She woke with a crick in her neck and eased her eyes open slowly as slivers of memory fitted themselves together. Sylvie’s sofa was just that little bit too short for her. She stretched her legs, thinking of the champagne, oysters and the dancing. Dancing with Henri, then with Alex. To dance with Henri was a whirlwind of banter and flirting; to dance with Alex was torture. He’d held her politely at a distance. Suddenly, he was a stranger again, neither of them knowing what to say to one another. A hundred questions poised and unsaid between them.
As she danced, her feet foolish and leaden, Nell had glanced occasionally back to the booth and wondered why Sylvie enjoyed meddling so much; setting up the evening and watching her subjects circle one another. As it was, the club closed earlier than expected because, as one was wont to hear all the time, there was a war on. Henri started to talk about a little drinking den he knew off Neal Street but, to Nell’s relief, Sylvie declared she was tired, and needed her bed – after all she still had some packing to do in the morning. Henri hailed a cab for them. Alex stood by and waited, saw Nell into the cab. His face was unreadable as he said goodbye. Nell in her inexperience and confusion didn’t even acknowledge him, but laughed instead at Henri running off to flag another cab and then falling over the kerb and onto his backside.
And now, this morning, as she peeled herself up from the sofa and padded into Sylvie’s kitchen to make the tea, she wondered at Alex, wondered at the whole scenario. In the hazy mid-morning light, it all seemed so remote, like a faraway dream; a play watched from the very back of the gods. She heard thumping up above and the latches on a suitcase snap. Sylvie came down in a pristine navy suit with a grey felt hat, looking far too good for someone who had drunk champagne until after midnight.
‘Oh, you look the part,’ Nell said. ‘That is, for whatever it is you are going to be doing.’
‘Put it this way, it’s pretty darn safe. You must reassure your mother,’ she said. ‘It’s a desk job in an office. Languages, you know. Just with a few more knobs on than I have in London.’
Nell braced herself. ‘Sylvie, I wanted to ask you about—’
‘Look, sweetie, my cab will be here any moment. Train’s at midday and the traffic is always bad on Praed Street. Help yourself to whatever you like. In fact, take what you can from the larder. Mrs Char will be in later to finish up. Why don’t you use the time? Go down to Oxford Street? Have a browse round Selfridges? I saw a really pretty evening dress in there the other day; black with white piping. Delightful. Would suit you well.’
‘The thing is, I really want to know why—’
A vehicle rumbled up the cobbles and tooted.
‘Here I go!’ cried Sylvie, leaping forward for a hug and a kiss. ‘Be a good girl, keep digging up those scoops. I’ll see you soon. Love to Auntie Moll, love to Mrs B!’
And in a commotion of suitcases, a delicious waft of Chanel No. 5 and a slamming of doors, she’d gone.
Nell sat with her tea in the rather bare, Sylvie-less room, and wondered. Yes, she should certainly use her time well. She’d telephone her father, try to arrange a visit. Perhaps take the train as far as Harrow, drop in for a cup of tea. The telephone sat on a fat directory. She placed it on her lap and turned to G for Garland. Halfway through the names beginning with ‘Ga’ she stopped, took a breath and turned to ‘Bla’ for ‘Blanford’. She had no idea of Diana’s father’s initials, but the surname was not common, was it? The listing could not be too hard to find. But this, she realised in defeat, turning to the front page, was the London directory. As if it could be that easy.
Someone knocked at the door. The cleaning woman was here already, and she still not dressed.
‘Just a moment,’ she called, and quickly ran a comb through her curls in front of the mantle mirror and hurried down the stairs.
She opened the door to Alex.
‘Oh crikey,’ she uttered.
‘Can I come in? I really want to speak to you.’
‘Sylvie’s not here. She left half an hour ago.’
‘Nell, I want to speak to you.’
She stood back, steeling her nerves and let him pass her.
‘You better put the kettle on,’ she said, ‘and make some more tea while I get dressed.’
