The Eighth Promise

Scorn is a double-edged knife. You can retreat, mortally wounded, from its thrust, or turn it aside by meeting steel with steel.

When Edward Massinger –smart as a whip in his new uniform –looked at me with his dark eyes and said, ‘I feel sorry for you,’ a fuse began to burn towards all the anger I held within me. Besides, it was the second time I had met him and the memory of the first encounter was still livid.

I sailed to India in the summer of 1939 with a rebellious heart and absolutely no intention whatsoever of looking for a husband. This was no ‘fishing trip’. I was twenty-two years old and bright as a silver button. No mere man was going to come between me and my ambition.

‘I work for Vogue,’ I repeated to everyone on the ship who was foolish enough to ask me about myself. ‘Yes, in the fashion department, naturellement. I look after the photographers. Yes, it’s so exciting I can hardly bear to leave it even for a short break.’

In truth, my job was a lowly one. I was a general assistant, a gofer, a dogsbody. I made tea, ran errands for the photographers and made sure that the demands of the models were accommodated. I didn’t divulge that, naturally, and in any case, it didn’t really matter because I was learning the trade. I was young, pretty, starry-eyed and happier than I could ever remember being.

The letter from my mother would have been rapturously welcomed at any other time in the preceding dozen or so years. Arriving, as it did, in the midst of the hectic run-up to Ascot, I read it with dismay.

Frank and Jean Arbuthnot

The Palm House

Ronaldshay Road,

Alipore

Calcutta

13^th May, 1939

Darling Cecilia,

At last we have made provision for you to come and see us! Your father and I have waited so long for this day to come. We are now in Calcutta. Out in the sticks we felt so isolated it did not seem right to ask you to give up your life in the bright lights to join us, even for a short visit.

Father has been appointed headmaster of a very good school in this fine city. A house comes with the job –a big one at that –so you see, there is plenty of room for you.

Of course, we understand that you have obtained employment in London. However, my letter to your superiors has elicited the response we sought –you are to be given a three-month period of leave! Your ticket for the passage awaits you at the P&O offices in Cockspur Street and you will sail in June.

We are so excited about having you with us once more, even for the shortest of times.

Your ever-loving Mama

I had barely seen my parents since I was nine years old. Everyone knew that the intolerable heat of India, with all the inevitable disease it brought, made it a poor place to raise children, but even so, the shock I experienced at being sent to a boarding school in Perthshire was considerable.

The food there was appalling, the conditions spartan and the freezing winters well-nigh unbearable. I suffered chilblains on my toes and gained a lifelong aversion to rice pudding and outdoor games. I endured crippling homesickness for a year, and then spent my remaining eight years at school raging at my situation. By the time I was due to leave, I felt estranged from my parents –who had managed to visit me only twice –and I had no idea what I was going to do or where I would go.

It was Great Aunt Edie –my father’s aunt –who was my saviour.

‘I have found you a job, Cecilia,’ she wrote from London, just before I was due to leave St Margaret’s School for Girls in Crieff. ‘As an assistant at a magazine. You can stay with me in Cadogan Square.’

The thought of staying with Great Aunt Edie was daunting, to say the least. I had only met her once, years ago, and had a dim recollection of slenderness and elegance, of scent and the rustle of taffeta. I eyed my school blazer and despised green woollen skirt with embarrassment.

Cadogan Square, though, turned out to be a very smart address in central London and Great Aunt Edie a wise, funny and extremely well-connected woman. She was in her seventies and childless, and she was itching to spoil me. She bought me a whole collection of smart new clothes. She introduced me to the concept of elegance and modishness. And, joy of joys, the magazine where I was to work turned out to be Vogue, the grand arbiter of fashion.

My mother’s summons to Calcutta, just when I was settling in nicely was, therefore, far from welcome.

My friend Lottie was deeply envious. ‘Think of all the men you’ll meet, Ceci. That’s where every girl goes who wants to find a husband. Everyone knows that. They’re desperate for pretty girls out in India.’

