A Song At Twilight (13 page)

‘Not far off.’ He swung his legs off the bed and opened the door. As she stood there, small and pretty in her flowered pinafore, he was suddenly filled with affection for her. Pulling her into his arms, he gave her a smacking kiss, and she squealed with surprise.

‘Ben! Whatever are you doing?’

‘Giving you a kiss,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘And what’s more, I’m giving you another one, too.’

This time the kiss was gentler and lasted a little longer. As he released her, they looked at each other, suddenly solemn. Then Jeanie gave a little laugh and stepped away.

‘Come on, Ben. The pie will be getting cold.’ She turned and ran down the stairs and he followed, slowly and rather thoughtfully.

Sitting round the kitchen table eating rabbit pie, Ben was suffused with warmth and affection. He glanced at Jeanie once or twice, remembering their kiss, and caught her peeping at him through her lashes. Each time, she blushed and looked away quickly, and his heart gave an odd little twist. Afterwards, he helped her wash up and felt the same comfort that he had experienced while helping May Prettyjohn with the same task.

‘We’re going to listen to the wireless in the drawing room,’ Olivia said. ‘You’re welcome to come in as well, Jeanie.’

‘Oh, no – you’ll want Ben to yourselves. Anyway, I’ve got to put Hope to bed and there’s some mending I ought to be getting on with.’ Her voice was flustered and Olivia glanced at her curiously. As she followed her son into the large, pleasant drawing room, she said, ‘I hope you haven’t been upsetting Jeanie, Ben.’

‘Of course I haven’t! How could I have upset her?’

‘I don’t know,’ his mother said, ‘but you should remember that she’s had quite a hard time. It wouldn’t be kind to give her the wrong idea.’

Ben felt the warmth creep into his face. He bent to put a log on the fire and let the heat redden his cheeks, then straightened up. He said, ‘It’s all right, Mum. I won’t do that.’ He met her grey eyes. ‘I like Jeanie. That’s all.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if it
weren’t
all,’ Olivia said, ‘so long as you’re honest, and sensible. I’m very fond of Jeanie myself. I just don’t want either of you to be hurt.’

They were still standing there when the door opened again and John came in, carrying the daily paper. He glanced at them and said breezily, ‘Hasn’t anyone turned on the wireless yet? We’ll be missing half the programme.’ And he walked over to the set and began to twiddle the knobs.

As the whistling and burbling sounds of the wireless warming up filled the room, Olivia and Ben moved apart. Ben dropped into an armchair and his mother settled herself on the sofa. The signature tune of their favourite comedy programme began and they smiled at each other and prepared to enjoy themselves.

Jeanie didn’t come downstairs again. She stayed in her bedroom, sewing and listening to her own wireless, and thinking of her lost fiancé, Terry.

Alexandra arrived on the eleven-fifteen train from Ports-mouth next morning and almost fell from the carriage into Ben’s arms. She exclaimed in surprise and flung her own arms around him for a hearty hug.

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me you were going to be here?’

‘They were afraid you wouldn’t come if you knew that,’ he said, grinning, and she made a face at him.

‘They were probably right. What’s happened? Has the RAF come to its senses and thrown you out?’

‘Not at all,’ he said with dignity. ‘We were just given a forty-eight-hour pass, that’s all, before going on new duties. Night-flying.’

‘Oh.’ Her tone told him that, like their mother, she understood exactly what this meant. ‘I expect you’ll enjoy that.’

They fell into step, strolling back through the lanes to the vicarage. Alexandra lifted her head and sniffed. ‘It’s lovely to smell fresh country air again. Not that we don’t get plenty of fresh air at Haslar, being right on the sea, but country air’s different.’

‘There’s more muck, for a start,’ Ben said, stepping round a pile of horse dung.

Alexandra laughed. ‘Well, there’s that. But it’s
nice
muck – except when it’s pigs’, of course. And I get plenty of that smell at Haslar – there’s a pig farm not far from the hospital. How d’you like your new station, Ben?’

‘It’s good. Right on the edge of Dartmoor – plenty of fresh country air there, I can tell you. Plenty of good fresh food, too. We get quite a lot of stuff from local farms, and there are even places where you can get clotted cream.’

‘
Proper
clotted cream?’ she asked, and he nodded. ‘I haven’t had proper clotted cream since we went to Cornwall on holiday before the war.’

‘You ought to come down to Devon for a few days next time you get leave,’ he said. ‘There are some nice villages around Harrowbeer. I’m sure we could find you somewhere to stay. There’s a girl—’ He stopped suddenly and his sister gave him a quizzical glance.

