V for Victory Read online

Outside, a plume of dust was lifting above the rooftops of Haverstock Hill and she could hear an ambulance bell. ‘Bottom of Belsize Lane,’ said someone. One old lady already had her broom out, pushing a pile of glass towards the gutter. ‘It’s the mess I can’t stand,’ she said, catching Vee’s eye. ‘I never liked mess, and now it’s just filth and dust, morning till night. I can never get things straight.’

  ‘They say it’s Belsize Lane,’ Vee reported back to the knitting circle, though half of them had already hurried away to check on their own windows. Vee stayed to help Mrs Lunn clear the floor and tack some muslin across the empty frames, and then she pushed the unfinished sock into her straw bag and set off back to the Vale of Health.

  When you took the turning off East Heath Road, it was like walking back into the countryside – a muddy track leading downward through a belt of woodland; you half expected to smell manure and hear a tractor coughing into life, and then the track curved and the purplish bricks of ‘Taormina’ came into sight between the trees, and suddenly it was all fanlights and balustrades, and name-boards swinging from wrought-iron brackets. The choice of names always puzzled Vee: if you had so much money that you could afford to live here, why didn’t you just up sticks and move to Braemar or Greenbanks or St Ives? Though given that half the houses were currently empty, the windows shuttered, the gardens a wilderness, perhaps the inhabitants had done exactly that.

  Vee had just passed ‘Llandudno’ when she heard Noel call ‘Mar!’, and she turned to see him hurrying to catch up, limping slightly, as he sometimes did when he ran.

  ‘There was a buzz bomb!’ he said, his voice breaking mid-sentence, so that ‘buzz’ was shrill with tension, and ‘bomb’ a growl.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be back yet,’ said Vee. It hadn’t occurred to her to worry about him, and she felt a rush of belated anxiety. ‘You weren’t anywhere near it, were you?’

  ‘No. What about you?’

  ‘Miles away,’ she said. ‘Barely heard it.’ He was a terrible worrier, his shoulders up around his ears as he inspected her for possible damage. She patted his arm. ‘What have you been doing? Your hands are black.’

  ‘Oh.’ He gave them a perfunctory wipe, his expression relaxing back to its usual blank watchfulness. ‘I was looking at a mediaeval roof boss.’

  ‘Were you?’ She turned the phrase over in her head, but she couldn’t face an explanation till she’d had a cup of tea. ‘Did you get the books?’

  ‘No. The shop’s vanished.’

  ‘Vanished?’

  ‘It was hit by a V-2.’ He paused, thinking. ‘The interesting thing is that a whole row of houses was flattened, but the staircases survived, and I’ve been wondering if that has to do with the fact that they’re right-angled triangles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The triangle is an inherently strong shape. Look at the Pyramids, still intact after thousands of years.’

  ‘But no one ever bombed them.’

  ‘But you can’t imagine them collapsing if someone did. Would you prefer to spend a raid in a tower or a Pyramid?’

  ‘A tower. Less cleaning up afterwards – think of the floor space in a Pyramid; it’d be sweep, sweep, sweep all day.’

  He cracked a smile. ‘Incidentally, I quite badly need the Bright’s English History – Mr Jepson says it’s essential for matriculation.’

  ‘Does he? There’s another year or two before you have to take that, isn’t there?’

  She pushed open the gate of their own house, and glanced up to see Miss Zawadska raising her blackouts. She worked nights at the BBC canteen and lived arsy-tarsy to the rest of them, eating Irish stew for breakfast and coming home to a supper of porridge.

  ‘I bought some carrots,’ said Vee. ‘Though they look woody to me. Are you using up the rest of that liver?’

  ‘Yes, in a hot-pot.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a liver that thick before – when I asked if it came from a horse, the butcher pretended he couldn’t hear me.’

  ‘He should have said, “Neigh”.’

  She sniggered. ‘What’s for afters?’

  ‘Apple charlotte.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  As usual, there was scarcely any difference between the temperature outside and inside the house. There was generally enough coke for a fire in the drawing room and the kitchen, and Vee had found a cluster of stone hot-water bottles in the cellar, which meant that so far none of the lodgers had been found as a frozen corpse in the morning, but all of them wore coats in the house and Mr Reddish wore a deer-stalker hat, even during meals.

