The Linden Walk

Lyn had been sure all day that a letter from Kenya would be there when she got home from work. And it was.

She put a match to the fire, changed her wet shoes for slippers, then carefully slit open the envelope.

Hullo, lovely girl!

This is a quick one to tell you that your dad has got us a passage home, and we should dock in England a week before Christmas. We have a cabin on a cargo ship from Mombasa to Cape Town where we embark on the Stirling Castle – newly refitted after being a troopship in the war.

I’m a bit nervous about flying, so your dad said it was no problem. By sea was much nicer, even though it’s going to take a lot longer.

Will give you all details – sailing times, cabin numbers, etc, as soon as we have them confirmed. Now that I know we are almost on our way, I can’t wait to see my girl again. And I’ll remember to pack warm clothes. I haven’t been so long gone that I have forgotten how cold it can be in Wales, in winter.

Will write again, soon.

With love,

Mam X X (and Dad)

Home! Her mother – her darling Auntie Blod – was coming home for Christmas! Only then did Lyn realize how much she had missed her, needed her. Eighteen months since she had seen her; eighteen years, near as dammit, since she saw her father.

Christmas, and them together in the little cottage in Wales – or would they be asked to Rowangarth? And how long would they be staying, once they knew that the wedding had been put forward to April? She wouldn’t care if they never went back. They would, of course, but just for a while she would be part of a family, with her father walking her down the aisle.

Her father, Jack Carmichael, was little changed it would seem, from when she last saw him. Still straight-backed and slim; still the thick, dark hair with hardly a streak of grey in it. Handsome, even yet. No wonder Auntie Blod had fallen in love with him and stayed in love with him.

All at once Lyn felt a strange contentment, because she wasn’t alone; stupid of her ever to have thought she was. Soon, she would have her mother to confide in, to tell of the uncertainties she still sometimes felt. And her mother would understand because she knew, didn’t she, what it was like to love a man, to lose him and then, in the end, to marry him.

‘There’s stupid, our Lyndis. Worrying about your wedding night, are you? Then get yourself into bed with him, girl. Try before you buy, why don’t you? I did!’ Lyn could almost hear the words.

‘Yes, and look where it got you. It got you pregnant with me,’ Lyn smiled to the face in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

All at once she was hungry. Nothing like good news to give you an appetite. She would boil the brown egg Daisy’s mother had given her and slice into the loaf Daisy’s mother had baked, then spread it thickly with bramble jelly. Sheer bliss. Eating home-made bread and jam was almost as good as being in love, especially when you were getting married in April. The second Saturday in April. It had a firm ring to it. Daisy had been married in April.

‘I always associate my wedding with windflowers,’ she once said. ‘The little white, wild anemones. They were flowering in Brattocks Wood.’

And she had added, pink-cheeked, that she associated their honeymoon with bluebells because they had gone back to the place she and Keth grew up in, made a sentimental journey to Beck Lane in Hampshire, where the woods were thick with bluebells. And they had been lovers there. Lucky Daisy and Keth who had wanted no other. They were still at school when they realized they were in love. No complications for those two; no doubts.

The fire had begun to blaze and crackle. Outside, the night was dark, but this snug, thick-walled little house with curtains pulled across the windows and lamps burning softly, was a good place to be. If she couldn’t be in the winter parlour at Rowangarth with Drew, that was. And the two of them making plans in the fireglow or even – crazy thought – making love?

But no, not now. She had lived these many years a reluctant virgin and would stay so until her wedding night. And instead of thinking about wedding nights she thought about a boiled fresh egg, and bread and jam and Drew, who loved her, even though he had never said so. Never actually said the words.

‘I love you, Drew Sutton,’ she whispered to the brown egg she lowered carefully into the pan. ‘I always will …’

‘So it’s to be an April wedding?’ Mary Stubbs sniffed. ‘Why the change of plan? I’d have liked June much better.’

‘Aye, but it’s not for you to say, is it, since it’s not you going to wed Sir Andrew.’

‘Don’t talk so daft! I’m well suited with the man I’ve got, thanks all the same.’

Well suited with Will Stubbs, once stable lad at Rowangarth, then promoted to groom and, since motors had replaced horses, now as apt a motor mechanic as any in these parts. Because Will had been astute; had learned about motors and their innards in the Great War, because horses, he had decided, would be on their way out once that war was over with. And he was right! He was very often right, Mary Stubbs was bound to admit; was what people might call a self-educated man though Tilda, in a fit of rage, had once called him a right know-all; she at the time being on the shelf with little hope of ever getting off it, and prickly about those who had.

