A Heart Is Broken E-Book

Barbara Cartland

• Herausgeber: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 439

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Jilted by her fiancé Tim, Mela MacDonald felt nothing but despair. Desperate to heal her wounded heart she travels from Canada to war torn England, to work for her Uncle, an important government official in the war effort. But on her arrival she finds her Uncle has been murdered – set on unravelling the mystery of his death, she teams up with Peter Flacton, an up-and-coming politician. As their investigations put them in a compromising position, and still too miserable to care what happens to her, Mela makes a reckless decision. But what she hadn't counted on was meeting Tim again. Told in her own words, Mela describes how they solve the mystery of her Uncle's death and how she discovers where her true love lies, in this passionate adventure of love and intrigue.

Leseprobe

Chapter One

“I’m sorry, Mela old girl, but it’s no use. I’ve got to come clean and tell you that I care for someone else.”

I just stood and stared at Tim. I had been longing to see him, waiting impatiently – and it seemed to me for years – until he could get leave. Actually, he had only been in Winnipeg for three months, and the only things to cheer me up were his letters, but when they had begun to get fewer and fewer I told myself it was because he was working and had no time to write. After all, they keep them pretty hard at it in the Air Training Units.

Of course I was stupid – I suppose any girl is when she is in love. If I had read Tim’s letters unblinded by my own feelings, I might have guessed sooner. Instead of which I just went on loving and loving him. I was mad about him. I still am. It’s no use people telling me that ‘love dies in a night’ or burbling about ‘Time, the Great Healer’, or any of that sort of nonsense. Love doesn’t die because of what people do. One loves them because one just can’t help it.

I adore Tim. I adored him even when he said goodbye for the last time and walked out of the door, rather pink about the face with the little muscle at the side of his jaw twitching as it always does when he’s nervous. I knew he was worried and unhappy at having to tell me the truth but it made me love him even more, if possible, because he minded.

Anyway, I suppose it was some satisfaction to know he cared enough to be upset. But no – nothing was really any consolation. Nothing could lessen the blow or make me feel better about it. It was just the end of everything. The bottom had dropped out of my world.

At first it was hardly painful at all. Rather like being struck down and feeling numb.

“I met her when I first got to Winnipeg, Mela,” Tim was saying, “and when I saw her – I can’t explain – but an electric current seemed to flash between us and I knew without doubt she was the one girl for me. I’d always thought you the finest person in the world. We’ve been such pals, haven’t we, Mela?”

He waited for an answer but I couldn’t speak.

“But this was different,” he went on, “it sort of knocked me out – but Jeeze! it’s hell having to come here and tell you!”

I stood looking at him and all I could think about was that there was a tiny spot of blood on his collar and that his uniform wasn’t really blue. It isn’t a good colour for the Air Force at all, I thought. Too much grey in the mixture. And my mind ran on, thinking of the most idiotic things and all the time my heart was telling me,

‘This is the end! It’s over, Pamela MacDonald. Tim doesn’t love you anymore.’

I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to put my arms round his neck, pull his dear face down to mine and kiss him – one of those long, exciting kisses which used to make me feel breathless, shaken, and somehow a little shy. But I couldn’t do that now. The Tim who was talking to me wasn’t the same Tim I’d loved and who had loved me. This was another man – a man who loved a girl called Audrey Herman who lived in Winnipeg.

When Tim had gone, I stood for a long time looking out of the window. Our house in Montreal is high up on the hill and on the horizon the mountains were covered with snow, and I thought how last year Tim and I had gone skiing in the Laurentians. What fun it had been! The sunshine and the snow, and Tim laughing and teasing me, saying that my cheeks felt and looked like frozen apples. But they hadn’t been frozen when we’d sat in front of the blazing fire in the little log cabin which Tim’s parents had built in the forest. After the others had gone to bed, we used to sit up and talk. We made plans about all the things we’d do when Tim had made enough money for us to get married.

We were awfully sensible about it and decided to wait until we could be really comfortable. We weren’t going to rush into anything. Not like some of my friends, struggling along without any luxuries and without a car. Of course, things would have been better if it hadn’t been for the war.

Daddy had been hit and so had Tim’s father, so there wasn’t the nice, fat allowance that we might have looked forward to in ordinary times – but still, Tim was doing well. His father’s business is one of the oldest firms on the Stock Exchange, so even in the worst slumps he has always managed to keep his head above water.

And then, quite suddenly, Tim decided that he must join in. We talked it over very carefully when the war started and had come to the conclusion there was no reason why he should enlist. Tim has always been rather more pro-American than pro-British. I didn’t mind, although I was supposed to be opposite, having an English mother who loves her own country. Not that after twenty-five years in Canada she’s any reason to love England except sentimentally.

