Return to Fourwinds (30 page)

At Watford Junction the door of the train compartment slid open and a woman in a neat green suit entered, holding the hand of a small girl in a woollen pixie hat. Peter stood up to help lift the woman's suitcase into the netting of the overhead rack. She thanked him shortly and sat down on the opposite seat, near the door. She got out a book. The child crept along the seat to look out of the window.

‘We're going to see my granny,' the child said. ‘Where are you going?'

‘I'm going to university.'

He noticed the woman's eyes flick over him, reassessing him.

‘Why?' the child persisted.

‘To learn to be a vicar.'

‘Don't bother the gentleman, Catherine,' her mother said.

When the train pulled in at Euston he helped her get her suitcase back down. The woman thanked him.

‘Do you need a hand with that?' he said, nodding at her case as they got off the train. ‘Which way are you going?'

At the taxi rank he waved them off. Feeling reckless, and sure he'd be destitute as a result, he opened the door of the next taxi and gave the address of his hall of residence in Victoria.

The taxi dropped him off in front of a red-brick building. Across the road was a square with the iron railings still missing, bare rectangles of earth from wartime vegetable plots. There was a nostalgic fragility to the air, the summer over, but fresh with a new season to be savoured. Enormous plane trees filled with shifting green light overhead.

In the lobby, beneath a stained glass window, an elderly porter behind a desk searched for Peter Donoghue on a list. Yes, he was expected. Peter realised he'd been holding his breath. The man shuffled
over to a board of hooks and fetched down a key. He pointed up at the stairs. ‘Two floors up, on the left.'

The sound of a choir grew louder and louder as Peter walked along the corridor, the din of trumpets and voices coming from inside the room with his number on the front. He tapped on the door, then tapped again and finally turned the handle. A man a few years older than Peter was sitting beneath a mullioned window. He jumped up and came through trails of tobacco smoke. He shook Peter's hand hard.

‘You must be Peter.'

‘Aye, Peter Donoghue. Pleased to meet you.' They had to raise their voices above the music.

‘Fred, Fred Baxter. Here, let me shut Elgar up for a minute.'

He wore a wide-shouldered tweed jacket, hair oiled back from bald temples, tortoiseshell glasses. Peter noted the regimental tie, a tiepin holding it flat against his shirt. His bed was made as neatly as an envelope. His books and possessions lined up and in order.

‘Stow your things here, old boy,' he said glancing over Peter's cardboard suitcase and pointing to a chest of drawers.

Peter placed his things in the chest: his three shirts and his sleeveless pullover. He put his comb and washbag on the top. Fred had disappeared to fill the tin kettle. He came back and set it to boil on the small gas ring. Opening the window he fetched in a milk bottle from the ledge, sniffed it and then poured it into teacups.

‘Would you like the music again?' Peter nodded and Fred replaced the gramophone needle onto the disc.

‘Girlfriend?'

Peter shook his head.

‘That's the spirit. Nothing worse for the mind than a girlfriend.'

Fred poured the boiling water onto the tea and put the lid on with a decisive click of pottery.

‘They've put out a spread downstairs, rock cakes, bread and jam. Then you've got registration, but why don't I take you out for a bit of a recce this afternoon? Get the lie of the land.'

London had the battered magnificence of an indomitable elderly businessman setting out for work each day in a gaberdine coat that had seen better days. The masonry of some of the grand buildings was pitted with shrapnel scars. Every so often they passed a shop where the windows were still boarded up.

Keeping up a fast pace Fred delivered a stream of information – the best place to buy cheap cheese, when to see the Changing of the Guard, where to buy second-hand textbooks. He spoke like a cinema newsreel, his voice clipped, resolutely cheerful and chipper. A voice to get you through a war.

‘There's the old girl,' said Fred as they walked towards the dome of St Paul's, its shape rising up at the end of a gulley of tall buildings. As they came nearer, the shops and offices ended abruptly and they came out onto a wasteland of broken walls and weeds that washed right up to the steps of the cathedral.

Everyone had seen the pictures of the Luftwaffe firestorm, St Paul's surrounded by towering flames – a miracle that no bombs had hit it. But it was still a shock to see the cathedral marooned among acres of cleared bombsites. Stringy weeds had taken over the ground like a cheap version of the countryside. Fallen masonry marked where buildings had once stood. Two office girls sat with their backs against a tombstone, eating their sandwiches, almost lost in the tall, straw-coloured grass.

Peter followed Fred up the cathedral steps. Inside its whispering gloom they were met by a man in white robes, stepping out of the shadows. It took a moment to register it was a painting. The man was
holding a lamp with a greenish light, paused in the act of knocking on a bramble-covered door: Jesus knocking on the door of the soul.

They skirted the blocky pillars in silence, their footfalls echoing flatly as they walked towards the centre where the gold mosaics of the dome twinkled above the gloomy greyness of the building. The organ was playing a fugue by Bach that Peter recognised. He could feel the vibration of the bass notes like an itch in his chest bone.

