Their Finest Hour and a Half Read online

  ‘If you’re ill are you going to use the bathroom?’ Pamela’s silhouette was visible in the light from the hall, her dressing-gown pulled tightly around her. She had, as yet, little in the way of bust or hips but posed as though she had lashings of both. ‘Are you?’ she repeated, impatiently.

  ‘Not for a while,’ said Edith. ‘And please don’t open the door until I say you may. It’s very rude.’

  ‘Sorree, I’m sure. Shall I take down the blackouts for you?’

  ‘No.’

  Pamela opened the door a little wider so that light from the hall spilled across the room. Edith could see her face now, preternaturally mature, her eyes judgemental. ‘Your room is very, very neat,’ she said, in a tone that implied that neatness was a solecism. ‘Do you always line up your shoes like that?’

  ‘Close the door, please.’

  ‘In a moment.’ Looking exhilarated by her own daring, she pushed it open still further. ‘Why do you arrange your dressing-table in that way? It’s like something in an exhibit.’

  ‘Pamela, close the door.’

  ‘And why do you wear gloves in bed? It looks awfully stupid.’

  Sitting up suddenly made Edith feel quite dreadful, but it had the desired effect. Pamela fled, leaving the door open, and after a minute or two Edith was able to walk across and shut it. She switched on the light, and sat down at the dressing table and rested her head on her gloved hands. The gloves were cotton, and she wore them to prevent the almond oil, with which she massaged her hands at night, from marking the sheets. She had seven pairs of gloves and she washed a pair nightly, drying them on glove stretchers to prevent shrinkage. Her six pairs of shoes were lined up according to colour, from black lace-ups at one end, to pale beige pumps at the other, the latter so beautiful and so vulnerable to dirt that she had barely worn them. Her clothes in the wardrobe were arranged by category (skirts, dresses, blouses, jackets, coats), and by colour within each category. The drawers of the tallboy contained sachets of lavender, and stockings and underclothes folded into beautiful, parallel rows. On the dressing-table (damp-dusted daily) her mother’s rosewood-backed mirror and twin brushes were arranged in an elegant fan. Edith’s night cream, day cream, powder and lipstick were kept in the top drawer, so as not to detract from the symmetry. She had sewn the curtains herself, and had made a matching coverlet for the bed, all in a heavy ivory slub. She had also made the ivory wool rug with brown geometric pattern that lay in the centre of the floor. Her laundry was hidden in a pale woven-fibre chest that doubled as a stool. The empty fireplace was concealed by a matchwood screen (also her mother’s). Pamela was right: the room was very, very neat and Edith was perversely pleased by the observation, although she knew that the phrase had not been used kindly.

  There had been a time when Pamela had called her ‘auntie’, and had played quietly in her room, sorting through the button drawer, building cotton reels into towers and stockades, learning to crochet long, helical scarves for her dollies. She had been five when Edith had answered the advertisement (‘good-sized room available in comfortable family home, would suit quiet business lady’), and Mrs Sumpter, Pamela’s grandmother, who owned the house, had been in her late sixties. She had been a vigorous, kindly woman who had managed to combine the role of landlady with that of hostess, and she had made it a welcoming place to live. The change in her had been gradual – a slowing, a tiredness, an occasional wheeze that had become, imperceptibly, constant. It was her heart that had grown large and dragged her down, she said, and the small blue pills from the doctor only gave her a dry mouth and did nothing for her chest. And then Poland had fallen and Mrs Sumpter, who had lost her husband at Ypres, had sagged overnight, had lost all of her remaining vim as if the advent of another war had somehow filleted her, and Mrs Bailey, her daughter, who had discarded her own husband at some (never-to-be-discussed-or-even-mentioned) point, had snapped to attention and started to impose her own regime on the house, cutting the comfortable corners and snipping at the more decorative trimmings of life at Number 40. And Pamela, who had been pudgy and sweet, had all of a sudden become pretty.

  It was a self-conscious prettiness, reaffirmed in every mirror that she passed (and in every window and polished surface), and boys had started to walk her home from school, and even ask her out to the cinema, although she had not been allowed to go. And now that this prettiness had placed her in a new world, she had begun to notice, with apparent pleasure, that not everyone was as pretty, or as popular with the boys, as she was.

