Aunt Letitia Read online

  The fog was closing in on Hugh. He felt he was about to go under. Without thinking, he reached for his service revolver. He had no idea if it was even there, or if he’d lost it somewhere in the waste of no-man’s land. His hand fumbled – grasped the cold butt; but darkness enveloped him at the very same moment. He was blind, helpless, slipping away: at the tommy’s mercy.

  There was a loud report. His arm jerked back. He heard a splash, followed by the rattling of machine-guns.

  Slowly, slowly the sound of the guns faded into the void.

  When he next opened his eyes, he could see again. The grey day was just the same as before, if indeed it was the same day – or even the same world. His leg was agony, the pain gnawing away at him: eating him the way rats eat the corpses. But he was still alive, somehow – just. And the tommy?

  He raised his head, looked down into the crater. The mudencrusted body was lying half-in, half-out of the pool. White eyes stared vacantly at the grey sky.

  Hugh laid his head back down. His entire life had shrunk now to a scrap of sky, a patch of mud, and the insatiable, devouring pain. His brain ticked over, slowly winding down. It was his birthday. He was twenty-one. He’d killed a man. Or had he? Was it a German bullet or an English one that had snuffed out the tommy’s life? What did it matter anyway? Death was death was death. And now death was waiting in the wings for him. Blessed release. Peace.

  He closed his eyes and his hand tightened around the lighter which somehow he still had hold of. Walking down blank grey corridors in his mind, turning corner after corner, he searched for his memories and found nothing. The walls were closing in on him. There was nothing left, except for red pain. It filled his head with an inextinguishable fire.

  Some time later, he woke. Rain was falling. It fell slowly, half-heartedly, large drops splashing on his face, bouncing on the mud. It seemed to be darker, or else his sight was failing again. He had slid down the side of the crater. His legs were in the noisome water, rotting away. Next to him was the body of the tommy. It seemed fitting they should be side-by-side in death.

  The end could not be far off now.

  In his Buckinghamshire lodgings, Hugh lay sleepless in November 1940. He flexed his leg. The old wound was giving him gyp. It was always worse in the cold. He shivered, curling up and pulling the bedclothes around him. Whenever his leg ached he was always taken back to the day of the attack. He had been twenty-one and he had expected to die. He ought to have died. The odds had been stacked against him. But instead, men had come out under cover of darkness and borne his unconscious body back to the line and thence to a casualty clearing station. All that was left of that time was his aching leg and the vague idea that he’d killed someone: that, and the lighter. He still had the lighter, buried somewhere at the bottom of his suitcase.

  He sighed and turned over and remained sleepless.

  Chapter Five

  NEWS CAME OF the fall of Tobruk. A victory at last, said Mrs Mansell, brandishing the newspaper.

  ‘Only against the Italians.’ Letitia did not think much of the Italians as fighting men, and she said so. She remembered how, in the last war, the Italians had fought eleven successive battles of the Isonzo against the crumbling Austrians and come out with little to show for it. She was even old enough to remember the humiliation of Italy at Adowa in 1896, four and a half months before the birth of her great-nephew Hugh. Mussolini, it was said, had worked wonders on the country since then, getting the trains to run on time, but Letitia doubted that even he could do anything about the Italian Army. All that talk of a Second Roman Empire was so much baloney, Letitia said.

  ‘A victory is a victory, Italians or no,’ said Mrs Mansell, not to be denied.

  But nothing could raise Letitia’s spirits. She was all gloom. The coming of the New Year had failed to bring any cheer. The problem was, she just didn’t feel like her old self anymore. There were dizzy spells, occasional breathlessness. She had taken to using a stick when walking, to be on the safe side. It was a depressing reminder of what she called her ‘increasing frailty’.

  ‘There’s no need to look so glum,’ said the doctor on one of his visits. ‘You’ve been through a lot just lately, what with the tumble in Oxford Street and then your close encounter with that bomb. It takes time to recover from such things at your age.’

