‘No, no tea, thank you,’ he said, surprisingly polite and subdued. It struck her that Maurice was nearly always simmering with suppressed fury (what a strange condition to live your life in), in some ways he reminded her of Hitler (she had heard that Maurice ranted at secretaries. ‘Oh, that’s so unfair!’ Pamela said, ‘but it does make me laugh’).
Maurice had never got his hands dirty. Never been to an incident, never pulled apart a man like a cracker or knelt on a matted bundle of fabric and flesh that had once been a baby.
What was he doing here, was he going to start pontificating again about her love life? It never crossed her mind that he was here to say, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this’ (as if this were an official announcement) ‘but Ted has caught one, I’m afraid.’
‘What?’ She couldn’t untangle the meaning. Caught what? ‘I don’t know what you mean, Maurice.’
‘Ted,’ he said. ‘Ted’s plane has gone down.’
Teddy had been safe. He was ‘tour expired’ and was instructing at an OTU. He was a squadron leader with a DFC (Ursula, Nancy and Sylvie had been to the Palace, bursting with pride). And then he had asked to go back on ops. (‘I just felt I had to.’) The girl she knew in the Air Ministry – Anne – told her that one in forty aircrew would survive a second tour of duty.
‘Ursula?’ Maurice said. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you? We’ve lost him.’
‘Then we’ll find him.’
‘No. Officially he’s “missing in action”.’
‘Then he’s not dead,’ Ursula said. ‘Where?’
‘Berlin, a couple of nights ago.’
‘He bailed out, and he’s been taken captive,’ Ursula said, as if stating a fact.
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Maurice said. ‘He went down in flames, no one got out.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He was seen, an eyewitness, a fellow pilot.’
‘Who? Who was it who saw him?’
‘I don’t know.’ He was beginning to grow impatient.
‘No,’ she said again. And then again, no. Her heart started racing and her mouth went dry. Her vision blurred and dotted, a pointillist painting. She was going to faint.
‘Are you all right?’ she heard Maurice say. Am I all right, she thought, am I all right? How could I be all right?
Maurice’s voice sounded a long way off. She heard him shout for a girl. A chair was brought, a glass of water fetched. The girl said, ‘Here, Miss Todd, put your head between your knees.’ The girl was Miss Fawcett, a nice girl. ‘Thank you, Miss Fawcett,’ she murmured.
‘Mother took it very hard as well,’ Maurice said, as if bemused by grief. He had never cared for Teddy the way they all did.
‘Well,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder, she tried not to flinch, ‘I’d better get back to the office, I expect I’ll see you at Fox Corner,’ almost casually, as if the worst part of the conversation were over and they could get on with some blander chat.
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
She sat up straight. The water in the glass trembled slightly. ‘Why will you see me at Fox Corner?’ She sensed Miss Fawcett still hovering solicitously.
‘Well,’ Maurice said, ‘a family gathers on occasions such as these. After all, there won’t be a funeral.’
‘There won’t?’
‘No, of course not. No body,’ he said. Did he shrug? Did he? She was shivering, she thought she might faint after all. She wished someone would hold her. Not Maurice. Miss Fawcett took the glass from her hand. Maurice said, ‘I’ll give you a lift down, of course. Mother sounded most awfully cut up,’ he added.
He’d told her on the telephone? How dreadful, she thought numbly. It hardly mattered, she supposed, how one was given the news. And yet to have it conveyed by Maurice in his three-piece pinstripe, leaning against her desk, now inspecting his fingernails, waiting for her to say she was fine and he could go …
‘I’m fine. You can go.’
Miss Fawcett brought her hot, sweet tea and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Todd. Would you like me to come home with you?’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Ursula said, ‘but I’ll be all right. Do you think you could fetch my coat for me?’
He was twisting his uniform cap in his hands. They were making him nervous, just by their very presence. Roy Holt was drinking beer from a big dimpled-glass beer mug, great draughts with every mouthful as if he were very thirsty. He was Teddy’s friend, the witness to his death. The ‘fellow pilot’. Last time Ursula was here, visiting Teddy, was the summer of ’42 and they had sat in the beer garden and eaten ham sandwiches and pickled eggs.
Roy Holt was from Sheffield where the air still belonged to Yorkshire but was perhaps not so good. His mother and sister had been killed in the awful raids in December 1940 and he said he wasn’t going to rest until he’d dropped a bomb directly on Hitler’s head.
‘Good for you,’ Izzie said. She had a peculiar way with young men, Ursula noticed, both maternal and flirtatious at the same time (where once she had simply been flirtatious). It was rather disturbing to watch.
As soon as she heard the news, Izzie left Cornwall post-haste for London and then commandeered a car and a fistful of petrol coupons from a ‘man she knew’ in the government, to take them both to Fox Corner, and then, onwards, to make the journey to Teddy’s airfield. (‘You’ll never manage the train,’ she said, ‘you’ll be far too upset.’) ‘Men she knew’ was generally a euphemism for ex-lovers (‘What did you do to get this?’ a surly garage owner had asked when they filled up at his pumps on the road north. ‘I slept with someone terribly important,’ Izzie said sweetly).
Ursula hadn’t seen Izzie since Hugh’s funeral, since her astonishing confession that she had a child, and Ursula thought that perhaps she should reintroduce the subject on the drive to Yorkshire (awkward to do) as Izzie had been so upset and presumably had no one else to talk to about it. But when Ursula said, ‘Do you want to talk more about your baby?’ Izzie said, ‘Oh, that,’ as if it was something trivial. ‘Forget I ever said anything, I was just being morbid. Shall we stop for tea somewhere, I could demolish a scone, couldn’t you?’
Yes, they had gathered at Fox Corner, and no, there was no ‘body’. By then the status of Teddy and his crew had changed from ‘missing in action’ to ‘missing, presumed dead’. There was no hope, Maurice said, they must stop thinking there was hope. ‘There’s always hope,’ Sylvie said.
‘No,’ Ursula said, ‘sometimes there really isn’t.’ She thought of the baby. Emil. What would Teddy look like? Blackened and charred and shrunk like an ancient piece of wood? Maybe there was nothing left at all, no ‘body’. Stop it, stop it, stop it. She breathed. Think of him as a little boy, playing with his planes and trains – no, actually that was worse. Much worse.
‘It’s hardly a surprise,’ Nancy said grimly. They were sitting outside on the terrace. They had drunk rather too much of Hugh’s good malt. It felt peculiar to be drinking his whisky when he himself was gone. It was kept in a cut-glass decanter on the desk in the growlery, and it was the first time she had drunk it when it had not been poured by his own hand. (‘Fancy a drop of the good stuff, little bear?’)
‘He’d flown so many missions,’ Nancy said, ‘the odds were against him.’
‘I know.’
‘He expected it,’ Nancy said. ‘Accepted it, even. They have to, all those boys do. I sound sanguine, I know,’ she continued quietly, ‘but my heart is split in two. I loved him so much. Love him so much. I don’t know why I use the past tense. It’s not as if love dies with the beloved. I love him more now because I feel so damn sorry for him. He’ll never marry, never have children, never have the wonderful life that was his birthright. Not all this,’ she said, waving a hand around to indicate Fox Corner, the middle class, England in general, ‘but because he was such a good man. Sound and true, like a great bell, I think.’ She laughed. ‘Silly, I know. I know you’re the one that understands. And I can’t cry, I don’t even want to cry. My tears would never do justice to this loss.’