26

‘I wouldn’t have known you,’ Bernard was saying.

Ditto, thought Julia. Bernard had not so much aged as deflated – as if the tremendous balloon of self-regard that used to give him such presence had been pricked and all the air had escaped from it. Mattie told her he was depressed and unable to compose.

Julia said, ‘It’s the uniform, I expect.’

She’d come in her battledress, which strictly speaking should only be worn on the gun site; however there was no one here to report her, only to disapprove.

‘Admittedly I’m short-sighted,’ said Bernard, ‘but for a moment when you came through the door I thought you were a boy.’ He extracted a leather tobacco pouch from his jacket pocket and filled his pipe, pushing down the brown aromatic shreds with a nicotine-stained finger. ‘Surely the cure for a failed love affair is to find oneself another chap, not turn oneself into one.’

‘Now you’re being provoking.’

She hoped he wasn’t going to talk about Dougie. She could not afford to take a drink from that cup, not a sip. These days she told herself she was an individual only so far as circumstance and context were working through her. Yet sometimes it was hard to give up the sense you had a starring part in your own life, and tonight was one of them. She had known Dougie would not be here. This had not stopped her from imagining what he would have made of her battledress.

It was early evening, and the party was yet to get into its stride. Around the Kensington sitting room were clusters of people, mostly servicemen and women, making the stilted conversation of those who did not know each other well. Beside the fireplace stood a gentleman in wire-rimmed spectacles who was smiling distantly in the way you did when you were pretending it didn’t matter that you had no one to speak to.

The flat was Mattie’s – or rather it was the flat of her fiancé – and the party was to mark their engagement. Her fiancé, who was also her boss, had the trim, square shoulders and lean back that advertised the work of a good tailor and the quiet authority of someone in possession of a great deal of privileged information. They were to be married towards the end of the year, the date possibly determined by such information. Mattie had found a priest prepared to conduct the ceremony in the ruins of St Bride’s – ‘after all, it’s still consecrated ground’ – although you would have thought November might prove a little wet and chilly for an open-air wedding.

Bernard lit a match and puffed on his pipe. ‘Once upon a time I seem to remember you weeping over a piano. “Asymmetries”, wasn’t it?’

‘Asymmetries’ was one of his pieces. On one of the few times she’d gone to Highgate to practise on his baby grand, he’d bullied her into playing it, then bellowed at her from across the room when she didn’t play it properly. ‘I don’t weep over pianos any more.’

‘Oh, I do,’ said Bernard, ‘I do. Copiously.’

For some reason, this assumption that creative work trumped all other kinds irritated her.

‘How are your Americans?’ Mattie had told her that Bernard’s house had been requisitioned and was now occupied by a number of officers on Eisenhower’s staff.

‘Very polite, very clean, very large. But they will keep offering me chewing gum.’

She laughed. ‘At least they’re not likely to be in occupation for long.’

‘You have knowledge to that effect.’

‘I expect someone here does.’

Julia gazed around at the uniforms – some very senior uniforms indeed. The room itself displayed a masculine notion of comfort, broadly evident as an absence of fuss and the avoidance of any of the brighter colours in the decorator’s palette. A couple of good eighteenth-century landscapes hung on the wall – hostages to fortune, you would have thought. She was surprised that places like this still existed in the demoralized dirty city that London had become.

We can’t take much more of this, thought Julia. The return of the bombing had not brought about a return of the Blitz spirit. Every face she passed in the crowded streets was pinched with anxiety and resentment.

‘Did you ever come to Primrose Hill?’

‘Not when you were there.’

‘It’s gone,’ Julia said. Nothing remained of the place where she had once fooled herself into thinking she was happy, the house she had once saved. She had been unable to establish what had become of Mrs Tooley, and this upset her more than anything.

‘Why are you surprised?’

The carriage clock on the mantelpiece ting-ting-tinged the hour.

‘What a pre-war sound,’ said Bernard. ‘So decorous, so civilized.’