‘But I don’t want a husband,’ I protested. ‘I want a career. And how can I achieve that if I’m shoved off to Calcutta?’

‘It’s only until September,’ Lottie said reasonably, her thick dark hair crimped and curled to within an inch of its life, her lips sweeping arcs of crimson. I thought Lottie the epitome of fashion and tried to copy her style, but I found that my own fine, blonde hair refused to hold a wave, and crimson against my fair skin looked like blood in the snow. Still, I was slimmer than Lottie, and I knew I was cleverer and I was happy to accept these trade-offs.

In the end, I had no choice and I suppose curiosity and the faint memories I still had of India and of my parents also acted as enticement. I sailed from Southampton at the end of June and it was impossible not to feel the excitement as the huge liner edged away from the quay to the cacophonous accompaniment of a dozen horns, a thousand ragged cheers and a cascade of coloured streamers.

I discovered a sport I did enjoy: flexing my charm muscles. By the time we sailed past Gibraltar, I had flirted with almost all of the men under thirty. By Malta, I had broken the hearts of those under forty. When we reached Port Said, I abandoned interest in all of them and became fascinated instead by the half dozen wealthy and darkly handsome Egyptian businessmen who came aboard with their retinues.

For some reason, I didn’t come across Edward Massinger until after we had sailed out of Colombo and were making our way up the east coast of the Indian sub-continent. I was at the captain’s cocktail reception in the imposing Grand Saloon. Great Aunt Edith had made me a parting present of an outrageously expensive gown, which I had donned for the occasion.

‘Balenciaga,’ I was declaiming to a circle of women who were clustered around me, admiring the dress, ‘is using soft blue this season. Chanel prefers coral. For myself, I’m more partial to the blue.’

There were appreciative murmurs, not just from the women but also from my usual group of hangers-on and hopefuls.

A voice came from the back of the crowd, deep, but dry as fine sherry. ‘I should have thought that khaki is more likely to be the colour next year.’

I craned my neck and spied a tall stranger with dark, slicked-back hair and fathomless eyes. Irritated at my flow being interrupted, I repeated, puzzled, ‘Khaki?’

‘I believe we will be at war within a few months.’ The man had caught the attention of the group, which turned towards him as one. Immediately fashion was forgotten, I was ignored, and the conversation had changed to politics and the international situation.

I pouted with irritation. This man –who was he? –was undeniably good looking, but I certainly did not appreciate my thunder being stolen. ‘Women,’ I said loftily, raising my voice above the murmur of discussion, ‘would never be seen dead in khaki.’ But I had lost my audience. My fragile blonde prettiness and Balenciaga gown could not compete with the topic that was on everyone’s mind, the shaky state of the peace in Europe.

In the days that followed –to my utter frustration –Edward Massinger proved polite but consistently uninterested in my looks, my conversation or my company.

‘I’m bored,’ I said to my mother, sitting up in my lounger and tossing aside my book. I yawned ostentatiously to underline my point. ‘Bored, bored, bored.’

In September, just as I was due to sail for London after a visit that I had found tedious to the point of numbness, war had been declared and all civilian shipping stopped immediately. To my utmost horror, I found I was stranded in India. What started as a mildly irritating duty visit turned into a nightmare with no discernible end.

‘The dhirzee is coming this afternoon,’ Mama replied, fanning herself wearily in the hazy heat of the morning sun. ‘You could ask him to make up a new dress for you. I’ll buy you some cotton lawn.’

‘Oh, the dhirzee, the dhirzee,’ I parroted impatiently. ‘Who cares about the dhirzee? At Vogue –’

Mama frowned. Her interest in my work at the magazine had long since evaporated.

‘There’s a reception at Government House tonight,’ she said, clearly more in hope than in expectation I would agree to attend. She knew I hated the way she lined up men for me to consider as a husband.

