“Does your mother know about Alberta?” Beth asked Geoff.

“No. Mother has taken up residence at Lily’s house. I think she’s exhibiting an overabundance of caution regarding her pregnancy. Yes, she had a miscarriage, but so did you and so did my mother. It does not automatically follow that a miscarriage is a harbinger of future problem pregnancies.”

“It’s good of you to be so brave about this, Geoff,” Beth said, clearly annoyed. Standing up, she added, “I’m very tired, and I need to ring Jack.”

After Beth left the room, I told Geoff I didn’t know that Beth had a miscarriage.

“It happened in India when Violet and I were staying with Jack and Beth. Beth said she was going to lie down. The next thing I know, she’s calling for James to get Ayah and for Michael to bring some towels. When we found her, she was sitting on the bathroom floor with her head on the tub, quietly crying.”

Standing up, he said, “Excuse me. I need to find Beth.”

❋❋❋

At breakfast, I told Beth that Geoff felt awful about what he had said. I was sticking up for someone who probably didn’t deserve it.

“Don’t worry, Maggie. Geoff is a very complex character, and I, perhaps more than anyone else, understand why he says the things he does. When he was with Jack and me in India, I was very hard on him. He was ten years old and throwing tantrums, something I never tolerated in my sons when they were toddlers. When he did come around, I found him to be extraordinarily bright and likable.

“Rather than sending Geoff and Violet back to England for schooling, I convinced Patricia to allow the children to stay with me and that I would supervise their education. When Geoff misbehaved, I told him if he didn’t straighten up, he would be joining his Burden cousins at Glenkill. That kept him in check.”

“Why? What’s wrong with Glenkill?”

“Nothing, if it’s the right fit, as it was with my boys. These public schools place a great deal of emphasis on games. Geoff is an agile athlete, but he has a slight build, which would have made him a target for bullies. Besides, he’s an intellectual with a love for history and the arts. Glenkill was all wrong for him. He managed to get expelled within a month of his arrival.”

Beth started to laugh. “He was very clever. He knew that attending religious services was mandatory, but from the beginning, he skipped out on chapel. When he was called before the headmaster, he declared he could not attend chapel because he was agnostic. The school notified Patricia that he could not continue, which is exactly what he wanted in the first place.

“Rand shrugged it off and enrolled Geoff at St. Paul’s in London, but Patricia was furious because the Burdens had been one of the founding families of the school. When she told him that every boy in the family had gone to Glenkill for generations, Geoff said…” Beth started to laugh. “He told his mother that generations of Burden males had pissed in the fireplace, ‘but we don’t do that anymore.’”

I could just picture Geoff standing defiantly before his black-robed headmaster. Geoff was not the big, tall fellow his father was, but he was someone who would stand firm if he believed in something.

“He certainly changes the discussion,” I said, declining Beth’s offer of sherry.

“Oh, yes. Where was I? It was when Jack and I were having a romp in the stables. We spent as much time pulling hay out of my hair as we did kissing,” Beth said, laughing. “But then the war came. All my stories end with ‘but then the war came.’

“My first involvement with the war effort was when our housemistress at Newnham asked if some of the girls would volunteer to go to the railway station to serve coffee to regiments passing through on their way to the Channel ports. But when we got to the station, the Red Cross had already set everything up. The woman in charge asked if we would be available to help with other things, such as knitting mufflers, and she explained that there were sewing and knitting clubs being organized to teach people how to do those things. All the while I was knitting balaclavas, socks, and mufflers, the British Expeditionary Forces, including Rand, were retreating from Mons in Belgium leaving thousands of dead behind them. Because of censorship, I don’t think anyone realized the extent of our losses.

“Our next assignment was to go to a warehouse that had been converted into a hospital. When the wounded arrived, we found they were not British at all, but Belgians. They were exhausted, filthy, and covered with lice, so we threw their uniforms into tubs of boiling water. This experience proved to be quite an eye-opener for me. Let’s just say their ideas regarding sanitation and modesty were quite different from mine.”

Beth stood up and asked if I had changed my mind about having a sherry, as she was going to have another. Even though it was getting late, and I had to work the next day, I said “yes” because I believed I was finally going to hear about Colin Matheson.

“I have avoided telling you about Colin because, after all of these years, I still find it difficult to talk about him. After Jack pushed off on me, I returned to London, where Colin was waiting. Because of his reputation, I had concerns about whether or not he could be faithful to one woman. I knew from an earlier conversation that he had tired of the whole London social scene. He didn’t want to have any more conversations with empty-headed debutantes, and he was tired of being the entertainment for bored wives. But it was only after he had assured me of his fidelity that I agreed to an engagement.

“Over the course of the summer, Colin courted me in royal fashion. There was hardly a day that went by when I didn’t get flowers or notes or something that had belonged to his mother. I allowed myself to believe I was in love. Since I couldn’t have Jack, the next best thing was Colin. But then the war came. See what I mean?

“Colin had served in the Irish Guards for four years and was considered to be a reserve officer. When war broke out, he was called up immediately. He fought at the First Battle of Ypres with the Guards suffering horrendous casualties. In December, he was given leave to come home so we could become engaged. But before I left Montclair for London, our family had the traditional Christmas tea. I kept looking at Jack, pleading for him to say something, but he didn’t.

