Noonday

TWENTY-SIX

21 October 1940

I’d forgotten what living in furnished rooms feels like — the smell of other people’s lives: transient lives, passing through. The way the silver plating’s always worn off the forks, the cracks in the bone handles on the knives. Oh, I can’t put my finger on it exactly, except here I’m a student again. Single. Oh, yes, single.

I’ve put my address on the board by the house. If Paul’s still trying to retrieve stuff he’s almost bound to see it and then he’ll realize I haven’t told him about the move. He’ll know I’ve found out about her.

I lived two doors down from here when I was a student at the Slade. Sometimes when I’m walking down the street I fancy I see her coming towards me, that girl. The girl who lived for days on end on packets of penny soup, made her own clothes, walked everywhere. She doesn’t seem so far away now. In fact, I walk through her ghost every time I cross the floor.

And this wallpaper. She’d have had that off the wall in no time. She’d have hated it, the dreary, dingy Victorian fussiness of it, the horrible yellow pattern — paisley, I suppose, a sort of cross between a flower and a praying mantis. No, she’d have been sloshing wallpaper stripper all over that, scraping away at it till her hands ached. How much energy I must have spent over the years, battling with Victorian wallpaper. Well, not anymore. Let it stay. You see wallpaper like this all over London where the sides have been ripped off houses. The Luftwaffe’s doing a much better demolition job than I ever could.

And I’d like to talk to Paul about it but, of course, there is no Paul.

I had to go to the shelter last night. While the house was still standing, I could use the hall, convince myself it was safe. Not here: it’s a death trap, so off to the shelter I must go.

The usual crowd, mainly women. There’s an old couple who play chess. Rather sweet, really. Oh, and there’s the major, a military gentleman with peppery blue eyes. No nonsense, no emotion, none of that. Only he has this absolutely marvelous mustache — a beautiful red-gold color. Titian. He takes tremendous care of it, not in public, of course, but you can imagine him, in private, combing and trimming it. In some strange way — in defiance of biology — all the major’s feminine qualities, his vulnerability, his gentleness, are distilled into that mustache. The rest of him is very properly hard, masculine, decisive. And of course he thinks he’s boss. Angela, the shelter warden, manages him very well. She always consults him, very deferentially, before going on to do exactly what she was planning to do anyway.

Angela’s tremendous. I wouldn’t like her job. The facilities are totally inadequate. We’re still using latrine buckets behind blanket screens — why didn’t they realize? Paul says they thought the raids would be quite short, though very destructive — thousands dead. Instead of which we have long raids — thousands homeless.

But it really is high time I stop referring to Paul as the great authority.

On the rare occasions when I’ve been here before — generally because Paul bullied me into it — there was an immensely fat woman with very beautiful blue eyes — harebell blue. You don’t see that very often. But she wasn’t there last night. She used to tell fortunes on top of a suitcase, ordinary cards, not tarot. Always good news: unexpected letters, legacies, tall, dark, handsome strangers.

I used to feel sorry for her, especially in the heat. It can’t be much fun. And the latrine bucket was harder for her than for most. Her knees wouldn’t take the weight, she had a terrible time of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody quite as fat. I think you can always tell if somebody’s always been fat. And she hadn’t. There was a thin girl in there. I thought, when she looks in a mirror she doesn’t see herself. A bit like Kit, in a way.

Anyway, she wasn’t there last night — Bertha, that’s her name — and apparently she hasn’t been for quite a while. I asked Angela if she knew what had happened to her. She looked round and lowered her voice. “She got bombed, they took her to hospital, but she died a few days later. Poor woman, she was in no state to stand up to anything.” I think of her lying upstairs in a pokey little room somewhere, frightened but too tired or too breathless to get to the shelter. Or too embarrassed. I hope she didn’t die because she couldn’t use the bucket, but it’s only too probable. If I’d known where she was I’d’ve gone to see her.

Our other notable personality is Dorothea Stanhope, who’s using the shelter at the moment because she’s having the cellar plastered, and a new floor laid. It’s going to be wonderful when it’s finished, only she can’t get the workmen so it’s taking longer than she thought. There she sits, with her jewelry case clasped in skeletal hands, diamonds worth an absolute fortune dangling from long, leathery earlobes. She has two daughters. Actually, I think it’s an unmarried daughter and a daughter-in-law. The daughter, fresh-faced but no longer young — what can one say? A complete doormat — having failed in what, I suspect, for Dorothea, is the sole business of a girl’s life: getting a rich husband. “Gel,” as Dorothea says. I don’t know if she says “Injun” because I’ve never managed to bring the conversation round to the Wild West, but I’d bet quite a bit of money she does.

Dorothea’s favorite is her granddaughter. Six years old, and very good, she’s no bother, a lot less trouble than some of the adults. There was one particularly bad raid when she screamed — but then the rest of us nearly screamed too. The door was shaking with every blast; we thought it was coming in. Dorothea remained totally calm. There’s a whiff of the Raj about Dorothea; she’s very grand, but also a couple of decades out of date. Anyway, the cellar’s finally finished, according to Angela, so we won’t be seeing her again.

I slept in this morning, tried to work but couldn’t seem to get started, and then the afternoon was so warm I just couldn’t bear to stay indoors. So I went and sat in the garden of my old house on a kitchen chair I pulled out of the rubble, no doubt looking very eccentric and rather pathetic but I don’t care.

I love my garden. I’m no use at gardening, unlike Mother — or Rachel, for that matter — but some things seem to grow in spite of me. I have Michaelmas daisies and sunflowers peering over the fence into the next garden, almost as if nothing had happened, even though there’s ruin all around them. Paul went through a phase of painting sunflowers. He used to say they were absolutely extraordinary, different from any other flower, because they’re as tall as a man, you look them in the face — or they look you in the face — and they move. Measurably, in the course of a single day, following the sun. And then they age in the same way as people. They develop a stoop, a sort of dowager’s hump, and the seed heads fold in on themselves, like an old man’s mouth without teeth.

Paul, Paul, bloody Paul. Just as I was getting thoroughly exasperated with myself, I felt a shadow falling across me. Looked up and there he was. He was holding the notice with my new address on it. “I hope you’re going to put that back,” I said.

“Well,” he said.

I wasn’t going to help him out, but eventually he did manage to get going, all by himself. It was very sudden, he said. It really was rather a shock, he said. Was I sure I was doing the right thing? Had I really thought it through?

What I heard, loud and clear, was the one question he didn’t ask: WHY? He didn’t dare ask, because then I might have told him. And then the whole business about the girl would be dragged into the open and he’s probably fooling himself it needn’t be. Not now, and possibly not ever. I suppose I could have forced the issue, but really I couldn’t be bothered.

He hung about. There was only the one chair, so after a while he sat in the grass at my feet, but that put him at a disadvantage so he stood up again, muttering something about if I wasn’t happy I should have said. Meaning the cottage, I suppose. I did say; he wasn’t listening. Anyway, it’s not about the cottage. It was awful. Really, really awful. I was glad when he gave up and went away.

I just sat there, after he’d gone, looking at the ruin of our life together. Love affairs don’t need much — you can manage the whole thing on moonlight and roses, if you have to. But a marriage needs things, routines, a framework, habits, and all of ours were ripped away. I could forgive him the girl — well, no, not yet, but one day perhaps. What I can’t forgive, what I’m afraid I may never be able to forgive, is the look of relief on his face when all this was destroyed.