If only it had rained, she thought afterwards… but all that weekend the Lake District preened itself, the air was as soft as wine, a silken sheen lay on the waters of Crowthorpe Tarn and when she climbed the hill where the hikers had perished she saw a view to make her catch her breath. In Kendrick’s woods the bluebells lay like a lake; there were kingfishers in the stream…
If only Patricia Frobisher had been there to lay her dead, authoritarian hand over the house and spoil Ellen’s image of Crowthorpe as a kind of jolie laide which could be brought back to life… But Patricia had overestimated her own strength: stricken by her double loss, appalled at the thought of Kendrick as sole owner of her home, she had allowed her brothers to take her away with them to Kenya.
Perhaps it was the blond Jersey calf, the youngest in the herd, which the farm manager made her feed from a bucket… Or the two old servants, the only ones who had not left to do war work, who invited her into the kitchen and fed her on shortcake… Or the sight of the sunshine streaming into a small summer house where her Aunt Annie, facing a gall bladder operation, could so suitably recuperate. But most probably it was the sight of three small, pale faces-Elsie and Joanie and Doris-the Cockney evacuees banished by Mrs Frobisher before her departure to the gun room on account of ringworm, who threw themselves on Ellen and said they wanted their Mam.
Travelling back to London, Ellen thought of Sophie, needing somewhere quiet to study for her University Entrance, and Ursula, whose appalling grandparents tried to keep her captive in their hospitalised house among spittoons and bedpans. Margaret Sinclair was working in the dungeons of the Ministry of Information and seldom saw the daylight; she would benefit from weekends in the country. Bennet was incommunicado doing something unbelievably secret in Bletchley Park, but her mother was working far too hard in her hospital. And if the bombing started, as everyone thought it must do any day, there could be no safer place in England than Kendrick’s home.
Even so Ellen held off until the day she met two men in uniform wearing the badge of the Czechoslovak Air Force-and realised that her heart had not leapt into her mouth. That she no longer expected Marek to appear, or claim her. That dead or alive she knew him to be lost for ever.
Kendrick would not have dared to propose to her again. No one proposed to Ellen in those years since Marek vanished. Isaac was sheltering in Gowan Terrace, waiting for his visa to the States, when Ellen came back from Hallendorf. He had seen in an instant that his case was lost, and shown his quality by leaving her alone. And the procession of young men who came to the house after he left for America, though they fell in love as they had always done (she was perhaps more beautiful than ever) knew better than to declare themselves. Perfectly friendly as Ellen was, there was something in her manner that put that out of court.
It was Ellen who informed Kendrick that if he was willing to consider a marriage of the old-fashioned kind, for the management of land and the care of children, she was prepared to become his wife.
Sophie and Leon met during their lunch break in Hyde Park to discuss the news of the engagement. Sophie’s father, complete with experimental rats and Czernowitz, was now installed in a big house in Surrey and her mother was in Scotland, so she spent the week boarding in Gowan Terrace.
The bedding plants had been removed and the ground divided into allotments so that Londoners could dig for victory; the gas masks abandoned during the phony war now hung again from people’s shoulders-but Sophie, who had been so terrified of rejection and abandonment, found herself less frightened than she had expected at the prospect of invasion and total war.
“Why is she doing this?”’ Leon asked. He was working as tea boy in a film studio, but still enjoyed the comforts of his parents’ mansion near Marble Arch.
“She’s sorry for Kendrick and the evacuees, and Aunt Annie has to have a gall bladder operation, and she wants us all to go there when the bombing starts-or even if it doesn’t.”
They were both silent, remembering Ellen driving off with Marek; the joy on her face-the absolute happiness that transformed everything about her-and her return after the fire.
“Do you think he’s dead?”’
Sophie shrugged. “I almost wish he was; she wouldn’t be so hurt that way. Anyway, whether he’s dead or not doesn’t make any difference.”
“No.”
Ellen had explained to them carefully what had happened at Pettelsdorf and why she would not be seeing Marek again. She had stayed on for the autumn term, the last term at Hallendorf, and packed up the children’s trunks and helped to clear the building. She had taken the tortoise to Lieselotte’s house and then everyone left. Two months later, Hitler had marched into Vienna and been greeted by jubilant and cheering crowds. Finis Austria…
“No storks have come yet,” Liseselotte had written that spring and the following spring-and then she became “the enemy” and could write no more.
“I suppose I’d better go and congratulate her,” said Leon now. “I’ll come round on Sunday.”
But on Sunday the inhabitants of Gowan Terrace, having baked an egg-free cake in his honour, waited in vain, and when they phoned him, the telephone rang in an empty house.
The wedding was planned for December, but long before then the poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning-and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those “enemy aliens” who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time.
Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling.
Leon happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age, packed his current film scenario-and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.
The views of the landladies evicted from their villas-from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven-are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused “enemy aliens” arrived-Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.