V for Victory Page 14

  She stooped to right the bucket, flashing her torch across the looted treasures within – the fire irons, the cracked front panel of a wireless, a soiled tea-cosy, a bright gilt naval button just like the ones on Elsie’s uniform. Winnie picked it out and ran her thumb across the embossed anchor, and then dropped it back with the other items.

  ‘Could you let me know if there’s a funeral for him?’ she asked the constable.

  Outside, it had begun to snow again. Elsie was still waiting, shifting from foot to foot, her eyes following the passage of the stretcher.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Poor old chap who lived on the streets. Half mad, wouldn’t ever let us help him.’

  ‘There’ll be a few more of those when this is over.’

  ‘Few more of whom?’

  ‘People on the streets. Where are they all going to live when they come back?’ Elsie said, her tone suddenly indignant. The doors of the bread van slammed shut and the wheels spun, gripped briefly and then slithered towards the main road, the van’s rear end giving an ungainly shimmy as it turned the corner.

  ‘You ladies going to a New Year party?’ asked the constable, carefully closing the front door of the house, even as snow began to blow in through the window.

  ‘No,’ said Elsie, soberly. ‘I’m off to give my fiancé the elbow.’

  ‘I am,’ said Winnie. ‘Not that I want to. Happy New Year, Tom.’

  He flipped a salute. ‘And to you, Win.’

  She linked arms with Elsie, and they resumed their walk.

  ‘I wish you were coming too,’ said Winnie.

  ‘I don’t. You know what I think about your sister, and anyway, what would I do at a literary party?’

  ‘What I’m going to do: drink. If there is anything to drink. And Avril’s house is terribly swanky.’

  ‘Any dancing?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘What will they talk about?’

  ‘Clive’s friends are all Ministry bods so there’ll be War Office gossip, I suppose. And there’s bound to be some bookish types …’

  ‘So if you forced me to summarize it, absolutely forced me – because, to be frank, asking a writer to précis his work is an act of utter barbarism. Just imagine demanding that Picasso scribble a little sketch of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for you – but if, as I say, you absolutely forced me to reduce it to a single line, I’d have to suggest that it’s about the impossibility of true communication between the sexes,’ said the man with a paisley neck-tie, checking over Winnie’s shoulder for the fortieth time in case someone more important or better-looking was standing behind her. ‘I’m thinking of calling it “Thus Endymion Weeps”. What do you think of that for a title? Intriguing, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Winnie, not even attempting enthusiasm, her facial muscles already fatigued by the expression of interest she’d been feigning for the last ten minutes. As far as she could gather, he hadn’t even written the book yet; it was just a clanking bucket of ideas he’d filched along the way, like poor old Jim with his looted rubbish.

  There was a tiny pause in the conversation, the sort of pause which might prompt someone not entirely self-absorbed to ask a question of the other person. ‘Of course, it’s not my only idea,’ he continued. ‘My agent was insistent that I should – oh, there he is. I say, Ivan!’

  Winnie turned to see an elderly man with a large red face, and an extraordinary arrangement of long white hair, like a swirl of mock cream. ‘Oh, hello, Maxwell,’ he said, with a certain lack of keenness.

  ‘Join us?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Ivan glanced around in the obvious hope of finding someone else to talk to, before resignedly moving towards his client.

  Maxwell resumed his monologue. ‘I was just saying to … to …’ He gestured vaguely at Winnie. ‘That you advised me very strongly to pursue the idea of fictionally examining what I would term – in a self-coined phrase, I believe – osmotic emotion …’

  Released from the post of solitary listener, Winnie edged backward a few inches, and then slowly revolved through forty-five degrees so that she was on the very fringes of – and yet not actually involved in – a different conversation (‘… at which point I said to him, “Oh, I hadn’t realized that you want the sort of poetry that can be sung to the tune of ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’,” and he looked at me daggers’); the speaker’s eyes slid over her without interest, and she was at last free to simply look around. The room was blue with cigarette smoke and completely full, and she knew no one besides her sister – twinkling somewhere at the centre of the crush – and her brother-in-law, Clive, who had greeted her briefly before being summoned away to a telephone call.

