5

Julia carried a tray into the garden. Saturday afternoon and, in the absence of Pye, their unreliable gardener, Richard had cut the grass and sat on a white-painted cast-iron seat mopping his forehead.

‘What a good job you’ve done,’ she said.

‘Not bad, is it?’ He brushed clippings from his gardening trousers.

She set down the tray on the white-painted cast-iron table and poured from the jug. Gulls wheeled overhead.

On the lawn, Peter was practising his cricket strokes, whacking the ball into the shrubbery and keeping up a running commentary. ‘Oh, well played, Bradman,’ he said. ‘Well played.’ In this he was aided by pale Simon Beeston, a boy who lived two doors down, who was bowling, and badly. Before Peter had gone away to school, they had been friends. She was unsure of the exact status now.

‘Boys,’ she said, ‘there’s lemonade here, if you’d care for some.’

Julia was at sea. Everything was the same and everything was different. Within the shell of ordinary life, structured and orderly – her husband in his gardening trousers, the fresh smell of cut grass, her son pretending to be a famous Australian batsman – was a strange new landscape where all the signposts were missing.

Her skin was alive; her blood sang. The world was so highly coloured it hurt to look at it. But the physical manifestations were nothing compared to the swell of emotions that threatened to pluck her up and dash her to pieces. There wasn’t a single waking moment when she didn’t long for Dougie – his voice, his touch, his mouth on hers – with an intensity that might equally be pleasure or pain. Mixed with that desire, bound up with it, was an appalling guilt at what she had done, and the gnawing fear of discovery.

‘Julia, are you listening?’ said her husband.

She blushed. ‘Sorry. I was miles away. What were you saying?’

‘The evacuees,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t reflect well on us. We should have taken one. Two, even. We’ve plenty of room.’

The evacuees. She’d seen them earlier on the high street with their host families, the brown luggage labels that said who they were tied to their coat buttons, an air of bargain basement about them.

‘I wasn’t in, Richard.’ She handed him a glass of lemonade. ‘You can’t expect Harry to give such an undertaking on our behalf.’

Thwack. ‘And Bradman scores his century.’

‘At any rate,’ she said, ‘I gather they’re all housed now.’

‘That’s not the point.’

Julia smiled to herself: the point would be principle. ‘You mightn’t have found it agreeable on a daily basis. They’ve come from the East End. Quite rough and ready, by all accounts.’

Richard took a sip of his lemonade, made a face. ‘Did Harry sugar this?’

Briefly she laid a hand on his shoulder. The impulse behind this was a great surge of pity. A curious thought occurred to her, which was that she would have liked to ask his advice on how to cope with her own betrayal of him.

And it wasn’t once now, but twice; and it would be three times if today went as planned. Yesterday when the billeting officer had called round she’d been with Dougie.

He had been sitting by the window, sketching, talking. She had been curled up half dressed at the end of the dumpy little sofa, feeling every minute of the past hour in the heat of her skin and the looseness of her limbs.

Smoke curled upwards from his cigarette. ‘Don’t move.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m trying to draw you.’

‘I thought you were drawing the view.’

‘I am.’

His attention exalted her.

Dougie said, ‘You moved.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Stop apologizing, Sinclair.’

Sinclair was her maiden name, one of the many details of personal history they’d so far exchanged. A little unusual for an endearment, perhaps, but she couldn’t imagine one that would have had a greater effect on her. ‘May I see it?’

His answer was to lean across and kiss her. ‘When I finish.’

Finish? she thought. She didn’t want this ever to end.

The week before her wedding, her mother had given her an awkward little talk up in her bedroom about what she called the ‘trying side of marriage’. Accepting that men had needs – omitting to say what those needs might be – was a small price to pay for marital harmony and the eventual blessing of children. One just had to get used to it.

The trying side of marriage had not proved trying at all. Once the honeymoon flush had died down and the shyness sorted itself out, she had found it rather cosy, like having a cup of tea when you really wanted one. But this wasn’t tea, it was wine. It didn’t quench thirst, it created one.

Julia collected the glasses, put them on the tray and checked her watch. Almost three, which was when she had arranged to meet him. You could stop this madness, she thought. You could stop it right here, right now.

‘Peter,’ said Richard. ‘Let Simon have a go batting. It’s only fair.’

The boys changed sides and effortlessly Peter became a famous English fast bowler. ‘And Larwood takes another wicket.’

Richard stood and surveyed the garden. ‘That pampas grass is dreadfully untidy. I think we should dig it up and get rid of it.’

‘I’m not attached to it.’ She picked up the tray. ‘Popping out to the shops for a bit.’

‘Right you are.’ He smiled. ‘By the way, that colour suits you.’

Indoors, Harry was turning out the scullery, humming and clattering. The dog was in his basket and the cat was curled up illegally on a pile of clean laundry. On the table was a letter from her father, which had arrived in the second post.

