Renee’s ‘connections’ were ambiguous but a few weeks ago Ursula had spotted her in the first-floor coffee lounge of the Charing Cross Hotel sipping daintily on gin in the company of a sleek and rather prosperous-looking man who had ‘racketeer’ written all over him.
‘There’s a sleazy gent if ever I saw one,’ Jimmy had laughed. Jimmy, the baby produced to celebrate the peace after the war to end all wars, was about to fight in another one. He had a few days’ leave from his army training and they had taken refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel while an unexploded bomb in the Strand was being dealt with. They could hear the naval guns that had been stationed on trolleys between Vauxhall and Waterloo – boom-boom-boom – but the bombers were looking for other targets and seemed to have moved on. ‘Doesn’t it ever stop?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Apparently not.’
‘It’s safer in the army,’ he laughed. He had joined the ranks as a private even though the army had offered him a commission. He wanted to be one of the chaps, he said. (‘But someone has to be an officer, surely?’ Hugh puzzled. ‘Better if it’s someone with a bit of intelligence.’)
He wanted the experience. He wanted to be a writer, he said, and what better than a war to reveal to him the heights and depths of the human condition? ‘A writer?’ Sylvie said. ‘I fear the hand of the evil fairy rocked his cradle.’ She meant Izzie, Ursula supposed.
It had been lovely spending time with Jimmy. Jimmy was dashing in his battledress and gained an entrance wherever they went – risqué venues in Dean Street and Archer Street, the Boeuf sur le Toit in Orange Street that was very risqué indeed (if not downright risky), places that made Ursula wonder about Jimmy. All in the pursuit of the human condition, he said. They got very drunk and a little silly and it was all rather a relief from cowering in the Millers’ cellar. ‘Promise you won’t die,’ she said to Jimmy as they groped like a blind couple along the Haymarket, listening to some other part of London being blown out of existence.
‘Do my best,’ Jimmy said.
She was cold. The water she was lying in was making her even colder. She needed to move. Could she move? Apparently not. How long had she been lying here? Ten minutes? Ten years? Time had ceased. Everything seemed to have ceased. Only the awful concoction of smells remained. She was in the cellar. She knew that because she could see Bubbles, still miraculously taped to a sandbag near her head. Was she going to die looking at this banality? Then banality seemed suddenly welcome as a ghastly vision appeared at her side. A terrible ghost, black eyes in a grey face and wild hair, was clawing at her. ‘Have you seen my baby?’ the ghost said. It took Ursula a few moments to realize that this was no ghost. It was Mrs Appleyard, her face covered in dirt and bomb dust and streaked with blood and tears. ‘Have you seen my baby?’ she said again.
‘No,’ Ursula whispered, her mouth dry from whatever filth had been falling. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again Mrs Appleyard had disappeared. She might have imagined her, perhaps she was delirious. Or perhaps it really had been the ghost of Mrs Appleyard and they were both trapped in some desolate limbo.
Her attention was caught again by Lavinia Nesbit’s dress hanging from the Millers’ picture rail. But it wasn’t Lavinia Nesbit’s dress. A dress didn’t have arms in it. Not sleeves, but arms. With hands. Something on the dress winked at Ursula, a little cat’s eye caught by the crescent moon. The headless, legless body of Lavinia Nesbit herself was hanging from the Millers’ picture rail. It was so absurd that a laugh began to boil up inside Ursula. It never broke because something shifted – a beam, or part of the wall – and she was sprinkled with a shower of talcum-like dust. Her heart thumped uncontrollably in her chest. It was sore, a time-delay bomb waiting to go off.
For the first time she felt panic. No one was coming to help her. Certainly not the deranged ghost of Mrs Appleyard. She was going to die alone in the cellar of Argyll Road, with nothing but Bubbles and the headless Lavinia Nesbit for company. If Hugh were here, or Teddy or Jimmy, or even Pamela, they would be fighting to get her out of here, to save her. They would care. But there was no one here to care. She heard herself mewling like an injured cat. How sorry she felt for herself, as if she were someone else.
Mrs Miller had said, ‘Well, I think we could all do with a nice cup of cocoa, don’t you?’ Mr Miller was fretting about the Nesbits again and Ursula, utterly fed up with the claustrophobia of the cellar, said, ‘I’ll go and look for them,’ and got up from the rickety dining chair just as the swish and pheew announced the arrival of a high explosive bomb. There was a giant thunderclap, a great cracking noise as the wall of hell suddenly split open and let all the demons out and then the tremendous suction and compression, as if her insides, her lungs, her heart and stomach, even her eyeballs were being sucked from her body. Salute the last and everlasting day. This is it, she thought. This is how I die.
A voice broke into the silence, almost next to her ear, a man’s voice saying, ‘Come on then, miss, let’s see if we can get you out of here, shall we?’ Ursula could see his face, grimy and sweaty as if he had tunnelled to reach her. (She supposed he had.) She was surprised to recognize him. It was one of their local ARP wardens, a new one.
‘What’s your name, miss? Can you tell me?’ Ursula muttered her name but she knew it hadn’t come out right. ‘Urry?’ he queried. ‘What’s that then – Mary? Susie?’
She didn’t want to die as a Susie. But did it matter?
‘Baby,’ she mumbled to the warden.
‘Baby?’ he said sharply. ‘You’ve got a baby?’ He backed away slightly and shouted something to someone unseen. She heard other voices and realized there were lots of people now. As if to verify this the warden said, ‘We’re all here to get you out. The gas boys have turned the gas off and we’ll be moving you in a tick. Don’t you worry. Now tell me about your baby, Susie. Were you holding him? Is he just a littl’un?’ Ursula thought of Emil, as heavy as a bomb (who had been caught out holding him when the music stopped and the house exploded?), and tried to speak but found herself mewling again.
Something creaked and groaned overhead and the warden grabbed her hand and said, ‘It’s all right, I’m here,’ and she felt immensely grateful to him, and to all the people toiling to get her out. And she thought how grateful Hugh would be too. The thought of her father made her start to cry and the warden said, ‘There, there, Susie, everything’s all right, soon have you out of here, like a winkle out of a shell. Get you a nice cup of tea, eh? How does that sound? Lovely, eh? Fancy one myself.’
Snow seemed to be falling, tiny icy needles on her skin. ‘So cold,’ she murmured.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you’ll see,’ the warden said. He struggled out of the coat he was wearing and covered her with it. There wasn’t room for such a generous manoeuvre and he knocked something, causing a shower of debris to fall on them both.
‘Oh,’ she said to the warden because she felt suddenly violently sick but it passed and she felt calmer. Leaves were falling now mixed with the dust and ash and flakes of the dead and suddenly she was blanketed in piles of wafery beech leaves. They smelt of mushrooms and bonfires and something sweet. Mrs Glover’s gingerbread. So much nicer than sewage and gas.