A Map of the Damage

by Sophia Tobin

  ‘Total destruction,’ he said.

  Each symbol, the symbol of something greater. Her mind juddered with it: ruined houses. The cries of the injured. The clouds of dust in the air. The terrible randomness of it. A house concertinaed to wood and rubble. A single survivor, standing outside, staring.

  A fragment of red satin, fluttering in the breeze.

  How had it happened in her lodgings? she wondered. Were the girls upstairs, preparing for an evening out, laughing? Painting their nails, and putting on stockings? Or had they taken shelter, under the kitchen table?

  It was the former, she knew. Remembered Jenny’s reckless laugh. If I go, I go, she had said. At least I’ve had fun. It’s just sex, Livy. You’ll get over him. Have some fun.

  She remembered the loneliness of it: standing in the night air, staring at the house, the sky light from the dock fires.

  She turned and looked at her husband.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He brushed her face with his hand. ‘When I saw you again, that morning, after the Club was bombed, and you didn’t remember anything. I thought I should probably let you go. But I found I couldn’t.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said.

  He looked into her eyes. ‘I was changed, and so were you. I wondered if we could find our way back to each other. We are surrounded by so much force. So much violence. I wanted you to choose.’

  She took his hand, and put her head against his shoulder. Together, they looked down at the map. She was glad it was not her borough; glad that her eyes were not drawn, inexorably, to Woodville Street, to a small square coloured black.

  ‘I suppose it’s rather beautiful,’ she said, ‘for such a terrible thing. But I don’t want to look at it anymore.’

  ‘One more,’ he said.

  He showed her a map of a section of the City of London. So many black sites, but the Mirrormakers’ Club coloured a light red. She felt obscurely proud of it, thinking of that night in December on the roof: their hours of labour, their camaraderie. She looked up and met his smile with one of her own.

  ‘If we keep fighting,’ he said, ‘we win, sometimes.’

  She nodded. It was a kind of assent to something. They were wary of speaking plainly to each other. They treated each other carefully, like tender and bruised things which needed time to heal.

  ‘I’ve realized something about the Mirrormakers’ Club,’ he said, taking her arm, and leading her away, with a nod to one of his colleagues.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think it was about her. Charlotte Kinsburg. I was blinded when I came to it – everywhere I looked, all I could see was you, and try and work out what you thought of it. But the truth is, the building was about love. Outside, for example – the configuration of the columns in the façade was meant to depict that of the temple of Mars Ultor in Rome, but he changed them, without permission as far as I can see – to those of the temple of Venus and Roma.

  ‘I think he was memorializing something to do with Charlotte. That’s my hunch. You said he drew flowers, tiny details like ribbons, children’s faces. These things are taken from life. And I knew I’d seen the Red Parlour before. It’s a replica, of one of the rooms at Redlands. When I was a patient there, my bed was in that room. It gave me a start, seeing it – I didn’t recognize it at first. It just seemed nightmarish, in some distant way. Would she have seen that message?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not. He was fevered with it. There is no unity to it, no resolution.’ He nudged her. ‘Like us.’

  She looked at him sadly. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I read through the building committee minutes, to see when the moat was changed,’ he said. ‘There’s a small note about “a change” in the 1880s, but that’s so long after everything we’ve been reading about. Oh – and – well, maybe you’ll like this, maybe you won’t – but the surveyor at that time was Dale-Collingwood’s son.’ Livy’s eyes widened, and he nodded. ‘Yes, Henry had a ward. He adopted him as his own child.’

  And what of the child? she thought, remembering Henry’s note. But she could not think anymore on it, she knew: otherwise she would spend her life trying to find out answers from the dead.

  ‘I found something else in the building committee minutes,’ he said. ‘A note about Woman and Looking Glass. That they accepted it from Kinsburg, but that he gave it on condition that the plate on the frame bearing his wife’s name was removed and that it was given a new name.’

