Darling Brenda

DARLING BRENDA

Richard Herley

Copyright Richard Herley 2012

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

I am most grateful to Ben Duffy, Mike Julien and Russell Tayler for editorial help and to Althea Wilson for the cover art.

— RH

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For Ben Duffy

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Table of contents

1 Rack

2 Gillian

3 Alexandra Burwood

4 An infarction

5 The interview

6 Nurse Vale

7 The trespassers

8 Thurston and the clouds

9 The library book

10 Benediction

11 Mrs Goldeneye

12 The list

13 To Brighton

14 Peacehaven

15 Cricklewood

16 Dever Park

17 The new housekeeper

18 Auf dem Wasser zu Singen

19 Polishing the brasses

20 Peppiard

21 Finucane Square

22 The gloves come off

23 Cyril Leppard

24 The lion’s den

25 Snow-graphs

26 A wild bugling

27 Clearance Day

28 The holdalls

29 Kilpatrick

30 France

Other novels by Richard Herley

1

Saturday, 25 June 1955

Brenda was in the lingerie department when she first saw her, a blonde girl of about her own age, attractive, well dressed, inspecting a display of cotton slips on special offer. Because of the hot weather, the store was almost empty. Brenda preferred shopping at such times, especially for clothes. She went and examined the slips too, holding one up.

‘They are good value, are they?’ the blonde girl said. She spoke with a foreign accent, German or Dutch, something like that. Her voice had a smoky quality Brenda found intriguing.

‘Very good value,’ Brenda said.

The girl’s blue eyes held Brenda’s for a moment before they looked away. The conversation was over, a commonplace exchange between shoppers.

Later, Brenda wanted a cup of tea. She had been to the store restaurant before and had a favourite table, or line of tables, next to the windows overlooking the High Street, several storeys below. She sat down; the waitress came; Brenda ordered a pot for one.

‘Would you like anything to eat, madam?’

‘No, thank you. Just the tea.’

She had nearly finished the first cup when she saw the blonde girl again, at the top of the short flight of wide steps leading down to the restaurant. The girl casually surveyed the room. Brenda felt her heart beating faster as she began to approach.

‘Hello again.’

Brenda looked up and made herself smile. ‘Did you buy that slip?’

The girl patted her shopping bag. ‘May I join you?’

‘Yes, of course. I’d be glad of some company.’

She put her bags on a vacant chair on her side of the table and sat down. Again their eyes met.

‘Coffee,’ the girl told the waitress. ‘Black. No, nothing to eat.’ To Brenda she said, ‘I like this shop, do you? Everything so smart and nice.’

Brenda smiled her agreement.

‘Do you live at Swaseley, may I ask?’

‘Yes. Well, just outside it, really.’

‘I live at Dever. Such a dull place. At least, that is how I find it.’

Brenda poured herself a second cup of tea, making herself concentrate on the task. With every husky syllable she uttered, with every animation of her hands or body or head, the blonde girl was fitting more closely the new ideal of allure which, in her presence, Brenda had already begun to construct.

They talked aloud of superficial things but their eyes were conducting another conversation altogether. By the time the girl had finished her coffee, Brenda was in no doubt of what the afternoon had so surprisingly offered her.

‘I think I’ve done enough shopping for one day,’ Brenda said.

‘Yes? What will you do now?’

‘There’s quite a good film at the Gaumont. Clark Gable and Lana Turner. I’ve been meaning to see it.’

‘Ah, Betrayed. I have heard it is a good film, also.’

With the barest hesitation, Brenda said, ‘Shall we go together?’

Triumph gleamed for a moment in the blonde girl’s eyes. ‘Yes, why not?’

‘I’d better introduce myself. Brenda. Vale.’ She held out her hand, which the girl took.

‘How do you do. Grete Schneider.’

Brenda’s hand was released. ‘Greta?’

‘G-r-e-t-e. I am German. From a little town in Westphalia. Alack, much like Dever.’

Walking the short distance to the cinema, Brenda learned that Grete lived and worked at the Feathers Hotel.

