Charlotte Gray (3 page)

"So we go to war, kill more people, to honour those already dead?"

"I don't think that's what I meant. But what about you? You told me you re patriotic. What are you defending?"

"Oh, the same as you, I'm sure." Cannerley's offhand tone signalled an end to the discussion.

The waiter was standing by the table, braced like a bosun in a gale, as he gathered their plates.

Irritated by Cannerley's dismissive manner. Charlotte opened her mouth to continue, then thought better of it. The waiter brought a brown mousse made with powdered eggs and Cannerley poured the remains of the wine to take the taste away.

Charlotte insisted on paying her part of the bill, and on the back of the receipt Cannerley wrote a telephone number before handing her the piece of paper.

"This is the number of my flat in Ormonde Gate. I thought you might like to have it in case you ever got bored with your doctor's waiting room. I'm sure I could find you something a little more ... stimulating. We're always very much on the lookout for bright girls.

Do you speak any languages?"

Charlotte stared incredulously at the telephone number in her hand, then rallied.

"Yes. I speak French."

"Fluently?"

"God, you sound like an interview, Dick!"

Charlotte looked steadily at Cannerley.

"Yes. My father fought in France in the last war. He used to take us back to where he had been.

To visit the graves. He was ... obsessed by it, you might say."

"And is that how you learned?"

"I also went on exchanges to a French family during the summer holidays. Then I read French and Italian at university."

Cannerley pushed back his chair.

"It sounds perfect. Do bear it in mind, won't you?"

They went back down the swaying corridors. There was nothing to see through the blinds; even the stations were only grudgingly illuminated, and passengers stumbled as they alighted. For some reason they talked in lowered voices, as though the German bomber crews might hear them.

England was blacked out and afraid.

Charlotte had been to London only twice before in her life and had recollections of nothing much more than the moving staircases in the Underground. She had been frightened as a girl that she would not get off in time and had made a little hop as the stairs collapsed and slithered back beneath the floor. Her mother had taken her to a department store where she had bought fabric for curtains and some school shoes for Charlotte. Then they had been to an Edwardian hotel somewhere near Piccadilly Circus where a waiter with shiny hair wheeled a great chariot of hors d'oeuvre to the side of the table. On a second visit there had been a theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue whose rococo decorations interested Charlotte more than the winsome drama.

When the famous actress sauntered on to the stage with an expectant modesty the whole audience applauded, which Charlotte thought was silly. That was almost all she remembered, apart from the names Cambridge Circus, Oxford Circus, Bakerloo.

She spent the night of her arrival from Edinburgh in the station hotel, and the next day through her taxi window she saw the undamaged mansions of Harley Street as they sped west along the Euston Road.

Caught by a blockage in Sussex Gardens, the driver diverted through the burrows of Paddington and Charlotte looked up to see what at first she thought was slum clearance. Two of the little terrace houses had been excised from the row; while the bricks and structural supports had been blown out by the blast, tenacious bits of stucco made a tidy proscenium arch. A fireplace and a sofa were suspended intact on the first floor like cut-out scenery in a children's theatre. The driver told her that parts of London were obliterated and parts of it untouched; there seemed to be no reason why the German bombers should have been so vengeful towards Battersea and Chelsea and so lenient on neighbouring Victoria. The taxi pulled up in a small street behind Old Brompton Road; it was an area that was neither safe nor specially targeted, but in any event the bombing of London had, for the time being, come to an end.

The driver helped Charlotte out with her suitcases and left her looking up the steps to the front door. She felt anxious to get inside. Any misgivings or unassimilated fears she might have felt were buried and sealed with the efficiency of long habit. There were four bells by the front door and she could see a white twocore flex run up from the one named forester over the ledge below the first floor and in through a hole drilled in the front windowsill.

The window was pushed up in answer to her ring and a young woman's head poked out.

"Charlotte? I'm on the telephone. Let yourself in and come up to the first floor. Catch!"

A single key on a piece of pink ribbon came spinning down and landed on the step. Charlotte let herself into a dark hallway. There were two bicycles and a pram on the lino floor as well as an old walnut dresser.

