Stratton's War (32 page)

Read Stratton's War Online

Authors: Laura Wilson

At half-past six, Apse gave her the perfect opportunity to talk to F-J by asking her to drop off some documents at his flat on her way home. She raced across the garden clutching the papers and almost fell up the stairs in her haste to reach him. Margot Mentmore opened the door. ‘Woooh! The cavalry’s arrived! Are you all right, Diana? You look awfully hot and bothered.’
‘Fine, thanks,’ Diana panted. ‘Is F-J here?’
‘Of course, I’ll tell him you’re here. How’s the delightful Claude? We haven’t seen him for a while.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Diana, irritated. ‘I haven’t seen him, either.’
‘Really?’ Margot raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you two lovebirds quarrelled?’
‘We’re not lovebirds,’ snapped Diana.
‘Oh, no, of course not.’ Margot rolled her eyes. ‘Perish the thought.’
 
F-J, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, was peering under the piles of paper on his desk when Diana entered his office. ‘She’s hidden it again,’ he said.
‘Here.’ Diana extracted a box of matches from her handbag.
‘Thank you. What have you got for me?’
‘These, sir.’ Diana deposited Apse’s documents on top of a stack of books. ‘And I’ve got something to report.’
‘Oh? You’d better sit down, then. Drink?’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Diana removed several folders from a spare chair while F-J splashed Scotch into a couple of tumblers.
‘Fire away.’
‘Well, sir . . .’ When Diana had finished explaining about the coded message she’d found at the bottom of the cutlery drawer at Apse’s flat, F-J stared out of the window for a moment, and then, turning back to her, said, ‘I see. You’re sure about this, are you?’
‘It was there, sir. I saw it. Some sort of code, I thought, arranged in groups of four letters.’
‘I see,’ he repeated, his voice heavy with disappointment.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, sir.’
‘Yes.’ F-J sighed, and turned to look out of the window. After a few minutes staring across the garden in the direction of Frobisher House, during which Diana kept quiet and sipped her drink, he turned back and said abruptly, ‘You’ll have to search his flat.’
‘But sir, I—’
‘Thoroughly. And we’ll need a copy of that document. Apse tells me he’ll be spending the weekend with his family, so you can do it on Friday night when there’s no-one there. Go through everything - and I do mean everything, Diana.’
‘You mean his bedroom, sir? His private things?’
‘Yes,’ said F-J. ‘I know it’s distasteful, but it’s got to be done.’
Walking back to Tite Street, it crossed Diana’s mind that perhaps F-J would rather not have known about Apse. But I had to tell him, she thought, even if he doesn’t like me for discovering it. He’d certainly treated her with less warmth than usual - no enquiry about Guy, or her week down at Evie’s, although, on reflection, that was probably just as well.
The thought of never seeing Claude again, or kissing him, or feeling his arms around her, gave her an actual, physical ache in the chest. Heartache. The word came to her with a sort of dull surprise. I suppose that’s something else I’ve learnt, she thought. The jeering, worldly voice in her head, which had been growing more intrusive each day, said, ‘My, aren’t we growing up?’
‘Yes,’ muttered Diana, ‘We bloody well are.’
 