‘Yes, I used to own one like it.’

A little later, after talking to the gentleman in the wire-rimmed spectacles (who was a downstairs neighbour) and a few others, Julia went to say her goodbyes. Mattie motioned to her to follow her out on to the landing. ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like to give a party. You never have the chance to speak to anyone. Will I see you later in the week?’

People tramped up the stairs.

Mattie said, ‘Walter, Felicity. Lovely you could come. Charles is inside.’

‘I’ll ring you,’ said Julia.

‘Do,’ said Mattie. ‘And mind you don’t go anywhere near the parks. They’re rutting in there every night. It’s Rabelaisian.’

The hostel was on Pentonville Road. It was relatively early when Julia returned, and the building was quiet, although the humid smells of talcum powder, scent and sweat lingered as evidence of feverish preparations for nights on the town.

The place had been recommended to her by someone on her old battery. She had stayed here a number of times – it was cheap and convenient for the station. Best of all, it offered the reassuring sense of female solidarity that she had grown to rely upon.

This time, however, she had paid a little extra to have a room to herself. The hostel, unlike some women-only establishments, did not enforce a curfew, which contributed to its popularity. To make the most of their leaves, some of the girls took the tablets popular with aircrews on missions – chemical stimulants that meant you could dance (or bomb) all night. These suppressed appetite too, handy when hunger was otherwise such a distraction. But wakey-wakey pills were not for her. After months on the front line, all she craved was sleep.

The single rooms at the hostel were at the rear of the building. In Julia’s, a partition halved the window, which was blacked out with paint, and a narrow bed took up most of the floor space under the disproportionately high ceiling. Pipes banged and she could hear the sound of running water. In the tiny smudged square of mirror over the hand basin she examined herself, ran her fingers through her hair. Perhaps she should let it grow out a little. Perhaps she should put on a skirt from time to time. A little lipstick wouldn’t go amiss. Funny, but now that she’d fired the gun and felt that sense of agency, it didn’t seem so incompatible with being a woman, not the way she’d come to understand it. She bent down, unlaced her boots, then undid the buttons on her battledress jacket.

Bea was somewhere in the Med: she owed her a letter. Pat Meadows, too, who had mastered the artillery training so well they had asked her to stay on at Manorbier as an instructor. And one day, she supposed, she should get round to replying to Fiona, who had written to offer her the Broadwood. An olive branch, or an unwelcome reminder of a previous wife that wanted shifting, hard to say. She sat on the bed and rummaged in her kit bag for pencil and paper.

She wrote to Peter instead.

It had been about a month since his letters had started coming more often, when they became longer, less forced in tone, when they went so far as to ask what she was doing. The change was as sudden and unexpected as cherry blossom on a bombsite.

She knew better than to rush things. Each word was a careful placing of one foot ahead of the other.

She wrote about her work, as much as the censor would allow. She did not suggest they meet. Since the bombing had returned he was boarding full time at the school in St Albans, a cadet (he had written proudly) in the OTC. His voice had broken (he had written proudly).

She did not ask too many questions. She did not ask how he was feeling or what he thought of her.

The siren went. She finished the letter and some minutes later came the all-clear. It was going to be one of those off-and-on nights. She was thinking about getting undressed and getting under the covers when a light knock came at the door.

The girl had a pale pretty face, a frizz of hair peeking out from under a kerchief. She was wearing mules and a quilted housecoat patterned with tiny pink rosebuds.

Dresden shepherdess, thought Julia. Fragonard.

‘I’m ever so sorry to disturb you, but I saw the light under your door. I can’t seem to get the electric ring to switch on.’

Down the corridor was a kitchenette where you could make yourself a hot drink or heat up soup or beans.

‘It’s silly of me, but I’m not very practical,’ the shepherdess said.

Then how are you any use to the services? thought Julia.

The siren went again.

‘There’s a knack to it,’ Julia was saying. ‘You have to jiggle the plug about a bit.’ She pushed open the door of the kitchenette.

Then