The Parrot Cage
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Contents
Daphne Wright
Dedication
Prologue February, 1967
Gerry
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Flixe
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Ming
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
London
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Daphne Wright
The Parrot Cage
Daphne Wright
Daphne Wright is a historical novelist with a special interest in the way wars have liberated women. Born in London, she worked in publishing for ten years before becoming a writer. After six historical novels, she turned to crime under the pseudonym of Natasha Cooper. She now divides her time between the city and the Somerset Levels.
Dedication
For my sisters, Dione, Ianthe, and Oenone,
(none of whom are remotely like the Alderbrook sisters) and for Crispin
Prologue February, 1967
‘And you worked for him, Mrs Suvarov, I understand,’ said the pleasant young man in the shabby lovat tweed jacket. He was sitting in front of her on a low tapestry-covered stool before the fire, his spiral-bound notebook on his knee and a biro, which had leaked sticky red ink over his fingers, in his right hand. Deceptively humble, dangerously charming, he was interviewing her about her late husband’s career for a Sunday newspaper.
‘Yes, for a few years,’ she answered, regretting the fact that she had agreed to the questions. The young journalist was nice enough and as yet had not probed too far, but even so, she wished he would go away.
‘What was he like to work for?’
Mrs Suvarov thought back through twenty years of marriage to the time when she had hardly known Peter and tried to say something that was both truthful and uninteresting enough to stop the young man’s questions.
‘He was very demanding – wanted everyone to give their best – but …’ She paused, telling herself that it was ridiculous for a middle-aged woman who had had seven months to get used to her widowhood to cry in front of a journalist like this. Then she took a deep breath to stop her voice from wobbling and said: ‘He was the first man I had ever met who knew me and spoke to me – as opposed to the person he thought I was, if you see what I mean. It was one of his great gifts.’
‘I understand,’ he said, and for a moment she really thought that he did. ‘All the people I have talked to have said he was the most remarkable man.’
Her deep violet-blue eyes softened and he realised how beautiful she must have been before she had grown so desperately thin. Her lips curved into the first smile of the morning and her voice was soft, and very confident, when she spoke.
‘He was. We loved him, all of us.’
The young man thought that he had the opening for which he had waited so patiently.
‘There were three of you, weren’t there? Three sisters, all working for him until the end of the war. It’s a wonderful story.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said coldly and with the disappointment sounding unmistakably in her patrician voice. ‘In fact there were four of us; but I thought you wanted to write about him.’
‘I do, Mrs Suvarov. The article I’ve been commissioned to write is about your husband and his transformation from revolutionary Russian refugee to head of a secret wartime department that is still never talked about and appears in none of the books.’
‘But …?’ she prompted, leaning back into the russet velvet wing-chair.
‘But while I was doing the preliminary research, I learned about these sisters, all ravishing, they say, and all very brilliant, who worked for him. The only one I could find is you, Mrs Suvarov; I … I sort of hoped that you might put me on to the others.’
‘It’s such a long time ago, Jonathan,’ she said very directly, ‘and best forgotten.’
‘But why? We won; you won. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to read about how you did it? Wouldn’t you like to tell it?’
‘It may all sound glamorous now, but it really wasn’t. We were simply a rather dull, small research group.’ She ought to have stopped there, but something he had said or some expression on his ingenuous face had activated all the memories that she had tried to suppress, and so she told him: ‘And there were some very bitter things done and said then.’
Because he admired her, and was coming to like her in these elliptical and difficult conversations they had been having at intervals for the last two weeks, he did not say, ‘all the better’, but that was what he thought. Several of his colleagues had been looking into the wartime conflicts between SIS, SOE and the Free French in London and the various missions they had sent into Occupied Europe; producing stories of tremendous courage, appalling danger and disaster, and catastrophic muddles and terrible hints of betrayal. Stumbling across hints of a still-undiscovered wartime secret in his research, he had decided to try to trump them all with revelations of his own.
He sat on the low stool, feeling the warmth of the fire at his back and smiled, brushing his long fair hair out of his eyes with his inky hand. Then, as gently as possible, because he could see that he had upset her, he laid:
‘Wouldn’t you feel better if it were told?’
‘Why should I need to feel better?’ She knew how dangerous it was to let him tempt her into a dialogue; she should just have answered the questions he actually asked and not participated in the unspoken ones.
‘It might get rid of some of the bitterness.’
‘You’d have been a good interrogator,’ she said irrelevantly.
‘Would he have approved of that?’
