‘Well, Annie.’
Annie had been keeping her hands under the table, but now she spread them out on the stiff-feeling tablecloth. They were pinkish and freckled, but delicate, not piano-player’s hands, not indeed as practical as one would have expected, thin and tender. After some hesitation, as though making a difficult selection, Sam Brooks picked up the left hand and most ingeniously put the currant ring onto the third finger, compressing it to make it fit exactly.
The others watched in silence. Annie did not know what to say or do, so she said nothing, and left her hand where it was on the table. Something inside her seemed to move and unclose.
At that precise moment, while the juniors were eating their dessert at Prunier’s, Annie fell in love with RPD absolutely, and hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way. After the war the species no longer found it biologically useful, and indeed it was not useful to Annie. Love without hope grows in its own atmosphere, and should encourage the imagination, but Annie’s grew narrower. She exerted the utmost of her will-power to this end. She never pictured herself trapped in the main lift with Mr Brooks above the third floor, or of rescuing him from a burning building or a Nazi parachutist or even a mad producer armed with a shotgun. He existed, and so did she, and she had perhaps sixty years left to put up with it, although her father died at fifty-six. She was in love, as she quite saw, with a middle-aged man who said the same thing to all the girls, who had been a prince for an evening which he’d most likely forgotten already, who had given her a ring with a red currant in it and who cared, to the exclusion of all else, for his work. As a result, it was generally understood, Mrs Brooks had left him, and the thought of his loneliness made her heart contract as though squeezed by a giant hand; but then you couldn’t really pretend that he was lonely, and so Annie didn’t pretend. This, of course, meant that she suffered twice, and she failed to reckon the extra cost of honesty.
The truth was that she was almost too well trained in endurance, having drawn since birth on the inexhaustible fund of tranquil pessimism peculiar to the English Midlands. Her father’s friends, who came round evenings and sat in their accustomed chairs, speaking at long intervals, said ‘We’re never sent more than we can bear’, and ‘You begin life helpless, and you end it helpless’, and ‘Love breaks the heart, porridge breaks the wind’, and when she worked at Anstruthers’ hosiery counter they hadn’t asked the customers whether they wanted plain knit or micro-mesh, but ‘Do you want the kind that ladders, or the kind that goes into holes?’ These uncompromising alternatives were not intended to provide comfort, only self-respect.
Annie – although she also knew that those who don’t speak have to pay it off in thinking – was resolved on silence. Whatever happened, and after all she was obliged to see Mr Brooks two or three times every day, though she by no means looked forward to it, feeling herself more truly alive when she could picture him steadily without seeing him – whatever happened, he needn’t know how daft she was. But words were scarcely necessary in the closeness of the RPA room. They all knew how it was with her there.
Vi wanted to be of help, but it was difficult to find facts which Annie had not already faced.
‘He’s old, Annie,’ she ventured at last.
‘He is,’ Annie replied calmly, ‘he’s forty-six: I looked him up in the BBC Handbook, and it’s my opinion that he’s putting on weight. I daresay he wouldn’t look much in bed.’
‘But what do you expect to come of it?’
‘Nothing.’
Vi felt troubled. She was conscious, as she sometimes was when Willie Sharpe was talking, of a sort of wrongheaded dignity, and she had a conviction, too, that relationships could not be altered to such an extent as this, and that RPD was simply not there to be fallen in love with. ‘It’s not right,’ she thought, feeling guilty, at the same time, of her own good luck in life. A few nights ago, just when Annie happened to be on night shift and she had her room to herself, Chris had turned up. He had docked at Liverpool with forty-eight hours leave, got the train as far as Rugby, been shunted off into a siding because of an air-raid warning and told they would stay there till morning, taken a lift with an army convoy to Luton, another one to Woolwich, and a third on a potato lorry to Covent Garden, and then, since it was in the small hours, walked the last eight miles to Hammersmith, climbed up the back of the house by way of the coal-shed, opened her window, got in under the sheets and when she’d nearly jumped out of her skin said, in quite the old way: ‘There’s no need to be surprised, you’re quite a nice-looking girl.’ Next morning her mother, when told Chris had arrived for breakfast, had made no comment, and it struck Vi that this too might have been much the same in 1914.
