Miss Carter's War Read online

  Outside the restaurant Tony said, ‘OK, Mags. He’ll be at the pub at eleven tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I don’t want to see him.’

  ‘You must. Do you want me to be there with you?’

  ‘No. I’ll be all right,’ she said wearily. ‘I usually am.’

  Chapter 32

  ‘Love the hair, old girl.’ The grin was uncertain.

  ‘Don’t, Jimmy, please.’

  ‘No. All right.’

  As they stood facing one another in Marguerite’s room, a train went under the building.

  Jimmy laughed.

  ‘The house is shaking as well.’

  He did look terrified. She said nothing.

  ‘I suppose you want an explanation.’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  He moved to the window.

  With his back to her he said, ‘Right. No more bullshit. I’m not her nephew. I’m her lover. She gives me lavish presents, keeps me in a style to which I am unaccustomed, in return for boosting her ego with her friends and the odd fuck.’

  She flinched as if he had struck her.

  ‘How long has it been going on?’

  He took a deep breath before answering.

  ‘All the time I’ve known you.’

  Marguerite was too stunned to speak.

  Jimmy was shaking.

  ‘You may ask yourself why I behaved like this. The answer is – that’s what I do. I lie. I cheat. I dissemble. I con my way through life. Usually I’m very good at it, but you have been my Achilles heel. I made the worst mistake for a conman. I cared about you.’

  Marguerite laughed,

  ‘I can’t believe this. You’re conning me now.’

  He turned to face her. He was ashen.

  ‘I swear not. Please sit down, Marguerite. I need to try and explain. To myself as much as you.’

  Marguerite reluctantly sat on the bed.

  ‘All right but it had better be good.’

  ‘That night at Tony and Donald’s, I prepared in my usual way. I know a bit about art from her collection. I read up on ballet and Donald’s career. I dressed as I thought they might find attractive, and did my full charm offensive.’

  Marguerite was appalled.

  ‘Is that what you did with me? That trip to Brighton, was it all coldly calculated? The picnic? The hotel?’

  He shouted, ‘Yes. Don’t you understand? That’s what I do. I please people. I make them happy. I do it well. As I’ve often heard you say, “All youngsters are good at something.” Well, I’m good at understanding what people want and giving it to them. Being it. Whatever they need.’

  ‘Even when you make love?’

  ‘Usually, yes. I’ve got it down to a fine art. Haven’t I? I’m good at it, aren’t I. Aren’t I?’

  She closed her eyes to shut out the image of his beseeching little boy’s face and murmured, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it all went wrong that night. It was the painting.’

  ‘The painting?’

  ‘Yes, the Samuel Palmer. When I asked to buy it, as a child, the man laughed at me. “You won’t ever be able to afford that, sonny.” Sod you, I thought. I made a vow there and then to prove him wrong. I wanted lovely things like that painting in my life and I’d damn well get them. But when I listened to Donald, I realised that man in Shoreham was right. Donald’s got real talent. I haven’t. I’m just good at pouring drinks and fucking. He worked for that painting and deserved it. I looked at all three of you that night and I felt jealous. You’ve made something of yourselves, you do something worthwhile. I liked them both so much. How kind they were to you and welcoming me like that. And you’ – he turned to look at her – ‘you’re a good woman, Marguerite. Dedicated, loving, clever. But I’m sorry – I can’t live up to you.’

  ‘You’re special, Marguerite. You have a mission. A vision of a better world. I fought because I had to. Now I want peace. You must obey your voices, my brave little Jeanne d’Arc. I am just a peasant farmer. I only want to hear the sound of the birds, and the wind in the trees. I can’t be part of your quest.’

  Marguerite put out her hand and pulled him to sit next to her.

  ‘It’s not too late for you, Jimmy. You obviously have a talent for art. I could find a course in art history that you could do—’

  ‘Could but wouldn’t. I’d give up when it got difficult. And what would I be in the end? Some old bloke working in a museum. It’s too late for me. Why do you suppose I’ve not done anything serious in the twenty-odd years since the war? You think education is the answer to everything but for some of us it isn’t. I don’t want to work hard. I can’t stick at anything for long. The only time I was really happy was in the RAF when I was told what to do and everyone thought I was a hero.’

