The House of Flowers Mass market paperbound - 2004

Excerpt

Part One
ENGLAND, 1941

Chapter One

Major Folkestone frowned and shuffled the papers at which he was pretending to stare so hard. On the other side of his desk Cissie Lavington stood with her trademark long cigarette holder stuck jauntily out of the side of her mouth while she regarded him with her one good eye, the other hidden as always behind her other trademark, a handmade black silk eye-patch. Even though the matter before them was of a serious nature, as always Cissie's expression was one of benign indifference, as if she had only a passing interest in what the world might throw at her.
'You'd rather I told her?' Cissie volunteered, finally growing impatient with the way Anthony Folkestone was hiding behind his paperwork.

'I don't see why you would think that,' Anthony Folkestone muttered, pretending to find the latest sheet of paper in his hand of particular interest. 'But it does have to be done.'

'I expect you feel, Major, I expect you feel that - well,' Cissie replied, tapping the end of her cigarette into the tin ashtray on the desk, 'that this sort of stuff comes a lot better from a woman.'
Cissie took one last draw on her cigarette, removed the stub and inserted a fresh smoke deftly in her holder, while never taking her eye off the man on the other side of the desk. As she had noted over the past few weeks spent training agents in H Section of what was discreetly described in Top Secret documents as 'the War Office', jobs involving the breaking of bad news always seemed to come a lot better from a woman.

'The point is I'd do it myself if I had the time. But just at the moment, all this paperwork . . .'

Folkestone shook his head sadly, at the same time collecting the loose pages up and tapping them into a tidy pile.

'I understand Lady Tetherington's in lodgings in Benton,' he added, handing Cissie a sheet of paper bearing the address. 'Taking some leave.'

'Rather well earned, considering. The top brass are very pleased with what we did - apparently it cheered the Old Man up no end. Not that we expect it to be the only attempt on his life, by any means, but there you are. One down, that's something at least. Quite apart from anything else it would have been invaluable propaganda. Although I understand the Old Man has a few doubles waiting in the wings for that moment, if it ever comes.'

Major Folkestone nodded. H Section had done brilliantly to thwart the assassination attempt on Churchill, but for the moment they had other matters on their minds.

'You could always ask the WVS,' he offered, his thoughts returning to Lady Tetherington.
Cissie shook her head, standing by his office door, already impatient to leave.

'I think not,' she replied in a firm voice. 'A factory was hit near Benton last night. We can't take anyone away from much needed work.' She opened the door. 'I'd rather do it myself, Major, since I helped train Lady Tetherington. Only right really.'

'Very well,' Folkestone agreed. 'So be it. And perhaps you'd be so good as to ask Miss Budge to come back in on your way out? My wretched intercom is on the blink yet again. Thank you.'
Cissie did as asked, after a thankfully brief exchange of observations about the weather with Major Folkestone's new assistant, the plump and smiling Miss Budge, who was only too happy to bustle into Major Folkestone's office, notebook at the ready.

Poppy watched Cissie strolling up the garden path towards the front door of the small suburban house in the back street of Benton. Cissie's eccentric way of still dressing in the vaguely flapper style of the late nineteen twenties meant that against the drab background of the privet hedge that ran along the side of the front garden she now seemed to stand out like some exotic foreign bloom.

In the kitchen at the back of the house Poppy's landlady, all too appropriately named Mrs Bellows, was listening to a radio that crackled and boomed at full volume, so much so that if Poppy had not noticed Cissie walking up to the door it was perfectly possible that neither occupant of Number 24 The Gardens would have heard the bell.

'Shall I answer it?' Poppy wondered academically, putting her head around the kitchen door after Cissie had rung for the third or fourth time. 'I think it might be someone for me.'

'It's just as I said!' Mrs Bellows shouted back over the radio. 'What I was telling you all over breakfast! Ministry of Food says we're all to go carefully with the tin-opener!'

'I'll answer the door, Mrs Bellows,' Poppy said, nodding backwards as she heard yet another long ring of the bell. She closed the kitchen door in order to try to shut out some of the radio's din, hoping that her visitor was coming to tell her that her leave was over, and she wasn't going to have to spend much longer under Mrs Bellows's roof eating watery oatmeal and paper-thin fried bread for breakfast, with tea so weak it might have come straight from the hot water tap. But as soon as she saw Cissie's face she knew that her visit was nothing to do with ending her leave.

'I imagine you can guess why one's here,' Cissie stated at once, when Poppy had shown her into the front room, an over-neat apartment furnished with heavy square furniture with rounded feet, and arms draped with lace antimacassars that matched the freshly washed nets at the front window.
'I would say, judging from your expression, that it has to do with my husband,' Poppy replied, sitting down on one fat arm of the chair behind her. 'And if it is, it can't be good news.'

'I'm afraid you're quite correct, and it's not, my dear,' Cissie sighed, expertly loading her cigarette holder before accepting a light from Poppy. 'Don't know how up to date you are?'

'The last I heard they were changing his hotel,' Poppy said, attempting a joke to lighten the atmosphere. 'They were sending him somewhere up north.'

'Yes, they did change his hotel. Sent him to a top security one, especially designed for the likes of him. Point is - point is someone made a gaff of it and the blighter tried to make a run for it, d'you see?'

