Never such innocence, p.1
Never Such Innocence, page 1
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Contents
Daphne Wright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Daphne Wright
Never Such Innocence
Daphne Wright
Daphne Wright is a historical novelist with a special interest in the way wars have liberated women. Born in London, she worked in publishing for ten years before becoming a writer. After six historical novels, she turned to crime under the pseudonym of Natasha Cooper. She now divides her time between the city and the Somerset Levels.
Dedication
For Mary Carter
Author’s Note
Apart from the facts of the Kesselring case (which are clearly set out in The Kesselring Case by A. P. Scotland, Bonn, 1952, The London Cage by A. P. Scotland, London, 1957, and in contemporary newspaper reports), everything that happens in this novel is a product of the author’s imagination, as are all the characters, who bear no relation to any real people, living or dead.
Chapter One
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ yelled Mark over the heads of the crowd between them. In all the din, Julia could not hear what he said, but she could see his face and read his lips. Pushing her way towards him through the packed, sweating, embracing bodies of her fellow-Londoners, she shouted back:
‘At least it’s over. We did it. Thank God.’
Someone’s Union Jack slapped her face in a sudden breeze and someone else trod heavily on her right foot as a new sound began to float across the great circle in front of the palace.
‘What’s that tune?’ asked Mark more quietly as she reached him at last.
‘I don’t know,’ said Julia, listening to the sound of a jazz band thumping up from the Mall. ‘It’s familiar, though.’
‘It’s High Society, you poor, middle-aged miseries,’ said Mark’s son, Richard, leaning on his stick and laughing at them. He looked younger by years than he had since he had been repatriated from France the previous year. ‘I’ve just been told the trumpeter’s Humphrey Lyttelton.’
Not wanting to add to his picture of a ‘middle-aged misery’, neither Julia nor Mark asked any more questions. Another heavy foot mashed down on Julia’s as an excited group of hatless girls and half-drunk men in uniform danced past and her patience gave out.
‘Let’s get on,’ she said to the others. ‘It’s all very wonderful, but it’s damned uncomfortable. Oh, good, here’s George. I thought we’d lost you in all this. I’m heading off. Are you coming?’
‘Rather. It’s all a bit much, isn’t it? I can’t think what they’re all hanging around here for. The royals aren’t likely to appear again,’ said George Wilson, gesturing to the red-draped balcony in the centre of the palace’s smooth, grey-stone façade. ‘I’ll push a way, Julia, if you stick close behind. Mark and Richard can look after each other.’
George Wilson, tall, thin and asthmatic, headed off into the dense, shifting crowd and Julia followed, wishing that she could share the ecstasy she saw on the faces all around her. She felt detached from the crowd and rather unreal, as though an important part of herself had been mislaid somewhere early in the war and she had only just noticed the lack.
‘Come on darling, give us a kiss.’
A large navvy pushed his red face towards her as she fought her way through towards Green Park. When she gave him her famous cold stare, he made a rude face and yelled after her:
‘Nothing to be sour about any more, ducks. Haven’t they told you? We won the war. Hitler’s dead!’
‘I know,’ said Julia under her breath. ‘And thank God for it.’
A space opened up in front of her and she saw a vast mass of flames crackling and spitting on the grass. Above them, through the new leaves that were shrivelling and turning brown in the heat, she could see searchlights sweeping and meeting across the darkening blue of the twilit sky. Fireworks exploded somewhere close by, splattering the sky with coloured fragments that looked like the hundreds-and-thousands she had sprinkled on her bread and butter as a child.
For a moment Julia forgot her troubles and her dislike of crowds and let herself share the triumph. A pair of golden fountains shot upwards, spread and began to fall, their sparks fading and dying. In the light of the fire she saw faces that looked happy as well as mindlessly excited; a young woman with a toddler in her arms watched the fireworks with an expression of such abandoned relief that Julia could feel it too. A major in uniform who was standing close behind the woman put a hand on her shoulder and she dropped her head slightly to stroke his hand with her cheek. They were happy; the war was truly over for them; they were beginning again.
The stick of a rocket plunged back to earth with the kind of whining whistle all Londoners had come to dread, and Julia tried to cling to the faith that had kept her going for so long.
‘Think of the good things,’ she apostrophised herself. ‘Look for the good things.’
That was an exercise that she had practised increasingly often as the war dragged on and on, and it had helped her to keep up the appearance of stoic calm for which she was well known among her colleagues. There were plenty of good things to look at in the crowds around the leaping, dazzling fire and Julia gradually fought down the memories of the Blitz and the Vis, which the fire and the lights and the explosions had brought so vividly to mind.
She felt an arm across her shoulders and looked round expecting another Bacchanalian reveller. All she saw was Mark’s familiar worn face, full of concern.
