Stratton's War (22 page)
Authors: Laura Wilson
Diana arrived at Apse’s just in time to see him ripping up a letter and dropping it into the wastepaper basket. Something about the haste with which this was done made her suspicious. So far, she hadn’t managed to come up with a single incriminating fact about the man, and she was beginning to believe it was hopeless, but the look on his face when he saw her was definitely furtive. A less controlled person, Diana thought, would have jumped.
‘Sorry I’m late, sir,’ she said. ‘Got caught in a raid last night. Bit slow off the mark this morning.’
‘Never mind.’ Apse recovered himself quickly. ‘You look . . .’ he frowned, searching for the right word, ‘. . . tired but happy.’ He gazed at her curiously, in a way that made her think of a zoologist studying a new and interesting specimen.
‘Do I?’ Diana feigned surprise and hoped she wasn’t blushing. ‘I suppose I am.’ Damn, she thought, he’s got me on the wrong foot again. ‘Relieved to be here, sir. It was pretty lively last night.’
‘Yes,’ said Apse, thoughtfully. ‘So I gather.’ It was hard to tell from his tone whether he was referring to the raid or to some intelligence he’d received about Diana’s behaviour.
‘Heavens,’ she said, as breezily as she could manage. ‘Did you sleep through the whole thing?’
‘Chloral,’ said Apse. ‘And bromide. Perhaps,’ he said, looking her squarely in the eye, ‘you ought to try it.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Diana. Unable to look at him for one more second, she busied herself in removing her hat. When she returned from the cloakroom, she noticed that the letter Apse had torn up was no longer at the top of the pile in the wastepaper basket, and decided she must rescue the pieces as soon as he had left the room.
At half-past eleven Apse announced that he had a meeting with F-J, and departed. Diana, who was about to catch a train for Aldershot where she was investigating rumours of spying, hastily upended the wastepaper basket, gathered up all the likely-looking scraps of paper and shoved them into her handbag.
The train was packed, all seats taken, and the corridors were full of soldiers sitting on their kit-bags, playing cards and complaining loudly of being buggered about. Diana stumbled over their legs, looking for a lavatory, and found herself in the middle of a gang of boisterous young men. One, his pack stuffed inside the top of his uniform, bellowed, ‘I’m in the family way!’
‘You’re in every bastard’s way,’ grumbled the sergeant, then, seeing Diana, added, ‘Beg your pardon, miss.’ She looked at the floor, embarrassed, and aware of the men’s eyes. Do they know that I am someone’s mistress, she thought. Can they tell? She certainly felt different, so perhaps it showed. After what seemed a long time, but was probably only a few seconds, she said, ‘Excuse me.’
As the men moved aside to let her through, she caught sight of the letters WC on a door and fought her way towards them. Once inside, she shook the scraps of paper out of her handbag and set about piecing them together. The handwriting looked feminine, and her excitement increased when she caught sight of the words ‘German’ and ‘secret’. Perhaps it was from Mrs Montague, but why risk disposing of it in the wastepaper basket? She turned over another piece of paper and saw the words ‘a field belonging to . . .’ Invasion plans? Yes, there was something about penetration, defence . . . Apse must have been about to burn the letter when she’d disturbed him. Diana knelt down on the floor and began feverishly arranging the scraps on the closed lavatory seat. There was an address in Shropshire, a name - Lavinia Driffield - or was it Duffield? and the words ‘Nazi sympathisers’, and ‘local farmer with access to’ - and then something about a horse . . . a code of some sort? This was serious, and very likely urgent. She’d have to get off the train at the next stop and telephone F-J, or, if that proved impossible, send a telegram.
The pieces were still too jumbled for her to extract any coherent meaning from them - she’d have to fit them together properly, with names, dates and plans, so that she could read it to F-J if she managed to speak to him. As she shuffled the paper jigsaw, her eyes widened. It couldn’t be . . . and yet, this was the only way the torn edges fitted together. But... ‘My God!’ Diana clapped a hand over her mouth. She scanned the assemblage of phrases, scarcely able to believe her eyes:
Forced me to submit . . . congress with a stallion . . . satisfy his depraved Nazi lust . . . heaving flanks . . . immense above my . . . Prostrated as I was . . . thrusting his . . . prevent myself from being invaded . . . nearly senseless . . . so completely at his mercy that I existed only to receive . . .
