Bombs on Aunt Dainty (16 page)

“Louise?” said Papa and made a face, but then he caught sight of Mama’s expression and said, “very well, then, Louise.”

Aunt Louise willingly gave Mama fifteen pounds to help eke out her savings.

“I’m sorry it isn’t more,” she said, “but I don’t like to ask Sam at the moment.”

The Professor had become anxious about money since his sister had unexpectedly returned to him with her two boys. He spent each meal-time watching expensive food disappear down the throats of his many impecunious relatives.

“And he worries,” said Aunt Louise, “what is to become of us all.”

“Anna insisted on contributing her five shillings a week
and Max sent a cheque for ten pounds from his RAF pay, so they were safe for a while at least. But Mama’s anxiety continued. It was difficult to be in her company, for as she sat with her hands clenched in her lap and her blue eyes staring the tension was like a physical presence in the room and nothing could alleviate it.

“Do you really think so?” she would cry when Anna suggested that some particular application for a job looked hopeful and, five minutes later, again, “Do you really think they’ll give me that job?”

The only thing that took her mind off her worries was playing bridge in the evenings. Then her fierce concentration would switch to the cards and as she argued about Culbertson, overtricks and bungled grand-slams the anxiety about her job receded.

Anna occasionally got dragged into these games – Papa couldn’t tell a club from a spade – but only if there was no one else at all, for she was so bored by them that she cast a blight on the other players. She would sit there, making mistakes and drawing all over her scorepad, to escape gratefully at the end, irrespective of whether she had won or lost. She felt sorry for Mama and wished to help her, but she also found it a strain sharing one small bedroom with her and so was guiltily relieved whenever there was a reason for her to stay out late.

One morning just as Anna was leaving for work Mama caught her at the door.

“Miss Thwaites wants to play bridge tonight,” she said.
“The Woodpigeon is free, but we need a fourth.”

“I can’t,” said Anna. “I’ve got my evening class.”

Mama had slept badly and the morning post had failed, yet again, to produce the job she was hoping for.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “It won’t matter if you miss it just once.”

“But I don’t want to miss it,” said Anna. “Can’t the Poznanskis play?”

Mama said that they couldn’t, and Anna could see the tension rising in her, like a kettle coming to the boil. She said, “Look, I’m sorry, Mama, but I really don’t want to miss my evening class. I’m sure you’ll find someone else.”

She edged nervously towards the bedroom door, but before she could reach it Mama exploded.

“Surely,” Mama cried, “you could do this one little thing for me! I don’t ask you much! God knows if one of your boyfriends asked you out you’d give up your evening class quick enough!”

“That’s not true!” cried Anna. She had always refused invitations on art school nights. But Mama was now in full flood.

“It’s my one pleasure in life,” she cried. “The only thing that takes my mind off the endless worrying about money. And it’s not as though anyone else in this family ever worried about how we’re going to live. You just go off to your nice little job each morning and Papa sits in his room writing poems, and I am left with everything – everything!”

“Mama …” said Anna, but Mama cut straight through her.

“Who went and asked Louise for money?” she cried. “Did you? Did Papa? No, as always, it was left to me. Do you suppose I enjoyed that? And who arranged for you to learn shorthand-typing and found a way of paying your fees? And who got Max out of the internment camp? It wasn’t you or Papa. Don’t you think that in the circumstances you could give up one evening – just one single evening – to make my life a little easier?”

Anna looked at Mama’s desperate scarlet face and had a curious, panicky sensation of being sucked into it. She backed away, feeling pale and cold.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said, “but I must go to my evening class.”

Mama glared at her.

“After all,” cried Anna, “it’s only a game of bridge!”

“And you, I suppose,” yelled Mama, “are going to produce a masterpiece!”

Anna made for the door.

“If I did,” she heard herself yell back, “you wouldn’t even know that it was one!”

Then she escaped, trembling, into the corridor.

She worried about it all day at the office. She thought of ringing Mama up, but there always seemed to be someone near the telephone and, anyway, she wouldn’t have known what to say. At six o’clock she still had not made up her mind whether to go home or to the art school. She decided to leave it to chance. If a tram passed her before she reached
Victoria she would go home – otherwise not. The tram came almost at once, but she ignored it and took the bus to Holborn, arriving just in time for the class.

And why shouldn’t I? she thought. After all, it wasn’t as though she’d been out a lot lately. Two of the young men who most frequently invited her had been posted away from London, so she’d had almost no social life at all. I was absolutely right, she thought, but it did not help, for she could not concentrate on her work and produced a drawing so poor that she crumpled it up and threw it away. At the end of the class she did not go to the café but made straight for the tube. If I get home quickly, she thought, there might still be time for a game or two of bridge.

