It was late afternoon, and the day was unusually warm for October. Robin threw down his sour apple as they took the public footpath leading from the orchard into the cornfields. As the south wind continued to blow, the trees bordering the fields rustled with memories of summer. Tendrils of hair blew onto Eleanor’s lips, which were damp even though she and Robin weren’t talking much. Their plan was to keep off the roads near to the Hall and castle, not being secretive but not wanting to be noticed, either. At every moment, Eleanor was conscious of what was going to happen that night. It gave her a feeling of imminence. No other word.
Robin walked briskly, keeping a step ahead of her. He’d spent his childhood wandering the countryside here and knew every inch. They hopped stiles and crossed cattle guards, and after an hour or so the footpath turned abruptly downhill, where it met a sunken wooded lane Eleanor had never seen before. Robin turned her up the lane, which wasn’t much wider than the footpath and had been walked so long it was dug down deeply below the fields on either side. The overhanging trees made the light around them look humid and weedy as a river.
“Like a river, or being in a glass house,” Eleanor said.
“Ours is long out of commission.”
“The grandparents must have led beautiful lives.”
“You don’t?”
“A file clerk. They would be horrified. But I’m not.”
Robin led her over a stile onto a new footpath that took them up a hilly field where they startled some pheasants that whirred up like fireworks. He said it would soon meet an old road to London once used for driving cattle to the Smithfield market, which she remembered vaguely having heard about and pictured as narrow and rutted. Yet when they reached the road, it proved to be macadamized, still narrow and closely bordered with hedges but smooth enough that after jumping a fence they could pick up the pace.
“Not tired?” Robin asked, as if he hoped she might want a rest.
“It’s not even dark,” she said.
But the sun was rapidly sinking. Soon they were walking into a peach-coloured sunset that turned the air that rare dusky rose. It picked out berries in the hedgerows, each twig ending in a cluster of jewels, a broach of burgundy pearls, a drift of glass rounded by the sea. The air smelled of woodsmoke and well-tended animals. Robin took her hand, and Eleanor realized she was perfectly happy. Surely you were allowed that once in your life.
Before long, the rose colour faded and the wild animals came out, nosing into the unexpected warmth. Robin dropped her hand to point out a hedgehog trundling along under the hedge. I love hedgehogs, she told him. Not such good eating. Oh, do stop, Robin. Around the next bend, an owl flew in front of them, its big wings flapping like carpet beaters. And there on the hill, two hares leapt joyously up a pasture into the last light of day.
Maybe not so joyously. A fox undulated behind them, looking debonair with his anticipatory swish of tail. Old England. A peaceable kingdom. It wasn’t, of course; alive with prey and predators. But it also wasn’t war.
At a quiet crossroads, Robin stopped and offered his canteen.
“Not yet, thanks.”
“Neither thirsty nor tired.” Robin took a swig.
“I’m actually quite fit, despite the city.” The growing darkness helped her say it. “I’ve thought, sometimes, we don’t actually know each other very well. I’m the type who needs to be active.”
“Some things are pretty obvious, surely.”
“What a bore, to be so obvious.”
He smiled, leaning close enough that she could see him looking possessive. She was glad he was so pleased with her. Pleased with them. Well, she was, too, despite the flutters.
“I will have a drink, actually.”
He handed her the canteen. Cool water. It must have been icy when he ran it in. The click of cold metal on her teeth fell somewhere between surprising and unpleasant.
“You wanted something stronger?”
She shook her head as they walked on. “Edward would have packed brandy, wouldn’t he? The two of you are so different, I’m quite fascinated. Being an only child, I suppose. I have Kate, but I don’t think it’s anything near the same when you haven’t got the same parents.”
“I’m not sure anyone has quite the same parents. My father was far easier on me than he was on Ted.”
“Does that mean you miss him more?”
“Rather less, probably. I’m afraid my brother minds everything too much.”
“I hate to say it, but I find him a little exhausting. Although I do like him.”