When she had heaved her suitcases past the obstacles she paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked up: a narrow strip of worn orange carpet wound up past a windowed half-landing; she breathed in, expecting the boardinghouse smells of cooking, cats and gas geysers, but found it smelled only of hyacinths. The door of the first floor flat was open and Charlotte put her luggage down in the tiny hall. Above a table with a bowl of bulbs and numerous magazines was a small gilt mirror. She unpinned her hat and shook down her hair before replacing the tortoiseshell comb; she could see the young woman who had opened the window waving theatrically to her to come into the sitting room.

As Charlotte entered, she put down the receiver and came across the room.

"I'm Daisy. That was Ralph on the phone. I thought I'd never get rid of the little pest. Sorry about the mess. It's - well, it's just a mess.

Sorry."

Charlotte looked around. There was a tea tray on a low table in front of the fireplace; it was laden with crockery she could tell was yesterday's by the way the milk had separated from the cold leavings of tea. There were newspapers and magazines all over the floor and women's clothes draped across the various chairs. The room was very cold.

"How was your journey? Bloody awful, I expect. I hate trains, don't you?"

"It wasn't too bad. There were two men in my compartment and we had dinner together. The food wasn't up to much, but--"

" You are a quick worker! Did they ask for your telephone number?"

"No, but one of them gave me his."

"What a beast! What a horribly ungentlemanly thing to do to make you do the ringing. Don't you dare. Was he gorgeous?"

"It wasn't really like that. It was a question of him perhaps being able to help me with a job."

Daisy Forester laughed, and her round, guileless face broke open.

"Darling, don't be naive." She looked at Charlotte more closely.

"You're awfully smart, aren't you?" She went up and felt the lapel of Charlotte's suit. "It's lovely. Is it Jaeger? I do love their clothes, but Mummy gives me such a piffling allowance I really can't afford anything nice.

Look at me."

Charlotte did. She wore a tight fawn sweater that made her breasts bulge, a single rope of pearls, a brown tweed skirt, woollen stockings and battered brown court shoes. Actually, Charlotte thought, she didn't look too bad. She began to say so, but Daisy interrupted her.

"I'd better show you your bedroom. It's tiny, I'm afraid, but you know we're jolly lucky to have anywhere at all. There's such a scrum for flats at the moment."

"Why?" asked Charlotte, thinking of the spacious Georgian houses of the New Town. Why on earth would people fight over a cramped and icy little place like this? Daisy looked at her in surprise.

"Because of the Germans, dear.

They've knocked down most of the houses in London. Hadn't you noticed?" Charlotte's room was at right angles to the end of the hall. It had been sliced from the adjacent room by the addition of a plasterboard partition that bisected the ceiling rose of the original, larger room.

It had a small chest of drawers with tear-drop brass handles and a glass top pressing on a kind of lace doily. There was a bed with a damson-coloured candlewick counterpane, one upright chair and a grimed single window over the street. It was flanked by lime-green curtains, unlined, on metal runners in a rusty track.

It was difficult for both women to be in the room at the same time, and impossible when Charlotte tried to introduce the suitcases as well.

"I think I'll unpack in the hall, if you don't mind," she said, 'and carry the clothes in."

"Good idea. You've got quite a lot of clothes, haven't you?" Charlotte could tell what Daisy was thinking before she said, "Do you think we're about the same size?"

Charlotte began, "I think maybe I'm a bit ' " More or less, I'd say. Perhaps I'm a bit bustier Daisy looked at Charlotte with her head on one side.

"Mind you, you're not exactly flat, are you?"

Charlotte laughed, not knowing what else to do, and said, "I'll just make a start on this one," as she undid the larger of the two cases. Daisy had taken the morning of work and did not leave until almost midday.

"It's frightfully dreary," she said.

"I work for the Red Cross. It's grisly work, but the office is in St. James's so there's lots going on. I've convinced Mummy that my work there is absolutely vital for the war effort and that's why she lets me stay on in London. She'd be much happier if I went down to dreary old Gloucestershire really."

"Does she worry about you?"

