15

Julia came out of the Tube at Lancaster Gate, half walking, half running and, turning her face upwards to the sun, was blessed by it. Outside the kiosk on the corner by the station entrance the tobacconist was sweeping up fallen leaves and glass splinters, unlikely conjunctions of this London autumn. The swish of the dead leaves and the shirring of the swept glass had their echo in the smell of charred wood and something earthy or medicinal, plaster or brick dust perhaps. These days, everywhere and everything reeked of dead houses, dead streets, particles of the pulverized city on the soles of your shoes, settled in the seams of your clothing, in your hair. A reminder, should you need it, that one morning it might be someone else doing the sweeping, someone else noticing the sweeping.

Thirteen (lucky for some) Leominster Gardens was the second turning on the left. The stuccoed building, five storeys high, was still standing. You never knew, not from one day to the next, and not knowing gave everything a weight, a meaning it did not altogether warrant. This was certainly true of the Institute.

The Institute was tiered, which was to say the men who made the decisions and communicated with the Ministry commanded the large airy rooms on the first and second floors, and those – chiefly women – who administered the decisions, informed the decisions with paperwork and privately queried the decisions among themselves occupied the hastily partitioned, cramped rooms on the top floors. Down below, the basement was equipped with camp beds and other temporary arrangements for fire-watchers and those working late after the sirens had gone and unable to get home.

When she pushed open the door and went into the vestibule Mr Keyes was waiting in his booth. (‘K-E-Y-E-S, I’m not a commissionaire for nothing.’) He handed her a pen to sign the register. ‘You’re late.’

She scrawled her signature. ‘Bad night.’

‘Yes, well, we’ve all had a bad night.’

She headed for the staircase.

‘Miss Sinclair?’

‘Yes?’ she said, her hand on the banister.

‘Miss Plume hasn’t come in today.’

‘Oh.’ Miss Plume was the senior clerk and her supervisor. She had never been known to be anything but early, even after the worst night.

‘Just so you know.’

‘Has she telephoned?’

‘Not as yet.’

Going up the stairs, pausing from time to time to note another raw gaping site through the taped-up landing windows, she wondered whether Miss Plume had been detained or, as it were, detained permanently. War sprouted such euphemisms: the rash of ‘suddenly’s in the death notices, for example. No doubt they would find out one way or another.

They were living through history, that’s what everyone said. But history had banished every tense except the present. Nights, which used to mark out one day from the next, were as continuous as the waking hours – or else oblivion.

When Julia reached the fifth floor and Records Office G (Midlands East), which was no more than a cubicle, she found a pile of flimsies waiting for her in the cardboard box lid that served as her in-tray. Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Solihull, Walsall, West Bromwich, Coventry: reports of production days, manning levels, unofficial walk-outs. She had expected to be as inept a clerk as she was a housekeeper. She had expected to chafe against the monotony. Instead, she found the dogged sorting of the right pieces of paper into the right folders, the right folders into the right files, the right files into the right filing cabinets – and their subsequent retrieval when requested by some denizen of the lower floors – as soothing and comforting as it was apparently pointless. Amid chaos was order. After the raids, sweeping up.

‘You’re late,’ said Mr Slater, who shared the cubicle with her and was one of the few males on their floor. He liked to tell people he had failed his medical owing to a heart murmur. Julia had heard him announce this to complete strangers, post boys. The truth was, he was well over the age of conscription and not wearing it well. ‘Bad night?’

‘A bit.’ Between two and almost four: a lot.

‘We had a right pasting. Third time in as many days for Kensal Rise. But then, there is the gasworks.’ Mr Slater scratched the end of his nose with a finger that wore a rubber sorting aid. ‘Miss Plume’s not in yet.’

‘I know.’

‘John Lewis has gone.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Burnt right out,’ said Mr Slater. ‘To think I was there only last week purchasing collar studs.’

At ten to one, Bea Justin (Records Office E: Midlands West) put her head around the door. ‘Lunch?’

They lay on the grass in Kensington Gardens, their sandwich wrappings packed away. There had begun to be a chill in the ground. It came through their coats, spread out beneath them. In the flowerbeds grew rows of cabbages.

‘God, I’m dead,’ said Bea. ‘All in. Do you think anyone would notice if I stayed here for the rest of the afternoon?’

‘Miss Plume would notice.’

‘Mmm,’ said Bea, and the unspoken thought hung between them.

Like the calming effect of filing, Bea had also been unexpected. Until they had met in the ladies’ cloakroom on Julia’s second day in the job, she had not realized how much she had missed female company.

Bea had an easy open manner and the free-limbed unconscious physical grace you associated with girls who spent their summers on tennis courts, girls on whom even school uniform could not do its worst. (Julia, whose prettiness had been late arriving, had not been that sort.) She was twenty-four and engaged to a serviceman stationed in Egypt – or ‘Auntie Edna’, in their code to circumvent the censors. Giles had terrible sunburn and didn’t think much of the Pyramids. ‘A heap of old rubble.’

