Life after life

November 1940

MISS WOOLF WAS treating them to a little piano recital. ‘Some Beethoven,’ she said. ‘I’m no Myra Hess, but I thought it would be nice.’ She was correct on both counts. Mr Armitage, the opera singer, asked Miss Woolf if she could accompany him if he sang ‘Non più andrai’ from The Marriage of Figaro and Miss Woolf, particularly game this evening, said she would certainly have a go. It was a rousing performance (‘unexpectedly virile’ was Miss Woolf’s verdict) and no one objected when Mr Bullock (no surprise) and Mr Simms (quite a surprise) joined in with a rather ribald version.

‘I know this one!’ Stella said, which was true of the tune but not the words as she sang enthusiastically, ‘Dum-di-dum, dum-di-dum, dum-didum-dum,’ and so on.

Their post had recently been augmented by two wardens. The first, Mr Emslie, was a grocer and had come from another post, having been bombed out of his house, his shop and his sector. He, like Mr Simms and Mr Palmer before him, was a veteran of the previous war. The second addition was in possession of a more exotic background. Stella was one of Mr Bullock’s ‘chorus girls’ and confessed (readily) to being a ‘striptease artiste’ but Mr Armitage the opera singer said, ‘We’re all artistes here, darling.’

‘What a bloody fairy that man is,’ Mr Bullock muttered, ‘put him in the army, that would sort him out.’ ‘I doubt it,’ Miss Woolf said. (And it did rather beg the question why the strapping Mr Bullock himself had not been called up for active service.) ‘So,’ Mr Bullock concluded, ‘we’ve got a Yid, a pansy and a tart, sounds like a dirty music-hall joke.’

‘It is intolerance that has brought us to this pass, Mr Bullock,’ Miss Woolf reproved him mildly. They had all been decidedly tetchy – even Miss Woolf – since Mr Palmer’s death. They would be better off saving their grudges for peacetime, Ursula thought. It wasn’t just Mr Palmer’s death, of course, but also the lack of sleep and the relentless nightly raids. How long could the Germans keep it up? For ever?

‘And, oh, I don’t know,’ Miss Woolf said quietly to her as she made tea, ‘it’s just the general sense of dirtiness, as if one will never be clean again, as if poor old London will never be clean again. Everything is so awfully shabby, you know?’

It was a relief, therefore, that their little impromptu concert party was good-natured, everyone seemingly in better spirits than of late.

Mr Armitage followed his Figaro with an unaccompanied and impassioned rendition of ‘O mio babbino caro’ (‘How versatile he is,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘I always thought that was a woman’s aria’) that they all applauded wildly. Then Herr Zimmerman, their refugee, said he would be honoured to play something for them.

‘And then are you going to strip, sweetheart?’ Mr Bullock asked Stella, who said, ‘If you want,’ and winked in complicity at Ursula. (‘Trust me to get stuck with a load of bolshie women,’ Mr Bullock complained. Frequently.)

Miss Woolf said, looking worried, ‘Your violin is here?’ to Herr Zimmerman. ‘Is it safe here?’ He had never brought his instrument to the post before. It was quite valuable, Miss Woolf said, and not just from a monetary point of view, for he had left his entire family behind in Germany and the violin was all he had from his former life. Miss Woolf said that she had had a ‘harrowing’ late night ‘chat’ with Herr Zimmerman about the situation in Germany. ‘Things are terrible over there, you know.’

‘I know,’ Ursula said.

‘Do you?’ Miss Woolf said, her interest piqued. ‘Do you have friends there?’

‘No,’ Ursula said. ‘No one. Sometimes one just knows, doesn’t one?’

Herr Zimmerman produced his violin and said, ‘You must forgive me, I am not a soloist,’ and then announced, almost apologetically, ‘Bach. Sonata in G Minor.’

‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula’s ear, ‘how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too. Think of the Choral Symphony – Alle Menschen werden Brüder.’