On Friday at five o’clock, after three days that seemed to pass in a flash, Apse left Frobisher House, valise in hand, to catch the train to the country. Diana went home, changed into slacks and a jersey, then drew the blackout curtains and sat in her room, smoking and counting the hours until it was dark enough to return to Dolphin Square. The worst of it was having no-one to talk to about Apse or Claude or any of it. She couldn’t tell Lally about Apse, and if she mentioned Claude she would - deservedly, it had to be said - get another flea in her ear. We’d only end up rowing, she thought, remembering how angry and defensive she’d been with Margot earlier in the day. Lally and Margot were good friends, she knew. Some people have a gift for that sort of thing, she reflected wistfully, but I don’t seem to be one of them.
She stared at the photograph of her parents that she kept on the dressing table, but it wasn’t reassuring. All it did was to remind her that, without it, she would hardly have been able to remember their faces at all. When she thought of her mother, she pictured a face in a sort of mist, vague and wispy, with blurred features, and the thing she most clearly recalled about her father was his smell, which had been a mixture of pipe, dog, and leather. Perhaps they hadn’t been good at friendship either, and she’d somehow inherited their lack of warmth. Her very childhood seemed long ago and not properly connected to her, as if it had happened to a different person.
At half-past nine she poured herself a small Scotch - Dutch courage, why not? - and lay down on her bed, scouring her memory for something comforting to latch on to. Eventually, she came up with a ludicrous infant mistake over the Lord’s Prayer, which she’d heard as ‘Our Father, Which art in Heaven, Harold be Thy name . . .’ It hadn’t seemed odd to her at the time - after all, God’s son was called Jesus, so why shouldn’t God have a name, too? It had struck her as strange that people could be called Harold, when, as far as she knew, no-one was called Jesus, but she accepted it, just as she accepted everything else, because it was all she knew. It just goes to show, she thought, that nothing is ever what it seems . . . I am not what I seem, even to myself. As one got older and life got more complicated, the mental acrobatics grew more difficult - and never more so than now.
Shrugging off her mood of self-pity, she downed the rest of her drink, checked that her torch was in her handbag, and put on her shoes and fur coat, the fine September weather having yielded to bitter cold in October. The sirens were starting up as she left the house. For a second, it crossed her mind that she could, reasonably, use this as an excuse not to go - but only for a second. Thoughts of Evie’s reaction if she were killed, combined with her sense of duty to F-J, only served to harden her resolve. Clutching her torch and muttering prayers through gritted teeth, she made her way as quickly as she could down to the Embankment. By the time she got there, the noise of the raid and the boom of guns was continuous, and the sky, criss-crossed by searchlight beams, was rose coloured from a dozen fires burning on the other side of the river, the light of which turned the water a dirty yellow. She saw a man and a girl coming towards her, and just had time to hear her say, ‘I told you we should have gone to the pictures, we’d be better off there,’ when a swishing, rushing noise, which seemed to be coming right at her, shook the pavement. She had a moment of utter blankness and then, as the very air seemed to disintegrate around her, felt herself pushed flat on the ground.
In the calm that followed the explosion, she lay on the gritty, dirty flagstone, enveloped in a cloud of dust and smoke that made her choke, and felt nothing but numbness. A small voice in the middle of the silence asked, ‘Where did it go?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered the man. ‘Over there somewhere.’ Diana felt a tug on her sleeve. ‘You all right, miss?’
‘I think so.’ She struggled into a sitting position, and saw the man and the girl beside her. ‘Here,’ said the man, offering his hand.
‘Thank you.’
‘Well, it can’t have gone in the river,’ said the girl. ‘We’d have heard the splash.’
‘Not with all that racket,’ said the man.
Diana looked round. ‘Over there,’ she said. A few hundred yards down the road was the silhouette of a vast jumble of debris that had once been a house but looked, in the dim and flickering light, like nothing more than a huge heap of coal that had slewed out onto the pavement.
‘That’ll be it,’ said the man. ‘Told you it wasn’t the river.’
‘Well, it might have been,’ said the girl. They continued on their way, still arguing. Diana took a few steps after them, with the vague intention of going to help, but her feet didn’t seem to want to take her. She stood, dazed, trying to will herself forwards, but her legs were shaking too much to obey any signals, and, fearing that she might simply fall over like a ninepin, she tottered across the pavement and leant against the nearest wall. After a moment, she was aware of an odd, insistent noise, and realised that her teeth were chattering. There is nothing I can do here, she thought. This is someone else’s work. Slowly, using the wall for support, she began to move forward, stumbling on the debris and glass that littered the pavement, willing herself to concentrate only on the next step.
