Camomile Lawn Read online

  Three

  ‘MAY WE ASK THE twins over?’ Walter addressed his aunt. ‘Of course.’ Helena glanced fleetingly at her husband’s fingers and balding top, which was all she could see behind the outspread Times. She watched the fingers tighten their grip. ‘Ask them to lunch tomorrow or Friday.’

  ‘I am out on those days.’ Richard Cuthbertson doubled up the paper with a sweep of his arms, tearing the top sheet. Helena winced and Walter and Polly exchanged a smile.

  ‘Telephone and ask them.’ Helena spoke towards Polly without moving her head. ‘Such nice boys.’

  ‘Extraordinary, considering their father. The fellow’s a conchie. I hear he’s filled the Rectory with Germans. What’s he going to get away with next?’

  ‘Actually, the Erstweilers are Austrian. He played the organ quite beautifully on Sunday, even though it needs repairing. It was so nice of him.’

  ‘Playing for his supper, that’s all. The fellow’s a Jew, I hear.’

  ‘Presumably that’s why they are here.’ Walter helped himself to more butter than he needed.

  Polly reached for the toast. ‘Are there any young Erstweilers, Aunt?’

  ‘One, in a camp. The Floyers say the Erstweilers are worried stiff.’

  ‘Brace him up, do him good. The General says they are splendid places. His friend at the Embassy offered to show him round one when he was over there. Of course he knows it’s all propaganda.’

  ‘What’s propaganda?’ Calypso came sleepily into the room. ‘Forgive me coming down in a dressing gown, Aunt. Good morning, Uncle.’

  ‘Concentration camps.’ Walter swallowed his toast.

  ‘Father says General Peachum is the most gullible man he’s ever come across. Any kedgeree?’

  ‘I ate it.’ Polly got up from the table.

  ‘All of it?’ Calypso whispered.

  ‘There wasn’t much. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll eat an egg.’ Calypso sat beside her uncle. ‘I didn’t think it worth dressing as I intend spending all day in the sun. Oliver’s marvellously brown.’

  ‘We are going to ask the Rectory twins to lunch tomorrow,’ said Walter.

  ‘If they are conchies like their father I won’t have them in my house,’ said Richard aggressively.

  ‘It’s Aunt Helena’s house, Uncle, and Father says we should all admire people like Mr Floyer. If there had been more like him in 1914 we should all be living in a better world.’

  ‘Walter,’ said Helena quietly. ‘Stop it. He will wreck The Times if you tease like that!’ The three young people gave a whoop of laughter. Helena suppressed a smile. Richard Cuthbertson left the room.

  ‘Aunt Helena, he’s worse than ever.’ Calypso laid a hand on her aunt’s.

  ‘He doesn’t want another war.’ Helena patted Calypso’s hand. ‘He won’t admit it’s coming. Here’s Oliver. You are up early, that’s not like you.’ Oliver came in through the French windows carrying a towel.

  ‘I’ve developed new habits, Aunt. Not all of them good. I’ve been swimming in the cove with the twins. Is there any coffee left for us?’

  ‘Come in, twins, we were talking about you. We were going to ask you to lunch.’ Polly went to pour coffee. ‘Don’t just stand there.’

  David and Paul came in shyly, muttering ‘good morning’, ‘thank you’ and ‘hullo’. Tall, with startling yellow hair and brown eyes, indistinguishable, they sat down, their eyes fixed on Calypso, by whom they were fascinated.

  ‘Uncle was suggesting you will be conchies if there’s a war.’ Polly handed them coffee.

  ‘No, no,’ they said. ‘Not this war. One should fight for the Jews.’

  ‘Two should.’ Calypso, aware of their eyes, mocked them.

  ‘Two will,’ said David.

  ‘Two are joining up at the end of the holidays,’ added Paul.

  ‘Oh,’ said Walter eagerly, ‘what in?’

  ‘Air Force,’ they said.

  ‘Long distance killing.’ Oliver looked at them. ‘Heard of Guernica?’

  ‘Of course we have. Picasso.’

  ‘Just as awful as close to. I shall go into the Navy as soon as they will take me.’ Walter spoke eagerly.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Helena, rising from the table. ‘Do stop, children. There may not be a war. It may not happen. All that over again. I can’t bear it.’ She left the room, closing the door.

