The Parrot Cage, page 24
The instructor for those lessons was an ex-Hong Kong policeman, whose chief purpose was to teach the six pupils how to defend themselves against a murderous attack, launched probably at night, certainly in the middle of a city. Since they were all clearly office workers of one sort or another, they would not be armed and had to learn to kill with their hands, with an umbrella, a hatpin or whatever else they might have about them. They were also taught how to disable an assailant without killing him, and it was on that exercise that Flixe came to grief.
Johnny had been told to stand behind her and grab her by the throat; she was to slide her fingers under his hands, hook his legs from under him and twist sideways so that he was flung to the ground. The instructor, perhaps because he had been irritated to see a woman as delicate and fragile-looking as Flixe flooring a man of six-foot-three, whispered some extra instruction to Johnny and Flixe found herself trying to hook away legs that were not where she had expected them. Surprised, frightened in spite of knowing that her assailant was only Johnny and that they were merely practising, she jammed her elbows backwards, happily missing his groin by a few inches. Nevertheless, he reacted as instinctively as she had and she found herself lying flat on her back on the hard mat on the gym floor, winded and in considerable pain.
In an instant, he was on his knees beside her, his face sheet-white.
‘Flixe, have I hurt you? God I’m sorry, darling…’ He was removed by the horny-handed ex-policeman.
‘Out of the way, Flying Officer Blenkarne. Now, Miss Alderbrook, don’t try to talk. Concentrate on your breathing: in … out … in … Come on, you can do better than that.’
In the end, she managed to get the gasping, painful breathing under control, told the policeman where her back and side hurt, was lifted up, examined and told that she would be all right after an hour or two lying on her bed. As she limped out of the gym, she passed Johnny, still looking horrified and guilty.
‘Don’t worry, Johnny: it’s all part of the game. I’ll be all right. And it’s my turn to buy the gin tonight.’
His face relaxed slightly and he smiled in gratitude, but later in the mess he told her that he would never have forgiven himself if he had really hurt her.
‘It was too horribly like that ghastly.… Flixe, I never meant to mention it, but I’m sorry for that too. Desperately sorry.’ She touched his lean, brown face, wincing a little as her back muscles protested as she stretched them.
‘Don’t, Johnny; it was as much my fault as yours. We were just a pair of inexperienced children, hurting each other because we knew no better.’
He covered her hand with his own and smiled. ‘You are the most charitable woman. But it was more my fault: I was using you – trying to kill the fear by showing someone that I was…’
‘Don’t, Johnny,’ she said again. ‘I’ve learned a lot since then. And I expect you have, too. Let’s just write it off to experience and forget it. After all, we’re friends now, aren’t we?’
‘All right, my dear. Thank you,’ he said, wondering about what she had learned and from whom, and hoping in some desperation that she had not learned it from the ‘dago’he had seen with her in the nightclub. ‘How will you go back to work with your back so sore?’
‘Oh, that’s OK,’ she answered cheerfully. ‘My chief wangled me some leave. I’m going to stay with mother and her evacuees for a few days.’
They parted, still friends, on the last day of the course, Johnny giving her his address in London and Flixe assuring him yet again that she was not badly hurt and was thoroughly pleased that they had met again, even at the price of an aching back. There could have been no better introduction to a weekend at Sudbrook House, she thought as she sat on the slow cross-country train later that morning, than to have exorcised an unhappiness from the past and made a new – real – friend.
The train steamed into her station two hours later, and she looked along the short platform for her mother. After a few minutes, she was accosted by three urchins.
‘You Felicity then?’ demanded the biggest of them.
‘Yes, I am,’ she said, astonished. Then she remembered the evacuees. ‘Can it be that my mother has sent you to fetch me?’
‘’S’right. We brought the cart.’
‘Cart?’ she repeated, beginning to smile in spite of the impossibility of seeing her mother in the company of such boys.
