‘He doesn’t have to come by train. Pilots get petrol, I’ll bet. He could come up by car even now.’ Sophie, usually so inclined to fear the worst, had all along been convinced that Marek would come – that he would stride in at the last minute and carry Ellen off.
‘Can’t we do something to slow her up?’
They thought of Aniella in her swagged boat, the draperies trailing in the water. Crowthorpe was wet enough, God knew, but Ellen was doing the short drive to the church in the estate’s old Morris.
‘We could put sugar in the carburettor,’ suggested Ursula, who had become addicted to gangster films.
But sugar was rationed, and the wedding was in half an hour.
‘He might still come,’ said Sophie obstinately. ‘Marek’s just the sort of person to burst into the church and if he does I’ll tug at Ellen’s dress or tell her to faint or something.’
From upstairs they heard the rustle of silk, a sharp intake of breath – then Ellen came down the stairs towards them.
‘Marek is here?’ she said very quietly. ‘He’s in England?’
All three turned to her, consternation in their faces.
‘Yes,’ said Leon, ‘I was with him in the internment camp.’
‘And he knows that I’m getting married today?’
Silently they nodded.
‘I see.’
Anguished, waiting, they looked at her.
But she did not crumple up, nor weep. She straightened her shoulders and they saw pride cover her face like a film of ice.
‘I’ll have my flowers, please, Sophie.’ And then: ‘It’s time to go –’
Kendrick was waiting at the altar beside his best man, a Cambridge acquaintance whom no one had met before. Pausing inside the church, Ellen surveyed the guests as they turned their heads. The Crowthorpe retainers in their dark heavy overcoats fared best, accustomed as they were to the hardship of the Frobisher regime and the freezing church. Margaret Sinclair was there, giving her a heartening smile, but not Bennet, who was still breaking his codes . . . Janey beside Frank, in the uniform of a private . . . a whole bevy of gallant aunts, real ones and honorary ones, in hats they had dusted out specially – and, sitting a little apart and looking not at all like Beryl Smith but entirely like Tamara Tatriatova (and wearing – Ellen had time to notice – a pilfered geranium from the conservatory in her turban), the Russian ballerina. Yet it was the detestable Tamara who had made the previous night endurable, taking Kendrick into his study to listen to Stravinsky and leaving Ellen free to help the maids with preparations for the wedding lunch.
But now it was beginning. Leon was sitting beside the old lady who played the organ; he had insisted on helping her turn the pages, ignoring her plea that she knew the music by heart. He was shuffling the music, still playing for time. She saw him look directly at Sophie, who half shook her head.
There was nothing more to be done. The first strains of Widor’s Toccata rang out over the church, Sophie and Ursula arranged the folds of Ellen’s dress, and she began to walk slowly towards her bridegroom.
She was halfway up the aisle when they heard it – Sophie and Ursula, Leon with his keen hearing . . . and Ellen too, even above the sound of the music. The creaking of the heavy oaken door on its rusty hinges; and the gust of wind as it blew open. Sophie tugged once at Ellen’s dress and Leon’s hand came down on the organist’s arm so that she faltered . . .
What they saw then was a strange reversal of what had happened to Aniella in the pageant. For Ellen turned, and as she saw the tall, broad-shouldered figure outlined in the lintel of the door, her face became transfigured. The pride and endurance which had made her look almost old, vanished in an instant, and she became so beautiful, so radiant, that those who watched her held their breath in wonder.
Then the latecomer, a neighbouring landowner who was Kendrick’s godfather, removed his hat and hurried, embarrassed, to his pew.
And the wedding went on.
In allowing the two ancient maids to prepare the master bedroom for their use, Ellen realised she had made a mistake. But she had not wanted to stop them having the chimney swept and doing what they could to air the bedclothes. Shut for years in their basement kitchen, chilblained and deprived of light, the Frobisher maids did not often use their initiative, and Ellen had no wish to deprive them of their traditional expectations.
