Instead, on her return – with an eye to entrance into the civil service – she did an intensive shorthand and typing course in High Wycombe, run by a Mr Carver who was later arrested for exposing himself in public. (‘A meat-flasher?’ Maurice said, his lip curling in disgust, and Hugh shouted at him to leave the room and never to use such language in his house again. ‘Infantile,’ he said when Maurice had slammed his way out into the garden. ‘Is he really fit for marriage?’ Maurice had come home to announce his engagement to a girl called Edwina, the eldest daughter of a bishop. ‘Goodness,’ Sylvie said, ‘will we have to genuflect or something?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Maurice said and Hugh said, ‘How dare you speak to your mother like that.’ It was a terrifically bad-tempered visit all round.)
Mr Carver hadn’t been such a bad sort really. He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.
Ursula had embarked for Europe a virgin, but didn’t return one. She had Italy to thank for that. (‘Well, if one can’t take a lover in Italy where can one take one?’ Millie said.) He, Gianni, was studying for a doctorate in philology at Bologna University and was more grave and serious than Ursula had expected an Italian to be. (In Bridget’s romantic novels, Italians were always dashing but untrustworthy.) Gianni brought a studious solemnity to the occasion and made the rite of passage less embarrassing and awkward than she had feared.
‘Gosh,’ Kathy said, ‘you are bold.’ She reminded Ursula of Pamela. In some ways, not in others – not in her serene denial of Darwin, for example. Kathy, a Baptist, was saving herself for marriage but a few months after she returned to Chicago her mother wrote to Ursula to tell her that Kathy had died in a boating accident. She must have gone through her daughter’s address book and written to everyone in it, one by one. What an awful task. For Hugh, they had simply put a notice in The Times. Poor Kathy had saved herself for nothing. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.
‘Miss Todd?’
‘Sorry, Mr Emslie. It’s like being in a crypt, isn’t it? Full of the ancient dead.’
‘Yes, and I’d quite like to get out before I turn into one of them.’
As she crept gingerly forward, Ursula’s knee pressed on something soft and supple and she recoiled, banging her head on a broken rafter, sending a shower of dust down.
‘You all right?’ Mr Emslie said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Are we stopped for something else?’
‘Hang on.’ She had once stood on a body, recognized the squashy, meat-like quality of it. She supposed she had to look, although God knows she didn’t want to. She shone her torch on what seemed to be a dusty mound of material, scraps of stuff – crochet and ribbons, wool – partly impacted into the earth. It could have been the contents of a sewing basket. But it wasn’t, of course. She peeled back a layer of wool and then another one as if unwrapping a badly packed parcel or a large, unwieldy cabbage. Eventually a small almost unblemished hand, a small star, revealed itself from the compacted mass. She thought she might have found Emil. Better then that his mother was dead rather than knowing about this, she thought.
‘Be careful here, Mr Emslie,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘there’s a baby, try to avoid it.’
‘All right?’ Miss Woolf asked her when they finally emerged like moles. The fire on the other side of the street was almost out now and the street was murky with the dark, the soot, the filth. ‘How many?’ Miss Woolf asked.
‘Quite a few,’ Ursula said.
‘Easy to recover?’
‘Hard to say.’ She handed over Renee’s identity card. ‘There’s a baby down there, bit of a mess, I’m afraid.’
‘There’s tea,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘Go and get yourself some.’
As she made her way, with Mr Emslie, to the mobile canteen she was amazed to spot a dog cowering in a doorway further up the street.
‘I’ll catch up with you,’ she said to Mr Emslie. ‘Get a mug for me, will you? Two sugars.’
It was a small nondescript terrier, whimpering and shaking with fear. Most of the house behind the doorway had disappeared and Ursula wondered if this had been the dog’s home, that it was hoping for some kind of safety or protection and couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. As she approached it, however, it ran off up the street. Dratted dog, she thought, chasing after it. Eventually she caught up with it, snatching it up in her arms before it had a chance to run again. It was trembling all over and she held it close, talking in soothing tones to it, rather as Mr Emslie had to Renee. She pressed her face against its fur (disgustingly dirty but then so was she). It was so small and helpless. ‘Slaughter of the Innocents,’ Miss Woolf said the other day when they heard of a school in the East End taking a direct hit. But wasn’t everyone innocent? (Or were they all guilty?) ‘That buffoon Hitler certainly isn’t,’ Hugh said, the last time they had talked, ‘it’s all down to him, this whole war.’ Was she really never going to see her father again? A sob escaped from her and the dog whined in fear or sympathy, it was hard to say. (There wasn’t a single member of the Todd family – apart from Maurice – who didn’t attribute human emotions to dogs.)
At that moment there was a tremendous noise behind them, the dog tried to bolt again and she had to hold it tightly. When she turned round she saw the gable wall of the building that had been on fire falling down, almost in one piece, the bricks rattling on to the ground in a brutish fashion, just reaching the WVS canteen.
Two of the women from the WVS were killed, as was Mr Emslie. And Tony, their messenger boy who had been scooting past on his bicycle, but not scooting fast enough unfortunately. Miss Woolf knelt down on the jagged, broken brick, oblivious to the pain, and took hold of his hand. Ursula crouched down by her side.
‘Oh, Anthony,’ Miss Woolf said, unable to say anything else. Her hair was escaping from its usual neat bun, making her look quite wild, a figure from a tragedy. Tony was unconscious – a terrible head wound, they had dragged him roughly from beneath the collapsed wall – and Ursula felt they should say something encouraging and not let him be aware of how upset they were. She remembered he was a Scout and started talking to him about the joys of the outdoors, pitching a tent in a field, hearing a running stream nearby, collecting sticks for a fire, watching the mist rise in the morning as breakfast cooked in the open. ‘What fun you’ll have again when the war is over,’ she said.
‘Your mother will be awfully glad to see you come home tonight,’ Miss Woolf said, joining the charade. She stifled a sob with her hand. Tony made no sign of having heard them and they watched as he slowly turned a deathly pale, the colour of thin milk. He had gone.
‘Oh, God,’ Miss Woolf cried. ‘I can’t bear it.’
‘But bear it we must,’ Ursula said, wiping away the snot and the tears and filth from her cheeks with the back of her hand and thinking how once this exchange would have been the other way round.
‘Bloody fools,’ Fred Smith said angrily, ‘what did they go and park the bloody canteen there for? Right next to the gable end?’
‘They didn’t know,’ Ursula said.
‘Well, they should have bloody realized.’
‘Well then someone should have bloody told them,’ Ursula said, her anger flaring up suddenly. ‘Like a bloody fireman, for instance.’