“You hadn’t heard?” he said.
“No.”
“Didn’t survive.”
He went on speaking at once, as if from a kind of embarrassment at having to announce such a thing.
“She and the young lady,” he said. “It was all at the back of the house. You wouldn’t think there was a jot of damage out here in front, but there’s plenty inside, I can tell you. Dreadful thing. Used to see a lot of them. Always very friendly people. Got their newspapers from me, matter of fact. If you know them, there’s a lady inside can tell you all about it.”
“I’ll go in.”
He threw away the stub of his cigarette and trod on it
“So long,” he said.
“So long.”
He was right about there being a mess inside. A woman m some sort of uniform was giving instructions to the People clearing up. She turned out to be Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.
“Eleanor.”
She looked round.
“Hallo, Nick,” she said. “Thank goodness you’ve come.”
She did not seem at all surprised to see me. She came across the hall. Now in her middle thirties, Eleanor was less unusual in appearance than as a girl. No doubt uniform suited her. Though her size and shape had also become more conventional, she retained an air of having been never properly assimilated to either sex. At the same time, big and broad-shouldered, she was not exactly a “mannish” woman. Her existence might have been more viable had that been so.
“You’ve heard what’s happened?” she said abruptly.
Her manner, too, so out of place in ordinary social relations, had equally come into its own.
“Molly’s …”
“And Priscilla.”
“God.”
“One of the Polish officers too — the nice one. The other’s pretty well all right, just a bang over the head. That wretched girl who got into trouble with the Norwegian has been taken to hospital. She’ll be all right, too, when she’s recovered from the shock, I don’t know whether she’ll keep the baby.”
It was clear all this briskness was specifically designed to carry Eleanor through. She must have been having a very bad time indeed.
“A man at the door — one of the wardens — said Ted was down at the post.”
“He was there when it happened. They may have taken him on to the hospital by now. How did you hear about it? I didn’t know you were in London.”
“I’m passing through on leave.”
“Is Isobel all right?”
“She’s all right. She’s in the country.”
Just for the moment I felt unable to explain anything very lucidly, to break through the barricade of immediate action and rapid talk with which Eleanor was protecting herself. It was like trying to tackle her in the old days, when she had been training one of her dogs with a whistle, and would not listen to other people round her. She must have developed early in life this effective method of shutting herself off from the rest of the world; a weapon, no doubt, against parents and early attempts to make her live a conventional sort of life. Now, while she talked, she continued to move about the hall, clearing up some of the debris. She was wearing a pair of green rubber gloves that made me think of the long white ones she used to draw on at dances.
“We shall have to have a talk as to who must be told about all this — and in what order. Are you in touch with Chips?”
“Eleanor — Chips has been killed too.”
Eleanor stopped her tidying up. I told her what had happened at the Madrid. She began to take off the green gloves. People were passing through the passage all the time. Eleanor put the rubber gloves on the top of the marquetry cabinet Molly’s sister had left her when she died, the one Ted Jeavons had never managed to move out of the hall.
“Let’s go upstairs and sit down for a bit,” she said. “I’ve had just about as much as I can take. We can sit in the drawing-room. That was one of the rooms that came off least badly.”
We went up to the first floor. The drawing-room, thick in dust and fallen plaster, had a long jagged fissure down one wall. There were two rectangular discoloured spaces where the Wilson and the Greuze had hung. These pictures had presumably been removed to some safer place at the outbreak of war. So, too, had a great many of the oriental bowls and jars that had formerly played such a part in the decoration. They might have been valuable or absolute rubbish; Lovell had always insisted the latter. The pastels, by some unknown hand, of Moroccan types remained. They were hanging at all angles, the glass splintered of one bearing the caption Rainy Day at Marrakesh. Eleanor and I sat on the sofa. She began to cry.
“It’s all too awful,” she said, “and I was so fond of Molly. You know, she usen’t to like me. When Norah and I first shared a flat together, Molly didn’t approve. She put out a story I wore a green pork-pie hat and a bow tie. It wasn’t true. I never did. Anyway, why shouldn’t I, if I wanted to? There I was in the country breeding labradors and bored to death, and all my parents wanted was for me to get married, which I hadn’t the least wish to do. Norah came to stay and suggested I should join her in taking a flat. There it was. Norah was always quite good at getting jobs in shops and that sort of thing, and I found all the stuff I knew about dogs could be put to some use too when it came to the point. Besides, I’d always adored Norah.”
I had sometimes wondered how Eleanor’s ménage with Norah Tolland had begun. No one ever seemed to know. Now it was explained.
“Where’s Norah now?”
“In Scotland, driving for the Poles.”
She dried her eyes.
“Come on,” she said. “We must get out some sort of plan. No good just sitting about. I’ll find a pencil and paper.”
She began to rummage in one of the drawers.
“Here we are.”
We made lists of names, notes of things that would have to be done. One of the wardens came up to say that for the time being the house was safe to stay in, they were going home.
“Where are you spending the night, Nick?”
“A club.”
“There might be someone who could take you part of the way. The chief warden’s got a car.”
“What about you?”
“I shall be all right. There’s a room fitted up with a bed in the basement. Ted used it sometimes, if he had to come in very late.”
“Will you really be all right?”
She dismissed the question of herself rather angrily. The A.R.P. official with the car was found.
“Good-bye, Eleanor.”
I kissed her, which I had never done before,
“Good-bye, Nick. Love to Isobel. It was lucky I was staying here really, because there’ll be a lot that will have to be done.”
The fire-engines had driven away. The street was empty. I thought how good Eleanor was in a situation like this. Molly had been good, too, when it came to disaster. I wondered what would happen to Ted. The extraordinary thing about the outside of the house was that everything looked absolutely normal. Some sort of a notice about bomb damage had been stuck on the front-door by the wardens; otherwise there was nothing to indicate the place had been subjected to an attack from the air, which had killed several persons. This lack of outward display was comparable with the Madrid’s fate earlier that evening, when a lot of talking in a restaurant had been sufficient to drown the sound of the Warning, the noise of the guns. This must be what Dr. Trelawney called “the slayer of Osiris and his grievous tribute of blood.” I wondered if Dr. Trelawney himself had survived: when Odo Stevens would receive the news: whether the Lovells’ daughter, Caroline, would be brought up by her grandparents. Reflecting on these things, it did not seem all that long time ago that Lovell, driving back from the film studios in that extraordinary car of his, had suggested we should look in on the Jeavonses’, because “the chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there.”