Part of the Furniture (3 page)

‘I understood you were joining your mother in Canada,’ Violet quizzed her uninvited relation. ‘I am off to work, you have only just caught me, I was eating my breakfast. Have you had breakfast? Like some coffee?’

‘Coffee would be heavenly.’ Juno followed her aunt.

‘These days we eat in the kitchen.’ Violet strode down the hall. ‘I encouraged the maids to join up.’

Juno said, ‘Oh. And did they?’

‘Cook is making Spitfires but Bridget, you remember Bridget?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, Bridget went back to her family in Cork, said the war had nothing to do with her, that she was a Fenian, if you please.’

Juno laughed. ‘And is she?’

Violet said, ‘How would I know? Help yourself to coffee and tell me why you are not in Canada.’

Juno poured herself coffee and, sitting opposite her aunt, drank, closing her eyes and shivering. It had been so cold walking through the snow, her feet were numb. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said.

Violet had been eating All Bran when Juno rang the bell; it had now grown soggy but would, she told herself, still do its job. She must not throw it away, not in time of war. Juno looked awful. What was the matter? The girl was watching her.

‘I suffer,’ she said, ‘from constipation, this stuff is supposed to help. It tastes of cardboard.’

Juno smiled and swallowed coffee. The girl needed help, talking about constipation was not exactly helpful. How should one talk to girls? Being childless, one didn’t know how to start. One was afraid of being clumsy. John and Bill would know, they both had girls, not as old as Juno, but girls.

‘So you don’t want to go to Canada, but would rather join one of the services? Do your bit? That it? Am I guessing right?’

What had the girl been up to? How old was she? Seventeen?

‘You are too young to get a commission but I’m sure I can help, you had better join the Wrens. I do know of some splendid girls who have become FA.N.Y.s, but there again it’s officers only and again you are too young. Tell you what, we’ll discuss it with my lodgers, John Baines and Bill Bailey, old friends. They work in the War Office and the Admiralty, they will know what the form is, what strings to pull. Are you sure you won’t eat anything? Did I offer? How awful of me. Would you like an egg?’ (I am making a dog’s breakfast out of this.) ‘Poached or boiled? Scrambled?’

‘No, no, Aunt Violet, just coffee, it’s lovely.’ Juno wondered what had possessed her, what crazy impulse had landed her here at Aunt Violet’s mercy.

‘So which service shall it be? I work for the Red Cross, but I can’t see you there somehow. Mine is executive work, of course.’

‘I don’t want to join any of the services, Aunt Violet’ Juno’s eyes met her aunt’s.

‘Don’t tell me you take after your father!’ Violet was aghast.

‘What do you mean, Aunt Violet?’

‘My dear, he was a conchie.’

‘I am proud of him.’ Juno bristled. ‘He was a brave man.’ She put her cup back onto its saucer.

‘My dear girl, he went to prison!’

‘Yes.’

‘Prison!’

‘Where he contracted TB, which later killed him.’

‘Ignominiously.’

‘Was there not ignominy in the trenches? I barely knew my father but I admire him. He did not believe in violence.’

‘What would you know about it? He was influenced by that awful man, Lord Russell.’

‘May I have some more coffee?’

‘Help yourself.’ Violet stared at her niece. ‘Have I got this right? You do not want to join your mother in Canada and you do not want to work for your country in time of war. I simply don’t understand you.’ If Dennis had not been killed, if Dennis had lived and they had had children—‘a pigeon pair’ Dennis had wanted, what a curious old-fashioned expression—if one of this ‘pair’ had been a daughter, would she, Violet, have been able to cope? Violet stared at her niece while envisaging Dennis’s daughter; she surely would have wanted to fight for her country? Juno with lowered lashes was pouring coffee; her hand was not steady. Some splashed into the saucer and she added milk.

Violet pushed the sugar bowl towards her niece. ‘Sugar.’

‘No, no, thank you.’ The coffee was good but her feet were still numb with cold.

‘So why are you here?’ Violet heard herself ask. ‘Are you short of money?’

‘I wondered whether you would let me have a bath. I have some money, thank you. I was caught in the raid last night, I missed my train back—I feel so filthy. There was a man who died, at least I think that’s what he did, I took it he was dead, I—’

‘Oh, my dear! Oh, you poor child! How stupid I am rambling on—why didn’t you say? You have had a shock. Now finish your coffee and come upstairs. You shall have a bath and I will put you to bed in the spare room with an aspirin. You’ll feel much better after some sleep. I have to go to work but I will be back tonight and then, after supper, we can discuss your future. Bill and John will be here and they will help, they have girls of their own. Come along, seeing a man killed is no joke—’

‘He wasn’t, I didn’t, he—’

Juno, don’t worry, tell me about it tonight. Between us we will sort you out.’