In return, Julia had told Bea about her true marital status, about Peter and about Dougie (who caused consternation at the Institute, where personal calls were forbidden, by ringing up pretending to be an undersecretary). Bea, who was essentially practical-minded, received such information with equanimity. Her loyalty to her fiancé, in her mind absolute, she regarded as in no way compromised by the occasional liaison she’d allowed herself since his departure. (‘Only as far as the bra, that’s my rule.’)

‘Do you ever get the feeling,’ said Bea, staring up at the innocent sky, ‘that you’re hallucinating? I mean,’ she went on, ‘actually seeing things?’

‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘Sometimes.’ These days she felt permeable.

Bea sat up, sneezed and blew her nose. ‘Do you? I do. I saw a rabbit on a roof the other day. Except it was a corner of a tarpaulin.’ She fished around in her bag. ‘Here, I thought we could share this.’ She produced an orange. ‘Old Baines saved it for me. It’s only a little bit off.’

The citrus tang released by Bea’s fingers digging in the peel was heaven. Never mind the unclouded night that the sunshine forewarned, not now. They sucked at the segments.

‘Your reorganization of the incoming chits was remarked upon,’ said Bea, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if you weren’t kicked downstairs, the way you’re going. I’ve worked here for eighteen months and never thought of that.’

Julia shrugged. ‘It just seemed sensible.’

As if in one mind, they got up and shook out their coats, put them on and headed back to the Institute.

‘Come out with us this evening,’ said Julia. Now, this was not sensible, but it was what they did: as often as they could, they went out and enjoyed themselves – ‘seizing the day’, Fiona would have called it. ‘We’re going to a supper club in Greek Street, well below ground, no windows. Really, you’d never know what was going on up top.’

They crossed the road, dodging two or three as yet unfilled holes from a bad night a couple of weeks ago. ‘I’d like nothing more than to meet this chap of yours.’ Bea smiled. ‘He sounds like a hoot. But I promised Susan I’d mind the fort. She’s on duty tonight.’ Bea lived with her sister, a volunteer warden, whose husband was on the minesweepers and whose children were in Wales.

‘Hello, all’s right with the world,’ said Bea as they came up to the fifth floor. ‘Voici la tante de ma plume. Right as rain and as large as life.’

Miss Plume was holding forth.

In addition to being the senior clerk and supervisor of the fifth floor, Miss Plume was a monologist. Every morning she had a compulsion to recount, with bus numbers, times, refreshments taken and wished for, sirens sounded, all-clears passed, everything that had happened to her since the previous evening. Julia had not been at the Institute long enough to know whether the raids had brought out this tendency in Miss Plume or merely worsened it. Whichever was the case, in her attempt to dramatize her experiences, she made the nightly bombing seem as ordinary as the wet afternoon of half-day closing. This was a considerable achievement.

So it was understandable that the monologue on this occasion was an account of her unexplained absence that morning, which turned out to involve a mislaid umbrella, the lost-property office at Victoria Station and a night spent sheltering in the Underground, after which, contact with ‘some very unwashed people’ had necessitated a tiring and much diverted journey home to her flat in Swiss Cottage in order to decrease the risk of communicable disease. ‘Imagine my dismay,’ said Miss Plume, ‘when I discovered the telephone was out of order. You must all have been frightfully alarmed.’

Someone asked if she had retrieved her umbrella.

‘Of course,’ said Miss Plume. ‘I have always found the Lost Property office to be most efficient.’

‘They ought to put her on the wireless,’ said Mr Slater, applying his rubber sorting aid to a stack of flimsies. Flick, flick, flick. ‘She’d soothe some nerves.’

By late afternoon, work tailed off in all the Records Offices, except Records Office A (Greater London), which was only to be expected. Elsewhere in the partitioned rooms, people began to anticipate the night.

In Julia’s case, anticipation took the form of heading off to the Ladies and changing out of the clothes she wore to work and into the frock that Dougie liked.

‘Where do you think you’re off to?’ said Mr Keyes, when she made her way downstairs after the siren sounded.

‘Out.’

‘In this?’ The night roared, the building shook, the sky burst into fragments.

‘I’ve got to meet someone.’

‘You’ll meet your Maker if you aren’t careful. Be a good girl. Go down the basement. It’s a heavy one. He’ll wait.’

Pedro’s was packed. It seemed that the whole West End was here; and if not here, then in similar places close at hand. These were the people who chose to stay when they had the option not to, who kept houses open among so many dust-sheeted and shut up. You might suppose this to be a show of solidarity with those Londoners, by far the majority of the eight million, who had no choice but to remain and be bombed. You might even be told so, with the sort of pride that flew the flag of humility. But that would not be the whole story, for no truthful account could omit the fact that many were having the time of their lives.

‘Waiting for someone?’ said the blonde, arching her eyebrows.

Dougie reached across to light her cigarette. ‘A friend. She’s a little late. And you?’

They were both sitting alone at tables for two.

‘Oh, I often toddle along of an evening. See who turns up.’

