It was first light by now and they heard the all-clear sound.
‘I thought I saw you earlier, and then I decided I’d imagined you,’ Ursula said, making peace. He was angry because they were dead, not because they were stupid.
She felt as though she were in a dream, drifting away from reality. ‘I’m as good as dead,’ she said, ‘I have to sleep before I go mad. I live just round the corner,’ she added. ‘Lucky it wasn’t our flat. Lucky, too, that I ran after this dog.’ One of the rescue squad had given her a piece of rope to tie round the dog’s neck and she had hitched it to a charred post sticking out of the ground. She was reminded of the arms and legs the stretcher-bearer had been harvesting earlier. ‘I suppose the circumstances dictate that’s what I should call him – Lucky, even though it’s a bit of a cliché. He saved me, you know, I would have been drinking my tea there if I hadn’t gone after him.’
‘Bloody fools,’ he said again. ‘Shall I walk you home?’
‘That would be nice,’ Ursula said but she didn’t lead him ‘round the corner’ to Phillimore Gardens, instead they walked wearily hand in hand, like children, the dog trotting beside them, along Kensington High Street, almost deserted at this time in the morning, with only a slight diversion for a gas main that was on fire.
Ursula knew where they were going, it was inevitable somehow.
In Izzie’s bedroom there was a framed picture on the wall opposite her bed. It was one of the original illustrations from the first Adventures of Augustus, a line drawing depicting a cheeky boy and his dog. It verged on the cartoon – the schoolboy cap, the gob-stoppered cheek of Augustus and the rather idiotic-looking Westie who bore no resemblance to the real-life Jock.
The picture was very much at odds with how Ursula remembered this room before it was mothballed – a feminine boudoir, full of ivory silks and pale satins, expensive cut-glass bottles and enamelled brushes. A lovely Aubusson carpet had been rolled up tightly and tied with thick string and left against a wall. There had been one of the lesser Impressionists on another of the walls, acquired, Ursula suspected, more for the way it matched the décor than for any great love of the artist. Ursula wondered if Augustus was there to remind Izzie of her success. The Impressionist had been packed away somewhere safe but this illustration seemed to have been forgotten about, or perhaps Izzie didn’t care so much for it any more. Whatever the reason, it had sustained a diagonal crack from one corner of the glass to the other. Ursula recalled the night that she and Ralph had been in the wine cellar, the night that Holland House was bombed, perhaps it had sustained the damage then.
Izzie had, sensibly, chosen not to stay at Fox Corner with ‘the grieving widow’ as she referred to Sylvie, as ‘we shall fight like cats and dogs’. Instead, she had decamped to Cornwall, to a house on top of a cliff (‘like Manderley, terrifically wild and romantic, no Mrs Danvers though, thank goodness’), and had started ‘churning out’ an Adventures of Augustus comic strip for one of the popular dailies. How much more interesting, Ursula thought, if she had allowed her Augustus to grow up, as Teddy had done.
A buttery, unseasonal sun was trying hard to nudge its way through the thick velvet curtains. Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? she thought. If she could go back in time and take a lover from history it would be Donne. Not Keats, the knowledge of his untimely death would colour everything quite wretchedly. That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) – one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.
She could hear a bird singing outside the window, even though it was November now. The birds were probably as confounded as people were by the Blitz. What did all the explosions do to them? Kill a great many, she supposed, their poor hearts simply giving out with shock or the little lungs bursting with the pressure waves. They must drop from the sky like weightless stones.
‘You look thoughtful,’ Fred Smith said. He was lying, one arm behind his head, smoking a cigarette.
‘And you look strangely at home,’ she said.
‘I am,’ he grinned and leaned forward to wrap his arms around her waist and kiss the back of her neck. They were both filthy, as if they had toiled all night in a coal mine. She recalled how sooty they had been when she had journeyed on the footplate that night. The last time she had seen Hugh alive.
There was no hot water in Melbury Road, no water at all, nor electricity, everything turned off for the duration. In the dark, they had crawled under the dustsheet on Izzie’s bare mattress and fallen into a sleep that mimicked death. Some hours later they had both woken up at the same time and made love. It was the kind of love (lust, to be honest about it) that survivors of disasters must practise – or people who are anticipating disaster – free of all restraint, savage at times and yet strangely tender and affectionate. A strain of melancholy ran through it. Like Herr Zimmerman’s Bach sonata it had unsettled her soul, disjointed her brain and body. She tried to recall another line from Marvell, was it in ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, something about bolts of bones and fetters and manacles but it wouldn’t come. It seemed harsh when there was so much soft skin and flesh in this abandoned (in all ways) bed.
‘I was thinking of Donne,’ she said. ‘You know – Busy old foole, unruly Sun.’ No, she supposed, he probably didn’t know.
‘Oh?’ he said, indifferently. Worse than indifferent really.
She was taken off guard by the sudden memory of the grey ghosts in the cellar and of kneeling on the baby. Then for a second she was somewhere else, not a cellar in Argyll Road, not in Izzie’s bedroom in Holland Park but some strange limbo. Falling, falling—
‘Cigarette?’ Fred Smith offered. He lit another one from the stub of his first and handed it to her. She took it and said, ‘I don’t really smoke.’
‘I don’t really pick up strange women and fuck them in posh houses.’
‘How Lawrentian. And I’m not strange, we’ve known each other since we were children, more or less.’
‘Not like this.’
‘I should hope not.’ She was beginning to dislike him already. ‘I have no idea what time it is,’ she said. ‘But I can offer you some very good wine for breakfast. It’s all there is, I’m afraid.’
He looked at his wristwatch and said, ‘We’ve missed breakfast. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.’
The dog nudged itself through the door, its paws pitter-pattering on the bare wooden boards. It jumped on the bed and gazed intently at Ursula. ‘Poor thing,’ she said, ‘it must be starving.’
‘Fred Smith? What was he like? Do tell!’
‘Disappointing.’
‘How? In bed?’
‘Gosh, no, not that at all. I’ve never … like that, you know. I think I thought it would be romantic. No, that’s the wrong word, a silly word. “Soulful” perhaps.’
‘Transcendent?’ Millie offered.
‘Yes, that’s it. I was looking for transcendence.’
‘I imagine it finds you, rather than the other way round. It’s a tall order for poor old Fred.’
‘I had an idea of him,’ Ursula said, ‘but the idea wasn’t him. Perhaps I wanted to fall in love.’
‘And instead you had jolly good sex. Poor you!’
‘You’re right, unfair of me to expect. Oh, God, I think I was an awful snob with him. I was quoting Donne. Am I a snob, do you think?’
‘Awful. You do reek, you know,’ Millie said cheerfully. ‘Cigarettes, sex, bombs, God knows what else. Shall I run you a bath?’