In the small world of the Dinner Kitchens, girls and women came and went. Perhaps to bigger money-making munitions; or because of a pregnancy caused by an over-glamorous romance with a Yank leading to expectations of a ranch in Texas; or – in the case of evacuated families – to return home to Bomb Alleys that had gone quiet. Almost an institution now, but certainly not establishment, were four of the women who had been there from the early days – Dorothy and Marie Partridge, Mrs Farr and Georgia.
At some time or other during those years, there were shortages of almost every kind of food and ingredient. Fortunately not everything ever disappeared at the same time. If the hated yellow dried-egg was in short supply, then the even more hated vivid yellow custard powder substitute came in. If the dried household milk which wasn’t very popular disappeared, lovely sweet tinned condensed milk came in. Fifty per cent of all sausages disappeared when they were cooked, as the high proportion of water-soaked cereal they contained exploded through the skins – nobody ever saw a sausage unless it was laid open as though dissected. Mrs Farr and Dorothy devised potato toppings and gave them a catchy name – but they were still Bangers. Somebody always came up with something, so that The Markham Town Restaurant came to have a much better reputation than the usual run of British Restaurants which were the pay-dirt of comedians.
There was a shortage of jam-jars, but throughout the year Dorothy would offer local children threepence a dozen for clean jars or a slice of bread pudding – the spicy smell of which almost always weakened their resolve to take the money. In summer Georgia organized, through the schools, hedgerow hunts for berries, and paid spot cash to the young scavengers who thought they were on to a good thing because blackberries and rosehips were free and plentiful around Markham. Ursula and her helpers used every pound of sugar allocation and every bottle of pectin for jam-making, bottled plums by the stone and dried apples by the hundredweight.
Marie had become Queen of the Till. Pretty and always looking fresh and nicely made-up, she was popular and had her regulars who brought her a few duck-eggs or a string of onions and a bunch of sweet-williams and, on occasions, perhaps a banana or orange or some similar rare delicacy from a crate ‘dropped’ whilst off-loading at Southampton Docks.
She and Paula often went out together, sometimes to the Air Force administration offices, or to a dance at the Yankee base, and once or twice to a social at Oaklands but, although Marie felt sorry for the boys there, she couldn’t stand what she saw in their frightened eyes and the way they went quiet and withdrawn, even when they were supposed to be on the mend. ‘I don’t know how nurses like Eve Hardy can stand it.’
But Paula would carefully coat her Cyd Charisse legs with leg make-up and dance with any of the Oaklands boys, however close to breaking point they were. ‘Poor little things. They’re only kids who have been frightened out of their wits at the terrible things they’ve seen.’ And she would hold them close and kiss them goodnight and try to make them feel like men again.
The Partridge family was not what it had been. It seemed a lifetime since Charlie joined up. Bonnie, ten years old now, mentioned him only because people talked of him to her: he was no more real to her than Jesus or God, but if people said there was Dad and Jesus, then there probably were.
Harry came and went in his well-pressed sergeant’s uniform, red beret and glossy boots, never there for more than twenty-four hours, going back to wherever another batch of men needed training into the techniques of leaping into mid-air suspended from a canopy of silk that they hoped would unfold, and if it did unfold would not carry them behind the enemy lines.
As the war dragged on and every able-bodied labouring man not essential to the war effort was being called up, Sam Partridge had only a boy of fourteen to help keep the park going. No model of the abbey fashioned from growing sempervivums had been made for years, nor any patterned carpets of miniature plants; even the herbaceous borders had been left so long to their own devices that all lupins were blue, all hollyhocks pink and single, and marigolds grew from every crevice of the retaining wall.
This summer it all seemed too much. The weather was depressing: as he went about trying to keep some control over the acres of grass and trees, he seemed to hear the turf cracking open it was so dry. On some days he hadn’t the heart even to go near to the old bowling green with its display of ox-eye daisies and bents and had consciously to put out of his mind the vision of its old velvet lushness, when a good player could bowl a wood along the rink and know that there was not one to touch it for miles.
At the time when the Germans were driving their way towards England or into Russia, Sam had plotted their advances and retreats with pins and flags on maps, but once the fighting was taken into countries like Greece, Africa and the Philippines, he felt no personal involvement. He would have preferred a simple confrontation with the Germans in the place where he had left his legs.