A distant, thundering sound.

The blonde caught his eye. ‘Don’t you just love this?’ She stretched an arm to the ceiling and the creped flesh underneath it wobbled. ‘So thrilling, don’t you think?’

‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

The blonde laughed. ‘It’s the only way of looking at it.’ There was something sultry about her mouth and the whisky notes of her voice. ‘Let me guess what you do,’ she said.

‘You won’t.’

‘Try me.’ She swivelled around in her chair and studied him in the guttering candlelight. ‘You’re not in uniform.’

‘True.’

‘You’re young enough to be called up, but something tells me you’re exempt.’

‘Also true.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were a civil servant.’

‘You flatter me.’

‘Clearly not a vicar.’

Dougie laughed. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

‘Cultured accent, dishevelled dress, general air of superiority.’ The blonde pressed her fingers to her temples, in a dumbshow of thinking. ‘Oh, I’ve got it. BBC.’

Dougie was amused. ‘May I buy you a drink?’

‘I’d be delighted. But first you must tell me if I’m right.’

He signalled to the waiter. ‘Another Scotch?’

The waiter brought their drinks. ‘I’m a film director,’ said Dougie.

‘Really,’ said the blonde, touching her hair.

He had her full attention, but she did not have his, because at that moment he spotted Julia across the room.

Julia came downstairs into the gathering chatter and saw Dougie clinking glasses – ‘Cheers!’ – with a woman whose impressive cleavage swelled from the front of a tight black bodice: ‘all her goods in the shop window’, her mother would have said. Her mind made one of those instant dismissive calculations: too old and brassy, surely. But Dougie was laughing.

She wove her way between the crowded tables. He waved and stood up.

‘My friend,’ he explained to the woman. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, ‘You look beautiful,’ as Julia squeezed past him with a rustle of skirts.

‘Some friend,’ said the blonde, with a laugh.

‘Am I interrupting something?’ Julia was confident, now she was closer, that her first instinct had been right. No threat. Well past forty. The hair colour out of a bottle. In the humid basement, a line of sweat beaded the woman’s upper lip, which bore the faint trace of a bleached moustache.

‘Who was that?’ she said later, when the woman had left.

‘No idea. But I was about to be devoured.’

She smiled. ‘I’m sure you would have handled it.’

‘That reminds me. Is Kenny still being a nuisance?’

In the dark under-stairs cupboard where she sheltered with the Tooleys on bad nights, Kenny’s wandering hands had been lending an added vexation to the business of staying alive.

‘Oh, he’s scarpered. I haven’t laid eyes on him since he got his call-up papers last week. And before I forget, I’m afraid the ceiling has come down in your study.’

Something clandestine about the autumn evenings, something snatched and liable to fall through at the last minute and with no notice, gave these encounters in the raids the tenor of an affair – their affair when it had first begun. It was obvious others felt the same, obvious in the dark fumbled streets charged with fear and sex.

A few distant thuds, then a much nearer one, broke conversation. Oil bomb in Marylebone, said someone, who had deputized himself to go out and ask a policeman. Then talk resumed, and things were as before: not hectic perhaps, but wholly alive and present.

It was not true what Julia had told Bea. She imagined that nowhere in the city, except on the deepest Underground platforms, could you forget what was happening up top. So far as a shelter was safe – the Institute basement, for example, the under-stairs cupboard at Primrose Hill, the tunnels at Denham – the supper club was safe enough. But this was to ignore what harm a basket of incendiaries landing on the roof might do – thanks to the porter Mr Keyes and his drills, she was now fully informed in that regard, along with everyone else in her department. Pedro’s, while maintaining a certain pre-war style in the quality of its refreshments, had no visible fire exit.

They held hands across the table and talked about their work. Or, rather, since Julia’s work did not lend itself to conversation, they talked about Dougie’s.

They were together so little. The last time they had spent any length of time in each other’s company had been ten days ago, a Sunday, when they’d packed up the paintings, the early Birdsalls, and most of his books and taken them to be stored in the attic of his producer’s house in Hertfordshire. ‘I paid twenty-five guineas for this,’ Dougie had said, laying a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a tea chest as if he were putting a baby to bed. A month ago, before the bombing began, the knowledge that he possessed such a valuable book – a book which, if sold, might fund a divorce – would have inspired her to hit him round the head with it. But at that moment his possessiveness seemed perfectly reasonable. People were losing everything.

‘To think a little bad weather used to make us miss shots,’ he was saying. ‘Considering what’s coming down from the sky these days, a force-nine gale would be a piece of cake.’ He shook his head. ‘You know, when I stumbled across this collagey way of working in the summer, I thought I was making a virtue out of a necessity. But it turns out to be much more expressive than that.’ His new film was about the bombing.

‘You didn’t stumble across it,’ said Julia. ‘It’s the way your mind works. Have you heard anything from the MOI?’

‘Yes, unfortunately. We have to cut the sequence we shot in Poplar, cut it right back. They’re worried it shows too much damage.’

