Ralph was from Bexhill, gently sardonic, left-wing, utopian. (‘Aren’t all socialists utopians?’ Pamela said.) Ralph was nothing like Crighton, who with hindsight seemed rather too powerful.
‘Being courted by a Red?’ Maurice asked, coming across her within the hallowed walls. She felt sought out by him. ‘It might not look good for you if anyone knew.’
‘He’s hardly a card-carrying communist,’ she said.
‘Still,’ Maurice said, ‘at least he won’t be betraying battleship positions in his pillow talk.’
What did that mean? Did Maurice know about Crighton?
‘Your personal life isn’t personal, not while there’s a war on,’ he said with a look of distaste. ‘And why, by the way, are you learning German? Are you awaiting the invasion? Getting ready to welcome the enemy?’
‘I thought you were accusing me of being a communist, not a fascist,’ Ursula said crossly. (‘What an ass,’ Pamela said. ‘He’s just terrified of anything that might reflect badly on him. Not that I’m defending him. Heaven forbid.’)
From her position at the bottom of the well, Ursula could see that most of the insubstantial wall between her flat and Mrs Appleyard’s had disappeared. Looking up through the fractured floorboards and the shattered beams she could see a dress hanging limply on a coat hanger, hooked to a picture rail. It was the picture rail in the Millers’ lounge on the ground floor, Ursula recognized the wallpaper of sallow, overblown roses. She had seen Lavinia Nesbit on the stairs wearing the dress only this evening, when it had been the colour of pea soup (and equally limp). Now it was a grey bomb-dust shade and had migrated down a floor. A few yards from her head she could see her own kettle, a big brown thing, surplus to requirements in Fox Corner. She recognized it from the thick twine wound around the handle one day long ago by Mrs Glover. Everything was in the wrong place now, including herself.
Yes, Ralph had been in Argyll Road. They had eaten – bread and cheese – accompanied by a bottle of beer. Then she had done the crossword, yesterday’s Telegraph. Recently Ursula had been forced to buy a pair of spectacles for close work, rather ugly things. It was only after she had brought them home that she realized they were almost identical to the pair that one of the Misses Nesbit wore. Was this her fate too, she thought, contemplating her bespectacled reflection in the mirror above the fireplace? Would she, too, end up as an old maid? The proper sport of boys and girls. And could you be an old maid if you had worn the scarlet letter? Yesterday an envelope had mysteriously appeared on her desk while she was snatching a sandwich lunch in St James’s Park. She saw her name in Crighton’s handwriting (he had a surprisingly nice italic hand) and tore the whole thing to bits and threw it in the bin without reading it. Later, when all the clerical assistants were flocking like pigeons around the tea-trolley, she had retrieved the scraps and pieced them together.
I have mislaid my gold cigarette case. You know the one – my father gave it me after Jutland. You wouldn’t have come across it by any chance, would you?
Yours, C.
But he was never hers, was he? On the contrary, he belonged to Moira. (Or perhaps the Admiralty.) She dropped the pieces of paper back in the bin. The cigarette case was in her handbag. She had found it beneath her bed a few days after he had left her.
‘Penny for them?’ Ralph said.
‘Not worth it, trust me.’
Ralph was stretched out next to her, resting his head on the arm of the sofa, his socked feet in her lap. Although he looked as though he were asleep he gave a murmured response every time she tossed a clue in his direction. ‘A Roland for an Oliver? How about “paladin”?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
An odd thing had happened to her yesterday. She had been on the Tube, she didn’t like the Tube, before the bombing she cycled everywhere but it was difficult with so much glass and rubble around. She had been doing the Telegraph crossword, trying to pretend she wasn’t underground. Most people felt safer underground but Ursula didn’t like the idea of confinement. There had been an incident only a couple of days previously of a bomb falling on to an Underground entrance, the blast had travelled down and into the tunnels and the result was pretty awful. She wasn’t sure that it had made the papers, these things were so bad for morale.
On the Tube, a man sitting next to her had suddenly leaned across – she had shrunk back – and, nodding at her half-filled grid, said, ‘You’re rather good at that. Can I give you my card? Pop into my office if you like. I’m recruiting clever girls.’ I bet you are, she thought. He got off at Green Park, tipping his hat to her. The card had an address in Whitehall but she had thrown it away.
Ralph shook two cigarettes from a packet and lit them both. He passed one to her and said, ‘You’re a clever thing, aren’t you?’
‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m in the Intelligence Department and you’re in the Map Room.’
‘Ha, ha, clever and funny.’
There was an easy camaraderie between them, that of pals more than lovers. They respected each other’s character and made few demands. It helped that they both worked in the War Room. There were a lot of things they never had to explain to each other.
He touched the back of her hand with his and said, ‘How are you?’ and she said, ‘Very well, thank you.’ His hands were still those of the architect he had been before the war, unspoilt by battle. He had been safely away from the fighting, a surveyor in the Royal Engineers, poring over maps and photographs and so on and hadn’t expected to become a combatant, wading through filthy, oily, bloody seawater being shot at from all quarters. (For he had, after all, spoken a little more of it.)
Although the bombing was awful, he said, you could see that something good could come out of it. He was hopeful about the future (unlike Hugh or Crighton). ‘All those hovels,’ he said. Woolwich, Silvertown, Lambeth and Limehouse were being destroyed and after the war they would have to be rebuilt. It was an opportunity, he said, to build clean, modern homes with all the facilities – a community of glass and steel and air in the sky instead of Victorian slums. ‘A kind of San Gimignano for the future.’
Ursula was unconvinced by this vision of modernist towers, if it were up to her she would rebuild the future as garden cities, comfortable little houses with cottage gardens. ‘What an old Tory you are,’ he said affectionately.
Yet he loved the old London too (‘What architect wouldn’t?’) – Wren’s churches, the grand houses and elegant public buildings – ‘the Stones of London’, he said. One or two nights a week he was part of the St Paul’s night watch, men who were ready to climb into the rafters ‘if necessary’ to keep the great church safe from incendiaries. The place was a firetrap, he said – old timbers, lead everywhere, flat roofs, a multitude of staircases and dark forgotten places. He had answered an advertisement in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ journal, appealing for architects to volunteer to be firewatchers because they would ‘understand the plans, and so on’. ‘We might have to be pretty nimble,’ he said and Ursula wondered how he would do that with his limp. She had visions of him beleaguered by flames on all those staircases and in the dark forgotten places. It seemed a chummy kind of watch – they played chess and had long conversations about philosophy and religion. She imagined that it suited Ralph very well.
Only a few weeks ago they had watched together, spellbound in horror, as Holland House burnt. They had been in Melbury Road, raiding the wine cellar. ‘Why not stay in my house,’ Izzie had said casually before she embarked for America. ‘You can be my caretaker. You’ll be safe here. I can’t imagine the Germans will want to bomb Holland Park.’ Ursula thought that Izzie might be rather overestimating the Luftwaffe’s precision with bombs. And if it was so safe why was Izzie turning tail and running?