Homing (25 page)

It was not just the helpless, bewildered creatures themselves that Sylvia saved—it was the morale of some one who had lost everything else. Jeff’s hair would have turned white if he had seen some of the risks she took. But Sylvia knew where she was now. Sylvia knew you couldn’t dodge it. When it was yours, you got it. Until then, everything was velvet. Afterwards—well, you were in good company.

November brought a lull to London, while Coventry caught it instead, and Birmingham, and Bristol. No one expected London’s lull to last, but they made the most of it, and invasion was generally considered to be off till spring.

The family took it in turns now to go for a few days to
Farthingale
, where they slept for hours without moving, had hot baths and changed before dinner, and sat about doing nothing with infinite pleasure. When Jeff and Sylvia came down it was the first time they had all met since Mab’s encounter with the German, and although the story had of course been told in letters it had to be rehearsed again with gestures, and by now it had somehow become very funny.

“The first time I hit him the racquet bounced!” Mab
recounted
with something like a giggle. “Then I got the edge of it going. It wasn’t fair, he only had one good arm.”

“He was enormous,” said Virginia, indicating seven feet of vertical air. “If he’d been standing up she couldn’t have
reached
his head!”

“Noel made as much noise as six dogs,” Mab said, anxious to share the glory, reaching down to pull the spaniel into her lap and cuddle him. “He wasn’t scared, he was being fierce. They don’t have all the fun in London, do they, doggie!”

Jeff rose and ostentatiously removed his half-crown from the mantelpiece.

“That tennis racquet is going to cost you two-and-six,” he remarked, dropping the coin into his pocket. “I was betting on a sure thing, anyway.”

“The way I was shaking, you really owe me sixpence of it,” Mab argued shamelessly.

“If I had sixpence for every time I shook!” cried Sylvia, and laughed.

She longed, that week at Farthingale with Jeff, to tell Mab what she had learned the hard way about living through the war. Once as they strolled along the frostbitten borders hand in hand she almost succumbed to the temptation to speak out of turn. If anything happens to me, she almost said, look after Jeff, won’t you. But that wouldn’t do, that would set Mab thinking. Mab would beg her to be careful, and she might with the best intentions upset Jeff. And anyway—if anything happened to her—they would know when the time came what to do, Sylvia told herself. One always seemed to know when it came right down to it, what to do.

The day they left Farthingale for London, with a half promise to return for Christmas if the lull lasted that long, Sylvia paused a moment looking back at the house in the late November drizzle. It would stand, she was thinking. And London would stand. People came and went. England would go on. The family would go on. Mab would grow up and marry and have children. There was a whole lifetime for Mab to live, when this was over, the kind of life no one had time for now….

Sylvia was feeling again, there in the drive at Farthingale, the same detachment in which she weathered the raids. It was as though one existed oneself within a frame of preconceived events over which one had no more control than an actor confined within the pattern of a playscript. You couldn’t ad lib this one. The producer couldn’t be argued with. This one had to be played the way it was written….

Jeff was waiting for her, his eyes questioning and kind. She felt a sort of compassion for him, for fear he had not learned what she had, as the war went on. She tucked her hand under his arm, with an upward look under her lashes.

“Next to Williamsburg,” she said, “I love this place. If I hadn’t ever seen it, I wouldn’t have lived.”

He recognized again the disturbing echo of finality in her words. She often sounded like an old, old lady looking back without regret on memories time itself could not steal from her. But Sylvia had only begun to collect memories. It was the war again, he thought, changing one’s whole perspective, so that only the past was safe, and nothing in the future was sure. Once people like Sylvia could look ahead with some confidence. Once they could say, Next year we’ll go home to America, Next month let’s go to Paris, Next week let’s ask the So-and-So’s to dinner. He ached with concern for Sylvia, for whom tomorrow could only mean more fortitude, and to whom a night without bombs was a treat.

The Bayswater flat where Stephen and Evadne lived had so far not been damaged, which made things very handy all round, as his canteen lived in a mews near the garage which housed Mona’s ambulance, and Sylvia’s Animal Post was nearer there than it was to Upper Brook Street. Jeff often contrived to wind up there after his shelter visits and fire engines and pub crawls and broadcasts, just as they were all coming off duty, and Mona sometimes slept on the sofa when she was not on call.