‘I shan’t put up with much more of him, he’s making everybody’s life a misery,’ Dolly declared frequently to Paula and Marie.
‘What can anybody do, though?’
‘I don’t know. But I reckon it’s only my job and you and Bonnie stops me sticking the bread-knife in him at times.’
‘Oh Mum, that’s not like you.’
‘Isn’t it? You’d be surprised, Marie. Since Mr O’Neill’s been trying to make this documentary film, life hasn’t hardly been worth living.’
‘You’d think he’d be proud they chose you.’
‘Proud! He’s jealous.’
‘Of Mr O’Neill?’
‘You’d think it was a film about a scarlet woman dancing the can-can instead of how ordinary women are managing homes and jobs.’
Dolly didn’t miss the look that Paula and Marie exchanged.
‘I think he believes that every woman in Markham is scarlet,’ Paula said.
It came to a head one hot evening when Dolly had stayed behind at the Dinner Kitchens for Niall O’Neill to do some filming there. Bonnie was having a last evening at the swimming pool which was about to be closed down because the filtration plant had packed up and it had been commandeered anyway. Marie and Paula were waiting in Dolly’s kitchen for Bonnie to come in.
Sam made the same sort of remark that he had made frequently about Dolly and married women generally always gadding about when Paula turned on him furiously.
‘Ever since I was little we’ve all made excuses because of your legs,’ Paula said harshly. ‘You’ve been sarcastic to me, bitter to Mum, who God knows has had enough to put up with your moods. Is it her fault you haven’t got a decent pension? She’s made something of herself, but have you ever given her one word of praise or encouragement? Never!’
Marie’s pent-up feelings about years of not wanting to say anything because she was only the daughter-in-law were now unleashed by Paula’s righteous attack and she could not hold back. ‘And the same goes for Charlie,’ she said. ‘Till he joined up, he done everything he could for you, never a morning went by without he didn’t come in and see you was all right, and you never had it in you to say anything but what it was to interfere in our lives. Don’t have a tanner on the horses, Charlie, go to your Union meeting, Charlie, time you hoed up your potatoes, Charlie. He was nearly thirty when he went in the RAF and you was still treating him like you was the head of our family instead of Charlie. And now I hear you starting on Bonnie. She’s my daughter. I don’t want her brought up in your ways. All right, she has to fend for herself sometimes when I’m at work, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Can’t you see that you’re turning everybody away from you. Everybody loves you, but you make it bloody hard for us.’ She flushed at the first swearword she had ever said outside her own four walls.
The old man’s eyes narrowed, but Paula wouldn’t let him fill the pause.
‘Especially Harry. He’s been trying since he was two to get you to give him a hap’orth of praise, but you’ve been as stingy with your praise as you’ve been with your love.’
He did not reply, but sat there and said nothing, letting it all pour over him until Bonnie’s bicycle bell sounded and she and Dolly were heard chattering happily in the kitchen.
Dolly had put her head round the door and seen their faces all turned from one another and felt the tension and had known better than to throw a match into that particular box of dry matchwood.
Brightly, she said, ‘What do you think? The chip-shop was open, and it’s only Monday. They had some real cod extra to their allocation, so they opened an extra evening. She was only going to let me have two pieces, but Bonnie come along so she let her have two and she cheeked him for another one.’
Sam Partridge’s heart ached to see Charlie: there were times when he felt sick at the thought of him being God-knew-where and in God-knew-what danger. Now they had all turned on him, except Charlie. Two and a half years and he hadn’t hardly clapped eyes on his son.
‘Would you like me to come with you, Eve?’
‘Would you, Monty? I don’t know why I should, but I feel quite edgy about it. Isn’t that silly, it was my home for twenty-five years.’
‘It’s only natural after a bust-up like that.’
They cycled through the silent, early-morning Sunday town. Along the wide main Winchester Road with its respectable large bay-fronted semis with front gardens, past small terraces, mean-windowed narrow cottages, Edwardian villas with uncontrolled wistaria and unpruned forsythia, past Victorian residences with monkey-puzzle trees, all temporarily in free neighbourly association now that they shared the same absence of railings and gates, the same emergency water supply, street wardens and stirrup-pumps. Beyond the railway arch a pub and, where the ground began to rise so that Mont and Eve had to dismount, potato fields and a clapped-out old mansion, and at the crest the cottage hospital in its flowery grounds where they stopped to take breath as the heat of the late spring began to shimmer off the roofs of Markham.
