12

The Fitzroy Tavern was on the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street, a big spit-and-sawdust sort of place, a bohemian haunt since the twenties. The Dog and Duck in Soho was where the Unit drank. Frank would be there, as he was most days. But Dougie didn’t want to see Frank, or anyone else from the Unit. They were all twiddling their thumbs, shooting a bit of footage, fiddling about in the studio – everyone, including Travis. They Also Serve had not led to much, except a few training documentaries along public-information lines – Keeping Rabbits for Extra Meat, that sort of thing. Macleod had left and they were rudderless without a producer.

‘And what are you having, my good sir?’ said Pop, behind the bar.

‘Pint of mild.’

‘Right you are.’ Pop leant on the tap, wheezing a little. ‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’

‘No,’ said Dougie.

‘Andre’s in,’ said Pop. ‘You’ll find him at the back. Or not, as it takes you.’

‘Cheers.’

Dougie had no desire to see Andre Masclin, who was a man of many projects and few completions. Instead, he took his pint to the front, where the engraved Victorian windows were further obscured by blast tape. Giddy times he had spent here in years past. Delia Krug had danced naked on a table. Then there was that odd chap who ate glass. Roaring nights, with the declaiming poets and artists and artistes and all the other riffraff London turned out of its pockets. This had been at a time when he had thought nothing of spending whole weeks in front of a blank canvas. Which was pretty much where he was now.

But his strongest memory of the Fitz was the day after Nell had been born. It had been a difficult delivery and she a bawling red scrap of a thing; Barbara touch and go there for a while. He had come from the Middlesex Hospital across the road to wet the baby’s head, feeling the redundancy of the by-standing father, the guilt of the husband, and found himself in tears. You could cry in the Fitz. It was allowed. Everything was.

‘Birdsall.’

Dougie glanced up and saw that Masclin was making his way across the pub in his direction. His heart sank. He was not in the mood for the man’s particular brand of self-deception.

With his bluish-white skin and hooded eyes, Masclin was one of those people who don’t look especially mammalian. He was clutching a tattered sheaf of pages and was accompanied by a man in his early forties who was vaguely familiar.

This turned out to be Julian Embry, an actor turned producer-director working under contract to Gaumont-British.

‘Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,’ said Embry when Masclin introduced them. ‘But I’ve heard of the Unit, of course.’

Embry had a suave sheen to him that wasn’t altogether due to money, or health or good looks, although he was evidently in possession of all three. Dougie would have taken an instant dislike to him had he not already disliked him on principle – the principle being that he was in features.

Nor did he warm to the man when names, both industry and household, were dropped in a masquerade of complicity intended to convey dominance. (It was at this point that Dougie found it necessary to stand, if only to demonstrate a height advantage, and to lean back against the table and light a cigarette with a weariness that was real.)

‘Tell me,’ said Embry, ‘how are you documentary chaps getting on without Macleod? I hear the MOI obstructionists did for him.’

‘He was never happy behind a desk.’

‘Quite,’ said Embry.

Masclin asked Dougie what he was working on at present.

‘Nothing’ would have been the honest answer. ‘This and that’ is what he said. In any case, the question was merely an invitation to ask one back.

When he didn’t, Masclin obliged. It appeared that the tattered sheaf of pages was a script he had written. Up the Garden Path was ‘some way into development’.

‘It’s a comedy,’ said Masclin.

‘I should imagine it is,’ said Dougie.

‘At times like these,’ said Masclin, ‘the public needs to be entertained.’

Embry made a show of checking his watch. ‘Ever thought of jumping ship, Birdsall? Diving, as it were, into the commercial sector?’

‘Why should I do that?’

‘It pays better, and we don’t suffer as much interference.’

‘No,’ said Dougie. ‘Not my kind of film-making.’

Embry shrugged. ‘Each to his own. Call me old-fashioned but personally I prefer telling stories.’ He handed Dougie a card. ‘If you ever change your mind, do get in touch. We’re always looking for people who know their way round a camera.’

This was an insult and was taken as such. After the pair of them left, Dougie sat tapping the card on the table, until its lower edge grew damp and wavily distorted in the wet rings on the table top.

Pop came by to collect his glass and began to talk about Dunkirk, as most people did that week in June, given half the chance. ‘Marvellous boys.’

