Homing (2 page)

“Phoebe didn’t do her share,” he remarked, still playing. “She only had Jeff. Maybe now Sylvia and Jeff—or Stephen and Evadne—or maybe if there’s going to be another war it’s just as well—”

“I’m glad we didn’t think of that,” said Gwen softly. “I’m glad we had ours.”

Fitz rose from the piano and came round the end of the sofa and laid his hands on her shoulders from behind.

“Lucky you and me,” he said. “I wonder if it will ever be so good again.”

Her hands came up to his on her shoulders.

“Oh, Fitz, you don’t really think—”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“Another war?” she cried, echoing the ages. “When?”

“Any time now. Whenever Hitler’s ready. He’s callin’ the tune this time.”

“Will we be in it too? Will Stevie have to fight?”

“We’re always in it sooner or later. It’ll be a young man’s war this time—flying and all. Stevie’s pushing thirty. But it won’t matter what you’re doing or what age you are, any more. Bombs dropped from a mile high don’t ask questions.”

Gwen shivered under his hands.

“Like Spain? Even the children?”

“They’re going to evacuate the children from the towns, you know. Break up families. Imagine having to decide. Send your child away to strangers—or keep it by you and see it blown to bits.”

“But not here, Fitz! In France and England, maybe—but not over here! If a war starts we must keep Stephen and Evadne here, especially if there are children.”

He sighed, and sat down on the end of the sofa.

“They might not think that was right. It’s for them to decide, remember—it’s their lives they have to live.”

“Listen,” said Gwen. “Wasn’t that a car stopping?”

Evadne had observed with appreciation the red brick and white clapboard of the little town, the green lawns and low hedges and picket fences. Lights were coming on at the College end of the street where the shops were. Beyond, the old
mulberry
trees made an arch of darkness all the way to the unseen Capitol at the other end.

Stephen turned the car off the main street and stopped in front of a white fence and a broad white house with lights behind the windows. When he opened the car door on her side she stepped down a little stiffly after the long ride, and stood still in the road looking round her gravely. It was a village, after all—like an English village, old and intimate and welcoming….

“I’ll come back for the bags,” he said, and put his arm around her waist and moved her towards the house.

They entered the lighted hall, they kissed all round, they said all the usual things. Stephen carried the luggage in, and she went with him up the broad stairs to his old room. There he turned and held out his arms.

“Now I know it’s true,” he said, and she went to him.

Soon the rattle of ice in a cocktail shaker came up from below, and they descended hastily to find Fitz at the foot of the stairs sounding the shaker like a bell to summon them. Behind him stood a stout coloured woman, her beaming face upturned to the two on the stairs, and Evadne saw Stephen fling his arms round her and kiss the black cheek which shone wet with tears.

“This is Hagar,” he said then. “She looks after us all.”

Evadne held out her hand with her radiant smile, and Hagar
took it in both hers and raised it against her bosom. And Gwen, in the drawing room doorway, and Fitz with the
cocktail shaker
, and Stephen at the bottom of the stairs, all stood
enchanted
, gazing at Evadne, with her short chestnut curls and her red-brown eyes and crimson mouth—there was a real look of her mother about her, Fitz thought, the same effortless vitality, the mischief, the
minxishness
of Virginia, but with
something
softer and less sure, something un-American and terribly appealing, which Virginia in her self-possessed girlhood had never had. Virginia at eighteen or so, when Fitz had seen her last, always knew the time of day. It was conceivable that Evadne could be lost and helpless and in need of rescue. A fatal quality in a woman, as Fitz very well knew, for Gwen had had it too.

“Welcome home, li’l dolly,” Hagar was saying in her soft, husky voice. “Many’s de time I hear my ol’ granny tell ’bout de night Miss Gwen come home to dis yere house. ’Bout time we had nudder bride, seems like, Mas’ Stevie—” Her high, sweet, coloured laughter rang like music. “He was so all-fired
slow
,” she confided to Evadne, “I almost done gib up hope on him, but I kin see now he had a right to wait. Now he caught up on Mas’ Jeff at las’—”

“Hagar only stays with us when Jeff isn’t using his house here,” Stephen explained. “And she’ll desert fast enough when he and Sylvia show up again.”

“Dey comin’ soon, mebbe?” Hagar inquired with transparent hope.

