The Second-last Woman in England (17 page)

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

Simon frowned. ‘But that’s why you wanted to meet, isn’t it? Because of Cecil?’

Well. Here it was. She took a deep breath.

‘No. It’s nothing to do with Cecil.’ She opened her cigarette case and took out a cigarette. ‘Freddie’s back. He’s been back a couple of months. I thought you ought to know.’

She closed the cigarette case and it was only when the cigarette was in her mouth and alight that she allowed herself to notice Simon’s reaction.

He was observing her silently and his face was expressionless. Quite expressionless, but she could see now that his hands, resting on the arms of the ancient leather armchair, were rigid, his entire body tense.

‘I see. When did he arrive?’ he asked finally. ‘And who knows he’s here?’

Yes, that was Simon. She could almost see the questions, the implications, flitting across his brain, one after another. Harriet drew on her cigarette. The smoke from its tip drifted in a single column towards the once ornate ceiling.

‘August. And no one knows.’

‘August!’ The fingers clenched tightly together for a moment then carefully stretched out again on the armrests. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me earlier?’

‘He asked me not to. Thought you might feel … compromised.’

‘Compromised! Too damned right! Good Lord.’ Simon fell silent, mulling this over. Finally he took a deep breath. ‘All right. But why now? What does he hope to accomplish?’

‘For God’s sake, he wanted to come home. Is that so hard to understand?’

‘Yes, damn it!’ and now Simon got to his feet, walked over to the window. Walked back again. Sat down. ‘He’s forfeited any right to come home. It’s not his decision to make. He can never come home.’

‘Well, he has.’

The silence that followed was lengthy.

Finally Simon spoke.

‘Have you assisted him?’

His eyes locked onto hers and Harriet wordlessly returned the look. Would Simon know if she were lying? He would think he would, but Harriet rather doubted it.

‘You sound like a barrister, Simon. No. I did not assist him. He didn’t ask me to. He telephoned me one morning in September after Cecil had gone to work and the children were at school.’

‘You mean he’s been to the
house
?’

‘No, I do not.’ She spoke slowly and calmly. ‘I’m hardly going to risk letting him come to the house, am I?’ She crushed her cigarette in the ashtray and searched for another. ‘I met him in the garden.’

‘But good God, Harri, anyone could have seen him—could have seen the two of you!’

‘It’s a private garden, only residents have a key. You know that. And it’s secluded. Besides, what the hell would it matter if someone did see him? He’s perfectly anonymous. He looks just like every other young man in London, Simon. Or did you think he’d have a mark on his forehead?’

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Madam?’ The ancient waiter appeared with a martini glass on a silver tray. He bowed stiffly and placed the glass on the table beside Harriet. ‘Good morning, Group Captain Paget. Your usual, sir?’

Simon nodded curtly. When the waiter had gone he turned again to Harriet.

‘I still fail to understand what Freddie hopes to achieve by coming back. And what on earth is he living on?’

‘The money Father left him? What he saved working overseas? Lord, I don’t know.’ Harriet shrugged impatiently. Why did Simon always get so caught up in the unnecessary details? Perhaps it was working at the Palace that did it. No doubt every minute of every day was timetabled, every item of one’s wardrobe was worked out in advance, every meal, every occasion, planned down to the finest detail.

Simon looked aghast.

‘You mean he’s just walked into his bank and made a withdrawal?’

‘How the devil should I know?’

‘Well, didn’t you ask him?’

‘Obviously not.’

From the Reading Room came the sound of a particularly unpleasant fit of coughing. While it lasted Harriet took the opportunity to knock back her Martini. She grimaced. It was hideous—drowning in vermouth. A small and wrinkled olive rolled about at the bottom of the glass, looking as though it dated from before the war.

‘Your scotch and soda, sir.’

Simon took the drink and nodded at the ancient waiter without looking at him, a frown creasing his brow and a vein twitching on his left temple. Harriet watched him through the haze of cigarette smoke, aware a similar frown had appeared on her own face.

