Homing (21 page)

“I’m not going,” said Mab. “Just Basil and Nurse.”

“Oh, Lord.” Nigel put a hand to his head. “It’s all settled for you to go. What does your mother say?”

“She thinks I’ll come round, but I won’t. Even Nurse is against it. She says it will upset Basil far worse than a few bombs here.”

“My dear child, it’s not just a question of a few bombs here any longer,” Nigel explained, as though he spoke to some one who was a little lacking. “If the Germans contrive to occupy even a part of this country, even for a short time—”

“You don’t really think they
will
,”
said Mab.

“No, I don’t,” he agreed promptly. “But neither did the Dutch and look at them now. We have to assume the worst and prepare for it. I should think you’d jump at the chance to go to Williamsburg for a while.”

“Grandmother Tibby didn’t go looking for a refuge when the war came to Williamsburg,” said Mab.

“That was a little war. You could put it in your pocket.”

“The colonists were ragged and hungry and short of guns and men, and far worse off than we are now,” said Mab. “And the British Army must have looked just as bad to them as the Nazis do to us.”

“Now, look here—” Nigel began.

“Anne says I’m right not to go,” said Mab, producing the clincher. “Anne says that when it’s over and Hitler never set foot in England after all, the ones that ran away won’t know where to look.”

“You see?” said Virginia to Nigel, with an expressive gesture. “Young England!”

Nigel, worried as he was, couldn’t but grin.

“I must see Anne while I am here,” he said, almost to himself.

“She came in when I did. I’ll tell her you’re here.” Mab started for the door.

“Ask her to come in here,” Virginia said. “Nigel is telling us what to do and what not to do, better than the Ministry can.” And when Mab had gone she added, “I suppose they haven’t much extra money, those girls. We shall have to look after them too, you know, if anything really bad begins.”

“Yes, please let’s not lose sight of Anne,” said Nigel, and Virginia glanced up at him with interest, and then took a good look at Anne as she entered the room, holding back a little on
Mab’s hand, smiling her wide, unself-conscious smile at sight of the visitor.

“Hullo, are you the man about the invasion?” Anne asked cheekily, and sobered under his steady gaze.

“Have you got a passport?” Nigel asked her in his most legal manner.

“No. I’ve never had one. It’s a bit late now, isn’t it? Holidays abroad aren’t what they used to be.”

“Have you any spare cash?”

“I don’t know what you mean by spare, I’ve got about two pounds, nine, and thruppence.”

“But haven’t you got a bank account?” Nigel insisted, rather like a kindly uncle.

“No. I only work there.”

“You mean that two pounds is all you’ve got in the world?”

“Just about. I sent some money home last week, they’re fixing up their shelter.”

“Then you really must allow me—” Nigel’s hand went again to his breast pocket.

“What for?” Anne asked bluntly.

“Emergencies,” Nigel replied as bluntly, and held out to her two five-pound notes. “Call it a loan,” he said.

“Well, thank you very much, but I don’t see any need for it,” said Anne, making no move to take the money. “We’re told to stay where we are and not go on the roads if there is any sort of trouble—and the Bank is responsible for us here. Unless, of course—” She turned a suddenly apprehensive look on Virginia “—unless your mother wants to close up the house or—”

“Nigel is behaving a bit like a mother hen,” Virginia said unfairly. “I have already assured him that I’ll look after you like my own, no matter what happens.”

“That’s awfully kind of you both, but I really have no right to—”

“Don’t be so stiff-necked and obtuse,” said Nigel in his incisive lawyer’s voice. “When this war is over I want to know where you are, and I want to find you alive and well.”

Three pairs of eyes stared at him in varying degrees of doubt, suspicion, and incredulity—Anne, Mab, and Virginia could think of no possible explanation of the above statement except that Nigel must be—well, interested. It came as an equal astonishment to each of them, in a different way.

Virginia recovered first.