Her English relations, with the exception of Uncle Edward, have treated her pretty badly. I’ve often planned how, when eventually I meet my grandfather, I’ll tell him what I think of him. I’d like to show him my father and say,

“There’s a fine man for you. There’s a man who’s worked, who has been successful and kept his wife happy into the bargain. Now aren’t you ashamed of yourself for forbidding your daughter to marry ‘a common Colonial’?”

Yes, that’s what he called my father when my mother wanted to marry him, and then he chucked him off the estate and told him to go back to Canada as quick as he could. He went all right – but my mother went with him. How I would have loved to have seen my grandfather’s face when he woke up in the morning to find her gone and only a note left behind to tell him what had happened!

I expect the butler took it in to him on the silver salver, and his porridge couldn’t have tasted so good that morning when he realised that – perhaps for the first time in his life – he had been outwitted. I suppose really it was Scot meeting Scot, for my father was Scottish, although his family had been in Canada for two generations. They had emigrated with only a pound or so in their pockets and they worked like beavers to make good.

Well, they succeeded. Daddy had a decent education and I suppose he’s one of the greatest experts on forestry in the country. Yet when he went over to England they talked about him as though he was a lumberjack. Of course, he was young in those days, but even so you’d have thought the English would have seen some difference between him and the men who just fell the trees. But they didn’t.

Mummy crossed the Atlantic and when they got to Canada they were married, and from that day to this, Uncle Edward is the only one of her relations who has ever spoken to her. He is different, of course. He was considered the black sheep of the family for years – which is funny now when you think that he is the one member of the family who has got a position in the British Government – and a pretty important one too. But even England has woken up to the fact that stuffy old people don’t get her anywhere and that if they are going to win this war they will want go-ahead men who can forget tradition and class distinctions.

Uncle Edward’s go-ahead all right – he’s done strange and exciting things all his life. He’s been in a gold rush, and in the Relief of Ladysmith, and he was torpedoed in a minesweeper in 1917 – and that’s only a few of the adventures he’s had.

I’d rather listen to Uncle Edward telling me stories than read any thriller that you can buy on a bookstall. However, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and one Uncle Edward doesn’t make all English people seem marvellous to me. In spite of all that Mummy’s said – and she’s always been a little bit homesick for her own country – I’ve hated a lot of the English people I’ve met and a good deal that I’ve heard about England.

So frankly I didn’t care a jot when Tim decided that he wasn’t going to chuck up his whole career to rush off and fight simply because England said we ought to. After all, England was a long way away, and there’s certainly something to be said for those who argue that Great Britain pays precious little attention to us until she wants something. But, of course, Mummy gets absolutely livid when I talk like that.

“England’s not only our Motherland, Mela,” she has said to me frequently, “she’s the greatest power for good in the world today.”

I can’t argue with Mummy when she talks in that strain. She feels it all so deeply. Besides, if she thinks like that – let her. But I don’t agree. I get sick of being told that “this must be best because it’s English” – “buy British for value” and all that sort of sales talk.

It’s always seemed to me a lot of nonsense that Home, Sweet Home should make Canadians, who haven’t seen the shores of England for forty years – if at all – sob ostentatiously into their handkerchiefs. I think Canada’s fine. It suits me, and all I ask for is a cosy little apartment in Montreal and Tim coming home after work, hooting his horn as he turns the corner of the street so that I shall be ready to run down and meet him as he arrives. But that’s a dream that can never come true now and I wonder what’s going to happen to me?

I suppose really my dreams began to fall to bits the day that Tim told me he was going to join the Air Force. He had been a bit restless all the month. The papers had been full of the Battle of Britain.

The radio said, “775 Nazi planes ... 185 German planes destroyed ... London in flames ... bombs raining death ... women and children buried alive…”

People like Mummy walked about with white faces saying, “Can’t they stick it?” I used to wonder why they felt so keenly. I’d have been awfully sorry to see those Germans win, but somehow it didn’t seem real. I just don’t believe that it would make all that difference to us if Hitler did conquer England. Why, for years we’ve been speculating as to whether it wouldn’t be better for the capital of the Empire to be in Canada. People talked about asking the Royal Family to come and live over here. If anything would make me violently pro-British it would be the Queen’s smile. I saw her when they came to Canada. Daddy was presented to her and he said it was the proudest day of his life. And he meant it, too.

After I’d seen her I just hugged myself. I said,

“I’m Scottish too, and Scottish on both sides.”

Which is true, because Mother’s family have been lairds in Sutherland since the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and as for Daddy’s family – I believe there’s still a lot of MacDonalds in Scotland.

I was always sorry that Tim didn’t see the King and Queen. He was in the States at the time and he couldn’t get back. Perhaps if he had it would have made him join up sooner because, personally, the Queen would make me want to fight for England, while the Battle of Britain left me rather cold. Well anyway, while I was feeling interested but not emotional, so to speak, it took a lot of people quite differently, and Tim amongst them.

“I’ve got to go, Mela,” he said, and he said it desperately, as if he was being compelled against his will.