Upstairs in Sylvie’s bathroom she washed quickly, squeezed the last of the toothpaste. She thanked herself privately for packing the summer dress with the little shells on it, and its link to their beautiful sacred evening by the river. As she buttoned it up, her mind unfolded tentatively to a possibility, a way back, or even better, a way forward. A strange peace settled within her. Perhaps they would talk, work things out. Perhaps the impossible could happen.
As she popped back into her cousin’s bedroom to get dressed she noticed that Sylvie had forgotten her handkerchief. She went over to the bedside table and picked it up. It had been pressed carefully into a kite shape and on its corner was a monogram in deep navy.
Downstairs, Alex was setting out the cups, whistling faintly. He seemed pleased, contented.
‘Not one of my greatest skills, making tea, so you’ll have to take a chance. And I don’t know yet if you take sugar, but you won’t be today; there is none, I’m afraid.’
‘Is this what you came back for?’ she asked him bluntly, and gave him the handkerchief.
He looked surprised, wondered where it had got to.
‘What was it doing up in Sylvie’s bedroom?’ Nell’s voice hit a shrill note of rage. ‘I think you need to tell me what’s going on here.’
‘Going on?’ he said, coming towards her. He opened his arms to her. ‘Nothing is going on, not from my part.’
She stepped away from him and flung up her hands. ‘Oh no, you see, this is where I go. I’m leaving now. I’m going.’
She ran up the stairs to grab her case and rushed back to find herself face to face with him, barring her way.
‘Not again, Nell. Don’t run off again.’ He looked bewildered, frantic, his eyes watering. ‘Please, I want to talk to you. It’s complicated, it’s—’
‘I don’t want to hear any of it. When you held my hand in the club, it didn’t feel right, and now, well now all of this makes me feel sick. Oh, where the hell is my coat, my handbag? I need to get out of here. I can’t look at you now.’ Her breath was coming hard and fast. ‘You’re not who I thought you were.’ She was ranting now, incoherent with fury. ‘You said your life expectancy was not good – and yet you’re still here!’
She saw her words hit him like a blow, his face crumple. She bundled up her belongings and ran down the stairs to the front door. To turn the latch, she had to put everything down on the floor at her feet. The door fumbled open, breathless and urgent, she stooped to pick them all up again. And the moment she slipped out the door, once more, her conscience told her, she was running away from Alex.
As she stumbled outside onto the cobbles the air raid siren suddenly started up, keening through the air, ripping apart the sunshine. She darted along the mews, clutching her belongings, and hit the main street. People were hurrying; cars tooting, swinging to the sides of the road. A bus rumbled by, with passengers hopping off the back as it turned the corner. A coalman perched on his cart was urging on his mare; someone official was blowing a whistle.
She stood still, breathing hard. Where on earth should she go? What should she do?
‘Is there a shelter round here?’ she asked a man in a suit as he panted past her, his eyes wide with terror under his trilby.
‘Down there, miss. Down the road. Under the church. The crypt.’
She remembered seeing the sign yesterday. Could it have only been yesterday?
She hotched up her case and took a step to the kerb when a hand fell heavily on her shoulder, pulling her back.
‘There’s no time. The mews has a cellar. Come back with me.’
The roads were emptying of people, front doors were slamming shut. She glanced in fear up at the sky. It was an empty blue summer’s sky. The audacity of it, she thou
ght, in broad daylight.
‘It’s all right, Alex,’ Nell trembled, her thoughts jumbled. ‘I’m going to go to the church, or the underground. It’s that way, isn’t it? I want to go and visit my father. I want to see him, you see.’
Alex was peering at her, his eyes puzzled.
‘Seriously, Nell, we need to get to the cellar.’ His hand gripped her arm. ‘Now.’
She twitched her arm ineffectually to try to release his hand. They stood together for a few moments more, the siren wailing, surrounding her, urging her.
‘But there aren’t any planes, Alex. It’s a false alarm. We have them out at Lednor all the time.’
And then she heard them, the engines humming. She dipped her head in fright as the droning grew heavier and heavier by the second. The sound folded up the air, making it uneven and full of metal.