“Colin was a sensible man, and he thought our wedding should be postponed until after the war. I’ve often wondered if we would have acted differently if we had known how long the war would last. He returned to Belgium in January and came home for leave in May. With both armies now trapped in static trench warfare, Colin hoped the combatants would negotiate a peace settlement. It was very difficult for him because he had studied in Dresden and had many German friends. He could hardly believe he might be shooting at them.

“I traveled with him to Harwich to see him off. He must have had a premonition about not surviving the war because he gave me his mother’s engagement and wedding rings. In his last letter, he wrote that his sector was very quiet. The biggest threats came from infiltrators and snipers and the occasional artillery bombardment each side used to remind the other they were still there.

“Colin was the last in his family, so when the telegram came, it was delivered to my father, whom Colin had listed as next of kin. He had been killed on July 2, 1915, in an artillery barrage. His colonel wrote that his death was immediate, and he did not suffer. I only hope it was true.” After pausing to dry her tears, Beth continued, “It’s so sad, because Colin had no one to keep his memory alive, so his mother’s rings have been in my jewelry box for thirty years.

“I remember crying on and off for days, and would do so again when Trevor was killed that autumn and Tom the following summer. By the time Matthew was killed, there had been so much death on the Somme, that it was a part of daily life. Someone you knew was going to get a telegram from the War Office. By the end of the war, I was barely functioning as a human being. What saved me was my love for Jack, and in the years following the war, my children. You have to move on, or you become a well of sadness.”

After hearing about Beth’s losses, I started to cry, and I knew it was time for me to go home. I wanted to be with my family, and I explained to Beth about my Aunt Marie.

Beth shook her head and said, “Maggie, please don’t. I know I’m being selfish, but this will be the first Christmas since 1940 that I’ll have all of my family together, and I consider you to be a part of my family. If you will stay until the new year, I’ll pay for an air transport ticket for you to the States.” Taking my hands in hers, she asked, “Will you do this for me?”

I loved Beth, but I was having the same tug at my heart as she was. I missed my family terribly. I was even starting to miss my brother. But it was my fear that Aunt Marie would die before I could see her again that was adding urgency to my plans to go home. I agreed to stay as long as I didn’t receive any bad news about my aunt. Beth gave me a quick hug and said, “Besides, Michael is coming home, and you wouldn’t want to leave before seeing him.”

Chapter 39

In preparation for Michael’s party, Beth sent me to an Italian bakery in Finsbury where Angela bought her pasta when she had lived in London. Because Angela was so beautiful, she received extra rations of flour and homemade pasta from an admiring Mr. Giordano. Hopefully, just by mentioning Angela’s name, I would get the same results. I did get what I wanted, but so did Mr. Giordano, who managed to brush up against both my backside and my breasts. In case I had to come back for more, I actually thanked him.

When I got home, the first thing I did was to check to see if I had any mail. I wasn’t expecting any letters, nor was I expecting to see a RAF hat on the table and a RAF overcoat on the coat rack. I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, but there seemed to be only one explanation — Michael was home early from Germany. I quietly opened the door to the morning room, and there was Michael, stretched out the length of a chair and ottoman, sound asleep. The fire had gone cold, but, apparently, so had Michael, who was softly snoring.

When I arrived in Germany in August 1946, I was a naive, devout Catholic, who believed that sex outside of marriage was not only a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church, but just plain wrong, and that such intimacy had a place only in the bedroom of a married couple. In the subsequent two years, I lost a good deal of my naiveté, and although I faithfully attended Mass, I hadn’t received Communion in months because I was guilty of the sin of lust. To make matters worse, I was lusting after two men at the same time, and one of them was asleep in the chair in front of me.

He looked so peaceful, and I wanted to touch his face. Instead, I left a note for Geoff on the foyer table telling him that his cousin was asleep in the morning room, and I went downstairs to find something to eat. I had been eating sardines and crackers for two nights in a row, and it seemed as if I was going to be eating them for a third when I heard Geoff’s familiar footsteps. He had bought some Chinese takeaway, which was becoming a mainstay for the two of us.

“Michael’s arrival blows Beth’s plans for a surprise party all to hell, doesn’t it?” Geoff asked.

“Not necessarily,” I answered. “Jack and Beth can go with him up to Crofton, and we can plan the party for this weekend. It was going to be tough pulling off a party midweek anyway.”

“Do you want a beer?” Geoff asked, as he gazed into the refrigerator.

“Make that two beers,” Michael said as he came down the stairs. Geoff jumped up and shook Michael’s hand to the point where he looked like he was working a water pump.

After grabbing a beer, Michael asked, “Were you two planning my surprise party?” Geoff and I looked at each other but said nothing. “I got here at noon, and Mrs. Gooding told me that Maggie had gone to Finsbury to buy flour to bake a cake. So the cake was either for my demob party, or someone is having a birthday.”

“Your mother will be so disappointed if you’re not surprised,” I said.

“I promise to be surprised.”

“How’s everything going with the Airlift?” Geoff asked.

“They’ve got this thing running like a well-oiled machine,” Michael answered. “A plane lands in Berlin every five minutes. They offload the cargo in a matter of minutes, and if there’s nothing wrong with the plane, off it goes back to its home base. The only thing that messes with the system is the weather.”