“I like Kate, for what it’s worth. Her husband . . . better in small doses.”
“I’m not sure he’s coming back.” A feeling she had, which meant nothing.
“Because he doesn’t care if he does? But there’s something thwarted about Arden, don’t you think?”
“What a fate. Not wanting to come back and you do.” She shook off her earnestness. “So we’ve settled him.”
It was almost dark now, although the moon wasn’t far past full and would cast a good light. As they walked on, Eleanor felt the hair prickle on her arms, but for a new reason. The Luftwaffe would fly in soon. She hadn’t kept track consciously, but since the Blitz had started in early September, she’d been trained like Pavlov’s dog. She looked up but there weren’t any bombers, and of course she would have heard them first anyway. Nor did they always fly in over Kent. Wind speed and direction, she supposed, cloud cover, weather—fortunately it had often stormed in September—and an attempt to confuse the anti-aircraft gunners. But they would be here soon, and across the country, the AA gunners would be in their positions and even more twitchy than she was. The whole of London would be listening for sirens.
Eleanor looked back over her shoulder to see the stars coming out in the east. There, the sky was already clear and black, while a rich navy lingered in the west. A couple of years ago, London would have cast a light bright enough to cloud the heavens, even though it lay below the horizon. Now, everybody’s blackout curtains would be drawn, the watch committees knocking up anyone who left a crack. Finally, busybodies had found a justification. Eleanor suspected the watch of being made up of the same ones, the same type, who centuries ago had denounced their neighbours as witches. Night must have looked like this when the witch-hunters went out hunting, lit only from above, the windmills and hayricks and trees casting giant uneasy articulated shadows under the waning moon.
“What are you thinking?” Robin said. When she paused, he turned amused. “You so audibly think,” he said.
“How flattering to be paid such attention.” Eleanor flounced a little and smiled. “If you give me a penny, maybe I’ll tell you I was thinking about the blackout. How nobody likes it, although of course we all know we need it. I was wondering if it’s largely because it gives nosy neighbours an excuse to spy.”
Eleanor held out her hand, and Robin made a show of fumbling in his pockets for a penny.
“Only shillings, I’m afraid.” The shillings in his palm caught the moon and glinted. She took one.
“Now I can add to my art collection.”
“Art collection.”
“It’s a story,” she said, as they continued on, the road winding uphill. “It starts with the time my aunt took me to an art opening when I was eight or nine. I was leaned over by an immensely tall woman with scarlet hair. My aunt told me later it was Lady Ottoline Morrell. She apparently said something apposite, although I can’t remember what. Mainly she scared me.”
“Didn’t she die a couple of years ago?”
Eleanor thought so. “It ended up a family joke, how I told my aunt I should like one of the paintings, please. A little boy by Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister. My aunt bought it and dunned my father. Who was amused, fortunately. That was the start of my collection, which is my aunt’s term. I’ve also got a couple of Kate’s, and some photographs of my parents, Elliot & Frye, and I managed to get a red chalk sketch I wanted out of Goodwood. Praying hands. That’s where I might need my shilling. I had to buy the sketch at one of the content auctions. My patrimony. Cost: eight shillings. The creditors wouldn’t let me just take it. Nor will they in the final auction, I fear.”
“They wanted your shillings?” When she nodded: “I suppose we’ll come to that.”
They reached the top of the hill and paused. The moon was bright but the valley below had disappeared into mist, which had risen as evenly as cream in a bowl. They could see a short distance into the valley and then there was nothing, a greyish blank, until the moonlit road emerged up the next hillside.
“Ghostly,” Eleanor said, and as they descended into the valley, the cool humidity clung to her like a spectral child. The muffling of their footsteps was beautiful, echoing behind them as if they were four, so they sounded like a family of padding animals. There must have been sheep in pastures to their right, the beasts shifting uneasily as they passed. They could only see a few feet ahead, even though Robin had out his flashlight, but he was confident they were still on the old road to London. Nor had they seen any traffic since the mist descended, although as they started uphill again beside a low stone wall, a brief flare of light behind it marked the opened and quickly closed door of an invisible house. A man holding his own flashlight walked out of the fog and onto the road. Farmer, from the looks of him.