‘Fancy a climb up there to the dome?' said Fred. ‘For a shilling you can go right up the ladder and stand inside the cross on top. Best view in London.'

The ladder inside the cross was surprisingly humble and workman-like, as if left there for repairs. Peter reached the murky Oriel window and scanned the view, the city spreading all the way to the horizon. Miles and miles of streets and buildings faded into a brown haze; Jerusalem, battered and bruised. If he squinted he could just make out the black sticks of the cranes and the docks beyond Tower Bridge. Somewhere out there, towards the East End, would be the parishes where he was going to work while training. He knew them already; the raggedy children playing in the streets, the men looking at the pittance in their pay packets. He saw himself opening doors for them out onto new possibilities, onto new lives. Redemption and hope.

Back again on the ground, standing with the weight of the building floating above, he felt humbled and chosen, lost for words.

Fred was engrossed in an inscription on a tomb, hands clasped behind him as he read. He turned from the tablet beneath the grand alabaster figure and looked rueful as he wandered back over to Peter. ‘Of course, for someone like you, Peter, a chance like this is going to be a step up and a step out.' He put a firm hand on Peter's shoulder, gave a small shake as if testing the strengthening of his resolution, and then began to walk towards the portico doors.

Peter stopped in his tracks. But that wasn't it at all. How to explain the impelling sense of a calling, to serve others? He followed Fred back outside to the cathedral steps, where the weed-strewn bombsites reasserted themselves, the wind gritty. There was a yellow cast to the sky, a smell of soot in the air.

‘D'you mind if I cut here? Got to meet someone, you see. You can find your way back to the halls?'

Peter nodded. He watched Fred run down the steps, coat flapping open, heading away through the derelict sites.

As Peter tried to find his way back to Victoria his eyes flickered over the faces coming towards him along the streets. There was no good reason to think that Alice would ever walk past, but he couldn't stop himself checking the oncoming faces all the same. Women in tired coats and small hats over resigned expressions; men in drooping macs or three-piece suits stretched out of shape with wear.

Cutting back up past a heap of bricks and rubble at least two storeys high he got hopelessly lost. He found himself on the edge of Trafalgar Square where smog the colour of weak tea was beginning to thicken, a cloud of pigeons whirring up around him in the yellow gloom. He realised that he must be near the bookshop in Charing Cross Road where they sold second-hand student texts. Locating the shop's frontage he pushed open the door and was taken into a warren of bookshelves.

The second-hand section was on the top floor. He climbed the narrow stairs and turned into a passageway between shelves of romantic poets. At the far end a girl in a gaberdine mac was taking a book down. She opened it and smoothed the page flat. She was so absorbed that she did not notice him there at the end of the narrow space.

Two things occurred to him. Firstly she was beautiful, a high colour in her cheeks, glossy black hair in thick waves. The second
thing that struck him was the expression on her face, hungry, her lips compressed and rueful. He recognised immediately the feeling that went with that expression. It was the other devastation left by the war, the hunger for the things you couldn't have now, the cold winds that blew through half-demolished lives.

She read on for another line or two. Then, with a swift movement, she raised the flap of her bag and slid the book inside. Peter stepped back behind the stacks. What should he do? Surely he ought to ask her to replace it. Or he should run down to the cash desk and warn them to stop her before she left.

But he didn't move. A small book to fill a gaping hole. How strange that he should feel he knew why she had done it. When he stepped forward again she was nowhere to be seen.

It was almost dark as he made his way through the murky streets, oddly wistful to think he would never see his little book thief again.

The following lunchtime Peter was standing in the green and pink marble halls of the main building beneath a handwritten notice that promised a glittering evening at the theology faculty ball, selling not many tickets, when he saw a girl with dark hair crossing the hallway. It was her. It was the thief from the bookshop. Seeing the notice about the ball she paused and then came over to read it.

Peter found himself flustered, but she calmly studied the notice. She hesitated, asked if she could buy two tickets. He heard a low voice, carefully proper vowels. Her cheeks pinker than ever as she hunted for the money in a small leather purse, determined to find enough. Handed it over, triumphant. He watched her dark hair flowing down the pinstripe cloth of her jacket as she walked away. He was surprised to notice that he was a little jealous of whoever was going to have the other ticket.

He didn't spot her at first. He didn't feel like asking anyone to dance. Then, queuing up with Fred for the buffet at ten o'clock, he finally saw her. Took him a minute to realise it was her. Even against the effort people had made for the Michaelmas ball, she looked glamorous and rare, as though Vivien Leigh had stepped down from a poster for a film. She wore a long yellow silk dress, bare shoulders, her hair piled up above a slender neck. Peter took an empty plate and moved down the buffet table, trying to keep up with her solitary quest to see how much she could balance on her plate: slices of ham, cold potatoes in salad cream, bread and butter. Haughty in her film-star dress she carried her plate out of the double doors to the terrace that looked over the Thames.