After which, apparently, the woman’s equine paramour was given hay and water, and she was escorted back to her cottage, presumably, Diana thought, by the depraved Nazi. She was horrified that anyone could imagine such things, much less write them down, and appalled at herself for reading about such filthy perversions, and - thank God she was alone - for feeling disturbed and excited by them. Not the horse thing - that was repulsive. Impossible, as well. Diana wondered what sort of horse the woman had imagined. A cart horse? An Arab steed? A Shetland pony?
That was absurd, but it was the words themselves that had stirred her, in a way that Elinor Glyn had never done. If that letter had been about a man . . .
No wonder Apse had torn it up. No wonder, too, that he’d looked uncomfortable. She’d misread his mood entirely; it hadn’t been guilt she’d seen in his face, but embarrassment.
She gathered up the pieces of paper, crumpled them into a ball, and returned them to her bag. Part of her wanted to laugh at her mistake, but the other part . . . She sat down on the lavatory, her legs clamped tightly together, feeling a mixture of arousal and shame. That, and the memory of Lally’s words about Claude and her response to them, produced such an appalling maelstrom of confused emotion that she felt almost sick. She wished she could spend the entire journey in the cubicle, but somebody was banging on the door, and she could hear the stamping of feet and the high, thin whine of a child.
For the rest of the afternoon, while Diana was sitting amidst the dusty clutter of a Victorian mausoleum - silk screens, cases of stuffed birds, brass candelabra and God knew how many bad oil paintings - and trying to placate an elderly tweed-clad gentleman who was almost entirely camouflaged against a sofa of some similarly hairy material, Lally’s words . . . Claude said he hadn’t meant it, they’d had their fun . . . committed suicide . . . and those of Lavinia What’s-her-name’s . . . dominated and utterly . . . drove himself more deeply into . . . powerless to resist . . . alternated in her mind. Seeing Apse again was going to be sheer torture. I must find a way to forget about that letter, she told herself. She sighed, so that the tweedy man stopped speaking for a moment before resuming his complaint, his voice pitched a peevish semi-tone higher in response to her interruption.
It was already nine o’clock when the train pulled into Victoria station. As she stepped round the piles of kit-bags on the platform, Diana decided that the lateness of the hour excused her from returning to Dolphin Square. She caught a bus back to Tite Street where she found a letter from Evie informing her, rather curtly, that Guy would be coming home on leave in two weeks’ time, and her presence would, therefore, be required - ‘if you can bear to tear yourself away from whatever it is you are doing in London’. She sighed. Her mother-in-law was clearly unshaken in her belief that her contribution to the war effort was wholly frivolous, and, as she could hardly disabuse her of this, it would have to stay that way. A sudden vision of telling Evie, over dinner, about the woman with the horse made her snort with laughter. She’d probably faint, thought Diana, face down in the soup, and it would serve her right for thinking she was just messing about with typewriters and going out a lot. Although, of course, the second part was absolutely true . . . She took out her writing case and sat down to compose a suitable reply, but realised that there was no point in writing anything until she’d spoken to Apse about some leave.
Guy might have told me himself, she thought crossly. The realisation that she wasn’t as annoyed about this as she ought to have been made her feel almost as guilty as she had that morning, when Lally’d remarked that it was hard cheese on Guy. At least, she thought, I am doing useful work. It was true that she had not, as yet, had the opportunity to question Helen Pender about Walter Wymark’s work for the Right Club, but there was bound to be an opportunity soon. And Mrs Montague was clearly pleased with her: at their last meeting, she’d given her a rather horrid silver brooch with an engraved emblem of an eagle and a snake and the letters PJ, for ‘Perish Judah’. Her first inclination was to wrap it in tissue paper and put it in the bottom of her jewellery box with no intention of looking at it again, but she’d realised it would be politic to sport the beastly thing at subsequent meetings. So far, so good, except that she was no nearer to discovering the nature and extent of Apse’s involvement with the Right Club.
She sat back and rumpled her hair and let her thoughts drift back through the day. On the whole, it had been a wasted afternoon - the tweedy man had proved to be a harmless crackpot like all the others, but that letter . . .