  ‘Poor Aunt Helena.’ Oliver buttered his toast. ‘She will not face the fact that in all of us, even in her, there is the person who is capable of killing, you, you and you.’ He pointed round the table with his knife. ‘Every one of us is capable of killing other human beings. Let’s have that game for this year. As well as the Terror Run we will have the Killing. What do you say? Draw straws? Not afraid, are you? Let’s have a killing, to take any form you choose. We’ll include Sophy. That makes seven of us.’

  ‘You are mad, Oliver.’ Calypso was looking excited.

  ‘It’s a mad world. Are you on?’

  ‘I’m on.’ Calypso smiled across the table at Oliver. ‘I’m on.’

  Nobody else spoke until Sophy, who had followed Oliver and the twins into the room, said: ‘What does it matter if there’s going to be a war, anyway?’

  ‘Out of the mouths—’ said the Floyer boys in a tone of relief and Walter said: ‘All right, let’s make it that the killers kill within a time limit of five years. That should include us all. Sophy doesn’t really count.’

  ‘But I do. I do count, don’t I, Oliver?’ Sophy screamed suddenly at Oliver.

  ‘Yes, yes, you count,’ Oliver said soothingly, not taking his eyes off Calypso. Calypso stared back, remembering the coarseness of his words the night before, her hasty refusal more from habit than inclination. Oliver back from Spain had a new dimension.

  Four

  RICHARD CUTHBERTSON SMOOTHED HIS hair with the ivory brushes Helena had given him when they married, brushing the grey hair along the sides of his head. He laid the brushes in exact alignment with the bottle of hair oil in symmetry with the matching clothes brushes, and glanced as he always did at the photograph of his first wife Diana, posed looking away from him, her arm round her dog, a sensible smooth fox terrier, not one of those rough-haired things one saw nowadays with oblong snouts and trembling legs. He had no dog now that his retriever had died. Helena had objected to the smells when it farted and the hair shed on the carpets. She was happier without a dog. She would not prevent him replacing his old companion but difficulties would be made, hints dropped. Two can play at that game, he thought. ‘It would be good for Sophy.’ His eyes travelled past his first wife’s photograph—had she really looked like that?—to the group photographs of his fellow officers, a splendid lot, mostly dead. He ran over their names, a familiar litany. They looked so young. Peter a stockbroker now, Hugh a brewer, Bunty secretary to a golf club, Andrew farming, their commanding officer now retired a general, chairman of the local bench of magistrates, Master of Hounds, rich.

  ‘And I live on my wife’s money and have one leg.’ Richard looked closer at the regimental group of 1913, young men without fear. He wiped a tear from his right eye with a fastidious handkerchief, a perpetual tear due to gassing just before the loss of his leg, an embarrassment and a nuisance. He would get a dog, to hell with Helena. He settled his tweed jacket squarely on his shoulders, tweaked his trouser crease into correct line down his artificial leg and turned to leave the room. As he did so he glanced out of the window and caught sight of his nephews and nieces running from the house across the lawn, carrying towels and bathing suits and accompanied by the parson’s twins.

  ‘Wait for me!’ Sophy’s high-pitched scream halted Oliver, who with Calypso made the tail end of the procession. ‘Wait, wait!’ Irritating child. He watched Oliver pause and noticed with a frown that he and Calypso were holding hands. Oliver had taken off the ridiculous bandage he had worn at breakfast, showing off, of course. Oliver dropped Calypso’s hand and, catching hold of the child, swung her on to
his shoulders to sit astride. The child’s gingham dress flew up and Richard saw that she was wearing no knickers, bloody little bastard exposing her bum.

  ‘Helena?’ Richard shouted, limping downstairs. ‘Helena, where are you?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Helena, I don’t often interfere in your department, but this time I must insist—’

  ‘What?’ Helena was in the drawing room, putting roses in a bowl he had won at polo before the war. She did not look round.

  ‘That bowl needs cleaning.’

  ‘If we polished the silver according to your directions there wouldn’t be a silver mark left. What is it, Richard?’

  ‘That child Sophy is wearing no knickers.’

  ‘How on earth do you know?’ Anxiety showed in Helena’s eyes.

