Life after life

November 1940

SHE WAS ON her back, lying in a shallow pool of water, a fact that didn’t worry her so much at first. The worst thing was the awful smell. It was a combination of different things, none of them good, and Ursula was trying to separate them into their components. The fetid stench of gas (domestic) for one, and, for another, the stink of sewage, disgustingly rank, that was making her gag. Added to that was a complex cocktail of damp, old plaster and brick dust, all mixed with the traces of human habitation – wallpaper, clothes, books, food – and the sour, alien smell of explosive. In short, the essence of a dead house.

It was as if she were lying at the bottom of a deep well. Through a hazy veil of dust, like fog, she could make out a patch of black sky and a pared fingernail of moon that she remembered noticing earlier in the evening when she had looked out of the window. That seemed a long time ago.

The window itself, or at least the frame, was still there, way, way above her, not where it should be at all. It was definitely her window, she recognized the curtains, charred rags now, flapping in the breeze. They were – had been – a thick jacquard brocade from John Lewis’s that Sylvie had helped her pick out. The flat in Argyll Road was rented as furnished but Sylvie declared the curtains and rugs to be ‘completely shoddy’ and subbed Ursula for new ones when she moved in.

At the time Millie had suggested that she move in with her in Phillimore Gardens. Millie was still playing ingénues and said she expected to go from Juliet to the Nurse with nothing in between. ‘It would be fun,’ Millie said, ‘to share digs,’ but Ursula wasn’t so sure that Millie’s idea of fun coincided with her own. She often felt rather dull and sober against Millie’s brightness. A dunnock keeping company with a kingfisher. And sometimes Millie burnt just a little too brightly.

This was just after Munich and Ursula had already started her affair with Crighton and it seemed more practical to live on her own. Looking back, she realized that she had accommodated Crighton’s needs a great deal more than he had hers, as if Moira and the girls somehow trumped her own existence.

Think about Millie, she told herself, think about the curtains, think about Crighton if you must. Anything except her present predicament. Especially the gas. It seemed particularly important to try to take her mind off the gas.

After their purchases in soft furnishings Sylvie and Ursula had taken afternoon tea in John Lewis’s restaurant, served by a grimly efficient waitress. ‘I’m always so glad,’ Sylvie murmured, ‘that I don’t have to take a turn at being other people.’

‘You’re very good at being yourself,’ Ursula said, aware that it didn’t necessarily sound like a compliment.

‘Well, I’ve had years of practice.’

It was a very good afternoon tea, the kind you couldn’t get any more in department stores. And then John Lewis itself was destroyed, no more than the black toothless skull of a building. (‘How awful,’ Sylvie wrote, moved in a way that she didn’t appear to have been by the dreadful raids on the East End.) It was up and running again in days, ‘Blitz spirit’ everyone said, but really, what was the alternative?

Sylvie had been in a good mood that day, and they had drawn closer over the subject of curtains and the idiocy of people who thought that Chamberlain’s silly little piece of paper meant anything at all.

It was very quiet and Ursula wondered if her eardrums were shattered. How did she get here? She remembered looking out of the window in Argyll Road – the window that was so far away now – and seeing the sickle moon. And before that she had been sitting on the sofa, doing some sewing, turning the collar on a blouse, with the wireless tuned to a short-wave German station. She was taking a German evening class (know your enemy) but was finding it difficult to decipher anything beyond the occasional violent noun (Luftangriffe, Verluste) in the broadcast. In despair at her lack of proficiency, she had turned the wireless off and put Ma Rainey on the gramophone. Before she left for America, Izzie had bequeathed Ursula her collection of records, an impressive archive of female American blues artistes. ‘I don’t listen to that stuff any more,’ Izzie said. ‘It’s very passé. The future lies with something a little more soigné.’ Izzie’s Holland Park house was shut up now, everything covered in dustsheets. She had married a famous playwright and they had decamped to California in the summer. (‘Cowards, the pair of them,’ Sylvie said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hugh said, ‘I’m sure if I could sit out the war in Hollywood I would.’)

‘That’s interesting music I hear you listening to,’ Mrs Appleyard said to Ursula one day as they passed on the stairs. The wall between their flats was paper-thin and Ursula said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you,’ although she could well have added that she heard Mrs Appleyard’s baby bawling its head off day and night and that was very disturbing. The baby at four months old was big for its age, fat and ruddy, as if it had leeched all the life out of Mrs Appleyard.

