16

‘Good Lord,’ said Dougie. ‘Half the BBC’s here.’

And most of the Unit, thought Julia.

It was New Year’s Eve and they were at Bernard’s house in Highgate.

A rumble of conversation filled the room; smoke wreathed under the ceiling. Despite the number of people and the occasion, this wasn’t a hectic dancing on graves; the mood, if not entirely sober, was sombre.

For good reason. The big raid on the City two nights ago had cut a wound deep in the national psyche. The destruction of buildings had become commonplace, not so the destruction of architecture. The morning after, there had been a leaden few hours when no one knew if St Paul’s was still standing or whether they could bear to carry on if it wasn’t. Then word began to spread that the cathedral had survived, against all odds, and this morning there had been a photograph in the Mail to prove it.

Dougie had been trying to talk his way past the cordons all day, with no success. None of his friends in the rescue services would let him anywhere near the worst of it. The entire area was a hazard. Fires were still burning, blackened remains of buildings still toppling as snow fell.

Now as they made their way through the crowd she was conscious of glances in his direction, admiring and curious. More than once she heard the murmured words London Pride, which was the title under which his Blitz film had been released. Overnight he had become somebody. Yet her pride in his achievement was tempered by an anxiety that from now on she would have to defend her claim on him against all comers.

Bernard had been a somebody for some time. They found him in the blacked-out conservatory, standing next to a concrete mermaid with a concave back from which sharp leaves grew. He was at the centre of a small, rapt, tweedy group, all male, talking about a work in progress, a ‘sonic poem very much inspired by the nightly cacophony’. It was an inner party, a salon within a salon. Flapping a hand and mouthing hello to acknowledge their arrival, Bernard moved to the baby grand and dashed off a few thunderous dissonant chords to the accompaniment of shrieking twangs on the piano strings produced with a pair of pliers.

‘These fragments, these fragments,’ he said, returning.

‘Most powerful,’ said a man with deep grooves in his face.

‘Ben thought so, when I sent it to him.’

Ben would be Britten, thought Julia.

‘Although of course he is a raging pacifist,’ said Bernard. ‘The sort who would welcome invaders with open arms and furnish them with hot-water bottles and tickets to the Hippodrome.’

‘It’s easy to be a pacifist in New York,’ said Dougie.

Bernard pointed at Dougie with his pipe stem. ‘This is the man who made the film that’s been such a great success at the American box office.’

Heads turned.

‘Dear boy,’ said Bernard, ‘a little bird told me Roosevelt had a private screening. Is it true?’

Julia sensed a hesitation on the ‘Roosevelt’. She felt sure Bernard had been about to say ‘Franklin’ or perhaps ‘Frank’.

Dougie said he didn’t know whether or not it was true.

‘Artistically, I thought the film most original,’ said Bernard. ‘All the visual links you were able to make, the connections. One sees such odd things these days, one needs an entirely new vocabulary.’

Dougie, visibly flattered, began to talk about film language.

Florian came into the conservatory with a couple of young naval lieutenants. ‘Your film, Dougie,’ he said, his hand on his heart. ‘I’ve seen it five times. It doesn’t half buck one up. Oh hello, Julia, darling, didn’t notice you there.’

Stranded on the edge of the group, a dotted outline of a person, Julia felt simultaneously invisible and exposed. At that moment through the drawing-room door she noticed a young woman with a heart-stopping face standing in front of the fire. She had black hair amateurishly chopped around her jawline and was wearing a holed red jumper, a pink silk shirt and a pair of men’s pinstriped trousers. Something had happened to clothing lately. You were no longer shocked to see people in the street in their pyjamas or dressing gowns, or in whatever they had been able to snatch up on the spur of the moment. This was different, this was a pose, thought Julia, surprised at the animosity that flared like a lit gas jet. As if sensing the ill-feeling, the girl turned and stared in her direction, a long level look, then resumed the conversation she was having with a BBC type in a sleeveless Aran jumper and horn-rimmed spectacles, one earpiece held in place with sticking plaster.

It was getting on for midnight.

‘Do you mean to tell me you have no windows?’ said Netta, Hugh Trevelyan’s wife.

‘It’s impossible to get them boarded up,’ said Julia. ‘There’s such a shortage. And no point in getting them glazed, of course. Supposing, that is, one could get them glazed.’

