9

Since Julia’s first visit, the flat in Primrose Hill had shed all traces of family life. The tea crates were long gone, and so was the spill of powder on the chest of drawers. In the children’s room, the nursery paper had been painted over, the three little cots had been shifted into the attic, and Dougie had set up a study for himself. Downstairs the furniture had been rearranged. Overall, the effect was more atelier than home and hearth.

‘I’m afraid I had to give him your address.’

Dougie came across from one of the shelved alcoves, where he had been searching for a book by Jung he wanted to show her, in a continuation of a discussion they’d been having about the symbolism of the Tarot. He sat down on the arm of her chair and brushed the hair back from her cheek.

‘What have you told him?’

‘I said I’m staying with a friend who’s been ill and that we have a lot of catching up to do.’

He laughed. ‘That’s one way of putting it. What’s this friend called?’

‘Marjorie.’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t like the name. I’ll be a Madeleine or a Marion, but I refuse to be a Marjorie.’

‘Luckily Richard doesn’t suspect anything,’ said Julia.

He got up abruptly. ‘I don’t like the name Richard either,’ he said, and went back to the shelves, where he stood pulling out one book after another and shoving them back into place as if they annoyed him.

She was going to respond, but thought better of it.

Then he turned. ‘What do you want, Sinclair?’ The nickname came with none of its usual amused tenderness.

‘What do you mean?’ A pulse beat in her throat. ‘This is all I want. To be here with you.’

‘Do you?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

This is where he asks me if I’m still sleeping with my husband, she thought.

‘I haven’t seen you for months,’ he was saying. ‘Have you any idea how hard that’s been?’ His illness (Marjorie’s illness) had left him thinner than ever.

‘Of course I do,’ said Julia, still uneasy. ‘It’s been hard for me as well. But let’s not worry about that now. We’ve a whole week to look forward to.’

‘A whole week,’ he said drily. ‘You should come with a ration book.’

Now she was in London, now she was with him, her birthday was neither here nor there. She knew his was in August and had the date circled in her diary. Those first times back at the cottage, when she had told him when hers was, he’d laughed. ‘Pisces!’ he’d said. ‘How delightfully appropriate.’ These were some of the inconsequential personal details that had seemed so significant at the time. Six months later, he showed no sign of remembering and she decided not to remind him; it would be tantamount to asking him outright to buy her a present or flowers, or spend money on her that he didn’t have, or perhaps didn’t want to spend on her.

Nevertheless, on the morning of her birthday, which was Friday, she was disappointed when he told her that there was to be a showing of the final cut of They Also Serve that evening and a party at a club in Wardour Street afterwards. The timing could have been better, she thought. But she was not about to tell him what day it was now or insist he miss the screening on her account; she had always found the kind of wheedling and manoeuvring that some women went in for false and demeaning. (It was also the case that she had never had to wheedle for anything; whatever she wanted or needed had always been provided.)

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, watching him dress. ‘I’ll meet you afterwards if you want, or see you back here later. But of course you must go.’

‘I intend to,’ he said, ‘and I’d very much like you to come with me.’

She hadn’t expected the invitation and wasn’t sure she welcomed it.

‘What’s the matter?’ Dougie paused in the act of buttoning up his trousers. ‘Not all of them bite.’

‘They know your circumstances. They know you’re married.’

‘They’re my work colleagues, Julia,’ he said, ‘not my moral guardians. What we do here is none of their business. Besides which,’ he said, bending over to give her a kiss that tasted of mouthwash, ‘I want to show you to yourself.’

‘You mean the footage?’ She was alarmed. ‘But you promised you wouldn’t use it. Anyone might see it.’ Richard might see it, she thought.

‘Don’t be cross.’ A half-smile. ‘I couldn’t bear not to. I’ve had nothing else to remember you by this winter.’

Julia had never been inside the Unit. Dougie had pointed it out to her once and had told her the story of the building’s colourful past, little else, so she didn’t know what to expect when she arrived that evening. Through the pedimented entrance was a squarish hall where a number of people were talking, overspills from the room on the left where the main gathering was.

This was overwhelmingly male; perhaps four or five other women out of sixty or so. The atmosphere was collegiate, the smell industrial, the surroundings institutional. Dougie was embedded in a group in the far corner of the room, animated, gesturing and oblivious of her arrival. She went over to a trestle table by the blacked-out windows and accepted a weak gin from a plump, pimply lad who was serving the drinks. Then a person she did recognize, Frank the camera operator, came over and began to talk to her about Dougie, which was the one topic they had in common, apart from the topics everyone had in common, namely the war and the weather.

