All the Sweet Promises. Elizabeth Elgin
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miss you, lad. I need to tell you about yesterday, meeting Jane and Lucinda, and about Ardneavie House. It’s smashing here, Gerry. No sirens or bombs, and a lovely garden, full of flowers. Ardneavie House is big – at least ten bedrooms – and Lucinda and Jane and me are on the top floor with the boat’s-crew Wrens. Just them and us, up here in the roof, and a storeroom and a bathroom.
The bathroom’s lovely, Gerry. Hot water in the taps, lots of it. No boiling kettles and lugging the bath in from the yard. This house belonged to a shipyard owner, but the Navy took it from him for the duration and now it’s a hostel for Wrens. I suppose that man had servants. They’d sleep up here on the top floor, I shouldn’t wonder, because there’s a little back staircase that goes down to the kitchens – sorry, lad, galley! And all the rooms have big windows. You can look out and see hills and trees and not another house in sight. There’s this big depot ship in the loch and it’s got a flotilla of submarines …
Submarines. It had shocked Vi to realize that her own side fought every bit as dirty as the Germans and that German seamen were torpedoed, too. Her first sight of a submarine had brought back the pain of Gerry’s death and she’d had to tell herself that those in the loch were ours, so they couldn’t be all that bad.
Strange, how easy it had been to accept the harshness of the training depot and the lessons she had learned. Never to volunteer for anything, for instance; to keep her bedspace clean and tidy; never, ever, to forget the eleventh commandment, Thou shall not get found out; and if you were prepared to agree that every word of King’s Regulations was Holy Writ and accepted that leave was a privilege and not a right, then life in the Navy needn’t be all that bad. The time to start worrying, she supposed, was when the war was over and they were all sent home – for where was home, now?
… I miss you, Gerry. I think about you always and I pray for you. I won’t ever forget you, lad; not while I live and breathe, I won’t. And I’m sorry about my ring, but it’s best I don’t wear it. I can’t have people ask me where my husband is. It would hurt too much. I’ve never been able to say I’m a widow. I know it inside me but I can’t say it out loud; not yet, Gerry.
Goodnight, lad. I’m fine, honest to God I am. Don’t worry about me …
Vi punched her pillow and stuck her face into it. Oh, damn all this killing. Why did men have to do it? Why?
Almost dark now, and the bombers would be taking off from Fenton Bishop, heaving and thrashing into the air, into the same sun that had reddened Loch Ardneavie. How long would it be, Jane demanded silently of the darkness, before she was able to speak of Rob or think of Rob and not weep inside her? It was nearly two months since her call-up papers had come; two months since S-Sugar had not come back. She had been angry at first, then disbelieving, but finally she had gone to the aerodrome to see the padre, begging him for news of Rob.
‘I’m not his next of kin, you see, and I never knew exactly where he lived. I want to write to his mother. Can you get her address for me?’
But such things were confidential, said the padre. He was evasive about Rob too; almost as if he hadn’t wanted to talk about him.
‘Try to forget, my dear,’ he had said. ‘Accept that it must end.’
That was when she first realized that to lose someone you love is not to feel instant separation. Rather it is first like a hopeless drifting, a little apart from the world, afraid and unwilling to reach out and ask for help. That day, in the padre’s little room, she accepted it was best she should be leaving Fenton Bishop, best she should be away from the sight of the uniform Rob had worn and the constant sound of aircraft. She wanted to be a number, to dress exactly as the other numbers dressed, to be nothing and no one.
That same night she had gone to Yeoman’s Lane for the last time, accepting without pain that she had thought their love was untouchable, yet now it was as if it had never been. Now, that loving counted for nothing and all the sweet promises they had made were empty words that floated like echoes in a great grey void. Tomorrow’s promises they had been, and tomorrow never came.
‘I can’t come here again, Rob,’ she had whispered, dry-eyed. ‘Tomorrow I am going away …’
‘You awake, Lucinda?’ Midnight, and sleep still evaded Vi.
‘Afraid so. I must be too tired, I suppose. I was thinking about home, actually.’
‘Where’s home?’
‘Lincolnshire, really, though we live in London now,’ she whispered into the darkness. ‘But I love Lincolnshire and Lady Mead – that’s the house I grew up in. We lived near Donnington on Bain, right in the country. Too beautiful. I wish I could go back there.’
‘You shouldn’t have left it, queen.’
‘Had to, Vi. The Air Force requisitioned it. Lincolnshire is a flat county, you see, exactly right for aerodromes, and they took our house for the airmen, I suppose. I’d love to see it again, though I think Mama won’t ever go back there. But Lady Mead will be Charlie’s one day, so I’ll make it, eventually.’
‘Charlie’s your brother, is he?’
‘My cousin. I don’t have a brother, that’s why Charlie will inherit.’
‘Inherit?’ Vi was instantly alert. ‘You rich or somethin’?’
‘Not really. We’ve got plenty of things – goods and chattels and land – but very little money because we can’t sell anything. Something to do with entail, you see.’
Vi did not see, but people who inherited things intrigued her.
‘If you like that house so much,’ she demanded bluntly, ‘won’t it make you mad to see your cousin get it?’
‘Oh, no. I’m going to marry him, you see.’
‘Just to get an ’ouse? But you love him, don’t you?’
‘Of course I love him.’ Of course she did. She always had. Well, almost always. She hadn’t liked him very much that night on the sofa. ‘But what about you, Vi? Who do you love?’
‘I – I don’t have nobody.’ Sorry, Gerry. ‘Free as the air, I am. Got no things, neither. They was all bombed in the May blitz.’ Just two crystal goblets in a drawer in Mary’s sideboard.
‘But you do want to get married, Vi? Every woman wants her own home, and babies.’
‘Homes get bombed and babies need shoes and clothes and food. You can’t rear a baby on love and fair words.’ Why had she started this conversation? She didn’t want to talk about her other life. Her wound had gone deep and she wasn’t ready, yet, for the knife to be turned. ‘What about you, Jane? You got a boyfriend, eh?’
‘She’s asleep,’ Lucinda whispered. ‘Lucky so and so.’
Jane Kendal was not asleep. It was seven o’clock and she was in Tingle’s Wood, waiting for Rob. And it was all a mistake about his being missing because he was there now, at the perimeter fence, smiling his lovely smile, saying ‘Hullo, Jenny.’ It was her favourite fantasy. It sustained her when the pain inside her became near-unbearable, and it was not for sharing.
Morning came, silver and gold, with sunlight that skimmed the surface of the loch and gilded the poppies and roses in the garden at Ardneavie. On either side of the lane that led to the jetty, creamy-white elderflowers scented the morning air and pale pink clover and forget-me-nots grew thickly, scorning the war, denying its existence.
‘Did you remember,’ Jane asked, ‘that this is Midsummer Day?’
‘Damn! And I should have remembered to dance barefoot through the dew and bow to the rising sun.’
‘Be serious. Aren’t you feeling scared? I know I am.’
They were standing on the jetty with