Mrs Appleyard – the deadweight of the baby asleep in her arms, its head on her shoulder – waved a dismissive hand and said, ‘Don’t be concerned, it doesn’t bother me.’ She was lugubriously East European, a refugee of some kind, Ursula supposed, although her English was precise. Mr Appleyard had disappeared some months ago, gone for a soldier, perhaps, but Ursula hadn’t asked as the marriage had been clearly (and audibly) unhappy. Mrs Appleyard was pregnant when her husband left and, as far as Ursula could tell (or hear), he had never been back to meet his squawking infant.

Mrs Appleyard must have been pretty once but day by day she grew thinner and sadder until it seemed as though only the (very) solid burden of the baby and its needs kept her tethered to everyday life.

In the bathroom that they shared on the first floor there was always an enamel pail in which the baby’s foul-smelling nappies lay soaking before being boiled in a pan on Mrs Appleyard’s tworing stove. On the neighbouring ring there was usually to be found a pan of cabbage and, perhaps as a result of this twin boiling, she always carried on her person a faint perfume of old vegetables and damp laundry. Ursula recognized it, it was the smell of poverty.

The Misses Nesbit, nesting on the top floor, fretted a good deal about Mrs Appleyard and the baby in the way that old maids were inclined to. The two Nesbits, Lavinia and Ruth, slight spinsters, lived in the attic rooms (‘beneath the eaves, like swallows’, they twittered). They might as well have been twins for all the difference between them and Ursula had to make a tremendous effort to remember which was which.

They were long retired – they had both been telephonists in Harrods – and were a frugal pair, their only indulgence being an impressive collection of costume jewellery, purchased mainly from Woolworths in their lunch hour, during their ‘working years’. Their flat smelt quite different to Mrs Appleyard’s, lavender water and Mansion House polish – the scent of old ladies. Ursula sometimes did shopping for both the Nesbits and Mrs Appleyard. Mrs Appleyard was always ready at the door with the exact money that she owed (she knew the price of everything) and a polite ‘thank you’, but the Nesbits were forever trying to inveigle Ursula inside with weak tea and stale biscuits.

Below them, on the second floor, were to be found Mr Bentley (‘a queer fish’, they were all agreed) whose flat smelt (appropriately) of the finnan haddock he boiled in milk for his supper, and next door to him the aloof Miss Hartnell (whose flat smelt of nothing at all) who was a housekeeper at the Hyde Park Hotel and rather severe, as if nothing could ever hope to meet her standards. She made Ursula feel distinctly wanting.

‘Disappointed in love, I believe,’ Ruth Nesbit whispered in mitigation to Ursula, clamping her bird-boned hand on her chest as if her own frail heart might be about to jump ship and attach itself to someone unsuitable. Both the Misses Nesbit were deeply sentimental about love, never having experienced its rigours. Miss Hartnell looked more as if she would mete out disappointment than receive it.

‘I also have some records,’ Mrs Appleyard said with the earnestness of a conspirator. ‘But, alas, no gramophone.’ Mrs Appleyard’s ‘alas’ seemed freighted with all the tragedy of a broken continent. It could hardly bear the weight it was asked to carry.

‘Well, do please feel welcome to come and play them on mine,’ Ursula said, rather hoping that the downtrodden Mrs Appleyard wouldn’t take up the offer. She wondered what kind of music Mrs Appleyard possessed. It seemed impossible that it could be anything very jolly.

‘Brahms,’ Mrs Appleyard said, answering the unasked question. ‘And Mahler.’ The baby shifted restlessly as if disturbed by the prospect of Mahler. Whenever Ursula met Mrs Appleyard on the stairs or the landing, the baby was asleep. It was as if there were two babies, the one inside the flat who never stopped crying and the one outside who never started.

‘Would you mind holding Emil for a moment while I find my keys?’ Mrs Appleyard asked, handing the cumbersome child over without waiting for an answer.

‘Emil,’ Ursula murmured. She hadn’t thought of the baby as having a name. Emil was, as usual, dressed for some kind of Arctic winter, bulked out with nappies and rubber knickers and romper suits and all kinds of knitted and beribboned garments. Ursula wasn’t a stranger to babies, both she and Pamela had mothered Teddy and Jimmy with the same enthusiasm they accorded puppies and kittens and rabbits, and she was the very picture of a doting aunt where Pamela’s boys were concerned, but Mrs Appleyard’s baby was of a less appealing order. The Todd babies smelt sweetly of milk and talcum powder and the fresh air that their clothes were dried in, whereas Emil had a slightly gamey scent.

