Ursula looked in the mirror and found that she was smudged all over with soot and coal dust. ‘What a fright,’ she said.
‘You look like a coalminer,’ Millie said.
‘More like an engine driver,’ she said, rapidly recounting the night’s adventures.
‘Oh,’ Millie said, ‘Fred Smith, the butcher’s boy. He was a bit of a dish.’
‘Still is, I suppose. I’ve got eggs from Fox Corner,’ she said, removing the cardboard box that Sylvie had given her from her bag. The eggs had been nestled in straw, but now they were cracked and broken from the jolting of the track or when she fell in the engine yard.
The next day they managed to make an omelette from the salvaged remains.
‘Lovely,’ Millie said. ‘You should get home more often.’
October 1940
‘IT’S CERTAINLY BUSY tonight,’ Miss Woolf said. A glorious understatement. There was a full-scale raid in progress, bombers droning overhead, glinting occasionally when they caught a searchlight. HE bombs flashed and roared and the large batteries banged and whuffed and cracked – all the usual racket. Shells whistled or screamed on their way up, a mile a second until they winked and twinkled like stars before extinguishing themselves. Fragments came clattering down. (A few days ago Mr Simms’s cousin had been killed by shrapnel from the ack-acks in Hyde Park. ‘Shame to be killed by your own,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘Sort of pointless.’) A red glow over Holborn indicated an oil bomb. Ralph lived in Holborn but Ursula supposed on a night like this he would be in St Paul’s.
‘It’s almost like a painting, isn’t it?’ Miss Woolf said.
‘Of the Apocalypse maybe,’ Ursula said. Against the backdrop of black night the fires that had been started burnt in a huge variety of colours – scarlet and gold and orange, indigo and a sickly lemon. Occasionally vivid greens and blues would shoot up where something chemical had caught fire. Orange flames and thick black smoke roiled out of a warehouse. ‘It gives one a quite different perspective, doesn’t it?’ Miss Woolf mused. It did. It seemed both grand and terrible compared to their own grubby little labours. ‘It makes me proud,’ Mr Simms said quietly. ‘Our battling on like this, I mean. All alone.’
‘And against all odds,’ Miss Woolf sighed.
They could see all the way along the Thames. Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element. They were on the roof of Shell-Mex House. The building was now occupied by the Ministry of Supply, for which Mr Simms worked, and he had invited Ursula and Miss Woolf to come and ‘see the view from the top’.
‘It’s spectacular, isn’t it? Savage and yet strangely magnificent,’ Mr Simms said, as though they were at the summit of one of the Lakeland fells rather than a building on the Strand in the middle of a raid.
‘Well, I don’t know about magnificent, exactly,’ Miss Woolf said.
‘Churchill was up here the other night,’ Mr Simms said. ‘Such a good vantage point. He was fascinated.’
Later, when Ursula and Miss Woolf were alone, Miss Woolf said, ‘You know, I rather had the impression that Mr Simms was a lowly clerk in the ministry, he’s quite a meek soul, but he must be quite senior to have been up on the roof with Churchill.’ (One of the firewatchers on duty on the roof had said, ‘Evening, Mr Simms,’ with the kind of respect people felt obliged to afford to Maurice, although in the case of Mr Simms it was less grudgingly given.) ‘He’s unassuming,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘I like that in a man.’ Whereas I prefer assuming, Ursula thought.
‘It really is quite a show,’ Miss Woolf said.
‘Isn’t it, though?’ Mr Simms said enthusiastically. Ursula supposed that they were all aware how odd it was to be admiring the ‘show’ when they were so painfully conscious of what it meant on the ground.
‘It’s as if the gods are throwing a particularly noisy party,’ Mr Simms said.
‘One I would rather not be invited to,’ Miss Woolf said.
A familiar fearful swishing sound made them all duck for cover but the bombs exploded some way away and although they heard the explosions bang-bang-bang-bang they couldn’t see what had been hit. Ursula found it very odd to think that up above them there were German bombers being flown by men who, essentially, were just like Teddy. They weren’t evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men. Although she would make an exception for Hitler. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘I think the man is quite, quite mad.’
At that moment, to their surprise, a basket of incendiaries came swooping down and crashed its noisy load right on the ministry’s roof. The incendiaries cracked and sparked and the two firewatchers ran towards them with a stirrup pump. Miss Woolf grabbed a bucket of sand and beat them to it. (‘Fast for an old bird’ was Mr Bullock’s estimation of Miss Woolf under pressure.)
‘What if this were the world’s last night?’ a familiar voice said.
‘Ah, Mr Durkin, you managed to join us,’ Mr Simms said affably. ‘You didn’t have any trouble with the man on the door?’
‘No, no, he knew I was expected,’ Mr Durkin said, as if feeling his own importance.
‘Is anyone left at the post?’ Miss Woolf murmured to no one in particular.
Ursula felt suddenly compelled to correct Mr Durkin. ‘What if this present were the world’s last night,’ she said. ‘The word “present” makes all the difference, don’t you think? It makes it seem as if one’s somehow in the thick of it, which we are, rather than simply contemplating a theoretical concept. This is it, the end right now, no more shilly-shallying.’
‘Goodness, so much fuss over one little word,’ Mr Durkin said, sounding put out. ‘However, I obviously stand corrected.’ Ursula thought that one word could mean a great deal. If any poet was scrupulous with words then it was surely Donne. Donne, himself once the dean of St Paul’s, had been moved down to an ignominious berth in the basement of the cathedral. In death he had survived the Great Fire of London, would he survive this one too? Wellington’s tomb was too hefty to move and had simply been bricked up. Ralph had given her a tour – he was on the night watch there. He knew everything there was to know about the cathedral. Not quite the iconoclast that Pamela had presumed.
When they emerged into the bright afternoon, he said, ‘Shall we try and get a cup of tea somewhere?’ and Ursula said, ‘No, let’s go back to your place in Holborn and go to bed with each other.’ So they had and she had felt rotten because she couldn’t help thinking about Crighton while Ralph was politely accommodating his body to hers. Afterwards, he had seemed abashed as if he no longer knew how to be with her. She said, ‘I’m just the same person as I was before we did this,’ and he said, ‘I’m not sure I am.’ And she thought, oh dear God, he’s a virgin, but he laughed and said, no, no, that wasn’t it – he wasn’t – it was just that he was so very much in love with her ‘and now I feel, I don’t know … sublimated’.
‘Sublimated?’ Millie said. ‘Sounds like sentimental twaddle to me. He has you on a pedestal, heaven help him when he discovers that you have feet of clay.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Is that a mixed metaphor or is it a rather clever image?’ Millie, of course had always—
‘Miss Todd?’
‘Sorry. Miles away.’
‘We should get back to our sector,’ Miss Woolf said. ‘It’s strange, but one feels rather safe up here.’