‘But you must be absolutely perishing in this weather.’ Netta had a broad thinking forehead and large practical hands. Before her marriage, she’d been a commercial illustrator working in advertising, but she’d given that up to have babies and sit on local committees. A lynchpin of the Chorleywood WVS, Julia understood.

‘We wear our coats. And sometimes blankets.’

Netta shook her head. ‘Oh dear, no. That is too bad. You must both come to us. We have plenty of room.’

Julia said, ‘We’re hardly bombed out.’

‘Neither of you can possibly function under such circumstances. Let me speak to Hugh.’

Someone had turned on the wireless and there was that moment of forced suspense, before the fake renewal of the New Year. Julia looked around for Dougie but couldn’t see him, and when the time came to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ she found herself holding hands with Sylvia and Bernard’s housekeeper, Mrs Railton. It was at times like these – dates on the calendar with memories indelibly stamped on them – that she missed Peter most. Should auld acquaintance.

Afterwards, Sylvia handed her a handkerchief, in the manner of a bus conductress punching out a ticket.

‘Sorry.’ Julia blew her nose. ‘Thanks.’

Sylvia was addressing the middle distance. ‘That system you devised has made quite a difference this past month, with the raids on the industrial towns. I have drafted a memo recommending that the same procedure be adopted across the Institute.’

‘Have you?’

‘I must confess I was surprised. You have a flair for this sort of work.’

A flair for filing? ‘It just seemed straightforward,’ said Julia.

Where was Dougie? she thought. Then she saw him through the drawing-room door, out in the hall, talking to the girl with the chopped black hair. ‘If anyone else talks about huge doll’s houses with their fronts ripped off, I am simply going to scream,’ said the girl in a clear, carrying voice. ‘It’s such a bloody cliché.’

Sylvia followed her gaze. ‘Not the easiest of men, I imagine.’

‘Who was that person you were talking to just now?’

‘No idea,’ said Dougie as they went out into the snowy night, the stinging flakes falling unobserved, but not unfelt. After the warm, crowded house it was bitterly cold and deathly still. Only criss-crossing searchlights probing the skies from Hampstead Heath disturbed the darkness.

From Highgate back to Camden it was a long way downhill. They turned out of Bernard’s road, she slid on the ice and he put a hand under her elbow to steady her up.

‘Netta’s terribly concerned that we have no windows,’ said Julia, huddling in her coat. ‘To the extent that she’s invited us to move in with them.’

There was a short pause, when she imagined him turning the idea over in his mind. This surprised her: she had thought he would dismiss it out of hand. Did she want him to dismiss it out of hand? She wasn’t sure.

‘Well, it’s much nearer Denham. And it wouldn’t be difficult for you to get to work either. They’re on the Tube and the main line into Marylebone.’

Footsteps came past; a man’s, by the sound of them. Across the road, a door opened on a blare of New Year sound, then thudded closed again.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘I can’t say the idea of being somewhere warmer and cleaner isn’t appealing.’ She tried to make this sound indefinite, fence-sitting.

‘Company for you, too, when I’m at the studio or away filming.’ He was conscious of letting out a breath, relieved that she was prepared to entertain the notion, which had not sprung to Netta’s mind unaided. Lately, the feeling of responsibility, of placing Julia in unnecessary danger simply by virtue of where he had chosen to live pre-war, had been weighing on him. In his mind, she had been dead under the stairs any number of times.

‘The children wouldn’t bother you?’ The Trevelyans had two boys and a girl under eleven, all in boisterous rude health, with pets.

She could hear his smile in the blackout.

‘You mean more than the raids and the guns? No, I doubt it.’

Warmth, cleanliness, company, convenience. Somehow this cataloguing of advantages was not as persuasive as it might have been. The flat in Primrose Hill, which had once seemed so intransigent, now stood in her mind as some sort of emblem of their love and life together.

‘We’d lose our privacy. At least to some extent.’

She imagined it being rather like putting up at a bed and breakfast where one knew the proprietors. And proprietors of bed-and-breakfast places were always a bit snoopy, whether you knew them or not.

