The Way Ahead (16 page)

‘I know beggars can’t be choosers,’ said Nick, ‘but I’ll duck any more figs. I had some for lunch as well as for breakfast.’

That amused Caterina very much.

At home, Annabelle came out of her sleep halfway through the night, and found herself wide awake. She slipped from the bed and drew the curtains apart. She looked out at the darkness. The night was wild, she could hear the wind gusting, and the window transmitted a coldness that belonged more to March than May. The weather was suffering fits of temper that were making the month a disappointing one.

Was it like this in Italy, was the weather there of a kind to keep RAF squadrons grounded? How many
more
combat missions did Nick have to get through before RAF Command brought him down from the sky?

In the South of England, the concentrated formations of men and armour awaited the day of assault.

‘Hope to Christ it’s not as rough as it bloody well is now.’

‘They’ll no’ send us if half of us are going to sink.’

‘Listen, Jock, if I get seasick, I won’t care if I sink or not.’

‘Aye, ye’re a cheerful laddie, Willy. Have a wee sup.’

‘Is that your flask?’

‘Aye, and a wee sup, I said, nae more.’

‘God bless you, Jock, I’ll buy you a French haggis for Christmas.’

‘New Year, Willy, New Year.’

‘Your say-so, Jock. Hang on to your kilt.’

Wednesday, 19 May

‘MAISIE?’

‘Yes, my dear?’ said Mrs Maisie Finch.

‘What happened?’ asked her husband, Edwin Finch.

‘You’ve been working too hard,’ she said gently. He was seventy, the silver in his hair advancing rapidly. But he was still a man of distinguished looks. A gentleman. He should have retired from his Government job years ago, but once the war began in 1939 he had said, quite firmly, that he would not give up his work until Hitler and his Nazi thugs were destroyed. Chinese Lady often thought the Government ought to enforce his retirement, but she had no idea his actual work was for British Intelligence, and that as a cypher specialist he was second to none. He had spent the whole winter of ’43–44 at Bletchley Park, the nerve centre of cypher intelligence, returning to his department in London at the beginning of April. He was a tired man by then.

Today, a Government staff car had brought him home in the early afternoon. A doctor was with him. He had collapsed on his way to lunch, from mental and physical exhaustion, the medical man said. He was to rest for a week, in his bed, and was not to get up except for ablutions. Here are some tablets. He is to take three each day at intervals of four hours. His local doctor has been advised, and will call, if necessary. Rest, Mrs Finch, is his primary need. There’s no real ailment apart from exhaustion.

Chinese Lady was shocked. Edwin was so pale, so weak. The doctor helped to get him to bed. It was now gone four, and she had been sitting with him for nearly two hours, watching him doze, watching him come awake every so often, when he said something, something irrelevant and she spoke reassuringly in return. She had loved her first husband, Daniel Adams, a corporal in the West Kent Regiment and long since gone from her life. For Edwin, the kindest of men and the most understanding of husbands, she had a deep abiding affection, and it pained her to think he might be failing. She was holding his hand which lay on the bedcover, watching him as his eyes closed again.

But he said from faraway, ‘The wheels are running down, Maisie.’

‘They need a rest, Edwin, that’s all.’ She hoped that really was all. ‘It’s the war, my dear, it’s made your work tiring and nerve-racking for you.’

A murmur from him, again as if his mind was faraway.

‘There’s a hopeful dawn coming, Maisie.’

‘Edwin? What hopeful dawn?’

‘Did I say something, Maisie?’ His voice was suddenly stronger.

‘You said there’s a hopeful dawn coming.’

‘Did I?’ He sounded like a man who had committed an indiscretion. He knew what was happening in areas of the South Coast. ‘Let us hope for the hopeful,’ he said, and with that innocuous comment he lapsed back into a doze.

Chinese Lady, still holding his hand, sat there and reflected on her life with him in peace and war. There was no time when he had not been a quiet strength and an unfailing support to herself and the family, more especially during these years of war. The country and its people had endured a cruel war, the people constantly in mourning for the casualties of sea, land and air battles, and air raids. Edwin, however, had never wavered in his belief that, given time and allies, the Empire would win the last battles of all. And lately he had been a happy and confident man in that respect. He must have been listening a lot to the wireless. Well, their own wireless, which had been a source of aggravation to her for years with its gloom and its unending talk about Hitler, had at last been consistently cheerful about the tide of war turning in favour of the Allies. The Russians, in winning back huge tracts of lost territory, had smashed great holes in German armies, the Americans were winning the war in the Pacific, the British 14th Army in Burma was inflicting on Japanese armies their worst casualties of the war, and the Royal Navy was hunting and destroying German U-boats week after week. Hitler
was
in his lair, foaming at the mouth. Well, the wireless didn’t actually say that, but some newspapers did, which gave Chinese Lady the satisfaction of a woman who had long thought Hitler the kind of man who ought never to have been born.

