11

Chalk Farm Road. Grimy, down-at-heel, not a green field in sight. The sort of joke that London’s long history told repeatedly.

Laden with laundry and shopping, mindful of her handbag and whether its clasp was done up (it was), Julia headed back in the direction of the Underground. It had been cloudy all morning; now the sun came out.

This did little to improve the view. She was not a casual visitor to this part of town any more; she was no longer a tourist, with the tourist’s arm’s-length curiosity about how the other half lived and private relief that clean, quiet lodgings in a better district were waiting once she had done with being intrepid. Which meant, however uncomfortable the thought might be, that the view was in some sense her view.

She came past the workingmen’s hostel, a dirty grey building with terracotta exhortations under the roofline interspersed by low reliefs of sooty sunflowers. As ever, it struck her as both ominous and contaminating; contaminating because to set eyes on it was to somehow imagine yourself in it. Further along, knowing children armed with sticks swarmed out of a yard chasing a dog with a bald tail.

The pavement was crowded near the Tube entrance and tram stop. People were shouldering past each other, chatting, smoking, checking their appearances in shop windows, some smiling.

‘The British way of dealing with a crisis,’ Dougie had said.

Pretend it’s not happening, thought Julia, averting her eyes from the headline on the placard, blocking her ears to the newsvendor’s cries. ‘Dutch surrender! Dutch surrender!’

Five minutes later she was turning into their road – Dougie’s road – and resting her eyes on the wide smooth greenness of the park. It was a relief to be home, if this indeed was home, which she supposed it must be, as nowhere else was. She went up the path and let herself in.

At the back of the passage came the creak of a door and a scuffle along the cracked encaustic tiles.

‘Miss Sinclair?’ The ‘Miss’ stressed. It was Dougie’s downstairs neighbour.

Julia made for the stairs and sped up them as fast as her burdens would allow. A brass rod rattled loose and she caught her heel, where she always caught her heel, in the worn bit of frayed carpet near the landing. The laundry toppled out of her arms.

‘Miss Sinclair?’

Too late.

‘Yes, Mrs Tooley,’ she said, massaging her ankle. ‘What is it?’

The woman was wearing a stained floral overall and men’s slippers. From above, you could see the chalky line of her centre parting where the black dye had grown out.

‘You had a bath this morning.’

Two and a half tepid inches in a stained tub with chipped enamel. ‘Yes,’ said Julia, over the balustrade. ‘I did.’

‘And yesterday.’

‘What of it?’

‘Them geysers don’t like it if you fire them up that often. They been known to blow.’

‘Have they?’ Julia hunted around in her handbag for her latchkey.

‘Another thing,’ said Mrs Tooley. ‘You want to stomp of an evening, you go down the dancehall. Some of us find it hard enough to sleep these days.’

‘Thank you for telling me,’ said Julia. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ She unlocked the door and went into the flat.

Inside she was greeted by a tang of paint, the dead used air of extinguished cigarettes and, more distantly, a library scent of old bindings and printed paper. Her trunk, which she had retrieved a fortnight ago, remained half unpacked on the landing. It was well over a month since her husband had thrown her out, and Primrose Hill was taking some getting used to. Everything was.

At times like these she felt a profound disorientation which love was doing nothing to alleviate. Richard she did not miss, so she told herself repeatedly – how could she, when it was Dougie who made her blood sing? Yet during the hours when she was alone, her marriage, the solidity of it, could not be forgotten so easily. Nor could the guilt.

Her instinct was to play her mood out of herself – Schumann would have done the trick, Beethoven would have been even better – but her instinct was like some sort of phantom limb, because there was no piano. Instead, she went upstairs, threw the laundry on the bed and took her shopping into the kitchen.

A stack of cups and plates sat on the Africa stain in the sink. The cups were a shabby sort of brown inside. She didn’t understand why this should be so. It wasn’t as if she didn’t wash them. How dreary it was doing dishes. You did them and then you had to do them again.

She scrubbed the potatoes with a wooden-handled brush worn flat in the middle. (Was there some knack to perking up the bristles?) Then she unwrapped the plump blue-black fish and placed them on a plate with a dish on top, as the cat was showing an interest.