‘All right, Julia?’ he asked. ‘You look pale.’
She nodded and then explained about the fire and the bangs and the searchlights, and the avid excitement on some of the faces in the crowd. There had always been some who had looked like that at any ‘incident’in the Blitz, people who had loved the drama of watching bodies being carried up out of the rubble and apparently found it easy to ignore the agony.
Think of the good things.
‘Don’t they look happy?’ she said to Mark, gesturing towards a couple embracing under a tree as completely abandoned to each other as though they were in their own bedroom.
‘Perhaps, but I think it’s a bit much, carrying on like that in public,’ he said severely. Julia managed to laugh at his dry voice.
‘Well at least they don’t look as though they’re trying to remember the bombs,’ she said.
‘I don’t suppose any of us who were here will ever forget, do you?’ said Mark, remembering the night the Temple was bombed. He and Julia had arrived for work the following morning to find half their chambers blown apart, their carefully hoarded library burned and the remains of confidential trial documents blowing in the street.
‘Quicker than those poor devils in Cologne and Dresden, I expect,’ answered Julia, thinking of the horrific newsreel films she had seen. Then she remembered those other newsreel films of what had been revealed when the Nazis’concentration camps were opened and she shuddered. She sometimes thought that the sick horror she had felt then would never leave her. Mark squeezed her shoulder and then removed his arm.
‘Don’t think about any of it,’ he said firmly. ‘Tonight it’s over. Tonight it’s reasonable to forget and to celebrate. The courts are closed. The bells have rung; the lights are up. Tonight we ought just to let rip like the rest of them. What did the old man say in Whitehall? Someone told me … Richard, wasn’t it you?’
‘Something about giving ourselves a short period of celebration. I can’t remember exactly. Father, we’re going to be late if we don’t get a move on, and you know what Mother’s like,’ he said.
Mark looked at Julia in the dusk and gave her a small, unhappy smile that seemed to hold an apology for his wife and a plea for Julia to understand her, and perhaps a hint of nostalgia too. Then he turned back to his only-surviving son.
‘Yes, I know. You go on ahead. George and Julia and I will follow on in our middle-aged way,’ he said.
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Julia, falling into a teasing voice as though determined to join in t he celebration. ‘I don’t admit to middle age, myself.’
Mark laughed and they walked up the hill towards Piccadilly in deliberate cheerfulness.
Sylvia Heathwood was indeed waiting for them in the restaurant Mark had chosen for their celebration. They found her tapping her foot in irritation as she sipped a cocktail. They had agreed not to dress, but Sylvia was wearing a beautifully draped silk frock in her favourite lavender colour with an immense diamond brooch on the left shoulder. As always, Julia was amazed by the other woman’s immaculate clothes and hair, and by her apparently inexhaustible supply of silk stockings and cosmetics. It was as though for Sylvia the war with all its terrors and readjustments and shortages had never happened.
Julia herself eked out her own miserable supply of stockings and lipstick for as long as she could by going unpainted to court every day and wearing thick, ugly lisle stockings for all but the very best occasions. Her own dark-grey utility suit and well-washed pre-war blouse looked decidedly shabby beside Sylvia’s elegance.
‘How sweet you look, Julia dear,’ said Sylvia, holding out a scented, creamed hand for Julia to shake. ‘But Mark must be working you far too hard,’ she went on. ‘You look exhausted – and far too thin. And he really ought to give you time off to get your hair properly done. It’s too bad of you, darling,’ she said, turning to her husband and displaying her ownership of him with a minatory pat.
‘It isn’t Mark, Mrs Heathwood,’ said Julia, wrily noticing Sylvia’s need to place her as an unalluring, ill-dressed bluestocking, ‘but my clerk who insists on giving me too many cases and works me far too hard. As for being too thin, thank God for it! At least the war’s meant that there’s been no need for banting. I always tended to put on weight in the old days.’ She laughed, but Sylvia ignored her, turning her impeccably dressed silvery-blonde head towards her son and waiting to be kissed.
Richard obliged and then called a waitress over to order drinks for them all. In the confusion Mark whispered to Julia:
‘Sorry about all that.’
‘It couldn’t matter less, Mark,’ she said. ‘She feels at a disadvantage – understandably – and is trying to turn the tables. It’s not important.’
‘A son is such a comfort, Julia,’ Sylvia called across the little group as she noticed Julia and Mark talking quietly with their heads close together. Julia felt Mark flinch beside her.
‘Richard’s a dear,’ she said with as much sincerity as tact. ‘You’re very lucky.’ Richard grinned at her and raised his glass in a silent toast.
‘Well, here’s to peace,’ said Mark suddenly, raising his own glass. They all echoed his toast and then George made one of his own:
‘And to absent friends,’ he said quietly, looking at Julia. She saw his expression and smiled shakily in gratitude for his remembering. To control her sudden childish urge to cry, she took a large gulp of her cocktail and almost choked as the spirit burned her throat. She hoped passionately that somewhere, anywhere, Anthony might benefit from the toast.
