—
There was notepaper and writing material on a desk in the residents’ lounge, and after dinner Gwendolen sidestepped a game of Bridge with the Distressed, took up the pen provided and wrote a short note for Cissy, saying, “Did Freda wear a locket? Can you ask the Ingrams if Florence did?” Perhaps it was best not to elucidate further, although Cissy must also have read those red and green tags around the necks of the war dead.
“Dratted child,” Cissy had said when she showed Gwendolen Freda’s farewell letter (Dear Mother…), but Gwendolen felt sorry for Freda. She had never been given much of a path in life to follow beyond showing off and now no one, not even Cissy, seemed terribly concerned that she had run away; but then Cissy regarded Freda as the cuckoo that had turned her out of her nest.
She added a postscript—“I hope you have sent the photos of Florence and Freda.”
The Hellespont
Niven was a member of a club in Piccadilly. It was useful in many ways, particularly if he needed to be left alone to brood. He had barely sat down in one of the masculine leather chairs in the library when a waiter approached and, in the discreet murmur perfected by such men, said, “There’s a lady downstairs asking for you, sir.” There was the slightest nuance given to “lady.” “Shall I dispose of her for you, sir?”
“Not necessary,” Niven said. Women were not, of course, allowed in the club, the very presence of the woman downstairs would constitute a dangerous invasion as far as the club members were concerned. Niven had arranged a meeting with the “lady” in question and, to the waiter’s relief, he swiftly escorted her out of the building and into his car, and from there into the snug of the Lamb and Flag, a more suitable venue for the business they had with each other.
She was not his type, although he didn’t really have a type. On the whole, Niven preferred the kind of woman he could forget about the moment she was out of his sight. That was why Gwendolen Kelling annoyed him so much. He still remembered her. And she was definitely, categorically, not his type.
The woman he was with in the Lamb and Flag was a member of the Forty Thieves. He placed a ten-pound note on the table in front of her and she finessed it discreetly into her bag. In exchange for the money, Niven found himself in possession of a handbag that was barely fit for rag and bone, let alone a ten-pound ransom. He threw the offending item into his car and set off along the Mall. He sensed the journey he was on wasn’t as simple as crossing the straits of Hyde Park Corner to reach Knightsbridge and the Warrender on the other side. He was swimming the Hellespont. That was not a story that ended well.
The Home Front
Over time, Frobisher’s stomach had accustomed itself to his foreign wife’s cuisine. He doubted that even the French in France used as much garlic as Lottie did. It had a talismanic quality for her. Something to do with Ypres, he supposed, where she had lost a daughter. Frobisher kept a constant supply of peppermints in his pocket to counter the garlic on his breath. It would have appalled Bow Street.
The bulb of garlic that had been in Lottie’s pocket when she was found in Ypres had been conserved and cherished. The garlic was old and dry by the time Frobisher met her, on the eve of the Armistice, standing on the parapet of Waterloo Bridge preparing to jump, but she had later brought it back to life, planting each individual clove in a little pot of earth, watering and tending them as keenly as Isabella did her pot of basil. They had studied Keats at school. Scraps often came back to Frobisher, uninvited.
The lineage of the original bulb lived on in their back garden, where Lottie also grew a foreign array of herbes. (“Airb,” Frobisher had thought she was saying for a long time.) Before he married her, Frobisher’s only encounter with herbs had been in the form of a mint sauce with lamb or a parsley one with cod. No one in England referred to mint and parsley as “herbs.”
When his wife was on form, Frobisher feasted like a French peasant. He worked with men who thought eel pie and mash was a gourmet dish. They would have been impolite towards Lottie’s cassoulets and coq au vins. There was no feasting today, however, for Frobisher. In the cold Ealing kitchen, he made himself a corned beef sandwich and ate it standing up by the sink.
Lottie had barely looked up when he came in. “I’m home!” he always shouted as he came through the front door, followed swiftly by a cheery “Bonjour!” so as not to appear too partisan. He had some French, remembered from school, but Lottie preferred him to speak English. His indifferent attempts at her language insulted her ears.
He had congratulated himself for remembering to stop by the Floral Hall on the way home. As the end of the day approached, the flowers were sold off cheaply and Frobisher had bought a fine bunch of mixed tulips—pink, red, yellow—at a bargain price. It was the time of day when the flower-sellers descended to pick up the contents of their boutonnières and posies and nosegays. Not Eliza Doolittles, just old women who would stand on cold street corners for hours to scrape a living. Frobisher sometimes bought a little nosegay of violets from them, more out of charity than anything, but he loved to plunge his nose into them and drink in the sweetness, the plague of London vanquished for a moment.
The tulips had seemed gay and cheerful in their paper wrapper as he had made his way home. He had taken the train back to Ealing. He was picking up his car from the showroom next week and it struck him how much he would miss the hustle and bustle of public transport. It made him feel as though he was part of something and not stranded in solitude. There was an Evening Standard discarded on one of the seats in the carriage. The headline read Old Ma Coker released from jail. Frobisher disliked that soubriquet. It made Nellie Coker seem like a benign character in a fairy tale, when in fact she was, if anything, the witch.
A woman in his carriage—rather downtrodden-looking, he thought—smiled at him and said, “I wish my old man would buy me flowers.” He’d had no answer to that, but now he regretted not saying, “Here, please have these,” and presenting her with the whole bunch, for his own wife had scowled at them as if they reminded her of something she would rather forget.
Lottie was in retreat, in her customary place in the back parlour. When she was in one of her moods, she would sit in her chair by the window and gaze listlessly at the garden for hours.
Lottie was a good needlewoman and from an antique shop in New Conduit Street Frobisher had bought her a pretty little rosewood sewing table, lined inside with pleated pale-blue silk. She was working on a tapestry cushion cover of brightly coloured parrots, but more often than not she picked it up and then put it down again without working a stitch.
Frobisher had also put up a bird table in the garden so she would have something to look at, but she seemed to take no notice of the flock of greedy finches who preyed like vultures on Frobisher’s charitable offerings. It was dusk now, the birds all roosted, but Lottie stared into the darkness as if she were waiting anxiously for someone to emerge from the gloom. Her daughter, he supposed. A tiny casualty of war.