The Parrot Cage, page 15
Gathering her courage to support her, Gerry answered him:
‘I’m glad you did, for I understand now. And although I still hurt, it’s bearable because I understand.’
‘Does it help to know that I hurt too?’
‘No. I knew you did all along. Oh, hell! Yes it does and I’m ashamed of that. It’s all so bloody unfair.’ He looked sideways at her and then drove off the road on to the wide grass verge. He switched off the ignition and turned to take both Gerry‘s hands in his own.
‘Gerry, I’ve told you that I should never have done it—’
‘I didn’t mean that you were unfair, Peter,’ she interrupted in a rush. ‘Only life. I mean so unfair on Diana and on you and only at the end on me. Honestly.’
‘Hush, Gerry; I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say that although I should never have done it and I am bitterly sorry for what I’ve done to you, I can’t help but be glad of what we shared.’
‘Oh, Peter.’
He dropped her hands, released the brake and drove carefully on to the road again. After a mile or so, he said:
‘Gerry, I think I probably ought to organise a transfer for you. Would you prefer to work for someone else?’
The thought that she might be exiled from his company as punishment for her lapse into emotion made Gerry’s insides knot themselves into an angry lump. When she could trust her voice, she said almost in a parody of the young women with stiff upper lips in the recent crop of patriotic films:
‘Oh, I think I can take it, Peter.’
Chapter Eleven
Gerry was immensely surprised to find a note from Felicity waiting on her doormat when Suvarov dropped her in Dover Street. They had had no communication since Annie’s funeral. Gerry unfolded the single sheet of paper, hoping that nothing had happened to Flixe. She did not think she could bear to hear of any more trouble until she had had a chance to recover. But all the note said was:
Dropped in to see you, but no you. Have nipped up for tea with Anna K. Perhaps I’ll meet the mysterious Mr Oldridge. Do pop up when you get back. We might have supper together and catch up. Flixe.
Grinning absurdly to herself, Gerry flung off her hat and gloves and pulled the door of the flat shut behind her. It would be wonderful to spend the evening with Flixe and joke and chat all the misery and melodrama away. Perhaps she would be able to bury the memory of Diana Suvarov’s beautiful face and wasted limbs if she and Flixe could talk for long enough and laugh.
As she took off her sapphire-coloured corduroy jacket and changed her shoes, Gerry tried to tell herself that it was a really good thing that Suvarov should have nipped their love affair in the bud; she should never have allowed it to come so close to flowering. Andrew was fighting thousands of miles away from home and she was his wife. However much she had hated his assumption of ownership when she was trying to join the WRNS she could not pretend that she had not betrayed him. It was a horrible thought. Looking back to that night when she had tasted the best and the worst of herself, she could not imagine how she could ever have let herself forget her husband and the things she had promised him.
She began to think that she must have been mad. Perhaps the perpetual, nagging tiredness, the skinning of her nerves by the nightly bombardment that had culminated for her in Annie’s death … Gerry stopped herself. It would always be possible to find excuses for what she had done and there was no point. Her feelings for Suvarov had no future. It had to be forgotten. She was married to someone else and ought to concentrate on him even if she could not accept that she owed him unquestioning obedience.
Locking the door of her flat, she walked up the steps through the main front door of the house and knocked on the door of Anna Kingsley’s flat. It was opened almost immediately by Felicity, ravishing as always in a sea-green jersey and speckled tweed skirt, her pearls reflecting the silky glow of her face. Gerry leaned forward to kiss her and wondered why Flixe hugged her so warmly, but the comfort was so welcome that she said nothing.
‘Come on, Gerry, Anna’s in the kitchen whipping up the most delectable kind of supper and she needs help.’ Gerry followed her glowing sister into the small kitchen, where Anna stood at the cooker gently stirring some savoury mixture in a wide, shallow copper pan.