Then the government had commandeered Pendenys Place and the Place Suttons thrown out of it and Sergeant Sidney Willis, together with a battalion of Green Howards, came to guard it. Very lucky Tilda had been, meeting her Sidney.

‘We’ll be invited to the wedding,’ said Tilda, seeing the need to change the subject. ‘And no problem with what to wear. You and me both have wedding outfits and decent hats.’

‘So we have, but I’m going to have to ask Alice Dwerryhouse to let mine out – just a little …’

‘Middle-age spread, Mary?’

‘No, Tilda dear. Just contentment and the love of a good man. And I’ll be off to look in on Miss Clitherow, make up her fire, then see if there’s anything Miss Julia or the Reverend wants when I’m in Creesby, this afternoon.’

‘You could call in on that grocer of ours, ask him if he’s got anything under the counter. That man is too smug for his own liking, ladies always flattering him for handouts. That one needs to be reminded that food won’t always be rationed and that in the old days, Rowangarth was one of his best customers!’ Tilda longed for the day when, telephone to her ear, she gave her order to the grocer and the butcher and what was more, had them delivered! ‘But everything comes to she who waits,’ she nodded with a narrowing of her eyes and a rounding of her mouth. ‘Oh my word, yes!’

‘Then I think you’ll be in for a long wait, Tilda. What with that lot in London rationing bread and everyone on waiting lists, still, for the necessities of life!’ (Mary Stubbs longed for a refrigerator.) ‘And with the Royal Air Force dropping food that by rights should be ours for those Germans in Berlin, I don’t know what the world is coming to. Our lot did win the war, Tilda? Correct me if I’m wrong!’

‘We won it.’ Tilda smiled. ‘I think it’s just peace that we can’t get used to.’ Wars weren’t all that bad; not when they had landed a battalion of Green Howards on her doorstep. ‘And will you tell Miss Julia that I got a jar of coffee powder the other day, and would she and the Reverend like to try it for elevenses?’

‘Powdered coffee,’ Mary gasped. Whatever was the world coming to!

Olga, Countess Petrovska sat beside the fire in the small, ground-floor room at the back of the house in Cheyne Walk. She did not like sitting in what had once – in another fairytale life it sometimes seemed – been the housekeeper’s room. But now they had no housekeeper, no servants and anyway the small room was more easily heated. She closed her eyes and drifted back to the house beside the River Neva where fires warmed all the rooms, and servants enough to keep them constantly burning.

It would be bitterly cold, now, in St Petersburg. The river beside which she once lived would have started to freeze, but she would have been making plans for Christmas, which lasted well into January, with parties and balls and friends calling each afternoon to gossip about who was with whom at the ballet, last night, and who would get himself talked about if he were foolish enough to have more than two dances with the Sudzhenska girl. Talked about, or compromised into an engagement if he wasn’t careful and thought less about her father’s wealth and more about her sullen, spotty face!

‘Mama. You were daydreaming again!’ Igor’s clicking fingers demanded attention.

‘Yes. I was in my salon with my friends, drinking tea from china cups.’

‘And putting St Petersburg society to rights!’

‘Tittle-tattle. Gossiping about anything and nothing, my only worry to find wives for my sons and thinking about whom my daughter might marry in two, three years’ time …’

‘When you ought to be thinking about your granddaughter’s wedding!’

‘Tatiana has a mother to worry about her; a mother who right from the start was determined to do exactly as she pleased. First she insisted upon marrying Elliot Sutton, then she went to work – a Petrovska, working! And now she has chosen to marry a doctor and become one of the middle classes!’

‘Mama! My sister was young and foolish and you did nothing to stop her marrying Sutton.’

‘He was wealthy …’

‘He was a brute! He wanted only to breed from her!’

‘Igor! Watch your tongue when you speak to your mother! I will not have such coarseness in my home! But you are right, I suppose,’ she shrugged. ‘He wanted a son. His mother demanded a son. Such a loud woman, that Mrs Clementina, but breeding will out!’

‘Shall we talk about Tatiana?’ he said softly, coaxingly.

‘Who is to marry a man with no background.’

‘A man who cares deeply for her, Mama. And don’t forget you said you quite liked him, when you met.’

‘I – I suppose I did, though he wasn’t an officer. But he did look me in the eye when he spoke to me. My granddaughter will be happy enough. She has a house, and money. She has forgotten she is Russian.’