Authors: Monica Dickens
‘Why, Archie?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to go to Woodstock.’
‘Not if it’s to go and see that mare I promised I’d try and get you? I’ve at last persuaded Higgins to sell. She’s an absolute little topper, darling, you can’t fault her for breeding or performance. She’s just what I wanted for you: hunts like a demon and hacks like an angel.’
‘It’s sweet of you, darling, but couldn’t we go to-morrow? I – I’ve got a bit of a head actually.’
‘I knew you would if you sat in the sun. You’ll be all right in the car. We can’t go to-morrow, because it’s Sunday. What’s the matter? You don’t look very bucked. I thought you’d be thrilled.’
‘Oh, I am, but – wouldn’t it be better to go when I’m dressed so I can try her?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I can try her for you. We don’t want to go all the way home now for you to change. Come on. Look, if you really have got a head, I’ll go on my own. I daren’t leave it, because he may let someone else have her. I know that old devil.’
She might as well go with him if he were taking his car, because she could not drive any of the others in the garage. ‘I’ll
come,’ she said, ‘of course. Thanks awfully, darling. It’s sweet of you.’ Belatedly ashamed of her ingratitude, she gave him a quick kiss, and Mrs Drake, who had bidden her coolies pause while she listened to the interchange, spurred them on.
Alexander was furious. Although she had looked for him, penetrating as far as she dared among the roasting smells beyond the buttery screen, Joy had not seen him before dinner, but she knew, the minute she saw his hand come over her shoulder with a soup plate, that he was furious. The bus must have been full.
She tried to catch his eye, but he was being his most aloof, sailing about with his head in the air, carrying more plates than it was humanly possible for anyone not to drop. From what she could see of his face in the shadows beyond the candlelight, he might have been serving a repugnant swill instead of
Sole Véronique.
‘I beg your pardon,’ she had to keep saying to her neighbours.
She would smile and talk animatedly for a moment without the slightest idea what she was saying, and then look for Alexander again. He would not understand that it was not her fault; that she could not order a car herself. Hadn’t he said that about the gravy? They had probably given him a horrid room and he would think that was her fault, too.
It was a grand, over-indulging dinner party, but the more Joy drank, the sadder she got. She had thought Alexander would be such a comfort to her, but he had turned out to be only an extra worry. He was hating it. He would certainly go home tomorrow, so she would have to find him after dinner, to ask him what he thought about the war, if he would talk to her at all after this.
To crown everything, with the entry of the ice pudding, the quartet in the musicians’ gallery struck up the ‘Londonderry Air’, the one tune that Alexander hated above all others.
When the ladies had chased after Mrs Drake to the other end of the room, she beckoned Joy to her chair. ‘You don’t look very happy,’ she stated. ‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself, Joyce?’ She would call her that although she had been told that Joy was a Christian name, not a nickname.
‘Yes, of course.’ Joy could not yet bring herself to say Mother, although that effort would have to be made some time.
‘Well, then, look like it,’ said Mrs Drake. ‘This party is being given for you, you know, as we’ve not yet had an official celebration of Archie’s engagement.’
First Archie indulging her, and now his mother. Were they trying to make her feel bad, or what? ‘You might have told me,’ Joy said, emboldened by the arrival of Alexander with coffee and a face that grew more cheerful as he got farther away from the quartet. ‘I can’t take everything for granted like you do, and get along without talking.’
‘I know that. You talk too much.’ Mrs Drake spoke too low for the other guests to hear, but Alexander heard, and Joy’s heart lifted at the look he gave her. Would he, she wondered, put a small white pill into her coffee?
They were all sitting in the garden when they heard about it. Joy had read novels about the last war, where, on August the Fourth, the family were sitting on the lawn, and someone came up stern-lipped, and said: ‘It’s war,’ and the mother cried a little and the boys looked, as if for the last time, over the rolling hills they loved, and the father made some brave quip.
It happened just like that at Astwick, except for the last part. They were all sitting on the great biscuit of lawn round which the drive circled in front of the house, waiting to go to church. The General came out of the house, and Mrs Drake was just opening her mantrap mouth to tell him he had kept her waiting, when he got in first with: ‘It’s war. I’ve just heard Chamberlain on the wireless.’