‘It’s not such a bad old place,’ Mont said, mopping his red face.
‘I think it’s lovely from here. Looks as though it hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.’
‘Well it has, you know. Only the bricks and mortar are the same. Everything else has been changed out of all recognition by the war, and it won’t ever go back.’
‘What about Oaklands when it’s finished being a hospital, and the Chapel Hall when they close down the Town Restaurant, and the munitions factory and the little engineering works – Georgia and I were talking about it. All those women having their small freedoms for the duration of the war. How can they cope with going back to their old domestic life, playing second fiddle?’
‘“How they goin’ to keep ’em down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paree”? D’you know that song?’
‘Sort of.’
‘It’s all happened before. Not only just to women. Ordinary blokes go in the Forces, get to see foreign parts, camels, pyramids, icebergs. Some of them get two or three stripes and find they’re as capable of organizing the setting up of a camp as their old bosses were of setting up a factory.’ Slowly they resumed the last half-mile along the road towards Eve’s old home, making no attempt to cycle, Eve content to listen to the old man who had carried their mail along this route twice a day all her growing years.
He sweated and puffed a little, but did not stop his flow. ‘There’ll be them who fly in aeroplanes or sit in holds of the big liners, sub-mariners and others who’ve been behind barbed-wire for months. It only needs one man to say out loud what he’s been thinking – “There’s something wrong somewhere” and they’ll all see that there is.’
‘My Ma says there are Reds everywhere.’
‘And Lady Connie might just be right.’
They had arrived at the entrance to The Cedars drive, along which a hundred years ago a white tourer tied with satin ribbons had been driven by a plump blonde girl who used to be the daughter of the house.
They halted briefly. She said, ‘Oh,’ and they walked on towards the house where they propped their bicycles against a sagging, overgrown pergola. She rang the doorbell but there was no response. ‘There’s no car about, so he probably isn’t here.’ She tried her key, but it would not turn in the lock.
Mont tried. ‘There’s one already in… oh, it’s open. Do you want me to go and have a look round. We should have brought Yap.’
Eve laughed, ‘Oh yes, he’d soon sink his gums into an intruder. Come on, let’s go and find some boxes and get my stuff packed.’ As she walked through the hallway, she called out, but there was no response.
‘The place looks deserted, don’t it?’
‘Look in here, Monty, everything’s packed up.’
Of all the furnishings that had once made The Cedars unique, the only items remaining were the great velvet curtains and voile drapes, the rest was in packing-cases or furniture crates. Swiftly she ran upstairs, where she found her own room tidy and neat, as she had left it. Her clothes were as she had left them, except that each hanger had a Mothak ring and all the drawers contained bags of crystals.
In her parents’ room she found a few shoes and some odd items of women’s clothing that were certainly not Connie’s. A blouse label read ‘Greenleaf and Gale – New York’.
Mont found plenty of empty cartons left by the packers, to which Eve quickly transferred her few possessions and stacked them in the corner of her old room. ‘He’s leaving, Monty.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Then there’s probably some truth in what Mr Greenaway found out.’
‘You don’t want to jump to conclusions. It might be that he just finds the place too big.’
‘That needn’t stop him telling me and Connie.’
Mont Iremonger kept his thoughts to himself. What sort of a man is it runs out on his own daughter without saying anything?
‘Perhaps he was going to tell you.’
‘Perhaps he still thinks David Greenaway wasn’t good enough for me. Perhaps he thinks I’d go running to Mr Greenaway and give the game away.’
Picking up a raffia bag of trinkets that she wanted to take with her, she quickly left the room. ‘Come on, Monty, let’s go and have a look at her.’
The white tourer had been jacked up in an outbuilding at the back of the house. As they crunched their way along the gravel drive, a two-tone horn sounded.
‘That’s my car horn.’
The double doors were wide open and a wide ray of sun like a spotlight picked out an apparently naked woman sitting at the wheel of Eve’s car.
‘Say, Fred, can I have this? It sure is neat.’ She turned and saw the two silhouettes against the sun. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing creeping in here like this?’
Eve did not move, but stood looking at the girl. She was probably a year or so younger than Eve, suntanned, groomed and very pretty.