  Vee filled the kettle and then started violently as a face appeared at the kitchen window.

  ‘Is Noel in?’ The voice was muffled, but imperious.

  ‘It’s your friend again!’ called Vee, over her shoulder. ‘I wish she’d come to the door instead of climbing over the fence, and if you’re out there, can you …’

  ‘Yes, I’ll feed the chickens,’ said Noel, already hurrying down the scullery passage, his heart beating almost as fast as when he’d heard the buzz bomb, though in a more pleasurable way. Genevieve Lumb was waiting for him outside the back door. She was wearing her blue school mac and a hair-slide in the shape of a bow, and her hair was in two short plaits, the ends fanning out like curtain tassels. Her eyelashes were dark and her eyes an unusual shade of brown; after considerable study Noel had identified them in an old paint chart as ‘burnt umber’.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In a minute.’ Genevieve’s ambition was to write detective novels, and she liked to apply an element of suspense to her own conversations. ‘Did you hear the doodlebug?’

  ‘Yes.’ At times, her presence seemed to rob Noel of the ability to speak in sentences. ‘I did,’ he added, inadequately.

  ‘Three killed, apparently,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that the V-1 blast is so bad that people can be blown to pieces and have to be identified by a piece of ear, or their foot. I don’t think I have very distinctive feet, but my ears are quite unusual. What do you think?’ She turned sideways and presented her left ear to Noel, and he leaned forward and examined its curlicues, the neatly rolled edge of the pinna, the velvety pinkness of the lobe.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes, I’d definitely know your ear if I saw it again,’ he said, a little huskily.

  ‘And I’d certainly know yours,’ said Genevieve. ‘I don’t mean that at all in a nasty way,’ she added. ‘It’s just that they’re very visible.’

  Noel nodded glumly. ‘What did you want to tell me?’

  ‘I have to go back to school.’ She pulled a face indicative of utter misery. ‘Mummy’s wired to say that London’s too dangerous and she can’t sleep until I’m back in Herefordshire. Will you write to me?’

  ‘Yes. Hang on a minute—’ He hurried over to the back wall, where a chicken was ineptly balanced, its head tilted, one silly eye contemplating the Heath beyond. Wary of the beak, he picked it up, disliking its prickly weightlessness, and tossed it back towards the summer house which he and Vee had converted into a coop.

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Genevieve, ‘that in four years’ time we can both go to Cambridge, and at twenty-one we can get married without my parents’ permission, though I’m afraid that I wouldn’t want sexual relations until I was ready to have children. Perhaps not until I’m twenty-six or twenty-seven. Would you mind that?’

  He shook his head dutifully, though merely hearing her enunciate the word ‘sexual’ meant that he had to turn away, crouching slightly, and pretend to look under a bush for eggs.

  ‘Of course, you don’t have any parents, do you?’ asked Genevieve. ‘So perhaps you could marry at sixteen if you wanted to. I meant to ask you why you call your aunt Ma.’

  ‘It’s “Mar” – M A R,’ he said, ‘short for Margery.’ Except, of course, that her name wasn’t really Margery, it was Vee,
and she wasn’t his aunt at all – just as his godmother Mattie, with whom he’d lived previously, hadn’t actually been his godmother. He didn’t have a family tree, he had a Venn diagram, in which none of the circles overlapped.

  ‘Oh,’ he exclaimed, ‘look!’ He pushed aside a swag of leaves; there were four eggs clustered in a shallow depression under the spotted laurel. Genevieve knelt beside him and reached into the hollow.

  ‘This one’s still warm,’ she said, holding it to her own cheek and then his.

  Vee was watching from the kitchen window. She’d been noticing lately that girls liked Noel – and not just girls; grown women went out of their way to talk to him, and she thought it was maybe because when he wasn’t sounding like a junior member of the Brains Trust, he actually listened to people; he wasn’t just waiting to tip in his own comments, like someone off-loading gravel. Or maybe it was because he had a way of making them laugh. It certainly wasn’t his looks, God bless him.

