Homing (10 page)

She supposed she would hear soon, what Nigel meant to do about the war. At thirty-one he would hardly be called up, not at first, and he had no mechanical sense even about a car, he would never be any use to the Air Force. There was no demand for enlistment now, except in civil defence, and he was already wardening at the Temple. Nigel had gone into himself with his heartbreak, which was hard for her to get used to, but it seemed best to let him alone. Archie would have known what to do about his son, Archie would have helped him through it when poor Phyllis died, Archie would have turned sixty now, if he had lived, but Archie was safe, Archie was out of it, they would have to do without him this war….

Sylvia had gone out with Jeff that Sunday morning in London to watch the orderly, self-contained crowds in the streets. A warm sun shone there too, women wore bright summer frocks and no hats, young men had left their collars open. Everyone carried the little brown box which held the gasmask. There were almost no children, almost no dogs.

News of the actual declaration of war was called out to them from a window in Stratton Street by a fellow reporter who had just heard it on the radio. He came down and joined them, young Denis Arnold, hatless and grave, with his gasmask slung over his shoulder, and they all drifted westward towards Buckingham Palace, where in 1914 a shouting, singing crowd full of ignorant enthusiasm had surged.

Today there was no visible change in the face of London as the eleven o’clock deadline passed. No one was taken by surprise, everyone had a fair idea of what it would mean, no one seemed
to look backward with regret. But there was no bravado. It was like having a tooth out. You didn’t argue with the dentist at the last minute, you screwed yourself up to it. England was now of a mind to have the tooth out and be done with it.

The three of them were at the edge of the crowd around the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of the Palace when the promised “Warbling Note” of the air raid warning began, about eleven-thirty. So far as Sylvia could see, no one turned a hair, and after the first upheaval in her own middle she felt Jeff’s fingers close tight round her elbow.

“There they come!” cried a woman’s voice lightly behind them in Mayfair garden party tones, and Denis said, “B’God, they aren’t wasting any time!” and laughed.

Wardens wearing helmets and armbands, and police on bicycles with TAKE COVER signs hung round their necks appeared from nowhere, shepherding everybody towards the shelters in St. James’s Park. No one hurried very much.

“Five to ten minutes, between warning and raiders,” Jeff was saying. “They must have been already on the way—”

The shelter entrance, with its stout wooden railings, was not crowded, and there was room on the benches inside for a third again as many people. They sat down and lighted cigarettes. The lighter in Jeff’s hand was steady, and Sylvia glanced up at him under her lashes and away. His heart had stood up to Prague last year, and more recently to the long days and nights of sleepless waiting. But would it weather a London air raid without going into the wild overbeat that left him prostrate and unable to stand until it had passed? She had never seen him during an attack, for he had not had one since their marriage, but he had told her in a few brief graphic words what could happen.

“I wonder if Bracken is already inside the House,” she allowed herself to say, after the first puff.

“Sure to be,” said Jeff. “They would have set out for there as soon as Chamberlain finished speaking.”

“Good shelter there—they’ll all be in it, wise-cracking,” said Denis, and she supposed she looked a little green under his kindly eyes.

Jeff was gazing thoughtfully towards the entrance of the shelter, guarded by a helmeted warden.

“Do you think if we showed our Press cards he would let us see what’s going on up above?” he suggested, and Denis said,
“Worth a try,” and Sylvia only just prevented herself from saying, “No—stay here with me.”

But it was all very new and serious to the warden, and he refused to let them pass.

The Alert didn’t last long, and the All Clear sang out its high, sustained note before noon. A mistake? Or had the raiders been turned back at the coast? Everybody trooped up the steps again into the sunshine, feeling excessively jolly, as though the tooth was already out.

The three of them had a late lunch at the Savoy, which except for sandbags was exactly as usual, and by then speculation about the delay in France had become embarrassing.

“It does make you think,” said Denis rather hollowly, “about those ugly rumours that something very queer is going on at the top over there.”

But when they got home for tea Bracken was able to reassure them. The declaration had come through from Paris at last. The French had not ratted after all.

They listened to the King’s broadcast at six, sweating it out with him, word by difficult word, and then Bracken handed round drinks. As usual the nervous reaction made them hungry, and dinner was a little early.

