Homing (29 page)

“Jeff—I want to go to London,” said Mab.

It took him completely by surprise, but he came into focus slowly, turning his head till his eyes rested on her, as though he had to think back with an effort to what he had heard her say.

“Visitors are not encouraged just now,” he said.

“Not as a visitor. Not just for a weekend. I haven’t been there since the war began. I think it’s time I went. Sybil Fenton’s got my room at the flat, because of being bombed out, but if Mummy was willing I could stay at Dinah’s, couldn’t I?”

“Dinah’s got room for you, I suppose, as far as that goes,” he admitted. “You’d better make sure they’ve got all their glass, though, it can be beastly cold without it. And you can’t count on hitting a dull patch in the raids, you know, just because of Cardiff and Bristol.”

Well, at least now there was something to talk about, she thought cautiously. At least now she had his attention.

“He’s slacked off for a while over London,” she said—
unconsciously
everyone spoke of the Germans as “he”—Hitler, without whom there would be no Germans over London. “And anyway—I think everyone should know what it’s like to be in a raid.”

“You won’t enjoy it,” he prophesied. “But in a way, I see your point. Living through an air raid has become a sort of graduation exercise to qualify as a citizen of this cock-eyed world.”

“Oh, Jeff, you
are
intelligent!” she said gratefully. “
Everybody
else would say I’m too young, or that it’s a foolish risk, or that I’ll be sorry—or they’d think I’m showing off! I’m not, and I know I shall be terrified. I don’t
want
to go, any more than one wants to go to the dentist, but it’s something I just feel as though I can’t not do!”

“Yes, and what does Virginia say?” he inquired, for
everything
came to that at Farthingale sooner or later.

“She doesn’t like it, of course, because of Sylvia.” The name lay there a moment on the quiet air, while they both forced themselves
to hear it without visible emotion. “But she wants to go to London herself, and she has to agree that I’m old enough to decide some things for myself now, and she says if I’m really determined to go she’ll go with me. As soon as you can be trusted here alone, that is, and if the lull goes on in London.”

“Correction,” said Jeff. “As soon as I can go along. Which ought to be pretty soon now.”

She looked at him doubtfully, wondering if she had done the wrong thing after all, to turn his mind Londonwards again. But you must always get right back on the horse that has thrown you, and Jeff was still a war correspondent with a job to do. Sylvia had always been the first to point that out with pride. Sylvia would never have tried to keep him here, in this walking trance of grief, just to keep him safe.

“If you—when you’re sure you feel up to it,” Mab said, with a lingering uncertainty, and his brows came down.

“If you think you’re going to go racketing around London in an air raid without me there to look after you—” he began, almost like old times, and she reached a quick hand to his.

“Oh, Jeff, I promise to go to the shelter—and that’s the worst of it,” she added, frowning. “Do you think I could have claus—claustrophobia, and not know it?”

“You’ll know it in a shelter, fast enough,” he said. “Why?”

“Because I dread being
under
something,” she confessed. “When we tried the refuge room here, after it was built, I—couldn’t stay in it long. I felt the whole house on top of me,
pressing
—I felt it in my chest,” she finished lamely. “Like smothering.”

“But you go in lifts. And in the Underground.”

“I can. But I hate it.”

“Dinah’s refuge room is quite a normal sort of place—you hardly know you’re in the basement,” he said. “Maybe with a little practice you can get used to it.”

But not without me, he was thinking. She’s not going through any raids without me. She’s had no training, and she’ll have no duties to fall back on. And if she really can’t stand shelters—lots of people can’t—some one must stay upstairs with her. That will be me. Of course she oughtn’t to go at all, but Virginia must know what she’s about, even to consider it.

He was at the moment too tired to take issue with Virginia, even on what was best for Mab, who had had a mind of her own last summer too, and the invasion had not come to prove her
wrong. The least he could do was to see her through it himself, and he had to go back to London some time, it wasn’t fair to Bracken to go on like this. Whatever Mab was trying to prove to herself, Jeff faced an important test case of his own in the first raid he encountered now. Without Sylvia in the world, he was no longer sure of his heart. His talisman was gone, his good angel, his guarantee. And so his heart could go back on him again—any time.

