by Lissa Evans
‘I did something stupid,’ said Vee. ‘I bought you that book you wanted for your birthday and then, in all the fuss, I went and left it in the street.’
Noel shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll get it out of the library.’
She smiled faintly. ‘You’re a good boy.’
He looked up at her, rather startled, and she felt suddenly close to tears again, and this time it wasn’t the fate of the old chap that was setting her off, but the nearness of her own death, because if she died now, she’d never know what would happen to Noel, and it would be like walking out of a cinema halfway through the feature, just as the plot was starting to unwind. Whatever the afterlife might be like – and a thousand chapel Sundays had still left her with no clear impression beyond general radiance and a preponderance of thrones – Vee was absolutely certain that it didn’t offer a balcony view of the world below.
Noel was still looking concerned. ‘Would you like me to come to the police station with you tomorrow?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t mean that I’d come into the interview with you, just that I’d be there as company. Besides, I’ve never been to a police station, so I’d be interested in observing the procedures, and seeing how they compare to those in detective novels.’
‘No.’ Vee could just imagine him correcting the desk sergeant on an abstruse legal point while some drunk staggered about taking a swing at people. ‘You stay here and get on with your school-work. If I have to see the coroner, you can come with me then.’
Noel cracked another egg, and examined it carefully. ‘Dr Parry-Jones is going to show me how to inject a yolk-vein with vegetable dye.’
Vee closed her eyes. What were you supposed to say to that kind of remark? I mean, what was actually the right word?
‘Good,’ she said.
Her interview with Sergeant Bayliss was a surprisingly benign affair – almost pleasant, in fact; she was treated like a guest and given a glass of water while the sergeant asked straightforward questions and carefully transcribed her answers, and for the first time – ever – she had an inkling of why some people seemed to trust the police force. Even when he told her that she would definitely be required at the inquest, she managed not to wring her hands or let out a bleat of anguish, but instead said, ‘Yes, Sergeant, I quite understand,’ just like a normal person, and the weather outside – a sudden thaw, a blast of sunlight – seemed to reflect her mood. This feeling of self-congratulation lasted for at least an hour, until she returned home to find that a pipe had burst and there was water cascading down the staircase and saturating the long rug in the hall.
‘It’s Turkish, I think,’ said Noel, pressing a foot on it and watching the liquid pool around his shoe; as a very little boy, he had traced the grids and lozenges of the pattern on to greaseproof paper. ‘Mattie brought it back from Serbia.’
‘And how in the world are we supposed to dry it? How?’
It took five of them to carry it into the cellar and drape it over two chairs. Within days, it was green with mould.
‘How much would that carpet have cost?’ asked Vee, still fretting over it as she sat with Noel in the kitchen on the evening of his birthday, darning while he worked at his books, a green scarf wound twice round his neck. A tenor on the wireless was wailing about the Mountains of Mourne.
‘Mattie said she swapped a pair of wellingtons for it. Or maybe that was the one in the drawing room.’ Noel paused over a page of Latin grammar, trying to pin down the memory. More than four years had passed since his godmother’s death, and it was only in dreams, now, that he could hear the exact tone and emphasis of her voice, its buoyant swoop; what remained with him was that sense of being borne along, of seeing the world from a height, at a gallop, the horizon wide and blue.
‘She wouldn’t have minded about the rug,’ he said. ‘Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse.’
‘And what’s that mean?’
‘Everything passes, everything becomes wearisome, everything breaks.’
‘Cheery,’ said Vee, her teeth clamped on the needle, as she turned one of his sweaters inside out. ‘How’s your scarf? I wasn’t sure about the shade.’
‘I like it. It reminds me of verdigris.’
In lieu of the lost book, she’d knitted him a present to add to the modest pile at the breakfast table – a bar of Empire Military Chocolate from Miss Appleby (now seeing an Australian), a ring-bound notebook with a brace of sharpened pencils from Mr Jepson, and a worn copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury from Mr Reddish.