Ursula didn’t answer as Herr Zimmerman had raised his bow, poised for performance, and a deep hush fell as if they were in a concert hall rather than a rundown post. Some of the silence was due to the quality of the performance (‘Sublime,’ Miss Woolf judged it later. ‘Really beautiful,’ Stella said) and some out of respect perhaps for Herr Zimmerman’s refugee status, but there was also something so spare about the music that it left plenty of room for one to engage deeply with one’s thoughts. Ursula found herself dwelling on Hugh’s death, his absence more than his death. It was only a fortnight since he died and she was still expecting to see him again. These were the thoughts she had put away for a future time and now the future was suddenly on her. She was relieved not to be embarrassed by tears, instead she was plunged into an awful melancholy. As if sensing her emotions, Miss Woolf reached out and gripped her hand firmly. Ursula could feel that Miss Woolf herself was almost vibrating with emotion.

When the music finished there was a moment of pure, profound silence, as if the world had stopped breathing, and then instead of praise and applause the peace was broken by the purple warning – ‘bombers within twenty minutes’. It was rather odd to think that these alerts were coming from her own Region 5 War Room, sent by the girls in the teleprinter room.

‘Come on then,’ Mr Simms said, standing up and sighing heavily, ‘let’s get out there.’ By the time they were out the red alert had come through. Just twelve minutes, if they were lucky, to dragoon people into shelters, the siren at their back.

Ursula never used public shelters, there was something about the crush of bodies, the claustrophobia, that made her skin crawl. They had attended a particularly gruesome incident when a shelter took a direct hit from a parachute mine in their sector. Ursula thought that she would rather die out in the open than trapped like a fox in a hole.

It was a beautiful evening. A crescent moon and her bevy of stars had pierced the black backcloth of night. She thought of Romeo’s encomium to Juliet – It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. Ursula was in a poetic mood, some might have said, herself included, overly poetic, as a consequence of her mournful mood. There was no Mr Durkin to misquote any more. He had suffered a heart attack during an incident. He was recovering, ‘thank goodness’, Miss Woolf said. She had found time to visit him in hospital and Ursula felt no guilt that she had not. Hugh was dead, Mr Durkin wasn’t, there was little room in her heart for sympathy. Mr Durkin’s position as Miss Woolf’s deputy had been taken by Mr Simms.

The strident noises of war had begun. The boom of the barrage, the raiders’ engines overhead with that monotonous, uneven beat that made her nauseous. The gun discharges, the searchlights poking their fingers into the sky, the muted anticipation of dread – all soon spoiled any idea of poetry.

By the time they arrived at the incident everyone was there, the gas and water, the Bomb Disposal Squad, heavy rescue, light rescue, stretcher parties, the mortuary van (a baker’s van by day). The road was carpeted with the tangled hoses of an AFS unit as on one side of the street a building was well on fire, with sparks and burning embers spitting out. Ursula thought she had caught a glimpse of Fred Smith, his features briefly illuminated by the flames, but came to the conclusion that she had imagined it.

The rescue squad was as cautious as ever with their torches and lamps even though the fire was blazing away at their backs. Yet, to a man, they had cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, despite the fact that the gas men hadn’t cleared the area, not to mention that the presence of the Bomb Disposal Squad indicated a bomb that might go off at any moment. Everyone just got on with the job in hand (needs must), cavalier in the face of possible disaster. Or perhaps some people (and Ursula wondered if she included herself among them nowadays) simply didn’t care any more.

She had an uncomfortable feeling, a premonition perhaps, that things were not going to go well tonight. ‘It was the Bach,’ Miss Woolf comforted, ‘it was unsettling for the soul.’

Apparently, the street straddled two sectors and the incident officer in charge was wrangling with two wardens who both claimed dominion over it. Miss Woolf didn’t join this little fracas as it turned out that it wasn’t their sector at all, but as it was obviously such a major incident she declared that their post should pitch in and get on with it and ignore what anyone said to them.

‘Outlaws,’ Mr Bullock said, appreciatively.

‘Hardly,’ Miss Woolf said.

The half of the street that wasn’t on fire had been badly hit and the acid-raw smell of powdered brick and cordite struck their lungs immediately. Ursula tried to think of the meadow at the back of the copse at Fox Corner. Flax and larkspur, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies. She thought of the smell of new-mown grass and the freshness of summer rain. This was a new diversionary tactic to combat the brutish scents of an explosion. (‘Does it work?’ a curious Mr Emslie asked. ‘Not really,’ Ursula said.) ‘I used to think of my mother’s perfume,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘April Violets. But unfortunately now when I try to remember my mother all I can think of are the bombs.’

