GOODNIGHT
SWEETHEART
Charlotte Bingham
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Also by Charlotte Bingham
Prologue
Part One: ‘Will it never begin?’
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two: ‘So this is war!’
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Three: ‘Who says we can take it?’
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
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First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Charlotte Bingham 2007
Charlotte Bingham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780593055939
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To the unsung heroines of
the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
and of
Special Operations Europe
1939–1945
Also by the Author
CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS
LUCINDA
CORONET AMONG THE GRASS
THE BUSINESS
IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW
STARDUST
NANNY
CHANGE OF HEART
GRAND AFFAIR
LOVE SONG
THE KISSING GARDEN
THE BLUE NOTE
SUMMERTIME
DISTANT MUSIC
THE MAGIC HOUR
FRIDAY'S GIRL
OUT OF THE BLUE
IN DISTANT FIELDS
THE WHITE MARRIAGE
GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART
THE ENCHANTED
THE LAND OF SUMMER
THE DAISY CLUB
The Belgravia series
BELGRAVIA
COUNTRY LIFE
AT HOME
BY INVITATION
The Nightingale series
TO HEAR A NIGHTINGALE
THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS
The Debutantes series
DEBUTANTES
THE SEASON
The Eden series
DAUGHTERS OF EDEN
THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS
The Bexham trilogy
THE CHESTNUT TREE
THE WIND OFF THE SEA
THE MOON AT MIDNIGHT
Novels with Terence Brady
VICTORIA
VICTORIA AND COMPANY
ROSE'S STORY
YES HONESTLY
Television Drama Series with Terence Brady
TAKE THREE GIRLS
UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS
THOMAS AND SARAH
NANNY
FOREVER GREEN
Television Comedy Series with Terence Brady
NO HONESTLY
YES HONESTLY
PIG IN THE MIDDLE
OH MADELINE! (USA)
FATHER MATTHEW'S DAUGHTER
Television Plays with Terence Brady
MAKING THE PLAY
SUCH A SMALL WORLD
ONE OF THE FAMILY
Films with Terence Brady
LOVE WITH A PERFECT STRANGER
MAGIC MOMENT
Stage Plays with Terence Brady
I WISH I WISH
THE SHELL SEEKERS
(adaptation from the novel by Rosamunde Pilcher)
BELOW STAIRS
For more information on Charlotte Bingham and her books,
see her website at www.charlottebingham.com
Prologue
Events of the past so often become more than they truly were, most particularly to those who were not there. Here is placed an assumption, there an undue emphasis – master and servant, mistress and maid, the first insensitive, the second inevitably downtrodden. Often, too, placed in the hands of those that were not there, the past becomes either a place of darkness or a landscape lit only with blazing floodlights, without even a suggestion of dappled shade, or gentle breezes.
Occasionally, a photo album, a love note from a supposed mistress, a card bearing the profound condolences of some patrician writer to the grieving – the writer a duchess, the grieving a former maid – speaks of a different world where friendly formality, not unlike the neat edging of lawns around an abundant border, might have made for a calm, which, in contrast to the present, would seem deceptively serene.
And so it is with the mural painted by Walter Beresford. Visitors to the house can stand before it and perhaps enjoy something of the past of which they were previously unaware, a feeling of ease that springs quite naturally from each personality depicted. It is as if the people painted on the wall are aware that they have each been assigned a role that they must play as best they can. As if, too, they know that what they are, what they are wearing, indeed everything about them, will quite soon be as fascinatingly old-fashioned as the house upon whose wall they are displayed.
To begin with the maids: Trixie and Betty. They are wearing their uniforms not with an air of servitude, but with pride, and if you look closer the expression in their eyes is at quite delightful odds with the strict decorum of their starched uniforms. Young Trixie, cap set on a thick spread of dark curls, seems to be staring out at the painter really quite critically, as if saying, ‘Watch where you put those brushes and paints on my nice clean floor, Mr Painter.’ And Betty’s face, while innocent enough, reflects a firm ambition, the set of the mouth and the look in her eyes marking her out as quite determined on improvement. Neither of these girls is going to stay in service if she can help it. Then there is Trixie’s father, Raymond, chauffeur and handyman. He has set his chauffeur’s hat under his arm, and his expression is as commanding as any High Court judge. Standing with his favourite motor car behind him, he is wearing old-fashioned chauffeur’s clothes, a long dark coat and black breeches tucked into long leather boots. Of course, by sporting this costume he wants you to know that he may be a chauffeur now, but he can also ride, and his father and his gran
dfather before him were in charge of the horses, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine.
