‘You know,’ Pamela said, ‘I used to argue with her because she said science had made the world a worse place, that it was all about men inventing new ways to kill people. But now I wonder if she wasn’t right.’ And that was before Hiroshima, of course.
Ursula lit the gas fire, a rather pathetic little Radiant that looked as if it dated from the turn of the century, and fed the meter. The rumour was that pennies and shillings were running out. Ursula wondered why they couldn’t melt down armaments. Guns into ploughshares, and so on.
She unpacked Pammy’s box, laying everything out on the little wooden draining board like a poor man’s still life. The vegetables were dirty but there wasn’t much hope of washing the soil off as the pipes were frozen, even in the little Ascot, although the gas pressure was so low that it could barely heat the water anyway. Water like a stone. At the bottom of the crate she found a half-bottle of whisky. Good old Pammy, ever the thoughtful one.
She scooped some water from the bucket that she’d filled from the standpipe in the street and put a pan of water on the gas ring, thinking she might boil one of the eggs, although it would take for ever as there was only the tiniest frill of blue around the burner. There were warnings to be vigilant about the gas pressure – in case the gas came back on when the pilot light had gone out.
Would it be so bad to be gassed, Ursula wondered? Gassed. She thought of Auschwitz. Treblinka. Jimmy had been a Commando and at the end of the war he had become attached, rather haphazardly according to him (although everything to do with Jimmy was always slightly haphazard), to the anti-tank regiment that liberated Bergen-Belsen. Ursula insisted that he told her what he had found there. He was reluctant and had probably withheld the worst but it was necessary to know. One must bear witness. (She heard Miss Woolf’s voice in her head, We must remember these people when we are safely in the future.)
The toll of the dead had been her business during the war, the endless stream of figures that represented the blitzed and the bombed passed across her desk to be collated and recorded. They had seemed overwhelming, but the greater figures – the six million dead, the fifty million dead, the numberless infinities of souls – were in a realm beyond comprehension.
Ursula had fetched water yesterday. They – who were ‘they’? After six years of war everyone had become accustomed to following ‘their’ orders, what an obedient lot the English were – they had set up a standpipe in the next street and Ursula had filled up a kettle and bucket from the tap. The woman ahead of her in the queue was terrifically smart in an enviable floor-length sable, silver-grey, and yet there she was, waiting patiently in the bitter cold with her buckets. She looked out of place in Soho but then who knew her story?
The women at the well. Ursula seemed to remember that Jesus had a particularly confrontational conversation with the woman at the well. A woman of Samaria – no name, of course. She had had five husbands, Ursula recalled, and was living with a man who wasn’t her husband, but the King James Bible never said what had happened to those five. Perhaps she had poisoned the well.
Ursula remembered Bridget telling them that when she was a girl in Ireland she had walked to a well every day to draw water. So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements. Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well-mannered of people, and yet … Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English, but that was something else you couldn’t say. Miss Woolf had believed that, she’d said—
‘I say,’ the woman in sable said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Do you understand why my water is frozen solid and yet this isn’t?’ She had a cut-glass accent.
‘I don’t know,’ Ursula said. ‘I know nothing.’ The woman laughed and said, ‘Oh, I feel the same way, believe me,’ and Ursula thought that perhaps this was someone she would like as a friend but then a woman behind them said, ‘Get a move on, love,’ and the sable-furred woman hefted her buckets, as strapping as a Land Girl, and said, ‘Well, must be off, cheerio.’
She turned on the wireless. Transmission of the Third Programme had been suspended for the duration. The war against the weather. You were lucky if you got the Home or the Light, there were so many electricity cuts. She needed noise, the sound of a familiar life. Jimmy had given her his old gramophone before he left, hers had been lost in Kensington along, sadly, with most of her records. She had managed to rescue a couple, miraculously unbroken, and placed one on the turntable now. ‘I’d Rather Be Dead And Buried In My Grave’. Ursula laughed. ‘Cheerful or what?’ she said out loud. She listened to the scratch and hiss of the old record. Was that how she felt?
She glanced at the clock, Sylvie’s little gold carriage clock. She had brought it home after the funeral. Four o’clock only. Ye gods, how the days dragged. She caught the pips, turned off the news. What was the point?
She had spent the afternoon trawling Oxford Street and Regent Street, for something to do – really it was just to get out of her monastic cell of a bedsit. All the shops were dim and dismal. Paraffin lamps in Swan and Edgar’s, candles in Selfridge’s – the drawn, shadowy faces of people like something from a painting by Goya. There was nothing to buy, or certainly nothing that she wanted, and anything she did want, like a lovely cosy-looking pair of fur-topped bootees, was outrageously expensive (fifteen guineas!). So depressing. ‘Worse than the war,’ Miss Fawcett at work said. She was leaving to get married, they had all clubbed together for her wedding present, a rather uninspiring vase, but Ursula wanted to get her something more personal, more special, but she couldn’t think what and had hoped that the West End department stores might have just the thing. They didn’t.
She’d gone into a Lyon’s for a pale cup of tea, like lamb’s water, Bridget would have said. And a utilitarian teacake, she counted just two hard dry raisins, and a scraping of margarine, and tried to imagine she was eating something wonderful – a luscious Cremeschnitte or a slice of Dobostorte. She supposed the Germans weren’t getting much in the way of pastries at the moment.
She murmured Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte accidentally out loud (such an extraordinary name, such an extraordinary cake) and attracted the unwanted attention of a neighbouring table, a woman stoically working her way through a large iced bun. ‘Refugee, love?’ she asked, surprising Ursula with her sympathetic tone.
‘Something like that,’ Ursula said.
While she was waiting for the egg to boil – the water still only lukewarm – she rooted among her books, never unpacked after Kensington. She found the Dante that Izzie had given her, nicely tooled red leather but the pages all foxed, a copy of Donne (her favourite), The Waste Land (a rare first edition purloined from Izzie), a Collected Shakespeare, her beloved metaphysical poets and, finally, at the bottom of the box, her battered school copy of Keats, with an inscription that read To Ursula Todd, for good work. It would do for an epitaph too, she supposed. She flicked through the neglected pages until she found ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.
Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.
She read out loud and the words made her shiver. She should read something warming, Keats and his bees – For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells. Keats should have died on English soil. Asleep in an English garden on a summer’s afternoon. Like Hugh.