V for Victory Read online

  ‘Mr Jepson’s very … enervated,’ he’d said to Vee, after his first lesson.

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Spiritless.’

  ‘Spiritless? He went to a university,’ said Vee, exasperated. ‘He knows Latin. He writes for a living. What do you want, party hats? The last person who answered the advertisement spelled “lodging” with a “j” – is that who you’d want teaching you English? Is it the ear that’s worrying you?’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  ‘Well, what is it? You’ve never complained about Dr Parry-Jones being enervated, and I don’t see her dancing any jigs.’

  It had been clear that this was one of those times when it really wasn’t worth pursuing a discussion with Vee, and Noel had taken his doubts away again, and examined them in private. Perhaps ‘enervated’ had been the wrong word; ‘extinguished’ might have been more accurate. Jepson was present but unlit, so that in the dining room he was more furniture than inhabitant, talked around and over, but never to. But in lessons there were glimmers – he had seized Noel’s first essay and pushed the words around the page like backgammon counters, showing him how to introduce a subject, how to make a neat and satisfying ending, how to prune and rearrange the content. ‘If I have any talent at all, it’s for editing,’ he’d said, and out of that tiny wisp of self-praise had grown their first real conversation – on the subject of dull openings to novels – and after that it had been easier, and Jepson had gradually become a visible member of the household, though never a very audible one, unless you could get him on his own.

  He was, too, a surprisingly rigorous marker. Both he and Dr Parry-Jones appended detailed notes to Noel’s written work, and set him masses of prep. Mr Reddish, on the other hand, was content to lie on his bed listening to Appointment With Fear on the wireless, while Noel worked his way, largely unsupervised, through Mathematics for Matriculation and Fullday’s Manual of Book-Keeping, while Miss Appleby had lately abandoned all pretence of teaching him any French, and instead used him as a sort of confessional booth for her love life. She had broken off her engagement to the Anzac after seeing an informational film about Australian spiders, and was now walking out with an asthmatic tax inspector. ‘Would you call that a step up from a soldier, or a step down?’ she’d asked. ‘He has lovely hair, though of course he’s not as muscular as Douglas was.’

  From the drill-hall kitchen, they heard a prolonged rattle of applause, followed by footsteps along the corridor. Mrs Claxton entered the room and Jepson closed his copy of Great Expectations, his expression stoic.

  ‘Do you want me back on duty?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no’ – she was opening cupboards, looking for something – ‘I think Cathy Jackson is giving an encore, and then the Merry Whistler – that’s the Reverend Bagshott – is doing requests before the interval. I’m searching for something large enough for one of the Dorita Juveniles to vomit into. I do hope it wasn’t the paste sandwiches, otherwise there’ll be mayhem – ah, here.’ She took a china basin from a cupboard behind Mr Jepson’s head and turned to go. The noise of sliding crockery came from the shelf she’d just removed it from, and she shot out a hand towards the cupboard door. Mr Jepson made an equally abrupt movement in response and, for a frozen moment, Noel stared at the peculiar tableau that had formed in front of him: Mrs Claxton with one hand outstretched, and Mr Jepson hunched over the table, his arms wrapped protectively around his head.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Claxton, in a low voice. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Quietly and rapidly, she rearranged the contents of the cupboard, and then took the basin and left.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Noel. It seemed a stupid question. When there was no reply, he touched his tutor’s sleeve, and Mr Jepson straightened, stiffly, his features a flattened mask of humiliation so that he looked suddenly years older, and hideous.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Noel.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Jepson stood without looking at him. ‘I think I’d better leave now. Please give my apologies to Mrs Claxton.’ And he was already scuttling out of the kitchen door, head down.

  ‘I’ll man the tombola!’ Noel called after him. ‘Don’t worry.’

  From the hall came scattered applause and then the first whistled phrase of ‘Danny Boy’, the rising notes as plangent as an evening blackbird. Noel stood, uncertainly. Two minutes ago, he’d been discussing gas fires, and now, inexplicably, the evening was fractured, unrecognizable; a single blow had punched it out of shape.

