The Fall (47 page)

T
HE METAMORPHOSIS
was complete: London had been a provincial city cringing beneath the bombs; it had become a metropolis, filled with uniforms
and accents from all corners of the earth. Bomb damage was still evident — you still turned a corner and found a wasteland,
with willow herb growing over the rubble — but the bombers had done their worst and the flying bombs after them, and now the
war had moved on.

How is Alan?
Meg wrote.
Do give him my love. He is awfully nice and really very devoted, and I’m so happy to hear about your engagement. It makes
me feel quite on the shelf. That’s a joke: I’m having a wonderful time, and marriage couldn’t be further from my thoughts!
You know what they say — go out with a Pole and come home with a Czech.

She carefully added
check
in parentheses in case Di didn’t get the joke. Since she’d moved to the Air Ministry, she’d got in with a fast set. It was
the Café Royale and the Trocadero and places like that most nights. This evening, when she’d finished the letter to Di and
had a bath and changed, it was going to be the Café èlysée. Elysian fields, all right.

There’s a rather dishy young colonel (my goodness, the colonels are only about thirty years old these days!), who’s something
in Special Operations,
she wrote.
Will I surrender my virtue yet again? I wonder.

The Café èlysée was off Leicester Square. The entrance was an inconspicuous door between a cinema and a tobacconist’s. You
went downstairs into the foyer, where there was a bar on one side and doors ahead of you opening out onto the balcony. It
was always a surprise to newcomers. First the shadowy foyer with people drinking at the bar, and then you pushed through the
double doors and there was the café laid out below like a stage seen from the gods — gilt tables, red plush, the lights on each
table almost like candles, the mirrors throwing the scene back at you from a dozen different directions. There always seemed
to be a crowd there — men just back from the Middle East or Europe where they had risked life and limb, and with them women
who were usually prepared to risk other things besides. The colonel — Colonel Tommy, she called him because that was what she’d
heard his driver call him and she thought it rather fetching — had been delayed by some flap or other and telephoned her to
go on ahead without him, and she was damned if she was going to worry about being a girl on her own, so there she was, descending
the stairs in style and making her way between the tables toward the one that had been booked by her own group, and there
was this man, sitting at a table with four others — two men and a couple of girls — five in all, and Meg knew at once.

She paused. Someone from her group waved at her. The man looked up. He didn’t recognize her. Of course he didn’t. A strong
face, suntanned, looking more mature than so many of the others. Army general service uniform with the rank badges of a major.

“Aren’t you Guy?” she asked.

He got to his feet, looking faintly embarrassed. “Yes…but I’m afraid…”

“Margaret York. Sounds like something out of the Wars of the Roses. That’s what you said. People call me Meg, although I always
think
that
sounds like a sheepdog.”

They shook hands, but he clearly still didn’t remember. Behind them the band came onto the diminutive stage to scattered applause.
“I’m a friend of Diana Sheridan’s,” she explained. “We met in Wales…”

He reddened. Even in the subdued lighting of the èlysée you could see it. “Oh, my goodness, yes,” he said, and sat down in
his chair as though she had pushed him. “Are you in touch with her? How is she? Look, won’t you join us for a drink or something?
Let me introduce you…” There was a shaking of hands with his friends and an exchange of brittle, instant smiles. Meg ordered
a gin and tonic. Guy drew up a chair for her, and she sat down, crossed her legs, and looked at him thoughtfully. “I didn’t
expect to see you in uniform,” she said. “Well, I didn’t expect to see you
at all,
come to that. But certainly not in uniform.”

He withered under her gaze. “I changed my mind.”

“You did
what?
Good Lord, I thought you were immutable in your beliefs.”

“It does sound dreadfully feeble, doesn’t it?” he admitted. “But when that business about the concentration camps came out — when
was it? two years ago now? that announcement in Parliament by Eden — I sat down and I thought about everything…” He shrugged
and looked at her as though for help. “You know what I mean?”

She gave him her withering look. “Most people had worked that kind of thing out long before.”

“Maybe I’m a bit slow.” He laughed awkwardly. “Anyway, they needed people with my skills to train squaddies not to fall off
cliffs, and that’s more or less what I did — in North Wales. Arduous training, they call it. But now they’ve posted me to an
office in Whitehall. Typical, isn’t it?”

The band had started playing — some Benny Goodman number — and a few couples had got up to dance. “So tell me about Diana,” Guy
said. “Is she well?”

“Haven’t you heard from her?”

“We exchanged letters for a while, but she sort of…told me to stop. Actually, when I got to London I did try and find her.
Went to the place where she had been billeted…”

“And?”

He looked distressed. “Nothing. Bombed out. Well, of course I thought, oh my God, Di…So I asked around, in the local pub,
the corner shop, the ARP post, that kind of thing. But the owners were the only victims, apparently. A Mr. and Mrs. Wardle
or something —”

“Warren.”

“You knew them?”

“I met them.”

“Both of them killed, poor devils. Last winter in fact, a doodlebug, a direct hit. I must admit it’s a bit of a relief to
know for sure that Di’s still…around.”

“Oh, yes, she’s still around,” Meg said. She thought for a moment, sipping her gin and watching Guy’s face with care. Clearly
he didn’t know, he didn’t know a thing. “As a matter of fact, she’s married.”

“Married? Good Lord.”