There was something incongruous in the sight of the elegant Anna, wrapped in a voluminous white apron and standing surrounded by pots and pans and all the debris of a cooking session. But she seemed thoroughly in control and displayed none of the panic or ill-temper with which Fanny Alderbrook attacked her own kitchen. Gerry breathed in the wonderful scents of gently frying butter and shellfish and some kind of alcohol.
‘Anna,’ she said, sighing luxuriously, ‘it’s good to be here. Thank you. That smells wonderful.’ Anna lifted her wooden spoon out of the mixture in the copper pan and inclined a cheek towards Gerry, who kissed her, noticing as she did so that Anna was wearing some of her spectacular diamond earrings.
‘I thought we’d better have one last beano before real rationing starts,’ she said as she straightened up again.
‘They’re grasping the nettle at last are they?’ Gerry said, watching Flixe scraping at one of the lobster shells on the table.
‘So Edwin tells me, and he usually knows.’
‘You know a lot of awfully influential people, Anna. What …’
‘Never mind that now, Flixe. I’m going to need that cream any minute. Can you hurry up with the shells?’
‘What can I do, Anna?’ asked Gerry, who was feeling rather out of things as the other two laboured at their tasks.
‘Help Flixe, if you will, Gerry. She’s scraping all the fat out of the lobster shells and beating it into the cream and she’s being slower than an arthritic tortoise.’ Flixe laughed, but before she could protest, Gerry could not resist saying:
‘Lobster! Is it quite decent to eat something like that with so little food about and rationing about to start?’
‘There’ll be much more once rationing’s here and everyone gets fair shares, according to Anna’s War Office Edwin. And anyway nobody ever minds your eating expensive food – it’s hoarding sausages that’s the sin, isn’t that right, Anna?’ said Flixe with such determined gaiety that Gerry began to wonder just what her sister was doing.
Later, as they were eating the perfect lobster and drinking some superb white burgundy Anna had produced from her fridge, Flixe started to tease Anna about her culinary skills and beg to be told where they had been acquired. Anna smiled across the table at her, as though amused at her eagerness.
‘No,’ she said at one moment. ‘There was no one at my parents’ home who could have taught me dishes like this.’
‘I can imagine, if their cook was anything like all of ours,’ said Flixe warmly. ‘So where was it?’
‘France. There were times when I was so homesick while I was there that only cooking helped. The physical sensations of good, French cookery are so all-conquering that they give terrific solace.’
‘And do you still cook for solace, Anna?’ Gerry asked, interested.
‘Will you teach me? I’d love to know how to do that.’ Before Anna could do more than nod at Gerry, Flixe intervened.
‘I think I remember Mother telling us once that you had spent several years in France. It was after she was married, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. What else did she tell you?’ Catching the slight edge in Anna’s voice, Gerry assumed that Flixe was going to change the subject and so she did not intervene. But she had reckoned without Flixe’s perennial interest in other people.
Flixe smiled apologetically at Anna and raised her glass, as though in a toast.
‘I’m sorry, Anna. It sounds as though those years could not have been happy ones. I’d never have asked you about them if I’d known.’ Anna raised her own glass in acknowledgement of the apology, drank some burgundy and then shrugged as she put the glass back on the table.
‘There’s no reason not to tell you. Fanny knows, but she disapproves so much that she’d never have passed it on to you. For most of the time I was there I was so happy – in seventh heaven as the Americans say. I was living just outside Paris with a man to whom I was not married.’
‘You, Anna?’ said Gerry, sounding shocked and quite forgetting her disapproval of Flixe’s curiosity in her astonishment.
‘That was jolly brave, Anna,’ said Flixe, trying to remove the sting from Gerry’s tone of voice.
Anna turned back towards Flixe, her fine-featured face colouring slightly. ‘Yes, I suppose it was brave, although it did not seem so at the time. Then it was the only thing I felt I could have done. I loved him so much. And he could not have married me: he was already married and his church does not allow divorce.’