Why couldn’t things be as simple as that for everybody? Teddy suggested that they might consult the Readers Problems in the Mirror. The answers column, conducted by the Two Old Codgers, he’d been told, had saved many from desperation and worse. He’d just set out the problem clearly, altering the names, of course, and the ages, and the addresses, and where they worked, and what they did. Vi had no patience with him sometimes.
Willie, saddened by the experience in which Annie seemed to be trapped without escape, took her to task.
‘It’s wrong, because your situation isn’t natural. I’ve worked that out to my own satisfaction.’
‘I can’t get it to go away, though. Doesn’t that make it natural?’
They were checking each other’s time sheets before going down to tea.
‘Love is of the body and the spirit,’ Willie told her earnestly, ‘and there’s no real difference between them.’
‘If you say that, you can’t ever have seen anyone die,’ said Annie. And indeed at this time he never had.
Mrs Milne, to whom no-one had given any kind of hint, must have learned through listening to the air itself what she would never have been willingly told. The Old Servants had developed a sixth sense in these matters. It occurred to her that it was her duty to speak to RPD.
Speaking, in this sense, was undertaken only at a ceremonial time, when the day’s letters were brought in for signature, and there was also a set rhetorical form, beginning with observations of general and even national interest and coming gradually to the particular. Mrs Milne, therefore, rustling in at five o’clock, began by asking whether he’d heard that members of the Stock Exchange had opened a book and were quoting odds on how many enemy aircraft were shot down each day, and what kind of mentality, when you came to think of it, did that show, and whether he’d noticed the acute shortage of kippers which made it well-nigh impossible to offer traditional hospitality to overnight visitors. It was different, of course, for those who could afford to frequent restaurants. These subjects were singularly ill-chosen and showed Mrs Milne to be in a state of nervous tension. Sam made no pretence of listening until she said:
‘Mr Brooks, I should like to have a word with you about Miss Asra.’
‘I can’t think why. When I tried to talk to you about her before you told me she was a very usual-looking girl from the Midlands.’
He scrawled his signature several times. ‘What’s she been doing?’
It was very unlike him to remember any remark she had made more than a few hours ago.
‘It might be better for everyone …’ she said, her voice scarcely audible now.
Her Director stared at her coldly.
‘I think that Miss Asra is alone in the world, except for an aunt,’ she went on resolutely. ‘The girl must feel lonely, and her aunt must miss her a great deal.’
‘Is her aunt alone in the world too?’ enquired Sam. ‘There can’t be as many people in Birmingham as I thought.’
Mrs Milne tried again.
‘Of course, Miss Asra won’t be due for any annual leave until she has been with us for a year, but, in view of the emergency and her special circumstances we might make an exception in her case, a kind of prolonged compassionate leave, if you follow me.’<
br />
‘I don’t follow you in the least. If you’re interested in Annie’s aunt you have my full permission to get in touch with her.’ He shovelled the heap of letters towards her. ‘Has Annie said she wanted to go away?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Tell me when she says so exactly.’
Annie had various methods, besides the control of her imagination, for maintaining proper pride. Sometimes she spoke to herself in the third person, as the organist at St Martin’s used to speak, when flustered, to the choir. ‘Asra, are you with me?’ ‘Dobbs, you’ve no need to glance so frequently at Asra.’ Asra, she said to herself, running for the Hammersmith bus, you don’t mean any more to him than the furniture does. And that was really a good comparison. He’d subside and lean against you and tell you all those difficulties about the European and Far Eastern sections, and you could feel his weight lying there, just as if you were the back of a chair. She’d no call to be surprised at this, Vi had told her about it when she came, only at first he hadn’t taken to her, now he had, but it was no-one’s fault but her own if she was cut to the heart. If you can’t face living your life day by day, you must live it minute by minute. At least, thank God, her aunt had gone overseas with the ATS and she’d no obligation to leave London. She was free to stay here and be unhappy, just so long as she didn’t become ridiculous; for that she didn’t think she could forgive herself.