"Oh yes. All the time. I'm not frightened, though. If there's a bomb with my name on it then that's just bad luck. I must fly. I'll be back about six. There's a spare key on the hall table. Sally'll probably be back before me."

"Sally?"

"The other girl who lives here. Didn't you know? She's got this ghastly boyfriend called Terence. I'll tell you about him later. He's very high up in the Navy. Make yourself at home."

The first thing Charlotte did when she was alone was to clear the tea things. The kitchen looked out over a small garden and the back of the terrace beyond; there were some tins of food in the glass-fronted cupboards and a parteaten loaf of bread on a wooden board. The room had an only half-inhabited quality. The rest of the flat did not take long to explore. Next to Charlotte's room, the other side of the partition, was another bedroom. It was slightly larger, but equally cold; it had a hanging rail on wheels with a number of women's clothes. It also looked over the street, though it had a greyish lace curtain over the window; on the bedside table was a book called Love in a Harem, and tucked in beneath the counterpane was an eyeless teddy bear.

Sally's room. Charlotte presumed.

The largest of the three bedrooms had a photograph of Daisy on the chest of drawers; next to it was one of what Charlotte took to be Daisy's parents-the man in spectacles, baldish, moustached, vaguely medical or academic-looking; the woman dark, round-faced with pretty eyes, a slightly more spiritual but perhaps also more vacuous version of Daisy and, tucked between the mirror and its wooden frame, a young man with crinkly hair in army uniform. Daisy's silver hairbrushes were laid out among the pots of cream and powder. An open lipstick stuck up between them, and Charlotte had to restrain herself from winding it back into its base. The bed, unlike Sally's, was not properly made; the eiderdown had been hastily straightened over the tangle of blankets beneath. There was a volume of Swinburne's poems on the bedside table and a copy of The Great Gatsby. This room, unlike the others, had a built-in clothes cupboard, and Charlotte could see a sliver of purple chiffon caught in its door. The walls were painted an indulgent crimson; there was a French couronne above the bed, from which hung some scarlet patterned fabric. On the wall was a reproduction of a Bume-Jones painting, all muscular breastplates and knightly, coiled desire.

Charlotte went to change her clothes. Because she had been living with her parents for the last two months, her mother had supervised her packing and had insisted on a sheet of tissue paper between each layer.

Her mother, Charlotte knew, had dreaded her departure, yet was aware that in some way it would simplify her own life.

Amelia Gray was amazed by her daughter, proud, and shocked by her. There seemed no limit to what the girl thought she could accomplish by herself. She had swallowed all the education she was offered without apparent effort, though it was five times what had been available in the suburban ladies'

establishment she had herself attended thirty years before.

Charlotte seemed impatient of the values of her mother's generation, yet she retained a personal delicacy in her dealings with other people, an almost excessive reticence, a lack of trust, from whose likely cause her mother turned her gaze away. Charlotte had sprung from most unpromising beginnings.

In the autumn of 1916 Amelia Gray's husband returned on leave from the Western Front to visit his wife and their three-year-old son Roderick. In his quizzical, doctor's eye his wife saw some exquisite pain. He prowled the house, unamused by books or conversation, silently tearing at himself. She thought of Nessus and his shirt of flame. He went for walks along the edge of the moor, then retired to the inn by the river.

He would have stayed all evening, but the landlord was a proper Christian man who would not stay open late to serve a soldier on leave, even if he was an officer.

Amelia Gray at first feared that during his time away he had found another woman. He appeared to feel guilty towards his own wife; it was as though he was anxious to be back in France. When she tried to search his mind, approaching him gently with oblique questions, he tossed his head and muttered some short phrase to cut her off. He had always been stoical, but his emotional state was now close to nullity. It seemed to his wife that he was oppressed by some unbearable secret, yet it was something that was not of his own making. She herself occasionally had a dream common, her husband professionally told her, to many people in which she found she had committed a murder, of which she had no recollection: all she had was the knowledge of her guilt and the fact of being hunted. Her husband wore the look of someone who had made the same discovery about himself; he seemed unable to cope with the knowledge he had unwillingly acquired, but his intellectual pride and medical detachment made him unable to confide.