‘Oh!’ Joy’s gasp was more audible because no one else gasped.
‘What are
you
oh-ing about?’ asked Mrs Drake. ‘We all knew it was coming, didn’t we? You’ve been fussing enough about it’
Joy wanted to cry. ‘Pull yourself together, Joyce,’ said Mrs Drake, ‘or I’ll send for cold water.’
They all took it so calmly that Joy could have screamed. Her instinct was to herd into a crowd, exclaiming, conjecturing, bewailing, reassuring each other with large talk, sharing the dread that was too much for one person to cope with alone. But no
one would herd. They remained sitting exactly where they were, tossing out casual comments as if the General had done no more than announce the winner of the Boat Race. If only Aunt Lily had been there, she at least might have fluttered a little, but Aunt Lily was laid low in her chintzy four-poster at the Dower House, having done herself too well last night. Eileen, who wanted to flutter, made some craven excuse about fetching another wrap and went indoors to do it.
True, Archie did come and squat before Joy on the grass, taking both her hands in his. ‘How will you like a soldier husband?’ he asked.
‘Oh, Archie, will you have to go?’
‘Will I have to
go?’
he echoed, loud enough for his mother to hear. ‘What are you talking about, darling? I’m in the Guards Reserve anyway. I shall get my commission at once.’ People began talking placidly about what they were going to do. This one was going into the Navy, this one would be a nurse, that one would give his cars. Mavis was going to do what she did in the last war, the General would come out of retirement, Freda would give her horses. She too thought in terms of the last war.
It was just as the M.P. had said. They were so rooted in security that they could not visualize Armageddon. They did not think of the ghastliness. Why Joy, who had never known war, felt its horror more than they. Or was it because she had never faced anything like this that she could not do it now, not without a few emotional heroics to help her through? If you could not be emotional at a time like this, when could you?
She heard the wireless booming unheeded in the great hall, and suddenly thought of the Portobello Road and what it must be like now. People would be clustering all down the street, wherever a wireless boomed from an open window or from a radio shop thrown open in spite of Sunday, just as they had for the King’s death and the Prince’s abdication and the Coronation, and now for Chamberlain announcing war. They would be milling round, shaking hands, crying, laughing, backing each other up, excited and exciting each other, friends and enemies welded in the shared emotion of crisis.
No one on the lawn at Astwick seemed to have come any closer because of the news which they had all heard. There was no one of her kind here, no one. Joy got up in a dither, and Mrs Drake’s terrible face looked round.
‘I’m going to church,’ she said. ‘Come along, Joyce; you can push me for a treat.’
‘No, no, I won’t!’ Joy cried, looked wildly round, and fled into the house.
The servants were all in their sitting-room listening to the wireless. She could hear it muffled through the baize with which their door was lined lest the crude noises of their relaxation should reach the other part of the house. When Joy flung open the door, they all looked round amazed, some of them chewing, and the butler stood up in silent reproval of her intrusion.
She hardly needed to look round to see that Alexander was not there. You could always sense him in a room, even behind your back. She ran away among the stone passages, in and out of larders, sculleries, cupboards, pantries, startling a girl scrubbing vegetables at a huge, archaic sink.
She could not find any bedrooms. He must be up on the tiny-windowed floor where the staff slept. She ran up the twisting back staircase and along a passage under a sloping ceiling, calling out for him, for she did not care who heard. She banged her way indiscriminately in and out of all the stuffy bedrooms and up a crooked stair to a long attic-room with six tumbled beds and six girls’ clothes overflowing from hooks and chairs on to the floor.
‘Alexander !’ Surely he would not go back to London without her? He must guess how she felt. Alexander always knew. The top floor of Astwick was like a rabbit warren; she could not find the backstairs again. Trying another way, by a ticking cistern, through a curtained door that sighed behind her as she passed, she came to an arched doorway set in the curving walls of what must be a tower-room. This was just the kind of place they
would
put Alexander, knowing that he was a person who saw ghosts. There was always a ghost in a tower-room; if not, Mrs Drake would order one.