‘Your nose is cold,’ said Eddie Waterlow, pressing it with his forefinger as she sat listening to music, his touch light as a fall of dust. ‘That is a sign of health in pets, so you are not actually out of condition. Something is amiss, however. How are you getting gon?’
Mr Waterlow was the only person she had ever met who imitated her voice, the scrupulously fair intonation of Selly Oak, neither rising nor falling, giving each syllable its equal weight, as though considering its feelings before leaving it behind, and lingering over the final one so that it is given the opportunity to start the next word also. With so many more obtrusive voices around him, so many much more decisive accents, he was fascinated, as a connoisseur, by the gentle transitions, said to be the most difficult in the English language to imitate exactly, getting gon, going gon, passing gon. Curiously enough, she did not mind this at all.
‘I’m getting on very nicely,’ she said.
‘No, no, you are not. You are not wanted as you should be, not appreciated as you wish, in this like me, in this very much like me.’
‘My God, Mr Waterlow,’ said Annie sadly. ‘Does everybody in Broadcasting House know how daft I am?’
He told her that she was betraying herself, and of course at the same time indulging herself, by playing Tschaikovsky. They had to adjourn to one of the canteen store-rooms where there was an old upright piano, long since retired from the struggle to divide the air into music, and a whole tone flat in the middle register. There it was Satie again, and to oblige him she tried one of the little cabaret songs, but could hardly make herself heard above his instructions.
‘Ah yes … modestement … for the nerves … just let it be a simple occurrence, no logic, just let it happen, however strangely … a little incongruity, please, “owl steals pince-nez of Wolverhampton builder” … sing, Annie, sing … like a nightingale, a nighting gale, with toothache … “I command removal from my presence sadness, silence and dolorous meditation”.…’
‘I can’t imagine how you get through the day without anything to do, Mr Waterlow,’ Annie said, when he had reverently shut the lid of the dejected piano, ‘I’ve never met a man before who didn’t have to work hard.’
Eddie spread out his arms, as one who was ready at any time for the call.
‘Surely the BBC can find something for you?’ she asked gently. He looked forlorn.
‘The BBC is doing gits bit. We put out the truth, but only contingent truth, Annie! The opposite could also be true! We are told that German pilots have been brought down in Croydon and turned out to know the way to the post-office, that Hitler has declared that he only needs three fine days to defeat Great Britain, and that there is an excellent blackberry crop and therefore it is our patriotic duty to make jam. But all this need not have been true, Annie! If the summer had not been fine, there might have been no blackberries.’
‘Of course there mightn’t,’ said Annie. ‘You’re just making worries for yourself, Mr Waterlow. There isn’t anything at all that mightn’t be otherwise. After all, I mightn’t have … what I mean is, how can they find anything to broadcast that’s got to be true, and couldn’t be anything else?’
He gestured towards the piano.
‘We couldn’t put out music all day!’
‘Music and silence.’
After she had gone back on shift, Eddie thought for a while about Sam Brooks. There was something magnificent after all, in the way he squandered young people and discarded them and looked round absent-mindedly for more. It implied great faith in his own future. But should his attention be drawn, perhaps, to Annie’s case?
