BEA IS THERE FIRST. SHE HASN’T BEEN IN THIS TEA room for two years, and never before at lunchtime. There are cracks in the window panes that have not been mended, and the tablecloths, the walls, appear more stained than she remembers. Even after her months in France, the smell steaming through the kitchen door is damper and less appetising than before. Well, hardly a soul has anything decent to cook with nowadays; not that the food was ever anything but grim here.
Will Mr Campbell have changed? Everyone changes out there, including her, the Beatrice Masters who can now sit silently by a man’s bed without itching to move. But it’s not something to think about, oneself, you can’t look at yourself any more apart from in the context of the war and what you are doing for it. Maybe that’s all Bea has become, just a part of the war effort, its exhaustion and suffering and grief, and the simply going on, even when she’s in the Ritz dining room with silk flapping on her ankles. Every time she’s been there in the past month, memories of her dinners there with Edward flood her mind. Come back soon, she almost wishes out loud.
She doesn’t see him come in, and suddenly Mr Campbell is sitting opposite her. He is still black-haired, strong-jawed, but his uniform bags across his chest as though he is melting away. When she looks into his eyes expecting to find that old darkness, it is gone. Instead they are sharp and worried.
They don’t speak. They just look across the table at each other, his hands knotted on the top of it, Bea’s underneath, on her lap, and neither of them asking How are you? For the answer will certainly be a lie.
Then Bea talks.
‘It’s good to see you.’
At first he doesn’t reply, just nods. Embarrassed by the silence, Bea looks down and to the side. Then he speaks.
‘Been a long time.’ His voice hasn’t changed, and its deepness sends a familiar rumble through her.
‘Two years.’
‘Decade, could be.’
She doesn’t understand, and looks back at his face. The decade is there, lines fan out from his eyes and run in creases across his forehead. Edward and the other men she knows have not grown this much older.
‘Is it so bad what you do, so different? From the others, I mean.’
Again he is still, then pulls over a smeared menu card lying on the table and looks straight down at it. As Bea watches him, his face whitens. Then he pushes the card away.
‘Not a conversation good for the appetite.’
Their cups of tea come, and Beatrice’s is placed to her left. She can’t reach across with her good right hand, so thinking fingers, fingers, keep the wrist straight, she raises it with her left. It’s not strong enough, and the cup wobbles, tea-stained milk adding to the growing map on the tablecloth.
‘What’s wrong with your arm?’
‘It’s just for a little while,’ she says, too quickly, forcing a smile on to her face, but his eyes have sharpened further.
‘I don’t believe you. Show me.’
Bea doesn’t want to show him, but he’s staring at her, telling her with his eyes just to do it. She puts her gloved hand on the table, trying to straighten her wrist and fingers. He takes it in both of his hands and turns it over surprisingly tenderly, and Bea feels the stiffness in her melt a little.
‘You wrote that it was a small thing.’
‘Compared to’ – she hesitates – ‘compared to out there. In any case, a hand is small.’ She smiles at her wit, and glances at him for approval. Mr Campbell is looking at her almost as though he has tears in his eyes.
The park, he says when they finish, let’s go to the park. Not a museum, nor the cinema. Not back into darkness. What he wants to see is green, and up to Hyde Park Corner and to the park they go.
They walk alongside each other and she tells herself that she’s relaxed with him, even if she flushes a little each time they pass a couple with their arms locked. Out of embarrassment, Bea keeps hers pinned to her sides. Not that Mr Campbell is the type to offer his arm. But Mr Campbell today, she feels, might do anything.
As they enter the park, Bea pulls west towards Kensington but Michael is marching straight on and up towards Marble Arch, alongside Park Lane. This way, he says, better view of the houses from here, like great ships they are, floating along while everyone else is drowning. Yes, says Bea. It must seem like that.
‘Not that you live far away. That address of yours.’
‘It’s not my address.’ This at least is true. It is Celeste’s house. ‘It’s just my mother,’ she continues. ‘Such a hoo-ha about the prospect—’
‘Are there many prospects?’ he butts in. ‘Young gentlemen with an income and the possibility of a future.’
‘According to you, young gentlemen will have no future at all.’
‘Remember that, Miss Masters.’
