Thieves Break In Page 7

  He beamed, patted her young hand with a frail old one, and said, “What a capital idea! Do you think he’ll be willing to spend his holidays here?”

  “If you pay him enough. I think he’s a bit strapped for cash, unlike most of the Americans one sees in Oxford.”

  “Ah! He’s American?”

  “Yes, dear Uncle, but quite housebroken, I assure you.”

  “If he dines on high table at B.N.C., I imagine he can sustain dinner at Datchworth.”

  It was this exchange, not the party, not the discovery of the lost family silver, that sent Meg driving through the gray, wintry countryside in a mood more appropriate to spring. She had a tutorial with Mr. Hillman at two-thirty that afternoon. All she had to do was get through six and a half hours without bursting like a big bubble of pleasure.

  Chapter 9

  MAY 1945

  Two Weeks After VE Day

  Fifty-two Years Before Rob Hillman’s Death

  Lady Bebberidge-Thorpe had expected the worst. It was for that reason that she had forbidden her amiable husband from accompanying her to Banner House. It was not going to be a pretty sight, Clarissa’s lying-in. John Banner had sounded desperately weary when he had rung Datchworth to beg his mother-in-law to come a week early. “Dear Marjorie,” he had said, “perhaps you can do something with her.”

  Clarissa had been willful from her childhood; Sir Harold always said, “Ah, she knows her own mind!” In his wife’s estimation, that description fell far short of the reality, which was that their only daughter was selfish to the bone. Marjorie Bebberidge-Thorpe would not have objected to a little selfishness. Sometimes she suspected that she was a little selfish herself. Certainly the times that her husband did things her way seemed to outnumber the times she did things his way. On the other hand, Marjorie normally felt she had earned his cooperation; after all, she put up with all the bad habits he refused to break. He was much too familiar with the servants, for instance. Imagine, helping her into the car and then telling the chauffeur to “Take care of Lady Bebb for me!” Fortunately, Baker never encroached; he had merely replied, “Certainly, Sir Harold.”

  For all Harold’s faults, however, Marjorie was sincerely fond of him, and was loath to expose him to Clarissa at her worst. And Clarissa had been at her worst ever since she had been married. No sooner had the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon in Scotland than Clarissa had bolted back to Datchworth for a visit, very much without her husband. Marjorie had known the moment her daughter stepped out of her cream-colored Bentley that they were in for it; judging from Clarissa’s stony face, in fact, Marjorie guessed that it was she, Mother, who was in for it, not Father.

  So it proved. Clarissa swept up to her childhood room with her mother in tow, dismissed the maid who was starting to unpack her suitcases, flung herself into the wing chair by the window, and cried with smoldering resentment, “Why in hell didn’t you warn me?”

  The genuine shudder that accompanied this accusation made it unnecessary for Lady Bebberidge-Thorpe to ask, “About what?” Instead she took a deep breath, got a stranglehold on her own anger at being thus addressed, sat down on the bed, and replied, “I was under the impression that I had warned you.”

  As a bride, Marjorie had received no more premarital advice from her own mother than the admonition to put a towel under her pillow. Came the night, Marjorie discovered what the towel was for, but she thanked God she had married a kind and patient man. She had resolved not to send any daughter of hers off to her wedding bed in a comparative state of ignorance. When Clarissa had elected from her numerous suitors a man nearly twice her age, Marjorie’s first act—after persuading her own husband that John Banner’s maturity and wealth probably made him a better spouse for their daughter than any younger, poorer man—was to take Clarissa aside and introduce her to the facts of life.

  Birds and bees had not figured in that discussion. Marjorie was no coward; not for her the timid euphemisms of her day. It was unusual for the 1940s, but her daughter received a straightforward, biologically specific description of marital relations. And when this lesson was received with a distaste bordering on horror, Marjorie was not taken aback. She had expected as much, and had the second half of her speech as well prepared as the first.