Frank was concealing something or other behind a large man’s affability. ‘You’ll be pleased when you see how he’s used the footage he shot of you. It’s slotted right into place.’ He gave her a sidelong glance.

She didn’t plan on seeing the footage. She planned on putting her hands over her face when the time came. ‘Who is he talking to?’

Frank blew out his cheeks. ‘The short bloke is Quentin Cheeseman, a big noise in the MOI and between you and me a complete and utter ass. The stroppy-looking person is the boss, Macleod, and next to him is Travis, who shot some of the film. The tall one is Basil Meers, the editor. You want to watch out for his wife.’ Frank nodded in the direction of a woman in a busy print dress on the fringes of the group, who was burrowing away in her handbag. ‘Sylvia’s a great friend of Barbara’s.’

Another sidelong glance, this time more calculating. ‘You been in London long?’

‘About a week.’

From across the room came Dougie’s shout of laughter.

‘Good to see him back on form,’ said Frank. ‘He’s been seventeen kinds of miserable all winter. And Dougie miserable you don’t want to know.’

After that, he introduced her to a few others, whose names and jobs she found hard to keep track of, then people began to drift towards the stairs and the lift, heading for the screening room. Dougie materialized by her side and draped his arm round her shoulders, which attracted attention. He was excited, yet underneath she sensed tension, wound tight like a spring. He’d had a haircut.

‘You look wonderful,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘I haven’t seen that dress before.’

This amused her. He hadn’t seen most of her dresses.

‘Mmm. And smell wonderful, too.’

‘L’Heure Bleue. I bought it this afternoon.’

‘L’Heure Bleue,’ he said. ‘My favourite time of day. Good choice. It suits you.’

The film was short, under half an hour, and its tone was established at the beginning with a line or two of commentary that made reference to the previous war. ‘And now we must fight again.’ Ordinary men and women filling sandbags, distributing gas masks, marshalling chattering schoolchildren through alien streets, raising barrage balloons on long anchored cables, joking in canteens, working on production lines, standing and staring out over the sea beside ‘our old island defences’ (her!), peering in shop windows, putting up blackout, hurrying into a shelter as a siren wailed a false alarm.

It wasn’t what you’d call propaganda, not exactly. The real world, with all its shadings and uncertainties, was too present for that.

The lights came up. ‘Did you see yourself, Sinclair?’

But he was soon surrounded and she never got the chance to answer, or to tell him how proud of him she was.

The Paradiso in Wardour Street was a hot, noisy basement with midnight-blue walls and a silver-foiled ceiling. When they came down the stairs, ‘Begin the Beguine’ was crackling on the gramophone. The bar was a hatch at the far end, where a tired, heavy-lidded blonde in a tight dress took pleasure telling people she couldn’t serve them the drinks they had asked for and sold them warm champagne at extortionate prices instead. Around the perimeter of the room were a few tables. No one sat at them, although some people sat on them, which led to breakages. A far cry from the yacht club, thought Julia.

Macleod had gone home after the screening. Now others arrived, girlfriends, wives, guests, some dressed up, some dressed down, one of them a man in pink trousers who clearly ‘batted for the other side’, as Richard would have put it.

Dougie was buoyed up. When he introduced her to Travis and Basil Meers, she had the sense he was showing her off, and not in the way a man normally showed off a woman but in the way a man showed off a valued colleague. This acknowledgement that she was in some sense part of their endeavour excited her.

‘And this is Mr Cheeseman,’ said Dougie. ‘He’s the man from the Ministry.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Cheeseman. He was short, balding and had the habit of raising himself on the balls of his feet when he wanted to get a point across. This was in most sentences.

Julia asked him what he thought of the film.

Cheeseman inclined his head. ‘It has a good deal of merit. Perhaps it’s been a little long in production, however. In wartime one must respond rather more quickly to events.’

The production delays that had beset the film had been the MOI’s doing. Chiefly these had centred on the script, with the Ministry insisting on inserting chunks of wordy exposition into the voiced-over commentary, in the ‘public interest’, which Dougie had battled to take out again.

‘It was Miss Sinclair who came up with the title,’ said Dougie. ‘And the title was what gave us the shape.’

Julia smiled to herself at how he had unmarried her.

‘Milton,’ said Cheeseman. ‘Very good.’

