‘Was . . . was that the house, do you think?’ I asked, in a very small voice.
Veronica climbed the stairs to our reinforced trapdoor, but it wasn’t hot, and she couldn’t smell any smoke.
‘Whatever that was, it was close,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have blocked our exit, though.’
Well, Montmaray House or our flat might be gone, but Veronica and my journal were safe down here; that was all that mattered. We settled back down on our bunk, nerves twanging but each of us determined to keep calm and carry on, as the posters say. Veronica retrieved her book, something heavy and Spanish, and I returned to Kick’s latest letter. Billy Hartington’s younger brother had just married Deborah Mitford – the latest in a ‘rash’ of recent weddings involving Kick’s friends, here and in America. ‘But I am still single, and sometimes feel I will stay that way forever!’ she’d written. Hmm, I thought, picking up my pen and wondering whether I ought to tell her that Billy seemed to be spending all his leave with Sally Norton these days. I’d seen them together at the Four Hundred. But if Billy was keeping silent about his unofficial engagement, then it wasn’t my business to tell Kick. And in any case, letter writing by candlelight was proving to be rather a strain on the eyes. Unfortunately we’d run out of paraffin for the lamp, and neither of us had had any spare time to queue up and buy more. I put down my pen with a sigh.
‘Reminds me of all those nights at Montmaray when the supply ship was overdue,’ said Veronica, abandoning her book as well. ‘Struggling to read by the glow of the stove.’
‘Remember that time Carlos curled up so close to it that his fur started to smoulder?’ I said. ‘And after we dragged him away, he kept trying to sneak back, because it was so cold?’
‘So we had to take him upstairs with us when we went to bed,’ recalled Veronica, ‘and we all piled up in my bed, and Toby kept complaining about Carlos slobbering on his neck, but that was actually Henry.’
All the while, the bombs were whistling down around us, punctuated by the stutter of the anti-aircraft guns, for what seemed like hours. Time tended to behave strangely underground, I’d noticed. It idled along for the first part of the night, stalling altogether at moments of high terror. It was only at two or three in the morning, after one had finally managed to fall asleep, that time began to sprint forward, in a belated attempt to catch up with itself. Veronica and I propped ourselves wearily against our pillows to wait out the raid, our conversation starting and stopping and going round in slow circles like the minute hand of the clock.
‘I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to smoke,’ said Veronica at one stage, as the air filtering through the vents began to take on a distinct smell of ash, ‘but look at all the people who do. And there’d be riots in the streets if the government ever decided to ration cigarettes.’
‘Tobacco probably tastes nicer than burning buildings, though. And perhaps they can’t help wanting to smoke? I think cigarettes might be a bit addictive.’
‘Like opium,’ said Veronica, nodding. ‘Someone I know in the Foreign Office started on that when he was posted to Shanghai.’
‘How did it make him feel?’
‘Drowsy, he said. And numb.’
I pondered this for a moment. ‘That doesn’t sound very enjoyable.’
‘No, I didn’t think so, either. But it might be one of those things that appeals to men more than women. Like sex.’
‘I don’t think that’s just for men,’ I said. ‘Look at Daphne. And Julia told me it’s very nice, once you find someone who knows what he’s doing.’
‘Oh, well, nice,’ said Veronica. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. I’m just not sure how much time and effort ought to be devoted to something that ends up being fleetingly nice.’
‘You said you hadn’t been to bed with Daniel!’
‘I haven’t.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, not really.’
‘More than kissing?’
‘Quite a bit more,’ she said. ‘But not enough to worry about getting pregnant.’
‘Oh.’ Veronica didn’t sound madly enthusiastic about it – but then, if she didn’t like it, she certainly wouldn’t still be doing it. It would be impossible for Daniel to coerce Veronica into that (or anything else), even if he were capable of behaving so despicably (which, of course, he isn’t). But I’d found kissing to be wonderful, and I hadn’t even been in love with the man. ‘Well, perhaps it’ll become nicer when Daniel knows more about what to do,’ I said.