‘Yes, come on. Mustn’t be late for luncheon,’ cried the head urchin while the other two heaved Flixe’s suitcase up into the back of the old governess cart that had been kept under a tarpaulin in the spare stable for as long as she could remember, and offered to help her negotiate the sinking, rickety step. Smothering her amusement that after the physical training she had just been put through she should be offered assistance by a seven-year-old, she found herself wondering snobbishly how long it had taken her mother to teach the urchins to call their midday meal luncheon.
They had harnessed poor old Buttercup between the shafts, and Flixe was interested to see that the leading urchin managed the mare with considerable assurance and a certain deft gentleness. The journey up to the house took nearly twenty minutes and by the time they got there, she had discovered that the driver was Jimmy, the middle-sized boy Sid and the youngest, Dick. She could not wait to see her elegant, resentful mother dealing with them.
As they turned into the short drive, Dick stood up, balancing himself against her bruised thigh, and called out in an ear-splitting shriek:
‘We got’er, Fan.’
Flixe sympathised with Buttercup’s sudden stumble and, after making certain that Jimmy managed to steady her, looked in interest for the first sight of her mother. When it came it was in its own way as surprising as the behaviour of the three extraordinary children.
Frances Alderbrook was dressed with all the over-tidiness her daughter remembered, but her face had lost its aggrieved lines and her deep-blue eyes were widely opened and lit up by amused affection. When Flixe clambered down from the governess cart her mother came forward and kissed her. Then, keeping one arm around her shoulders, she said proudly:
‘Well, what do you think of my boys?’
‘Terrific!’ said Flixe, unable to think of any more suitable comment. ‘How long did it take you to housetrain them?’ She wished that she had not sounded so caustic as she saw her mother’s expression. To make up for it, she leaned forward to kiss her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘It’s all right, Flixe. I know what you mean. And we certainly had a few battles at the beginning, but we’ve come to know how far each side is prepared to go and now we’re reasonably peaceable.’ She then ruffled little Dick’s hair and called out: ‘See to Buttercup, will you, Jimmy? Luncheon in fifteen minutes.’
‘OK, Fan.’
‘Mother, do you really let them call you that?’ whispered Flixe, far more naturally.
‘I had to if I didn’t want them calling me miss or m’um. They couldn’t have managed Mrs Alderbrook and anyway it would have become absurd once we knew each other, and “Aunt Fanny” would have been dotty, too.’
‘Yes, it does sound as though it should be spoken delicately by a Victorian miss over her embroidery frame.’
‘Precisely. Now, sherry while the boys clean up?’
‘Lovely.’
‘Come on in then and tell me about the war.’
‘It seems to have reached even Sudbrook House,’ said Flixe, laughing as she followed her mother into the drawing room.
‘You could say that. Will you pour us each a glass, Flixe?’
They talked on with a friendliness that Flixe could hardly bring herself to believe in, and even the arrival of the noisy children did not break up the generous atmosphere.
‘Mother, you are the last person who I’d have expected to get on so well with a bunch of evacuees like that,’ said Flixe after the depressing sausagemeat and potato pie had been consumed and the boys disappeared again into the garden.
‘Poor children. They have had the most frightful time, Flixe,’ answered her mother, carrying the dirty plates out to the scullery. ‘Would you rather wash or dry?’
‘Wash, if that’s all right with you,’ said Flixe, taking up an apron from a hook on the door. ‘I can imagine they must have, if they came from the East End. Gerry saw it burning one night when she stood in for Anna Kingsley, and she told me enough about it. I say, are you all right?’ she said curiously, aware that her mother had flinched.
‘Yes, but that’s what happened to their parents.’
‘Burned?’
‘Yes, mother, father, an uncle and an elder sister,’ said Fanny with a break in her voice.
‘But why? They always sheltered in the tubes.’
‘It was right at the beginning, Flixe, before the … when the government was still barring the entrances to the tubes.’
