The Parrot Cage, page 36
‘Gerry said that you wanted to see me.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, hardly looking at her. ‘Sit down, will you?’
She obeyed and waited in silence as he seemed to struggle with his thoughts. It was so unlike him not to be able to say whatever was in his mind that at last she prompted him.
‘Is it something you want to tell me, Peter?’
‘Yes,’ he said again, this time more firmly. But he paused again before he could go on. ‘It’s Jean-Pierre. He’s dead. You know that they’ve been hunting him since last autumn? Well, he was cornered last night, and he shot himself.’
Because she did not speak, he had to look up at her. Her delicately-featured face was completely white and her mouth looked like a thin, bitter old woman’s.
‘Felicity. It was better that way. He must have done it because he knew what he would face.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘But think how lonely he must have been.’ Suvarov winced, but she was too deep into her own feelings to notice.
‘Think of the things he did, my dear.’
‘I know, and I’ve hated him because of Ming. But I loved him once, and I can’t forget that completely.’ She was gripping her abdomen again.
‘I think I ought to get you home, Felicity,’ he said just as an extraordinary whistling sound wailed overhead. They both looked at each other in surprise, but before either could speak, there was the sound of an immense explosion somewhere to the north of them.
‘Oh, God, not again,’ Flixe said, getting up from her chair. ‘Haven’t we had enough?’
Suvarov swung round on his swivel chair and looked out of the window, but there was nothing to see.
‘It didn’t sound like an ordinary bomb: it must have been one of the new rocket-powered ones. Still, it was miles away. Come on, I’ve got a car outside; I’ll drive you back to Kensington.’
Flixe shook her head.
‘No, but thank you, Peter. I promised to go and have supper with Ming and Anna Kingsley this evening. I’ll just walk across the park with Gerry when she’s ready to go.’
‘Are you sure, Flixe? Shouldn’t you go and lie down or something?’
‘Why? Just because the man I tricked into caring for me so that we could get information from him has shot himself? Why should that make me need to be driven home?’ She hated the bitter, sarcastic sound of her voice, but it came out before she could stop it. Peter Suvarov dropped his face into his hands and did not try to answer. Ashamed of herself, Flixe backed out of his office and went to look for her sister.
Gerry looked at her face and quickly said:
‘You look ghastly, Flixe. What did he want? Surely he didn’t upset you?’
‘What? No, of course not. If I look washed out it’s because I’ve got frightful curse pains,’ said Flixe, not wanting to have to talk about Jean-Pierre. She wanted to tell someone about what had happened, but not Gerry.
They walked back across the park and then Gerry insisted on fetching Flixe some A-K tablets from her flat before they went up to see Ming. When she opened the door to them the first thing she said was:
‘Gerry, Andrew rang Anna earlier on today to say that he had to go out to some kind of meeting this afternoon and so he’s likely to be back late. Anna says, would you like to have dinner with us and Flixe?’
‘How gorgeous! Anna’s cooking is always such a treat. You’re looking well, Mingie,’ said Gerry, following her sister in through the front door. ‘Flixe, why don’t you come and put your feet up in the drawing-room?’
‘I’m all right, Gerry. Don’t fuss. I’m going to have a word with Anna. She in the kitchen, Ming?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Did you hear that awful bomb?’
‘Yes,’ answered Gerry as they went to pour themselves drinks. ‘We’d better have the news on later in case they tell us anything.’
Flixe left them chatting and walked slowly down the passage to the kitchen, where Anna was standing as usual surrounded by delectable scents of food and wine. Even rationing did not seem to reduce her to the state of bored panic with which most women seemed to face the prospect of making adequate meals from the dingy, dreary materials available.
‘Well, Flixe?’ she said, looking up from her pestle and mortar.
‘Not really. Jean-Pierre’s dead.’
Anna put down the green-covered pestle, got up from the table and came to stand in front of Flixe. She did not touch her, but there was a look of such sympathy in her face that Flixe’s chin puckered like a child’s and tears fell from her eyes. Anna said nothing, but she held out a clean drying-up cloth, which Flixe used to mop her face.
