by Lissa Evans
‘It’s my fault.’
‘How’s it your fault?’
He looked away, his features bunched with guilt. In the silence, Vee heard the soft squabble of chickens.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘You’ll hate me.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You’ll hate me.’
‘Listen,’ she said, sharply. ‘I doted on Donald so much I thought he was perfect, and then you came along and all I looked for were faults. Which is why I know there’s no badness in you. Not a speck of it. There isn’t anything I could hate. So tell me.’
And if she hadn’t demanded that, if she hadn’t made him tell her everything – every last scrap – then what would have happened, four weeks later, when Noel found that item in the North London Press, while searching for a suitable article to translate into Latin?
Vee had been making the bed in Miss Appleby’s room when she’d looked up and seen him in the doorway, a statue with a newspaper in its marble grip. She’d sat him down on the bed and he’d pointed mutely at the item, a six-line report on a body discovered after a rocket strike, confirmed by a police investigation to be a deserter from the Royal Navy, a Lieutenant Simeon Foster, aged thirty-four, who had absconded while owing ‘considerable sums’ in gambling debts, and who’d been on the run and living illegally in a ruined building. God forgive her, after the first shock she’d felt a rush of relief as strong as a downed brandy.
Noel had said nothing, and after a moment she’d sat down beside him, and had rested her hand on the back of his head, and they’d stayed like that, not speaking, while a band of pale sunlight had edged slowly down the chest of drawers and across the faded rug, illuminating the stain that a previous lodger called Mr Lomax had insisted wasn’t anything to do with him, despite the fact that it exactly matched his hair-dye. And then Noel had stood, rather stiffly, and said that he needed to clean out the chickens, and Vee had said, ‘Do you want me to keep that for you?’ and he’d nodded and handed her the newspaper. She’d folded it carefully and put it in a shoebox at the bottom of her wardrobe.
And it was then that she’d wondered what would have happened if he’d kept his secret – whether it would have been the start of a slow retreat, with Noel finding less and less to say to her until one day she discovered that everything in his life was a closed door, with her knocking from the other side, a cup of tea in one hand and a clean shirt over her arm – and she went into Mr Reddish’s room, which had a window that looked on to the back garden, and she stood and watched as Noel swept out the summerhouse with careful efficiency.
Spring
* * *
1945
It was early May, but so warm that Vee had wedged the back door open, and as she’d done so, a swallow had hurtled in, twisting along the scullery passage before doubling back towards the garden, passing her face so closely that she’d felt the rush of air across her cheek. Her shriek had served instead of a dinner-gong.
‘Is that a decoration on the pie?’ asked Dr Parry-Jones.
‘It’s a V,’ said Noel, cutting a slice straight through it. ‘It was a hasty late addition, after I heard about the German capitulation on the three o’clock news. It should have been “VE”, really, of course, but I ran out of pastry scraps.’
‘So it’s official? The war’s over? But there’s been nothing from Mr Churchill.’
‘Perhaps he’s still writing his speech,’ said Mr Reddish.
‘He must have known the end was coming,’ said Vee. ‘What’s he been doing? Reading a book?’ Both Noel and Gerry laughed, but it was true. The last few weeks had been like a bath being drained: almost imperceptible change giving way to a faint stirring, and then suddenly it was all gurgling down the plughole, the Russians pouring into Berlin, Hitler dead at last. What on earth were they waiting for? A bell?
‘Well, I’m going down to Trafalgar Square, anyway,’ said Miss Appleby. ‘I’ll probably be very late, Mrs Overs, but I’ll tiptoe in. The end of the war only comes once in a lifetime, doesn’t it?’
‘Twice,’ said Dr Parry-Jones and Mr Reddish simultaneously.
‘Oh, yes, I forgot about that one,’ said Miss Appleby. Embarrassed, she started to twist her engagement ring and then seemed to remember that it wasn’t there any more.
‘On the final day of the Great War, I was working in the cashier’s office in Aldershot,’ said Mr Reddish. ‘There was a private sweeping the yard outside. When eleven o’clock struck, he swung the broom round his head in a great circle and let it go, as if it were a hammer, and it went straight through the window of the officers’ mess. I have never forgotten it. Today was less memorable. I started a new double-entry book.’ He left a brooding pause.