“Not very soon, I’m afraid. You’ll have to make do with us for a while. They sent you their love.”

“Mas’ Stevie—dis yere war—is Mas’ Jeff goin’ to git mixed up in it?”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Stephen reminded her. “No harm in hoping.”

Fitz had poured the cocktails and now approached with them on the tray.

“Yassuh, yassuh, I fetch de can
-apes
,” said Hagar, and was off to the kitchen in a rustle of white apron and starched
petticoats
.

“She’s wonderful,” said Evadne, gazing after her. “Like
Gone
With
the
Wind.
Was she your Mammy, Stephen?”

“Her sister was Jeff’s Mammy, and she really belongs to the Day house. Mine was very old and died a long time ago. In a
family like ours the maids are more or less interchangeable according to who’s sick, or having a baby, or nursing a relative.” Stephen raised his glass. “Well, Pop—Mother, darling—Home Sweet Home!”

They sipped.

“To Stevie’s bride,” said Fitz gallantly then, smiling over his glass at Evadne. “God bless her!”

Later, in the dining room as the pumpkin pie came in, Evadne looked slowly round the table in the candlelight at the three waiting faces, watchful and kind and full of affectionate interest in what was on her mind to say—Fitz with his long, bony head and sensitive mouth, his grey hair still thick in a curving crest, Gwen slender and doe-eyed and, like all the Sprague women, cherished and serene—and Stephen, intrinsically gay, magnetic, charming, untheatrical even though acting was his job, and
hers.

“Isn’t this lovely?” she said, very low, and stretched out a hand to Fitz on one side and Gwen on the other. “No
refuge rooms
, no gas lectures, no bandage classes, no need to think about blackout paint and buckets of sand and what to do about the children—it doesn’t seem possible,” said Evadne with a catch in her breath, “that all of a sudden nobody’s
worrying
!”

Fitz and Gwen exchanged compassionate glances.

“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that,” Fitz said reluctantly.

“No, of course Hitler’s still there,” Evadne conceded at once. “But he’s a lot farther away from Williamsburg, isn’t he! I don’t think anybody here in America can quite realize the
difference
that makes. I mean, it’s so easy to say what Chamberlain should have done at Munich last October—”

She broke off in embarrassment. On the boat coming over she had had to listen more than once to outspoken comment on the Munich agreement, usually by homeward bound Americans. To anyone who understood the problems of civil defence which England had faced that autumn of 1938, ridicule or scorn of the reprieve seemed quite as unrealistic as short-sighted rejoicing. Even those who had supported Chamberlain two months ago were now unwillingly aware that it did not mean peace even for his time, and he was seventy. Air Raid Precautions proceeded doggedly even in the villages, with mock drills and public shelter plans. There was no attempt to minimize the likelihood of another European crisis in the spring. Romania, they thought, would be next. Or Poland. And what would Italy do? And where did Russia really stand? So much for appeasement.

“Now, now,” said Stephen gently, into the silence she had left. “Merry Christmas.”

“I know. I
will
be merry.” Evadne drew a breath and gave them her smile. “Surely we can snatch one more Christmas before it happens.”

“And we’ll trim a tree,” said Gwen.

“Oh, definitely a tree!” cried Evadne. “We always have a tree at Farthingale, and my father used to read out the labels on the presents one by one. Christmas is always a hard time for Mummy—she was quite young when he died, but she never married again—” Evadne looked round the table, feeling suddenly rather far from home. “Am I talking too much? It seems queer that nobody here ever
knew
my father—”

“I knew your mother,” said Fitz. “Long before you did!”

“Of course you did.” Evadne beamed at him mistily. “You’re some sort of cousin to Mummy, because after all, Stevie and I are vaguely related, aren’t we. When did you see Mummy last?”

“Just before she went back to England to marry your father. The same time Bracken married your Aunt Dinah. Brother and sister married brother and sister. It’s happened that way before in our family. We never thought they’d forget to come home, though, once in a while.”

“That happens too,” said Gwen ruefully.