‘Thanks, Anna. I had to tell someone. Don’t pass it on to the girls, will you? They don’t know enough about it all.’
‘All right. Sit here for a minute. Would you like a drop of cooking brandy?’
Flixe smiled shakily.
‘That would be wonderful, Anna.’ She accepted a medicine glass half-filled, and sipped.
‘I’m not sure that I know enough about it either, Flixe,’ Anna said after a quiet interval. ‘I know that you haven’t seen him since last year. And I can’t help thinking that there was more to it all than there seemed to be. Not that I’m trying to force your confidence.’
‘I know, Anna,’ answered Flixe, putting down the glass. ‘And there was more, but nothing I can tell you. Anyway, not yet.’
‘Oh, this wretched war.’
‘That’s right, Anna. But it is going to end soon. And some things have come right, haven’t they?’ said Flixe, trying once more to count her blessings as a way of coping with the hurts.
‘Ming, you mean,’ said Anna, an extraordinarily sweet smile washing across her face. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? All that grace and goodness in a child of her age, who’s been through so much. And Gerry, too, is better.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Flixe. ‘Somehow, she seems to have found something to love in that husband of hers. I just hope she’s not deceiving herself. I’m sorry, Anna, that sounds bitchy.’
‘A bit … Never mind: if you can’t be bitchy about your sister to someone who cares for you both, who could you be bitchy about?’ Flixe smiled at Anna, opened her mouth as though she was going to say something and then shut it again quickly. Anna looked carefully at her.
‘Flixe, when you want to talk, I’m here. When you can, I mean.’
‘Thanks, Anna,’ Flixe said, looking hard at the row of copper pans hanging on the wall to her left. Then she looked back at Anna, standing so elegant and self-contained in front of her cooker. ‘There is one thing I want to ask, if I may?’
‘Ask away, Flixe.’
‘How did you do it, Anna? How did you learn to forget and reconstruct yourself so that it didn’t hurt any more? How did you learn to live without other people?’
Anna put the wooden spoon down on the table, lowered the heat under her pans and came to sit opposite Flixe, taking one of her hands in a light clasp.
‘Flixe,’ she said very gently. ‘Don’t try to do what I did. It’s not worth it. I did it, and it took this war to teach me how mad I’d been.’
‘But you were content, Anna,’ protested Flixe, trying to remove her hand from under Anna’s.
‘Yes, that’s true,’ Anna said, letting Flixe’s hand go. ‘But dead, really. It is better to let yourself care about people and risk being hurt than that. Oh Lord, something’s burning.’ Anna got up from the table and whisked a pan off the cooker. ‘I must cope with this. Will you tell the others that we can eat in about five minutes?’
Flixe obeyed, bitterly disappointed to have been denied her one possibility of escape. Well, she said to herself as she walked out of the kitchen towards her sisters, Anna learned how to insulate herself; I can do it too. Whatever she says, it must be better than this. When she reached the drawing room her sisters were listening to the news for information about the bomb. When it came it was the usual discreetly inadequate announcement that there had been a bomb leading to ‘some loss of life and damage to private property’. Flixe got up and walked over to the wireless and switched it off just as Anna appeared with a tray full of dishes and plates.
They ate the simple, delicious food and drank the wine Anna provided and then Flixe, pleading tiredness, left them to go back to her own flat. She thought no more about the bomb until she met Gerry again the following day in the office. Gerry’s face was even paler than usual and before Flixe could ask what the trouble was, Gerry had told her.
‘Andrew didn’t come home last night. The War Office doesn’t know where he is. That meeting was in Harrow.’
‘Harrow?’ repeated Flixe, stupidly. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘That’s where the bomb was.’ Flixe sat down in her chair, unable to produce the usual consolatory sentences about being sure Andrew would be all right. She simply looked at Gerry with pity in her eyes.
The confirmation came in the end, of course. Someone at the War Office telephoned Gerry at work to tell her that Andrew had been caught by a collapsing wall on his way back from the meeting, and had been killed instantly with four other people. When Gerry put down the telephone, she could not feel anything at all, and just sat staring at the wall beside Suvarov’s desk. After a while her stillness registered with him and he looked up from his work.