“But why?” I asked. “Why now? We’ve talked it all over. You decided not to volunteer. Of course, if it’s a case of conscription it’s a different thing. And now, suddenly, for no reason.”

“There’s a reason, all right,” Tim interrupted, “but I can’t put it into words. It’s those boys in the air – standing up to those devils – beating them at their own game without enough ’planes, without enough ammunition! They’re game enough but they want help and I’m going to give it them.”

I knew it was no use arguing with Tim. He’d made up his mind and that was that. Needless to say, I wasn’t enthusiastic. And what puzzled me was why he should suddenly change his mind and his life – or rather, our lives – overnight.

Dunkirk hadn’t made him want to rush off and defend England against invasion. I couldn’t see why a battle in the skies, which so far appeared pretty indecisive, should make such a difference to him.

But there it was – and there was nothing for me to do but grin and bear it. Really I was a tiny bit piqued, too. I felt that I should have been a good deal more important to Tim than a little island away across the Atlantic, but evidently I wasn’t to be considered. It surprised me, too, the way Mother and Father took it. I quite understood Mummy getting all sentimental and saying how proud and glad she was – she has always, to my mind, been a bit silly about England – but from Daddy I did expect a more level-headed attitude.

Instead he said, “Good boy!” and held out his hand to Tim. He put an accent on the ‘good’, which showed me he was particularly pleased. Everyone was unusually nice to me, too, as if I’d done something commendable. And when I tried to say I couldn’t quite understand Tim’s point of view, they took up the attitude that I was miserable because he was going away and that I must try to be unselfish and bid him Godspeed with a brave heart!

No one would see that while I minded him going personally – and I suppose selfishly – what puzzled me was why he should want to go. It was no use trying to talk to my friends. Most of their young men or their husbands had joined up at the very beginning. I’d known that in a sort of way they despised Tim, but I didn’t care. We were perfectly happy together and, what was more, a great many of his American friends thought it very sensible of him to keep on with his job and not start flag-wagging because there was a war going on in some other part of the world.

“Your boy’s got sense,” one of them said to me. “Look what happened last time. You’re too young to remember, but when the boys came marching home again what did they find? Their jobs had got filled by someone else! And let me tell you it’s no fun being a hero on an empty belly.”

But sensible or otherwise, Tim went off to Winnipeg to be trained as an airman and I learnt for the first time in my life what it was to be lonely. Tim had been about ever since I grew up. There had been other men, too, when I first left school, who’d given me a rush and made a fuss of me. Some of the boys had wanted to marry me, but there had never really been anyone but Tim.

I think I loved him from the first day that he tipped me out of his toboggan head first into a six-foot snowdrift. It soon became pretty plain, too, that there was no one else in Tim’s life, though he didn’t say anything for a long while. We just played around and had a good time.

Then one night coming home from a party, Tim stopped the car. It was a moonlight night and the stars were twinkling nearly as brightly as the lights of the city. Tim threw away his cigarette and turned towards me – he didn’t say anything but he looked at me and suddenly I felt strange and breathless. Tim’s arms went round my shoulders and his lips were against mine – then I knew that happiness hurts, but it is so wonderful that one is afraid even of moving lest such ecstasy should vanish for ever...

But it didn’t vanish. Not where I was concerned, at any rate. Everything went on getting more wonderful, until the day that Tim said he had got to go and fight for England. That certainly increased the grudge I have always borne against that country, but still I had to put a good face on his going, and I kidded myself that perhaps he’d be no use as a pilot and they’d throw him out.

When Tim wrote that he’d got leave and was coming to see me I walked on air. I’d had a pretty gloomy three months one way and another. There had seemed very little to do after Tim had gone. I suppose I ought to have made an effort and gone to work at the Red Cross or helped with some of the evacuees, but I didn’t see why I should. Any time I want work they are only too pleased to give it me at the McGill University. I find it quite simple to translate a German treatise into French or vice versa. I’ve translated one or two books and everyone’s been very complimentary about them – so it’s nice to think I can make a few dollars any time I want to.

Tim always said he wanted to support his wife and where Tim was concerned I wanted to be supported – so why worry about a permanent job?

Mother took all the credit for my ability.

“You’re just like your grandmother,” she said. “She was a brilliant woman. She travelled all over the world and could speak at least six languages, as if she were a native of the country. It’s funny how talents like that skip a generation. I was always a terrible French scholar and never even tried to learn any other language.”

I didn’t want to be beholden to any grandmother who was unnatural enough not to want to see her daughter after she had run away with the man she loved. Mother tried to tell me that Victorian wives didn’t dispute their husband’s decisions, but I took that with a grain of salt. If my grandmother had really cared for her daughter surely she would have written to her, if only once a year?

“Do you think there’s anything in this hereditary theory of Mother’s?” I asked Daddy.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Your mother’s mother was a fine woman.”

“You ought to hate her for the way she’s behaved,” I said.

Daddy laughed.

