Life after life

September 1940

SHE MISSED CRIGHTON, more than she had let on to either him or Pamela. He had taken a room at the Savoy on the night before war was declared and she had got dressed up in her good royal-blue satin only for him to announce that they should call an end to things (‘to say our adieux’). ‘It’s going to get awfully bloody,’ he said, but whether he meant the war or them she wasn’t sure.

Despite or perhaps because of their adieux, they went to bed together and he spent a lot of time telling her how much he would miss ‘this body’, the ‘lineaments of your flesh’, ‘this pretty face’, and so on, until she got rather fed up and said, ‘Well, it is you that wants out of this, not me.’

She wondered if he made love to Moira in the same way – detachment and passion in equal measure – but it was one of those questions you couldn’t ask in case he were to tell the truth. What did it matter, Moira was getting him back. Soiled goods perhaps but hers nonetheless.

The next morning they breakfasted in the room and then listened to Chamberlain’s speech. There was a wireless in the suite. Not long after, a siren sounded but strangely neither of them panicked. It all seemed very unreal. ‘I expect it’s a test,’ Crighton said. Ursula thought that from now on everything would probably be a test.

They left the hotel and walked along the Embankment to Westminster Bridge, where air-raid wardens were blowing their whistles and shouting that the scare was over. Others were riding along on bicycles with All-Clear signs attached to them, and Crighton said, ‘Good God, I fear for us if this is the best we can muster in a raid.’ Sandbags were being stacked along the bridge, being stacked everywhere and Ursula thought it was just as well there was so much sand in the world. She tried to remember the lines from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. If seven maids with seven mops – but they had reached Whitehall by now and Crighton broke into her thoughts by taking both her hands in his and saying, ‘I must go now, darling,’ and for a moment he sounded like a rather cheap and sentimental movie star. She decided she would live out the war as a nun. Much easier.

She had watched him walk along Whitehall and suddenly felt horribly alone. She might, after all, go back to Finchley.