‘“The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace,”’ Dougie said. The dim light of his shaded torch picked out a bomb-damaged patch of pavement, which he steered her around. There was that sudden familiar earthy smell mixed with a nauseous stench of gas and effluent, a kind of reeking cavity in the air, which told them more than the pavement had been damaged. He remembered someone telling him about a block of flats in Stoke Newington. A direct hit in the middle of the building had trapped over a hundred and fifty people deep underneath the shattered floors, where they had drowned in sewage. No one had come out alive. To drown in shit: he gagged at the thought.

They came past Kentish Town Station, identifiable by the white ‘S’ for shelter painted outside. There were more people about, more voices, a little off-key singing.

‘You wouldn’t mind moving, then,’ she said.

‘I can’t help but feel we’re chancing our luck staying where we are,’ he said. ‘It would be nice not to worry about you any more than is strictly necessary.’

Here was the second-guessing again, thought Julia. The reasoning that led you to flee from danger right into its open arms. ‘I suppose it would be sensible.’

They walked the rest of the way home in silence, a rare enough silence in Dougie’s case, a puzzled one in Julia’s. It seemed to her in these first minutes of the New Year – a year likely to bring invasion or worse – that he was bestowing on her as much safety as it was in his power to give. And safety was not a quality with which she associated him.

The dome of St Paul’s was Darwin’s forehead. He dissolved the two smooth hemispheres into each other in his mind, then carried on sketching.

A week later, the area around the cathedral was still smouldering, wisps of thin grey smoke rising in the air, as if from camp fires. A light snow fell, white on black, and immediately melted. They were near St Lawrence Jewry, or what remained of it. An arched window framed in stone was latticed, cross-hatched, all the panes gone. High up to either side were chipped and shattered memorials, busts, festoons, garlands, inscriptions. Down below, the strong diagonals of wreckage and cracked tomb lids, where the burning steeple had crashed down. Below that, unknown vaults held the fire’s fierce heat.

A stage set, he thought, trying to capture the geometry, to compose what he was seeing. He had his Leica slung over his shoulder; he could have taken a photograph, but what he wanted was not reportage, it was the telling response of the human eye. It was more truthful.

There had been a time, some weeks ago, when he had found the loss of a London landmark supportable, set against the loss of hundreds, thousands, of ordinary London homes and lives. No longer. For before him, behind him, to either side, were the graves of eight Wren churches, churches that had sprung in all their intelligent beauty out of the ashes of London’s last great fire, along with Wren’s masterpiece, the cathedral.

What, all my pretty chickens and their dam?

Not the dam, thank God, thought Dougie. He rubbed his eyes and bent his head to his drawing. Not the dam.

Julia was perched on a hillock of rubble a short distance away, trying to work out where her father’s accountancy office had been. She remembered visiting the premises as a schoolgirl, along with her brother, up two floors in a sooty Victorian building off Moorgate, a place stuffed with ledgers that had smelled of tired paper and polished wood, with a swimming dim light from green Holland blinds. The telephonist had always given them peppermints from a bag she kept in a desk drawer, shushing her lips as she did so. Now, H. W. Peters & Co. was some part of the obliterated scene in front of her – which part, it was impossible to tell.

Fore Street was closed. Cheapside and London Wall were sealed off. Not that they resembled streets any more.

She had spoken to her father twice since she had seen him in June. The first time was in September, soon after the beginning of the Blitz, when she realized he didn’t have her telephone number; the second, on Christmas Eve, when she had been badly missing Peter’s heart-sick anticipation of his stocking. On each occasion he had said that he was as well as could be expected and rung off as soon as possible.

The ruins swarmed with people. They popped in and out of view from behind the few standing walls, scrabbled up and down, clustered in small groups, pointing. One of them was waving.

‘Mattie?’ said Julia.

‘Well remembered.’ Mattie scrambled up the side of the hillock, panting. She was in civvies, which suited her less than her uniform, being dowdier and less tailored. Dougie looked up from his drawing.

‘I saw your film,’ said Mattie, clutching her hat on her head. ‘You’re developing quite an eye, aren’t you? Rather different from Macleod’s.’

‘That’s the general idea,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’

‘I thought it most impressive. The sequence in the raid was thrilling.’

‘Frank’s the best cameraman there is.’

‘You mean he puts his neck on the line when you ask him to.’

Dougie glanced at Julia, then began to pack up his drawing materials. ‘A reserved occupation,’ he said, ‘doesn’t guarantee safety. Nor should it.’ He got to his feet and said he was going to move a little further away, see if he couldn’t get a better view of St Paul’s.