  ‘At my age. You make me sound like an old crock, which is exactly how I feel. If I was a horse, I’d have been put down by now. I’ve outlived my usefulness.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ The doctor stuffed his stethoscope into his black bag. ‘In most respects you are as fit as a fiddle. Give your body time to recover. You can’t rush these things. You have to learn to take it easy.’

  ‘Take it easy! Don’t you realize there’s a war on?’

  The doctor laughed. He was perched on the edge of the chaise-longue, Letitia stretched out along it. They were in what had once been the dining-room, but now served as a sort of reception-room for entertaining visitors. Not that there were many visitors these days. Letitia spent most of her time in her bedroom or in the kitchen.

  ‘The war is impossible to ignore. Even your quiet little square has its bomb damage now. I always think that hole in the terrace looks like a gaping wound, but that’s just my medical mind speaking.’

  Letitia watched as the doctor looked round the room with a keen eye. She tried to imagine how it must appear to him. Undeniably shabby, but it still retained a faded opulence. There were vestiges of the past: a cabinet containing cut crystal glasses; a long mahogany table with a damask cloth; an exotic-looking fruit bowl. No fruit, of course.

  ‘It can’t be easy for you, rattling around in this big old place on your own. Why not get out of London altogether? There must be somewhere you could go, friends, relatives?’

  ‘It will take more than a few bombs to drive me out of my home. Besides, all of my friends are dead. I am the only one who went in for longevity in my circle.’

  ‘Family then?’

  ‘There’s only Hugh. He’s off somewhere doing hush-hush war work. There’s his son: Ian. But he’s in the army of course. I’m not quite sure if Hugh’s wife counts as family these days. She has rather drifted away from us. Apart from the two boys (as I call them) there are a few cousins so distant I can’t even remember their names. Possibly they may all be dead by now. I forget how time flies.’

  ‘It’s odd that you should have so few relatives.’ The doctor was in an unusually chatty mood that morning. ‘For some reason, I always assumed you came from one of those big Victorian families. I picture you as a girl in the nursery, with a governess and a nanny and a pile of brothers and sisters.’

  ‘The nursery and the nanny I’ll grant you, but there were only three of us children. Me, my brother Jocelyn, and Angelica. That’s Jocelyn scowling over there on the sideboard.’

  The doctor picked up the photograph. ‘Yes. I can see the family resemblance. And where is Angelica?’

  ‘There are no pictures of Angelica.’ Letitia sighed. ‘Angelica, you see, was not considered normal. She was a rather backward girl. In her later years, I thought of her as a child in a grown-up’s body. Father was ashamed of her, of course. Kept her hidden away. The family skeleton. But Angelica never did any harm to anyone. In all my years I’ve never come across anyone else I could say that about.’

  ‘The Victorians had a rather unfortunate attitude in such cases.’ The doctor replaced Jocelyn on the sideboard, stooped to inspect the Indian statuette. ‘I’d like to think we’d be more sympathetic in this day and age.’

  ‘Are we, though? From what one reads and hears, the Nazis are not disposed to be sympathetic.’

  ‘Which is precisely why we are fighting them.’ The doctor straightened up, turned to face her. ‘And that reminds me, Mrs Warner. I, too, am going off to do my bit for king and country. But you will be happy to know I am not abandoning my patients without a thought. I have arranged for a locum. Doctor Kramer. She is very good, I am assured.’

&nbs
p; So that explained his chattiness, thought Letitia. He was in holiday mood, off on adventure, leaving his patients in the care of a woman. Letitia raised her eyebrows at the idea.

  The doctor laughed. ‘Oh come, Mrs Warner, don’t tell me you are one of those people who don’t hold with women doctors!’

  ‘My generation was brought up to believe women were merely decorative, except when they were bearing children. My father must be turning in his grave, the way things are today: all this war work for women, jobs in factories, on the land, even in the services. Not to mention doctors,’ she added with a wry smile. ‘But I am sure I shall learn to get on with this Doctor Kramer.’

  ‘I hope so. And now I must be going. I have lingered long enough.’

  ‘Still riding around on that bicycle of yours?’

  He patted his belly. ‘It does wonders for my figure, in case you hadn’t noticed. I shall say au revoir, Mrs Warner, rather than goodbye. For I intend to return once my task is done. And I fully expect you to be here still when I do.’