‘He knows perfectly well what to do,’ she said. ‘He’s had other lovers. No, I expect it’s me. I prefer to think, rather than feel, which is probably a disadvantage in that area.’ She stopped to rearrange her pillow. ‘You know,’ she went on thoughtfully, ‘sometimes I’d be quite happy to be a disembodied brain, floating from place to place.’
‘Steered by willpower,’ I said, picturing it.
‘Yes. Imagine how much easier that would be, not having a body that needed to be fed and rested and all those other boring things.’
‘Eating isn’t boring,’ I protested. ‘Well, it is now, but think of all those delicious meals we used to have before the war. And you’d be missing out on long steamy bubble baths, and lying in the sun with the scent of fresh-cut grass wafting on the breeze, and slipping between clean linen sheets, and all sorts of lovely things. I suppose I’m more sensual than you, though. Or is it sensuous? I can never remember the difference . . . But wait, did you just say Daniel had been in love with someone else?’
‘He’s thirty-one years old,’ she pointed out. ‘It would be a bit odd if he hadn’t. There was a girl at Oxford he was mad about, but her parents disapproved of him, and she finally married a much richer friend of his. That’s why he took up the job at Montmaray, to get away for a while. Then, after he came back to London, there was some older woman, an Italian Communist. But that was years ago.’
Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to be someone’s second love – or third love – but Veronica didn’t seem the slightest bit jealous. That was where an aptitude for calm, rational thinking was an advantage, I supposed.
‘And speaking of Italy,’ Veronica said, yawning, ‘I wonder how Mussolini’s feeling, now the Italian Army in Abyssinia is about to surrender . . .’
At which point, I fell asleep. After what seemed only a few seconds, I was shaken back into consciousness.
‘Sophie, come and look!’ said Veronica. She was fully dressed, and when I sat up and rubbed my eyes, I saw that the cellar was now filled with thick grey light. I tugged on my shoes and my coat, and stumbled after Veronica. Outside, scraps of charred paper churned about in the smoky breeze, and the rising sun was a dull yellow ball. We walked up the path alongside Montmaray House – which was still standing, seemingly unscathed – and out into the middle of the road. Two unfamiliar men wearing ARP armbands and tin helmets were standing there, gazing at our neighbour’s house. Except . . . it had vanished. It simply wasn’t there any more. I was struck by the realisation of how much empty space makes up a building, for the house, a three-storey Georgian mansion, had been reduced to an untidy pile of crushed stone and splintered timber that stood no taller than my shoulder. Thank Heavens the owners had moved to the country a year ago. I gaped at the ruins for a while, then turned to peer at Montmaray House. There were some broken windows, but no other apparent damage.
‘All the windows facing south on the third floor were blown out,’ said Veronica. ‘But the floors above and below are fine. It’s so odd.’
‘That’s nothing to what I’ve seen,’ one of the ARP men said. ‘I’ve seen a row of terrace houses razed to the ground, with the house at the end completely untouched.’
‘Is our flat all right?’ I finally thought to ask Veronica.
‘A big crack in the bathroom wall, but nothing that can’t be patched up.’
‘I’ve seen a house in Notting Hill with the entire front peeled away,’ said the ARP man. ‘Like a doll’s house, it was. The lights still worked and all.’
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br /> ‘That was a bad raid, last night,’ the other ARP man told us. ‘Low tide, you see. The firemen couldn’t pump enough water out of the Thames.’
‘Elephant and Castle went up like a tinderbox,’ said the first man, with a sort of gruesome relish.
‘I heard they hit the Houses of Parliament, too,’ said the other.
‘No!’ chorused Veronica and I, horrified.
But he was right. The House of Commons, the War Office, the Law Courts in the Strand, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of St James, St Thomas’s Hospital, King’s Cross Station, the church where Julia and Anthony had been married, the cinema at Marble Arch where I’d seen Wuthering Heights . . . and worst of all, the one that made Veronica nearly cry when she heard about it, the British Museum. Hundreds of thousands of its books, burnt to cinders.