Julia watched him go. ‘They didn’t actually shoot that bit in the raid,’ she said to Mattie. ‘It was newsreel footage.’

Mattie snorted. ‘That sequence was filmed by my brother from the roof of Soho Square.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you not know?’

Julia shook her head.

‘Did Dougie not say?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you want to ask him,’ said Mattie. ‘He was there too.’

Julia felt a hand squeeze her heart. Moving to Hertfordshire wasn’t going to prevent that from happening in the future.

They stood for a while and watched men working on the remains of a building; to the left, cranes lifted blackened girders in slow-swinging arcs. Shouts, and then a charred wall came down as if in a dead faint. Onlookers, hundreds of them, raised their eyes to the sky, the crump of the falling masonry bringing to mind a different kind of drop.

Bomb tourists, they called them.

‘Do you think they laid on a coach?’ said Julia.

‘It’s human instinct,’ Mattie said, winding her muffler round her throat. ‘They only want to see for themselves what the papers won’t tell them.’

‘You mean they come for the truth?’

‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’

Julia did not reply. She was here because Dougie was here, because she had hitched her desires to his. She was here because it was a way of spending a day with him, which was a rare enough occurrence.

Mattie stared into the distance. ‘I was christened at St Bride’s and, ever since I was a little girl, it was always where I planned to be married.’ She turned to Julia. ‘Do you know it?’

‘No,’ said Julia.

‘The steeple is tiered, like a wedding cake.’ Mattie’s gloved hands shaped the tiers of a wedding cake. ‘That part’s still standing. Everything else is burned out.’

Julia often fooled herself into thinking that she didn’t judge the appearance of others – in adolescence, her own had been nothing to write home about and even now her good looks seemed like the trick of the light in a mirror, on the point of vanishing. But there was no getting away from the fact that Mattie strongly resembled her brother, in a way no woman would want to. It was hard to imagine her as a little girl – she was so much her own unvarnished present self – much less a little girl with romantic ideas in her head. Ponies and gymkhanas, perhaps, not bridal veils at St Bride’s.

They set off, walking – slipping – in the direction Dougie had gone, stones and loose dirt cascading under their feet, threatening to reveal at any moment disinterred skeletons, dry bones rattling to the surface from the many ruined churchyards, or to drop them into some concealed, heat-blasted cavern.

The landscape was as desolate as a battlefield and with about as many distinguishing features: part of a wall here, an empty shell there, no more. You imagined snipers on what rooftops remained, tank treads lurching, grinding over the debris, chewing it up and spraying it out, multiple black dots of invaders peppering the skies. For surely this was the prelude.

Mattie tripped on a shattered tombstone and narrowly avoided falling over. ‘It’s the wilful neglect that makes me furious,’ she was saying, recovering her foothold. ‘The stupidity. Leaving these buildings unattended over the holiday. Shutting them up without so much as a caretaker in attendance. We bloody asked for it.’

‘It was no one’s fault the tide was low.’ At the height of the inferno, the mains had burst, the hoses had been unable to suck up water from the river mud and the pumps had run dry.

‘They jolly well should have anticipated that possibility and constructed a reservoir. Not a single aspect of this war has been properly thought through. Not evacuation, not shelters, not anything.’ Mattie turned to her, her breath a cloud in front of her face. ‘Do you ever feel that you want to fire a gun? Repeatedly?’

‘I can’t say I do,’ Julia said.

Mattie shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘Are you quite certain you’re fighting the same war as I am?’

There was an element, an undercurrent, of hostility in the question that Julia did not like, and it was echoed in the embattled expression on Mattie’s face, which suggested that should she get hold of a gun she might use Julia as target practice.

The three of them went and had tea. There had been nothing to eat or drink in the City since the raid, no water, no gas, but Mattie knew a café at the top of St John’s Street near Sadler’s Wells. It turned out that Dougie knew it too. When they reached it, they found it ‘more open than usual’, as the saying now went. One of the plate-glass windows was gone; the other heavily taped. It was crowded with rescue men dressed in grimy overalls, with filthy hands and faces, as blackened as coalminers’. One recognized Dougie, and he went over to speak to him.

