Night Over Water - Ken Follett [4]
By Wednesday morning the Clipper would be ready to do it again.
CHAPTER TWO
The day war broke out was a lovely late-summer Sunday, mild and sunny.
A few minutes before the news was broadcast on the wireless, Margaret Oxenford was outside the sprawling brick mansion that was her family home, perspiring gently in a hat and coat, and fuming because she was forced to go to church. On the far side of the village the single bell in the church tower tolled a monotonous note.
Margaret hated church, but her father would not let her miss the service, even though she was nineteen and old enough to make up her own mind about religion. A year or so ago she had summoned up the nerve to tell him that she did not want to go; but he had refused to listen. Margaret had said: “Don’t you think it’s hypocritical for me to go to church when I don’t believe in God?” Father had replied: “Don’t be ridiculous.” Defeated and angry, she had told her mother that when she was of age she would never go to church again. Mother had said: “That will be up to your husband, dear.” As far as they were concerned the argument was over; but Margaret had seethed with resentment every Sunday morning since then.
Her sister and her brother came out of the house. Elizabeth was twenty-one. She was tall and clumsy and not very pretty. Once upon a time the two sisters had known everything about each other. As girls they had been together constantly for years, for they never went to school, but got a haphazard education at home from governesses and tutors. They had always known one another’s secrets. But lately they had grown apart. In adolescence, Elizabeth had embraced their parents’ rigid traditional values: she was ultraconservative, fervently royalist, blind to new ideas and hostile to change. Margaret had taken the opposite path. She was a feminist and a socialist, interested in jazz music, Cubist painting and free verse. Elizabeth felt Margaret was disloyal to her family in adopting radical ideas. Margaret was irritated by her sister’s foolishness, but she was also very sad and upset that they were no longer intimate friends. She did not have many intimate friends.
Percy was fourteen. He was neither for nor against radical ideas, but he was naturally mischievous, and he empathized with Margaret’s rebelliousness. Fellow-sufferers under their father’s tyranny, they gave one another sympathy and support, and Margaret loved him dearly.
Mother and Father came out a moment later. Father was wearing a hideous orange-and-green tie. He was practically color-blind, but Mother had probably bought it for him. Mother had red hair and sea green eyes and pale, creamy skin, and she looked radiant in colors like orange and green. But Father had black hair going gray and a flushed complexion, and on him the tie looked like a warning against something dangerous.
Elizabeth resembled Father, with dark hair and irregular features. Margaret had Mother’s coloring: she would have liked a scarf in the silk of Father’s tie. Percy was changing so rapidly that no one could tell whom he would eventually take after.
They walked down the long drive to the little village outside the gates. Father owned most of the houses and all the farmland for miles around. He had done nothing to earn such wealth: a series of marriages in the early nineteenth century had united the three most important landowning families in the county, and the resulting huge estate had been handed down intact from generation to generation.
They walked along the village street and across the green to the gray stone church. They entered in procession: Father and Mother first; Margaret behind with Elizabeth; and Percy bringing up the rear. The villagers in the congregation touched their forelocks as the Oxenfords made their way down the aisle to the family pew. The wealthier farmers, all of whom rented their land from Father, inclined their heads in polite bows; and the middle classes, Dr. Rowan and Colonel Smythe and Sir Alfred, nodded respectfully. This ludicrous