Happy Little Bluebirds Read online

  HAPPY LITTLE BLUEBIRDS

  For Clement Crisp

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  A Vision of Loveliness

  Ghastly Business

  The Following Girls

  CONTENTS

  Also by the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Louise Levene

  Chapter 1

  Monday 30 September 1940

  ‘I’d no idea anyone actually spoke Polish,’ the girl was saying. ‘Apart from Poles, obviously. The customs chap looked awfully surprised. Whatever on earth made you learn?’

  She didn’t stay for an answer but began shoving her bags alongside Evelyn in the back of the waiting car.

  ‘Budge up.’

  Evelyn edged along the wide seat and the girl closed the door and leaned forward to instruct the uniformed driver who was wiping his mouth on his handkerchief as he wedged the pungent remains of a sandwich into the glove compartment.

  ‘No mad hurry, Carson, the Chicago train doesn’t leave until five so we may as well let Mrs Murdoch enjoy the scenic route: head north along Broadway, through the Park and down Fifth. Jolly good.’ She turned to Evelyn with a stillborn smile then gripped her fingers in a well-practised handshake.

  ‘Genista Broome. HQ have detailed me to shepherd you across town and generally get you up to speed.’

  Genista Broome was a lot younger than Evelyn had anticipated and affected the kind of flashy glamour she had noticed among the Americans on the ship: a showy brooch on her lapel, glossy nut-brown hair rolled in permanent curls beneath her hat and enough scent to fumigate a church jumble sale – hardly businesslike.

  The smell of perfume combined unpleasantly with the prevailing fog of Swiss cheese and German sausage in the limousine’s interior. Still queasy from her voyage, Evelyn felt for the folded paper bag in her pocket as she sniffed the air: Jicky. Her late mother had worn it. Evelyn’s father, a Methodist minister, had disapproved of scent but he had liked the smell of flowers and so his wife had filled the vases with violets or jasmine or nicotiana and then sprinkled a matching fragrance on her handkerchiefs depending on the season, hiding the bottles behind her underthings. Jicky was what she wore at lavender time. Evelyn’s husband Silas had had the same Wesleyan horror of adornment and had not liked women to wear scent, or earrings, or eye-black (‘You would not be at such pains were none to see you but God and His holy angels’, as John Wesley was so fond of saying). Nine months since his death Evelyn still could not break the habit of imagining Silas beside her, seeing all she saw.

  Genista Broome was what Silas would have called ‘light-minded’. She seemed to have used her exeat from the office as an excuse for a shopping trip and was now fretting over the bags and parcels while dispensing a steady stream of pleasantries with the girlish spontaneity of a speak-your-weight machine: nice day … surprisingly warm for the time of year … had it been an enjoyable voyage?

  Enjoyable? As if Evelyn had braved the torpedo-infested Atlantic merely for a change of air.

  ‘Well, you got here safe and sound which is the main thing. Unlike the poor City of Benares – but I don’t suppose they told you about any of that … Said to be rather smart, the Mouzinho, as that class of boat goes … And Portuguese is one of yours, isn’t it? So quite social?’

  ‘My spoken Portuguese is pretty rudimentary, I’m afraid, but hardly any of the passengers actually hailed from Lisbon itself. In any case, I spent most of the passage in my cabin.’

  ‘Oh dear, what a shame.’ The girl lit a cigarette, adding petrol fumes to the fug. ‘Mal du mer?’

  ‘De mer, not du mer,’ corrected Evelyn before she could stop herself. ‘The memo said to keep a low profile and the public rooms were extremely crowded. Refugees, I think. Jews mostly –’ Genista Broome’s nose wrinkled in sympathy ‘– most of them were ferried off to the island place before the rest of us could disembark. It took forever but luckily – as you saw – I was fished out of the crush in the customs shed by some chap in uniform or I’d be there still. Wasn’t even searched –’ Evelyn nodded in the direction of her suitcase on the front seat. ‘I might have had anything in there.’

  ‘What happened to your trunk? Carson here looked everywhere but it appears to have gone AWOL.’

