had been no pain in their relations. ‘Was she unhappy?’ he asked Helena. ‘Was she in pain?’

  ‘Waste of time worrying about what that child felt. I never asked her. She’s just the same now, doesn’t have any feelings. People say she is enigmatic but I wonder whether there is anything there.’

  Disliking his passenger Hamish said: ‘Perhaps you never bothered to find out.’

  Helena was silent, rebuked by Calypso’s son. She liked men to approve of her. Max had given her this luxury; from now on she must live with less approval, less of everything. ‘It would be nice if I could find violets,’ she said. ‘He loved violets.’

  ‘Wrong time of year,’ said Hamish, hoping to hurt, thinking of Sophy. ‘No violets.’

  Sophy’s flight was unpremeditated. Suddenly she could bear no more. The insidious horror had begun towards the end of the previous term, started again on her return to school, grown over the weeks to unbearable proportions. If she had known what it was about she might have fought back, but she could do nothing about sniggers from her peers, nothing to protect herself from the sarcastic innuendoes of mistresses, nothing against the prick of snide remarks, nothing against the incomprehensible envy, disgust and veiled accusation which wrapped her in a frightening fog. Instead of doing history prep she took her pocket money, put on her outdoor shoes and overcoat and caught a bus to the station. Her money bought a single ticket to Liverpool Street and from there she walked, arriving outside Polly’s house in the early hours footsore, hungry, elated at having escaped her prison. She looked forward to telling Polly how she had crossed London through the blackout, alone.

  No one answered the bell. She stepped back in the street to look up at the windows. The ground floor was shuttered; she could see by the light of the moon that the upper floors had curtains drawn. She remembered Polly writing, ‘Sometimes I go to Bletchley.’ This must be one of those times. Her elation evaporated. She was too exhausted to walk on to Calypso in Westminster. Helena was only round the corner. She made her way to Helena’s house. She hoped Richard or Max would open the door, be there to protect her from Helena’s disapproval. Arriving, she stood hesitating to ring the bell. How could she explain to Helena a mystery with undertones of indecency and disgustingness? She pressed the bell. She was poised for flight should Helena appear, but as at Polly’s nobody answered, nobody came. She leant against the door in defeat. It swung open.

  Coming off duty from his fire station, looking forward to a few hours’ sleep, Tony Wood, passing Helena’s house, noticed the front door open and a light showing. He went to investigate.

  ‘Hullo? Hullo? Helena? You there? Your front door’s open, anything wrong?’ There was no answer. Puzzled, he put his tin hat and gas mask on the hall table, shut the door, investigated. Strong smell of cigarettes and liquor, signs of a party, cushions crushed, chairs awry, music sheets loosely stacked on a side table, no people. He went down to the kitchen, found Sophy standing petrified with terror, a glass of milk in one hand, a piece of meat in the other.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what the hell are you doing here? Where’s Helena?’

  Sophy leapt into his arms, clutching him round the neck, gasping incomprehensible sentences. ‘Couldn’t stand any more—nobody here—hungry—walked from Liverpool Street—they said—I can’t—it was horrible—I’ll never go back—please, Tony—please help—I won’t—I can’t—I had to run away.’ Her thin arms clutching him in a vice reminded him of a terrified cat up a tree.

  ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, calm down, let a chap breathe.’ He tried to prise her from his neck but she clung tighter, her face pressed into his neck, her hair stuffed up his nose. He held her taut body, patting her back, stroking her. ‘Calm down, try and tell me what it’s about.’ He managed to free his face from her hair. ‘There, now, let’s find somewhere to sit.’ He led her to the drawing room, sat her on the sofa, put his arm round her. ‘Try and tell me what happened, poor child, tell now—’ But she’s not a child, he thought, she’s a girl and a bloody attractive one. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘been in trouble with some man, been
writing notes to a boy? My sister had that trouble at her school. Is that it?’

  ‘No!’ Sophy screamed, pulling away from him. ‘No. They said—they thought—they—they—it wasn’t men, they said—they said I was—I was in love with Miss Stevens.’

  ‘A woman? One of the mistresses?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Silly cows.’ Light glimmered in Tony’s perplexed brain. A schoolgirl pash.

  ‘How could I be in love with a woman? She looked up at him, her eyes enormous in her white face, her expression one of profound disgust.

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘A woman in love with a woman? I can’t believe it.’ She looked incredulous.

