Louise

Winter, 1942

When she was alone, which was very nearly all the time these days, and when she was not completely inert—she would try to put the pieces of herself together into some recognizable shape so that she could sort of see what she was. At the acting school they had spent hours discussing characteristics of people—facets of their personality, aspects of their nature, quirks of behaviour or temperament. They had discussed characters in plays, of course, and over the weeks had condemned “bad” plays that had characters who were merely two-dimensional—cardboard cut-outs with no depth. Then, when she had talked about this with Stella and had trotted out all their theories, Stella had said: “Of course, that’s why Shakespeare and Chekhov are the only playwrights with genius. Their characters are more like eggs. However you approach their surface they are never flat, always tailing mysteriously off round a corner that isn’t even a corner, but at the same time you can always imagine the whole shape …”

But she, although she was not merely a character in a play, did not feel at all like an egg; more like a bit of crazy paving, or part of a jigsaw puzzle. She did not feel like anyone she could recognize; even the disparate pieces of paving or jigsaw seemed hardly to belong to her, were more like a series of bit parts that she had become accustomed to, and was therefore good at playing. Mrs. Michael Hadleigh was one of them. The fortunate young wife of a glamorous man who, according to Zee, had broken innumerable hearts. People wrote “Mrs. Michael Hadleigh” on envelopes; it had been the caption to the photograph taken by Harlip that had appeared shortly after her marriage in Country Life. Receptionists in hotels called her that. This person had gone through a fashionable wedding with photographs of it in most of the newspapers. “I look like a new potato in white lace!” she had wailed, knowing it would make Michael’s family laugh. This person wore the gold watch that the Judge had given her as a wedding present and a turquoise and diamond ring that Zee had given her for her engagement. She had new luggage stamped L.H. in gold on the white hide. At Claridge’s, she had been given a room in which to change from the white lace to the suit Hermione had made her for going away—a pretty creamy tweed with a wide-spaced thin scarlet check on it, a straight short skirt and a short-sleeved jacket with light scarlet buttons. She had emerged from the lift to walk through the wide entrance to the hotel that was thronged with family and people she had never seen before in her life, to the Daimler where Crawley—the Judge’s chauffeur—was waiting to drive them away. Her topcoat had been forgotten, and Zee sent Malcolm Sargent for it. “Kind Malcolm will get it,” she had said, and he did. Mrs. Michael Hadleigh was the person who was eyed appreciatively by admirals, some of whom had sent huge packing cases full of what had clearly been valuable but was now shattered glass. These had been difficult to thank for, as in the worst instances, the fragments made it impossible to know what the object had originally been. “Thank you so much for sending us all that lovely glass,” she had written to one of them. A large number of people—many of them distinguished—were delighted to meet Mrs. Michael Hadleigh, and congratulated Michael with varying degrees of elegance and gallantry on his charming young wife. Sometimes she felt a little like a conjuring trick, the white rabbit he had so cleverly produced from nowhere. Mrs. Michael Hadleigh only seemed to come to life when there were other people present.

Then there was the child bride. Her youth was endlessly harped upon, by senior naval officers, by friends of Michael, many of whom were even older than he. This also applied at Hatton, where she discovered they were to spend half of their honeymoon. “A week on our own, and then we’ll stay with Mummy,” Michael had said. She was the child: arrangements were announced to her with the ostensibly indulgent, slightly teasing admonition that she would like whatever it was, wouldn’t she? It would have been churlish to disagree, and she never did. Part of being the child bride was everybody approving of her—a good child bride … So—they had spent a week in a cottage lent to them by a godmother of Michael’s who lived in a large house in Norfolk. The cottage was pretty, with a reeded roof and a large open fireplace in the sitting room where they also ate. Lady Moy, the godmother, had arranged for somebody to cook and clean for them, and when they arrived, that first evening, it was to the enticing scents of a log fire and roasting chicken. Crawley brought in their suitcases, touched his cap and left, and when she had served them their chicken and shown them the damson tart lying on the trolley, the cook, who said her name was Mary, also left and they were alone. She remembered that she had thought, “This is the very beginning of my married life—the happily ever after bit,” and wondered what that would be like. And Michael had been full of the most charming admiration, telling her again and again how lovely she had looked as a bride and how lovely people had told him she was. “And just as lovely now,” he had said, picking up her hand and kissing it. Later, when he had poured two glasses from the bottle of hock Lady Moy had left for them, he had said: “Let’s drink to us, Louise and Michael.” And she had repeated the toast, and sipped the wine and then they had had dinner and talked about the wedding until he had asked her whether she would like to go to bed.

Afterwards, when she slipped out of bed to put on one of the nightdresses her father had given her when she was fourteen that were still her best, she thought how lucky that this hadn’t been the first time, because at least now she knew what happened and was more or less used to it. She had, in fact, been to bed with Michael four times before: the first time had been awful because it had hurt so much and she’d felt she couldn’t tell him as he seemed so enthusiastic. The other times had been better in that it hadn’t hurt, and the beginning of one time had even begun to be exciting but then he had started to put his tongue in her mouth and after that she had a sort of black-out and felt nothing. He didn’t seem to notice, though, which at the time had seemed a good thing, but, and it happened gradually, during that first week of the honeymoon, she began to feel that it was odd that although he kept saying how much he loved her, and kept telling her how he was feeling and what was happening to him throughout his lovemaking, he didn’t seem to notice much about her. In the end she wondered whether the sharp sweet thrill—as though something was starting to open inside her—had actually occurred.