  “Yes, dear, I know it sounds repulsive. However, with time one becomes accustomed. One even grows to enjoy it, although I can tell from your face that you find that impossible to believe. My best advice to you is this: make sure you have something you like to drink, and I do not mean cocoa, in the bedroom. Encourage John to have no more than one glass, but you should drink two or even three. If he questions you about it, tell him you are nervous. I believe he will understand. If you are tipsy it will be easier for you. Of course I know that I do not need to warn you against drinking so much that you behave in a way that will disgust your husband. The trick is to do this unladylike thing in the most ladylike manner that you can. Oh—and put a towel under your pillow.”

  Many a girl in Clarissa’s generation would have given her trousseau for so useful a talk prior to her wedding day. Clarissa, however, showed no sign of gratitude.

  “You call that a warning?” she now shouted angrily. “You said it was unladylike. Unladylike! God, it was like animals! Like slimy, horrid—” There followed a noise so eloquent of revulsion that Marjorie wondered for a moment if her daughter was actually vomiting.

  Lady Bebb was patient. She rang the bell and ordered tea for the two of them to be served there in Clarissa’s room. She listened. She commiserated. She talked. She reassured. Nothing did a particle of good. Eventually she announced that it was time to change for dinner.

  “Oh, Lord, Mother, I couldn’t possibly! Just tell them to bring a tray up to me here.”

  “No, Clarissa. You will change your dress and powder your nose and come down to dinner and smile at your father and your brother, who have been looking forward very much to seeing you. They will ask polite questions. You will give them polite answers. And you will say nothing to distress your father, do you understand?”

  Clarissa’s eyes narrowed. “I think you’re forgetting, Mother dear. I’m married now. I don’t have to do what you tell me to do any more.”

  Lady Bebberidge-Thorpe again throttled the rage that rose up in her, and after a few seconds of icy silence replied in an even voice, “Then ring for your maid and order your car and leave. I believe The White Hart serves a tolerable supper.”

  Clarissa’s narrow-eyed frown slackened to a look of high indignation. She started to say, “You wouldn’t dare—” but a closer study of her mother’s expression changed her mind, and she shut her mouth.

  “Shall we see you in half an hour, then?” asked Marjorie. Her voice betrayed no trace of smug triumph, which in itself was so smug a triumph that her daughter all but ground her teeth.

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Marjorie had won that battle, but before the week was over it was clear who was winning the war. Strictly obedient, Clarissa had said nothing to distress her father that first night at dinner. She had not been forbidden to distress her sixteen-year-old brother, however, and she spent most of the meal needling “Greggers” to within an inch of his life. As the Bebberidge-Thorpes had long followed the policy that siblings must learn how to get along without interference from their parents, they would say nothing to deter Clarissa. Marjorie’s only satisfaction was that Gregory gave as good as he got. He always had, she reflected, even when he was quite young. Naturally he had never laid a finger on his sister; that would have been ungentlemanly. But he had always returned taunt for taunt, insult for insult. Sometimes brother and sister had managed to be civil to each other, but their mother knew there was little love lost between them. Since she had never had much time for her own siblings, she believed that this was normal behavior and nothing to be concerned about.

  Clarissa seemed unusually hostile that first evening, and she remained particularly aggressive toward Gregory as the week wore on. Nobody was surp
rised when he announced five days after his sister’s arrival that he’d had a letter from one of his Harrow chums, and if his parents had no objection he proposed to go visit Charlie immediately. His parents had no objection.

  As Sir Harold was much occupied in the summer with the farms, that left mother and daughter alone together most of the time. Marjorie took advantage of their privacy to try to persuade her daughter to return to her spouse. Nothing availed, and Clarissa simply alternated between shouting and sulking. On the twelfth day of her visit, however, that soul of patience, Sir Harold, put his foot down.

  “Come now, darling, you can’t just run away from your husband the minute you get back from the honeymoon. If he’s not mistreating you, and you say he isn’t, then you belong at home. Your new home. I’ll order your car for tomorrow morning, there’s a good girl.” So Clarissa was dispatched, muttering furiously all the time, back to Banner House.