Joy banged on the door. ‘Are you there, Alexander?’ and a voice, deadened by the thickness of the iron-bound door, said: ‘Yes.’
It was a round room with slotted windows that gave very little light. Alexander was lying neat as a corpse on a bed in the shadows. Oh, poor Alexander – they had given him something bad to eat, and no one had told her he was lying here ill needing her. She hurried close. He sat up with a jerk like a marionette, and it wasn’t Alexander at all, but an old, old something with a hooded head, that leered at her and put out a groping hand.
When at last she found Alexander looking for her in the other part of the house, she ran straight into his arms as if he were a father. It was no good him telling her that she had only seen an invalid great-aunt who was given that dim room because her eyes were weak. Joy knew that she had seen the ghost of Astwick Hall. She was still slightly hysterical when they reached London, where she had to be put to bed for several days with sedatives.
Autumn withered into winter, and Rodney did not think much of the war. He did try at first to join up, but those were the days when a man of his age could not get into the war without pulling more strings than was dignified. The first flush of his patriotism subsided. His old leg wound, always worse in cold weather, reminded him that he had done his bit in the last war. Everyone said that this one was going to involve the civilian as much as the soldier, so where was the dishonour in remaining a civilian?
He soon grew tired of being rushed underground every time a siren sounded. It spoiled all the pleasure of shopping. Although his wine merchant had offered him a place among the select company in the cellar should London ever become completely troglodyte, Rodney was seriously considering taking Ned’s children to Canada.
Ned, being younger, and having joined the Air Force Reserve last year when Rodney had put all thoughts of war behind him, was already in uniform. So was his wife Frances, in a bowler hat and a dark blue suit full of hips and bosom, for she, with equal forethought, had joined the Red Cross last year. The children were to go to her aunt in Ontario.
Rodney was in the gratifying position of being needed in two places at once. He could either take Ned’s place in the family office, or he could play nursemaid across the Atlantic. Ned, thinking of his office, advised the latter. Frances, thinking of her children, advised the former. Both offered him equal danger, for in London he might be bombed, and at sea mined or torpedoed, so it was just a question of which offered him the least discomfort.
Once in Canada, he might stay there and do propaganda for Britain; talks and so on, and cultural goodwill, and raising funds. He tried to make Joy go with him, and she refused. He tried to make Alexander go, and he declined courteously, and in the end Ned’s children also dug in their toes, so that settled that.
Alexander had tried to join up, but had been turned down on account of his age and legs. He did not tell Rodney this, and he only spoke about it once to Joy, and then shut up like a clam when she tried to sympathize with his disappointment. She had wanted to join up herself, but Rodney would not let her. He did not want her losing all the graces he had taught her on the barrack square, or ruining her lovely hands on tarry ropes. He did not approve of women in uniform, and what about her engagement to Archie?
What indeed? She seemed to have been forgiven by the Drakes for her behaviour on Sunday, September the Third, although Mrs Drake had declared that she was unstable and would have to be overhauled before she could marry her son. The wedding, however, was postponed, for Archie had been sent to Scotland. He wrote his usual friendly letters full of news about people she did not know, the sort of letters anyone might read. He telephoned her sometimes, but was never able to say much more than ‘Speak up, darling; I can’t hear a word you’re
saying.’ He tried to make Joy go up to Scotland for the weekend, but she made excuses. She did not want to have to see him yet and commit herself one way or another. She did not know yet what she was going to do about him.
Life at the flat pursued its normal course. The phoney winter war set in and Rodney was no longer shoved below every time he put his nose into Fortnum and Mason’s. The office staff managed to discourage him from taking his
locum fratris
duties too seriously and soon he was not going there much more often than before. He resumed his pottering orbit around the clubs and restaurants and sale-rooms, still had Lady shampooed once a week and himself twice a week, although the manicurist who knew his quicks callously deserted him for the Land. There were still plenty of people in London and plenty of food and drink, whatever the gloomers prophesied. He still gave his perfect little dinner-parties, where martial friends could relax after the rigours of the Air Ministry or the War Office. He was proud to think that he and Joy were keeping up morale by preserving the things for which England was fighting.