‘Shall we go in?’ said Sylvia, getting up to lead the way into the high, pink-and-gold dining room. Julia followed obediently. She was only twelve years younger than Sylvia Heathwood, but whenever they were together Sylvia behaved as though she were a great lady and Julia a cross between a poor relation and a skivvy. Having had plenty of practice in dealing with her mother’s disdain for her appearance, Julia usually managed to ignore both the patronage and the sneers, and almost always allowed Sylvia her petty triumphs. The only things she had that Julia envied in the least were the presence of her husband, safe and well in London, and her son.
‘Won’t it be wonderful to have new clothes again?’ Sylvia said as she was shaking out her napkin and laying it on her silken lap. ‘And proper shoes and hats.’
‘And hot baths,’ said George Wilson, entering gamely into the spirit of her conversation. ‘What about you, Julia? What things – material things – have you missed most?’
‘Since 1939?’ she said to give herself time to think of anything other than Anthony. ‘Um, fresh butter, I think. Lots and lots of melting butter on crisp, hot crumpets for tea after a long, cold, winter’s walk.’ In fact, almost more than any food she longed for inexhaustible supplies of sanitary towels and lavatory paper, which had at various times during the past five years been almost impossible to buy in adequate quantities. She turned to Mark Heathwood. ‘What about you, Mark?’
‘Petrol – the freedom to get in a car and go anywhere that takes my fancy,’ said Mark with a grin that transformed his thin, serious face into an almost boyish mask. Most of the time it looked much older than his forty-eight years.
‘But darling,’ protested his wife in her most irritating drawl, ‘you never – ever – went anywhere of your own free will. Don’t you remember, Richard? I always used to have to drag Daddy off to Cassis in the summer or Scotland for the shooting. All he ever wanted to do was work and sweat out the summers in chambers even out of term time.’ She directed a venomous look at Julia as she spoke, although before the war Julia had been far too junior a member of chambers to have had much influence on Mark Heathwood KC.
‘Holidays!’ she exclaimed to deflect Sylvia’s attention. ‘Just think: we’ll be able to go abroad again.…’
‘Yes, and swim in the sea without risking bumping up against a mine,’ said Richard cheerfully. He had been horrified by the change in his mother when he had been invalided home the year before, but he had become accustomed to her new character by then and was quite used to jollying her along and ignoring her attempts to provoke arguments. ‘No more barbed wire on the cliffs either – or mines on the beaches.’
‘Back to innocence, perhaps,’ said George more seriously. ‘Ah, food. Thank you.’
He looked down at the plate a waitress had put in front of him and then raised his eyes again.
‘What I look forward to most is proper meals again. None of this. “If you have bread with your soup, you can’t have pudding” nonsense. Game and burgundy on a winter’s evening after Julia’s crumpets …’
‘Caviare and vodka,’ said Richard with a beatific expression on his face. Julia rather doubted whether he had eaten much caviare before the war, which had, after all, broken out when he was seventeen.
‘Vulgar!’ said his mother, lifting up her knife and fork.
Through all the lighthearted discussion that followed of what they planned to do in the new world of peace and plenty, Julia thought of her husband. Until she knew where he was she could not bring herself to make any plans at all, even the most trivial. It was only when the conversation turned to what each of them most dreaded about life after the war that she came to life again and joined in their frivolity.
‘That all the things I’ve missed so far because of it, and longed for, will turn out to be dull after all,’ was Richard’s contribution, which raised a laugh from his elders.
George, who had been exempted from conscription because of his weak heart and his asthma, said seriously:
‘That we’ll mess things up. There’s such a chance now to put right everything that was wrong before the war, let alone during it, but can we do it?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Mark. ‘Not everything.’
‘Here or internationally?’ asked Julia, interested.
‘Both, I suppose,’ answered George, having drunk a spoonful of his depressing-looking soup, ‘but I really meant here: employment, housing, education and so forth. But what about you, Mark? What do you most dread?’
‘Much the same as you, I suppose,’ he said, carefully not looking at his wife, ‘finding that nothing has really changed despite the horror and the sacrifices. Julia?’
Knowing that what she most dreaded was not a suitable matter for conversation on such a night, she buried it again and smiled disarmingly at her two colleagues.
‘All the men coming back from the war and competing for briefs. I can see it now: that wretchedly misogynist clerk of mine will give me nothing but contracts and arbitrations and written opinions; I’ll never see the inside of a court again; my wig will fall to pieces through lack of use; and my sharply honed advocacy skills will be blunted by time and boredom; and I’ll be forced into premature retirement and have to learn to cook.’
