‘Oh, yes, please, that would be lovely.’
‘And while you’re at it,’ Millie said, ‘you can take that ruddy dog in the bath with you. He smells to high heaven. But he is kinda cute,’ she said, imitating an American accent (rather badly).
Ursula sighed and stretched. ‘You know I really, really have had enough of being bombed.’
‘The war’s not going away any time soon, I’m afraid,’ Millie said.
May 1941
MILLIE WAS RIGHT. The war went on and on. Into that dreadfully cold winter, and then there was the awful raid on the City at the end of the year. Ralph had helped to save St Paul’s from the fire. All those lovely Wren churches, Ursula thought. They had been built because of the last Great Fire, now they were gone.
The rest of the time they did the things that everyone of their kind did. They went to the cinema, they went dancing, they went to the lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery. They ate and drank and made love. Not ‘fucking’. That wasn’t Ralph’s style at all. ‘Very Lawrentian,’ she had said coolly to Fred Smith – she supposed he had no idea what she was talking about – but the crude word had jarred her horribly. She was used to hearing it at incidents, it was a vital constituent of the heavy rescue squad’s vocabulary, but not in the context of herself. She tried saying the word to her bathroom mirror but it felt shameful.
‘Where on earth did you get it?’ he asked.
Ursula had never seen him so dumbfounded. Crighton weighed the gold cigarette case in his hand. ‘I thought I’d lost it for ever.’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes, of course I do,’ Crighton said. ‘Why the mystery?’
‘Does the name Renee Miller mean anything to you?’
He frowned, thinking, and then shook his head. ‘Afraid not. Should it?’
‘You probably paid her for sex. Or bought her a nice dinner. Or just gave her a good time.’
‘Oh, that Renee Miller,’ he laughed. After a couple of beats of silence, he said, ‘No, really, the name means nothing. And anyway, I don’t think I have ever paid a woman for sex.’
‘You’re in the navy,’ she pointed out.
‘Well, not for a very, very long time then. But thank you,’ he said, ‘you know the cigarette case meant a lot to me. My father—’
‘Gave it to you after Jutland, I know.’
‘Am I boring you?’
‘No. Shall we go somewhere? The bolthole? Shall we fuck?’
He burst out laughing. ‘If you want.’
He cared less ‘for the niceties’ these days, Crighton said. These niceties seemed to include Moira and the girls and they soon resumed their furtive affair, although less furtive now. He was so different to Ralph that it hardly seemed like infidelity to her. (‘Oh, what a beguiling argument!’ Millie said.) She hardly saw Ralph now anyway and it seemed to be a mutual kind of waning.
Teddy read the words on the Cenotaph. ‘The Glorious Dead. Do you think they are? Glorious?’ he asked.
‘Well, they’re certainly dead,’ Ursula said. ‘But the “glorious” bit is to make us feel better, I expect.’
‘I don’t suppose the dead care about anything much,’ Teddy said. ‘I think when you’re dead you’re dead. I don’t believe there’s anything beyond, do you?’
‘I might have done before the war,’ Ursula said, ‘before I saw a lot of dead bodies. But they just look like so much rubbish, thrown away.’ (She thought of Hugh saying, ‘Just put me out with the dustbin.’) ‘It doesn’t seem as though their souls have flown.’
‘I shall probably die for England,’ Teddy said. ‘And there’s a chance you might too. Is it a good enough cause?’
‘I think so. Daddy said he would rather we were alive and cowards than dead and heroes. I don’t think he meant it, it wasn’t his style to shirk responsibility. What is it that it says on the war memorial in the village? For your tomorrow we gave our today. That’s what your lot are doing, giving up everything, it doesn’t seem right somehow.’
Ursula thought that she would rather die for Fox Corner than ‘England’. For meadow and copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood. Well, that was England, wasn’t it? The blessed plot.
‘I am a patriot,’ she said. ‘I surprise myself with it although I don’t know why. What does it say on Edith Cavell’s statue, the one by St Martin’s church?’
‘Patriotism is not enough,’ Teddy supplied.
‘Do you think that really?’ she said. ‘Personally, I think it’s more than enough.’ She laughed and they linked arms as they walked down Whitehall. There was quite a lot of bomb damage. Ursula pointed out the Cabinet War Rooms to Teddy. ‘I know a girl who works in there,’ she said. ‘Sleeps in a cupboard, more or less. I don’t like bunkers and cellars and basements.’
‘I worry about you a lot,’ Teddy said.
‘I worry about you,’ she said. ‘And none of that worrying has done either of us any good.’ She sounded like Miss Woolf.
Teddy (‘Pilot Officer Todd’) had survived his time in an OTU in Lincolnshire, flying Whitleys, and in a week or so was due to join a Heavy Conversion Unit in Yorkshire and learn how to fly the new Halifaxes and start his first tour of duty proper.
Only half of all bomber crews survived their first tour of duty, the girl in the Air Ministry said.
(‘Aren’t the odds the same every time they go up?’ Ursula said. ‘Isn’t that how odds work?’
‘Not in the case of bomber crews,’ the girl from the Air Ministry said.)
Teddy was walking her back to the office after lunch, she had taken a long hour. Things were not quite as hectic as they had been.
They had planned on somewhere swanky but ended up in a British Restaurant and dined on roast beef and plum pie and custard. The plums were tinned, of course. They enjoyed all of it though.
‘All those names,’ Teddy said, gazing at the Cenotaph. ‘All those lives. And now again. I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don’t you think?’
‘No point in thinking,’ she said briskly, ‘you just have to get on with life.’ (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) ‘We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.’ (The transformation was complete.)
‘What if we had a chance to do it again and again,’ Teddy said, ‘until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’
‘I think it would be exhausting. I would quote Nietzsche to you but you would probably thump me.’
‘Probably,’ he said amiably. ‘He’s a Nazi, isn’t he?’
‘Not exactly. Do you still write poetry, Teddy?’
‘Can’t find the words any more. Everything I try feels like sublimation. Making pretty images out of war. I can’t find the heart of it.’
‘The dark, beating, bloody heart?’
‘Maybe you should write,’ he laughed.
She wasn’t going out on patrol while Teddy was here, Miss Woolf had taken her off the roster. The raids were more sporadic now. There had been bad raids in March and April and they seemed all the worse for their having had a bit of a breather from the bombs. ‘It’s funny,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘one’s nerves are wired so tightly when it’s relentless that it’s almost easier to deal with.’
There had been a decided lull at Ursula’s post. ‘I think Hitler’s more interested in the Balkans,’ Miss Woolf said.
‘He’s going to turn on Russia,’ Crighton told her with some authority. Millie was on another ENSA tour and they had the Kensington flat to themselves.