V for Victory

by Lissa Evans

  She hadn’t wanted to write to Dr Simpkin directly; their last encounter had been brusque. Ida, having removed Noel from a children’s home, had simply deposited him at Green Shutters, trusting that he would be looked after, and then she had walked away. She had left the house, the city, the country, the whole chill, grey, narrow world she’d grown up in. She had slammed the doors behind her, one after another, and arrived in a place of blinding light and sea on every side, painted houses, bare rock, Africa on one horizon, Europe on another, and it had been easy to begin again, to become a person with a straightforward past and a shining future. And then Simeon had reappeared, and all those doors had burst open, and even when he’d re-embarked – owing money to half of Gibraltar – the draught had remained, whistling from the past, and she hadn’t been able to get warm again.

  She had written to the solicitor, Mr Pomeroy, hoping that he’d remember her and enquiring in very general terms about Dr Simpkin and the child, and had found that both Pomeroy and his client were dead, and then, just after that, she’d seen the item in the newspaper.

  ‘I might never have come back,’ she said, ‘but my aunt – I live with my aunt – has a subscription to a London paper. It arrives very late, of course, but last month I saw a report about a body found after a rocket blast, and—’

  ‘Noel saw that too,’ said Vee.

  ‘—and I couldn’t stop worrying about … about who was looking after the boy. About who was protecting him, now that Dr Simpkin’s gone.’

  ‘Bit late for that.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘He’s perfectly well looked after.’

  ‘I’m sure he is.’

  Vee folded her arms tightly, terribly afraid of this calm, poised young woman – she should have chased her away with a broom, not invited her in. In the strained silence, a bird began to sing on the conservatory roof, a parade of trills, and the visitor glanced towards it and said, ‘Oh, a blackcap – I’ve not heard one of those in a long time,’ and in that automatic curiosity, in that quick, pleased statement, devoid of boastfulness, Vee saw Noel again.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘What do you want to know?’

  Ida’s expression softened. The phrase ‘a widowed cousin of Dr Simpkin’ had conjured up for her someone bosomy, genteel and slow-moving, not this sharp-elbowed gatekeeper from the same world as herself, but beyond that there was something oddly familiar about the woman, something which meant that despite the frosted gaze and terse replies, she felt no deep fears about how Margery Overs might be treating her son.

  ‘Could you … could you tell me something about him?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean? What sort of thing?’

  ‘How is his health? Does he still limp?’

  ‘Only when he’s tired.’ Vee hesitated, not wanting to make Noel sound like Tiny Tim. ‘He’s never ill,’ she added. ‘He’s as tall as me and eats three times as much as I do.’ And now he sounded like Charles Atlas.

  ‘Is he still at school?’

  ‘No, but he has tutors. He’s clever. They say he’s going to sail through his matriculation. The lady doctor who teaches him science said that he ought to study medicine, but the last I heard, he wanted to be an architectural historian, whatever that is …’ Vee could hear herself, clattering away unstoppably, like Mrs Arthur at the knitting circle, going on about her son’s accountancy exams, but it seemed as if, once started, she couldn’t stop boasting about this paragon that she’d raised, not that she’d ever have said any of this in front of him. ‘… And his Latin tutor says he’s a born linguist. And he can cook.’

  ‘He can cook?’

  ‘One of the lodgers calls him the Esc— the Escoff—what’s the word? A French chef who’s very famous.’

  ‘Escoffier,’ said Ida, pulling the name out of her past.

  ‘He’s making a big pile of eclairs today. For the victory celebrations. And he’s always quoting things, poems and Latin, and so on.’

  ‘Dr Simpkin did the same.’

  ‘And he reads all the time. Lives in the library.’ There was a pause. ‘Anything else?’ she enquired, lifting her chin pugnaciously, and Ida all at once knew exactly who this woman reminded her of: her own aunt – a scrappy fighter, fierce, protective and scorchingly proud of her charge.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Except – what’s he like?’

  The question disconcerted Vee. You could never compare Noel to anything; it was like comparing a banana to a plate of chops.

