7

It was only when Julia boarded the train that the full realization of what she was doing hit home. Compartment doors slammed up and down the length of the carriages. A guard shouted. It was still not too late to get off, to retrieve the case she had stowed on the brass overhead rack. It was still not too late to turn back.

A whistle, a hiss of steam and a jolt. Across the compartment, a middle-aged woman in a tweed suit and squashy hat raised her eyes from her newspaper.

The train began to move. Julia pressed her gloved hands down on to the hard oblong of the unopened book in her lap as if that would quell her panic. What if there was a crisis and Richard tried to reach her? What if he telephoned her father and discovered she wasn’t there? What if she came across somebody she knew?

That morning, packing her weekend bag, making arrangements with their housekeeper, returning her husband’s goodbye kiss, accepting spending money from him, along with the warm wishes he sent her father, she had been driven by an imperative that seemed to exist outside herself, something that had a life and a will of its own.

The imperative or impulse had taken her all the way to the nearest town served by the branch line, to the post office, from where she sent Dougie a telegram, and to the railway station, where she bought her ticket. To the waiting room, where she had waited, and to this compartment, whose only other occupant was now slipping sweets from a twist of paper and pencilling in answers to a crossword puzzle. The bulbs in the lamps were blue, one more novelty of a war that wasn’t behaving like one. A poster screwed behind a sheet of glass advertised the Continent via Harwich.

What was she doing?

The train began to pick up speed. She stared through the window at the flat familiar landscape, the isolated stands of trees, the gulls swooping over the brown ridged fields, landing and alighting, landing and alighting, the boy cycling up to a halt, and the green lorry parked by the dusty roadside. The signal boxes and level crossings flew past. Nothing settled her. A speck of grit blew into her eye and she extracted it with the tip of her finger.

Perhaps if she had grounds, an excuse, to behave this way. If there had been ill treatment, something to complain about. But there was nothing to complain about except there was nothing to complain about.

‘Oh!’ she said, and only realized she had said it out loud when the tweedy woman opposite raised her eyes from her puzzle and frowned a question.

‘Sorry.’

Then she could hear him say, ‘Stop apologizing, Sinclair,’ and began to tremble.

And yet there was still time, she told herself. Where the branch line met the main line she could always change trains and turn back. She could always go home.

Those first few days after Dougie had gone back to London, Julia had often found herself at her desk, picking up her pen and putting it down again. Scratching the nib on the blotting paper, making chicken-feet marks, filling in circles with drips and blots. What was the point in writing? He would forget her – he had forgotten her already.

Picking up her pen and putting it down again. It was wrong. She was married, she had a son. There was nothing to say. It was over, and some distant part of her that she couldn’t quite reach breathed a sigh of relief.

Peter went back to school, with his scar and gas mask. Julia played the piano a lot. She played ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ and imagined Dougie listening to her. After a time she could not hear his imagined comments on her playing; she was forgetting the sound of his voice.

The letter came just when she’d given up expecting it. You don’t really know anybody until you read what they’re like on the page. Dougie on the page seduced her all over again. Such was the power of a good prose composition.

‘My own Sinclair, I miss you terribly,’ he wrote. ‘Your skin is like silk, did I tell you? I want to fuck you so badly I can’t think of anything else.’

That letter was in her handbag, memorized. The train sped along. She saw Peter in hospital, his head bandaged, water dribbling over his chin. She hadn’t heeded the warning. No doubt the gods would find some new and uniquely terrible way of punishing her for what she was planning to do. Wouldn’t it be best to turn back?

A little way outside Colchester the train came to a halt in a siding. No announcements were made. Five, ten minutes of inactivity and the tweedy woman put her head out of the window of the compartment door, then sank back in her seat declaring that the unexplained delay was typical of the way the war had disrupted the timetables.

‘We wait here any longer,’ said the woman, ‘and I’ll miss my connection.’

Julia had been wondering whether the train had sensed the opposing forces inside her, pushing forward, pulling back, and stopped itself on purpose. Now, with the woman’s fretting, her anxious checking of her ticket and watch, she felt as if something was about to be taken from her before she had the chance to seize it.

The woman shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, you must excuse me, I’m on edge. My daughter’s expecting her first any day now.’

She produced a photograph of a young woman with fluffy hair, and Julia admired it.

‘They say she takes after me.’ The photograph was tidied away. ‘Are you going far?’

Was she? thought Julia. Exactly how far was she going?