“Great-aunt Sally began it,” Fitz recalled. “She married elderly millionaires, one after another, while she was young, and then lived and died in elegant Edwardian sin at Cannes. And then there was Cousin Camilla, who inherited Cannes—and all the elegance and maybe some of the sin—till she married Bracken’s European representative and is now in Berlin, which I wouldn’t wish on a dawg. And there’s Bracken, married to a ladyship and spending half his time in London. And my own sister Phoebe, took a British Army officer for her second husband and settled down in London. And your mother, staying on at Farthingale after your father died—”

“And now Sylvia and Jeff,” added Gwen. “With a perfectly good house here in Williamsburg, they seem to feel that London is their home—”

“Well, blame the newspaper business for one thing,” Stephen reminded them. “It’s worse even than acting—you can’t settle down in it, Jeff can no more turn his back on the biggest story of the century than I could turn down a good show.”

This is fascinating,” Evadne said, listening with her chin in
her hand. “There’s so much I don’t know about people I’m related to. Somehow before Stephen came to England I never thought much about the American side of our family. There was always Phoebe of course, and there was Phoebe’s Jeff—but because she married Uncle Oliver at the end of the war
everybody’s
forgotten she had another husband, it’s almost as though Jeff was Oliver’s son, or Bracken’s. Who
was
Jeff’s father?”

“Miles Day,” said Fitz. “Cousin Miles. As near to a stick-
in-the
-mud as the family ever produced.”

“Oh, poor Miles,” said Gwen with a sigh. “He was second choice with Phoebe, and I’m afraid he knew it. Anyway, it didn’t last long. He died quite suddenly before Jeff was born. So when Oliver’s wife died too during the war it—it all came out right for Phoebe after all.”

“It’s like opening a new book I can’t wait to read,” said Evadne. “How Mab would love to be here tonight! She knows lots more about the family than I do. That’s my sister Irene’s daughter,” she explained to Gwen, unaware how simple the family intricacies were to the older generation. “She’s only about thirteen, but she’s always had a thing about America. She knows exactly who married which, on both sides of the Atlantic, all down the line from Grandfather Julian on. She got Mummy to make a sort of map of the generations, and she has it pinned up on the schoolroom wall. I wish now I’d taken more interest.”

“Mab is one-quarter American, through your mother,” Gwen reminded her, and Evadne began to count it up on a taper finger, while they watched her with delight.

“Let’s see, now, Mummy was American and married an Englishman. That makes me half American, so I backslide and marry one myself.” She grinned at Stephen. “But Irene married another Englishman, so Mab is only one-quarter, but there is some sort of throw-back so that she and Mummy are more like mother and daughter than she and Irene.
I
think Irene is quite heartless,” she told Gwen. “She’s still dotty about Ian and won’t lose sight of him even for a weekend if she can help it, and now that they’ve got a son, which is what they wanted in the first place, honestly,
anybody
can have poor Mab, so far as they’re concerned! She’s at Farthingale most of the time, and they leave everything to Mummy about clothes and governesses and even holidays.”

“Mab likes it that way,” said Stephen.

“Well, who wouldn’t, Mummy’s much more fun than Irene
any day,” said Evadne, dismissing her elder sister. “After Munich last October, when we were all at Farthingale
recuperating
, somebody said something about sending Mab out to Williamsburg if there was a war next year, and she said she couldn’t leave Mummy. Not a word about Irene! That just shows you,” said Evadne.

“We’ve always hoped that Virginia would come back here some day, even for a visit,” Gwen mused. “I wonder now if she wouldn’t bring the children here, if there’s a war.”

“Especially not if there’s a war,” Evadne said without
hesitation
. “We’ve all got our jobs there when it starts.” Quick to sense an undercurrent, she looked from Stephen to his father. “But the theatres won’t close here, if war is declared in England,” she said contritely. “I forgot about that.”

“Well, if the worst comes,” Fitz drawled easily, “I reckon the new show will have to wait till Stevie wins the war for you.”

“I want to get a mobile canteen going as my contribution,” Stephen admitted. “I’d look fine doing a show in New York, with Evadne back at the post in London. Besides, it isn’t ready yet, we’ve got a lot of work to do on it first. But you see how they are in England, Pop, they won’t run out on the war. Farthingale will be full of evacuees, and Virginia will want to stay and see that they don’t wreck the place.”

“It’s the house where she and Daddy lived together, and the four of us were born,” Evadne explained. “She loves it as though it was another child, I think.”