  She had started to walk home from school with little Margaret Raleigh from three doors down, who wore spectacles and had curves in all the wrong places and who, it was evident from Pamela’s demeanour, provided an especially flattering contrast to her own appearance. At home, she had begun to watch Edith, sometimes covertly, sometimes openly, with the expression of a zoologist viewing a new, inferior and slightly amusing species. Edith, mid-breakfast, would suddenly realize that Pamela was staring at her nose, or her hair, or her hands, her nails, her mouth; a hard, assessing stare that would make her self-conscious so that she rattled her cutlery, or clinked her teeth, in a clumsy way, against the water glass. Only once had Edith protested. She had said: ‘Please don’t stare at me when I’m eating, Pamela’ and Pamela had looked amazed.

  ‘I wasn’t staring,’ she’d said, in a wounded voice, ‘I was admiring your necklace’ and Edith had been left in the position of having to apologize to a thirteen-year-old. Afterwards, meeting on the stairs, Pamela had given her a triumphant look.

  It was ridiculous, of course – ridiculous for an independent woman of thirty-six to be intimidated by a child, but Edith had found herself beginning to glance around furtively as she scurried through the communal areas of the house, to cut short her little walks in the garden with Mrs Sumpter (a garden that was overlooked by Pamela’s bedroom), to retreat to her own room more and more. There, in the pleasant place that she’d made for herself, she could cut out a pattern, or read, or listen to the wireless, or write letters, without worrying about whether her chin was particularly shiny, or her hair in need of a wash. Because, although she had always tried to do her best with what God had given her, what He had given her was straight hair, a beaky nose, a small mouth and a permanent shadow under each eye, the whole packaged into an expression of perpetual anxiety, unchanging even when she was feeling particularly merry or at ease. It was true that He had also given her a pair of useful (if large) hands, a discriminating eye for line and colour, a near-perfect memory and a neat figure, but she knew that those were not items that had ever really counted. Pamela was only doing what Edith had done to herself at the same age – dissecting her appearance feature by feature and finding each one wanting.

  At the dressing-table, Edith took off her gloves and massaged her forehead. Lavender oil, she had heard, was good for headaches. Perhaps it was Mrs Sumpter who had told her; she felt too muzzy to remember. There was an unused phial in the drawer, a birthday present from her cousin in Norfolk, and she extracted the tiny cork and dabbed a little of the essence on her temples. The astringency seemed to cut through the fog behind her eyes and she held the cork under her nose and took a longer sniff. It was a purple smell, shot through with silver – a tiny, clean bolt of lightning that zipped through her skull. She smiled for the first time that day, recorked the bottle, switched off the light and lay down on the bed again.

  She dreamed of Red Indians. They were dancing in a circle on the lawn, chanting menacingly and waving their tomahawks, while Pamela sat on the back wall and swung her legs in a provocative manner. Edith herself was carrying a tray of cups, and wondering how to explain to the visitors that Mrs Bailey had imposed a household limit of no more than two spoonfuls of tea per pot, regardless of the number of takers. And then she was awake, and the war-chant was still audible, a low-pitched chorus, sinister and uneven, emanating not from the garden but from the sky above. The siren came late, as if triggered by her own fumbling realization, and in its wake cam
e Mrs Bailey, rushing up the stairs and throwing open the door.