  Lying on the chaise-longue, Letitia heard the front door close as the doctor left, heard faintly his feet skipping nimbly down the outside steps. The house sank back into silence. There was not even a ticking clock. She had always hated that measured tick-tock, counting away the seconds of one’s life.

  In the stillness, half dozing, she imagined that she could hear laughter up on the landing: innocent, ingenuous laughter, an echo from the past. Which was ridiculous, because Angelica had never been in this house.

  She stirred, banishing the past, concentrating on the present. She swung her legs off the chaise-longue, planning the rest of her day, deciding to start with a spot of shopping. As for the doctor’s advice, she intended to ignore it.

  ‘Take it easy, my eye! I’ve never been in the habit of taking it easy, and I don’t intend to start now!’

  ‘Books have become incredibly popular. The publishers can barely keep up with the demand. Of course, the new editions are not produced to the same standard as before the war. But I always say that it is the words inside the book that are important, not the quality of the paper or the binding.’

  The shop assistant ended on a note of regret as if, despite her words, a lack of quality was something to be decried.

  Letitia listened absently, wondering which of the many books on display it would be best to send out to Ian. ‘The problem is,’ she explained, ‘I have no idea what kind of books he likes.’ Ian was a bit of a mystery all round.

  ‘The classics are selling well, of course.’ The assistant spoke with exaggerated patience. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer something more contemporary. There is always this thing.’ She pointed to a book called England’s Hour, an apologetic expression on her face. ‘It is very topical, though I gather the author is persona non grata these days.’

  ‘Really? Why is that?’

  ‘She’s a pacifist. Need I say more?’

  ‘It’s a pity there aren’t more of them about. If there were, we might not be in the mess we are in today.’ Letitia, disliking the officious assistant, decided to take charge of the situation. ‘Now then, how about a good biography? Where do you keep them?’

  ‘Over here. We have a wide selection, naturally. This particular title is new in this week.’

  Letitia glanced at the volume indicated, and immediately her heart skipped a beat. The author’s name was the same as that of a persistent letter-writer who had pestered her for information and reminiscences about her family. The letters had stopped coming, oh, quite a time ago: before the invasion of Norway last year. Letitia had thought that meant the tiresome man had given up, that she had scuppered his plans to write a biography of her father. But it seemed the odious author must have gone ahead anyway, and here was the finished work. The Militant Shepherd, it was called: no doubt because of her father’s famously forceful manner. He had been far more opinionated even than this huffy assistant.

  The assistant picked up a copy of the book. ‘This should be right up your street, if you go in for all that Christian charity and forgiveness: love thy neighbour and so on, etcetera.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think this particular bishop was a churchman of that type.’ Letitia gathered herself, was relieved to find she could sound so offhand. ‘Perhaps you remember – well, no, you wouldn’t, you’re too young. But you may have heard about the chaplains in the last war who used to bless the guns in the hope that Divine intervention would make them more efficient: more efficient in massacring Germans, that is. I often thought at the time that my father, had he been alive, would have approved. Indeed, I am quite sure he would have been first in the queue when it came to bestowing blessings upon guns, shells, tanks and gas canisters.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that the Bishop of Chanderton was your father?’ The assistant showed real interest for the first time. ‘How extraordinary! Then I’m sure you’ll want to read The Militant Shepherd. It says here on the jacket that the bishop was someone who believed passionately in right and justice and would have approved of our stand against Fascist tyranny. He is compared with Churchill.’

  ‘Not a particularly apt comparison,’ said Letitia. ‘Even Churchill is not such an egotist as my father. Good day to you.’

  ‘But you haven’t bought anything!’ the assistant called after her. After all the trouble I’ve gone to, was implied but not spoken. Letitia wondered if her abrupt departure would be put down to bad manners or if, given her age, it would be assumed she had taken leave of her senses.

