Opposite Chloe and Gwyneth, sits a plain, thin, tearful child, with pale, deep-set, slightly squinty eyes peering out from beneath a creased brow. Marjorie. She has a mass of frizzy hair, which is kept back from her forehead by a battery of brown metal hair clips. She is not accustomed to the language and behaviour of the other children in the coach. Until recently Marjorie has lived a protected life. Then her father Dick upset everyone by volunteering for army service and her mother Helen took her away from her private school in the country, and enrolled her in the local state school which promptly closed. Now, re-opened for just one week, the school has been evacuated, and Marjorie with it.
Or, as the lovely, highly-principled Aryan Helen, Marjorie’s mother, wrote to her handsome, tormented, highly-principled Jewish husband, Marjorie’s father, only the night before:
‘We’re all in this together. It’s best for Marjorie to take her chance with the others. I believe she’s going somewhere in Essex. The country air should be good for her spots – I’m afraid London aggravated them shockingly. I’ll be down to see her as soon as possible, though you know what the trains are like, and actually I’ve offered the house as a hospitality centre for Polish Officers and am acting as hostess, so you can imagine how busy I’m going to be. Don’t worry – I’ve packed all your books and papers safely away in the attics – and cleared the library for the dancing. Poor fellows – what a dreadful business this war is: they deserve all the relaxation they can get.’
Dick, posted somewhere in Scotland to supervise the manufacture of Wellington Boots for the WRAC (the Women’s Royal Artillery Corps), can hardly object to anything. If Helen did not consult him before removing Marjorie from her school, neither did he consult Helen before joining the army. He just came home one evening, late at his own party, and said, ‘I’ve done it’ and the next day he was gone. What kind of conduct was that?
If Helen has put his books and papers up in the attics, where the roof leaks, then it is his fault for not attending to the attic roof (as she has repeatedly asked him to do) but going to political meetings instead. If she wants to be unfaithful on the library floor (dancing always makes her sexy, and they both know it) or even on his bed, or even in the corridors in front of the very servants, then she will, and he deserves it, and he knows it. For Dick slept with a friend’s wife – the second woman he’d ever made love to – the night Marjorie was born, and the friend’s wife, in a flurry of either guilty malice or boredom, told Helen. All this Dick knows, and so is helpless.
Dick scarcely knows his daughter Marjorie. First she had a nanny, then she went away to school. He assumes she will be all right. She is not pretty, and he is sorry for her, but now the Army is his life. He can fight Hitler. Helen he cannot fight.
As for Helen, she simply cannot think what she did, during all those lovely laughing years of childless marriage, to deserve Marjorie. Who is plain and who fawns, and at whose birth she lost her husband.
Now little Marjorie, labelled, rejected and forlorn, sits and stares at Chloe’s small gloved hand lying so securely in Gwyneth’s, and starts to cry. Chloe, longing for the safety of a label round her neck, sickened by the noise and the smell of vomit and worse, begins to cry as well.
Gwyneth begins to cry too. She takes her spotless handkerchief from her pocket and dabs her daughter’s face, and her own, and Marjorie’s too, seeing it to be there.
And so the train arrives in Ulden. It was, as we know, meant to go on to Egden, and only the relief train on Platform 6 to stop at Ulden, but the driver has misread his instructions.