‘But Aunt—’

‘Not now, Juno, later, come along.’ Violet put her arm round her niece and led her upstairs. ‘Now let’s find you a clean towel and if you want to wash your hair, there’s shampoo. Everyone caught in a raid gets dusty. There’s plenty of bath water—’

‘But I wasn’t, there wasn’t a bomb.’

‘Of course there was, I can see it all, you are disorientated. We see lots of this in the Red Cross. Rest is what you need—’

‘Could you lend me a pair of clean knickers?’

‘Why yes, of course.’ Had the girl peed from fright? People did, one heard of it, but Juno was ‘family’, could she have? ‘Here we are.’ They had reached the bathroom. Violet turned on the taps. Juno began to undress. ‘I’ll fetch you some knickers.’

Violet plumped up the pillows of the spare-room bed, pulled the curtains and, finding a pair of knickers she had bought in a sale before the war, meant to change because they were too small but never got round to it, returned to the bathroom. Juno had left the door open and was submerged in the bath. Her clothes, scattered on the floor, looked dry except for shoes lamentably sodden. Violet said, ‘You can keep these, they are too small for me.’

‘Thank you very much, Aunt Violet.’

Lying there in the bath, her wet hair clinging to her skull, Juno reminded Violet of her brother; he too had been long and thin, but fair-haired where Juno was dark. ‘You have not told me what you were doing in London.’

‘I came in for the day, missed my train back. I have to go back to collect my suitcase, it’s still in the cottage.’

‘But your mother’s gone to Canada, she wrote—’

‘Yes. The cottage is let to other people.’ Juno closed her eyes. ‘This water’s lovely.’ She felt she could lie in it for ever, forget and forget. But her aunt was speaking, enunciating carefully, ‘Is your mother going to marry that man?’

‘I did not know you knew about him.’

‘She made no secret. What do you think she went to Canada for?’

‘To escape the war?’

Was the girl being pert?

‘Your mother would not run away.’ Juno’s mother, her sister-in-law, whatever else, was, Violet intimated, no conscientious objector. ‘I think she has decided to marry again. The man is rich, got some sort of business.’

‘He has a name.’ Though not fond, Juno felt protective towards her parent.

‘Jack something.’

‘Sonntag.’

‘German.’

‘Might be Dutch?’

‘Possibly,’ Violet conceded. ‘Do you approve of him as a step-father?’

‘Mother likes him. Personally I don’t care if I never see either of them again.’

‘Juno! What an unnatural thing to say!’

‘No more unnatural than admiring your brother, my father, and desperately wanting—’ (oh so desperately wanting Jonty and Francis). Juno sank down into the water to hide a rush of tears. Coming up to breathe, she said, ‘You are being so very kind, Aunt Violet, considering you do not really like me.’

Violet breathed in, held her breath, let it out. ‘You are my niece, of course I like you, blood is thicker than water.’

‘What a remarkably silly expression that is,’ she would say later that night, when regaling John Baines and Bill Bailey with an account of Juno’s visit. ‘The very fact that a person is a relation can be irritating. If she were not my niece, I am sure I would like her more. She looks like my poor brother. I could never approve of his ideas, they were so—well—embarrassing.’

Munching a Brussels sprout, for they were at supper, Bill Bailey said, ‘Perhaps it’s as well she left before you got back from work.’

Violet said, ‘No, Bill dear, no. I feel I should have stayed. I could have rung the office, told them to manage without me. I could have reasoned with her.’

John Baines said, ‘Girls like that do not see reason, it’s a waste of breath.’

S
QUASHED INTO A CORNER
on the crowded train, Juno read the
Evening Standard.
The bomb which had fallen on the Café de Paris had killed a great many people. Had those girls sheltering with their boyfriends in the basement kitchen, frustrated from their fun by the raid, reached it in time to get killed? Crushed against her neighbours, swaying with the movement of the train, she remembered the party tiptoeing out, suppressing their laughter, closing the street door, their footsteps receding along the pavement.

‘I like to catch a train before the raid starts,’ her neighbour was saying to a friend. ‘My daughter and Fred worry less—’

‘It says here,’ said the friend, who was reading the
Evening News
, ‘that the roof was of glass. What can the authorities have been thinking of? Just imagine, glass!’