That first night, however, she simply felt relieved that it didn’t hurt and he had seemed to enjoy it; she also felt suddenly dog tired, and fell asleep moments after she got back into bed.

In the morning she woke to find him making love to her again and then there was all the novelty of having a bath together and getting dressed and a delicious breakfast with eggs and honey, and after it they went for a long walk in the park where there was a lake with swans and other waterfowl and then woods. It was a perfect September morning, mellow, balmy and still. They walked hand in hand, saw a heron, a fox and a large owl, and Michael did not talk about the war at all. During the week, they went and had dinner at the big house where Lady Moy and a companion existed in a state of elaborate decay. Most of the house was shut up and the rest of it seemed implacably cold; it was the sort of house, she thought, that made you want to go out of doors to get warm. Lady Moy gave Michael a beautiful pair of Purdey guns that had belonged to her husband and two watercolours by Brabazon. “I’ll have them sent over to you,” she said; “And you,” she later said to Louise, “I could hardly choose a present for someone I had not seen. But now I’ve met you—and by the way, Mikey, I think you’ve done very well for yourself—I know what to do.” She rummaged about in a large embroidered bag and produced a small watch of blue enamel edged with pearls that hung from an enamelled bow with a brooch pin behind it. “It was given me by my godmother when I married,” she said. “It does not keep very good time, but it is a pretty thing.”

During dinner Lady Moy asked Michael about his ship and he told her a great deal about it. She tried to be, and then to look, interested but the number of guns with which a new MTB was going to be equipped was not a subject to which she could contribute.

It was not until they were about to leave, and Lady Moy asked them about their plans, that she learned that they were to spend the second week of Michael’s leave at Hatton.

“Mummy is so longing to see us. And we thought it would be nice for her if we went.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

She found Lady Moy’s eyes upon her but she could not interpret their expression. “I must kiss you too,” she said after she had embraced Michael.

They walked back down the drive to their cottage in the dark.

“You never told me we were going to Hatton!”

“Didn’t I? I must have. I’m almost sure I did. You don’t mind, anyway, do you?”

“No.” She was not at all sure.

“You see, darling Mummy is not very well, and she worried so frightfully about me that it seemed—she loves you very much, you know. She told me that she couldn’t imagine a better mother for her grandson.”

She was aghast.

“We’re not actually having one, are we?”

He laughed, and squeezed her arm. “Darling, you’ll be the first to know that. There’s always a hope.”

“But—”

“You told me you wanted six. We have to start somewhere.”

She opened her mouth to say that she didn’t want them immediately—now—and shut it again. His voice had sounded teasing—he wasn’t serious.

But the subject was resumed at Hatton. She got the curse when they had been there four days, and although Zee didn’t talk to her directly, this resulted in various messages. She had fairly bad stomach cramps, and Michael was very kind to her, tucking her up in bed with a hot-water bottle after lunch.

“You are sweet to me,” she said, after he had bent down to kiss her.

“You are my little darling wife. By the way, Zee told me one useful tip. When you’re OK again, after we’ve made love, it helps if you prop your legs up with a pillow. It gives the sperm a better chance to meet an egg.”

She swallowed: the thought that he had been discussing all this with his mother suddenly nauseated her.

“Michael—I’m not at all sure that I want to have a baby so quickly. I mean, I do want them in the end, but I want to get a bit more used to being married first.”

“Of course you do,” he said heartily. “But that’ll happen in no time, believe me. And if, by any chance, the other thing does happen, nature will take over, and you’ll feel fine about it. Now you have a lovely snooze, and I’ll wake you up in time for tea.”

But she didn’t sleep at all. She lay and worried about why they wanted her to have a baby so badly, and felt guilty that she didn’t feel as they did.

The rest of the week was passed with music and Michael drawing her and beginning an oil painting, and jokes and games with neighbours and a dance and the Judge reading aloud to them, and they all treated her with teasing, affectionate indulgence and she was the favoured, petted child bride. Conversation at meals was exhilarating: the family jokes involved being better read and having a far larger vocabulary than she possessed. She had asked the Judge, whom she had learned to call Pete, if he would make her a reading list.

“He was delighted,” Michael said when they were dressing for dinner that evening. “You do fit in so well with my family, my darling.”

“How did you know I had asked him?”

“Mummy told me. She was very touched that you asked him.”

Whenever people came to lunch or dinner, they would ask Michael about his ship, and he always told them, usually at great length. She noticed that however often he talked about the superior merits of Oelikon guns to the Bofers or Rolls, Zee listened with rapt interest as though it was the first time she had heard him on the subject. Privately, she found these conversations very boring, more boring even than when they talked about the war more generally: the battle for Stalingrad, which was on the news every night, and the bombing raids on Germany.

During all this time, which was actually very short, only two weeks, excitement, like a heat haze, had obscured most of any other feeling: she had married her wonderful, glamorous Michael, who, although he was so much older and famous and brave, had chosen her. It was exciting, if you have never thought much of your appearance or brains, if you felt, as she felt then, that you had not been properly educated, to be told from morning till night how beautiful, clever and talented you were. It was a fairytale, and she was the fortunate princess who at nineteen had already embarked upon her “ever after.”

They left Hatton at the end of the week, and went by train to London. Michael had to go to the Admiralty and they arranged to meet at Waterloo station.

“What will you do with yourself, darling?”

She hadn’t thought. “I’ll be all right. I might try to get hold of Stella, but they don’t like you ringing students at Pitman’s. If I can’t get her, I’ll go to the National Gallery.”

“Have you got any money?”

