‘Make the most of it,’ Pamela said, ‘there’ll be no more cake, I expect.’ She fed a piece to Heidi, an unprepossessing mongrel rescued from Battersea. ‘Did you know that people are putting their pets down, thousands of them?’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘As if they weren’t part of the family,’ Pamela said, rubbing the top of Heidi’s head. ‘She’s much nicer than the boys. Better behaved too.’
‘How were your evacuees?’
‘Grubby.’ Despite her condition, Pamela had spent most of the morning organizing evacuees at Ealing Broadway while Olive, her mother-in-law, looked after the boys.
‘You would be so much more help to the war effort than someone like Maurice,’ Ursula said. ‘If it were up to me I would make you Prime Minister. You’d make a much better job of it than Chamberlain.’
‘Well, that’s true.’ Pamela put down her tea plate and took up her knitting – something pink and lacy. ‘If it’s a boy I’m just going to pretend it’s a girl.’
‘And aren’t you going to leave?’ Ursula asked. ‘You’re not going to keep the boys in London, are you? You could go and stay at Fox Corner, I don’t expect the Germans will be much bothered with bombing sleepy hollow.’
‘And stay with Mother? Lord, no. I have a friend from university, Jeanette, a vicar’s daughter, not that that’s relevant, I suppose. There’s a cottage that belonged to her grandmother, up in Yorkshire, Hutton-le-Hole, dot on the map, that kind of place. She’s going up there with her two boys and suggested I join her with my three.’ Pamela had given birth in quick succession to Nigel, Andrew and Christopher. She had taken to motherhood with gusto. ‘Heidi will love it too. It sounds utterly primitive, no electricity, no running water. Wonderful for the boys, they can run around like savages. It’s hard to be a savage in Finchley.’
‘I expect some people manage,’ Ursula said.
‘How’s “the man”?’ Pamela asked. ‘“The Man from the Admiralty”.’
‘You can use his name,’ Ursula said, brushing cake crumbs off her skirt. ‘The antirrhinums don’t have ears.’
‘You never know these days. Has he said anything?’
Ursula had been involved with Crighton – ‘the Man from the Admiralty’ – for a year now (she dated it from Munich). They had met at an inter-departmental meeting. He was fifteen years older than Ursula, rather dashing and with a vaguely wolfish air that was barely offset by his marriage to an industrious wife (Moira) and their clutch of three girls, all at a private school. ‘I shan’t leave them, no matter what,’ he told her after the first time they had made love in the rather basic quarters of his ‘emergency bolthole’.
‘But I don’t want you to,’ Ursula said, although as a declaration of his intent she thought it might have been better if he had let it precede the act rather than provide its coda.
‘The bolthole’ (she suspected that she was not the first woman to have seen the inside of it at Crighton’s invitation) was a flat provided by the Admiralty for the nights when Crighton stayed in town rather than ‘hiking’ all the way back to Moira and the girls in Wargrave. The bolthole wasn’t his exclusively and when it wasn’t available he ‘trekked out’ to Ursula’s flat in Argyll Road where they spent long evenings in her single bed (he had a sailor’s practical attitude towards confined spaces) or on her sofa, pursuing the ‘delights of the flesh’ as he put it, before he ‘slogged his way’ back to Berkshire. Any journey on land, even a couple of stops on the Tube, had an expeditionary quality for Crighton. He was a naval man at heart, Ursula supposed, and would have been happier sailing a skiff to the Home Counties rather than making his way overland. They did once take a little boat out to Monkey Island and have a picnic on the banks of the river. ‘Like a normal couple,’ he said apologetically.
‘What then, if not love?’ Pamela asked.
‘I like him.’
‘I like the man who delivers my groceries,’ Pamela said. ‘But I don’t share my bed with him.’
‘Well, I can assure you he means a good deal more to me than a tradesman.’ They were almost arguing. ‘And he’s not a callow youth,’ she continued for the defence. ‘He’s a proper person, he comes whole, all … ready-made. You know?’
‘Ready-made with a family,’ Pamela said, rather crotchety now. She looked quizzical and said, ‘But doesn’t your heart beat a little faster at the sight of him?’
‘Perhaps a little faster,’ Ursula conceded generously, sidestepping the argument, suspecting that she would never be able to explain the forensics of adultery to Pamela. ‘Who would have thought that out of everyone in our family, you would turn out to be the romantic?’
‘Oh, no, I think that’s Teddy,’ Pamela said. ‘I just like to believe that there are nuts and bolts that hold our society together – especially now – and that marriage is part of that.’
‘Nothing romantic about nuts and bolts.’
‘I admire you, really,’ Pamela said. ‘Being your own woman. Not following the herd and so on. I just don’t want you to be hurt.’
‘Believe me, neither do I. Pax?’
‘Pax,’ Pamela agreed readily. Laughing, she said, ‘My life would be so dull without your salacious reports from the front line. What a deal of vicarious excitement I derive from your love life – or whatever you want to call it.’
There had been nothing salacious about their outing to Monkey Island, they had sat chastely on a tartan blanket and eaten cold chicken and drunk warm red wine. ‘The blushful Hippocrene,’ Ursula said and Crighton laughed and said, ‘That sounds suspiciously like literature to me. I have no poetry in me. You should know that.’
‘I do.’
The thing about Crighton was that there always seemed to be more of him than he ever revealed. She had overheard someone in the office refer to him as ‘the Sphinx’ and he did indeed wear an air of reticence that hinted at unexplored depths and suppressed secrets – some childhood harm, some magnificent obsession. His cryptic self, she thought, peeling a hard-boiled egg and dipping it into a little screw of paper that contained salt. Who had packed this picnic – not Crighton, surely? Not Moira, heaven forfend.
He had grown rather remorseful over the clandestine nature of their relationship. She had brought a little excitement into what had become a rather tedious life, he said. He had been at Jutland with Jellicoe, he had ‘seen much’ and now he was ‘little better than a bureaucrat’. He was restless, he said.
‘You’re either about to declare your love for me,’ Ursula said, ‘or tell me that it’s all over.’ There was fruit – peaches nestling inside tissue paper.
‘It’s a fine balance,’ he said, with a rueful smile. ‘I am teetering.’ Ursula laughed, the word didn’t suit him.
He embarked on a tale about Moira, something to do with her life in the village and her need for committee work, and Ursula drifted off, more interested in the discovery of a Bakewell tart that had apparently been magicked from a kitchen somewhere deep in the Admiralty. (‘We’re well looked after,’ he said. Like Maurice, she thought. The privileges of men in power, unavailable to those adrift on the sea of buff.)
If Ursula’s older female colleagues had got wind of the affair, there would have been a stampede for the smelling salts, especially if they had known just who in the Admiralty it was that she was dallying with (Crighton was rather senior). Ursula was good, very good, at keeping secrets.