Mere mention of the sequence he’d shot in Poplar ambushed her with retrospective fear. On the first night of the Blitz – what had seemed at the time the catastrophic beginning of invasion – they had watched London burning from the top of Primrose Hill, the sky pulsing red in the east as if the sun had decided to set in the wrong direction. She later learned that while they were standing there Frank was filming the blazing docks from the riverbank near Greenwich. The same impulse to bear witness now sent Dougie to locations where he stood every chance of being a casualty of the next bomb that fell. ‘But isn’t the point to show how well we cope? Isn’t this aimed at the Americans?’

‘Exactly. And if the point is to show how well we cope, I should have thought you’d need to see the scale of what we’re coping with. All the same, it seems I’ve gone too far. God knows,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette, ‘how they decide such things. However, they very much liked the tea-making in the mobile canteen. And the plucky kid. Everyone likes a plucky kid.’

‘They should trust your judgement. They must know you see things you can’t film. That doesn’t mean you aren’t telling the truth.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ An example of his self-censorship sprang to mind. It was the Middlesex all over again. You might talk about limbs being lost, as if they might turn up down the back of the sofa, or limbs blown off, as if in a high wind. But the leg retrieved from the bomb site in Poplar by the Heavy Rescue sifting through a smoking, shifting pile of rubble that used to be three terraced houses was the actuality: no flesh below the knee, nothing except a loose flap of skin and gory splintered bone, the foot gone, blasted to buggery. A bloody skein of dangling veins flapped about as the body part was covered in sacking and laid on a stretcher alongside an assortment of humanoid gobbets.

Other things, too. The people who had been killed by bits of other people, for example. ‘Now heads is heavy,’ the rescue worker had told him. ‘Ten pound or more. You don’t want to be hit by one of those.’

Then there were the vermin who had crawled out of the woodwork: the ones who pinched the rings off dead fingers, who whisked away roof slates stacked by the kerbside, who looted bombed shops, who raped in the shelters, who knifed black-market rivals in dark wharves and alleyways or conveniently bludgeoned burdensome wives. He had been told so many similar stories by members of so many defence squads, by policemen, firemen, ambulance drivers, wardens, that it would be idiotic, or wilfully blinkered, not to believe at least some of them.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘demolition men are notorious for thieving? They stuff their overall pockets with silver and whatever else they can lay their hands on. Apparently they view it as compensation for the danger of the job.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me, I’m afraid,’ said Julia. ‘War was never going to turn us into a nation of saints.’

‘I suppose not.’

Julia said, ‘Besides, if you filmed such things, the Germans would use it as propaganda.’

‘There is that.’

She was watching his mouth. He was watching hers.

‘Shall we go?’ he said, his thumb circling in her palm.

They went upstairs, pushed through the thick blackout curtain that hung limp inside the club entrance and came out on to the street. Outside things had quietened down a bit. The guns were silent, although the imprint of their heavy sound still hung in the air. Searchlights fingered the black sky. Shrapnel clattered on a Soho roof and rattled into a gutter.

There in the dark they turned to each other, and in the hunger of their kiss was their first kiss, laced with experience.

‘Later,’ she said, knowing full well you couldn’t depend on there being a ‘later’ and not wanting him to stop. He didn’t. She didn’t. Instead he steered her down an alley and had her up against a wall.

‘Good evening?’ said Bea, the next day.

‘Yes, thanks,’ said Julia, turning her face away. Her hand reached round her back, under her blouse, where the wall had scraped her.

‘Did absence make the heart grow fonder?’

‘Doesn’t it always?’ It had been another person who had had sex in the street, thought Julia, another person who had enjoyed it, although ‘enjoyed’ did not begin to convey the blind urgency she had felt. Such was her present dismay that already in her mind another story was being written, where Dougie had been the sole instigator of this quite shameful and outrageous act – an act worthy of ten divorces – and her transgressive pleasure had played no part in it at all.

Late October, the thirty-second night of continuous bombing. A bad night.

Julia was in the under-stairs cupboard with Mrs Tooley and George. The guns were pounding away on Primrose Hill, but they didn’t bother her any more. She could sleep through the guns. Once she put her head on the pillow, she was out like a light.

What bothered her was what they were hearing now: swoosh, swoosh, swish, followed by thud, thud, thud as bombs dropped nearer and nearer. A gap, an enormous THUD and the house shook on its foundations, wobbled like a milk tooth. You couldn’t shut out the noise. Nor could you contain it. You became it, and it became you.

‘Did you turn off the gas?’ said Mrs Tooley when she could make herself heard. Dirt, or some loose constituent of the house, trickled down underneath the stairs.

‘I did,’ said Julia.

‘Have you got the torch?’

‘I have.’

‘Mind you don’t go switching it on, then. We’ll need the battery when they come to rescue us. We’ll need to shine a light, show ’em we’re here.’

They had spent all or parts of twenty-three nights in this under-stairs cupboard, five on the trot one week. On each occasion Mrs Tooley said the same thing and on each occasion it felt like the first time she’d said it.

