Life After Life (29 page)

Ralph! Of course, Ralph. Ursula had quite forgotten him. He had been in Argyll Road too. Was he there when the bomb exploded? Ursula struggled to turn her head to look around, as if she would find him among the wreckage. There was no one, she was alone. Alone and corralled in a cage of smashed wooden beams and jagged rafters, the dust settling all around her, in her mouth, her nostrils, her eyes. No, Ralph had already left when the sirens went.

Ursula was no longer bedded by her man from the Admiralty. The declaration of war had brought on a sudden flush of guilt in her lover. They must stop their affair, Crighton said. The temptations of the flesh were apparently secondary to martial pursuits – as if she were Cleopatra about to destroy his Antony for love. There was enough excitement in the world now, it seemed, without the added hazards of ‘keeping a mistress’. ‘I’m a mistress?’ Ursula said. She had not thought of herself as sporting a scarlet letter, a rubric that belonged to a racier woman, surely?

The balance had shifted. Crighton had teetered. And apparently tottered. ‘Very well,’ she had said equably. ‘If that’s what you want.’ She had begun to suspect by then that there was not, in fact, a different, more intriguing Crighton hidden beneath the enigmatic surface. He was not so very inscrutable, after all. Crighton was Crighton – Moira, the girls, Jutland, although not necessarily in that order.

Despite the fact that the end of the affair was at his instigation, he was cut up. Wasn’t she? ‘You’re very cool,’ he said.

But she had never been ‘in love’ with him, she said. ‘And I expect we can still be friends.’

‘I don’t think that we can, I’m afraid,’ Crighton said, already wistful for what was now history.

Nonetheless, she had spent the following day dutifully crying for her loss. Her
liking
for him had not been quite the negligent emotion that Pamela seemed to think. Then she dried her tears, washed her hair and went to bed with a plate of Bovril on toast and a bottle of 1929 Château Haut-Brion that she had filched from Izzie’s excellent wine cellar, left casually behind in Melbury Road. Ursula had the keys to Izzie’s house. ‘Just help yourself to anything you can find,’ Izzie had said. So she did.

It was rather a shame though, Ursula thought, that she no longer had assignations with Crighton. The war made indiscretions easier. The blackout was the perfect screen for illicit liaisons, and the disruption of the bombing – when it finally started – would have provided him with plenty of excuses for not being in Wargrave with Moira and the girls.

Instead, Ursula was having an entirely above-board relationship with a fellow student on her German course. After the initial class (
Guten Tag. Mein Name ist Ralph. Ich bin dreizig Jahre alt
) the two of them had retired to the Kardomah on Southampton Row, almost invisible behind a wall of sandbags these days. It turned out that he worked in the same building as she did, on the bomb-damage maps.

It was only as they left the class – held in a stuffy room, three floors up in Bloomsbury – that Ursula noticed that Ralph was limping. Wounded at Dunkirk, he said, before she could ask. Shot in the leg while waiting in the water to get into one of the little boats that were shuttling back and forth between the shore and the bigger boats. He was hauled on board by a fisherman from Folkestone who was shot in the neck minutes later. ‘There,’ he said to Ursula, ‘now we don’t need to talk about it again.’

‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ Ursula said. ‘But how awful.’ She had watched the newsreels, of course. ‘We played a bad hand well,’ Crighton said. Ursula had run into him in Whitehall not long after the evacuation of the troops. He missed her, he said. (He was teetering again, she thought.) Ursula was determinedly nonchalant, said she had reports she needed to take to the War Cabinet Office, clutching buff folders to her chest like a cuirass. She had missed him too. It seemed important not to let him see that.

‘You liaise with the War Cabinet?’ Crighton said, rather impressed.

‘Just an assistant to an under-secretary. Actually, not even to the assistant, just another “girl” like me.’

The conversation had gone on long enough, she decided. He was gazing at her in a way that made her want to feel his arms around her. ‘Must push off,’ she said brightly, ‘there’s a war on, you know.’

Ralph was from Bexhill, gently sardonic, left-wing, utopian. (‘Aren’t all socialists utopians?’ Pamela said.) Ralph was nothing like Crighton, who with hindsight seemed rather too powerful.