‘That’s why I’m going into town,’ said Miss Appleby. ‘If I’m ever asked what I was doing on the last day of the war, I don’t want to have to say I was typing a memorandum about balsa-wood shortages.’
‘Pursuing one’s work is nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Dr Parry-Jones. ‘Noel, for instance, in future years can look back with pride on the fact that today he received ninety-nine per cent in an essay on the oxidation of salts.’
‘Why didn’t he get a hundred per cent?’ demanded Vee. From the corner of her eye she caught Gerry looking amused – I enjoy it when you unsheathe your sword on Noel’s behalf, as he put it – and she turned away to stop herself smiling.
‘Perfection is not within human reach,’ said the doctor. ‘It may be approached, but not achieved. Somewhat like Zeno’s arrow.’
Mr Reddish raised his head like a hound scenting entrails. ‘“I shot an arrow in the air – it fell to earth I know not where. For, so swiftly it flew, the sight, could not follow it in its flight.” Beloved, immortal Longfellow. I shall be giving my Hiawatha at a victory concert on Saturday at the Masons’ Hall in Kentish Town, should anyone wish for a congenial evening of varied entertainment. The young lady who is organizing it told me that all tickets are in aid of the Hampstead Widows and Orphans Fund.’
Noel and Vee exchanged a brief and inadvertent glance.
‘What did you do today, Mr Jepson?’ asked Vee, recovering herself. ‘Any news for us?’
She still couldn’t bring herself to call him by his first name in front of others, though she supposed that at least half the house was aware that they went to the cinema together nearly every Saturday evening. Last week, while leaving the Regal arm in arm, having seen Blithe Spirit, they had bumped into Mrs Claxton from the Methodist knitting circle and Vee had felt instantly like the Whore of Babylon, but Mrs Claxton had been perfectly pleasant and had told Mr Jepson that she was a regular reader of the North London Press and that the Kwik Krosswords were currently much too difficult. ‘I shall pass that on to the relevant department,’ Gerry had said, and he probably had, since reliability was one of his qualities. He also listened when she spoke, remembered what she said last time, paid for the cinema tickets, and loaned her a clean handkerchief during the sad bits; there was not one single, solitary thing about the situation that Vee was used to. She sometimes felt like a Hottentot walking out with a missionary, except that Jepson was also surprisingly cheerful. When Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit had begun one of her ringing, dramatic pronouncements, he’d whispered, ‘Mr Reddish,’ and she’d nearly dropped her ice-cream.
‘It’s been an interesting day,’ Jepson was saying. ‘I went to interview a soldier who’d been captured at Dunkirk, and who’s only just arrived home. He was in a camp in Poland, and just at the point when liberation began to seem likely, all the prisoners were suddenly forced by the guards to evacuate the camp and head towards Germany – they had no warning at all, it was midwinter and some of the men didn’t even have proper boots, only rough slippers.’
‘Frostbite and worse,’ said Dr Parry-Jones. ‘There must have been deaths.’
‘Yes. A great many. This young man was lucky, in a way. After weeks of the most awful conditions – they had to sleep outdoors, in t
he fields – he collapsed by the road and was found by someone decent and taken to a German hospital. He was eventually flown back a week ago.’
Lieutenant Emlyn Crowther had looked thin but not moribund, his deprivations more visible in his actions than his appearance – his rounding-up and consuming of every single biscuit crumb on the plate, his use of the coffee mug as a hand-warmer, his stillness, as of someone trying, desperately, to hoard every scrap of energy.
‘Did he have a sweetheart waiting?’ asked Miss Appleby.
‘A wife,’ said Jepson. ‘A nice woman. She was a full-time warden until last month.’
‘No children?’
‘No. I think they’d only just married when he went away.’ Jepson had stayed with the couple for over an hour, and what had struck him most was how careful, how polite, they were with each other – there’d been none of the verbal shorthand of the long relationship, no comfortable slide into mutual memory. It was as if they were on adjacent ships in a convoy, conversing in semaphore.