Mrs Appleyard rummaged for her keys in her large battered handbag, an item that looked as if it, too, had crossed Europe from a faraway country (of which Ursula, patently, knew nothing). With a great sigh, Mrs Appleyard finally located the keys at the bottom of the bag. The baby, perhaps sensing the proximity of the threshold, squirmed in Ursula’s arms as if preparing itself for the transition. It opened its eyes and looked rather quarrelsome.

‘Thank you, Miss Todd,’ Mrs Appleyard said, reclaiming the baby. ‘It was nice talking to you.’

‘Ursula,’ Ursula said. ‘Do please call me Ursula.’

Mrs Appleyard hesitated before saying, almost shyly, ‘Eryka. E-r-y-k-a.’ They had lived next door to each other for a year now but this was the nearest they had come to intimacy.

Almost as soon as her door closed the baby began its customary roaring. ‘Does she stick pins in it?’ Pamela wrote. Pamela produced placid babies. ‘They don’t tend to turn feral until they’re two,’ she said. She had given birth to another boy, Gerald, just before last Christmas. ‘Better luck next time,’ Ursula said when she saw her. She had taken a train north to visit the new arrival, a long and challenging journey, most of which was spent in the guard’s van, on a train packed with soldiers on their way to a training camp. She had been subjected to a barrage of sexual innuendo which had started as amusing and ended as tedious. ‘Not exactly perfect gentle knights,’ she said to Pamela when she finally arrived, the last part of the journey being accomplished in a donkey-cart as if time had slipped into some other century, some other country even.

Poor Pammy was bored with the phoney war and with being shut up with so many little boys, ‘like being a matron in a boys’ school’. Not to mention Jeanette who had proved to be ‘a bit of a slacker’ (not to mention a moaner and a snorer). ‘One expects better of a vicar’s daughter,’ Pamela wrote, ‘although goodness knows why.’ She had decamped back to Finchley in the spring but since the nightly raids had started she had retreated with her brood to Fox Corner ‘for the duration’, despite her previous misgivings about living with Sylvie. Harold, now at St Thomas’s, was working on the front line. The nurses’ home there had been bombed a couple of weeks ago and five nurses killed. ‘Every night is hell,’ Harold reported. It was the same report that Ralph gave from the bombsites.

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.’

‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said. ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.’

‘Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?’ Ralph asked mildly.

‘Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.’

‘But nobody knows what’s going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him. Could you do that? Could you kill a baby? With a gun? Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood.’

If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought. Not just Teddy, of course, the rest of the world, too. Teddy had applied to the RAF the day after war was declared. He had been working on a small farm in Suffolk. After Oxford he had done a year at an agricultural college and then had worked on different farms and smallholdings around the country. He wanted to know everything, he said, before he got his own place. (‘A farmer?’ Sylvie still said.) He didn’t want to be one of those idealistic back-to-the-land types who ended up knee-deep in muddy yards with sickly cows and dead lambs, their crops not worth picking. (He had worked on one of those places apparently.)

Teddy still wrote poetry and Hugh said, ‘A poet farmer, eh? Like Virgil. We’ll expect a new Georgics from you.’ Ursula wondered how Nancy felt about being a farmer’s wife. She was awfully smart, doing research at Cambridge into some arcane and bewildering aspect of maths. (‘All gibberish to me,’ Teddy said.) And now his childhood dream of becoming a pilot was suddenly and unexpectedly within reach. At the moment he was safe in Canada at an Empire Training School, learning to fly, sending home letters about how much food there was, how great the weather was, making Ursula green with envy. She wished he could stay over there for ever, out of harm’s way.

‘How did we end up talking about murdering babies in cold blood?’ Ursula said to Ralph. ‘Mind you,’ she cocked her head towards the wall and the rise and fall of Emil’s siren wail.

Ralph laughed. ‘He’s not so bad tonight. Mind you, I’d go batty if my children made a racket like that.’

Ursula thought it was interesting that he said ‘my children’, not ‘our children’. Strange to be thinking of having children at all during a time when the very existence of the future was in doubt. She stood up rather abruptly and said, ‘The raids will be starting soon.’ Back at the beginning of the Blitz they would have said, ‘They can’t come every night’, now they knew they could. (‘Is this to be life for ever,’ she wrote to Teddy, ‘to be harried without rest by the bombs?’) Fifty-six nights in a row now so that it was beginning to seem possible that there really would be no end to it.