The letter ran to several pages of Basildon Bond and included an appended diagram on graph paper of the Anderson shelter he was constructing, with measurements. Her father, a retired accountant, was a reliable correspondent of minutiae.

Julia set the letter aside to read later, brushed off the uneasy feelings it aroused in her: the nagging suspicion that she had failed her father too. Then she reached for her shopping basket, a fluttering bird caged in her chest, its wingbeats, tiny heartbeats, almost unbearable. Ten minutes and she would be with him.

At that instant screams came from outside, followed by the sound of her husband shouting for her.

She dropped the basket and rushed to the back door just as Harry came haring out of the scullery. In the garden, Richard was bending over their son, who was stretched out on the ground. It was Simon, unscathed, who was doing the screaming.

All mothers know that bringing a life into this world gives a hostage to fortune, just as all mothers learn that a working knowledge of the medical dictionary is not enough to avert disaster, for trouble, when it comes, will always choose the moment when you are looking the other way and will take the form you least expect. It will also, thought Julia, hurrying to her son’s side, choose the worst possible time.

‘What happened?’

‘I’m not precisely sure. I was putting the mower away,’ said Richard. ‘Simon, will you please get a grip.’

‘I didn’t mean to,’ said Simon, the screams subsiding to sobs. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

Harry said, ‘He’s out cold.’

Julia knelt down on the grass. Her pulse drummed in her ears. How small he looked, how pale! ‘Where’s all the blood coming from?’

‘Try to keep calm,’ said Richard. ‘Head wounds always look worse than they are. Harry, fetch the first-aid box. We’ll have to take him to the cottage hospital. He doesn’t seem to want to come round.’

The cottage hospital, on the outskirts of town, was an Edwardian brick building that resembled a slightly inflated pair of semi-detached houses. They parked in front. Richard gathered up Peter from the back seat, where Julia had been holding his limp body, and ran with him indoors. They were all splattered with blood.

It seemed to take hours. In the green-tiled waiting room, the clock ticked away. Richard stood by the window, from where he issued reassurance, both in words and in the silence of his back. Julia sat twisting her cold hands.

This was her punishment, she knew. Don’t let my child die, she said in her head. I’ll do anything, but don’t let my child die. Don’t let him be maimed or broken.

When the door of the waiting room opened, she jumped out of her seat. ‘Mr Compton?’ said the doctor. ‘Mrs Compton?’

Peter had come to half an hour ago, he said, and was making sense. A trifle dazed, as one might expect, but his vision was not blurred, which was a good sign. The gash had needed four stitches and would probably leave a small scar. ‘A little lower and he would have lost the eye. A little more power behind the bat and we’d be looking at something rather more serious than concussion. Even so, I’d like to keep him in tonight as a precaution. Always better to err on the safe side.’

‘Thank God,’ said Julia. ‘May we see him?’

‘Peter?’ she said, coming into the consulting room with its surgical smell of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant. Relief washed over her.

He opened his good eye. The other, beneath a bandage that swaddled half his forehead, was swollen shut. ‘Mummy.’

‘Mummy’ turned her stomach to water. She sat down on the edge of the examining couch. ‘How are you feeling, my love?’

Peter was white as a sheet. ‘I’ve got a beastly headache.’

‘I expect you have. Nasty bump.’

He struggled to raise himself up on the pillow. ‘May I have a drink?’

She turned to the doctor and he nodded. ‘Here you are,’ she said, raising a beaker to his lips. Even these were greyish.

The back of his hand flitted up to his dressing and a little water dribbled down over his chin. ‘Am I going to be very disfigured?’

‘Not at all,’ she said, her mouth twitching at the corners, her heart leaping up. ‘There may be a little scar.’

‘Simon’s a rotten cricketer,’ said Peter. ‘He wouldn’t make the second eleven at my school. Even if we had a tenth eleven he wouldn’t make it.’

‘I expect he wouldn’t,’ said Julia. ‘What happened?’

‘I was showing him how to bat. He kept missing the ball.’

‘But not your poor head.’

‘You must have been standing right behind him,’ said Richard, from the other side of the examining couch. ‘That wasn’t particularly sensible, old boy.’

Peter said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Twenty, thirty, forty minutes, and she still hadn’t appeared. Dougie tried to apply himself to the chits from the shoot. McGod always wanted to see the figures before the footage. As usual, they refused to add up. He felt around in his pocket and pulled out a note and a handful of coins. Not enough to make up the difference.

In the primitive kitchen, he took one of the bottles of ale Frank was chilling in the sink. The label, slimy to the touch, slid off under his fingers into the cold water. The bottle-opener wasn’t in the drawer or anywhere in its immediate vicinity.