“Oh! No—no, I’m afraid I haven’t.”

He thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a wad of notes. “There.”

“I won’t need all that!”

“You never know. You might. I’ll deal with the luggage.”

They kissed. It was enjoyable (she did not then know how enjoyable) to part knowing that they would meet again so soon.

She tried to ring Stella from a telephone box but could not get her, so she went to the National Gallery where Myra Hess and Isolde Menges were playing two pianos. In the interval, when she was buying a sandwich, she saw Sid talking to a very old man with thick white hair and a walking stick. She was just about to walk over and make herself known, when she saw a youngish woman, or girl, in fact somebody probably no older than she, leaning against the wall at the end of the sandwich table and staring at Sid with a look of such intense, moony devotion that she wanted almost to laugh. What Aunt Jessica used to call a pash, I suppose, she thought. At that moment, Sid saw her, smiled and beckoned.

She was introduced as Louise Hadleigh to the man with white hair and the man said, yes, he recognized her. “You married my old friend Zinnia Storey’s son a few weeks ago. How is Zee? Now she is in the country so much, I hardly ever see her.”

Fumbling about to shake hands, he dropped his stick. Instantly, the girl leaning against the wall had leapt forward, bent down and picked it up.

“How kind!”

The girl blushed—her forehead looked damp, Louise noticed—as Sid said, “Well fielded, Thelma,” and introduced her to them as one of her pupils. Then the interval was over, and everyone began leaving the basement where the sandwiches were served for the resumption of the concert.

“Please give my love to Zee,” the man said and she smiled and said yes, she would. But as she would not be seeing Zee for she did not know how long and had not the faintest idea who he was there was no chance of that, she thought.

When the concert was over, after the lovely and expected comforting encore of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” she wondered what to do. There were no pictures to see at the gallery: they had all been removed to a place or places of safety. She walked out into Trafalgar Square. There was sun, but it was without heat, and the sky was an unclouded cool blue decorated by the glinting barrage balloons that floated serenely—like gigantic toys, she thought. It was two hours until the train, and she wondered what to do. Michael had given her a wad of pounds, there must be at least ten of them; she felt rich, and free—and then, with no warning at all, extremely frightened. “What am I to do with myself?” “Why am I here?” “What am I for?” A host of small, darting, preposterous queries that seemed to come at her from nowhere and were only dwarfed by their quantity. To answer any of them—even to consider them—spelled complete danger: she would not attempt any reply; she must do something, think of something else. I’ll go to a bookshop, and buy some books, she thought and, furnished with this sensible and practical purpose, she caught the bus to Piccadilly that stopped outside Hatchard’s.

By the time she had bought three books and hailed a cab to take her to Waterloo her spirits had risen. She was not going tamely home to Sussex to be criticized by her mother and asked to do boring things by the rest of the family. She was catching a train with her husband and then a boat to the Isle of Wight where they were to stay in an hotel—something she had never done in her life before. She was Mrs. Michael Hadleigh again, and not whoever it was who had been struck by some idiotic panic on the steps of the National Gallery. It would have been nice to get hold of Stella, but she would write to her.

But, she quickly discovered, life in that hotel, and subsequently in other hotels, in Weymouth and Lewes, was not at all as she had imagined. Michael went off at eight in the morning and she was left for the day, day after day, with nothing whatever to do. The Gloster Hotel had a particular disadvantage, made worse because, to begin with, it had seemed like an incredible luxury. There was always lobster for lunch and for dinner. Occasionally there was something else, usually not awfully nice, but after a week or so, she took to having whatever it was. She got bored with lobster; and started to hate it. She read books, and went for walks in the town, but the place was stiff with troops, and the whistling and inaudible, but undoubtedly rude remarks made her dread going out. Then one day she went into a greengrocer to buy some apples and, without the slightest warning, seemed to lose her balance, everything went black, and she came to on the ground surrounded by a smell of earthy hessian. Someone was bending over her and telling her she would be all right, and asking her where she lived, and she simply couldn’t think. Her head was propped against a sack of potatoes and she’d laddered her stocking. They gave her some water, and she felt better. “The Gloster Hotel,” she said. “I can easily walk there.” But a kind woman took her back there, got the key of her room for her and helped her upstairs. “I should have a little lie-down if I were you,” she said when Louise thanked her. After she had gone, she did lie on their bed, on top of the slippery quilt. It was half past eleven by her gold watch that the Judge had given her. Michael would not be back until six in the evening. She felt shocked and suddenly violently homesick. She began to cry and when she had finished and blown her nose on one of Michael’s large white handkerchiefs she lay on the bed again. There did not seem to be any point in getting up.

After that she would lie in bed in the mornings, watching Michael shave and dress with what seemed to her a heartless speed and pray that something would happen that would stop him going. The ship he commanded was a new MTB still on the slips on the Medina river and he was passionately excited by everything to do with her. Every evening he came home full of news about its progress (she had learned to call it “she” but privately she thought of the ship as “it”). They had dinner and then he drew her and then they went to bed and he made love to her and it was always exactly the same and she tried not to disenjoy it. She did not tell him how lonely and aimless—well, bored really, she felt, because she was ashamed of these feelings. There were no other naval wives staying in the hotel, there were no other women there: people came and went; they seemed to be the only long stayers in the place. When she told him about fainting in the greengrocer’s shop, he smiled and said, “Oh, darling! Do you think it might be—”

“What?” She knew what he meant, but she was so appalled at the idea that she wanted to gain time.

“Darling! A baby! What we’ve been trying to have!”