By the time she reached Dolphin Square, fire engines, tenders, and ambulances were hurrying past towards Chelsea Bridge, and her strength had returned, together with a feeling of elation, almost hilarity, at something conquered. She ran up the stairs of Frobisher House with renewed energy, opened Apse’s front door, and shone her torch into the office. Apse had pulled the blackout curtains before he’d left, so the beam would not be seen from outside. She took off her shoes and carried them into the kitchen, where she deposited them on the floor, washed the grime off her hands and set about copying down the coded message. Somehow, the near-miss had sharpened her brain; seldom had she known such clarity of thought. Leaning on the wooden draining board, writing down the meaningless sequence of letters, she felt as if she were wired up to an electrical circuit that made her bright and sharp and instant, like light itself. The noise of the raid and the answering ack-ack was all around her, and several times, when the bombs seemed almost on top of her, she stopped and folded herself in the space under the draining board. Her rational mind knew it would make no difference if the place was hit, but somehow sheltering underneath something, even if it was only a thin plank of wood, made her feel safer while the building shook and a thin rain of plaster dust fell from the ceiling. She caught herself praying, ‘Our Father Which art in Heaven, Harold be Thy name . . .’ and laughed. Surely, she thought, as she scrambled to her feet, God would not mind?
She was determined to complete her task: if Apse’s flat were hit before she’d finished, then any evidence she might gather would be lost. She checked and re-checked her copy of the message, put it in her bag, returned the original to the drawer, then went down the corridor to the bedroom to set about searching the wardrobe. There seemed nothing out of place - shirts, suits, shoes and all the usual accoutrements - and the only thing that struck her as peculiar was a framed photograph of a young boy and girl (Pammy and Pimmy, perhaps?) hidden beneath a pile of underclothes in the chest of drawers. Maybe, she thought, Apse had put it there to stop it being damaged if the building was hit. It seemed a vain hope, but people did strange things out of a kind of superstition . . . perhaps, by protecting this image of his children (assuming they were his children) Apse felt that he was protecting them. This thought gave her such a feeling of warmth towards him that she felt instantly shamed by what she was doing, closed the drawer, and left the room in confusion. As she was about to return and set to once more, she heard, through the noise of the raid, another sound - quiet, closer - a click, and then a creak. Someone had opened the door of the flat.
Diana froze. Another second, and whoever it was would turn on the light and see her standing there. Behind her, in the corridor, was a full-height cupboard, built into the wall. Almost without thinking, she opened the door and, seeing a space beneath the lower shelf, dropped onto all fours and crawled into it, pulling the door closed a second before the light was switched on. After a moment, a lull in the bombing allowed her to hear the scuffling of feet on the mat, the sound of someone depositing a bag on the floor, and then a voice - Apse, but why had he come back? - said, ‘Here we are.’ A male voice - a London accent, not Cockney, but not far off it - said, ‘Nice place.’ Diana’s heart thudded in her chest, almost as loud to her ears as the guns. More murmurings, from the direction of the office; she strained to listen. She heard the sound of drinks being poured. Thank God she’d replenished the water in the jug on the tray that afternoon. If Apse went into the kitchen, he’d see her things on the floor . . . What on earth was he doing? Why wasn’t he in the country with his family? Perhaps the railway station had been bombed, and he’d had to come back, or . . . what? And who was the other? She didn’t recognise the voice - it sounded young, but it couldn’t be the son of one of his friends . . . a servant from home, perhaps, who’d gone into the services? ‘When you followed me,’ the man was saying, ‘I thought you was a policeman.’ The man must be from the Right Club, Diana thought, or one of Mosley’s followers who’d managed to stay out of gaol. She remembered Apse’s words about dealing with unsavoury people - but this, clearly, was someone he trusted enough to bring into his home. She heard laughter, and then Apse’s voice, ‘A friend told me to look out for you.’ He sounded different, almost - to Diana’s disbelief - coquettish.

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