George scrabbled in his basket, meeping.

‘You want to get rid of that cat.’

‘He’s not mine to get rid of.’ Julia had become attached to the cat. She talked to the cat.

Early on in the Blitz, she and Mrs Tooley had discovered the one thing they had in common, aside from, or rather related to, the desire to stay alive: an aversion to public shelters. The local shelter where Mr Morton, their warden, urged them to go on a nightly basis was a surface shelter, and they’d all heard about those. ‘You’d be a sitting duck, I tell you that for nothing,’ Mrs Tooley said. Julia agreed. The Tube didn’t appeal either. You had to queue early to secure a spot and her job ruled that out. Besides which, she had a horror of its stinks, latrines, unwashed bodies, the stale, claggy odours of the refreshment trains, and of shifting for herself among large numbers of strangers.

Say what you like about Mrs Tooley, but she was no longer a stranger.

It seemed to Julia that in the matter of sheltering, where and when, they all clung on to the illusion of choice, because choice suggested that you had some control over your destiny, and that decisions could be made by applying reason to evidence. Yet she knew this was not the case. The first time you decide to go down the shelter, the shelter takes a direct hit. The first time you decide not to go down the shelter, you’re killed in your bed. Hundreds of chance decisions, hundreds of ways chance could catch you out. You couldn’t second-guess them all. The best you could do was pick a place where you didn’t mind waiting for death.

Swoosh, swish, swish. Thud, thud, THUD.

The walls pulsed with the blast wave. A shudder, a roar, then a sound like someone kicking a tin trunk down the stairs.

That was near.

Safe as houses.

Except houses weren’t safe any more. They were killers, versatile killers with many methods up their sleeve. Flying glass from the windows. Dodgy ceilings. Gas explosions. Burst water mains. Heavy furniture that toppled over and sent you flying into the next world. Mr Morton, the cats’ meat man in a former life, had told them of the wife two streets away obliterated by her own cart-wheeling dining table, a table she hadn’t finished paying for yet. In the next breath, the boy whose wardrobe had fallen over him like an upturned coffin and saved him when the ceiling came down.

‘If you can’t face the Tube,’ Dougie had said, ‘promise me you’ll sit under the stairs. It’s the strongest part.’ She’d seen this for herself. Who hadn’t? Those peeled-away doll’s houses, fronts off, roofs off, and still the stairs clung on, connecting floors that were gone, connecting nothing with nothing. Didn’t mean you’d be dug out, though. Didn’t mean you wouldn’t be trapped by the rubble. Didn’t mean you wouldn’t burn to a crisp.

Didn’t mean Dougie wouldn’t either, wherever he was.

‘How’s your boy getting on?’ said Mrs Tooley, a few hours later.

‘Fine, by all accounts,’ Julia said into the dark. ‘He likes school, which is just as well, considering he has to stay there. At least, he likes everything about it except lessons. And the food.’

A chuckle. ‘Bet you miss him.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Julia. The bombing had brought one benefit. It had allowed her to delude herself that war was all that separated them. Peter’s latest letter was in her handbag, and her handbag was at her feet beside her respirator. Dear Madre, Could Harry send a parcle, the food is drettful. Day boys from Birmingham were now billetted at Crossfields: the school was full to bursting.

‘Still, he’s well out of this.’

‘He is,’ said Julia. ‘Have you heard from Kenny?’ This was pushing things, she knew, but they had arrived at the stage when confidences seemed in order. It was either that or plan your own funeral.

‘He’s with my sister.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Over the water,’ said Mrs Tooley, with grim satisfaction.

Ireland, thought Julia. A low drone of planes sounded overhead.

Shells fired from the anti-aircraft emplacement on the top of Primrose Hill shrieked on the ascent and exploded at some altitude. Then came a sound Julia dreaded more than any other, the cascading rattle of incendiaries.

Mrs Tooley had heard it too. In the dark sloping cupboard, musty, cobwebby and black-beetled, Julia sensed a different quality of attention, the working of a tongue around toothless gums.

‘The roof,’ said Mrs Tooley, ‘do you think?’

‘We’d best check.’

No answer.

Julia put out a hand she couldn’t see and with it touched some yielding, uncorseted part of Mrs Tooley. ‘If it’s the roof, it’ll take two of us to deal with it.’

Another cascading rattle.

They plunged from the cupboard and ran up the dark stairs. At the top, weak wavering torchlight located the ladder placed in readiness under the roof hatch, alongside a shovel and a pair of buckets filled with sand.

‘Something’s burning.’ Julia grabbed a bucket, climbed the ladder and opened the hatch.

White light, eye-aching. Two of them, two brilliant magnesium lumps, were burning in the roof space, one under the eaves. A haze of smoke stung her eyes.

‘Pass me the shovel,’ she said to Mrs Tooley. ‘Hurry.’

They called it a drill because they drilled it into you. Wardens, leaflets, cigarette cards.