‘Did your letters to each other get through?’ Jepson had asked, and had seen the quick glance between them.
‘Yes, right up until Christmas,’ said Winnie Crowther.
‘The trouble is that there’s nothing to say about life in camp,’ said her husband. ‘The monotony is terrible. I was bored rigid for four and a half years while Winnie never stopped working and putting herself in danger. And now that she has stopped, I worry that she’s probably terribly bored herself.’
‘No,’ she’d said indignantly. ‘Of course I’m not.’ She’d taken her husband’s hand and squeezed the fingers, and her expression had been briefly identical to his – a troubled awareness, perhaps, that the road ahead wasn’t the straight track of the fictional reunion, but something branching and unmarked.
Jepson had left shortly afterwards, noticing, on his way out, a small pile of library books on the table – Modern Interior Decoration, Gardening Today, Home Carpenter.
‘Making plans?’ he’d asked, and for the first time, Crowther had almost smiled.
‘My wife brought those back for me this morning as a surprise,’ he said. ‘Which was very kind of her, and very understandable, given that I wrote about little else for four years, but do you know what?’ He turned to his wife. ‘I’ve had it up to here with the whole subject, Winnie. I never again want to read about the difference between a shade and a tint. I have no further interest in gazebos or lampshades. If we ever get a garden, I’ll insist that we also buy goats.’
‘Goats?’ she’d repeated, sounding amazed. And as the astonishment in her voice had given way to a breathy noise that was very nearly a laugh, it seemed to Jepson that something hopeful had just happened – the flags dispensed with, the ships within hailing distance now. Though he had always been sentimental, had always hoped for happy endings, and not only his own.
‘And what did you do today, Noel?’ he asked. ‘Apart from making this pie, which is very good, I must say.’
‘Thank you. I finished reading The Road to Wigan Pier and then I went to the library. Oh, and I also saw a female cuckoo in the clump of elders opposite the fishmonger’s.’
‘“In May she sings all day,”’ said Mr Reddish.
‘Yes, except it’s the males who give the eponymous call. The females make more of a throaty, chuckling sound. And I researched dessert recipes for tomorrow.’
‘A victory sponge?’
‘I’m actually thinking of attempting an adapted version of a croquembouche, if we have enough eggs.’
He chose to omit the most memorable moment of the day, which had been the arrival of a letter from Genevieve Lumb, signed with a firmly inscribed kiss and containing the information that she would be spending the whole of the summer – the whole of the summer! – with her grandparents, next door. She was also writing a play about Boadicea and Suetonius and needed his help with the Latin. The writing paper had smelled faintly of coal-tar soap and he had held it under his nose for several minutes.
Collecting the eggs the next day – and there were plenty – Noel couldn’t quite work out why he felt that something was missing from the morning. A fine rain had wet the grass, but the clouds were lifting and the BBC forecaster had stated with certainty that it would clear in London later, to allow ‘a day of sunny celebration’. Churchill (if he’d managed to finish his speech) would address the nation on the wireless mid-morning, and no doubt the King and Queen would appear on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, graciously accepting credit for the victory, but in the meantime it seemed a day like any other, the lodgers at work, Vee hurtling through the housework. Perhaps that’s what was odd: a blackcap was singing in the plum tree, and there were no drums, no bells, no fireworks or sirens. War had slid quietly into peace, whereas he’d always somehow assumed that the transition would be vast and seismic, loudspeaker-vans roaring triumph, ululation in the streets.
‘Noel!’
He turned to see Vee at the back door, accompanied by a man who was carrying a briefcase and wearing a buttoned mackintosh and a bowler hat. He had exactly the sort of official appearance that would normally send her into a frenzy of nerves, so the fact that she appeared not only calm, but smiling, could mean only one thing.
‘This is Mr Barfield from the Ministry of Agriculture,’ she said, when Noel approached. ‘It’s a poultry spot-visit. Here’s your records.’