  ‘I saw Oliver pick her up.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘All?’ He was nonplussed. ‘It’s indecent. I ask you.’

  ‘Richard,’ Helena laughed, ‘she’s only ten, she never wears knickers if it’s hot. What are you fussing about? She’s gone bathing with the others. A little girl of Sophy’s age can’t be indecent.’

  Helena’s laughter infuriated Richard.

  ‘Your friend the General wants you to ring him.’ Helena always referred to the General as ‘your friend’.

  ‘What about, did he say?’

  ‘He’s going to put the hounds down, thought you ought to know as you are on the Hunt committee.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘He says if it’s war it’s total. No more hunting.’

  ‘Good God! So he thinks there will be a war?’ Richard was shaken.

  ‘Yes, my dear, he does.’

  ‘Helena—’ he took the hand she held out to him. ‘Helena, I am useless, useless.’

  ‘Nonsense, Richard. There will be masses of things for you to do.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Organizations, A.R.P., things like that.’

  ‘Answering the telephone? I ask you. I’m not a bloody clerk.’

  ‘Ring the General. Have a talk with him, he will be in the thick of things.’

  ‘I have only one leg.’

  ‘You don’t answer the telephone with your legs,’ Helena said brutally. ‘Now I must get on, if Cook and I are to feed your army of relations.’

  ‘What about Sophy’s knickers?’

  ‘There’s going to be a war. What the hell do Sophy’s knickers matter? If you are interested I don’t wear knickers in very hot weather. Knickers are a Victorian innovation.’ Helena picked up the flower scissors, brushed stalk ends into the wastepaper-basket and left the room. Oh, why must I be so awful to Richard? she asked herself. If Anthony had only lost a leg instead of being lost altogether would I be so beastly to him? Getting no answer to her hypothetical question Helena dismissed her first husband, whose bones lay somewhere in France, from her mind, and went to discuss meals in the kitchen. It was amazing what a lot of food Calypso, Walter, Polly and Oliver consumed; not only breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, but continual snacks from the larder. Remembering the last war she speculated on the return of food rationing, one of the chief topics of conversation among her friends and relations of that time. The shortage of potatoes. The occasion when one of her aunts had had her butter ration stolen on a bus, blown up into an epic, treated as a tragedy almost equal to the loss of a dear one in the trenches. Helena stood in the doorway leading to the kitchen, remembering the telegraph boy bringing the news, ‘killed in action’, and the physical shock in her chest. ‘Now all’s to do again.’

  ‘What, Madam?’ said Cook.

  ‘Oh, nothing, Cook. I was just thinking. What shall we feed the Major’s crowd on?’

  ‘Something filling.’ Cook said this every August. Helena was horribly aware of the end of the life to which she had grown used, afraid of what a drastic change might do to her uncertain equilibrium. Women entering what is euphemistically called ‘the change of life’ were not famous for making the passage of others’ lives pleasant.

  I must, she told herself, speak to Mildred, she is a rock, and she smiled at Cook as she thought of Mildred Floyer, barely five feet tall but with the strength required to cope with a High Church parson husband in a parish which was essentially Chapel and Low.

  ‘Poor Mrs Floyer has two sons,’ she said.

  ‘Coming to lunch, are they?’

  ‘Going to war.’

  ‘Then we must see that they get a good lunch,’ said Cook, who had the talent of living in the moment.

  Five

  ‘WHEN IS THE FULL moon?’ Polly, lying on the rocks beside Oliver, watched him watching Calypso swim out from the cove with Walter. Oliver closed his eyes and lay back.

  ‘Thinking of the Run?’

  ‘Yes. Shall we let Sophy do it? She does so want to.’

  ‘I don’t see why not, if she practises a bit first.’

  ‘Will you tell her? It will fill her cup of happiness.’

  ‘A full moon ago,’ said Oliver, ‘I was on the Ebro.’ Polly said nothing.

  ‘One of my friends, a Czech, was killed, never made a sound, shot through the jugular. He and his friends burned a priest, made a bonfire and burnt him. What good did that do? The joke was it turned out he was one of us, or had been.’

  ‘Joke?’

