V for Victory Page 11

  ‘Biscuit?’ asked Basset, reaching for the tin.

  ‘It’s empty, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’ll bring some in. The missus got a tin from the lady she used to clean for.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Soft-soaping her. Wants Min to go back after the war.’

  ‘Will she?’

  He shook his head. ‘She says she’ll stay on, helping at the day-nursery, if they’ll have her, loves it there. What about you, Chief?’

  ‘After the war?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Winnie shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea.’ Her own job was utterly finite; the armistice would come, and then no one would need air-raid wardens any more. The whole intricate jigsaw of Civil Defence – the ARP, the Heavy and Light Rescue, the Fire Service, the WVS tea-vans that turned up at incidents as if conjured like Cinderella’s coach – all these pieces would be shaken apart, and she herself, after five years of steadily increasing responsibility – a woman in charge of men – would suddenly be in charge of nothing at all. It was like being in rep: a role learned, played and discarded.

  ‘The thing is,’ she’d written to Emlyn recently, ‘I’m now so used to putting on a boilersuit that I can’t imagine having to wear a skirt to work, and where, in any case, will I find an employer who lists “ability to run across uneven ground while carrying two full buckets” under “qualifications needed”?’

  He hadn’t yet answered – in fact, it was almost a fortnight since she’d received his last letter, which had consisted of a full-page rumination on the subject of orchards – should they grow damsons or plums on their hypothetical half-acre? Perhaps they should stick to apples, in which case would she prefer Worcester Pearmain or Blenheim Orange, though he’d heard the latter only flourished in sandy soil? He’d ended with a sketch of a fretwork planter he’d once seen at Kew, and the usual ‘all my love, Emlyn’. The letter had gone under the bed with all the others.

  ‘Right,’ she said, finishing her cocoa. ‘I need to get over to Myddleton Square and see if anyone’s turned up to repair the shelter roof yet. If I’m not back by lunch-time, have a merry Christmas, won’t you, Basset? And best wishes to Min.’

  ‘Thanks, Chief. Where are you spending yours?’

  ‘With my parents. I’m getting the train tonight.’ And returning on Boxing Day, if she could possibly manage it, with the excuse that her friend Elsie would be turning up on leave from Portsmouth at some point. And then there was Avril’s party on New Year’s Eve; the invitation had arrived, with ‘Please come, dearest Winnie. It won’t be a proper celebration without you’ handwritten on the back, while the front bore a rather clever line-drawing of her sister’s striking profile above the typed words ‘This slender volume will shock many; it will, however, impress a great many more – New Statesman.’ Winnie had inked a moustache on the picture, before propping it on the shelf above her gas fire.

  On the way to Myddleton Square, she called again at the basement flat on Falcon Road, and again there was no answer. The cat, though, was still waiting outside.

  Noel’s most vivid memory of past Christmases was of a moment simultaneously marvellous and catastrophic.

  ‘Now be rather careful while opening this,’ his godmother had said. He’d been six or seven years old, seated on the wicker armchair with the brown velvet cushions, and Mattie had placed something very heavy and smooth and round on his lap, the whole wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with a green ribbon. He had pulled on one end of the ribbon, and the paper had whispered away to reveal a glass sphere, enclosing a tiny pine wood, and at its centre a cottage with a puff of smoke emerging from the chimney. Standing in the doorway, carrying a basket and about to step on to the path that wound through the trees, was a small girl in a red cloak. And in the leafy shadows hid a wolf.

  ‘If you carefully tip it up, just see what happens,’ Mattie had said, and he had tipped it and snow had fallen from nowhere, drifting like ash, a silent, delicate blizzard. He had never forgotten the wonder of it. And when the last flake had settled, he had tipped it again and somehow misjudged the weight, so that the globe had rolled over his hand and off the edge of the chair. The precise noise of it hitting the floor had never left him.

