In Honour Bound Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  Contents

  Nina Bawden

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Nina Bawden

  In Honour Bound

  Nina Bawden

  Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children – Carrie’s War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry – have become contemporary classics.

  She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured – but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages.

  Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter’s Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime’s contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970.

  Epigraph

  Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be,

  but what society makes them. The generous feelings and high

  propensities of the soul are, as it were, shrunk up, seared,

  violently wrenched and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse

  with the world, something in the manner that beggars maim

  and mutilate their children to make them fit for their future

  situation in life.

  HAZLITT

  Chapter One

  It was hot in Court Number Four. Prosecuting Counsel yawned, his Junior played cat’s cradle with a piece of red string hidden under the table, like a boy during a dull lesson in school. Counsel for the defence, ponderously on his feet, spoke of a good war record. The Judge thought of his son, dead over the Ruhr, and looked at the accused: John Prothero, ex-Squadron-Leader, D. S. O., D.F.C., and bar.

  He was pale, attentive, politely bewildered like a man who has come to the wrong party. Earlier, he had been an excellent witness, clear, concise and, the Judge would have sworn it, truthful. Now he was listening with an air of embarrassment to the things Counsel was saying on his behalf. For the first time that morning his eyes wandered: he glanced across the court at his wife, a pretty, keyed-up young woman in a blue hat, and smiled.

  That smile, brief, no more than a quizzical apology, arrested the Judge’s attention. No man in his situation could smile like that, in just that unaffected, intimate way, unless he were buoyed up by a very special brand of confidence. Not a brash pretence, not even the basic confidence of money, but something much rarer, an innocent expectancy, a lack of doubt. This was the kind of man, the Judge thought, that you couldn’t talk to for five minutes without scenting all the advantages of his closed, cosy world, the expensive preparation for life, the assurances, the promises, the certainty. Watching Prothero, the Judge felt no curiosity—nothing surprised him any more—but he did feel an unexpected little rush of pity. A man like this would find it difficult to believe in any kind of final disaster.

  The Judge stirred, sighed. He had come a long way to his seat in this stuffy court, fought hard for it, waited too long, and paid, in the end, a little too much for it, so that now his only emotional indulgence was the pain he felt for his dead boy. Even pity flicked him lightly as a hair on the throat. He folded his veined hands in his lap and listened to Counsel, but without much attention. He wanted no more evidence of the tiresome heroics of men. Courage and honour were words: he was concerned with facts. And not just with facts, but with the imperfect instrument of law. He leaned back against the smooth, hard wood, closed his eyes and ground his weapon sharp.

  The world, his mother used to say, had been made on a Monday, a phrase that had a sharp ring of truth in the brown, urban street by the railway line where the dust and soot seeped under the door and through the ill-fitting windows and where Monday was D-day in a long battle, first to pay the rent and then to keep the house clean. His mother had not been complaining, though. Like the Judge, she had a stoic, Victorian belief in the dignity of labour: they were both willing volunteers in a world most people are conscripted to. The Judge smiled faintly. Here was a young man whose world had been made on a Sunday.…

  Looking up timidly beneath the blue hat, Mary Prothero saw the old man smile and thought he looked kind. She had a remarkable gift for hope. She sat neatly, legs folded gently together, ankle to ankle, knee to knee, still as a princess on an Egyptian tomb. Only her eyes moved; from the Judge to Counsel, to Johnny. He was leaning forward, his chin cupped in a long, brown hand that had a signet ring on the fourth finger. Her expression mirrored his bewilderment and more: her face was suddenly shocked, blind, almost stupid with disbelief. Like the Judge, Mary Prothero had come a long way but, unlike him, she had retained her capacity for wonder.

  In the early summer of 1944 she had gone to live with a woman called Ames in a mining town in South Wales. Mary was a schoolgirl then, a Londoner who had lived in the valley since the outbreak of war: when the grandmother who had cared for her died suddenly of a stroke, the billeting officer sent her to the Ames’s house and told her she was lucky to get such a good home.

  Mary believed him. She was seventeen and nine months old, credulous, expectant—not innocent, exactly, but as trusting as a strong, healthy child who has never been hurt. She was no match at all for Mrs. Ames who knew no higher good than her own proud ignorance and never doubted the wickedness of other people. Her father had been a greengrocer and her husband a civil servant: there was a presentation silver salver on the sideboard in the dining-room inscribed from his colleagues at the Board of Trade. Mrs. Ames had never got over the social elevation her marriage had brought her. Her only sister had married a jobbing builder and Mrs. Ames never entertained or visited her though she sometimes sent parcels of old clothes and once, when a letter arrived to say her youngest niece had poliomyelitis, she replied with a postal order for fifteen shillings. She often told Mary, proudly,
how fond she had been of Dora when they were girls together—she was one of those people who regard the bestowal of affection as a gift of extraordinary munificence—but she was too powerfully conscious of the dignity of her dead husband’s position to do more.