‘Peter? Yes, I suppose he would,’ she answered slowly and turned her head away from him. It was a while before he noticed that she was looking at a silver-framed photograph on a table at her side. From where he was sitting, Jonathan could see that it was a grainy portrait of a dark-haired man; he looked about forty, with well-cut features and far-seeing, intelligent eyes set under strongly marked brows. Apart from the man’s mouth, which looked gentle despite its firmness, the face seemed to express steely determination. But there was a hint of something else too, some indefinable but powerful attraction. Jonathan laughed at himself for reading into an old photograph all the things he wanted to find in the man he was trying to discover.
‘And the others, your sisters?’ asked Jonathan, getting back to the matter in hand.
‘God knows. We never actually agreed to forget it – or bound each other to silence, or anything like that. No, don’t say anything,’ she said as he sat up, expectant as a puppy that sees the chance of a walk or a game. ‘I shall think about it, and then I’ll ring you up.’
‘Then they are alive?’
She looked so sad, sitting there in the huge chair, that he began to wish he had not pressed her. He had never left so good a story unfinished, but this time he stood up, stuffed his notebook into his sagging pocket, and stood over her to take her hand.
‘I am sorry to have raked up those bitter memories.’
She smiled up at him, disarmed by his concern and by the warmth of his hand. No one had touched her since her husband had died.
The winter sun blazed into her white room, dimming the flames in the fireplace and outlining all the comfortable shabbiness of the beautiful furniture and the faded Aubusson rug that Peter had loved so much.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she promised.
Gerry
1940
Chapter One
It was the first weekend of the twins’summer holidays, Felicity was home on a rare forty-eight hours’leave, and the ugly old house had taken on an unaccustomed gaiety. Mrs Alderbrook might be too exhausted to notice it, but her eldest daughter felt the lighter atmosphere as soon as she came down for breakfast. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the silver pot on the sideboard, listening to the twins’chatter.
‘You sound very cheerful, Annie,’ she said as she carried her coffee cup to the big table and sat down.
‘Oh Gerry, who wouldn’t be with eight whole wee
ks’freedom from school?’ retorted her sister.
Gerry laughed and tried to remember the days when she, too, had felt that their home represented freedom.
‘You must have some proper breakfast, Gerry,’ said her mother from the head of the table. ‘Remember Doctor Granard’s advice.’
‘I still feel so sick in the mornings, Mother. I’m sorry, but I just can’t face scrambled egg at this time of day.’
‘It’s kedgeree this morning,’ said Ming, who was always the peacemaker. ‘Mother got up specially early to make it for us as a treat.’
Gerry looked across the polished mahogany at her youngest sister and saw the anxiety in her dark-blue eyes. Don’t spoil it, she seemed to be saying. Don’t start an argument. Give in for once. Gerry smiled in reassurance, and Ming got up at once.
‘Shall I get you some, Gerry?’
‘Well, thank you, Ming. Just a little.’ A few minutes later Ming brought her a plate with a tactfully small mound of nauseating-looking yellow rice and haddock with the bones sticking out like half-submerged barbed wire.
‘When did your new cook actually leave, Mother?’ asked Annie brightly, apparently not having noticed any of the tensions that her twin had tried to defuse. As their mother answered, Gerry wondered for the umpteenth time how a pair of twins could be so different. It was not just that they were not identical; their entire characters were worlds apart. Annie took after their father, sandy of hair, forthright of voice and opinion and with the kind of self-confidence that never doubts. But Ming, who was as fair as Gerry and, like her, had inherited their mother’s startling dark, violet-blue eyes, was timid, gentle and so aware of her doubts that Gerry sometimes wondered what would have happened to her if she had not had Annie to protect her and push her through life.
Gerry put a forkful of sticky rice into her mouth and almost gagged on it. But she forced herself to swallow it. She did not want to provoke her mother; not, like Ming, because she was afraid of the likely explosion of temper, but because she recognised that her mother had had a lot to put up with since the last of the maids had left three weeks earlier. When Gerry had masked the taste of the haddock with a mouthful of sweet, milky coffee she looked up and saw that Annie was staring at her intently.
‘I thought people only felt sick before a baby was born,’ she said, sounding interested. Mrs Alderbrook looked anxiously at her eldest daughter and then, as though she had not got the strength to intervene between them, got up and carried her plate out to the kitchen. Ming looked down at the table. Gerry took a deep breath to keep her voice steady and tried to answer calmly.
‘Yes, in a way, Annie. What the doctors call “morning sickness” happens only at the beginning. This is different …’
‘You mean because the baby was stillborn? I’m not meaning to be beastly.’
‘Annie,’ said Ming, for once loudly and with anger. ‘Gerry, she doesn’t understand. She just wants to know.’
