‘That’s not our kind of love.’
‘I sometimes don’t believe there’s any other kind.’ I suppose I should have recognized that she was already under a stranger’s influence - she had never spoken like that when we were first together. We had agreed so happily to eliminate God from our world. As I shone the torch carefully to light her way across the devastated hall, she said again, ‘Everything must be all right. If we love enough.’
‘I can’t turn on any more,’ I said. ‘You’ve got everything.’
‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘You don’t know.’
The glass from the windows crumbled under our feet. Only the old Victorian stained glass above the door had stood firm. The glass turned white where it powdered like the ice children have broken in wet fields or along the side of roads. She told me again, ‘Don’t be scared.’ I knew she wasn’t referring to those strange new weapons that still, after five hours, droned steadily up from the south like bees.
It was the first night of what were later called the V1s in June 1944. We had become unused to air-raids. Apart from the short spell in February 1944, there had been nothing since the blitz petered out with the great final raids of 1941. When the sirens went and the first robots came over, we assumed that a few planes had broken through our night defence. One felt a sense of grievance when the All Clear had still not sounded after an hour. I remember saying to Sarah, ‘They must have got slack. Too little to do,’ and at that moment, lying in the dark on my bed, we saw our first robot. It passed low across the Common and we took it for a plane on fire and its odd deep bumble for the sound of an engine out of control. A second came and then a third. We changed our minds then about our defences. ‘They are shooting them like pigeons,’ I said, ‘they must be crazy to go on.’ But go on they did, hour after hour, even after the dawn had begun to break, until even we realized that this was something new.
We had only just lain down on the bed when the raid started. It made no difference. Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the Common like the tail-light of a slow car driving away. I have wondered sometimes whether eternity might not after all exist as the endless prolongation of the moment of death, and that was the moment I would have chosen, that I would still choose if she were alive, the moment of absolute trust and absolute pleasure, the moment when it was impossible to quarrel because it was impossible to think. I have complained of her caution, and bitterly compared our use of the word ‘onions’ with the scrap of her writing Mr Parkis had salvaged, but reading her message to my unknown successor would have hurt less if I hadn’t known how capable she was of abandonment. No, the V1s didn’t affect us until the act of love was over. I had spent everything I had, and was lying back with my head on her stomach and her taste - as thin and elusive as water - in my mouth, when one of the robots crashed down on to the Common and we could hear the glass breaking further down the south side.
‘I suppose we ought to go to the basement,’ I said.
‘Your landlady will be there. I can’t face other people.’
After possession comes the tenderness of responsibility when one forgets one is only a lover, responsible for nothing. I said, ‘She may be away. I’ll go down and see,’
‘Don’t go. Please don’t go.’
T won’t be a moment.’ It was a phrase one continued to use, although one knew in those days that a moment might well be eternity long. I put on my dressing-gown and found my torch. I hardly needed it: the sky was grey now and in the unlit room I could see the outline of her face.
She said, ‘Be quick.’
As I ran down the stairs I heard the next robot coming over, and then the sudden waiting silence when the engine cut out. We hadn’t yet had time to learn that that was the moment of risk, to get out of the line of glass, to lie flat. I never heard the explosion, and I woke after five seconds or five minutes in a changed world. I thought I was still on my feet and I was puzzled by the darkness: somebody seemed to be pressing a cold fist into my cheek and my mouth was salty with blood. My mind for a few moments was clear of everything except a sense of tiredness as though I had been on a long journey. I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate: my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness. I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy.
But when memory did return it was not in that way. I realized first that I was lying on my back and that what balanced over me, shutting out the light, was the front door: some other debris had caught it and suspended it a few inches above my body, though the odd thing was that later I found myself bruised from the shoulders to the knees as if by its shadow. The fist that fitted into my cheek was the china handle of the door, and it had knocked out a couple of my teeth. After that, of course, I remembered Sarah and Henry and the dread of love ending.
I got out from under the door and dusted myself down. I called to the basement but there was nobody there. Through the blasted doorway I could see the grey morning light and I had a sense of great emptiness stretching out from the ruined halclass="underline" I realized that a tree which had blocked the light had simply ceased to exist - there was no sign of even a fallen trunk. A long way off wardens were blowing whistles. I went upstairs. The first flight had lost its banisters and was a foot deep in plaster, but the house hadn’t really, by the standard of those days, suffered badly: it was our neighbours who had caught the full blast. The door of my room was open and coming along the passage I could see Sarah; she had got off the bed and was crouched on the floor - from fear, I supposed. She looked absurdly young, like a naked child. I said, ‘That was a close one.’
She turned quickly and stared at me with fear. I hadn’t realized that my dressing-gown was torn and dusted all over with plaster; my hair was white with it, and there was blood on my mouth and cheeks. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘you’re alive.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
She got up from the floor and reached for her clothes. I told her, ‘There’s no point in your going yet. There must be an All Clear soon.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.
‘Two bombs don’t fall in one place,’ I said, but automatically, for that was a piece of folklore that had often proved false.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘I’ve lost two teeth, that’s all.’
‘Come over here, let me wash your face.’ She had finished dressing before I had time to make another protest -no woman I have ever known could dress as quickly. She bathed my face very slowly and carefully.
‘What were you doing on the floor?’ I asked.
‘Praying.’
‘Who to?’
‘To anything that might exist.’
‘It would have been more practical to come downstairs.’ Her seriousness frightened me. I wanted to tease her out of it.
‘I did,’ she said, ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘There was nobody there. I couldn’t see you until I saw your arm stretching out from under the door. I thought you were dead.’
‘You might have come and tried.’
‘I did. I couldn’t lift the door.’
‘There was room to move me. The door wasn’t holding me. I’d have woken up.’