Nancy had only been able to get one night off and so they parted on yet another station platform barely twenty-four hours after they had met on one. He had been under the impression that they would be able to spend longer together and felt rather blue as he waved her off, but once the train had disappeared he realized that perhaps what he felt was guilt at the relief.
Keith had also come up to London on leave and they met up and made a congenial, platonic foursome in Quaglino’s with Bea and her friend Hannie, a refugee. They all drank a good deal, and Keith did his best to flirt with two women at once. Hannie was very pretty but seemed uninterested and Bea was “spoken for,” engaged to a doctor, although they were both very sweet to Keith. Teddy never met Bea’s doctor. He went over with the troops on D-Day and was killed on Gold beach and instead she married a surgeon after the war.
Bea was working at the BBC, producing and doing a little continuity, and some “behind-the-scenes” things, and Hannie worked as a translator for an obscure-sounding government department. Bea had moved in a medical world during the Blitz when she had been recruited to work in a mortuary, piecing together jigsaws of body parts. Her art-college background had, for some unlikely reason, deemed her suitable for this work. “Anatomy, I suppose,” she said. Even Teddy, who had become inured to the sight of the disintegrated bodies of men, didn’t think he would have had the stomach for such work. In later years, in a different age of terrorism, Teddy read about bombs in parks and nightclubs, in skyscrapers and passenger airliners, bodies blown to bits or falling to earth, and wondered if someone pieced them together again. Sylvie had always maintained that science was about men finding new ways to kill each other, and as the years went by (as if the war wasn’t evidence enough) he grew to think that she was perhaps right.
He danced with Hannie, she was just the right height for him, and she smelt of Soir de Paris, which she said “someone” had brought her back from France, which made him think that she must move in rather secretive circles. (Was there a woman he knew who didn’t?) She was wearing emerald earrings and she hooted with laughter when he commented on them and said, “Costume! Do I look like someone who can afford emeralds?” She had left her family behind in Germany and wanted “every single Nazi” to die in agony. Fair enough, Teddy thought.
The four of them arranged to meet up again the following night and went to see Arsenic and Old Lace, which they all agreed was an excellent antidote to the war.
After the war Teddy learned from Bea that Hannie was with the SOE and had been parachuted into France before D-Day. Ursula and Bea had done their best to find out what had happened to her (“because she has no one else now”). It was the usual awful story.
It turned out those earrings weren’t paste but genuine emeralds, French, fin de siècle, very pretty and had belonged to her mother, who was herself French. (“And I have some Hungarian blood as well as German, of course, and a little Romanian even. A European mongrel!”) The earrings had begun their life in a goldsmith’s atelier in the Marais in 1899 and, in the manner of objects, lived on long after the people who had worn them. Hannie left them with Bea for “safekeeping.” (“You might not see me for a few weeks.”)
“I think she knew she wasn’t coming back,” Bea said. Bea gave them to Teddy before she died, because he was, literally, the only other person in the world who remembered Hannie, and thus it was that Bertie wore the earrings on her wedding day, a day that sadly Teddy didn’t live to see. She married in winter, to the man she met by chance on Westminster Bridge, in a Saxon church in the Cotswolds, and wore antique lace and carried a bouquet of snowdrops. After some argument she allowed Viola to give her away. It was perfect.