Dodo said impulsively, “Would you like to sit on my newspaper?”
He grinned.
“Thank you very much. I do suffer from rheumatism.”
“Then you shouldn’t sit on the grass at all,” Dodo pointed out.
“There are a couple of chairs under that tree. Or I could bring one over here.…”
“As a matter of fact, I’m just going.”
He looked thoroughly disappointed.
“I’m afraid that must be true, because I can’t flatter myself that I’ve alarmed you.”
“Of course not. Only—”
“Only what?”
Dodo looked at him squarely.
“I don’t want you to waste your time. I mean, it’s five now, and if you’re looking for a date for this evening, which is perfectly natural, you’d have to start all over again about half-past, and if you want to have dinner anywhere you ought to be there by seven, or there won’t be any food. I’m just telling you.”
“You don’t think an hour and a half would leave me enough time?” enquired the corporal seriously.
“Good heavens, how should I know?” cried Dodo.
“There’s a chap on our site who says he can pick up a date in forty seconds flat.”
“I dare say he can,” agreed Dodo. “I’ve seen it done, in Piccadilly.”
“Of course, no one ever offers Ginger a newspaper to sit on. On the contrary, Ginger singes the grass. If I’m going to tell you much more about Ginger, I’d better fetch that chair.”
He did so, and returning gave Dodo many interesting particulars about his friend, life on an Ack-Ack site, and his own previous career as an architect in the cathedral city of Winchester. He talked with an odd detachment, as though he saw himself as a faintly humorous figure; and with great fluency, as though it were some time since he had let himself go.
“Do you like being in the forces?” asked Dodo curiously.
“Very much. In one way, of course, I don’t like it at all. I dislike the washing arrangements and the interference with my personal habits. But I like the chaps, and I like doing a useful and warlike job which is within my powers. We’re not glorious, but we’re necessary.”
“Like the A.R.P.”
He laughed.
“I’ll tell that to the chaps.”
“No, you mustn’t,” said Dodo, very earnestly. “You don’t know what a comfort it is to hear the barrage go up. We take a pride in it. You tell them that!”
“I will. It’s nice to be appreciated. It’s been nice of you to let me sit here and talk.”
With some surprise, Dodo realized that it was six o’clock. He made no attempt to detain her, nor did he suggest another meeting; they parted as casually as they had met, without even a handshake. “Good shooting!” said Dodo. “Quiet night!” said the corporal; an exchange so formal that it might have come out of a book of etiquette for time of war.
2
When Dodo got back to the Mews Adelaide immediately observed that the walk had done her good. Dodo, feeling rather acutely that there was nothing to conceal, replied that she had been picked up by a soldier.
“I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened before,” said Adelaide calmly. “Was it by the Serpentine?”
“No, by the Round Pond.”
“What sort of soldier?”
“A full corporal, darling, in Ack-Ack. He just wanted someone to talk to.”
“Humph,” said Adelaide.
“He did really. I warned him.”
“What precisely,” enquired Adelaide, “did you warn him of?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. Is Gerhardi off duty yet?”
“Gerhardi’s back-stage: the lighting’s gone wrong again.”
Dodo groaned. Things were always going wrong, because everything was getting worn out, and it was almost impossible to procure the nuts and bolts, bits of wire, electrical fittings, needed for repairs. (Three-ply wood, for example, simply vanished; the last piece in the workshop had been found by Dodo lying in the road after a blitz—no doubt part of some one’s blackout—and she brought it home in triumph.) Even the puppets were getting shabby, which was serious, for part of their charm had always lain in their immaculate miniature perfection. To them both Adelaide and Dodo made sacrifices: Leda’s swan was replumaged from the latter’s best pre-war hat, and a certain dark-blue velvet of Adelaide’s cut up into the Madonna’s cloak for the nativity play and a most useful midnight sky. But what work it all meant! What stitching and contriving! Treff was clever at touching up a head, but it was a pity, thought Dodo, he couldn’t sew.…
Gerhardi had fixed the lights when she joined him and was arranging the puppets on their pegs ready for the evening performance. They were doing a ballet, The Brave Tin Soldier, and Music Hall.