  ‘They said to keep personal effects to a minimum. There was talk of a berth on a submarine at one point …’

  ‘Golly. What have you got in there, anyway? Two nighties, a Hungarian phrasebook and a pound of finest Ceylon? It can’t hold much more, surely? Ah well, not to worry. Lots to get through –’ She looked at her wristwatch. ‘The original plan was to debrief you over at HQ but we reckoned without the huddled masses slowing everything down and queering the timetable.’

  She opened her pocketbook and produced a slim deck of buff-coloured index cards.

  ‘Now, while I remember: you will need to fill in one of these.’ She handed Evelyn an official-looking form. ‘New thing: you need to register as an alien with a post office within the next thirty days: height, weight, fingerprints, all that. Purely a formality, we’ve all had to do it. There’s a bit asking whether you’ve had anything to do with “organisations devoted to furthering the political activities of foreign governments”, which you haven’t, so you can tick “have not” with a clear conscience. And you have signed the you-know-what, haven’t you? London said you had.’

  Evelyn nodded and the other woman lowered her voice to a mutter barely audible above the thunder of Eighth Avenue traffic.

  ‘You’ll have to leave the address bit blank for the moment, I’m afraid. The thing is …’ she looked embarrassed ‘… there’s been a bit of a mix-up. A few months ago our Colonel Peyton from HQ chummed up with this Anglo-Hungarian film chap and spent quite a bit of time over in Hollywood in hopes of getting him to help out on the propaganda front. You didn’t hear me say that, obviously: they take their neutrality very seriously over here; one whiff of any of this and Saucy and his film-producer friend would be back in Blighty before you could say Un-American Activities.’

  ‘Saucy?’

  ‘Colonel Peyton. Henry Percival Peyton.’

  Evelyn looked blank.

  ‘HP? Like the sauce? Anyway, the chap said he’d play ball and so Saucy took to whizzing back and forth to Los Angeles seeing how the land lay. This was all well and good up to a point but Saucy soon spotted that those studio men won’t give you the time of day if you drive your own car or answer your own telephone and said he would need some sort of aide-de-camp, preferably a linguist. Practically everyone in Hollywood hails from foreign parts and they all tend to talk amongst themselves rather, which left Saucy at something of a disadvantage. Anyhow, Kiss was all in favour – he’s frightfully keen on presteesh as he calls it – and volunteered to hire someone at his own expense.’

  ‘Kiss?’

  ‘Kiss. Did London not brief you? He’s a film producer, Hungarian Jew by the name of Zan-dor Kiss.’ Each syllable handled like a caterpillar being tweezed from a salad.

  ‘Kiss would have gone ahead and hired someone locally but Saucy wanted to be certain of their loyalty so he arranged – unofficially – to have London muck in and scan the files for a suitable polyglot – all madly unorthodox. After the usual delays
, a wire was received saying that they had selected “E. Murdoch” of Postal Censorship for the task: meticulous bureaucrat; no family ties; nine languages. Might have known you were too good to be true but it was only when one of our Lisbon friends got in touch that we realised you weren’t actually a man and by that time the Mouzinho was halfway to the Azores. Red faces all round.’

  ‘I was interviewed in person by a Major Bannister,’ protested Evelyn. ‘Twice.’

  She smiled at the memory. After a few paper preliminaries – a German prose; translate ‘Jabberwocky’ into Italian; usual pedagogic larks – she had been wheeled in for personal assessment.

  ‘However did you come by so many languages?’ marvelled the Major, whose own skills were taxed by the menu at Prunier’s.

  ‘I had a knack for it,’ said Evelyn. ‘It became a sort of habit after a while.’

  ‘You seem to have spent quite a bit of time abroad.’ He looked up from her file. ‘Rather unusual.’