  ‘It was an accident and not in any way your fault,’ Mattie had said, consoling him with one of her enveloping hugs. ‘We should have opened it at the table, and I will make it my life’s purpose to hunt for another,’ though she hadn’t ever been able to find one exactly like it. But over the years there had been other astonishing presents – his own pair of binoculars in a leather case, a box of magic tricks, some of which had taken him weeks to master (‘Bravo! I shall henceforth call you the Great Noelini!’), an enormous illustrated atlas, with whales spouting in the South Atlantic, and Japan shaking cherry blossom across the Tsugaru Strait. One year there had been a tree so large that there was still a long, scraped mark on the drawing-room ceiling.

  His narrow, rationed Christmases with Vee had been unremarkable by comparison, the gifts inevitably home-produced, the disasters limited to occasional power cuts and roast fowl of varying toughness. This year, Noel had modest hopes for the main course; he had found a recipe in a library book about the history of food preservation, and since the evening of the 23rd, the chicken had been steeping in brine, to which he’d added the peel from the single lemon allocated to Vee after a Sicilian shipment had resulted in a two-hour queue at the greengrocer’s. By the time he went to bed on Christmas Eve, he had already prepared the parsley and sausage-meat stuffing. The potatoes were washed, the carrots scrubbed and the ring of pink blancmange had set satisfactorily and was under a cover in the larder. Before switching off the light, he re-read the Christmas card he’d received from Genevieve Lumb, which she had signed with five ‘X’s. He remained a little troubled by the message, which mentioned that she was spending Christmas ‘with my cousins, Andrew, Lloyd and Alistair. Alistair has just won the South of England under-16s long-jump trophy, although, as you know, I don’t much care about sports.’

  He woke abruptly, jaw clenched, from a vile and familiar dream of destruction. It was still dark. The alarm clock was ticking reassuringly, its luminous hands at twenty past four, but he could also hear what sounded like the tail end of an explosion, a low growl that, as he listened, resolved into the sulky mutter of a motor-car engine, and then stopped altogether. A door squealed, a door slammed; in the sudden silence he fell asleep again. He awoke a second time to see yellowish light oozing around the edge of the curtains, and he parted the folds to see a film of ice on the inside of the glass, and unbroken fog without. It was ten to eight. Time to take the chicken out of the brine.

  The first sign that the day was to prove unprecedentedly memorable came at the top of the stairs. Noel could hear someone snoring, and the snore grew louder as he descended, rising to a climax as he approached the drawing-room door, which was slightly ajar. Peering round, he saw Corporal O’Mahoney wrapped in a great-coat and lying on the ottoman, his stockinged feet projecting over the end, like planking on a builder’s van. A pair of muddy boots lay on Mattie’s favourite rug. Fastidiously, Noel removed them and then dropped each boot from waist height on to the stone floor beside the window seat. There was no break in the easy rhythm of the snoring.

  The kitchen was empty, but someone had made tea and the pot was still warm. He poured himself a cup and stared broodingly out through the kitchen window. If, as he suspected, the American had come for Christmas lunch, then the small chicken would be utterly inadequate and Vee would just have to open the tin of corned beef she’d been saving since August. And the corporal needn’t think he’d be getting any of the white meat.

  The fog was slowly shifting, no longer uniformly opaque; the bulky rectangle of the coal bunker emerged gradually from the soup and a flake of soot wandered past the window. The fruitcake, thought Noel. If he sliced the tombola fruitcake and served it with the blancmange and the tinned pears, there would, at least, be more than enough pudding
for them all. Another flake of soot followed the first, and then a whole flurry of them, each minutely curled and fronded, almost feather-like. Or not just feather-like, he realized, with surprise; actual feathers.

  He found Vee just outside the back door, muffled in coat and balaclava, plucking a turkey.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said. ‘Look what arrived this morning.’

  The turkey’s head jerked back and forth, ridiculously small by comparison with its body, the wattle like a pendulum.

  ‘What are we supposed to do with that?’ asked Noel.

  ‘Do with it?’ Vee glanced up, a tiny feather glued to the end of her nose. ‘Roast it, of course. How long since you’ve had a Christmas turkey?’

  ‘But that’ll take all day. And we have the chicken.’