“Why should I?” he asked. “After all, she produced the one thing on Earth that I wanted more than any other. I am very grateful to her for that. Besides, my dear Mela, a victor should always be magnanimous to those he has defeated.”

I snorted. It was all very well for Daddy to feel philosophical about it, but somehow I couldn’t. It was annoying, too, not being able to boast at school about my smart relations. All girls – and boys too, for that matter – boast to each other, and there was a smug child at my school who used to tell us that she was a direct descendant of Louis the Fourteenth.

I used to itch to say that my family was related to Mary, Queen of Scots, for Mother had told me that we were and that a picture of her hangs in my grandmother’s castle. But I couldn’t tell them that without admitting that Mother had been cut off from her family for demeaning herself by marrying ‘a lumberjack’.

So I had to keep silent, but I nearly burst with the effort at times.

Oh well, I’m thankful I take after Father – and until the war came I don’t suppose I gave my English relations so much as one thought a year, but after that it was England, England, England all the time, and although Tim and I decided we wouldn’t let the war affect our lives, it did and it has! It has taken Tim away from me as surely as though he had been killed by a bullet. It’s ruined my life and it’s destroyed my happiness both now and for all time.

“My heart is broken,” I told my mother.

She came in from shopping as I was still standing in front of the window. I suppose I must have looked miserable, for she came in talking cheerfully, then stopped and put her basket down on the table.

“Why, Mela darling,” she said suddenly, “whatever is the matter?”

Then the calm numbness that had paralysed me ever since Tim had told me that he loved me no more, cracked. I gave a big gasping sob.

“My heart is broken!” I cried. “Oh Mummy, Mummy, I’m so utterly miserable!”

Chapter Two

I expect at any moment to wake up and find it isn’t true – to find that I have dreamt the whole thing and that I am in my own pink and white chintz bed, and not feeling rather sick and muzzy on the last lap of my journey to England. The muzzy feeling comes from having too many cocktails before I left Lisbon.

“They will give you Dutch courage,” my escort said.

Not that I needed it, for I haven’t been frightened, not for one minute, since I left New York – but I could quite see, even in the few hours I was there, that to drink is the thing to do in Lisbon. Most of the people have nothing else to occupy their time. Some of them have been waiting three or four months to get either a seat in an aeroplane to England, or a visa to get them taken on board an American ship. Some of them, I’m told, will just have to sit drinking in Lisbon until their last penny is exhausted. Nobody seems to worry about what will happen to them after that.

I wished in a way that I could have stayed a little longer, but it was awfully flattering to be told that a special priority seat had been kept for me on the very next aeroplane to England, which would be leaving exactly three hours after the ship docked.

It’s a windy day and the aeroplane is heaving up and down, and I only hope I shan’t be doing the same very shortly! I’m a pretty good sailor on the whole – and I’ve never yet been airsick, but the longest journey I’ve made was from Montreal to Toronto. I suppose really I ought to feel frightened. At any moment a Messerschmitt might come swooping out of the clouds and shoot us down, but somehow I can’t work myself up into feeling dramatic. I couldn’t on the boat, not even when we got into the danger zone and were told it would be wiser to sleep in our clothes.

The whole thing was like watching a film and I couldn’t take it seriously. Besides, life seemed to go on pretty much as usual. There were the innumerable meals that always seem to overlap each other, there were men talking business just as if they were in their offices – one wonders why they bother to come to sea to do it – and there was a stewardess who said, “Don’t you worry about submarines, honey,” as though she was talking about mosquitoes in the cabin!

The steward laughed when I asked him if there had been any incidents on any of the other trips.

“That would be telling,” he said, and winked at me.

So I ate, and slept, and read all the magazines and books that Daddy had given me at the last moment in case I felt lonesome, and altogether it was very uneventful and very dull. Only when we got to Lisbon did things begin to happen. It was there they spoke of Uncle Edward with something approaching reverence. I had realised that he was pretty important, but apparently in Lisbon, which is supposed to be neutral, British Cabinet Ministers really have some standing. I was escorted from the ship to the aerodrome as if I was Royalty, my luggage was looked after. I was given my ticket – which I was told had been paid for in England – and altogether I found myself, what Tim would have called, ‘a pretty big cheese!’

A very nice young man took me out to lunch and said he had been told to look after me – and they certainly picked the right sort of person to do it. He was full of talk and chatter about Lisbon and about the people passing through there. He made me laugh at the tales of how some of the society women were absolutely furious at not being given priority seats, and how a famous playwright who was on a job for one of the ministries refused to go at all unless he could take his valet.

“I really can’t trust the pressing of my clothes to anyone but George,” he kept on saying, and so in the end they had to find an extra seat!

The time seemed to pass almost too quickly – in fact, I was really sorry when he said I’d have to be getting aboard the plane.

“I’ll tell Uncle Edward how wonderful you’ve been to me,” I said, and the young man blushed with pleasure.