The auditorium was almost deserted. They arrived towards the end of the first picture and settled into a nearly empty row of the stalls, Grete on Brenda’s right.

Brenda began to wonder if she had made a mistake. This would deflect her yet further from her ambition: to find and marry some pliable man with money. So far she had met plenty of men, but few had been pliable, and even fewer had had any money. She liked going to bed with them, perhaps too well; but always there was something else, something better, out there, waiting for her, just as Grete had been waiting today.

It had started at school, at home in Norfolk, with a girl in her class. On a hot afternoon’s outing to the emptiness of Holkham Bay they had swum in the freezing North Sea, then retired to the dunes to dry off and sunbathe. There, in a private hollow sparsely littered with pine cones, accompanied by the dreamily soughing trees, Brenda had tasted her first consensual kiss.

The lights in the cinema came up. An usherette walked past with an illuminated tray of fruit drinks and ice creams. She reached the bottom of the aisle, under the screen, and turned to face the audience. A small queue formed. A second usherette, with a similar tray, had taken up the corresponding station at the bottom of the other main aisle.

Grete leaned closer. ‘Would you like something?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Willpower, yes? Your figure shows it.’ She touched Brenda’s lapel. ‘I love this jacket. How do you say? Stylish?’

Brenda felt doubly flattered.

‘It looks very cool.’

‘It is.’

‘Linen?’

‘Yes. I’ve had it ages.’

‘Ages? I am sorry.’

‘A long time.’

‘Ages. I will remember that. I must improve my English. That is only why, since two months, I am working at the Feathers.’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘I was engaged for one duty and I must do another. They said I would be on the reception desk and so on. Instead I am a … how did he say it? Dogsbody.’

‘He?’

‘The barman. He says they took me because I am cheaper. To get my work permit, they tell to the authorities they cannot find anyone to speak fluent German. Since April we are having three German tourists only in the hotel.’

‘How long is your visa for?’

‘A year.’

‘Can’t you get another job?’

‘I must have a new permit for that.’ Grete opened her handbag. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like a cigarette?’

‘Yes. Please.’

Grete lit one and gave it to her. At this Brenda became more excited still. The fluttering in her stomach had grown. Seen at close range, in the low lighting of the auditorium, Grete was more than merely attractive. She smelled good, too. Brenda gazed at her thickly braided hair. She had always wished that she could have been born blonde instead of brunette.

‘What do you do, may I ask, Brenda?’ Grete said, using her name for the first time.

‘I’m a nurse.’

‘That is very humane. In a hospital?’

‘No, in a private house. I’m looking after an old lady.’

‘Is she ill?’

‘No. Just old. She’s ninety-four.’

‘Do you enjoy this work?’

‘It’s easy. The house is enormous. Lots of staff. There’s a swimming pool. I use it all the time. Have it to myself.’

‘That sounds nice.’

‘It’s a bit lonely.’ Brenda inhaled more smoke. ‘You must come over some time and have a swim.’

‘I would like that.’

The lights went down. They sat in silence during the advertisements and trailers. At last the screen filled with the censor’s certificate and the film began.

Brenda could not concentrate on the story. It had something to do with the war, and Holland, and spies. Lana Turner was a spy.

Grete put her face close to Brenda’s. ‘She is gorgeous, do you think?’

‘Like you.’

After another line of dialogue, Brenda felt Grete’s hand touching her own. Looking straight ahead, she returned the pressure. More words boomed from the huge and incomprehensible faces on the screen.

Grete whispered, ‘Do you find the film interesting?’

‘Not really.’

‘Shall we bother to stay?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Would you like to see my room?’

‘All right.’

The next Dever bus was a double decker. They sat upstairs, their bodies in contact, Brenda next to the window. The swaying motion of the bus, the frequent stops and starts, the short-lived accelerations, the waits while passengers got on or off: all this paralleled and reinforced the sensations going on in Brenda’s mind and below her waist. How long had it been? Three whole years. How many men since? How many obtuse, careless and perfunctory men?

As usual on her weekend off, she had told the butler that she might visit her ‘cousin in London’, twenty miles away. Her absence overnight would cause no concern.

