will be safe. They’ll bomb all our cities.’
‘Of course they won’t, dear. Now, isn’t it time you had your medicine and a little lie-down? I’m sure Lydia will excuse you.’
Mrs Alforde rang the bell. She and the maid helped the old man out of the room. When Mrs Alforde came back alone, Lydia was on her feet.
‘I think perhaps I ought to be going. Thank you so much for asking me.’
‘Do sit down, and in a moment we’ll ring for more tea. I’m sorry you had to see Gerry like that.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Not really. He was too long in France. They kept sending him back to the front, and he felt so responsible for his men. He can keep up appearances for a little but you can never quite tell what’s going to set him off. Sometimes it’s a motorbike backfiring on the street. Or seeing a soldier in uniform. Or a headline in the paper. Even the mention of war can do it.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Yes, well we have to make the best of it.’ Mrs Alforde folded her hands on her lap and looked at Lydia with bright little eyes. ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’ She went on, without any change of tone: ‘I had lunch with your mother on Tuesday.’
Lydia said nothing.
‘She is very worried about you, you know. I gather you and Marcus have been having a difficult time.’
‘That’s one way of describing it.’
‘You mustn’t mind my talking about it, dear,’ Mrs Alforde said. ‘After all, Gerry’s your godfather, and if his health permitted, I’m sure he would be saying exactly the same things as I am.’
‘My mother asked you to talk to me, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want to go back to Marcus.’
‘That’s as maybe, dear. But it doesn’t follow that it’s suitable for you to be with your father.’
Lydia frowned. ‘I don’t understand. I know he’s not well off but at least he is my father.’
‘I’m not disputing that. But I don’t think you fully understand about his little weaknesses. Your mother has always tried to spare you. She thinks now however that you ought to know. And she asked me to talk to you because she wasn’t sure you’d believe her.’ Mrs Alforde looked sternly at Lydia over the top of her glasses. ‘Which is in itself a very sad state of affairs.’
Lydia looked around the overcrowded room. She heard movement elsewhere in the flat, a door closing, raised voices. Was the maid some sort of nurse as well? She wondered what it was like to live with someone poised on the brink of a mental breakdown, someone who occasionally fell over the brink. She said, ‘If you want to tell me something about him, you’d better go ahead and get it over with.’
Mrs Alforde nodded. ‘Very wise. It’s always more sensible to know these things. Now, let me see: you were born in 1905, weren’t you? It all came to a head the previous winter. Gerry and I had been married in July and it was our first Christmas together. We were down at his uncle’s place. Rawling Hall, near Saffron Walden. Your father was there too. He was Aunt Connie’s nephew. Gerry knew him quite well — he’d met him out in India once or twice when his battalion was there. But your father had resigned his commission since then. It had all been rather sudden, I’m afraid, and in the circumstances Gerry was quite surprised to see him at Rawling.’ Mrs Alforde paused. ‘To be perfectly frank, my dear, he left the army under a cloud. In fact, if his CO hadn’t wanted to avoid the scandal, he would have been cashiered.’
‘What had he done?’
‘Forged several cheques, falsified the accounts and embezzled the mess funds,’ Mrs Alforde said crisply, abandoning finesse. ‘No doubt about it. One of the NCOs was involved as well, a mess sergeant. I believe the sergeant went to jail. And there was your father, as bold as brass, at Rawling Hall. But Aunt Connie always had a soft spot for him. She’d given him a little job to do — he was making pen-and-ink sketches of the chimney pieces that Gerry’s uncle had put in the drawing room and the library. Can’t think why — horrible pseudo-Jacobean things; best forgotten. The maids hated dusting them.’
‘I’m glad someone had a soft spot for him.’
Mrs Alforde glanced at her. ‘I’m sorry to have to say that he was cold-shouldered by the men down there and by most of the women too. And then he seduced your mother under our very noses. Do you know, she was only just sixteen? She wasn’t even out. He was after her money, of course. Not that she wasn’t very lovely too. And the very final straw was that he didn’t even trouble to take precautions. He made the poor girl pregnant. With you, in fact. Of course she had no choice but to marry him. We all rallied round, for your mother’s sake. But no one was surprised that the marriage didn’t last.’
‘You make him sound very ruthless,’ Lydia said quietly. ‘Very calculating.’
‘My dear, he was. Of course he ran through the money in a year or two. I gather he’s a sad case now. Even so, he’s not to be trusted. So that’s why I think you’re better off without him.’
Lydia sat staring straight ahead and said nothing.
‘All marriages have their ups and downs,’ Mrs Alforde went on. ‘Gerry and I — well, I won’t go into details but it hasn’t always been easy. But one soldiers on. I’m sure you and Marcus will soon be rubbing along together perfectly well again. And it would make your mother so happy.’
Lydia looked at her hostess. Mrs Alforde was a nice woman, she thought, and doing her best. It wasn’t her fault that her best had nothing to do with what Lydia wanted, and nothing to do with what was actually happening.
‘Now promise me, dear — you will at least think about it.’
Lydia shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going back to Marcus. I wasn’t before and I’m certainly not now, when I’ve seen him and my mother behaving like farmyard animals together.’
She sat back and watched the blood leave Mrs Alforde’s face. All the vitality drained out of the older woman. She looked small, pale and frightened.
By the middle of Tuesday morning Rory had already smoked the third of the three cigarettes which were, in theory, his ration for that day. He was typing yet another letter of application on the Royal Portable and trying to resist the temptation to light a fourth.
He had spent the weekend in Hereford with his parents and his sisters. Here the familiar rituals of his childhood continued to be observed, except all the participants were older than they had been. Despite the comforts of home — despite the freshly laundered sheets, the excellent leg of lamb for Sunday lunch, his father’s Navy Cut cigarettes — there had been something unreal, even stultifying, about the weekend. He had been glad to get away, even though it was only to return to the uncertainties of an independent life with a failed engagement, dwindling savings and no prospect of ever earning a decent income.
He heard the muffled sound of the postman’s knock, and movement in the house below. Then came footsteps on his own stairs and a tap on his door. When he opened it, Lydia Langstone was waiting outside on the landing. She was carrying a parcel and her face was slightly flushed from the exertion of climbing the stairs.
She held out the parcel. ‘It was for you. I thought I might as well bring it up.’
‘Thank you.’
She turned to go, and then looked back at him. ‘Do you remember when you showed me that cufflink the other day? When we had lunch.’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘I happened to hear at the weekend that the Fascists have hired the chapel undercroft for another meeting.’
‘Really? When?’
‘Saturday week. The first of December, I think. Apparently it’s part of a big push to attract businessmen to the movement.’
‘By telling them the Fascists will shoot all the reds under the beds and make sure there will always be a market for British goods?’
‘Something like that. Do you think it was Fascists who attacked you?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t find anything else that supported the idea. The most likely explanation is that somebody just happened to lose a cufflink there and it had nothing to do with me whatsoever.’
He thanked her again and said goodbye. He stood for a moment watching her as she clattered down the