“That will be His Majesty’s uniform,” he said belligerently. “And who’s him wearin’ it?”
“From Ackley Castle, my friend. I’m Denholm,” Robin said. “Glad to see you’re keeping an eye out.”
The man wavered. “Who’s your father then?”
“We just lost him. You can stand down. I’m on my way back from leave.”
Unacknowledged by either Robin or the farmer, Eleanor felt herself turning to mist. This is what it’s like to be inconvenient, she thought. Robin angled himself half in front of her, even though the farmer refused to see her anyway, because what did she signify? If not a German spy, then a girl freebooting it at night. Freedom was fine for Robin but not for her. When the farmer stood down (as Captain Denholm had ordered) it was still without a glance at her. Grumbling, “Ow right, then,” he stomped off into another flare of light and slammed the door.
Eleanor couldn’t help giggling into Robin’s overcoat. “The invisible woman. Or Mata Hari. I’m not sure which he thought me. Is this woman’s role? I should capitalize: Woman’s Role. Men either don’t see us or can’t bear to see us in case we contaminate them. I’d like to think we’re advancing, but . . .”
“It would be better to stay off the road. Though we easily could go wrong in the fog.”
“Since you’re travelling with a seductive spy, that is of course a danger.”
Then she remembered the Durex and blushed, glad he couldn’t see it. In silent agreement, they picked up the pace, Robin soon falling into a march. It was forty-five miles from Preston Hall to London and they couldn’t have made a dozen so far. That was lucky given the farmer; people around here knew Ackley Castle. But fame had its limits, and Eleanor was glad when the road began winding through less populated country, hilly country, parts of it wooded. In one long climb after another, they found the heights clear of mist but the valleys so shrouded and humid they half swam through them. Occasional drivers or riders or passersby stopped to challenge them, not thinking for a moment they might be challenged themselves, too rooted in the land and their own rightness upon it.
“And what happens if we encounter German spies?” Eleanor asked. They’d just waved on a truck with only its sidelights lit, driven, she was certain, by a black marketeer running meat into London.
“It’s all right,” Robin told her. “I’ve got a pistol, too.”
“You mean he did?”
“Never took his left hand off it.”
“Well, this is an adventure,” Eleanor said merrily.
“You’re still not tired?”
“I shouldn’t have boasted quite so thoroughly about my new boots. But I’m fine.”
“Up the next hill is a dry old wood,” Robin said. Well, here we are, Eleanor thought, and grew conscious of breathing rapidly.
When they reached the heights, Robin led the way over a low wood fence into a stand of trees. It was still unusually warm in the dry heights when they were out of the mist. A humid summer night: how odd for October. The moon was high now and the wood open enough for a silvery light to find its way down to the bracken covering the floor. Its dry fronds rustled against their legs as they took a narrow animal path away from the road. The first leaves had fallen onto the bracken and where the moonlight caught them they glowed like old gold, like fool’s gold, like veins of fire to light the path.
Before long, they passed a huge old yew tree surrounded by a crumbling metal picket fence. Ahead Eleanor could make out an even more ancient oak that looked as if it had been building its boles since Elizabethan times. The night was alive with small invisible scurrying creatures, or maybe they were sprites called out by the summery warmth to dance around the toadstools. Pixies, she thought, the word coming to her out of nowhere. She wanted fireflies, but looked up and saw a brilliant watch of stars and that was enough.
Then they reached the oak and there were fireflies, too. Just a few of them, woken to flit up into the branches like newborn stars. “Surely this can’t happen,” she said, feeling under a spell. There was an owl here, too, on a lower branch, its alert ears visible in the moonlight. The land sloped down again beyond the oak, and Eleanor could see wisps of mist wandering up the hillside to infiltrate the trees. Not see it precisely, but sense a change in the air that turned the more distant trees woolly, so they might have been embroidered on the tapestry of night.
