V for Victory Page 4

‘Now, Winifred, you have to admit that you’ve definitely done your bit,’ her mother had said, on her last visit. ‘Why don’t you come back here until Emlyn comes home? There’s masses of things you can help with – the Savings Committee’s always short of people, and I know that the Chippenham Players would die if you offered your services.’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘You’re a trained actress!’

  ‘I’m a trained warden. I even train other wardens.’

  ‘Yes, but …’ She could see her mother casting around for bait. ‘They’re going to be putting on War and Peace, and I’m almost certain they don’t have a Natasha yet.’

  Winnie had let out an incredulous hoot. ‘Oh, Mummy, don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Why is that ridiculous?’

  ‘Natasha’s supposed to be sixteen and drop-dead beautiful – and she’s the lead. Even when I was at drama school, I only ever played servants.’ Three years of trudging across the stage with a broom (‘Housemaid … Winifred Bridge’), of bobbing a curtsey, of answering a flimsy front door to willowy blondes, of attempting to wring character from the words ‘Shall I collect the tea tray now, madam?’ In everyday life, she might merely be classified as stocky, but the physical standards of the acting world were different; she’d realized quickly that lissom beauty was the norm and her own role was that of useful visual contrast, a bulky prop that might add ballast to a scene. In the end, she hadn’t bothered to give the starched apron back to the college wardrobe department each time, but had just hung on to it for the next part. After graduating, she’d only had one professional job, touring the East Midlands in a thriller, playing an unnamed nurse (‘Please don’t tire him’) while trebling as ASM, understudy and prompt, and then the war had started, and then she’d met Emlyn.

  ‘I wouldn’t stay even if the Chippenham Players cast me as Napoleon. Which might suit me, actually,’ she’d said, and her mother had looked hurt.

  ‘It’s only that I want you to be safe. After all, it’s nearly all over and it would be so awful if …’

  ‘I got squashed by the last bomb of the war?’

  ‘Don’t say it, darling. You joke about the most awful things.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She wondered what her mother would say if she could eavesdrop on Post 9, the air spiky with swear-words, no topic too delicate for a laugh, sudden death the casual punchline.

  Under her mother’s letter was one from her friend Elsie, a Wren stationed in Portsmouth, and having ‘the most smashing time in my whole life, Winnie’, and beneath that was a bundle held together by a paper band, the latter stamped with a Red Cross and signed by the censor. Winnie felt a familiar flattening of the spirits and then she broke the band, and three letters dropped on to the table. That made four from Emlyn in the last fortnight. She chose one at random, and slit the envelope.

  Dearest Win, I have been thinking about our garden and I’ve realized something terrible – there is nowhere for us to sit! Of course, we could pick up a garden bench for a song, but I have been thinking along the lines of a little gazebo, nothing fancy, just a raised platform roofed with trellis, perhaps near the orchard, where we could sit and catch the last of the …

  She stopped reading, the page drooping in her hand. There had been one letter from him last week and three the week before that, and she hadn’t actually counted them all but if they averaged eight a month since May 1940, when Emlyn had been captured at Dunkirk, then that came to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters, and the green rattan suitcase under her bed was packed tight with them and she was having to put the overspill in a sewing basket, and still they came. Winnie wrote to him once a week, trying to amuse with everyday gossip, and received in return these reams of domestic fantasy, microscopic in their detail – the motor-car the two of them would choose, the breed of dog they’d pick, the gramophone records they’d play, the proposed paint-colour in the imaginary porch of the house that they didn’t own. I think, on consideration, I’d prefer to concrete the drive rather than use gravel; the latter’s very hard on tyres, although there’s something rather swish about the noise, isn’t there?