  It was a long time since she’d been to a party like this, and she could feel her current self, the Winnie who drew up orders and joshed with colleagues, begin to slough away; how many times, as a gauche drama student, had she stood in just this position, sucking in her stomach and attempting to laugh at the same time as everybody else? That was exactly what she’d been doing on the night she’d met her husband; she could recall, suddenly, the taste of cheap sherry, and the dawning realization that the nice-looking young chap with the Labour Party badge was gazing at her and at no one else, and the precision of the memory seemed to jog something within her, so that she felt an unexpected shiver of the heart-strings, accompanied by a very definite sensation at crotch-level – a pleasurable tug – that made her shift and blush, though no one was looking at her. She had almost forgotten Emlyn as a solid being, awkward but gentle, his cold feet, the oddly biscuity smell of his hair, his ticklish middle: she’d been able to tease him into a defensive ball of arms and bony knees, begging for mercy. He’d kissed nicely, too. Last year, after a Civil Defence Social Night, she’d experienced the damp-lipped vacuum suck of the Chief Officer of Haringey Heavy Rescue, who had wanted to thank her very much indeed for her help in putting away the chairs, and it had roused nothing in her apart from the desire for a handkerchief. What if she turned her head now, and saw Emlyn?

  She turned her head and saw Avril, svelte in a silver-grey dress, a fuchsia silk bow at her neck.

  ‘Twinnie! I’ve been looking for you – where have you been? This is my sister, everybody.’ The adjacent conversations stopped abruptly, and Winnie could almost feel the gazes shuttling between herself and Avril; Maxwell’s expression was one of baffled pique. Bet he wished he’d asked me some questions now, thought Winnie.

  ‘Come with me,’ said Avril, grabbing her hand and leading her back through the crowd. ‘Have you had a drink?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have another.’ She plucked a glass from a waiter’s tray and passed it to Winnie. ‘Clive’s raided the family cellars. I wish you’d said you needed a new dress, I could have weaselled one out of Saks, the head of gowns is a friend of mine.’

  ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ asked Winnie.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, darling, it just looks as if you climbed into a box in 1937 and have only just found your way out. Come and stand here.’ She halted beside the empty Adam fireplace at the end of the room, and patted the mantelpiece, as if expecting Winnie to clamber up and perch on the end.

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘Because I want you to be able to hear my speech. Though my editor’s going to say something first.’ Under her words came the repeated pinging of metal on glass, and the roar of conversation gradually diminished, until only one querulous, elderly voice was still audible – ‘of course what we weren’t allowed to say was that Virginia was an ABSOLUTE BITCH … What’s the matter? Oh …’

  In a small clearing in the crowd, a bald man in a tight tweed suit handed his glass and spoon to someone, and turned to face the bulk of the room, his back to Winnie. There was a very long pause and then she noticed that the people around him were leaning inward, tilting their heads, and that what she had taken for the noise of someone clearing their throat was in fact a speech, virtually inaudible from where she stood.


  ‘Is nobody going to give a SPEECH?’ enquired the elderly voice, plaintively. In the corners of the room, conversation was beginning again. ‘Well, if there are to be NO SPEECHES, then I shall most definitely go and find THE LAVATORY.’

  The distant throat-clearing continued for a while longer and was followed by a smattering of applause, and then Avril’s husband, Clive, carried a dining chair into the clearing. A moment later, Avril’s head and shoulders appeared above the crowd.

