When she reached Priscilla’s house, she stopped for a moment to look up at the mansion, which she now knew as the home of a family to whom she was devoted, but when she first crossed its threshold, it had been as a girl still in her teens, nervous about meeting the parents of the young man she loved, Captain Simon Lynch, a doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps. They had been introduced by Priscilla at a party in the autumn of 1914, when the women were at Girton College. For Maisie and Simon it was a first love, a love forged in wartime, and for the most part in France. Following Maisie’s posting to a casualty clearing station, it seemed fate was playing a strong hand in their lives when Simon was sent to work at that same station.
The house where Priscilla and her family lived had once been the home of the Lynch family; Simon’s widowed mother had sold the property to Priscilla and Douglas Partridge when she realized she wanted to spend the rest of her days at her country home in Cambridgeshire. But Simon had grown up in this house. Now he was dead, a casualty of the Great War who had succumbed to his wounds years after the Armistice.
“Tante Maisie!”
Maisie looked up to see Thomas bounding down the steps. Priscilla’s eldest son bore a broad smile as he held out his arms to the woman he considered a beloved aunt.
“Thomas, I hear you have broken your mother’s heart,” said Maisie.
“Oh, I might have known she’d have to tell you.” He stepped back, hands in pockets. “She just doesn’t understand—I thought it best to sign up for the RAF now.” He shrugged, sighing. “I mean really, Tante Maisie, if she thought about it, Mama would realize that by the time I’m assigned to a squadron, this war will all be over—I’ll just be square bashing until then, with the odd training flight, and I’ll be earning money! I keep telling her, she really has nothing to worry about. But at least I’ll be near an aeroplane or two and, well, doing something important.” Another sigh. “Do tell her to keep her hair on, won’t you? Really, they won’t let me take on the Luftwaffe for ages yet.” Thomas reached forward, grinned again, and kissed Maisie on the cheek. “Got to go now, Tante Maisie.”
She watched as he jumped down the final steps. “Is she pretty, Tom?”
He turned and laughed. “Absolutely! Must dash, can’t be late!”
And as Maisie looked up, she saw the curtain move: Priscilla, watching her son as he ran towards the underground station. “Oh, my dear Tom,” she whispered, following Priscilla’s line of vision. “Your mother does understand, that’s the trouble—she understands only too well.”
Maisie listened to Priscilla’s grievances regarding her sons, and her concern that Elinor—her sons’ nanny, not yet thirty years of age—had decided to enlist for service.
“She says that all the years of living in France, first with another family, and then with us, has given her such a fluency in French that she would be useful in any arm of the services. It was those advertisements over the past six months, telling us all to do our national service, that did it—she signed up, and she’s in the army auxiliary . . . I think. There are so many services now, one never knows which is which.”
“I take my hat off to her, Priscilla—and let’s face it, keeping your boys in order has given her good practice for the army.”
“Oh, very funny, Maisie—but you’ve got a point there.” Priscilla shook her empty glass. “Another?”
“I’ve barely touched mine yet—don’t let me stop you, though!”
“Oh, don’t worry—you won’t.” Priscilla stood up and walked to a chrome trolley laden with an assortment of decanters, an ice bucket, and a soda syphon. The shelf underneath was stocked with glasses and several bottles of Indian tonic water. Eschewing ice tongs in favor of her fingers, she half-filled her glass with ice and prepared her second gin and tonic, then returned to the sofa.
“Is Elinor’s French that good?” asked Maisie.
“Most definitely,” said Priscilla. “She picked it up from the locals, but—very clever of her—she took lessons twice a week from a local woman who had decamped from Paris to Biarritz. She said she was aware the accent was different there, so she wanted to learn properly, to ‘broaden her horizons’ when the boys were older and she left us.” Priscilla laughed. “The trouble is, they’ve been old enough for a few years—Tarquin is almost fourteen now—but we were loath to let her go. She’s become one of the family. But now she’s on her way, though we have insisted that this is her home when she is on leave, that sort of thing. Which leaves me to do my bit.”
“What do you mean?”