  ‘You were.’

  ‘For a while. Not later. After the war no one wanted to know. I wasn’t one of the famous Few. I was Bomber Command. We destroyed Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg, killed thousands of civilians. We lost more men, half of us in fact, than any other set up, including my navigator. He got hit by flak in the rear turret and when we limped back to base, I scraped him off the bloody walls of the plane. We thought he’d died for his country, but then we found out he was a war criminal.’

  ‘You won a DFC, Jimmy. That’s more than Donald or Tony ever did.’

  He stood up suddenly and started pacing round the room.

  ‘Right, now I’m spewing it all out. Let me tell you the truth about that. Let me tell you about that valiant event. The true version, not Stan’s. When the plane was hit I knew I was badly injured. I managed to ditch the plane. Two of them had got out and were in the drink. I thought the other two, still inside, had gone for a Burton. Mind you, I didn’t spend a lot of time checking their pulses, I was too busy trying to get the dinghy out, because I knew – I, you understand me, I, me, I didn’t care about the others – I knew I was too knocked about to do much swimming. I managed to release the dinghy just before the plane went under the waves. Then, I helped Chalky heave Stan into it, and I fell into it myself.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Stan told me. You saved his life.’

  ‘Actually he saved mine. There I was flopped on the bottom of the boat like a dead fish, with my face in 6 inches of water, drowning, and, as usual, I gave up. But he lifted my nose out of the water with his foot. I managed to sit up. And then – then, I could hear this voice calling for help. One of the other lads was in the drink somewhere. He wasn’t dead.’ Jimmy’s face contorted with grief.

  ‘What happened then?’

  Jimmy started pacing again.

  ‘This is the funny bit. Get ready to laugh. I organised a sing-song to drown out the noise. The sound of him dying – drowning – begging for help. It went on for fifteen minutes. And, guess what? They gave me a medal for keeping up the morale of my crew until we were rescued. You’re not laughing. Don’t you think it’s funny?’

  ‘Jimmy, listen to me. I know from Stan you were badly wounded. You couldn’t have reached the other man.’

  ‘You would have. Someone like you would have. But not me. I just got the lads singing “Roll Out The Barrel” to stifle the noise of a drowning comrade. So there you are, Marguerite. That’s me. Phoney war hero, without a pot to piss in. I bum around, and truth to tell, I like it that way. I get the lovely pictures, the Lalique glasses, the silk shirts and the luxurious houses. Second-hand, but better than a bedsit in Pimlico. You think they’re deadbeats, but I even like my friends at the Dominion. I feel at home with all those failures. Yes, it works for me. But it wouldn’t for you, my dearest, dearest Skylark.’

  He looked intensely at her face, as if he were drinking in its features.

  ‘Thank you. Knowing you has been a Samuel Palmer painting for me. Something truly wonderful that is out of my reach.’

  He kissed the palm of his hand and laid it on her lips. Then he turned abruptly, and picked up his jacket from the chair.

  He held it up,

  ‘Best
chamois leather,’ he chortled. It was back. The lopsided grin.

  And then he was gone.

  Five minutes later Tony arrived, presumably tipped off by Flo. Marguerite had not moved from the bed. He sat next to her. She no longer felt any anger at Jimmy’s betrayal, just a terrible despair that she could see no way to help him.

  ‘Has it occurred to you, petal, he actually doesn’t want or need help? He’s surviving in the best way he knows. Your way is not his. Beware the Messiah complex.’

  Marguerite murmured:

  ‘ “And, though little troubled with sloth,

  Drunken Lark! Thou would’st be loth

  To be such a traveller as I.” ’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A poem we liked. Or I liked. And he probably pretended to like. Who knows? My judgement is not very reliable. Is it?’