Bracken was finally showing the strain of tension and loss of sleep, and Dinah persuaded him to go to bed early and let Jeff handle the Sunday midnight broadcast to America, when they hoped also to call in Johnny from Berlin. Jeff promised to ring up the house if anything sensational developed, and then took up the vigil at the BBC, with the intention of returning for a last look round at the Fleet Street office after his broadcast. They were not to be alarmed if he decided to sleep there on one of the cots which had been set up several weeks before.

Before he set out, and Bracken went wearily to bed on Dinah’s orders, they knew that Churchill was back in his old room at the Admiralty—and that when the signal went out to the Fleet:
Winston
is
back,
there were happy cheers. They knew too that Poland was standing fast under heavy raids, and the lack of bombs on London brought a guilty feeling, almost as though Britain had not fulfilled her duty and declared war. There was a story from Poland that Ambassador Biddle’s suburban villa had been bombed, apparently without injury to himself or his family—the German airmen either had not known or had not cared whose it was, or that America was not in the war.

Because Dinah was engaged in what she called sitting on Bracken’s head till he rested, there would be no one at the studio to hear Jeff through the earphones unless Sylvia went with him, and this he refused to allow, on the grounds that he had enough on his mind already. After he left the house she went wearily to bed alone except for Midge in the room they shared. There was a bad moment when a taxi at the corner ground its gears like the opening growl of the siren, and then she sank into a trance of exhaustion.

It seemed to her only moments later that she found herself sitting bolt upright in bed feeling sick, while the real, authentic siren wail filled the air again. It was 2 am Monday morning and Jeff had not come in. She wondered if he was still at the office, where there was a shelter, or if he had been caught in the streets on the way home.

Bracken knocked on her door and set it ajar.

“May as well go down to the shelter, I think,” he said calmly. “They may mean it this time.”

Her hands were not quite steady as she pulled on a pair of slacks over her pyjamas and added socks and slippers. Tonight was going to be harder because Jeff wasn’t with her—no one even knew where he was by now. There was going to be a lot of this, she realized, when they were not together. I mustn’t be a baby, I mustn’t hang on to him, think of the women whose men are away in the Army…. I must be steadier than this when it’s my turn at the Animal Post, or I will be ashamed. That’s tomorrow night. Tomorrow night I will be on duty, on my own. If Evadne can do it, so can I. But Evadne got it licked last year, training to be a warden. Evadne is brave….

She collected Midge in his covered cage from a table in the corner farthest from the window, snatched up her gasmask, and joined Dinah and Bracken on the stairs. Midge’s gasmask, she had learned from the Animal A.R.P., would be a small blanket dipped in a solution of bicarbonate of soda and laid over the cage. The solution and the blanket awaited him below—unnecessary until the hand-rattles of the wardens should signal an actual gas attack.

Bracken saw them settled in and then, taking his gasmask, returned to the upper floor and the street outside, where he encountered the warden on his beat and as an old friend was permitted to stay outside and watch while nothing happened. For nearly two hours Dinah and Sylvia sat in the comfortable
basement room, drinking the tea Dinah brewed from the electric kettle, reading, or trying to, dozing, listening—there were no loud bangs, and the All Clear was plainly heard.

“Maybe we really have got something that stops them,” Sylvia said hopefully as they climbed the stairs again and met Bracken in the hall.

“Scouts,” said Bracken. “Try-ons. Still working on our nerves. Well, so much for my nice early night.”

The telephone stopped them before they reached their bedrooms and Bracken turned back and snatched up the instrument in the hall. Once more they saw incredulity and horror grow on his face as he listened—something worse than a Russian Pact this time. He thoughtfully tilted the receiver so they could be sure it was Jeff’s voice at the other end of the line.

“It took ’em nearly a year to work up to that last time,” he said. “Where will the survivors come in—Glasgow? She sailed from there, yes.—All right, you come home now and catch some sleep, pack a bag and go up to Glasgow tomorrow and talk to survivors.” He hung up and turned back grimly to the anxious women. “They have sunk a liner,” he said. “The Athenia. Heavy loss of life. It’s the Lusitania all over again. Well my dears, the war is on, all right! It may last quite a while. I suppose we had better learn to go back to bed. Jeff’s on his way here.”