Dr Parry-Jones had ordered a rat in formaldehyde for Noel to dissect at her surgery, a prospect that appeared to please him.
‘Oh, there was something else,’ said Vee. ‘I forgot – that card on top of the dresser.’
Noel stood up and reached for it, and she realized that he’d grown. More trousers to buy.
‘It came yesterday,’ she said. ‘Postmarked Hereford. Go on, open it.’
Noel recognized Genevieve Lumb’s neat but forceful handwriting. Even the thought that she had licked the envelope was quite physically stirring.
‘I’ll read it later,’ he said.
Avril didn’t issue invitations to lunch. She didn’t ask the recipient, or even beg; she summoned. Almost everything about her twin irritated Winnie, and this imperiousness was the annoying start to the inevitably infuriating encounter that followed, but on the other hand, the lunches were invariably expensive and delicious – Winnie would often mentally re-consume them while drifting off to sleep at night – and when weighed against Avril’s presence, the scales hung almost level.
‘So I’ve booked Canuto’s for Tuesday at one,’ announced Avril on the telephone.
‘But how do you know I’m not on duty then?’
‘Are you?’
‘Well, no, as it happens. But what if I had been?’
‘Couldn’t you have got out of it? It’s not as if you’re busy at the moment, and I’ve got something tremendously important to tell you.’
‘Of course I’m busy.’
‘Well, we’re all busy, Winnie – I’m rushed off my tiny feet – but I still don’t pretend to imagine I’m so vital to the war effort that the Allies will lose if I take an hour off to go and eat roast plover followed by an ice-cream.’
‘Ice-cream?’
‘Yes, the dairy ban’s been lifted and they’re allowed to make it again now, didn’t you know?’
‘But it’s snowing outside.’
‘Apparently, Americans eat it all year round, whatever the weather, and Canuto’s is always full of them – I only managed to get a table because of Clive. So I’ll see you there, shall I?’
There was a pause.
‘What flavour ice-cream?’ asked Winnie.
‘Custard vanilla, I think.’
Winnie arrived early; she was led downstairs by an elderly waiter and seated at a corner table next to a peeling mural of the Grand Canal. At night, Canuto’s was a club, occupying the whole of the basement, but by day, a red velvet curtain was drawn across half of the room. In front of it, a pianist in a dinner jacket was giving a lacklustre account of ‘Berkeley Square’.
Despite Avril’s comment, there were no Americans among the diners. At the next table two Senior Ministry types, grey complected, with receding hairlines and tortoiseshell glasses, were discussing the Appian Way and eating devilled kidneys; both looked like Avril’s husband, Clive – as did most of the men in the room, though none of them actually were, since Clive was currently abroad, doing something for the Foreign Office. He was a very nice man, diffident and slightly bewildered, like a staid dog who’d been taken for an unexpectedly vigorous and sustained walk. The couple had met in the basement air-raid shelter of the Ministry of Information, where Avril was employed in the publications department. ‘I fell for his intellect,’ she always said, not mentioning the houses in Belgravia, Norfolk and the Loire. T
here was no need to ask what Clive had fallen for; heads snapped round whenever Avril stalked past. They did so again now, as she tip-tapped down the stairs ahead of the waiter.
‘Darling Winnie!’ she called, from across the room, and the other diners simply stopped with forks halfway to their mouths. She was striking rather than beautiful – seemingly drawn with a stronger pen than everyone else. She had also, since the last time Winnie had seen her, dyed her hair red.
‘What do you think?’ she said, sitting down. ‘Clive came back from his last trip with a packet of henna rolled in his underpants. Obviously, we mustn’t speculate about where he went, but I do hope they hold another conference in North Africa.’
One of the diners on the next table was trying to fish his spoon out of his soup.
‘Hello, Avril,’ said Winnie, used to this ruthless annexing of attention. ‘I don’t really like it, to be honest. It makes you look very pale.’
‘Renaissance, Clive said. Titian’s La Bella.’ She took a compact out of her bag and inspected herself for a moment or two. ‘I think I should be wearing a darker shade of lipstick, though – more the colour of yours, perhaps.’