He might have been praising a schoolgirl for a Latin declension, or having her hat on straight. Julia, who knew about the script wrangles and was feeling mischievous after champagne, said that she thought the commentary was admirably restrained. ‘It treats the audience as adults, not children. In fact, you almost didn’t need it at all. We’re all so sick of being hectored in leaflets.’

Cheeseman gave a quick, tight smile. ‘It is always interesting to meet a woman with a mind of her own.’

‘Pompous ass,’ said Dougie, after Cheeseman had left. ‘And, what’s worse, it looks like we’re going to be working for him rather than simply answering to him. But at least we’re still in business for now. Do you want to go home?’

She nodded.

‘I’ll get your coat.’

In the Ladies, Julia realized she was a little tight. She splashed water on her wrists, glimpsed her flushed, happy face in the mirror, then went into the lavatory and drew the bolt.

Behind the door, she heard a couple of women come in, the swish of their dresses, the snaps of their handbags and powder compacts. A hiss of atomized scent.

‘Did you see her?’

‘I did. On the screen and in the flesh.’

‘And what did you think?’

‘Well, say what you like about Dougie, he’s got good taste,’ said the other.

‘Oh, she’s pretty enough,’ said the first. ‘But Barbara, now Barbara has style.’

‘If you admire that kind of thing. She’s always seemed rather brittle to me.’

‘Is it any wonder? What the poor love has had to contend with over the years would try the patience of a saint.’

The powder compacts were snapped shut.

‘Yes, I’ve often wondered how she stands it.’

‘Oh,’ said the first, ‘he strays, but he’s like all men. He only strays so far. He knows which side his bread is buttered on.’

There was a shove at the door. ‘Never mind. Let’s go back. I can wait.’

Julia came out of the lavatory. In the mirror her eyes were huge dark pits.

They went home in a cab. All the way she stared out of the window at the zebra-striped wartime city, black streets faintly lit here and there by shaded torches and hooded headlamps that picked out the white cautionary banding painted on kerbs and bollards and lamp posts.

Barbara had style, did she? A wife might be in Canada, but she was still a wife. And what about the other women she’d had to ‘contend with’? Who were they? How many had there been? Did they have style too? She obviously had none.

‘I think you’ve had a little too much to drink,’ said Dougie, as they came into the flat. ‘I’ll make us some supper.’

The flat was cold. The fire was unlit. She huddled in one of the club chairs and kept her coat on. The cat threaded itself through her legs: they had reached an uneasy truce, she and the cat. Downstairs, she could hear Mrs Tooley, who she’d now met twice and hadn’t liked on either occasion, riddling out the grate. Outside, a shrill whistle and the distant sound of a train.

A few minutes later Dougie appeared with a couple of plates. She put away her handkerchief. It was his evening and she wasn’t going to spoil it. But she felt like spoiling it.

‘Something wrong with my scrambled eggs?’ he said.

The eggs had the texture and consistency of small bits of rubber. ‘You’re a better film-maker than chef.’

‘You can talk,’ said Dougie with a smile. They ate out most evenings, because Julia didn’t know how to cook; she only knew how to instruct cooks. He remembered her asking which days his char came and being surprised when he couldn’t stop laughing.

‘Basil was quite taken with you.’

‘That’s nice.’ Unlike his wife. Julia was almost certain it had been Sylvia she had overheard in the lavatory.

‘He thought you were perceptive.’ As did Dougie, surprisingly so: the comment she had made to Cheeseman about the film not needing a commentary had set his mind fizzing.

‘Yes, and I do know my Milton.’

‘What’s the matter?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

From the twin of her chair Dougie said, ‘Sitting separately is a bore.’ He came across the room, took her plate and put it on the floor. Then he reached into his pocket, drew out a small box and placed it in her lap. An address in High Holborn was scrolled in gold letters on the top.

She looked up. ‘What’s this?’

‘Open it,’ he said, perching on the armrest.

She opened it. Inside, on a velvet cushion, was a brooch, about an inch in diameter, a circle of garnets set in gold. The dark red stones were like little pinpricks of blood.

‘Happy birthday, Sinclair,’ said Dougie.

She burst into tears.

He held her, waited out her crying, then drew her coat aside and pinned the brooch to her dress. ‘Leave him. It’s a waste for us to be apart. Can’t you see that?’ He wiped her face with his handkerchief. ‘People fall in love every day. You have to stop feeling guilty about it.’

She traced her finger round the circle of stones. Love. It was his first mention of the word.