The tension between them was eased at last, with no mention of voodoo and with the pitfalls seemingly avoided. In his own
unhappy
preoccupation he had failed for once to read her mind with his usual ease, and did not suspect that she had first
conceived
the trip to London as a debt to Sylvia she had to pay. It seemed to her that the least she could do for Sylvia now was to hear German bombers herself, and not stay safe in the country all through the war, like a child. And now, as it was working out, she saw it also as a way of bringing Jeff back to himself. He would go to London now, as habit reasserted itself, to try to watch over her. And once there, more habit would claim him—the newspaper routine, the daily round with Bracken, Dinah’s serene and
comforting
presence—that way his salvation lay, especially if he could come to it unaware, believing only that he went because she might be frightened in a raid. Might? She would be terrified. But with Jeff beside her, it might not show. It must not show. Sylvia had seen much worse than anything that happened in London now. Perhaps when she had heard a few bombs herself, she could bear to think of Sylvia again. And Jeff, back on the job with Bracken, would gradually be able to bear it too….

“Of course it’s a worry about Noel,” she said, to cover her own thoughts from Jeff’s uncanny perception. “If I go to London, he will have to stay here, because of his walks. Gran says his walks might be very inconvenient, if there was a raid on. It will be the first time we’ve been separated.”

“You shouldn’t be away from him too long,” he pointed out, seizing a useful argument against unnecessary risk. “One raid is pretty much like another. See one and you’ve seen ’em all.”

E
VERYONE
WAS
relieved that Jeff wanted to go with them to London. It meant, at least, that he had not resigned from life entirely. No one suspected that it represented to him a challenge that had to be met. He had to find out if he could weather a raid, with Sylvia gone. And secondly, by undertaking to see Mab through it, he had placed himself in a position where he simply could not afford to collapse.

Early in March, they arrived in Upper Brook Street to find Bracken’s glass intact, and Dinah worn and serene and smiling, and very glad to see them. The crocuses were out in the Parks, and much of the winter bomb damage had been swept up and tidied away in the recent respite. There was even a little theatre life, in the daytime, and people seemed to have given up carrying their gasmasks again, in spite of more invasion talk now that spring had come.

There were a few alerts, but no noisy nights in
that part of London—nothing that sent them to the shelter, during the first few days of their stay. And then, on the nineteenth, without any notice, the blitz was on again.

It began before they had finished dinner, so that the china chattered on the table and the chandelier shuddered above their heads.

“Oh, well,” said Bracken, bored. “Let’s have coffee
downstairs
, then.”

They all rose from the table at their leisure, and Dinah collected her knitting-bag from the drawing room and Virginia chose a new book. Mab’s palms were wet as she picked up a copy of
Punch,
and she found Jeff close beside her when they descended the stairs, followed by Gregson who carried the
coffee-tray
. And Jeff, to his horror, felt his heart beginning to lurch in his side. Out of practice, he told himself firmly. Got to get used to it all over again. With a difference.

They sat down in the light, comfortable basement room. Dinah poured the coffee. Bracken handed round the cups.

“How it takes one back,” Virginia said, and her eyes went round the substantial furniture and the astonishingly normal look of things down there. “The same beastly sensation of having one’s stomach hit the floor, the same old pretence that one doesn’t give a damn. Except that we used to sit on a hard bench in the scullery, with the Zeppelins overhead. Nothing so posh as this.”

“If we had had to spend as much time on that bench we’d have done something about it!” said Dinah, and the noise from outside began to penetrate their sanctuary. The lights flickered, but stayed on. Dinah rose and brought a candle and matches to the table beside her, and resumed her knitting. Bracken was filling his pipe.

Mab sat with
Punch
open on her lap, staring down at the page. Her hands were cold, there was lead in her middle, her ears sang with her own heartbeat.

It seemed to her that the house above them jarred and settled several inches stealthily. She glanced round at the walls, refused to look up at the ceiling. Jeff moved his chair so that it nearly touched hers, and sat there quietly, smoking, not watching her—within reach of her hand. She realized that she was sweating all over now—like a horse, she thought.

Dinah and Virginia chatted on, without apparent effort—reminiscing, mostly, about the other war. Bracken joined in, and made them laugh. The noise outside increased. Steady, damn you, said Jeff to his heart. I can’t, I can’t, thought Mab, sitting still.

“Bracken, I think the servants really should come down,” Dinah said at last. “Go and be firm with them, they’ll listen to you.”

He rose and went upstairs to the kitchen. It was a point of honour with the Gregsons not to budge from there unless it got really bad. Mab’s eyes followed him with longing to the door which led to the stairs. She did not know her teeth were clenched.

“It’s noisier up there,” Jeff murmured without moving. “And you’ve still got three stories above you. Do you want to try it?”

She looked at him dumbly, and managed to move her head from side to side in negation.

