The Fall (32 page)

She froze. She was naked underneath. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. He sucked his breath in when he discovered the
fact: surprise, perhaps. Maybe it was as much a shock to him as it was to her. Perhaps he had expected to find that she was
wearing a petticoat or something beneath the dressing gown. Maybe he hadn’t intended the violation to be so brutal. Perhaps
he expected her to wriggle and giggle and say how awful he was; perhaps he expected her to take it as a kind of game: not
a very nice one, but a game nevertheless. Anyway, she was naked, and she froze, and his hand was motionless.

“Nice bit of fur you’ve got there,” he said quietly. His tone was almost conversational. He swallowed and moistened his lips
and smiled at her. “Off the ration, is it?”

She would have screamed, but no scream came. She did actually open her mouth, but nothing at all came out. She just stood
there immobile, with his hands on her and her mouth half open. Warren shifted his fingers gently. “Don’t scream, darling,”
he whispered. “Just be quiet and you’ll be all right.”

She could smell his breath. It had the sour, flat smell of town gas, the stench that often hung around the streets after a
raid. She closed her eyes. Breathe in deeply. That’s what she told the injured to do.
Take a deep breath,
she would say, cradling their broken limbs, their broken bodies, trying to keep a grip on slippery, bloody pressure points.
Breathe deeply. In
— pause —
out
— pause;
in
— pause —
out
— pause. It’s what you do to try and reduce hyperventilation and meliorate the effects of shock. Shock is a big killer; people
didn’t seem to realize that. One minute the victim might seem quite all right, talking to you, smiling, responding normally,
and the next minute they were dead.

“No harm intended, no harm done, eh?” Warren whispered. “Just a bit of fun, dear; just a bit of a giggle.”

Finally, mercifully, she found her voice. Very quietly she said, “If you let me go immediately, I won’t say anything about
this. Nothing at all. I promise you that.”

Perhaps it was the calmness that surprised him, her matter-of-fact tone. It certainly surprised her. Slowly, reluctantly,
he slid his hand out from inside her dressing gown and let her go. “Just a bit of fun, eh?” he repeated. He lifted his hand
to his nose and sniffed his finger. “Nice,” he said.

She pulled the dressing gown tight around her and pushed past to the bathroom. “I can get you things,” he called after her.
“Chocolate and stuff. If you like. If you’re good to me.”

She slammed the door behind her, locked it, and plugged up the keyhole with a piece of toilet paper. Then she opened the hot
tap and sat down on the edge of the bath and wept.

She tried to change her billet after that, but things were difficult and if you couldn’t find anywhere better, you had to
put up with it. So she put up with it. The motto of the whole bloody country:
Put up and shut up.
They might as well have put it as a slogan on posters, along with
Be Like Dad: Keep Mum.
Every morning she returned to the house hoping to discover that the place had been hit by a stick of bombs and reduced to
a heap of rubble — with Mr. Warren underneath it all. But every morning, the house was still there.

“You should have kneed him in the balls, darling,” Meg said when Diana told her. “What an odious little creep. Do you want
me to come and sort him out?”

Meg seemed to enjoy the war. Austerity became her. She had blossomed. With her hair piled up and pinned, and her shoulders
military broad, and her legs carefully balanced on high heels, and her lips bloodred, she drew men’s eyes the way a Dornier
drew searchlights. The metaphor was hers. She was living and working somewhere near Croydon, and occasionally they met in
Town. Usually they went to a Lyons Corner House, or sometimes a tea dance at one of the hotels. Meg had joined the Women’s
Auxiliary Air Force and was doing something with radio, something she couldn’t talk about, although Meg doing anything worth
not talking about seemed ridiculous. She was full of talk about other matters, of course. She knew people; she heard things.
Apparently clothes rationing was going to be introduced, but they weren’t going to ration makeup because Churchill liked to
see girls with makeup. Apparently the American ambassador was a Nazi sympathizer and believed that the British would surrender
within weeks. Apparently the factories were running out of rubber for condoms, and there was going to be the most frightful
increase in the birthrate. Apparently.