‘You’re like a dog,’ Ralph said. ‘You’ve got a sixth sense for the raiders.’

‘Well you’d better believe me then and go. Or you’ll have to come down to the dark hole of Calcutta and you know you won’t like that.’ The sprawling Miller family, Ursula had counted at least four generations, lived on the ground floor and in the semi-basement of the house in Argyll Road. They also had access down to a further level, a subterranean cellar that the residents of the house used as an air-raid shelter. It was a maze, a mouldy, unpleasant space, full of spiders and beetles, and felt horribly crowded if they were all in there, especially once the Millers’ dog, a shapeless rug of fur called Billy, was dragged reluctantly down the stairs to join them. They had also, of course, to put up with the tears and lamentations of Emil, who was passed around between the cellar occupants like an unwanted parcel in a futile attempt to pacify him.

Mr Miller, in an effort to make the cellar ‘homely’ (something it could never be), had taped some reproductions of ‘great English art’, as he called it, against the sandbagged walls. These colour plates – The Haywain, Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (how smug they looked) and Bubbles (the most sickly Millais possible, in Ursula’s opinion) – looked suspiciously as if they had been pilfered from expensive reference books on art. ‘Culture,’ Mr Miller said, nodding sagely. Ursula wondered what she would have chosen to represent ‘great English art’. Turner perhaps, the smudged, fugitive content of the late works. Not to the Millers’ taste at all, she suspected.

She had sewn the collar on her blouse. She had switched off the Sturm und Drang of the wireless broadcast and listened instead to Ma Rainey singing ‘Yonder Come the Blues’ – an antidote to all the easy sentiment that was beginning to pour out of the wireless. And she had eaten bread and cheese with Ralph, attempted the crossword and then hurried him out of the door with a kiss. Then she had turned off the light and moved the blackout aside so that she could catch a glimpse of him walking away down Argyll Road. Despite his limp (or perhaps because of it) he had a buoyant gait as if he was expecting something interesting to cross his path. It reminded her of Teddy.

He knew that she was watching him but he didn’t look back, simply raised an arm in silent salute and was swallowed by the dark. There was some light though, a bright slice of crescent moon and a scattering of the faintest stars as though someone had flung a handful of diamond dust into the dark. The Queen-Moon, surrounded by all her starry Fays, although she suspected Keats was writing about a full moon and the moon above Argyll Road seemed more like a moon-in-waiting. She was in a – rather poor – poetic mood. It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it.

Bridget always said it was bad luck to look at the moon through glass and Ursula let the blind fall back into place and closed the curtains tightly.

Ralph was casual with his safety. After Dunkirk, he said, he felt proofed against sudden violent death. It seemed to Ursula that in a time of war, when one was surrounded by an immense amount of sudden violent death, the odds were quite changed and it was impossible to be protected from anything.

As she knew it would, the caterwauling commenced, followed swiftly by the guns in Hyde Park starting up and the noise of the first bombs, over the docks again by the sound of it. She was galvanized into action, snatching her torch from the hook beside the front door where it lived like a holy relic, picking up her book, also kept by the door. It was her ‘shelter book’ – Du côté de chez Swann. Now that the war looked as if it were going to last for ever Ursula had decided she might as well embark on Proust.

The planes whined overhead and then she heard the fearsome swish of a bomb descending and then a walloping thump! as it landed somewhere nearby. Sometimes an explosion sounded much closer than it actually was. (How quickly one acquired new knowledge in the most unlikely subjects.) She looked for her shelter suit. She was wearing a rather flimsy dress considering the season and it was horribly cold and damp in the cellar. The shelter suit had been bought by Sylvie, up in town for the day not long before the bombing started. They had gone for a stroll along Piccadilly and Sylvie had spotted an advertisement in Simpson’s window for ‘tailored shelter suits’ and insisted that they go in and try them on. Ursula couldn’t imagine her mother in a shelter, let alone a shelter suit, but it was clearly a garment, a uniform even, that attracted Sylvie. ‘It’ll be rather good for mucking out hens,’ she said and bought them one each.

The next massive bang had an urgency to it and Ursula abandoned her search for the dratted suit and instead she grabbed the blanket of woollen squares crocheted by Bridget. (‘I was going to parcel it up and send it off to the Red Cross,’ Bridget had written in her round schoolgirl’s hand, ‘but then I thought you might need it more.’

