A Fragile Peace Read online

  ‘Honestly, Allie! Anyone’d think you were trying for Wimbledon!’ Libby’s laughing voice rang in the still air. ‘We’re in danger of our lives on this side of the net!’

  Allie gave a small, downturned smile, crossed over to the other court and stood, racket swinging, as she waited for the others to sort themselves out. Her partner gave a silly, yelping laugh and called across to her.

  ‘Bet you a quid you can’t do that again.’

  ‘You’re on.’ Allie lined up her racket.

  In mock terror Libby shrieked and scuttled across the court. ‘Oh, no you don’t. Not at me. –Edward, come on, do the gentlemanly thing – I don’t give a toss what the rules say – you take it.’

  As Edward, clowning terror, moved across the court a movement beneath the oak tree caught Robert’s eye and he experienced the familiar, involuntary, almost physical shock that the sight of Celia always produced in him. Her tall, slim figure emerged from the dappled shade of the tree as if materializing from the shadows. She picked up the ball that lay in the flower bed and stood tossing it idly in her hand, smiling a little as she watched the players. Libby waved, and called. Allie, apparently engrossed, ignored her. The ball rose, the racket sang with every aggressive ounce of energy and effort the girl could muster behind it.

  Edward stepped back. ‘I say, old girl.’ He sounded truly aggrieved. ‘Steady on!’

  Allie laughed, the sound high and a little harsh, and her father’s attention was drawn from Celia to his daughter, a straight, thoughtful line drawn between his brows. It struck him, not for the first time, that it had been a long time since he had heard Allie laugh in her old, happily infectious way, a long time, too, since they had spoken together without strain. There had been about her, over these past few months, a brittle and defiant shield that defeated any attempt to pierce it and behind which the Allie he had always known seemed to have disappeared entirely.

  He had been utterly astounded when Allie, soon after her eighteenth birthday in February, had announced that she had made up her mind not to return to St Leonard’s after the Easter holidays to take her final examinations. Since she was not going to university after all, she had said, taking full advantage of what she well knew was her father’s tender conscience over that issue, then she could see no point in continuing her education. No amount of argument would shift her. It had been Myra, practical as always, who, quoting horses and water, had pointed out that it would be a useless exercise to force the girl back to school. And so Allie had stayed home – and sometimes Robert thought it was like having a young stranger in the house. It disturbed and puzzled him, this change in his favourite child. Allie was by turns morosely moody and excessively bright, withdrawn and flamboyantly gay. With certainty, her father sensed, beneath the uncharacteristic and sometimes highly irritating behaviour, a core of bleak pain, the cause of which he could not discover since Allie, when taxed, denied absolutely its existence. Trying to ignore his own hurt at his daughter’s oddly changed behaviour, he had waited patiently, unable to believe that, in the end, she would not come to him with her troubles as she always had before. But gradually now he was coming to admit that, for a reason that was totally beyond him, their old, special, easy relationship was gone. Any conversation he had managed to hold with her over the past few months had been, on Allie’s side, flippantly inconsequential, peppered with racy slang and silly jokes. Her only interests, it seemed, were dance music and rather silly young men in fast cars.

  Just once, a week or so ago, the old Allie had shown herself briefly, only to withdraw again almost immediately. It had been at the end of April, when the reports had come through about the Fascist bombing of a small town in Spain called Guernica. They had all listened, shocked, as the radio announcer’s dispassionate voice had described the brutal and fiery death of this small market town. Wave after wave of bombers, German-built and German-piloted, and timed like clockwork to appear every twenty minutes for three hours, swept from the bright springtime sky to destroy the town and machine-gun its fleeing, terrified inhabitants. Libby, her hands to her ears, had left the room before the report was finished. Myra, her face almost expressionless, had heard the bulletin to the end, then, wordless, followed her elder daughter, leaving Robert alone with Allie. Robert, swearing softly, had turned off the wireless with a sharp, angry movement. The silence that ensued had been charged with anger, outrage and, somewhere, buried deep, the first faint stirrings of fear. Allie had been sitting bolt upright on the sofa, her face bone-white, her brown hair veiling one side of her face, her only movement a rhythmic, nervous clenching and relaxing of her left hand. So still was she that it had taken a moment for Robert to realize that her cheeks were shining with tears.