  ‘Atrocities are jokes, you can’t survive otherwise. We all committed atrocities, their side and ours, made this pit, built a fire in it and pushed them in to frizzle.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I stood by. It comes to the same thing. I don’t remember whether I actually pushed anybody in but I think I helped.’

  ‘Think?’

  ‘We were all drunk, Polly. If it wasn’t wine it was fear or rage or just wanting some action. There’s an awful lot of waiting about. To fill the time you burn, rape, pillage.’

  ‘Rape?’

  ‘Yes. Well, actually she was more than willing and later I thought, oh God, I may get clap.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No, I was lucky. I didn’t.’

  ‘Just the once?’

  ‘No, sweet, every time I got the chance.’ Oliver laughed.

  ‘So that’s why you say we are all capable of killing. You’ve changed.’

  ‘Who would you like to kill?’ Oliver leant on one elbow, looking at Polly stretched beside him, her body nearly as beautiful as Calypso’s.

  Looking down her nose at the bobbing heads in the cove, Polly said, ‘I don’t think I know anyone I want to kill, but I’d like to have the power to make people suffer,’ she lied, speaking lightly, for there were times when it would be nice to have Calypso out of the way. ‘What’s your killing game to be?’

  ‘It’s just an idea. I must plan it. Look how far out the twins are. They’ve got Sophy with them.’

  ‘They won’t drown her. D’you know, Olly, their father was a stretcher-bearer in the war?’

  ‘Jolly brave. He’s never talked about it. He’s not a war bore.’

  ‘Poor Uncle. I hope none of us will become like him.’

  ‘The Somme, the Marne, Wipers, the B.E.F., General Haig, General French, trenches, conchies, war profiteers, yankees, comradeship and what does it produce? Cotton poppies and two minutes’ silence. Christ Almighty!’

  ‘I don’t feel, somehow,’ Polly was laughing, ‘that he’d call you officer material if he heard you now.’

  ‘Too true. I’m for the ranks.’

  ‘Really? After all that O.T.C. at school?’ Polly was intrigued. ‘I should have thought you’d go straight into the Guards as an officer.’

  ‘Not after the International Brigade.’

  ‘I suppose not. Was there comradeship there?’

  ‘Lots of comradeship.’

  ‘Making bonfires?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Now let’s plan the new game. Sophy!’ Oliver shouted through cupped hands towards the twins who were swimming to shore, Sophy between them, a hand on each twin’s shoulder. ‘Like to join the
Terror Run this year?’

  ‘What?’ The child scrambled up the rocks. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said would you like to join the Terror Run this year?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘You’ll have to practise.’

  ‘I know the path. I know it better than any of you.’

  ‘Not in the dark, not by moonlight.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well, you must let me see you run it so that I’m sure.’

  ‘I’m sure. There’s a man with a snake on it. Will you watch the whole way?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll watch both ends and the middle and see how you do.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, Oliver.’

  ‘See what it is to give happiness.’

  Calypso sat beside the twins, who watched Oliver, who watched the drops of water run down her legs into her groin.

  ‘Will you run?’ Polly invited the twins.

  ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘When is it?’

  ‘Full moon, whenever that is.’

  ‘And the Killing Game?’ Calypso looked round. ‘You both in on that?’

  ‘Yes,’ they said, surprising the cousins.

  ‘That makes six of us,’ said Walter.

  ‘Seven,’ said Sophy. ‘It’s me, too.’

  ‘Oh, Sophy, you’re too small to kill anyone.’

  ‘Oliver said, he said.’ Sophy looked from face to face, distressed. ‘Besides, I shall grow up.’

  ‘Oh, let her.’ Calypso wiped the salt water from her arms with fastidious movements. ‘I think we should include Aunt Helena and Uncle and Betty and Cook and the Rector; make it more of a lottery.’

  ‘Not Father,’ said the twins.

  ‘All right. Aunt and Uncle then, not Betty or Cook.’

  ‘Why not? Because they’re village, not our class?’ Walter jabbed at Oliver. ‘I thought all you Comrades were classless.’

  ‘Far from it,’ said Oliver, laughing, ‘as you’d know if you’d been there. No, Betty and Cook might get ideas.’

  ‘Above their station?’

  ‘No, you fool. They might easily go full tilt, might take it seriously.’

  ‘Go to the police?’ Polly grinned.