“It’s been a great honour to look after you, Miss MacDonald.” he said. “What’s more, I wish all my duties were as jolly as this one has been.”

I shall certainly have to get Uncle Edward to recommend him for promotion – if there is such a thing in that particular service. Perhaps he might even slip him a medal of some sort, second or third class.

‘I wonder if Uncle Edward has altered at all now he’s so grand?’ I asked myself.

It must be nearly three years since I saw him and then he was quite an ordinary Member of Parliament who, I understood, was frowned on pretty consistently by the Chamberlain Government because he asked uncomfortable questions that nobody wanted to answer. He always said Mr. Churchill was wonderful, even in the days when everyone thought he was finished and was not likely to hold an important office again, and when he became Prime Minister, he made Uncle Edward Minister of Information.

I just couldn’t believe my eyes when Mummy brought me his cable. He sent two – one was official asking me formally to come as his secretary, and the other was to Mummy saying,

Delighted to see Mela, and although we are breaking things rather than mending them in England just now, I’ll do my best.

This was a joke, of course, because Mummy had wired him that I’d got a broken heart and she wanted me to get away. I suppose it was pretty beastly of me to worry her so much – but once I’d begun to tell her about Tim, I just broke down and cried like a child. And that’s not a very good simile because I can’t remember crying very much in my childhood. I’ve always been very happy – I expect really I’ve been spoilt. I’ve certainly always had things when I wanted them. This is the first time I have ever come against it and I’m pretty ashamed of being so bowled over, but I can’t help it.

I love Tim. I want him all the time, every minute, and now that I’m going off to England to forget him, it’s making things worse. I keep thinking,

‘How interesting this is. What will Tim think when I tell him?’

Then I remember that I won’t be able to tell him and when that happens I just start crying all over again.

I stood on the top deck of the ship looking at the sea, bleak and grey, and I wondered why I didn’t chuck myself in. After all, I have really nothing to live for now. All the natural things in life are barred to me forever – a husband, a home, and children – that was what I wanted and that’s what I’m never going to get. Yet somehow the idea of committing suicide is so ridiculous. I’ve always felt there was something theatrical and unreal about the accounts in newspapers of love-pacts and people putting their heads in gas ovens or jumping off the Empire State Building in New York.

I couldn’t do any of those things and I don’t think it’s because I don’t love Tim enough – it’s going to be far harder to live without him than to die for love of him. I keep thinking it would be just perfect if a bomb fell on me in London. I could then die a heroine’s death and perhaps Tim would be sorry when he heard about it.

It’s terribly annoying in many ways having been brought up in the twentieth century – or perhaps I should say in twentieth-century Canada. Maybe they do things differently in other countries. If I tried to drift about and go into a decline nobody would be at all sympathetic.

I’d like to fade away wanly in black velvet and pearls with a few violets in my hand – but the point is that no one would come in with hushed voices and visit me and I shouldn’t have a salon of adoring friends hanging on my dying words. They’d just say,

“Oh, don’t let’s go to see Mela – she’s such a crashing bore!”

Besides, I’m not really the fading type. I wonder how many times I’ve looked in the glass this week and wondered what Audrey Herman has that I haven’t. I’ve always thought myself pretty good-looking on the whole. Of course one notices one’s own worst points more than other people do.

Strangers have raved to Mummy and said I was “the prettiest thing in years” and though I didn’t allow myself to get too puffed up about that, I’d have been a fool if I hadn’t realised that I certainly had points over some of my friends. I’ve got lovely hair, for instance. It’s a mixture of Father’s and Mother’s and I shouldn’t have asked for any other colour if I’d had the choice.

Mummy was red – Scottish red – not that dull sandy colour but the rather deeper tones that make you think of autumn leaves, and Daddy is a sort of golden brown, so I, with what I call consummate tact, compromised between the two.

I’m what Hollywood calls a ‘a chestnut blonde’. I’m too fair to be red and too red to be fair. And with that I’ve got dark eyelashes. Genuine ones. No stranger believes it, but they’ve always been that colour since I was a baby. I’ve also got the whitish sort of skin that goes with red hair, a turned-up nose, and grey-blue eyes, the colour of the Atlantic the only day there was a glint of sun.

The colour of eyes isn’t important, though. I think my generation seldom notices anything but the expression in them. Mother was describing her family to me one day and I realised then that I’d not the slightest idea of the colour of anyone’s eyes except my own.

“In my day,” Mummy said, “we used to notice eyes particularly and all the novelists harped on them. I think it must have been the fashion, but you are all in much too much of a hurry to sing Two Eyes of Grey to someone you love.”

I know Tim would have yawned his head off if I’d ever tried to sing to him, and anyway his eyes were brown – and brown rhymes with town, which doesn’t sound very romantic but makes you think of going places and having fun – and we certainly did that, both before and after we were engaged. Oh, dear! – it’s depressing to think that all my memories are in the past and that now I shall always think of love in the past tense instead of in the future.