  The kettle was boiling, and Vee picked up the tea strainer and tipped the used leaves back into the pot. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a good, strong cup of tea – or, for that matter, a slice of bread that had a bit of spring to it, or a bun with icing, or a whole handful of currants instead of a guilty couple from a hoarded packet. A hopeful belief had been sustaining her that when the war ended (and it couldn’t be long now, the Allies snapping at the Siegfried Line) there’d be food in wagonloads again – but this idea had been squashed by Mr Jepson, who’d pointed out that Great Britain was up to her hair-roots in debt, and regretfully, in his opinion, there’d be rationing for at least another five years, so no end to the meanness, the blandness, the dismal substitutions and the counterfeits that fooled no one: sugar by the grain, sausages stuffed with bread …

  She jumped again, as Noel knocked on the window. ‘Eight,’ he mouthed, holding up the egg basket.

  ‘Good. Bring in a bucket of coke as well, will you?’

  He nodded. The Lumb girl was lingering near the window, and before she could turn away, Vee hooked her eye and gave her a hard stare. She hadn’t been mothering Noel for four years just so that some pert blonde piece could break his heart like a stick of charcoal. Genevieve Lumb stared back, faintly puzzled.

  ‘I don’t think your aunt likes me very much,’ she said, joining Noel as he scattered fish-meal for the hens, ‘though I’m not aware I’ve done anything to offend her.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to offend my aunt for her not to like you,’ said Noel. ‘There may be other reasons.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  He shook his head. Impossible to explain Vee’s myriad antipathies, her constantly updated list of prejudices and judgements. ‘Their name is legion,’ he said. ‘Though there are some we can discount – you’re not a man with a yellow tie, and you don’t have sideburns.’

  Genevieve smiled, and Noel felt as if his heart were being slowly squeezed by one of her long-fingered hands. ‘And you’re not Welsh,’ he added.

  Dr Parry-Jones always gripped her cutlery very near the ends, manipulating the knife and fork with delicate precision. She had a similar approach to conversation, impassively pinning down and dissecting casual remarks, so that a phrase such as ‘they say it’s going to be foggy tomorrow’ was left writhing under the scalpel. Vee had, in any case, only said it as a way of distracting the lodgers from the passage of the potato dish around the table – specifically from the sad, repeated clink clink of the spoon which indicated that there were only two each.

  ‘It was someone in the haberdasher’s that told me,’ she said. ‘I think they only said it “might be” foggy.’

  ‘They said it “might be”?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Dr Parry-Jones continued to look at Vee enquiringly, as if awaiting more stringent clarification; she was a general practitioner, bombed out of her house but still cycling daily to her practice in Finchley, her age a mystery, her white hair strained into a French pleat, her crisply neat appearance a near-miracle in frayed, darned, second-hand London. She taught Noel Biology, Chemistry and accuracy; her steady gaze seemed to see and expect only the truth.

  ‘Maybe I heard it wrong,’ said Vee; the bowl of potatoes had reached her and there was only one left, which meant that someone (Mr Reddish) had taken three.

  ‘There was definitely no mention of fog in the Daily Telegraph weather notes,’ said Dr Parry-Jones, giving the conversational corpse a final prod.

  Mr Reddish made the preliminary throat-clear that indicated that poetry was on the way.

  ‘Do you need some salt, Mr Reddish?’ suggested Vee, quickly, hoping to forestall him, but he was already in recital posture, chins lifted, one hand raised as if to ward off an attack. He worked in the accounts department of St Pancras Borough Council but spent his evenings performing in amateur entertainments. He had a very large head and had once, he claimed, been mistaken for President Roosevelt.

  ‘“I saw the fog grow thick, which soon made blind my ken; it made tall men of boys, and giants of tall men.”’

  ‘Ooh, more poetry!’ said Miss Appleby, with a giggle. ‘I don’t know how you remember—’

  ‘“I clutched my throat,”’ continued Mr Reddish, clutching his throat. ‘“I coughed. Nothing was in my head. Except two heavy eyes, like balls … of burning … LEAD.”’

  There was a tiny pause, while everyone waited to see if there was going to be another verse. ‘Salt?’ asked Vee again.

  ‘I recall I was once lost in the fog with a young lady,’ said Mr Reddish, abandoning his pose. ‘What an experience that was!’

  ‘I know that poetry shouldn’t be treated as if it were factual,’ said Noel, ‘but I really don’t see why the eyeballs are referred to as “burning” when fog’s notoriously cold and clammy. In any case, lead actually only burns when it’s powdered, in which case it’s pyrophoric, and ignites spontaneously at room temperature.’

