‘No thanks,’ she said. The house was too big and empty. She had taken the key though and occasionally foraged in the house for useful things. There was still some tinned food in the cupboards that Ursula was keeping for a last-ditch emergency, and, of course, the full wine cellar.
They were scanning the wine racks with their torches – the electricity had been turned off when Izzie left – and Ursula had just pulled a rather fine-looking bottle of Pétrus from the rack and said to Ralph, ‘Do you think this would go with potato scallops and Spam?’ when there was a terrific explosion and, thinking the house had been hit, they had thrown themselves on the hard stone floor of the cellar with their hands over their heads. This was Hugh’s advice, instilled in Ursula at a recent visit to Fox Corner. ‘Always protect your head.’ He had been in a war. She sometimes forgot. All the wine bottles had shaken and shivered in their racks and with hindsight Ursula dreaded to think what damage those bottles of Château Latour and Château d’Yquem could have done if they had rained down on them, the splintered glass like shrapnel.
They had run outside and watched Holland House turn into a bonfire, the flames eating everything, and Ursula thought, don’t let me die in a fire. Let it be quick, please God.
She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the idea of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again not love, more like the feelings you would have for a favourite dog (and, no, she would never have said such a thing to him. Some people, a lot of people, didn’t understand how attached one could be to a dog).
Ralph lit another cigarette and Ursula said, ‘Harold says smoking is very bad for people. Says he’s seen lungs on operating tables that look like unswept chimneys.’
‘Of course it’s not good for you,’ Ralph said, lighting one for Ursula too. ‘But being bombed and shot at by the Germans isn’t good for you either.’
‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said. ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.’
‘Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?’ Ralph asked mildly.
‘Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.’
‘But nobody knows what’s going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him. Could you do that? Could you kill a baby? With a gun? Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood.’
If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought. Not just Teddy, of course, the rest of the world, too. Teddy had applied to the RAF the day after war was declared. He had been working on a small farm in Suffolk. After Oxford he had done a year at an agricultural college and then had worked on different farms and smallholdings around the country. He wanted to know everything, he said, before he got his own place. (‘A farmer?’ Sylvie still said.) He didn’t want to be one of those idealistic back-to-the-land types who ended up knee-deep in muddy yards with sickly cows and dead lambs, their crops not worth picking. (He had worked on one of those places apparently.)
Teddy still wrote poetry and Hugh said, ‘A poet farmer, eh? Like Virgil. We’ll expect a new Georgics from you.’ Ursula wondered how Nancy felt about being a farmer’s wife. She was awfully smart, doing research at Cambridge into some arcane and bewildering aspect of maths. (‘All gibberish to me,’ Teddy said.) And now his childhood dream of becoming a pilot was suddenly and unexpectedly within reach. At the moment he was safe in Canada at an Empire Training School, learning to fly, sending home letters about how much food there was, how great the weather was, making Ursula green with envy. She wished he could stay over there for ever, out of harm’s way.
‘How did we end up talking about murdering babies in cold blood?’ Ursula said to Ralph. ‘Mind you,’ she cocked her head towards the wall and the rise and fall of Emil’s siren wail.
Ralph laughed. ‘He’s not so bad tonight. Mind you, I’d go batty if my children made a racket like that.’
Ursula thought it was interesting that he said ‘my children’, not ‘our children’. Strange to be thinking of having children at all during a time when the very existence of the future was in doubt. She stood up rather abruptly and said, ‘The raids will be starting soon.’ Back at the beginning of the Blitz they would have said, ‘They can’t come every night’, now they knew they could. (‘Is this to be life for ever,’ she wrote to Teddy, ‘to be harried without rest by the bombs?’) Fifty-six nights in a row now so that it was beginning to seem possible that there really would be no end to it.
‘You’re like a dog,’ Ralph said. ‘You’ve got a sixth sense for the raiders.’
‘Well you’d better believe me then and go. Or you’ll have to come down to the dark hole of Calcutta and you know you won’t like that.’ The sprawling Miller family, Ursula had counted at least four generations, lived on the ground floor and in the semi-basement of the house in Argyll Road. They also had access down to a further level, a subterranean cellar that the residents of the house used as an air-raid shelter. It was a maze, a mouldy, unpleasant space, full of spiders and beetles, and felt horribly crowded if they were all in there, especially once the Millers’ dog, a shapeless rug of fur called Billy, was dragged reluctantly down the stairs to join them. They had also, of course, to put up with the tears and lamentations of Emil, who was passed around between the cellar occupants like an unwanted parcel in a futile attempt to pacify him.
Mr Miller, in an effort to make the cellar ‘homely’ (something it could never be), had taped some reproductions of ‘great English art’, as he called it, against the sandbagged walls. These colour plates – The Haywain, Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (how smug they looked) and Bubbles (the most sickly Millais possible, in Ursula’s opinion) – looked suspiciously as if they had been pilfered from expensive reference books on art. ‘Culture,’ Mr Miller said, nodding sagely. Ursula wondered what she would have chosen to represent ‘great English art’. Turner perhaps, the smudged, fugitive content of the late works. Not to the Millers’ taste at all, she suspected.
She had sewn the collar on her blouse. She had switched off the Sturm und Drang of the wireless broadcast and listened instead to Ma Rainey singing ‘Yonder Come the Blues’ – an antidote to all the easy sentiment that was beginning to pour out of the wireless. And she had eaten bread and cheese with Ralph, attempted the crossword and then hurried him out of the door with a kiss. Then she had turned off the light and moved the blackout aside so that she could catch a glimpse of him walking away down Argyll Road. Despite his limp (or perhaps because of it) he had a buoyant gait as if he was expecting something interesting to cross his path. It reminded her of Teddy.
He knew that she was watching him but he didn’t look back, simply raised an arm in silent salute and was swallowed by the dark. There was some light though, a bright slice of crescent moon and a scattering of the faintest stars as though someone had flung a handful of diamond dust into the dark. The Queen-Moon, surrounded by all her starry Fays, although she suspected Keats was writing about a full moon and the moon above Argyll Road seemed more like a moon-in-waiting. She was in a – rather poor – poetic mood. It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it.