Useless to say that the happiness had been a counterfeit, the togetherness no more than a sweet illusion; she would not have understood. And simpler, if crueller, to say he had found someone else and he could not therefore carry on seeing Angela, and he was very, very sorry and it had been wonderful, but it would be wrong of him to allow things to continue.
Once she had stopped crying, she became angry, telling him he was a rotter, that he had no business to abandon her after all she had done for him, ‘listening to you going on and on about your work, it was so boring, and sitting through films I hated, and cycling out when it was almost raining, and coming back early from outings so you could listen to the six o’clock news with my father, and those picnics, all those picnics I made. You enjoyed them, didn’t you?’
Tom said she had indeed been the perfect girlfriend, and he was sorry he’d bored her and the picnics had been wonderful, but it had to end now.
It had taken Angela a long time to get over it. She was not to be seen at village dances, or the cinema, or indeed anywhere at all, apart from Parsons; and this made Tom feel truly terrible. Then his godmother told him that Angela had taken up with the head of Home Furnishings and was very taken with him, and he with her, and Tom relaxed and was able to fully enjoy Laura – in every sense of the word – and contemplate from such unlikely places as muddy football pitches how extremely happy he was. If it hadn’t been for the shadow of war hanging over everything, he would have said he was perfectly happy. If war was declared, which everybody said it wouldn’t be – even the politicians couldn’t be that stupid – he would clearly go and fight, along with all his friends and colleagues. Meanwhile, they could all only wait and trust and pray they were in good hands.
Then, at the dentist one evening, nursing a nasty toothache, he picked up a rather dog-eared copy of The Times; it was open at the Court Circular and he was about to turn it over quickly, in search of some news that mattered, when he saw a familiar name and learned that Diana Southcott had become engaged to some titled creature from Yorkshire. No doubt they deserved one another: two toffs with a single purpose – to breed more toffs. While not wishing Diana ill, but remembering the way she’d looked down on him, literally as well as figuratively, as he stood in the drain, he couldn’t wish her well either. She was very beautiful though, no one could deny that, and sexy too, even at sixteen.
‘Mr Knelston, do come in, the dentist will see you now.’ And all thoughts of Diana Southcott, her beauty and her sexiness, were wiped out by half an hour of excruciating pain followed by an evening of excruciating pleasure with Laura Leonard.
Chapter 6
1940
He should have gone into the Air Force, Johnathan thought. It would have eased the guilt he felt to have risked that almost certain death. A lot of his friends had chosen that path, and many, many of them were gone, their planes shot down. Piers, his beloved eldest brother, so handsome, so dashing, had been one of them, one of the Few, the fighter pilots taking to the skies in their crazily tiny Spitfire planes, and into open warfare with the German Luftwaffe. ‘Never,’ said Winston Churchill – now, thank God, in charge of the country and the war – his rumbling, roaring tones spilling out of the wireless, ‘was so much owed by so many to so few.’ And Piers had been among them, grinning out of photographs taken before he was sent up, complete with the statutory accessories of dangling cigarette, fur-collared flying jacket and parachute. They were the bravest of the brave, all of them: it was like facing a firing squad, day after day, going up, coming back, seemingly inviolate.
Only finally Piers wasn’t; stalking one German plane he was spotted by another which opened fire on him and his plane went down into the sea. Everyone said death must have been instant, but Johnathan was very much of the opinion that everyone could be wrong; there was the hell of being engulfed in flames, the terror, the waiting for the end as he plunged down. Nothing very instant about any of it.
The pain of losing Piers was appalling. He tried to find comfort in Diana but although she made an effort to console him, he sensed that her emotions lacked substance. She had not known Piers very well, and Johnathan tried to make excuses for her on that basis, but that was not the point; it was his grief that he expected her to understand, and she did not. She had never experienced any serious loss herself and seemed incapable of imagining it. He was discovering, not for the first time, that she lacked emotional imagination.
He finally despaired when she said that of course it was dreadful, but it had been a hero’s death and he must be so proud of Piers, as if that made the loss less savage. Angry with her, and trying to conceal it, he went to see his parents and his brother Timothy without her. They were all devastated, their father particularly so. His mother had somehow prepared herself for it, and Timothy was distracted from the worst excesses of his grief by an imminent naval posting to Norway, but Sir Hilary seemed completely inconsolable. He wandered around the house like a shadow, and could often be heard weeping behind closed doors. Years later he explained to Johnathan that it had been made far worse by having seen so many young men die in the trenches in the First World War, but for now he withdrew into himself, unable to share how he felt even with his wife. Piers had been his firstborn and his heir, the love of his life to a great extent. Hilary had married Vanessa out of duty, pressed by his own father to continue the line. He was fond of her, of course, and she was a wonderful consort, but in no way was she a soulmate and never less of one than now. Johnathan, recognising Diana’s failure in this regard, only to a far lesser degree, realised that his father, like him, felt absolutely alone. He was just a little able to convey this to him, and could see it was some kind of comfort.