‘May I?’

Simon reached over and took a cigarette from her case and lit it silently.

I shouldn’t have come, Harriet realised. It had been a mistake. She had come here for Simon’s sake because surely he had the right to know; would want to know? But now she realised the opposite was true: Simon would rather not know.

She looked around for the waiter, but he had vanished and perhaps that was just as well: she felt bloody-minded enough to inform him just how undrinkable his martini was. She placed her glass on the table and sank back into the uncomfortable leather upholstery of the chair. She had come here, she realised, not for Simon’s sake at all, but because she needed his help. Help that Simon did not have, and had never had, any intention of giving.

‘And not even Cecil knows?’ said Simon, leaning forward and speaking in a low tone.

‘
No
. I haven’t said anything.’

‘Well
don’t
, for God’s sake. The fewer people who know—’

‘No one knows! God, you can be so bloody conventional sometimes, Simon.’

He glared at her and they smoked in silence.

‘All right, then, where has he been? Where was he living all this time?’

‘Canada, I understand. I think he was in the States for a while, too, but mostly Canada. Toronto, Alberta, Vancouver. He appears to have moved around.’

‘Doing what?’

‘All kinds of things. Clerical. I think he said he was a clerk for a railway company out west. And for a shipping company in Hudson Bay.’

Simon nodded, then he sighed.

‘But what does he intend to do here? Nothing’s changed.’

‘He thinks it has.’

‘Then he’s mistaken.’

‘No, he believes there’ll be an amnesty. Soon.’

Simon picked up the scotch and soda again and swirled it around in the tumbler. His eye was caught by the folded copy of
The Times
that Harriet had discarded. The headline about Peter Goodfellow lay between them in bold, 18-point serif typeface.

‘Perhaps there will be,’ Simon replied at last. ‘But it changes nothing. Don’t you see that, Harriet? He’s a deserter. That can’t be changed, amnesty or no amnesty. ’

Chapter Eleven

NOVEMBER 1952

He would wait for Harriet to tell him herself about Freddie’s return.

Cecil reached for his cufflinks and fixed them to his shirt cuffs. He had made this resolution two weeks ago, when he had come home from the office during his lunch-hour and seen Freddie in the garden, and, so far, Harriet had not said a word. Instead, she continued to make polite conversation over breakfast and dinner and was always ready with his scotch and water each evening. She appeared to be attending the usual number of committees, charity events, lunches, dinners, appointments with her dressmaker, gallery openings and first nights. Indeed, here they were off to Sadler’s Wells to see
Don Giovanni
just like any other married couple. Just as though Freddie had not come back.

‘Don’t fiddle with that, please, Anne.’

She was next-door in her dressing room now, arranging her hair. He could tell by the way she spoke that she had a hairclip stuck in the corner of her mouth. And by the sound of it, Anne was assisting her.

‘Which ones will you wear tonight, Mummy?’ Anne could be heard inquiring in her mock-adult voice.

‘Hmm? Oh, just the pearls.’

‘Shall I help you put them on?’

‘No, dear. The catch is very easy. And I’d rather not have your sticky fingers all over them.’

‘I don’t think my fingers
are
sticky.’

Perhaps the spell was broken? Perhaps whatever hold Freddie appeared to have over her was no longer there, she had cast it off? But if that were true, why had she failed to tell him that Freddie had returned?

‘This is from India, isn’t it?’ said Anne, and he knew she was opening her mother’s jewellery box.

‘Yes, I believe so, originally.’

‘Did grandfather bring it back from India with him?’

‘No, dear. Your father picked it up in a shop on the Fulham Road.’

Cecil paused in his attempt to fix the cufflink and looked at his reflection in the dressing-table mirror. He
had
picked it up in the Fulham Road, years ago, one balmy July evening on his way home from the office. He had seen it in the window of the old antique shop that used to be on the corner—long gone now—and on the spur of the moment had walked in and purchased it. It had come from India, originally, and perhaps that was what had made him buy it for her.