  ‘They’re coming, they’re coming,’ she shouted, ‘I’ve switched off the gas’ and then she was gone again and Edith was groping for her slippers, and all the time the swoop of the siren continued, and beneath it the stammering throb of the engines. And she couldn’t believe (her mind still bleared with sleep), she simply couldn’t believe that after a year of waiting, of endless false alerts, of lectures and leaflets and fortnightly air-raid drills at work, of month after month of dreary preparation and dire warnings during which the frightening and the immediate had gradually flattened into the mundane, that now, today, really, actually now, the bombers were here. She sat up and smoothed her hair. She put on her dressing-gown, and tied the belt into a bow, and then re-tied it so that the tasselled ends were exactly the same length. She straightened the bedclothes and took a further second or two to remove a loose thread from the rug, and yet another to tip the dressing-table mirror forward so that the frame wasn’t touching the wall; and then a great whistling roar outside drowned even the siren, and the stomach-shaking crash that followed was a starting-gun that propelled her through the door. And what if I die, she thought, running down the stairs, across the hall, through the kitchen, what if today is my last day on earth? What if I have only a minute left to live, half a minute, ten seconds? For a moment she seemed to see the pilot’s viewpoint, a vast patchwork of lawn and tile and tarmacadam, splashed with the pink and blue of hydrangeas, the flapping white of drying sheets and the scarlet of her own dressing-gown as she ran out of the back door and across the grass towards the shelter, newly built, its roof a curl of shining metal. And then there was a tearing noise, as if the sky had been ripped in two and the air seemed to slide sideways and drop away like a cut necklace and she was lying on her face in the flowerbed, clinging to the ground as the wind dragged at her, while behind her a giant sledgehammer laid waste to a wall.

  And then the buffeting eased and stopped, and she released her grip.

  Her hands were full of broken stems, the palms lightly scored with cuts. Her mouth was stuffed with earth, and, kneeling, she hawked and spat on the lawn, and wiped mud from her lips. The sky above was empty, faintly traced with vapour, but from the Raleighs’ garden, three doors down, a plume of dust was rising, and there was no roof on their house, and no wall on the first floor so that the Raleighs’ bathroom was shamelessly displayed, a used towel abandoned on the lino, the wallpaper blotched with damp, while in the next room a pink-quilted double bed protruded over the broken floorboards like a vulgar tongue. The house beside it was windowless and oddly bowed, as if sagging at the knees, and the next along had coughed its back door clear across the garden, while a severed pipe burped water through the gap. Edith wiped her mouth again and looked at Mrs Sumpter’s house. For a moment she thought it untouched, and then she registered the slight shift in angle of the guttering, the hunched look of the roof gable, the strange clarity of rooms seen through empty frames. There was silence, utter silence inside her head, and then, one by one the sounds slid back – a tile skittering down the roof, the splatter of water from next door, dogs barking, a man shouting hysterically, a fire-engine bell, the bombers – the bombers still somewhere overhead, and then her own name being called, over and over again. Quite calmly, she stood up and walked round to the entrance to the Anderson shelter.

  They sat, knee to knee, in the near-darkness, a crack of light framing the ill-fitting door, and there were four more explosions, each further away than the last, and the gradual diminution of engine noise, and a long, inexplicable wait before the sounding of ‘Raiders Passed’. And, by then the conversation had become a sealed loop, rotating endlessly.

  ‘Dear God,’ Mrs Sumpter would say. ‘Who’d have thought the Zeppelins would come again in my lifetime? Who’d have thought it?’

  Then Pamela – ‘They’re not Zeppelins, they’re aeroplanes’ – at which point Mrs Bailey would let out a low moan and take Pamela’s hand. ‘I shouldn’t have listened to you, I shouldn’t have let you come back home, I should have left you with the Collins sisters in Leighton Buzzard where you were safe,’ and Pamela would wrench her hand away and mutter, ‘I wasn’t staying with those old witches for anything, I’d rather stay in London and die. Anyway, it smelled of cat’s piddle.’

  ‘You’re going back.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Is the house much damaged, dear?’ – Mrs Sumpter to Edith.

  ‘No.’

  Mrs Bailey: ‘It must be. She’s shocked, you can see she’s not all there, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. It’ll be flattened, I know it will.’

  ‘Dear God,’ (Mrs Sumpter). ‘Who’d have thought the Zeppelins would come again in my lifetime . . .’

  Round and round – aeroplanes, Leighton Buzzard, witches, cats, shock, Zeppelins, no not Zeppelins. And Edith sitting on a plank raised on loose blocks, because the shelter was too new to take any drilling, her hand-sewn felt slippers drinking up the damp from the earth floor. And inside her head, exhilaration, the most extraordinary exhilaration, her skull awash with light, her thoughts exultant, flying, singing with triumph. A bomb had lifted her up and cast her down and here she was without a scratch and nothing now could touch her. She was shaking with the thrill of it, she was skimming the ground with such speed that she might leave a trail of stars, and the climbing note of the All-Clear lifted her still higher, so that once again she was looking down at the gardens and roofs of west Wimbledon and watching as three women and a girl emerged into the white light of a cloudy August day.