‘And it ended badly,’ suggested Flixe. Anna’s dark-green eyes seemed to swim for a moment with tears that did not fall. Appalled at having shaken the self-control that had always seemed absolute, Flixe quickly stood up and collected the empty lobster plates to take out to the kitchen. Gerry soon followed her with the dishes. When she had shut the kitchen door behind them, she whispered to her sister:
‘Flixe, did you know anything about that before? How could we have known Anna so well and not known?’ Flixe shrugged and turned to the sink to run the sticky plates under the hot tap.
‘It’s not really a matter for general conversation. Poor Anna. Look, we can’t stay here talking about her. There’s a soufflé in the fridge. Get it out, will you, and I’ll find some pudding plates.’
A little surprised by Flixe’s peremptory voice, Gerry did as she was told and preceded her sister back into the dining room. Anna appeared to have regained all her usual control and she smiled kindly at Gerry’s anxious expression.
‘Did you have a pleasant weekend, Gerry?’ Anna asked. Gerry put the soufflé in front of her and then sat down at the table again.
‘Not altogether,’ she said moderately. ‘Sometime I’d like to tell you about it, but not … not quite yet.’
‘It’s all right, Gerry. I understand. And I’m the last person to try to force your confidence.’ They smiled at each other, even more in sympathy than usual. Then Flixe reappeared with the plates and they talked of other things.
When she had swallowed her first mouthful, Flixe looked at Anna with an expression of awed admiration on her face.
‘Anna, this is ambrosial. What on earth is in it? I’ve never tasted anything so heavenly in the whole of my life.’ Her trick of giving so trivial a matter such a weight of words broke the slight tension that remained and Anna answered in her usual easy voice.
‘Just cream, marrons glacés, maraschino, crystallised violets, and a little gelatine. It’s just an ordinary cold soufflé, Flixe.’
‘Well, it’s the very best I’ve ever tasted. And I suppose it’ll be the last until after the war. We should take it seriously. Au revoir, soufflé, she said, licking the last of it out of her silver teaspoon.
‘I’m glad you enjoyed it, Flixe, dear,’ said Anna. ‘Gerry, some more wine?’
‘No, thank you, Anna. It was marvellous, but if I have any more I think I’ll collapse on to the table in a stupor.’
‘It can’t be as bad as that. You don’t look flushed and your speech is still perfectly discreet.’
‘Unlike mine,’ said Flixe cheerfully. ‘Still, I can’t regret going overboard about cooking like yours. Now, we’d better help you with the washing up and then I’ll have to push off.’
‘Wash up, indeed! Certainly not. Gerry is exhausted and ought to be in bed.’
‘I must say I am rather longing for my pillow. Thank you, Anna. It’s been lovely.’ Gerry stood up, leaned over to kiss Anna, and tried to express all the sympathy she felt for her but was too shy to put into words.
When she and Flixe had left the flat and were standing on the pavement outside Gerry’s iron steps, she said:
‘Flixe, how is it that people always tell you things? I thought I knew Anna better even than Mother, and yet I had no idea about any of that.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t always set out to make people tell me things, although I always want to know. And I suppose they respond to that. Didn’t you get the feeling that she’s been rather longing to talk about it? I’ve often thought she must be so lonely.’
‘Lonely? Anna?’ Gerry said, surprised that her extrovert sister should have divined the essential unhappiness of their mother’s old friend.
‘Oh, I know she has hosts of friends,’ answered Flixe, too accustomed to being corrected by Gerry to take her remark as anything but dissent. ‘But not all that close. It’s almost as though she deliberately keeps her distance. I don’t know. And we won’t solve any mysteries tonight. Good night, Gerry old thing. Look after yourself.’ Felicity leaned forward to kiss her sister’s cheek.
Gerry watched her go, wondering whether Flixe had always got on to the important things about people so quickly, and whether her intuition would have saved her from the mess in which Gerry had found herself. But the memory of that mess was too painful, and she herself was too tired, to let her mind think much. She was turning to climb down the steps when Flixe reappeared, a quite different expression on her face. Gerry waited to hear what she had to say, and it surprised her.