I’d got so used to thinking, ‘when we are married I’ll do so-and-so’ that now I find myself still doing it. If I see a dress I like or a nice piece of furniture, I find myself thinking,

‘I’ll have that when I’m married. I wonder if Tim will like it!’ – then I remember!

I didn’t get many clothes to come on this trip. I just couldn’t bear to go round the shops – in fact, Mummy bought me two or three dresses without my even seeing them. I couldn’t rouse myself to do anything but cry. I cried the whole of the first night after Tim had gone. Mummy sat up with me until it was nearly dawn. I kept saying to her, “Do go away and leave me alone”.

But when she got to the door I’d ask her to stay.

I despise myself for it – at the same time it just shows the thinness of the veneer of ‘we can take it’, and ‘our generation’s tough’. I remember a girl who was at school with me saying, “No man will ever cause me a sleepless night” – and thinking how right she was and that I’d feel the same.

But that was before I met Tim – before I fell in love. Perhaps love is the same in every generation and it doesn’t pay any account to the fashions or the affections of the period. If one comes to think of it, it must be. That’s why Mummy was prepared to go with Daddy after she’d only met him a few times and give up everything she’d ever known because she loved him. It’s funny, but one never thinks of one’s parents as being ‘fraught with passion and emotion’. When one talks about love for them one imagines it a nice, discreet, kid-glove affair – tea and buns in the drawing room and hardly kissing each other except in a friendly way.  It’s stupid I know, but I suppose we all imagine that love is more tremendous, more passionate, and more overwhelming for us than for anyone else, and there’s something faintly shocking in thinking that older people have felt the same.

Now I come to think of it, I see that Mummy must have loved Daddy violently, with every breath she drew, just as I love Tim, and that’s why she was so understanding. I think, too, she was a bit frightened as to what I’d do. I was pretty wild in some of the things I said.

“I’ll get him back,” I told her. “I’ll go up to Winnipeg and I’ll beat that girl Audrey Herman. Tim’s just taken with a pretty face. He wants me really – he must want me.”

I meant it at the time. Now I think I should have enough pride to leave him alone. And yet I don’t know. Can one have pride where love is concerned? If Tim so much as sent me a postcard with a few words of hope on it, I’d go back this second if it meant swimming the Atlantic. But I suppose there’s no chance of that now or ever.

Mummy realised it quicker than I did – she cabled Uncle Edward first thing in the morning. It was pretty sporting of her really because I know it was hard for both her and Daddy to let me go when the time came, but Uncle Edward had said before the war,

“Send Pamela over to me when you’re tired of her. She could be my secretary if she could spare the time in between sightseeing and turning the heads of all our young men.”

“Would you like to go?” Mummy asked me.

“I’d love to,” I replied, “and I’ll work hard, I promise you that, Uncle Edward, if you’ll have me.”

“Perhaps next fall,” Mummy said. “It would be a lovely experience for Mela and I’d like her to see England.”

There was a wistful note in her voice and a funny look in her eyes, which comes there when she speaks of England, and most of all of Scotland. It means she’s homesick, but I know she’d never go back while she’s not welcome.

“Next fall then, Uncle Edward,” I said gaily. “I’ll be with you, and don’t forget to polish up the town band.”

I didn’t go because of Tim. I never gave England a thought after that, as for going away – Mummy couldn’t even get me to go down to Toronto for a weekend if there was a chance of seeing Tim in Montreal. I suppose she felt now that my one chance of forgetting Tim was to go away, and although she didn’t tell me what she said, I gather her cable to Uncle Edward was pretty desperate.

We got the reply in three hours, and exactly half-an-hour after it came, they rang up from Ottawa to say they were getting a special permit for me to travel to England. Still, I couldn’t be enthusiastic about anything. I just wandered about looking miserable and crying myself to sleep every night until Daddy said,

“For the Lord’s sake, Mela, cheer up! No man in the world is worth being so miserable about and if that young man was here now I’d kick him hard in the pants!”

“I can’t help it,” I said, and started to cry.

“Leave the child alone,” Mummy said. “Don’t you see she’s making herself ill?”

“She ought to have more sense,” Daddy growled.

He didn’t mean it unkindly. I knew that. He was only upset that I should be so miserable. When the moment came to leave him on the dock in New York, I suddenly felt I couldn’t bear it.

“I’m not going,” I said. “I can’t leave you. We’ll get my baggage off and go back home.”

He shook his head.

“Your mother would never forgive us.”

But I wasn’t thinking of Mummy at that moment, or really of Daddy either. I was thinking of Tim. I felt I couldn’t go so far away, couldn’t leave him behind and put a whole ocean between us. At that moment I felt I must have been crazy to consent. I looked up at the ship towering above us and I knew it was relentless and stern – an instrument of torture specially manufactured to take me away from all I loved.

“I won’t go – I won’t!” I said – but it was no use.