“I don’t know. It might be, I suppose. People are alleged to faint at such times. And feel sick in the mornings. But I haven’t felt in the least sick.”

Shortly after that, she did meet a naval wife, a lady much older than herself whose husband was commander of a destroyer and she suggested that Louise come and help her at the Mission to Seaman. “We’re always short of willing hands,” she said; “there’s bound to be something for you to do, my dear.”

So from nine until twelve each morning she either helped in the canteen, or made up endless bunks. This last entailed stripping the sheets off the old ones—generally extraordinarily grey and concealing beer bottles, odd socks and other detritus. This coincided with her starting to feel sick in the mornings. When Marjorie Anstruther discovered her retching over a sink, she sent her home to lie down, saying she quite understood, and that Louise had been a little Trojan to stick it out. So that was the end of that. She was pregnant, and she had gradually come to think that perhaps this was as it should be: if one got married and had nothing else to do, one was meant to have babies. Although the prospect still secretly terrified her, she managed to seem cheerful about it, and very soon a letter arrived from Zee, saying how delighted she was with the news (which Michael had telephoned to her).

She spent her mornings feeling sick and sometimes being it and mostly otherwise in bed, but at noon, as regular as clockwork, a single German reconnaissance plane came over the island and thence to Portsmouth, and all the ships lying in what she had learned to call Cowes Roads let off every anti-aircraft gun at their disposal. They never hit the plane, but the noise was very great, and Michael had told her always to be on the ground floor on these occasions. So she would put on her overcoat and creep down—braving the nauseous fumes of boiling lobsters—to the hall, where pieces of glass dripped disconsolately from the roof down onto the tiled floor, while she read very old numbers of the Illustrated London News. After about fifteen minutes, the plane sheered off. Then she would go back to her room and sometimes she would collect her things and go along the passage for a bath. She had come to dread the lonely lunches in the hotel dining room and usually went out to the town to a cake shop that sold buns and very solid Cornish pasties that were mostly potato and onion. She had run out of books to read quite quickly, but there was a bookshop, and she spent hours there choosing, but they didn’t seem to mind. She read novels by Ethyl Mannin, G. B. Stern, Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson, and then one day she saw a second-hand copy of Mansfield Park. It was like meeting an old friend unexpectedly and she could not resist buying it. After that, she bought all the others, in spite of the fact that she had a whole set at home in Sussex. They engrossed and comforted her more than anything else and she read them all twice. When she wrote to Stella, it was largely about what she was reading. “By the way, I’m pregnant!” she put at the end of one letter. The exclamation mark was meant to make it sound exciting. She thought about telling Stella what she felt about this, and what life was being like for her, but found she could not bear to do it. It meant thinking about things seriously, and she felt too confused and altogether unsure of everything to try. Also, she was afraid it might clear things up in a way that she might find unendurable. As long as she played her part (and she was in love with Michael—look at how she hated him going every morning and practically counted the hours until his return), it would be a kind of betrayal to say that she was finding life difficult—or boring. “Intelligent people are never bored,” Zee had said at Hatton during her honeymoon. “Do you agree with that, Pete?” And the Judge had replied that it might imply a certain dimness. She must never be dim.

By the middle of November, Michael’s ship was ready, and Zee and the Judge came to Cowes for a night, as Zee was to launch her. Rooms were booked for them at the hotel, and Michael got off work early to meet the ferry at Ryde.

Dinner was at the Royal Yacht Squadron—very grand—because Zee knew an admiral who was a member and who invited them all.

“Dear little Louise! You are looking splendid. Pete has brought your reading list.”

At dinner there was the dreaded lobster and Michael talked with unflagging enthusiasm about his ship. “I can’t wait to see her!” Zee exclaimed and Louise saw Michael basking in her enthusiasm. It transpired that the Admiral, whom they called Bobbie, had not been going to be present at the launch, but by the end of the evening Zee had got him to say he would come.

But the next morning, Louise, apart from a particularly virulent bout of sickness, had a sore throat and a temperature.

“Poor darling! Better stay in bed, though. Can’t have you getting ill. I’ll get them to send you up some breakfast.” After a long time, tea in a scalding metal pot, two pieces of leathery toast and a pat of bright yellow margarine arrived. The tea tasted of metal and she could not face the toast at all. It was all too much. Just when something was actually happening she couldn’t go, was doomed to yet another dreary lonely day, only worse than usual, as she felt so awful. She got out of bed to go to the lavatory—an icy interlude; there was no heat in the bedroom. She put on a vest and some socks and went back to bed with some aspirin which sent her to sleep.

Michael came back in the evening to say that he was sleeping on board as the ship was starting her trials early the next morning. Zee and the Judge had left, but Mummy had been marvellous at the launching, and they had had a jolly lunch.

“Poor darling, you still look rather mouldy. Mrs. Watson says she sent somebody upstairs to see if you wanted any lunch, but you were asleep. Shall I get them to get you something for supper?”

“Couldn’t you have it with me?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m expected back on board. The flotilla commander is dining with us.”

“When will you be back, then?”

“Tomorrow evening, I expect. But, I told you, darling, while the trials are on life will be hectic. I shan’t be able to sleep ashore all the time. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky, you know.”

“Have we?”

He had been collecting his shaving gear and cramming it into a brand new black leather briefcase.

“Darling, of course we have. My Number One hasn’t seen his fiancée since Christmas. And our coxswain hasn’t even set eyes on his latest son who is nearly six months old. I don’t say we shouldn’t be lucky, I want you to be the luckiest girl in the world, but it doesn’t do any harm to recognize one’s blessings. Most officers I know couldn’t afford to have their wives in an hotel. Do you know where my pyjamas are?”