‘Listen, old thing, you will tell me if you need me …’
‘Why should I need you, Flixe?’
‘You’ve had a rough deal so far, Gerry, and since I haven’t, I just want to … to …’
‘Hand over a bit of your luck?’ Gerry suggested.
Felicity laughed at that and said much more naturally:
‘I suppose that was what I meant. Dearest Gerry, don’t take things too tragically, will you.’
What do you know? Gerry asked silently. And who told you?
Gerry went to the office the following morning with much less reluctance than she had felt since Suvarov had propelled her, and himself, into their emotional swamp. Although there could be no rescue from it, Gerry no longer had to feel humiliated to find herself there and that in itself made it far easier to look her chief in the eye, even smile at him.
If only there could be a decent bit of war news, she sometimes thought, then she might almost feel content again. But there was no reassuring news from any part of the world. Although the Americans had agreed to supply arms and ammunition to the Allies under their lend-lease terms, there was no sign of their actually joining in the fight against Nazi Germany, and Britain seemed to be making no headway. The U-boat attacks were increasing in intensity and in success, and thousands of tons of Allied shipping were sent to the bottom of the Atlantic every month. The British had to retreat from Greece in April, leaving a bloody mess behind and only hanging on in Crete by the skin of their teeth. Then at the end of May Crete fell.
Britain had lost control of the Aegean, and it began to look increasingly as though she would lose the Middle East as well. Gerry began to worry about Andrew’s safety. Earlier in the month, Admiral Darlan, now virtually in control of Vichy France under Pétain, had allowed the Germans to use the air fields in French Syria in order to send supplies to Rommel in North Africa. For the first time since the real war had started, Gerry felt she had reason to be afraid for her husband – and father. Brigadier Alderbrook was facing Rommel in the desert and Andrew was somewhere in Palestine, horribly near those now-German air fields.
From the various reports and memoranda that had crossed her desk, she knew that General de Gaulle had been pressing the British to help the Free French move against Vichy in at least one of the French colonies, but with no success. There had been a badly botched attempt to take Dakar in West Africa the previous September, just after Gerry joined RE(1)R, and since then there had been no joint actions. But now with the new danger looming in Syria all that had changed, and an operation was planned.
The expedition began on 8 June and fourteen days later Damascus had fallen to a determined and brave commando raid. It was said that Pétain wanted to surrender, but that Darlan would not let him. The end came on 8 July, by which time thousands of men had died on each side, many of them Frenchmen killed by other Frenchmen.
Gerry listened to the heated arguments in the analysts’room as bits of news came in and wondered whether Andrew had been anywhere near the fighting. She heard stories of great heroism and gallantry and wondered how many were true.
‘But what was it all for?’ she asked at one point. ‘Was it really all about the air fields?’
‘Partly,’ answered Mike, looking coldly at Michel, who had taken little part in the discussion. ‘But surely it was mainly to recruit more members of the Free French. It was thought, was it not, Michel, that if there was something that could be seen as a Free French victory, then all the Vichyists in the Levant would flock to de Gaulle?’ He was about to continue when Michel said quietly from the window:
‘If that will help to get the Germans out of France it is justified, whatever it costs, however many are killed. You could not understand that, Mike, because your country is not under occupation. You English may be fighting this war, too, but you have no idea what it is really about.’
Gerry watched Mike’s fair skin colour in a painful blush at the sincerity in Michel’s voice and thought it was time for her to retreat herself. As she carefully closed the door between herself and the two men who seemed to have got over their compulsion to hurt each other in vicious arguments, she wondered when Michel would go off and join his hero in Carlton Gardens. At least if he were gone, there would be fewer people to remind poor Mike Endlesham what had happened at Dunkirk, and presumably Philippe would stay with RE(1)R to explain the myriad French points of view when the British analysts needed any interpretation. It seemed sad – and wasteful – that the analysts’room should have been divided so often by the quarrels between Mike and Michel, but Gerry knew that they were merely a microcosm of the often bitter divisions between the French in London and their reluctant hosts.