  Jepson had left his book on the table, and also the matches and cigarettes, and Noel took a Mellow Kensitas out of the packet and attempted to light it, coughing gouts of acrid smoke across the kitchen and eventually retching into the sink. He crushed it out and sat down again, opened Great Expectations near the end and was at once back at home. The book had been his childhood frame of reference: the local fishmonger sounded like Joe Gargery; his godmother’s solicitor looked like Wemmick; the booming of thunder over the Heath was the noise of the guns from the prison hulks. And now he accompanied the adult Pip to Satis House (in Noel’s imagination, a cross between Green Shutters and the Natural History Museum) and together they climbed the cobwebbed stairs. Miss Havisham had just gone up in flames when the scrape of chairs in the hall heralded the interval.

  A dense smell of river mud hung over the embankment, stirred by more delicate currents of petrol and sewerage. Vee breathed through her mouth as she hurried to keep up with the corporal’s long stride.

  ‘Can you swim?’ asked Mario, breaking off from an anecdote about his short-sighted neighbour, who’d once adopted a skunk, thinking that it was a cat.

  ‘No,’ said Vee. ‘Can you?’

  ‘Had to learn in the summer in one of the ponds up by your house – did it by numbers, a hundred guys in short pants and an instructor with a bullhorn. ‘Scoop with your arms, kick with your legs. One, two, three, SWIM!!!!’

  The final word was so loud that there was an answering shout from one of the passing barges; there was a line of them in both directions, their blueish bow-lights stroking the choppy surface. Mario finished his cigarette and flicked it over the parapet.

  ‘So,’ he said, halting. ‘I have to ask you something.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Vee had been walking a careful hand’s breadth away from him, but he’d made no attempt even to take her arm, and now that they were standing facing each other, there was at least a foot of icy air whistling between them. She found herself thinking that if he gave her a squeeze, at least she’d be warm. His head was a giant silhouette, with the moon balanced on his right ear. He leaned down towards her and the moon disappeared.

  ‘Couldn’t say this in front of other people,’ he said, ‘but I can get you a turkey.’

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘A turkey. I drove a truckload for Thanksgiving, I know a farm where I can get one.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Would you like that? Isn’t that what the English have on Christmas Day?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘Don’t know when I can get it – it’ll all depend what deliveries I’m making – but when I get it, it’s yours.’

  He straightened up again, and the moon jumped back into place. ‘Thank you very much,’ said Vee, formally.

  There was a series of hoots from the river, where a large ship was nosing under Blackfriars Bridge. It sounded, to Vee, like sarcastic laughter.

  ‘OK, you want to go to a mushroom bar?’ asked Mario. ‘That’s what they’re calling them – they spring up in the night, some of them even have a band. There’s one around here somewhere.’ And they were off again, Vee taking four steps for every two of his so that by the time they got back to the Strand she had a stitch, and had to stop and lean against a lamp-post, like an inebriate, while Mario consulted a passing American sailor for directions.

  ‘Just up that side alley on the right,’ he said, returning to the circle of dim light in which she was standing. ‘You need me to car
ry you?’

  ‘Carry me? No, of course not. It’s just you’re a fast walker.’

  ‘I’m a fast dancer as well.’ He performed a little hop and a twirl, ridiculous but oddly graceful for someone so large, and she couldn’t help but smile. ‘You like dancing?’ he asked.

  ‘I used to,’ said Vee. ‘I think I’ve forgotten how.’ She could hear the music, now – the agonized squeal of a trumpet.

  ‘No one forgets,’ said Mario. ‘It’s like … what do you say over here? Laying an egg?’

  ‘Riding a bicycle. Everyone there will be half my age.’

  ‘Except for me, and who cares, anyhow? Aw … come on.’ He held out a hand like a shovel and Vee took it. It was so easy, she thought, as he led her towards the music; he was so easy – a printed postcard, when every other man she’d ever known was a sealed letter filled with blank pages or mystifying codes. And perhaps you didn’t always have to worry about every damned thing, every second of the day; perhaps sometimes you could just dance.

  It was after midnight when she arrived home. She let herself in through the back door, and groped along the scullery passage, hesitating when she saw a wavering light on the wall ahead.

  ‘Hello?’ she called softly.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Noel. He was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing an old blue dressing-gown over his clothes, a brick of a book open in front of him, and a candle burning. Vee had a sudden memory of coming home late after a dance in St Albans, twenty-odd years before, and her mother bearing much the same rather pursed expression.