“Isn’t it a cosy war,” Evadne remarked one night, when they sat drinking tea in her little sitting-room during a midnight calm.

And Mona said, with her mouth full of cheese cut from a whole Cheddar which Gwen had sent from Williamsburg, “Isn’t it funny—and isn’t it dreadful—how little it takes to
comfort
us these days? An electric fire which still functions to warm our shins—a quiet night—a parcel from America—equals Luxury! I suppose it all leads back to our stomachs, just as the man said—” She reached for the teapot. “Just to be able to have all the tea we want, because we happen to have some rich relatives in America—”

“But I give lots of it away, to people who have only the ration!” Evadne reminded her anxiously.

“Darling, I
know
you do! It’s only when I’ve gorged like this that I’m strong enough to feel guilty and gluttonous,” said Mona kindly. “And I do think cutting down our tea was harder on most people than anything the war has done. It was such a
harmless
indulgence—that nice ’ot cupper tea when things went wrong.”

“I’ve done up another pound in little twists of paper, just enough for a pot in each,” Evadne said. “You must take some with you when you go—to give away, I mean.”

“Thanks, I’d like to.”

They were trying hard not to make a fuss of Mona or seem to watch or cosset her. But they all felt she was taking Michael’s death just a bit too well. Somewhere behind that glacial
cheerfulness
, that unshaken competence and devotion to her hazardous job, was a walled-up grief which was due to crack right across like a mirror and leave nothing but shards. True, it was no greater burden than hundreds of other women carried nowadays. But it was the way Mona bore it—the bright, defiant,
untouchable
façade of her sorrow—that was frightening. It seemed impossible that she could keep it up. One wondered with pity and dread how and when she would break.

She had made no outward change in her routine since Dunkirk. She never missed an hour of duty, she even took on other people’s shifts in order that they might have time off—“Nonsense, I’ve nothing better to do,” she would say lightly, dismissing their faltering gratitude. Which was true, as they knew very well. She had got thin, and her mouth was drawn and tight at the corners under the bright lipstick. Her hair still shone with brushing, her carriage was still tall, with a new, braced look to the shoulders, as though she faced a high wind, and her chin stuck out at an almost aggressive angle. She would not give Hitler the
satisfaction
, by acknowledging grief.

“If it doesn’t hot up here again before Christmas,” Evadne suggested casually, “how about coming down with us to
Farthingale
for a couple of days?”

But Mona could see through that.

“Thanks very much, but there’s sure to be some one who can really make use of some leave,” she said evenly. “As a matter of fact, I’ve already let it be known at the Post that I am available right through the holidays.”

“It’s time you had a rest,” Evadne insisted.

“Nonsense, I’m perfectly fit. Look at Nigel.”

The Temple had been hit during October, with heavy damage and casualties. Nigel’s rooms had been pretty well demolished and he himself had been buried for several hours without serious injury. But the family knew he was still pretty shaky and subject to prostrating headaches, and there was a conspiracy to get him transferred to the Regional Commissioner’s office near
Farthingale
, where his lifelong knowledge of the countryside and its inhabitants would be of great value; and which if it came off would make it possible for him to marry Anne and settle in for a while.

They were all holding their breath for Nigel. It seemed too much to hope for that anything could work out like that for
anyone
these days. And Nigel himself, concussion and all, felt guilty and incredulous at the mere prospect of even such
legitimate
happiness, so accustomed were they all to waiting and losing and doing without. As though he hadn’t earned it, Mona would have said. All his most cherished belongings smashed and that nasty crack on the head besides. And Anne? Anne said her prayers each night with childlike faith that all might come right for Nigel, who deserved much more than she asked for him—a new job and herself to look after him, day by day.

“I’d sort of like to go to Nigel’s wedding,” Sylvia said, with a glance at Jeff, who had had a shaking up recently by a bomb near the office, which had taken out all the glass and the
telephone
and the electricity, and fired a broken gas-main at the corner. She had promised Bracken, with some misgivings, to try to persuade Jeff to spend Christmas in the country.

“Yes, let’s all go to Nigel’s wedding,” said Evadne helpfully, and then remembered Mona, who never by the flick of an eyelid betrayed anything but simple pleasure at other people’s weddings. “I still can’t imagine how it happened so fast,” Evadne hurried on, because of Mona. “Nigel is not the impulsive type. Mummy says Anne will be good to him, which is all that matters, of course.”