“Here?” Robin said, spreading a blanket from his knapsack under the oak. He seemed determined and eager and slightly nervous, which had the surprising effect of calming Eleanor. She trusted him, and was surprised to realize how deeply she loved him. When they sat down, and lay down in what might as well have been a savannah, she helped him with her clothes, slowly at first. If they survived the war they would marry and have children. If they didn’t survive, at least they would have had this.
They were awakened by a rumble. Eleanor bolted upright, finding that mist had risen and shrouded the hilltop, leaving them in complete darkness. No stars. No moon. Robin clicked on his flashlight and aimed it at the forest floor, which let them see each other and a few feet of bracken. They couldn’t make out what was approaching from the south, but knew it was the Luftwaffe coming for London. The fleet was still far away and high enough it seemed like the grumble of a distant storm. Nor could Eleanor make out the ack-ack guns and tracers and searchlights that must already be targeting them.
“That isn’t . . . ?” Robin asked, knowing that it was but still slightly muzzy from sleep. “Not sure what to do.”
“Some people don’t bother with shelters, figuring that when their time’s up, it’s up.” Eleanor paused, wondering how much gossip he’d heard about the past month’s horrors; the ones that didn’t make the newspapers or BBC. “Especially after a bomb gets down the Underground, where people have been told to go to be safe. Although we try to keep news of incidents like that from getting out.”
He noticed the unconscious slightly nervous we.
“I’m in transportation at the Ministry. It’s rather boring. But one hears things.”
“How do you cope with the bombs?”
“We’ve fixed up the cellars, Kate and I. Cots and candles. They’re quite deep.” Eleanor heard her voice shaking. “You mean now? If the artillery gets off a lucky shot, they might bring a plane down on top of us—or the castle, for that matter, if Edward’s gunner is up there.”
Robin didn’t seem to find it any more likely than she did.
“Sometimes they discharge their bombs randomly on their way back home, whether to ‘sow terror,’ as the newspapers have it, or because there’s been a cock-up in their bomb bay over London. I think a cock-up is far more likely.”
“So we’re just as likely to get hit . . .”
“. . . here, there or anywhere. Unless you know of a cave.”
“Bit claustrophobic,” Robin admitted, surprising Eleanor. So they shared that, too.
Going silent, they leaned back against the tree and let the bombers approach, which was harder than she would have thought. Her mouth was dry and she was scared—terrified—wanting to run but knowing it was a chicken-with-its-head-cut-off sort of thing. (She had no idea why the thought of chickens frightened her.) The Luftwaffe could have been approaching from the west or east, since Eleanor knew the ears were easily fooled, but it sounded as if the bombers were coming directly toward them, the droning hum of the engines growing louder.
Ack-ack fire blasted from the lee slope of the next hill. Who knew they had artillery there? Bright lights speared into the sky like beacons muzzied by the fog. Then the first bombers were above them, frighteningly loud now, their hum both demanding and insinuating. In two minutes, the first of them would reach London, losing their bombs on the dockyards, on factories in Dagenham. What was left of them. Six straight weeks of bombing, forty-five days and nights of solid vicious blitzkrieg. Nights, lately. Every single night, each of them carnage.
The bombers came in endlessly, the anti-aircraft fire a continuous series of shocks in the ground and the air. Eleanor huddled into Robin’s arms. The planes were still high up but the drone of their engines was pervasive, a loud industrial chorus from Hitler’s Wagner: bass notes and tenor and the occasional soprano scream of descent, all of it blending into an oratorio that went on and on and on and on and on and on. On and on, no end to it, both of them too cowed now to even think of running, transfixed by the power, unable to believe there was so much machinery in the world, so much metal, so much ingenuity and evil and such dreadful, dreadful waste.
We could solve all the problems in the world if we threw half this much effort into it, Eleanor thought.
“So many?” Robin asked.
“They must think they’re winning,” Eleanor replied. “I don’t think so. They might.”