‘You see, even within my own family I have the status of a refugee,’ Ursula wrote to Pamela.)

She passed the Nesbit sisters on the stairs. ‘Ooh, bad luck, Miss Todd,’ Lavinia giggled. ‘Crossing on the stairs, you know.’

Ursula was going down, the sisters were coming up. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ she said, rather pointlessly.

‘I forgot my knitting,’ Lavinia said. She was wearing an enamel brooch shaped like a black cat. A little rhinestone winked for an eye. ‘She’s knitting leggings for Mrs Appleyard’s baby,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s so cold in their flat.’ Ursula wondered how many more knitted garments could be applied to the poor child before it resembled a sheep. Not a lamb. Nothing lamb-like about the Appleyard infant. Emil, she reminded herself.

‘Well, do hurry, won’t you?’ she said.

‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,’ Mr Miller said as they trooped, one by one, into the cellar. A ragtag assortment of chairs and temporary bedding filled the dank space. There were two ancient army camp beds that Mr Miller had scrounged from somewhere and on which the Nesbits were persuaded to rest their elderly bones. In the current absence of either sister, Billy the dog had installed himself on one of them. There was also a small spirit stove and an Aladdin paraffin stove, both of which seemed to Ursula extraordinarily dangerous items to be in such proximity when people were dropping bombs on you. (The Millers were effortlessly sanguine in the face of jeopardy.)

The roll-call was almost complete – Mrs Appleyard and Emil, the queer fish Mr Bentley, Miss Hartnell and the full complement of Millers. Mrs Miller voiced her concern for the whereabouts of the Nesbits and Mr Miller volunteered to go and hurry them up (‘ruddy knitting and all’) but just then a tremendous explosion rocked the cellar. Ursula felt the foundations trembling as the blast moved through the earth beneath her. Obedient to Hugh’s directive, she dropped to the floor with her hands over her head, grabbing the nearest of the smaller Miller boys (‘Oi, get your hands off me!’) on the way down. She crouched awkwardly over him but he wriggled away from her.

All went quiet.

‘That wasn’t our house,’ the boy said dismissively, swaggering a little to restore his wounded male dignity.

Mrs Appleyard had also thrown herself to the floor, the baby soft-shelled beneath her. Mrs Miller had clutched not one of her brood but the old Farrah’s Harrogate toffee tin that contained her savings and insurance policies.

Mr Bentley, his voice sounding a quaver higher than normal, asked, ‘Was that us?’ No, thought Ursula, we would be dead if it had been. She sat down again on one of the rickety bentwood chairs provided by Mr Miller. She could feel her heart, too loud. She began to shiver and wrapped herself in Bridget’s crochet.

‘Nah, the boy’s right,’ Mr Miller said, ‘that sounded like Essex Villas.’ Mr Miller always professed to know where the bombs were dropping. Surprisingly, he was often correct. All of the Millers were adept at wartime language as well as wartime spirit. They could all take it. (‘And we can give it out too, can’t we?’ Pamela wrote. ‘You would think we had no blood on our hands.’)

‘The backbone of England, no doubt,’ Sylvie said to Ursula on first (and last) acquaintance with them. Mrs Miller had invited Sylvie down to her kitchen for a cup of tea but Sylvie was still cross at the state of Ursula’s curtains and rugs, for which she blamed Mrs Miller, under the apprehension that she was the landlady and not merely another renter. (She was deaf to Ursula’s explanations.) Sylvie behaved as though she were a duchess visiting the cottage of one of her rustic tenants. Ursula imagined Mrs Miller later saying to Mr Miller, ‘Hoity-toity, that one.’

Up above, the racket of a steady bombardment was now under way, they could hear the timpani of the big bombs, the whistling of shells and the thunder of a nearby mobile artillery unit. Every now and then the foundations of the cellar shook with a crump and thump and bump as the bombs hammered down on the city. Emil howled, Billy the dog howled, a couple of the smallest Millers howled. All in discord with each other, an unwelcome counterpoint to the Donner und Blitzen of the Luftwaffe. A terrible, endless storm. Despair behind, and death before.