Suddenly, on the train, she had a vision of Mama crying on the bed after she had lost her job. How could I? she thought, and was overwhelmed by pity and guilt. As she hurried down the street she thought of Mama in Paris, Mama helping her buy her first pair of slacks, Mama taking her out on her sixteenth birthday.

“Mama!” she cried as she burst into the lounge – and there was Mama playing bridge with Miss Thwaites against the Woodpigeon and Mrs Poznanski.

“You’re early,” said Mama, and Miss Thwaites added, “Mrs Poznanski found she didn’t have to go out after all.”

“But Mama …” cried Anna.

Then rage filled her and she turned on her heel and walked out of the room.
“I couldn’t help it,” she said later to Papa. “I’ve got a right to my own life. I can’t just throw it all up to play bridge whenever Mama wants me to.”

“No, of course not,” said Papa. He was looking tired, and Anna realised that the day could not have been easy for him either.

“Mama is having a difficult time,” he said after a moment. “I wish we could all live very differently from the way we do. I wish I could be more help.”

There was a pile of closely-written sheets on his desk and Anna asked, “What are you writing?”

“Something about us – a kind of diary. I’ve been working on it for a long time.” He shook his head at Anna’s look of hope. “No,” he said, “I don’t think anyone would buy it.”

He had some bread left over from lunch and as Anna couldn’t face her cold supper he made her some toast. He suspended a slice of bread from a large paper clip and Anna watched as he held it over the gas fire at the end of a stick from the garden.

“It’s so difficult,” she said, “sharing a room.”

Papa looked worried. “I wish I could …”

“No,” she said. “I know you need yours to write in.”

Outside on the landing a door slammed and there were voices and footsteps on the stairs. The bridge game must have broken up.

Suddenly Papa said, “Be nice to her. Be very, very nice to her. She is your mother and it’s quite true what she says – life is not easy for her.”

“I am,” said Anna. “I always have been.”

As she got up to leave him he said, “Try to forget all about today.”

But she could not quite forget and nor, she suspected, could Mama. There was a carefulness between them which had not been there before. One side of Anna was saddened by this, but another secret, steely side, whose existence she had never even suspected, half-welcomed it for the increased privacy it brought her. All because I wanted to go to art school that one night, she thought. How complicated life became if there was something you really wanted to do.

The following week at the café she said to John Cotmore, “Do you think art, if one takes it seriously, is bad for personal relationships?”

She had never used so many abstractions before in one sentence, and his mouth twitched as he looked at her.

“Well,” he said at last, “I think it probably makes them more difficult.”

She nodded and then blushed, overcome by embarrassment. She had just remembered what someone had told her – that he did not get on with his wife.

In the autumn, the National Gallery put on an exhibition of French Impressionist paintings. It was a great event, for all valuable pictures had been hidden away since the beginning of the war to save them from being bombed. But there had been only few air raids on London recently – the Luftwaffe must have been too busy fighting in Russia – and so it was considered worth taking a chance to show them again.

Anna had never seen them. There was a book about them in the library, but it had only black and white reproductions and you could not really tell from them what the paintings were like. So, on the first Sunday after the opening of the exhibition, she went along to look at it.

It was a brilliant cold day and she was feeling happy because it was the weekend, and because she had done two good drawings during the week, and because Mama had at last got a job – not a very good job, but after the worry of the past few months it was a relief for her to have got anything at all. As she crossed Trafalgar Square the stone lions cast hard shadows on the pavement and there were more people than usual milling round Nelson’s column in
the sharp air. The fountains had not worked since the beginning of the war, but as she passed between them a cluster of pigeons took off at her feet and she watched the spatter of their wings turn dark as they rose up into the shining sky. Suddenly she felt a great surge of joy, as though she were flying up with them. Something marvellous is going to happen, she thought – but what?

The National Gallery was crowded and she had a struggle to make her way up the steps and into one of the main rooms. This, too, was full of people, so that at first she could only see parts of the paintings between bobbing heads. She knew at once that she liked them. They looked like the square outside, brilliant with light and a kind of joyful promise.

They were hung in no particular order and as she walked from room to room she was bewildered by the profusion. She did not know what to look at first, since it was all unfamiliar, and stared at landscapes, figures and interiors indiscriminately between the shifting bodies of the crowd. When she got to the end she went round again and this time some things leapt out at her – a mass of green water lilies in a green pond, a woman in a garden, a miraculously drawn dancer tying her shoe.

But when she went round a third time she had already changed. The water lilies which had so dazzled her before now seemed less remarkable, and she was fascinated, instead, by some bathers painted entirely in tiny spots of brilliant colour. She looked and looked and finally, when
she could see no more, she fought her way to the office near the main door in the hope of buying some postcard reproductions which she could look at at home, but the gallery was about to close and there were none left. She must have been looking at the pictures for nearly three hours, she thought in surprise.