  Livy nodded. ‘I didn’t know her name was on it originally – but Jonathan had a letter, stating that it was to be known as Woman and Looking Glass.’

  ‘And he specified that it hang on the far side of the Stair Hall, in a dark corner by the door leading to the basement. The minutes are polite, of course, but it was obviously most irregular.’

  *

  When she had returned to the Mirrormakers’ Club, Livy went back to the Document Room, turned on her lamp, and fetched a box from the shelves: 1880–85. She took her place at the table. It was strange working there alone. She had the sense that Jonathan might walk in at any moment, or that Miss Hardaker might come and take her to task for some typing she had done.

  Her eyes skimmed over various papers and bills. And then: another notebook, this one covered in ox-blood leather. She opened it, and started at the name.

  James Dale-Collingwood. Surveyor.

  The Mirrormakers’ Club.

  It was a harder hand than Henry’s, the characters more laboured, more self-conscious in style. As she read through it, Livy sensed that every word was deliberate; there was no rush or hurry. But, she supposed, the Club had been built by then, and his job as surveyor was not so pressurized.

  Her eyes caught the phrase.

  . . . an irregular matter. In this I was commanded by Mr Kinsburg. As the financier of the building it was not in my power to refuse.

  She glanced at the point marked in the minutes by Christian. A small change in the moat structure was also approved at the recommendation of the surveyor.

  After she had put the boxes away, and exhausted her attention for the afternoon, Livy went to the storeroom to see the painting of Charlotte. She uncovered the face and looked at every detail. The painting seemed a quieter thing, now: the image did not thrill before her eyes, or pulsate like a heart on its last beat. Livy thought of the colours on the bomb map, and of the green hills of Bedfordshire where she would go and plough the land, and of Christian’s brown eyes. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. Her voice sounded strange in the empty room. She leaned forwards, her face inches from Charlotte’s, and then pulled the sheets back over the painting so their faces were separated by the white cloth. She wondered if she would ever look at that face again.

  A moment later, the detonation.

  The walls around her shifted sickeningly. She got to her feet, and found she was shaking. She ran out of the storeroom and into the area of the vaults where they had their living space. Peggy was standing there, frozen to the spot.

  ‘Where’s Bill?’ Livy cried, her breath catching in her throat.

  ‘He’s gone out,’ said Peggy. ‘Maybe, if we just stay here—’

  ‘We have to get out,’ Livy shouted, and she ran forwards and took Peggy’s hand, pulling her towards the stairs. They ran, and it felt as though they were running on the spot, on an ever-revolving staircase, until, finally, Livy reached forwards and pushed open the green door to the Stair Hall. A vast slab of coloured marble had fallen from the opposite wall. It lay at a diagonal over the door, a small margin of triangular space left at the side. Livy shuffled through the space, then held a hand out to Peggy. Peggy came through.

  They did not look up. They ran towards the doorway to the Entrance Hall. A door that was already in flames, like the panelling of the room beyond. But there was only one thing to do, and that was to go forwards, hand in hand, to reach the door. So that is what they did: the simple
st thing. As the building screamed and groaned above them, they ran, holding onto each other, until they found themselves in the midst of the light, and the fury, and the flames.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  1941

  Redlands in the evening light was a benign place, its downstairs shutters shut tight against the approaching night. As Jonathan walked up the driveway, he caught the scent of cigarette smoke on the breeze, and saw a soldier smoking at an open window. He had sent no word. He wanted to happen upon the house like a stranger. Walking, taking it in slowly, he saw how strange it was, with its classical centre and its long wings. Ashton’s son had added Gothic dressings to it, and it seemed a sad mish-mash, but grand still, and aloof.

  He came through the front door, past nurses and patients, unacknowledged like a ghost. Up to his wing of the house, where he knocked on their sitting-room door. It had once been a guest bedroom, and he wondered for a moment whether Henry Dale-Collingwood had slept there, and looked out of its windows.

  Stevie opened the door. ‘Jonathan,’ she said, as though he had been gone for hours rather than weeks. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’re in time for tea.’