The war. Still going on. It was a wonder the family had survived. But they had, all except poor Emily, killed by a bomb almost four years ago. Boots had married Polly Simms later, and now they were the parents of twins, Gemma and James, lovely infants of two and a half years. Polly was still living in Dorset, and Boots had a new job somewhere or other, with orders that meant going overseas again. Chinese Lady thought it downright unresponsible of him to accept such orders, especially as he hadn’t long been back from Italy. During his leave, when he and Polly, with the twins, had spent time here at home, she had asked him what he thought he was up to at his age, going off to Italy as he had.

‘Ah,’ said Boots.

‘What d’you mean, ah? That’s not an answer.’

‘Well, the fact is, old lady,’ he said, ‘your question has foxed me.’

‘Now you know what I mean,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I do,’ he said, ‘but I’m sound in wind and limb.’

‘Boots, it won’t be long before you’re fifty,’ she said, ‘and you still can’t see properly out of your left eye. It’s disgraceful if the Army sends you somewhere else, and they ought to be ashamed.’ Her querulousness hid her affection and concern for her eldest son, as distinguished in his looks as Edwin had always been. ‘After Dunkirk, I thought you were
going
to spend the rest of the war safe behind a desk.’

‘That was the idea,’ said Boots. ‘Unfortunately, old girl, the idea got torpedoed.’

‘It’ll upset Polly and the twins, Boots, if you do go overseas again.’

Polly, in fact, had been a mixture of optimism and gloom.

‘Boots is a born survivor, Maisie. Any man who survived the hell of the trenches in the last war can survive this one. I’m relying on that. Or is that wishful thinking? God, I can’t lose him, Maisie, I need him for my old age.’

‘Now, Polly, you won’t lose him,’ said Chinese Lady. There was a surprising rapport between Boots’s cockney-born mother and her upper crust daughter-in-law. ‘Don’t say such a thing. Boots was never a careless man or a careless soldier. And besides, think of the twins.’

‘I know about children, Maisie, I know about them growing up and going their own way,’ said Polly. ‘I want to grow old gracefully, and I need Boots there for that, or I’d turn into a complaining and sour old biddy. I only hope he’ll land a job that’ll keep him stuck to a desk. Heaven help me, why am I talking like a wet blanket when you know and I know he’ll always duck at the right moment?’

‘Well, at least we’re doing a bit more winning than losing now, Polly.’

That was true, as the wireless had been saying lately. Included among the happier items of news this morning was the announcement that the British Eighth Army, famed for its defeat of
Rommel
’s Afrika Corps in the Western Desert, was part of the Allied force advancing in Italy. Alongside the British was an American army, its boisterous GIs demonstrating to the Italian ladies of liberated towns and villages Uncle Sam’s way of celebrating glad days. In return, the flushed Italian ladies asked only for candy bars, cigarettes and fully-fashioned stockings. This, however, the wireless didn’t mention. The BBC was conservative to the point of discreet silence concerning happy-go-lucky American soldiers with a pronounced sex drive. If it had decided to be forthcoming, its roving reporters could have gathered a mine of information without going to Italy. They could have gathered it at home, from many girls and women of the United Kingdom, including housewives whose husbands had been away for years.

Chinese Lady was not the sort of woman who would have thanked her wireless for broadcasting what she didn’t want to hear. It would have upset her and her kind if it issued details of unfaithfulness at home. The fact was, however, that the influx of red-blooded GIs into Britain had resulted in many women losing their heads and hearts, and a sad number of men with the 14th Army had received what had come to be known as ‘
Dear John
’ letters. These were letters from wives saying they were awfully sorry, but they would like a divorce so that they could marry their favourite GI. Or from sweethearts saying, ‘
I hope you won’t mind too much, but I’m going to marry Elmer, an American soldier who lives near Hollywood, would you believe. He’s ever so sweet
.’

It was true, however, that certain rumours did
float
about to land in Chinese Lady’s ears. She chose to dismiss them. She liked an ordered world, in which the right and proper kind of behaviour prevailed, according to the Ten Commandments.

