by Lissa Evans
‘Dearest darling, of course I’m proud of you in your new job, but do be careful. I’m sure there’d still be plenty of useful work for you to do if you went to live somewhere quieter, and it’s quite painful having to sit here with little or nothing to occupy me while my dearest girl is in danger …’
Winnie remembered wondering what on earth she could write about, since any mention of her work, or sleepless nights, or shelters, or the myriad disruptions to daily life that stemmed from nightly bombing, led to pages of anxious admonition, and the subject matter of her own letters began to shrink, so that each one became a checklist of the same, careful topics: books read, wireless programmes listened to, neighbours’ gossip, rationing complaints …
‘Dearest darling Winnie, I’m always thinking and worrying about you, as you know, but you might laugh when I tell you what I dreamt about last night: it was that time when you were trying to extricate one of your shoes from under the bed, using the broom, and then the head of the broom came off, and we ended up having to lift the mattress and reach through the springs, in a dusty and annoying way. I woke up having made the momentous dream-decision that we must ensure we have a house with a bedroom large enough to have the bed entirely in the middle of the room, so that lost shoes can be retrieved from either side …’
‘Dearest darling Winnie, I’ve been thinking further on the bedroom scheme in my last letter. Yet another advantage of the central bed would be the chance for us each to have our own nightstand, and perhaps a bookshelf as well – and a lamp each, too. I’ve done a little sketch of the sort of thing I mean …’
The next letter was a further rumination on the subject of bedroom decor, with blinds versus curtains displacing the tense enquiries about her welfare. Was it at this point that she’d begun to lose the habit of carrying Emlyn’s letters around with her and re-reading them at quiet moments? A letter largely about bedside tables, however lovingly intended, is still largely about bedside tables. She’d read each one quickly and dutifully and had quickly and dutifully written her own in reply. It occurred to her now, for the first time, that perhaps Emlyn had been as uninterested in the non-availability of pencils as she herself was in whether ceilings should be painted lighter or darker than walls. They’d no longer been writing to each other; they’d been standing back to back, talking into the wind, words lost, only a thin warmth still tangible.
‘Winnie, are you there?’ It was Elsie’s voice, accompanied by a tentative knock.
‘Just a minute.’ She shovelled the letters back into the suitcase and pushed it under the bed before going to the door.
‘Your downstairs neighbour let me in,’ said Elsie, bringing a cylinder of cold air into the room with her. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d be back from the party. Can I stay here?’
‘Yes, of course. What’s happened? Did you tell Gordon?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He cried, and then I cried, and I gave him back the ring and he said I should keep it, and we shook hands and I cried again. It was all just like a film, except then he told me he’d probably marry Cherry Parsons now.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Neighbour on the other side. And then I went home and saw my mum, and she’s thrown me out.’
‘What?’
‘I told her about Gordon, and she hit the roof and said I’d end up a stringy old maid. I think she’s always preferred him to me.’ She gave a weary half-smile. ‘Talk about burning my boats.’
‘Lucky you’re a WREN.’
‘Ha ha. How was the party?’
‘Avril made a speech about me.’
‘Did she?’
‘Compared me to an ox.’
‘Cow.’
‘No, ox.’
‘Her, I meant.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ There was someone bawling a song in the street outside, and it was a second or two before Winnie realized that it was ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘Is it midnight?’
‘Nearly.’ Elsie checked her wristwatch. ‘Five minutes. Haven’t got anything to toast the New Year in with, have you?’
‘Yes! Bottle of sloe gin – it was a present from my mother.’ She fetched two mugs and poured them each an inky inch or two.
‘Looks like a magic potion, doesn’t it?’ said Elsie, admiringly, tilting her mug. ‘What’ll we wish for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Winnie. She felt as if she were dragging Emlyn’s letters along in a sack. ‘Peace in 1945, I suppose.’
‘Not just peace. I don’t only want the fighting to stop, I want it to be better than it was before.’
‘“O brave new world, that has such people in it!”’