‘Being courted by a Red?’ Maurice asked, coming across her within the hallowed walls. She felt sought out by him. ‘It might not look good for you if anyone knew.’

‘He’s hardly a card-carrying communist,’ she said.

‘Still,’ Maurice said, ‘at least he won’t be betraying battleship positions in his pillow talk.’

What did that mean? Did Maurice know about Crighton?

‘Your personal life isn’t personal, not while there’s a war on,’ he said with a look of distaste. ‘And why, by the way, are you learning German? Are you awaiting the invasion? Getting ready to welcome the enemy?’

‘I thought you were accusing me of being a communist, not a fascist,’ Ursula said crossly. (‘What an ass,’ Pamela said. ‘He’s just terrified of anything that might reflect badly on him. Not that I’m defending him. Heaven forbid.’)

From her position at the bottom of the well, Ursula could see that most of the insubstantial wall between her flat and Mrs Appleyard’s had disappeared. Looking up through the fractured floorboards and the shattered beams she could see a dress hanging limply on a coat hanger, hooked to a picture rail. It was the picture rail in the Millers’ lounge on the ground floor, Ursula recognized the wallpaper of sallow, overblown roses. She had seen Lavinia Nesbit on the stairs wearing the dress only this evening, when it had been the colour of pea soup (and equally limp). Now it was a grey bomb-dust shade and had migrated down a floor. A few yards from her head she could see her own kettle, a big brown thing, surplus to requirements in Fox Corner. She recognized it from the thick twine wound around the handle one day long ago by Mrs Glover. Everything was in the wrong place now, including herself.

Yes, Ralph had been in Argyll Road. They had eaten – bread and cheese – accompanied by a bottle of beer. Then she had done the crossword, yesterday’s
Telegraph
. Recently Ursula had been forced to buy a pair of spectacles for close work, rather ugly things. It was only after she had brought them home that she realized they were almost identical to the pair that one of the Misses Nesbit wore. Was this her fate too, she thought, contemplating her bespectacled reflection in the mirror above the fireplace? Would she, too, end up as an old maid?
The proper sport of boys and girls
. And could you be an old maid if you had worn the scarlet letter? Yesterday an envelope had mysteriously appeared on her desk while she was snatching a sandwich lunch in St James’s Park. She saw her name in Crighton’s handwriting (he had a surprisingly nice italic hand) and tore the whole thing to bits and threw it in the bin without reading it. Later, when all the clerical assistants were flocking like pigeons around the tea-trolley, she had retrieved the scraps and pieced them together.

I have mislaid my gold cigarette case. You know the one – my father gave it me after Jutland. You wouldn’t have come across it by any chance, would you
?

Yours, C
.

But he was never hers, was he? On the contrary, he belonged to Moira. (Or perhaps the Admiralty.) She dropped the pieces of paper back in the bin. The cigarette case was in her handbag. She had found it beneath her bed a few days after he had left her.

‘Penny for them?’ Ralph said.

‘Not worth it, trust me.’

Ralph was stretched out next to her, resting his head on the arm of the sofa, his socked feet in her lap. Although he looked as though he were asleep he gave a murmured response every time she tossed a clue in his direction. ‘
A Roland for an Oliver
? How about “paladin”?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

An odd thing had happened to her yesterday. She had been on the Tube, she didn’t like the Tube, before the bombing she cycled everywhere but it was difficult with so much glass and rubble around. She had been doing the
Telegraph
crossword, trying to pretend she wasn’t underground. Most people felt safer underground but Ursula didn’t like the idea of confinement. There had been an incident only a couple of days previously of a bomb falling on to an Underground entrance, the blast had travelled down and into the tunnels and the result was pretty awful. She wasn’t sure that it had made the papers, these things were so bad for morale.

On the Tube, a man sitting next to her had suddenly leaned across – she had shrunk back – and, nodding at her half-filled grid, said, ‘You’re rather good at that. Can I give you my card? Pop into my office if you like. I’m recruiting clever girls.’ I bet you are, she thought. He got off at Green Park, tipping his hat to her. The card had an address in Whitehall but she had thrown it away.

Ralph shook two cigarettes from a packet and lit them both. He passed one to her and said, ‘You’re a clever thing, aren’t you?’

‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m in the Intelligence Department and you’re in the Map Room.’