  ‘Perhaps she fancied you?’ Tony suggested.

  ‘Oh God.’ Sophy shuddered. ‘Revolting.’

  ‘Men love men,’ Tony found himself saying.

  ‘That’s different.’ Sophy pulled away from him. ‘That’s all right, I know that happens, but women, ugh.’

  Tony laughed, pulling her towards him. ‘Try and forget it, it’s over now.’

  ‘Not if they send me back.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they will.’ But Tony thought: They probably will. Helena wants her out from under her feet.

  ‘Oh God,’ Sophy began to cry. ‘Oh God, if they knew what it’s been like.’

  Tony kept quiet, holding her against him, letting her cry, handing her his handkerchief to mop the tears which spilled the fear of the indefinable from her system. He guessed she would tell him no more, that probably she couldn’t.

  ‘It’s not against the law,’ he said, ‘what women do. Chaps, that’s different. Found out and you go to prison.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve often wondered,’ said Tony, who frequently found his own sex attractive. ‘The laws of sex are rather obfusc.’

  ‘I wish I knew about sex. Nobody tells one anything and what the girls at school say is patently untrue.’

  ‘I long to know.’

  ‘I shan’t tell you, you’d laugh. Oh God,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’m so tired.’

  ‘Bed then.’ He took her hand and led her upstairs. ‘You’d better get into Helena’s bed. She’s vanished somewhere, and Max too.’

  ‘Don’t leave me.’ Panic sounded again.

  ‘OK, but go and wash and get undressed.’ He yawned, fatigue catching up with him from long hours on duty. Sophy took off her school jersey and skirt and laid them on a chair. He watched her as she stood with her back to him, thin legs in black lisle stockings protruding from grey school bloomers. He counted the knobs on her spine before she turned round, breasts showing small under her wool vest.

  ‘D’you think I could borrow one of Aunt Helena’s nighties?’

  ‘Sure.’ He yawned again.

  She searched in a chest of drawers. ‘Gosh!’ she exclaimed. ‘What undies, silk, look!’ She held up a pair of pink camiknickers. ‘Wow, what a change falling in love with Max has made. She used to wear liberty bodices and, oh, look at this.’ She held up a brassiere.

  ‘Buck up, find a nightdress.’

  ‘D’you think I could borrow this?’ Sophy whispered as though in church as she held up a white satin nightdress trimmed with lace. ‘It’s awfully bridal.’ She began to giggle. ‘Aunt Helena, of all people. She’s so old.’

  ‘Hurry up, Sophy, I’m whacked.’

  ‘All right.’ She disappeared into the bathroom carrying the nightdress. Tony scrubbed his hand over his jaw feeling the bristles. From the bathroom he heard small exclamations, the sound of taps being turned on and off, the clatter of glass on the glass shelf. ‘Hurry up,’ he called, ‘I’m half dead.’

  Sophy came out of the bathroom on a choking wave of scent, her black hair brushed, wearing the white nightdress. She held it up on one side like a ball dress. He stared at her, taking in long arms and legs, black eyes, black hair, the shadow of her small bush through the white silk, her hand outstretched.

  ‘What do you think this is?’ She reached out to him. ‘She’s got gallons of Chanel 5 in there and Elizabeth Arden make-up. What d’you think it can be?’ She handed him a Dutch cap. ‘What is it for?’

  ‘You’d better put it back where you found it.’

  ‘Oh, is it medical?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Something like a truss? For a bosom?’

  ‘Buck up and get into bed. Put that thing back first, though.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Now get into bed and go to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t leave me.’ She was afraid again.

  ‘I’ll be downstairs.’

  ‘Can’t you wait until I’m asleep? Mrs Floyer does. Kiss me goodnight like her.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Our Rector’s wife, the twins’ mother.’

  ‘I’m not the Rector’s wife,’ said Tony through gritted teeth.

  ‘She sits on the end of my bed.’

  Tony sat on a chair at a safe distance, feeling her school skirt and bloomers bunching under him.

  ‘Won’t you kiss me?’ She held out her arms.

  He bent over her and kissed her mouth. ‘You stink,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t mean to use so much.’ She lay back in the bed. ‘Why don’t you lie here, if you’re so tired?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake go to sleep,’ he yelled at her, exasperated.