  Evelyn’s unusual facility had been revealed quite by chance at the age of three when she had regaled the lunch table with all eight verses of ‘Alouette’. Her late father soon discovered that a child he had hitherto found uninteresting combined a swotty willingness to memorise irregular verbs with a parrot-like ability to repeat whatever was said to her. The Reverend Charles Dent had always taken the Parable of the Talents very much to heart and felt it was incumbent on all of them to make the very most of his daughter’s surprising gift. He set about teaching her Latin with the aid of a handwritten textbook of his own devising. Any mistakes and she would be made to begin at the top: ‘non amatus sum, non amatus es, non amatus est’ (the romance languages were a piece of cake in comparison). Once she had outstripped his own limited mastery of French and German, he had dug out his old university address book and begun a campaign of letter-writing and for three summers in a row the young Evelyn had been packed off to the Continent to lodge with a string of Nonconformist clerics.

  ‘I see you have a smattering of Hungarian,’ said the Major. ‘They’re particularly keen on the Magyar angle. Spend much time in Buda?’

  ‘Not as such. My school had a Hungarian singing teacher for a bit …’

  It was important not to overstate one’s competence, Evelyn felt: Postal Censorship’s recruitment officer had been plagued by optimistic applicants who assumed that their various smatterings – restaurant French; railway German – would qualify them to monitor the idiomatic scribblings of potential fifth columnists.

  ‘I could catch a train or order a meal, I suppose.’

  ‘We’ll put you down as “conversational”,’ Major Bannister decided, ‘though I’m sure you’re being unduly modest.’

  ‘Poor old Lefty Bannister,’ sighed Genista Broome, ducking her head to check her reflection in the rear-view mirror. ‘I dare say he got his wires crossed but everything’s up in the air at the moment, particularly now that Saucy has had to toddle off to Bermuda.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Classified – or at least I assume it’s classified: nobody told me.’

  ‘And when will the Colonel be back?’

  ‘Search me. You’ll have to play it by ear until we have a clearer idea of his movements, but he should be joining you once he’s got things up and running. The powers that be this end were all for sending you straight back when they found out you weren’t a man but Kiss persuaded them that a female linguist might actually be a better bet vis-à-vis lurking on the sidelines at a film studio asking stupid questions. Flirtation can be a lot more effective than the third degree …’

  The girl ran an appraising eye over Evelyn’s mannish, pavement-grey suit and Evelyn caught her suppressing a small smile before turning to gaze out at the theatre-lined street, the names of plays and players twinkling bright in the deepening dusk. The streetlights gave a jaundiced cast to Genista Broome’s prettified face: cheeks thickly powdered, eyebrows pencilled into permanent parabolas of astonishment. The girl had slathered colour over the natural edges of her mouth to make it appear fuller than it was – the way film actresses did. The effect was intended to be voluptuous but the impressionistic brushwork simply made it look as though she’d painted her face in the dark.

  Evelyn’s sister-in-law Deborah back in Woking kept her make-up next to her siren suit on her night table and would smear on lipstick as they dashed out to the air-raid shelter whenever the warning sounded, blotting her mouth with one hand and wrenching off her hairnet and clips with the other as she, Evelyn and their elderly mother-in-law (‘the Outlaw’, Deborah always called her) scurried down the garden path. ‘I’m damned if I’ll be found dead with curlers in.’ Woking had so far survived unscathed, although there had been a major raid on an aircraft factory in Weybridge which, as old Mrs Murdoch was quick to point out, was only a bus ride away.

  ‘The original plan,’ the Broome female was saying, ‘was for Mister Evelyn Murdoch to bunk up with HP in the bachelor bolthole Kiss leased for him near the studio. That’s obviously no go now but Kiss’s people are on the case. You’ll get further gen on all that between trains tomorrow afternoon.’

  The girl rummaged once again in her pocketbook and extracted a cardboard wallet containing two sets of train tickets.

  ‘You reach La Salle station at around eight tomorrow morning, if memory serves. The Super Chief won’t leave until gone seven so you’ve a room booked for the day at a nearby hotel where you will be met at eleven hundred hours by our man in Chicago who will complete your induction: fair hair; English tailor; contact word: “dandelion” – Lord alone knows why.

