Life Class (25 page)

‘Yes – and because the inner light leads us in that direction. I know, that probably strikes you as –’

‘Doesn’t strike me as anything, particularly. I don’t think I have the right to judge other people’s decisions. I’m a woman. Nobody’s asking me to fight.’

‘And you don’t want to … nurse?’

‘Good God, no.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘Ignore it – as far as I can.’

‘And how far is that?’

‘Not very far, because there’s Paul, and there’s my brother who’s joined the army.
And
I’ve got a German friend whose father’s just been interned. But I keep working. Painting,’ she explained, to cut off the question.

‘Landscapes, Paul says.’

‘Quakers pray in silence, don’t they?’

She couldn’t have done that, not that she prayed much at all. But to lose the vaulted aisles, the stained glass, the music, the words of the Book of Common Prayer and put nothing in its place except silence and other people’s faces and tummy rumbles. God, no.

‘Yes, we have a meeting at the hospital every Sunday morning. Paul joins us now and then.’

So, added to the image of Paul expertly winding bandages around amputated stumps, she had to try to imagine him sitting in a hut in silence, surrounded by earnest, well-meaning – but surely rather dull? – men. Women too, presumably – all excellent people, no doubt. But
Paul
?

At that moment, as if summoned by her incredulity, Paul appeared in the doorway and began threading his way between the tables. As he bent to kiss her, she smelled the cool night air on his cheek, overlaying, without hiding, the hospital smell of disinfectant and blood. He nodded to Lewis, picked up the carafe and caught the waiter’s eye, before sitting down. Silently she passed her own almost full glass across to him. He looked slightly embarrassed, but took it nevertheless.

‘Cheers,’ he said, toasting them both, but nothing could hide his need for that first glass.

She went on talking to Lewis, aware all the time of Paul, of the
colour coming back into his face. She could see Lewis was concerned. We’ve a lot in common, she thought. We’re both in love with Paul. Three months ago, she wouldn’t have thought to use those words.

A waitress, with a white cloth tied round her waist, came up to the table. She was invisible to them, standing there with a pad and pencil in her hand, but then, when Paul looked up to give the order, she said, ‘I haven’t seen you here for a long time.’

‘No.’ He’d flushed slightly. ‘I’ve been busy.’

‘And you too, Monsieur Lewis. You have been too much occupied, I think?’

Lewis agreed that he had been too much occupied. After she went, there was an awkward pause, and then Lewis and Paul both rushed in to break it, frustrating each other’s efforts. Elinor stared down into her glass, realized she didn’t care – she ought to care, but she didn’t – and then she started to smile, and then to laugh.

Paul stared at her in amazement. ‘What’s funny?’ He sounded irritable, resentful even.

‘Nothing. I’m just happy to be here.’

They ate some spicy sausages with potatoes. Paul looked even more tired than he had the night before and contributed little. Elinor talked about the things she’d seen and done that day, the places she’d sketched, and they asked about home, about London. Had it changed much? No. The searchlights were beautiful, there was a huge gun on Hampstead Heath, all the lamps were painted blue. The worst thing was the gutter press – always going on about ‘the enemy within’. Lewis asked about the Slade, what was it like now? A convent, she said. A nunnery. A herd of sheep with Tonks the only ram, but she kept faltering into silence.

Paul burst out that when he looked back on those days now he thought they’d all been barking mad.

‘No,’ she said. ‘
This
is mad.’

‘Well, all right.’ He was tapping his fingers on the table. God, he was bad-tempered. ‘Perhaps not mad, but like children. Spoiled, self-indulgent, selfish children.’

‘And this is better? Young men in wheelchairs. Or dead.’

‘At least it’s not contemptible.’

‘And we were?’

‘Weren’t we?’

She shook her head. Lewis tried to change the subject, and from then on she concentrated entirely on him, asking him about his schooldays – not long past – and his ambitions for the future. He wanted to play the piano, he said, professionally, but he didn’t know if he was good enough. If he couldn’t do that, he’d teach.

‘Music?’

‘Oh, yes – I don’t know about anything else.’

It had been a warm day – perhaps the last day of the long Indian summer. It couldn’t go on much longer, they were into November now – and the café was airless. She seemed to be breathing in the same breath over and over again. And the candles didn’t help.