‘More to the point – what are you doing. Now get out of my car.’
The young woman was obviously used to doing as she was told. As she jumped down from Eve’s car she revealed that her only garment was a skimpy sunsuit of such colourful good quality that Eve knew it could not have been bought in England.
Eve turned on her heel and went towards the house with Mont.
By now, Eve and Mont were ahead and inside the kitchen door, which Eve bolted against the young woman.
In the echoing breakfast-room, Eve said, ‘I suppose that’s his latest. I needn’t have behaved like that. The drawingroom windows are open if she wants to get back in.’
‘I thought you behaved very ladylike. She’s a common bit of goods if you ask me.’
‘What am I going to do now?’
‘What we were going to do anyhow, pile your boxes in the hall ready for the van to collect.’
‘I don’t want to see him.’
The sound of a motor car crunching gravel, voices and the rattle of keys.
Eve went into the hall where her father and the girl had just come in.
‘Evie! Sweetheart.’ Effusively, he came towards her, but she moved so that his kiss only brushed the air beside her car. Eve smiled at the girl over his shoulder.
‘You obviously didn’t tell her you had a big grown-up daughter.’
‘Hell, Fred, you didn’t. Nor about that little automobile being hers.’
‘Go and get dressed, Suzi.’
She went. Mont backed into the kitchen, leaving Eve and her father standing in the echoing entrance hall.
‘It looks as though you’re leaving.’
‘I would have been in touch.’
‘After you had gone?’
‘I was going to arrange for your things…’
‘And Connie’s?’
He shrugged.
‘You needn’t have done it without telling me, Pa.’
‘I have to go quietly, Evie… you understand?’
‘No.’
‘I’m leaving Markham.’
‘I can see that.’
She wanted him to tell her. The rumours about a conspiracy investigation had become the talk of Markham. Gossip had it that there were a group of businessmen involved in everything from fraud to embezzlement.
‘I would have got in touch.’
‘I’m your daughter. A father doesn’t just pack up house, go away and then just get in touch with his daughter… not a normal father. He says goodbye, exchanges addresses.’
‘I’ve had a lot on my mind.’
Eve looked towards the ceiling from where sounds of Suzi came. ‘I can see.’
‘Don’t judge, Eve.’
‘Who’s judging? Is she going with you?’
‘Well, actually, I am going with her.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Of all places, Las Vegas: it’s where she’s from. Her family’s pretty well-heeled. Casinos. It’s all fixed.’
‘And the house?’
‘When the dust has died down, I shall arrange for it to be sold.’
‘And the factory?’
He avoided her eyes, ‘I’ve been bought out. Part of a deal with Carnutzi Brothers – Suzi’s family.’
‘Suzi Carnutzi.’ She raised her eyebrows slightly. ‘Sorry, that was cheap.’
‘At least Suzi doesn’t think that I’m cheap, as your mother did.’
‘I really don’t want to know.’
‘I’m sorry about the house.’
‘And Connie?’
His voice hardened. ‘Look, Eve, no matter how it might have appeared to you, it wasn’t all that bad.’
‘It never looked at all bad to me. To be honest, it came as a shock to me when Connie went.’
‘Once the physical thing had finally gone out, there wasn’t anything left. Now maybe that’s a difficult thing to swallow about your parents. But I can’t let you go off thinking Connie was a saint and I was the sinner. I like women, always have, and I never thought a bit of extra-marital fun was too serious. When the house is sold, I shall make a settlement on her.’
‘I don’t think she’ll divorce you.’
Tm not short of money, Eve. And there’s a will in case…’
‘I don’t want to know any of it.’
‘Listen.’ His voice was low and insistent. ‘For a goddam minute stop putting on airs and listen.’
Eve heard the word ‘goddam’ and knew that her father no longer existed. Goddam. Her mind hung on to the word… a strange and embarrassing Americanism that Freddy Hardy would have ridiculed. He would become as brown and hard as Suzi Carnutzi. She would buy him jackets with large checks and he would wear strange, unEnglish shoes.
She scarcely heard the rest of his attempt at reconciliation. ‘When I get to America and the deal is settled, you will find your bank account quite full. Suzi will never want for a brass farthing, the Carnutzis are rolling in it. When I gave you a present, I always did the wrong thing in Connie’s eyes. Tasteless, no style – like the diamond clips and the car… Con would have bought a dark green car, wouldn’t she? But I am me, and I never did have the advantage of an upper-class upbringing like hers. But then she never had the advantage of knowing how to get rich like me. She might have despised me, but she never looked down on my cheque book. So don’t you, Evie.’
