Page 21 of Last Letter Home
‘Good lord no. We’d not speak to half our neighbours if we took that attitude. I say, your sister’s a damned pretty girl, but I’ve yet to see her smile.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear. Mummy wouldn’t like it.’ For a moment Sarah walked ahead, feeling unaccountably disturbed. Actually she didn’t care sixpence about him swearing, she had said it simply to shut him up.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’
She turned. ‘Listen, Diane’s had a worse time than any of us,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t want to talk behind her back, but please remember that.’
‘I said I’m sorry.’ His brow creased with anxiety and she relented.
‘No, it’s I who should apologize. I spoke too harshly. Forgive me.’
‘Of course.’ He gave her a sorrowful smile. ‘I sometimes say the wrong thing, but I don’t mean to.’ Now she felt a rush of sympathy for him, glimpsing a sensitive nature, and laid her hand briefly on his arm to reassure him.
They trudged on for a while up the steep hill, breathing heavily with the effort, then the woods came to an end, and suddenly there before them, a few hundred yards away, was Westbury Hall. They stopped to rest and Sarah stared at gracious lines of its old ochre brick walls, the crenellations and turrets crested with drifts of snow, the diamond-paned windows overhung by icicles.
‘Lovely pile, isn’t it?’ Ivor remarked.
‘Elizabethan?’ she asked as they set off towards it.
‘That sort of whatnot. As Mother said, the family are in London much of the time. Money’s tight. Can’t afford to run a full staff, Dad reckons. If there’s another war, well, you can understand why the Kellings, the Bulldocks and their ilk are resisting it so loudly.’
‘Sir Henry Kelling, too?’
‘He’s not as bad as some of the others,’ Ivor admitted. ‘But another war would put paid to his sort, that’s what Father thinks.’
‘Don’t you think the danger is past? That Germany has all it wants now?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ivor spoke as though weighing his words. ‘Surely they’re not foolish enough, but the stories you hear of the strength of their forces tell otherwise. We can only hope. What do they want, that’s what I’d like to know. And what could we do against them? Sometimes I think the Bulldocks of this world are right and we should stay out of it, but then . . .’
‘We have obligations.’
‘Yes, we do, and we cannot cut ourselves off from our sworn allies.’
They were close to the house now so that it towered over them, and their boots met gravel under the snow. Sarah, on tiptoe, clutched a sill to look in through a window, and was put out to find the curtains were drawn. Instead Ivor led her under an arch into a courtyard at the side of the house, then on through a snowbound garden, where they passed the muffled shapes of bushes, statues, a simple fountain. Two sides were lined with poplar trees, but along the far edge ran a high brick wall of the same ochre hues as the house and into one end of this was set a studded wooden door. It was closed and banked up with snow.
‘The kitchen garden’s through there,’ Ivor explained, ‘and beyond that the cottage where the Hartmanns live. I say, we should start back, don’t you think?’
A doleful twilight brooded over the snow, and Ivor turned to go, but Sarah was reluctant. The thought of the walled garden beyond the door was intriguing. She longed to see it, but Ivor was already ahead. As she hurried after him, the thought of a warm fire and Christmas cake rose in her mind. She’d return here and see the gardens properly in the spring, she promised herself. Hopefully with an invitation, for today it felt they were trespassing.
They arrived back at Westbury Cottage in cheerful spirits only to be puzzled by their reception.
‘Goodness, dears, how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed we look,’ was Aunt Margo’s greeting as they entered the stuffy drawing room. And everyone stared at them in amusement, which Sarah found unnerving.
There had been something unreal about the whole day, she reflected that evening, the alien light on the snow, the sense of desertion at Westbury Hall. She’d longed for the delightful Christmases of her childhood, for although there had been icicles, candles and a leaping fire in the grate today, and rich marzipan fruit cake, it was marred by bereavement and rumours of war. The innocence of those far-off days of her childhood was gone for ever.
Eleven
Jennifer Bulldock, who opened the farmhouse door on New Year’s Eve, was a tall girl, but awkwardly coltish rather than gracefully willowy.
‘Oh goody, Ivor, you’re just in time for Blind Man’s Buff.’ Her hearty voice competed with the yapping of the small terrier dog which she was trying to collar.
‘Maybe once I’ve got a drink inside me,’ Ivor laughed. ‘Jen, this is Miss Sarah Bailey and her sister Diane.’
‘Wonderful to meet you both. Do come in. Whoops, don’t mind Chester, he gets overexcited.’ The dog was making angry rushes at the newcomers, but Jennifer was finally able to nab him and bundle him into the arms of a maid who bore him away.
‘You’re very kind to have us,’ Sarah said, liking this girl immensely. She possessed an air of good humour and took their hats and coats without any fuss before ushering them into a large cheerful drawing room where a scene of chaos greeted them. The furniture had been pushed to the walls and a dozen young people were crowding around a burly ginger-head in an ill-fitting dark suit. His blindfold, a ladies’ polka-dotted scarf, pushed his fringe up into a spiky halo.
‘He’s all yours, Harry!’ somebody shouted.