Ursula offered Mr Emslie a peppermint. ‘It helps a little bit,’ she said.

The closer they got to the incident the worse it proved to be (the opposite, in Ursula’s experience, was rarely so).

A grisly tableau was the first thing to greet them – mangled bodies were strewn around, many of them no more than limbless torsos, like tailor’s dummies, their clothes blown off. Ursula was reminded of the mannequins she had seen with Ralph in Oxford Street, after the John Lewis bomb. A stretcher-bearer, lacking as yet any live casualties, was picking up limbs – arms and legs that were sticking out of the rubble. He looked as if he was intending to piece the dead together again at a later date. Did someone do that, Ursula wondered? In the mortuaries – try and match people up, like macabre jigsaws? Some people were beyond re-creation, of course – two men from the rescue squad were raking and shovelling lumps of flesh into baskets, another was scrubbing something off a wall with a yard brush.

Ursula wondered if she knew any of the victims. Their flat in Phillimore Gardens was a mere couple of streets away from here. Perhaps she passed some of them in the morning on her way to work, or had spoken to them in the grocer’s or the butcher’s.

‘Apparently there are quite a lot of people unaccounted for,’ Miss Woolf said. She had spoken to the Incident Officer, who had been grateful, it seemed, to talk to a warden with common sense. ‘We’re not outlaws any more, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

One floor above the man with the yard brush (although there was no floor) a dress was hanging on a coat hanger from a picture rail. Ursula often found herself more moved by these small reminders of domestic life – the kettle still on the stove, the table laid for a supper that would never be eaten – than she was by the greater misery and destruction that surrounded them. Although when she looked at the dress now she realized that there was a woman still wearing it, her head and legs blown off but not her arms. The capriciousness of high explosives never ceased to surprise Ursula. The woman seemed to have become fused with the wall in some way. The fire was burning so brightly that she could make out a little brooch still pinned to the dress. A black cat, a rhinestone for an eye.

Rubble shifted underfoot as she made her way to the back wall of this same house. There was a woman sitting propped up amongst the rubble, arms and legs splayed like a rag doll. She looked as if she had been tossed in the air and landed any old how – which was probably the case. Ursula tried to signal to the stretcher-bearer but there was now a stream of bombers passing overhead and no one could hear her above the noise.

The woman was grey with dust so that it was almost impossible to tell how old she was. She had a horrible-looking burn on her hand. Ursula fumbled in her first-aid pack for the tube of Burnol and smeared some of the ointment on to her hand. She didn’t know why, the woman looked too far gone to be cured by Burnol. She wished she had some water, it was painful to see how dry the woman’s lips were. Unexpectedly, she opened her dark eyes, her lashes pale and spiky with dust, and tried to say something but her voice was so hoarse from the dust that Ursula couldn’t understand her. Was she foreign? ‘What is it?’ Ursula asked. She had a feeling the woman was very near death now.

‘Baby,’ the woman rasped suddenly, ‘where’s my baby?’

‘Baby?’ Ursula echoed, looking around. She could see no sign of any baby. It could be anywhere in the rubble.

‘His name,’ the woman said, guttural and indistinct – she was making a tremendous effort to be lucid – ‘is Emil.’

‘Emil?’

The woman nodded her head very slightly as if she were no longer capable of speech. Ursula looked around again for any sign of a baby. She turned back to the woman to ask how big her baby was but her head was lolling limply and when Ursula felt for a pulse she found nothing.

She left the woman there and went in search of the living.

‘Can you take Mr Emslie a morphia tablet?’ Miss Woolf asked. They could both hear a woman screaming and swearing like a navvy and Miss Woolf added, ‘To the lady that’s making all the noise.’ A good rule of thumb was that the more noise someone was making the less likely they were to die. This particular casualty sounded as if she were ready to fight her way out single-handed from the wreckage of the house and run round Kensington Gardens.