She glanced at Edwin. He was sleeping now, not dozing. That pleased her. Sound sleep was what he needed.

Boots wouldn’t like it that his stepfather was an exhausted man. Boots and Edwin were close friends, and always had been.

Air raids on the United Kingdom were no longer a positive menace, and some younger members of the family had come home. Daniel, for instance, and Vi and Tommy’s daughter Alice. Alice, just nineteen, would be going to university in September unless she decided to volunteer for one of the Services. Vi and Tommy’s sons, David and Paul, were still in Devon, Paul at fourteen to finish his schooling there, and David, eighteen, working on a farm while waiting to join the RAF. Paul had given up dissecting dead rabbits in favour of a more socially acceptable occupation: that of having his first girlfriend. Jenny Lymes, the daughter of neighbours, was a live-wire madcap who, he advised his mum and dad, would go off bang one day. He felt, he said, that as she wasn’t a bad bit of Devon plum duff for a girl, he had to stay near enough to her to pick up the pieces and take them home to her mum and dad. Meanwhile, he’d be grateful to receive a two-bob postal order, as Jenny was getting a bit hard on his pocket lately.

Lizzy, retailing this to Chinese Lady, but leaving out the plum duff bit, received the comment that
while
a girl shouldn’t be after what a boy had in his trousers, it was always right for a boy to treat a girl.

Lizzy, coughing, said, ‘You mean what a boy has in his trousers’ pocket, Mum.’

‘What did I say, then?’ asked Chinese Lady.

‘Never mind,’ said Lizzy.

Seventeen-year-old Daniel, Sammy and Susie’s eldest, was a lively one, like his dad. And like his Uncle Tommy, he was a natural mechanic and was working at the firm’s garments factory in Belsize Park as assistant on the maintenance of the sewing and cutting machines. The machines were overworked in fashioning Army and RAF uniforms day in, day out, and Tommy, factory manager, was often stretched to the limit to make sure breakdowns did not exceed the number of spare machines available. New machines were difficult to come by. Daniel was proving invaluable, the son of his dad in his energy and application. Good old Gertie Roper, charge-hand of the machinists and seamstresses, mothered him, and the younger girls teased him. So Tommy said. Chinese Lady, suspecting the machinists were a bit common because they were mainly from the East End, hoped the teasing wasn’t vulgar or downright suggestive. She told Sammy she also hoped it wasn’t catching, as she didn’t want Daniel, now growing into a nice young man, to turn common. Don’t worry, Ma, he’s fighting it, said Sammy. Don’t call me Ma, said Chinese Lady, if anything’s common, that is.

She thought about Polly. With her twins, Polly was now on another visit to her parents in their grand house in Dulwich. Her father, General Sir
Henry
Simms, had been forced by ill-health to retire from active service and take a desk job. Polly and her children were making up for the frustrations he felt at losing his command. It was nice for him, thought Chinese Lady, to have his happy little grandchildren close at hand, especially as he doted on them. He was a natural gentleman, like Edwin, with an admiration for Boots, his son-in-law, for the part he had played in making Polly a mother when she was well over forty. Damned fine man, your eldest son, Mrs Adams, he’d said, and healthier than many men only half his age. Chinese Lady hadn’t wanted to talk intimately about Sir Henry’s admiration for Boots’s virility, so she said well, I must say he’s always had his good points, although he still says things I can’t make sense of sometimes. That changed the subject.

As for dear Rosie, still living down in Dorset, she said in her letters or phone calls how much she was missing her husband Matthew. But her children, Giles and Emily, filled her time, and Tim’s wife Felicity, she said, was always an invaluable help and companion. Chinese Lady thought what a blessing that was, a blind companion actually being an invaluable help. Well, of course, Felicity was an Adams now, and any Adams seemed to take on something that Chinese Lady felt was to do with the sterling qualities of her long-dead first husband, Corporal Daniel Adams. But it didn’t seem right, so many of the family being away in places as good as foreign. Chinese Lady liked things to be more natural. More natural to her was having her children, grandchildren and, yes, great-grandchildren,
within
walking distance. There was always something right and proper about being able to put one’s hat and coat on, and slip out for a family visit down the road, up the road or somewhere else not far away. This war was as bad as it could be in interfering with family life. Even if the last battles were won, as Edwin was sure they would be, the country and its people would end up tired out from all they’d had to put up with and a bit bitter from the results of long separations.