When the rumbling started, she thought: thunder. Good. She’d always loved storms. She imagined them lying on the bed with the curtains open, blue flashes lighting up their bodies; and they wouldn’t need to talk, and perhaps that was just as well. Then she became uneasy. Paul and Lewis were staring at each other, not alarmed, just puzzled.

‘That was close,’ Lewis said.

Then the candles guttered and the whole room shook and from the look on people’s faces she realized it wasn’t thunder.

Paul had gone white. ‘It’s a stray. Has to be.’

But even as he spoke there was another crash and everything on the table did a little jump into the air. The light bulb was swinging at the end of its flex, sending shadows from side to side. All the people in the room seemed to be clinging to the clapper of a bell. The electric light flickered again, only it was more than a flicker now. A long, fierce, edge-of-darkness buzzing and then the lights went out. The candles, which were really no more than ornaments, wobbled but kept going, giving just enough light to show people’s faces and hands. What Elinor remembered afterwards was the inertia. Nobody moved. They couldn’t believe it had happened; they didn’t want to abandon their nice meals and their bottles of wine, and so they all just sat there, staring at each
other, until another thud, closer, brought with it the sound of breaking glass.

Scraping chairs, screams, panic. Paul grabbed her and dragged her towards the door. Lewis was just behind them, treading on their heels. Outside in the dark people were running all in different directions, but Paul stood on the pavement with his hand gripping her upper arm. She wanted to run too, though there was no point running from danger that struck randomly from the air.

‘I’d better get back,’ Lewis said.

‘Yes,’ Paul said. ‘You go.’

Lewis felt for her hand. ‘I’ll see you again.’

She nodded, stammered something and then he was gone, running like a stag down the centre of the road. Paul put his arm around her and they walked back, slowly, to the house. At intervals, the ground shuddered under their feet. The streets were ravines of darkness now, all the lights extinguished, only in the sky was a whirl of sparks flying upwards and an orange glow lighting the underbelly of the clouds.

Another explosion. Paul took her hand. ‘Come on. Not far now.’

As soon as they turned the corner and saw the house they started to run, though running made her more afraid. She stood, gasping for breath, while Paul fitted the key in the lock. The back of his hand was meaty red with the light from the sky. They got inside and switched on the light, but nothing happened.

‘Madame?’ Paul called. They waited but there was no answer. ‘She’ll have gone to her mother’s.’

The walls and floor seemed to be trembling all the time now, not just when a shell landed. They went down to the kitchen. You had to go down a flight of stairs to get to it; once there they looked for another door leading down to the cellar, but the one Elinor tried opened on to a cupboard full of deckchairs and old coats.

‘There’ll be candles,’ Paul said, opening the cupboard under the sink and beginning to rummage about among floorcloths and scrubbing brushes, but he didn’t find any. Elinor opened the curtains and the full moon shone in. Another shell burst, and the rocking chair in the corner started to rock as if to comfort itself. The grinding
of its rollers on the stone floor was worse than the bombs and she went across to it and held it still.

‘Under the table,’ Paul said.

‘No, I want my passport.’

‘That can wait.’

‘No it can’t, I want it now.’

‘All right, but you’ll have to be quick.’

Though when they got to the top of the house he was the first to go across and stand at the window. It was far worse than she’d thought. At street level you couldn’t see the extent of the devastation. Up here, the cloth tower was encircled by fires and seemed to float above the city, borne aloft on billowing clouds of smoke.

Because this window was level with the roofs, they could follow the shells as they came in. Three hundred yards away a house burst open, like a ripe pod, as if the pressure came from within. She felt Paul beside her.

‘I ought to go back to the hospital. If it’s hit …’

She didn’t ask him not to leave her, and in the end he didn’t go, though she could feel him disliking her for standing between him and his duty. That’s why it’s called the forbidden zone. That’s why they didn’t want wives and girlfriends here.

She found her passport and money and they crept downstairs again and sheltered under the kitchen table. From time to time the floor shook. Paul built a barricade of chairs intended to protect them from flying glass. At first every explosion made her heart jump, though she made no sound, not because she was brave, but because she’d found out the hard way that her own cries frightened her. It was easier to be stocial, to force her clenched fingers to uncurl. They talked about their childhoods, the good parts, the woods and fields, the excitement of learning to paint, and then he talked more about his mother. The years of her illness when he hadn’t known from day to day which face she would turn towards him.