  Mary was conscious of it, too. She grieved for her grandmother whom she had deeply loved, but fear was sharper by now than grief. The old woman’s death, sudden and horrifying, frightened her in dreams. Nothing was permanent. So she was comforted by the dark solidity of Mrs. Ames’s house and the awful walnut furniture that had belonged to Mr. Ames’s father who had owned half a small coal mine. She was prepared to be comforted by Mrs. Ames and impulsively ready to be grateful; in fact, for the first few months she was grateful to the point of sycophancy. She admired everything, even the grisly picture of a large, brown dog mouthing a gory pheasant that hung in the drawing-room. She was genuinely excited by her room which was twice the size of the one she had shared with her grandmother who had rented two rooms in a miner’s cottage, and had half the amount of furniture, all of it ugly, but solid and well polished. There was a reading lamp on the desk, curtains that opened and closed on a pulley and a fitted brown carpet on the floor. She believed she was a lucky girl and asked no more of Mrs. Ames than the pride of being connected with her house, which was fortunate because Mrs. Ames had nothing else to offer.

  Occasionally they sat after supper in the drawing-room, by the light of one standard lamp so heavily shaded by a frame covered in dark, Japanese silk that the lofty yellow ceilings and the distant corners of the Turkey-carpeted floor were hidden in black shadow. If she was in a good mood, Mrs. Ames would sit upright, skirt taut over bulging knees, head erect above the great, jutting shelf of her bosom and preside with baleful solemnity over certain set subjects: the ingratitude of the young; the ingratitude, particularly, of Dora who had betrayed her sister’s affection by marrying beneath her; Mary’s carelessness in stumping upstairs in her outdoor shoes and how it showed what sort of home she came from; her own, startling beauty as a young girl and how she had just washed her long, heavy hair on the day that Mr. Ames came into the greengrocer’s shop to buy a pound of apples for his mother; the vulgarity of sex; the disgusting filth that was published in modern novels; the ingratitude of the working classes; the sanctity of Mr. Churchill and the importance of regular habits. At the end of each item she tossed back her head and drew in her breath with a curious, angry hiss, at the same time reaching out a plump, ringed hand to the biscuit barrel.

  It was the signal for Mary to murmur agreement. She learned, early on, that it was unwise to do anything else: there were too many ways in which a spiteful, middle-aged woman could humiliate a younger one. One day, set off by a mild difference of opinion at breakfast, Mrs. Ames had made a terrible scene about a spot of blood she claimed to have found on the bathroom mat. Her attack had a coarse gusto.

  ‘I thought you were a nice girl,’ she had said. ‘A nice girl from a nice home. Such a thing has never happened in my house before. Not in all my married life.’ Her black, Welsh eyes bulged, her voice rose on an absurd note of tragic indignation.

  Mary was shocked, partly because of the subject but chiefly because Mrs. Ames, for some inexplicable reason, was telling a lie. She was not a prim girl, but she was at the age when you regard small sins with a serious moral attention. ‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered and then went on more firmly. ‘But you must have made a mistake.’ She hesitated, blushing. ‘I mean—it’s not possible, just now.’

  Mrs. Ames was inflamed. She cried hoarsely, ‘That’s enough. I won’t have indecency. Just see you’re more careful in future, if you please.’ Her chins trembled. ‘I’m only telling you for your own good, Mary. Suppose Frederick had been here!’

  Frederick was her only son and her God. He was not in the Forces because he had a deformed hip, the result of rheumatic fever when he was a little boy. Mrs. Ames regarded this misfortune as a form of divine intervention for Frederick was away at college, preparing to go into the Church.

  He came home in June when the university term ended. The day before, his mother had been to the hairdresser and when his taxi drew up, she was waiting on the steps, her hair in stiff corrugations, her cheeks powdered like a clown’s. She flung her arms round Frederick like a young girl greeting her lover.

  Hovering in the background, Mary could not help a feeling of disappointment. Frederick was fat, he wore glasses, his tow-coloured hair receded at the temples and he had a jutting lower lip like his mother. Glowing and vivacious, Mrs. Ames led him into the drawing-room where tea was laid on a low table. Rations were difficult, but there was thin bread lavishly spread with the week’s butter, a plate of drop scones and three kinds of cake. Frederick rubbed his hands together. ‘By Jove, Mummy,’ he cried. ‘Scones for tea.’