I yawned again and drawled, ‘Terrific. Another boring do with more boring people.’ Then, as much to my astonishment as Mama’s, I added, ‘I suppose I might go. Anything is better than sitting in this dreary place.’

I was being unkind and I knew it. Calcutta was far from dreary: the city teemed with life and colour and every day brought new sights and new experiences. It was just that I had set my mind against them all. I longed for London and for the world of high fashion. Mother’s candidates did not attract me because I had no wish to marry, not in India at least.

I spent the late afternoon in the bazaar. I had little money for shopping but the smells and sounds and the blaze of colour generally lifted my spirits. I might find some trinket to adorn my hair, perhaps, or at least watch the glass blower at work and admire the pretty coloured baubles he coaxed from the end of his pipe. Here was the potter, his brick-red platters and bowls stacked high outside his shop. In this corner was the silversmith, using his bellows to fan the fire in his floor hole to heat his tongs. I stopped to watch him.

‘The process is called annealing,’ he told me in his old-fashioned, curiously lilting English, in response to my questions. ‘When I hammer the silver it goes hard. I have to heat it in the furnace to make it workable again.’

I had no money for his wares but I stopped at the tassel shop to finger the silky cords that hung there: white, green, magenta, gold. Why, I wondered in a rare moment of introspection as I stroked some intricately embroidered trimmings, was I so cantankerous all the time? I held a scarlet ribbon up next to my face and studied myself in the mirror the tassel seller held up for me. A small vertical line had developed on my forehead, like a reproach, and my lips seemed to have become tighter and thinner.

‘I’ll take this,’ I told the wrinkled, nut-brown vendor hurriedly, waving the mirror away.

The truth was, I hated being in Calcutta –and it was beginning to show.

The reception was in honour of a new regiment that had been recruited. Already troops were beginning to move through Calcutta and the atmosphere was increasingly sombre. In August, a friend of Mama’s had called a meeting at the Lighthouse Cinema to form ‘The Ladies General War Committee’. Mama had tried to persuade me to attend, but I had been stubbornly resistant. This war would be over in a few months and I was going back to London, and to Vogue. Why should I care?

I had taken some trouble over my appearance, donning another of Great Aunt Edie’s gifts, a daring scarlet gown, which I set off with a smart bow among my soft curls. The silk ribbon I had purchased was a vivid weal against my fair hair, but suited my present mood. I thought of Lottie and outlined my lips in bright red lipstick. It seemed appropriate: a bloody colour for the bloody war that was keeping me from England.

At the reception, I accepted a glass of tepid gin and bitters and managed to discreetly separate myself from my mother’s overbearing clutches.

Sir John Herbert, the new governor, bore down on me, clearly trying not to look too directly at my rather low neckline. ‘Ah, Miss Arbuthnot, delighted, delighted,’ he said. Then, making a gallant effort to engage me, he caught a passing soldier by the elbow and boomed, ‘May I introduce Captain Massinger? Or perhaps you know him already? I believe you sailed out together earlier this year.’

I turned and found myself staring into familiar inky black eyes. ‘Oh. It’s you,’ I said abruptly, disconcerted by the amusement I read in his gaze.

‘Honoured.’ He took my hand and bent over it, curiously formal, as Sir John’s attention was drawn elsewhere. ‘And how are you finding Calcutta?’

‘Utterly tedious,’ I replied with rash honesty.

‘Really? I should have thought there would be a great deal to do here. Calcutta’s going to be an important hub as this war unfolds. My friends tell me lots of women are already working hard to put support in place for those of us who will be on the front line.’

‘I don’t fancy knitting socks,’ I said, aware, even as I spoke, that the words sounded churlish. I had been distracted because I had just realised that a uniform did something to a man. Edward Massinger, accountant, had been handsome but irritatingly pedestrian. Edward Massinger soldier, though, had another aura entirely. On the ship I had seen him merely as a challenge. Now I felt the stirrings of real interest. Perhaps there might be something in Calcutta for me after all.