‘There is, is there?’

‘It’s nothing like that!’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just a girl I met at a party at the Squadron Leader’s house. She helps his wife – they’re friends. Anyway, I don’t think they’d have room,’ he finished, remembering the situation in the Prettyjohns’ cottage. ‘But there must be plenty of other places.’

‘It’s an idea,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘as long as Mum wouldn’t mind. I know she likes me to come home whenever I can.’

They arrived at the vicarage gate and went into the house. Jeanie was polishing the hall floor and sat back on her heels as they came in, beaming. From the kitchen came the warm aroma of freshly baked bread, and they could hear Olivia chatting to Hope, who was kneeling up on a chair and watching as she stirred cake mixture in a brown and white earthenware bowl. She looked round as they came in and left the mixture at once to come and hug her daughter.

‘Alexie! You’re looking well. Come and sit down and I’ll make some coffee. Only Camp, I’m afraid, but it’s all we’ve been able to get for ages now. Take your fingers out of the cake mixture, Hope. I’ll let you scrape out the bowl when I’ve finished.’

‘Oh, I was hoping to do that,’ Ben said at once, and Jeanie bustled in from the hall and swooped on the little girl.

‘Come on, naughty. We’ll take you out into the garden and leave Mrs Hazelwood in peace. No,’ as Hope let out a roar of disappointment, ‘it’s no good screaming at me. We’re going to feed the chickens.’

‘It’s all right,’ Ben said as they departed, ‘I’ll leave the bowl for you.’ He went to put the kettle on and Olivia returned to her mixture. Alexandra sat down in the chair Hope had vacated, and stretched her arms above her head.

‘Oh, it’s good to be here. We’ve been terribly busy at the hospital. A lot of patients came in from that ship that went down in the Channel a week or so ago, and I’ve been working in theatre almost non-stop. We’re all exhausted – it’s the busiest we’ve been since Dieppe. Are there real eggs in that cake mixture?’

‘One,’ Olivia said. ‘The rest are dried. Ben had two for his breakfast.’

‘Greedy gannet,’ Ben’s sister said automatically. ‘Are the hens off lay, then?’

‘No, not yet, but I wanted to save some for you to take back with you. They’re in that bowl.’ Olivia nodded towards a bowl containing three brown eggs and Alexandra kissed her fingers at them. ‘You’ve got somewhere you can boil them, haven’t you?’

‘We can use the stove in the dormitory. You’re an angel, Mum. But will there be any left for Ben’s breakfast tomorrow?’

‘Not that you care!’ he said, pouring a teaspoon of dark brown Camp coffee liquid into each cup and adding boiling water. ‘What you’re really asking is whether you can have those too. You can if you like – we get fed pretty well. Won’t do me any harm to go without an egg for one morning.’

‘You’re both angels,’ Alexandra told them. ‘I come from a family of angels. That’s probably why I’m as nice as I am. Where’s Dad?’

‘Over in the church, being an angel,’ Ben said, and she drank her coffee and fished in the tin of broken biscuits, then pushed back her chair and stood up.

‘I’ll go and find him. Coming, Ben?’

Ben looked at her. As the only girl in the family, Alexandra had a special relationship with their father, and he knew that she really wanted some time with him on her own. He smiled and shook his head.

‘You go and be angels together, Sis. I’ll come over and tell you when lunch is ready.’ He slid into the chair she had vacated and stretched a tentative finger out to the mixing bowl.

Olivia slapped his hand away. ‘Honestly, Ben, you’re as bad as Hope.’ She sighed a little and he knew that she was thinking of her other two sons and wishing they could all be here together. ‘Sometimes, I wish you were all little again, playing around my feet and squabbling over who was going to scrape out the bowl or have the skin off the custard. It all seemed so safe, then. Nothing seemed to go wrong. The Great War was over and done with, the Twenties were in full swing and there was no sign of the Depression. It was a charmed time.’

‘It was an unreal time,’ he said. ‘Nothing was going wrong, but it was all there under the surface, waiting to happen. Like a pullover with one dropped stitch, waiting to unravel. And once it starts, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.’

‘Oh, Ben, that sounds terribly gloomy.’ She turned the mixture out into a cake tin and opened the oven door. ‘Even an unravelling pullover can be mended.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He ran his finger round the bowl and licked it. ‘I’m not so sure about an unravelling world, though.’