  She’d met him at one of her sister’s awful parties; they’d both been very drunk, crushed together in a group on the narrow iron balcony outside Avril’s Kensington flat, and when a warden in the street below had shouted that they were showing a light, Emlyn (who’d been an English teacher before joining up) had replied, ‘It is the east and Juliet is the sun,’ and Winnie (who had once played the Capulets’ maid) had found herself supplying the next line, after which there wasn’t much else they could do except finish the scene (to some applause), lock lips for the rest of the evening and then go to bed together. Winnie had married him a month later, and waved him off at the station a week after that, and she’d been so deeply in love that the train had seemed to drag half of her away along the tracks, and the awful truth was that now she could barely remember what Emlyn looked like. She had photographs, of course – it wasn’t the outline of his features that she’d forgotten, but the play of his expressions: did he squint when he laughed, was there a line between his eyes when he frowned, did he show his teeth when smiling? She had no idea. Nor could she remember the timbre of his voice, or the sound of his yawn, or what he said when he sneezed, and because he wrote very little about the POW camp, even when she asked him to, she couldn’t even visualize what he was seeing, or doing, so that there was nothing solid for her to hold on to, only those letters with their endless impersonal detail; she had fallen for Romeo and now found herself padlocked to the editor of Modern Homes and Gardens.

  Sitting with the page in her hand, her future life planned down to the handles on her kitchen cupboards (lucite and chrome), Winnie felt the same coppery taste in her mouth, the same ominous visceral lurch as when she’d heard the doodlebug approach this afternoon.

  At the Post, they’d had a sweepstake for the date of the German surrender. Smiler had picked out December ’44, and Winnie had got June of next year. The terrible thing was that she half hoped she’d win.

  Vee hadn’t expected Oxford Street to be so crowded. After spending a fortnight’s meat budget on The History of European Architecture in Cullbright’s (‘Wouldn’t you rather get a surprise for your birthday?’ she’d asked Noel. ‘No,’ he’d said. ‘I’d rather get precisely what I want.’), she crossed to Dickins and Jones at the top of Regent Street. Half the windows were still boarded up, but the place was heaving, and it took forty minutes of determined elbow-work to purchase a pair of flannel pyjamas and three vests for Noel and a pale-green crêpe blouse – marked down because of a water stain – for herself.

  By the time she’d escaped it was edging towards twilight. It had snowed earlier in the week – just a sprinkling, but it hadn’t melted and now the pavement was corrugated with ice. The book in its string bag banged against her knees as she walked; all the lodgers had chipped in to buy it, although ‘all the lodgers’ no longer included Miss Zawadska, who had transferred to BBC Drama at Evesham. So far, there had been no takers for her room; the card in the window of the Hampstead newsagent’s was beginning to look rather dog-eared.

  At the bus stop there was a long queue. An 88 had just drawn up, the platform already crammed, the conductress standing with one foot dangling over the edge and an arm curled round the pole. ‘Room upstairs!’ she shouted as people burrowed past her.

  The line swayed forward. ‘I can’t get on there,’ said an old chap with a stick, just in front of Vee. ‘Want to go ahead of me?’

  ‘No, I’ll wait.’

  The bus moved off again, edging into a stream of taxis.

  ‘Be quicker to walk home,’ said the old gent. ‘If it wasn’t for my leg, that’s what I’d do.’

  ‘War injury, is it?’ asked Vee, scenting a talker, and wondering whether she was about to spend half an hour wincing at the news from Spion Kop.

  ‘Turned me ankle dancing at the Palais.’

  ‘Oh.’ She gave him a bi
t of a smile. A car swerved and hooted as a green army lorry started to nose out of a side road opposite.

  ‘You ever go dancing?’ he asked, leaning against the lamp-post and straightening his injured leg. He had pink cheeks and thick white hair, cut very short, so that his head looked like a thistle.

  ‘Me?’ said Vee. ‘No.’

  ‘Why ever not? Youngster like you – we all need a bit of fun, don’t we? Especially now.’

  Vee shrugged awkwardly. A whole lifetime was wedged between the last time she’d danced and the present, though she could remember it clearly enough: she’d worn a tartan frock with a matching bow in her hair, and had accidentally kicked the girl next to her while attempting the Charleston.

  ‘I met my wife dancing,’ said the man. He tapped his red knitted scarf, like someone touching wood. ‘She had the neatest pair of pins in Kentish Town. Still has.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Vee. ‘Nice thing to say.’

