Yes, he had. He seized the neat silver frame and held it close. It was her; it must be her. Though she looked very different; smiling now, and looking upwards and hugging a fat, old, black Labrador.
Had this been her bedroom then? He stared around at the huge dark furniture, all highly polished, at the green satin bedcover, pulled tight as a board. It drove him to what he would never normally have done. He opened, furtively, drawers, wardrobes. They were still full of stuff. But the stink of moth-balls was overpowering, and the clothes were elderly women’s clothes; thick grey stockings, wrinkled as an elephant’s skin; long thick cotton directoire knickers; massive and dumpy fur coats. Some aunt’s room. Some aunt who had kept a picture of her niece on the dressing-table. Of course people don’t display photographs of themselves, stupid! Not on their own dressing-tables.
But by now he was committed to his sin; the bug had truly bitten him. All sense departed. He plunged from room to room of the big house like a robber, a rapist. There must be more of her in this house.
Only once was he brought up short in his madness. By the room that was obviously Mrs Meggitt’s; for spare, dumpy, shiny trousers hung in the wardrobe, and the drawers were full of drab, modern cardigans, and there was a spool of audio-tape with a loose end dangling on the dressing-table, and typescript for a talk on Indo-China on the bedside-table. He backed out hurriedly, as if caught red-handed in a burglary.
It was then that the strangeness struck him. Those trousers and jumpers, tape and typescript were the only things he’d found that belonged to today. Everything else could have come from . . . the War, or before the War. It was almost as if he and Mrs Meggitt were camping out in the past.
He was heading downstairs to explore the ground floor when the front door suddenly opened, and Mrs Meggitt herself was there. Harry saw her sense his silent presence, look up . . .
All he could do was continue down the stairs towards her. She looked at him enquiringly.
‘I was thinking of going out for a bite to eat,’ he said.
She looked at her watch. ‘You’ve left it a bit late,’ she said. ‘Half-past eight. And it’s raining.’
He just stood there, feeling a total fool. He couldn’t see the expression on her face, against the dim light of the dusk outside. But she studied him a long time, then seemed to relent and said, ‘There’s a chip shop still open on the main road, if you like that sort of thing.’ She said it with distaste. Then held out towards him the short, stubby thing that she had in her hand. He saw it was a woman’s folding umbrella. ‘You’d better take this.’
Once again, he fled from her. But she called, as he went through the front gate, ‘Have you got your key?’
He was so glad that he could yell ‘yes’.
On the way home, he got into a panic. He’d left his bedroom door standing wide open, and the book he’d stolen on the table wide open, with the photograph propped up. Suppose she went up there . . . ?
He dumped her wet umbrella into the hall-stand, and ran up the stairs; like a madman. But the door was still just exactly as far open as he’d left it, and the book still lay, and the photograph was still propped up against the vase.
Of course, she might be the sneaky type, lying in wait for him to hang himself finally. But she didn’t look the sneaky type; she looked the sort who lived inside her own head, in a world of her own.
He closed his door and locked it again, and sat at the table eating his fish and chips out of the newspaper, and still compulsively turning the pages of the big diary. Not reading it solidly, but skipping, now, looking for exciting bits. He was careful just to touch the edges of the pages; but in the end his hand slipped and he put a great big greasy thumb-print on one delicately-written page.
At first, he was horrified, and tried to rub it away with his hanky. But it wouldn’t come off, and in the end he wasn’t really sorry. He’d put his mark on her. He’d reached out from 1955 and put a mark on her in 1940. It seemed to him a sort of bridge between them, spanning time itself. He wondered where she was now, after all these years. Had the famous Ben come home and given her a brood of kids? She’d be fat and forty by now. Probably playing the memsahib in some corner of the dwindling British Empire. Or living in the country breeding dogs. He supposed Mrs Meggitt might know. But he wouldn’t ask her; no fear. Didn’t want to let the Meggitt’s lifeless hands get on to his precious dream . . .