Inching from joist to joist, crouching under the smoke, she shovelled sand over both bombs until they were covered. Then she scraped up the particles of burning metal as fast as she could and dropped them into the bucket.

She handed the bucket down to Mrs Tooley and shone the torch around the attic. The skeletal shapes of the children’s cots. One, two, three holes in the roof. There was another one somewhere.

It didn’t take long to find it. When she pushed open the bedroom door she saw the bomb had burned through the ceiling and landed on the mattress. The fire was beginning to catch, flames licking the ticking.

The guns started up again, and the thuds. The banshee whines, the ack-ack ack-acking away, the shrieks and the roars and the clangs and the clatters.

She worked quickly, fetching the second bucket, dumping sand on the incendiary and scraping up the burning bits under the bed. Then she sent Mrs Tooley for the blanket that was soaking in the bath and threw it on the mattress. The bed hissed and steamed.

As soon as the fire was out Julia took both buckets down the stairs, switched off the torch and opened the door. Overhead, raking searchlights. Shrapnel hissing, clanging everywhere. She left the buckets in the street.

‘You get all of it?’ said Mrs Tooley, back in the cupboard.

‘Let’s hope so.’ It was only then she was aware that her heart was hammering.

While Julia sheltered in an under-stairs cupboard of her own choosing, Dougie was a few miles away, crouched alongside Frank on a flat, narrow strip between the leaded slopes of a valley roof. They were filming.

‘Over there,’ said Frank. ‘Land mine, don’t you think?’

‘Possibly. Judging by the scale of the fire.’ The fierce Fauvist colours – the lurid greens, blood reds, sharp yellows – the sheer gaudiness of the Blitz: this they could not capture. ‘How I wish we had Technicolor.’

‘Do me a favour. Those cameras are the size of a fridge. It was hard enough getting the Newall up here.’

And if they could not reproduce the colours, nor could they begin to suggest the smells. Down by the docks the other day had lingered the stench of burning resin, tar, spice: an unholy, industrial, commercial stink. Tonight, a damp heavy fug of cordite hung over Soho Square.

A starburst over to the east, then the rumbling chunter of impact. Searchlights caught the planes, masses of them, engines thrumming, black shapes with wings outstretched against the lit-up sky. Each bomb blazed a path for the next.

‘Bastards,’ said Frank, passing him the hip flask.

The angel roof, thought Dougie, taking a swig. What had Julia said that day back in the church? Not menacing, not protective, but indifferent. As indifferent as God. You would have to be to destroy indiscriminately, to know that you must be killing women and little children, the elderly, the sick. Schools, churches, hospitals had taken direct hits – another crump nearby and he wondered about the Middlesex.

‘Are we done?’ said Frank. ‘Because I for one am beginning to feel rather uncomfortable up here, even with the tin hat.’

Shrapnel was pinging around the place. They packed up, rapped on the roof hatch and handed the camera down into several pairs of unseen hands. This took a while.

Back at street level, they paused in the doorway. ‘Thanks,’ said Dougie.

‘Always happy to oblige.’

Dougie lit a cigarette. ‘I couldn’t let them shovel in that appalling newsreel footage.’

‘Oh,’ said Frank, ‘I quite agree. Worth risking your life not to have them shovel in that appalling newsreel footage. Where are you off to now?’

‘Home.’

‘In this? You’ll be lucky.’

‘I worry about Julia sitting through it on her own.’ Or as good as, he thought, remembering Mrs Tooley.

Frank said, ‘I expect she worries about you out here filming.’

‘She would do if she knew.’

In the event, Frank was right. He couldn’t get home. It was too late for the Tube to be running. On the roads were no taxis, no buses; the only vehicles ambulances, fire-pumps, hose-laying lorries, mortuary vans, careering past on their way to incidents. He hadn’t got much further than the blasted caverns north of Oxford Street when a warden blew a whistle in his face and more or less marched him into Goodge Street Station.

Every shelter had its own character. Some were still and sober, temples of waiting and silent prayer. Some were busy with darts, card games and knitting. Others were as lively as a barrelful of monkeys: at Aldwych – or was it Bank? – there was reputedly a conjuror who did tricks while his accomplice picked your pockets. Goodge Street Station, where there wasn’t so much as a square inch of platform left unclaimed, had a musical bent. He found a spot to prop himself up by the lift shaft and listened to ‘One Man Went to Mow’ echoing along the tunnels.

The mornings were the worst. Dougie could stand the clamour of the nights because they roused a kind of Boy’s Own excitement in him which he understood to be the way he dealt with fear. The determination of the rescue squads in the face of the nightly onslaughts and the comradeship in the shelters also brought out a kind of pride that was part fierce patriotism and part a sense of wonder at what the human spirit could take. But mornings were desolate. The next day when he came out of the shelter at Goodge Street amid the clearings-up, he had the sense that he was moving through memories of the dead, or that he himself was the one being remembered, that he was someone else’s memory. He felt weightless.