And Claude. Claude. Oh, dear . . . She crossed her legs.
Les plaisirs solitaires,
the French called it . . . She couldn’t use the English word, even in thought. It was too crude and embarrassing. A foreign tongue placed it at a distance, gave it sophistication . . . What was happening to her? The intensity of feeling between her thighs was becoming actually painful.
Les plaisirs solitaires,
the French called it . . . She couldn’t use the English word, even in thought. It was too crude and embarrassing. A foreign tongue placed it at a distance, gave it sophistication . . . What was happening to her? The intensity of feeling between her thighs was becoming actually painful.
This was dreadful: perversity, morbidity, self-indulgence. All wrong. You’re Guy’s wife, she told herself. Stop it. Then the excuse: it’s probably because I’m tired; things are bound to seem different after a good night’s sleep - if I can only get one. She decided she’d have a bath. The evil-smelling heater hadn’t been very reliable of late, but she might be able to coax it into producing just enough hot water for a quick soak before the raids started.
Sprinkling F-J’s bath salts into the tepid water, Diana remembered his warning - things happen, and so forth . . . Don’t want you getting hurt . . . As she slipped off her dressing gown, she wondered, in a disinterested way, if she were heading for a smash. If I am, she thought, easing herself into the scented water, there seems to be nothing - despite F-J or Lally - that I can do about it, nothing at all. She lay back in the bath and closed her eyes.
TWENTY-THREE
Stratton looked at the contents of the deed box. The top layer consisted of advertisements for films and cuttings from magazines with names like
Kinematograph Weekly
, and, staring up at him from the middle of the pile, a pair of enormous eyes in an ethereally beautiful face with delicate features and a small, pointed chin. So, that, he thought, was Miss Mabel Morgan, and she was, or had been, a knockout.
Kinematograph Weekly
, and, staring up at him from the middle of the pile, a pair of enormous eyes in an ethereally beautiful face with delicate features and a small, pointed chin. So, that, he thought, was Miss Mabel Morgan, and she was, or had been, a knockout.
The magazine cuttings seemed to consist mostly of sugary titbits about her career, looks, and hobbies. Taking these out, Stratton saw a bundle of letters tied up in red ribbon and several piles of unmarked film canisters. He prised the lid off one of the top ones and found that it did, indeed, contain a reel of celluloid.
He paused, scratching his head. He’d have to come up with some way of watching the films. Perhaps Donald would know someone with projection equipment; owning a camera shop would surely put him in contact with such people. But that could be left until later. For now, he would concentrate on the letters. He untied the ribbon, settled himself on the rickety chair, and began to read.
The letters bore no addresses or dates, and were directed to someone called Bunny and signed only with the nickname Binkie. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, thought Stratton, they were full of the affected language of fashionable people in the twenties - everything was ‘divine’ or ‘bogus’ or ‘shy-making’. It reminded him of an Evelyn Waugh novel he’d once attempted to read - he could see that the thing was well-written, and some of it had made him laugh, but the characters were such a shower that you wished you could knock their heads together.
Presumably, one of the writers was Mabel Morgan - why would she have kept the letters otherwise? Perhaps the other was her husband - the one Ballard said had died in a fire - or maybe a lover. Stratton reached for the pile of cuttings and discovered that she had been married to a film director called Cecil Duke. Perhaps that was how these people usually spoke - Stratton, who’d never met anyone like them, didn’t know. But it was a bit much that they wrote with a lisp, as well as talking with one . . . Somehow, though, it didn’t match Joe Vincent’s description of a woman with a fondness for pubs and acid drops. Where had Mabel Morgan actually come from? He should have asked Joe more about her while he had the chance.
Stratton put the letters back in the box and went to find Jenny, who was busy with some darning. ‘You remember I asked you about Mabel Morgan?’
‘Yes . . .’ Jenny looked up, abstractedly, then back at the sock in her hand.
‘Do you remember anything else about her?’
‘Only that Mum used to like her . . . There was another one, too, Lilian Hall-Davis. I was thinking about her back in the summer, after what you said - she committed suicide, too. Put her head in a gas oven. That was quite a few years ago, before Mum died. Dreadful, to think of someone being that unhappy.’
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