She left the woman there and went in search of the living.
‘Can you take Mr Emslie a morphia tablet?’ Miss Woolf asked. They could both hear a woman screaming and swearing like a navvy and Miss Woolf added, ‘To the lady that’s making all the noise.’ A good rule of thumb was that the more noise someone was making the less likely they were to die. This particular casualty sounded as if she were ready to fight her way out single-handed from the wreckage of the house and run round Kensington Gardens.
Mr Emslie was in the cellar of the house and Ursula had to be lowered down by two men from the rescue squad and then had to worm her way through a barricade of joists and bricks. She was aware that an entire house appeared to be resting precariously on this same barricade. She found Mr Emslie stretched out almost horizontally next to a woman. Below the waist she was completely trapped by the wreckage of the house but she was conscious and extremely articulate about the distress she was in.
‘Soon have you out of here,’ Mr Emslie said. ‘Get you a nice cup of tea, eh? How does that sound? Lovely, eh? Fancy one myself. And here’s Miss Todd with something for the pain,’ he continued soothingly to her. Ursula passed him the tiny morphia tablet. He seemed very good at this, it was hard to imagine him in his grocer’s apron, weighing sugar and patting butter.
One wall of the cellar had been sandbagged but most of the sand had spilled out in the explosion and for an alarming hallucinatory second Ursula was on a beach somewhere, she didn’t know where, a hoop was bowling along beside her in a brisk breeze, seagulls squawking overhead, and then she was back, just as suddenly, in the cellar. Lack of sleep, she thought, it really was the devil.
‘About fucking time,’ the woman said, greedily taking the morphia tablet. ‘You’d think you lot were at a fucking tea-party.’ She was young, Ursula realized, and oddly familiar. She was clutching her handbag, a large black affair, as if it were keeping her afloat in the sea of timber. ‘Have you got a fag, either of you?’ With some difficulty, given the awkward space they were in, Mr Emslie produced a squashed packet of Players from his pocket and then, with even more difficulty, extracted a box of matches. Her fingers tapped restlessly on the leather of the bag. ‘Take your time,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Sorry,’ she said after she had drawn deeply on the cigarette. ‘Being in an endroit like this has an effect on the nerves, you know.’
‘Renee?’ Ursula said, astonished.
‘What’s it to you?’ she said, returning to her former churlish self.
‘We met in the cloakroom at the Charing Cross Hotel a couple of weeks ago.’
‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ she said primly. ‘People are always doing that. I must have one of those faces.’
She took another very long drag on her cigarette and then exhaled slowly and with extraordinary pleasure. ‘You got any more of those little pills?’ she asked. ‘Good black market price for them, I bet.’ She sounded woozy, the morphia kicking in, Ursula supposed, but then the cigarette dropped from her fingers and her eyes rolled back in her head. She started to convulse. Mr Emslie grabbed hold of her hand.
Ursula, glancing at Mr Emslie, caught sight of a colour reproduction of Millais’s Bubbles, hanging by a piece of tape from a sandbag behind him. It was a picture she disliked, she disliked all the Pre-Raphaelites with their droopy, drugged-looking women. Hardly the time and place for art criticism, she thought. She had become almost indifferent to death. Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire. And again she was somewhere else, a little flicker in time. She was descending a staircase, wisteria was blooming, she was flying out of a window.
Mr Emslie was talking encouragingly to Renee. ‘Come on, Susie, don’t give up on us now. We’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you’ll see. All the lads are working on it. And the girls,’ he added for Ursula’s benefit. Renee had stopped convulsing but now she started to shiver alarmingly and Mr Emslie, more urgently now, said, ‘Come on, Susie, come on, girl, stay awake, there’s a good girl.’
‘Her name is Renee,’ Ursula said, ‘even if she denies it.’
‘I call ’em all Susie,’ Mr Emslie said softly. ‘I had a little girl by that name. The diphtheria took her off when she was just a littl’un.’
Renee gave one last great shudder and life disappeared from her half-open eyes.
‘Gone,’ Mr Emslie said sadly. ‘Internal injuries probably.’ He wrote ‘Argyll Road’ on a label in his neat grocer’s hand and tied it to her finger. Ursula removed the handbag from Renee’s rather reluctant grasp and shook its contents out. ‘Her identity card,’ she said, holding it up for Mr Emslie to see. ‘Renee Miller’ it said, indisputably. He added her name to the label.
While Mr Emslie began the complex manoeuvre of turning round in order to make his way back out of the cellar, Ursula picked up the gold cigarette case that had fallen out with the compact and lipstick and French letters and God knows what else that formed the contents of Renee’s handbag. Not a gift but stolen property, she was sure of that. It was a difficult task for Ursula’s imagination to place Renee and Crighton in the same room as each other, let alone the same bed. War did indeed make strange bedfellows of people. He must have picked her up in a hotel somewhere, or perhaps a less salubrious endroit. Where had she learned her French? She probably only had a couple of words. Not from Crighton anyway, he thought English was quite enough to rule the world with.
She slipped the cigarette case and the identity card into a pocket.
The debris shifted in a heart-stopping way as they were trying to back out of the cellar (they’d given up on trying to turn round). They remained paralysed, crouched like cats, hardly daring to take a breath for what seemed an eternity. When it felt safe to move again they found that this new arrangement of wreckage had made the barricade impenetrable and they were forced to find another, tortuous exit, creeping on their hands and knees through the shattered base of the building. ‘Doing my back in, this lark is,’ Mr Emslie muttered behind her.
‘Doing my knees in,’ Ursula said. They carried on with weary doggedness. Ursula cheered herself up with the thought of buttered toast, although Phillimore Gardens was out of butter and unless Millie had gone out and queued (unlikely), there was no bread either.
The cellar seemed to be an endless maze and it slowly dawned on Ursula why there were people unaccounted for up above – they were all secretly cached down here. The residents of the house clearly used this part of the cellar as a shelter. The dead here – men, women, children, even a dog – looked as though they had been entombed where they had been sitting. They were completely cloaked in a shell of dust and looked more like sculptures, or fossils. She was reminded of Pompeii or Herculaneum. Ursula had visited both, during her ambitiously titled ‘grand tour’ of Europe. She had been lodged in Bologna where she had made friends with an American girl – Kathy, a gung-ho type – and they had taken a whistle-stop tour – Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples – before Ursula left for France and the final leg of her year abroad.
In Naples, a city that frankly terrified them, they hired a loquacious private guide and spent the longest day of their lives trudging determinedly round the dry, dusty ruins of the lost cities of the Roman Empire beneath a merciless southern sun.
‘Oh, gosh,’ Kathy said as they staggered around a deserted Herculaneum, ‘I wish no one had ever gone to the bother of digging ’em up.’ Their friendship had flared brightly for a short time and fizzled out just as quickly when Ursula went to Nancy.
‘I have spread my wings and learned how to fly,’ she wrote to Pamela after leaving Munich and her hosts, the Brenners. ‘I am quite the sophisticated woman of the world,’ although she was still little more than a fledgling. If the year had taught her one thing it was that after having endured a succession of private students, the last thing she wanted to do was teach.