And then I went up on the top deck as they started moving the gangways. I didn’t tell Daddy, but I’d a sneaking hope right up to the last moment that Tim would turn up and stop me going. I’d crept out the night before and sent him a wire.

“Sailing Europe tomorrow,” I’d said, and I’d added the name of the ship.

‘If he cares at all,’ I thought, ‘surely he’ll come or at least wire, Don’t go until I see you.’

But there was nothing and when the ship slowly drew out from the harbour I knew that my last hope had died, and then once again I didn’t care what happened. I went down to my cabin and locked myself in, but after an hour or so I felt hungry. It just shows that matter has an ascendancy over mind, whatever people say to the contrary. I’d cried so much that I could hardly see out of my eyes and yet when I went down to the saloon for dinner I ate heartily. Going down to the saloon that evening made me pull myself together, only it wasn’t the food that did it. It was something I overheard one of the officers say to another.

I was coming out of the dining saloon just behind him and he didn’t see me. He stopped to light a cigarette, and as he did so he said to his friend,

“Pretty lousy lot this trip.”

Now that particular officer had been sitting opposite my table at dinner. He was young and quite attractive and I knew then what a freak I must look. I’d been so unhappy that I hadn’t bothered even to powder my nose or make up my lips and when I got back to my cabin I nearly had a fit when I saw my face. It just shows that one can control oneself if one wants to, however impossible it seems, because after that I didn’t cry nearly so much.

There were moments, of course, when someone started to play the piano in the lounge one evening and they played Over the Rainbow, which was one of the tunes we’d danced to all the summer. Another time when I went out on deck just before I went to bed – it was very cold but the wind had dropped and the stars were shining – there was a sort of radiance over the sea and suddenly I felt,

‘How wonderful this would be if I was with Tim on my honeymoon trip!’

We’d sometimes talked of going to Europe – it was to be a toss-up between Paris and Florida. I ran below simply howling, but when I looked at myself in the glass in my cabin, I stopped. I didn’t want to look ‘lousy’ even if it was a relief to my feelings to sob my heart out.

I’ve cried very little since. I expect I shall become hard, cold, and bitter – one of those withered women that people always avoid because they say such shrewish things to everyone they meet. It’s awful in a way to realise that my love life is finished at twenty-one, but it is, and I shall try and grow old gracefully with an atmosphere of wistful sadness about me so that people will say.

“Poor dear, her heart was broken when she was very young and she’s never really recovered from it.”

The awful thing is, I don’t believe Tim will mind. How will he know? I wish now I’d had the sense to say that whatever happened we’d remain friends and correspond with each other. I could then have written him long letters with an underlying meaning that would have shown him what I was feeling and suffering. But perhaps that wouldn’t have worked either.

Oh, well, it’s all done now – it’s past and finished and there’s nothing for me but to look forward to England and hope by some lucky chance I’m blown up in a raid.

Chapter Three

When the taxi stopped in front of 92 Smith Square, I just sat and stared through the window.

At first, I thought he had brought me to the wrong house, then the driver opened the connecting window and said,

“Looks as if there’s been a spot of trouble ’ere!”

It certainly did! There was a heap of bricks and rubble on the pavement and although the front door was closed the rooms on either side of it were open to the rain – there were satin curtains lying wet and bedraggled, across what had been the window railings. Over the mantelpiece, in what had obviously been the dining room, I could see a picture with its frame smashed, but with the portrait of Uncle Edward himself still intact. After a moment of bewildered amazement, I gave a cry of horror, and jumped out of the taxi. A policeman walked across the road to me.

“Can I do anything for you, Miss?”

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“We’ve ’ad a spot of trouble round ’ere,” the policeman replied.

It annoyed me the way both he and the taxi driver spoke as if someone had cut their fingers or been had up for exceeding the speed limit. This was serious – in fact, to me it was desperate. Where was Uncle Edward? I was just going to ask further questions when another policeman – I think he was an inspector – came striding up.

“Are you Miss MacDonald?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Miss, but you’re a bit earlier than we expected. I was told to look out for you. Will you come this way?”

He gave the taxi driver a number and then he and I walked about a hundred yards down the street to where there was a smaller house with a green door and green painted shutters. Not that I’d time to notice much at the moment. I was feeling agitated and upset by this unexpected reception.

The inspector was still apologising.

“You never know these days with aeroplanes. Generally they are two or three hours late. To tell you the truth, when Mr. Flacton told me to look out for you I didn’t think I need start on the job for another half-hour or so.”

I was just going to ask who Mr. Flacton was, when the green door opened and the inspector said, “Miss MacDonald”, to the butler, and added.

“The taxi with her luggage is coming up now.”

The butler said pompously,

“This way, Miss.”

He led me through a little panelled hall into a large room overlooking a courtyard at the back of the house.

My first impression was of books – books in shelves from floor to ceiling – and then from behind a big desk at the far end of the room there rose, rather slowly, a man. He was tall, dark, and extremely good-looking in a stiff upper class English way. I always feel there is something cynical and inhuman about those sorts of men. He came slowly across the room to meet me and I saw that he walked with a limp.

