A Gathering Storm (17 page)

Beatrice stared at him, her mind working, suddenly remembering the way Angie had looked at her in the mirror, her behaviour with Rafe this evening. She put her hands over her face as if to shut away the image. Peter was twisting everything, that was all. His hatred was poisonous.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, her voice dull.

‘Yes, you do.’ She felt him come close. He pulled her hands away roughly. ‘Look at me,’ he said, and she did. The anguish on his face was dreadful to see. ‘Believe me.’

‘Peter,’ she said, desperate. ‘You’ve got it wrong. They love you and care for you. They’ve been worrying all evening where you were. Didn’t they find you?’

‘Ed came up, and Mother,’ he said. He chuckled. ‘They knocked and called a bit, then when I didn’t answer they went away. As I say, they didn’t try very hard. I don’t fit in, you see. Don’t play the games they play.’

‘That’s silly,’ she said. ‘Childish.’

‘Don’t be unkind!’ he cried. ‘Not you, too.’

‘No, of course I won’t be, Peter, don’t worry, it’s all right.’ But he was looking at her so tenderly now it frightened her. She’d always been wary of him – his moods, his cutting comments – and now it was as though he stood open before her, and she saw his unhappiness down to the core. Poor Peter, the misfit. He slumped suddenly on the bed beside her, rolled over and buried his face in the eiderdown. She put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him as Rafe had tried to comfort her only half an hour ago. She knew he was wrong about his family. They did love him. They were loyal. They loved her and had been kind to her. Angelina had her faults, of course she did, but that was understandable. She was vulnerable, too. Beatrice didn’t mind that Mrs Wincanton had made her Angie’s guardian angel, she was proud to do it. And now Peter needed her help, too.

She coaxed him to sit up and it helped her to be strong. ‘Peter, come on. Your tie’s all crooked – there. Let’s go down, then, well, maybe you would take me in to supper.’ She’d said she’d go with Rafe, but Rafe would surely understand.

When they got downstairs, it was as though someone had turned on a bright light and she saw everything more clearly. She realized that her hostess and Brent Jarvis Esquire kept a too deliberate distance from each other, that Mr Wincanton had disappeared altogether. As for Angie, Rafe came up, full of apologies. ‘I waited a bit for you, then Angie asked me to take her in for supper. I hope you don’t mind.’

Beatrice shook her head dumbly.

After supper, Peter drank glass after glass of wine and shadowed Beatrice like a silent black dog, though hanging back from the dancing and the carol-singing round the piano, which was played by Jarvis. She was glad when midnight came and the car arrived to take them home. In the back seat, Rafe held her hand all the way and talked about the Wincantons, how pretty Angie had grown and what a good chap Ed was. On and on. Beatrice could hardly bear to listen.

Everybody was going away. After Christmas, Rafe travelled to Southampton to meet his mother off the ship, then accompanied her to London. On the first day of 1939, Beatrice walked up to Carlyon Manor to say goodbye to the Wincantons. The household was in a flurry of packing up. Angie, after much debate, was to return to Paris for a short time at least, Peter was set for school, Ed for Oxford. Only ten-year-old Hetty and her mother would remain, and they, too, would be moving to London in March for the start of the season. Beatrice wandered through the untidy rooms, sensing that a whole era of her life was coming to an end.

There was her own packing up to do, her mother furiously sewing name-tapes on the blouses, tunics and cardigans that arrived in the post. Two days into January her father drove her to his parents in Gloucestershire – the first time she’d met them for several years. In their lovely house of golden stone also lived her uncle and aunt and three younger cousins. Her grandparents’ household was a formal one, Mr and Mrs Marlow growing elderly now, and Beatrice’s Uncle George, Hugh’s elder brother, had taken over the management of the estate. She liked the gentle rolling countryside and the villages of mellow stone, liked being part of a busy family household and being treated as a grown-up, dressing for dinner every night and being introduced to guests as though she were a young woman, no longer a child. The cousins were rather sweet, twin girls of eight and a younger brother of six. Their mother, Aunt Julia, was Uncle George’s much younger second wife, his first, Sylvia, having caught tuberculosis and died around the time Beatrice was born. Julia was a jolly, friendly woman with a passion for hats and days out. She immediately took Beatrice under her wing, taught her to style her hair more fashionably and gave her face powder and lipstick.

Several days later, her father drove her to Larchmont, a girls’ school twenty miles from her grandparents’, and for the first time in her life she was left alone amongst strangers.

Larchmont was not one of those schools designed to teach genteel young ladies accomplishments. Rather, its Headmistress had founded it shortly after the Kaiser’s war to give girls who might need to earn a living an academic education.

Beatrice was relieved to find that although she was a little behind in geometry and algebra, Miss Simpkins had served her splendidly in all the other subjects she must take for her School Certificate. Lessons in a class of intelligent girls, mostly eager to learn, were a delightful new experience. The boarding, however, she hated.