Olivia shut the oven door and straightened up, turning to face him. ‘You don’t think it’s that bad, do you? Oh, I know it’s dreadful – the whole war is dreadful. But surely we can put it right, eventually? It’s got to come to an end one day. Nobody can go on like this for ever.’

Ben looked at her. He wished he had not said anything – he wasn’t even sure why he had. The thoughts he had just expressed were those that came to him in the night, when he couldn’t sleep, when his fears about the dangers he faced every time he took off in his aircraft outweighed his joy in flying. And when men like Tubby Marsh were killed. Tubby, and all those others he had seen go to their deaths during the past two years.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Of course they can’t. It’ll come to an end one day, and we’ll sort it all out and put it right then. And it can’t be too long before that happens. Not after all we’ve been through.’

‘I hope not,’ Olivia said, staring with troubled eyes at the cluttered table. ‘Oh, Ben, I do so hope not.’

John and Alexandra returned in time for lunch, strolling arm in arm up the path that led from the churchyard. Jeanie and Hope had had their lunch first and gone for a walk, despite Olivia’s protests. ‘You want your family to yourself,’ Jeanie had said. ‘It’s only right. We’re going down to the Suttons’ farm to see Sylvie and the others – we’ll be back by teatime.’ She pulled on her coat, wrapped Hope’s scarf around her neck and departed.

Olivia shook her head. ‘She really doesn’t need to do that. She’s one of the family now.’

‘Is she?’ Alexandra asked. She hadn’t seen as much of Jeanie as Ben had done. ‘Does she have her meals with you all the time, then?’

‘Of course. She does most of the cooking, after all, and we usually eat in the kitchen these days. It would be silly for her and Hope to have their meals separately.’

‘I suppose so. Still, it’s nice to be on our own.’ Alexandra sat down at the table. ‘Mm, stew. It smells lovely – better than we get at Haslar.’

‘It’s always more difficult to cook large amounts.’ Olivia spooned out a helping of rich brown gravy, filled with carrots, onions and meat. ‘It’s rabbit again, I’m afraid, Ben, but it’s almost impossible to get any other meat now, except in tiny amounts. I don’t know what we’d do without Percy Fry bringing us rabbits. He brought two beauties this week – must have known you were coming.’

‘I like rabbit, anyway,’ Ben said, helping himself to mashed potato. ‘That pie Jeanie made last night was scrumptious. She’s turned into a really good cook, Mum, and all due to you.’

‘Oh, she wasn’t a bad cook when she first came. She just hadn’t had much chance, that’s all.’ Olivia served the rest of the stew and sat down. Alexandra looked impatient.

‘Do we have to talk about Jeanie all the time? After all, she’s only the maid, isn’t she? And if she didn’t have that child she’d be doing proper war work, like the rest of us have to.’

There was a brief silence. Ben opened his mouth indignantly, but before he could speak his father said quietly, ‘We don’t look on her as a maid, Alexie, but I’m sure she wouldn’t want us to be talking about her anyway. Tell us what you’ve been doing with yourself in your spare time.’

Ben glanced at his sister and saw the flush on her cheeks. He knew that she wouldn’t like being reproved by her father and hoped she wouldn’t go into a sulk. There was little enough time for them to spend together as it was. Swallowing his own annoyance at her remark, he said encouragingly, ‘Yes, what films have you seen lately? Or have you been dancing on your nights off?’

Alexandra ate in silence for a moment or two, then she said reluctantly, ‘I went to see
Jane Eyre
, with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. That was good. And Ingrid Bergman in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.’

‘I saw that, too,’ Ben said. ‘I thought it was rather good.’

‘I’ve been to a few dances as well,’ Alexandra went on. ‘We go over to Southsea mostly. They have Joe Loss sometimes, and Ambrose – all the big bands. And sometimes we push back the beds and do a bit of jitterbugging in the dormitory – one of the girls brought in her gramophone. I’m collecting Frank Sinatra’s records. I’ve got “You’ll Never Know” and “My Heart and I”.’

‘I like Glenn Miller best,’ Ben observed. ‘Have you heard his new one, “American Patrol”?’

They went on chatting and Jeanie was forgotten for the time being. Later, however, as they sprawled in armchairs in the sitting room in front of the fire, drinking tea and reading newspapers, they heard Hope’s voice piping on the pathway, and a moment or two later the front door opened. Alexandra glanced up from her paper and said, ‘Do they make themselves at home everywhere? I mean, will they be coming in here?’