“Mab, are you all right?” Virginia asked sympathetically. “Does being in the shelter bother you worse than the raid?”

Again she signified No. But they had looked at her now, and
in the effort for self-control she began to tremble visibly. Jeff rose and laid a casual hand on her shoulder.

“Let’s see how it is upstairs,” he said gently. “We can come back if it doesn’t help.”

Punch
fell to the floor as she stood up to follow him, and they left it there. Walking woodenly with the effort not to break into a run, she reached the door of the shelter. At the top of the stairs they met Bracken returning with the servants.

“Change of air,” said Jeff, covering her with his good arm, and they nodded comprehendingly, and went on down into the shelter.

He closed the door at the top of the stairs behind them, put out the light in the hall, and led her to the front door. It opened inward on a blast of cold air and reverberating sound—a smell of cordite and burning—a flare of fiery sky. She stood with his arm around her, braced against his shoulder, gazing out—and was not trembling any more.

“Well, that’s it,” he said after a moment, and closed the door, and guided her back to the drawing room where the lights had been dimmed to one or two. “We’re just as well off here, for a little while anyway. I’m sorry you ran into this one, it’s the worst in some time.” He went to a side table and poured two liqueur brandies and came back with them to the hearthrug where a dying fire still cast some warmth towards the sofa which faced it. “Come and drink this,” he said, and put a glass into her hand. “All of it. Right down.”

She obeyed him, and he set the empty glasses aside, and sat down on the sofa with his good arm towards her.

“Come here,” he said, and she went to him gratefully, and felt the warmth and strength of him, and hid her face against his coat. Crrrump—
crrump
—CRUMP!—a stick of bombs seemed to hurdle the house, leaving behind an uncanny quiet. “Missed,” said Jeff, his arm tight and steady around her. “That will be the nearest, probably, for tonight.”

“I’m all right now,” she said. “I think it really was the shelter, even more than fright. I couldn’t get any air. I never meant to disgrace myself.”

“You were doing fine,” he assured her. “It’s always a good idea to look outside now and then.”

“Jeff, is this really a bad raid?”

“It’s a humdinger. Nothing like it in weeks. He must have known you were here.”

She sat up, spreading her hands palms up, and rubbed them together.

“See?” she said with some satisfaction. “I do feel better up here. I’ve stopped sweating and shaking.”

“Sure you have. That was claustrophobia.”

“But you haven’t got it. You ought to go back down.”

“Hell’s bells, Mab, I’m used to being
outside
when it’s like this!”

And so was Sylvia, she thought. This is what Sylvia went through every night. There was a long, whistling whine, with a bump on the end of it.

“Oops,” said Jeff. “Back again. They come in waves.”

The house seemed to curtsey and rise again. He pulled her to him, shielding her against his body.

“Go ahead and be scared!” he said, against her ear, making himself heard above the guns on the ground. “You got a right!”

She clung to him, battered and bruised by the noise.

“Some of it is our guns, you know,” he said. “You get so you can tell the difference.”

“This is worse than Jamestown,” she said. “At least it was daylight then.”

“What about Jamestown?” he asked, to keep her talking. It was a queer thing, he had noticed before now, what people found to talk about in a raid. The effort to function at all—the need for normal speech—the determination not to show fear—often laid bare the deeper layers of consciousness and reserves. He had heard strong men resorting to almost total recall in the process of keeping a conversation alive during a raid. “What about Jamestown?” he repeated, willing to fall in with whatever game was going.

“When Wayne made a mistake, beyond Green Spring—Lafayette was furious, he hadn’t wanted a battle there—we had the whole British Army after us, he swore at Wayne up one side and down the other—”

He bent his head to hear, above the London guns. And while he listened, time seemed to shimmer and slip and fall away, and he began to remember….

“—but Lafayette got us out of it, that night, up the Neck—” she was saying, and her lips were smiling, her eyes were wide and dark and fixed on the dying fire. “—he was a darling man, you couldn’t ever fool him—you could look at him barefaced and lie and he knew it, but he wouldn’t give you away—he spoke
wonderful English, but he couldn’t spell it—he always put two n’s in enemy—”

She was silent in the close circle of his arm, as though drowsy—but when he roused himself to look at her, her eyes were open on the fire, and the present caught him again, like a slow
awakening
from a dream, and he sat very still, contemplating the extraordinary thing that had happened in the noise of the guns and the pound of bombs falling much too near. Was it the brandy, which she had never tasted neat before?—he had poured rather a stiff dose, for her first. Was it the raid, establishing some sort of fourth dimension, like his own hallucination that night at Boulogne—he had nearly lost his moorings again just now….