  ‘Excellent, Noel,’ murmured Dr Parry-Jones.

  Mr Jepson looked up from his plate and, with a gesture that was habitual, gave his moustache a quick stroke. It was a sparse affair – more like an eyebrow than a moustache – but it caught the gaze because, unlike the hair on his head (brown threaded with grey), it was ginger. Vee suspected that he’d grown it in order to draw attention from his missing ear.

  ‘The trouble is that “like balls of lead” wouldn’t scan,’ he said. ‘It needs a couple of syllables in there for the rhythm of the writing. Perhaps “balls of molten lead” would have been an improvement.’

  Noel shook his head. ‘If they were molten, they’d no longer be balls and they’d simply dribble out of his eye sockets.’

  ‘Well, how about “burnished”? No, I think maybe “burnished” only applies to bronze. I’ll have to check that in Chambers.’ Mr Jepson extracted a tiny notebook from his breast pocket, and made a tiny note with an equally tiny pencil. He wrote features for the North London Press and never had to ask Noel what on earth he was on about. ‘By the way, the stew is excellent,’ he said, picking up his cutlery again.

  ‘Yes, very nice, Noel,’ said Miss Zawadska, approvingly. ‘And I taste pepper!’

  ‘Someone told me a grocer in Tufnell Park had a delivery,’ said Vee. ‘I hurried over there and got the last packet!’

  ‘And mushrooms,’ said Miss Zawadska, continuing to address the culinary wunderkind and ignoring the woman who actually did all the queuing and shopping.

  ‘I found a cluster of them just by the tumulus on the Heath,’ said Noel. ‘Obviously, I was extremely careful about identification. I have an illustrated guide.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Miss Appleby, with a giggle, ‘I hope they’re not death caps!’

  ‘No, we’d already be in the initial stages of irreversible kidney damage if that were the case,’ said Noel. ‘They’re shaggy ink-caps, which are completely harmless unless taken with alcohol.’

  Mr Jepson gave a hiss of amusement. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’


  ‘Why?’ asked Miss Appleby, suddenly sharp. ‘What happens if you drink alcohol after eating them?’

  ‘It results in violent vomiting.’

  Miss Appleby stared at him, mouth open. The tip of her nose, which usually moved cheerily up and down whenever she talked or laughed, was ominously static, and her eyes – hare’s eyes, slightly protuberant – were suddenly bulging with tears, and she pushed back her chair and ran from the room.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Dr Parry-Jones, with no obvious emotion.

  ‘Ah, the tender feelings of a young lady,’ said Mr Reddish, sonorously. ‘“My eyes are tired of weeping, my heart is sick of woe …”’

  ‘I wish the door would open, I’m desperate for the po,’ finished Mr Jepson, sotto voce, to Noel. ‘The song of the lodging-house bathroom.’

  Noel laughed, and Vee rose, reluctantly. ‘I suppose I’d better see what the matter is.’

  When she’d started taking in paying guests, she’d thought that the worst of it would be the constant cleaning, the nasty surprises found clinging to sheets or round the bowl of the water closet, but far worse than those were the unwonted roles constantly thrust upon her by a houseful of strangers: she had to be confidante, captive audience, magistrate in inter-lodger feuding occasioned by repeated use of a toothpick during meals, and here she was again, missing her supper and following the sound of weeping up the stairs.

  ‘Miss Appleby …?’

  Sheila Appleby was sitting on her bed. She had one of those delicate complexions that respond violently to emotion, and now looked as if she’d had a snowball rammed in her face.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ asked Vee, not really wanting to know. It would be a man, again.

  ‘Auggie,’ said Sheila.

  ‘Is that the sailor?’

  ‘Soldier.’

  ‘The Canadian?’

  ‘The American.’ The latter word was broken by a sob and extended across at least five syllables. The girl groped in her sleeve for a handkerchief. ‘He’s leaving tomorrow, Mrs Overs, his unit’s going to Italy, though he’s not supposed to have told me, so don’t pass it on to anyone, and he’s taking me to Rainbow Corner tonight and he says he has something for me and I keep thinking that it might be a ring …’