‘Good Lord-I say, you’re an American, aren’t you? You’re the first American I’ve had pop down to see me.’
He hadn’t popped down to see her. He’d come up into the night for a breath of fresh air.
‘All sorts of chaps pop down, but I don’t think we’ve had an American down here since, well… since the autumn. Ed Murrow came. The chap who broadcasts for CBS. Do you know Ed Murrow?’
‘We’ve met. I wouldn’t say I knew him.’
She hopped off the tomb. A small woman, no more than five feet tall.
‘Daisy Hopton,’ she said cheerily.
Daisy, Poppy. Did the English upper classes name all their daughters after flowers?
‘Calvin Cormack. Would that be Miss or Missis Hopton?’
‘Neither, darling-Lady Daisy, actually.’
‘You’re married to a lord?’
‘No, Daddy’s one. Lord Scowbrook. That’s in Derbyshire. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it?’
“Fraid not. Do you have estates there?’
‘No. Not so much as an allotment or a shed. All our land’s in Devon. But then all the Duke of Devonshire’s is in Derbyshire, so it all sort of comes out in the wash.’
Cal had heard of the Duke of Devonshire-who hadn’t? Half the women he met in Washington before the war wanted to marry a duke’s son or an earl’s. He knew one who’d memorised the name and title of every eligible eldest son in Debrett’s. Being a congressman’s son didn’t count for much among the belts and garters.
‘Look, there’s bags left over. Would you like something to eat?’
It was tempting. Walter had eaten his breakfast. He’d skipped lunch just waiting for him to show.
‘Sure.’
‘A little smoked salmon and a glass of sherry perhaps?’
She unwrapped a sandwich for him. It was white bread. White bread was scarce. It was prized.
‘You just have to know the right people,’ she explained.
Cal sipped at his sherry, looked around at the ruins half hidden in the darkness, felt the mixture of chemical sterility and human heat still wafting up the stairs from the crypt.
‘What exactly do you do here, Lady Daisy?’ he asked.
‘I sort of run a first aid post. I have my little bag of tricks, as you can see. And I have a tin trunk full of bandages and iodine and… stuff… yes, stuff, I’ve got lots of stuff, stuff of several different kinds, I should think. Absolutely oodles of stuff.’
‘And you tend to the wounded?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘There hasn’t been a raid for almost a week, and if people make it in here, they usually arrive before it starts. Short of a direct hit we don’t get a lot of injuries. I’ve taken splinters out of fingers, bathed a few cuts, but the biggest thing I’ve ever done is set a broken leg in a splint. Between raids they tend not to want to know me. I believe “fiercely independent” is the cliché. Does tend to make one feel a bit redundant.’
‘Then why do you do it?’
‘Well, one has to do one’s bit… and besides…’
Poppy Payne’s words came unbidden to Cal’s lips.
‘Besides, there’s no Season.’
‘How very perceptive of you, darling. Yes, that’s it in a nutshell. No Season. I mean, one would get awfully bored wouldn’t one?’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘And in the meantime I pursue this exercise in democratic futility.’
This threw Cal. He’d not the faintest idea what the woman meant. Just when he thought he’d got her pegged as a do-gooding social butterfly she tossed in a polysyllabic from an Economics Major. He thought better of saying anything.
‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘you hear all this guff about all being in the same boat. How the Blitz has formed us into a classless society. Isn’t true, of course. In fact it’s complete roundies.’
Roundies? Almost involuntarily Cal glanced at his shoes. He’d always called them roundies-it was military school slang. Complete shoes? It didn’t make sense?
‘Excuse me?’
‘Bollocks, darling. Complete bollocks. And you still don’t know what I mean, do you? Men’s roundies-balls, darling, complete balls. We’re one nation, strictly for the duration. We tolerate one another without liking one another. When this war’s over the poor will probably eat us.’
They were eating smoked salmon and white bread and sipping dry sherry. Suddenly it seemed to Cal less like a novelty and more like a skirmish in the great British class war. Now, he’d really no idea what to make of this woman. Kitty wasn’t exactly simple-but compared to this she was simplicity personified.
‘Your copper’s taking his time,’ she said.
‘A lot of people to look at.’
‘Who are you looking for? A criminal of some sort? God knows there’s enough of them down there.’
‘No-a nark, I believe that’s the term.’
‘A nark?’
‘A Mr Hudge.’
‘Darling, why didn’t you say so?’
‘You know him?’
‘Little chap, no taller than me? Club foot? Sort of clumpy limp?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. Walter never described him. I just know the name-Hudge.’
‘Actually, darling, it’s Jaroslav Hudcjek. But Hudge is generally all most people can manage, so Hudge it is. I know Hudge, everyone knows Hudge, although I think the news that he’s a rozzer’s nark might come as a bit of a shock to more than a few people round here…’
‘You could always keep that to yourself.’
‘Discretion is my middle name, darling-or at least it would be if it weren’t Phoebe. As a matter of fact I even know where the little blighter lives.’
‘So do we. Got bombed out on Saturday.’
‘And by Tuesday he’d got himself somewhere else. I’m way ahead of you, darling.’
‘And you know where this somewhere else is?’
Daisy Hopton led him out of the churchyard and pointed off to the east, towards the only building still standing in the rubble desert. It reminded Cal of Jubilee Street where Stilton lived, but the devastation was the greater and the contrast the starker. This was a slender house, that at some point had been in the middle of a terrace. Standing alone it looked perilous, as gravity-defying as the tower of Pisa. As though someone had swept away everything else and at the end thrust a knife into the ground as a marker. He found himself wondering what kept it up.
‘He lives there?’
‘You bet. Everyone else got bombed out, the last family left in January, but when it was still standing after Saturday’s raid Hudge decided it was charmed. After all, everything else got flattened months ago, and then pounded to dust only last week. It does look miraculous. Dead lucky, he reckons. You’ll find him in there somewhere.’
As a child, Cal had been force-fed books. It was a maxim of his father’s that they should not forget the old country, be that old country the Scotland of his father’s family or the Germany of his mother’s. What his wife thought of this no one thought to ask. Cal, meanwhile, grew up on a diet of the Brothers Grimm, Goethe, Fontane, Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stepping into the silent gloom of Hudge’s chosen ruin he could not help but remember the scene in Kidnapped when David Balfour visits the House of Shaw and his Uncle Ebenezer sends him in darkness to climb a topless staircase. Cal set foot on the stairs, knowing they too might be topless, or middleless, and at any moment could send him crashing to earth. He wished for a torch. Tomorrow he’d go out and buy one, if regulations still permitted.
The stairs were intact, as far as the second floor. A chunk of the outside wall was missing-he walked twelve steps on a wooden hill without any visible means of support, and, in a blacked-out back room on the second floor, found what he was looking for. A naked light bulb dangled from the ceiling by a twisted thread of cable. A hammock had been strung across the room from nails banged into the wall at either end. Above this a large black umbrella diverted overspill from a leaky cistern away from the head of the sleeping occupant, a short club-footed man, clutching a book to his chest. Cal looked at the book. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He’d no idea people still wrote books in Latin. Less that anyone might actually read them.