‘Bad news, Gerry?’
‘Yes,’ she said, still staring at the wall. ‘Andrew’s been killed.’
‘Oh, my dear, I am sorry,’ he said, getting up from his desk. He waited, but she neither spoke nor looked at him. He did not know what to do or say. After a painful moment she said, ‘Oh, Peter,’ but he was not sure what she wanted from him. Moving slowly, as though with terrible reluctance, he laid one of his hands on her bowed head and very gently stroked her hair, touching her tense hands as he did so. Then he slid his hands down to her face and carefully lifted her head so that he could look at her.
‘Gerry, he is dead. It is over. You’ve done so much to try to make him happy. You have to let yourself off now.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. We each have to work that out for ourselves. I can’t stay, my dear, but shall I find Flixe for you?’
Gerry shook her head. ‘No, but would you tell her for me? And if Mike’s there, could I … do you think I could have him for a minute?’
‘Yes, of course,’ answered Suvarov, covering his surprise.
Gerry cried a little as he shut the door, and when Mike came up a few minutes later, her face looked childishly grubby under its tearstains. That did not worry him at all; it seemed normal. What put the fear of God into him was the expression in her eyes. They looked so dark as to be almost black and there was a brooding intensity in them he had never seen before.
‘Gerry, dearest Gerry, Peter told me. I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, Mike,’ said Gerry, bursting at last into a storm of real tears. ‘I tried so hard. And now he’s dead.’
‘I know you tried,’ said Mike, cradling her body in his arms. ‘I know you did, Gerry. But he’s free now, darling. Nothing can hurt him any more.’ She withdrew a little and he immediately released her.
‘You’re so good, Mike,’ Gerry said, but there was no spark in her voice, no confiding smile or gentle hand. He pushed away all the thoughts he had cherished for the long, weary years of the war and walked across the room to sit on the edge of Suvarov’s desk.
‘You were very good to me, Gerry, when I was at the bottom of the pit,’ he said in an easy, warm voice. ‘And you seemed to know about it even then.’
‘How did you get out?’ The bitter unhappiness in her voice made his teeth ache as though he had just swallowed a mouthful of icy water.
‘Don’t worry about it now, Gerry,’ he said, crossing the room and briefly touching her bright hair. ‘Just know that you will get out, that there is a ladder.’
‘I just wish that I hadn’t spent so long hating him. And making him so unhappy.’
‘Go easy on yourself, my dear,’ said Mike, trying to ignore all the needs that were shrieking in his brain. ‘He made you unhappy, too. Don’t make it all worse by trying to hate yourself.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Suvarov insisted that Gerry took some compassionate leave for and after Andrew’s funeral, and by the evening of the following Friday she was safely ensconced in the drawing room of Evelyn Adamson’s house, pretending to listen to the news with her. All the stone-mullioned windows stood open, for it had been a boiling day and the evening breeze was still warm and spiced with the scents of wallflowers and night-scented stocks, which grew just outside the house. Gerry heard the deep, authoritative voice of the man reading the news, just as she heard the twittering of the last few starlings, the lowing of the neighbouring farmers’cows and all the other sounds of a Cotswold summer’s night, but she could not take in the sense of what he said. Her mind was almost entirely occupied with the past thirty-six hours.
She had travelled to Andrew’s old home on the same train as his coffin. His parents must have known as well as she that the elaborate oak box with its expensive brass handles and name plate probably contained most of someone else’s body – or indeed bits and pieces of many people’s – and Gerry could not understand why they did not share her distaste for the whole sinister masquerade of the funeral. But they did not. When she reached the house, mercifully driven in a car different from the hearse that carried the coffin, she found the hall piled high with flowers and wreaths, and Andrew’s mother dressed in full, old-fashioned mourning.
Old Mrs Kyrle had taken Gerry’s right hand in both of hers and pressed it, gazing into her eyes and murmuring:
‘This terrible war. My poor boy.’