  ‘She was dancing with another fellow and I went up to her and I said—’ Brakes squealed and someone shouted. Vee turned her head and saw that the army lorry had pulled right out into the traffic and was swinging at speed into the wrong lane. She could see the white star on the door, she could see the driver, his face all mouth and eyes as he realized he was about to crash head-on into a taxi, and then the lorry jerked and seemed to glide sideways so that it was no longer heading for the taxi but directly towards herself. She had time to take a single step to the side. The lorry brushed gently past her coat and struck the bus stop with a muffled thud; muffled, because there was something soft between the front bumper and the pole. The soft thing folded over the bonnet, red scarf trailing.

  Vee didn’t faint, but the pavement bucked under her, and she had to rest a hand on the warm metal of the bonnet. Her mouth was full of saliva. She couldn’t see the old man’s face, just the back of his head, but the fingers of his right hand were splayed near hers – they were square-tipped, a little dirt under the nails; a gardener’s hand. The thumb was trembling very slightly. She heard the steady hiss of an exhalation and the man’s torso seemed to widen and flatten like dough spreading across a board. The thumb stopped twitching and someone behind her said, ‘Oh God, oh God,’ and Vee turned away and put a hand over her mouth. Sour liquid ran down her palm and on to the pavement.

  She lost a moment or two, and then she was sitting on the kerb and a policeman was taking her name and address. ‘Margery Overs,’ she heard herself say (thank Heavens). ‘And did you see how the accident occurred?’ he asked, and if she’d been thinking straight, if she hadn’t been feeling such a rag, she’d have said, ‘No, I didn’t, I’d turned away, I was looking in my handbag, I just heard a crash,’ because that’s what you did with the police, you kept your mouth shut, you never told them anything you didn’t have to, but instead she nodded; instead, she said, ‘I saw it all.’

  ‘You’ll have to go to the Wallace Street Station tomorrow and make a statement,’ he said. ‘Ask for Sergeant Bayliss.’ After that, a lady from one of the shops, with a diamanté bow at her neck and purple lipstick, brought her a glass of water and offered to find a taxi, and handed over three shillings to the driver, so that Vee was borne in splendour back to the Vale of Health, which was just as well, because when she tried to get out of the cab, her legs were like rubber bands. The cabbie knocked on the door for her, and Mr Jepson came out and helped her along the path, as if she were a ninety-year-old.

  ‘Do you have any brandy?’ he asked, when she was sitting in the kitchen. ‘Stupid question, I suppose.’

  ‘I’d rather have tea.’

  She watched him make it, not even protesting when he threw away the old tea-leaves and put three spoonfuls in the pot.

  ‘Cigarette? Anything to eat?’ he asked, as if he were an usherette with a trayful of ices. She shook her head. ‘Where’s Noel?’

  ‘In with Dr Parry-Jones. I think they’re studying the circulatory system – I caught the word “aorta” as I passed the door. Do you want me to fetch him?’

  ‘No, he’ll only worry. I’ll be all right in a minute.’

  Mr Jepson gave his moustache a stroke. ‘Where did it happen?’ he asked.

  ‘Near Bond Street. I’d come out of Dickins and – oh dammit, damn it all.’ She stood, abruptly, knocking her chair back, and looking wildly around the kitchen, just in case the string bag that she had absolutely and certainly left in Oxford Street had somehow miraculously flown back home. And then she sat down again and burst into tears, something she hadn’t done in a long while, and certainly never in front of a lodger.

  Mr Jepson reached into a pocket and gave her a folded handkerchief, and then he poured the tea as she wiped her eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, taking a gloriously strong mouthful. ‘All these bombs we’ve had and I’ve never seen a dead person before. Except in a coffin.’ She thought of her father’s oddly healthy appearance as he lay in his box in the front parlour; she thought of her husband, looking as if he’d never been alive. ‘And the poor old chap was talking about his wife to me, before it happened. He was saying lovely things about her, how he first met her at a dance in Kentish Town, and now she’ll just be finding out, I suppose …’ Her lips trembled and she pressed her fingers to them. ‘Could I have that cigarette after all?’

  It struck her, as she coughed her way through the first fag she’d had in years, that Jepson wasn’t looking as uncomfortable as you might expect for a man whose landlady had just wept noisily and unexpectedly in front of him.