“That I will guarantee to undertake personally,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Nigel formally, and as Anne would not take the money, he laid it down in front of Virginia. “I’m sorry to be so abrupt, but I feel rather pressed for time.”

And Mab, looking from him to Anne, saw that Anne was blushing from the V of her blouse to the roots of her hair, and wondered if Nigel had just proposed, right there in front of everybody, and what Anne was going to do about it.

“And now,” said Virginia, rising with all the bank notes in her hand and the list of things to be packed in a bag, “Mab and I will go and gather all this together—”

Mab followed her from the room, resisting a backward glance as she closed the door.

There was a long silence when they had gone.

“I am most terribly sorry,” said Nigel at last, not a bit like a lawyer. “I can’t think why I did it like that, except that I’m a bit rattled like everybody else. Will you forgive me? It’s only Mummy, after all, and she was bound to catch on soon.”

“But—I don’t—” Anne put both hands to her face with a sound half gasp, half laugh.

“Naturally, you don’t,” said Nigel. “I can’t expect you to. But now that I’ve put my foot in it, I might as well say that there hasn’t been a day since I last saw you that I haven’t thought of you—wondered about you—and looked forward to seeing you again. This warden job I’m in now leaves a lot of time for thinking, when one might otherwise be reading, working, killing time with friends—especially on the night shift, as I am. When you came in the door just now, so smiling and sweet and safe, I got it right between the eyes—that nothing must happen to you if I can prevent it. I know it was clumsy of me, I do apologize.”

“Oh,
no
—” Both her hands started towards him, protectively, and then were withheld. “You mustn’t sound as though you had done something rude! It was only—” Again the lovely blush swept upward, and this time he saw it.

“Only—?” he prompted, watching.

“It was as though you had read my mind, I—didn’t know where to look.”

“Read your mind?” he repeated, and took her hands, and when she tried to draw them away he held them, still resisting, in his. “Anne—?” he said, with a question.

“I had let myself dream,” she confessed, looking down at their hands. “I had let myself
pretend.
I’ve always told myself
fairy stories, it’s childish of me, I know, but as soon as I came to this house it set me off again on another make-believe.”

“The house, yes—but where was I?” And when she would not answer—“Anne?”

“We—don’t know each other,” she gasped, pulling at her hands, and he let them go, and she rose and walked away from him down the room.

“Anne, was I in the dream?” He waited, standing where he was. “Oh, yes, I know it’s all too sudden and too soon. It’s not fair to press you now, when everyone is over-wrought.”

“Yes, that’s it,” she agreed faintly. “You might—feel quite differently when things are normal again. And I feel sure they will be, don’t you?”

“You misunderstand me,” he said gently. “My mind is quite made up. But you have a right to some sort of proper courtship when things permit.”

“C-courtship—?” said Anne incredulously, and turned to face him across the room.

“Flowers — little dinners — dancing — house parties — if those things ever come again. Anyway, a chance to know me well enough to decide if you can put up with me.”

“B-but you can’t mean—how can you possibly—”

“I don’t know how it came about, if that’s what you’re asking. I only know that you’re always with me now—your eyes, your voice—I’m just as surprised as you are, I suppose—except that I’m getting used to it and it’s just been sprung on you entirely in the wrong way, I admit. Perhaps it’s those long lonely hours on night duty. Perhaps it’s the long lonely days and nights before that began. I was going quietly crazy with my loneliness, until I saw you. I couldn’t seem to lay hold of anything—there didn’t seem to be anybody I needed or wanted—I was empty and dreary and old before my time. And now I need you. You comfort me. I’m going to love you very much. Do you mind?”

“Oh, my dear—!” said Anne, and opened her arms.

It was not a thing which Virginia had anticipated, but she was quite content that an engagement should exist between Nigel and Anne Phillips, whose first name she had never used till the toasts were being drunk. Anne was gentle and sweet and soft, and plainly would worship Nigel all her life, and that would be
good for him, which was all that mattered these days. The wedding would come later, when things had a little resolved themselves. Meanwhile there would be the deep satisfaction to each that the other was aware—and there was the post, which still functioned regularly.