Diana could talk freely about her work, of course, but she didn’t much. “You should see what it’s like in the East End,” she
said quietly “It’s terrible, Meg. They’ve got no shelters, no proper shelters at all. They’re using the Tube stations, and
the authorities even tried to stop them doing that. And railway arches. There’s fifteen thousand using the Tilbury arches
under the Commercial Road.
Fifteen thousand,
Meg. They’re living like animals half the time.”

Meg sighed. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t give me the suffering working-class nonsense. It’s just as bad in the West End.
We’ve even been hit in Croydon.”

Diana shook her head. “Nothing like Stepney or Poplar or any of those areas. Really.” She felt sullen and depressed. What
fact did she want to convey? She didn’t know herself.

“My dear, we’ve all got our bomb stories. The whole bloody city has got its bomb stories. It’s becoming the great social bore.
Guess who’s in Egypt?”

“Who?”

“Hilda, the lucky girl. I’d love to be posted to the exotic Orient. Anything rather than bloody London. Have you heard from
any of the old gang? I got a letter from Eric.”

“Eric?” Diana found it difficult to remember Eric. It was absurd, this forgetfulness, this detachment from the past. As though
it didn’t exist.

“Yes, Eric, you chump. Remember Eric? Eric the airman. God, you two were together for a couple of months.”

They were in the ballroom of the Albion Hotel, the Royal Albion Hotel featuring Jerry Rollo and His Music. There were half-a-dozen
couples already on the floor, dancing the cha-cha. Jerry Rollo was shouting Olé! from time to time just to make it clear what
was expected.

“Of course I remember Eric.”

“Well, he’s training in Canada. Bombers, apparently. Says all it does is snow.”

Outside, the sirens began to sound, that awful switchback wail, that swooping up and down that brought a fluttering of panic
and beads of sweat on your forehead and under your arms. The
warbler,
that’s what some people called it. “Oh my God, what a bore,” said Meg in her world-weary voice.

Jerry Rollo paused the music for a moment and turned to the hesitating dancers with a smile of pure Brylcreem. “Ladies and
gentlemen, it seems that we have visitors, and I don’t think they’re here to tango. If you care to avail yourselves of the
hotel’s shelter facilities in the basement, you are most welcome. The band, however, will soldier on.”

There was some laughter. People looked at one another nervously, as though to move would be to commit a solecism. One or two
couples got up to leave, but maybe they’d have left anyway. Strangely enough it was easier when you were on duty, actually
out there in the streets, rather than sitting like this at a table on the edge of the dance floor and pretending there was
nothing wrong.

The music struck up again and drowned the distant sound of the ack-ack guns. “It sounds as though it’s miles away, thank God,”
said Meg. She lit a cigarette and blew a self-conscious stream of smoke toward the ceiling. Behind the music you could hear
the crump of bombs faraway in the Docks. Someone else was getting it, not the hotels and clubs and cinemas in the West End,
not this time. “What about you, darling? Heard from that Guy?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.”

The cha-cha finished and some nigger minstrels came on and sang “If I Didn’t Care.” They swayed and warbled and rolled their
eyes.

“Still battling for peace and civilization, is he? Guy, I mean.”

“The tribunal rejected his application. It’s gone to appeal.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. Isn’t he some kind of Communist? No wonder the board turned him down. Religious conviction can
get you registered straightaway, so I believe. Look, there are a couple of fellows over there. They’re watching us. Come on,
show your best profile.”

“Meg, I’m pregnant.”

“Hey, look, I think they’re coming over.” She hadn’t heard, hadn’t been listening, hadn’t heard.

“Meg.”

“Yes, darling?” They
were
coming over. One of them was in uniform, the other in civvies. They looked all right.

“Would you lovely ladies care for a dance?” the uniformed one asked.

Meg turned to Diana, feigning indifference. “What about it, darling?”

Diana shrugged. “All right by me.” They got up to dance. The floor was half empty or half full, depending on how you saw it.
Meg would have seen it half full; Diana had no doubt that it was half empty. She shuffled around a bit, and when the number
was over, she thanked her partner very much and said she was feeling slightly headachy and needed to sit the next one out
if he didn’t mind, and of course he didn’t. He followed her back to the table and tried to engage her in conversation. He
was something in the Ministry of Food. A reserved occupation, so he hadn’t been called up. He could get her things if she
wanted.

