8

Suddenly Sam Brooks’s designs came right, both for the forty-pound mobile recording equipment and the microphone windshield. It was almost as if the war was won. All the four juniors were summoned. Their Director was going to celebrate, he was going to take them out to dinner.

‘It’s impossible for all of them to be off duty together, Mr Brooks,’ Mrs Milne pointed out. ‘You’re aware of that, naturally.’

‘Tell Spender to find out what their duties are and look after the discs for a couple of hours, about eight till ten this evening.’

‘Mr Spender is a Permanent, Grade 3.’

‘Well, it won’t hurt him. It will familiarize him with the juniors’ work.’

Mrs Milne reminded him that Spender had been an RPA himself for several years before reaching his present position.

‘That’ll make it all the easier for him,’ said Sam.

Mrs Milne could hardly have explained, even to herself, why she was opposed to the whole scheme, or why, now that it appeared inevitable, she had to concern herself so much with the details.

‘Lyons in Piccadilly would do very nicely for them, Mr Brooks. They serve a cold baked potato there now, you know, instead of bread, to beat the shortages. Sometimes you have to queue for a while, but a baked potato is very filling.’

‘Book me a table at Prunier’s,’ Sam replied.

He disappeared immediately with his drawings, surrounded by engineers.

At the two o’clock changeover Mrs Milne summoned the RPAs to her office, to learn of their good fortune.

‘This is a very well-known restaurant, a French restaurant, and you must all of you consider your appearance.’

She was falling imperceptibly into the tone of a Victorian housekeeper inspecting the slaveys.

‘Of course, some people think that, with Hitler at our gates, there shouldn’t be any of this luxurious and rather ostentatious eating out, particularly perhaps in the evening. We’re all of us asked to economize in our own way. The Governors were served with dried egg pasty at their last Board Meeting.’

‘They got whisky, too,’ said Teddy. ‘I saw it going up.’

‘I wish you were coming with us, Mrs Milne,’ Annie said, turning, on an impulse, towards her. Mrs Milne saw that she meant it, and if any one of the others had made the suggestion it would have been quite gratifying. They, after all, were in a sense children of the regiment, they had come before the cold winter of 1939 and were known all over the building; the boys, not really fully grown yet, were patted on the head and given small coins by Dr Vogel. Then she reminded herself, but not because she had forgotten it, that Annie Asra had been her own appointment. Mary Staples had referred to it only the other day, as a proof of how well things could be managed if all the interviewing was left to the two of them.

Before leaving the office, Mrs Milne always arranged a candle and a box of matches, half open, with one match taken out and laid diagonally across the box, on RPD’s desk. This was in case the power failed and he needed a light in a hurry. She had never managed to get him to take very much interest in the arrangement, but it was the last thing she had to do before she left. Willing to extend her control for a little longer, she traced RPD to the fifth floor and asked what he intended to do about transport.

‘Tell DPP I’ll need his taxi,’ said Sam impatiently.

DPP’s taxi-driver allowed all five of them to get inside, Willie being small, and destined to provide exceptions. Regent Street was closed to traffic while the shop fronts were being reinforced, so they went round by Marble Arch. There had been showers all day. In Green Park the barrage balloons were going up in a flock through the tepid evening sky, while inside the taxi a pastoral atmosphere also reigned, the juniors content with their newly restored guardian.

‘They cost £500 each, you know, Mr Brooks,’ said Willie, gazing at the silver-fleeced balloons, which seemed to be fixed and grazing in the upper air. ‘It’s going to be a serious matter if we lose two or three of those.’

In St James’s they got out and waited on the pavement while the taxi was paid off, then entered the grand restaurant through whose doors came a whiff of the lost smell of Paris. Inside the brownish glitter of the two mirrored walls reflected a heroic display which rejected the possibility of change. Even the diners, many of them in uniform, seemed to have escaped time. Some of them could have sat opposite Clemençeau or Robert St. Loup, and one, with his great starched napkin at the ready, might almost have been General Pinard.

Willie lingered rather behind the others, talking to the sedate commissionaire in his chocolat au lait-coloured uniform. Then he came confidently over to their corner table.

‘Mrs Milne thought we wouldn’t know how to behave in a place like this,’ he observed.

‘I’m not sure that you do,’ Vi said quietly. ‘What were you talking about to that man at the door?’

‘I was asking him if he’d seen Frédé. I described him as well as I could from what you told me. After all, a chap like that must see a lot of Frenchmen come and go.’

‘Frédé wouldn’t ever come to a place like this, it’s expensive.’

‘French people spend a remarkably high proportion of their income on food,’ said Willie seriously.