As she emerged onto the steps above Trafalgar Square, now purple in the dusk, she stopped for a moment. Suddenly she did not want the bother of catching buses and tubes and of sitting through supper at home. She stood and stared across the darkening square, feeling vaguely afloat.

A voice behind her said, “Hullo,” and she turned to see John Cotmore in his old duffel coat.

“Well,” he said, joining her at the balustrade, “and what did you think of the Impressionists?”

“I loved them,” she said.

He smiled. “First time you’ve seen them?”

She nodded.

“First time I saw them was twenty years ago,” he said. “In Paris. I was quite a dashing young man then.”

She could not think what to answer. Finally she said, “I used to live in Paris. I went to school there.”

“What, finishing school?” he asked, and she laughed.

“No, the école communale – elementary school.”

There was a sudden exodus from the gallery and people streamed past them down the steps, hemming them in.

“I’m a German refugee,” she said, and immediately
wondered why on earth she had said it. But he seemed interested and not too surprised, so she went on to explain about Max and Mama and Papa and their life together since they had left Berlin.

“I don’t usually tell people about it,” she said at last.

This did surprise him. “Why not?” he asked.

“Well—” It seemed obvious to her. “People think it’s odd.”

He frowned. “I don’t think it’s odd.”

Perhaps it isn’t, she thought, as the darkness closed round them and the last footsteps clattered past. It was suddenly cold, but he seemed in no hurry to leave.

“You mustn’t go round pretending you’re something you aren’t,” he said. “Where you come from is part of you, just like your talent for drawing.”

She smiled, hearing only the word “talent”.

“So no more of this pretence.” He took her arm. “Come on, I’m going to walk you to the tube.”

They made their way along the narrow pavements of a side street, and as they reached the Embankment she was again filled with the happiness that she had felt earlier that afternoon. But this time, instead of being shapeless, it seemed to contain the paintings she had seen and the fact that she was walking through the dusk with John Cotmore, as well as a huge and mysterious sense of expectancy.

The feeling was so strong that she smiled involuntarily, and he said, “What’s funny?” looking put out.

He had been talking, but she had hardly listened.
Something about living alone, cooking his own supper. Had his wife moved out, then?

Hurriedly, she said, “I’m sorry, nothing’s funny, it’s just …” She hesitated because it seemed so idiotic.

“I’ve been feeling terribly happy all day,” she brought out at last.

“Oh!” He nodded. “I suppose at your age…How old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen,” she said.

“Really,” he said to her annoyance. “You seem much younger.”

They had arrived at the tube station and stood together for a moment before she bought her ticket. Then, as she stepped into the lift, he called after her, “See you on Tuesday!”

“See you on Tuesday!” she called back, and the happiness welled up again inside her and lasted all the way home to Putney.

The cold, sunny weather persisted, and so did Anna’s happiness. She felt almost painfully aware of all the sounds, shapes and colours around her and wanted to draw everything in sight. She drew on the tube and in her lunch-hour and when she got home in the evenings. She filled one notebook after another with drawings of people straphanging, sitting, eating and talking, and when she was not drawing she thought about it.

She loved everything. She felt as though she had been
asleep for years and had just woken up. In the mornings when she took the bus down Putney Hill to the tube station she stood outside on the platform, so as not to miss a moment of the view as the bus crossed the river in the early light. She spent hours looking at a book about the French Impressionists which John Cotmore had lent her, and some of the reproductions so delighted her that it was almost as though she could feel them with her eyes. When there was music on the radio in the lounge it seemed to her unbearably beautiful, and the sight of the dead men’s clothes at work made her unbearably sad. (But even this was curiously agreeable.) She joined the local firewatchers, which meant turning out at night whenever there was an air-raid warning, and stood endlessly in the dark, admiring the dim shapes of the suburban landscape in the starlight.

One night she was on duty with Mr Cuddeford, who was the leader of the group. There had been a few bombs, but nothing close, and some anti-aircraft fire from the guns on Putney Heath. No incendiaries, which was what Anna and Mr Cuddeford were watching for. It was very cold and the All Clear was a long time coming, and Mr Cuddeford began to talk about his experiences in the previous world war.

He had been in the trenches where there had been a lot of suffering and Mr Cuddeford, especially, had suffered with his legs. Other men had been wounded and others yet had had trench feet, but Mr Cuddeford had varicose veins. In case Anna did not know what varicose veins were, he
explained them to her, and exactly how they felt, and what the doctor had thought about them.

Like everything else during the past weeks, Mr Cuddeford’s varicose veins were very vivid to Anna, and as he proceeded with his description she found herself feeling slightly sick. How silly, she thought, but the feeling grew alarmingly until suddenly, when Mr Cuddeford said, “So the doctor told me, ‘We’ll have to cut those out,’” she was overwhelmed by a stifling wave of nausea.