It was at that point that the diary suddenly ran out. October 9th, 1940. Frantically he searched the words of the last entry. ‘October 8th. A long night. Bombing especially bad. The East End suffered again. Mrs Hewitt managed to filch five boxes of Mars bars for the van, and we had twenty gallons of coffee in the urns. Took a long time to get through; many roads blocked by debris or unexploded bombs. But the smiles we got from the Heavy Rescue men were reward enough. One gang had just dug out a little boy and his dog alive in Whitechapel, after twelve hours. Quite unharmed, and very brave, they said. He sang “Rule Britannia” for hours to guide them to where he was. Not much luck elsewhere. The body-sniffers were very pessimistic about their chances. Too busy to write more now. Will write later after I have slept.’
But after that, there was nothing. Just clean sheet after clean sheet, right till the end of the year.
It was then that Harry knew that she was dead. The saddest thing, he thought, was that he didn’t even know her name.
He slept badly that night; the first time he had slept badly since the night before he sat Geography for Higher School Certificate, all of three years ago. In his dreams, he was back in his own little Blitz, on the northeast coast. He was seven years old again, down in the shelter, wanting the lav badly, while the Jerries chugged their broken note overhead, and the guns and rockets fired, bang, swoosh, with a noise that his gran said would waken the dead in Preston Cemetery.
Three times he started awake, and thought he could hear the siren going, or the all-clear; or the sky ringing, as if the guns had just stopped firing.
The last time, to convince himself it was only a dream, he got up and went to the window, and drew back the curtains. In his sleepy muddle, he even caught himself worrying about the black-out curtains. . . .
But outside, the night was clear and silent, except for that vague roar like distant surf that is London never sleeping. There were no searchlights or blinding flashes; only the dark orange glow over the West End that was merely neon street-lighting, not fires started. The moon was high and small-looking, very bright. Far off, he could just see the moonlight catching the curve of St Paul’s dome.
Nothing.
And yet there was St Paul’s, that had stood for three hundred years, and survived the Blitz. And below his window, on the bigger of the bomb-sites, was a static water-tank that had stood there since 1940. By daylight, you could see it was drained, so that kids could not drown in it, the bottom just littered with shallow puddles and half-bricks. But looking down at it now, in the shadows cast by the moon you could have almost sworn it was full again.
Bomber’s moon, his dad used to call it, and oh how they used to fear it. Bomber’s moon tonight. Suppose the all-clear had just gone, and the searchlights switched off? Suppose that orange glow over the West End was fires? There was nothing he could see outside his window that could prove it wasn’t 1940 . . . suddenly he scared himself, like he sometimes could. The artistic temperament, his mother called it. Said he had too much imagination. He pulled back inside the room, and looked for some object to comfort him. And saw the corporal’s greatcoat and gas mask hanging on the back of his door. The identity card, a patch of white on the mantelpiece in the dim moonlight.
There were his clothes on the chair; but shirts and trousers and sweaters were much the same as they’d been in 1940 . . .
Suddenly he was running for his jacket, hanging on the back of a chair. He dug in the inside pocket. There was his wallet, full of pound notes. But had pound notes been different in 1940?
Then he found his student union membership card
: number 1174; dated October 1952. It was all rubbish, all just rubbish inside his head. He was safe, here in 1955, safe, safe, safe, with a bit of thin card.
But she, his lovely girl, was back in 1940. She smiled up at him from the table, her eyes just pools of dark in a patch of light. Had she been buried? She’d be a mouldering skeleton by now. Or had she been cremated by her sorrowing parents? Or burned in the Blitz? Or been blown to bits; small chunks of her picked from the telegraph wires by little innocent birds? He mourned for her with all his heart. And then perversely he wished again that time was elastic, and he could travel back and meet her, stand close, make love.