‘Marvellous.’ Dougie’d seen the newsreels; who hadn’t? Grimy faces leaning out of carriage windows, thumbs up. Mugs of tea and sandwiches. What remained of their forces and the French, the numbers daily rising to a tally no one had dared hope for.

‘They’ve got wards full of them across the road.’

‘Have they?’

‘Still,’ said Pop, glancing at Churchill, pinned up behind the bar beyond the optics. ‘Wars are not won by evacuations.’

‘No, indeed.’ Dougie reached in his pocket for his notebook.

Matron’s black lace-ups squeaked down a long greeny-grey linoleum corridor on the second floor of the Middlesex Hospital, turned sharp right, then left by a scabrous light well giving on to dull brickwork sprouting buddleia. Her starched cap had sharp upturned wings.

‘Your credentials, Mr Birdsall, may have got you this far,’ she said, pushing open a door and waiting for him to pass through. ‘From here on, the well-being of our patients is my concern. We’re very busy and very understaffed. As one might expect.’

‘Of course.’

‘Ten minutes. No more.’

The ward stretched ahead, the high-level windows blacked out with paint. It was late morning the following day, and stifling. The smell hit him first: sweetish, close, with an undertow of butcher’s shop, overlaid with carbolic. It was only then that he registered the sounds coming from the beds ranged to either side, some of which were screened.

It was clear to him as soon as he went through the door that this had been a mistake. But he was not about to admit as much to Matron nor turn his back on the men whose eyes were now following him as if he were a doctor, come against the odds to put things right. He would take the full ten minutes he had been allocated.

A porter pushing a gurney disappeared round the back of a screen and a few moments later reappeared with a shrouded body laid out on it. One of the nurses, carrying a bedpan, whispered to Matron in passing, ‘Private Greenwood.’

In the middle of the ward was a long table laden with biscuit tins, frilled cakes sashed in ribbon and bottles of champagne. It looked like a display at Fortnum’s. ‘The public has been most generous and appreciative,’ said Matron, seeing where his eyes were straying. ‘If a little ill-informed.’

None of the men, propped up in the beds or stretched prone, groaning or silent, seemed interested in or capable of eating and drinking. One of them was being fed through a straw inserted into a hole in his face. Bullets could go anywhere. Jaws, noses, heads, shoulders, hips, backs, cheeks, chests. Penises, he thought, and other unseen places. There were many amputees. Many multiple amputees.

Everywhere, the brisk steps of nurses as they pulled wheeled screens across, fetched linen, water and drugs. He counted four of them. There were perhaps two dozen white-painted iron beds in the ward, all occupied, save now for the late Private Greenwood’s. Halfway down on the left-hand side, a middle-aged woman sat reading to a soldier with bandaged eyes, like a mother telling her child a bedtime story.

One nurse, holding a bundle of soiled dressings at arm’s length, advanced across the ward, looking as if at any moment she might break into a run that would take her clean out of the building into Mortimer Street.

‘Sister?’ said Matron.

‘Matron.’ The nurse stopped in her tracks.

‘What is it?’

‘Have a look.’

The dressings were crawling with maggots.

‘What do I do? There’s more of them.’

‘Leave them. They clean the stumps.’ Matron turned to Dougie. ‘Seen enough?’

His response was to ask her if he might talk to one of the men. She checked the watch pinned upside down to the bib of her uniform and then led him to the bedside of a sandy-haired young man missing both arms below the elbows. ‘I’ve a visitor for you, Private.’

The boy turned his head on the pillow. He had very clear blue eyes. His name was Atkins and he came from Tottenham.

Dougie sat down on the hard edge of a hard chair and explained he was a film-maker working for the government, recording the war.

‘Nice life, I expect,’ said Atkins. ‘Can you do it with no hands?’

Across the ward, the middle-aged woman was still reading to the soldier, her voice rising and falling. Reading was easier than finding something to say.

‘Joke, governor,’ said Atkins. ‘Your face. Now there’s a picture.’

Dougie said, ‘You could do it with no hands. Some of it, anyway.’ He tapped his head. ‘You do a lot of it up here.’

‘That rules me out, then.’ Atkins laughed. ‘Thick as two short planks, I am.’ He struggled to lever himself upright on bandages damp with yellow and pink. ‘Where’s your camera?’

Dougie had nearly brought a crew with him. He shuddered to remember that now. It was a pity that Macleod was no longer around. He wanted to tell him that there was such a thing as too much truth. ‘I’m not filming today.’