Mr Emslie was in the cellar of the house and Ursula had to be lowered down by two men from the rescue squad and then had to worm her way through a barricade of joists and bricks. She was aware that an entire house appeared to be resting precariously on this same barricade. She found Mr Emslie stretched out almost horizontally next to a woman. Below the waist she was completely trapped by the wreckage of the house but she was conscious and extremely articulate about the distress she was in.

‘Soon have you out of here,’ Mr Emslie said. ‘Get you a nice cup of tea, eh? How does that sound? Lovely, eh? Fancy one myself. And here’s Miss Todd with something for the pain,’ he continued soothingly to her. Ursula passed him the tiny morphia tablet. He seemed very good at this, it was hard to imagine him in his grocer’s apron, weighing sugar and patting butter.

One wall of the cellar had been sandbagged but most of the sand had spilled out in the explosion and for an alarming hallucinatory second Ursula was on a beach somewhere, she didn’t know where, a hoop was bowling along beside her in a brisk breeze, seagulls squawking overhead, and then she was back, just as suddenly, in the cellar. Lack of sleep, she thought, it really was the devil.

‘About fucking time,’ the woman said, greedily taking the morphia tablet. ‘You’d think you lot were at a fucking tea-party.’ She was young, Ursula realized, and oddly familiar. She was clutching her handbag, a large black affair, as if it were keeping her afloat in the sea of timber. ‘Have you got a fag, either of you?’ With some difficulty, given the awkward space they were in, Mr Emslie produced a squashed packet of Players from his pocket and then, with even more difficulty, extracted a box of matches. Her fingers tapped restlessly on the leather of the bag. ‘Take your time,’ she said sarcastically.

‘Sorry,’ she said after she had drawn deeply on the cigarette. ‘Being in an endroit like this has an effect on the nerves, you know.’

‘Renee?’ Ursula said, astonished.

‘What’s it to you?’ she said, returning to her former churlish self.

‘We met in the cloakroom at the Charing Cross Hotel a couple of weeks ago.’

‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ she said primly. ‘People are always doing that. I must have one of those faces.’

She took another very long drag on her cigarette and then exhaled slowly and with extraordinary pleasure. ‘You got any more of those little pills?’ she asked. ‘Good black market price for them, I bet.’ She sounded woozy, the morphia kicking in, Ursula supposed, but then the cigarette dropped from her fingers and her eyes rolled back in her head. She started to convulse. Mr Emslie grabbed hold of her hand.

Ursula, glancing at Mr Emslie, caught sight of a colour reproduction of Millais’s Bubbles, hanging by a piece of tape from a sandbag behind him. It was a picture she disliked, she disliked all the Pre-Raphaelites with their droopy, drugged-looking women. Hardly the time and place for art criticism, she thought. She had become almost indifferent to death. Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire. And again she was somewhere else, a little flicker in time. She was descending a staircase, wisteria was blooming, she was flying out of a window.

Mr Emslie was talking encouragingly to Renee. ‘Come on, Susie, don’t give up on us now. We’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you’ll see. All the lads are working on it. And the girls,’ he added for Ursula’s benefit. Renee had stopped convulsing but now she started to shiver alarmingly and Mr Emslie, more urgently now, said, ‘Come on, Susie, come on, girl, stay awake, there’s a good girl.’

‘Her name is Renee,’ Ursula said, ‘even if she denies it.’

‘I call ’em all Susie,’ Mr Emslie said softly. ‘I had a little girl by that name. The diphtheria took her off when she was just a littl’un.’

Renee gave one last great shudder and life disappeared from her half-open eyes.

‘Gone,’ Mr Emslie said sadly. ‘Internal injuries probably.’ He wrote ‘Argyll Road’ on a label in his neat grocer’s hand and tied it to her finger. Ursula removed the handbag from Renee’s rather reluctant grasp and shook its contents out. ‘Her identity card,’ she said, holding it up for Mr Emslie to see. ‘Renee Miller’ it said, indisputably. He added her name to the label.

