The Safest Place in London (6 page)

She was paired that day with a man called Ed whose wife, Phyllis, had been paired with some other man. Whether this deliberate splitting up of couples was strategic or merely a part of the fun Diana was uncertain. Her partner, Ed, a vigorous-looking fellow with very black hair, inspected her through narrowed eyes and remarked, ‘I understand you possess a sound backhand,' and though his words suggested a compliment they were delivered in such a way that he might have been commenting on an alleged and rather shameful misdemeanour rather than her sporting prowess. A little bewildered by her partner's tone and rather wishing the man had been paired with his wife, who in turn had been paired with a tall and nice-looking young man with wavy dark hair and very definite eyebrows and a ready smile, she nevertheless acquitted herself admirably and they easily enough won all three of their matches and were set to play another couple in the ‘final'. The wife and her tall, nice-looking partner had proved a fairly hopeless combination and were now sitting out as vocal onlookers, so that Diana wished she was seated next to the nice-looking man, whose ears stuck
out, but in an endearing way, she decided. But she was in the final and he was an onlooker—though he appeared more taken up by his gin and tonic and by the wife of the man called Ed than by a girl with a sound backhand who lived above a shop in Pinner. She would try extra hard, Diana resolved. And then she resolved that she would not try at all because she suspected a man found it unattractive if a young lady tried too hard, particularly at physical activity.

She was aware of the sweat stains under her arms.

It was not her finest set of tennis. The man called Ed becoming increasingly cross, the wife who made sarcastic calls from the sidelines, the man in the white coat with the silver tray whom she could see always in her peripheral vision walking back and forth across the lawn, the nice-looking man with the eyebrows who clapped and said, ‘Oh bad luck,' when she sent an easy forehand thundering into the net—all of it put her off.

She would never be asked back. She had a sound backhand but when the time had come, when the pressure was on, she had buckled. She had been found wanting.

Their opponents—a couple named Cecily and Johnny who seemed to know Ed and were unconcerned by his increasing irritation and who, by comparison, appeared to be having a marvellous time—played brilliantly. As Ed and Diana moved swiftly towards an inevitable defeat, Diana's sound backhand finally deserted her and Ed's patience deserted him. He snatched at a volley that by rights was hers and sent the ball straight at the girl, Cecily, who was crouched on the far side of the net ready to pounce. The ball caught her squarely in the face and she keeled over backwards.

‘Good
God
—Cee, are you alright?' cried her partner, running over, and there followed a lengthy delay while icepacks were produced and sympathetic words spoken. Eventually, Cecily's wellbeing assured and nothing more life-threatening than a black eye and colourful bruise being the upshot, the match was declared over and, as the other couple had forfeited, Diana and Ed were declared winners. Diana felt this a little unjust and said so but Ed didn't hear her.

Standing in the conservatory dabbing sun-reddened and perspiring faces with towels and quaffing great quantities of chilled lemonade, the acerbic wife, Phyllis, walked up to her husband, Ed, and said, in a voice that hushed the room: ‘You hit that ball at poor Cee on purpose.'

‘What a ridiculous thing to say!' he countered, barely looking at her, but a hush fell over the room.

‘It's not ridiculous. We all saw it. You did it deliberately.' Phyllis somehow managed to sound both bored and spiteful, and if her objective had been to provoke her husband she succeeded, for he rounded on her now, taking her by her arm.

‘
How dare you accuse me?
' he demanded, his fingers closing tightly around her upper arm so that she gasped in sudden pain. He let her go at once, throwing his towel to the floor and walked off.

A horrible silence ensued. The wife rubbed her arm and gave a high-pitched, frightened little laugh that only made things worse, then she too left, making some excuse to their host.

Afterwards, everyone was a little stiff and formal and the fun had gone out of the day, and Diana began to wonder if she too might offer some excuse and depart.

‘That was rather beastly, wasn't it?'

‘Oh!' she said, because the tall, nice-looking man with the ears and the eyebrows and the ready smile had sought her out to offer her a fresh lemonade and to make a comment on what had happened and he had the most marvellous voice, sort of solid and comforting, just like the man on the BBC. ‘Yes. Yes, it was, rather.'

‘Look here, I'm thinking of pushing off. Party seems to have ended somewhat abruptly. Can I give you a lift? I'm Gerald, by the way.'

It must be nearing midnight. A hurricane lamp hung from the ceiling swinging crazily and Diana attempted once more to read the time on her watch by its light but gave up.

An elderly woman with swollen ankles sporting a volunteers' armband appeared on the platform's edge bearing a tray of sausage rolls and hot cocoa in mugs, and the way she loudly and coarsely spruiked her wares suggested she spent her daylight hours out on a market stall. When the woman saw Abigail she fell silent. She gently stroked Abigail's pinched face, then she reached over and patted Diana's hand before moving on. As though she could sense their fear. Their isolation.

They ate ravenously, wolfing down the rolls and licking their fingers for every last crumb. With food in her stomach, Abigail dozed, but Diana could not sleep.

She thought about her old school friend Marian whom she not seen again since that afternoon in 1928, and Marian's friend, the girl called Bunny, whose decision to drop out of the tennis
party at the last minute had changed the course of Diana's life. It was a little humbling and a little frightening to realise how one's destiny might be shaped by something so small, by someone else's decision.

She thought of her vegetable garden, which had failed.

After the first year of the war the wonderful Mr Baines had gone to live with his elderly sister in Cirencester, they'd had a series of early winter frosts and the soil had proved too chalky. The failure of the garden would have been inconsequential enough under ordinary circumstances, but in wartime it had assumed catastrophic proportions.