‘Can’t say I blame you. This is hardly what folks want to see, is it? We’re no oil paintings.’

Atkins, thought Dougie, underestimated his own intelligence. ‘What happened to you, Private?’

‘Gangrene is what they say. I don’t remember nothing about it. What I remember is they strafed us just as we was approaching the port. Then I didn’t get off the first day, not the second day neither. And the sea was that filthy.’ He winked. ‘Do us a favour. Scratch my nose, would you? I’d do it myself, but it’s not the same with the dressings.’

Dougie bent across and scratched his nose.

Matron reappeared. ‘Time’s up, Mr Birdsall.’

‘He’s a film-maker,’ said Atkins.

‘So I gather,’ said Matron.

A film-maker under false pretences, thought Dougie.

‘Don’t you worry about me, sir,’ said Atkins. ‘They’re going to fix me up good and proper. Artificial limbs – they can do wonders with those. I’ll be right as rain, you’ll see. I’ll be able to smoke and everything.’

Matron ushered Dougie to the door of the ward, as if he might run away and hide under one of the beds like a recalcitrant child seeking to prolong playtime.

He paused at the door to collect himself. ‘Are they all like him?’

She softened. ‘The morphia helps. We may need to reconsider the dose.’

When he went out of the hospital into the glare of the street he remembered that this was the day Julia was seeing the lawyer.

Julia was so nervous that she had to ask several times at the porter’s lodge before she was capable of taking in the directions she was given. The solicitor’s office, a suite of panelled rooms, two of which contained clerks, typists and files, was three floors up on the eastern side of one of the austere eighteenth-century brick squares that comprised Gray’s Inn. (Richard would have killed for such premises, she thought. His own office was above a funeral director’s.) The view from the window was of a tree in full leaf, a London plane, one of those hardy survivors. She found it useful to focus on.

Mr Gore-Finlay had a reputation for successfully representing wives in difficult divorces. He filleted the facts out of her in a matter of minutes.

‘How would you describe these letters your husband found?’

She hesitated.

‘Let me put it another way,’ said Mr Gore-Finlay, who had a hawkish face and a forensic manner. ‘Should they be read out in court, would the judge gain the impression that you and the co-respondent were friends, that you were conducting a harmless flirtation, or . . .’

‘No,’ she said, with a scorching blush. ‘They go some way beyond that.’ A breeze rippled the leaves of the plane tree. ‘A long way.’

He was taking notes, his pen scritching across the paper. ‘And where are the letters now?’

‘In my possession.’ The Modess packet was one of the few things she had taken with her on her night flight from home.

Mr Gore-Finlay said, ‘All of them?’

‘Yes.’ Come to think of it, she didn’t know. ‘I’m not certain.’

‘It might be useful to establish that. No other evidence that you know of? A private investigator’s report? Witnesses?’ The solicitor went on to explain that, since adultery was regarded as a quasi-criminal offence, a high standard of proof was required. The petitioner had to satisfy the court beyond all reasonable doubt that it had occurred, with dates, if possible. ‘You haven’t, for example, left your signature in a hotel register somewhere?’

‘No.’

At that moment a siren sounded. The door opened. ‘Sir?’

‘What is it, Miss Hodges?’

‘The siren, sir.’

‘False alarm, I expect. So many of them these days.’

Miss Hodges closed the door.

‘Where were we?’ He put down his pen. ‘Oh, yes. In my experience, wives rarely stray when all is well with the marriage. Have you any cause for complaint? Has Mr Compton been unfaithful to you or been cruel to you in any way?’

‘No,’ said Julia. ‘My husband has always been thoroughly decent to me. He’s a solicitor.’

‘That’s a pity.’ Said with no trace of irony. Mr Gore-Finlay paused, gave her a level gaze freighted with she knew not what. ‘Now, Mrs Compton, I’m afraid I must be somewhat indelicate. Did marital relations take place between you and your husband at any time after he discovered your adultery?’

Could a blush blush? It could. ‘No, not after.’

‘Certain?’

‘Quite certain.’

Scritch, scritch went the pen.

‘You may wonder why I should need to ask you such a distasteful question,’ he said. ‘The answer is that there have been cases where a husband has been refused a divorce because he did not desist from marital relations with a wife he knew to be adulterous. This can be viewed as condoning the offence.’

For the first time, Julia understood that Richard was now her opponent.