  ‘Allie, darling, you mustn’t—’

  ‘Children,’ she said. ‘Women with babies. Blown to pieces. Machine-gunned. Machine-gunned! Oh, Daddy—’ She had been in his arms in a second, sobbing, her face buried in his shoulder. ‘It’s so horrible!’

  Briefly and, despite the circumstances, with a lift of happiness, he had held her, stroking her hair. Then, as the storm subsided, he had felt the change in her. In one movement she had stiffened and pulled away from him, turning away, dashing a hand across her face.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was stupid.’ Her voice had been harsh, totally withdrawn.

  ‘Allie…’

  ‘I’m all right. You know me. I always was a grizzler. I’d better go and do some running repairs on my face. The gang’ll be here in a minute.’ She had left him, standing alone, with no backward glance.

  He watched her now as, the game over, she threw a white cardigan over her tennis dress and strolled with the others towards the house. Celia had disappeared. In a sudden eruption of sound and flying gravel, a small sports car skidded up the drive and came to a screeching halt, horn blaring stridently. It was driven by a young man whom Robert recognized with a lowering of his brows and a slight tightening of his mouth. He had disliked young Ray Cheshire on sight, remarking to Myra that too much money and very little sense was not a combination that appealed to him in his daughter’s friends. Allie walked over to the car and stood talking to the driver for a few moments. Robert saw her glance once or twice towards the house as she spoke. Finally she stepped back and the little car, engine growling, leapt forward, made a skidding turn and disappeared down the drive. Allie rejoined her sister and the young men. Robert saw Libby stop, looking at Allie in surprise, obviously startled by something that she had said. Allie shrugged in that odd, defiant way that was becoming all too familiar. Libby’s hands lifted to heaven as she appealed to Edward. Allie turned and left them, coming towards the house.

  Myra, too, had been watching. ‘I wonder what all that was about.’ Then, following Robert’s own thoughts with uncanny accuracy, ‘I can’t think where Allie found these new – friends – of hers.’

  He shook his head.

  Myra walked to the table, stood tinkering absently with the papers upon it. ‘Robert?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘I think perhaps you ought to have a word with Allie. I’m not at all sure that these people – this “gang” of hers – are altogether suitable.’

  The door slammed. They heard Allie’s light, quick footsteps as they crossed the hall and she ran up the stairs, two at a time.

  ‘I think, too,’ added Myra firmly, ‘that the time has come for us to settle Allie’s immediate future. It seems to me that we’ve given her quite enough leeway. Since she shows no interest in anything herself, I feel strongly that we should take a hand. For the child’s own good.’

  ‘You mean Sir Brian Hinton’s offer?’

  ‘Exactly. I think it most kind of Celia, and of her father. I am of the convinced opinion that Allie should take advantage of Sir Brian’s offer. I never thought the day would come when I would say about Alexandra that she needed steadying down – but I’m saying it now.’ She lifted her smooth head and waited for her husband’s agreement. ‘This job with Sir Brian is exactly what
she needs.’

  Robert cleared his throat. ‘I—’ He stopped, started afresh. ‘Allie – doesn’t seem all that keen on the idea.’

  Myra’s voice sharpened. ‘Robert, my dear, I think, extraordinary though it seems, that you’d be hard put to find anything that Allie is “all that keen on” just at the moment, apart from very loud dance music and equally loud young men.’ She lifted her hands in a graceful gesture of exasperation and sank into a nearby chair. ‘Really, she is the most tiresome and unpredictable child. I can’t imagine what’s got into her. I almost preferred her socialist phase…’ She glanced at Robert, a half-smile quirking her pretty mouth. ‘All right, that’s an exaggeration. Anything would be better than that. But, nevertheless, I am concerned about her. I felt we were wrong to give in to her over Switzerland, and it seems to me that I’m being proved right. We’ve been too lax with her, Robert, and now we’re paying the penalty. I’m absolutely determined that she must be taken in hand. Between Richard and Allie—’ she sighed suddenly and laid her head back on the chair ‘—I really can’t see what we’ve done to deserve this kind of behaviour from them both.’

  ‘Darling, I hardly think—’

  She ignored his interruption. ‘She must be given no choice in the matter. In fact—’ suddenly brisk, she stood up and reached among the papers on the table ‘—I’ve written a draft here, a letter to Sir Brian accepting the position he has offered.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little high-handed?’