‘I know. It’s all right, Ming. And it’s months ago now anyway. I suppose that is why, Annie. Granard said that everything inside is rather messed about and that I can’t expect to feel well for some time.’
‘Annie, go upstairs, will you, and wake Felicity?’ said Mrs Alderbrook, coming back into the dining-room. ‘We can’t leave breakfast lying about all morning for her.’ When she had obeyed, her mother said quietly to Gerry: ‘She doesn’t understand. She’s only fifteen and none of it is really real to her. It’s not meant to be cruel.’
Gerry just nodded, concentrating on the view that she could see through the heavy red curtains that bordered the window. She thought that if she tried to speak again she might cry, and it had been her pride before her marriage that, of the four of them, she alone had never cried in front of their parents.
Ming refilled Gerry’s coffee cup and then followed her twin out of the room. Gerry took a sip and then said:
‘I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t seem able to brace up. This keeps happening.’
‘I know. Don’t worry about it. Granard says that you will gradually feel stronger and stronger, provided that you rest and eat and keep calm.’
‘Calm! I’m far too calm. That’s half the trouble. If only I had some job to do. Then at least I might have something else to think about.’
‘You’re not well enough yet, Gerry. And there’s plenty to do here in the house as soon as you are,’ Mrs Alderbrook added, her normally well-disciplined sense of grievance sounding in her voice for a second. Gerry heard it and, although her mind understood and sympathised with her mother, the sharpness in her voice was too much for Gerry’s composure and the tears poured over her darkened eyelashes. She put the cup back into the saucer, spilling some coffee, and pushed her chair back from the table.
She almost bumped into her second sister, appearing casually late for breakfast, and pushed past her without a word.
‘What’s up with Gerry?’ asked Felicity, shutting the door behind her.
‘Oh, Annie was tactless about the baby.’
‘Poor old Gerry. It really has rotted her up. She always used to be so tough and now I’ve never seen her so fragile. Has she told Andrew yet that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to have any more?’
‘I don’t think so. She sometimes shows me his letters, though never the ones she writes to him. She definitely didn’t tell him in the first letter after the baby, because she let me read the one he wrote back then and he was talking about having more and forgetting about this one.’
‘I don’t suppose Gerry liked that much,’ said Felicity, sitting down at the table and pinning up her shoulder-length fair hair at the same time.
She looked very like Gerry; in fact they had been taken for twins by strangers more often than Annie and Ming ever were. The elder sisters had oval faces with fine skin and classically good features that might have been a little dull had it not been for their splendidly coloured eyes and for the character that showed in their expressions. That morning Felicity’s hair seemed more gold than her sister’s and her skin clearer and more luminous than Gerry’s, but that might have been simply because Gerry had still not recovered from her difficult pregnancy and the terrible, nineteen-hour labour that had ended in the birth of her dead son.
Felicity leaned forward to pick up the folded newspaper and spread it open on the table.
‘Darling, must you?’ said her mother. ‘I need to clear the breakfast and if you start reading that you’ll …’
‘I’ll deal with the crocks, Mother. You go and put your feet up or something. Please? I’ve only got forty-eight hours’leave and it’s such a luxury to read The Times at breakfast in peace.’
Mrs Alderbrook shrugged and left the room for the depressing scullery to start preparing the vegetables for luncheon. She had never peeled a potato in her life until her cook departed to join the ATS, let alone cooked a whole meal, and she had never realised how difficult it all was and how dreadfully time-consuming.
As soon as she had gone, the dining-room door opened again and Gerry came in to drop into a chair beside her sister.
‘Hello, old thing,’ said Felicity, folding up the newspaper again. ‘I thought you couldn’t be far away.’
‘No. Thank God you’re here, Flixe. I can’t talk to the others; I try sometimes, but it just makes it all worse. And as for Mother …’
‘“Come on, darling, brace up”?’
‘Not really. At least, yes. She never says any of it, but I can’t help thinking all the time of what she’s suppressing and all the things she’s said in the past and what she might say in the future. It’s vile of me, because she’s been good to me; she really has. I couldn’t have dealt with it on my own.’ Gerry reached over to her old place to pick up her coffee cup. ‘But now, we just get across each other all the time. I wish I could get away.’
‘Well can’t you? I thought the whole thing about being a married lady meant that you were no longer under their control.’ There was a slightly acid note in Flixe’s voice that made Gerry look sharply at her. Flixe smiled wryly. ‘Well, that was why you married him, wasn’t it?’
Gerry started to look outraged and then succumbed to a rueful laugh.