  ‘He’s like … he’s like himself,’ she said, and as she spoke, she heard his voice calling ‘Mar?’ from somewhere in the house.

  Ida looked startled.

  ‘It was his choice to call me that, it wasn’t my idea,’ said Vee. ‘Hang on,’ she added, ‘I’ll put him off.’

  She was only out of the room for half a minute, just enough time for Ida to take a couple of steadying breaths; it had taken her three days to summon up the courage to visit the house. She had called on her family but had stayed in the nurses’ hostel at St Thomas’s, where she’d trained, and both of these circumstances had made her feel junior, shrunken. And London – London itself had been a terrible shock: nothing she’d read or heard about had truly prepared her for its battered, scabbed reality, every view scarred, every street knocked around, the population so used to the destruction that they scarcely noticed it any more, walking straight past, as if ignoring a drunk in a doorway.

  ‘I’ve told him it’s someone from the Methodist knitting circle,’ said Vee, reappearing. ‘He’s going to start on his baking, so I can let you out through the front door.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ida. There was a pause. ‘I was fifteen,’ she said.

  ‘I had a son at seventeen,’ said Vee. ‘An accident, like yours.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I brought him up.’

  Ida dropped her gaze. The bird was singing on the roof again, like someone whistling in a waiting room. ‘I’ll go,’ she said.

  Vee followed her towards the front door, Ida halting involuntarily beside the small framed photograph on one of the drawing-room bookshelves; Noel, the same age as when she’d last seen him, sitting on a bench with Dr Simpkin. It was like a ruled line across her past; she’d had a life before those two, and a life after, and the second was infinitely better.

  ‘Is your boat today?’ asked Vee.

  ‘Yes. Ten o’clock this evening.’

  ‘And when do you come back for good?’

  Ida shook her head before she spoke. ‘I won’t. Gibraltar’s my home now. I have a little house there with my aunt.’ She thought of the balcony, draped in sunlight, the slice of sea that swayed between the houses opposite, the great rock, like a whale breaching above the rooftops.

  ‘You’ve no family in London?’

  ‘Yes, I have family but … they think I’ve got above myself.’ Two days ago, she had visited her parents’ flat and had spent all afternoon sitting in the kitchen, her siblings bobbing in and out, two brothers that she’d never met before, her mother visibly older but still pretty, still dispensing affection for only as long as it pleased her, still poised to deride anything she viewed as pretension: advice gained from a book, for instance, or a word she hadn’t heard before, or an interest or an ambition that reached beyond her own experience. Ida had been told about bombs and babies and fiancées and celebrations, but no one had asked her any questions, so that anything she’d said about her own life had had to be pushed into the conversation, and had sounded like boasting. By the end of the visit, she’d hated the shrill brightness in her own voice, so different to the way that she usually sounded.

  She pulled her eyes from the photograph, and saw behind it the spines of a row of labelled box-files: NOEL, GEOGRAPHY. NOEL, CLASSICS. NOEL, HISTORY. NOEL, RECIPES. NOEL, CHEMISTRY. NOEL, POLISH.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, impulsively. ‘Thank you for being a mother to him.’

  She held out her hand, and after a surprised
second, Vee shook it, and then Ida continued briskly into the hall, and opened the front door with the double tug that it had always needed.

  ‘Wait,’ said Vee, but the word stuck in her throat so that Ida couldn’t hear it.

  ‘Wait,’ she said again, just before the door closed. ‘Wait there a moment.’ There was a pain in Vee’s chest, as if she’d been cracked in half, but she turned and walked down the passage towards the kitchen. Noel was weighing ingredients, and he stood and listened to her with a spoon drooping in his hand, a trickle of sugar falling unnoticed on to the table.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s here?’ His eyes were huge. He made an abrupt movement as if to head to the door, and then swayed back.

  ‘What does she want?’

  ‘Nothing – no, it’s not like that, not money or anything. She came to check if I was looking after you properly. To see if I passed muster.’

  He looked at the spoon, as if he’d never seen one before. ‘Did you?’ he asked.

  ‘Cheek. Anyway, it’s you she really wants to see.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the front hall. ‘Go on.’