“That uniform,” he said at once, “should go to the cleaners. It is unspeakable.”
“Well, it can’t,” said Dodo. “They take six weeks. Any news at the Post?”
Gerhardi paused, his fingers twitching on the strings so that the soldier appeared to shudder.
“They are saying if Hitler knows he is beaten, he may use gas. Gas will be his secret weapon.…”
Dodo, considering the red jacket, which was indeed very soiled, remarked that gas could hardly be called a secret.
“It will still be abominable. Will you look at these trousers? They should be white, and they are yellow like an old man’s moustache.”
“Rub chalk on. Or couldn’t you Blanco them?”
“And where am I to get the Blanco? Also I need black enamel and some window cord. You know I never make difficulties, but this is too much!”
Dodo consoled him as well as she was able, but for once could not take his troubles seriously; which was odd, since they were all—from the shortage of Blanco to the prospect of gas—so eminently her own troubles too. She felt unreasonably cheerful; as Adelaide said, her walk had done her good.
3
As the weather continued fine Dodo formed the habit of slipping across to the Gardens before the evening performance. She usually walked twice round the Pond, once briskly and once more slowly, and was back in an hour. It was a sensible way of getting exercise, and one which her aunt warmly encouraged.
On the sixteenth of these promenades, or when she had circled the Pond thirty-one times, the corporal rose from a bench and politely saluted her. He said at once:—
“I couldn’t get up last week. Were you here?”
Dodo felt annoyed; he seemed to have forgotten that no word had been said of a further meeting. She said rather coolly:—
“I always walk here in the evening.”
“That’s what I thought,” said the corporal blandly. His manner was not exactly more confident, but more carefree, as though he were in possession of some private good news. “May I walk with you?”
“I’m just going as far as the Serpentine.…”
“That’s no distance. Ginger recommends the back of Apsley House.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” cried Dodo, “you’ve been asking Ginger’s advice?”
“Certainly not. But I evidently returned to duty in a noticeably cheerful mood, because he at once congratulated me on breaking my duck. I can’t help Ginger, you know, he persists in behaving like a mother to me.”
“I think he sounds nice,” said Dodo.
“He is. You mustn’t think I’ve been bandying your name among the brutal and licentious soldiery, because I haven’t. In the first place I don’t know your name, and in the second our sergeant is a Plymouth Brother. We are known in the regiment as ‘Ernie’s Choir.’ Ginger regards your mere shadow with the greatest respect. In fact, he said the reason he advised Apsley House was so that we could converse about the Duke of Wellington.”
“You know, it’s very odd,” said Dodo, “but you manage to give the impression of being rather strong and silent.”
“I assure you I don’t usually talk at this rate. It’s the excitement of seei
ng you again. By the way, my name is Richard Tuke.”
“Mine’s Dodo—Dorothy—Baker.”
He repeated the name appreciatively, and at once went on talking: it was remarkable how much an hour’s concentrated discourse revealed. Dodo learned, for instance, that he had never married, and never would, for the simple reason that on an income (after paying taxes) of six hundred a year he supported three women already—his mother and two elder sisters. “My family is one of the last examples,” he told Dodo wryly, “of the true shabby-genteel. We know all the nice people in Winchester, and eat too much farinaceous food. One thing I’ve enjoyed in the Army is meat.” The possibility of marrying any one with money had apparently never occurred to him; he was conditioned to think of money as something one scraped up to spend on other people. From twenty years’ work he had achieved only one personal satisfaction: he possessed a cottage, picked up cheap in a moment of self-indulgence, and thenceforward evidently the pride and preoccupation of his life. (It wasn’t near Winchester; it was in Bucks.) He began to describe it in detail, but suddenly and unexpectedly paused; Dodo, wondering what had stopped him, could only think of a small boy who interrupts the account of his rabbits with a “Wait till you see them.” … There was a slight hiatus, and when he went on it was to speak about Ginger.