  The blue eyes were undisturbed. ‘Of course it is. But do you have anything else to suggest?’

  He was silent.

  ‘It’s settled then,’ Myra said crisply. ‘There’s no need to say anything to Allie yet, of course. We’ll leave it for a few days, shall we? Until after the celebrations. I’m sure we can rely on Celia to help us to persuade her that—’

  As if conjured up by her name, the door opened to frame Celia against the sunlight that was reflected in a shining pool on the polished floor of the hall. Seeing them, the girl stopped, confused.

  ‘Oh – I’m sorry – I didn’t realize there was anyone here…’

  ‘Come in, my dear. As a matter of fact we were just talking about you.’

  Celia looked startled. Her eyes flickered to Robert and away. ‘About me?’

  Myra smiled and extended a hand. ‘You and I are going to enter a conspiracy.’

  ‘We are?’ Celia was dressed in dark green, a colour that suited her well. Her skin, which never took the sun, was a startling alabaster white.

  ‘I think perhaps I’d better leave you to it.’ Robert strode past the girl, barely glancing at her. ‘I’ll see you at lunch.’

  Celia watched him to the door, in the depths of her eyes an enigmatic spark that glittered disturbingly for a moment before, her face pleasantly expressionless, she turned back to Myra.

  Upstairs, Allie heard the murmur of voices below her, heard the opening and closing of the dining-room door and the sound of her father’s firm footsteps in the hall. She was standing at the back window of her bedroom, still in her tennis dress, her racket and cardigan discarded upon the bed. She heard the sound of her father slowly mounting the stairs. She stiffened. The footfalls stopped on the landing outside her room.

  ‘Allie? Allie, are you there?’

  She did not reply.

  ‘Allie?’

  Almost without thought, she flew across the room and flattened herself against the wall behind the door. A couple of seconds later the door opened a little as her father surveyed the apparently empty room. She stood very still, scarcely breathing. The door closed, softly. She waited until she heard him go back down the stairs before she moved. At last, satisfied that he would not come back, she took up again her position by the window.

  The marquee was up. With its swooping, pointed roof, pennants fluttering from each corner and its sloping sides, it looked like something from a medieval masque, requiring only a tilting ground to complete the picture. Her breath misted the glass. She rubbed at it with one finger, imagining knights on caparisoned chargers, their lances glittering in the sun, and graceful ladies offering scarves and gloves as tokens – in a way that was fast becoming a habit, she manufactured inconsequential thoughts and allowed them to crowd her mind in defence against the anxious, almost pleading note she had heard in her father’s voice as he had spoken her name. She lifted her chin. He didn’t deserve sympathy. He didn’t deserve anything. And nothing, nothing in this world, was going to force her to stay for the coronation party tomorrow night. She knew there would be hell to pay when they discovered that she had made other arrangements, but she didn’t care. Nothing would induce her to stay, to have the buried and festering memories of that other night revived, to watch her father – and Celia. Her wide, straight mouth hardened. If other people didn’t care what they did, what hurt or damage they caused, why should she? By hook or by crook she would go with Ray and the others. And she would have a good time. She would.

  With a sudden impatient, distracted movement, she turned from the window and flung herself upon the bed. On the bedside table lay several magazines, on the front of each one a picture of those most unprepared of monarchs – King George VI and his pretty Scots queen, Elizabeth. Allie rolled onto her stomach, her chin propped on her hands. Somewhere in Europe, a lonely man waited to marry the woman he loved, a woman for whom he had sacrificed not just a throne and a lifetime’s preparation for that throne but a people’s respect and love at a time when Europe trembled again with presentiments of war. Allie wondered if he was happy. If he would ever be happy. Despite the younger generation’s general sympathy for the couple – after all, wasn’t their story every romantic Hollywood film rolled into one? – Allie had her doubts. She wondered, not for the first time, at the strength of a love that could make such a sacrifice.