But of course, that wasn’t really the worst. The very worst was all the people who lost their lives. I don’t know how many died, because they don’t tell us the numbers any more. Hundreds, probably, and thousands badly hurt, and even more made homeless. That’s why I disagree with Veronica, about fleeting pleasure being worthless. Everything is fleeting now. Life is fleeting. We have to savour any little bit of pleasure we come across, no matter how evanescent it may turn out to be.
28th June, 1941
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT there must come a time when our population will mostly consist of the dead, and the horribly injured, and those neither dead nor injured but so overwhelmed with grief that they are unable to function as normal human beings. At which point, I assume we will surrender. Unless the Germans get there before us, in which case they will surrender. There are moments when I don’t much care who reaches that point first, as long as the war ends. I experienced one of those moments today.
Of course, I do understand why we’re fighting. I understand that the Nazis are wrong, that sacrifices must be made if we want to defeat them. I know all that, and yet this incessant suffering makes me so sick to my stomach that I simply want it to stop. The fact that I have avoided the worst of it so far – that all of my family is still alive – only adds anxiety and guilt to my despair.
But who wouldn’t feel despair, on the day of a funeral? And such a depressing funeral, too. There is something badly wrong with a world in which so many parents are mourning their sons, and young wives their husbands . . . Oh, what a mess this journal entry is turning out to be, much like my day. Let me start again.
David Stanley-Ross was killed in battle last week in the Middle East. He was buried where he fell, in the desert, some place with a biblical name, and afterwards, his brigadier sat down and wrote a letter to David’s parents. He no doubt described David as a hero, cut down while valiantly leading his men to victory; official letters always say that sort of thing. I can’t imagine it provided any consolation at all to Lord and Lady Astley, from what I observed of them at the funeral. Lady Astley seemed determined to maintain a dignified front and greeted everyone with a steely, straight-backed composure. It was only up close that one noticed the tremor. If Julia hadn’t had a firm grasp of her mother’s arm throughout, I really think poor Lady Astley might have fallen into a shaking heap. Meanwhile, Lord Astley slumped into the front pew, dropped his head into his hands and wept. I’d never before seen a grown man cry – not in public, not in England. (I know Mr Churchill does it sometimes at bomb sites, but he’s half American and entirely eccentric, so he doesn’t count.) Rupert – usually so compassionate – made no attempt to console his father, but perched at the very end of the pew, his face averted, his jaw clenched, his arms tightly crossed. There was no sign of Charlie, Rupert’s elder brother. Most shocking of all was the sight of Penelope, David’s widow. I hadn’t realised she was having a baby (although the person most likely to mention it would have been Julia, who might have had her own reasons for not bringing up the subject). Poor Penelope! She looked so pale and bewildered as she was helped down the aisle to her seat. The sweltering heat, or clothes rationing, or advanced pregnancy, or perhaps sheer, unadulterated misery, had led her to abandon her usual fashionable outfits in favour of a shapeless frock in an unflattering cotton print. I don’t think I’d ever felt so sorry for someone I disliked. I hadn’t liked David much, either, and I felt desperately sorry for him, too. So I was pretty much drowning in uncomfortable, mismatched emotions.
If only Veronica had been able to take time off work to come to Astley with me, or Toby had been granted leave. But all I had was Aunt Charlotte and Lady Bosworth, who’d collected me from Salisbury railway station in Lady Bosworth’s official Red Cross motor car. Aunt Charlotte had insisted on sitting in the front so she could give Lady Bosworth helpful driving hints (never mind that Aunt Charlotte has never held a driving licence). As a result, the journey was less than peaceful. Sitting between them in church wasn’t much better. In addition, the vicar was one of those excessively patriotic types who fancied himself a great orator – he even affected a Churchillian lisp. He held forth on ‘defending our great and mighty Empire’ and ‘standing firm against the brutish Hun’ and how ‘every drop of our boys’ blood spilled in the sand brings us closer to victory’. Poor Penelope looked as though she was going to be sick, and even I started to feel a bit queasy. It was a relief when the final hymn was announced, despite this being ‘The Son of God Goes Forth to War’ (I refused to sing it, the lyrics are simply too gory and awful).