It was a scruffy place: cracked linoleum, peeling walls, days’-old, curling sandwiches in a glass cabinet. A stopped clock on the wall sat above a poster of Frinton-on-Sea, and a framed, slightly askew photograph of Anna Pavlova as the Dying Swan hung beside a pair of miniature ballet shoes in a nod to the location.

Julia ordered at the counter and carried the mugs over to their table by the taped-up window. Mattie was writing in a notebook.

‘Diary?’ said Julia.

‘Something like that.’ Mattie put the notebook away.

‘I’ve got a job,’ said Julia, sipping her hot chocolate. It had a thin, rather granular taste. She explained about the Institute of Labour Management.

‘It sounds like filing.’

‘It is filing.’

Mattie, Julia thought, was the kind of person who was always going to find her lacking. Or perhaps she hadn’t got the hang of Mattie’s bluntness. Or perhaps her bluntness was ordinary rudeness. Turning in her seat, she saw that Dougie was still talking to the rescue men. Then, when she thought about going over to give him his tea before it went stone cold, she saw the girl with the chopped black hair come in, the girl from New Year’s Eve.

This time she was wearing a long black greatcoat, which she had belted tight at the waist, leather riding boots and a soft grey beret. Her lips were scarlet. Her cheekbones – how had she previously overlooked the cheekbones?

‘Probably a dancer,’ said Mattie.

‘Who?’ said Julia, pretending not to have noticed the girl, or to have experienced the same instant dislike she had felt the week before. Which play, film, or novel did she think she was in now? Anna Karenina?

The young woman with the chopped black hair – and the cheekbones – went over to the group of rescue men and began talking to Dougie.

‘You can always tell dancers,’ Mattie said. ‘They have a way of holding themselves. A certain carriage of the head, a springy spine.’ She drank her tea. ‘You needn’t look so alarmed. I wouldn’t have said she was his type.’

‘I’ve no idea what you mean,’ said Julia, who did not care to have her mind read so easily.

A siren wailed. Then a distant thud. People looked up, calculated the distance and remained where they were.

Mattie was talking about the East End, whether Julia had been there, and if not, why not. ‘Everyone should see it, even sheltered creatures like you. It’s devastating.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Julia. Preoccupied by the girl with the chopped hair, watching her as a cat might watch another slink into its backyard and through the bushes, her animosity like a living thing, she had caught the ‘sheltered’ too late to refute it with her bomb story. And she was rather proud of her bomb story.

Dougie came over to join them, put his Leica down on the table, took a sip of his tea and made a face. ‘They lost two members of the squad in the raid. One of them was a chap called Briggs. A chap I filmed.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘They wanted to know if I would go to the funeral.’

‘You should,’ said Julia.

Mattie said, ‘Are they expecting you to shoot it?’

Out of the corner of her eye, Julia saw the girl hovering around the counter, pulling a compact out of the pocket of her greatcoat, dextrously applying powder.

‘Who’s she?’

Dougie turned his head and shrugged. ‘Her? A pain in the arse. She saw my film and now she wants a job.’

‘Are you going to give her one?’ said Mattie.

‘Not up to me,’ said Dougie.

Mattie snorted. ‘Is that so?’

‘She was at Bernard’s party,’ said Julia. ‘That’s a bit of a coincidence.’ She waited for Dougie to say that there was no such thing as coincidence, but he didn’t.

Another thud, closer by.

‘Did Julia tell you we’re moving?’ said Dougie as they came out into the street and headed for the Angel. People were already queuing up outside the Underground station, clutching blankets, deck chairs and bedrolls, concertinas and birdcages.

‘No,’ said Mattie. ‘She didn’t. Where to?’

‘Hertfordshire. Hugh and Netta’s place.’

‘You surprise me, Douglas. I had you down as a stayer.’

They parted at the barrier. Mattie’s direction was south towards Embankment; theirs was north.

‘Poor old thing,’ said Dougie.

Down on the platform, a few families had already marked out their patch, bedding rolled up the curve of the grubby tiled wall, thermoses at the ready. An elderly man in a homburg was smoking and playing Patience, slapping down the cards as if he had something against them. A gust of dead air blew down the tunnel as a train approached.

Julia said, ‘I thought she was doing her level best to be unpleasant.’

Dougie waited for her to mind the gap, then stood next to her, his Leica swinging from its strap. ‘Her fiancé’s plane came down over the Channel last month. They’d known each other since they were children. She’s heartbroken.’