  Mrs Sumpter staggered, and Mrs Bailey took her arm and screamed at Pamela who had run ahead to the back door, so that in the end it was Edith who entered through the crooked frame, and picked her way across a floor covered with glass and smashed plates – Edith who was still hovering, still somewhere beyond herself, able to watch dispassionately as the figure in the dressing-gown crossed the hall and passed the front door with its empty oval where, instead of a red glass ship on a blue glass ocean, a stretch of pavement was visible, and a gaggle of sight-starers, gaping at the damage. Then up the stairs, the ruined slippers leaving a trail of imprints in the dust, and under the section of plaster that swung from the ceiling like a flag, and over to the door that looked intact but which wouldn’t open, twist the handle as she might. It was the shove that did it, the unladylike shoulder heave that forced it open a few inches, gouging a groove in the floorboards and flinging Edith back into herself so that when she edged around the door and saw what had happened to her room, there was no comforting distance between herself and the pyramid of plaster and lath and viscous black attic dust from the fallen ceiling, or the smashed wigwam of her wardrobe, from which a shredded organdie sleeve semaphored for rescue. Nothing ivory was visible, nothing beige, nothing smooth, nothing cherished. And she was no longer shaking with the thrill of it, only with the disgust, and from the garden she could hear Mrs Bailey screaming, calling her mother’s name.

  *

  Dear Edith,

  Well the news from London is very bad I must say, and I’m very sorry to hear about your landlady, her heart giving out though I can’t say I’m surprised, it must be terrible with those Bombs falling. We said a special prayer in chapel this Sunday for people in London and Reverend Stead the visiting preacher said that if more people in London were Observant then God might fling his shield of righteousness over the city but things being as they are then the good must perish with the evil, sustained only by the sure and certain hope of their salvation. I don’t say that I agree with this Edith, but Reverend Stead lived in Croydon for many years and he says that the taint of sinfulness is everywhere to be seen there. Of course it may be different in Wimbledon.

  We are all as well as can be expected. Myrtle has started at the grammar school and received a Highly Commended for her first composition, the title was ‘My Happiest Memory’ and she wrote about going to London on the train on her own and seeing Buckingham Palace
and Trafalgar Square and Betty Grable walking past in an evening gown all imaginary of course, but the teacher didn’t know that and said it showed wonderful Powers of observation so of course I had to write a note explaining that none of it was true.

  I am more busy than ever, everyone is worried that there will be clothes rationing and I am Snowed Under with orders in the shop, two overcoats this week in Astrachan fabric one with an Indian lamb collar the other with Chinchilla Plush. I had Elsie Breen working for me but she’s gone into munitions. In fact Edith, I wanted to say that you are always welcome to stay here with us in Badgeham while London is bad, not that the war isn’t here too there’s all sorts of wire and tank traps and a minefield on the beach and a gunnery school in the wood behind the dunes, so we are full of soldiers and you need a permitt to come further than Ipswich on the train, though you being family it shouldn’t be a problem.

  God bless you.

  If you gave me a Hand I could pay you what I gave Elsie, minus your keep.

  Your loving cousin, Verna

  No, thought Edith, re-reading the letter. Things were bad in London and worse in Wimbledon, but it hadn’t yet come to working for Elsie Breen’s wages minus keep. Though if she closed her eyes she could see the long empty curve of sand along Badgeham Bay and almost feel the cold, clean wind. She’d spent every holiday there as a child. She could still remember the sense of boundless space.

  In Number 40, there was no space at all. Three and a half ceilings had come down and until Mrs Bailey could find a carpenter, a plasterer, a tiler and a general labourer to cart away the debris, the remaining occupants were confined to two bedrooms, one containing Mrs Bailey, and the other Pamela and Edith. ‘This is my part of the room,’ Pamela had declared, indicating an area which included bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers and access to the door.