“And how different from being good
for
him!” Mona pointed out.

“Well, that too, no doubt,” Sylvia said. “And she has a sort of Cinderella state of mind that’s very touching. Christmas falls on a Wednesday, I looked it up. I suppose I daren’t suggest a whole week away?” And she looked under her eyelashes at Jeff, who pretended not to see.

“If you could get Hitler to take the week off too—” Stephen remarked. “But no, he’s much too conscientious for that!”

“Jeff—” Sylvia persisted, looking pretty and beguiling.

“We’ll see,” said Jeff, unimpressed.

Hitler usually chose the weekends for the worst of it, and Sylvia knew it was going to be a bad night soon after it began on the eighth of December. As the telephone began to ring, the familiar orange glow in the sky made things uneasily visible as she worked. Then, when it seemed to slack off for a bit, she stood in the doorway of the Animal Post looking out at the sky above St. Paul’s—too red—too low and hot. All the poor churches. It was one of the mysteries, that the churches had to go.

She knew a strange reluctance for the night still ahead of her—a lassitude, a desire to go back inside and sit down—a shrinking from the sheer noise. The thought of all the things that needed to be done inside—the wheezing canary who had caught cold because all the glass in his house had been blown out, so he slept each night in the Animal Post with a ball of cotton soaked in eucalyptus in the bottom of his cage; the dog whose feet were so badly cut by broken glass that they had been enclosed in hard little bandage boxes after the splinters were removed—his master had been taken away to hospital and he couldn’t understand that he had not been heartlessly abandoned, and had to be coaxed to eat; another dog with a nervous breakdown, who howled every time a screamer came down; and the mother cat anxiously guarding a family of puny new kittens who had to have a drop of whiskey in the milk—all good excuses to potter and delay and stay off the street….

A woman hurried up, incoherent, in tears, pulling at her sleeve—Sylvia stepped out of the doorway and followed.

Aeons later, though it was the same night, the smell of singed fur on an injured cat went clean against her, so that she turned aside and was apologetically sick in the gutter.

“There, now,” said the cat’s owner sympathetically, out of her own anxiety. “It does turn you up sometimes, and no mistake!”

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Sylvia, trying to laugh it off. “You come along back to the Post and we’ll see what we can do about these burns—”

She noticed as she cleaned and bandaged the cat, which remained ominously silent, that her hands were not quite steady any more. What’s the matter with me tonight, she thought impatiently—I must be getting too tired—better knock off for a week soon, she thought, because one’s judgement went, one started to make mistakes, one did foolish things and bungled
them…. We’ve had nights like this before, she reminded herself severely—buck up, can’t you, it must be almost over….

The woman went away with her cat, full of gratitude, and Sylvia forced herself to go out into the street again, dodging into a doorway as a bomb came down near enough to swish, emerging showered with grit and ash as the walls behind her lurched and steadied and somehow remained upright. She was furious now to find herself shaking and cold, with a dry catch in her throat. She hated the smell the bomb had left, she hated the taste of the smell, and the stinging it brought to her eyes. She caught dizzily at a pillar box and clung to it as to a friend. Then she straightened and with her handkerchief wiped the grime and plaster dust blindly from her face. Tears came with it—her cheeks were wet with endless tears. Stop it, now, she addressed herself firmly. It’s just a bad night. You’ve seen bad nights before….

Another bomb swished down, and the blast rocked her where she stood—why can’t you duck, she muttered—go on like this and you’ll get yourself killed….

It seemed to her that tonight’s crumps had been too near Evadne’s post on the other side of the square, and she walked towards it, knowing that Stephen’s canteen would be somewhere about. As she turned the corner she saw an ambulance at the kerb—not Mona’s—and wardens and rescue men working in a new crater, prying at heavy timbers which were tilted like a giant jackstraw game. Over everything was the Smell, much stronger here. Her hasty glance found the entrance to Evadne’s post undamaged in the light of a flaring gas-main further down the street. Dark figures moved efficiently against the shooting flame. It was suddenly quiet overhead, and the orange glow of fire in the sky had begun to merge with a red dawn.