Half past four said her watch. She should do the washing-up. Or dust? But dusting never seemed to make any difference; the rattling sashes, loose in their frames, saw to that. The ancient carpet sweeper was useful only as a form of indoor exercise. Instead she went along to Dougie’s study and pushed open the door.

Here was the source of the paint smell: a small canvas propped on a splattered easel in the corner, a little essay of fractured planes that didn’t know what it wanted to be yet. What dominated the room, however, was a large felt-covered panel, rather like a substantial blackout blind, tacked up on one of the walls that flanked the window. On it were pinned drawings, scraps of illustrations torn out of magazines, newspapers, leaflets. At first sight you might think the arrangement was random. Look closer, and you saw the method in it. The curve of a woman’s spine that echoed the swell of a hump-backed bridge, an advertisement for male support garments next to an escape artist trussed in his chains, a suite of images where a theme was teased out, looping up from a skipping rope via a washing line to an acrobat on a high wire.

He’d been working on it the previous evening when she’d poked her head round the door to say she was going to bed. ‘What are you doing?’ she’d said.

‘Just keeping my eye in. Why don’t you come and have a play?’

‘It’s rather late.’

‘It’s not that late.’

‘I didn’t get much sleep last night.’

‘I’m well aware of it.’ He drew up a chair for her, patted the seat.

‘You are a hard taskmaster.’

‘It’s not my fault you inspire me.’

‘Do I really?’ she said, sitting down.

‘Oh, you stimulate me in all sorts of ways,’ he said.

In the end they had sat there for ages, fiddling around with torn paper, as absorbed as if they were completing a jigsaw on the prom deck of an ocean liner with land nowhere in view and nothing else to occupy their time, or like children who had invented a private game before tea which made no sense to anyone but themselves. Occasionally their hands would brush and Dougie would glance at her, wearing an expression she could not identify.

He pinned a scrap up on the board. ‘Yes, yes, that goes better.’

‘How about this?’

‘No, let’s leave that aside for the moment.’

‘And this?’

‘Ah, excellent. Echoes the Brâncuşi.’

‘Isn’t it funny,’ she said, ‘how you can change the way you read an image just by putting something different next to it?’

Dougie shook his head. ‘Sometimes, Sinclair, you say the most surprising things.’

In the light of day, as Julia stood tracing the connections on the board, it all seemed foolish. What was the point of creating anything – anything at all – when the world was hell-bent on destroying itself? When countries fell, armies retreated and refugees were machine-gunned as they fled? Better get a gun yourself, better fire it. Better still, get a tank.

Something Dougie had told her the other day insinuated itself into her head, something that someone who knew someone in the War Office had said, which was that there were rumours in high places about a negotiated peace. (She remembered, not so long ago, wishing she could discuss the news with him. That was before she discovered he had sources of information that supplemented the official broadcasts in ways that did not always make for reassuring hearing.)

‘A negotiated peace?’ she had said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Essentially, jackboots in Whitehall,’ said Dougie. ‘In which case, Sinclair, we’ll have to head for the hills and set about bomb-making. The Highlands, for preference. I’ve never liked Wales. Too wet in one way, too dry in another.’

At that moment, a noise distracted her and she went to the window. Down below in the narrow untended garden, she saw Mrs Tooley digging a hole under a laurel bush, heard the spade ring against stones. Then she saw her pick up a bundle wrapped in what looked like an old hearth rug and bury it in the ground.

Back home around the start of the war, there had been some talk of the vicar interring the candlesticks and communion plate. He had settled for locking the church instead. She wondered what Mrs Tooley was keeping safe from invaders. Fear was a taste on her tongue.

‘Mackerel,’ said Julia, setting down the plates.

‘I can see that,’ said Dougie. He had returned late from the studio and in the abstracted mood that told her he hadn’t left it behind.

‘The potatoes are a little overdone,’ she said, ‘and also a little underdone. I’m not quite sure why this should be. But I’ve given you the best ones.’

She sat down and pushed her damp hair back from her face. At least the fish were all right, nicely browned. She’d caught them just in time. There were only a couple of black bits.

