Damn these people! Damn polite society! It wasn’t as though she were even a Christian herself, really. She only came to church for her parents’ sake.
Dear Mary, there with George and the children. Her oldest friend.
‘Darling!’
‘Hullo, darling. Goodness, hasn’t the baby grown!’
‘They do that,’ said Mary, comfortable, happy Mary. She couldn’t get used to her as a wife and mother. She was only twenty-two. Margot still thought of her as her pigtailed friend from Sunday School days, sharing whispers and toffees behind their prayer-books. ‘She’s quite the pig, aren’t you, angel? How long are you home for? You must come and see us.’
‘Oh, the whole holidays. I’d love to.’
They arranged a date. Darling Mary. Margot had almost forgotten what it was like to have a proper friend like that.
1916
That summer – the summer Margot turned sixteen – had been like something out of a storybook.
Harry would be nineteen in September, and then he was going to join up. He’d had a bad case of bronchitis the year before, and so had been exempt from conscription, but he thought he’d pass the medical in September.
‘I’d feel such a wart if I did anything else,’ he said.
Margot thought he was probably right, but the idea of it terrified her. Not that she’d ever really believed that anything would happen to him. She’d been more concerned with the thought of them being apart for months and months on end.
‘How can I bear it?’ she’d said to him.
‘I don’t suppose you will,’ he’d said cheerfully, ‘But that’s what women have to do in wartime, isn’t it? Buck up!’
He’d agreed to wait until his birthday to join up, so they had the summer at least.
‘One summer!’ she said, knowing as she did so that she was putting it on for dramatic effect, and he’d laughed and kissed her.
They’d belonged to each other from the moment they’d met. Perhaps she’d been deluding herself – could it really have been love? Was such a thing possible when you were fifteen and as much of an ass as she had been? Surely he must have been a bit of an ass too, an eighteen-year-old dragged to a village in the middle of nowhere, full of restless energy and frustration. What had he really seen in her? The recklessness? The adoration? The blonde hair?
They’d both been bored silly, she remembered. Aside from a week in Scarborough, she’d been home all summer with – it seemed – nothing to do besides chores and music practice and dull church groups.
The previous summers, Margot had been willing enough to play about with Jocelyn and Stephen in the vicarage garden and on the common, going on excursions with Mother, on woodland picnics and walks on the fells and day trips to Robin Hood’s Bay. They’d helped their father with the Sunday School picnic and the church fête, dug half-heartedly in the garden, helped more enthusiastically with the fruit-picking, made summer puddings and apple cakes, and spent long lazy afternoons reading in the vicarage garden.
In 1916, however, something had changed. Stephen was moody and frustrated, realising, perhaps, that next year he would be eighteen and expected to fight. He seemed suddenly aware of his status as a young man, and he showed little interest in childish games. Margot too, could feel herself becoming too old for childhood. She had spent a lot of the early part of the year locked in her bedroom, staring at her reflection in the looking-glass and worrying about the life that lay before her. Would she ever find a husband? Why had no one fallen in love with her yet? She was fifteen, after all. Surely someone should have by now?
And then Harry Singer had walked into the church.
How frustrating their courtship had been! They could never be alone together. When he called at her house, her mother always insisted on waiting in the drawing room with them; when she called at his, one of his little sisters was forced to chaperone them, protesting loudly at the duty.
‘Why can’t you get engaged?’ his sister Prissy had complained. ‘Then I won’t have to sit here for hours watching you canoodle.’
‘Could we, though?’ Margot whispered, while Prissy retreated behind her novel, sighing ostentatiously.
‘Get engaged? Of course. But—’
‘But what?’
‘Well – will it really make any difference? Will your parents let us be alone together? Because I’m damn sure mine won’t.’
‘Of course they will!’ said Margot.
But they hadn’t.
Her parents had treated her engagement with something like amusement.
‘Well, well, we’ll see,’ her mother said. And, ‘I hope you aren’t expecting to get married before he joins up, are you?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Margot had retorted. She would be sixteen in July. But of course she had no intention of doing anything of the sort – how could she possibly get married? She was still at school. Nobody could expect her to run her own house – she was, for all reasonable purposes, a child. But to have the whole thing treated as a joke made her almost want to do it – just to show them.
As to being allowed to spend time on their own...
‘I think not, my dear,’ her father said, and Jocelyn or her mother would be dispatched to sit in the drawing room whenever he appeared.
‘Polite conversation!’ said Harry. He was an active young man, and sitting in the drawing room or the garden bored him senseless. He leaned in towards her. ‘What do you think would happen if I kissed you on the lips?’ Margot giggled.
‘Goodness!’ she whispered back. ‘I can’t imagine. I rather think my mother might turn into a pillar of salt.’
‘Shocking behaviour,’ he agreed, and he dropped a folded piece of paper into her hand.
She waited until he was gone and unfolded it.
2 o’clock. Make some excuse and meet me at the Harcourts’ house?
And so it began.
The Harcourts were away for the summer. They had shut up the house and taken the servants with them, but before they left, they’d engaged Harry to water the plants, feed the cats, mow the lawns and generally keep the garden in good order.
All that long summer, the Harcourts’ house became their escape and their sanctuary. She would set off in the ostensible direction of his house, then – making sure nobody could see her – duck off into the lane down to the Harcourts’ house. Even now, remembering it, Margot felt the old shiver of excitement. The lane to the Harcourts’ house was a pale green tunnel, the boughs of the trees meeting and intertwining over her head, the sunlight green-patterned and dappled through the leaves. To Margot, it felt like slipping through into a wild green kingdom, one where she and Harry were free to live as they chose.
And then, of course, there was the Harcourts’ house itself. A modern white-brick bungalow with a half-wild garden ingeniously filled with grottos and seats and bits of statuary. And at the end of the garden, the view over the valley, distant, smoky and strangely beautiful. The empty house itself, the furniture covered with dust sheets, other people’s crockery in the cupboards and other people’s books on the shelves. Other people’s love letters, presumably, in the locked writing-desks, and other people’s nightdresses in the cupboard drawers, although Harry – who was strictly honest about such things – would never look.