The catch on the cufflink refused to snap back into place no matter how hard he tried to force it and eventually it broke in two, and he stared down at it in disbelief. They had been his father’s cufflinks, a present from his mother to his father, and now they were broken.

At a sound on the landing he looked up and saw Anne in the mirror, standing in his bedroom doorway, silently watching him. He turned around and smiled at her, though he could think of nothing to say.

‘What are you going to see, Daddy?’ she asked, though he knew she already knew.

‘
Don Giovanni
.’

‘What is
Don Giovanni
, Daddy?’

‘Not what, who. He was a Spanish nobleman who treated women badly and came to a very sticky end. Or that’s the myth anyway. And then he was made into an opera by Mozart.’

She nodded thoughtfully, and encouraged by this, Cecil added:

‘We’ll take you, in a few years. You and Julius. Would you like that?’

‘I don’t think I shall like opera,’ she replied, and drifted off.

Cecil turned back to the mirror and after a moment he undid the first cufflink and laid it and the two halves of the broken one side by side on his dressing-table.

Less than a week after he had seen her in the tea room at Harrods, the meaning of his wife’s tears had become horribly apparent.

The police had come to the house in March of ’44 and at first Cecil had assumed they had come to report that Freddie had been killed in action.

They had all been sitting down to Sunday lunch, a rare enough event in those days, and exactly what this wartime Sunday lunch had consisted of it was hard now to imagine, though sometime around 1943 Mrs Thompson had begun producing pigeon pie, and by March ’44 it had felt as though they had been subsisting on pigeon and boiled turnips for some months, though it had probably only been a few weeks. The windows, he remembered, had had tape stuck diagonally across each pane in case of shrapnel, and during the week the black-out curtains were simply left in place and half rooms not used. But that day, it being a Sunday and Cecil being at home for once, Mrs Thompson had pulled back the curtains and lit a fire in the grate.

The two men had rung the doorbell. Somehow one did not expect bad news when people rang the doorbell. It would be a sharp rap on the front door, not this dignified chime that ought to have heralded guests for lunch but instead brought two officers of the military police.

Julius had jumped down from his chair, his spoon in his hand, and had run down the stairs shrieking excitedly. Harriet had got up, calling sharply after him, and Cecil had remained in his chair, wondering where Julius had picked up such atrocious table manners.

‘Soldiers!’ cried Julius, and he could be heard now pelting back up the stairs. ‘Mummy, it’s soldiers!’ and Cecil and Harriet had exchanged a look.

What look, then, had they exchanged? Cecil had thought, well, that’s it, it’s Freddie, wounded or worse … Harriet’s look, he remembered clearly, was one of sheer panic.

Mrs Thompson had appeared in the doorway, wheezing and holding onto the doorframe.

‘Two young men for you,’ she had announced and it seemed now, in hindsight, that her words had been spoken portentously. But perhaps she had merely been trying to catch her breath.

‘What young men, Mrs Thompson?’ Cecil had enquired calmly.

‘Military police! Or so they claim.’

And that was the point at which he had assumed Freddie had been killed in action. A gasp from Harriet had seemed to confirm that this was what she, too, believed.

‘What do they want?’ Harriet had demanded, and he had looked at her in time to see the blood draining from her face.

‘Buggered if I know,’ Mrs Thompson had replied, and it had been a measure of everyone’s growing alarm that no one had chastised her.

‘We had better go and find out,’ Cecil had said and, grimly, he and Harriet had gone downstairs.

The two MPs had been standing in the hallway, men in their late thirties, both over six foot in winter great-coats and holding their hats at their sides. They had looked somehow indecent in the hallway beside the tubular steel Le Corbusier telephone table and the Ivon Hitchens abstract on the wall that Harriet had picked up in a small gallery in Mayfair before the war. Julius had been standing on the stairs, half hiding behind the banisters and staring wide-eyed at the two men, who had studiously ignored him.