‘Mrs Tooley buried her valuables in the garden this afternoon. Well,’ she said, with a false lightness – the British way of dealing with a crisis – ‘I’m assuming they were her valuables. Unless they were body parts.’ The woman seemed to her a likely murderess.

He was staring at his plate. ‘You made this yourself.’

‘I did,’ she said. ‘Although the peas, of course, are tinned.’

‘Naturally.’

She forked a potato, which shot across the table. ‘How did it go today?’

Dougie prodded his mackerel.

She retrieved the potato and ate a mouthful of peas, which tasted reliable, predictable. ‘I collected your shirts. But I’m afraid they lost a handkerchief.’

She understood now that she had formed a wrong impression of his attitude to cleanliness. Scruffy clothes, dirty jerseys and so forth: these were what he wore on location, which made a kind of practical sense, although she suspected there was more to it than that. Otherwise, he was particular, not to say fastidious, about his collars and cuffs. Socks, not so much so.

‘Julia,’ said Dougie, ‘did you clean these?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I washed them under the tap for ages. Some of the skin came off, but I don’t think that matters.’

He prodded his mackerel again, which oozed. ‘That’s not the kind of cleaning I meant. You’re supposed to remove the guts before you cook them.’

She stared at the fat fish on her plate.

‘How on earth did you not know that?’

She waited for him to laugh off this mackerel debacle the way he laughed off her singed toast and her tinned meals – ‘Canned Cuisine’ was what he called them. When he didn’t, a slow burn rose in her face.

‘You might as well give these to the cat. They’re inedible.’ He pushed his plate across the table. ‘By the way, the reason the potatoes were overdone and underdone is because you didn’t cut them up into the same-sized pieces. It’s basic physics.’ He got up from his seat.

‘Sorry.’ Her smile felt like a guilty dog waving its tail. ‘I always was useless at science.’

‘Domestic science, clearly.’

That stung. ‘Where are you going?’

He fumbled in his pockets. ‘Have you any change?’

‘Thruppence or so.’

‘Thruppence?’

‘They charged more for the washing this week.’

‘God, Julia!’ said Dougie. ‘I gave you thirty shillings on Monday.’

‘You gave me a pound.’

‘It was thirty shillings. I remember it distinctly.’

It was a pound, thought Julia. ‘London’s expensive. The potatoes were ninepence. I’m sure they shouldn’t have been as much as that.’ In fact, she was not sure how much potatoes should cost. Until six weeks ago, she had never bought any.

‘Money well spent.’

That stung too. ‘You know, it would be much easier if we paid on account.’

Light blue touchpaper.

‘Have you any idea how hard it is to find the rent every month?’

She had been warned about his temper, and now he was losing it she understood she had been wrong to discount the warning or to imagine it would never apply to her. He began shouting and waving his arms around.

Millions of women made millions of meals every day, ordinary working women eking out their husband’s low wages. How could it be so fucking difficult. Couldn’t she get a fucking book of recipes out of the library or something. He couldn’t go on giving her money hand over fist and have it chucked in the bloody bin.

She stood and scraped the plates. This intransigent flat, which refused to clean itself or look after itself in any way. How was this now her responsibility? ‘You cook, if it’s so easy!’ The words flew out of her mouth.

‘Christ!’ he said. ‘So I’m to work all hours and toddle home to make your supper? Precisely how do you fill your time?’

Good question, thought Julia. She filled her time by waiting for him to come back.

‘Standing in queues, for a start!’ she said instead. ‘Buying lavatory paper – it doesn’t replace itself, you know!’ (Which had been news to her.) ‘Collecting your shirts from the laundry!’ Your fucking shirts, she had been on the point of saying. ‘Where are you going?’

The door banged behind him. Her heart was pounding; her cheeks were flushed. For two pins, she would have run after him and shouted in the street. Rowing, she thought, as a person who was new to the experience, was a bit thrilling, whether or not you had a leg to stand on. Frightening, too, and she burst into tears while the cat leapt on to the table and tore the mackerel to pieces, crunching the bones sideways in its thin needled jaws.

When she woke the next morning a little after dawn there was that jolt of mental correction when she realized she wasn’t at home and that the man sleeping next to her wasn’t her husband. Dougie had his back turned. When had he come back? Late, she supposed. She got up and he didn’t move a muscle.