But she had not examined the room in detail, having expected little from her wedding night except to endure it, and she had not realised that there was quite so much furniture: tables both round and square, brass pots, palms and fenders, bellows and tallboys and a stuffed osprey in a case. A picture of the The Released Garrison of Lucknow Crossing the Ganges hung above the bed, which was high and, considering its nuptial purpose, surprisingly narrow, and on the opposite wall was a painting of a pale, dead shepherd in the snow, guarded by two collies who did not seem to have gathered that he was no longer in a position to tell them what to do.
The farm manager had sent up a basket of logs, but the vast size of the chimneypiece made the small fire seem even smaller, and Kendrick, in an unexpected attack of masculinity, had earlier hit the logs with a poker and almost destroyed it. On the chest in the dressing room were photographs of Roland and William in various manly situations – playing cricket, decimating tigers or passing out on parade at Sandhurst – and none as usual of Kendrick – who now came nervously into the bedroom in his striped pyjamas, fell over a padded stool and said: ‘Oh Ellen!’
His tone was reverent rather than passionate and he looked cold.
‘Come and get warm,’ said Ellen, who was already in bed, her hair brushed out, looking, as Kendrick stammeringly began to tell her, like Danaë or Cleopatra, or perhaps Goya’s Maya on her satin couch.
But even he realised that the time for conversation was past, and with a gulp he got into bed beside her where, considering how thin he was, he seemed to take up a surprising amount of room, especially his feet, which were icy and very large.
Once in bed, he found himself staring straight at the dead shepherd being guarded by dogs and Ellen saw a flicker of alarm pass over his face.
‘What is it, Kendrick?’
‘I always used to look at that picture when Mummy was telling me what I’d done wrong. She used to send for me while she answered letters at that desk. That was where she read me my school reports too.’ His gaze turned inwards to the terrors of the past.
‘We’ll change the pictures tomorrow,’ promised Ellen – but the idea that anything connected with his mother could be changed seemed to frighten Kendrick even more.
She lay back on the pillow, stifling a yawn, and waited to see if Kendrick had any idea of how to proceed – he might after all have read a book. When this did not seem to be the case, she stretched out her arms and drew her trembling husband towards her, letting his head rest on her breast, where he continued, though short of air, to proclaim his worship and to liken her to various people whose names she did not catch.
‘I think we should get undressed properly,’ said Ellen, trying to repress the school-mistressy note in her voice.
She slipped off her nightdress, but the sight of her naked, fire-lit body affected him so strongly that he became hopelessly entangled in his pyjama cord.
Ellen freed him, glad that her time at Cambridge had given her some experience. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said. ‘We’ve lots of time.’ And: ‘Everything’s all right,’ she said at intervals during the long night, wondering what exactly she meant by this, while Kendrick shivered and stuttered out his admiration and said he was no good to anyone and never had been but he loved her more than anyone had ever loved before.
‘Do you think you would be better in another room, Kendrick?’ she asked towards dawn. ‘Somewhere that doesn’t have these associations?’
For a moment, Kendrick brightened. ‘There’s the old nursery at the top of the house. I slept there when I was little with my nanny.’ Kendrick’s face had relaxed; clearly
he was remembering a golden age. ‘It’s quite a big room and it clears the trees so you can see the river.’
‘Good. We’ll try that as soon as I can make some blackout curtains. Now don’t worry any more, darling. We’ll be fine up there. Just go to sleep.’
But Kendrick had sat up, in the grip of a terrible panic: ‘You won’t leave me, Ellen, will you? You won’t go away and leave me alone? I’ve always been alone and I couldn’t –’
He began to weep and Ellen, fighting a weariness so profound that she thought it must pull her down to the centre of the earth, managed to take him into her arms.
‘No, Kendrick, I won’t leave you alone, I promise. I’ll never leave you alone.’
He became calm then, and slept, and snored (but not unpleasantly), while Ellen lay awake till the image of the dead shepherd in the snow became visible and she had achieved the dawn.
‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Jan Chopek, looking at Marek stretched out on his iron bed in the Air Force barrack at Cosford. ‘I’ve never seen him drunk. Not like this. Not incapable. God knows he drank all right with the Poles, and with those idiots from the Foreign Legion in France – but I’ve never known him pass out.’
‘Well, he’s passed out now. Thank God he’s not on duty for the next forty-eight hours.’
‘If he had been he wouldn’t have done it,’ said Jan, and the British Pilot Officer shrugged. He’d already noticed that Marek was hero-worshipped by his fellow Czechs.
Marek had approached his blackout systematically, retiring to his room, loosening his tunic, and tilting the vodka bottle into his mouth so that no one would have to drag him to his bed. He had not even been sick, but all efforts to rouse him were unavailing.
Between his locker and Jan’s was a picture of a pneumatic blonde left behind by the previous occupant who had not returned from a night raid on Bremen, and a calendar. Under the date – December the eighteenth – was the motto: No Man Can Bathe Twice In The Same River.
‘Something went wrong,’ said Jan. ‘He tried to get leave for the weekend – he was going up north to the Lake District for something. He got it, too – and then Phillips pranged his car and he had to go up instead of him. He didn’t say much, but he was very upset, I think.’
Marek, when things went wrong, became extremely silent, but he had not often resorted to the standard panacea for disappointment.
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do except wait till he comes round,’ said the Pilot Officer.
This Marek did some six hours later, about the time that Ellen was rising from her nuptial bed. He had a shower, changed and decided that Fate had spoken. He was not certain now if he would have gone north and interrupted the wedding like someone in an opera. Certainly he had intended to. But the war had intervened – while Ellen was being married he was turning back over the Channel – and it was for the best. For Oskar Schwachek, now Gruppenführer Schwachek, still lived, and while he did so, Ellen must be protected from whatever was to come.
It wasn’t only Goethe who said beware of what you wish for in youth in case in later years it is granted to you.
He did say it – in the course of his long life Goethe said almost everything – but others said it too, among them Nora Coutts, Marek’s formidable grandmother, who now sat by his bed and said: ‘Did you expect to be pleased then, when you heard?’
Eighteen months had passed since Ellen’s marriage. In the summer of 1941 Hitler’s madness had caused him to attack Russia, but even if the danger of invasion had ceased, the British, their cities ceaselessly bombed, their Air Force stretched beyond its limits, were experiencing total war as never before.
Marek had flown Wellingtons with the Czech Squadron of Bomber Command since his release from the Isle of Man and always returned safely, but the previous week a hit to his port engine had forced him to bail out with his crew before he could land. His leg was in plaster and in traction, and now, to his fury, he was being taken out of active service and sent to Canada as an instructor.
‘I’ll be fit in another month,’ he’d raged, but without avail.
‘We need first-class people to train the younger men,’ the Station Commander had said, not liking to point out that two years of solid flying were enough for a man well into his thirties and one who had been through hell before he ever reached Great Britain.
But it was not this news to which Nora Coutts was referring. As next of kin she had been summoned when Marek was injured, and now she sat at the head of his bed, knitting comforts for the troops. The balaclavas and mittens she made bore no resemblance to the misshapen artefacts which Ellen had garnered from the gardens at Hallendorf: Nora was a champion knitter as she was a champion roller of bandages and provider of meals-on-wheels, and since her return to her native land just before the outbreak of war had been the mainstay of the WVS.
‘What did you expect?’ she repeated.
‘To be pleased. To be relieved . . . to feel that a weight had dropped from my mind,’ said Marek, and wondered why he had been so stupid as to share with his grandmother the news he had received three days before from Europe. If he hadn’t been feeling so groggy and confused after they set his leg he would have had more sense.
‘You ordered a man to be killed and to know who was responsible. Your orders have been carried out, Schwachek is dead – and you expect to be pleased? You?’
‘Yes.’
But looking into her face, whose implacable sanity reminded him somehow of Ellen, he began to realise how mad he had been. ‘I should have done it myself. I wanted them to find him but it was for me to do.’