  ‘And now we’ve got a turkey as well. Can’t we joint it? Mario drove nearly all the way to Norwich last night – he said he’d fetch us one, but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know for sure if he’d manage it.’

  ‘But if I’d known, we needn’t have killed Fleur.’

  ‘Who? Oh, the white one. But she hadn’t laid since September – you knew there was no point in keeping her. I’ve asked the corporal to lunch – after all, there’s going to be plenty.’ Her hand was moving automatically as she spoke, the dark feathers hanging in the air around her.

  Noel turned away. He was not sentimental about the hens; on the other hand, Fleur (he had been reading The Forsyte Saga when she’d arrived) had seemed more characterful than the rest of the flock and his choice of cooking method had been, in a small way, a tribute to that.

  ‘You’ve not got a coat on,’ said Vee. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

  ‘Have you fed the hens?’ he asked. He could hear them crooning impatiently, the wiry scrape of their feet.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Still coatless, he aimed through the fog towards the coop, and shovelled some fish meal through the flap on the side. ‘No,’ he said, in response to the commotion inside, ‘you can’t come out yet. Later, maybe.’ There was a hint of brightness overhead.

  ‘Have a look in the larder!’ called Vee. ‘You’ll never believe it. And your present’s on the dresser.’

  When, ten minutes later, she brought in the turkey, now reduced to pimpled nakedness, Noel was already halfway through the first chapter of The History of European Architecture.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, a little stiffly.

  ‘There wasn’t another one in Cullbright’s, but Mr Jepson found a copy in a shop in Wood Green,’ she said. ‘Are you pleased?’

  ‘Yes. And did you like yours?’ He had wrapped the talcum powder and left it outside her bedroom door.

  ‘I did, it’s a treat.’ She waved a wrist in his direction, and the smell of lavender cut through that of raw meat. ‘So, if you’ve stopped being cross, can we get this in the oven?’

  ‘I’m not cross.’

  ‘Did you see what else he brought? Did you see the little bags with tea in them? I cut the end off one, and there was nearly a spoon and a half in it, so I’m going to open them all and put the tea in the caddy – the only trouble is that it’s so fine it’ll go straight through the strainer, it’s like dust. I might see if I can cut up a stocking and use that instead. And the ham! Did you see the sliced ham? And the great big oranges!’

  He had never heard her so animated. ‘They’re grapefruit,’ he said.

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘They’re grown in California and picked by itinerant workers from the Oklahoma dustbowl, as chronicled by John Steinbeck. People in the USA have them for breakfast.’

  ‘What do they taste like?’

  ‘I don’t actually know,’ said Noel, with reluctant curiosity.

  ‘We could have an American breakfast,’ said Vee. ‘That’d be a Christmas surprise for everybody, wouldn’t it?’

  The corporal slept on. Only Dr Parry-Jones really enjoyed the grapefruit, and Vee had to remove the sugar bowl from the table after Mr Reddish had lunged for a third spoonful.

  ‘I’m assuming it’s not ripe,’ he said. ‘I once had to help a young lady in the street – she’d eaten a very sour lime and had developed the most terrible muscle shudders, and I had to give her my arm to the nearest Tube station.’

  ‘Muscle shudders?’ repeated Dr Parry-Jones, arrested in the act of raising a tea cup to her mouth. ‘Spasms, you mean? Or was it fasciculation? Though I can think of no link between unripe fruit and either of those.’

  ‘Perhaps she’d been dipping it in gin,’ suggested Miss Appleby.

  ‘Again, I can think of no clear link,’ said the doctor. ‘Muscle weakness and inebriation, yes, but the symptoms that Mr Reddish is describing don’t fall into this category.’

