Early the next morning, another beautiful, hot, sunny morning, Linda lay back on her pillows and watched Fabrice while he dressed, as she had so often watched him in Paris. He made a certain kind of face when he was pulling his tie into a knot, she had quite forgotten it in the months between, and it brought back their Paris life to her suddenly and vividly.
‘Fabrice,’ she said. ‘Do you think we shall ever live together again?’
‘But of course we shall, for years and years and years, until I am ninety. I have a very faithful nature.’
‘You weren’t very faithful to Jacqueline.’
‘Aha – so you know about Jacqueline, do you? La pauvre, elle était si gentille – gentille, élégante, mais assommante, mon Dieu! Enfin, I was immensely faithful to her and it lasted five years, it always does with me (either five days or five years). But as I love you ten times more than the others that brings it to when I am ninety, and, by then, j’en aurai tellement l’habitude –’
‘And how soon shall I see you again?’
‘On fera la navette.’ He went to the window. ‘I thought I heard a car – oh yes, it is turning round. There, I must go. Au revoir, Linda.’
He kissed her hand politely, almost absent-mindedly, it was as if he had already gone, and walked quickly from the room. Linda went to the open window and leaned out. He was getting into a large motor car with two French soldiers on the box and a Free French flag waving from the bonnet. As it moved away he looked up.
‘Navette – navette –’ cried Linda with a brilliant smile. Then she got back into bed and cried very much. She felt utterly in despair at this second parting.
20
The air-raids on London now began. Early in September, just as I had moved there with my family, a bomb fell in the garden of Aunt Emily’s house in Kent. It was a small bomb compared with what one saw later, and none of us were hurt, but the house was more or less wrecked. Aunt Emily, Davey, my children, and I, then took refuge at Alconleigh, where Aunt Sadie welcomed us with open arms, begging us to make it our home for the war. Louisa had already arrived there with her children, John Fort William had gone back to his regiment and their Scottish home had been taken over by the Navy.
‘The more the merrier,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘I should like to fill the house, and, besides, it’s better for rations. Nice, too, for your children to be brought up all together, just like old times. With the boys away and Victoria in the Wrens, Matthew and I would be a very dreary old couple here all alone.’
The big rooms at Alconleigh were filled with the contents of some science museum and no evacuees had been billeted there, I think it was felt that nobody who had not been brought up to such rigours could stand the cold of that house.
Soon the party received a very unexpected addition. I was upstairs in the nursery bathroom doing some washing for Nanny, measuring out the soap-flakes with wartime parsimony and wishing that the water at Alconleigh were not so dreadfully hard, when Louisa burst in.
‘You’ll never guess,’ she said, ‘in a thousand thousand years who has arrived.’
‘Hitler,’ I said, stupidly.
‘Your mother, Auntie Bolter. She just walked up the drive and walked in.’
‘Alone?’
‘No, with a man.’
‘The Major?’
‘He doesn’t look like a major. He’s got a musical instrument with him and he’s very dirty. Come on, Fanny, leave those to soak –’
And so it was. My mother sat in the hall drinking a whisky-and-soda and recounting in her birdlike voice with what incredible adventures she had escaped from the Riviera. The major with whom she had been living for some years, always having greatly preferred the Germans to the French, had remained behind to collaborate, and the man who now accompanied my mother was a ruffianly looking Spaniard called Juan, whom she had picked up during her travels, and without whom, she said, she could never have got away from a ghastly prison camp in Spain. She spoke of him exactly as though he were not there at all, which produced rather a curious effect, and indeed seemed most embarrassing until we realized that Juan understood no word of any language except Spanish. He sat staring blankly into space, clutching a guitar and gulping down great draughts of whisky. Their relationship was only too obvious, Juan was undoubtedly (nobody doubted for a moment, not even Aunt Sadie) the Bolter’s lover, but they were quite incapable of verbal exchange, my mother being no linguist.
Presently Uncle Matthew appeared, and the Bolter told her adventures all over again to him. He said he was delighted to see her, and hoped she would stay as long as