While Mr Emslie began the complex manoeuvre of turning round in order to make his way back out of the cellar, Ursula picked up the gold cigarette case that had fallen out with the compact and lipstick and French letters and God knows what else that formed the contents of Renee’s handbag. Not a gift but stolen property, she was sure of that. It was a difficult task for Ursula’s imagination to place Renee and Crighton in the same room as each other, let alone the same bed. War did indeed make strange bedfellows of people. He must have picked her up in a hotel somewhere, or perhaps a less salubrious endroit. Where had she learned her French? She probably only had a couple of words. Not from Crighton anyway, he thought English was quite enough to rule the world with.

She slipped the cigarette case and the identity card into a pocket.

The debris shifted in a heart-stopping way as they were trying to back out of the cellar (they’d given up on trying to turn round). They remained paralysed, crouched like cats, hardly daring to take a breath for what seemed an eternity. When it felt safe to move again they found that this new arrangement of wreckage had made the barricade impenetrable and they were forced to find another, tortuous exit, creeping on their hands and knees through the shattered base of the building. ‘Doing my back in, this lark is,’ Mr Emslie muttered behind her.

‘Doing my knees in,’ Ursula said. They carried on with weary doggedness. Ursula cheered herself up with the thought of buttered toast, although Phillimore Gardens was out of butter and unless Millie had gone out and queued (unlikely), there was no bread either.

The cellar seemed to be an endless maze and it slowly dawned on Ursula why there were people unaccounted for up above – they were all secretly cached down here. The residents of the house clearly used this part of the cellar as a shelter. The dead here – men, women, children, even a dog – looked as though they had been entombed where they had been sitting. They were completely cloaked in a shell of dust and looked more like sculptures, or fossils. She was reminded of Pompeii or Herculaneum. Ursula had visited both, during her ambitiously titled ‘grand tour’ of Europe. She had been lodged in Bologna where she had made friends with an American girl – Kathy, a gung-ho type – and they had taken a whistle-stop tour – Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples – before Ursula left for France and the final leg of her year abroad.

In Naples, a city that frankly terrified them, they hired a loquacious private guide and spent the longest day of their lives trudging determinedly round the dry, dusty ruins of the lost cities of the Roman Empire beneath a merciless southern sun.

‘Oh, gosh,’ Kathy said as they staggered around a deserted Herculaneum, ‘I wish no one had ever gone to the bother of digging ’em up.’ Their friendship had flared brightly for a short time and fizzled out just as quickly when Ursula went to Nancy.

‘I have spread my wings and learned how to fly,’ she wrote to Pamela after leaving Munich and her hosts, the Brenners. ‘I am quite the sophisticated woman of the world,’ although she was still little more than a fledgling. If the year had taught her one thing it was that after having endured a succession of private students, the last thing she wanted to do was teach.

Instead, on her return – with an eye to entrance into the civil service – she did an intensive shorthand and typing course in High Wycombe, run by a Mr Carver who was later arrested for exposing himself in public. (‘A meat-flasher?’ Maurice said, his lip curling in disgust, and Hugh shouted at him to leave the room and never to use such language in his house again. ‘Infantile,’ he said when Maurice had slammed his way out into the garden. ‘Is he really fit for marriage?’ Maurice had come home to announce his engagement to a girl called Edwina, the eldest daughter of a bishop. ‘Goodness,’ Sylvie said, ‘will we have to genuflect or something?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Maurice said and Hugh said, ‘How dare you speak to your mother like that.’ It was a terrifically bad-tempered visit all round.)

Mr Carver hadn’t been such a bad sort really. He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

Ursula had embarked for Europe a virgin, but didn’t return one. She had Italy to thank for that. (‘Well, if one can’t take a lover in Italy where can one take one?’ Millie said.) He, Gianni, was studying for a doctorate in philology at Bologna University and was more grave and serious than Ursula had expected an Italian to be. (In Bridget’s romantic novels, Italians were always dashing but untrustworthy.) Gianni brought a studious solemnity to the occasion and made the rite of passage less embarrassing and awkward than she had feared.