‘Well, he’s not spending it over here, anyway. You didn’t see him. He couldn’t wait to get rid of Lise and be off.’

Teddy was talking to RPD about wine, and, by a method as old as Socrates, was made to feel that he had chosen the champagne which they eventually ordered. Annie looked at de Gaulle’s proclamations, pasted to the walls of the beautiful shadowy room. I’m beginning to know those by heart, she thought.

Prunier’s were inclined to think that it must be a First Communion outing. There was a spirit of indulgence suitable to a godfather in the way the host demanded the best there was, and then, as it happened, Annie was wearing a white dress. It was, in fact, one she’d been obliged to get for choir competitions, in a style not likely to have been chosen by anyone but the Vicar’s wife, with a view to Christmas and to further competitive events, and made in white silk from Anstruthers’ Fabric Hall. She wouldn’t have put it on if Mrs Simmons hadn’t taken it out, and exclaimed, and insisted that it would only take her ten minutes to iron it, though in fact it came to much more like half an hour. Of course, she had to wear it then. The white dress caused the head waiter to place her on Mr Brooks’s right.

Boiled lobsters came, and the table was almost hidden by the fringed sea creatures, resting between their cracked tails. None of the juniors liked the taste of them fresh. Seaweed and a taste of drains, thought Vi. But they bent their faces low, their sensations must not be guessed, and Sam, who deceived himself so often, was easily deceived by these children. They worked together as though following an unseen cue, one of them talking while the others concealed the bits and pieces, with tactful haste, under the lobster’s carapace on their plates.

‘They plunge them head first into boiling salted water,’ declared Willie. ‘That instantly destroys life.’

‘I’ve done it often enough with shrimps,’ said Vi, ‘but it’s hard to tell whether they’ve gone in head first or not.’

She had intended to check Willie when they got to the restaurant, but by now she felt that it wasn’t worth while. Champagne is bought and drunk to lead to such changes of mind, and Vi had drunk three-quarters of a glass. So too had Teddy.

‘I want you to know that I’ll always treasure this moment,’ he said suddenly. ‘Land, sea, or air, I don’t know where, But when the sad thought comes to you, Be sure that I’m remembering too.’ While Teddy half-rose to his feet, toasting his own certainty of living for ever, the debris on the table was swept away and replaced by a beautiful red currant tart.

The waiter described a flourish with his tongs over the melting crust. Like all good waiters he was a fine adjuster of relationships, particularly when children were to be served, and he estimated the RPAs as that. Children had to be addressed with an eye on the adult who was paying for them, but directly, too, as from one who had a family to support at home.

‘You are the youngest, you do not mind being served last?’ he asked, poised over Willie with a fatherly smile.

‘Perhaps, since you’ve put that question, you’d like my considered opinion,’ Willie replied, ‘I don’t just mean on the comparatively trivial matter of eldest and youngest. When peace comes I think it shouldn’t be too difficult to get the governments of the world to consent to my scheme of alternative roles for all human beings. It’s generally accepted already that if everyone were to eat one day and have nothing at all on the next we could ensure world plenty. But I’d like to see more than that. Those who serve and those who are served would also change places in strict rotation, so that to-morrow evening, for example, you in your turn would be waited upon.’

Vi roused herself. ‘I shouldn’t like to be here when you’re doing the serving, Willie. There’d be long delays all round.’ She added, as kindly as she could, ‘You shouldn’t go on like that, he’s got other tables to look after.’

Willie turned red. ‘I can be thoughtless at times,’ he said.

Their Director gave them all a little more champagne, ignoring the just perceptible hint not to do this, sketched by the retreating waiter. The infants are getting overexcited, his shoulders said. And now Sam, leaning back in his chair and filling such a noticeable space, began to exert a natural power which few people had ever seen, but which answered in human terms to his ability with electrical equipment. Some of the same qualities are needed to organise people and things, and though Sam did not understand his juniors, he knew how to make them happy. Without even noticing Willie’s embarrassment of a few moments ago, he conjured it away. He told them stories, delaying as he drew near to an end so that they were on the verge of seeing too well what was going to happen next, then pausing and asking them if they’d like to finish for him, but they were under a spell, and could not.

In these engrossing tales Eddie Waterlow appeared, and the Director General, and the last-minute removal of drunken commentators from the microphone, and the sad deafening of Dr Vogel as he knelt down to record the opening batsman at Old Trafford. Lured into the circle of words, knowing how much he was putting himself out, they felt themselves truly his guests, ready to do anything for him. Teddy’s laughter must have been some of the loudest ever heard at Prunier’s.