It was the reason she had come up to London.

The chalk was the main source of the problem, for the Chilterns was, essentially, one very long chalk escarpment that ringed the outer rim of London from Watford to Uxbridge. And yet they had brought it upon themselves, she and Gerald, choosing to live in a place that was not merely built on chalk but positively boasted about its chalkiness; ‘Chalfont', they discovered, meant a chalk spring. This had seemed perfectly delightful in 1930 when they toured the pretty little village preparatory to buying a house here. Now, when the beautiful begonia beds had been dug up to make way for marrows and carrots and running beans, the chalk was the stuff of nightmares. Other women tossed and turned at night haunted by ration books and clothing coupons. Diana lay awake fretting about her vegetable garden.

And yet other people's gardens did not seem to suffer the way hers did. When one peered into the neighbours' gardens one saw broad beans as tall as golf clubs, tomatoes as shiny as
jewels, carrots as abundant as—well, as carrots had been before the war. Everywhere she saw gardens brimming with bounty. But at The Larches nothing seemed to grow. And yet that first autumn when they had dug up the flower beds and sowed vegetables, there had been a decent enough crop. The second year the results had been disappointing. This last autumn the crops had failed altogether. Baines had left instructions. It had seemed straightforward enough. Diana had sowed when he had told her to sow, she had planted, she had fertilised, she had watered. She had watched as the shoots wizened and died, as no shoots appeared at all, as the chalky earth coughed up a tomato the size of a marble, a solitary dwarf carrot, a runner bean fit only for a doll's tea party.

The vegetables had failed.
She
had failed.

She had wondered then, What
am
I good for? She had passed a handful of exams and done moderately well at a secretarial college; she had learned shorthand, though she doubted she could remember much of it now, and could type at a speed of thirty words a minute (a good typist could do forty-five). She still had a sound backhand, though she had not played tennis in four years and could not find a way, in her present circumstances, to put this particular skill to any practical use. She was a wife and a mother and she supposed that she had made a fair job of both these things—and were these not, when all was said and done, the two most important roles a woman could have? But she had not seen her husband in more than three years and she had failed to put fresh food on the table for her child. She had lived with her failure for many months and told no one because defeatism was now a crime in wartime.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, she had decided to go up to town to do her Christmas shopping, even though Christmas in wartime (and this was their fifth) was a pitiful affair. Abigail, however, was excited, though having only experienced wartime Christmases Abigail's expectations were set rather low.

She had taken the nine o'clock train, arriving at Baker Street a little after ten o'clock. She had made her way by bus to Bond Street and there ran into Lance Beckwith.

‘Diana Pettigrew! Is that really you?'

He came out of nowhere (in fact, he came out of Boots, the chemist, but she wasn't to learn this until later) and the use of her maiden name disorientated her for a moment. It was another moment before she realised who he was, this tall middle-aged man, incongruous in a light grey suit and a paisley-pattern silk scarf on this drearily overcast December day, a soft felt hat pushed to the back of his head and a smile in his eyes.

‘Lance!' And at once the drearily overcast December day and the few hurrying Christmas shoppers and the stream of red buses and black cabs on Bond Street, the sandbags, the bombsites, the uniforms faded away. She thought of sunshine and birds singing and trees thick with summer foliage from a summer that had ended more than twenty years ago. It was Lance.

‘Diana Pettigrew. Well I never.' He stood back to regard her, his eyes narrowing as though he viewed her from that distant place, that summer twenty years ago, but the smile never wavered, so that she felt a little flustered. Of course he was older, there were lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and the flesh at his cheeks had sunk a little, but still she felt a little flustered. ‘You haven't changed a bit!' he said.

Diana laughed. ‘That's what people say when someone has deteriorated beyond all recognition.'

‘That's not what I say! And anyway, it's not true as I recognised you instantly.'

She laughed again, conceding this. ‘I, on the other hand, would probably have passed you on the street without another glance if you hadn't stopped me.'

That was untrue. He looked so different to every other person in Bond Street that morning she would have noticed him regardless.

‘Oh dear. Have I gone so badly to seed?'

‘Not at all. You look the picture of health and vitality—as I am sure you well know. Where have you just sprung from? The Riviera?' Lance had an unseasonal tan on his face and hands.

‘Boots!' he replied, holding up a small brown bottle as proof then banging his chest. ‘I may look the picture of health and vitality but this climate is doing its best to bring me low.'

‘I wouldn't have guessed it—you look marvellous!'

‘What an outrageous flatterer you've become, Diana. I would not have believed it of you. Come on—let's find a cup of tea somewhere. What do you say?' And he held out his arm to her.

She had not even begun her shopping, had planned to complete everything by lunchtime so that she could lunch at Debenhams in Oxford Street and catch the two o'clock train home. Having tea with Lance Beckwith was not on the agenda but she took his arm and went with him anyway, because of John.

He found a little cafe on Conduit Street, a dreary enough sort of place into which one would not dream of going but for the war. As it was, they were grateful for the tiny three-legged table
they were allocated in the window, and the mismatching folding chairs they sat down on, and the menu which was a single sheet of typed paper with the words . . .

Tea

Bread and butter

Bread no butter

. . . printed on it, and Lance remarked that it would be quite amusing in a music hall comedy sketch and Diana agreed and suggested they order the tea. His hair, now that he had removed his hat, was very black, too black to be entirely real. She steered her gaze away from it. It did not quite fit the sense she had of his otherworldliness, the whisper of tropical skies and exotic locations that hung around him, eclipsing, for a blissful moment, the drabness of wartime London. She forgave him the too-black hair.