Anne, watching timidly for reservations on the part of Nigel’s mother, began gradually to hope that it wasn’t just good manners, and that she might be welcome in this magic household where she had so allowed her imagination to run away with her. She still could not quite believe that she would ever belong here as a member of the family—she understood that it was a formidable family, headed by the fabulous Bracken Murray, who was Nigel’s uncle—but so far there was nothing to make her feel an outsider. Anne bloomed during dinner that night, with a new brilliance in her mysterious, heavy-lidded eyes and a new tilt to her generous mouth. Being engaged makes a girl
feel
pretty very quickly, and it shows.

During the evening they listened to Churchill’s broadcast, and thanked God again for such a leader:
“Therefore, in casting up this dread balance sheet and contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye, I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair,”
the strong, fighting voice declared into the quiet room.
“The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into the broad, sunny uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

When they realized that he had finished, they looked at each other, their throats too tight for speech. Tears were slipping quietly down Anne’s face. She wiped them away with her fingers, and her eyes followed Nigel’s tall figure as he moved to shut off the radio.

It was Mab who first found words.

“He sounds like a tired lion,” she said.

Not even Virginia knew what it had cost to make the decision from which Mab never wavered after that day. The coveted chance to see Williamsburg had been presented at last, but with
too high a price tag. To see it without Jeff there would have been disappointing enough at best. To use it as a bolt-hole while Jeff was out reporting a war which was being fought to preserve what Williamsburg stood for became impossible.

And yet one lived with fear. It was fear which rolled in across one’s consciousness like a surf on a beach as one woke to each new day, and set one’s insides to churning so that one was never sure that food would stay down—though one ate conscientious meals as they came in order not to be conspicuous in the general self-possession which prevailed. To go off one’s feed now would be regarded as dramatization, which was always frowned on in the family, and which as a rule only Basil descended to. Once Jeff was back in England, she promised herself, it would be easier. More than half the fear was for him.

His telegram came the same day the French armistice terms were published. After four days in an overloaded, unseaworthy cargo boat from Bordeaux he had arrived at Falmouth and sent off identical messages to Farthingale and London:
Home
again.
Love.
Jeff.
Then he got into a crowded train and walked in the door at Upper Brook Street an hour ahead of his telegram.

So there was still time for Mab to accompany Basil and Nurse to Williamsburg with Jeff’s approval, and the pressure was still on from everybody but Virginia and Nurse. The fear was still there too, in the pit of her stomach, for the French were going to be even less use than anyone had supposed.

Mab fought it out again that night in her room. Not fair waiting just to see what Jeff would say. She was old enough to make up her own mind. A long time before war had come to England Jeff had once recounted to her a family legend to the effect that a hundred and fifty years ago Tibby at the age of sixteen had dressed herself in her twin brother’s clothes and gone to meet Lafayette’s army before Jamestown, in order to be near Julian who was one of Lafayette’s aides. There was nothing to prove that Tibby was not frightened too.

When the time came for Basil and Nurse to sail, Hitler had begun to bomb the English ports as foreseen, and getting aboard a liner was likely to be a nervous business. Jeff came down with Irene to escort them to Liverpool, but this time Sylvia stayed on duty at the Animal Post in London, where there were occasional alerts without bombs.

Irene had reluctantly surrendered Mab’s passage to another child, giving up on the long distance argument. As usual her
attention was centred on Basil but now she had begun to have qualms about losing sight of him, and for his safety on the way.

Mab sat next to Jeff at dinner that night, in a quiet ecstasy at his being there within reach of her hand, although nothing but general conversation was possible in so small a gathering. After coffee in the drawing room Irene went up to see Basil in bed, assuming that Virginia had nothing better to do than accompany her. When they had disappeared up the staircase Mab found Jeff’s speculative eyes upon her and hunched her shoulders in a small, derisive movement.