  ‘Welcome, everybody – I say, welcome!!’ She was holding a little ceramic bell, and she tinkled it reprovingly towards those who were still talking. ‘Quiet, everyone! I need a reverent hush. Pretend I’m the six o’clock news.’ There was a light laugh, and silence fell. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ said Avril. ‘It’s a stinking night, and I suspect that no one wanted to leave home, even for free alcohol and relative warmth, so I’m awfully grateful for your attendance. I’m also grateful to my editor, Allen Faste, whose invariably valuable advice to me is, fortunately, more audible than his speeches.’ There was another laugh. Blimey, she’s good at this, thought Winnie. No wonder she wanted me to hear it. No one was chatting now; the room was paved with upturned faces. ‘… So, yes, I know that I’m a very fortunate girl indeed to be with such a progressive publisher. Now, who else do I have to thank? Ah yes, Clive, I haven’t forgotten you; little did you know that when you said “I do” in Chelsea Town Hall, you were marrying a tortured artist. I hope that it’s not been … too painful.’ She smiled downward in a way that made the man standing nearest to Winnie give an excited little inhalation.

  ‘Lucky, lucky fellow,’ murmured someone else.

  ‘But there’s another person I need to thank,’ continued Avril. ‘It’s the woman whose experiences inspired me to write Tin Helmet.’

  Winnie flinched, spilling some of her wine.

  ‘Senior Warden Winifred Crowther, also known as my twin sister, Winnie – she’s the one in blue, standing beside the fireplace over there—’

  A hundred faces turned to look at her.

  ‘—Winnie has lived the truth that I’ve merely attempted to transfer to the page; she epitomizes the gumption and bravery of civil defence workers, all those chaps who so often only stand and wait, yet who are required to act at a moment’s notice, in the service of us all. But, of course, truth in fiction can only ever be the filet mignon to the unwieldy farmyard beast that is real life. So I would like to raise a glass to Winnie, who, while I was safely ensconced in the cosy basement shelter of Senate House, was outside, under the searchlights, wrestling with the great, dull, sweating ox of verisimilitude. To Winnie!’

  ‘To Winnie!’ echoed the party-goers.

  ‘They’re certainly NOT IDENTICAL, ARE THEY?’ observed the elderly voice.

  Avril climbed down, to applause, and then reappeared almost immediately, holding a copy of the book – ‘I have been induced to read a short section’ – and Winnie downed the remains of her wine and started to edge through the crowd towards the door, unable to face hearing about Binnie and her bed-bouncing exploits. From those who caught her eye on the way out, there were smiles of gratitude and encouragement, such as one might give to a person endowed with gumption and bravery, or, indeed, to a perspiring ungulate who was behaving well in public. She could see herself brooding for several days on the nuances of Avril’s speech.

  In the hall outside, she waited for the maid to bring her coat. Once again, applause sounded from the drawing room, followed by the resumption of chatter.

  ‘Oh, Winnie, you’re here! I was worried I’d missed you.’

  ‘Clive.’ Avril’s husband kissed her cheek and she felt the unexpected scrape of stubble.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, clapping a hand to his chin. ‘I only flew back from … another place this afternoon; I had to shave on the aeroplane, not ideal.’

  He was wearing a grey suit and there was a greyish tinge to his pleasantly baggy features, so that he resembled a photograph in a newspaper.

  ‘You look tired,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t we all? But I couldn’t miss this, could I? Wasn’t Avril simply marvellous?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Absolutely luminous.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know which line she always reminds me of?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Byron sonnet. “And all that’s best of dark and bright, meet in her aspect and her eyes.” You know it, of course.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Winnie, wondering how long this would go on for; once Clive got on to his favourite topic, he was difficult to shift.

  ‘How’s the war coming along?’ she asked, only half facetiously; he was, as Avril liked to say, un grand fromage at the Foreign Office.

  ‘I suppose one could say it’s progressing towards the correct conclusion,’ said Clive. ‘Though not altogether smoothly.’

  ‘Were you in France today? No, sorry, I know you can’t say. But how was it, wherever you were?’

  ‘Rather windy, as a matter of fact. Have you heard from Emlyn recently?’

  ‘No, actually. Not for a few weeks. I keep thinking that since everything’s in uproar, the letters aren’t getting through, or else that he’s been liberated and he’ll suddenly turn up on the …’ There was an indefinable shift in Clive’s expression. ‘What?’ asked Winnie, just as the maid arrived with her coat. Clive waited until the woman had left, and then gestured towards a door further down the hall. Inside was a small sitting room. He drew the curtains and switched on a lamp.

