The clock ticked towards six. The Indian-summer afternoon was slipping away and that mattered so much these days, when people lay in the parks and squares basking in the sun like lizards, or stood in doorways and windows, raising their eyes to the light, storing it up against the blackout. Nobody dared think about the coming winter, when days would be shorter and air raids longer. As he crouched over the files, he could hear Hilde’s stocking-clad legs — where did she get them? — whispering to each other as she walked across to the filing cabinet. She bent to pull out the lower drawer and he gazed hungrily at her backside. A minute later, she found the file she was looking for and straightened up. As she turned, their eyes met and he saw her flinch as she registered the full force of his melancholy lust. Quickly, not looking at him, she returned to her desk.
Ah, well. She wasn’t even noticeably attractive, though to him at the moment almost all women were attractive, at least to some degree. On his last free night, he’d gone out walking. It was one of the paradoxes of his present exhausted state that on the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he sometimes found it difficult to sleep. After tossing and turning for an hour, he thought: To hell with it, and went out. Though he was London born and bred, he found the blacked-out streets not only startling, but confusing. More than once he got lost. Piccadilly, after dark, felt particularly strange, because in peacetime it had always been so brightly lit. He stopped to light a cigarette and heard the tapping of a prostitute’s heels on the pavement. High heels, on these lightless nights, always sounded erotic, but a prostitute’s especially so because they hammered tacks into the heels and toes, to make them stand out. And stand out they certainly did, beating an urgent, unmistakable tattoo. This wasn’t the only way prostitutes defeated the blackout. Another was to lurk in shop doorways and, whenever a man approached, shine their blackout torches on exposed breasts or the triangle of darkness at the apex of their thighs. He found these spotlit body parts disturbing: they reminded him of an incident he’d attended near King’s Cross where a railway arch, being used as an unofficial shelter, had suffered a direct hit. When the ambulances got there, heavy rescue squads were pulling arms, legs, heads, hands, feet from the rubble, lining them up on the pavement. Somebody had flashed a torch along the line and it was exactly like this. Revulsion and a kind of excitement. The girl whose tap-tapping footsteps he’d heard — he could see her now, walking towards him, or at least he could see the shape of her, which was all he needed or wanted to see. As he came closer, she shone her torch down onto her slim legs — the ankles almost feverishly thin. They found each other in a shop doorway. He pushed up her skirt, his fingers snagging on her stocking tops, slipping across her bare thighs into the warm, moist darkness between, moaning now, gasping for breath, over in seconds, laughing shakily as he withdrew. From beginning to end, he hadn’t seen her face.
Promptly at six, Neville closed the file he was working on and reached for his hat. Hilde was already putting on her jacket. They walked to the lift together, or if not together then at least not ostentatiously apart, but then she met one of the secretaries from the room next door and stopped to chat so he waved and went on alone.
The lift took ages to arrive; it always did at this time of day. He killed time by looking at the paintings on the wall, which were quite possibly, for all he knew, selected by Kenneth Clark himself. His office was farther down the corridor. One, in particular, Neville objected to: a landscape, a beauty spot somewhere in the Lake District, precisely the sort of painting that had no reason to exist. A bit like some of Tarrant’s early stuff. Oh my God, it might even be a Tarrant. He peered at the signature, but it was illegible, and then stood back, determined to give the painting a fair chance. No, nothing there at all, just a picture-postcard view of a lake. Couldn’t even tell which one. Ullswater? Wet, anyway.
The sight of that scrawled, illegible signature—was that a “T”?—reminded him he was having supper with the Tarrants that night. Probably not a good idea. The continued silence from Kenneth Clark had begun to prey on his mind. Of course it shouldn’t matter that he — Neville — was being continually passed over. Every night when on duty he saw lives ended prematurely, people injured, mutilated, in terrible pain. What possible importance could personal ambition have in such a context? Oh, but it did, it did. It hurt that Tarrant’s reputation had overtaken his. And yet somehow the friendship survived, though it was an odd relationship. Sometimes it hardly seemed like friendship at all.
Whatever it was, he was in for a whole evening of it. The original invitation — when they finally managed to hit on a date when nobody was on duty — had been for dinner at their house, but then Elinor had telephoned to say the house had been damaged by blast — kitchen window blown in, something like that — so now they were going to a restaurant in Dean Street instead.
Elinor was already at the bar when he arrived. She raised her cheek for him to kiss and then they settled down to wait for Tarrant, who’d been unavoidably delayed. No sirens yet.
“So you’ve been bombed?” he asked.
“Just blast. Kitchen window came in, I’ve been running round all day trying to find a glazier…”
“Still, you’ve got it boarded up all right?”
“Oh, yes, no problems there, it’s secure.”
“Well, that’s the main thing.”
“The clocks have stopped. And the electric went off for a time but it’s back on now.”
She was looking tired, he thought. Understandably. “Shall we have a drink while we wait?”
“Oh, yes, please.”
While the barman poured, she sat clasping and unclasping her hands. “You know, I was expecting Paul to be upset. About the clocks, I mean. He’s very fond of them, he’s always polishing them and winding them up, and he wasn’t at all. In fact, he was rather excited. ‘We’re outside time,’ he said.”
“Is that why he’s late?”
“No, he’ll be painting.”
“How has he been?”
“Not too bad, he’s not falling over or anything, but he does seem very unsettled. You know that woman he met—?”
“The Witch of Endor, yes.”
“He keeps talking about her.”
“I’m surprised he doesn’t see through it.”
“It’s Kenny; he blames himself. I don’t know what to say anymore, he’s got me at my wits’ end.”
Tarrant arrived a few minutes later, wearing an open-necked blue shirt and a shabby, expensive jacket. “Sorry.” He settled into the chair beside Elinor. “I lost track of time.”
Oh dear me. The artist at work.
“You still have an outside studio?”
“God, yes, I couldn’t work at home, never could.”
“I’ve got a room in the attic,” Elinor said.
Neville raised his hand to summon the waiter. “What’ll you drink, Tarrant?”
“I think I’ll stick to wine.”
“Well, make the most of it. I drink whisky all the time now. No chance of that running out. Unless he invades Scotland first.”
“Oh, don’t talk about invasion,” Elinor said. “Do you know Violet’s got a cyanide capsule? She has, she showed me.”
Bloody hell. It had come to something when middle-aged, dried-up old spinsters took to carrying cyanide capsules. What did she think was going to happen to her, for Christ’s sake?