“Things?”

He looked furtive, a bit like Mr. Warren. “You know, off the ration…”

The singers broke into the “Java Jive.” They liked coffee, they liked tea, but these days, presumably, they couldn’t always
get it unless they knew this louche young man with the plausible manner. A Mr. Warren in the making. Diana had a sudden vision
of him in the next war, fifty years old and groping young girls billeted in his house. “You mean black market, do you?”

“Shh! For Gawd’s sake, you’ll get me into trouble.”

Meg was hanging on her partner’s arm as they came back to the table.

“Meg?”

“Yes, what is it? Look, darling, Dan here — ”

“Don.”

“Don,
then.” She laughed at her mistake. It was easy for her. “Don thinks we ought to go on to a place he knows off Shaftesbury
Avenue, a kind of club. When do you have to be back on duty, darling?”

“Meg, I want to tell you something.”

“Tell away, darling, tell away.”

“In private.”

Somewhere outside there was a louder explosion. The ground reverberated gently. Glasses and crockery trembled. They could
hear the antiaircraft guns going off nearer now, in St. James’s Park probably. And perhaps there was even the sound of aero
engines above the music of Mr. Jerry Rollo. Meg smiled and asked whether the boys minded just letting them be alone for a
second. “Just a sec. Girl talk. We’ll be right with you.” She took out a cigarette, tapped it impatiently on the packet, and
struck a match. “Well, what is it, darling? Tell.”

“Meg, I’m pregnant.”

Meg stopped. She looked almost comic sitting there across the table with her eyebrows up and her mouth half open. Bright-red
lips, with the cigarette hanging limp between them. The match burned down, and she shook it out.
“Pregnant?
My God, darling, are you
sure?”

“Keep your voice down — ”

“Pregnant? Oh my God, Di, this is awful! Who was it? How long have you
known?”

“I’ve missed my third period.”

“God, that’s
three months
.” Somehow three months made it seem worse. “Di, you really are awfully silly not to have told me earlier. I mean, trying
to keep a pregnancy secret is the most ridiculous thing, if you think about it. Who on earth
was
it?” It was plain from her expression that Meg was calculating, running twelve weeks back through her mind and ending up
in North Wales, in the Ogwen Valley, on an August weekend. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, “not Mr. Conscientious himself?”

Diana nodded.

“God, darling, he’s about twice your age.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Well, he should have known better, that’s what. I mean, didn’t he
use
anything, darling? Apart from you, I mean.”

Diana shrugged and stared away across the dance floor, seeing the dancers through a blur of tears. Meg struck another match
and lit her cigarette. The band played and the minstrels sang. The two young men who had been dancing with them hovered by
the bar, glancing over from time to time and wondering whether the whole thing was pointless and whether there were other
fish to catch. Or fry. Meg spoke through exhaled smoke, a cloud of fashionable gray that emerged from mouth and nostrils and
floated toward the ceiling like a chiffon scarf tossed up in the air. “So what are you going to do, Di? Have you told your
parents?”

“I’ve not told anyone but you.”

“And what about him? I mean, if he’s got such a powerful conscience, he ought to do the decent thing and make an honest woman
of you. How would you fancy being Mrs. Guy Matthewson?”

“I wouldn’t fancy it at all.”

“Well, neither would I at the moment. I mean, Guy’s a good-looking fellow, of course, but…”

“I haven’t told him, anyway.”

“He doesn’t even
know?”

“Meg,” Diana said quietly, “I want to get rid of it.”

Dear Guy,

Thank you for your last letter. I’m glad to hear that your position seems to be better. Here, things go on as usual, which
you will know from reading the papers. London is a sad place, half empty, drab, and damaged, but not yet destroyed.

I am sorry to write this letter, but it is to tell you that I wish to stop this correspondence. The world is changing sharply
and so, surely, are we. I enjoyed meeting you and enjoyed our brief friendship, but now I think it is time to look to the
future. Although my experience here convinces me that you are misguided, my decision has nothing to do with your stand against
participating in the war effort.