“Afraid I don’t.” She was so miserable at the thought of a night and a whole day entirely alone that she sounded sulky.

“They must be somewhere! Honestly, darling, try to think.”

“Well, usually the chambermaid puts them under the pillow when she makes the bed. But she didn’t come in this morning.”

“Oh, well, I’ll take some new ones.”

But when he got some out, they proved to be almost without buttons.

“Oh, damn! Darling, you might have looked them over when they came back from the laundry. After all, it isn’t as though you have an awful lot to do.”

“I’ll sew them on now, if you like.”

“They aren’t there to sew on. You’ll have to get some.”

He took her Royal Yacht Squadron burgee brooch, presented by the Admiral the previous night to celebrate Michael’s being made an honorary member. “I should think I’m the only naval officer who does up his pyjamas with one of these. I must fly now.” He bent to kiss her forehead. “Cheer up: don’t get too gloomy.” At the door, he blew her another kiss. “You look very cosy,” he said.

After he had gone, and she was sure that he wouldn’t be coming back, she had wept.

When she was better he had suggested that she go to her home for a bit while he finished the trials. “Then, when I know where we’ll be sent, you can join me again.”

She did not demur. Homesickness—not quite, but nearly—as bad as she had had as a child had been assailing her, and she would lie in bed after he left in the mornings, longing for the familiar, shabby house that was always so full, the sounds of so many lives going on; the gasping squeak of the carpet cleaner, the wheezing grind of the nursery gramophone alternating “The Grasshoppers’ Dance” with “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”; the steady rumble of the Brig dictating, the insect whirr of the Duchy’s sewing machine, the smells of coffee and ironing and reluctant log fires and damp dog and beeswax … She went through each room in the house furnishing them with the appropriate inmates. Everything that had either bored or irritated her about them before now seemed only to make them more charming, dearer and more necessary. Aunt Dolly’s passion for mothballs, the Duchy’s belief that hot paraffin wax was essential for burns, Polly and Clary’s determination not to be impressed by her being so much more grown-up than they, Lydia’s uncanny impersonations of anyone she chose to emulate; Miss Milliment looking exactly the same, but none the less mysteriously older, her voice gentler, her chins even softer, her clothes encrusted with random pieces of ancient foods, but her small grey eyes, magnified at certain angles by her narrow, steel-rimmed spectacles, still so unexpectedly penetrating. And then, a complete contrast, Aunt Zoë who contrived to look glamorous whatever she wore, whose years now in the country had not at all altered the impression she gave of being fashionable and pretty. And darling Aunt Rach whose uttermost word of approval was “sensible”—“such a sensible hat,” “a really sensible mother”: “I am going to give you a really sensible wedding present,” she had said. “Three pairs of double linen sheets.” These were all at home with the many other presents, waiting until she and Michael had a home of their own, although God knew when that would be. Perhaps it was entirely the war that was making life seem so strange. Going away to the cooking school and then to the rep had seemed like logical excursions from home—all part of growing up and preparing for her great career on the stage. But being married had changed everything—in many ways that she had not envisaged. Leaving home was a much more final business when one married. As for her career, not only was there no sign of the war ever coming to an end, when she supposed she might resume it, but there was the problem of having children as well. Her mother had stopped dancing when she married: had never danced again. For the first time, she wondered what that had been like for her, whether her mother had minded or had chosen just to be married. But somehow, in her nostalgic dreaming about Home Place and her family, she could not, or did not want to, include her parents: there was something—and she did not want to find out what—that was vaguely … uncomfortable. All she knew was that in the weeks before the wedding, she had come to dislike being alone with her mother nearly as much as she disliked being alone with her father—although not exactly, if at all, for the same reasons. This had been confusing, because she could see that her mother was trying very hard to do everything to make the wedding a success. She had been endlessly patient about the fittings for the dress and her few other clothes, had given her clothes coupons, had even asked her whether she wanted her friend Stella to be a bridesmaid. Stella hadn’t wanted to—had been gently adamant—and it had been a question of choosing which of the girls; in the end it had been Lydia and Polly and Clary. Zoë and her mother and the Duchy had made their dresses of white curtain net that her mother had dyed in tea so that it was a warm cream colour. Pure silk ribbon was still available in London shops. Aunt Zoë had chosen the colours, pink, orange and dark red, and she had sewn the ribbons together in strips to make sashes. The dresses had been plain, high-waisted, with low round necks and a deep flounce round the bottom—“Like little Gainsboroughs,” the Judge had said when he saw them outside the church. There had been an awful lot of work in the short time between the engagement and the marriage and most of it had fallen upon her mother. But besides all her organizing, the letter-writing, the arrangements and the discussions, she had sensed something about her mother that she simply could not bear: it had made her cold, sulky, irritable; she had snapped when asked perfectly ordinary questions and then felt ashamed but somehow unable to apologize. In the end she discovered what it was: the night before the wedding her mother asked her if she “knew about things.” She had instantly said, yes, she did. Her mother had smiled uneasily and said, well, she had supposed that Louise would have learned all about that sort of thing at that awful acting place, adding that she would not have liked her to enter upon marriage “unprepared.” Each allusion made the whole thing seem nauseating and the allusions, she had realized, were only the tip of the iceberg. In a fever of revulsion and anger it had seemed to her then that her mother had been thinking of nothing else all these weeks, and not only thinking but wondering, ruminating, imagining her in bed with Michael, employing the most disgusting curiosity about something which had absolutely nothing to do with her! (As though one married people simply to go to bed with them!) After that bit of the evening, her mother could say nothing that did not have some sickening double meaning. Yes, she should go to bed early, she needed a good night’s sleep as tomorrow was going to be such a day. “You must be fresh for it.” Well, she had thought, when she had finally escaped to her room in Uncle Hugh’s house for the night, in twenty-four hours I shall be miles away from her. It will never have to be like this again.