Still she worries whether he does know where she lives and is just testing her, or whether she’ll flinch as they pass her home and he will guess. She must be a little unsteady for as they draw up alongside Number Thirty-Five, she slips on a wet leaf and for the first time in over three years, since Glebe Place, his hand is on her arm again.
He pulls her upright, and she feels the warmth of his body, and a strange light-headedness with it. When she has steadied her feet, she looks up. Mr Campbell’s face is but half a dozen inches from hers, looking down at her more tenderly than she has ever thought he could feel. It is Bea’s turn to be still, for a moment. Later she will tell herself that her head must have still been spinning from her skid, and that’s why she kissed him.
His lips don’t move and Bea jerks back, her eyes already wet with embarrassment, but he catches her again, holds her and kisses her as angrily as she should have expected.
There are voices in the drawing room when she passes. She walks in to find Clemmie, and the back of a head with short fair hair next to hers on the small green sofa.
It is Clemmie who sees her first.
‘Bea-Bea!’ she exclaims as she pulls herself up.
The man, now upright too, swivels round to face Bea. He is slightly flushed. Bea does not recognise him.
‘I didn’t think—’ continues Clemmie.
‘No,’ interrupts Bea. ‘You didn’t think. Either of you.’ And she stands there, eyes fixed on the pair of them as the man straightens himself and mumbles, ‘See you at dinner, I suppose,’ and walks out, nodding to Bea as he passes.
Clemmie has already lit a cigarette.
‘Don’t look so horrified, darling. It’s wartime. The war effort, you could say. Tom’s been away such ages. They need something, you know, not to mention we do …’ Clemmie pauses and stares back at her. ‘Oh, Bea, don’t be such a prig. You’re behaving as though you’re still a virgin.’
*
Bea lies on her bed, surrounded by green creeper and red velvet, and thinks about Clemmie’s remarks. Is Bea really being sanctimonious, do the rules change that much in wartime? Think about it, Beatrice, think how much they have already changed for you. When, before the war, would she have leant forward and kissed a man before he had tried to kiss her? She may like to think that she had it in her, but she didn’t do it. Yet this afternoon she had not been embarrassed by kissing Mr Campbell, well, not once he responded.
Yet, God, what has she done? Mr Campbell is a law clerk, the sort of man whom she should not even know, let alone kiss. The more enjoyable it was, thinks Bea, the more hideous her situation is. Clemmie may talk about breaking the rules but Bea will wager she hasn’t even imagined anyone going this far. She wants to say Never see him again, and that would obviously be the simplest. Or maybe it would be enough that Mr Campbell will say, as he surely will when she sees him on Thursday – and how can she not turn up now – that Monday was the most terrible mistake and they should forget it immediately. And that was what, in the very least, they would do.
Bea is pushing open the glass-panelled tea-room door at twenty past eleven in the morning, feeling nauseous even before the smell has hit her. The memory of what she did is becoming more, rather than less, embarrassing. He had wanted to kiss her, hadn’t he? After all, he did kiss her back, and it had hardly been a politely surprised kiss back. Yet that anger – she had taken it for a degree of passion, but it could have been anger at her for daring to change their friendship. And what will he say to her now? Bea is trying to think of the conversational practicalities or, rather, impossibilities of two people so divided by social station that they still address each other by their surnames, yet have kissed, and her cheeks simply grow hotter.
Mr Campbell is over there, by the window on the far side of the room. When she sees the back of his hatless head, her stomach clenches and she forces herself to take a deep breath.
She sits down opposite him, her eyes fixed on his interwoven fingers, which are whitening at the knuckles as they squeeze his palms.
‘Hullo,’ he says.
‘Hullo.’ Beatrice, you cannot have a conversation with a man’s knuckles, she tells herself. So she looks up and there they are, those chocolate eyes, fixed on her and steadier than they were two days ago.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he says, more tenderly than he has ever spoken to her, and Bea feels herself flushing.
‘Yes. Yes,’ she replies, then stops. What does she say now? Say something, anything, Bea. What conversation are people flogging to death at present? And, almost automatically, Bea finds herself asking Mr Campbell a question that has rolled off her tongue several dozen times during the past fortnight: whether he reckons that the arrival of the American troops any day now means that the war will be over soon.