  ‘Listen, it’s not the end of the world, Mags. So a romance has failed. It happens. You should hear my track record. You’ve had some fun, and a lot of sex. Count yourself lucky.’

  ‘But I thought it was something more than that. Oh Tony, every­thing’s gone so hideously wrong. I keep letting people down. I want the world to be a better place and it gets worse. That sodding war is still affecting everything. Jimmy’s youth was squandered killing people, when he should have been building his life. The damage is never-ending.’

  Tony put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Nonsense, Mags, the world’s a much kinder place than it was. Think of these last few years. We’ve stopped hanging people “by the neck until dead”, women don’t have to bleed to death having illegal abortions, people can divorce without reviling one another in public, and Donald and I can have it off in private without being nicked.’

  ‘I’ll probably never have it off again.’

  ‘Nonsense, with that hair and your lovely knees they’ll be flocking round you.’

  ‘But what will happen to Jimmy?’

  ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. And neither should you.’

  ‘I feel weary, Tony. I keep being disappointed.’

  ‘Cheer up, honey. The future’s bright. We’ve got a man onto the moon. If all else fails we can go and live there. But if, as looks possible, Wilson gets thrown out and even if the dreaded Tories get back we may be all right. Two of my early protégés are emerging on the political scene. Heath and that Thatcher woman. She looks like a “not do nothing” sort of gal. If they were listening to my heckles all those years ago, they won’t be so bad as their predecessors. Anything is possible. Hold on a minute. I can’t believe I’m saying this. That should be your line, surely? I seem to have taken over your role.’

  ‘Well, you play it well. I almost believe you. Fingers crossed for the future, eh?’

  ‘That’s better. That’s the Lizzie Dripping I know and love. Fingers crossed, my darling.’

  Chapter 33

  Tony’s ‘protégés’ were to dominate the next two decades to an extent neither he nor Marguerite could have predicted from seeing the humble start of their political careers in Kent in the 1950s. Margaret Thatcher in particular had changed beyond recognition. As Education Secretary she had evolved miraculously into a bouffant-haired, elegant-suited, slightly old-fashioned Galatea to the Saachi PR agency’s Pygmalion.

  While watching her purring on television one night a growling Tony quoted his idol Aneurin Bevan:

  ‘ “No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.” ’

  Heath, who had amazed them both by becoming Prime Minister in 1970, was less adaptive to the new image-making. He remained obdurately gauche and remote, apart from spasms of grumpiness, interspersed with sudden bouts of alarming shoulder-shaking laughter. It was difficult to like this odd man but, because of the continuing sniping at Heath’s single state, Tony did his best. Marguerite, in her turn, felt honour-bound to defend Margaret Thatcher, the first woman, against mammoth odds, to gain a foothold on the political power ladder.

  Marguerite had never really been as politically committed as Tony. Now, in her mid-forties, she was even less so. In fact, since Jimmy’s disappearance from her life she had found it difficult to engage in much at all apart from her work. Her severance from him had been painful. She grieved his absence continually. It left a chasm in her life. Sometimes she was tempted to find him and beg to continue their relationship on any terms he wished. Sitting in her room, marking books to the sounds of humanity from the pub below, made her ache for his laughter, his moods, the closeness of his body. She didn’t care if it was all pretence, it was better than this nothingness.

  She lies on the narrow bed, listening to the chatter and laughter in the corridor. Why is she not excited like them? This is what she wants. A student at Cambridge. A brilliant future. No. All she wants is Marcel lying beside her, their legs and arms entwined.

  Tony, as so often in her life, rode to her rescue.

  ‘The flat below us has become free, Mags. It’s got a garden and two poofs living above who adore you. Why not leave that grotty pub and make a nest for yourself? It’s the done thing now to have a mortgage and become one of the property-owning class.’

