Page 93 of The Gathering Storm

‘He didn’t care about money and titles and society and all that sort of thing. That’s why Mummy disapproved of him at first. At least, Robert disapproved of him – Mummy just wasn’t sure about him. But he was such fun to be with. After he came back from that trip, he was different. He seemed the same on the surface, but underneath he was – harder.’

‘But you still married him,’ Molly said.

‘I loved him,’ she said simply. ‘I love him. But I don’t feel I – quite – know him now. Not as I used to.’

‘Specifics?’ Molly said briskly. Vivian would be back in a moment.

‘His business friends, whom we have to entertain. I don’t feel that they’re like us. And why do we have to entertain them? You don’t do that.’

‘We have authors to dinner.’

‘That’s different. You don’t have to impress them.’

‘You have to impress these – business friends?’

‘Dinner has to be very good, the best wines. I have to have new gowns all the time. And be charming.’

‘It’s the hostess’s job to make her guests feel welcome. Look at your mother.’

Charlotte frowned. ‘I know. But it’s more than that. I can’t explain it. And there’s this business of not wanting me to work.’

‘Ah,’ said Molly. She’d been wondering about that. Since her marriage, Charlotte had been doing some editing and proof-reading at home, part time. ‘So you won’t be coming back to the office?’

‘He says I wouldn’t have time, with running the house and entertaining. But I don’t think it’s that. I think he just doesn’t want me to have a job.’

‘A lot of men don’t like it,’ she said. ‘Probably the majority, if we’re honest. Even Vivian, though he’s the most enlightened of men, sometimes feels a little put out that I’m not his helpless little woman. He really likes it when I have a day at home writing, and have it all put away in time to greet him when he gets back from work, with my frock changed, my hair brushed and a cocktail mixed ready for him. Sometimes it’s a nuisance for me to stop when I’m in the throes of inspiration, but I make a point of not letting him catch me still pounding away at the typewriter when he puts his key in the door. Marriage takes compromises, you know.’

Charlotte tilted her head. ‘Isn’t it always the wife that has to compromise? I don’t see with Vivian – and I really like him, honestly I do! – what he’s had to give up.’

‘Ah, well,’ Molly said. ‘That’s the way the two sexes were created. You’d have to ask God to explain that one. The caveman went off to hunt, and when he got back with the mastodon steaks, he expected the cavewoman to have collected the firewood and have the cave warm and tidy.’

‘But—’ Charlotte began, and broke off as Vivian came back in, holding a bottle.

‘It was in completely the wrong bin,’ he grumbled. ‘I don’t know how things move around on their own when one’s back is turned.’

Molly look amused. ‘My dear chap, if you’re thinking that I, or the servants, go into your wine cellar while you’re at work and play around with the bottles for fun, I can assure you—’

‘Oh, no, of course I don’t think that. I expect I moved it and forgot.’ He caressed some dust from the bottle and displayed it proudly. ‘Now, this is a Frapin vintage cognac from 1906. It’s something you ought to try once in your life – if you’re lucky enough to be offered it.’ Belatedly, he looked at them, scenting an atmosphere. ‘Did I interrupt something?’

Charlotte looked away.

Molly said cheerfully, ‘Not at all. Ring the bell, and they’ll bring the coffee. I didn’t want them bringing it in until you were back or it would have got cold.’

When the capitán, a Belgian called Dupont, asked for volunteers to make an attack on the Fascist redoubt, Basil was surprised to see his own hand go up even before Zennor’s. They had come back from leave to find that the line had been moved about a thousand yards further forward, so it was now only a couple of hundred yards from the Fascists. The point of the proposed exercise was to draw fire away from the main attack, which was to go in on the other side with the aim of cutting the road that supplied the besieged town.

Williams and Kellerman put up their hands, and grinned exuberantly across at Basil as Dupont outlined the plan, like children promised a treat. Basil’s shadow, Javier, also volunteered, and prodded his skinny younger brother Jorge, who had come out recently to join him, to do the same.

‘Action at last, eh?’ Zennor said to Basil. He seemed as calm as always, but Basil sensed excitement in him. ‘If it doesn’t get cancelled again.’

‘It won’t be cancelled this time,’ said one of the Spanish boys, known as Primo – Primo meant ‘cousin’, but it also had a slang meaning of ‘mug’ or ‘dupe’, and Basil could never determine which applied to him. ‘Aguila told me.’ Aguila was Primo’s cousin, who was second in command of the battalion. Primo often presented himself as possessor of inside information. ‘There’ll be seventy tropas de asalto attacking the next position, on the right, so we can take the redoubt by surprise.’

Dupont was at that moment saying the same thing, so it seemed Primo’s information was right this time. The redoubt was positioned at a point where the Fascist parapet bent round almost at a right angle, making it a natural weak spot, and the next position was two hundred yards further along. The storm troopers were the elite of the militia, and a determined assault by them would take attention away from Dupont’s action. ‘We’ll sneak in and take a chicken while the farmer’s chasing the fox,’ said another of the Spanish boys.

They were issued with cartridges, and three bombs per man. They set off at midnight across no man’s land, creeping in the pitch dark, bent double, tripping over the rough tussocks, slipping on the mud, stumbling into drainage ditches that were full to waist height after the recent rain. Before they even reached the wire they were all coated with mud, wet and cold.

A halt was called while the wire-cutting party went forward. They were close enough now that they were in range of the Fascist machine-guns, and it was essential to be absolutely quiet. In the black, still, damp night, the snip of the cutters sounded horribly loud, and Basil crouched, cold dread in his stomach, expecting any moment a shout from up ahead. Then the night would light up with whirring death. At this range, the gunners would not need to aim, only spray bullets from side to side.

But the wire was cut, and they filed through the gap and moved on. There was a second line of wire only twenty yards from the Fascists, and the parapet was just visible now, a looming darker shadow in the blackness. Basil felt they had been creeping forward for hours, so slow was their progress, and he scanned the sky anxiously for signs of dawn. But it was still black, the dead black of the small hours. Still there was no sound from the enemy. They crawled through the gap in the second line of wire. Basil was just behind Dupont; he heard Javier’s noisy breathing as he came up on his left; shadows, more felt than seen, crept past him as the men spread out to form a line. Then Dupont lifted his arm, swung it back and hurled a bomb over the parapet. It exploded with a noise that was huge in the silence, but immediately, as if at a signal, the night lit up with a roar, with vivid light and black shadow, as a whole line of enemy rifles opened fire at once – twenty or thirty, Basil guessed. The attack was no surprise after all: the Fascists had been waiting for them.