‘There’s a sleazy gent if ever I saw one,’ Jimmy had laughed. Jimmy, the baby produced to celebrate the peace after the war to end all wars, was about to fight in another one. He had a few days’ leave from his army training and they had taken refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel while an unexploded bomb in the Strand was being dealt with. They could hear the naval guns that had been stationed on trolleys between Vauxhall and Waterloo – boom-boom-boom – but the bombers were looking for other targets and seemed to have moved on. ‘Doesn’t it ever stop?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Apparently not.’
‘It’s safer in the army,’ he laughed. He had joined the ranks as a private even though the army had offered him a commission. He wanted to be one of the chaps, he said. (‘But someone has to be an officer, surely?’ Hugh puzzled. ‘Better if it’s someone with a bit of intelligence.’)
He wanted the experience. He wanted to be a writer, he said, and what better than a war to reveal to him the heights and depths of the human condition? ‘A writer?’ Sylvie said. ‘I fear the hand of the evil fairy rocked his cradle.’ She meant Izzie, Ursula supposed.
It had been lovely spending time with Jimmy. Jimmy was dashing in his battledress and gained an entrance wherever they went – risqué venues in Dean Street and Archer Street, the Boeuf sur le Toit in Orange Street that was very risqué indeed (if not downright risky), places that made Ursula wonder about Jimmy. All in the pursuit of the human condition, he said. They got very drunk and a little silly and it was all rather a relief from cowering in the Millers’ cellar. ‘Promise you won’t die,’ she said to Jimmy as they groped like a blind couple along the Haymarket, listening to some other part of London being blown out of existence.
‘Do my best,’ Jimmy said.
She was cold. The water she was lying in was making her even colder. She needed to move. Could she move? Apparently not. How long had she been lying here? Ten minutes? Ten years? Time had ceased. Everything seemed to have ceased. Only the awful concoction of smells remained. She was in the cellar. She knew that because she could see Bubbles, still miraculously taped to a sandbag near her head. Was she going to die looking at this banality? Then banality seemed suddenly welcome as a ghastly vision appeared at her side. A terrible ghost, black eyes in a grey face and wild hair, was clawing at her. ‘Have you seen my baby?’ the ghost said. It took Ursula a few moments to realize that this was no ghost. It was Mrs Appleyard, her face covered in dirt and bomb dust and streaked with blood and tears. ‘Have you seen my baby?’ she said again.
‘No,’ Ursula whispered, her mouth dry from whatever filth had been falling. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again Mrs Appleyard had disappeared. She might have imagined her, perhaps she was delirious. Or perhaps it really had been the ghost of Mrs Appleyard and they were both trapped in some desolate limbo.
Her attention was caught again by Lavinia Nesbit’s dress hanging from the Millers’ picture rail. But it wasn’t Lavinia Nesbit’s dress. A dress didn’t have arms in it. Not sleeves, but arms. With hands. Something on the dress winked at Ursula, a little cat’s eye caught by the crescent moon. The headless, legless body of Lavinia Nesbit herself was hanging from the Millers’ picture rail. It was so absurd that a laugh began to boil up inside Ursula. It never broke because something shifted – a beam, or part of the wall – and she was sprinkled with a shower of talcum-like dust. Her heart thumped uncontrollably in her chest. It was sore, a time-delay bomb waiting to go off.
For the first time she felt panic. No one was coming to help her. Certainly not the deranged ghost of Mrs Appleyard. She was going to die alone in the cellar of Argyll Road, with nothing but Bubbles and the headless Lavinia Nesbit for company. If Hugh were here, or Teddy or Jimmy, or even Pamela, they would be fighting to get her out of here, to save her. They would care. But there was no one here to care. She heard herself mewling like an injured cat. How sorry she felt for herself, as if she were someone else.