And then he told himself not to be a silly bugger, but to go back to bed and get some sleep, or he’d be bloody useless in life-modelling class tomorrow.
The next morning, he felt dozy, unreal, as he signed in at the porter’s cubicle at the Slade. The place was milling with people he knew, back for the new term, but he only waved and kept his distance. Down in the basement, the senior sculpture class was busy stripping the sheets of plastic from their life-sized clay models, grumbling as they found parts of them too dry or too wet, after the long stretch of vacation. The clay models were nearly finished; this would be the last week of the pose. They echoed the shining creamy flesh of the living model on the rostrum with their dull lifeless greyness; one living model surrounded by all her dead imitation sisters . . .
He swung his own model round on its turntable, till it matched the angle of the living model, and his eye began the long check of details; angle of back of pelvis, jut of breasts, curve of thigh. Yes, he’d done some pretty good work, last term . . . then he went across to where the long sausages of soft new clay lay, fresh from the pug-mill, pulled off a handful, and stood poised to see where new dabs of clay were needed on the left upper arm of his own work.
But he couldn’t settle. He was obsessed with the contrast between living flesh on the rostrum and the dead clay on the turntables. He knew the last thing he should be thinking of was the model’s living flesh; that was a certain way to ruin his work. If the work was to progress, she must remain an abstract network of masses and thrusts, points of reference and measuring marks which he could measure with his clayey calipers. Think of her as a human being and emotion would come into it, and emotion, in this sculpture school at least, was certain death.
He struggled on manfully till three o’clock, and achieved nothing new. In a temper, he cut loose on one clay breast with a metal tool, digging away viciously, and nearly ruined something that he’d got right the previous term. And he had to struggle like hell, sweat running down into his eyes, to regain what he’d thrown away. When he had got it back, or nearly got it back, it was time for the model’s last rest of the day. She slipped on a grubby, pink, satin dressing-gown, and went to talk to the student who everyone knew was her lover, gracefully standing with her weight on one leg, hand on hip. All round the room there were other girls, students. This one standing back from her work, both hands pushed up into her hair, with a gesture that unconsciously made the most of her breasts, usually hidden by the loose folds of her smock. Another girl lit up a fag and kept it in the corner of her mouth, squinting up her eyes against the smoke as she looked at her work. Usually he liked to watch the girls, unobserved. But today they seemed as dead and boring as the clay models. Only one girl was alive to him today; the girl in the diary. And she was dead.
He was seized by a terrible impulse to dash back to his lodgings and get on with reading the diary.
But something in him seemed to recognize a frightening temptation; so he resisted hard. Yet he knew it was dangerous for his work, to go on in this mood. So he went to the Students’ Union for a cup of tea instead; then on to play table tennis with a bunch of cronies who he knew were busy failing their degrees. And they were going on to a screening of Le Salaire de la Peur starring Yves Montand, so he went with them.
Thus it was later, not earlier than usual, that he returned to his digs in Brangwyn Gardens.
Dusk was falling; but there were no lights on in the house. Mrs Meggitt must have gone to work already. But, perversely, as he took his key out of the front door, he called her name. Was he just making sure she was out? Or was he looking to contact some kind of friendly base camp before he ascended his dark pyramid?
When she did not reply, the whole dark house seemed to rustle awake. Seemed to become . . . sexually exciting. He climbed up past the white bear, expecting every second that something would leap at him out of some dark corner. Half dreading it, half wanting it.
But all he found, when he banged his light on, were his own things waiting for him as he’d left them that morning. But oddly fossilized and made strange by the lapse of time. Time, time, what a strange thing was time, he thought, as he cooked himself bangers and beans bought at the offie on the main road.
Then he settled on his bed with the diary.