“Yes, married. It does happen. In Di’s case, to a doctor. He works in Liverpool General Hospital, although they met when she
was here in London. They’re very happy.” It was hard to read the man’s expression — sadness of some kind, but a nostalgic sort
of sadness, as though he was regretting a whole lot of things that were not just Diana: his life before the war, the mountains
perhaps, his vanished pacifist principles.

“Well, that’s excellent, then,” he said. “I’m glad she’s happy.”

Meg glanced around. People were coming down the stairs from the balcony, her colonel among them. “I’m afraid I have to go.”

Guy rose from his chair. “Maybe I could get in touch with you some time?”

She thought for a moment, considering him carefully as one might consider the future and wonder what it had to offer. Then
she opened her respirator case, found a pen, and bent to scribble on the back of a bill. “My phone number. There are three
others in the flat, so someone’s usually there to take a call. One of my flatmates is on nights, so try not to ring in the
morning.” And then she had gone to join her friends, easing her hips around the other tables, waving to Tommy, who suddenly
seemed rather obvious, gauche even, loudmouthed and uninteresting beside Guy Matthewson. Guy’s eyes followed her as she went,
watching the sinuous line of the seam down the back of her stockings. She knew it.

He rang a few days later. They went out to the cinema together and to supper afterward. It was hardly a passionate encounter:
he was polite and withdrawn, as though Meg were some kind of relative, a distant cousin perhaps, and he was doing all this
out of a sense of duty. She felt cross throughout the evening, cross that he was not making a pass at her, cross that he could
presume to take her out without doing so, cross that Diana had broken through barriers that seemed, for the moment, impregnable
to her.

When he dropped her back at her apartment, he got out of the cab and came around to her side and even accompanied her to the
front door of the block, but no, he didn’t think he ought to come in for a coffee or anything. He ought to be getting back — an
early start tomorrow. He put out his hand, and he actually expected her to
shake
it, shake his bloody hand, for God’s sake. “Don’t I even get a kiss?” she asked.

He smiled wryly, and bent and kissed her gently on the cheek. Brother and bloody sister, she thought. She turned away and
walked in through the door and didn’t even glance around as the car started up and drew away. That was the last she would
see of Mr. Guy bloody Matthewson. She would consign him to the scrap heap of lousy dates.

A
LTHOUGH IT CAME
shortly after VE day, shortly after the end of the war in the West, shortly after those two days of cheering and laughing
and herding rather aimlessly — and later drunkenly — around the streets of London, Diana’s wedding was a drab affair with little
in the way of celebration. There were the uncles and aunts and cousins there, of course, but so many old friends were still
far away. Not that Meg minded that, really. Somehow the friends from before the war had lost their relevance: they seemed
to belong to another person and another century.

“Darling, I’m wildly honored,” she had said when Diana had asked her to be a bridesmaid, “but I’m not sure that it’s really
appropriate, is it? Aren’t bridesmaids meant to be just that?”

“Just what?”

“Well,
maids,
darling. You know,
virgo intacta.
Hardly the case, is it? Haven’t you got some adorable little cousins who can look coy and be sick all over their dresses?”

“Well, it’s hardly the case with me either, and I’m wearing white.”

“Maybe I could be a matron of honor,” Meg suggested as a compromise. “Mind you, that sounds as though I’ve got fifty-two-inch
hips.”

Di’s wedding dress was adapted from her mother’s. Rationing meant that a new one was out of the question, but she looked pretty
enough, if a little passé. Alan was solemn and rather fine in kilt and tight black jacket. He insisted on explaining the finer
points of his kit — the
skean-dhu,
the type of tartan, all that kind of nonsense — to anyone who would listen. That was rather a bore. And of course the inevitable
jokes were made — about sporrans, about what Scotsmen wear beneath the kilt — but not in front of the groom. The couple seemed
happy — they
were
happy, according to Di. “He’s very
kind,”
she assured Meg. “Very
thoughtful
.”

The service was in the church in Diana’s village, and the reception was at a hotel in Chester. It was rather dull and really
a bit thin on champagne. Meg slipped away and went upstairs to find Di in one of the bedrooms, where she was fussing over
her going-away dress. She was standing in front of the mirror in her underwear with the dress held against her like a limp
and recalcitrant child. It was in some kind of nondescript gray wool, but it had still cost, Diana claimed, twelve coupons.

“Darling, it’s lovely,” Meg said. “It makes you look positively
respectable”.

“Trouble is…”

“What’s the trouble, darling?”

“Alan knows I’m not.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. Everyone’s been in your position these days.”

“You haven’t.”

“There’ve been a few close calls, I can tell you. Look, darling, there’s no point in just standing there
posing.
You’ve got to put the damn thing
on.
By the way…” She said it casually, tossed it into the conversation like someone throwing a stone into a pond, just to watch
the ripples: “By the way, I came across your old flame the other day.”

“Who’s that?” Di asked. “Eric?”

“Don’t be silly, darling. How on earth could it be Eric? He was posted missing in action three years ago. No, Guy Matthewson.”

Diana went pale. There she was, dressed in her underwear — parachute silk underwear, Meg happened to know, having been instrumental
in getting hold of the material — and hugging her dress to her and looking as though she was about to be sick all over it. She
sat heavily on the bed. “Oh my God,” she whispered.