Mrs Miller had said, ‘Well, I think we could all do with a nice cup of cocoa, don’t you?’ Mr Miller was fretting about the Nesbits again and Ursula, utterly fed up with the claustrophobia of the cellar, said, ‘I’ll go and look for them,’ and got up from the rickety dining chair just as the swish and pheew announced the arrival of a high explosive bomb. There was a giant thunderclap, a great cracking noise as the wall of hell suddenly split open and let all the demons out and then the tremendous suction and compression, as if her insides, her lungs, her heart and stomach, even her eyeballs were being sucked from her body. Salute the last and everlasting day. This is it, she thought. This is how I die.
A voice broke into the silence, almost next to her ear, a man’s voice saying, ‘Come on then, miss, let’s see if we can get you out of here, shall we?’ Ursula could see his face, grimy and sweaty as if he had tunnelled to reach her. (She supposed he had.) She was surprised to recognize him. It was one of their local ARP wardens, a new one.
‘What’s your name, miss? Can you tell me?’ Ursula muttered her name but she knew it hadn’t come out right. ‘Urry?’ he queried. ‘What’s that then – Mary? Susie?’
She didn’t want to die as a Susie. But did it matter?
‘Baby,’ she mumbled to the warden.
‘Baby?’ he said sharply. ‘You’ve got a baby?’ He backed away slightly and shouted something to someone unseen. She heard other voices and realized there were lots of people now. As if to verify this the warden said, ‘We’re all here to get you out. The gas boys have turned the gas off and we’ll be moving you in a tick. Don’t you worry. Now tell me about your baby, Susie. Were you holding him? Is he just a littl’un?’ Ursula thought of Emil, as heavy as a bomb (who had been caught out holding him when the music stopped and the house exploded?), and tried to speak but found herself mewling again.
Something creaked and groaned overhead and the warden grabbed her hand and said, ‘It’s all right, I’m here,’ and she felt immensely grateful to him, and to all the people toiling to get her out. And she thought how grateful Hugh would be too. The thought of her father made her start to cry and the warden said, ‘There, there, Susie, everything’s all right, soon have you out of here, like a winkle out of a shell. Get you a nice cup of tea, eh? How does that sound? Lovely, eh? Fancy one myself.’
Snow seemed to be falling, tiny icy needles on her skin. ‘So cold,’ she murmured.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you’ll see,’ the warden said. He struggled out of the coat he was wearing and covered her with it. There wasn’t room for such a generous manoeuvre and he knocked something, causing a shower of debris to fall on them both.
‘Oh,’ she said to the warden because she felt suddenly violently sick but it passed and she felt calmer. Leaves were falling now mixed with the dust and ash and flakes of the dead and suddenly she was blanketed in piles of wafery beech leaves. They smelt of mushrooms and bonfires and something sweet. Mrs Glover’s gingerbread. So much nicer than sewage and gas.
‘Come on, girl,’ the warden said. ‘Come on, Susie, don’t go to sleep on me now.’ He held her hand tighter but Ursula was looking at something glinting and twirling in the sunlight. A rabbit? No, a hare. A silver hare, spinning slowly in front of her eyes. It was mesmerizing. It was the prettiest thing she had ever seen.
She was flying off a roof into the night. She was in a cornfield with the sun beating down. Picking raspberries in the lane. Playing hide-and-seek with Teddy. She’s a funny little thing, someone said. Not the warden, surely? And then the snow began to come down. The night sky was no longer high above, it was all around her, like a warm dark sea.
She was floating into the blackout. She tried to say something to the warden. Thank you. But it didn’t matter any more. Nothing mattered. The darkness had fallen.
A Lovely Day Tomorrow
2 September 1939
‘DON’T GET UPSET, Pammy,’ Harold said. ‘Why is it so quiet, what have you done with the boys?’
; ‘Sold them,’ Pamela said, perking up. ‘Three for the price of two.’
‘You ought to stay the night, Ursula,’ Harold said kindly. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own tomorrow. It’ll be one of those awful days. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Thanks,’ Ursula said. ‘But I’ve already got plans.’