  He seized his mother round her thick waist. ‘Oh Rumpty-foo, rumpty-foo,’ he sang, twirling her round and smacking a kiss on her cheek. Mrs. Ames simpered, one hand to her hair. Mary stared at her feet and wondered if she should leave the room.

  But Frederick turned. ‘You must be Mary,’ he said. He crossed the room, panting a little after his exertions and smiling. He had a ready, practised smile. He took Mary’s hand and looked deeply into her eyes. ‘I’m glad to meet you, Mary. I hope we will be’—a long, significant pause—‘good friends.’ Although he was not handsome, Mary was flattered. It was kind of him to seem to be interested in her.

  The interest did not flag. During the next ten days, Frederick encouraged her to talk about her school, her family, her plans for the future, and if his questions were simply excuses to talk about himself, Mary was still disarmed. They went for long walks over the mountains and Frederick talked. Like his mother, he had several standard topics: poetry; God; the time he had lost his faith; how he had found it again riding in a bus down the East India Dock Road and—this was his favourite—the rottenness of the way some of the chaps he knew talked about girls.

  By the end of the week Mary was used to Frederick’s queer voice which was high and nasal and had a monotonous singsong quality as if he were already ordained and chanting evensong. Because he was kind and ridiculous and charming, she persuaded herself that she liked plump men and that a balding forehead was distinguished. She also felt that she was much older than he and that he needed protection.

  One Sunday evening, the telephone rang while Mary and Frederick were washing the dishes after supper. Frederick answered it. Mary heard him say loudly, ‘Yes, of course. How simply marvellous.’ Then he put the receiver down and went to speak to his mother. Mary could hear the tone of their voices, though not what was said: Frederick’s arguing and pacifying, his mother’s raised and querulous. She wondered, as she dried the plates, why Mrs. Ames was angry.

  Then Frederick came back into the kitchen and said, ‘What, have you finished already?’ He was rubbing his hands together, a thing he did when he was nervous or excited. ‘That was a friend of mine on the telephone. A man called Johnny Prothero. He’s coming to stay tomorrow.’

  His happiness glowed like a victory beacon. Though he tried to sound matter-of-fact, his eyes were exultant and his mouth kept twitching in a shy, give-away grin.

  Johnny Prothero had been at school with him. (Mrs. Ames had told Mary at least twenty times what school Frederick had been to, emphasizing the name in an awestruck voice as if, by sending him there, she had virtually wangled him a passport to heaven.) ‘We ran into each other in Piccadilly Circus, of all places. Of course he’d forgotten me but I remembered him. I’d always admired him tremendously,’ Frederick said innocently and Mary felt a stab of patronage and pity. How like Frederick to accept so humbly the fact that he was bound to be passed over.

  He perched on the kitchen table, hands tucked under plump thighs. Johnny was really a splendid chap, older than he was—he had been Captain of cricket and the School’s champion swimmer when Frederick was a bullied fat boy with warts on his hands. ‘He was a wonderful diver. He could dive anyhow, a jack-knife, a
somersault … he wasn’t afraid of anything. He used to stand on the top board and laugh.’

  Mary smiled: Frederick was afraid of heights, afraid of falling, of horses, of dentists.… The whole of childhood must have presented a face of unalterable physical menace. One summer, the School had gone camping in the Lakes and Frederick was in Johnny’s section. He had seen Frederick’s white, beaded face on an innocuous rock scramble; the next day, without comment, he had offered to teach him to fish. The kindness was engraved on Frederick’s memory.

  The summer had ended in war. Johnny had gone into the Air Force. He was a bomber pilot; early in the war he had won his D.F.C. dive-bombing a bridge in an old Fairy Battle, later he had been ‘rested’for a year in a night-fighter squadron and later still had joined one of the crack squadrons that had broken the Mohne and Eider dams. Frederick had one great and rare virtue; he could admire men whose virtues he did not share. ‘He’s the sort of chap you really can look up to,’ he said, glowing.

  Listening to him, Mary was vaguely embarrassed. She said, ‘Anyone can be brave. Courage is a kind of ignorance really.’ It was something she had read somewhere.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Mary,’ Frederick said and looked troubled for a moment, as if she had spoiled some of his pleasure in his friend.

  But he could not be cast down for long. He spent the rest of that evening and the next morning in a fever of activity, arranging the room where Johnny was to sleep, lugging out the ugly furniture and substituting less hideous pieces from his own room, hanging a Van Gogh print on the wall where the sunlight would catch it and hurrying down to the town to buy Algerian sherry—it was the time when there was nothing else to buy—a store of new paperbacks and several packets of Senior Service, the cigarettes Johnny had been smoking when they met in Piccadilly Circus.