One night last month, 185 German bombers were shot down. This was in one night, and clearly they’d only got a fraction. The radio said the RAF had lost twenty-five fighters, and read between the lines: Britain was relying on ground fire. The RAF wasn’t nearly as well supplied as the Luftwaffe, which, six weeks into the Blitz, was able to throw hundreds of bombers at London again tonight.
“One Messerschmitt came down on Victoria Station last month. That wasn’t just a rumour; I saw it. No idea what happened to the crew. Parachutes and POWs maybe. If the crowd got them, they would have been lynched. They don’t publish the casualty figures, but there must be thousands dead in London alone, and then there are the Midlands.”
From far away, they could sense rather than hear the bombs falling, invisible concussions carried through the air and the rock and soil of the hilltop. Dogfights had started up, the RAF coming in from the north, bringing with it distant fire and the occasional whine of a crashing plane. Nothing close.
“My brother,” Robin said. “Usually.”
“No,” she replied, surprising him. He’d turned off his light but they could see flashes of each other’s faces in the weird light-streaked foggy darkness. “I think he drops spies into Europe. I saw the manifest. They send French clothes and shoes to his base.”
She shouldn’t have said that, but they might be killed at any moment. They probably wouldn’t be, but if Edward didn’t make it through his next mission, Robin might find solace in knowing how it really happened.
“I sometimes think back in London,” Eleanor said, as the noise diminished slightly, the fleet now scattered over the city, the estuary, some perhaps making for Manchester or Liverpool. “Maybe the terror would be greater if it wasn’t so regular. But every night: time for tea, finish work, go home. Oh, there go the sirens. Into the shelter. Random strikes might be harder to take psychologically. As it is, people are bearing up.”
“I didn’t know. I’ve wondered.”
Eleanor imagined pulling back the fog like a curtain to show him a panorama of London in the flaring light of ack-ack fire and searchlights and incendiary bombs, the great city illuminated by man-made lightning that flashed on and off to reveal miles of offices and houses and the snake of a river curving through it. Toy bombers would be banking above it and dropping their lozenge-sized bombs. Puffs of smoke on the ground as the artillery fought them off. Each small volcanic burst of fire would reveal the route of an old Roman road or medieval cow path; reveal the ragged craters of past and present strikes.
It was giving her a headache, but she insisted on picturing the domes of churches, St. Paul’s still improbably standing. Looking inside it, they would see fire-watchers hunkered in the rafters, waiting to save history. Looking further down, they would see ARP wardens drinking tea in their makeshift posts, preparing for the moment when local strikes would call them into action. Below them was a layer of families and strangers huddled into their basements, maybe forgiving each other for old mistakes but probably not, and further down in the Underground were people who didn’t have their own shelters, or who had been caught outdoors, or who were living in makeshift tents in the Underground stations after being bombed out of their houses, and below even them were the forgotten graves of the plague dead, whose skeletons shimmied at each new strike. Dante’s many layers of hell were twenty miles away, a battlefield screaming carnage. With luck, Kate was sitting safely in their cellar reading her unbeliever’s bible by candlelight. O woe be unto their city, being blasted into a heap of brick and wood.
Her headache was bad now, pain spearing her right eye. Eleanor could no longer tell what part of the clamour was overhead and what was echoing in her skull. Noise beat inside and out. She held a hand over her eyes, and the next time she took it away she saw a line of shadowy figures passing through the trees. Beyond surprise, she thought they must be elves and fairies in solemn procession. Urging them along was Queen Mab, a long-legged armoured sovereign who strode beside them, light glowing from her braided hair.
A longer look and Eleanor realized they weren’t fairies but ancient people robed in linen and broaches: Britons following Boadicea in her fight to save the country. They didn’t seem to see Eleanor but trudged along stoically, a long-dead company mustered out of the past to help fight the Nazis. As Boadicea strode past, she turned her long neck and gave Eleanor a look of sorrow and compassion, as if wishing she didn’t have to live through this. Her face was the face of Eleanor’s mother in her scavenged photograph.
