‘Brahms,’ Mrs Appleyard said, answering the unasked question. ‘And Mahler.’ The baby shifted restlessly as if disturbed by the prospect of Mahler. Whenever Ursula met Mrs Appleyard on the stairs or the landing, the baby was asleep. It was as if there were two babies, the one inside the flat who never stopped crying and the one outside who never started.
‘Would you mind holding Emil for a moment while I find my keys?’ Mrs Appleyard asked, handing the cumbersome child over without waiting for an answer.
‘Emil,’ Ursula murmured. She hadn’t thought of the baby as having a name. Emil was, as usual, dressed for some kind of Arctic winter, bulked out with nappies and rubber knickers and romper suits and all kinds of knitted and beribboned garments. Ursula wasn’t a stranger to babies, both she and Pamela had mothered Teddy and Jimmy with the same enthusiasm they accorded puppies and kittens and rabbits, and she was the very picture of a doting aunt where Pamela’s boys were concerned, but Mrs Appleyard’s baby was of a less appealing order. The Todd babies smelt sweetly of milk and talcum powder and the fresh air that their clothes were dried in, whereas Emil had a slightly gamey scent.
Mrs Appleyard rummaged for her keys in her large battered handbag, an item that looked as if it, too, had crossed Europe from a faraway country (of which Ursula, patently, knew nothing). With a great sigh, Mrs Appleyard finally located the keys at the bottom of the bag. The baby, perhaps sensing the proximity of the threshold, squirmed in Ursula’s arms as if preparing itself for the transition. It opened its eyes and looked rather quarrelsome.
‘Thank you, Miss Todd,’ Mrs Appleyard said, reclaiming the baby. ‘It was nice talking to you.’
‘Ursula,’ Ursula said. ‘Do please call me Ursula.’
Mrs Appleyard hesitated before saying, almost shyly, ‘Eryka. E-r-y-k-a.’ They had lived next door to each other for a year now but this was the nearest they had come to intimacy.
Almost as soon as her door closed the baby began its customary roaring. ‘Does she stick pins in it?’ Pamela wrote. Pamela produced placid babies. ‘They don’t tend to turn feral until they’re two,’ she said. She had given birth to another boy, Gerald, just before last Christmas. ‘Better luck next time,’ Ursula said when she saw her. She had taken a train north to visit the new arrival, a long and challenging journey, most of which was spent in the guard’s van, on a train packed with soldiers on their way to a training camp. She had been subjected to a barrage of sexual innuendo which had started as amusing and ended as tedious. ‘Not exactly perfect gentle knights,’ she said to Pamela when she finally arrived, the last part of the journey being accomplished in a donkey-cart as if time had slipped into some other century, some other country even.
Poor Pammy was bored with the phoney war and with being shut up with so many little boys, ‘like being a matron in a boys’ school’. Not to mention Jeanette who had proved to be ‘a bit of a slacker’ (not to mention a moaner and a snorer). ‘One expects better of a vicar’s daughter,’ Pamela wrote, ‘although goodness knows why.’ She had decamped back to Finchley in the spring but since the nightly raids had started she had retreated with her brood to Fox Corner ‘for the duration’, despite her previous misgivings about living with Sylvie. Harold, now at St Thomas’s, was working on the front line. The nurses’ home there had been bombed a couple of weeks ago and five nurses killed. ‘Every night is hell,’ Harold reported. It was the same report that Ralph gave from the bombsites.
Ralph! Of course, Ralph. Ursula had quite forgotten him. He had been in Argyll Road too. Was he there when the bomb exploded? Ursula struggled to turn her head to look around, as if she would find him among the wreckage. There was no one, she was alone. Alone and corralled in a cage of smashed wooden beams and jagged rafters, the dust settling all around her, in her mouth, her nostrils, her eyes. No, Ralph had already left when the sirens went.
Ursula was no longer bedded by her man from the Admiralty. The declaration of war had brought on a sudden flush of guilt in her lover. They must stop their affair, Crighton said. The temptations of the flesh were apparently secondary to martial pursuits – as if she were Cleopatra about to destroy his Antony for love. There was enough excitement in the world now, it seemed, without the added hazards of ‘keeping a mistress’. ‘I’m a mistress?’ Ursula said. She had not thought of herself as sporting a scarlet letter, a rubric that belonged to a racier woman, surely?
The balance had shifted. Crighton had teetered. And apparently tottered. ‘Very well,’ she had said equably. ‘If that’s what you want.’ She had begun to suspect by then that there was not, in fact, a different, more intriguing Crighton hidden beneath the enigmatic surface. He was not so very inscrutable, after all. Crighton was Crighton – Moira, the girls, Jutland, although not necessarily in that order.
Despite the fact that the end of the affair was at his instigation, he was cut up. Wasn’t she? ‘You’re very cool,’ he said.
But she had never been ‘in love’ with him, she said. ‘And I expect we can still be friends.’
‘I don’t think that we can, I’m afraid,’ Crighton said, already wistful for what was now history.
Nonetheless, she had spent the following day dutifully crying for her loss. Her liking for him had not been quite the negligent emotion that Pamela seemed to think. Then she dried her tears, washed her hair and went to bed with a plate of Bovril on toast and a bottle of 1929 Château Haut-Brion that she had filched from Izzie’s excellent wine cellar, left casually behind in Melbury Road. Ursula had the keys to Izzie’s house. ‘Just help yourself to anything you can find,’ Izzie had said. So she did.
It was rather a shame though, Ursula thought, that she no longer had assignations with Crighton. The war made indiscretions easier. The blackout was the perfect screen for illicit liaisons, and the disruption of the bombing – when it finally started – would have provided him with plenty of excuses for not being in Wargrave with Moira and the girls.
Instead, Ursula was having an entirely above-board relationship with a fellow student on her German course. After the initial class (Guten Tag. Mein Name ist Ralph. Ich bin dreizig Jahre alt) the two of them had retired to the Kardomah on Southampton Row, almost invisible behind a wall of sandbags these days. It turned out that he worked in the same building as she did, on the bomb-damage maps.
It was only as they left the class – held in a stuffy room, three floors up in Bloomsbury – that Ursula noticed that Ralph was limping. Wounded at Dunkirk, he said, before she could ask. Shot in the leg while waiting in the water to get into one of the little boats that were shuttling back and forth between the shore and the bigger boats. He was hauled on board by a fisherman from Folkestone who was shot in the neck minutes later. ‘There,’ he said to Ursula, ‘now we don’t need to talk about it again.’
‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ Ursula said. ‘But how awful.’ She had watched the newsreels, of course. ‘We played a bad hand well,’ Crighton said. Ursula had run into him in Whitehall not long after the evacuation of the troops. He missed her, he said. (He was teetering again, she thought.) Ursula was determinedly nonchalant, said she had reports she needed to take to the War Cabinet Office, clutching buff folders to her chest like a cuirass. She had missed him too. It seemed important not to let him see that.
‘You liaise with the War Cabinet?’ Crighton said, rather impressed.
‘Just an assistant to an under-secretary. Actually, not even to the assistant, just another “girl” like me.’
The conversation had gone on long enough, she decided. He was gazing at her in a way that made her want to feel his arms around her. ‘Must push off,’ she said brightly, ‘there’s a war on, you know.’