The window itself, or at least the frame, was still there, way, way above her, not where it should be at all. It was definitely her window, she recognized the curtains, charred rags now, flapping in the breeze. They were – had been – a thick jacquard brocade from John Lewis’s that Sylvie had helped her pick out. The flat in Argyll Road was rented as furnished but Sylvie declared the curtains and rugs to be ‘completely shoddy’ and subbed Ursula for new ones when she moved in.
At the time Millie had suggested that she move in with her in Phillimore Gardens. Millie was still playing ingénues and said she expected to go from Juliet to the Nurse with nothing in between. ‘It would be fun,’ Millie said, ‘to share digs,’ but Ursula wasn’t so sure that Millie’s idea of fun coincided with her own. She often felt rather dull and sober against Millie’s brightness. A dunnock keeping company with a kingfisher. And sometimes Millie burnt just a little too brightly.
This was just after Munich and Ursula had already started her affair with Crighton and it seemed more practical to live on her own. Looking back, she realized that she had accommodated Crighton’s needs a great deal more than he had hers, as if Moira and the girls somehow trumped her own existence.
Think about Millie, she told herself, think about the curtains, think about Crighton if you must. Anything except her present predicament. Especially the gas. It seemed particularly important to try to take her mind off the gas.
After their purchases in soft furnishings Sylvie and Ursula had taken afternoon tea in John Lewis’s restaurant, served by a grimly efficient waitress. ‘I’m always so glad,’ Sylvie murmured, ‘that I don’t have to take a turn at being other people.’
‘You’re very good at being yourself,’ Ursula said, aware that it didn’t necessarily sound like a compliment.
‘Well, I’ve had years of practice.’
It was a very good afternoon tea, the kind you couldn’t get any more in department stores. And then John Lewis itself was destroyed, no more than the black toothless skull of a building. (‘How awful,’ Sylvie wrote, moved in a way that she didn’t appear to have been by the dreadful raids on the East End.) It was up and running again in days, ‘Blitz spirit’ everyone said, but really, what was the alternative?
Sylvie had been in a good mood that day, and they had drawn closer over the subject of curtains and the idiocy of people who thought that Chamberlain’s silly little piece of paper meant anything at all.
It was very quiet and Ursula wondered if her eardrums were shattered. How did she get here? She remembered looking out of the window in Argyll Road – the window that was so far away now – and seeing the sickle moon. And before that she had been sitting on the sofa, doing some sewing, turning the collar on a blouse, with the wireless tuned to a short-wave German station. She was taking a German evening class (know your enemy) but was finding it difficult to decipher anything beyond the occasional violent noun (Luftangriffe, Verluste) in the broadcast. In despair at her lack of proficiency, she had turned the wireless off and put Ma Rainey on the gramophone. Before she left for America, Izzie had bequeathed Ursula her collection of records, an impressive archive of female American blues artistes. ‘I don’t listen to that stuff any more,’ Izzie said. ‘It’s very passé. The future lies with something a little more soigné.’ Izzie’s Holland Park house was shut up now, everything covered in dustsheets. She had married a famous playwright and they had decamped to California in the summer. (‘Cowards, the pair of them,’ Sylvie said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hugh said, ‘I’m sure if I could sit out the war in Hollywood I would.’)
‘That’s interesting music I hear you listening to,’ Mrs Appleyard said to Ursula one day as they passed on the stairs. The wall between their flats was paper-thin and Ursula said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you,’ although she could well have added that she heard Mrs Appleyard’s baby bawling its head off day and night and that was very disturbing. The baby at four months old was big for its age, fat and ruddy, as if it had leeched all the life out of Mrs Appleyard.
Mrs Appleyard – the deadweight of the baby asleep in her arms, its head on her shoulder – waved a dismissive hand and said, ‘Don’t be concerned, it doesn’t bother me.’ She was lugubriously East European, a refugee of some kind, Ursula supposed, although her English was precise. Mr Appleyard had disappeared some months ago, gone for a soldier, perhaps, but Ursula hadn’t asked as the marriage had been clearly (and audibly) unhappy. Mrs Appleyard was pregnant when her husband left and, as far as Ursula could tell (or hear), he had never been back to meet his squawking infant.
Mrs Appleyard must have been pretty once but day by day she grew thinner and sadder until it seemed as though only the (very) solid burden of the baby and its needs kept her tethered to everyday life.
In the bathroom that they shared on the first floor there was always an enamel pail in which the baby’s foul-smelling nappies lay soaking before being boiled in a pan on Mrs Appleyard’s tworing stove. On the neighbouring ring there was usually to be found a pan of cabbage and, perhaps as a result of this twin boiling, she always carried on her person a faint perfume of old vegetables and damp laundry. Ursula recognized it, it was the smell of poverty.
The Misses Nesbit, nesting on the top floor, fretted a good deal about Mrs Appleyard and the baby in the way that old maids were inclined to. The two Nesbits, Lavinia and Ruth, slight spinsters, lived in the attic rooms (‘beneath the eaves, like swallows’, they twittered). They might as well have been twins for all the difference between them and Ursula had to make a tremendous effort to remember which was which.
They were long retired – they had both been telephonists in Harrods – and were a frugal pair, their only indulgence being an impressive collection of costume jewellery, purchased mainly from Woolworths in their lunch hour, during their ‘working years’. Their flat smelt quite different to Mrs Appleyard’s, lavender water and Mansion House polish – the scent of old ladies. Ursula sometimes did shopping for both the Nesbits and Mrs Appleyard. Mrs Appleyard was always ready at the door with the exact money that she owed (she knew the price of everything) and a polite ‘thank you’, but the Nesbits were forever trying to inveigle Ursula inside with weak tea and stale biscuits.
Below them, on the second floor, were to be found Mr Bentley (‘a queer fish’, they were all agreed) whose flat smelt (appropriately) of the finnan haddock he boiled in milk for his supper, and next door to him the aloof Miss Hartnell (whose flat smelt of nothing at all) who was a housekeeper at the Hyde Park Hotel and rather severe, as if nothing could ever hope to meet her standards. She made Ursula feel distinctly wanting.
‘Disappointed in love, I believe,’ Ruth Nesbit whispered in mitigation to Ursula, clamping her bird-boned hand on her chest as if her own frail heart might be about to jump ship and attach itself to someone unsuitable. Both the Misses Nesbit were deeply sentimental about love, never having experienced its rigours. Miss Hartnell looked more as if she would mete out disappointment than receive it.
‘I also have some records,’ Mrs Appleyard said with the earnestness of a conspirator. ‘But, alas, no gramophone.’ Mrs Appleyard’s ‘alas’ seemed freighted with all the tragedy of a broken continent. It could hardly bear the weight it was asked to carry.
‘Well, do please feel welcome to come and play them on mine,’ Ursula said, rather hoping that the downtrodden Mrs Appleyard wouldn’t take up the offer. She wondered what kind of music Mrs Appleyard possessed. It seemed impossible that it could be anything very jolly.