Means nothing, he replies, clearly a little surprised by her change in tack. ‘Until they are actually here. At the rate it’s going, it may be too late for your lot.’
‘My lot?’
‘The men won’t have much more of it.’
‘You’re making it sound like Russia.’
‘It’s bad enough.’
Christ, she walked into that one.
‘How’s your sister?’ she asks quickly.
Mr Campbell looks away, and Bea is almost sure she sees him biting his lips.
‘She’s gone,’ he says. ‘She vanished a year ago. Not a trace of her.’
Bea doesn’t know what to reply. His sister was the only one he had left. God, poor man, she thinks. And as she looks at him, his aloneness appears so evident that, without thinking, she reaches across the table and puts her gloved hand on his bare one. He hesitates, then pushes his fingers up through hers, interlocking them.
Bea looks down at the tablecloth. It is torn. Underneath she can see cheap wood scarred by knives and forks.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘At least my ma’s not here to see. And it’s them that this bloody war is supposed to be for,’ he continues.
‘I think I should do more,’ she says.
‘I think you’ve done your bit.’ He nods towards her left arm, crooked hand fixed underneath the table.
‘All I’ve done is help ease the pieces back together, or try to.’
His grip releases. ‘That’s all I do.’
God, how could she have said that? Angry with herself, she feels sick again, and then she realises, relieved, that at least the question of where ‘this’ is going has been resolved. But the conversation can’t suddenly end now, so Bea tries to bring it to a graceful close.
‘But we’re helping, aren’t we? Just getting them ready to go back out again.’
‘We,’ he says, ‘we. Isn’t it funny, that it was violence that brought us together.’
‘You pulling me out of it,’ she replies.
He is silent. He just looks at her and shakes his head. Then he grips her hand again, tighter than before. Hers doesn’t move. ‘Come with me,’ he says into her silence. She follows him out of the tea room.
The front of the house is a dirty white, window panes almost the same colour. She follows Mr Campbell inside. He steps into the landlady’s room and engages her in loud conversation as Bea tiptoes up the stairs. Top floor, he’s told her, at the front.
The stairs smell of rotting wood and Bea, chest pulled in as though that’s the only way she’ll fit between the banisters and the wall, tests each step before she puts her weight on it. She didn’t expect the house to be this grey, even the wood has a greyness to it. Bea runs her finger along the handrail as she climbs. There’s no dust, at least it’s clean; the colour is just from the years of penumbra that have saturated the building and its contents.
The floorboards in Michael’s room are grey, too, rough and unpolished. Bea wonders whether she will be more or less likely to pick up splinters in stockings or bare feet. Did one, in any case, remove one’s stockings in these situations? There has to be some sort of convention, everything else seems to be governed by one set of rules or another, even if the principal rule seems to be that they should be broken. Though perhaps not this far. It’s not just that Bea is in a man’s bedroom, but what sort of man’s bedroom she is in.
The walls are not much better, a browning yellow. In the far corner is a clothes horse with two pairs of socks hanging from it. Does he do his own laundry? Who else would he have to do it for him? Would she, once they had done this, be expected to do it for him herself?
Mr Campbell is upstairs with her now. His steadiness has gone and he is mumbling about the years he’s been here, that the landlady is a good sort, her son’s in Flanders. He’s looking everywhere but straight ahead of him at Bea and the bed beyond. It occurs to her that maybe he is a virgin, too, and what a farce that would be, if he knew no better than her. She suddenly wants the whole matter to be over and done with as soon as possible.
Deciding to take some sort of initiative, she takes two steps backwards and sits on the edge of the bed. The springs sink, and the mattress with it. The sharp hospital iron of the bedstead digs into her calves.
Mr Campbell walks to the far side of the bed and sits on it, she imagines, facing the window. The mattress rocks from side to side as he does whatever he is doing. He has stopped talking. After an hour-long minute of movement and silence, Bea turns to look behind her. Mr Campbell has removed his shirt and is sitting in his vest, chin to the window and the tendons on his neck taut. Against the plaster of his skin his vest is grey. Laundry again. Bea puts her purse on the floor and unbuttons her coat. She stands up to slip it off, and once she is holding it in her hand she realises that she is unsure of where to put it. On her side of the bed there is only the clothes horse, and she doesn’t quite have the guts to start striding about half naked. She moves the damp socks to one side and drapes the coat over it. Stepping backwards, she returns to the edge of the bed and starts to unbutton the top of her shirt and stops. Surely she can do better than this. She slides her hands behind her and, even with fingers half clotted, manages to unhook her skirt, letting it fall to the floor. Almost before her waistband has reached the splintering floorboards, she is in the narrow bed, stockings still on.