By the end of August the heavy raids had begun. Vi and Annie were both out when the Simmonses’ house in Hammersmith was knocked down. Mrs Simmons and the children were quite all right, having taken shelter under the hall table, a half-size billiard table really, which was of a quality you couldn’t get nowadays if you tried. Mr Simmons had to stay to look after the shop, but the family left London, and Vi went with them. Annie got accommodation at the YMCA hostel opposite Westminster Abbey; Mr Simmons brought up her things in his van, and she knew he was kindly using some of the petrol ration which he got for the business. It was only her clothes, really, covered now with flakes of plaster. It was just as well that she had brought so little with her in the first place.
Vi wrote to say that her wedding day was fixed, she was going up to Liverpool some time in September to marry Chris and to be his till the end of Life’s Story. She wished she’d been able to invite them all, but they’d have a reunion after the war when the lights went up again, they must all swear to make a note of it, August the 30th by the Edith Cavell statue off Trafalgar Square, the side marked Fidelity. The letter did not sound quite like the Vi they had known, and made her seem farther away.
9
After the first week of September London became every morning a somewhat stranger place. The early morning sound was always of glass being scraped off the pavement. The brush hissed and scraped, the glass chattered, tinkled, and fell. Lyons handed out cold baked potatoes through one hole in their windows and took in the money through another. The buses, diverted into streets for which they were not intended, seemed to take the licence of a dream, drawing up on the pavements and nosing against front windows to look in at the startled inhabitants. A number 113 became seriously wedged against DPP’s taxi in Riding House Street and volunteers were needed to dislodge it. They returned to Broadcasting House white with dust. The air in fact was always full of this fine, whitish dust which was suspended in the air and settled slowly, long after the buildings fell.
More menacing than the nightly danger was the need to find a willing listener for bomb stories the next morning. Little incidents of the raids, or of the journey to work, were met and countered at the office by other little incidents, and fell back rebuffed. But all new societies are quick to establish the means of exchange. After Mrs Staples had described how the contents of her handbag, keys, throat lozenges and all, had been sucked, rather than blown, away from her, and how she’d not been allowed to smoke all evening because of the broken gas mains, Mrs Milne felt entitled to a question of her own, if things were going on like this – and she had several anecdotes in reserve – wouldn’t it be wise to send one’s nice things away to some safer part of the country?
‘I’m sure it would,’ said Mrs Staples, ‘if you can find someone you can trust to look after them.’
‘I can’t get RPD to consider the question at all. He doesn’t even seem to know whether he has any nice things or not. I daresay Mrs Brooks took most of them away with her when s
he left Streatham. I don’t think we shall hear very much more from that quarter,’ she added.
Mrs Staples considered. ‘You mean specimen glass and china, and that sort of thing?’
‘Yes, the irreplaceables, the things you never use – those are what really matters. I’ve got a damask tablecloth, you know, and napkins to match for twenty-four people. I’ve heard it said that a woman’s possessions are part of herself. If she loses her things, her personality undergoes a change.’
‘It’s just that one has to be careful when living alone,’ said Mrs Staples. ‘When one’s children are grown up or in the Forces and the flat is empty I find that one talks to certain pieces of furniture quite often, and to oneself, of course.’
‘The thing is not to be too hard on oneself,’ Mrs Milne replied.
DPP’s economy in the matter of staff made it possible for him to avoid the morning stories and almost all discussion of the raids. Placed, as he now was, with the responsibility of making a clean sweep of the programmes at any given moment in favour of battle instructions and of the Prime Minister’s new slogan ‘You can always take one with you’, which was to resound through every home and place of work in Great Britain as soon as the first German landed on this soil, Jeff wished that he had not run out of cigars. Mac might bring some, and he was due over in England pretty soon. He had cabled that he wanted to broadcast direct from the roof of BH, in the thick of the raids, instead of being confined with the rest of the overseas correspondents to the basement studios. There was little or no chance, however, of the Director General giving way on this point, and Jeff idly pictured himself wrestling with Mac on the stairs, as in a silent film, to prevent him going any higher, while Nazi assault troops pounded out of the lifts. Perhaps we all ought to be in the movies, he thought.
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