  She went and got the extra cup and saucer herself, and he asked her where the maid was. ‘I sent her home this week,’ she said. ‘Her brother was killed in France.’

  He sat down on the sofa with its faded floral textile, and looked around at the familiar room. A small fire was already burning in the grate with Stevie’s old Labrador, Mitten, dozing before it. He looked at the same silver and enamel photograph frames containing pictures of them as a couple over many years. He felt himself sink into the sofa, and he watched with tenderness as Stevie poured tea into a white and gold cup. She was dressed in an emerald-coloured housecoat; the cut nipped in her waist and broadened her shoulders. He remembered it from before the war, and it gave her a certain glamour.

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for, in London?’ she said, in that same calm tone. Mitten got up and went to her, nosed at her hand, and settled at her feet.

  Jonathan looked at her. He felt nothing so much as a desire to weep, which he pushed down.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You should have telephoned more often,’ she said. ‘I heard every morning of the bombing of London, but nothing of you, apart from the occasional telephone call about that wretched diamond, and your note about Christmas.’ Her eyes focused on him at last. ‘It was cruel of you.’

  ‘I am sorry.’ He put his tea down, leaned forwards, and clasped his hands. His signet ring caught the light; she saw the sheen of white on the red carnelian. ‘I am sorry, Stevie, I am so very sorry.’

  ‘I suppose you had other things to think of, in London,’ she said, as though to the room in general. ‘Was it – Bunty?’

  ‘Bunty?’

  Then he realized: the couple he had dined with, their friends, Bunty and edmund. And Stevie thought, that is, she implied—

  ‘No!’ he said.

  She exhaled. ‘That’s a relief, at least. I couldn’t have borne it, for her to triumph over me. She always wanted you, you know.’

  Her openness alarmed him. She had never spoken of such things before. ‘Please, Stevie, my dear. How are you?’

  ‘Well enough. Not much energy. Dr Lamb is very good, and calls every day. But Jonathan – how are you?’

  ‘I looked for more information on the diamond, in the archives of the Mirrormakers’ Club.’

  ‘Oh, that funny place,’ she said. She had been there once. ‘I still remember that dinner – when I had to wash my hands in the rosewater dish – they made such a fuss.’

  ‘Yes.’ He swallowed. ‘There was a girl there.’

  She looked at him again, her eyes sharpened. ‘Please, Jonathan. Don’t say any more. Everyone is allowed a crise, I think? And if we are truthful, I suppose you have not been right for some time.’ She put her cup down carefully, and offered him a piece of bread and butter. ‘I remember talking about marriage once, with one of our patients. A young soldier. He said he was ready to forgive his wife anything.’ She flexed her hand. ‘The occasional infidelity is only to be expected. We are all just human beings, after all.’

  As Jonathan looked at her, her words sinking in, she seemed to change before his eyes, from victim to something else.

  She saw the look on his face, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ She smiled down at Mitten, who had risen and was wagging her tail. ‘Not you, silly doggy.’

  Jonathan picked up his cup, and stared into his tea, wretchedly.

  ‘My poor Jonathan,’ said Stevie. ‘You are like a moth in the spider’s web I saw one day in the glasshouse. One evening, we go to sleep, and our life is perfect. Then, in the night, you are caught, and you turn and thrash wildly and blindly, and when we wake our life is full of holes. When I had taken such care, to make sure things went well.’

  He frowned. It was true: they had always got on so well together. It was so strange that something so small had tipped them off balance. Perhaps that was their problem: they had never cried, never fought, never had any differences. How perfect they had seemed, and yet it could be wrecked, just like that, their contentment nothing but a thin silken tissue, easily torn.

  ‘Everything has always been about you, hasn’t it, Jonathan?’ she said.

  He looked at her questioningly. She leaned forwards, and put her hand on his knee. ‘But that’s all right.’

