Chapter Forty-Four
Doris
‘If you want your clothes back, here comes Elizabeth now.’ Doris flicked her eyes towards the house, from where Elizabeth could be seen, wearing Honor’s cream silk pyjamas, picking her way across the lawn in a pair of silver heels.
‘She will leave holes,’ Honor said in irritation. ‘And Andrews will be furious because he is about to serve lunch and she’ll be looking for breakfast.’
‘Poor Honor,’ Doris said lightly. ‘Such a bore for you.’
Honor laughed, reluctantly. ‘I know you think my concerns are ridiculous,’ she said, ‘but they are my concerns.’
‘Not ridiculous, just unworthy.’
Elizabeth reached them and dragged over a chair to the little table. ‘Maureen and Duff are quarrelling most magnificently.’ She took a cigarette case from the pocket of her pyjamas. ‘I heard them as I went by. I lingered awhile. Just to make sure.’
‘Make sure of what?’ Doris asked, curious. Elizabeth hadn’t bathed, she thought. There was a musty smell from her. She edged her chair away.
‘That they really were fighting properly.’ She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, exhaling with a sigh. ‘Not just rowing idly, the way they like to.’
‘And?’
‘They were,’ she said in satisfaction.
‘You’re pleased, aren’t you?’ Honor said.
‘Rather. Isn’t it lovely when the men are away?’ She stretched her legs out into the sun. ‘And the Americans. And the young people. Honor, do you think we might have drinks out here?’
‘Elizabeth, it is scarcely noon.’
‘That is the downside, of course,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Without Chips, one is left to your tender mercies. And they aren’t so very tender. Who cares if it’s “scarcely noon”. Don’t be so middle-class,’ she complained.
‘Oh, very well. Kill yourself with drink if you must. What’s it to me?’
‘Precisely. Now, watch Duff follow the tray. Once he sees Andrews and the cocktails, he’ll be out like a shot.’
But Duff didn’t appear. Andrews, ever a mind-reader, came and deposited a jug with slices of orange and a ruby-coloured mixture with the bitter, herby smell of Campari, to which Elizabeth helped herself.
Doris and Honor both declined. Elizabeth had a second glass, and still no Duff.
‘It must be a worse row even than I supposed,’ she said happily.
‘Why so pleased?’ Doris said.
‘You’d be pleased too if, your whole life, Maureen was always in front of you – better, richer, happier.
Like a hare going around a greyhound track that you can never catch, no matter how fast you run.
And always – always! – flaunting it so that you knew her happiness grew on yours, fed off yours, grew stronger as yours grew weaker. ’
‘But why so personal? That’s just Maureen, surely?’
‘All those Guinnesses,’ Elizabeth insisted. ‘Not you, Honor, but the others. You might think it’s not, but it is personal. Even my wedding – especially my wedding – poor bit of a thing that it was—’
‘Hardly!’ Honor said. ‘Quite the social event.’
‘It was alright, until Oonagh thoroughly eclipsed it by having her own, barely a week later, in the same church—’ Her voice took on a whining tone.
It was a tale – pitiful, irrational – they had heard before. ‘Everyone gets married at St Margaret’s,’ Honor tried to say.
‘—and the most lavish wedding of the season. But even that I didn’t mind, until Maureen took such pains to point it out to me – all the ways in which Oonagh’s wedding was better than mine. At least Oonagh’s marriage to Philip came a cropper too,’ she said.
‘Don’t be cruel, darling, it doesn’t suit you,’ Honor said. ‘I know it is not how you really are.’
‘And it’s not really the wedding, is it?’ Doris asked after a minute in which she had watched Elizabeth smoke furiously, finish one cigarette and start another with an angry snap of her lighter.
‘Of course not.’ Elizabeth shrugged. ‘I can’t even pretend to myself that it is.
Maureen married the man she loved, and so did I.
And now, eight years later, she has three children and the man she loves is still in awe of her, and what do I have?
Nothing. Nothing at all. No children. No money.
Pelly and I don’t talk. We barely lasted four years.
The constant rows about money did for us. ’
‘Not just money, from what I heard,’ Doris said.
‘Money,’ Elizabeth reiterated firmly. ‘Imagine the misery of trying to scratch a living? Never, ever more than half above water, liable to drown at any time. Knowing that every time my parents saw me, they knew I would ask for a loan. Or if I didn’t ask, that they would feel compelled to offer, and I would say yes, because I couldn’t afford to say no.
Endless hopeless jobs in nightclubs, in hotels, in a dress shop. ’ She shuddered.
‘Hardly Maureen’s fault,’ Honor said loyally.