‘I concede the tedium of knitting socks,’ he smiled, ‘but I should have thought there would be other openings. The Messenger Service? Red Cross Supplies? The Censorship Office? What do you do with your time, by the way?’

I bridled. Was amusement turning to contempt? ‘I’m extremely busy,’ I lied.

‘Really? I suppose there is a certain amount of work necessary to maintain one’s looks –even for such a natural beauty as yourself.’

The compliment was so backhanded that I felt my breath leave my body. ‘Oh!’ I gasped, my hand fluttering to my heart. Tact was not my strongest suit, but I expected more of it in others.

‘Boredom,’ he added more gently, observing my upset, ‘should be a word in nobody’s lexicon. I apologise for my rudeness, Miss Arbuthnot, but I feel sorry for you. I believe you grossly underestimate how long this war will last and I do believe you might find some interest in some form of useful work.’

He took my hand to shake it farewell, but failed to release it. His eyes drilled into the core of my being and I felt my heart lurch absurdly. ‘You’ve been given many gifts, Cecilia,’ he said in a low voice, as if trying to address my very soul, ‘but you have only one life. Don’t waste it.’

His touch seemed to sear my skin like a branding iron. I felt that he was patronising, and I hated that –but something in a dusty corner of my mind must have registered the wisdom of his words. I had never felt so confused. I wished he would stop looking at me with that amused, gentle gaze, but at the same time I wanted nothing more than to sink into his embrace and dance with him into paradise. In that moment, I sensed a current of electricity arcing between us and knew that he felt it also.

Then he released my hand and was gone.

I joined the St John Ambulance Brigade and started my training as a nurse the very next day. There was little thought in my head either of self-fulfillment or of contributing to the war effort, the act was merely a settled determination to show Captain Massinger exactly what I was made of. I chose the St John, if I was honest, because the white dress and short veil offered the smartest uniform of all the volunteer services in Calcutta, and because I had a mental vision of myself as tender heroine, an angel of healing, adored by all. What I had completely failed to consider was just how grim the job would be.

Sister Crawford tried to instil in us the qualities we were expected to show. ‘We wear on our breasts the eight-pointed cross of Malta,’ she told us briskly on our first day. ‘Each point carries a promise assigned to it by the ancient Knights of St John: Loyalty, Perseverance, Tact –’

Commitment and determination I had in abundance, discretion I knew I needed to learn. She went on. ‘ –Dexterity, Observation, Explicitness, Gallantry –’ She explained what each would mean to us as nurses. ‘ –Sympathy.’

Here I struggled. Years of boarding had toughened me to the point of selfishness. I persevered, though. Anything was better than sitting at home with Mama, whose efforts to secure me a husband had intensified. The lectures on First Aid and Home Nursing and the examinations were dull but easy enough. Reality bit when I went on duty at the hospital. I experienced the humdrum of hospital routine and suffered through endless, sleep-deprived nights on duty. A month in an operation theatre began a gruelling process of hardening my soul to the sight of human bodies being sliced open, the flow of crimson blood and the nail-biting tension of emergency surgery. The operating theatre was just the beginning of it. In the wards, I had to steel myself against the hideous stench of gangrenous limbs and suppurating abscesses. I dealt with tuberculosis and venereal disease as a matter of routine.

I thought of the silversmith in the bazaar. ‘Hammering makes the silver hard,’ he had told me. I felt as though my mind and my senses were being constantly hammered. These things offended me but they didn’t touch my heart.

One day, a distraught mother arrived at the hospital with her baby, who had been appallingly scalded by an accident with a cooking pot. The mother’s wails were tortured, but the child seemed to be beyond screaming. She stared at me with terrified brown eyes. A single tear trembled on her cheek. I caught my breath.

‘I can’t bear this,’ I whimpered to my colleague as she started to dress the burns.

The nurse looked at me, irritated. ‘Just be glad that we are able to help,’ she said curtly. ‘And for God’s sake, get me some more liniment.’