After Lymperne the top deck emptied of other passengers altogether. Grete spoke in a low voice. ‘You are so lovely.’ Her pupils had dilated. She too was experiencing this breathlessness, this anticipation, this tingling suspense. Had it not been for the angled mirror, so placed at the top of the stairs that the conductor could see, Brenda felt that Grete might not have been able to wait.

They alighted almost outside the hotel, a former coaching-inn. An archway led into the mews. From here Grete proceeded at a normal pace, turning right and through a heavy black door, which stood open on a cobbled floor. To the left rose a flight of stone steps with an iron handrail.

They encountered no one on the way up to the staff quarters, nor in the long, stuffy corridor, near the end of which was Grete’s door. She took out a latchkey. Brenda preceded her, received an impression of a cramped room almost filled by a broad bed upon which lay, forlornly, a teddy-bear, and, as the door clicked shut, let herself be swept at last into Grete’s embrace.

2

Rack was sitting on the lock-gate, watching the reflections on the brickwork of the bridge. When the weather was warm, and when he had finished his day’s work in the greenhouse or about the lawns, that was how he liked to pass the time before supper.

Sometimes he would stand on the bridge itself and lean on the parapet, looking down into the dark water of the canal; or he would gaze upstream, along the pound, the willow trees overhanging the towpath on the left, on the right the gentle pasture rising towards the wood. When he was like this, with his old, seamed face at its most inscrutable, his eyes became especially inane. He might take his blue cap and revolve it in his hands while, up at the bend, appeared the painted prow of a narrowboat. When it reached the lock he would benignly supervise the antics of the crew: the rapid revolutions of the windlass and the clatter of the pawls, the water gushing through the paddles, the graze and bump of hempen fenders as the level rose or fell. He would return any friendly gesture with one of his own, vague but adequate to the occasion, and, as the boat chugged between the gates and below the bridge, he would move to the other parapet to see it on its way.

The boats carried coal, mostly, and timber, bricks, gravel, steel: heavy things passing to and from London and the Midlands. The cargo occupied nearly the whole length of the boat forward of the cabin, and was tented with tarpaulins. Often the cabin door was open and one could see inside, see the domestic details of the tiny void in which the bargee and his family passed their lives, the spotless bits of lace and linen and embroidery. The exterior of the cabin was usually decorated with gaudy designs in yellow, scarlet, white, bottle green. The canal people loved patterns, the more intricate the better, diamonds and chevrons, crescent moons, roses, stars, reaching a pitch of complexity on one or two galvanised iron objects carried loosely on the cabin roof: a watering can, perhaps, a washing bowl or pail.

Rack was a relative of the housekeeper. At one time he had lived in an institution. There had been no gardens there for him to tend, no coots’ nests to find, no lake, no poplars lit by a glancing sun. But he had not been unhappy. One winter’s day in 1938 he had been brought the five miles here by car. He had been shown his new bed, in his own small room overlooking the pasture and the wood.

He now heard his niece calling his name, got up, went indoors, and washed his hands at the kitchen sink before sitting down to his meal.

* * *

In the main house that evening there were no guests to dinner. Nigel’s father had become expansive. The afternoon’s outing to Swaseley seemed to have pleased him, and he had already drunk two glasses of Chablis. Forbidden now to touch spirits, he claimed that wine ‘didn’t count’.

‘A toast,’ he said. ‘To Alistair.’

‘Or Gabrielle,’ Nigel’s mother said.

‘To the baby,’ Gillian said, diplomatically.

The four resumed eating.

The dining room windows looked out on the orchard, where a pair of spotted flycatchers was still feeding fledglings in the dusk. Besides this view of the darkening exterior, the panes held a reflected version of the room produced by three table lamps. The curves and facets of the glassware and silver were dominated by the electric light, but they also found space for a few old-fashioned glints from the candlesticks burning among the clutter on the table itself.

At its centre stood a bowl of clove-scented dianthus blooms. Something made Nigel take one and give it to his wife. Without speaking, she put it in her hair.

His mother’s face lit up.

