The Parrot Cage, page 9
After more sleep than she normally had in ten days or so, Gerry returned to London much less tired than usual, but feeling low, and glad only at the prospect of getting back to work. But nothing much was happening in the office either, and Gerry plodded through her dreary days, listening to the BBC when she got back to the flat each evening, writing letters to Flixe and Andrew and even her mother, and trying to alter a batch of old clothes she had brought up to London with her so that they would be wearable again. Everyone said that it could be only a matter of weeks before clothes rationing was brought in, and Gerry had been determined to salvage what she could from the wardrobes at her mother’s house.
One morning, five days after her return to London, she stormed into the office with an open letter in her hand. Suvarov looked up, mildly surprised at the noise she was making.
‘My mother is sending my twin sisters to stay with their godmother for three days before term begins. Can you believe it? They need clothes or something. It’s mad at this juncture, but I can’t stop it now. According to this, they’re arriving this afternoon. Oh, why couldn’t she have telephoned? Then I could have explained,’ she said as she hung up her gas mask and started to unbutton her thick camel coat.
‘She probably tried. Come on, Gerry, you know as well as I that most of the telephone lines were put out of action on the twenty-ninth.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. But you’d have thought that reports of the fire storm might have shown her that London’s not the place for a couple of schoolgirls who don’t have to be there.’
Gerry sat at her desk and began ripping open the envelopes of the day’s post, wishing that she had not started the discussion and knowing that her reactions to her mother could never be rational. Striving for a calmer voice, she went on: ‘Never mind. I can’t do anything to stop it now. Mother wants me to meet them at the station and take them somewhere for a treat this evening while their godmother does her ARP stint.’
She looked across the room at him and smiled placatingly. ‘It would mean leaving here about two-thirty. I wouldn’t ask if there was a flap on, or anything.’
‘No, that’s OK. I should just be able to manage on my own for one Friday afternoon,’ answered Suvarov with a smile.
‘Thanks.’
By the afternoon she was quite glad to be leaving early even though she was still furious at what she saw as her mother’s criminal carelessness in sending the twins into the middle of a city that was still being bombarded if not nightly at least several times each week. Gerry was also irritated at the prospect of the usual frustration of waiting for a train that did not appear on time and finding no one able to say what had happened or when it might come.
But for a miracle the twins’train reached Paddington only about twenty minutes after its advertised time. When they came to the barrier both of them looked expectantly around, each one carrying a small overnight case in her left hand. Annie was wearing her navy uniform overcoat and, with her sandy hair and freckles, looked the very picture of a healthy, hockey-playing schoolgirl. But Ming, looking tired and pallid, was dressed in a pale tweed coat and skirt that had once belonged to Gerry and suited her as little as it suited Ming.
‘Twins!’ shouted Gerry, waving. ‘Here I am. How was the journey? It can’t have been too bad since you’re here so early.’
‘No, not bad at all, Gerry,’ answered Annie, who was always the spokesman for the pair of them. ‘But Ming felt a bit sick.’
‘Are you all right now, though? You do look rather pale.’
‘No, I’m all right, Gerry,’ said Ming, her voice so much fainter than Annie’s that Gerry wondered yet again whether Annie had somehow stolen all the vitality that had been available and left her twin with none.
‘Good,’ she said bracingly. ‘Now, Aunt Anna suggested that we go to the cinema this afternoon, but since the train was so early there’s plenty of time to go back to her house to change and leave your bags. She’s lent me a key. Shall we go?’
‘Yes, please,’ answered Annie, picking up her suitcase. ‘How is Aunt Anna?’
‘Well, I haven’t seen much of her – we’re all so busy these days – but she sounded very perky on the telephone when I rang her up this morning after I’d heard you were coming. She’s firewatching tonight, though. Did she tell you?’
‘Mummy did. What does she have to do?’
‘Well, in amongst all these beastly bombs Jerry drops things called IBs – incendiary bombs – and if they’re spotted in time they can easily be put out, so people like Aunt Anna patrol their key buildings to stop any bad fires from starting.’