Ginger was a great help to them. They had both by this time become very conscious not only of each other, but also of themselves, and particularly of their ages: the notion that they were falling in love was shaded by a doubt whether they might not be too old for it—they could not make the direct approach of boy and girl. In this state of emotional self-mistrust Ginger was invaluable, a sort of invisible go-between, whom Richard avowedly feared to disappoint. He could ask Dodo for her photograph with less embarrassment, because Ginger thought he ought to have one. “Ginger has six, all different,” explained Richard, “and all signed with love and kisses. You needn’t put anything like that, of course; if you wrote something rather ladylike and aloof—‘Kind thoughts,’ or ‘Good wishes’—Ginger would consider it just the thing.” Dodo laughed and promised to find one, whereupon Richard solemnly produced a snapshot of himself, rather faded, and inscribed “Best regards.” They laughed again as Dodo put it in her bag; but the fact remained that she now possessed his likeness.…
She herself hadn’t talked nearly so much, indeed she had no opportunity: Richard knew only that she lived with her aunt and ran a puppet theatre. This second item did not interest him very much, and Dodo, who was used to the curiosity and envy of the intelligentsia, at first wondered why. In time she came to understand that he had a dislike for all that part of her life which he had not shared: he wanted to think of her, not as an efficient business woman, or even as an efficient warden, but simply as the girl he walked with in Kensington Gardens.
That evening he took her back to Albion Alley, and there under the archway they found it surprisingly hard to separate; but he would not come in to the Theatre. The Alley was deserted; the houses in Albion Place stood empty, their back windows for the most part broken or boarded-up. A creeper drooped long straggling trails over the wall of Number 7; at Number 8 the paint of the back door still showed faintly green.
“My aunt used to live there,” said Dodo.
“Did she?”
“About seventy years ago.”
They looked seriously up at the solid brick wall, with the spikes still so firmly embedded on top: it looked ready to stand seventy years more, unless of course it got a bomb.
“Next week?” said Richard.
Dodo nodded. He hesitated a moment, and then (as though at the prompting of a distant voice) stooped quickly and kissed her on the cheek. They were both acutely aware that this was only their second meeting, but—who knew where the next bomb might not fall? Dodo kissed him back.
CHAPTER III
1
The tempest shakes the oak: the insects in its roots run about their business.
On D-Day Dodo managed to get some enamel. She and Treff and Gerhardi took the wireless into the workroom and spent the afternoon overhauling the entire set of Hans Andersen. But before that, immediately after lunch, she had hurried across the Park to Westminster Abbey, and said a prayer there, and hurried back. She did not know quite why she did this, but it appeared to be a common impulse: all around her as she knelt people dropped in for a moment and hurried away again. In the streets outside, except for the mobbing of newspaper-men, there was neither excitement nor bustle; every face wore a look of extreme preoccupation—concentrated, sober, yet curiously absent, like the faces of sleepwalkers; as though a united will was being thrown into the struggle. Once more, after the long pause, history was on the move—but moving away from England, back to the old cockpits, and leaving only spectators behind.
For seven days all thought was fixed within the narrow limits of the Channel and the beaches; then a single plane over London was hit, it was assumed, by the first shot; and then as the rumours took shape the spectators found their new rôle to have been prematurely adopted. The new planes were not planes at all, but flying-bombs—pilotless, and therefore not to be turned back by the barrage.
Like every one else, Dodo said it didn’t sound too nice.
