Gwendolen slowed her pace and then finally stopped so that she could listen better. The cornetist was playing “Blow the Wind Southerly,” very beautifully, and Gwendolen didn’t think she had ever heard anything sadder—the “Last Post” perhaps, but that, by its very nature, was the embodiment of grief and melancholy.
The tune was doing him little good as no one was tossing any coins his way, and he changed tack, towards the English hymnal. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Again, he played it in a terrifically mournful manner. Gwendolen hadn’t previously thought of the cornet as such a wretched instrument. She was tempted to request “I Want to Be Happy”—the poor man would make more money.
What a friend we have in Jesus. (Do we?, Gwendolen wondered. She had lost any religion she may have once had.) It was the hymn the men sang their own lyrics to, you heard it everywhere. When this bloody war is over. She had heard a rousing chorus once, from a mixed bag of walking wounded and stretcher cases being evacuated home, a job lot of Blighty wounds on an ambulance train that she was accompanying to Boulogne.
They were words one didn’t hear in mixed company—not just “bloody” but “arse” and “fucking”—and when they spotted Gwendolen, they all grinned ruefully and gave apologetic little salutes, murmuring down the line Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister. As if—years into the war by then—she could still be discomfited by words alone. (She was not a sister, but they were all sisters to the men.) She had bed-bathed some of those men, you would think that might be more awkward for them than her hearing an “arse” or a “bloody” on their lips. Or indeed a “fucking,” come to that—a word she had certainly never heard before she went to France but which she heard plenty of times once there. Patients in extremis were inclined to obscenities and men close to death were not always as polite as people liked to think.
In the rose-tinted accounts of her fellow nurses in those endless diaries, the men were all well and cheery, even the most broken, even those nearest to death. Suffering in silence was for saints, not soldiers, in Gwendolen’s opinion. Where was the virtue in a quiet death—slipping below the waves, sinking into the mud? Or living on, limbless after gas gangrene or with a body flensed of flesh or ripped to ribbons by artillery fire?
Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister…Sorry, Sister. She had laughed and said, “Good luck, boys.” Some—most—would be back in a few weeks. Some—many—would be dead or badly injured by the end of the year. She could have wept for them, but what good did weeping do?
The veteran moved on to “Abide with Me,” which was tricky on a cornet. It had been played on the wheezing church organ at her mother’s funeral. The cornetist’s sombre repertoire had made her spirits drop. She no longer felt elated by her spree—her purchases had been paid for with those never-ending bales of barbed wire, no different really from profiteering from armaments and munitions. Her father knew he had blood on his hands, it had been unkind of him to pass on the poisoned chalice to her, tainting her new-found sense of release. She had been wrong, the war would never be vanquished. And, even if it was, another one would come along and overlay the memory of this one.
One must be cheerful, she determined. And she must give the poor man some money. Fumbling in her handbag for her purse, she was suddenly rushed at by someone—a woman—and knocked to the ground. Gwendolen gave a cry, more of shock than pain, as she lay sprawled full-length on the pavement. Quite stupefied by the collision, it took her a moment to understand that it had been deliberate—she had been robbed! Her handbag had been stolen. Only this morning, in the car outside Holloway, Frobisher had warned her that there had been a spate of women being robbed of their handbags. What a fool she was not to have been more vigilant.
As she lay prone, momentarily stunned, she watched as her battered old cloche hat rolled into the road and was squashed beneath the wheels of a butcher boy’s bike. Several people stepped around her. So this is what London is like, she thought.
* * *
—
“Goodness, Miss Kelling,” Mrs. Bodley said when Gwendolen returned to the Warrender after her encounter in Regent Street. “What on earth happened to you?”
Gwendolen supposed she looked a sight. Her cheekbone had hit the pavement and must already be bruising, a black eye seemed inevitable. There was an ugly tear in one of her stockings, she had a badly scuffed shoe and her skirt was smeared with something unpleasant. Thank goodness it was her shoddy old clothes.
A man had helped her to her feet—or rather, he hauled her up efficiently—and asked her, quite brusquely, if she was all right. Was she injured?
“Just my dignity, I’m afraid,” she said.
“They took your handbag, and your money with it, I presume.”
“They?”
“There were two of them, women. Allow me to give you a lift somewhere,” he said. “My car’s parked just around the corner in Conduit Street.” He had a supercilious eyebrow that managed to make this simple offer sound cynical.
Ordinarily, Gwendolen would have resisted—accepting a lift from a strange man in a strange city might be regarded as the height of folly—but now that she was on her feet, she had begun to feel woozy—the shock, obviously. And he was right, she had no money for a cab, although her thieves might be disappointed by how little remained in her purse.
The man offering her a lift was smartly dressed, just this side of being a “swank,” although he had one of those moody manners that some—nay, many—women (and particularly the Bront? sisters) seemed to find attractive. Still, it seemed unlikely that a handsome man in a smart car (the adjectives were interchangeable) was planning to shanghai her, so she said, “Thank you, that’s very kind of you.”
His car had indeed been just around the corner. There was a dog on the back seat, a big wolfish Alsatian that regarded her indifferently. Exactly the kind of dog you would expect a man like that to have.
The car itself was a magnificent beast. Gwendolen knew nothing about cars, but she knew a thing of beauty when she saw one and she recognized the stork in flight on the bonnet from the car in The Green Hat. In the novel, Iris Storm’s car was yellow, but this one was the colour of clotted cream. “Hispano-Suiza,” she said, and he said, “I’m impressed. Most women don’t know one make of car from another.” The way he said “most women” bordered on the dismissive.
“My apologies,” she said after a few minutes of driving in silence. “In all the drama I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Gwendolen. Gwendolen Kelling.”
He didn’t reciprocate and she wondered if he wanted to remain anonymous for some reason—was he a famous film star trying to be incognito? Or a criminal, avoiding identification? Or was he just displaying the gruff reticence of the Heathcliff type? She had known a few of those in her time. Gwendolen liked an open-faced, optimistic manner in the opposite sex.
Eventually he answered. “Niven. My name’s Niven.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Niven.”
Her rescuer spoke with a light Scottish burr. A Celtic accent was another attribute that some women were persuaded by. Her friend Cissy used to say she was in danger of marrying any Irishman who spoke to her. Luckily none had. It would take a good deal more than an accent to capture Gwendolen.
Her rescuer took her straight to the Warrender, no shanghaiing, and helped her out of the car. She caught his swift assessment of her, her faded clothes, her poor coiffure. Her hair had been cut off (some might say hacked) by herself with a pair of surgical scissors during the war and she had never really learnt to deal with it since. At least she had not been alone in tiring of the impracticalities involved in being a woman during wartime.
“The Warrender,” he said, reading the name above the door.
He seemed to find amusement in the plaque that announced the hotel to be “For Ladies Only.” “You’re in a convent,” he said, with no little sarcasm.
“Better than a brothel,” she bristled. He gave her a long look. She refused to be discountenanced by him.