And so to the family, who are not standing together in a formal group but threaded in and out of their servants, or standing about the garden, or by the river with their dogs and ducks. The painter’s intention, it seems, was to make sure that Mr and Mrs Anthony Garland, their twin sons and their two daughters look no more important than their servants. They are all quite simply part of a lively, but passing, scene. So much so that a detached observer could be forgiven for expecting that any minute now all the people depicted will step down from the wall, and very soon they will hear their laughter, listen to their gossip and their chatter, watch them dining, dancing, picnicking, fishing in the river that runs through the grounds, admire their grace and their kindness, perhaps even cry for them …
PART ONE
‘Will it never begin?’
Chapter One
Caro was aware that she was probably the only person excited about the arrival of the fashionable painter, for this reason perhaps she had spent the greater part of the morning pretending to interest herself in Katherine’s ball gowns, while secretly waiting only for the arrival of the artist.
The dress that her elder sister was currently sporting was blue, with immense silver sleeves. Privately, Caro herself did not particularly like it, but Katherine obviously did, perhaps because it showed off her long swanlike neck; and it was swanlike. Everyone had always remarked on Katherine’s beautiful neck. It was a fact.
‘How about these ones?’
Katherine was holding up a pair of black evening gloves with small pearl buttons that did up with a neat little glove hook. She held them against the blue sheen of her ball gown, while tossing back her dark hair, which was almost as black as the long, long gloves.
‘Very femme fatale, lovey.’
Caro was sitting on the window seat, which overlooked the drive, so she was able to see all the visitors that morning: the postman, twice within an hour, because he had forgotten to bring a parcel; the lady from the village, who came for second-hand clothes to sell for the orphans; the grocer in his van, who stopped at the front of the house, as if to register his presence, before moving slowly off down the back drive towards the tradesmen’s entrance.
‘Don’t say “lovey”, Caro. You’re too old for that kind of talk, really you are.’
Katherine did not look round at Caro as she told her younger sister off, but rolled her eyes at her own reflection in the dressing mirror. Really, Caro was eighteen; you’d have thought that she would have become more sophisticated by now.
‘I know I’m too old, but because I’m the youngest I always feel younger than I really am,’ Caro murmured, as usual unable to resist taking up the challenge of her sister’s quite open despite. ‘Actually I don’t just feel yards younger than you, dearest Sis, I also feel horribly plain; but with your looks, you wouldn’t know what that feels like, Katherine, would you? Such a burden for you to be a beauty, to never hear people say, “Well, we all know who has drawn the long straw as far as looks are concerned,”’ she added mischievously, while pretending to pull a sad face.
Katherine did not turn to look at Caro, but continued to stare at herself in the mirror. They had both long ago accepted that poor Caro was not, and never would be, a beauty.
‘You’re perfectly pretty, and you know it,’ Katherine stated absently, while not denying that she herself was not merely pretty, but beautiful.
‘And you’re too, too kind, my deah. But I am quite sure, looking as I do, that I shall probably never, ever marry,’ Caro went on, pretending to sob uncontrollably, putting her head in her hands, while watching Katherine’s reaction through her fingers.
‘Oh, you’ll marry all right,’ Katherine stated absently, paying absolutely no attention to her younger sister’s pretend histrionics, not even turning from the mirror in front of which she seemed to have been frozen. ‘It’s who you marry that will be the crux of the matter. You could marry anyone, Caro, but what you want to do is to make sure that you marry someone.’
Caro pretended not to hear; she also pretended not to have spotted a pale grey, open-roofed motor car, which was even now pulling up below, outside Chevrons’ double front doors.
From her window seat she could see that the car was being driven by a tall man wearing a light suit. He pulled on the brake, but for a moment did not get out of the car, remaining in the driver’s seat, possibly drinking in the vision of the beautiful white-painted, delightfully rambling house, the back of which faced on to a wide, fast-flowing river, a part of which could just be seen from the front drive.
Upstairs Katherine remained mesmerised by her dressing mirror.
‘It’s a very good colour for me, this particular blue,’ she murmured. ‘David is right; he said it was a very good colour for me.’