‘Yes, why not? If Mum’s wrong and I ever do end up married with kids, I want them to have a lot more than I had – in fact, I don’t even want kids if I can’t give them a nice time: what’s the point? I can’t ever remember not having a sore mouth when I was little, or a bunged-up nose. I can’t ever remember feeling properly full, I can’t even remember having fun, not till I joined the Amazons.’
Winnie touched her arm. ‘I wasn’t teasing, honestly. I agree with you, you know I do. Peace isn’t enough, it isn’t anywhere near enough, we should drink to … to …’
‘Happiness,’ said Elsie, firmly.
‘All right.’ They clinked mugs.
‘I taught you that toast, didn’t I?’ asked Elsie, gin halfway to her mouth. ‘The old sailors’ one?’
‘I stands afore you,’ said Winnie.
‘I catches your eye.’
‘I bows according.’
‘Down the hatch!’
There was a pause, and some coughing.
‘Bloody HELL,’ said Elsie, tears in her eyes. ‘I’ll have another of those.’
‘Are you looking for the RAF canteen?’ called Noel, as the third grey uniform in an hour wandered into view.
The figure looked up, startled, craning his head back to see the walkway on which Noel was standing.
‘Yes, actually, I am.’
‘Turn left at the bottom half of Trajan’s column, go out of the door, straight through the metalwork gallery and down the stairs by the cabinet of early-nineteenth-century milkmaids’ bonnets.’
‘Thanks awfully.’
Noel watched the small figure pass through the narrow gap between a Celtic cross and the Boy David, and then disappear from view behind a tank-sized Veronese pulpit, his footsteps audible for a few seconds longer. And then, once again, Noel was the only person in the entire, vast space. He resumed his slow circumnavigation. The walkway was more than thirty feet above ground, just below the boarded-up glass roof, and it ran all the way round both Cast Courts, affording a vertiginous view of the contents. Its balustrade was slightly lower than Noel found comfortable, and he kept his weight towards the wall, where smaller, less interesting casts were accumulating dust on a series of narrow tables: Greek porticos, Venetian well-covers, Roman inscriptions, all rendered in plaster, and cast from moulds, enabling all the culture of the Grand Tour to be delivered to those Victorians too poor, too frail or too female to make the journey to see them.
And now, of course, it was the casts themselves that were deemed too fragile to be moved, so that despite the fact that the museum façade was savagely pocked from blast damage, and that earlier in the war, a bomb had actually dropped straight through the roof and destroyed a pair of mediaeval German effigies, the two huge halls of the Cast Court looked just as they had throughout Noel’s childhood, when he had played Hide and Seek with Mattie among the colossal souvenirs: ‘Is that a stray cherub I spy behind the Portico of the Gloria, or have I found my godson?’ The rest of the museum was half empty, with only the most resilient or least valuable exhibits left on display. The majority of visitors seemed to be airmen, and most of those appeared to be looking for the temporary canteen. Noel had so far seen no one from the navy.
‘You back again?’ the doorman had said to him this morning. ‘You was here all day yesterday.�
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‘I’m interpreting the frieze on Trajan’s column,’ he’d replied; he’d brought his binoculars and a notepad, for authenticity, as well as a packet of sandwiches and an apple.
He ate the apple and took another turn around the room, resisting the temptation to drop the core into the open goal of the Veronese pulpit, thirty feet below; such an impulse was possibly one of the reasons why the walkway was not actually open to the public, but there were so few staff currently at the museum that he had found his way up there unchallenged, walking through empty galleries and along passageways with cryptically labelled doors. It was the sort of mild rule-breaking that came to him automatically; a combination of Mattie’s lofty dismissal of the law, and Vee’s attempt to glide unnoticed just beneath it. Tomorrow – if he needed to come back again tomorrow – he might bring a camping-stool with him, and wait in comfort. Though ‘comfort’ was the wrong term: ever since Christmas Day he had felt like the rhinoceros in the Just So Stories, a pinch of grit permanently sifting beneath his skin. He felt so utterly different that he couldn’t believe that he still looked the same.