‘More vino, Nigel?’ his father said, lifting the bottle.

His mouth full of asparagus, Nigel covered his glass with his hand.

‘Vera?’

‘No, Thurston, and I think you’ve had quite enough yourself.’

‘Rubbish.’ And he replenished his glass almost to the brim.

‘Dr Rawlings —’

‘Man’s a menace. He killed Quaid’s mother, you know. Diagnosis completely wrong.’

‘Quaid doesn’t think so,’ Nigel said.

‘He wouldn’t. D’you know what he’s gone and bought himself now, Nigel? A poodle. A bloody poodle.’

Nigel suppressed a snigger. ‘What’s he called it?’

‘God knows. Prince, I suppose. Rex. Tarquinius Superbus.’

‘You’re both perfectly beastly to that nice Mr Quaid,’ said Nigel’s mother, though she herself was smiling, as was Gillian.

Quaid, the chief negotiator in the family firm, had unwittingly dealt himself a savage blow in his quest for what he regarded as social advancement.

‘You ought to invite the Quaids here for tea.’

‘That wouldn’t do him any good. And I’m damned if I’ll have him in the golf club. I see quite enough of the odious little twerp during the week.’

‘You know what he wants, don’t you? What you virtually promised him.’

‘He’s not getting a partnership and that’s that. I had enough trouble with Saunders. The only partner I want now is Nigel here. As soon as he gets himself qualified.’

The subject of Nigel’s exams was a sore point. Through indolence and lack of aptitude he had failed them twice. He was meant to be sitting them again in the autumn; indeed, claiming the need to study, he had excused himself from today’s shopping trip, but had spent most of the afternoon swimming and dozing by the lake.

‘Admit it, Thurston. Without Mr Quaid the office would grind to a halt.’

Nigel’s father growled and readdressed himself to the remnants of his trout.

The family took coffee on the terrace, the women sitting in the creaking, pre-war comfort of a canopied, sprung and upholstered swing-hammock, while Nigel and his father reclined in cushioned deckchairs.

Thurston was puffing on a cigar, having been told by Dr Rawlings to give up his daily intake of sixty Senior Service. Nigel was drawing freely on a Gauloise, a brand of French cigarette, smelling somewhat of burning socks, that he had recently begun to affect as a sign of his cosmopolitan independence of thought.

The meal had helped to mellow his father’s mood and the conversation was calm. Nigel wondered why his mother had allowed her husband to drink more than was good for him, and concluded that it had been for the sake of tranquillity. At table Thurston was wont to hold forth on the evils of modern life. He would express his view on the mooted abolition of capital punishment, advancing himself as hangman if there were no other candidates. He suggested other deterrents, such as castration, for homosexuals and child molesters, and foresaw grave problems with the influx of undesirables from the shrinking territories of the Empire. But he reserved his most bilious execrations for the Labour Party and the infantilising, debilitating, and ultimately catastrophic blunder of founding a welfare state.

‘Shoveler,’ he said, aiming his cigar at two ducks speeding westwards, high above the lake. ‘Pair of ’em.’

In his youth he had pursued the sport of wildfowling, spending freezing days punt-gunning on the Broads or standing knee-deep in mud on the Essex marshes. His desire to shoot the ducks that flighted down the valley each evening had been one of his motives for buying Norton’s Farm, but since the war he had lost his taste for slaughter and had even sold his guns. Yet he retained the hunter’s affection and keen eye for his prey, and could identify, at baffling distance and in the worst light, all the species of wildfowl that visited the lake. In the afterglow, the shovelers seemed to Nigel quite indistinguishable from mallard.

As night came on, a delicious coolness entered the air. Finally it became too dark to make out each others’ features. Gillian and Nigel’s parents went indoors while he stayed behind to see to the garden furniture.

The chairs lived in the shelter of the loggia, but the swing-hammock was fitted with a canvas cover which he now pulled over the canopy and began to tie, fastening each pair of tapes in a bow.

Crouching to tie the last one, he heard the plop of a fish. He looked round and, in that moment, felt disquiet. He did not understand why. The sensation was too fleeting, leaving only an awareness of some evil external to himself and his family.

