In the summer of 1943 Marjorie goes up to London for the day, to visit her mother. It’s a Sunday. The Frognal house, built in 1933 by a leading architect, rather in the fashion of a concrete boat, with portholes instead of windows, now stands like some dingy ark stranded in a jungle of creepers and shrubs. All the young gardeners have been called up and all the old ones can find better-paid work.
But Helen is cheerful. She still entertains: there are more than enough guests. Assorted Polish officers on leave in London, one or two reformed friends left over from the Peace Pledge days; former struggling painters, now official war-artists, previous avant-garde writers, now earning good money as war correspondents – all take refuge in her house. Tradesmen, warmed by Helen’s charm, supply extra food in quantity and the hospitality is lavish.
Helen cannot leave her guests to meet Marjorie, who makes her own way to Hampstead from Liverpool Street Station on a bus which takes her through the still smouldering rubble of the City, and from the top of which she sees, half hidden by bricks, what she thinks at first is a sack and then realizes is the top half of a body. She wonders whether to draw the attention of the conductor, and then changes her mind. Someone must know. She does not want to look silly.
She tries to tell Helen about the body, but Helen is too busy to listen. She is telling her friends what an independent girl Marjorie has become, by virtue of living in the country and going to the village school. Marjorie, laying the table for lunch, overhears her mother talking to a friend, thus:
Helen Poor dear Dick! I don’t know what he’ll miss most in his prison camp. Sex, or culture. Can you imagine Dick without the Left Book Club, or the New Statesman or Apollo? All they ever get to see in those places is Tit-Bits and Esquire, I believe, sent in by the Red Cross. I’m afraid his mind will quite wither up and dry without its accustomed stimuli, and that’s not the only thing that will! He was never a one for inner resources.
Marjorie Mother?
Helen Run along, Marjorie.
Marjorie You mean father’s a prisoner of war?
Helen Yes of course he is, dear. Mr Songford told you.
Marjorie finds her father’s POW address by searching her mother’s rosewood desk. Every week she posts a lengthy letter to this address, copying out pages from Apollo, and the New Statesman, and whole stories out of Penguin New Writing; Chloe helps, churning out page after page when she should be doing her homework, and Grace – ‘quite the little artist’ as her teacher says – copies Henry Moore sketches and Paul Nash paintings on to airmail paper, and these too are enclosed. (Grace has an amazing facility for graphic mimickry: she will pick up a pencil and dash off a copy of someone else’s original, with half indifferent, half contemptuous pride.) Whether the letters get through, none of them knows. Certainly there is no reply. It doesn’t seem to matter.
‘I expect they’ve tortured him to death,’ says Grace, one day over tea. ‘You know what the Germans are.’
‘Be quiet, Grace. He’s an officer and a gentleman,’ says Esther, comforting, ‘that kind of thing only happens to the ranks. Don’t upset poor Marjorie.’
But Grace does if she can, and no wonder, Marjorie’s school report is startling. At the end of her first year in the Grammar School she’s top of everything, with Chloe running second. Grace gets the Art Prize and ‘Could do better if she tried’ for nearly everything else. And though Grace does have normal parents, and lives in her own house in a fairly normal way, these, with the years, appear less and less desirable attributes. Grace is limited to the reality of Edwin – choleric, open-pored and fallible. Marjorie with her missing father, and Chloe with her dead one, live in a world of might-have-been and might-yet-be.
Marjorie sends her school report to her mother, and gets a reply in which Helen quite ignores the report but says she is going to the States for a year to work for a Free French organization in New York – Will she tell Mr and Mrs Songford, please.
Marjorie does. The guinea a week has long since ceased arriving.
‘You should be doing some kind of warwork,’ is all Edwin says to Esther, ‘sitting round here on your backside all day.’
Esther rarely sits. It’s all patch and mend and make-do, these days. Every available blackberry is bottled; turnip pulp must be added to the jam to make it go further; custard must be set with golden syrup, not eggs – there are no eggs available; even here in the country, officials pounce, it seems, while they’re still falling from the hen. Only the supply of cabbage is unlimited. And, of course, the garden vegetables.
‘I’m singing for the troops at the concert,’ says Esther, roused to defiance at last by the injustice of his fault-finding. Before she married, Esther had plans to be an opera singer. Edwin is horrified.
‘You’ll make a fool of yourself,’ he says. ‘And me.’
But Esther persists, and Edwin tries to get the organizers to cancel her appearance. But they won’t, and Esther sings. She stands up in front of all those men, this middle-aged lady with her red, swollen hands and lost ambitions, and sings, of all things, a Brecht song. ‘The Ballad of the German Soldier’s Bride’:
‘And what did he send you, my bonny lass,’
it goes,
‘From Paris the City of Light?
From Paris he sent me a silken dress
A dream caress of a silken dress,
From Paris the City of Light.
And what did he send you my bonny lass,
From the deep deep Russian snows?
From Russia he sent me my widow’s weeds,
From the funeral feast my widow’s weeds,
From the deep deep Russian snows.’
Her voice is clear and firm and young, her delivery exact and confident. There is silence after she finishes. Then applause, on and on. She seems gratified but not surprised by the response she gets. She won’t sing an encore.
‘That’s enough,’ she says. ‘That will last me for ever.’
It has to.
‘Sometimes,’ says Gwyneth to Chloe, ‘you rub brass and find gold. Not often, but sometimes,’ and for once what she says sounds true to Chloe.
Edwin does not hear his wife sing or witness her triumph. He slips a disc a couple of hours before she is due to appear on stage, and takes to his bed, and afterwards is in too much pain to listen to anyone’s description of the event.