‘I’m not wearing lipstick, Avril.’
‘Really?’
‘They’re just chapped. And don’t say, “It suits you.”’
Avril leaned across the table and patted her hand.
‘Dear old Twinnie, cross as ever. You’re looking a little bit tired, if you don’t mind my saying.’
‘That’s because I was on shift last night.’ She had slept on a camp bed at the Post, and been woken at half three by an explosion so loud that she’d assumed a bomb had landed in the next street. Scrambling outside, she’d found that all was quiet, a full moon prinking the frost so that the ruined houses looked like cliffs of quartz, and then, as she’d stood listening, her breath fogging the view, there’d been another blast, this one preceded by a noise like a rifle crack, and followed by a flood of orange light above the rooftops to the east. She’d set out in that direction, and had met Doreen Hurst from Post 8 coming towards her, a torch in each hand and a hat with ear-flaps under her helmet.
‘Nothing,’ Doreen had said. ‘Not in our sector. I don’t know where they fell.’
Miles away, it had turned out – one in Stoke Newington and one in Southwark, the first landing harmlessly in a park, the second squarely on a block of municipal flats, killing twenty-two and injuring scores. There was a scientific explanation for the way the noise seemed to leap across the city, but the effect was to make the rockets feel ubiquitous, constant, inescapable. Winnie had heard yet another on her way to the restaurant – a thud that had shivered the pavement and sent every shop-window trembling so that reflections had scurried across the glass.
‘So what’s this important news?’ she asked. She wondered if Avril was expecting, though it seemed unlikely from the look of her, a green leather belt cinched tightly around the waist of her charcoal dress. Winnie herself had missed a monthly just after Emlyn had gone off to fight, and though it had come to nothing, she sometimes speculated on what would have happened if she’d actually been pregnant. Presumably she and the child would have gone to live with her parents for the duration, and she would never have discovered that she was capable of using a broom to dislodge an incendiary from a roof gutter while leaning over a parapet with someone holding her feet – nor would she have learned how to mend a stirrup pump, or win at Shove Ha’penny, or instruct a hall-ful of middle-aged men on ‘The Duties of the Incident Officer’, or to carefully collect in a bloodied canvas bucket the shreds and wedges of what had recently been a person.
‘Let’s order first,’ said Avril. ‘It’s on me, obviously.’
‘Thanks.’ Winnie, currently bringing home two pounds five shillings a week, had long ago swallowed her pride on that score.
Disappointingly, there was no plover, so she settled for ravioli followed by fried whitebait, her stomach giving an audible groan of anticipation.
‘Go on, then,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
Avril pursed her lips, enjoying the moment. ‘I’ve written a book,’ she said.
Winnie had to adjust her expression, from one of cynical expectation to one of genuine surprise. So many of Avril’s triumphs were not only irritating and apparently unmerited, but seemed framed specifically in order to annoy – ‘Mr Carson told me confidentially that the reason that I was so bad at secretarial work was that I was too clever and that was why he was going to promote me’ – but this was a concrete achievement.
‘A book? You never told me you were writing one!’
‘I don’t tell you everything.’
‘Oh yes, you do, usually in the most tremendous detail.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Then how do I know about Clive’s birthmark? It’s not anything I would ever have asked you, but you told me anyway and now I can’t look at him without thinking about it.’
‘I think it’s probably better to tell people too many things than sit like a total clam-shell, refusing to give any details of your private life at all.’
‘Are you saying that’s what I do?’
‘Yes, absolutely. And if you bottle things up, they end up fermenting inside you.’
‘I don’t bottle things up. I just don’t tell you.’
Winnie’s voice was shrill enough to turn the heads of the diners at the next table. She took a hasty sip of wine. Every conversation with Avril was like this – a series of skirmishes interspersed with the odd, fragile truce. Their relationship now was almost indistinguishable from the one they’d had at ten, an unfriendly rivalry in which the balance of power was always Avril’s, though over the years, surreptitious kicks and deliberate sneaking had been replaced, on Avril’s side, with kindly condescension, and on Winnie’s with utter recalcitrance.