“It was so hot, and we felt so sorry for the horses,” Mab went on, seeming not to care whether he heard or not. “We were thirsty all the time, remember?—and the water always tasted bad, when we did get it—Julian, I want a drink of cold water—”

It ran down his spine in a tingling shock, which he instantly suppressed, without moving. She had used the wrong name—she had spoken as Dinah and Virginia spoke in the shelter, of the old war which lay within their mutual memory. We sat on a hard bench in the scullery, said Virginia of 1917—we were thirsty all the time, said Mab of 1781…. Once more, he held the portrait of Tibby in his arms, alive and warm and breathing, and time had no meaning. She had come back to him. They were together again. As it was in the beginning….

She stirred against him, and sighed.

“I suppose it’s the brandy that makes me so thirsty,” said Mab. “Is there any water on the tray?”

“Soda water,” he said, glancing round at the siphon.

“Never mind,” she said. “Don’t go away. Like this nothing matters.”

“No, nothing matters now,” he said, and laid his cheek against her hair. “We’ve got past it, haven’t we.”

Crump—
crrump
—CRUMP—

She ducked closer to him as the stick went over again, and his arm tightened as he leaned above her.

“It’s wrong for you to stay up here,” she murmured in the ensuing pause. “They’ll think it very odd downstairs.”

“They know why we’re here.”

“It wouldn’t matter so much if I got killed, just because I couldn’t stand a shelter. But Bracken couldn’t get along without you.”

“Nor I without you,” he said.

“Oh, Jeff—” She raised a face streaming with tears. “Oh, Jeff, I would have died
instead
! I should have been the one! You didn’t need me!”

“We don’t know,” he said, and took out his handkerchief and wiped her cheeks. “We never know—we aren’t running this show—you said it yourself one day—you said we can’t choose or refuse—”

CRRUMP—
crump
—crump—

Again they leaned together instinctively while the house rocked around them. Again the din receded and left them limp and incredulous, clinging. But now Mab could not stop crying, and he gave up trying to dry her face, and sat quietly while she wept away the weeks of unnatural composure and fortitude, not from fear now, for she was past fear and hardly heard the noise—tears of exhaustion and despair and a hopeless yearning for what she only dimly understood—tears of relief that somehow, anyhow, she was here beside him with constraint and uncertainty knocked out of them by the raid.

Then the lights went out.

“That always helps,” said Jeff calmly. “I didn’t bring up a torch.”

“What does it mean?” she asked, without real apprehension, sitting up away from him in the fireglow.

“They’ve busted a main power line somewhere. It often happens. There are some candles on the mantelpiece if we want them.”

In the faint light from the coals he saw her put her hands to her face, wiping it with her palms in a childish gesture, resolute and pathetic.

“Well, now you owe me that half-crown,” she said, and he laughed.

“Not after a crack like that!”

“I’m sorry, Jeff.”

“For what?”

“I couldn’t stick the shelter. I cried and made a general fool of myself up here. I’d better go back to the country where I belong.”

“Where you can really get in amongst the Germans,” he amended.

“I say, are you all right up here?” said Bracken’s voice at the door, and the beam of his torch found the sofa.

“We’re fine,” said Jeff cheerfully. “Come and join us. Have a drink. Make yourself comfortable.”

“Damned if I don’t,” said Bracken, and turned the torch on the table which held the tray. “They’ve buggered off again now. That’s all for tonight, no doubt. Brandy?” he suggested with his back to them, busy at the bottles.

“Just a spot.” Jeff rose. “Our glasses are somewhere over here.”

Perhaps it was the brandy—his heart had given no more trouble.

The March nineteenth raid took the heaviest toll of lives for many weeks. It caught Irene and Ian dining out with friends. They were not far away from their own flat—but far enough so that if they had stayed where they were they would not have been killed in the direct hit which demolished the house where they lived. And while Mab had always preferred to be with Virginia, and had come almost to regard Farthingale as her home, to lose both parents in a night, and every trace of their possessions and mutual life as a family, was a knockout blow.

They got her back to Farthingale and put her to bed. Jeff went with them, though it was Virginia she turned to now. She seemed not so much grief-stricken as unbelieving and lost. She did not want to be alone. Her eyes followed people as they moved about her room, as though dreading that they might go away and leave her. She wanted a light at night, she wanted a radio playing on the bedside table, she wanted Noel under her hand. She clung to tangibles against the void.