‘I’ve always loved the car. You wouldn’t have given it to her?’
‘Give Suzi your car? Evie baby! I have already arranged for old Thornton at the garage to keep it until you want it again.’
‘Thanks. I have to go, Monty’s waiting, and I’m due at a wedding later this morning.’
‘Are you still at the same Nurses’ Home in London?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve been in Markham since June – at the hospital at Oaklands.’
‘You might have told me.’
‘I… You can always get hold of me through Georgia Kennedy. You know…?’
‘Yes, I know Georgia Kennedy.’ He smiled too enigmatically for Eve.
Not Georgia…
‘I shall see you again, shan’t I?’
‘Oh yes. Once the dust has settled… the war’s nearly over. You must come to Vegas.’
Ursula Farr and Niall O’Neill were married at Markham’s Civic Offices in July and held a lunch-time reception at the Town Restaurant.
The Press, who would have loved to get wind of such a gathering, were not told that O’Neill who was now one of the foremost makers of Government documentary films, was to marry the woman who, as a militant girl, had caused such uproar in the House of Commons gallery.
There were no name-cards at the long tables: people sat with whoever they happened to find themselves at the time. Two men with very cut-glass accents, who had been boys at the ‘experimental’ school where Ursula as a very young woman was cook, sat either side of Georgia. One of them was Sir Henry somebody who said, Hello, my name’s Henry, Ursula tells me you’re the brains behind all this. The other one, whose name was Perry, told scurrilous and hilarious behind-the-scenes stories about Clark Gable’s false teeth and Jean Harlow’s lack of underwear.
Marie found herself sitting beside a friend of Ursula’s, a woman called Dora who talked sense about peace and throwing away life and about the way to stop the war.
Dorothy discovered that the friend of Niall’s by whom she was seated was quite a famous poet – though you’d never guess. He wrote the words for some of Niall’s films.
Eve, who immediately recognized George Lansbury, charmed and was charmed by him.
Poor old Sam, said Dolly when she knew: he would have given anything to see George Lansbury.
Most of Niall’s friends were male and getting on in years, whilst most of Ursula’s were female and young: Eve, Georgia, Marie, Pammy, who was now a pregnant GI bride, Trix in WAAF uniform, Cynth. And Hildegard, a stumpy young woman – where she had come from no one knew, except the bride and groom, and possibly Mont Iremonger for whom she had been keeping house since he had developed leg ulcers. It was to have been a temporary arrangement, but she had stayed on after his leg healed. They rubbed along very well because neither interfered with the other.
It was quite late in the evening when Ursula and Niall walked with some of their guests to the railway station. Now, instead of black-out restrictions, there was a ‘dim-out’, so that windows need be covered only by normal curtains; pubs had taken down door shutters so that here and there orange pools of light shone out; and in streets where lamps could be shut off in an emergency there were, here and there, glimmering lights after five years of complete blackness at night.
‘Markham looks alive again,’ Ursula said, as they stood waiting on the gas-lit platform.
Henry, who had been seated next to Georgia, said, ‘The Germans can’t hold out much longer.’
Perry, the other one, said, ‘They’re still not entirely out of the game. Those bloody V2s scare the hell out of me.’
‘It seems to me,’ said Niall, ‘that everybody’s jittery in London. With good reason. I’ve heard that they are coming over at the rate of six or eight a day.’
Silently, until the huge blast, one fell two streets away from where Connie Hardy was walking, blowing down a garden wall which fell across her back.
After the wedding reception, Eve went back to Oaklands and Georgia to her home. As Georgia rounded the corner she saw Harry Partridge outside her house just propping up the great Vincent motor bike on which she had ridden pillion to the coast. Her pulse-rate rose. Harry Partridge’s company was just what she needed. Nothing heavy, nothing serious.
Her relationship with Nick had become a bit of a mess.
Earlier in the year, they had decided to take a few days holiday together, perhaps each thinking that something might happen to clear the air between them. Although it would be the first time they had slept together, Georgia had not intended that either of them take the step too seriously. They went to the Isle of Wight, staying as a couple at a down-at-heel Ventnor hotel which had been splendid before the war. From the time they met on the quayside at Southampton and went aboard the paddle-steamer, each of them was over-aware that they were heading for bed together at last.