‘Gosh,’ Kathy said, ‘you are bold.’ She reminded Ursula of Pamela. In some ways, not in others – not in her serene denial of Darwin, for example. Kathy, a Baptist, was saving herself for marriage but a few months after she returned to Chicago her mother wrote to Ursula to tell her that Kathy had died in a boating accident. She must have gone through her daughter’s address book and written to everyone in it, one by one. What an awful task. For Hugh, they had simply put a notice in The Times. Poor Kathy had saved herself for nothing. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.

‘Miss Todd?’

‘Sorry, Mr Emslie. It’s like being in a crypt, isn’t it? Full of the ancient dead.’

‘Yes, and I’d quite like to get out before I turn into one of them.’

As she crept gingerly forward, Ursula’s knee pressed on something soft and supple and she recoiled, banging her head on a broken rafter, sending a shower of dust down.

‘You all right?’ Mr Emslie said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Are we stopped for something else?’

‘Hang on.’ She had once stood on a body, recognized the squashy, meat-like quality of it. She supposed she had to look, although God knows she didn’t want to. She shone her torch on what seemed to be a dusty mound of material, scraps of stuff – crochet and ribbons, wool – partly impacted into the earth. It could have been the contents of a sewing basket. But it wasn’t, of course. She peeled back a layer of wool and then another one as if unwrapping a badly packed parcel or a large, unwieldy cabbage. Eventually a small almost unblemished hand, a small star, revealed itself from the compacted mass. She thought she might have found Emil. Better then that his mother was dead rather than knowing about this, she thought.

‘Be careful here, Mr Emslie,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘there’s a baby, try to avoid it.’

‘All right?’ Miss Woolf asked her when they finally emerged like moles. The fire on the other side of the street was almost out now and the street was murky with the dark, the soot, the filth. ‘How many?’ Miss Woolf asked.

‘Quite a few,’ Ursula said.

‘Easy to recover?’

‘Hard to say.’ She handed over Renee’s identity card. ‘There’s a baby down there, bit of a mess, I’m afraid.’

‘There’s tea,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Go and get yourself some.’

As she made her way, with Mr Emslie, to the mobile canteen she was amazed to spot a dog cowering in a doorway further up the street.

‘I’ll catch up with you,’ she said to Mr Emslie. ‘Get a mug for me, will you? Two sugars.’

It was a small nondescript terrier, whimpering and shaking with fear. Most of the house behind the doorway had disappeared and Ursula wondered if this had been the dog’s home, that it was hoping for some kind of safety or protection and couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. As she approached it, however, it ran off up the street. Dratted dog, she thought, chasing after it. Eventually she caught up with it, snatching it up in her arms before it had a chance to run again. It was trembling all over and she held it close, talking in soothing tones to it, rather as Mr Emslie had to Renee. She pressed her face against its fur (disgustingly dirty but then so was she). It was so small and helpless. ‘Slaughter of the Innocents,’ Miss Woolf said the other day when they heard of a school in the East End taking a direct hit. But wasn’t everyone innocent? (Or were they all guilty?) ‘That buffoon Hitler certainly isn’t,’ Hugh said, the last time they had talked, ‘it’s all down to him, this whole war.’ Was she really never going to see her father again? A sob escaped from her and the dog whined in fear or sympathy, it was hard to say. (There wasn’t a single member of the Todd family – apart from Maurice – who didn’t attribute human emotions to dogs.)

At that moment there was a tremendous noise behind them, the dog tried to bolt again and she had to hold it tightly. When she turned round she saw the gable wall of the building that had been on fire falling down, almost in one piece, the bricks rattling on to the ground in a brutish fashion, just reaching the WVS canteen.

Two of the women from the WVS were killed, as was Mr Emslie. And Tony, their messenger boy who had been scooting past on his bicycle, but not scooting fast enough unfortunately. Miss Woolf knelt down on the jagged, broken brick, oblivious to the pain, and took hold of his hand. Ursula crouched down by her side.

‘Oh, Anthony,’ Miss Woolf said, unable to say anything else. Her hair was escaping from its usual neat bun, making her look quite wild, a figure from a tragedy. Tony was unconscious – a terrible head wound, they had dragged him roughly from beneath the collapsed wall – and Ursula felt they should say something encouraging and not let him be aware of how upset they were. She remembered he was a Scout and started talking to him about the joys of the outdoors, pitching a tent in a field, hearing a running stream nearby, collecting sticks for a fire, watching the mist rise in the morning as breakfast cooked in the open. ‘What fun you’ll have again when the war is over,’ she said.