It was a turning point. I forgot the hours of tedium spent in rolling bandages in the early days of my training or in staffing the first aid tent at sweltering gymkhanas. I saw how useful the work I had done protestingly at the baby clinic and the women’s outpatient department had really been.

Like the silver in the bazaar I had been plunged into the fire, and my compassion was finally unlocked. I went through the process of annealing, becoming hardened to the sights, smells and sounds of injury and disease, and softened by compassion for those I tended.

It had been almost a year since I had seen Edward Massinger at the governor’s party. I dreamed of him often but the searing memory of his taunts had been set against the grim reality of my daily experiences and had faded into nothingness. I only wished I could tell him.

I met Edward, for the third time, at a party on Christmas Day, 1940. I had arrived, hot and weary, and still dressed in my white uniform dress with the eight-pointed St John Ambulance cross embroidered in black on the left breast. In the saddlebag of my bicycle there was a pretty floral gown and some sandals.

Above me was an open window and I could hear Christmas carols being sung. ‘In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,’ was being lustily chanted by a dozen mildly drunk voices, and floated through the humid evening air. I started to laugh. The incongruity of song and place and time, compounded by exhaustion and the emotional intensity of the experiences of the day, proved too much for me. My laughter turned abruptly into hysteria and I flopped helplessly to the grass. My bicycle toppled and started to fall and through my tears and wails I had the sense of it being caught by a strong hand, and steadied.

‘Here,’ said a familiar voice, ‘let me.’ The bicycle was swiftly parked against the wall, a khaki-clad figure folded easily onto the grass beside me and a clean cotton square was produced for my use.

‘I’m so-so-sorry,’ I sniffed, when I was able to catch enough breath. ‘This is silly.’

An arm came round my shoulders and I felt a hand tilt my face upwards so that I found myself looking into a pair of eyes as dark as the night.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said, as I had once before.

‘You became a nurse, Miss Arbuthnot,’ he said, surveying my white dress with its eight-pointed cross: Eight promises, the eighth of which is love.

I smiled shakily. This was not at all how I had imagined our meeting. ‘You dared me. I was so angry with you for patronising me I went and volunteered the next day.’

‘Good for you.’

I looked at him sharply. In the bright, clear light of the stars I could see in the flesh the straight nose, the thick, dark eyebrows and strong chin that I had seen in my dreams for so long.

‘Are you being condescending again?’

I’d long since got over my anger. It had not been Edward’s fault that I had been packed off to boarding school half a world away from my family and it was not his fault that I was trapped here by the war. And –though I hated to admit it –he had been right. Working had been good for me, not just because it kept me busy to the point of bone weariness, but also because becoming a nurse had taught me about love.

‘If you thought I was being condescending, I’m sorry.’

The carollers above us trilled energetically into the night air: ‘Angels and archangels may have gathered there.’

I’d imagined my feelings for Edward Massinger were based on anger and had refused to countenance any other possibility. I’d longed to meet him again so that I could brandish my achievements in his face and prove that his opinion of me had been false. I’d wanted to thumb my pert little nose at him.

Now, under the stars, I was overcome by an ineluctable torrent of desire. I wasn’t angry with him, I realised –I craved his approval and I wanted only his love.

Another strain drifted towards us: ‘Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.’

I didn’t think about whether what I was doing was right or wrong –or, indeed, what the consequences might be. I simply lifted my hands and cradled them round his face, pulling his mouth towards mine, my hunger for his touch overwhelming.

‘Still bored, lovely Cecilia?’ he whispered, when at last we surfaced for air.

London seemed a world away, Vogue a ludicrous indulgence. Even if I returned to England after the war, I knew I would never go back to the magazine. Sympathy, Compassion, Love –the eighth promise. I looked deep into Edward’s eyes and saw that he already knew the answer to his question.

I pulled him closer again and we kissed until my breath ran out and my lips became blissfully numb.

‘Yet what I can I give him,’ came the voices from the window above us, drawing the carol to an end, ‘Give my heart.’