Down on the landing, decorated outside the kitchen with a slime of what the cat had been unable to digest, she knelt by her trunk and sifted through the remains of her former life. Her hair, grown long, fell over her face and she pushed it back with annoyance.

Clothes (winter and summer), sheet music, a few books, a few records, some shoes, some hats: an edited selection of a much more extensive collection of belongings.

She had returned to the house, not as a thief or ghost but as an unwilling participant in a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. When she let herself in, she had noticed there was a new doormat.

The sound of the door closing had brought Harry to the end of the hallway, where she stood half in and half out of shadow.

‘Mrs C.’ The housekeeper’s eyes slid over her. Her mouth was set in a line, her expression guarded and accusatory.

Years of intimacy, no less warm for their formal basis, were gone, vanished without trace. Until then, it had not occurred to Julia that she might have shattered other loyalties.

‘Mr C didn’t mention you were coming.’

‘I’m just collecting a few things. I arranged it with him.’

‘Arranged’ sounded amicable. Richard hadn’t been amicable. Previously she would have said he had a forgiving nature. But previously there had been nothing for him to forgive.

‘I see,’ said Harry.

The wordless censure irked her. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not making off with the teaspoons.’

Or the piano. Richard had made that clear. She had thought it was hers, since she was the one who played it, but it turned out it was his, since he was the one who had bought it.

Harry sniffed and returned to the kitchen, from which direction came the wholesome aroma of a stockpot, its familiarity oddly unsettling.

Julia went from room to room, each indifferent to her inspection. The house hung on her like a dead man’s coat. Perhaps it was bravado, or perhaps it was repudiation, but she found she wanted very little; some drawers she barely opened. Yet how spacious it all was, how clean, how orderly.

Harry came upstairs as she was removing a photograph of Peter from its silver frame. It dated from last summer and he was squinting into the sun.

Julia, conscious of scrutiny, put the photograph into her handbag. ‘The negatives are in my desk drawer. He can always have another print made.’ On impulse, she wrenched off her rings, the gold band and the solitaire, and dropped them on to the glass top of her dressing table, where they spun.

‘Terrible vibrations in here,’ said Harry. ‘Terrible.’ Lunch was not offered.

Eventually the trunk was packed, labelled and its carriage paid for. Before Julia left the house, seeking a more tangible talisman of her son, an old jumper or shirt perhaps, something that had his grubby-knee boy-smell, she tried the door to his bedroom. It was locked.

Now she sat on her heels running her fingers over the photograph. Part of what had been ‘arranged’ between her and her husband was Peter. Peter was to remain in ignorance of what she had done and where she had gone. Peter must be protected. To that end, she must continue writing to him as if nothing had happened, sending the letters care of Richard, who would forward them on with the right postmark. (Presumably after reading them.)

If this was a form of domestic censorship, it was one to which she had submitted without protest. Better than the alternatives: her husband telling his own version of events or, worse, her having to account for what to any nine-year-old must seem a desertion. He was much too young to understand or make sense of it all.

How keeping Peter protected from the truth was going to survive the half-term break was a problem they had left unexplored. But here the war had stepped in and solved it for them. As the situation in Europe worsened, boarding schools up and down the country, Crossfields included, cancelled all holidays for the foreseeable future, deeming it too dangerous to send children home, especially those who lived in main cities or coastal areas. Their own hostilities could therefore be concealed behind the exigencies of a much greater conflict. While none of this made her separation from her son any easier to bear, it did recast it in the light of the kind of rupture many families were enduring. After all, as Dougie kept reminding her, his own children were five thousand miles away.

‘I suppose I must buy you a train ticket.’

She started and looked up.

Dougie, hair sticking up in some directions, flattened in others, had pulled on his trousers but was not wearing much else. (He didn’t believe in dressing gowns or slippers, which were bourgeois.)

‘Oh, are you throwing me out too?’

‘Julia.’

She swept up her things and began stuffing them back in the trunk. ‘It’s hardly surprising. I can’t cook, I can’t clean, I can’t keep house. I am unacquainted with the physics of potatoes. I’m obviously no use to you whatsoever.’