‘What?’ demanded Flixe, putting the last plate in the rack to drain and letting out the dishwater.
‘Yes, they thought that the populace would develop “deep-shelter” mentality unless they were forbidden to use the tubes – and their pathetic houses went up like matchwood. But don’t let’s talk about it any more; it makes me so angry – and depressed. Let’s go and see what’s out in the garden; it’s such a lovely day.’
‘Yes, let’s,’ answered Flixe, warmly. ‘But tell me something: where were these boys in between then and getting to you?’
‘Somewhere in Hertfordshire – with a woman who sounds like a fiend,’ said Fanny, stopping to pick some lavender spikes. ‘I need this to keep the sheets smelling nice. It was ages before they trusted me not to behave like her.’
‘But what did she do?’
‘I don’t know – they still haven’t managed to tell me. I expect she was horrified by their lack of cleanliness and some of their habits. They are – no, were – disgusting. But they’re such brave boys, Flixe: pitchforked into a life that is completely strange; knowing they’ve no home, no family to go back to, they keep their spirits up and their wits about them. And what wits I’d always assumed that that sort were stupid, born ineducable or something, but they’re not. They’re really bright.’
‘They sound like paragons.’ It was supposed to be a light, joking comment to help the conversation on, but Flixe could hear bitterness in her voice and hated herself for destroying the happy pride in her mother’s face, but it was too late. She waited, not knowing what to say.
Fanny Alderbrook stopped, turned to face her daughter and said gently:
‘Don’t be jealous, darling. You have so much compared to them.’
They walked on in silence towards the woods. Flixe smarted from that word, jealousy, which had reached right down into some of her worst childhood memories.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever called me “darling” before,’ she managed to say at last.
‘Oh, of course I have,’ answered her mother, taken aback. ‘I often call you darling.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Then the dammed-up words broke through the constraints she had built up over the years: ‘Why couldn’t you have been kind to us like that? Why did you have to keep it for three strangers who had no rights to it?’
‘But, Flixe, what do you mean?’ asked Fanny Alderbrook, appalled to see the happiest of her four daughters look and sound so like the perennially difficult Gerry.
‘You were always foul to us,’ Flixe burst out, quite beyond considerations of tact or even kindness. ‘Whatever we did was wrong; anything that was nearly all right just wasn’t enough. You spent the whole time criticising us. And everyone else. Whenever we went anywhere, afterwards you would go over and over all the failings of the people we’d seen: their social failings, their dullness, their awful clothes, their voices, their books, their furniture, their taste, their food, their servants, gardens, horses, children. No one was ever good enough for Fanny Alderbrook. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say anything kind about anyone until those boys.’
‘Flixe, that’s absurd.’ Her mother’s voice sounded stricken, but Flixe could not stop now that the sealed wells of childhood misery had been unstopped.
‘Any achievement was denigrated, any friend criticised, any aspiration mocked, any wound probed and salted until we screamed in pain.’
‘Stop it, Flixe; you’re hysterical.’
‘No, just slowly coming to understand that one can’t hide from it for ever. I’ve never let myself say those things even to myself. I have spent most of my time blaming Father for most of the miseries of the past. I might have gone on doing it for ever if I hadn’t seen what you could have been – if you’d cared for us as you care for those children. He was always bloody to me – and you didn’t even try to stop him.’ She turned away and began to walk slowly back towards the house. Then, almost as though she were talking to herself, she went on: ‘I wonder if it would have been better if we’d been boys. Or were you just getting your revenge on your past by making us as miserable as you had been?’
They were both almost in tears by then, but the last accusation was so extravagant that Mrs Alderbrook pulled herself together. She caught up with Flixe, made her sit down on the stile and herself leaned against the adjacent thick prickly hedge.