  As Lady Bebberidge-Thorpe’s car rolled through the stone gates to that lavish dwelling, she was trying to remember how many times in the last eleven months the bride had abandoned home and husband and fled back to her parents. Altogether too often, that was certain. There was gossip, of course, but Clarissa hadn’t cared about that. Sometimes her mother wondered if Clarissa cared about anything but Clarissa.

  Now, almost a year after the wedding, the reluctant wife was about to present her long-suffering husband with a child, possibly an heir. (“Please, God, let it be a boy,” Marjorie had prayed for many weeks.) She had no reason to believe that Clarissa was happier, now, with John. True, the husbandless visits to Datchworth had grown fewer after Clarissa had discovered she was pregnant, but she had informed her mother it wasn’t so bad at Banner House now that she could tell her husband not to touch her. The new Mrs. Banner had even insisted on separate bedrooms, which her mother informed her was a bit old-fashioned. Clarissa had merely retorted that it showed women used to have better sense.

  It was a dreary day for May. Later, in midsummer, the flowers would show the benefit from all this rain, but in the meantime, thought Lady Bebberidge-Thorpe, it was rather depressing. If the sun had been shining, she might have dragged Clarissa out for a walk. No hope of that now. At least the dull weather obscured the raw newness of John’s enormous redbrick residence. In bright sunlight Marjorie could hardly look at it without wanting to close her eyes.

  As her car pulled up to the front entrance, one of the servants emerged with an enormous umbrella. No, not a servant. As the man descended the shallow steps, Marjorie discerned the limp that had kept John Banner out of active service in the war. How kind of him to come out to greet her himself. Unless, Marjorie thought with a flicker of mordant humor, it was only a sign of how desperate he was to have someone in the house who might, just might, be able to control his wife.

  Her son-in-law got to the car door even before her driver did, opening it with a welcoming smile. “Marjorie!” he cried. “You are a gift from Heaven.”

  She emerged into the shelter of the umbrella and they kissed on both cheeks, continental fashion. It was a habit he had picked up in Paris before the war, and his mother-in-law had decided she liked it.

  She returned his smile, but adjured him not to spread flannel over her until she’d earned it. “My presence is no guarantee she’ll behave, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, you couldn’t possibly do any worse with her than I have. The mere sight of me seems to infuriate her.”

  The unmistakable sadness in this admission moved Marjorie to real pity. She and her son-in-law had become friends; he was a gentle soul, only five years younger than herself, and she had hoped, once upon a time, that marriage to him would improve Clarissa. It was dishearteningly clear to her now, however, that she and Sir Harold, in bestowing their young and beautiful daughter upon John, had not done him any kindness.

  Marjorie’s low expectations of her daughter preserved her through the days that followed. In one sense it wasn’t quite as bad as she had feared. Clarissa’s greeting when her mother came into the bedroom was slightly sullen, but not actively hostile. It was as though the heavily pregnant girl had figured out that the suffering she had so far endured was going to get worse before it got better, and she was in need of an ally. As there were no available female Banners, and certainly none of the servants was suitable, that left Mother.

  Mother obliged. She listened to Clarissa’s complaints about the horrors of pregnancy and agreed with them. When Clarissa asked how on earth her mother had managed to go through it three times, Marjorie carefully drained the frost from her voice before she replied, “I was fond of my husband. I wanted children both for him and for myself.” And she managed not to add, “And I knew my duty,” although the words were marching through her mind like the Queen’s Regiment.

  There was silence for a minute while Clarissa brooded on what her mother had said. Then she said plaintively, “I am fond of John, really I am. It’s lovely being married to him, all except for—oh, God, Mummy, how can you stand it?”

  Lady Bebberidge-Thorpe’s withers were slightly wrung, if only because her daughter so rarely called her “Mummy.”