She tried on the yellow crêpe de Chine tea dress that she’d bought earlier that day in an eve-of-war spending spree on Kensington High Street. The crêpe de Chine had a pattern – tiny black swallows in flight. She admired it, rather admired herself, or what she could see in the dressing-table mirror as she had to stand on her bed in order to see her lower half.
Through Argyll Road’s thin walls Ursula could hear Mrs Appleyard having a row, in English, with a man – the mysterious Mr Appleyard presumably – whose comings and goings at all times of the day and night kept no noticeable timetable. Ursula had encountered him in the flesh only once, in passing on the stairs, when he had glared moodily at her and hurried on without a greeting. He was a big man, ruddy and slightly porcine. Ursula could imagine him standing behind a butcher’s counter or hauling brewery sacks, although according to the Misses Nesbit he was in fact an insurance clerk.
Mrs Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the flat Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn’t place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr Carver’s Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London. (‘She’s Czech,’ the Nesbits had eventually informed her. ‘We didn’t used to know where Czechoslovakia was, did we? I wish we still didn’t.’) Ursula presumed Mrs Appleyard was also some kind of refugee who, looking for safe harbour in the arms of an English gentleman, had found instead the pugnacious Mr Appleyard. Ursula thought that if she ever heard Mr Appleyard actually hitting his wife then she would have to knock on their door and somehow put a stop to it, although she had no idea how she would do that.
The dispute next door reached a crescendo and then the Appleyards’ front door slammed decisively in conclusion and all went quiet. Mr Appleyard, a great one for noisy exits and entrances, could be heard stomping down the stairs, a trail of profanity in his wake on the subject of women and foreigners, of which the oppressed Mrs Appleyard was both.
The sour aura of dissatisfaction that seeped through the walls, along with the even less appetizing smell of boiled cabbage, was really quite depressing. Ursula wanted her refugees to be soulful and romantic – fleeing for their cultural lives – rather than the abused wives of insurance clerks. Which was ridiculously unfair of her.
She stepped down from the bed and did a little twirl for the mirror. The dress suited her, she decided, she still had her figure, even at nearly thirty. Would she one day develop Sylvie’s matronly girth? It was beginning to seem unlikely now that she would ever have children of her own. She remembered holding Pamela’s babies – remembered Teddy and Jimmy, too – how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be if it were her own child? Perhaps too strong to bear.
Over their afternoon tea in John Lewis, Sylvie had asked, ‘Do you never get broody?’
‘Like your hens?’
‘A “career woman”,’ Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. ‘A spinster,’ she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. ‘Perhaps you will never marry,’ Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula’s life was as good as over.
‘Would that be such a bad thing? “The unmarried daughter”,’ Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. ‘It was good enough for Jane Austen.’
She lifted the dress over her head and, in petticoat and stocking feet, padded through to the little scullery and filled a water glass at the tap before hunting down a cream cracker. Prison fare, she thought, good practice for what was to come. All she had had to eat since her breakfast toast was Pamela’s cake. She was hoping to be stood, at the very least, a good dinner by Crighton tonight. He had asked her to meet him at the Savoy, they rarely had such public assignations, and she wondered if there was going to be drama, or if the shadow of war was drama enough and he wanted to talk to her about it.
She knew that war was to be declared tomorrow, even though she had played rather dumb with Pammy. Crighton told her all kinds of things he shouldn’t, on the basis that they had ‘both signed the Official Secrets Act’. (She, on the other hand, told him almost nothing.) He had been teetering again lately and Ursula wasn’t at all sure which way he was going to fall, wasn’t sure which way she wanted him to fall.
He had asked her to meet him for a drink, a request conveyed on an Admiralty docket that had arrived mysteriously while she was briefly out of the office. Not for the first time Ursula wondered who brought these notes that seemed to appear on her desk as if delivered by elves. I think your department may be due an audit, it read. Crighton liked code. Ursula hoped that the navy’s encryptions weren’t as rudimentary as Crighton’s.
Miss Fawcett, one of her clerical assistants, spotted the note lying in full view and gave her a panic-stricken look. ‘Crikey,’ she said. ‘Are we? Due an audit?’