‘Julia.’ He made a move towards her, stepped in the cat sick and lifted his bare foot in disgust.

She slammed the lid of the trunk and sat on it. ‘Why, I can fritter away a whole pound in five days.’ Her gaze challenged him to disagree with this. He didn’t. ‘And, according to that foul woman downstairs, whose foul son creeps about spying on me, I take too many baths. Although I do pay for them. Admittedly with your money.’ The geyser was coin-operated.

He ran his fingers through his hair until what was flat was upright, and vice versa. ‘What’s Kenny been doing?’

‘He looks up my skirt.’ She got up from the trunk, twisted her hair into a knot and made to brush past him.

‘You can’t blame him for that.’

‘God!’

They stared at each other.

‘I have a filthy temper.’ He said this in the way you might say ‘I’m five foot eleven’ or ‘My middle name is William.’

‘I find I have a temper too.’

A half-smile. ‘I daresay you didn’t need one before.’

Their faces were inches apart.

‘I can’t give you the kind of life you’re used to,’ he said. ‘But I had imagined you wanted a different one.’

‘Perhaps not quite so different.’ Tears pricked.

His finger traced the curve of her cheek.

‘Where did you get to last night?’

His answer was to take her to bed.

A week went past. The Germans were in France, the BEF was cut off with their backs to the Channel, and they were having a party. A bottle party.

‘What’s a bottle party?’ said Julia.

‘Democratic,’ said Dougie. ‘And cheap.’

‘There hardly seems cause for celebration.’

‘Sitting on our own by the wireless won’t change anything. Don’t put your hair up tonight. I like it loose.’

The idea of hosting a party without Harry to make the cheese straws and preside over the drinks table dismayed her. As did the alarming people who came with their democratic bottles of Beefeater’s and Bass. Film people like Frank and Basil, whom she knew. Painters, talkers, writers, whom she didn’t, including a woman she kept catching sight of here and there throughout the evening who had a memorable if not an altogether pretty face and who always seemed to be staring at her.

At one point, handing round sandwiches, she found herself jammed in a corner with Frank’s sister, a plotter in the Wrens, and a man with a wall eye who was holding forth about Norway, how the campaign had all been about controlling the supply of iron ore (with statistics), which was why losing it was such a disaster.

‘Disaster, yes, but not solely nor primarily for that reason,’ said Frank’s sister, who was what Julia’s mother would have called sturdily built and her father would have called opinionated.

‘Do enlighten me,’ said the man.

‘Anchorages in fjords. Safe harbours out of the range of our reconnaissance. Control of the North Atlantic. Hitler means to starve us. If he doesn’t invade us first.’

‘Sandwich?’ said Julia.

The man with the wall eye said no and moved away.

‘Bad loser,’ said Frank’s sister. She held out her hand. ‘Mattie. I don’t think we’ve properly met.’

‘Julia,’ said Julia.

‘So I’ve heard.’ Mattie gestured at the blackout blinds. ‘Dougie’s doing, I take it. The end of civilization as we know it.’

The blackout blinds were covered in chalk drawings. Fragments of classical temples, triumphal archways and broken columns were set in a plane of severe perspective out of which grew stunted trees, their roots cracking through a pavement that tapered to an inexorable vanishing point. A lone female nude surveyed the blasted landscape.

‘Yes, he spent all last night working on it.’

‘Are those your breasts?’ said Mattie. She had a full-throated, rounded voice, rather pleasant, if a little booming.

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Here’s betting they are.’

‘Rather Paul Delvaux, don’t you think?’ said a young man who was threading his way over to them through the crowded smoky room, one arm held aloft to save his drink from spilling.

Paul Delvaux: Belgian surrealist, thought Julia, whose art education was now considerably advanced.

‘Florian!’ said Mattie. ‘Have a fish-paste sandwich. They are really rather remarkably good if you’re absolutely bloody famished.’

‘Thank you no, darling.’ Florian had cheekbones that looked like they were carved from marble, a flop of dark hair and a plump defined mouth. ‘The only fishy substance I can tolerate is caviar.’