She is now tucked up to her collarbone between a pair of sheets thinned to the slipperiness of an ice-rink and under a faded pink blanket. She leans her head back, searching for a pillow. There is only one, roughly in the centre, and Bea is firmly holding her position to one side. It seems churlish to take the pillow and impossible to lie half on and half off it, so she shuffles her shoulders further to the side, leaving the rest of her where it has landed, putting her in an awkward diagonal.
Mr Campbell is clearing his throat.
Ready now? he asks, his voice reed-thin.
Afterwards, Bea doesn’t know whether to be relieved or shocked that he had a preservative. Had he been planning the event? And was it for her, or, or … A far from romantic thought comes into her mind and she checks herself; is there always this much hypocrisy around making love? If that’s what this was. They are lying in silence but Bea is still short of breath, she feels as though her insides have leapt out of her and back in again. She had no idea that ‘this’ would be so energetic. From the way she had heard it whispered of, it was a distanced affair.
Distanced is not what she feels. She wants to reach out and touch Mr Campbell’s face but is unsure whether it would be too forward, even now. She smiles to herself. But what struck her more than anything was the extraordinary vulnerability that men are reduced to, it hadn’t occurred to her that Mr Campbell could ever be so at her mercy, and she suddenly feels a burst of gratitude towards him. Thank you, she wants to say, thank you for doing this for me. Instead she turns towards him having now decided to stroke his forehead, and finds his big, dark eyes drinking her in. He reaches for her hand and kisses the heel of her palm.
‘Beatrice? May I call you Beatrice now?’
‘God. Yes.’ She hesitates. She’s never called him by his Christian name before, and it is slow to form in her mouth. ‘Michael.’
He reaches for her hand closest to him, the bad hand.
‘Will you marry me?’
Her hand freezes on his forehead. She pulls her fingers back.
‘Beatrice, will you marry me?’
‘Michael.’ It still feels strange to say his first name. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Understand what?’ Anger is flashing back into him, and Bea feels her pulse quicken. But what does he mean? Move into this room and wash his clothes? She pushes away from him and sits up. He watches her, puzzled.
‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’
Bea doesn’t reply. She stands up and starts to dress quickly. She’s fumbling, but she can just pull her coat on over her clothes.
It’s Michael’s turn to sit up, and his voice is irritable now. ‘Where are you going?’ He says, as if telling her to come back.
‘Mr Ca— I’m sorry, Michael—’
‘Sorry?’ He’s out of bed now, stark naked, without even the manners or care to cover himself. ‘Why, what was this to you? Some charity fuck?’
As Beatrice runs down the stairs and pushes past the small woman standing at the bottom, she bursts into tears.
She’s still a wreck when she falls in through the front door of Number Thirty-Five. Clemmie is in the hallway, looking shrunken. She casts a glance at Bea, up and down. I see you’ve heard, she says. Heard what, Bea replies, and Clem can’t meet her eyes. And with this look, or not-look, Bea knows. She shuts her eyes, holds her breath. She wants to block the words out.
Clem holds her elbow as they go up the stairs. A stone statue that is Mother is sitting on the far sofa in the red drawing room, her neck livid and her face white. A piece of paper is in her hand. Her eyes are as red as the wallpaper.
‘Poor Edward,’ she says.
Bea opens her mouth to speak but no words come out. Not that Mother will hear anything. Bea stares at Mother, Clemmie, the paper, the brown envelope, and she turns to the door.
‘Beatrice, where are you going?’ asks Clemmie.
‘Out on the motorcycle,’ she says. ‘It was still in the garage when I last looked.’
And Clemmie is chasing her, whispering don’t do that as though she wants to shout it out. You’ll kill yourself. But Clemmie can’t shout that out.
‘Your arm, Bea,’ she pants. ‘How will you hold—’
‘Fuck my arm.’