  ‘You’ll have a couple of hours before our chap joins you so you might as well take the opportunity for a few running repairs. There’s a beauty parlour in the hotel; Alphonse is the top man – if you can get him. There probably won’t be time for a wave …’ She frowned doubtfully at the bale of hair beneath Evelyn’s hat. ‘And you’ll want a manicure –’ she gave a complacent glance at her own scarlet fingertips ‘– although there’s usually a woman on the train. Your steward will know.

  ‘It’s good form to keep all your receipts but it’s all Kiss cash so you won’t have to answer in triplicate to the accounts bods. If anyone gives you any trouble about anything on the trains or at the hotel just keep tipping until they sort it out. Demented system but you will be a-mazed at the difference a well-placed gratuity can make in the Land of the Free: service with a lick. Don’t forget about the manicure: they really mind about that kind of thing. And get them to do something with the eyebrows.’

  Evelyn opened her mouth to protest but the girl had barely paused for breath. Evelyn might prefer to take her meals in the privacy of her compartment (the club sandwiches were very good) but if she were to head off to the dining car – Evelyn mustn’t take this the wrong way – she might want to make use of the built-in shower thingy beforehand.

  ‘Americans are frightfully hot on personal freshness.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘One becomes rather sensitised oneself after a bit.’

  Evelyn, half-suffocated by the car’s excessive heat, pressed her thick woollen sleeves to her sides.

  ‘If by any ghastly chance you get buttonholed by fellow passengers – they are the nosiest people on God’s earth, constantly inviting one to things – crank up the accent and say that you are taking up a position in voice culture – brown cows, you know the stuff – but only divulge if seriously pressed. Never, ever, volunteer information and for God’s sake, keep the old parley-voo under your hat.’

  A street-corner hoarding with a gaily coloured daub of sunbeams and palm trees shouted ‘See America First! Visit California: The Land of Winter Sunshine’. A road sign up ahead read ‘Grand Central Station 1½ miles’ and Evelyn realised with a surge of panic that in all this talk of taxis and manicures she had been given no inkling of what her duties were to be. It could hardly be a translation job; America must be teeming with suitably qualified émigrés.

  ‘But what do I actually do once I get there if Colonel
Peyton is still in Bermuda? How can I be an assistant if there’s no one there to assist?’

  The girl became still more evasive – perhaps she too had been kept in the dark?

  ‘He’s due back any day now … probably. And if he isn’t I should just lie back and enjoy it, if I were you. Smile and wave, as my mama always says. I’m sure the studio can find something to keep you occupied in the meantime …’

  She took refuge in her index cards.

  ‘Now then –’ a tape measure and a stub of pencil were produced from her pocket ‘– I don’t know what you’ve managed to cram into that toy suitcase of yours but Mr Kiss doesn’t want you letting the side down. Sit up straight.’

  It seemed that an operative from Kiss’s Hollywood office was going to be sent on a mercy dash to a Los Angeles department store the instant HQ rang through with Evelyn’s weights and measures.

  ‘Thirty-eight, call it thirty-four to allow for the tweed. Shoe size? Brassieres? Stockings? Gloves? Hat size? Hats aren’t de rigueur in California as a rule but older women still wear them.’ The insult was all the more wounding for being entirely unintentional.

  ‘Take your lead from the other women in the studio but when in doubt think Côte d’Azur rather than Café Royal … if that helps at all’ – another pitying smirk at Evelyn’s ensemble. ‘The studio’s little shopping spree will be waiting at whatever billet they’ve found for you; in the meantime, Kiss’s New York office have supplied some light camouflage – the man’s grasp of detail is remarkable.’ She yanked a shiny lavender-coloured carrier bag on to her box-pleated lap. ‘There’s a rather lovely lucky dip in here: a pair of dark glasses, some jolly smart gloves, various bits and bobs you might find useful …’ She began to go rather red in the face. ‘You’ll see that they’ve – er – tried to anticipate all eventualities … and I’ve slipped in a couple of last week’s newspapers to get you up to speed.’

  She snapped a gold watch on to Evelyn’s wrist then pulled out a red kid pocketbook and, unasked, began decanting the contents of Evelyn’s handbag. ‘You’ll find plenty of ready money in the wallet.’