  ‘You do this, don’t you?’ she asked, with sudden realization. ‘For the newspaper. You talk to people after they’ve seen horrible things.’

  ‘I do on occasion, yes.’

  He hesitated, and then pulled out a chair opposite her and sat as he always did, a little on the slant, so that she couldn’t see the crumpled depression where his left ear had been.

  She had never asked him about it; she touched a hand to her own ear. ‘The Great War, was it?’

  ‘Yes. They tried to sew it back on, but it didn’t take. Still, I wasn’t exactly Valentino to begin with, so …’ He gave a twitch of a smile. He still had the slender build of so many of those grinning lads who’d marched off to war carrying packs nearly as large as themselves. He had, too, the careful, raw, guarded air of those who’d returned – a generation dropped and then carelessly mended, the pieces not quite aligning. Bits missing.

  ‘Were you already married then?’ she asked.

  He looked startled. ‘No. No, I met Della afterwards.’ The conversation seemed suddenly to stall, and Jepson’s face lost all expression, his fingers picking at themselves, his pale eyes focussed on someone who wasn’t in the kitchen. You’d think he was the one who’d lost a spouse, thought Vee, and then realized that she was mixing him up with a previous lodger whose wife had gone to her aunt in Cheadle, to escape the bombs, and that Jepson had never before even mentioned a wife, and that she had undoubtedly just put her foot in it.

  ‘Well …’ she said, awkwardly.

  ‘And what about you, Mrs Overs?’ asked Jepson, with an obvious effort, and still looking as if he’d accidentally swallowed a lead weight. ‘Where did you meet your husband?’

  And now it was her turn to stall, since it was exactly the sort of question she always worried about, but never planned for. She heard herself give a false and breathy laugh – ‘Ooh, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it!’ – and then Noel came in, thank God, and she didn’t have to decide which particular lie to tell. Though it wasn’t until she was giving Noel a dry summary of the accident – one that omitted her own near-miss – that she remembered tomorrow’s appointment, and felt her heart trip over itself.

  ‘Oh, I’ve come across Sergeant Bayliss,’ said Jepson. ‘He’s not a bad sort.’

  ‘What will I have to say to him?’

  ‘Simply what you saw. He’ll talk to all the witnesses, and then get a draughtsman to draw up a diagram of the scene so that they can use it in co
urt.’

  ‘In court?’

  ‘It’ll be a coroner’s case – road traffic accidents always are.’

  ‘But I won’t have to be in court, will I?’

  ‘Well, it’s … it’s …’ She could see him framing the word ‘likely’ and then clocking her expression and changing the shape of his mouth. ‘Possible,’ he said.

  Court. Court.

  ‘So I’d have to stand up in the box and swear my name on the Bible and—’ She could feel rather than see Noel’s warning look, and she took a breath, and tried to look like someone so consistently law-abiding that she’d only ever read about such things.

  ‘If there was a white star on the door, it must have been an American lorry,’ said Noel, taking the egg-box and a dish of pallid sausages out of the larder. ‘And that’ll be why he was driving on the wrong side of the road. Would that be manslaughter, Mr Jepson?’

  ‘I doubt it will get that far. I’ve been at the court for a couple of similar incidents, and the American army look after their own.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Vee, tea cup halfway to her mouth.

  ‘It’s quite likely that the driver in question will be sent out on manoeuvres, or some such, and won’t turn up on the day, so that everything has to be postponed, or shelved altogether.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ That was a bit better, then. Jepson went off somewhere and Vee sat and drank her tea, and watched Noel cracking eggs.

  ‘Toad in the hole, is it?’

  He nodded, intent on his work.

  ‘How was your lesson with the doctor?’

  ‘Quite interesting. Until William Harvey, the general belief was that blood moved up and down the body like a tide. That was Galen’s theory – he was a Roman – and for sixteen hundred years that belief persisted, until one experiment changed everything.’

  There was an abrupt rumble somewhere to the west of the house. The floor vibrated for a second or two and from the larder came the clink of jars.

  ‘Kilburn,’ said Noel. ‘Or maybe Willesden.’