‘Flixe, you are beside yourself. The war has worn you out and made you see things wildly out of proportion. But try to listen: I care and always did care very much for you all. If I seem kinder to the boys than I did to you, it’s because they are so different. I’m not trying to fit them for life; I don’t have to watch over them and worry about whether they’ll achieve all they have to in order to be safe.’
‘Then what are you trying to do for them?’ asked Flixe, as though quite uninterested, looking away from the face that was so like her own would be in twenty years.
‘To make them happy, of course,’ said Mrs Alderbrook.
It was too much. Flixe stood up and said brusquely:
‘I’m going to see Evelyn. Don’t wait supper for me if I’m not back.’
‘Flixe, you can’t leave like this. Not after what you’ve said.’
‘I can’t stay. I’ll be back later. I know you hate the fact that Gerry and I care for Evelyn, but it so happens that without her I’d have said something frightful to you or Father years ago.’
Flixe pushed her hair back away from her forehead and then covered her eyes for a moment, remembering the days in the past when she had gone to Evelyn, flaming with resentment or desperate with half-angry misery. She could feel her mother moving towards her and thought that at that moment she could not bear to be touched, despite having longed for years to have some physical affection from her parents. She took her hands away from her face and stood up straight, facing her mother.
‘Evelyn kept me going. And, incidentally, always refused to listen to any criticism of you. She’s not like you, you see – she tries to build people up, not destroy the things that help them manage.’
Chapter Eighteen
When Flixe arrived back at her London flat soon after four on the following Monday, she found a note from Jean-Pierre telling her how much he had missed her and inviting her to dine that evening. After her mother’s depressing cooking the prospect of dinner at the Ritz or the Berkeley was enticing, but Flixe knew that she would never repair the ravages of a week’s self-defence training and a weekend with her mother and the evacuees in time. Regretfully, she telephoned Jean-Pierre’s manservant to leave a message, saying that she would be unable to dine that evening, but would be free the next. Then she wrote to her mother, trying to apologise for what she had said, and to Ming, describing the funnier aspects of the course with as much discretion as she could, and addressed it to the headquarters of the organisation that Ming had joined when she had left school. Her own letters never carried any other address and so although Flixe was certain that Ming was not based there, she had nowhere else to send the letter. Having sealed the envelopes, she scribbled a note to Gerry asking when they could meet, ran out to post all three letters, and returned to unpack and start washing her smalls and pressing the skirts and frocks she had taken away with her.
Later, when she was having a shallow, tepid bath before getting into bed, she caught sight of the enormous bruise on her thigh. The mark had faded a little over the week, but it was still far too distinct to have been explained away to Jean-Pierre. There was little hope that it would have gone even by the following evening: could she tell him that she had walked into a table? Or fallen off her horse? Just as she was running through possible stories, the telephone rang. Cursing mildly, she got out of the bath, wrapped herself in a towel and went to answer it.
‘Hello? Flixe?’ came the unmistakable voice of her chief.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ she answered ungrammatically. ‘How are you, Suvarov?’
‘Well enough. But I gather you’re a bit damaged,’ he said, and she thought that she could hear a laugh at the back of his voice.
‘Yes, I was just examining my bruises – a dead giveaway, you know,’ she said, laughing aloud.
‘Poor you. But, seriously, Flixe, I need to talk to you. Will you feed the ducks tomorrow, one-forty-five?’
‘Yes, all right. I’ll be there.’
‘Good,’ he said and rang off.
When they met on the edge of the Round Pond, he looked carefully at her face. A little embarrassed but determined not to be outfaced, she stared back, noticing all over again how beautiful his face was. His eyelashes were thick and black and seemed to give his eyes more definition than anyone else’s had, and his nose was perfectly straight, with the nostrils most delicately cut. He seemed to be thinner than the last time she had seen him, and his mouth looked harder.
‘You really are all right, then?’ he said at last. Feeling suddenly much happier than at any time since she left Johnny Blenkarne at the course, Flixe tucked her hand into her chief’s arm.