Another voice chimed in, ‘Direct hit, wannit? Can’t have known much.’

A man standing between the crowded seats, retaining his balance with a hand on the rack, said, ‘Society folk ain’t, got no nous,’ and then placatingly, ‘Not a bad way to go, dancing. I like dancing.’

‘I think my Fred would rather know,’ said the woman who liked to catch her train before the raids started. ‘Fred doesn’t like surprises and, society or not, they can’t have known.’

But they had known, Juno remembered, had been told, and they had not listened, had not believed; they were intent on some fun on the last night of Jonathan’s leave, whoever he might be. The man had told them about the glass roof. What had been his name? Sitting squashed in the train, chugging along in the gathering dusk, blinds drawn claustrophobically, she tried to remember. She could remember the weight of his arm across her body and that he was dead and that she, freeing herself, had slid down the banister into the hall, a quick exhilarating slide.

Aunt Violet’s stairs had a similar rail of polished mahogany; she had slid down that on rare duty visits with her mother—‘Don’t do that, darling, you might pitch onto your head,’—but today she had walked decorously down, left a polite note on the hall table thanking for the coffee, the bath and the knickers, silk-knit elasticated at the knee. Quite unlike the pair they had eased off her gently, determinedly, well, not so gently perhaps; those were now crushed into her bag, slightly torn.

She was glad she had left a note, though it had been a mistake to visit Aunt Violet, who was kind and conscientious and would now do her utmost to keep in touch and inveigle her, if not into the services, into some form of worthy war work.

She must collect her suitcase and escape, Juno told herself, shrinking from the prospect of returning however briefly to the house she had lived in for so long with her mother. It was too close to Jonty’s and Francis’s homes, did in fact belong to Jonty’s parents, who were now renting it to another family. She had been a fool to leave her suitcase there—all her other belongings had gone to Canada with her mother—but she had not wanted Jonty and Francis to be burdened with it on their last day in London. (Stupid, I could have left it in the left-luggage at the station.) She had been riding on some sort of wave, carried away.

Carried away, she could hear her mother’s voice, ‘You get so carried away, darling, do try to be sensible.’ Who was she to talk? Falling in love at her age, she was nearly forty! It was ridiculous; how could a woman of that age fall in love? And with Mr Sonntag, a man of fifty.

‘Do call him Jack, darling, Jack is his name. You will learn to love him as I do; we will be a proper family at last, not just you and me. Think of it, a whole new life in Canada.’

Juno clenched her teeth and twisted her toes in her damp shoes, torn between embarrassment for her mother and affection.

If she could retrieve the suitcase, she could change her shoes for a more sensible pair.

‘Nearly reached Reading,’ said a woman’s voice.

‘Will Fred be meeting you?’

‘Either Fred or my daughter,’ said her neighbour.

‘Nice to get out,’ people were saying as they gathered up their bags. ‘Trains get so stuffy in the blackout, can’t get used to it. You getting out here, love?’ nudging Juno.

Juno said, ‘Two more stops.’

‘There’s Fred,’ said Fred’s wife, ‘standing under the light so I can see him. Don’t these wartime lights make people look like corpses! Fred, here I am.’ She waved. ‘Here!’ she shouted.

Evelyn, the man’s name was Evelyn. Evelyn Copplestone. He had not looked like Fred, but he had been dead.

‘Will you be all right, dear?’ Fred’s wife was opening the train door, letting in a rush of icy air. ‘You all on your own? You look a bit funny.’

Juno said, ‘Yes, thank you.’ She was all right, she said, ‘Goodnight,’ and pulled the train door shut. Two more stops, and a three-quarter mile walk to the cottage. There were dry clothes and shoes in the suitcase, the house would be empty, she could sleep and tomorrow—well, tomorrow she would decide what to do. No need for the moment to think of Evelyn Copplestone, whose mouth had been open as were his eyes, but he was dead. Dead bodies lack glamour.

T
WO STOPS ON FROM
Reading Juno left the train, surrendered her ticket and started walking. She forgot Evelyn Copplestone; more immediate thoughts crowded a mind so choked with love for Jonty and Francis and the surprises they had sprung on her that there was room for little else. It would be much later that it would occur to her that finding a man dead she should have dialled 999, asked for an ambulance or a doctor, or even rung the bell of the house next door and roused the neighbour who had stirred soup in his kitchen. But she had not; she had slid down his banisters and hopped it.