David Monnery - For King and Country

A game of pontoon occupied the four of them until they reached Carlisle, where they had to change trains. The relevant platform was thronged with people waiting for the next London express, which was apparently already running half an hour late. This at least gave the SAS men a chance to stock up on food for the night ahead – the chances of a restaurant car were thin indeed – so, while Farnham and Tobin guarded their bags and a spot dangerously close to the platform edge, the other two purchased a mound of dubious-looking sandwiches from the station buffet. Chewing on an unidentifiable selection from the pile, Farnham gazed thoughtfully at the line of clapped-out locomotives stabled alongside a disused platform. Everything was wearing out, he thought. Germans or no Germans, this war was going to be around for a long time.

The train eventually arrived, and for the first two hours they had to make do with a crowded section of corridor, but at Preston a group of Engineers in the adjoining compartment got off. Night had now fallen on the outside world, and they had to read the names of the passing stations through the small diamond cut in the blackout screen. Inside the carriage visibility wasn’t much better, thanks to the ever-thickening fug of cigarette smoke.

It was midnight when they reached Crewe. Tobin left them there, hoping his connection to Swansea was also running late. The others watched as he was swallowed by the unlit station, feeling more than a little envious. He might not find a train but at least the buffet would be open.

Their train continued south, stopping more and more frequently, or so it seemed to Farnham, who alone in the compartment seemed unable to sleep. He woke the snoring Rafferty at Bletchley, and watched him stumble off in search of a Cambridge train, hoping that a week with his wife and baby son would restore him to his old carefree self.

An hour or so later the train finally rolled into Euston, leaving him and McCaigh to emerge, somewhat bleary-eyed, into the pale grey light of a London dawn. They breakfasted together in a crowded greasy-spoon in Eversholt Street, and then went their separate ways, McCaigh heading down into the Underground while Farnham, suffering from too many claustrophobic hours on the train, waited for a bus.

From the upper deck of the bus which carried him to Hyde Park Corner it didn’t look as if much had changed since his last brief sojourn in the capital, a couple of months before. The so-called ‘Little Blitz’ had tailed off during the past few weeks, and there were no startling new gaps in either the familiar terraces of Gower Street or the shops in Oxford Street.

He decided on impulse to walk from Hyde Park Corner, telling himself he was fed up with crowds of cheek-by-jowl humanity, but knowing in his heart that he simply wanted to delay his arrival at the house in Beaufort Gardens. Stepping through his father’s front door meant stepping out of the war, and that meant having to confront the life and family he’d left behind when he joined the Army. It meant remembering that he loathed his father.

Randolph Farnham was a sixty-two-year-old insurance tycoon who worshipped wealth, power and breeding. He’d been an admirer of the Nazis before the war, and the outbreak of hostilities had not so much changed his mind as persuaded him that it wouldn’t be wise to publicize such views. Over the past year Farnham Insurance had been more successful than most at using the small print to wriggle out of claims made by bomb-damage victims.

His wife Margaret – Farnham’s stepmother – was just as selfish and not much more likeable, but her wanton disregard of convention could sometimes seem almost admirable. At a party before the war he had stumbled across her and one of her friends’ husbands engaged in furiously silent sex in one of the guest rooms, and the look in her eyes when she noticed him had been one of pure amusement.

He had no desire to see her or his father, and in fact there were only two reasons why he ever came to Beaufort Gardens. One was that all his worldly goods – all that remained of them – had been brought here from the bombed-out cottage in Sussex; the other was the presence of his sixteen-year-old sister Eileen, on whom he doted. She was kind, interesting, lovely to look at and wise beyond her years, and quite how she had managed to become so under their father’s roof was something that Farnham was at a loss to explain. But she had. Living proof, he thought, that children had a much bigger say in how they turned out than their parents liked to believe.

He covered the last few yards and rapped on the door with the heavy knocker. Norton answered, looking every one of his seventy-three years, and ushered him inside with the usual lack of friendliness. ‘Your father has left for the office, Mr Robert,’ he said stiffly. ‘Mrs Farnham has not yet come down.’

Fuck them, Farnham thought. ‘My sister?’ he asked.

‘She is at breakfast,’ Norton said, but at that moment Eileen burst through the door at a run, a huge smile on her face.

‘Robbie!’ she cried happily, throwing her arms round his neck.

After a while they disengaged and he got a better look at her. She seemed older, he thought, though it had been only a couple of months since he last saw her. Her clothes seemed drabber than usual, but the eyes were as bright as ever.

‘Let’s go out,’ she said. ‘I’ve got two hours – we can go for a walk in the park.’

‘All right,’ he said, glad of the excuse to get out of the house before his stepmother appeared.

It took Eileen only a moment to grab a coat and they were out on the street, walking briskly across the Brompton Road and heading up Montpelier Street. ‘What are you doing in two hours?’ he asked. ‘Shopping with one of your friends, I suppose,’ he added with a grin.

‘Shopping! Where have you been? There’s nothing in the shops to buy. And I have to go to work,’ she said triumphantly.

He was suitably astonished. ‘You’ve got a holiday job?’

‘In the East End. I’m a volunteer. Oh, Robbie, it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done. I’m helping in this shelter for people who’ve been bombed out of their homes. It’s run by a clergyman named Tim and two old ladies.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Everything. Cook, clean, visit people, help people sort out problems, try to trace missing relatives…’ She giggled. ‘I even helped Tim write his sermon last week.’

Farnham laughed. ‘You were an atheist last time we talked.’

‘I still am. But Tim says it doesn’t matter as long as your heart’s in the right place.’

‘Right,’ Farnham said drily. ‘You’re not sweet on this clergyman by any chance?’

‘He’s older than Father,’ she said indignantly. ‘And anyway I don’t have time to be sweet on anyone. Oh, Robbie, I’m so glad you’re here because I need a big favour.’

He sighed. ‘And what might that be?’

She kept him waiting for an answer until they were safely across Knightsbridge. ‘I don’t want to go back to school until after the war’s over,’ she said as they entered Hyde Park. ‘I’m much more useful where I am. And I’m learning so much more!’

‘Yes?’ Farnham asked, knowing full well what was coming.

‘So will you talk to Father for me?’ she pleaded.

‘I’ll try, but I doubt he’ll listen.’

‘Just soften him up for me, then I’ll move in for the kill.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up too high, Eileen,’ he warned her.

She turned her blue eyes on him. ‘I won’t. But I have to ask, don’t I?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he agreed. Something in the way she said it set off an alarm bell in his mind, but she left him no time to think it through.

‘So what are you doing?’ she asked.