‘Your mother will be awfully glad to see you come home tonight,’ Miss Woolf said, joining the charade. She stifled a sob with her hand. Tony made no sign of having heard them and they watched as he slowly turned a deathly pale, the colour of thin milk. He had gone.

‘Oh, God,’ Miss Woolf cried. ‘I can’t bear it.’

‘But bear it we must,’ Ursula said, wiping away the snot and the tears and filth from her cheeks with the back of her hand and thinking how once this exchange would have been the other way round.

‘Bloody fools,’ Fred Smith said angrily, ‘what did they go and park the bloody canteen there for? Right next to the gable end?’

‘They didn’t know,’ Ursula said.

‘Well, they should have bloody realized.’

‘Well then someone should have bloody told them,’ Ursula said, her anger flaring up suddenly. ‘Like a bloody fireman, for instance.’

It was first light by now and they heard the all-clear sound.

‘I thought I saw you earlier, and then I decided I’d imagined you,’ Ursula said, making peace. He was angry because they were dead, not because they were stupid.

She felt as though she were in a dream, drifting away from reality. ‘I’m as good as dead,’ she said, ‘I have to sleep before I go mad. I live just round the corner,’ she added. ‘Lucky it wasn’t our flat. Lucky, too, that I ran after this dog.’ One of the rescue squad had given her a piece of rope to tie round the dog’s neck and she had hitched it to a charred post sticking out of the ground. She was reminded of the arms and legs the stretcher-bearer had been harvesting earlier. ‘I suppose the circumstances dictate that’s what I should call him – Lucky, even though it’s a bit of a cliché. He saved me, you know, I would have been drinking my tea there if I hadn’t gone after him.’

‘Bloody fools,’ he said again. ‘Shall I walk you home?’

‘That would be nice,’ Ursula said but she didn’t lead him ‘round the corner’ to Phillimore Gardens, instead they walked wearily hand in hand, like children, the dog trotting beside them, along Kensington High Street, almost deserted at this time in the morning, with only a slight diversion for a gas main that was on fire.

Ursula knew where they were going, it was inevitable somehow.

In Izzie’s bedroom there was a framed picture on the wall opposite her bed. It was one of the original illustrations from the first Adventures of Augustus, a line drawing depicting a cheeky boy and his dog. It verged on the cartoon – the schoolboy cap, the gob-stoppered cheek of Augustus and the rather idiotic-looking Westie who bore no resemblance to the real-life Jock.

The picture was very much at odds with how Ursula remembered this room before it was mothballed – a feminine boudoir, full of ivory silks and pale satins, expensive cut-glass bottles and enamelled brushes. A lovely Aubusson carpet had been rolled up tightly and tied with thick string and left against a wall. There had been one of the lesser Impressionists on another of the walls, acquired, Ursula suspected, more for the way it matched the décor than for any great love of the artist. Ursula wondered if Augustus was there to remind Izzie of her success. The Impressionist had been packed away somewhere safe but this illustration seemed to have been forgotten about, or perhaps Izzie didn’t care so much for it any more. Whatever the reason, it had sustained a diagonal crack from one corner of the glass to the other. Ursula recalled the night that she and Ralph had been in the wine cellar, the night that Holland House was bombed, perhaps it had sustained the damage then.

Izzie had, sensibly, chosen not to stay at Fox Corner with ‘the grieving widow’ as she referred to Sylvie, as ‘we shall fight like cats and dogs’. Instead, she had decamped to Cornwall, to a house on top of a cliff (‘like Manderley, terrifically wild and romantic, no Mrs Danvers though, thank goodness’), and had started ‘churning out’ an Adventures of Augustus comic strip for one of the popular dailies. How much more interesting, Ursula thought, if she had allowed her Augustus to grow up, as Teddy had done.

A buttery, unseasonal sun was trying hard to nudge its way through the thick velvet curtains. Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? she thought. If she could go back in time and take a lover from history it would be Donne. Not Keats, the knowledge of his untimely death would colour everything quite wretchedly. That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) – one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.