The school was situated in a converted mill, and a very long narrow room under the eaves held the forty boarders in a single dormitory with no privacy but the blankets under which they slept. The bathrooms, too, were communal. Whilst in many ways enlightened, the Headmistress had no truck with individualism. Solitude, apart from the rule of silence in the library to foster private study, was deemed unhealthy, and once studies were over, the girls were expected to play team games in all weathers, or to join in the weekly cross-country runs. Beatrice, because of her illness, was excused all these, but since to be different at Larchmont meant social ostracism, she quickly became determined to drive the weakness from her limbs. This didn’t stop a small group of girls seeing her as odd and freezing her out of their activities. In time, she found her place, swimming in the middle of the shoal, determined to be no different from the other nervous fish swimming about her. It was to be another lesson in survival and she learnt it well.

She and Rafe wrote to one another regularly. He was happy that his mother was home, but the first surprise of the year was that he gave up Oxford, which seemed to be down to difficulties with money.
My stepfather has arranged for my inclusion in the next intake at military college. There’s nothing I can do.

At the end of March, Beatrice went home to Cornwall. On the evening of 26 March, the family listened to the devastating news that Hitler’s troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. Beatrice’s father leant forward and turned off the wireless. ‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said, his eyes blazing with a strangely satisfied light. ‘Even Chamberlain can’t ignore that.’

‘What do you think he’ll do?’ Delphine asked, her dark eyes huge in her pale face with its halo of prematurely greying hair. ‘There’s still a chance, isn’t there? He wouldn’t attack France or us. Why would he do that? Why should we have to fight him?’

Hugh Marlow took out his pipe and started to pack it with tobacco. ‘We can’t stand by and watch, my love, as he ravages other nations,’ he said. ‘It’s a moral principle, as simple as that. And it could be us next.’

‘Never mind the people of Czechoslovakia,’ Beatrice Ashton told Lucy. ‘Never mind the inexorable road to war. For Angelina, it was as though nothing had happened.’ She rooted about in a shoebox and brought out a small packet of letters, one of which she extracted and passed to Lucy.

‘This was all she could think about when Prague fell under the jackboot.’

Lucy took the sheets of folded paper, the top one engraved with an address in Queen’s Gate, Kensington. The letter was written in her grandmother’s rounded hand, quite easy to read.

Lucy handed it back to Beatrice. ‘I see what you mean. I suppose she was still very young. She told me once about being presented. She made it sound as though it was one of the greatest experiences of her life.’

‘You’re a kind girl and you’re right, I’m not entirely fair to her,’ Beatrice said, replacing the pack of letters in the box. ‘Our lives had to go on in the usual way, after all, and those debutantes all felt that it was their turn, their moment. It was what they’d been bred up for. It’s all too easy to be disapproving, looking back. My parents took a great interest in the political situation. Many people weren’t so well informed. But as the year waxed on there was such an odd atmosphere – on the wireless or when you talked to people. It was as if we knew we were walking towards disaster but could do nothing about it.’

‘I read somewhere that that sort of situation can make people eager to grab life and live for the moment,’ Lucy said.

‘I suppose that’s it. The danger imparted an urgency to everything. And so the debutantes danced and flirted, and I, who was only able to read what Angie wrote about it, I missed it all.’

July 1939

For two months now there had been no letter from Rafe, just a postcard of Nelson’s Column that arrived at school at the end of June with a
Hope all well, having a splendid time, will write soon
scrawled on the back which falsely raised her expectations. She wrote back to him immediately, a long gossipy letter about her school life, and looked every day after that for a reply, but there was nothing and she was cast down. Then term ended and her father came to fetch her.

Home was dull. Her parents were pleased to see her, of course, but they’d got used to being without her. Delphine was using Beatrice’s bedroom as a storeroom. There was a strange winter coat mothballed in the wardrobe, and a stack of Parisian fashion magazines – her mother’s private weakness – under the chest-of-drawers. Bea found one or two acquaintances to play tennis with, and exercised the horses for old Harry, but with the Wincantons away, St Florian’s felt empty.

The letter from Angie landed on the mat at home a week later. She picked it up with a feeling of foreboding, hearing the postman’s mournful whistle and the squeak of the garden gate.

‘I’m taking Jinx out,’ she called to her mother. On a whim, she set off, not for the beach, but up past the tennis club, where a path led alongside a field of ripening grain. By the tennis courts was a bench where she sat and took out the letter. The place had a deserted feel about it. Behind her, Mr Varcoe, the groundsman, was re-liming the lines on the grass courts.

The envelope smelt of scent and stiff elegance, and opened easily. She read it twice, which was necessary, for the sentences rambled about in Angie’s careless manner.

Beatrice sat for a long moment, lost in thought. Gradually she became aware of the normal sounds of summer around her. Birds singing, Mr Varcoe’s pottering, someone sawing wood a couple of gardens away. Jinx lay panting, waiting patiently for his walk. There was nothing to suggest that life was any different from five minutes ago and she couldn’t say exactly how, but it was. Something had shifted. The thought of walking back home to her parents and continuing with the routines of her life seemed completely impossible.

Jinx gave a little bark to remind her he was there.

‘Yes, all right,’ she told him. She made herself stand up.