  ‘You didn’t have to stay up,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t tired. How did you get back?’

  ‘A friend of Mario’s gave us a lift.’ A US Army motor-car, holding at least eight people, a jolting, draughty and hilarious journey, everyone singing, a toothy ATS girl screaming whenever the driver braked.

  ‘I didn’t hear a vehicle,’ said Noel, sounding like a policeman.

  ‘The driver wouldn’t come down the lane – he said the ruts would tear the bottom out. The corporal walked me back.’ He had taken her arm on the muddy track, and saved her from a couple of spills – not that she was tiddly, it was just that after two hours of dancing she felt as if her feet had been savagely broken and then carelessly re-set – and when they’d got to Green Shutters Mario had said, ‘Keep a look-out for that turkey!’ and then plunged off into the darkness of the Heath, apparently intent on walking to Camden guided only by moonlight and a failing torch with a bulb like a glow-worm.

  ‘I see,’ said Noel, marking his place and closing the book. ‘The council won the quiz, by the way, even though I was scrupulously fair in every possible respect. And Mrs Claxton gave me the left-over prizes from the tombola.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then.’ Vee found herself yawning, hugely. ‘I’d better get off to bed, plenty to do tomorrow. Same goes for you, young man. Nighty night.’

  Noel listened to her footsteps along the hall. She seemed to be limping with both feet. He’d stayed up partly to check that she arrived home safely and partly to tell her about some of the more amusing events at the Drill Hall, but it seemed that she’d already been sufficiently amused this evening. She hadn’t even noticed the tin of pears and cream or the fruitcake.

  ‘It’s very odd that nobody won the best prizes,’ he’d said to Mrs Claxton, during the tidy-up. ‘Could the matching tickets have inadvertently been left out?’

  ‘Why don’t you take them home, dear,’ said Mrs Claxton, apparently failing to hear the question. ‘You’ve been a great help. Your aunt must be very proud of you. And do thank Mr Jepson, when he’s feeling better.’

  Their eyes met briefly.

  ‘My husband never turned a hair during the raids,’ said Mrs Claxton, ‘but if someone lights a match in the dark, he’s straight under the table. It takes him back to the trenches, you see – snipers. And the language afterwards … he’s ashamed, though he can’t help himself. I should think it’s the same thing with your Mr Jepson – some nasty event in the past must have set him off.’

  She folded the tablecloth with sober precision, her smooth, bright manner momentarily dented. ‘I hope this is the last war,’ she said. ‘I hope you youngsters manage it better than we did. I hope you find better things to do than kill one another.’

  ‘“And they shall beat their swords into plough-shares,”’ said Noel, by way of agreement, clattering the last chair on to a stack. It was one of the few Bible verses of which Mattie had approved.

  On her way to Post 9 on Christmas Eve, on a morning so cold that the water in her kettle had frozen overnight, Winnie saw a black-and-white cat hanging around the ruins of Falcon Road – on the look-out for rodents, presumably, given that any residents had long since left. The only visible human being was a familiar bearded figure carrying a bucket and wearing a brown mohair hat that he claimed had been given to him by an Afghan tribesman. Rather than, say, swiped from a second-hand clothes shop on the Caledonian Road.

  ‘What?’ he shouted, catching sight of Winnie. ‘I am doing nothing wrong. Nothing. This is PERSECUTION.’

  ‘Looting,’ said Winnie. ‘Article 2:4 of the Special Wartime Measures Act. “The removal by a private individual of household objects from the site of a dwelling destroyed or partially destroyed by enemy action.” What’s in the bucket today?’

  ‘One or two things that caught my EYE.’

  He was perhaps in his seventies, a tartan shawl knotted across his stained coat, his jaw constantly moving as if chewing tobacco, his speech peculiarly uncontrolled, so that every phrase started slowly and accelerated into a gabbled shout. Winnie only knew him as Jim. It was possible, she thought, that he also only knew himself as Jim.

  She peered into the bucket. Two-thirds of a china shepherdess lay supine across a few lumps of coal and a smashed clock.

  ‘So you going to arrest me?’ His eyes flickered, as if Winnie were a train going past.

  ‘I’m not, but you know quite well if the police see you, you’ll be straight down the station and in front of the beak.’