Ming shivered and Gerry quickly turned to see if she were all right.
‘Don’t worry, Ming. Are you afraid? You mustn’t be. It’s not what we call a bomber’s moon tonight; there’ll be hardly any moon at all and they don’t like that. Sometimes they don’t come at all on black nights. And Eaton Gate isn’t in the bit of London where the bombs are dropping – it’s mostly in the East End, you know.
Ah, here we are. Annie, here’s half a crown, will you get the tickets? Three to Sloane Square, please.’
Gerry and Ming waited with the luggage, while Annie queued for the tickets, and then all three of them walked down to the Inner Circle platform, where Annie looked around her.
‘But where are the shelterers, Gerry?’ she asked in a voice of great disappointment.
‘They’re further down – on the Bakerloo platform. The Circle is hardly underground at all – it wouldn’t protect you from anything.’
‘Can we go down and see? Please, Gerry,’ wheedled Annie.
Ming turned to her twin sister with a look of such cold disapproval on her face that Gerry was quite startled.
‘Really, Annie, how can you?’ Ming said. ‘How voyeuristic.’
Annie tossed her reddish-fair hair back from her face and shrugged.
‘Oh, you’ve just been listening to that ghastly bolshie you’re so fond of.’
‘Bolshie?’ Gerry repeated, fascinated to see that Ming was beginning to fight back against Annie at last and apparently develop her own character and opinions.
‘Oh, Ming has a pash on a wretched woman called Roseheath who’s come to teach history. I can’t bear her, but she and Ming have a real thing going – it’s something chemical between them, I think. Come on, Gerry, whatever Ming thinks, I do want to go and see the shelters.’
‘Well all right,’ answered Gerry. ‘I don’t really see why you shouldn’t. Do you want to come, Mingie, or will you wait here with the luggage?’
‘I’ll wait. I don’t want to stare at other people’s misery,’ announced Ming, turning away from both her sisters.
‘All right. Don’t talk to any strange men,’ said Gerry. She and Annie took the lift down to the Bakerloo platform, where they stood while Annie examined the sheltering families, who were already pitching their camps along the curved wall. A strip of clear platform had been left at the edge so that people could use the tube trains, but the rest was already full of bedding rolls, shopping baskets, picnic food, chatting adults and playing children at half-past three in the afternoon.
‘I thought it would smell worse,’ said Annie, staring interestedly around at everything there was to see.
‘I gather it did at the beginning,’ answered Gerry, amused, ‘but there are better arrangements for lavs and washing and things now. Someone comes along with carbolic in the mornings when all the families have to clear out.’
‘Well, I can’t think what Ming was being so sanctimonious about: these people aren’t miserable – look at those men playing cards over there under the cocoa advertisement. They all seem quite happy to me.’
‘Even so she’s quite right, you know, Annie. I mean, think of having to leave your house and not know if it’ll still be standing when you get back in the morning, and having to come so early to bag a place, and really give up all normal life.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. We’d better get back or Mingie will be thinking we’ve fallen under a train or got arrested or something. She always expects dreadful disasters to happen.’
‘Don’t you?’ Gerry asked, seeing for the first time that the twins were not as easy to read as she had always imagined; she had seen Ming as Annie’s shadow, always doing as she was told; now Gerry began to suspect that Ming was not quite the cipher she had always seemed. Perhaps in her own way she too exercised a certain power. Gerry decided to try to get to know the twins better – as people, not simply as little sisters to be bossed or protected.
They found Ming safe and unmolested beside the two small suitcases when they got back to the Circle platform, and were soon on a tube train heading for Sloane Square. The twins spent the twenty-minute journey reading the advertisements, most of which were new since their last pre-war London visit: there were the few old faithfuls like the Stephens ink blot and the Amami shampoo advertisement, but there were also ‘Careless talk costs lives’posters and Ministry of Food exhortations to eat plenty of potatoes, and pictures of the ‘Squander Bug’tempting feckless housewives into extravagance or waste. Gerry sat back listening to her two sisters commenting, arguing and laughing at each other.
