A Gathering Storm(58)

‘Cheer up, won’t you?’ her father remarked as he served himself his wife’s famed duchesse potatoes and she rose, threw back her chair and ran out of the room. A few minutes later her mother found her sitting on her bed, staring dully at the floor.

‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’ she asked Beatrice. ‘You won’t say why you came home from London early and you’ve been rude and miserable ever since.’ The girl did not reply so she went back downstairs. Delphine didn’t know that her daughter held a letter hidden behind her back, the letter from Rafe. The phrases floated in Bea’s head. It was wonderful to see you, but also, I realized when I saw Angie again the depth of my feelings for her. It was like a light going on in my head. Bea, I will always value you as my dear, dear friend who saved my life and has been saving it ever since with your friendship and reassurance . . .

‘Don’t you see?’ she wanted to shout at him. ‘She doesn’t really care, she just wants you to be in love with her. She needs adoration.’ It seemed so clear to Bea now. She hated Angelina for casually reaching out and plucking Rafe. Because she could. Because it was easy. Did she really despise Beatrice so much, or care so little for her? What could Beatrice do or say? Nothing, without losing her dignity. Nothing.

After a while she recovered herself sufficiently to go back downstairs. She resumed her seat under her father’s baleful glare and muttered, ‘Sorry.’

‘Our dinner’s getting cold, young lady,’ was all he said. ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

They had been invited to the Brookers’ for tea and party games. Beatrice tried hiding behind the excuse of a headache but her mother, who was worried about her, insisted she come and be cheered up by Charades and Consequences. She wasn’t. After tea came the reading of a poem entitled ‘Bombers over Bethlehem’, written by another guest, Mr Cyril Thatcher, St Florian’s resident poet, which really proved the limit.

‘Much more of this, is there?’ Beatrice heard her father whisper to her mother and was relieved when they left shortly afterwards to walk home under the wintry stars.

In January she returned to school a different girl to the one who’d left full of bright-eyed expectancy before the holidays. Everybody noticed how withdrawn she was, how she took no interest in her work or anything.

‘Beatrice Marlow, we hardly hear from you.’ Her science teacher dragged her out of her thoughts. ‘Will you tell us the four types of Arthropod, if you please.’ Brought back to the reality of the chalk-dusty classroom, and the inquisitive eyes of the dozen other girls in black pinafores, she stuttered out an answer that was more or less correct, and the lesson moved on. But when the bell went, Miss Hardwick held her back and asked, ‘Is there anything wrong, dear? Such dark shadows under your eyes. Are you sleeping properly?’

Beatrice was not sleeping at all well. Her dreams revolved around memories of Rafe and Angelina, the jagged nightmare snapshot of them sitting together on the sofa, or sometimes another, that she was searching for him in the dark, howling, stormy sea, and this time not finding him.

‘You’re talking in your sleep again, Marlow Do shut up,’ Hilary Vickers drawled one morning, not unkindly. Hilary, an earl’s grand-daughter, possessed a natural air of authority. She considered the other girls at Larchmont beneath her in the social scale – she was probably right – and effortlessly assumed charge. But Beatrice was grateful to her, for in her desire for control, Hilary had stamped out some of the culture of cattiness, and this year the others seemed to respect the aura of ‘keep your distance’ that Beatrice had woven round herself.

Winter gave way to spring, but she hardly noticed through her blur of misery. Another letter arrived from Rafe, extoling Angie’s sweetness and she couldn’t bring herself to reply – did he really not understand how deeply he had hurt her?

Just before Easter, there was a letter from Angelina. When she read it, Beatrice felt nothing. Part of her had been expecting it all along. Rafe’s regiment had gone abroad, Angelina wrote – to France, she thought. Before he embarked he’d asked her to marry him. She had told him she would, but hadn’t finally decided.

Slowly, Beatrice’s anger grew. Angie seemed to be treating something as serious as a proposal of marriage as lightly as an invitation to tea. Worse was the knowledge that Rafe was possibly in the front line and there was nothing she could do but hope and pray that he’d be all right. She considered writing to him via his regiment, indeed twice started letters, but found she couldn’t keep her anger off the page. He wouldn’t need that from her at the moment.