  ‘I missed you,’ he said. He only realized how much with her sitting there in front of him. Looking at her now, he could still see a hint of the girl she had once been: that girl who had played tennis in white, careless of her brown muscled limbs and her freckled face, free from any kind of make-up, her face and her body shaped by the air and the sunshine. He remembered how he had adored everything about her: her physical strength, her ease and jollity, her good sense, without neurosis of any kind. Stevie saw his sudden watchfulness. Her mouth tilted upwards, with a knowing, dark humour.

  ‘I remembered something else, after I sent you the letters,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll be pleased.’

  ‘My love?’

  ‘I’d forgotten about it. When I was a bride, your mother took me aside and gave me the key to a small safe, in the wall of the lady’s closet, behind the panelling. “The grey box”, she called it. She said it had been handed down through the women of the family. Can you imagine? It was such a lark. I almost told you at the time, my darling. But she swore me to secrecy – and she was so fierce.’

  ‘She always was rather fierce,’ admitted Jonathan.

  ‘Of course, she always said the house had to be kept the same – that it really was a kind of museum to the Kinsburgs, even the lady’s closet, where I write my correspondence – and I have kept it the same, haven’t I? That’s why I turned my attention to the garden, and did not think of anything else other than preserving – that is what your mother said, “preserve, Stephanie, preserve!” ’

  ‘My poor Stevie.’ He was puzzled. ‘And you never said anything to me.’

  ‘It hardly mattered.’ She gazed at him. ‘I had you. Then, at least – I had you. The house did not matter to me.’

  ‘You still have me.’

  ‘It seems so. However did I manage it?’ She petted Mitten. ‘The safe. I looked through it, of course. And the truth is, it is just a poor collection of things – rather pitiful. A few letters, yes, but other little things that make no sense. Knick-knacks and the like, which were collected by Charlotte’s daughter – your grandmother – and kept. Poor old Isabel. She must have missed her mother a great deal. I put it away, and never really thought of it, until you rang. I looked again, of course, but it still made no sense to me. And there’s nothing to do with the diamond.’ She rose, with her customary grace, and walked into the next room. He knew that he was expected to follow her, and did so with a growing sense of anticipation. The next room was used as their bedroom, and a crude box he had never seen before lay on her table, so unlike the ot
her refined objects of Redlands. Badly made, as though by an amateur, and dirty, with a grey wash of paint as thin as watercolour.

  Stevie picked it up, opened it, and emptied the box out onto the bed. Newspaper clippings fluttered onto it, carried by musky-smelling letters, heavy and folded, yellow, large black handwriting, some beads and other small objects. A slight aroma: a little stale, but just detectable.

  Lily of the valley.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  1841

  REDLANDS

  The evening began quietly enough for Ashton. His wife had just returned from London, arriving early enough in the day to order a good dinner, which he had enjoyed. Nicholas and Barbara were away with their daughter, and he had been relishing their absence and the serenity it provided, for his wife always understood when he wished to be left alone. After supper had been cleared, he had taken his place at his desk in the salon bleu, to look over some mineral samples he had recently acquired. He heard the door open and close behind him, and the shift of his wife’s skirts as she walked across the room. But instead of going to sit in her usual chair, Charlotte came to his side, and stood there until he looked up at her.

  When he did, she put a leather-covered box down on the desk in front of him. He recognized it, and looked at her questioningly.

  ‘I thought you had better put it in the safe,’ she said.

  He couldn’t help it; he flicked open the box to look at the diamond. Just to see, for a moment, the light shift and quiver in its depths as it lay on its blue velvet bedding. ‘What did the goldsmith say?’ he murmured, as he looked at it.

  ‘We couldn’t agree on the correct setting for the tiara.’ She turned to the footman. ‘Michael, would you leave us, please? And send Miss de la Fointaine in. She is waiting outside.’

  Ashton shut the box, and looked at her properly then. He saw that she had changed her dress. ‘My dear?’ he said. The footman had gone, and in came her new maid, her face set, carrying a bonnet and a cloak, and wearing her own.