She mumbled, “I’m sorry, but I’m feeling rather ill,” and then, amazingly, the sky shifted sideways and the ground lurched up towards her and she was lying in some wet leaves and Mr Cuddeford was blowing his whistle.

“I’m all right,” she said, but he told her to lie still and almost at once the boots of another firewatcher appeared on the ground beside her.

“Passed out,” said Mr Cuddeford with a certain satisfaction. “I reckon it’s the cold.”

“No, really—” said Anna, but suddenly they had a stretcher and were loading her on to it.

“Heave-ho,” said Mr Cuddeford, they lifted her up and the stretcher began to move through the darkness. Trees and clouds passed erratically above her and for a while she watched them with pleasure, but as they approached the hotel she suddenly realised what her arrival would look like to Mama and Papa.

“Honestly,” she said, “I can walk now.”

But the firewatchers had seen no action for months, and
there was no stopping them. They carried her through the front door and Mama, who must have seen them from the window, came rushing down the stairs in her dressing gown.

“Anna!” she shouted so loudly that various doors opened and the Woodpigeon appeared behind her, followed by the two Czech ladies and the Poznanskis.

“Where is she hurted?” cried the Woodpigeon.

“Yes, where?” cried Mama, and Mr Poznanski, amazingly wearing a hairnet, suddenly called from the top of the stairs, “I will a doctor fetch.”

“No!” shouted Anna, and Mr Cuddeford at last let her off the stretcher so that she could prove to everyone that she was all right.

“It was only Mr Cuddeford’s varicose veins,” she explained when her rescuers had left, and it seemed ridiculous even to herself.

Once Mama had got over her fright she thought the whole incident very funny, but she said, “You never used to be so easily upset.”

It was true, thought Anna, and wondered at the change in herself.

The evening classes were the focal point of her world. She now went to three a week and John Cotmore not only helped her with her life drawings but took an interest in the sketches she made out of school.

“These are very good,” he once told her after looking at
a series of drawings she had made of workmen shifting rubble on a bomb site, and she felt as though she had suddenly grown wings.

It was disturbing and yet exciting to be absorbed in something of which Mama and Papa knew so little. Neither of them had ever had the slightest wish to draw. Once, while John Cotmore was talking at the café, Anna suddenly understood about abstract painting, which had always been a bit of a joke at home, and her feeling of elation was followed by a twist of something like regret.

How far away I am moving from them, she thought, and Mama must have sensed it too, for although she admired Anna’s sketches she became increasingly irritated with the evening classes.

“Always that old art school,” she would say. “Surely you don’t have to go
again
!” And she would ask Anna about the people she met there and what on earth they found to talk about all that time.

Sometimes Anna tried to explain and Mama would listen, her blue eyes bright with concentration, while Anna expounded some thought she had about drawing.

“Oh yes, I understand that, it’s quite simple,” Mama would say at the end, and expound it all back to Anna to prove that she had indeed understood.

But Anna always felt that somehow during the explanation some essential ingredient had escaped, so that not only had Mama not
quite
understood, but the thought itself had somehow shrunk in the process and had been
returned to her poorer and more meagre than before.

Talking to Papa was more satisfying. There was an initial difficulty to overcome in that she did not know the words for what she wanted to say in German, and Papa did not know them in English. She had to speak in each language in turn, with a bit of French thrown in for good measure, until her meaning came across – more, she sometimes felt, by telepathy than anything else. But then Papa understood completely.

“It’s very interesting that you should think this,” he would say, and talk about some comparable aspect of writing, or ask her what she thought of some painter she hadn’t mentioned.

Both he and Mama were curious about John Cotmore and the students with whom she spent so much of her time.

“What sort of people are they?” asked Papa, and Mama said, “what sort of homes do they come from?”

“I suppose they come from all sorts of homes,” said Anna. “Some of them have cockney accents. Harry, I think, is quite grand. I like them because they all draw.”

“This John Cotmore,” said Mama. “What sort of age is he?”

(Why did she have to call him
this
John Cotmore?)

“I don’t know,” said Anna. “Quite old – about forty.” Later she said hypocritically, “It’s a pity you can’t meet them all,” knowing full well that there was little opportunity for Mama to do so.

However, next time Max was home on leave he
suggested coming to the café one day after school. Probably it was Mama’s idea, thought Anna, but she did not mind – she had wanted him to come anyway.

At first it was difficult. Max sat there among the cracked coffee cups with his open smile and his uniform, looking like an advertisement for the RAF, while the pale young man and Harry discussed the influence of Cubism and the girls gazed at Max admiringly but dumbly. But then Barbara arrived. She was a recent addition to the group – a big blonde girl in her late twenties with a pleasant, placid face. She settled herself next to Max and asked such intelligent questions about the Air Force that he was delighted. Then she said, “We all have great hopes for your sister, you know,” which was an exaggeration but made Anna blush with pleasure.