At last Katherine moved, but not away from the mirror, merely turning slowly in front of it, black gloves now covering her arms. She held up her hair, seemingly absorbed in her own image.
Caro moved off the window seat just as the man below, having parked the motor car, was taking a straw hat from the back seat. After which he paced the drive, obviously admiring the house, as visitors always did when they first arrived, and for good reason. It was not just the deer under the trees, many of which were white, like the frontage of the house, or the distant sheep on the surrounding hills, it was the feel of Chevrons: the calm, the peace, the utter tranquillity of its surroundings.
Chevrons in early summer was idyllic, mystical. It was as if there had never been the Great War, as if not just time had passed it by, but that time had decided to rest on his laurels there, to let the domestic idyll that was Chevrons seep into his ancient bones, and calm his frenetic hurtle towards his next engagement.
Caro herself always thought the magic of Chevrons lay in the fact that the house was so much off the beaten track that it surprised you when you came across it so suddenly. Perhaps because of this her directions to visitors were invariably the same.
‘You toddle along the main road until you are about two miles from Speytesbury, but you must be careful, because if you aren’t looking you will whoosh past it; but if you just toddle along quite slowly and pay great attention, suddenly you will find there’s a little sign which says, in quite small letters “Private”, which is where you must turn off, being careful of the potholes in the road, which are really quite huge, I’m afraid because …’
But of course even as she issued instructions to visitors, Caro was well aware that, careful though they might be to follow her instructions, there would be no inner warning voice to say to them, ‘Just wait till you see this.’
This would also have been true for their newly arrived painterly visitor as he had turned off the main highway and bump, bump, bumped down the narrow lane, with its tall bramble hedges, which at this time of year would be full of madly scrambling wild honeysuckle and nesting birds, and rabbits that scuttled out in front of his car, and then disappeared into the thick hedges at a vague, arrogantly slow pace, giving the impression that, as far as they were concerned, all was well with the world. Sometimes a hare could be seen in a nearby meadow, staring with momentary interest at the approaching motor car, before cantering off on far more urgent business than the rabbits, so urgent that it could wait for no one, not even the new king.
The visitor was looking around him with a puzzled expression, as if he was thinking, why did no one warn me about the beauty of this place? For in its way, Chevrons was quite perfect, not just because the house was so pretty, and yet, being only two storeys high, held no pretensions to grandeur, but because it was so well set in its grounds.
Caro’s father, Anthony Garland, always said that Chevrons was the kind of house that Englishmen dream of coming home to when they are abroad. Not too grand, not too fussy, not the kind of house that overpowers human beings. It had not been built following a great military victory, or to make a statement of power, it ha
d been built a century and a half before by a young squire as a wedding present for his bride.
Caro always thought that something of their happiness had stayed on in the old house. As a child, on rainy days, she had wandered down the light-filled corridors and up the wide wooden staircase, imagining that she could hear the happy laughter of the first Mr and Mrs John Anthony Garland as they played with their children and their pug dogs, or rode out together into the surrounding countryside, cantering into the far-flung woods where often on a summer’s day they would picnic beneath trees that had seen a thousand just such summers.
The portraits of the Garlands down the centuries reflected the line of both humans and pug dogs that had continued without interruption right to the present day. Caro’s father and elder brother had both been christened, in the Chevrons tradition, ‘John Anthony Garland’, which actually was a kind of living hell for young Jag – as the elder twin had inevitably been nicknamed at school – most especially if his father opened one of Jag’s bills by mistake. But it was also comforting because it meant that by retaining the same names, the Garlands did not need to remind themselves, or indeed the rest of the world, that after all these years their line had survived, that they had gone on, despite, as Jag, and Francis, his twin, always joked, ‘war, pestilence and sheep’s feet’.
However, it was largely thanks to judicious husbandry and to the sheep – and their sometimes troublesome feet – that the Garlands had always lived well, if not extravagantly. Certainly they had never been in danger of starving, Chevrons coming as it did with a parcel of land amounting to a little over four hundred acres. Admittedly it was not good land, certainly not land on which to build, for once away from the house and the river, it sloped gently upwards, but it was good heath land, which drained well, the winter rains running down into the river, thus enabling generations of Garlands to keep, and prosper, from their herds of famous Garland sheep.