The FitzOsbornes at War (33 page)

‘All the windows facing south on the third floor were blown out,’ said Veronica. ‘But the floors above and below are fine. It’s so odd.’

‘That’s nothing to what I’ve seen,’ one of the ARP men said. ‘I’ve seen a row of terrace houses razed to the ground, with the house at the end completely untouched.’

‘Is our flat all right?’ I finally thought to ask Veronica.

‘A big crack in the bathroom wall, but nothing that can’t be patched up.’

‘I’ve seen a house in Notting Hill with the entire front peeled away,’ said the ARP man. ‘Like a doll’s house, it was. The lights still worked and all.’

‘That was a bad raid, last night,’ the other ARP man told us. ‘Low tide, you see. The firemen couldn’t pump enough water out of the Thames.’

‘Elephant and Castle went up like a tinderbox,’ said the first man, with a sort of gruesome relish.

‘I heard they hit the Houses of Parliament, too,’ said the other.

‘No!’ chorused Veronica and I, horrified.

But he was right. The House of Commons, the War Office, the Law Courts in the Strand, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of St James, St Thomas’s Hospital, King’s Cross Station, the church where Julia and Anthony had been married, the cinema at Marble Arch where I’d seen
Wuthering Heights
. . . and worst of all, the one that made Veronica nearly cry when she heard about it, the British Museum. Hundreds of thousands of its books, burnt to cinders.

But of course, that wasn’t
really
the worst. The
very
worst was all the people who lost their lives. I don’t know how many died, because they don’t tell us the numbers any more. Hundreds, probably, and thousands badly hurt, and even more made homeless. That’s why I disagree with Veronica, about fleeting pleasure being worthless. Everything is fleeting now.
Life
is fleeting. We have to savour any little bit of pleasure we come across, no matter how evanescent it may turn out to be.

28th June, 1941

I
T SEEMS TO ME THAT
there must come a time when our population will mostly consist of the dead, and the horribly injured, and those neither dead nor injured but so overwhelmed with grief that they are unable to function as normal human beings. At which point, I assume we will surrender. Unless the Germans get there before us, in which case
they
will surrender. There are moments when I don’t much care
who
reaches that point first, as long as the war ends. I experienced one of those moments today.

Of course, I do understand why we’re fighting. I understand that the Nazis are wrong, that sacrifices must be made if we want to defeat them. I
know
all that, and yet this incessant suffering makes me so sick to my stomach that I simply want it to stop. The fact that I have avoided the worst of it so far – that all of my family is still alive – only adds anxiety and guilt to my despair.

But who
wouldn’t
feel despair, on the day of a funeral? And
such
a depressing funeral, too. There is something badly wrong with a world in which so many parents are mourning their sons, and young wives their husbands . . . Oh, what a
mess
this journal entry is turning out to be, much like my day. Let me start again.

David Stanley-Ross was killed in battle last week in the Middle East. He was buried where he fell, in the desert, some place with a biblical name, and afterwards, his brigadier sat down and wrote a letter to David’s parents. He no doubt described David as a hero, cut down while valiantly leading his men to victory; official letters always say that sort of thing. I can’t imagine it provided any consolation at all to Lord and Lady Astley, from what I observed of them at the funeral. Lady Astley seemed determined to maintain a dignified front and greeted everyone with a steely, straight-backed composure. It was only up close that one noticed the tremor. If Julia hadn’t had a firm grasp of her mother’s arm throughout, I really think poor Lady Astley might have fallen into a shaking heap. Meanwhile, Lord Astley slumped into the front pew, dropped his head into his hands and wept. I’d never before seen a grown man cry – not in public, not in
England
. (I know Mr Churchill does it sometimes at bomb sites, but he’s half American and entirely eccentric, so he doesn’t count.) Rupert – usually so compassionate – made no attempt to console his father, but perched at the very end of the pew, his face averted, his jaw clenched, his arms tightly crossed. There was no sign of Charlie, Rupert’s elder brother. Most shocking of all was the sight of Penelope, David’s widow. I hadn’t realised she was having a baby (although the person most likely to mention it would have been Julia, who might have had her own reasons for not bringing up the subject). Poor Penelope! She looked so pale and bewildered as she was helped down the aisle to her seat. The sweltering heat, or clothes rationing, or advanced pregnancy, or perhaps sheer, unadulterated misery, had led her to abandon her usual fashionable outfits in favour of a shapeless frock in an unflattering cotton print. I don’t think I’d ever felt so sorry for someone I disliked. I hadn’t liked David much, either, and I felt desperately sorry for
him
, too. So I was pretty much drowning in uncomfortable, mismatched emotions.

If only Veronica had been able to take time off work to come to Astley with me, or Toby had been granted leave. But all I had was Aunt Charlotte and Lady Bosworth, who’d collected me from Salisbury railway station in Lady Bosworth’s official Red Cross motor car. Aunt Charlotte had insisted on sitting in the front so she could give Lady Bosworth helpful driving hints (never mind that Aunt Charlotte has never held a driving licence). As a result, the journey was less than peaceful. Sitting between them in church wasn’t much better. In addition, the vicar was one of those excessively patriotic types who fancied himself a great orator – he even affected a Churchillian lisp. He held forth on ‘defending our great and mighty Empire’ and ‘standing firm against the brutish Hun’ and how ‘every drop of our boys’ blood spilled in the sand brings us closer to victory’. Poor Penelope looked as though she was going to be sick, and even I started to feel a bit queasy. It was a relief when the final hymn was announced, despite this being ‘The Son of God Goes Forth to War’ (I refused to sing it, the lyrics are simply
too
gory and awful).