But, even if not discounted right away, it was quickly forgotten as an irrelevance that had no place in his mind.

* * *

Nigel awoke in the early hours through overheating. Even the thin blanket was too much. He pulled it aside and with it the clammy top sheet. Together they slid to the floor.

The room faced west and overlooked the lake. On warm nights he and Gillian liked to leave the windows open. Moonlight was falling across the bed.

He raised himself on one elbow and studied her form. A stripe of shadow, cast by a glazing bar in one of the casements, had traversed her face. At glacial speed it moved towards the dimly reflective hem of her nightie and began to creep across the pillow.

Even at its most adventurous, her part in their marital repertoire had never broken the rules of normality she must have absorbed in her upbringing. Too timid to suggest any of the other things he had read or heard about, Nigel would sometimes hint at the size of the territory she had left unexplored. With no result. Her recent fears for the welfare of the ‘little one’ had even brought down the curtain on their one-act play. The two or three months before the birth had become a wasteland.

After listening for a time to her breathing; after considering several hopeless stratagems for arousing her first in one and then in another sense of the word, he got to his feet. His pyjama jacket, which he had already unbuttoned to let the moon bathe his chest and belly, slipped from his shoulders. A moment later he undid the waist cord and got rid of the trousers too.

Rhythmically pressing himself against the edge of the windowsill, Nigel looked out across the water. It had been turned to glittering silver. In the middle of the refulgence, almost obscured by it, there glided, royally, and quite improbably, two swans.

As Nigel watched them his mind became detached, leaving only his healthy animal self standing there: twenty-three years of age, with his father’s fair complexion and exceeding him in height. All thought of his station in life had been yielded with his gaze. He knew not that he was an only child, nor that he had attended a very expensive school where he had been lonely and miserable, nor that he was heir to a thriving estate agency; nor that, besides the business, he stood to inherit this family house, its acres of freehold land, the furniture and paintings, and a worthwhile sum in jewellery, gilts, shares and cash.

He heard the squawk of a coot.

‘Nigel?’ Gillian said. ‘What are you doing …’ and he could not be sure whether she had hesitated before adding ‘by the window?’

‘I was hot,’ he said, refraining from turning round.

‘Is that why you took your jimjams off?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Is it the firm again?’

‘No.’

‘Come back to bed.’

At that he decided to make no further secret of his condition and brazenly turned to face her, only to find that she had already shut her eyes and composed herself for sleep.

3

The following morning the sky was grey, a disappointment to Nigel’s mother, who was expecting people to lunch.

Having spoken to Mrs Kirton, the housekeeper, she went out to cut some flowers. Space was set aside in the kitchen garden for marigolds, sweet peas and the like, but she and Rack began by cutting roses from the formal beds near the house. A stem was suggested by her: Rack would give or withhold his permission for it to be added to the trug. The rules he applied were mysterious, yet he was always right. The absent blooms always improved the look of the bed as a whole. He knew which rose bushes would not ‘mind’, as he would say, and which bushes were ‘poorly’. He showed just the same sympathy for the spiders in the barn or the wrens nesting by the staff-cottage wall.

Rack was sixty-six. He was invested with an aura of miraculous serenity, and had dispensed with everything inessential: possessions, desires, intellect. He rose at dawn, in summer and winter, to dedicate himself anew to his communion. When his work was over he ate his supper and retired early. He might listen to music on the Light Programme before falling asleep, and Mrs Kirton would switch off his bedside radio when she looked in on him later.

‘Now, Rack,’ Vera said, ‘we have some important friends coming to lunch.’ He nodded. ‘I want you to look in the greenhouse and pick out a really nice plant for them.’

‘In flower, Mrs?’

‘Yes, in flower. What about one of those Japanese lilies?’

‘There a nobilissimum they can have.’

He spoke with the local burr. His vocabulary was sparse, but he never had trouble with horticultural names.

Rack honoured Nigel’s mother with the deepest affection and reverence. She in turn loved him with a mixture of filial and maternal devotion. Like Mrs Kirton, he was part of the family. The household often took lunch together, but today Rack and the housekeeper ate alone in the kitchen.