In the Lyons Corner House where he went for breakfast he was gripped by the sudden dread certainty that Julia was dead. He saw the house at Primrose Hill, a pile of rubble like so many others, and her lifeless body underneath it, bundled up in the cupboard under the stairs. When he lit a cigarette his hands were shaking.

It was early, and there were few others in the teashop: one or two customers on their own like him, and a couple of women murmuring at a table near the entrance, their hats touching. The waitress came with his tea and a bun so stale you could have bowled it. Beyond the steamed windows an army lorry juddered past, new recruits in their battledress off to training camps, their young half-shaved faces half asleep.

From the phone box on the corner he rang the flat. There was no answer. A chill settled inside him and he decided to walk for a bit, see if he could walk the feeling away. The house in Primrose Hill loomed in his mind. He formed the notion that if he went back before he got through on the phone he would find no one and nothing there. This was nonsense: the lines were always going down. But everyone was superstitious after their own fashion these days. Everyone had their way of crossing their fingers.

All around, the streets were a maze of diversions. Each morning London had to learn new routes, flush its traffic through its own damage as best it could. Buses churned down side roads and, everywhere, the rumble of rubble being shifted and cleared.

The raids had been going on for long enough now that you could distinguish new ruins from old. The old, stuck all over with little paper Union Jacks, already beginning to soften a bit, to acquire a sort of historical aspect; the new, raw and ragged. This morning, Holborn was a mess, blocked off, and the rescue squads were busy, digging, calling at intervals, watched by a small crowd of rubberneckers.

He stood a moment, wondering which of the familiar buildings had been bombed. The insurance headquarters? The music-hall theatre? That little parade of shops where he had bought Julia the garnet pin? It was hard to get your bearings, marshal your memory, when whole streets were gone.

‘Gone’. That implied a vacancy, a vanishing act. What he was seeing and smelling was deconstruction, where the parts occupied more room than the formerly whole. How buildings came to pieces told you how they were put together.

It was always the same. Up above, the rakish angle of caved roofs, exposed joists, purlins and rafters; down below, the everlasting pinkish brownish whitish dust, churned into sticky mud by the fire hoses. Floors sandwiched together. A litter of bricks, half bricks and what held the bricks together; the slithery slope of blasted timber, planks over planks; wires, twisted pipework and fallen guttering. Laid bare the stage sets, or doll’s-house rooms, a flapping curtain snagged on a hook, lavatory tiling, a panelled corridor leading nowhere, family photographs lined up on a mantelshelf above a floorless room. Here and there in the rubble something recognizable: a typewriter with paper fed through the carriage, a tailor’s dummy, an umbrella stand fashioned from an elephant’s foot. The city a surrealist’s landscape, where trees wore clothing.

Tin-hatted men were swarming over the wreckage, peering into holes and cavities, their boots scrabbling for purchase. ‘Quiet!’ and an arm would go up.

The stillness was a wound in itself.

Oh my London.

He turned north towards Bloomsbury, into the austere pattern of Georgian streets around the British Museum, each door- case, each fanlight seeming to shimmer on the brink of loss. The eighteenth-century mind, which he admired so much for its enquiry, its industrious reason, its codifying of what was beautiful and useful, and not least for its honest vulgarity, was nowhere more present than in these threatened, coal-blackened squares. It began to rain.

As he walked, he could not tell the difference between what he had shot and what he was seeing, what he remembered and had recorded and what was presently laid out in front of him. ‘We Can Take It,’ read the slogan on the back of a salvage van.

The all-clear. They came out of the cupboard, stretched their numb, cramped limbs, all pins and needles, and looked at each other as if surprised to discover their voices were attached to bodies. Every morning that same astonishment, the same dizzying fall away into separateness after the same dark closeness of smell and sound and fear. It was almost a kind of embarrassment.

Mrs Tooley said, ‘Turn on the gas, will you? I’ll set the kettle to boil.’

Mr Morton, the warden, called by in his tin hat to check them off his list and tell them number thirty-nine had gone and the back of number twelve in the next road. UXB in the park; they wanted to watch out, keep away from the taped-off parts. ‘They’re softening us up for invasion. That’s their game, all right.’ He handed them a bottle of milk.

‘Where’d you find that?’ said Mrs Tooley.

‘On the doorstep.’

Julia was sitting on the stairs drinking her tea. The usual glorious release of morning was missing; she didn’t know why. Instead, she felt gritty inside and out, her head swimming. She thought she should ring the Institute, tell them she’d be late, then she remembered it was Saturday and she didn’t have to. Only the senior staff worked Saturdays. ‘Number thirty-nine?’ she said. ‘Is that the one with the green door?’

‘Brown door. Second on the right past the turning,’ said the warden.

‘The Connells,’ said Mrs Tooley. ‘Rough lot.’

The warden said you mustn’t speak ill of the dead. He shook his head. ‘All six of them, including the gran.’

‘Being dead don’t make them any less rough,’ said Mrs Tooley.

The warden noted details of their incendiaries for his report, then paused halfway out the door. ‘You use a stirrup pump?’