  ‘What?’ asked Winnie again, alarmed now. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Emlyn’s in Stalag Ten, isn’t he?’

  ‘Ten A. Why? Have you heard something? Tell me.’

  ‘The thing is, Winnie, we’ve had a report from a Red Cross delegate that POWs in camps close to the Russian advance – and that may include Emlyn’s – are being moved. The delegate had actually seen groups of Allied prisoners being marched west by their guards.’

  ‘Marched?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s the middle of winter!’

  Clive made a rather helpless gesture. ‘I didn’t know whether to tell you. There’s no certainty about this information, obviously, and, of course, it’s …’

  Automatically, in the childish gesture always used at Post 9, Winnie found herself lifting a hand to her lips, and turning an imaginary key.

  ‘Thank you, Clive,’ she said.

  He patted her arm. ‘You know that if I hear anything more … You’re going now?’

  ‘Yes. Say goodbye to Avril from me, will you, and congratulations and all that.’

  ‘I shall. You know, she thinks the world of you, Winnie.’

  Even in her current state of mind she had to hold back a wordless puff of disbelief.

  She arrived back at the flat hardly aware of having made the journey, and immediately took the old sewing basket and the suitcase from under the bed, and opened both, and sat back on her heels, staring at the bundles of letters. The one certainty – the one absolute certainty –she’d had about Emlyn over the preceding four and a half years was that he was safe: out of the fighting and behind a prison fence, and safe. She didn’t know when he’d be coming back, or how long he’d have to remain in the army, or what either of them would do after the war, or where they’d live, or what on earth they would have to talk about beside the advantages of parquet flooring over linoleum, but she’d always assumed that at the end of the war he’d be alive. And how entirely stupid that assumption suddenly seemed, as if there were rules in war, as if fairness came into it, as if a bullet in combat were the only way for a soldier to die. She’d heard dozens of stories of people losing sons or husbands in unexpected ways or stupid accidents, tanks swinging round during training, catastrophic parachute drops, traffic collisions whilst on leave, neglected colds in army camps that led to ’flu, but somehow that hadn’t intruded on the imaginary cocoon she’d spun around Emlyn. He’d been invulnerable, which had
meant she could stow all those stifling letters under the bed, and turn away and do other things. It had been different at first: she’d had a Red Cross postcard when he’d been captured in France and then nothing at all for nearly two months, so that when his first letter had arrived from the camp, in July of 1940, it had been like a great gasp of oxygen after weeks of holding her breath; she had read and re-read it until the creases had pulled apart, and by then she’d memorized every sentence.

  She started lifting the bundles from the suitcase, each layer older than the last, until she reached those early letters, handled so often that their written surface had the texture of felt.

  ‘Dearest darling, I can’t stop thinking about you, I can’t forget for a second that you’re not with me …’ The words poured on to the page, seemingly without artifice or hesitation; she remembered that, as she’d read, she’d heard Emlyn’s voice, and she tried to recall it now, but though she could have described its lineaments – a trace of a Welsh accent, a teacher’s tendency to over-pronounce long words (she had teased him about that) – the actual sound of it was lost to her. The phrases that had once turned her inside-out brought only a flat sadness.

  ‘Dearest darling, there’s so much that I want to say to you and yet so little to actually tell you about. Each day here is much the same as the next, up at 6.30 and then fourteen hours of petty activity and dreadful tedium …’

  ‘Dearest darling, I’ve been trying to store up things to write to you about but most of them are so tiny and dull that they’ve fallen down the cracks in my memory and I’m sitting here, staring out at the compound (it’s raining for the first time in a while), simply wishing that you were sitting beside me …’

  She re-opened one letter after another. The dates shifted to August, and then to September and the start of the Blitz and, though she’d tried not to alarm him, there was a change in Emlyn’s tone.

  ‘Darling Winnie, I gather that you might all be having rather a difficult time of it at home. I know you haven’t said much, but we manage to learn odd bits and bobs along the way, and it’s worrying the hell out of me …’