  ‘Sorry.’ She closed her eyes and, as he watched, relaxed suddenly like a cat and slept. Presently he stood up and looked down at her full mouth, short thick lashes. He pressed his hand against his genitals, grunting with anger and need.

  Downstairs he stood by the telephone, the receiver on the table, dialling with one hand while he fingered his flies with the other. He got no answer from Polly and the telephone rang disregarded in Calypso’s house. ‘Bloody little sexual hazard,’ he cried out loud. ‘Under age, too,’ he muttered in anguish. ‘Miss Stevens, indeed. What about me?’ He lay face down on the sofa, blotting out the feel of Sophy’s mouth against a cushion while he wooed sleep.

  Thirty-two

  SARAH, HOPING TO FIND Helena’s daily help, rang the bell in Enderby Street. She was surprised when Tony Wood, dishevelled and sleepy, opened the door.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘You were not at the party last night.’ She sounded aggrieved.

  Tony explained himself, brushing his hair back with his fingers, straightening his loosened tie.

  ‘I am a friend of Helena’s. I met her through Polly and Calypso.’

  ‘My nieces.’ Sarah eyed him with chill.

  ‘Then you must be Sophy’s aunt. She’s upstairs.’

  ‘Sophy’s at school.’

  ‘She’s asleep in Helena’s bed, or was when I last looked. She ran away.’

  ‘Perhaps you can explain. Do you mind if I come in?’ Sarah crossed the threshold. Tony hastily buttoned the top of his trousers and reached for his coat.

  ‘Has there been a fire?’ Sarah sniffed the atmosphere in the drawing room, wondering what a fireman was doing in Helena’s house. ‘Where’s Helena’s daily?’

  ‘I don’t think she comes today. Would you like some coffee or something?’

  ‘I will make you some,’ said Sarah, taking charge. ‘Open the windows and get rid of this fug. While I make coffee you can explain.’

  Guiltily Tony obeyed, throwing wide the windows, letting in the chill air. He joined Sarah in the kitchen.

  ‘Why did she run away? Is the child in love with you or—’ He could see the phrase ‘something silly’ freeze on her respectable lips.

  ‘I wish—I mean, no. She came here because she couldn’t find Polly. She—’

  ‘I must have missed her. I got in late from Helena’s party. Perhaps you had better tell me what you know.’

  ‘Do you know where Helena is?’

  ‘By now she should be arriving at home in Cornwall.’

  As she made coffee Sarah gave Tony a bare account of Helena’s departure with Richard and Max, but not all
the reasons for it. In his turn Tony told of finding the lights showing, the door open and Sophy in the kitchen. He did not tell her why Sophy had run away.

  ‘Why did she run away?’

  ‘I think she’d better tell you herself, she was very upset last night. She doesn’t want to go back.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have run away if she wanted to stay,’ said Sarah crisply. Tony recovered his equilibrium. He had not, he told himself, done anything. Well, not much.

  ‘Helena will be put out,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ He took the cup she tendered.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. I have to go and see Calypso. I can take Sophy with me.’

  ‘I tried to phone her in the night; she didn’t answer. I tried Polly’s number first.’

  ‘Polly’s away. I sleep very deeply. I am staying in her house.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tony neutrally. ‘Oh.’ They sat on either side of the table. Tony drank coffee. Sarah watched him, wondering where he fitted into the scheme of things, whether he was trustworthy.

  ‘So you are a friend of my nieces?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sounded coldly inquisitorial. Next she would be enquiring whether he went to bed with them. He felt disinclined to tell her that whereas he and Polly had slept together they no longer did, that when he had last invited himself into Calypso’s bed she had refused him on the feeble pretext that she had not enjoyed herself the last time. As for Sophy, it was a case of thought more than deed. At some later date he hoped he would rectify the situation. He smiled at Sarah, putting on the charm.

  ‘You must be Oliver’s mother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How is Oliver?’ Blast his guts, he thought, remembering Oliver snitching Calypso from under his nose, so confident, so handsome.

  ‘Oliver? Did you say Oliver?’ Sophy came eagerly into the kitchen. ‘Aunt Sarah, how are you, how is Oliver?’ She hugged Sarah. ‘I am glad to see you,’ she said sincerely.

  ‘Go and put a dressing gown on, then I’ll make you some breakfast. You’ll catch cold in that thing.’

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Aunt H has got some terrific clothes. Where does she get the coupons?’