‘Have you got a spot coming?’ Vee had asked, startling him in the hall on the morning of Boxing Day. He’d been standing in front of the huge Georgian mirror, turning his head from side to side, studying his face from unfamiliar angles, hoping to surprise himself with a glimpse of paternal cheekbone or a fleeting expression that matched his father’s. ‘You’ve always had nice skin,’ she’d added, carrying on past with an armful of ironed sheets, noticing nothing.
Which was, of course, what Noel wanted. His meeting with Sim was a secret which he had no intention of sharing, and yet he also found himself unable to resist using the word ‘father’; it kept rolling out of his mouth and into his conversations.
‘What was yours like?’ he’d asked Mr Jepson. They had been studying Daniel Deronda, so it was not quite a non-sequitur.
‘My father?’ Jepson had smiled, lifting his gaze as if just spotting someone coming in through the door. ‘Well, he was a quiet man, but very kind – he was a cabinet-maker; when he came home from work he’d say, “Hold out your hand, son,” and he’d tap his fingers on my palm and I’d find a little toy there, something he’d whittled in his lunch-hour – a soldier, or a whistle. Or once a key fob, shaped like an acorn. I had it with me in the trenches …’
Noel had asked Miss Appleby as well (‘My dad? Oh, he’s a terrible old fuddy-duddy’), and Dr Parry-Jones (‘How is this relevant to our studies?’), but not Vee, since for all her obliviousness in front of the mirror, she was unlikely to miss a clue of that size. And it wasn’t as if Noel had any actual desire to know anything about Vee’s father; he just wanted the topic to be voiced, present, a guest at the dinner table …
Mr Reddish, unexpectedly, had been the only person to turn the subject back to the questioner. ‘I wonder if you can help,’ Noel had said, looking up from a sticky calculation involving double-boilers of varying sizes, in One Hundred Problems in Logic. ‘I’m currently reading a George Eliot novel about a young man who finds out that he’s adopted. I need to write an essay on’ – it took him a second or two to invent a title – ‘“Desirable Paternal Qualities”.’
Mr Reddish, lying on the bed, had removed his wireless ear-piece and placed it on the counterpane. Noel was perched at the foot-end, using the chest of drawers as a desk. ‘Paternal qualities,’ repeated Mr Reddish, resting his hands across his stomach, fingertips touching. A burst of static from the ear-piece resolved into the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, those four insistent beats that Morse code enthusiasts had declared were the dot, dot, dot, dash that spelled out ‘V for Victory’, so that now it was never off the airwaves. ‘“Desirable Paternal Qualities”,’ said Mr Reddish again. ‘As Theseus declares in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “To you your father should be as a god. One that composed your beauties, yea, and one to whom you are but as a form in wax by him imprinted.”’ He returned his voice to more normal levels. ‘Of course, as a bachelor without offspring, I can only offer thoughts based on the finer attributes of my own father.’
There was a long pause; Mr Reddish’s fingers drummed his knitted waistcoat. All Noel could see of his face was the spongy nose, the empty sag of the jowls.
‘He had none,’ said Mr Reddish, abruptly. ‘As a young lady once said to me – a young lady who was very special to me – “Your father is an extremely unpleasant man.” And he was unpleasant – and bitter, and jealous, and lazy. He knew of my theatrical ambitions and he laughed at them. He forbade me to join an amateur dramatic society as a youth, on the grounds that it would lead to effeminacy. He began to suffer from “glass back”. Have you ever heard the phrase?’
‘No.’
‘It signifies bone idleness in the guise of spurious infirmity. In other words, lying in bed while others work. I was the oldest in the family and had no choice but to leave school at the earliest possible opportunity. Having a moderate talent for mathematics, I became a clerk, perusing columns of figures while my youth fled. The war came and I was enrolled in the pay corps. The years passed. The velvet curtain closed for ever; the limelight gleamed, and was gone. Deadening, Noel. My soul turned to ash.’ The bed creaked as Mr Reddish pushed himself upright, taking two attempts to stand. He straightened his waistcoat. ‘I have no knowledge of your own paternal situation, Noel – it is none of my business – but I would say that the greatest gift my own father could have given me was his absence. And were I a parent myself, I would open the door of my house, and turn to my child and say’ – he extended an arm towards the imaginary horizon beyond the wardrobe – ‘“The World is Yours. I will help you if I can, but you must choose your own Way.”’