‘Crikey, old Fritz is really trying to put the wind up us tonight,’ Mr Miller said, calmly adjusting a lamp for all the world as if they were on a camping trip. He was responsible for morale in the cellar. Like Hugh, he had lived through the trenches and claimed that he was impervious to threats from Jerry. There was a whole club of them, Crighton, Ralph, Mr Miller, even Hugh, who had undergone their ordeal by fire and mud and water and who presumed it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

‘What’s old Fritz up to, eh?’ he said soothingly to one of the smaller, more frightened children. ‘Trying to stop me getting my beauty sleep?’ The Germans always came singularly for Mr Miller in the person of Fritz and Jerry, Otto, Hermann, Hans, sometimes Adolf himself was four miles up dropping his high explosive.

Mrs Miller (Dolly), an embodiment of the triumph of experience over hope (unlike her spouse), was doling out ‘refreshments’ of tea, cocoa, biscuits and bread and margarine. The Millers, a family of generous morals, were never short of rations thanks to Renee, their eldest daughter, who had ‘connections’. Renee was eighteen and fully formed in every way and seemed to be a girl of most easy virtue. Miss Hartnell made it clear that she found Renee very wanting indeed although she was not averse to sharing in the provender that she brought home. Ursula got the impression that one of the smaller Miller children was actually Renee’s rather than Mrs Miller’s and had, in a pragmatic way, simply been absorbed into the family pool.

Renee’s ‘connections’ were ambiguous but a few weeks ago Ursula had spotted her in the first-floor coffee lounge of the Charing Cross Hotel sipping daintily on gin in the company of a sleek and rather prosperous-looking man who had ‘racketeer’ written all over him.

‘There’s a sleazy gent if ever I saw one,’ Jimmy had laughed. Jimmy, the baby produced to celebrate the peace after the war to end all wars, was about to fight in another one. He had a few days’ leave from his army training and they had taken refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel while an unexploded bomb in the Strand was being dealt with. They could hear the naval guns that had been stationed on trolleys between Vauxhall and Waterloo – boom-boom-boom – but the bombers were looking for other targets and seemed to have moved on. ‘Doesn’t it ever stop?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Apparently not.’

‘It’s safer in the army,’ he laughed. He had joined the ranks as a private even though the army had offered him a commission. He wanted to be one of the chaps, he said. (‘But someone has to be an officer, surely?’ Hugh puzzled. ‘Better if it’s someone with a bit of intelligence.’)

He wanted the experience. He wanted to be a writer, he said, and what better than a war to reveal to him the heights and depths of the human condition? ‘A writer?’ Sylvie said. ‘I fear the hand of the evil fairy rocked his cradle.’ She meant Izzie, Ursula supposed.

It had been lovely spending time with Jimmy. Jimmy was dashing in his battledress and gained an entrance wherever they went – risqué venues in Dean Street and Archer Street, the Boeuf sur le Toit in Orange Street that was very risqué indeed (if not downright risky), places that made Ursula wonder about Jimmy. All in the pursuit of the human condition, he said. They got very drunk and a little silly and it was all rather a relief from cowering in the Millers’ cellar. ‘Promise you won’t die,’ she said to Jimmy as they groped like a blind couple along the Haymarket, listening to some other part of London being blown out of existence.

‘Do my best,’ Jimmy said.

She was cold. The water she was lying in was making her even colder. She needed to move. Could she move? Apparently not. How long had she been lying here? Ten minutes? Ten years? Time had ceased. Everything seemed to have ceased. Only the awful concoction of smells remained. She was in the cellar. She knew that because she could see Bubbles, still miraculously taped to a sandbag near her head. Was she going to die looking at this banality? Then banality seemed suddenly welcome as a ghastly vision appeared at her side. A terrible ghost, black eyes in a grey face and wild hair, was clawing at her. ‘Have you seen my baby?’ the ghost said. It took Ursula a few moments to realize that this was no ghost. It was Mrs Appleyard, her face covered in dirt and bomb dust and streaked with blood and tears. ‘Have you seen my baby?’ she said again.

‘No,’ Ursula whispered, her mouth dry from whatever filth had been falling. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again Mrs Appleyard had disappeared. She might have imagined her, perhaps she was delirious. Or perhaps it really had been the ghost of Mrs Appleyard and they were both trapped in some desolate limbo.