  ‘She was a delicate little thing,’ said Mr Reddish, nostalgically. ‘When we arrived at the entrance to Goodge Street, she said, “Thank you, sir, you’re very kind,” and skipped away towards the escalators like a damsel-fly.’ He flicked his fingers in an impression of gauzy delicacy and Noel had to bite his cheeks and glance towards Mr Jepson, who’d always been a useful collaborator at these moments, able to balance a poker face against a gleam in the eye. But Mr Jepson was concentrating on his grapefruit. Since the evening of the Methodist Entertainment, he had moved around the house as if on a different track to Noel, smiling as he passed, still in the vicinity but no longer heading the same way. And during their Tuesday Latin lesson, Noel had turned the page on an unseen translation and had found himself picking his way through a Pliny passage extolling the fortitude of Vespasian’s forces: ‘When the men fought they were as brave as wild-cats and as unbending as the pines that grow upon the Palatine Hill. Though spears fell like snow they did not flinch.’ He had hurried on, but embarrassment had crackled in the air and Mr Jepson’s face had lost all its humour and alertness so that he’d resembled a ventriloquist’s dummy, cheeks painted red, the expression stiff and unnatural. All the ease of their usual conversation had disappeared, and for once, Noel had been glad when the lesson had ended and he’d been able to leave the room. Thinking about it afterwards, he’d found himself torn between sympathy and irritation; he’d seen it before, this tendency of adults to let a single flawed moment ruin everything, and he wished he could say something bald and straightforward: ‘Mr Jepson, despite my youth, I have been present at the worst minutes of several other people, by which measure the incident in the kitchen at the Drill Hall pales into insignificance, and I can assure you that I have no intention of ever referring to it again, nor do I think the less of you because of it, whatever its cause. Can we now carry on making puns about Suetonius?’

  Without Mr Jepson to bounce off, the breakfast-table conversation seemed to Noel to have a dreadful flatness, emphatically lacking seasonal cheer. Mr Reddish had heard on the morning news that the Germans were continuing an extensive counterattack on the Western Front. He had also heard that the Tube strike had been extended over Boxing Day, that three rockets had fallen in South London on Christmas Eve, and that Ming the Panda had died at London Zoo. Mr Reddish and Dr Parry-Jones agreed that the Tube strikers were not only unpatriotic but almost certainly communist. Miss Appleby said that she’d once been to see Ming when accompanied by a sailor she’d been walking out with who was himself now dead. Mr Reddish remarked that many people who had been alive at the start of the war were now dead. Miss Appleby started to cry and said that the war had only taken the best, and Dr Parry-Jones said that, as a matter of fact, she’d known of several ne’er-do-wells who’d died as a result of enemy action, and that death was the great leveller, winnowing saints and sinners alike. Mr Reddish recited ‘Death Be Not Proud’, Vee cleared the dishes, and breakfast was over.

  ‘You’re not with us for Christmas lunch, are you, Mr Jepson?’ said Vee. He seemed to be lingering, a small parcel in his hand.

  ‘No. I’m walking to Finchley to see my old editor – he lives alone and is in rather poor health, so I thought …’ He held out the parcel to Noel and
aimed a smile at a corner of the kitchen. ‘A little gift for you, not sure whether you’ve read it already, it’s light but tremendously gripping.’

  It was a slim volume entitled Rogue Male, and Noel was padlocked to the pages for the entire morning, unfastening himself periodically to baste the turkey. Each time he looked up there was more light spilling in through the kitchen windows, and by the time Major Quive-Smith had come to a deserved and satisfying end in a Dorset lane, the sky was a cold, clear blue, and Corporal O’Mahoney was awake.

  Mr Reddish raised his glass. ‘Here’s to the Greek government in their continuing fight against the rebels.’

  ‘The Greek government!’ said everyone, not quite in unison. The corporal’s final contribution to the meal, brought into the house in a kit bag, had been a box of chocolates (‘for the kid’), two bottles of Californian white wine, a bottle of Portuguese sherry and a hip-flask full of whisky. All the usual toasts – Peace, the King, Health and Happiness, Our Mothers – had already been made, and Mr Reddish was now working his way through the current news.

  ‘I believe that ELAS is regarded as a liberation force, rather than a rebel group,’ said Noel, who was drinking lemon squash.

  ‘ELAS poor Yorick,’ said Mr Reddish, holding up a drumstick. ‘Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?’