She could hear a bird singing outside the window, even though it was November now. The birds were probably as confounded as people were by the Blitz. What did all the explosions do to them? Kill a great many, she supposed, their poor hearts simply giving out with shock or the little lungs bursting with the pressure waves. They must drop from the sky like weightless stones.

‘You look thoughtful,’ Fred Smith said. He was lying, one arm behind his head, smoking a cigarette.

‘And you look strangely at home,’ she said.

‘I am,’ he grinned and leaned forward to wrap his arms around her waist and kiss the back of her neck. They were both filthy, as if they had toiled all night in a coal mine. She recalled how sooty they had been when she had journeyed on the footplate that night. The last time she had seen Hugh alive.

There was no hot water in Melbury Road, no water at all, nor electricity, everything turned off for the duration. In the dark, they had crawled under the dustsheet on Izzie’s bare mattress and fallen into a sleep that mimicked death. Some hours later they had both woken up at the same time and made love. It was the kind of love (lust, to be honest about it) that survivors of disasters must practise – or people who are anticipating disaster – free of all restraint, savage at times and yet strangely tender and affectionate. A strain of melancholy ran through it. Like Herr Zimmerman’s Bach sonata it had unsettled her soul, disjointed her brain and body. She tried to recall another line from Marvell, was it in ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, something about bolts of bones and fetters and manacles but it wouldn’t come. It seemed harsh when there was so much soft skin and flesh in this abandoned (in all ways) bed.

‘I was thinking of Donne,’ she said. ‘You know – Busy old foole, unruly Sun.’ No, she supposed, he probably didn’t know.

‘Oh?’ he said, indifferently. Worse than indifferent really.

She was taken off guard by the sudden memory of the grey ghosts in the cellar and of kneeling on the baby. Then for a second she was somewhere else, not a cellar in Argyll Road, not in Izzie’s bedroom in Holland Park but some strange limbo. Falling, falling—

‘Cigarette?’ Fred Smith offered. He lit another one from the stub of his first and handed it to her. She took it and said, ‘I don’t really smoke.’

‘I don’t really pick up strange women and fuck them in posh houses.’

‘How Lawrentian. And I’m not strange, we’ve known each other since we were children, more or less.’

‘Not like this.’

‘I should hope not.’ She was beginning to dislike him already. ‘I have no idea what time it is,’ she said. ‘But I can offer you some very good wine for breakfast. It’s all there is, I’m afraid.’

He looked at his wristwatch and said, ‘We’ve missed breakfast. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.’

The dog nudged itself through the door, its paws pitter-pattering on the bare wooden boards. It jumped on the bed and gazed intently at Ursula. ‘Poor thing,’ she said, ‘it must be starving.’

‘Fred Smith? What was he like? Do tell!’

‘Disappointing.’

‘How? In bed?’

‘Gosh, no, not that at all. I’ve never … like that, you know. I think I thought it would be romantic. No, that’s the wrong word, a silly word. “Soulful” perhaps.’

‘Transcendent?’ Millie offered.

‘Yes, that’s it. I was looking for transcendence.’

‘I imagine it finds you, rather than the other way round. It’s a tall order for poor old Fred.’

‘I had an idea of him,’ Ursula said, ‘but the idea wasn’t him. Perhaps I wanted to fall in love.’

‘And instead you had jolly good sex. Poor you!’

‘You’re right, unfair of me to expect. Oh, God, I think I was an awful snob with him. I was quoting Donne. Am I a snob, do you think?’

‘Awful. You do reek, you know,’ Millie said cheerfully. ‘Cigarettes, sex, bombs, God knows what else. Shall I run you a bath?’

‘Oh, yes, please, that would be lovely.’

‘And while you’re at it,’ Millie said, ‘you can take that ruddy dog in the bath with you. He smells to high heaven. But he is kinda cute,’ she said, imitating an American accent (rather badly).

Ursula sighed and stretched. ‘You know I really, really have had enough of being bombed.’

‘The war’s not going away any time soon, I’m afraid,’ Millie said.