‘Sand,’ said Julia. ‘They’ve sold out of stirrup pumps.’

‘You done well,’ said the warden. ‘I shouldn’t think one in four would have had the sense. Perhaps,’ he said, ‘not one in ten.’

Julia said it was nothing; she’d been taught how to do it at work.

‘You can teach people until you’re blue in the face,’ said the warden. ‘That doesn’t stop them sitting around on their backsides waiting for someone else to do it for them.’ He nodded. ‘You saved the house, you know. And probably your skins and all.’

Julia was surprised. She supposed she had. What she’d done she’d done without thinking, just as she would have pushed Peter out of the way of an oncoming car purely on instinct.

When he had gone, she thanked Mrs Tooley for the tea and made to go upstairs. Her feet didn’t seem to want to connect with the treads. Her feet didn’t seem to be at the end of her legs.

‘You want to have a wash. I should,’ said Mrs Tooley. ‘You need a penny or two for the geyser, you just ask.’

Julia nodded.

Mrs Tooley said, ‘Your man’s wife, her that went. I’d like to see her deal with them bombs the way you did. Some people haven’t got the stomach for this.’

Julia barely made it upstairs before she was sick in the lavatory. She ran the taps in the basin, but the water was off. So she leant over the bath, where the wet blanket had been soaking, and rinsed out her mouth. You filled the bath and the kettle before the sirens went. Most times, it was the only way you had water in the morning.

The phone was dead.

George, released from his basket with the all-clear, eyed her from his usual perch on top of one of the club chairs, tail flicking. Nothing else was as usual. Denuded ochre walls where the pictures had been, emptied bookshelves, a coarse film of dirt sprinkled over everything, and the last of the windows gone. She went to fetch the dustpan and brush to sweep up those jagged splinters that had fallen indoors, not out. Days later, an odd glint would catch her eye and she would find another lethal shard lurking by a skirting board.

The bedroom was worse than she expected, the mattress damp, blackened, with a yawning cavity in the middle down to the springs, the blanket ruined and pillows ditto. It smelled foul. She was so tired she briefly considered hauling the children’s cots down from the attic until she realized how foolish that was. Instead, returning to the sitting room, she cobbled together the seat cushions of the club chairs, undressed, wrapped herself in her good coat and lay down on them while the cat curled itself at her feet, on her feet and between her feet, until it had made itself quite comfortable thank you.

War made strange bedfellows, thought Julia, thinking not of the cat but of Mrs Tooley. War made strange beds.

Two hours later, the telephone woke her. It was Dougie. ‘Sinclair. I’ve been trying to reach you.’

‘The phone was out of order.’

‘What was under water?’

‘I said the phone was out of order. We had a bit of a fire.’

The operator: ‘One minute, caller.’

‘Where?’

The line was bad. She had to shout. ‘In the bed.’

‘Your side or mine?’

She laughed. ‘Where are you?’

Dougie said, ‘On my way home.’

He was elated. Julia was alive, he was alive, they were both alive. What did they say? You don’t die a day sooner than you’re meant to. Others would not have survived the night, but they had. A form of rebirth propelled him out of the phone box and on to the pavement. That was when he noticed where he was. Lamb’s Conduit Street. He had meandered round in a circle.

A degree of normality was returning after the raids. People walked past, engaged on errands or private business. The sun came out. He lit a cigarette and watched a young woman coming along the street towards him.

‘Is it working?’ she said, indicating the phone box.

‘All yours,’ he said, pulling the door open for her.

My God, how lovely she was. Stupendous eyes. Great legs.

‘Bad night,’ he said.

Her stupendous eyes brimmed a little. ‘Frightful.’ She stepped past him into the phone box and the door closed behind her.

A few minutes later she finished her call and emerged. ‘Oh. You’re still here.’

‘I was wondering if you’d have lunch with me.’

A wan smile. ‘What makes you think I have lunch with strange men?’

‘Dougie Birdsall,’ he said.

Her name was Imogen Watts and, yes (after some charming prevarication), she supposed she might accept his invitation; she was quite shaken up, she had to admit. There was nothing like the Blitz, was there really, to break down the barriers between people.

This unoriginal sentiment made him smile inwardly. But she was so very, very lovely to look at. And now the elation had worn off, there was that familiar chafing sensation that someone was waiting for him in a place they both called home.

‘There’s a nice place round the corner,’ he said. ‘I’m assuming you have no strong objections to Italian restaurants?’

‘Let’s hope it’s still standing.’ Her smile was a little stronger, as if she had instructed herself to be brave.

‘I came past it earlier.’

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. That absurd line of Dowson’s echoed in Dougie’s head. Unlike Barbara, who had always been able to tell what he had been up to as soon as she heard the scratch of his key in the lock, Julia lacked the nose for betrayal. Or perhaps it was her eyes she kept shut. Whichever was the case, he led Imogen Watts up Lamb’s Conduit Street towards Luigi’s with the deeply reassuring sense of the danger that safety bestowed.