Henrietta Sees It Through (6 page)

I said, ‘Yes.'

‘I never thought I'd want to buy a hat out of our Street, but I want that little hat,' said Lady B, and she heaved a sigh which blurred quite a large patch on the shop window.

‘Buy it,' I said.

Lady B turned anxious blue eyes on me. ‘Do you think it would be helping Hitler?' she said in a low voice.

‘It would help Mathilde's shop.'

‘It is sometimes very difficult to know what is the Right Thing to do,' said Lady B, and she sighed again.

I rubbed the glass with my handkerchief, and we gazed once more in silence at the little black hat. Then I said: ‘If you were to wire the brim of the hat you wore at the Thomson wedding, you could make it very like that one.'

‘But I'd never get a quill that colour. I like the quill.'

‘There are seagulls on the beach,' I said, ‘and I have some coloured inks.'

The weather on the day of the party was lovely, and I thought I had never seen the Locals looking so smart and gay, but as soon as we caught sight of the Best Dressed Woman we realised that the one thing we had forgotten to do was to shorten our skirts. This cast a dowdy gloom over the beginning of the party, though people were able to throw it off later and enjoy themselves. Lady B looked a peach in the home-trimmed hat, and personally I thought she left the Best Dressed Woman at the post, but that may be because I had had a hand in the trimming.

I wore my black London coat, and my fox fur, mercifully preserved from the moth, and the hat I wore last time I
lunched with you at the Savoy Grill. I remember you said you liked it, Robert, and so, according to Lady B, either you are not a nice man, or it is a bad hat. I kept thinking of this, and what fun that lunch had been, and how little real fun there is about these days, and what with these sad thoughts and my usual Party Panic, which attacks me on the doorstep, I arrived at Mrs Savernack's house in a very low state, and it was all I could do to get myself in at the front door.

The first thing I did at the party was to tread on a tomato sandwich which Colonel Simpkins had dropped on the floor, and grind it into the carpet with my heel. Drawing back with a cry of dismay, I bumped into the Conductor, who spilt his tea down the back of my coat. The Conductor mopped me up with his handkerchief, and we managed to scrape the tomato sandwich off the floor with the fire shovel without either Mr or Mrs Savernack seeing.

‘And this is our Doctor's Wife,' said Mrs Savernack, and I was propelled unwillingly into the Presence.

‘I'm not. I'm Henrietta Brown,' I said.

‘Yes?' they said, with gracious Government House smiles.

‘At least, of course I
am
the Doctor's Wife, but I'm Henrietta Brown too, if you know what I mean. I always think it is rather depressing being called somebody's wife all the time.'

The Best Dressed Woman looked at me without sympathy. ‘It has always made me very proud,' she said simply, and she and the Cabinet Minister exchanged a long, loving smile. After that there was a pause.

Feeling it was up to me to make a non-committal remark, I asked if they had seen the Savernacks' garden. They said they had, and that the fruit was magnificent.

I was propelled unwillingly into the Presence

I said: ‘We're going to have a plumper bum crop this year.' Then Lady B came and led me away.

Mrs Whinebite arrived late, wearing the Mathilde model, and gave Lady B a very disagreeable look. Mrs Whinebite, who ought always to wear hats trimmed with raffia, and generally does, looked terrible in the Mathilde, and nobody but she and Lady B and I recognised it as a twin.

Always your affectionate Childhood's Friend,

H
ENRIETTA

 

 

 

August 12, 1942

M
Y
D
EAR
R
OBERT

I have been having headaches. Evensong, who suffers dreadfully in her head, said they were nothing. I thought they were quite bad, but whenever I mentioned them to
Charles, he said fretfully: ‘For goodness' sake don't let's have Illness in the Home;' so at last I put on a hat and went and sat in his waiting room with all the other patients. Even that wasn't a great success, because the patients said: ‘You won't mind if I go before you, will you, because you can see dear Doctor Brown at any time, and I'm in such a hurry.' So that, in the end, I was the only one left, and Charles rushed in and said: ‘I'm awfully sorry Henrietta, but I can't stop now. You must come another time.'

When the Linnet came home for some leave, I told her about my headaches. The Linnet, who is a sympathetic child, listened with attention, and when Charles came in she said, in a sort of nurse's voice: ‘I think Mummy's got neurasthenia.'

‘Then she'd better go and see Knox,' said Charles, in a relieved voice.

Knox is the eminent psychiatrist who heals the mentally unstable in our Cathedral City. Knox isn't his real name. We call him that because he is a Nervo specialist, from which you will gather, dear Robert, that this family is not yet cured of its habit of making poor jokes.
*

The following Wednesday I was shown into the hushed stillness of Knox's exquisite waiting room. I sat there in great contentment. I was a Patient at last. I hadn't enjoyed such a luxury for years.