Her attention was caught again by Lavinia Nesbit’s dress hanging from the Millers’ picture rail. But it wasn’t Lavinia Nesbit’s dress. A dress didn’t have arms in it. Not sleeves, but arms. With hands. Something on the dress winked at Ursula, a little cat’s eye caught by the crescent moon. The headless, legless body of Lavinia Nesbit herself was hanging from the Millers’ picture rail. It was so absurd that a laugh began to boil up inside Ursula. It never broke because something shifted – a beam, or part of the wall – and she was sprinkled with a shower of talcum-like dust. Her heart thumped uncontrollably in her chest. It was sore, a time-delay bomb waiting to go off.

For the first time she felt panic. No one was coming to help her. Certainly not the deranged ghost of Mrs Appleyard. She was going to die alone in the cellar of Argyll Road, with nothing but Bubbles and the headless Lavinia Nesbit for company. If Hugh were here, or Teddy or Jimmy, or even Pamela, they would be fighting to get her out of here, to save her. They would care. But there was no one here to care. She heard herself mewling like an injured cat. How sorry she felt for herself, as if she were someone else.

Mrs Miller had said, ‘Well, I think we could all do with a nice cup of cocoa, don’t you?’ Mr Miller was fretting about the Nesbits again and Ursula, utterly fed up with the claustrophobia of the cellar, said, ‘I’ll go and look for them,’ and got up from the rickety dining chair just as the swish and pheew announced the arrival of a high explosive bomb. There was a giant thunderclap, a great cracking noise as the wall of hell suddenly split open and let all the demons out and then the tremendous suction and compression, as if her insides, her lungs, her heart and stomach, even her eyeballs were being sucked from her body. Salute the last and everlasting day. This is it, she thought. This is how I die.

A voice broke into the silence, almost next to her ear, a man’s voice saying, ‘Come on then, miss, let’s see if we can get you out of here, shall we?’ Ursula could see his face, grimy and sweaty as if he had tunnelled to reach her. (She supposed he had.) She was surprised to recognize him. It was one of their local ARP wardens, a new one.

‘What’s your name, miss? Can you tell me?’ Ursula muttered her name but she knew it hadn’t come out right. ‘Urry?’ he queried. ‘What’s that then – Mary? Susie?’

She didn’t want to die as a Susie. But did it matter?

‘Baby,’ she mumbled to the warden.

‘Baby?’ he said sharply. ‘You’ve got a baby?’ He backed away slightly and shouted something to someone unseen. She heard other voices and realized there were lots of people now. As if to verify this the warden said, ‘We’re all here to get you out. The gas boys have turned the gas off and we’ll be moving you in a tick. Don’t you worry. Now tell me about your baby, Susie. Were you holding him? Is he just a littl’un?’ Ursula thought of Emil, as heavy as a bomb (who had been caught out holding him when the music stopped and the house exploded?), and tried to speak but found herself mewling again.

Something creaked and groaned overhead and the warden grabbed her hand and said, ‘It’s all right, I’m here,’ and she felt immensely grateful to him, and to all the people toiling to get her out. And she thought how grateful Hugh would be too. The thought of her father made her start to cry and the warden said, ‘There, there, Susie, everything’s all right, soon have you out of here, like a winkle out of a shell. Get you a nice cup of tea, eh? How does that sound? Lovely, eh? Fancy one myself.’

Snow seemed to be falling, tiny icy needles on her skin. ‘So cold,’ she murmured.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you’ll see,’ the warden said. He struggled out of the coat he was wearing and covered her with it. There wasn’t room for such a generous manoeuvre and he knocked something, causing a shower of debris to fall on them both.

‘Oh,’ she said to the warden because she felt suddenly violently sick but it passed and she felt calmer. Leaves were falling now mixed with the dust and ash and flakes of the dead and suddenly she was blanketed in piles of wafery beech leaves. They smelt of mushrooms and bonfires and something sweet. Mrs Glover’s gingerbread. So much nicer than sewage and gas.

‘Come on, girl,’ the warden said. ‘Come on, Susie, don’t go to sleep on me now.’ He held her hand tighter but Ursula was looking at something glinting and twirling in the sunlight. A rabbit? No, a hare. A silver hare, spinning slowly in front of her eyes. It was mesmerizing. It was the prettiest thing she had ever seen.

She was flying off a roof into the night. She was in a cornfield with the sun beating down. Picking raspberries in the lane. Playing hide-and-seek with Teddy. She’s a funny little thing, someone said. Not the warden, surely? And then the snow began to come down. The night sky was no longer high above, it was all around her, like a warm dark sea.

She was floating into the blackout. She tried to say something to the warden. Thank you. But it didn’t matter any more. Nothing mattered. The darkness had fallen.