  He dropped the spoon and walked off in a single movement. Slowly, keeping an ear out for voices, Vee dusted the sugar off the table and into a bowl. He was back before she’d finished sweeping the floor.

  ‘We’re going for a walk,’ he said.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘She’s only here until tonight.’

  ‘I know.’

  He turned to go and then swung round again, took a step towards her and landed a clumsy kiss next to her ear. ‘See you later, Mar,’ he said.

  Mild anarchy was in the air, the Heath full of aimless, grinning people. Someone had launched a makeshift raft on the mixed bathing pond, and a man with a clarinet was sitting on it cross-legged, playing ‘Begin the Beguine’, while another man played bongos on the bank. Two nurses were paddling in the shallows and a Dalmatian with a Union Jack tucked into its collar was running in wild circles.

  They walked slowly, taking no particular route, talking in spurts, subjects approached randomly, dabbed at, pushed aside, like someone searching through an overstuffed drawer for a lost item.

  ‘Did you see dolphins on the crossing?’

  ‘I didn’t, but I saw flying fish, though they don’t really fly.’

  ‘No, it’s a misnomer, but I suppose “gliding fish” doesn’t have the same alliterative ring. Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Because you sound like Dr Simpkin.’

  Two Spitfires and a Wellington crossed above them, keeping pace with each other, leaving the sky looking as if it had been scored with a fork.

  ‘What was he like when you first met him?’ asked Noel.

  ‘Charming. He made me laugh on an awful day. And he was still charming in Gibraltar. Was he kind to you?’

  Noel thought about the answer for a second or two. ‘He made me want to see him again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think he was a bad person?’

  ‘I think …’ Ida slowed. ‘I think he was someone who expected life to be easy, and had no resources when it turned out to be hard. It’s as my aunt says: you can’t eat charm.’

  ‘And do you think I look like him at all?’

  She’d been waiting for the chance to study him properly, rather than snatching sideways glances; he was still an inch or so shorter than her, but with the gangling promise of greater height, and he had her own father’s ears and colouring, and her mother’s straight nose, and eyes like Dr Simpkin – though that clearly wasn’t genetically possible – and he looked likeable and interesting and at this moment rather hopeful.

  ‘A little, yes,’ she said. ‘And you have the same build – you’re definitely going to be tall.’

  ‘And you?’ he asked, pleased by this. ‘Do I look like you?’ He’d been relieved to see that her appearance was less like a drooping pre-Raphaelite and more like an auburn Jeanne d’Arc.

  ‘You have my hands,’ said Ida. ‘I noticed straight away.’

  He looked at his right hand and then held it up, palm towards her, and she fitted her left against it. ‘See?’ she said. ‘Broad palms. Long fingers. Do you play the piano?’

  ‘Not very well. I’m exceptionally fast at peeling carrots, however. What shall I call you? I don’t think I could ever …’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t. Just call me Ida. Miss Ida Pearse, 42 Lynch Lane, Gibraltar, just in case you ever felt like writing.’

  ‘Pretty lady!’ They turned to see two American sailors approaching along a brambled path. ‘We’re lost, pretty lady, can you help us?’

  ‘Where do you want to get to?’ asked Ida, with the composure of someone who spent most of her professional life sticking needles into servicemen.

  ‘Have you heard of Parliament Hill?’

  ‘I have. Carry on along this path, turn right through the patch of woodland and then bear left up the hill.’

  ‘See, we only know port and starboard. Can you escort us there? Kid, can we escort your sister?’

  Noel opened his mouth and then closed it again. ‘Sure thing,’ he said.

  They could hear the noise before they saw its source: a chaotic murmur, cut through with odd whoops, a harmonica razzing above it, a doodling version of ‘The Marseillaise’ played on a trumpet. The crowd had extended along the whole, broad brow of the hill. Some people were sitting on the grass, some looking at the view, some flirting, some kissing, some dandling babies. Nothing was actually happening; no one was waiting for anything; no one was issuing orders. The sailors spotted a friend and wandered off, and Noel and Ida stood side by side and looked out across the city, and Noel felt as if the laws of gravity had been loosened for the day, and that he might, at any minute, lift just above the grass and swoop like a swallow over London.