'That can't have been good, I imagine.'

'Absolutely not. Chaps with him took a very dim view, I'm afraid. An extremely dim view. Hence my visit.'

There was a short silence while Poppy stared at Cissie Lavington, searching deep to try to find her feelings which at that moment seemed to have deserted her.

'I see,' she said finally. 'That is, Basil's dead, I take it?'

''Fraid so. Lord Tetherington was shot while trying to escape.'

'Yes. Yes, I rather thought that might happen.'

Cissie nodded and drew on her cigarette. 'A better thing altogether, if one considers it. Better than the alternative, if you see what I mean.'

'Of course,' Poppy replied quietly, imagining that given the choice anyone would prefer the bullet to the rope.

'Absolutely no doubt,' Cissie agreed. 'Much better thing all round. Besides - it's always a major worry that blighters like that might get sprung, and then one's back to square one again.' She stared at Poppy, wondering how she would take the implication. Poppy met her gaze and nodded.

'Agreed.'

Cissie could not help feeling relieved that Poppy had obviously decided on a practical, no-nonsense approach, but as a woman she was also curious. Having known Poppy from her early days at Eden Park, when she had helped turn the shy bespectacled young ingénue into a confident, courageous and bright young woman, she was well aware that Poppy's brief marriage to Basil Tetherington had been unhappy to say the least, but this did not necessarily mean that Poppy had never loved him.

'It's quite strange, really-' Speaking quietly, Poppy stood up and walked over to the window, drawing aside the net curtain to look outside. 'Even as early on as my honeymoon I used to wonder why Basil had married me, and I realised fairly quickly that it had to be because I had money. He thought of me as a gold mine - you know, only child, American parents in the diplomatic corps, no confidence. I was an easy target really, particularly for someone like him. Yet I still hoped, still went on hoping that he might just have married me because he had some feelings for me. But of course he didn't. Not one. No - actually, that is not entirely true. I think he did have feelings for me - feelings of contempt. As a matter of fact I don't think he liked me at all. So it's all rather odd, hearing that he's dead, probably because he has been dead for me for so long already.'

'Understandable.' Cissie looked round for an ashtray but finding none got rid of her cigarette ash in the coal bucket instead.

'I know. But it doesn't seem to affect me at all because the thing is I suppose I feel as if I have been a widow already. Ever since the Fascists blew up his car in Italy - and of course I didn't really know what he was up to then, that they were just faking his death so they could smuggle him back into England - but ever since that moment I have felt - well - widowed. I lost Basil then, really, but then he came back to life again, and now he's died again - so the consequence of all that is that now I don't really know how to feel. Or what.'

'Why should you, my dear? Matter of fact I'd say it would be really quite rum if you did know how to feel. Or what. If you felt anything at all.'

'Yes,' Poppy agreed thoughtfully. 'I imagine you're right.'

Cissie glanced at Poppy, who was staring out of the window at the bleak view without, and drew slowly on her cigarette.

'When it's as quiet as this, hard to think there's a war on. One gets so used to sirens, and ambulances, bombs and all the rest of it. It's unsettling, this quiet,' she murmured, breaking the silence.

'When I first heard Basil was dead,' Poppy continued, as she remembered walking in Green Park the day Basil proposed to her, and how oddly happy she had been then, 'when they said he'd been killed in Italy, for a second I did actually think that since I'd known and seen a little bit of the nice side of Basil - possibly all there was - I did think it was my duty as a widow to try to remember him at those moments. But even though he'd seemed so kind when we first met at a really rather dull dance, it really was impossible to hang on to that sort of memory, seeing that he was a traitor. Yet I still feel guilty, because after all I married him. No one else did.'

'See what you mean. Yes.'

'I suppose what I actually feel like, to be perfectly honest, is heaving a rather large sigh of relief. I can't actually pretend to be sad, that would be hypocritical. After all, he stood for everything I hate.'
'Regret's an odd sort of thing, you know. Speaking for oneself, one finds one's memories of someone are so often more than a bit tinged with regret for what they weren't, rather than for what they were.'

Poppy looked round at Cissie, intrigued as always by her observations. Many people who didn't know Cissie Lavington well, or who didn't bother to try to get to know her better, were inclined to write her off as a bit of a social butterfly, because of her upper class mannerisms and her apparent determination to take nothing in this life very seriously. But those who knew Cissie well, those who bothered to talk to her and to listen to what she really had to say, admired and respected her for the astuteness of her observations and her refusal to tell anything but the truth.

'Anyway,' Cissie said in conclusion, firmly squashing her cigarette on the inside wall of the fireplace. 'The war's still on so one had best beetle off and continue to fight the g.f.'

'Of course,' Poppy agreed, walking to the door with her. 'Besides, I think my late husband's already had far more attention than he deserves.'

'Pity we didn't pay more attention to taking people like him more seriously, and locking them away years ago,' Cissie replied, dropping her cigarette holder back into a handbag that she then snapped smartly shut. 'If people had only listened a little to the warning voices, we might not be in this pickle now.'

'I thought it was precisely because of people like Basil-'

Media reviews

“Her imagination is thoroughly original.”
–Daily Mail