  ‘I’d plead my case, I’ll tell them who’s boss, I’ve done it BEFORE.’

  ‘I bet you have. If you come to the Post, I’ll make you a cup of tea, if you like.’

  ‘No, no, you won’t try to trick me that way.’ He coughed; the noise was like mud being shovelled.

  ‘Your chest sounds bad, Jim.’

  ‘Blame the Boche for that, THE BOCHE. Dirty way to fight.’

  ‘You should get in the warm.’

  ‘That’s what that bugger on Falcon Road said to me, he said, “Why are you standing in the COLD?”’

  ‘Which bugger’s that, Jim?’

  ‘The one who’s living there.’

  ‘Living where?’

  He flapped a vague arm and then stumped off, eyes scanning the ground like a beachcomber.

  Winnie turned to go, and then hesitated. At the Post, they kept lists of the occupants of each address in the sector, but Falcon Road had been deserted for weeks, half the street obliterated and the remaining houses roofless and windowless, three storeys of Edwardian solidity reduced to crenellated bungalows. She glanced back at the empty road, and immediately saw the cat again. It was sitting on a gatepost; not hunting, but waiting, and it stood as she approached, and pushed its face into her cautiously outstretched hand.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked. No gate hung from the gatepost, and the house beyond was just a façade, the ground-floor window framing a tree in the back garden, but the front path had been partially cleared, the plaster and broken slates pushed to one side, so that one could easily reach the gap in the wall that led to the basement steps. Which had also been cleared.

  ‘It was very neat,’ she said to Basset, later, warming her hands on a mug of cocoa. That had been her first impression, when no one had answered her shouted greeting and she had first knocked, and then tried the door. Whoever was living there had arranged the remaining furniture into a
snug, the items clustered around the kitchen fireplace, in which the ashes were still warm. A bowl and a plate had been washed, and beside them on the table, a shining teaspoon sat in a clean cup, though when, out of curiosity, she went over to the sink and tried the tap, there was no water, only a hollow thudding from the pipe. Three blankets had been folded and placed on the sofa. A duffel bag hung over a chair.

  ‘A Mrs Fergus and her daughter used to live in that flat,’ she said. ‘I checked. They left before the V-2s.’

  ‘I remember them,’ said Basset.

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Irish.’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious that it wouldn’t take much to bring down the rest of the house,’ said Winnie. ‘Who’d choose to live there now?’

  ‘Someone who didn’t want to pay rent.’

  ‘It’s a man, according to Jim.’

  ‘Any description?’

  ‘His exact words were “that bugger on Falcon Road”.’

  ‘Narrows it down,’ said Basset. He carried on cleaning his nails with a used matchstick, applying the same concentration and thoroughness that he brought to every task. He was a volunteer in his fifties, a lathe worker in a tool factory, laconic, pallid and sporting a set of poorly fitting false teeth which gave him mouth ulcers, the only thing she’d ever heard him complain about. He arrived on time for every shift at the Post, never swore, never panicked and barely showed anxiety, even at the height of the night Blitz, when it had been merry hell from dusk to dawn. He was the sort of person who ought to get a medal after the war but who probably wouldn’t, and he was absolutely nothing like any of the characters in Avril’s book, which Winnie had finished the previous evening. And for ‘finished’ one could substitute the phrase ‘thrown across the room’. What was especially galling was that Avril had managed to get all the detail right – the parameters of an incident, the timings, the procedures, the almost unbearable slowness with which Heavy Rescue dug in search of casualties, the exhaustion, the dirt, the chaos of an ever-changing landscape. It was the people and emotions that were all wrong, and the idea that the Wardens’ Post was a cauldron of simmering lust in which every glance could be pantingly misinterpreted, and then acted upon later that evening under the raw pale moon that thrust through the panes, thrust again, yes, and again! Death, in Avril’s novel, was inevitably followed by sex, whereas in Winnie’s experience, what one yearned for most after dealing with a corpse was a bath or a beer. And no one in Tin Helmet ever discussed the sort of topics that were regularly chewed over at Post 9, such as what you could put in a gas meter instead of threepences, or how much Churchill actually drank; they never told terrible jokes, they never did the crossword or compared chilblains – no, it was all sliding obliquities so that you had to re-read every half-page to work out what they were actually talking about.