‘Oh do stop pretending to be posh,’ said Mattie. ‘It’s jolly irritating. Every bit as bad as my brother passing himself off as one of the proletariat. What do you pretend to be, Julia?’

Julia, who could not imagine where this was leading, said without much conviction that she didn’t pretend to be anything. She was about to exercise the hostess’s right to circulate when Dougie appeared and absently caressed the nape of her neck.

‘Florian,’ he said, ‘where’s Bernard? Is he putting in an appearance later?’

‘No,’ said Florian. ‘He’s in mourning for France.’

‘Why?’ said Julia, alarmed. ‘Has France fallen?’

‘Not that I’ve heard,’ said Dougie.

‘He should mourn a bit closer to home,’ said Mattie. ‘The way things are going.’

‘Still,’ said Florian, ‘he mourns, on the chaise longue.’ He mimed mourning for France on a chaise longue.

The corner of Dougie’s mouth was twitching. ‘That’s a pity. I was hoping to introduce him to Julia. She’s a pianist.’

‘A pianist,’ Florian said. ‘How extraordinary.’

‘I’m a little out of practice,’ said Julia. ‘I haven’t got a piano at present.’

‘Bernard has a baby grand. You must come and play it.’

‘Bernard is a composer,’ said Dougie. ‘A very good one.’

‘If you like a racket,’ Mattie said.

‘Not a racket,’ said Florian. ‘Atonal.’ He turned to Julia. ‘What lovely long stretchy fingers, darling. Tell me, do you play jazz at all? We dote on it. Or are you of the classical persuasion?’

Julia shook her head. ‘Jazz is beyond my stars. I can’t get the hang of it.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sinclair,’ said Dougie with a smile. ‘There are no female jazz musicians that I can think of. Singers, yes, but not musicians.’

Some sort of commotion reached them from the other side of the room. It was Kenny and a few of his pals.

‘How did they get in?’ said Julia.

‘I invited them,’ said Dougie. ‘Excuse me.’

Florian went after him.

‘Surprisingly antediluvian these leftists,’ said Mattie. ‘There’s a girl at my digs who plays boogie-woogie like a dream. Nonsense to make out it’s anything to do with testicles. She’d teach you, if you asked her nicely.’

Breasts, testicles – whatever next? Julia came from the sort of family who said ‘white meat?’ and ‘dark meat?’ when carving a bird, to avoid the anatomical terms. At that moment she noticed that the woman with the memorable face, whose features were all individually a little too big for beauty, was still staring at her. ‘Who is that person?’

Mattie followed her eyes. ‘A glutton for punishment, among other things. Caro should have known better than to come.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Well, I’d better be off. My shift’s in an hour. What line of war work are you in?’

‘None at present.’

‘None?’

‘I’ve only been in London a month or so.’ Six weeks, but still.

‘In a month or so there might not be a London. Oh, look,’ Mattie said, pointing at the blinds, ‘the end of the end of civilization as we know it. All the chalk’s come off.’

So it had. The drawings on the blinds were smudged and obliterated to head height. Someone began to sing La Marseillaise.

The next morning, a Saturday, they slept late. Julia rose first and went to make the tea. Briefly, a rumour of disquiet reached her from the previous evening, a trickle of water down the back called Caro. This was followed by another – something that Frank had said towards the end when he was drunk, something about Macleod leaving.

Then she collected the post.

‘Fish-paste sandwiches,’ said Dougie, propping himself against his pillow. ‘How breakfasty.’

Julia set down the tray.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’

‘Out with it.’

‘I’ve heard from Richard.’

‘Oh? And what does Adolf have to say for himself?’

She handed him the letter.

He read it through twice, then drew her across to him and kissed her forehead. ‘I think it’s time we found you a lawyer. One you’re not married to.’ He lit a cigarette and passed her the packet.

The letter, typed and undoubtedly carbon-copied, expressed in formal legal language Richard’s intention of suing her for divorce and custody of their son, citing Mr Douglas Birdsall as co-respondent.

‘It could be worse,’ he said, casting it aside. ‘He could have begged you to come back.’

‘Would you have begged me to come back?’

‘Obviously,’ he said.

Divorce, co-respondents, petitions. Christ, he thought.