Annie’s eyes were bright and her attention was almost painful, but she did not laugh as much as the others. It was not her way. That would not quite do for Sam, and without leaving the rest of them he turned to his right and concentrated his whole attention for a moment on her. She looked back at him fearlessly, sitting solid and composed in her peculiar white dress.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

Annie nodded, but that was not enough for him.

‘You know, I’ve remembered now what it is, I mean who it is, you remind me of, Annie. It’s a French picture by Monet, or Manet, it doesn’t really matter which, a girl, or perhaps a boy, dressed in white, and sitting at a café table, all in shade, under a striped awning, but there’s very bright sunshine beyond that, and there’s some older people at the table too, with glasses of something in front of them, wine I suppose, but none of them are really looking at each other.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t know whether it was a boy or a girl,’ said Annie mildly. He saw that she had not given in.

‘You haven’t been with us as long as the others. I should like.…’ He was improvising. ‘I should like to give you a present. The best! There’s no point at all in a present unless it’s the best one can give.’

‘I don’t know what the best would be, Mr Brooks.’ She was not worried.

It was a game.

‘I shall give you a ring.’

They had all of them been with him in the studio and knew how dexterous he was, but none of them would have believed that he could take the inch of gold wire still dangling from the champagne bottle, pierce the end through one of the red currants and give it three twists or flicks so that the currant was transfixed, a jewel on which the blond light shone. His broad fingers held the wire as neatly as a pair of pliers.

‘Well, Annie.’

Annie had been keeping her hands under the table, but now she spread them out on the stiff-feeling tablecloth. They were pinkish and freckled, but delicate, not piano-player’s hands, not indeed as practical as one would have expected, thin and tender. After some hesitation, as though making a difficult selection, Sam Brooks picked up the left hand and most ingeniously put the currant ring onto the third finger, compressing it to make it fit exactly.

The others watched in silence. Annie did not know what to say or do, so she said nothing, and left her hand where it was on the table. Something inside her seemed to move and unclose.

At that precise moment, while the juniors were eating their dessert at Prunier’s, Annie fell in love with RPD absolutely, and hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way. After the war the species no longer found it biologically useful, and indeed it was not useful to Annie. Love without hope grows in its own atmosphere, and should encourage the imagination, but Annie’s grew narrower. She exerted the utmost of her will-power to this end. She never pictured herself trapped in the main lift with Mr Brooks above the third floor, or of rescuing him from a burning building or a Nazi parachutist or even a mad producer armed with a shotgun. He existed, and so did she, and she had perhaps sixty years left to put up with it, although her father died at fifty-six. She was in love, as she quite saw, with a middle-aged man who said the same thing to all the girls, who had been a prince for an evening which he’d most likely forgotten already, who had given her a ring with a red currant in it and who cared, to the exclusion of all else, for his work. As a result, it was generally understood, Mrs Brooks had left him, and the thought of his loneliness made her heart contract as though squeezed by a giant hand; but then you couldn’t really pretend that he was lonely, and so Annie didn’t pretend. This, of course, meant that she suffered twice, and she failed to reckon the extra cost of honesty.

The truth was that she was almost too well trained in endurance, having drawn since birth on the inexhaustible fund of tranquil pessimism peculiar to the English Midlands. Her father’s friends, who came round evenings and sat in their accustomed chairs, speaking at long intervals, said ‘We’re never sent more than we can bear’, and ‘You begin life helpless, and you end it helpless’, and ‘Love breaks the heart, porridge breaks the wind’, and when she worked at Anstruthers’ hosiery counter they hadn’t asked the customers whether they wanted plain knit or micro-mesh, but ‘Do you want the kind that ladders, or the kind that goes into holes?’ These uncompromising alternatives were not intended to provide comfort, only self-respect.

Annie – although she also knew that those who don’t speak have to pay it off in thinking – was resolved on silence. Whatever happened, and after all she was obliged to see Mr Brooks two or three times every day, though she by no means looked forward to it, feeling herself more truly alive when she could picture him steadily without seeing him – whatever happened, he needn’t know how daft she was. But words were scarcely necessary in the closeness of the RPA room. They all knew how it was with her there.

Vi wanted to be of help, but it was difficult to find facts which Annie had not already faced.

‘He’s old, Annie,’ she ventured at last.

‘He is,’ Annie replied calmly, ‘he’s forty-six: I looked him up in the BBC Handbook, and it’s my opinion that he’s putting on weight. I daresay he wouldn’t look much in bed.’

‘But what do you expect to come of it?’

‘Nothing.’