‘So kind of you to come,’ Lady Astley said afterwards on the church steps. She pressed Aunt Charlotte’s hand and gave us both a gracious smile. ‘Everyone has been so –’
She looked over my shoulder, and her mask slipped for a second, revealing naked anguish.
‘Oh, Sophia,’ she cried, ‘won’t you try to talk to him?’
I turned to see Rupert shoving past the vicar and stalking off round the corner of the church. I was still gaping when Aunt Charlotte, to my surprise, added urgently, ‘Yes, dear. Go on!’
So I ran after him. I was wearing my narrow black skirt and city shoes, though, and he was striding so quickly between the gravestones that I hadn’t a hope of catching up.
‘Rupert!’ I called. ‘Rupert!’
He whirled about, scowling, his fists clenched. Then he blinked. ‘Sophie?’ he said, his voice rough and strange.
I took a cautious step forward. ‘I . . . I only wanted to see if you were all right,’ I said, feeling as though I ought to be crouching down and holding out my fingers, the way one does with a wary, unfamiliar dog. ‘It’s fine if you’d rather be alone, but I thought I’d ask.’
I decided not to mention his mother’s concern.
Rupert pushed his hair off his damp forehead. ‘I just wanted to get away from that lot, that’s all,’ he said, jerking his head at the church. ‘I’m going back to the house. You can come, if you’d like.’ Then he walked off.
It wasn’t the most cordial invitation I’d ever received, but I picked my way after him, past raw wooden crosses with wilting posies propped against them, and on into the old section of the graveyard, where the grass and the wildflowers brushed my knees and weathered fragments of gravestones were sinking back into the earth at odd angles. Then the grass flattened out, and we came to a low stone wall and a gate that was hanging off its hinges.
‘I think we’re meant to be responsible for that,’ said Rupert, nudging the gate with his shoe. ‘Fixing it, I mean.’ A path meandered out of the graveyard, past a cornfield and up the hill towards Astley Manor. But Rupert turned his back on the house and sat down on the wall, in the shade of a broad chestnut. I went over to join him.
‘Sorry,’ he said, after a while.
‘What for?’ I said. ‘I don’t need an apology.’
‘But I was rude to you,’ he said, ‘and I ignored everyone else, when they were just trying to help. And I snapped at the vicar.’
‘Well, vicars ought to be accustomed to people getting upset at funerals,’ I said. ‘Besides, he didn’t seem a very sensitive vicar. I wanted to throw a hymn book at him myself, wh
en he started going on about boys bleeding to death in the sand.’
‘Wasn’t it disgusting?’ said Rupert. ‘I thought poor Penelope was going to pass out. “Young David’s blood was not spilled in vain”! I could hear my father muttering, “Yes, it was!” He just wishes it’d been my blood.’
‘He didn’t say that!’
‘He might as well have. That’s what he thinks. Much better I were killed than his beloved David. His favourite, the heir.’ Rupert grimaced. ‘We had an almighty row last night, as you might have gathered. He said something stupid to Penelope at dinner, about how she’d better make sure the baby was a boy. It was one of those joking remarks that’s not really a joke. So she burst into tears and rushed out, and Julia went after her, and I told him he was an unfeeling clod. You can imagine how it went from there. Oh, and my mother made it all ten times worse by taking my side. It reminded him yet again of what a pathetic mama’s boy his youngest son is. He hates the idea of me as the new heir. The last five Lord Astleys were officers of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, and here am I, so feeble I couldn’t even pass the army medical!’
I wasn’t even sure where to begin with this. I had to admit that Lord Astley was rather gruff at the best of times, and now, grief-stricken, might well have lashed out and said something insensitive. But it was also true that Rupert and his father had always been sadly at odds with each other. And then this baby of Penelope’s . . . I understood that if the baby turned out to be a boy, he was destined to be the next Lord Astley, now that David was dead. Still, if the baby were a girl . . . well, wasn’t Charlie the elder son now?
The FitzOsbornes at War Page 21