A clank, and the train got underway again. ‘About time,’ said the woman.

They were moving, slowly. ‘London,’ said Julia, over the noise. ‘I’m going to London.’

‘Oh, do take care in the blackout, won’t you?’ said the woman. ‘There’ve been so many accidents, one hears.’

Richard had said the same that morning.

Then all at once the madness was back, the driving, relentless imperative, and she marvelled at its power to override her better judgement, to mow everything down in its path. She would deal with the gods later.

‘It’s not the gods you have to worry about, Sinclair,’ said Dougie. ‘It’s the mortals. They’re much more dangerous, by and large.’

They were sitting in a small Soho restaurant run by a Hungarian who had greeted Dougie like a long-lost brother or comrade-in-arms. The walls were crowded with pictures and on each table was a little lamp with a pink shade which flattered all the faces in the room. The tables were very close together, so that the waiters in their long white aprons had to perform balletic manoeuvres to serve the food and pour the wine, which they did with a kind of mocking deprecation of their own performance that only served to highlight its consummate skill. This wasn’t her London, thought Julia, gazing round at the other diners, many of whom were in the services and not all of them English. At the next table was a Canadian pilot.

Earlier, when she had arrived at Liverpool Street, she’d noticed the same prevalence of uniform, just as she had breathed in the city smell of dirty wet pavement. Dougie had been waiting for her at the barrier. Now his thumb was pressing against her palm and she was flooded with an enormous sense of well-being and the extravagance of hours to spend with him. No past, no future, no fear on either account. She was conscious only of a long exhalation into a limitless present tense.

‘What a lovely lady,’ said Viktor, the Hungarian restaurateur, coming to enquire after their meal. ‘You are a very lucky man.’

‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ said Dougie.

‘Luck has everything to do with it, my friend,’ said Viktor.

‘Do you often come here?’ said Julia, when Viktor had taken his professional solicitude to another table. By which she meant, do you often come here with your wife?

‘Sometimes, if I’m going to be staying late at the Unit.’ Then he began to describe the difficulties he had been having at work, how he couldn’t see his way clear on this new film and, lightly, jokingly, how it was all her fault for putting him through hell. ‘The telegram was a nice touch. I’ll say this for you, you do keep me on my toes.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I should have given you more warning.’ But more warning would have meant more thought, and it wasn’t thought that put her on the train or kept her there.

‘Don’t apologize, Sinclair,’ he said, with an amused look. ‘Indecent haste is perfectly fine by me.’

In fact, the telegram had given him quite a fright. In the short interval between learning that it had arrived at the Unit and him opening it, his mind had had time to picture enemy torpedoes and his children in a lifeboat cast adrift on the mountainous waves of the North Atlantic, the lifeboat sinking, Nell in her little orange buoyancy jacket going under.

Viktor returned with brandies and the compliments of the house.

They drank their brandies. ‘Tell me more about your film,’ said Julia.

As he did, she could sense an unwinding in him. This pleased her.

Dougie lit a cigarette. ‘You mustn’t indulge me,’ he said to Julia, after a time. ‘I’m frightful at talking shop.’

‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That’s what it’s about, isn’t it?’

He exhaled. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it’s about.’ He shook his head and smiled.

‘Listen to this.’ Dinner was over and they were at his flat, a place Julia registered as one of alien smells, colours and urgencies, of both danger and safety, impressions only heightened by the fact they’d kissed all the way back in the cab.

‘“Tea for Two”?’ she said, picking up the record sleeve. A little banal, wasn’t it? A little Lyons Corner House? And here she wondered, with a slight sinking feeling, whether she had misjudged him and he was not quite so extraordinary after all. As if she had discovered he wore dentures.

‘Art Tatum.’

‘Who’s he?’

Dougie lowered the needle. ‘I heard him play at Ciro’s last year. As a pianist, I’d be interested in your opinion.’

A scratching sound as the needle went round the disc. Then the opening bars burst out and all thoughts of Lyons Corner House went clean out of her head.

What was this?

She had never heard anything like it before. The music swept her up and turned her inside out. She felt it in her spine, on the soles of her feet, in her itching finger-ends. It was joyous, joyous, joyous.

When it stopped, she said, ‘Play it again.’

If anything, it sounded even better. This time what she heard was a whole new vocabulary. An exuberant teasing playfulness that pushed you forwards, sideways and all round the harmonic houses. Dizzy cadenzas cascading up and down the keyboard over a strutting, striding rhythm. She was stunned. It was like listening to a melody in three dimensions.