Fifty minutes. He was unsuccessfully trying to lever off the bottle top with a combination of brute force and a blunt knife when he thought he heard a knock on the door. No one was there.

An hour. What had happened to her? Had she been found out? Had she changed her mind?

Dougie went from room to room. The cottage was small; it didn’t take long. He thought about going for a walk on the beach, then dismissed the idea – or deferred it for when he might need its bracing consolations. Something about Julia, something he couldn’t put his finger on, had got to him. What’s more, he was taking no steps to defend himself against it; on the contrary, to all intents and purposes he was welcoming it with open arms.

As he welcomed her, when she eventually arrived around half past four. ‘Ah,’ he said, after she told him what had happened, ‘the old cricketing accident excuse again. How is he?’

On her way over to the cottage, Julia had pictured a cooler reception, considering how late she was. She had half expected not to find him there at all. Either possibility would have made what she meant to do easier. Now, his evident relief at seeing her, his arousing smell of tobacco and shaving soap, his nearness, was an electric-bar fire on her skin.

‘He’s a little shaky.’ She might have been talking about herself. ‘I came –’

‘Wrong tense.’ He touched her face. ‘But we’ll soon see to that.’

‘No,’ she said, drawing away. ‘I came to tell you –’

They hadn’t got much further than the hallway.

A rap on the door. ‘Mr Birdsall?’ Another rap. ‘Mr Birdsall?’

‘Oh God,’ said Julia. ‘It’s Mrs Coveney.’

‘Go upstairs,’ Dougie said. ‘I’ll get rid of her.’

The postmistress was perched on the doorstep like a little tame robin, bright of eye yet ready to fly off, or to peck. ‘Mr Birdsall, I do hope I’m not disturbing you.’ She peered into the hall. ‘I heard voices. I thought you might have a visitor.’

‘I was reading a script.’

‘A woman’s voice,’ said Mrs Coveney.

‘I play all the parts,’ said Dougie. ‘What can I do for you?’

She tilted her head. ‘I was wondering if you will be wanting to stay another week? If so, terms would be favourable.’

‘Thank you, but no. We’re leaving tomorrow,’ said Dougie. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’m rather busy.’

But Mrs Coveney was not the sort to pass up the opportunity to snoop on what she regarded as interestingly irregular lives. It took a good few minutes before she could be persuaded to go, which was not before various excuses had been advanced in an attempt to gain access, each more obvious than the last, ranging from a pressing need to inspect the paraffin heaters ‘should the night turn chill’ to a sudden anxiety about towels.

‘You can come down now,’ said Dougie, calling up the stairs. ‘The coast is clear of enemy shipping.’ He went into the front room. ‘That was tiresome,’ he said when Julia came through the door. ‘It’s obviously not our day today.’

‘No.’

‘What’s the matter?’ He studied her face. ‘You look like the world’s ended. She didn’t see anything.’

‘You’re leaving tomorrow.’

‘So that’s what it is. I thought you were going to say you wanted nothing more to do with me.’

That had been her intention, which she now realized she could have accomplished simply by staying away. ‘Is it true?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Dougie. ‘Macleod wired this morning. He wants us back in London. Or rather he wants the camera back.’

She sank down at one end of the sofa and stared round at the tawdry seashell pictures and the model boat – very handmade – on the windowsill. No doubt intended to impart cheer, a holiday mood, their effect was the opposite. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was going to. But, as you may have noticed, we were interrupted.’

It occurred to her that after all she didn’t have to say anything. She didn’t have to put an end to it: it had put an end to itself. She began to feel everything was hopeless. ‘I suppose I’m just a conquest to you.’

‘You’re showing a surprisingly damp side of yourself, Sinclair,’ said Dougie. He sat down beside her, fished about in his pocket and passed her a handkerchief.

‘Don’t you possess anything that’s clean?’ she said, blowing her nose on it. ‘I’ll never see you again.’ Whether this was a statement of fact or intention, she wasn’t sure.

Dougie said, ‘Remind me one day to teach you the rudiments of logic. And while I’m at it, I’ll furnish you with a railway timetable.’ He opened his sketchbook, wrote a few lines and tore out the page. ‘Here’s where to reach me.’

She stared at the paper. The address was in Soho Square.

‘Your turn.’ He handed her the pencil.

‘Whatever for?’

‘Don’t be fatalistic.’ He took her face in his hands. ‘Did you think it would stop here?’

She laid her head on his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what I think any more.’

‘Then don’t think. It’s a great mistake to do too much of it.’ He murmured into her hair. ‘We’re filming tomorrow morning. We won’t leave until later. See if you can get away after lunch, if only for a short time. Will you try?’

She found herself nodding.

‘In a few weeks Barbara and the children go to Canada, which will make things easier. That’s not long to wait.’

Barbara, thought Julia. The wife had a name.