‘Maybe not, but it became intolerable. To be constantly comparing myself and my poor scraps with her abundance.’ She shook her head, then picked a shred of tobacco from her top lip. ‘So yes, when I hear Maureen and Duff fight, there is a part of me that is simply thrilled.’
It was, Doris reflected, awful. And yet, the awfulness was really in how much Elizabeth must mean it. It was one of the few serious things she’d ever heard from her.
‘I say,’ Elizabeth said then, eyes gleaming suddenly, ‘what’s this I hear about you being out all night, Doris? And being caught sneaking in at dawn …?’
‘You should really turn your talent for intrigue to better use, Elizabeth. You’re barely up, haven’t seen a soul as far as I can tell, and already you know everything.’
‘One picks things up,’ Elizabeth said vaguely. Then, ‘I think I’ll walk down to the village. Another afternoon hanging around here, waiting to see what exertions that Kennedy girl forces us into, I cannot bear!’
‘You’d better change,’ Doris said. ‘You do know you’re still wearing your pyjamas?’
‘My pyjamas,’ Honor corrected automatically.
‘Yes, I’m aware,’ Elizabeth said with dignity. ‘I am not a complete fool, you know.’
‘Not a fool at all, Elizabeth, that’s my point,’ Doris said. ‘Why don’t you come with me to Berlin? I’m sure you could be useful.’
‘As you are useful?’ She gave her a shrewd look.
‘Yes.’
‘I think not. But thank you for asking. And for thinking I might be of some use. Most people see me as rather ridiculous.’
‘You’re not that.’
‘No. But I do feel rather obliged to behave that way.’
‘Why?’
‘People expect it of me.’ She left then, taking off the silver shoes and walking barefoot back to the house.
‘I suppose she will raid my wardrobe now, and Molly will be unable to stop her. You know, you are different, Doris. I can see it, but I don’t know what it is, exactly.
’ Honor looked consideringly at her. ‘It isn’t the way you look.
Or even the way you behave, so much. It is a feeling …
Oh, I explain so badly … But I feel that you are less yielding, like clay that has hardened overnight. ’
‘Something of that is probably true,’ Doris said.
‘There are things you haven’t told me, aren’t there?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.’
‘You are not allowed?’
‘No. Or rather, yes, but it’s not that. I don’t know how to put them into words.’
‘Try.’ Honor took her hand in both hers. Her hands were dry and cool.
‘Very well. I will try. I don’t have the habit of saying things anymore.’
‘Take all the time you need. We have hours.’
Doris sat in silence, trying to find a place to begin.
She cast back through memories that were only half in place, because she had never allowed herself to fully absorb them, trying, now, to single them out, to squash the instinct she had learned to deny them.
Because, she realised, if she didn’t speak them to someone, they would swamp her.
There was too much that she had pushed away.
‘At first, it was such fun,’ she began. ‘The daring, the intrigue. Boring too, often, of course, but always with the feeling that something might happen, and knowing that what I was doing was, in its way, useful. And I knew no one, except the people I was sent to know. Mostly men, mostly officers. My mother’s family are all here now, thank goodness.
But then, I made new friends that I didn’t intend.
The family in the flat beside mine; a mother, father and daughter.
Hannah. She played the violin. Terribly. ’ A tiny smile.
Honor smiled back. ‘Go on.’
And Doris told her. About Hannah, her violin. Beatrice, her plea for help. Doris’ failure.
‘I couldn’t ask for the help they needed, even though I knew the very people who could have helped them.
Because to do that would have been to risk everything I did there.
Everything I had been sent to do. That’s when I realised the terrible truth of the position I was in, and I hated it.
In order to help many, I couldn’t help the few who were in front of me.
I did nothing. Except listen. I listened every day to Hannah, scraping away, trying so very hard.
’ She gave a weak and shaky smile. ‘The sound of that violin to me was as though she were the greatest soloist in the world. Because it meant that she was still there. Until she wasn’t. ’
‘But you did try to help,’ Honor said.
‘Yes, but too late. They were gone before I could do anything. Just as I had decided that I didn’t care anymore, that I would help them whatever it took, they were gone.’
‘Do you know where?’ Honor asked when it seemed that Doris could say nothing more.
‘No. I never found out. They left everything behind. Their furniture, Hannah’s violin. I took it from the back of the lorry and I have it still. After that, nothing was quite the same.’
‘But you stayed?’
‘Of course. To do what I went there to do. That can’t change.’
‘But you are changed?’
‘I think I must be.’
Doris waited for Honor to tell her to be careful. She didn’t. ‘How lonely you must be,’ she said.