Vi felt troubled. She was conscious, as she sometimes was when Willie Sharpe was talking, of a sort of wrongheaded dignity, and she had a conviction, too, that relationships could not be altered to such an extent as this, and that RPD was simply not there to be fallen in love with. ‘It’s not right,’ she thought, feeling guilty, at the same time, of her own good luck in life. A few nights ago, just when Annie happened to be on night shift and she had her room to herself, Chris had turned up. He had docked at Liverpool with forty-eight hours leave, got the train as far as Rugby, been shunted off into a siding because of an air-raid warning and told they would stay there till morning, taken a lift with an army convoy to Luton, another one to Woolwich, and a third on a potato lorry to Covent Garden, and then, since it was in the small hours, walked the last eight miles to Hammersmith, climbed up the back of the house by way of the coal-shed, opened her window, got in under the sheets and when she’d nearly jumped out of her skin said, in quite the old way: ‘There’s no need to be surprised, you’re quite a nice-looking girl.’ Next morning her mother, when told Chris had arrived for breakfast, had made no comment, and it struck Vi that this too might have been much the same in 1914.

Why couldn’t things be as simple as that for everybody? Teddy suggested that they might consult the Readers Problems in the Mirror. The answers column, conducted by the Two Old Codgers, he’d been told, had saved many from desperation and worse. He’d just set out the problem clearly, altering the names, of course, and the ages, and the addresses, and where they worked, and what they did. Vi had no patience with him sometimes.

Willie, saddened by the experience in which Annie seemed to be trapped without escape, took her to task.

‘It’s wrong, because your situation isn’t natural. I’ve worked that out to my own satisfaction.’

‘I can’t get it to go away, though. Doesn’t that make it natural?’

They were checking each other’s time sheets before going down to tea.

‘Love is of the body and the spirit,’ Willie told her earnestly, ‘and there’s no real difference between them.’

‘If you say that, you can’t ever have seen anyone die,’ said Annie. And indeed at this time he never had.

Mrs Milne, to whom no-one had given any kind of hint, must have learned through listening to the air itself what she would never have been willingly told. The Old Servants had developed a sixth sense in these matters. It occurred to her that it was her duty to speak to RPD.

Speaking, in this sense, was undertaken only at a ceremonial time, when the day’s letters were brought in for signature, and there was also a set rhetorical form, beginning with observations of general and even national interest and coming gradually to the particular. Mrs Milne, therefore, rustling in at five o’clock, began by asking whether he’d heard that members of the Stock Exchange had opened a book and were quoting odds on how many enemy aircraft were shot down each day, and what kind of mentality, when you came to think of it, did that show, and whether he’d noticed the acute shortage of kippers which made it well-nigh impossible to offer traditional hospitality to overnight visitors. It was different, of course, for those who could afford to frequent restaurants. These subjects were singularly ill-chosen and showed Mrs Milne to be in a state of nervous tension. Sam made no pretence of listening until she said:

‘Mr Brooks, I should like to have a word with you about Miss Asra.’

‘I can’t think why. When I tried to talk to you about her before you told me she was a very usual-looking girl from the Midlands.’

He scrawled his signature several times. ‘What’s she been doing?’

It was very unlike him to remember any remark she had made more than a few hours ago.

‘It might be better for everyone …’ she said, her voice scarcely audible now.

Her Director stared at her coldly.

‘I think that Miss Asra is alone in the world, except for an aunt,’ she went on resolutely. ‘The girl must feel lonely, and her aunt must miss her a great deal.’

‘Is her aunt alone in the world too?’ enquired Sam. ‘There can’t be as many people in Birmingham as I thought.’

Mrs Milne tried again.

‘Of course, Miss Asra won’t be due for any annual leave until she has been with us for a year, but, in view of the emergency and her special circumstances we might make an exception in her case, a kind of prolonged compassionate leave, if you follow me.’

‘I don’t follow you in the least. If you’re interested in Annie’s aunt you have my full permission to get in touch with her.’ He shovelled the heap of letters towards her. ‘Has Annie said she wanted to go away?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Tell me when she says so exactly.’

Annie had various methods, besides the control of her imagination, for maintaining proper pride. Sometimes she spoke to herself in the third person, as the organist at St Martin’s used to speak, when flustered, to the choir. ‘Asra, are you with me?’ ‘Dobbs, you’ve no need to glance so frequently at Asra.’ Asra, she said to herself, running for the Hammersmith bus, you don’t mean any more to him than the furniture does. And that was really a good comparison. He’d subside and lean against you and tell you all those difficulties about the European and Far Eastern sections, and you could feel his weight lying there, just as if you were the back of a chair. She’d no call to be surprised at this, Vi had told her about it when she came, only at first he hadn’t taken to her, now he had, but it was no-one’s fault but her own if she was cut to the heart. If you can’t face living your life day by day, you must live it minute by minute. At least, thank God, her aunt had gone overseas with the ATS and she’d no obligation to leave London. She was free to stay here and be unhappy, just so long as she didn’t become ridiculous; for that she didn’t think she could forgive herself.