“Are you Miss MacDonald?” he asked. “I’m Peter Flacton. I’m sorry that I couldn’t get down to Croydon to meet you. If I’d been certain the aeroplane would arrive punctually I might have managed it, but sometimes they’re so delayed.”

As he stopped speaking, I came to the point.

“What’s happened to my uncle?”

“Won’t you sit down?” Peter Flacton said.

He pointed to a chair near the desk and as I crossed to it, he limped back to his own chair.

“Perhaps I’d better explain who l am,” he started.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said impatiently. “There’s only one thing I want to know and that is – what’s happened to my uncle? It’s been rather a shock seeing the house when I arrived.”

“You’ve seen the house!” he exclaimed. “I’m sorry about that. I told the inspector to meet you at the end of the road.”

“Well, he didn’t,” I replied sharply. “The taxi took me to Number 92, and then I saw that it had been hit by a bomb. Was Uncle Edward injured? – that’s what I want to know.”

Peter Flacton hesitated, and then he spoke quietly.

“Your uncle was killed.”

I stared at him, not being able for the moment to take it in.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you like this,” he went on. “I wanted to prepare you for the shock. It’s been a great shock to me too. You see, I was fond of your uncle. I was his P.P.S.”

I said nothing, and he went on as if giving me time to compose myself.

“That means Parliamentary Private Secretary in case you don’t know. I’d done a lot of work one way and another for him before the war, then after Dunkirk when I got my leg smashed up, he asked me to go back to him. It’s been wonderful working with him because I admired your uncle more than any man I have ever met in my life. Somehow I can’t believe that his career is really finished.

“When did it happen?” I asked, and my voice sounded strange even to myself.

“The night before last.”

“Does everyone know? Is it in the papers?”

“It was given out on the one o’clock news today, so it will be in the evening papers. We didn’t release the information sooner for certain reasons.”

“What reasons?”

Peter Flacton looked uncomfortable. He hesitated. Then as if he had suddenly made up his mind, he said,

“I’m going to tell you the truth, Miss MacDonald. I think you are entitled to it. I see no reason why I shouldn’t, but what I am going to say is completely and absolutely confidential.”

“You can trust me.”

He looked at me as if he was confirming my words, then said,

“Your uncle was killed by a bomb. There was a raid on at the time, but we know with absolute certainty that no aeroplane flew over this particular area.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he replied, “that the bomb which exploded in Number 92 was put there with the intention of destroying your uncle’s life.”

“But who did it?”

“We have no idea. Naturally, the police are working on the matter – that’s why the news of your uncle’s death was kept from the public. We don’t want to lose the chance of getting some clue but frankly, at the moment, we have none.”

“None at all?” I asked. “But surely German spies, or whatever they are, can’t rush about London blowing people up?”

I spoke with a kind of horror. I was just beginning to realise how ghastly it was that Uncle Edward had been killed, and now that he was no longer there, I knew how much I had looked forward to seeing him.

“It sounds fantastic to me,” I added hotly. “I don’t suppose you could blow up one of the chiefs of the Nazi party and get away with it!”

“We shall do everything in our power to bring those responsible to justice,” Peter Flacton said.

“That’s all very nice, but what about Uncle Edward? That won’t bring him back, will it? Didn’t he have detectives to guard him? What were you all doing to let something like this happen?”

“Miss MacDonald,” Peter Flacton replied frigidly, “I assure you this has been the most terrible shock and surprise to us all. At the Cabinet Meeting this morning the Prime Minister expressed not only his deepest regret but also his horror at the occurrence.”

“That still doesn’t explain how it was allowed to happen,” I insisted obstinately.

Peter Flacton suddenly stopped being calm and explanatory.

“Damn it all! Do you suppose I haven’t asked myself that question over and over again?”

He looked human for the first time, less stiff and correct and more like a man who was really upset at having lost someone he cared about.

“Well, why don’t you do something?” I asked. “Why don’t you catch the people? What’s the point of sitting here and saying you’re sorry. Why, in Canada the Mounties don’t let people get away with murder.”

“Well, it’s a pity you didn’t bring some of them over with you,” Peter Flacton snapped, and we both stared at each other with angry eyes.

Then he seemed to remember his manners.

“I’m sorry, Miss MacDonald, I know this is a terrible shock for you, but I’m a little on edge myself and I haven’t had much sleep since it happened.”

“Don’t apologise,” I said. “I’d rather you did show a little emotion about it instead of the ‘imperturbable British calm’ I’ve heard so much about.”

He looked for a moment as if he might smile, but instead he reverted to his impersonation of the perfect statesman and replied,

“May I assure you once again, Miss MacDonald, that everything I can do will be done and that the whole nation will mourn your uncle’s death. He has died in the cause of freedom just as surely as if he had been shot in battle.”