They separated silently, with reassuring smiles, closing the doors behind them gently as though there had been a death in the house. Sylvia replaced Midge on his night table and leaving her light on against the new nightmare turned the unseen pages of a book till Jeff let himself in quietly and came to take her in his arms. His coat smelled of tobacco smoke and outdoors as she buried her face against it.

“It’s going to be a tough war,” he said. “Well, we knew that. Sure you won’t go down to Farthingale for a few days—”

Instantly she faced him, tousled and indignant.

“Now, Jeff, you know I’m booked to go round to the animal shelter tomorrow morning just as always—”

“All right, all right, I only asked a civil question,” he said, half amused.

“I keep thinking about Stephen and Evadne,” Sylvia said. “If they sailed last Saturday—”

“They’re on an American boat. Hitler won’t do anything now to bring America in.”

“You can’t tell what he’ll do. It won’t be very comfortable at sea right now.”

“Honey, let’s face it. Nobody’s going to be very comfortable anywhere, for a while!” said Jeff.

“Except in America.”

“Land of the free. How about going back there for a visit? Yoy could take Mab with you, she’s always—”

“Jeff Day, if I was willing to desert you, which I am not, I wouldn’t cross the Atlantic now for a million dollars!” Sylvia told him with a shudder. “Whatever comes, I’ll take it on dry land, and together.”

“Maybe you’re wise, at that.” Jeff kissed her and put out the bed lamp and went to part the heavy curtains on the dark room and raise the window.

Moonlight streamed across the floor, and he stood a minute, leaning on the sill looking out.

“Come and look,” he said, and she got out of bed and joined him at the window.

All she saw was bright moonlight over the housetops. He turned his head towards her uncomprehending silence.

“Notice anything?” he asked quietly.

“There’s not a sound,” she whispered.

“Look again. It could be a hundred—two hundred years ago. No lights—no traffic. I noticed, walking home tonight—a lot of London is just the same now as when Wren put up his churches after the Great Fire. When you take away machinery and artificial light, a lot of London is still pretty much the way our great-great-grandfathers saw it. London has gone back—way back—nobody’s seen it like this since George III was King. And you know what? It’s the loveliest city in the world tonight. And I wouldn’t be anywhere else for a million dollars.” He straightened with a sigh. “Make sure I hear the alarm,” he said, and fell into bed and was asleep.

But Sylvia lay awake now, listening, wondering, watching the moon-shadows creep across the room—remembering the safe, dreaming streets of Williamsburg under other September moons, the silky, whispering night air, the wafts of sudden fragrance, the gay Negro voices, the unquestioning security…. Oh, God, make me brave, make me do the right thing here, don’t let me disgrace myself….

“Of course Evadne hadn’t thought about Williamsburg all her life the way I have, before she went there,” Mab said at breakfast on Sunday a week later. “It would be all new to her. But now she’s
seen
it, with her very own eyes, and if we take a map and some pictures I can ask her—”

“Sweetheart, you get so carried away by Williamsburg, it’s rather worrying sometimes,” Virginia said, mindful of what she could only call a spooky letter from Evadne, all about Tibby’s portrait being Mab, and Jeff looking like Julian’s, as everyone knew, and the Mawes cottage down by the Landing which nobody but Fitz remembered any more….

“Worrying how?” asked Mab with her upward, candid look, and Virginia found herself fumbling a little, which she was not accustomed to.

“It seems rather odd,” she said lamely. “A place you’ve never seen, and yet sometimes you sound almost homesick for it.”

Mab’s eyes widened.

“That’s exactly how it feels!” she agreed. “Like wanting to go
back.
How clever of you, Gran. It’s as though I had been there as a very small child, too small really to remember, and yet—Are you sure I wasn’t?”

“Quite sure.”

“And yet it’s as though I
might
remember if I saw it again. Do you think I could?”

“Remember?” asked Virginia uneasily, wondering if she ought to change the subject, aware that changing the subject was rarely any solution to the matter involved, divided between a wish somehow to get to the bottom of it with Mab and a doubt of the wisdom of encouraging her to dwell on her obsession, even to discuss it in cold blood. “Remember?” asked Virginia, with a slight frown on her serene brow.