‘Eventually she stuck a pair of scissors in my neck. That’s when Dad decided we couldn’t manage with her at home any more.’

Through her fear of the repeated shockwaves shaking the table
Elinor reached out and took his hand. ‘Make love to me.’ She didn’t know what else to say.

‘I’m not sure I can. I’m frightened too, you know.’

But there was no problem. Afterwards, leaning on Paul’s shoulder, she managed to get some sleep, and woke with a neck so stiff she could barely move. The room was lit with dirty-dishwater light and the shelling seemed to have stopped. They drank cup after cup of hot, strong coffee until her veins buzzed, and then walked out into a street covered with plaster dust, like grey snow. A thin mist of dust hung on the air; they’d walked only a few yards and their heads and shoulders were white. It got into your throat. Paul was coughing really badly. She looked around. Buildings still burned, the flames licking blackened timbers. Some of the house fronts had been ripped off and all the little private things laid bare: wallpaper, counterpanes, chamber pots, sofas, a crucifix hanging askew above a bed, a little girl’s doll. It was indecent. In one living room everything had been smashed except for the china ornaments on the mantelpiece, which sat there, bizarrely untouched. A huge puddle of water lay in a dip in the road where the fire engines had worked all night to damp down the smouldering timbers. As she watched, rings of rain began to pockmark the surface. She saw it in the puddle before she felt it on the back of her neck. It seemed important somehow to notice and remember that. Important and meaningless.

In a daze they began to walk towards the square. In the centre were several bundles covered with rugs or blankets. At first she thought some families bombed out of their homes had rescued their possessions and covered them to keep them dry. She was almost standing over the bundles before she saw the feet sticking out of one covering, a hand out of another. Further on were other people lined up but not yet covered: a woman with a little dog in her arms, three other women, two men, and then, lying on the cobbles, a child. She thought, how strange it was, to lie on the cold ground looking up at the sky with rain falling into your eyes, and not blink or turn your head away.

Paul’s voice in her ear. ‘Come on, now. Come away.’

She hadn’t known she was shaking till he touched her. Now she
looked up into his face. His eyelids were crusted with white dust. In the middle of it all, a red, wet mouth making sounds. ‘We’ve got to get you to the station before it starts again.’

‘It mightn’t.’

‘Why would they stop?’

So they ran back along the cratered road. She looked down one of the side streets and saw water from a burst main jetting fifteen, twenty feet into the air and a gang of boys daring each other to run through it. Their dark figures leaping about against the plume of water were full of joy.

She was packed in minutes. They hardly spoke. Paul tried to help, but two people packing one bag doesn’t work so he went and stood with his back to her, staring out of the window. She thought about her mother and father. Until she saw the child lying dead in the square she hadn’t given them a thought. Now she thought of nothing else.

When she’d checked that she’d got everything, she joined Paul by the window. One of the houses that had been hit last night had a green silk bedspread lolling out of its upper window. It looked … sluttish.

‘Well,’ Paul said, turning to face her. ‘That’s that, then. We’d better go.’

Paul carried the suitcase, striding ahead so fast she had to run to keep up with him. The station was packed. Ruthless suddenly, nothing like the man she thought she knew, he elbowed his way through the crowds. They stood near the edge of the platform, looking up and down the line, not knowing when, or if, a train would arrive. Many of the other people looked like refugees, weighed down with as many possessions as they could carry.

‘Write as soon as you can,’ Paul said.

She could see him itching to get back to the hospital. ‘Look, why don’t you go? I’ll be all right.’

‘No, you won’t. This is going to be a real scrum.’

It was. As soon as the train appeared the crowd surged forward. If it hadn’t been for Paul, she’d have ended up on the line. As it was she lost a shoe. The guards shouted and blew whistles and
yelled at people to keep back, but they were clawing at the sides of the train before it stopped. Paul got on and hauled her up behind him, then had to fight to get off again. She was hemmed in on all sides, her suitcase, or somebody else’s, cutting into her calf. She wasn’t sure her feet were on the ground, even, and she couldn’t see anything except backs and heads and necks. Whistles blew, doors slammed. At the last moment she twisted her head and saw him standing there, one hand raised, and then somebody moved and a shoulder hid him from her sight.