‘Your nose is cold,’ said Eddie Waterlow, pressing it with his forefinger as she sat listening to music, his touch light as a fall of dust. ‘That is a sign of health in pets, so you are not actually out of condition. Something is amiss, however. How are you getting gon?’

Mr Waterlow was the only person she had ever met who imitated her voice, the scrupulously fair intonation of Selly Oak, neither rising nor falling, giving each syllable its equal weight, as though considering its feelings before leaving it behind, and lingering over the final one so that it is given the opportunity to start the next word also. With so many more obtrusive voices around him, so many much more decisive accents, he was fascinated, as a connoisseur, by the gentle transitions, said to be the most difficult in the English language to imitate exactly, getting gon, going gon, passing gon. Curiously enough, she did not mind this at all.

‘I’m getting on very nicely,’ she said.

‘No, no, you are not. You are not wanted as you should be, not appreciated as you wish, in this like me, in this very much like me.’

‘My God, Mr Waterlow,’ said Annie sadly. ‘Does everybody in Broadcasting House know how daft I am?’

He told her that she was betraying herself, and of course at the same time indulging herself, by playing Tschaikovsky. They had to adjourn to one of the canteen store-rooms where there was an old upright piano, long since retired from the struggle to divide the air into music, and a whole tone flat in the middle register. There it was Satie again, and to oblige him she tried one of the little cabaret songs, but could hardly make herself heard above his instructions.

‘Ah yes … modestement … for the nerves … just let it be a simple occurrence, no logic, just let it happen, however strangely … a little incongruity, please, “owl steals pince-nez of Wolverhampton builder” … sing, Annie, sing … like a nightingale, a nighting gale, with toothache … “I command removal from my presence sadness, silence and dolorous meditation”.…’

‘I can’t imagine how you get through the day without anything to do, Mr Waterlow,’ Annie said, when he had reverently shut the lid of the dejected piano, ‘I’ve never met a man before who didn’t have to work hard.’

Eddie spread out his arms, as one who was ready at any time for the call.

‘Surely the BBC can find something for you?’ she asked gently. He looked forlorn.

‘The BBC is doing gits bit. We put out the truth, but only contingent truth, Annie! The opposite could also be true! We are told that German pilots have been brought down in Croydon and turned out to know the way to the post-office, that Hitler has declared that he only needs three fine days to defeat Great Britain, and that there is an excellent blackberry crop and therefore it is our patriotic duty to make jam. But all this need not have been true, Annie! If the summer had not been fine, there might have been no blackberries.’

‘Of course there mightn’t,’ said Annie. ‘You’re just making worries for yourself, Mr Waterlow. There isn’t anything at all that mightn’t be otherwise. After all, I mightn’t have … what I mean is, how can they find anything to broadcast that’s got to be true, and couldn’t be anything else?’

He gestured towards the piano.

‘We couldn’t put out music all day!’

‘Music and silence.’

After she had gone back on shift, Eddie thought for a while about Sam Brooks. There was something magnificent after all, in the way he squandered young people and discarded them and looked round absent-mindedly for more. It implied great faith in his own future. But should his attention be drawn, perhaps, to Annie’s case?

By the end of August the heavy raids had begun. Vi and Annie were both out when the Simmonses’ house in Hammersmith was knocked down. Mrs Simmons and the children were quite all right, having taken shelter under the hall table, a half-size billiard table really, which was of a quality you couldn’t get nowadays if you tried. Mr Simmons had to stay to look after the shop, but the family left London, and Vi went with them. Annie got accommodation at the YMCA hostel opposite Westminster Abbey; Mr Simmons brought up her things in his van, and she knew he was kindly using some of the petrol ration which he got for the business. It was only her clothes, really, covered now with flakes of plaster. It was just as well that she had brought so little with her in the first place.

Vi wrote to say that her wedding day was fixed, she was going up to Liverpool some time in September to marry Chris and to be his till the end of Life’s Story. She wished she’d been able to invite them all, but they’d have a reunion after the war when the lights went up again, they must all swear to make a note of it, August the 30th by the Edith Cavell statue off Trafalgar Square, the side marked Fidelity. The letter did not sound quite like the Vi they had known, and made her seem farther away.