She had managed not to be alone with her father at all until the day of the wedding when he turned up just as she had finished dressing with a half-bottle of champagne. “I thought we might each have a glass,” he had said. “Dutch courage, don’t you know.” He looked very dashing in his morning dress with the pale grey silk tie and white rose in his buttonhole. By now she was feeling nervous, and the champagne seemed a good idea.

He eased the cork out of the bottle and caught the fizz in one of the glasses. He had put them on the dressing table and now she saw him looking at her reflection in the mirror. When he saw that she saw, he looked away and filled up both the glasses.

“Here you are, darling,” he said. “You can’t possibly know how much happiness I wish you.”

There was a small silence while he handed her her glass. Then he said: “You look—most awfully pretty.” He sounded humble—almost shy.

“Oh, Dad!” she said, and tried to smile, but her eyes pricked. Nothing more could dare to be said.

“To my eldest unmarried daughter,” he said as he raised his glass. They both smiled at each other: the past lay between them like a knife.

It was when she got back to Sussex that these scenes recurred—when she was alone, when she was not playing one of her parts.

“Do you feel different being married?” Clary had asked the first day.

“No, not especially,” she had answered—the lofty, older cousin.

“Why not?”

The simplicity of the question confounded her.

“Why should I?”

“Well—I mean, you’re not a virgin any more to start with. I don’t suppose you’d tell me what that’s like, would you?”

“No.”

“I thought not. I do see how writers get circumscribed by having to rely on direct experience nearly all the time. Or reading about things, which is not at all the same as someone telling you.”

“You’re far too inquisitive, in a morbid way. A bit disgusting to boot,” she added.

But Clary, having suffered countless accusations about her curiosity, had become adept at defending it.

“It isn’t like that at all. It’s simply that if you are really interested in people and how they behave you get every sort of thing to be curious about. For instance—” But Louise had seen Zoë on her bicycle in the drive and had gone downstairs to meet her.

“Honestly! I’m sick of people accusing me and then not listening to anything I say,” Clary grumbled later to Polly as they were waiting in the day nursery for Ellen’s kettle to boil so that they could fill their hot water bottles. “It isn’t just a question of whether she’s a virgin or not, I’m just as curious about prisoners, and nuns and royalty and childbirth and murder and things like that—anything that either hasn’t happened to me or couldn’t ever happen.”

“Royalty’s the only one of them,” Polly pointed out: she was used to these discussions.

“No—what about your favourite song? ‘I am so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun.’”

“I don’t know how fond of pleasure I am,” Polly said sadly. “We really don’t get enough of it to find out.”

She had not wanted to announce her pregnancy at home but she felt so sick the first morning that she couldn’t get up for breakfast. Lydia was sent up to see why she hadn’t come down.

“It’s nothing. I must have eaten something.”

“Oh, poor you! It’s probably that horrible meat loaf we had last night for supper. Do you know what Neville thinks? He thinks Mrs. Cripps puts mice and hedgehogs in it. He thinks she might be a witch because of her black hair and her face is practically luminous in the dark. Even toads, he thought she might put—squashed, you know—he thinks that might be the jellyish bit you get on the outside—toads’ ooze—”

“Oh, shut up, Lydia.”

“Sorry. I was only trying to think what it could be. Shall I bring you up some tea?”

“Thanks, that would be lovely.”

But it was her mother who arrived with tea and toast, and she seemed to know at once without Louise saying a thing.

“Oh, darling! How exciting! Does Michael know?”

“Yes.”

“He must be pleased.”

“He is—very.”

“Have you been to a doctor?”

“No.”

“Well, Dr. Carr is awfully good. Eat the toast, even if you don’t put anything on it. Toast and water biscuits are the thing for morning sickness. How long …?”

About five weeks, she thought. It seemed like for ever.

In the end she stayed nearly a month at home, by which time Dr. Carr had confirmed her pregnancy. Everybody assumed that she was delighted at the prospect. The only person she came near confiding in was Zoë. She was helping to put Juliet to bed. “You give her her supper while I clear up,” Zoë had said. They were alone in the nursery: Wills and Roly were being bathed by Ellen.

Juliet sat in her high chair. She wanted to feed herself, which was a messy and inconclusive business. “No, Jule do it,” she repeated whenever Louise tried to take the laden spoon from her.

“Goodness! She’ll need another bath.”

“Oh, I’ll just sponge the worst bits off. One has to let them learn.”

“I don’t know anything about babies.”

Zoë looked at her quickly and waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t. She often found herself trying not to cry these days.

“Listen,” Zoë said as she came across the room to sit at the table by Louise and the high chair, “neither did I. And it’s terrifying because everybody seems to assume that you do.”

“And that you’re thrilled,” Louise said in a muffled voice.

“Yes.”

“And you weren’t?”

“Not the first time—no. And then everyone kept saying I should have another one and I didn’t want to.”

“But you did.”

“Not then, not immediately. Hang on, Jules. Let me clean you up a bit first.