Georgia’s awareness made her nervous. She had known for ages – for ever perhaps – that there would come a time when she and Nick would be lovers. But there was something unspontaneous and calculated about the way they were doing it. Bookings, coupons, time-tables – preparations that took the romance out of it. Yet, since she and Harry had rolled together on the beach, she had felt released enough from her marriage to make love with Nick – almost duty-bound to make love with him having done so with Harry.
It was early in the season, so that there were not enough other guests for them to go unnoticed. The proprietor was an army officer on leave and he was about everywhere, enjoying his old role as mine host. His wife, who had run the place for six years, was trying to come up to her usual scratch now that she was back under his eye. So that what with those two hovering to make their guests welcome, and the curiosity of the few elderly guests and long-term residents, Georgia felt awkward and very aware of the double room booked in Nick’s name and Liverpool address.
The proprietor’s, ‘Let me take that bag, Mrs Crockford,’ had made Georgia cringe with embarrassment at the ridiculous deception. It was the stereotypic film situation for illicit love. The woman always forgets her name and blushes confusedly at some blunder. In their room, Georgia found the sight of the double bed even worse. Two white pillows propped against its varnished headboard, two precisely flanking night tables and lamps, two bath towels, two hand towels, two upturned glasses. The only shared things were a mirror and the high bed itself. This Georgia tried to ignore, it seemed so… so arranged.
She wondered whatever it was that had made her believe that she could make love with Nick for the first time in such a commercial set-up?
Blessedly, the dinner gong sounded, obviously pleasing the proprietor. ‘You arrived just in time. Time to wash your hands. We have only one serving… shortage of staff, of course.’
After a very good dinner of unexpected guinea-fowl with purple sprouting and baked potatoes, and rarely seen home-made ice-cream, they went out. As yet, the Island had not adopted the ‘dim-out’, so that the town was lit only by the rising full moon. They strolled down the steep road from the hotel, hand in hand like young sweethearts, then up again to the cliff-top where there were neglected antiinvasion obstacles and. barbed-wire protecting the high mast on the grassy downlands that overlooked the sea. There Nick spread his greatcoat, and they sat down and looked out to sea.
‘Nick?’
‘Ah… peace, and the sea, and the woman I love.’
‘Nick. I’ve got to be honest with you – I felt very awkward and stupid at the hotel.’
‘You don’t need to tell me, I’m not surprised. It all seemed such a set piece. I saw the ludicrousness of it. Two adults wanting only to sleep together and make love, yet they have to flaff around like we did at dinner.’
‘It’s not only that. I think from that time you came to the house with the dahlias I knew that there would come a day when we would do something like this, and then when it comes to it… oh, that hotel… that bedroom. I just suddenly went off it, I don’t know why. I’m sorry.’
He squeezed her hand and fingered her wedding ring until he had removed it. ‘Perhaps it is to do with this.’ This was the first time that she had been without the ring since Hugh had put it there.
He sucked her empty finger. ‘There, now he’s gone. You must have known that I wanted you then… badly, you don’t know how badly. But then I’d wanted you for ages before that.’
‘And I’ve wanted you. Time and time again I’ve imagined how it would be, and it was always in one of the places where we used to mess about when we were kids. That’s probably why that awful bedroom seems such an anticlimax.’
He combed back her hair with his fingers and grinned, ‘No such inhibitions, I’m afraid: I’d have had you anywhere, anytime. I came that night aching for you… you kept me waiting nearly five years – and I’m still waiting.’
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t had girls in Liverpool.’
‘Celibacy for me is not having Georgia Honeycombe, which means that I’ve lived in life-long celibacy. Georgia, Georgia, how did we get like this?’
‘Like… ?’
‘Talking about it, afraid of it. That’s not us. What happened to us between those old days in Emberley and now?’ He kissed her and she relaxed into the warmth of him.
‘We got older… grew up… became adults.’
‘Something else happened, you stopped being Georgia Honeycombe… at least you tried to.’
‘You still call me that.’
‘So that you won’t forget who you are.’
‘The country girl… the innkeeper’s daughter? And what about Nicky Crockford who used to quote poetry at the drop of a hat?’