‘Ha, ha, clever and funny.’

There was an easy camaraderie between them, that of pals more than lovers. They respected each other’s character and made few demands. It helped that they both worked in the War Room. There were a lot of things they never had to explain to each other.

He touched the back of her hand with his and said, ‘How are you?’ and she said, ‘Very well, thank you.’ His hands were still those of the architect he had been before the war, unspoilt by battle. He had been safely away from the fighting, a surveyor in the Royal Engineers, poring over maps and photographs and so on and hadn’t expected to become a combatant, wading through filthy, oily, bloody seawater being shot at from all quarters. (For he had, after all, spoken a little more of it.)

Although the bombing was awful, he said, you could see that something good could come out of it. He was hopeful about the future (unlike Hugh or Crighton). ‘All those hovels,’ he said. Woolwich, Silvertown, Lambeth and Limehouse were being destroyed and after the war they would have to be rebuilt. It was an opportunity, he said, to build clean, modern homes with all the facilities – a community of glass and steel and air in the sky instead of Victorian slums. ‘A kind of San Gimignano for the future.’

Ursula was unconvinced by this vision of modernist towers, if it were up to her she would rebuild the future as garden cities, comfortable little houses with cottage gardens. ‘What an old Tory you are,’ he said affectionately.

Yet he loved the old London too (‘What architect wouldn’t?’) – Wren’s churches, the grand houses and elegant public buildings – ‘the Stones of London’, he said. One or two nights a week he was part of the St Paul’s night watch, men who were ready to climb into the rafters ‘if necessary’ to keep the great church safe from incendiaries. The place was a firetrap, he said – old timbers, lead everywhere, flat roofs, a multitude of staircases and dark forgotten places. He had answered an advertisement in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ journal, appealing for architects to volunteer to be firewatchers because they would ‘understand the plans, and so on’. ‘We might have to be pretty nimble,’ he said and Ursula wondered how he would do that with his limp. She had visions of him beleaguered by flames on all those staircases and in the dark forgotten places. It seemed a chummy kind of watch – they played chess and had long conversations about philosophy and religion. She imagined that it suited Ralph very well.

Only a few weeks ago they had watched together, spellbound in horror, as Holland House burnt. They had been in Melbury Road, raiding the wine cellar. ‘Why not stay in my house,’ Izzie had said casually before she embarked for America. ‘You can be my caretaker. You’ll be safe here. I can’t imagine the Germans will want to bomb Holland Park.’ Ursula thought that Izzie might be rather overestimating the Luftwaffe’s precision with bombs. And if it was so safe why was Izzie turning tail and running?

‘No thanks,’ she said. The house was too big and empty. She had taken the key though and occasionally foraged in the house for useful things. There was still some tinned food in the cupboards that Ursula was keeping for a last-ditch emergency, and, of course, the full wine cellar.

They were scanning the wine racks with their torches – the electricity had been turned off when Izzie left – and Ursula had just pulled a rather fine-looking bottle of Pétrus from the rack and said to Ralph, ‘Do you think this would go with potato scallops and Spam?’ when there was a terrific explosion and, thinking the house had been hit, they had thrown themselves on the hard stone floor of the cellar with their hands over their heads. This was Hugh’s advice, instilled in Ursula at a recent visit to Fox Corner. ‘Always protect your head.’ He had been in a war. She sometimes forgot. All the wine bottles had shaken and shivered in their racks and with hindsight Ursula dreaded to think what damage those bottles of Château Latour and Château d’Yquem could have done if they had rained down on them, the splintered glass like shrapnel.

They had run outside and watched Holland House turn into a bonfire, the flames eating everything, and Ursula thought, don’t let me die in a fire. Let it be quick, please God.

She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the
idea
of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again not love, more like the feelings you would have for a favourite dog (and, no, she would never have said such a thing to him. Some people, a lot of people, didn’t understand how attached one could be to a dog).

Ralph lit another cigarette and Ursula said, ‘Harold says smoking is very bad for people. Says he’s seen lungs on operating tables that look like unswept chimneys.’

‘Of course it’s not good for you,’ Ralph said, lighting one for Ursula too. ‘But being bombed and shot at by the Germans isn’t good for you either.’