The guests were a man named Burwood, his wife, son and daughter. The boy was twelve or thirteen, his sister about nineteen. They arrived punctually, in a dark-blue Bentley driven by a chauffeur in a matching uniform. He declined a meal in the kitchen and was given permission to absent himself till three o’clock.

Nigel knew little about Mr Burwood except that he was a London developer who had figured in the recent sale of the local stately home. A tall, distinguished-looking man, he was also attentive, polite, and immaculately turned out. Nigel sensed that his father despised him.

No mention of business was made during lunch. Afterwards everyone sat for a while on the terrace. Vera then asked the Burwoods’ children whether they would like to explore the lake, and Nigel was dragooned into taking them for a row.

This was a job he would have welcomed but for the presence of the boy. When judging girls his rule was this: look at the mother. Mrs Burwood in her time must have been a stunner. She had rather run to fat, but what she had lost was made up for by her air of quiet wisdom.

Nigel asked himself why Mr Burwood was tolerating such grudging hospitality. The answer had to involve money. Since he was already rich, the amount he was hoping for was plainly large. As Nigel dipped the blades into the water he began to wonder what, exactly, was going on.

He was making way towards an island which, wooded with willows and two elms, had been the scene of his best boyhood adventures.

‘I hope you’re not seasick, Alexandra,’ he said.

She smiled, and he could have knocked her brother overboard there and then. The boy had already, in a voice that had not yet broken, passed oblique comment on Nigel’s technique, mentioning the men his father had taken him to see at Henley Regatta. This when Nigel had just caught a big crab – more of a lobster, really – and soaked part of his sister’s dress.

‘Are there any fish?’ he demanded, peering over the gunwale.

‘Of course.’

‘Big ones?’

‘Pretty big.’

‘What’s the biggest?’

‘Pike, I’d say.’

‘How big?’

‘Five feet long and sixty pounds. That’s supposed to be the biggest. But thirty pounds is more like it round here.’ Nigel explained that the pike or jack, also called the freshwater shark, was equipped with fearsome teeth and habits to match, and made itself the terror of the lake, even snatching unsuspecting waterfowl as big as moorhens or coots.

The boy bent his head yet closer to the water and his sister and Nigel exchanged a look which, if not actually conspiratorial, was not wholly devoid of meaning.

* * *

Norton’s Lake, a gravel pit, was dug in the early years of the twentieth century. In places it is fifteen feet deep; elsewhere are reefs and strands that become visible or more prominent when the water is low. On the map it makes an approximate oval, with a couple of blunt promontories. Its area is about forty-seven acres.

More or less parallel with the canal, a tributary of the Thames skirts the northern shore, which for part of its length is quite steep, forming a line of little cliffs. Further east the shore is shelving and overgrown with flag irises and sedge. The pasture between shore and river was owned by an Oxford college, rented by Thurston Dodd, and sublet to a farmer who used it for fattening cattle.

Thurston had also signed leases on the western and southern shores, which were mainly wooded. That land was owned by a London property company; the leases had been arranged in 1936, at the time when Thurston had bought the house, which stood on the eastern shore.

Finished in the local manner with a slate roof and stone quoins, the house had been built by the wealthy Georgian farmer, Elias Norton, whose descendants had sold off his fields and mineral rights. Interrupted by the war, Nigel’s parents had renovated and extended it. Most of the grounds lay between the lakeside and the towpath, though Thurston also owned a pasture and a small wood on the far side of the canal; he had right of way over the canal bridge. The drive, or track, surfaced with hoggin, fenced with wire and hemmed in by thorn hedges, skirted the wood and came out on the lane to Dever, from which it was but a short distance to the main London road.

The dust raised by the Burwoods’ Bentley had scarcely settled before Nigel knew he was in trouble with Gillian.

‘Enjoy yourself?’ she said.

She had pulled him to a halt in the drawing room. His parents had already gone back to the terrace, where the sun was trying to come out again. She was close to tears.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you know? Don’t you know