He laughed warmly.
‘All through that summer at ease we lay.
And daily from the turret wall
We watched the mowers in the hay
And the enemy half a mile away,
They seemed no threat to us at all.
‘There. Crockford still showing off his ability to memorize.’
‘I remember thinking of that bit the day when we saw the bombers and the dog-fight and the farm caught fire… then suddenly they were a threat.’ She gently fingered the puckered area of his brow that was a burn-scar caused that day.
‘I feel that I’m still pretty much Crockford, the country lad. I remember when you were still Georgia Honeycombe, and we were all so physical and full of ourselves, and I was oh so hungry for you and too shy and proud to tell you because of what you might say.’
‘Physical… yes, we were, weren’t we? You used to lift my plait and kiss the back of my neck and I was too gauche to tell you how much I loved it.’
He lifted her heavy, golden hair, pale as his own white head in the moonlight and moved his lips in the hollow of her neck.
‘Yes… like that. Now that I’m all grown up, I can tell you I love that… ask you not to stop.’
‘How easily we used to throw off our clothes and jump into the lake without a second thought, and yet this evening we both tiptoed around that bedroom as though the bed was enemy territory.’
Inevitably she thought of Harry and the isolated cove, of lying uninhibited and naked with Harry Partridge. Now the spring tide was coming in roughly, hitting the shore far below, moving a bar of shingle that shushed-shushed as each wave came and receded.
Why was there this barrier between her and Nick, the man she had wanted since before she knew why she wanted him?
When Nick had first suggested they go to Ventnor, she had fantasized them in the scene that one never actually saw in films – the scene that is behind the door when it shuts upon the camera. Rhett Butler sees Scarlett undoing her own dress, Scarlett O’Hara sees that the bed is a low divan spread with coloured shawls and cushions; only Rhett sees her expression when they make love once quickly and then more slowly. With Nick in her fantasy it would be perfect.
More perfect than with Harry?
For her, that thought had come between them. She could not trust herself to enjoy Nick in the way she had enjoyed Harry. Harry had been casual, no consequences, no strings attached. But Nick… ? I love Nick. It’s that… the love… the commitment.
‘It wasn’t “we”, it was me. It’s my fault, I’m stupid with apprehension.’
‘Apprehension? Oh Georgia.’ He put his arms more tightly about her and drew her close.
‘I think that I’m afraid that it won’t be good enough, and that I shall be so anxious that it will turn out to be the same half-cocked thing that it has always been with Hugh. I’m afraid that perhaps it won’t work out because when we were little we were like brother and sister. I’m afraid it would not turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to us – I couldn’t bear that.’
‘Tears, Georgia Honeycombe?’ He had touched them with his tongue. ‘It will be good. Good, good. I promise you. With you and me, it can’t be anything else. It will be like this.’ He caressed her intimately for the first time. He groaned gently as though it was he who had been caressed by her. ‘We were never brother and sister, and so what if we were? So what if we are? I should still touch you like this, caress you like this.’
As he lay close to her she could feel his stomach gradually contract with contained laughter. She undid a button of his shirt and slid her hand inside, catching the hair on his chest with her scarlet nails.
‘Oh Georgia Honeycombe, wonderful, desirable Georgia Honeycombe, with skin like silk and hair like honey… kiss me and tell me that you never did believe that anything to do with me could be half-cocked.’
Then she laughed with him, and he heard the voice of the girl who used to be wild and joyful. The fresh wind was chill through his open shirt, but her lips warm and moist in the dished hollow of his chest. With the sea surging and the red light of the tall mast above them and the moon whitening the Downs, they made love. Their first, long-delayed consummation had been urgently and quickly good, their second soon afterwards in the hotel room was good… good.
She sat back panting.
‘Lovely!’ he said. ‘That was more wonderful than I dreamed of it. Nick Crockford’s dream come true – to be pinned down and forced by Georgia Honeycombe. I love you, Georgia. I always have and always shall.’
She, satiated and alive, looked down and kissed him. A long kiss that occupied her mouth so that she should not commit her feelings to reckless words which, although they might be true, if said aloud would be too binding. And I love you, Nick Crockford.
That was weeks ago. He had gone back to Liverpool, and the joy of their love-making weekend was dulled by a return to the misconnections, crossed lines, lines engaged and the, ‘Three minutes – your time is up’, interjections of a wartime liaison conducted by telephone.