The solicitor referred to his notes. ‘You are no longer living in the matrimonial home.’

‘No. I am living with Mr Birdsall.’

‘The co-respondent.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it your intention to marry, should the divorce go through?’

Until the solicitor asked the question, Julia had been keeping from herself how much she wanted this to happen, and the degree to which a future where she was Dougie’s wife was alive in her mind. Mrs Dougie Birdsall – she tried on the name like a schoolgirl marrying herself to a boy she had a crush on at the back of her homework diary.

‘Mrs Compton?’ Pen poised.

‘We haven’t discussed it yet. Mr Birdsall is married. Although,’ said Julia, anxious not to paint too grim a picture, ‘he and his wife are separated.’ This stretched the truth somewhat.

‘Mmm.’ Mr Gore-Finlay drew the papers together. ‘Well, Mrs Compton’ (how she wished he would stop calling her that) ‘there are two courses of action open to you. Firstly, defend the divorce and hope that your husband has nothing more material to place before the court than his recollection of your letters.’

‘Unlikely,’ said Julia.

‘I think so too,’ he said. ‘As someone more than familiar with the legal system, he is bound to have his ducks in a row, if you forgive the colloquialism. The other option, of course, is not to contest. Washing one’s laundry in public can be very upsetting.’

‘I don’t mind about the divorce,’ said Julia. ‘It’s Peter I mind about.’

‘Unfortunately the two are very much connected.’

Julia was remembering the pantomime over Peter’s recent birthday – his tenth – which had appalled her. ‘Their’ present was an Everyman edition of Robinson Crusoe chosen by Richard: was the irony of the castaway story deliberate? ‘Is my husband likely to be awarded custody?’ She almost didn’t want to know the answer. Her heart thumped around in her chest.

‘There is nothing quite so hard and fast about it.’ The solicitor went on to explain that she might be lucky and the judge might take a broader, more tolerant view of human frailty, might be of the opinion that children are best kept with their mothers, or at least shared with them, whatever the failings of those mothers. On the other hand, she might find that the judge regarded a wife’s infidelity as symptomatic of moral unfitness. ‘Even so,’ said Mr Gore-Finlay, ‘there are always visiting rights to play for. And these can be generous.’

A terrible thought struck her. ‘Could I be prevented from seeing my son at all?’

He capped his pen. ‘It has been known for petitioners to apply for such orders. However, even if they are granted, they apply only until the child reaches the age of majority. They do not last a lifetime.’

The all-clear sounded and the sun danced in the leaves. Neither was cause for relief. Julia thought she had prepared herself for the worst. She hadn’t. A shadow came over her mind, and settled there.

‘A final word of advice,’ said Mr Gore-Finlay, rising from his desk. ‘It would be better if you kept away from your son until the case comes to court.’

‘Why?’

And here Mr Gore-Finlay made a reference to Solomon and the two warring mothers. ‘Judges dislike seeing children used as ammunition in their parents’ battles.’

‘Peter’s at school.’

‘That’s much the best place for him while the two of you sort out your affairs.’

The first thing Julia did when she returned to Primrose Hill was to work her way through the Modess packet. Although it was ages since she’d read the letters, she had many of them by heart. This was why it didn’t take her long to realize that one was missing. I want to fuck you so badly.

‘Oh dear,’ said Dougie later.

‘It seems I am a quasi-criminal.’

‘Well, that makes two of us,’ he said.

‘Richard’s very good at planning. I always forget that about him.’

Her head was resting on his lap, her eyes staring at some indeterminate point on the floor. She turned to examine him upside down. The reverse skyline of his beaky nose. ‘I can’t allow that letter to be read out in court.’

He wasn’t keen on the prospect himself. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

She sighed. ‘It’s going to be so expensive.’

‘I dare say it will be.’

She levered herself upright. ‘Would you be able to help me out, do you think?’

‘Julia,’ he said, ‘I might not have a job next week. I barely have one now. It’s about as much as I can do to feed us and put a roof over our heads. But there’s nothing to stop you from looking for work.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I don’t know. Teaching piano?’

‘I don’t have a piano!’

Out of nowhere a row blew up. Over the course of the next hour and a half it blew them all around the houses before dropping them, exhausted, right where they had started.

‘Borrow from a friend, then,’ said Dougie. ‘That friend of yours – what’s she called? – isn’t she well off? Or ask your father for a loan.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said Julia.