‘Someone’s idea of a joke,’ Ursula said, dismayed to find herself blushing. There was something un-Crighton-like about these salacious (if not downright filthy) but seemingly innocent messages. I believe there is a shortage of pencils. Or Are your ink levels sufficiently topped up? Ursula wished he would learn Pitman’s, or more discretion. Or, better still, stop altogether.
When she was ushered inside the Savoy by a doorman, Crighton was waiting for her in the expansive foyer and instead of escorting her up to the American Bar he shepherded her up the stairs to a suite on the second floor. The bed seemed to dominate the room, enormous and pillowy. Oh, so this is why we’re here, she thought.
The crêpe de Chine had been deemed unsuitable for the occasion and she had donned her royal-blue satin – one of her three good evening dresses – a decision she now regretted as Crighton, if form was anything to go by, would soon be divesting her of it rather than treating her to a slap-up meal.
He liked undressing her, liked looking at her. ‘Like a Renoir,’ he said, although he knew little about art. Better a Renoir than a Rubens, she thought. Or a Picasso, for that matter. He had bestowed on her the great gift of regarding herself naked with little, if any, criticism. Moira, apparently, was a floor-length flannelette and lights-out woman. Sometimes Ursula wondered if Crighton didn’t exaggerate his wife’s sturdy qualities. Once or twice it had crossed her mind to journey out to Wargrave to catch a glimpse of the wronged wife and find out if she really was a dowd. The problem, of course, with Moira in the flesh (Rubenesque, not Renoir, she imagined) would be that Ursula would find it difficult to betray a real person rather than an enigma.
(‘But she is a real person,’ Pamela puzzled. ‘It’s a specious argument.’
‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ This later, at Hugh’s sixtieth birthday, a rather querulous affair in the spring.)
The suite had a magnificent view of the river, from Waterloo Bridge to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, all shadowy now, in the encroaching twilight. (‘The violet hour’.) She could just make out Cleopatra’s Needle, a dark finger poking skywards. None of the usual blaze and twinkle of London lights. The blackout had already begun.
‘The bolthole wasn’t available then? We’re out in the open?’ Ursula said while Crighton opened a bottle of champagne that had been waiting for them in a sweating silver bucket. ‘Are we celebrating?’
‘Saying our adieux,’ Crighton said, joining her at the window and handing her a glass.
‘Our adieux?’ Ursula said, bemused. ‘You’ve brought me to a good hotel and are plying me with champagne in order to end it all between us?’
‘Adieu to the peace,’ Crighton said. ‘We’re sa
ying goodbye to the world as we know it.’ He raised his glass in the direction of the window, to London, in its dusky glory. ‘To the beginning of the end,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ve left Moira,’ he added, as if it were an afterthought, a nothing. Ursula was caught by surprise.
‘And the girls?’ (Just checking, she thought.)
‘All of them. Life is too precious to be unhappy.’ Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim.
Suddenly and unexpectedly panicked, Ursula said, ‘I don’t want to marry you.’ She hadn’t realized quite how strongly she felt until the words came out of her mouth.
‘I don’t want to marry you either,’ Crighton said, and, perversely, she felt disappointed.
‘I’ve taken a lease on a flat in Egerton Gardens,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps you would come and join me.’
‘To cohabit? To live in sin in Knightsbridge?’
‘If you will.’
‘My, you are bold,’ she said. ‘What about your career?’
He made a dismissive sound. So, she, and not the war, was to be his new Jutland then.
‘Will you say yes? Ursula?’
Ursula stared through the window at the Thames. The river was almost invisible now.
‘We should have a toast,’ she said. ‘What is it they say in the navy – “Sweethearts and wives – may they never meet”?’ She chinked her glass against Crighton’s and said, ‘I’m starving, we are going to eat, aren’t we?’
April 1940
A CAR HORN down in the street below broke the Sunday-morning silence of Knightsbridge. Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly.
Life After Life Page 23
