Jane cocked her head, listening. “He’s snoring.”
“I’m so glad,” replied Bella. “My poor sweet Reggie. He’s thinking about taking a leave of absence from the college. Since the physics lab copped it last month, he’s had to teach out of the gardener’s potting shed. Not that he’s got that many students these days — so many have dropped out to enlist — but he says it’s still hard to do anything on the two or three hours of sleep he gets at night and with groundskeepers and gardeners popping in and out during his lectures and rattling pots.”
Carrie reached across the table and touched the hand of her friend and former next-door neighbour. “Considering what the professor’s been going through, you’re both very kind to let us stay here tonight.”
“You’re most welcome. But I seriously doubt you’ll get to spend the whole night here. Since there isn’t room for all of us in the shelter out back, I’m afraid that once that siren starts screaming, I’ll have to send the whole lot of you off to the tube station.” Bella smiled. “Although…there have been some interesting rumours flying about lately — that the Nazis are deliberately avoiding this neighbourhood on Hitler’s special instructions. They say he adores Du Cane Court and wants to use that whole block to house his SS officers after the inva—”
The words of Bella’s explanation trailed off because Carrie had turned away from her in the middle of them. Bella bit her lip.
“I’m so sorry, love. I wasn’t thinking.”
Carrie spoke without looking at Bella. “Or maybe you just thought the incendiary that ended my mother’s life was a Nazi mistake.”
“That isn’t what I — all I’m saying is that some of our neighbours here in Elmfield Road do believe this, and so they don’t bother to take shelter. That’s all I’m saying.”
Carrie nodded. She turned back to her friend and said, softening, “I know you meant no harm.” She tried to smile. “Maybe it isn’t Art Deco Hitler likes. Maybe it’s all those music hall singers and dancers who live there. Sometimes I walk along the High Road and I can hear them carrying on inside. I know what it’s like to lose oneself in music — to forget there’s even a war going on. To forget everything that eats you up from the inside.”
Maggie touched Carrie tenderly on the shoulder. “Like the night we went to the Palais and you were carried a million miles away.”
Carrie laughed mordantly. “By a man who probably should have been sitting in a prison cell.”
Bella considered Carrie for a moment before speaking. “Carrie, you haven’t sworn off men altogether, have you?”
Jane laughed. “Oh, I don’t think you have to worry about that.” At that moment Lyle returned from his trip to the lav, and all the women sitting at the dining room table, save Carrie, burst into laughter. Lyle looked at them speculatively and then checked his flies.
“No, brother, we aren’t laughing at you,” said Jane, and then quickly correcting herself: “Well, of course we are. But not in a bad way.”
Lyle, still looking befuddled, sat down next to Carrie just as Professor Prowse padded sleepily into the room from his early evening nap. “I thought I smelt Mrs. Hood’s vegetable soup. Is there any left?”
“Pull up a chair, Reggie,” said Bella, going to her drowsy-eyed husband to smooth back his bed-mussed hair. “I’ll fetch you a bowl. You know all the girls. You don’t know Lyle. He’s Jane’s brother. Lyle’s a fugitive from justice. These chums of mine from childhood are his abettors.”
The professor and Lyle shook hands. “You’ll be pleased to know, Mr. Higgins, that I—” The professor interrupted himself to cough away some accumulated phlegm from his throat. “—am a moral relativist. Whatever you did, you had your reason for doing it, and it isn’t my place to judge.” The professor yawned. “Are those Mrs. Hood’s currant rolls? What did we do to deserve that woman’s cornucopian generosity?” Assuming there’d be no answer to his potentially rhetorical question, Prowse bit off the end of one of the rolls and continued, “At times of communal crisis, members of society are forced by circumstances to do one or more of the following things, and you’ll usually see all of them employed in varying measure. One: ‘Extend, amend, or bend.’ The rules, that is. The rules of societal and civil engagement. Exempli gratia: Michelle Hood extending her wonted liberality to bounteous excess. Elsewhere, female factory workers and Land Girls being permitted to wear trousers. Cooks replacing butter with marg.”
“But certainly not by choice!” pronounced Ruth. Everyone laughed.
The professor quickly reclaimed the floor: “A chap puts on a uniform and suddenly he’s given license to kill. Or rather, to follow the ‘amend and bend’ model, the soldier has been provided a ‘justification’ for murder. By definition, it’s still murder, but we fix a wartime rider to the rule to extenuate the consequences.
“Two. ‘Break the rules entirely.’ Both sides in this war have done their share of that. They’ve broken confirmed promises not to bomb civilian targets. The rules against killing noncombatants are ignored, purposefully flouted.
“Three. ‘Anarchy reigns.’ All rules simply disappear. It is every man to his own defence, every man by his own conscience — should such a thing as conscience withstand the crucible of communal crisis.
“One of my colleagues — Dr. Haverson, in the astronomy department — he’s conducting research on the relationship between coronal mass ejections — those bursts of solar wind and electromagnetic radiation that sometimes get tossed by the sun far into space — which means, on occasion, right at us—and thermospheric auroras — the Borealis and Australis — examining the degree to which the auroras are intensified by these solar events. I mention this because he and I had a very interesting discussion the other day about something quite extraordinary that took place in a small mill town outside of Manchester in 1859. It was coincident to the first recorded observation of a solar flare, and the solar storm that went along with it. The storm was the biggest there has ever been — at least since astronomers acquired the ability to recognise them. The result of this event was one of the most chilling examples of mass hysteria ever recorded.”
“Mass hysteria?” asked Ruth.
“The whole town, to put it in the vernacular, losing its bloody mind.”
“I don’t understand. Just because the sky lit up with beautiful colours?”
“It was a little more than simply beautiful colours. Are you going to eat that biscuit? Thank you. The whole sky lit up like noontide in a cloudless desert, even though it happened in the middle of the night. For the people of Tulleford it augured the end of the world. Armageddon. Whatever apocalyptic designation you wish to put to it. I mention this because it’s the best example I can think of for the kind of disorder and chaos that hasn’t really any underlining purpose. It’s the human animal in a state of utter madness. Chickens running about without their heads. This is what happened in Tulleford in the early hours of September 2, 1859. I fear this is just the sort of madness into which we will descend should this terrible war go on for too long. We’ll lose every covenant of civilized society. We’ll even lose our instinct for self-preservation. We’ll be like those who jump to their deaths from burning buildings — mindlessly trading one form of death for another.”