Sunday morning and, down on the mole, half the population of the town was watching a film camera and associated cabling and equipment being loaded on to the back of the Bawdsey Belle, the men cooperative and arguing by turns about the right way of doing things, the women taking an unaccustomed back seat, patting their hair, striking decorative poses and giving their best profile. Children ran about. Their thin high shouts echoed across the harbour water.

Dougie clambered on board. ‘How are your sea legs this morning?’ he said to Frank.

‘I didn’t have breakfast.’

‘Sensible precaution.’

‘I do try to keep everyone’s best interests in mind.’

You wouldn’t think it would be hard to shoot the sea at sea. They filmed a few reverse angles from ship to shore: that was straightforward. But whenever they tried to get a clear shot of an open expanse of water, which Dougie was determined to have, something bobbed into view. Once it was a pleasure boater, who waved his pipe cheerily from the tiller of his dinghy, another time a dark grey vessel, a minesweeper, loomed up on the horizon, and then gulls, resting on the water, flapped up directly over their heads, crying and screeching.

The gulls did it. Dougie lost his temper all over the boat. Then, soon after, he got the footage he wanted and everyone was happy. ‘Cut,’ he said as Frank rushed to the side and retched.

‘What’s the matter with your man?’ asked Joe Seddon, the skipper.

‘He gets a bit queasy,’ said Dougie.

‘No swell to speak of.’

‘We can head back now.’

‘I could kiss you for that,’ said Frank, returning and wiping his mouth.

‘Do and I’ll make sure we stay out all day,’ said Dougie.

When they puttered past the mole around eleven, the harbour was deserted. ‘Where’s the welcoming party?’ asked Frank. Not a soul was about.

They were tying up and starting to unload the equipment when the siren sounded, low at first, then rising to a mournful wail. It was as if all the streets and houses in the town were voicing their distress.

‘We seem to be at war,’ said Dougie.

‘You missed the broadcast,’ Harry said.

Julia came into the hall, unpinned her hat and stripped off her gloves. ‘No, they had a wireless at the hospital.’ Behind her, Richard brought in Peter as if he were a consignment of china.

Peter said, ‘Hitler is a rotter.’

‘Just look at the state of you,’ said Harry. ‘You’d think you’d seen action already.’

This pleased him, Julia saw. However, he took no persuading to go upstairs to bed, where he lay propped on pillows, the bandage askew over his eye. ‘Will I be better by Tuesday?’ Tuesday was when he was due back at school, a date he anticipated as much as she dreaded.

She tucked him up. ‘We’ll have to see what the doctor says. You gave us all quite a fright.’ A stab of guilt there, a twist of the knife. She had no sooner bargained for his life than she had let down her side of it.

‘I was brave, though, wasn’t I?’

‘Very,’ she said.

‘You know, Matron can always change the dressing.’ He touched the dressing. ‘She’s rather an expert at those sort of things.’

Clearly he was desperate to show off the bandage.

‘Let’s not worry about that right now. Would you like me to read to you?’

‘No,’ he said faintly. ‘Hospital was quite exhausting.’

Julia doubted that Peter would be going back to school before the stitches were out. That gave her at least another week with him. But as she went down the stairs her mind was focused on another departure.

‘I would feel happier,’ said Richard later that evening when the news was over, ‘if Chamberlain weren’t leading us into this. If we must be in it, we’re going to need someone who at least has an appetite for it.’

They were having a drink in the drawing room after dinner. The blackout was up, the walls had closed in. Everything was deadened. ‘Have you made this stronger than usual?’ said Julia.

‘No, I always make them the same.’

That afternoon between bouts of nursing she had managed to slip out for long enough to meet Dougie. Outside the cottage, Frank had been packing the car.

‘Chin up, darling,’ said Dougie. ‘Write to me. I’ll write to you.’

She nodded, and saw that he was already somewhere else. It struck her then that she knew him in one way but not in most others.

Now she was sitting in the stuffy lamplight, feeling a great sense of anticlimax. He would be gone now, she thought. Gone back to London, to his wife, who had a name. Tears pricked at the back of her eyes and began to trickle down her face. Everything was so confusing.

‘Come, Julia, we knew this was on the cards.’ Richard reached over and patted her on the knee.

‘It’s the shock.’ She blew her nose on the handkerchief Dougie had given her the day before.

‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘Where on earth did you get such a grubby article?’

She got up from her chair. ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’

‘Good idea. I’ll be up shortly.’

Richard arranged papers in his study, sorting them into piles. He cast his eye over the terms of a will, the seventh he’d been asked to draft in as many days, and slipped it into his briefcase. Out in the kitchen, he heard the dog whine in a dream. His brother stared out of his photograph, always twenty-two, always uniformed, clean-shaven, alive. The responsibility of defence settled on his shoulders. Around him the household slept.