It is past midnight. The last day of peace in Britain is over.
Georgia Kennedy has left her bed where the pillow is wet with the tears that have released some of the stress of the eventful day. Resting her arms on the sill at the open window, she looks at Station Avenue where, until now, gaslights made yellow pools at night. Now, not a crack of light is permitted. The air is dry and hot, and the dark sky is lit very occasionally by the merest flicker of lightning, which is so far distant that the sound of thunder never does reach Markham.
As she has done for as long as she can remember, she tells herself a kind of story of what has happened during the day, keeps a kind of mental diary. She thinks of the coaches streaming out of London and wonders about the children who were in them, now in strange, frightening surroundings, sleeping in strangers’ bedrooms where there are new night-time shadows in the cupboards. She tries to make order out of her experience – the drawn-faced parents on Waterloo Station evacuating their children privately. Middle-class voices, men in Anthony Eden hats, children in little clumps of grey and navy-blue serge. Why had those parents added stuffy school uniforms to their children’s discomfiture? To create a good impression on the fostering parents? Would they give less care to children who travelled in cotton shorts or thin dresses? Mothers wearing straw plate hats, plenty of rouge and scarlet lipstick that had seemed to emphasize the false cheerfulness of their smiles. Children, labelled like game-hampers, being told lies.
‘You will be quite all right, Deborah. Nanny Barnes will not forget to meet you.’
‘I envy you, old chap. Lot of fun living in the country; you will simply love it – and Mama will visit. Chin up, we men don’t cry, do we?’
‘Just think how exciting it will be, Jack – Uncle Rollo says he will let you choose a pony if you’re a real little man about this.’
Those children – hen-eyed with the knowledge of what happened to Hansel and Gretel, to the Babes in the Wood, and to the Princes in the Tower-were apprehensive of their parents’ long smiles. Snow White’s wicked stepmother had been as beautiful as their own smiling mother, hadn’t she? Mrs Darling had left her children in the care of a dog; and the Water Babies… ?
Georgia feels, once again, Little-Lena and Roy clutching her hand tightly and that, seeing how the other children are being disposed of, they are now verging on the unthinkable – how do they know that Mrs Kennedy is not kidnapping them? Even so they cling to her because to be parted from that one familiar face amongst all those crowds would be worse. Waiting on the platform, Little-Lena asks Georgia, ‘Mrs Kennedy? You know those mothers whose babies were killed by King Herod? Do you think that they ever had any other babies?’
A mine-field of a question. Georgia sees herself giving them coins to buy Nestle’s chocolate discs from the red machine on the platform. Now she wonders. Did they have other babies? And is Little-Lena reassured? And wonders too why she has taken so little notice of Little-Lena before yesterday.
Now that she has thought about the experience of London, she can allow herself to think of Nick.
Until tonight, Georgia Kennedy has shed few tears. From the window, she can see the pattern of a constellation and wishes that she knew which one it was. She knows that today was the end of her girlhood, end of that life which was given its expectations by her parents, by Hollywood movies, by Hugh’s perfect tango and his Wolsey car, and by novels from Boots Library. Happy Ever After. The sunny housewife in her pretty green kitchen with its sprigged curtains, the golden-haired young wife of the cricket captain, the gins sipped in a summer garden surrounded by the scent of roses and philadelphus.
Until this evening, her cockleshell marriage to Hugh has kept afloat because the waters on which it sailed were calm. Nick’s visit has whipped up white horses. Feeling the danger of being capsized, she longs to reach out to Nick and wonders now how she could have thought that marriage to Hugh and the sophistication of the Sports Club set was preferable to a haphazard life as Nick’s woman.
Hugh had offered her his house, his status, his ability to tango and to come up with ace serves at tennis. Perhaps she should have looked up the true definition of sophistication before she discovered it from experience. Eighteen was no age for making life-long decisions about marriage.
Had she been only twenty, she would never for a moment have supposed that she was suited to the battle-loving Hugh Kennedy, after she had spent her youth knocking around with Nick Crockford, drifting in and out of romances with him. There were times during those youthful summers when she had felt that, had he said the word, she would have gone with him into the New Forest and lived rough and been a charcoal-burner or hurdle-maker and lived with him on birds’ eggs and hedgehogs like the gypsies.
Now it’s too late.
Before dawn, there came the first rattle of large raindrops followed soon by a steady downpour, cleaning and softening foliage, soaking into cracked and sun-baked fields, greening up tawny meadow-grass and sending up to open bedroom windows the scent of roses and wetted pavements. The chain of long, hot, dry weeks, when men’s sinews have been dried and become tight thongs, and women have felt that their scalps were shrunken with the drought, was broken.
Georgia listens to the guttering rainwater, and wonders how she can bear to go on being married to Hugh, knowing now that she loves Nick and has never loved anyone else. But she will have to bear it, she is steeped in the thou shall nots and the solemnity of Christian marriage.
And you’ve only got to look at his father, Georgia.