A secretary with a face like a Madonna stole silently into the room. ‘Will you come this way, Mrs Brown,' she said, with a gentle smile, and I tiptoed into the Presence.

‘My dear Henrietta,' said Knox. ‘I am delighted to see you, but what brings you here?'

‘I've got neurasthenia,' I said proudly.

‘Dear me!' said Knox in his kindly way; ‘and how have you managed to get that?'

‘Do you think it might be the war?'

‘It's a possibility.'

Knox's room was cool and dim, and the Patients' Chair a cradle of billowing comfort. After answering one or two sympathetic questions about the children, Matins, Evensong, and Shopping in the Street, my tongue was loosened and a torrent of words poured from my lips. Knox listened with the deepest attention. From time to time he made an attempt to say something himself, but I waved him aside and swept onwards, borne on the torrent of my own loquacity. I was a Patient with neurasthenia, and I had often heard Charles say that they did nothing but talk about themselves. Well, here was my chance. It might never occur again, and I was going to make the best of it.

At the end of an hour, I paused for breath, and Knox rang the bell and asked the secretary to bring me a glass of water.

‘All you have told me is very interesting,' he said.

‘Is it?' I said in a hoarse voice, and opened my mouth to begin again.

‘Tell me,' said Knox quickly, ‘do you ever have dreams?'

‘Often.'

‘Peculiar dreams?'

‘Very peculiar. I once dreamt that I went to put something in the oven, and there, curled up on the bottom shelf, was a tiny little kangeroo. And another time I dreamt that Charles had grown a long, drooping moustache.'

‘Nothing more peculiar than that?'

‘If you don't think a kangaroo in the gas cooker peculiar, I do.'

‘I dreamt that Charles had grown a long, drooping moustache'

‘Perhaps,' said Knox sadly, and wrote it down in his little book.

‘She looks very flushed and excited, doesn't she?' said the Linnet, when I got home. ‘Was it nice, darling?'

‘It was
lovely.
'

‘Have you got back to the Bee and the Pollen yet?' said Charles.

‘I suppose you know you'll fall in love with the Doctor,' said the Linnet. ‘They all do.'

‘It's a very humiliating thought,' I said.

‘Oh, I don't know,' said the Linnet. ‘I think Knox is rather sweet.'

‘He's very sweet. But having everything you say written down in a little book and typed out by the secretary afterwards is not my idea of a good love affair.'

‘I see what you mean,' said the Linnet.

Always your affectionate Childhood's Friend,

H
ENRIETTA

P.S. My headaches have gone.

 

 

 

*
Nervo and Knox were a pair of well-known music-hall comedians and members of the immensely popular Crazy Gang.

 

 

 

September 9, 1942

M
Y
D
EAR
R
OBERT

Every time I see one of those Fuel Target notices in the paper a sort of film comes over my brain, but Charles likes problems, and he spent the whole of what would have been a free hour on Sunday afternoon working out how much coal, gas, coke and electric light we would have to do without this winter.

After a lot of muttering he laid down his pencil and said: ‘That's easy. If we shut up the dining room and put one of those stoves in the drawing room we ought to be all right.'

‘Good.'

‘Of course, you must never light the gas fire in your bedroom, or use the electric iron, or the vacuum cleaner, and I'm afraid you'll have to shut up your studio and bring your work down to the drawing room, and Matins and Evensong must never have more than one burner alight at a time on the gas cooker; otherwise we can go on much as usual.'

‘I see. I thought the Government said that if we saved one lump of coal a day it would be enough.'

‘Did they say that?' said Charles. ‘They can't have meant it.'

Charles now calls himself Herr Fuel Obermeister, and has developed the irritating habit of poking his head round the door of any room where I happen to be sitting and switching off the light, leaving me in darkness. He says that if we hit our Fuel Target he would like to be called Herr
Von
Fuel Obermeister.

I have become a sort of unofficial Fire-Watcher. I can't be a proper one because, if Charles is out, there is nobody to answer the telephone, but I have got a tin hat, and a
whistle with which to communicate with the Fire-Watchers proper in the road below, and I walk about on the flat roof outside my bedroom.

I was out there a few nights ago, admiring the moon on the sea and thinking that the hum of aeroplanes is quite the most disagreeable sound in the world, when I heard feet crunching on the gravel below. ‘Who's there?' I said in a loud whisper, leaning over the parapet.

‘It's Lady B,' said a voice out of the shadows. ‘Can I come up?'

‘Wait a minute and I'll come down and open the door.'

‘Can't I come up the ladder?'

‘Well, if you really want to——'

‘Of course I want to,' said Lady B, and a minute later she was stepping nimbly over the parapet and onto the roof. By the light of the moon I could see she was wearing a neat siren suit and a tin hat.

She was stepping nimbly over the parapet

‘How nice you look,' I said.

‘Nonsense, Henrietta!' said Lady B. ‘An old woman of my age!' But I could hear she was pleased.