So good were her spirits at this time, however, that her chief anxiety was lest her mother should take fresh alarm and renew her efforts to get her, Dodo, out of London. They could not succeed; but if they were made, and rejected, both mother and daughter must suffer by it. Alice’s next letter, however, arrived no sooner than usual, and expressed no unusual solicitude. “Take care of yourself, my darling,” she wrote—but that was what she always did write; and moreover she wrote from Somerset. Upon that less-tried area London’s buzz-bombs could make little impact. They were no doubt very dreadful; Londoners, poor things, were having a terrible time again; but one had become used to saying such things, just as Alice had become used to telling Dodo to take care of herself. It was not exactly indifference, but rather the same useful instinct of self-defence which had refused, after Dunkirk, to envisage defeat, and which now refused to envisage the equally possible reduction of Southern England to a rubble-heap. (Evacuated Londoners found this attitude irritating and illogical, just as Continentals had found the British attitude irritating and illogical in 1940; but Londoners carried illogic one step further by returning to London.) In addition Alice had a particular reason for cultivating serenity, for the new baby was due next month, and its mother inclined to peak; when Ellen, who still missed Treff, tried to talk her into making another attack on Britannia Mews, she replied stoutly that Dodo was old enough to know her own mind.
“Treff would be another man for Freddy,” suggested Ellen.
“My dear, Freddy didn’t really care for him at all,” said Alice rather pointedly; for she felt it slightly presumptuous that Ellen, unmarried, should talk thus knowledgeably about men. To be sure, she’d had Treff in her house for over eighteen years, but as Freddy once said, they were really a couple of old women together. “I’ve never been possessive,” went on Alice. “Dodo knows she can come here the moment she likes—though I’m sure I don’t know where we’d put her, especially with the monthly nurse—but I know she hates me to fret over her, and I shan’t. I’ve decided to do all the layette knitting in white, and Joan can crochet a pink or blue edging afterwards; it will be a nice occupation till she’s about again.”
It was a pity Dodo could not overhear this conversation; it would have reminded her of the tale about the burdock-leaves.
2
The buzz-bombs continued to arrive with annoying regularity—particularly between eight and nine in the morning, when people were going to work, and between five and seven, when they were going home; and every one complained about them far more than about the blitz. The old, almost forgotten feeling of defencelessness returned, and with it the old suspension of all nonessential activity. People stayed at home as much as possible, and for the first time since the big blitzes attendance at the Puppet
Theatre fell off.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Adelaide impatiently. “What on earth are they afraid of?”
At that moment, with a noise like an express train, a bomb approached. As it passed overhead the swing-doors of the foyer were sucked open, hung a moment ajar, and clashed back.
“Of sudden death,” said Dodo.
“But the chances are precisely the same”—The engine cut out. Dodo pulled her aunt inside the Theatre, where there was less glass. “—here, as in their own homes. Who’s that under the stage?”
It was Treff. He waited to hear the explosion and emerged unaffectedly brushing his knees. Adelaide sniffed and said:—
“Perhaps Treff has found the solution. We might invite our patrons to crawl under there too …”
“The point is, Aunt Adelaide, people don’t want to get killed now the war’s nearly over.”
“People never do want to get killed that I know of. But one has to come to terms with death.”
Dodo, who was not on duty, sat down in one of the back seats and regarded her aunt speculatively. It was very rarely that Mrs. Lambert fell into anything like an abstract mood, and she wanted to hear more. But Adelaide, after a moment’s pause, merely remarked that the Theatre was looking very shabby, and that as soon as the war was over they would have to think about redecorating.
“Turn the Slade loose on it,” advised Treff, coming down the aisle. (The Puppet was always used to draw on unpaid labour of this sort; it exercised a perennial fascination over generations of art students.) “Personally I’d like to try something baroque: cherubs, for instance, with plaster behinds.”
He took the seat next to Dodo’s; Adelaide had drawn up the old rocking-chair; they all three sat in a row before the empty stage as though waiting for a performance. Dodo said suddenly, “I don’t believe most people think about death at all. They avoid it.”
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