When they all got off the train at Sloane Square, Gerry led the way out of the station and round to Eaton Gate. In the hall she found a note addressed to herself and put it in her bag while she took the twins up to their bedrooms. As soon as they had unpacked their overnight cases and Annie had announced that she would be having first bath, Gerry took the envelope into the drawing room.
Dear Gerry [she read], So sorry I can’t be with you all this evening, but you’ll find everything for supper in the Frigidaire. Please help yourself to a drink – and give one to the twins if they’ve reached that stage. Here are three tickets to the five o’clock performance of Gone with the Wind. You may have seen it, but it looks the most suitable thing for the twins. Take them and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Anna.
Smiling at the effortless efficiency, Gerry stuffed the note into her bag and went to pour herself a glass of Anna’s always excellent sherry. It was rather early for a drink, but she felt that she deserved one. She took the glass over to one of the yellow chairs, picked up the latest Spectator and sat down with it until the twins came back, when she put down the journal and said:
‘Look, Aunt Anna said there was food in the fridge. Are you hungry now, or will you wait till we come back from the cinema?’
‘We’re always hungry. Is there time to have something now? What are we going to see?’
‘Gone with the Wind, Annie. And yes, there’s about half an hour before we need to leave.’
‘All right, you sit there and we’ll forage and bring you something too.’
Gerry sat back, thinking that it was really very nice to be waited on for once. When the twins came back with a tray loaded with an eccentric mixture of delicacies, they seemed to have forgotten their disagreement about the war and the shelterers, and they began to entertain her with a lot of new jokes and apparently slanderous descriptions of school, the mistresses and their fellow pupils.
‘Will you be sad to leave?’ she asked at one moment in the taxi on the way to the cinema.
‘In a way,’ answered Annie, as usual speaking for both of them. ‘We take school cert, in the summer, just after our birthday, and then we’ll leave.’
‘Aren’t you going to take Higher?’
‘No. We thought we’d get in on the war and then do all that sort of thing later, didn’t we, Ming?’
Ming nodded her silvery-blond head and then said:
‘I’ll miss Rosie, though. She’s so sensible. But she thinks it isn’t fair on poorer girls to stick it out at school while they’re in factories and things.’
‘Goodness, this Roseheath of yours sounds very radical.’
‘Oh, no, Gerry. And despite Annie’s insults, she’s not a bolshie. But she has got very sensible ideas, I think.’
‘That sounded almost like a snort, Annie. Don’t you agree?’
‘No, I think she’s silly. I nearly told Father some of the things she’s trying to teach Ming. I know he’d take us away, but it’s a bit difficult in letters. I hoped he’d be back this year, but Mother says no.’
‘I thought you two always thought the same about everything. Look, here we are. Golly, look at that queue! Isn’t Aunt Anna brilliant to have got us tickets?’ said Gerry, beginning to think that despite the oddly unattractive sanctimoniousness she had instilled in Ming, this new teacher of hers was doing a lot of good in helping Ming to emerge from Annie’s shadow.
Absorbed in her ruminations, Gerry hardly noticed the beginning of the film, but gradually it caught her attention and she laughed and cried as much as her younger sisters. The scenes of Clark Gable’s masterful behaviour made her think sentimentally about Andrew, and she began to compose a letter in her mind to make him laugh about it. When the final determined scene faded from the screen and they had stood for the National Anthem, they sat down again in the stalls and waited until the rush was over. Then they made their way out into the street, where, to Gerry’s complete astonishment, a taxi with its flag up passed them and she hailed it at once.
‘Well, what luck that was,’ she said as they sat back a together on the main seat. ‘Now, did you enjoy it?’
‘Yes; much better than staying at home in spite of the bombs. When do they start, Gerry?’