His arm had remained raised for several seconds, his expression poised somewhere between Wistful Melancholy and the Bright Dawn of a New Hope, and then, in lieu of an audience ovation, a V-2 had gone off somewhere – far enough away that they had felt no vibration, only caught the long, slow, dark rumble.
In the Cast Court, a woman was issuing orders. Noel looked down, and saw a very small child in a pink coat grasping the flexed leg of one of the dancing girls on the Moghul Gate as if it were a door handle. ‘No, you mustn’t touch,’ repeated the speaker. The child took its hand away, studied the writhing figures for a moment or two and then reached out and carefully patted one of the many, many globular breasts. ‘Nigel, what did Mummy say?’ asked the woman. She was sitting on the bench beside the plinth of the Trajan Column, reading a magazine. Nigel let go of the breast, leaned forward and licked another of the sculptures, and his mother rose with an exclamation, and swiftly crossed towards him, pulling him away from the Gate with such speed that he lost his footing and sat down heavily on the marble floor. The wail spiralled upward, like a siren.
Noel aimed a hard stare at the back of the woman’s neck. The category of ‘father’ might be a blank to him, but he knew plenty about Desirable Maternal Qualities. In a similar situation, rather than chastising him, Mattie might well have used the multiple bosoms on the Moghul Gate as a chance to work on the higher reaches of the two-times table, while Vee wouldn’t have taken her eyes off him for a second, just in case something was accidentally knocked over or smashed, although if this had actually happened, she’d have scooped Noel under her arm and scarpered to the lower-ground exit, pursued by fist-shaking museum guards.
Of course, the child in the pink coat couldn’t be more than two or three years old, and Noel had already turned four by the time he’d met Mattie. Of his life before then, in a home for children with polio, he retained only a vague memory of a room full of high-sided cots and a sense of chafing compression, the latter explained by the fact that he’d arrived at Green Shutters wearing a stiff leather corset, prescribed in order to support his affected back muscles. Mattie had taken him to a masseuse, who had suggested long walks over uneven ground, and the corset had been ceremonially burned in a brazier in the back garden, leading to a smell so pungent as to be almost visible,
and multiple complaints from the neighbours. Not that Mattie had cared; ‘Fearless Devotion’ might have been the label for her particular brand of parenting, just as ‘Fretting Fondness’ might be Vee’s; both styles, centred as they were on his own welfare, seemed to Noel superior to what Nigel was going to have to put up with.
The pink coat was dragged away; the court was momentarily empty and then his father walked in and, before he knew what he was doing, Noel had shouted ‘Hello!’, his voice cracking halfway through the word in that humiliating half-octave plummet that still happened when he was upset or excited.
The lieutenant tipped his head back – ‘Are you calling me?’ – and it wasn’t his father at all, but a man with a pale, lipless face, who took off his cap to reveal hair the colour of a pumpkin. The sight was dislocating; Noel felt as if he’d missed a step in the dark.
‘Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.’ He drew back against a table laden with plaster medallions and watched the lieutenant progress around the gallery, his hair startlingly bright against the marbles and clays. Ida Pearse, the woman who’d given birth to Noel, was also a redhead, of course – a redhead, a senior nurse and a fine girl; he had a mother who consisted of two concrete but generic facts and a nebulous summation. He wasn’t sure that he really believed in her; she was like the Princess-over-the-Water in fairy tales.
Disappointment had left him feeling hungry, and he ate one of his sandwiches: soy-bean paste with finely chopped gherkin, a surprisingly successful combination. It was, after all (he reminded himself), only Tuesday. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ his father had said, of their prospective meeting. There was plenty of time yet.
‘You’re off to the museum again?’ asked Vee, on the Thursday morning, looking through her handbag for a missing glove.
‘Yes. Where are you going?’ She was wearing her best hat, the one on to which she’d sewn a jay’s feather he’d found on the Heath.