  Acknowledgements

  Two compelling non-fiction books written by air-raid wardens, and actually published during the war, inspired me to tell Winnie’s story in V for Victory: Raiders Overhead by Barbara Nixon, and Post D by John Strachey. The North London Press – Jepson’s paper – was a real weekly newspaper and I spent many hours in the British Library finding inspiration in its 1944 and 1945 editions. Finally, the wartime diaries of Gwladys Cox, a West Hampstead resident, immersed me in the frustrations and terrors of that last, seemingly endless year of conflict. Their volumes are kept at the Imperial War Museum.

  Don’t forget to read Evans’ hilarious novel

  OLD BAGGAGE

  Old Baggage is a funny and bittersweet portrait of a woman who has never, never given up the fight.

  It is 1928. Matilda Simpkin, rooting through a cupboard, comes across a small wooden club – an old possession of hers, unseen for more than a decade.

  Mattie is a woman with a thrilling past and a chafingly uneventful present. During the Women’s Suffrage Campaign she was a militant. Jailed five times, she marched, sang, gave speeches, smashed windows and heckled Winston Churchill, and nothing – nothing – since then has had the same depth, the same excitement.

  Now in middle age, she is still looking for a fresh mould into which to pour her energies. Giving the wooden club a thoughtful twirl, she is struck by an idea – but what starts as a brilliantly idealistic plan is derailed by a connection with Mattie’s militant past, one which begins to threaten every principle that she stands for.

  ‘Essential . . . Evans is a brilliant storyteller’ Stylist

  READ ON FOR THE OPENING CHAPTERS . . .

  PART 1

  * * *

  1928

  MATTIE ALWAYS CARRIED a club in her handbag – just a small one, of polished ash. That was the most infuriating aspect of the whole episode: she’d actually been armed when it happened.

  The New Year’s Day fair had been audible from the moment she’d left the house – a formless roar that receded as soon as she turned off the track and took the path through the woods. The quickest route to the U
nderground station was along the narrow lane to Hampstead, but there was (as she’d pointed out to The Flea only this morning, apropos of their neighbour’s new motor-car) very little point in living with the Heath absolutely on one’s doorstep if one didn’t take every opportunity to tramp across it. Besides the exercise, it was a rare walk that didn’t provide one with at least a nugget or two of brain-food, as evinced by Mattie’s December column in the Hampstead & Highgate Express in which she’d compared a dead duck, frozen into the pond, with the Prime Minister’s current position. She’d been bucked by the news that the paper had already received thirteen letters in reply, several of them furious.

  Last year’s beech-mast crunched pleasingly underfoot. It was a day of splendour, the air still, the sky cloudless between bare branches, every vista possessing the hard-edged brilliance of cut glass: all was ruled lines, crisp sounds, sunbeams like polished stair-rods – a marvellously true, sharp world.

  Lately, Mattie’s view of it had been becoming increasingly impressionistic. ‘I find I am living in a perpetual Pissarro,’ she had remarked to the optician. ‘Aesthetically pleasing, perhaps, but I miss the detail.’

  ‘I’m afraid that a deterioration in eyesight is inevitable as we get older, Mrs Simpkin.’

  ‘Miss Simpkin. And I am not yet sixty; I’d really rather you didn’t speak as if I were creaking along in a bath-chair.’

  Her new eye-glasses had restored clarity; she might now be walking through one of the landscapes of that tiresome moralist Holman Hunt.

  In a tree above her there was a vicious chuckle, and she looked up to see a magpie sidling along a branch, the crown of its head marked with an anomalous white patch, like a tonsure.

  ‘Afternoon, Abbot, not seen you in the garden for a day or two. Busy dismembering blue tits, no doubt.’

  It cocked its head, its wicked gaze fixed upon her. Had she been responsible for naming the species, she would have chosen vigilans rather than pica as its suffix; thieves, they might be, but their watchfulness was paramount. The Abbot glanced over Mattie’s shoulder and she turned, automatically, to check behind her.