  Out on Charing Cross Road, Letitia tried to hurry away from the bookshop but found that she could not. Her hurrying days were over. She leant on her stick, taking small steps, struggled to remain calm, breathing slowly and deeply. Her mind was churning. She very much wondered what the book had to say about her father but knew that she could never bring herself to read it. But the book itself was neither here nor there. It was the unexpected reminder of her father that had really flustered her. He always reappeared when she least expected it, haunting her from beyond the grave: last autumn in Selfridge’s, today in a book shop on Charing Cross Road. Would she never be free of him?

  The bishop and that shop assistant would have got on famously, Letitia decided as she waited for a bus. The bishop, were he alive today, would speak of pacifists with exactly the same sneer in his voice. No doubt he would demand they be rounded up and put in camps to reflect on the error of their ways. Nobody would be able to convince him that freedom of conscience was one of the things for which Britain was fighting in 1941. It had always been a pointless exercise trying to persuade him that there were two sides to any argument. He had firmly believed that his own point of view was – as it were – gospel.

  It was only when she was shuffling onto the bus that Letitia remembered she still hadn’t found anything to send to Ian. The failed errand seemed the last straw. Her whole day was in tatters.

  Blinking back tears as the bus swung into Shaftesbury Avenue, she just wanted to get home as quickly as possible.

  ‘You really ought to stop doing more than you can manage,’ said Mrs Mansell as she made hot sweet tea. ‘And I think you should let me telephone for the doctor.’

  ‘There’s no need for any fuss. I shall just sit down for a minute or two, and then I shall be right as rain, as you would say.’

  Mrs Mansell looked at her dubiously. Letitia was sitting in a carver in one corner of the kitchen, surrounded by cushions and draped in an old cashmere shawl. Her stockinged feet were propped up on another chair. She hoped she did not look as frail as she felt just then. The shopping trip had taken it out of her – not that she would ever admit as much.

  Mrs Mansell turned her attention back to the tea. ‘What were you up to, anyway, traipsing all over London?’

  ‘I wasn’t “up to” anything. You make it sound like I was engaged in some nefarious activity.’

  ‘So might you have been as far as I know, seeing as I don’t have the foggiest what nef – nef – what was it?’ Mrs Mansel
l stirred vigorously, the teaspoon chinking against the mug.

  ‘Nefarious. It means up to no good. But all I was doing was buying some books for Ian.’

  ‘And where are they, these books?’

  ‘I couldn’t find anything to suit. I’m not sure what Ian’s tastes are, in any case.’

  ‘Perhaps he don’t want books. My Bob now, I know he’d rather I sent him a pack of cigarettes.’ She handed Letitia a mug of steaming tea. The mugs were Mrs Mansell’s innovation. She did not hold with fancy china in the kitchen. ‘I’d had more than enough of books by the time I left school.’

  ‘Books are wonderful things, more precious than treasure. They are powerful too. That is why the Nazis burnt so many.’ Cradling the mug in her gnarled hand, Letitia wondered if it might be possible to burn that biography of her father. Or perhaps an obliging bomb would fall on the warehouse from which it was distributed. That would scupper the second coming of the Bishop of Chanderton.

  ‘Drink your tea,’ Mrs Mansell ordered, bringing Letitia out of her reverie.

  Letitia obeyed, concealing a wry smile. Mrs Mansell would not have lasted five minutes in the old days, when servants were expected to be deferential if not invisible – just how the treasured Annie had been at The Firs. But, having got used to Mrs Mansell, Letitia felt she could no longer do without her. In any case, there was something to be said for Mrs Mansell’s way of going about things. One felt more on a level with her. She was a companion as well as a servant. And her advice was often worth listening to. Perhaps cigarettes would be right for Ian after all.

  Thoughts of Annie and The Firs, and of Ian who was goodness-knew-where, naturally led Letitia round to Hugh. It was over a month since his last visit. He’d been in a sombre mood back then. Anxious about Ian, obviously; but also feeling neglected: Ian had spent his embarkation leave with his mother in Leicestershire. He was entitled to spend his leave however he wanted, of course; but Letitia, biased in favour of Hugh, felt she would have a bone to pick with Ian when (or if) she saw him again. And perhaps she wouldn’t bother with cigarettes, either.