‘It’s done now; there was no choice.’
But she said no more, for the fracture in his leg was a multiple one and he had a dislocated shoulder – and now he was to be separated from his comrades and the work he loved.
Lying back on the pillows, weary and in pain, Marek reached out once more for the triumph that should have been his – and once again it eluded him. Schwachek had been bound for Russia. That horrific campaign in which the Germans were dying like flies might well have done Marek’s work for him. His grandmother was right; he had been mad.
‘Do you ever think of Ellen?’ she asked suddenly.
Marek turned his head on the pillow and smiled.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
After she left Marek, Nora Coutts did something she did very seldom; she hesitated.
She had not hesitated when she told the Russian anarchist not to be silly, and she had not hesitated when she left all her possessions behind and walked to the Czech border, arriving there an hour before the Germans invaded, but she hesitated now.
‘Do you ever think of Ellen?’ she had asked Marek, and got her answer.
But Ellen was married. In the world into which Nora had been born that would have been the end of the matter. But in the world as it was now, where human beings were shot out of the sky, or torpedoed or gunned down, was it perhaps important that people should part without misunderstanding, with the air clear between them? She did not for a moment consider that Ellen would leave her husband, and would have been shocked if anyone had suggested it – but would it comfort Ellen to know that Marek was aware now of his madness? That it would console Marek to see her before he sailed, she was certain.
In the end she decided to do nothing, but a month after her visit to the hospital, a troop ship en route from Canada was torpedoed.
Two days later, she set off for the north.
Nora walked from the station; at eighty-two she would have scorned to take a taxi for a distance of two miles. Marek had been discharged from hospital and was waiting for his orders to sail. Glad though she was that he was no longer flying, she would miss him badly when he went overseas. He talked of her joining him in Canada, but she would stay now and die here.
Once again the Lake District failed to live up to expectations. It was not raining; the late summer afternoon was golden and serene; after the devastation of the cities, this piece of
untouched countryside with its dark, leafy trees, its running brooks, its silence, was Paradise indeed. Nor did the first sight of Crowthorpe dismay her; she had after all been born when Queen Victoria was on the throne; the gables and turrets and pointless timbering did not trouble her. She herself in Folkestone had been brought up in a villa not unlike Kendrick’s house.
But at the gate she hesitated. She had not told anyone she was coming; only Ellen knew her – to anyone else she would be just an old lady in stout shoes going for a walk. Her case was still at the station – she had wanted to leave her options open – and now she decided to take a path that led towards the back of the house and seemed to slope upwards towards the hill. In this country of ramblers it was probably a right of way, and she wanted above all to get the feel of the place, and of Ellen’s life.
She had not told Marek what she was going to do, for the simple reason that she did not know herself. To see if Ellen was happy? Nothing as simple as that – yet there was some question that she expected this visit to answer.
In a small meadow by the house she saw a flock of Angora goats; beautiful animals, their bells reminding her of the cowbells in the Bohemian hills and bringing a sudden stab of homesickness for Pettelsdorf. Down by the stream in the valley, children were paddling and calling to each other in Cockney accents. Evacuees. Yes, there would be evacuees; Ellen would welcome them with open arms.
She had come to the kitchen garden; looking through the gate in the wall she saw tomatoes ripening in the greenhouses and well-kept vegetable beds. As she gazed, a land girl came by trundling a barrow, but Nora was not ready yet and turned away. What had been a lawn had been ploughed up and planted with potatoes. As she might have expected, Ellen was presiding over a house and grounds most excellently and patriotically kept, and in a countryside of unsurpassed loveliness, and to her own dismay she found herself experiencing a pang of disappointment. Yes, there was no other word for it, and she was shocked. Had she wanted to find that Ellen was unhappy, full of regrets . . . even ill-treated or misunderstood? Had she wanted to take the girl in her arms and comfort her and tell her that Marek still loved her, and marriages could be annulled?