And then she saw it, high up, between a gap in the buildings at the far end of the street: on the horizon, the squadron, like a fleet of black arrows in perfect V-shape, regimented and in control. Advancing, tearing open the sky.
‘Christ, Alex,’ she uttered.
He pulled her along the mews in such a desperate rush that she turned her ankle on the cobbles. He opened the little door under the stairs and she followed him down concrete steps, dipping her head under low beams. There was a battered sofa, blankets, an oil lamp. Alex quickly struck a match and the lamp glowed feebly, highlighting the dusty brickwork, reams of cobwebs, the green line of damp creeping up the wall.
She slumped into a corner of the sofa as cold, blood-freezing realisation filled her guts. The unmistakable uneven beat of the engines swooped low, over their heads, and the first bomb fell like a crunch of thunder into the ground, then again, and again. Again.
The foundations flinched. It’s my turn, she thought, cowering on the sofa, holding her head in her hands. It’s all over. Alex sat beside her, put his arm over her shoulder. The deep thuds continued in hideous, punishing rhythm, as if a giant was kicking a keg of beer over and over again. The earth rocked with every one, a trickle of dust fell from the joists over her head. In the corner, dust poured down like water.
She moaned, pushed her fingers deep into her hair. When she dared, she looked at Alex. His face was white, startled, his eyes like black pools in the lamplight.
‘Whatever you do, keep the light going,’ he said, opening his arms wider to her, pulling her close. He wrapped his body over hers, shielding her. ‘Keep the light going.’
She felt his heart pounding through his shirt, his grip on her tighter and tighter. Pressure pushed down on her body. Her guts were cold, twisting. She wanted to speak to him, but couldn’t form words in the mess of her terror. Her throat was hot and tight. They were bombing them blindly, any old how. One, two, three, count them. They were degraded together, she and Alex, cowering in their hole.
The silence then was like death. She slowly became aware of the stench of drains and damp. The horror, the nightmare cramped close to her in the darkness.
Alex moved away from her, to sit upright on the sofa. She heard him say, ‘Are you all right, Nell?’
She wanted to answer him but her mouth was dry, her tongue stuck to her gums. She found his hand and pressed her own into his. She brought his hand up to her mouth to kiss it.
Presently he said, ‘Can you move?’
‘Yes,’ she managed, ‘I just want to get out of here.’
Alex tried the door and she saw his relief that the hallway was intact, that the building had not been hit. But, as he opened the front door, the stench of burning hit her. Clouds of smoke blocked the sun and forced the afternoon into evening. The sky was on fire. An angry light glowered down on them, smoke billowed upwards. She came and stood next to him on the cobbles, not wishing to leave his side for a second.
She breathed fire and brick dust as they stumbled in shock to the end of the mews. Hosepipes snaked along the centre of the road, firemen were at work, ambulances parked with back doors flung open. Thick white dust covered cars, lampposts, everything. Three houses along from Sylvie’s mews was a shattered, gaping void. A neighbour, in dressing gown and wellies, was stumbling over rubble, calling for her cat. There was a gathering of activity around another smoking ruin at the end of the street. Men stood in lines passing buckets of debris, some with masks and goggles on, others coughing with every other breath. A bedstead protruded rudely from the ruins.
‘There but for the grace of God,’ muttered Alex.
She gazed up at him, reappraising him. Her fear no longer choked her. Dust filled his hair, and his eyes were bright red and watery against his ashen, exhausted skin. She knew that she would look exactly the same to him: almost unrecognisable.
But then someone hurried past them and said hello to her. It was the man in the suit from earlier, transformed by dust and shock. He seemed to have lost his hat.
He blurted, ‘Hello again, miss. The shelter was full, so some kind soul took me in. Did you know, the church took a direct hit? I just went past there. It is full of blood and flesh …’ He paused, thinking about what he had just said. ‘Hats and shoes, slippers all over the place, like a jumble sale … I couldn’t look. I couldn’t stomach it. I suppose one must try to help but …’
She turned from him and pressed her face into Alex’s shoulder.