No, it was someone else.
Eleanor slept.
Morning sounds. Bird calls. Eleanor stirred on Robin’s shoulder, if that’s when she was. She meant where she was. Sitting up, hugging herself, feeling cold and stiff, Eleanor found that the night’s bombardment was over. It was coming on dawn, and the only remaining sign of the bombers was the distant smell of smoke on a cooler wind. Foul industrial smoke as if a factory had burned. As several no doubt had.
Robin sat up after her, shrugging his shoulders. “Here you are. You fell asleep during the raid. How on earth did you manage?”
“I dreamt that Elizabeth Mortlake was Boadicea come back to save us from Hitler.”
Robin barked out a healthy laugh. No better start to the day than bird calls and laughter. As she came fully awake, Eleanor felt amused at herself as well. Another of her glimpses, this one more droll than most. Robin kissed her hair and tried to pull her closer, but it was daylight and anyone might arrive at any minute. She shrugged him away and unbuckled her knapsack, tearing off a loose buckle and shoving it inside.
“My aunt packed us some hardboiled eggs for breakfast.”
As she got them out, Eleanor remembered the Durex. Not that she’d ever forgotten it, although she’d been too embarrassed to say anything last night. Seeing it now, her stomach clenched, although she told herself it was unlikely she’d get pregnant the first time, surely. The first two times. And if she did, they would marry?
“A picnic,” she said, having to clear her throat because it came out wrong. “A picnic,” she repeated more clearly.
“She didn’t pack a thermos?” Robin asked, and no, there wasn’t any coffee. But they were famished and wolfed down bread and eggs and pickle. After one long pleased look at each other and a longer kiss, they brushed themselves off, Eleanor picking dried bracken off Robin’s coat before they got back on the road. And she was right; the world was stirring. As they clambered over the fence at the edge of the wood, a farmer crested the rise with his horse and cart, startled to see them and pulling the dray to a stop.
“Can I help you, Captain?” he asked, making it clear he had no suspicions they were spies but was quite certain about everything else.
“Quite all right. Carry on,” Robin said, sounding the very pattern of English manhood, as Eleanor could now attest he was. The farmer saluted him ironically and drove on, leaving Eleanor to take Robin’s arm as they hiked the last twenty miles into London, slowing down in Greenwich to marvel at the damage: the knocked-down houses and offices and an upended still-smoking lorry from last night, a steel-helmeted bobby directing traffic around it, one of the heavy rescue crews working on a collapsed naval office where they must have thought there were survivors, a street glittering with shards of newly broken glass like drafts of unmelted hail; all this, and surrounding it, block after block of intact buildings that bustled with ordinary life.
A store with a queue out front where a shrill woman complained about rising prices. Several homeless families dossed down in the tunnel under the river, a ropy old grandfather looking senile and lost, five or six children kicking a can up and down the tunnel with a hollow echoing rattle. When they reached the west end, playbills advertised reviews outside theatres, and a doorman touched his cap as they walked by his hotel, a shallow crater still sending a thin plume of smoke into the road. London was a patchwork, a motley, a mosaic. The destruction was terrible but life went on.
They found her aunt’s townhouse still undamaged and a note from Kate on the front table. She’d gone to the hospital, having got permission to draw children in the casualty ward, and would doss down there for the rest of the week. Reading her scribble, Eleanor wondered if Kate had received a telegram from her aunt suggesting she arrange to be away or whether this was a coincidence. In either case, she and Robin would have two days completely alone before she was due back at the Ministry and Robin had to carry on north.
“So this is what it’s like these days,” he said, looking around the dark sitting room, where she and Kate had stacked mattresses against the windows and upended the dining table to hold them in place. Eleanor turned on the light to show him that the room was otherwise cozy with chintz armchairs, her aunt’s well-polished occasional tables, and the family portraits they’d salvaged from Goodwood smiling dustily from the walls.
“Two days,” she said, knowing that two days could be forever.