Instinctively recoiling from the saccharine voice, Gerry knew that her mother-in-law was sincere, genuinely heartbroken, but she did not know what to say to try to comfort her. The mixture of regrets, powerlessness and distaste brought tears welling into her dark-blue eyes. It was the best thing that could have happened. Mrs Kyrle released Gerry’s hand, put an arm around her shoulders and led her into the drawing room, saying:
‘Poor child. I understand. But you must try to be brave. I always knew that you loved him; even when he was so troubled I told him that it would all come right. And it did, didn’t it, Gerry? It’s the only comfort I have that everything was all right again between you two before he was taken. He was so lucky to have had you, Gerry dear.’
Gerry suddenly shivered at the memory of those inaccurate words, and Evelyn, who was sitting beside her with some khaki knitting in her hands, said:
‘You must be tired.’
‘I am rather. Sorry to be such poor company, Evelyn.’
‘Don’t be silly. This is not the moment to try to be the life and soul of the party. But if you want to talk I hope you will. I mean, don’t try to be a British heroine with an upper lip like board.’
‘No, I promise. When I can talk about it without bursting into tears, I’ll start.’
‘I don’t mind tears either. I’ve poured out a goodly share myself.’
‘Where’s Bob?’ asked Gerry suddenly, as though only just becoming aware that he was not in the house.
‘He’s over there.’
‘France? Oh, Evelyn, I’m so sorry: here I am again, so sunk in my own mind that I didn’t … Will you forgive me?’
‘Of course, and there isn’t any need to be so anxious. He’s not in the front line. He’s just an adviser.’
‘Is he working for Peter, too?’
‘I imagine so. I’ve never asked and neither of them has told me.’
‘It took me a long time to understand how far Peter’s tentacles stretched, how powerful he is, how many lives he …’ She broke off, the infuriating tears starting into her eyes.
‘Try not to hate him, Gerry.’
‘Oh I don’t hate him, Evelyn. I’ve no right to.’ She laughed unhappily. Evelyn came to the end of the stocking she was knitting and started to cast off.
‘Gerry,’ she said, apparently concentrating on what she was doing, ‘how much did Peter have to do with your difficulties with poor Andrew?’
‘Everything,’ she said without thinking, and then, ‘No, nothing. Oh, Evelyn, I don’t know. No. It had started before: that was why I came here the day I first met Peter. Do you remember? Andrew had forbidden me to join the WRNS.’
‘What were the grounds? I’ve forgotten,’ she asked, folding up the completed stocking and beginning to cast on the stitches for its pair.
‘He didn’t say then, but later I discovered. At that juncture regulars like Andrew believed that the women’s services were hotbeds of immorality, and that if I joined up I should be coarsened and made unfit to be the wife of a man like him. Besides, he thought my duty was to be at his side and if I couldn’t be that because of my health and the state of the Mediterranean then I jolly well shouldn’t be at anyone else’s side instead. Absurd.’ She got up from the sofa and went to stand at one of the open windows, breathing in draughts of the warm, scented air.
‘And pathetic,’ said Evelyn from behind Gerry. ‘He must have been very uncertain of himself to have behaved like that.’
‘I don’t think so, honestly, Evelyn,’ answered Gerry, still addressing the dark garden. ‘He just hadn’t thought. He’d lived all his adult life in a world where the lives, friends, activities, dress, status and everything else of women depended on the rank of the men to whom they were married. To him women did not really have any existence apart from their husbands … decent women, I mean.’ She laughed sadly and came back to where Evelyn was sitting. ‘You see he knew absolutely nothing about real life. And since I was only just beginning to learn about it myself, I couldn’t help. I could only fight him, until I realised what I was doing to him.’
‘Did he know about Peter?’
‘No. He thought I was having a liaison with someone. Which I wasn’t. I mean, whatever you think about Peter and me, it wasn’t that. There had been one occasion, but that wasn’t … It didn’t mean anything.’ Gerry was embarrassed, but she and Evelyn seemed to have reached a pitch of communication where it was possible to hint at anything, even if not actually to put it all into words.