‘Usually about half-past eight, but one can never be quite sure. Anna said she’d try to be back when you get in, but if she isn’t you must promise that if the raid starts you will go straight away to the basement. You know, where I showed you.’
‘But I thought you said they don’t bomb Eaton Gate.’
‘It’s all right, really, Ming. They never have yet, but it’s so much better to be safe than sorry.’
‘Yes, of course. Here we are. Good night, Gerry.’
‘Good night, twins,’ she said, blowing a kiss through the taxi window. ‘If you’d just wait until they’re safely in and then take me to Dover Street,’ she said to the cabby.
She got back to the flat just as the horrible rising and falling wail of the siren started. Paying off the taxi, she ran down the steps to her front door and quickly let herself in, checked the blackout by feel and then switched on the lights. Wondering whether she ought not to have stayed with the twins at least until Anna got home, she took off her coat and hat and changed her shoes.
The evening and night passed as usual with chess and noise and finally sleep, which was broken by the alarm clock at seven o’clock. Gerry dressed, breakfasting as she did so on a slice of bread and cup of tea. Just as she was about to leave the flat, she looked at her watch. There would be time for a quick telephone call to Eaton Gate, she decided, just to double-check that everything was all right with the twins. Telling herself that she was being needlessly anxious, she dialled the number, to be answered by the thin, high humming of a damaged line.
Something’s probably happened to the telephone exchange or the wires. They’re always going in raids she said to herself in a deliberately calm voice, but three minutes later she was out of the flat and running down past Green Park and Hyde Park Corner, across Belgrave Square and through the tall, white streets to Eaton Gate.
By the time she reached the turning, breathing was agony and she had a dreadful stitch in her side, but she could not let herself stop. Rounding the corner she saw the smoking ruin at once, and saying under her laboured breath, ‘No, no. It isn’t. Can’t be,’ she reached the yellow police signs and hailed a young-looking officer.
‘What happened? Have you got them out?’
‘Look, miss,’ he said without even looking at her, ‘we’ve had a major incident here. We can’t be doing with sightseers. Please move along.’
‘I’m not,’ she said in a furious gasp. ‘My twin sisters were in that middle house last night. Have you got them out?’
Without producing any apology, he gave her his full attention at last.
‘How many people?’
‘Just the two of them. They’re fifteen. They were alone.’
‘The neighbours say the house is owned by a Miss A. Kingsley, who was thought to be out at the time of the incident.’
‘Was she? Well thank God she’s all right. Where is she?’ asked Gerry, but before the officer could reply, she went on again: ‘But my sisters were definitely there. Oh, what’s happening?’
‘Steady on, miss,’ he said, putting a heavy hand on her shoulder. ‘If they’re there, we’ll get’em. Strong houses these, not like down near the Docks.’
‘I know,’ she began when she heard a cry:
‘Gerry, Gerry!’ She turned away from the policeman to see Anna Kingsley hobbling across the road, her hair flying out of its pins.
‘Anna, thank God,’ said Gerry, holding out both her hands. ‘Look what’s happened. They haven’t found anything yet, nor heard. Where were you?’
Anna’s hand gripped her waist hard and stopped the incipient hysteria before it even began.
‘At the post. It was a bad raid: I’ve only just got off duty.’ She squinted across the road at all that was left of her house and, with quivering lips, but in a voice of enormous detachment, said: ‘Direct hit, I see. Well, I expect they are safe in the basement.’
‘I’d told them to go straight down when the sirens sounded. Oh, God, I wish I’d stayed with them.’
‘Why? So that you could be down there, too? Don’t be silly. Listen, Gerry. I’m here now so that when they’re brought out I can take care of them. Hadn’t you better go to work?’
‘Work! Now? Anna, how can I?’
‘Gerry, you can’t do any good here, and you have responsibilities.’
‘No, I can’t go. Pe— the people I work for will understand. But I suppose I ought to telephone at least.’ She looked around helplessly, as though expecting to see a telephone box.