“But when I finally did have her—it was wonderful. It was—well, with Rupert gone, she just made all the difference. I had been dreading something happening to him so much, it seemed like the worst thing in the world that could happen, and then it happened—but at the same time, there was Jules.”

“Chockat!”

“No. Onto your pot first.”

But Jules did not agree with this. She lay on the floor, arched her back and set about a luxuriant tantrum.

Louise watched while Zoë dealt with this. Finally, Jules was on her pot with a small piece of chocolate. “It usually turns out to be a compromise.”

“Aunt Zoë—I—”

“I’d much rather you dropped the Aunt. Sorry! What?”

“I just wanted to say I hadn’t realized about—what an awful time you must have had.”

“Why should you have? You were a child. And, anyway, it’s far harder for you. I didn’t start until I’d been married for about five years, and Rupert wasn’t in the war then. You’re doing it all at once.”

In some ways this conversation was comforting; but in other ways not. Perhaps, like Zoë, she would feel quite differently about a baby once it was there: on the other hand, and for the first time, she came up against the dreadful prospect of Michael getting killed.

A few evenings later when he rang her up, which he did from time to time, he told her that he could get away for a night and proposed coming to Sussex. “We’ve had a bit of engine trouble and so I’m leaving them to it for a day or two.”

She felt light-hearted with excitement, everybody was very pleased for her and the whole family entered into preparations to welcome him. The Duchy procured a brace of pheasants for dinner; the Brig spent the morning choosing and decanting port; Lydia had a row with Polly about wearing their bridesmaids’ dresses for dinner (Polly thought it was unsuitable but Lydia, who had tried to wear hers for lessons, for tea on Sundays and sometimes secretly after her bath was determined). “It is perfectly the proper thing to wear for dinner,” she said, “and it will remind Michael of old times—his lovely wedding and all that.”

“You won’t be at dinner,” Polly had said.

“I shall! Louise! You’ll let me be, won’t you, as your sister?”

But before Louise could reply, their mother had said she was afraid it was out of the question. There was not enough pheasant to go round: Aunt Dolly would be having a tray upstairs, and Aunt Rach had said that she found pheasant a wee bit indigestible and was going to stick to veg.

“Couldn’t I be at dinner and have a boiled egg?”

“No, you can’t. Miss Milliment is having hers on a tray in the nursery. You may have yours with her.”

“Thanks very bloody much.”

“That’ll do, Lydia. I’ve told you not to use that word.”

“It’ll only be an ordinary old dinner,” Clary said when Villy had left the room.

“It wouldn’t be ordinary to me. I don’t have dinners as a rule. I seem to be in a class by myself for misfortune. It doesn’t seem to have struck them that we might all get bombed before I reach the age to have any privileges at all. I shall have had a completely wasted life.”

Clary and Polly exchanged weary, consciously adult glances but then made soothing noises of comfort and commiseration. But Louise had recognized the faint irritation in her mother’s voice and found herself in sympathy. Lydia was only trying to get the rules changed: all children did that—why, even she had done the same thing ages ago. Being at home certainly made her feel older although not the same age as anyone else in the family.

Michael arrived that evening by train, and she went to meet him with Tonbridge who now called her “Madam.” He drove her so slowly to Battle that she thought they would be late, but they weren’t. She had only to stand a minute at the door of the ticket office when the train shuffled in. Although it was dark, small chinks and streaks of dark yellow light were emitted by the train as doors opened and some passengers twitched aside the blackout in a hopeless attempt to see where they had arrived. Stations had been without names for so long that most people were used to it, and simply counted the number of stops, but there were always a few anxious strangers.

“Fancy seeing you here!”

“Oh—I just thought—if I meet enough trains, I’m bound to know someone getting off one of them.”

He put his free arm round her and gave her a hug before a kiss. “I’m not ’arf glad to see you. How’s His Nibs?”

“Who?”

“Our babe.”

“Fine.”

“Darling girl! Have I missed you!”

The feeling of excitement and happiness came back. He was wearing his greatcoat that smelled faintly of diesel oil and salt and camphor with the collar turned up round his neck; the badge on his cap glinted slightly in the darkness when he turned his head towards her. They sat, holding hands, and made grown-up conversation for the benefit of Tonbridge.

“News is good, isn’t it? Good old Monty.”

“Do you think we’re actually winning the war?”

“Well,” he said, “it would seem that the tide is turning. The Russians are holding on in Stalingrad. North Africa is definitely our biggest victory so far. But we’ve still got a long way to go.”

“What’s wrong with your ship?”

“We’ve been having trouble with the port engine. Each time they think they’ve got it right and then it packs up again. So now they’re having a really serious overhaul. There have been other things, of course. But the crew is shaking down nicely. Little Turner packed us some cheese for you, it’s in my case. I’ve scrounged a tin of butter as well. So I hope I’ll be popular.”

“You would be, anyway,” she said. “They’re all longing to see you. Lydia wanted to wear her bridesmaid’s dress in your honour. Do you think you could draw Juliet? It would be so lovely for Zoë.”

“I might at that. Not easy because at that age they don’t keep still. You’re my best sitter, darling. Which was Juliet?”

“My smallest cousin.”

“She was ravishing. I’ll have a go. Haven’t got very much time, though.”

“When do you have to go back?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, I’m afraid.”

What he did not tell her then, what only came out at dinner—it seemed to her almost by accident—was that he wasn’t going back to the ship the next day, he was going to go on a bombing raid over Germany. “They’re going to pick me up at Lympne, which seems to be the nearest airfield to you, but it’s devilish small for a Stirling. However, they say they can just about manage it. That would be super,” he said when Villy offered to drive him there. “It would be lovely to have a family send-off.”