  “Clarissa, darling, is he, ah, doesn’t he make any effort to, ah . . .” but she found that it was more difficult to discuss the facts of life with a daughter who had already experienced them than with a prenuptial virgin. But she didn’t need to finish the question.

  “Yes, Mother, he does make the effort, I can see him trying to—to—be kind about it, he even apologizes, but oh I just can’t stand it!” This speech ended on something approaching a shriek: Clarissa, to her mother’s horror, burst into hysterical sobs.

  Marjorie comforted her as best she could. She sat on the bed and held her weeping child and patted her and murmured into her ear such comforts as she could think of: “There, there, darling, you’ll get used to it in time, and besides, when you see your baby you’ll know it was all worth it, worth every bit of it. When I held—” Marjorie swallowed an unaccustomed lump in her throat and resolutely put away from her mind the child who had drowned—“when I held each of my three babies in my arms, I knew it was worth it. You’ll feel the same way, you wait and see.”

  Marjorie Bebberidge-Thorpe had her share of faults, but dishonesty was not one of them. She believed every word she was saying, even though she knew that Clarissa didn’t. Not yet, anyway. But when the baby was born, then Clarissa would understand.

  Lady Bebb clung doggedly to this conviction through the difficult days that followed. Clarissa, as if determined to compensate for her display of weakness in front of her mother on that first day, returned to her usual petulant manner. Nothing the servants did was good enough, nothing her mother said or did was acceptable, and as for her husband, she couldn’t bear the sight of him. When her mother insisted John be admitted to the bedroom in which Clarissa had confined herself, and even accompanied him to make sure her daughter was not rude to him, Clarissa would give him only fleeting glances between long sullen stares out the window.

  As the time drew near, however, even the much-abused husband began to feel his spirits rising. Come the day, John was positively cheerful.

  “I’ve sent for the doctor,” he announced with ill-suppressed excitement. He had just joined his mother-in-law in the morning room.

  “Poor fellow,” replied Marjorie, referring to the doctor. “I imagine Clarissa must have been one of his least pleasant cases.”

  John Banner had not yet grown accustomed to Lady Bebb’s extraordinary frankness regarding her daughter. He was sure she would not speak thus of Clarissa in general, and had concluded that she did it to comfort him. And it was indeed a comfort. He rather suspected he might have gone right ’round the bend if she hadn’t been there for the last few weeks.

  “Marjorie,” he began awkwardly. “I really can’t thank you enough for all—”

  “John!” she interrupted in the voice of a school-teacher who had run out of patience with a slow pupil. “You have thanked me far too much already.
She is my daughter. It was my duty.” She looked at her emotionally exhausted son-in-law and relented slightly. “And my pleasure,” she added graciously, nodding to him. “And I must go now to Clarissa.” She put down her teacup, rose from her chair, and walked briskly to the door, which John held for her while muttering yet another sheepish thank-you in spite of himself.

  She did not acknowledge it; it was doubtful if she heard it. She had set her face toward her daughter’s bedroom.

  It would be difficult to say who suffered most through the next five hours. Medically it was an easy birth; mother and baby were strong and healthy; labor and delivery were accomplished without any of the difficulties and disasters that might have attended them. But the servants and the grandmother-to-be had been well nigh deafened by the screams of the laboring mother before the doctor arrived; when he did arrive, and dared to touch Clarissa, he was sworn at for his pains, and was grateful for the expectant grandmother, who surged out of the dressing room to which she had retired upon his arrival, grasped her daughter’s flailing wrist, and ordered her in implacable tones to remember she was a lady.

  But the baby emerged, responding to a smack on the bottom with a good, healthy cry. Lady Bebberidge-Thorpe looked down at the product of her daughter’s efforts and beamed, but cautioned the doctor to wipe off the infant before offering the mother a look. The cord was cut, the baby was cleaned and wrapped, and the nurse, defying tradition, handed the tiny bundle first to the grandmother. Lady Bebb, no fool, knew she was being rewarded for her beneficial influence over the termagant who now lay quiet, limp and sweating, in the bed.