Noel took the yellow notebook that he kept in the kitchen dresser and shook hands with Mr Barfield, who was looking rather disconcerted, obviously far more used to brittle panic at his unannounced arrivals, which were intended to flush out those who were keeping an illegally high number of chickens, or selling on the eggs without a licence, or breaking one of half a dozen other domestic poultry rules as outlined in the Ministry publication Keeping Chickens, a Householder’s Guide, the contents of which Noel knew off by heart. ‘Shall I show you the coop?’ he asked, leading the way.
Vee stood by the back door, enjoying the spectacle of a civil servant having his ear bent, and then, after they’d disappeared from view, she filled a bucket from the coal-bunker, keeping one eye on the sky for later, since Gerry had offered to take both her and Noel to a party in the square outside his newspaper office, so she didn’t notice the woman coming round the side-path.
‘Mrs Overs? Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’
She was young, barely thirty, a redhead dressed in a smart blue poplin coat with matching hat, both of which smacked of foreign tailoring, though her accent was English enough.
‘Can I help you?’ asked Vee, and then, with rising hope, ‘Have you come about the card in the newsagent’s? There’s a very nice room at the front with a view of the lane. Half-board included. Good, plain cooking.’
‘No, I haven’t come about that.’ She must have been five foot nine or more, but had none of the usual apologetic hunch of taller women, and she was good-looking in an unshowy way. No lipstick. She glanced quickly at the garden, and then up at the back of the house, her expression peculiar, guarded. ‘Could I talk to you somewhere private?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps in the summerhouse.’
‘It’s full of chickens,’ said Vee. ‘How do you know there’s a summerhouse?’
‘Because I used to work here when I was a girl. I was Dr Simpkin’s char.’
And as she spoke, as the implication of her words broke like a bottle over Vee’s head, they both heard Noel’s voice from the far end of the garden, the clearly enunciated phrase ‘Prevention of Fowl Pox’ floating towards them as if borne on a zephyr, and Vee said, ‘Conservatory!’ and found herself scurrying after the visitor up the scullery passage and through the hall and the drawing room towards the glassed-in lean-to at the back of the house.
It was not a room that Vee sat in very often; it was either, as Noel put it, Bergen or Caracas, depending on the season, and she hadn’t noticed till now that the wet spring had sent a densely leafed creeper growing up and over the roof, so that the place had the dim, greenish tint of an undersea
grotto.
Neither of them sat down.
‘My name is Ida Pearse,’ said the woman. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her, as if about to give a formal address.
‘I know,’ said Vee. ‘I know who you are.’
‘Did you meet Simeon Foster? Did he give you my name?’
‘No, I didn’t meet him. Only Noel met him. What do you want?’
‘I don’t want anything – or, at least, nothing specific.’ She had one of those quiet voices that carried, the sort of voice possessed by people who are used to being listened to.
‘So why are you here?’ Vee’s own voice was a defiant squeak, the sound of a surviving mouse who has just discovered that the household has bought a replacement cat. ‘I thought you were abroad.’
‘I was. I am. I came across with a hospital ship, repatriating serious burns cases, but I’m sailing back tonight. I’m here because I wanted to meet you.’
‘Me? Not Noel?’
‘I don’t feel …’ For the first time, the visitor sounded uncertain. ‘I don’t feel I have any right to meet Noel.’
‘No,’ agreed Vee, a little thrown by this unexpected concession. In the momentary silence, they looked at each other, Vee searching the other woman’s features for a trace of Noel and seeing it only in the steady self-possession of her gaze.
‘You’ve never come before,’ she said.
‘I haven’t been to England for eleven years.’ Ida was standing with her back to the garden, her view comprising the conservatory door, the study beyond it, the tall oak bookcase at the far end, its bottom shelf filled with a set of morocco-bound encyclopaedias; every inch and angle of the rooms were familiar; the only strangeness was Margery Overs, whose existence she’d known of for less than two months.
‘Thank you for your letter,’ the reply from Pomeroy and Clarkson had read. ‘Unfortunately, we cannot pass your enquiry on to Dr Simpkin, as our client is deceased. Since her death in 1939, her ward has been under the guardianship of Mrs Margery Overs, a widowed cousin of Dr Simpkin.’