‘I need to take you home,’ Alex said into her hair. ‘I need to get you home to Lednor.’
But still, they stood and stared, deep in shock at the glowing horizon, the flames over the West End.
Alex sighed, devastated, ‘London is well and truly burning.’
Nell suddenly cried, ‘The moon! See Alex, the moon is pink.’ She pointed at the faint crimson disc rising sedately over the ruined and bloody horizon. ‘They even changed the moon.’
She came off the telephone to her mother and left the fuggy confines of the public call box. It had been the fifth one they’d stopped at on their way, the first one which had a working line. She told her mother that she was all right. Her mother replied that Sylvie had called safe and sound earlier from Berkshire; she had caught her train well before the raid. But why was she, Nell, calling at three in the morning?
Now, curled up in the passenger seat, Nell stared out of the window, waiting for Alex to finish stretching his legs. They were parked on the country road somewhere near Amersham, some eight miles from Lednor. The indigo of the short summer night was becoming paler by the moment. Nell glanced behind her to see the flaming glow on the eastern horizon like a bloody sunrise. In contrast, the hawthorn hedgerows along the verge were pure and white with star-like blossom. She wound down her window and breathed the peaceful sweetness of cow parsley, drinking its balm like an elixir. Moths fluttered around the dipped car headlights. Dawn would be with them in less than an hour.
‘It looks stormy up there, over in the west; can you feel the humidity?’ said Alex getting back into the car. ‘But never mind, we’ve not far to go.’
Nearly six hours earlier, they had made their way back through streets of chaos and confusion to Alex’s digs on Baker Street and found that his car was intact and his landlady safe. He had insisted on giving Nell a tot of brandy and then filled the flask with tea. His landlady gave them some sandwiches and a mothballed cardigan for Nell, who was shivering, her bones aching with a residue of terror.
The landlady pressed Alex, telling him that Nell should stay there and rest up.
‘I just want to get out of here,’ Nell replied. ‘I want to go home.’
He drove as fast as he could through the night, negotiating roadblocks, police signs, slowing for the ringing ambulances, being bellowed at by an air raid warden for nearly running him over. Alex knew his way out along the short cuts out of town, through the tight grey suburbs and onto the A-road deep into Buckinghamshire.
Parked by the verge now, Nell could indeed feel the sultry heat of the storm approaching. She felt as if the heat of the fires of London was still upon her. Burning into her mind, her clothes, singeing her
hair. Those people. Those poor, wretched people. Cold sweat broke down her back. She took the landlady’s cardigan off and tossed it out of the window.
Alex fired the engine and turned down a lane. The narrow unclassified road unfurled before them like a rich purple ribbon as they meandered through dark beech groves.
‘I want to cry, Alex,’ she said in the gloom, ‘but I just can’t.’
‘It’s the shock, my love,’ he said, reaching for her hand and pressing it tightly in his.
It took her a few moments to realise he’d called her his love, and yet in her turmoil, her earlier confusion and doubt began to reform and grow like a filthy stain.
‘Nearly there,’ said Alex, cheerfully. ‘Nearly—Oh.’
The car shuddered, the engine made a whining noise and cut out.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Run out of petrol. What a fool.’
Nell stood in the blanketing, dark silence under the trees, while Alex unloaded her coat and suitcase from the boot. She decided that it would do them good to walk. They needed to breathe some good Chiltern air.
They began to walk down the lane. Meadows and hedgerows emerged from the gloom, their shapes shifting, and shadows melting and re-forming at every switch and turn in the lane. All the time, a great billowing bruise of cloud rose against the darkness of the western sky. A breath of cold breeze was chased by warm, stifling air. Nell could feel her forehead grow sticky and then cool in another instant.
‘Hear that?’ Alex asked, cocking his head. ‘That’s a nightjar.’
She wondered aloud if they were going to have another birdwatching contest and told him she hoped not for she was shattered and her skills were compromised.
‘Don’t you miss being a pilot?’ she asked out of nowhere, her mind leaping among a thousand thoughts.
He told her no, that his new job was far more interesting and suited his background.
The September Garden Page 17