  And her father? Always it came back to her father. How would he choose, if he were forced? Who – or what – did he truly love? The sense of bitter betrayal that had poisoned her every waking moment since that night in the conservatory rose again, acid in her throat. Until that moment Allie had never questioned, had hardly indeed been aware, that the very basis of her life was her absolute faith in her father and her mother, both separately and together: their separate strengths, perhaps even their weaknesses, their love, their support, their indivisible unity. To deny any one of these things was to deny them all. It was to her young mind perfectly simple: you could not love two people at once. Not in the way that adults were supposed to love one another. So her father, of all people, was living a lie every minute of every day. He and Celia had shattered not only her faith in him but, by association, in everything else as well. Sometimes she felt she hated him for it, though perhaps not surprisingly it was for Celia that she reserved her cold, wholehearted detestation. It had become a game to hide it, to reserve for unexpected moments those quiet barbs that brought to Celia’s eyes a sudden, astonished flash of pain. Thinking of it now, Allie tried to feel some satisfaction for the just punishment she had on occasion been able to exact. To her own surprise, instead she buried her face suddenly in her hands to hide the tears.

  * * *

  It was at dinner that evening that Allie broke the news to her parents that she had made other arrangements for Coronation Day. With the echoes of her own too-loud voice still in her ears, she stabbed viciously at a piece of potato, head down, her cheeks bright with hectic colour.

  Very precisely Myra laid aside her knife and fork. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m – we’re – going to London. To watch the procession.’

  Myra considered. ‘Well, that’s all right. I don’t see why not. You can be back here perfectly well in time for the evening—’

  ‘Mother, I told you – Ray’s got tickets for the Coronation Ball – a dinner-dance thing – at the Ace of Spades. You’ve heaps of people coming here.’ Allie’s voice verged on desperation. ‘You won’t miss me.’

  Silence hung, drumming like rain, about the
table. Libby stole a glance at her mother. Robert was watching Allie, who resolutely refused to lift her eyes from her dinner plate. At that moment, he thought with a pang, she looked exactly the rebellious child that she was.

  Myra took a slow, audible breath. ‘Am I to understand that you have made these plans, deliberately, behind our backs? That you never intended…’ the pause was slight and acid ‘…to grace us with your presence?’

  With her mouth set in defiance, Allie gave an almost imperceptible shrug. She did not raise her eyes. Libby, watching her mother, winced.

  ‘Alexandra, you will kindly look at me when I’m speaking to you.’

  With an effort Allie lifted her head.

  ‘I have absolutely no objection,’ her mother said icily, ‘to your going into town tomorrow to watch the procession. On the contrary, in the circumstances, I might say that your absence might be positively beneficial. You will, however, be home here by seven, in good time to ready yourself to receive our guests at eight o’clock. Is that clear?’

  The battle in Allie’s face was open and painful to watch. ‘Yes, Mother,’ she said, and lowered her eyes again to her plate.

  The rest of the meal was taken almost entirely in silence.

  * * *

  ‘Right, a few more bubbles of Dutch courage…’

  Squashed into the telephone box, Allie obediently and a little dizzily tilted her head back and let the warm champagne trickle from the bottle into her mouth. The taste reminded her of something, but she could not for the moment place the memory.

  ‘…and off we go. Come on, old thing. You can remember your own telephone number, can’t you?’

  To Allie’s inexpressible relief, it was Mrs Welsh who answered the phone. She pressed the button and the pennies clattered into the box.

  ‘Hello – Welshy? It’s me – yes, Allie—’ She clamped a hand over the mouthpiece as Ray, champagne bottle held aloft, nuzzled her ear inexpertly. Outside the booth, laughing faces were pressed to the glass, grotesquely distorted. She giggled explosively. ‘Sorry, Welshy, I can’t hear very well. The noise is awful.’ She made furious, dismissive gestures at Ray, who in reply slid his arm around her waist and started on her ear again. ‘Look, Welshy, I know it’s awful of me but I’m afraid I’m…’ she hesitated ‘… going to be late,’ she finished. Ray growled at her. ‘Yes – there’s a bus strike, you see, and there are just millions of people about. Taxis are just impossible – oh, yes thanks, it was lovely. The Queen looked marvellous. She’s such a dear. What? Oh, no, don’t bother.’ A note of panic crept into her voice. ‘I haven’t long, and I haven’t any more change, don’t call anybody – could you just be a love and tell them that I’m going to be late? I know Mother will be furious, but – oh, thank you, Welshy, you’re an angel. We’re stuck in Trafalgar Square, and the crowds are really awful – I’ll be home as soon as I can. Yes, yes, I will – oh, and Welshy? I’ll call again if it looks as if I’m going to be really late, all right? Lovely. Thank you. I will. ’Bye.’ She cradled the receiver.