‘The news-vendors have an obscene new habit. On their billboards they are putting things like “116 for 32” as if they were advertising some Test Match. It is the number of planes the RAF have shot down, and how many we lost yesterday. And they shout the score with such ruthless cheerfulness. I almost slapped one who shoved his obscene paper in my face on the way down into the Piccadilly tube. I felt like shouting at him, “These aren’t bats and balls you’re shouting about, they were brave young men who were alive yesterday, laughing with their friends, and now they are dead, burnt to a cinder.” I only just caught myself in time. But so many are dying up there in the sky while the world watches and makes a game of it, as if they were the ancient gladiators of Rome . . .’
At that point, Harry heard the front door bang open. He listened intently, to see if he could hear Mrs Meggitt’s dreary footsteps through the thick wood of his door.
But to his amazement, he heard quite clearly that there was more than one person. A man’s voice:
‘I’ll put these in your fridge to chill, Kath!’
Then a young woman’s. ‘Don’t keep them there too long. I’m parched. I could drink a whole vineyard dry tonight.’
‘And every other night, darling.’ Another man’s voice.
‘God, you are a sot, Barbara.’ Yet a third man’s voice, light and clear.
‘Who isn’t these days, darling? Eat, drink and be merry . . .’
‘Oh, God, she’s going to talk about the bloody War again. It’ll cost you a shilling, Barbara. Everybody who talks about the War puts a shilling in Kath’s collecting box . . .’
‘What’s the box for, Kath?’
‘Comforts for the troops.’
‘The comforts the troops really need cost more than any shilling . . .’
‘You offering, Megan?’
‘She has already. It’s her sole contribution to the War effort.’
Loud and prolonged laughter.
Harry simply couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They sounded like a bunch of rep actors in a very bad play. Maybe they were in some play. In the West End? No, if they were in the West End, their play wouldn’t have finished yet. By his watch it was only nine o’clock . . .
It was not to be borne. Harry had to find out exactly what was going on. If Mrs Meggitt had some secret life, a host of drunken friends, that was a fact so amazing . . .
He pushed the diary off his chest and jumped to his feet. Moved to open his door. The voices were clearer, louder, zooming up the dark stairwell.
‘Kath? Kath? Glasses, for the love of Allah.’
‘Cooooming . . .’
‘Daft bugger can’t see the hall-stand straight enough to hang up his coat.’
‘If you’ll shut that front door I can put a light on . . .’
Harry ran down one flight of stairs. In the dark. He did not wish to be seen. He ran down another, past the white bear, and down another.
‘Corkscrew, Kath, corkscrew.’
‘I always carry one in my gas mask case. Voilà!’
‘Genius child. What would we do without you?’
Harry was poised on the first floor landing now. Poised to dash down among them. He could always make the excuse that he was on his way for a bite to eat again. He plunged, as someone called, ‘Dammit, don’t spill it. I don’t want to end up licking the carpet again tonight . . .’
The lower hall was in total darkness. The only light was a street-lamp outside, shining weakly in through the fanlight over the door. He gazed about him in bewilderment. Because he knew from the still, cold feel of the air, from the cold smell only of wax polish and dying flowers that there was nobody there, nor had there been anyone there for some time . . .
But unable to believe it, he ran to the front door and flung it open. Where had all the merry throng gone? They must be out in the street . . .
But under the unsympathetic orange glow of the street-lamps, there was only a solitary human figure, crossing the street towards him. She was carrying a bulging brief-case in one hand, and a carrier-bag in the other. It carried the logo of Victor Value’s. She looked up at him, and her pebble glasses flashed in the lamp-light.
‘Off for a bite to eat again, Mr Shaftoe? Are you sure your student grant can bear the expense?’
It wasn’t just her sarcasm that made him suddenly hate her.
He lay in his bed, in his striped pyjamas, too full of bangers and beans, and the fish and chips he’d had to buy to support his alibi. He still quivered all over when he thought about the voices in the hall.
Of course, it might have just been a dream; brought on by reading too much diary. He had come to with a start when he heard the voices, and he had been lying on his bed, with the diary heavy on his chest.
The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral Page 10