“Why on earth are you going in a bomber? They haven’t told you to, have they?”

“No. I just thought it might be fun. And I’m rather interested in camouflage at the moment. Said it would be useful to me to make the trip. And they agreed.”

Pride forbade her letting the family know that this was news to her so she was silent. But once they were on their own, undressing for bed, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to tell you. I have.”

“I can’t think why you want to do that. You might—you might get—”

“No, darling, that’s very unlikely. Where’s the bathroom, darling? I’ve rather lost my bearings.”

She told him and he went. Alone, remnants of news bulletins kept bombarding her: “Three of our aircraft missing”; “Two of our bombers failed to return.” He was mad to go if he didn’t have to; of course it was dangerous. It wasn’t fair that he should risk his life—on purpose, as it were—when he had married her and was so keen on having a family.

“Does Zee know?” she asked when he returned. (That might stop him: she was sure Zee would be against it.)

“Yes. Of course she doesn’t like the idea any more than you do, darling, she loves me too, you know. But she just put her arms round me and gave me a hug and said, ‘You must do what you want.’

“Actually,” he said, smiling at the recollection of it, “she said, ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.’ She is amazing—she really is.”

“You saw her last night? Did she come to Cowes, then?”

“No. She came up to London for the night. There was a play of Jack’s she wanted to see.”

“Jack?”

“Jack Priestley. So we went to that. Jolly good it was. We both thought of you and how much you would have enjoyed it.”

It was all too much. He had two—no, three nights’ leave and he had chosen to spend the first with his mother and the third on a bombing raid over Germany. She burst into tears.

“Now, darling,” he said, “you mustn’t upset yourself. You really mustn’t. This is war, you know. I shall have to do all kinds of things that involve a certain amount of danger, that’s what war is. You must learn to be brave.”

The next morning he spent half of it drawing Juliet, and the other half teaching her a code so that if he was taken prisoner he could send messages about his escape plans in apparently innocuous letters to her. He wrote out a specimen of the code in his beautiful clear writing and told her to lock it up somewhere safe. “Unless you can memorize it,” he said. “That would be best, of course.”

Then there was lunch—fricassé of rabbit and gooseberry fool—but she found it difficult to eat anything, listening dumbly to the usual family discussion about who was to come on the excursion to the airfield. Lydia was determined to go and Wills wanted to see the aeroplane, but as she would not have been alone with him in any case, she did not very much care. Michael had brought some petrol coupons with him (he must have planned to get the lift, she thought); it seemed as though all of his arrangements about life were unknown to her until they happened. She sat in the back of the car with him with the children wriggling and chattering in front. She had become very passive, and simply concurred in everything, but inside she felt cold and heavy with fear. In an hour, she thought, he would be gone, and she might never see him again, and he seemed unaware, unconscious of what this meant. To spend your last hour with someone who was map-reading, while “I spy with my little eye” went on in the front of the car seemed bizarre.

Eventually they reached the windswept but bright green grass runway, and everybody got out. It was raining, not hard but steadily. Michael was saluted by a very young man in RAF uniform and they were conducted to the hut, which smelled strongly of the paraffin stove that stopped it being entirely cold.

Here was an officer who said he was the station commander, adding that he was amazed that a Stirling was going to land there: “I must say I rather doubt whether it can.”

For a moment she imagined it falling—swooping away, and not managing to pick up Michael, after all. But a second later the throbbing sound of the engines could be heard and, surprisingly soon, there it was. It looked enormous. It did one circuit over them and then came in at the far end of the runway, finally stopping right at the other end, with its blunt nose almost in a hedge.

“Right,” he said, “here we go. I mustn’t keep them waiting.” He kissed his mother-in-law affectionately, bent down and kissed Lydia on the cheek and she blinked and went pink, nodded to Wills who was transfixed by the Stirling and finally turned to her, put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a kiss on her mouth of the kind that is almost over before it has begun. “Keep your pecker up, my darling,” he said. “I’ll ring some time tomorrow. Promise.”

Her mother took the two children to the car: Wills had broken out into a roar of despair when he realized that he was not going to get into the aeroplane. She stood and watched him climb up into the bomber, watched them pull the narrow stairway up into it after him, watched the door, or hatch, or whatever it was, slam shut removing him from sight, watched the huge unwieldy plane turn and then taxi away down the runway.

“The wind’s east,” the station commander said. “They’ll go out to sea and then turn and come back over us. You can wave to them then.”

So she waited a few minutes to do that, wondering whether he could see her, whether even if he could see her, he would be looking.

Her mother was very kind to her in just the right way: she made it clear that she thought it was hard, but she did not go on about it.

Lydia wanted to go and have tea in a tea-shop in Hastings, “As we’ve come all this way. To make it a proper treat.”

Villy turned to Louise who was sitting in front beside her. “Do you want to do that, darling?”

She shook her head. As so often nowadays, she was perilously near tears.

“We’ll go home, then.”

They drove home in the dusk, and that evening she stayed with the family to listen to the nine o’clock news. “French fleet has been scuttled by their crews in Toulon harbour,” it began, but eventually it got to heavy raids having been carried out on Kiel and Cologne the previous night. Then she realized that she wouldn’t know anything about the raid Michael was on until he rang up. So the aircraft that were being reported missing could have nothing to do with him. Soon, as she was unable to bear the atmosphere of covert sympathy, she escaped to bed where she had what her family would have called a good cry. She had begun to be afraid that Michael did not love her, and that he would be killed.