She could see her ravioli approaching. ‘So, go on, tell me about this book,’ she said, gripping her cutlery.
Avril lit a cigarette. ‘Do you remember the pamphlet I wrote about women at work?’
‘The one you interviewed me for?’ It was quite a pleasant memory: Avril sitting listening to her, making notes, refraining from criticism or contradiction, asking questions and then actually allowing Winnie to answer them rather than vaulting in with her own replies. The written account (succinct and surprisingly accurate) had appeared between that of a policewoman and a member of a barrage-balloon crew. ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ she asked, her mouth full of pasta. ‘This is delicious.’
‘In just a minute.’
‘So did the MoI ask you to do a longer version?’
‘It’s not actually a Ministry publication. It’s a novel.’
‘A novel? What’s the title?’
‘Tin Helmet.’
‘A war novel?’
‘Yes. Of sorts. I was at a party last year and a man from Hatchards started saying that there were plenty of good first-hand accounts of the Blitz, but thin pickings fictionally. Have you read Greene’s Ministry of Fear?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, it’s all spies and spivs. Very good on the raids, but nothing with any soul or depth. So I thought, Why not give it a go? After all, when my short story was published in Isis, the editor said the prose was both luminous and excoriating.’
Avril seemed to be smoking with tremendous concentration, knocking off the ash with such assiduousness that a plug of smouldering tobacco fell on to the table. Winnie automatically doused it with a splash of wine.
‘You’ve made a hole now,’ she said, peering at the mess. ‘Someone will have to bleach and then darn that.’
‘The book’s about a female air-raid warden,’ said Avril. ‘Now don’t get hold of the wrong end of the stick,’ she added, as Winnie’s head jerked up. ‘It’s a novel, it’s not about you.’
‘It’s not about me, but it’s about a female air-raid warden? How many other female air-raid wardens do you know?’
‘It’s a novel, Winnie. The character is fiction
al.’
‘So you keep saying, but you seem awfully nervous about something.’
‘Well, I was worried that I’d get exactly this reaction,’ said Avril, lighting another cigarette. Her soup was beginning to congeal. ‘Obviously, I drew on your notes, and on what you’ve told me over the years. I wouldn’t want to be inaccurate.’
‘Are you going to let me read it?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Aside from anything else, I’d like to double-check all the facts.’
‘Actually, Clive’s friend Arnold has already done that. He’s the ARP regional commander for Westminster.’
‘Oh.’
‘He even helped to find me a publisher.’ She was reaching down into her bag as she spoke.
‘You’ve found a publisher?’
Avril straightened up. ‘Here we are!’ she said, brightly, holding up a small black book. ‘It’s out just after Christmas.’
Winnie stared at her twin. It was unprecedented for Avril to have delayed the announcement of such thrilling news; when Clive had proposed by moonlight, she’d sent Winnie a telegram that evening.
‘This is your very own copy, Twinnie,’ said Avril, avoiding her eye. ‘Do take it.’
It was a typical wartime edition, meanly bound and lacking a dust jacket. Winnie looked at the red lettering on the spine. ‘Avril Bridge?’
‘We decided that Clive’s surname is too distinctive. Some of the plot is quite near the knuckle.’
Winnie opened the cover and read the brief synopsis.
Belinda Holdsworth, raised in a comfortable London home, has, in her twenty-one years, encountered little to disturb or enlighten her. Her route from naivety to a bitter understanding of the facts of love and war is the subject of this tense and important novel.
‘Tense and important,’ she repeated, unwillingly impressed. ‘Is that a quote from someone?’
‘No,’ said Avril, ‘I wrote that, but I’m getting some awfully good reviews as well. Lilliput magazine says that I’m the first fresh fictional voice of the war, and New Thought says that my prose feels like an inoculation of truth.’