He liked undressing her, liked looking at her. ‘Like a Renoir,’ he said, although he knew little about art. Better a Renoir than a Rubens, she thought. Or a Picasso, for that matter. He had bestowed on her the great gift of regarding herself naked with little, if any, criticism. Moira, apparently, was a floor-length flannelette and lights-out woman. Sometimes Ursula wondered if Crighton didn’t exaggerate his wife’s sturdy qualities. Once or twice it had crossed her mind to journey out to Wargrave to catch a glimpse of the wronged wife and find out if she really was a dowd. The problem, of course, with Moira in the flesh (Rubenesque, not Renoir, she imagined) would be that Ursula would find it difficult to betray a real person rather than an enigma.
(‘But she is a real person,’ Pamela puzzled. ‘It’s a specious argument.’
‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ This later, at Hugh’s sixtieth birthday, a rather querulous affair in the spring.)
The suite had a magnificent view of the river, from Waterloo Bridge to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, all shadowy now, in the encroaching twilight. (‘The violet hour’.) She could just make out Cleopatra’s Needle, a dark finger poking skywards. None of the usual blaze and twinkle of London lights. The blackout had already begun.
‘The bolthole wasn’t available then? We’re out in the open?’ Ursula said while Crighton opened a bottle of champagne that had been waiting for them in a sweating silver bucket. ‘Are we celebrating?’
‘Saying our adieux,’ Crighton said, joining her at the window and handing her a glass.
‘Our adieux?’ Ursula said, bemused. ‘You’ve brought me to a good hotel and are plying me with champagne in order to end it all between us?’
‘Adieu to the peace,’ Crighton said. ‘We’re saying goodbye to the world as we know it.’ He raised his glass in the direction of the window, to London, in its dusky glory. ‘To the beginning of the end,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ve left Moira,’ he added, as if it were an afterthought, a nothing. Ursula was caught by surprise.
‘And the girls?’ (Just checking, she thought.)
‘All of them. Life is too precious to be unhappy.’ Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim.
Suddenly and unexpectedly panicked, Ursula said, ‘I don’t want to marry you.’ She hadn’t realized quite how strongly she felt until the words came out of her mouth.
‘I don’t want to marry you either,’ Crighton said, and, perversely, she felt disappointed.
‘I’ve taken a lease on a flat in Egerton Gardens,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps you would come and join me.’
‘To cohabit? To live in sin in Knightsbridge?’
‘If you will.’
‘My, you are bold,’ she said. ‘What about your career?’
He made a dismissive sound. So, she, and not the war, was to be his new Jutland then.
‘Will you say yes? Ursula?’
Ursula stared through the window at the Thames. The river was almost invisible now.
‘We should have a toast,’ she said. ‘What is it they say in the navy – “Sweethearts and wives – may they never meet”?’ She chinked her glass against Crighton’s and said, ‘I’m starving, we are going to eat, aren’t we?’
April 1940
A CAR HORN down in the street below broke the Sunday-morning silence of Knightsbridge. Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly.
‘Why the horn,’ Crighton said, ‘when we have a perfectly good doorbell?’ He looked out of the window. ‘He’s here,’ he said, ‘if he’s a young man in a three-piece suit puffed up like a Christmas robin.’
‘That does sound like him.’ Although Ursula didn’t think of Maurice as ‘young’, had never thought of him as young, but she supposed he was to Crighton.
Hugh’s sixtieth birthday and Maurice had grudgingly offered her a lift to Fox Corner for the celebrations. It was going to be a novelty, and not necessarily a good one, to spend time cloistered in a car with Maurice. They were rarely alone with each other.
‘He has petrol?’ Crighton had said, raising an eyebrow but really it was more a statement than a question.
‘He has a driver,’ Ursula said. ‘I knew Maurice would squeeze the most out of the war.’ ‘What war?’ Pamela would have said. She was ‘marooned’ in Yorkshire with only six small boys for company and Jeanette, who had turned out to be not merely a moaner but ‘quite the fainéante. I expected better of a vicar’s daughter. She’s so lazy, I run around all day long after her boys as well as mine. I’ve had enough of this evacuation lark, I think we’ll come home soon.’
‘I suppose he could hardly turn up at home in a car without having given me a lift,’ Ursula said. ‘Maurice wouldn’t want to be seen to be behaving badly, even by his own family. He has a reputation to keep up. Besides, his family are staying there and he’s bringing them back to London tonight.’ Maurice had sent Edwina and the children to stay at Fox Corner for the Easter holidays. Ursula had wondered if he knew something about the war that the public didn’t – was Easter to be a particularly hazardous time? There must be so many things that Maurice knew that others didn’t, but Easter had passed off without incident and she supposed it was merely a case of grandchildren visiting grandparents. Philip and Hazel were very uninventive children and Ursula wondered how they were getting on with Sylvie’s rambunctious evacuees. ‘It’ll be horribly crowded on the way back, with Edwina and the children. Not to mention the driver. Still, needs must and so on.’
The car horn sounded again. Ursula ignored it as a matter of principle. How wickedly satisfying it would be, she thought, to have Crighton in tow, in full naval fig (all those medals, all that gold braid), outranking Maurice in so many ways. ‘You could come with me, you know,’ she said to him. ‘We just wouldn’t mention Moira. Or the girls.’
‘Is it your home?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You said, “he could hardly turn up at home”. Isn’t this? Your home?’ Crighton said.
‘Yes, of course,’ Ursula said. Maurice was pacing impatiently up and down on the pavement and she rapped on the window pane to get his attention and held up her index finger, mouthing ‘one minute’ to him. He frowned at her. ‘It’s a figure of speech,’ she said, turning back to Crighton. ‘One always refers to one’s parents’ place as “home”.’
‘Does one? I don’t.’
No, thought Ursula, you don’t. Wargrave was ‘home’ for Crighton, even if only in his thoughts. And he was right, of course, she didn’t consider the flat in Egerton Gardens to be her home. It was a point in time, a temporary stopping-off place on yet another journey that the war had interrupted. ‘We can argue the point if you want,’ she said amiably. ‘It’s just, you know … Maurice, marching up and down out there like a little tin soldier.’
Crighton laughed. He never looked for arguments.
‘I would love to join you and meet your family,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to the Citadel.’ The Admiralty was constructing an underground fortress, the Citadel, on Horse Guards Parade and Crighton was in the process of moving his office over.
‘I’ll see you later then,’ Ursula said. ‘My carriage awaits and Maurice is pawing the ground.’
‘Ring,’ Crighton reminded her and Ursula said, ‘Oh, yes, of course, I nearly forgot.’ She had started wearing a wedding ring when not at work, for appearances’ sake, ‘Tradesmen, and so on.’ The boy who delivered the milk, the woman who came in to clean twice a week, she didn’t want them thinking she was in an illicit relationship. (She had surprised herself with this bashfulness.)