Dougie was watching her face and when he saw how the music affected her, he smiled. ‘This is how you make me feel,’ he said. ‘You are very jazz, Sinclair.’

‘Funny that,’ she said. ‘I was thinking the same about you.’

‘Again?’

She nodded. Then they were circling, twirling round the room, laughing and bumping into the furniture.

It was dark. A moment of dislocation before she remembered where she was, marvelled at where she was, then her hand reached out to the other side of the bed and found it cool and empty. She got up and fumbled about on the floor, found a shirt – his shirt – and put it on.

Downstairs, a light was burning. He was sitting at the table in the bay window, writing. A cat, hunched on the back of an old cracked leather club chair, swiped a paw at her arm experimentally.

‘You’re awake.’

Dougie turned. ‘I’ve been awake most of the night, as you can’t have failed to notice. Come here.’

She went across to him and leant over his shoulder.

‘They Also Serve’ was written at the top of the page. Underneath was a scene-by-scene breakdown. ‘Your doing,’ he said, pulling her round on to his lap.

‘You would have got there without me.’ She was thrilled.

‘I wouldn’t care to bet on it.’ He kissed her ear. ‘What do you want to do today?’

She laughed.

‘Apart from that,’ he said.

‘Apart from that, listen to the Art Tatum.’

He smiled. ‘You’ll wear it out.’

All weekend, wherever they were, however they were occupying themselves, Julia felt as if she were carrying a large brimming bowl of water from one side of a room to another: this was happiness and she didn’t want to spill a drop. (Happiness was a more complicated emotion than she had thought, remarkably close, at times, to its opposite.)

Evidence of Dougie’s family was everywhere in the flat: in the tea chests on the landing, in the spill of face powder on the chest of drawers in the bedroom, in the three small cots next door with its nursery wallpaper. She tried not to see these, or dwell on them, or mention them.

At the same time, she kept coming up against all the ways in which Dougie was a stranger to her. While this novelty enticed and excited her, it was also daunting. Julia had grown up and married into a world of antimacassars, of gloves and hats and table linen, of wallpaper, doilies and coasters. Of things you put over things, lest real life come in direct, messy contact with you, or vice versa. Dougie, she was beginning to understand, did not live in this world; he barely acknowledged it. The paintings on the walls said this, so did the stain in the kitchen sink, which was the shape of Africa, and so, too, the dead flowers decaying in a vase of stinking water. Most of all, the books on the shelves, on the table, under the bed, many of which sprouted torn slips of paper slipped between their pages. There were other concerns here, and they had nothing to do with appearances.

Equally unsettling was his part of London – what her father would have called a ‘rough area’. It wasn’t the East End, a district that had infested her imagination since childhood with amorphous dread, but it was a far cry from the suburb she’d grown up in. Evenings spent drinking in public houses were rare experiences for Julia; an evening spent drinking in a public house frequented by inebriated poets and Irish working men who sang Republican songs was a shock to the system. Along with her Hungarian introduction to Soho, she felt as if she had spent the weekend in a foreign city. It was but one of many ways she had lost her bearings.

‘Next time,’ said Dougie, ‘I should like to hear you play.’

They were standing under the Great Eastern war memorial at Liverpool Street Station, waiting for her train to be announced. The anonymity of a busy railway terminus surrounded them, all the strangers coming and going, no one caring who they were. Above arched a vaulted glass roof supported by cast-iron girders through which the fading sunlight slanted.

Julia tucked away ‘next time’ like a present to unwrap later. ‘How do you propose to do that?’ she said. He didn’t have a piano.

He lit a cigarette. ‘I’ll think of something.’

‘Let me have a puff,’ she said.

He put his cigarette between her lips. ‘That’s four puffs and counting. I’m afraid I’m a terribly bad influence on you.’

‘You are.’

‘Have you got the disc?’ he said.

‘I do. It’s safe in my bag.’

The station clock, which had been telling her the same time whenever she glanced anxiously at it, chose that moment to rush forwards. The tannoy blared and the barrier was opened. Dougie had bought a platform ticket and followed her to her carriage.

‘Steady on, squire,’ said a sergeant, climbing on board with his kit bag. ‘Give the missus a chance to breathe.’

She cried all the way home, despite the fact she was rather relieved to be going there.