They had seen one another only once since, when he had come unexpectedly into her office holding Pete by the hand. Pete at six years old was a most attractive child, with his father’s physique and Nancy’s large thickly-fringed eyes and full mouth. Until then, Georgia had never much thought of Nick in the role of father. The sight of him, huge and gentle, holding the hand of the child he had fathered upon Nancy, had plunged her into a strangely erotic mood.
She felt embarrassed and confused in front of the child, by a sudden upsurge of desire which, although he addressed the boy in a neutral voice, was evident in Nick also. He did not flirt or call her Georgia Honeycombe, but he did not appear able to take his eyes from her. Not only desire for each other, but love. If Georgia and Nick had not been in love before, then they were now. The child seemed to be the catalyst.
He was obviously proud of Pete, sitting with him held encircled in his long arms and legs. He had wanted to show him off to her.
‘He’s a super kid, Nick.’
‘Pete’s going to live with his Grandpa now, aren’t you, Pete?’
The boy had looked up at Nick and nodded. ‘Just till Daddy comes back home… you said, didn’t you, Daddy?’
‘That’s right, as soon as the war’s over. Then you will live with both me and Grandpa.’
‘And Mrs Dancer.’
‘Well, Mrs Dancer’s going to help Grandpa out.’
‘With the washing.’
Nick had smiled and nodded, obviously touched by the boy, loving him more than he had ever let on, more than Georgia ever guessed. ‘And nobody’s going to hurt you in Grandpa’s house, are they, son?’
The boy had looked at his boots and shaken his head. Georgia frowned questioningly, and Nick nodded.
‘Been having a bad time of it lately has our Pete. Nancy’s signalman has been heavy-handing him. I went there on the off-chance to see Pete and when I saw the state of him, I just brought him away, didn’t I, Pete?’ He ruffled the boy’s hair.
‘But you’ve no legal claim. Won’t they…?’
‘Let them try! But they won’t. He knows I’d go through every court in the land, and he won’t have any stomach for that. In any case, he just don’t want Pete there now they’ve got kids of their own – that’s the trouble. Six-year-olds want a lot of time and attention.’ He pulled the boy to him. ‘But Daddy and Grandpa want you all right, Pete, don’t we?’
‘And what about Nancy?’ Georgia asked.
‘She’s got her hands full with the other ones, and she’s relieved that Pete’s out of reach of the signalman. Nancy won’t make any trouble for me.’
Georgia had wanted to ask, Did you have Pete at home when you asked me to marry you? But she thought that she knew him better than that. He would have told her about Pete straight off and been honest about it. Even so, she had not been one hundred per cent sure – he obviously loved Pete and it would be only natural to think of his welfare first, of somebody more permanent than old Mrs Dancer.
Since then they had spoken a few times by telephone, having only the standard three minutes. Nick was still in Liverpool, but had applied for a transfer back to the south. Within weeks of their wonderful days together on the Isle of Wight, their honeymoon love seemed to have soured.
So that was why her pulse raced when she saw the Vincent parked outside her house. The one thing that Harry Partridge was not was serious.
Inside the house, he gave her a long hard kiss and an appreciative caress. ‘Ah, Georgia, lovely, scrumptious Georgia, I could eat you. I’ve only got a couple of days. Are you free to be eaten?’
‘As air,’ she said gaily.
‘Come on then, get those gJad-rags off and put on your hot red pants and we’ll be away. Do you fancy Brighton and a little bit of ’ows your father?’
She laughed, loving the uncomplicated feelings that his spontaneity bubbled up in her. ‘September’s a bit late in the year for any seaside larks, isn’t it?’
‘I wasn’t thinking of the beach… more of The Metropole, say?’ He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
‘The Metropole! Goodness, how grand.’
‘Why not?’ Lighting two cigarettes and handing one to her, he was challenging her with directness.
‘Absolutely, Harry – why not?’
As she was putting a dress and toiletries into an overnight bag, she caught sight of herself in the dressing-table mirror. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright and a smile raised the corners of her mouth, and she recognized the features of happiness. Harry Partridge. His intentions were as unambiguous as her own. An occasional lover with no ties, no complications, no guilt. No one but herself to consider.
She smiled at the happy woman.
Georgia Honeycombe, you are a free woman.