‘So kind of you to come,’ Lady Astley said afterwards on the church steps. She pressed Aunt Charlotte’s hand and gave us both a gracious smile. ‘Everyone has been so –’

She looked over my shoulder, and her mask slipped for a second, revealing naked anguish.

‘Oh, Sophia,’ she cried, ‘won’t
you
try to talk to him?’

I turned to see Rupert shoving past the vicar and stalking off round the corner of the church. I was still gaping when Aunt Charlotte, to my surprise, added urgently, ‘Yes, dear. Go on!’

So I ran after him. I was wearing my narrow black skirt and city shoes, though, and he was striding so quickly between the gravestones that I hadn’t a hope of catching up.

‘Rupert!’ I called.
‘Rupert!’

He whirled about, scowling, his fists clenched. Then he blinked. ‘Sophie?’ he said, his voice rough and strange.

I took a cautious step forward. ‘I . . . I only wanted to see if you were all right,’ I said, feeling as though I ought to be crouching down and holding out my fingers, the way one does with a wary, unfamiliar dog. ‘It’s fine if you’d rather be alone, but I thought I’d ask.’

I decided not to mention his mother’s concern.

Rupert pushed his hair off his damp forehead. ‘I just wanted to get away from that lot, that’s all,’ he said, jerking his head at the church. ‘I’m going back to the house. You can come, if you’d like.’ Then he walked off.

It wasn’t the most cordial invitation I’d ever received, but I picked my way after him, past raw wooden crosses with wilting posies propped against them, and on into the old section of the graveyard, where the grass and the wildflowers brushed my knees and weathered fragments of gravestones were sinking back into the earth at odd angles. Then the grass flattened out, and we came to a low stone wall and a gate that was hanging off its hinges.

‘I think we’re meant to be responsible for that,’ said Rupert, nudging the gate with his shoe. ‘Fixing it, I mean.’ A path meandered out of the graveyard, past a cornfield and up the hill towards Astley Manor. But Rupert turned his back on the house and sat down on the wall, in the shade of a broad chestnut. I went over to join him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, after a while.

‘What for?’ I said. ‘I don’t need an apology.’

‘But I was rude to you,’ he said, ‘and I ignored everyone else, when they were just trying to help.
And
I snapped at the vicar.’

‘Well, vicars ought to be accustomed to people getting upset at funerals,’ I said. ‘Besides, he didn’t seem a very
sensitive
vicar. I wanted to throw a hymn book at him myself, when he started going on about boys bleeding to death in the sand.’

‘Wasn’t it disgusting?’ said Rupert. ‘I thought poor Penelope was going to pass out. “Young David’s blood was not spilled in vain”! I could hear my father muttering, “Yes, it
was
!”
He
just wishes it’d been
my
blood.’

‘He didn’t say that!’

‘He might as well have. That’s what he thinks. Much better
I
were killed than his beloved David. His favourite, the
heir
.’ Rupert grimaced. ‘We had an almighty row last night, as you might have gathered. He said something stupid to Penelope at dinner, about how she’d better make sure the baby was a boy. It was one of those joking remarks that’s not really a joke. So she burst into tears and rushed out, and Julia went after her, and I told him he was an unfeeling clod. You can imagine how it went from there. Oh, and my mother made it all ten times worse by taking my side. It reminded him
yet again
of what a pathetic mama’s boy his youngest son is. He hates the idea of me as the new heir. The last five Lord Astleys were officers of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, and here am
I
, so feeble I couldn’t even pass the army medical!’

I wasn’t even sure where to begin with this. I had to admit that Lord Astley was rather gruff at the best of times, and now, grief-stricken, might well have lashed out and said something insensitive. But it was also true that Rupert and his father had always been sadly at odds with each other. And then this baby of Penelope’s . . . I understood that if the baby turned out to be a boy, he was destined to be the next Lord Astley, now that David was dead. Still, if the baby were a girl . . . well, wasn’t
Charlie
the elder son now?

‘Oh, but I haven’t told you,’ said Rupert, following my thoughts. ‘Charlie’s gone missing, you see. Not missing in action – we just don’t know where he is.’

‘You mean . . . he’s deserted?’

‘No, apparently he’s changed his name, which makes it hard to track him down. He could even be with the British Army now. The Colonel thought he might have been recruited into a commando unit, which wouldn’t surprise me in the least. If Charlie had been stuck with a lot of Canadian soldiers in billets up north, doing absolutely nothing for months on end, he’d have leapt at the chance for some excitement.’ Rupert dug the tip of his shoe into the dust, and added, without looking at me, ‘It
is
possible he was sent to Crete last month.’

‘That . . . didn’t go very well for the Allies, did it?’

‘Complete disaster, according to the Colonel. If Charlie
was
there, he’s probably a prisoner of war now. If he wasn’t killed in action.’

‘Oh, Rupert,’ I said helplessly. ‘I’m
so
sorry.’

‘Even if he’s alive, he’ll never want to settle down
here
. He used to say to me, “The only good thing about David is that
he’s
responsible for all this, not us. He’ll be stuck here forever, and we’ll be free.” It’s true, you know. David got all the attention and all the privileges, we were just the spares. And David
loved
strutting about, lording it over us –’