  If someone had suggested joining a religious sect, living in tents in the Sahara Desert, she would have probably grabbed their hands off, so needful was she of change, but she opted for a very nice garden flat in Myddelton Square. There was a rowdy knees-up at the Carpenter’s Arms to wish her goodbye. After closing time the customers, under the direction of Bob and Florrie, heaved her possessions onto wheelbarrows and market stalls and trundled them through the streets to her new abode,

  Marguerite had never had a real home. She was surprised how much she enjoyed creating a place of her own, where she intended to live for the foreseeable future. With Donald and Tony’s help she stripped off the fading wallpaper and crumbling plaster, revealing the bare brick walls, which they painted white. They peeled back the cracked lino and hired a terrifying electric sander to clean off the old pine floorboards.

  The move was the catalyst she needed to get back her joie de vivre. To help pay for the refurbishment of the flat she took on extra work as a tutor for the newly formed Open University – a job she enjoyed; working with mainly older students who were avid for study, sometimes to improve their job prospects, but often for the sheer joy of learning. It was a relief, after struggling with increasingly indifferent youngsters at school, to work with people who slaved away in the privacy of their own homes and listened greedily to the lectures and her advice.

  One of her students, a middle-aged vicar’s wife, mentally bullied by her husband for years, was so emboldened by the discovery that she had a good brain that, on her return from a week’s summer school, at a dinner party she was obliged to give for her husband’s stiff-necked colleagues, and after a slighting remark he made about her, she poured a bowl of soup over his head, packed her bag and left him before serving the dessert. Marguerite, delighted, helped her find a job as a social worker, for which, with her life experience and subsequent first-class degree, she was amply qualified.

  Aware of the emerging strength of women who had been suppressed by lack of opportunity, she became passionate about improving their lot in society. This attracted her more than party political dogma. When, with the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, there was an upsurge of feminist militancy, she, campaigner that she had always been, was keen to participate. She took part in women’s consciousness-raising groups, formed in workplaces and hideous tower blocks where women were trapped by low expectations and poverty. She supported some striking cleaners.

  More fun was an escapade at the Albert Hall, when she joined a few women who interrupted a petulant Bob Hope compèring the annual cattle market of the Miss World Competition. She sat, rigid with fear, in the stalls, listening to the glib comic tell a string of sexist jokes.

  ‘I don’t
want you to think I’m a dirty old man. I never give women a second thought. The first thought covers it all.’

  Then, at the signal of a football rattle whirled by a woman in the front row, she joined the others scattered around the auditorium mooing and blowing whistles. The paper bag of flour she threw landed and burst into a white cloud at Bob Hope’s feet, causing him to scuttle off the stage in terror.

  As Marguerite ran round the corridors of the hall, dodging irate attendants, she heard him return, doubtless having quickly consulted his gag-writers, and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is a nice conditioning course for Vietnam,’ which, considering that that appalling war had already cost millions of lives including those of American troops, was perhaps not in the best of taste.

  When she poked her head round a door to shout the slogan ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry’, she heard him further demonstrate his lack of judgement by saying solemnly, ‘Anyone who wants to interrupt an event as beautiful as this must be on some kind of dope.’

  Running from the police waiting outside the Albert Hall, her heart pounding with fear and excitement, Marguerite hoped that, if nothing else, they had exposed Bob Hope for the berk that he was. Translation learnt at Risinghill that would not have been approved of by her more militant colleagues: Berk: Berkshire Hunt. Cunt.

  Marguerite narrowly escaped arrest, whisked, or rather juddered, away by Tony, who was waiting in a side road in the ancient Gladys, now grandly regarded as a vintage car.

  The whole country seemed to be campaigning about something. There were sit-ins, standoffs, marches, strikes, and Tony and Marguerite were in the thick of a lot of them. Afterwards she would retreat thankfully to her comfortable home, which she continued to embellish.

  She made forays with Tony and Donald to Habitat for stylish furniture, Casa Pupo for highly coloured rugs, Biba for mulberry satin sheets and huge decorative feathers in jars for her bedroom.

  ‘A proper tart’s parlour,’ said Tony. ‘You can’t fail to pull in this.’