“She’s a Communist. Was, anyway.”
“Violet?”
Elinor bristled. “Why not?”
“You never really know people, do you?”
The waiter brought them a menu, which showed a surprising range of choice. “They’re good here,” Tarrant said.
Elinor began reminiscing about food in Spain. “It’s so easy, you know, you go to the market every day, everything’s so fresh.”
“It’s becoming a bit of a legend, our time out there,” Tarrant said.
“Yes,” Elinor said. “It is a bit; it’s our Land of Lost Content. Well, mine, anyway.”
“When did you come back?”
“We gave the place up in ’36,” Tarrant said. “A man we knew very well — he used to keep an eye on the house when we were in England — was shot in the marketplace and nobody was charged though everybody knew who’d done it — so we thought: Right, that’s it, time to go.”
“I still think about sitting out on the terrace in the early morning, having coffee; the sun used to catch the top of the church and everywhere else was still dark.” She seemed to be on the verge of tears.
Tarrant said, quite sharply, “I think we can be just as happy here.” No response. “Elinor’s inherited her mother’s cottage and it’s…Well, it’s really rather nice.”
“Roses round the door.”
Tarrant put his glass down. “I think you’d like it if you’d only give it a chance.”
Elinor seemed to become aware that Neville was being virtually excluded from the conversation — excluded, but also used as an audience. She said lightly, or with an attempt at lightness, “Paul wants to pack me off to the country, away from all the nasty bombs.”
“Yes. I do — and I’m not ashamed of it either.” He looked directly at Neville. “I’d just find everything so much easier if I knew she was safe.”
“She? I am still here, you know.”
Tarrant was looking increasingly exasperated. “People didn’t take their wives into the trenches with them.”
“No, but the trenches didn’t run through the family living room.”
“And now they do?”
“Paul, the kitchen window was blown in last night! Anyway, I’m not going and that’s that.”
A tense silence.
“You’d be missed,” Neville said. Not perhaps the most tactful thing he could have said, but true all the same.
She looked at him and smiled, and immediately he was back in the country lane, seeing her nipples, hearing a loud plop as a frog, affronted by the invasion of his territory, leapt to safety in a ditch…And for all the hope he had of kissing the princess, he might as well have been the fucking frog. All the same, this marriage was in trouble. Oh, they’d both deny it, but all the same it was. He knew the signs.
Fortunately, at that moment, the waiter arrived to tell them their table was ready, and over the meal the talk took a less abrasive turn.
—
GOING HOME in the taxi, Elinor said, “I wish you hadn’t mentioned the cottage.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want him telling the other drivers and them thinking I’m suddenly going to not show up or something.”
“I don’t think he’ll do that.”
“He’s a gossip.”
“No, he’s not. He’s not interested enough in other people to be a gossip.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Tell you one thing, though, he’s a bit in love with you.”
A yelp of disbelief. When she saw he was serious, she said: “Actually, I used to think he was a bit in love with you.”
“What, Neville? No, he’s not like that.”
She shrugged and stared out of the window, though there was little to be seen except a circle of blue warning lights around a crater in the road.
While Paul paid the driver, Elinor opened the front door and went through into the drawing room, where she was immediately confronted by the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, its hands stopped at twenty past three. Oddly enough, the grandfather clock on the upstairs landing disagreed, putting the time of the explosion at twenty-five to four.
She remembered how strange Paul had been, how almost…elated. She’d watched him bending over the clock, shaking it gently to see if it would start, getting out the key, trying to wind it up. She’d been so sure he’d be upset, even perhaps disproportionately upset, but when he turned to face her his eyes were shining. We’re outside time, he’d said.
She heard the taxi pull away and a moment later Paul came into the room. “Do you fancy another drink or…?”
“No, I think I’ll go up now.”
Undressed, stretched about between the sheets, she waited for him to join her, worrying about the broken window and where, in this city of broken glass, she was going to find a glazier willing to take on a small domestic job. Paul got undressed quickly, and as soon as he got into bed turned on his side away from her. Cautiously, not sure if she’d be welcome or not, she rested her cheek between his shoulder blades, feeling a raised mole pressing into her skin. She could have drawn, from memory, the position of every mole on his back. She rested her hand on his hip, then let it slide across his stomach until she was gently cupping his balls. His breath quickened, but he didn’t turn to face her, or, in any other way, respond, and after a while she took her hand away.
SIXTEEN
Elinor came off duty, her hair gray with dust and her trousers sticking uncomfortably to the backs of her thighs. She’d tried shampooing her hair in the showers, but it didn’t work. If you weren’t careful you risked turning the plaster dust into a paste. People were aged by it, the dust in their hair, that and the rings of exhaustion under their eyes. Women who, before the war, had worn no makeup plastered themselves with it now. Even Violet had been seen dabbing girlishly pink lipstick on her mouth. Dana, like Elinor, went the whole hog: vanishing cream, powder, rouge, eye shadow, the lot.
Elinor walked quickly. She wanted to get home, make tea, have a bath, fall into bed and snatch a couple of hours’ sleep before starting on the shopping and cooking and the hundred and one other things that had to be fitted in as if everything were normal. Painting? Ah, well. Somehow, in these changed circumstances, Paul went on painting. She didn’t.
The sun was only just rising over the rooftops of the still-intact buildings, casting a cruel light on ruins that had already become familiar, no longer novelties to be gawped at. There was a gap on the corner, and it was an effort to remember which shop used to be there, though it couldn’t be more than a week since that bomb fell. Everywhere, there was the crunch of glass under tramping feet as people came up out of the shelters, blinked, took deep breaths, tried to decide between heading home or going straight to work. The streets glittered, hurting her eyes.
Farther along, she stopped, then almost ran the rest of the way, because now she could see yellow tape stretched across the entrance to the square. Somebody’s house must’ve been hit, and though really it was no more than a nameless, mouth-parching fear, the conviction grew on her that this time her luck had run out, this time it was her house that had gone.
A group of people, among them many of her neighbors, was standing at the tape. An old man with white hair tried to duck under it, but a warden yelled at him to get back. There was a time bomb at the center of the square, under the grass, and another in the middle of the road. She could see a sort of boil under the tarmac. Until those bombs were dealt with, nobody was going home.
From this angle, she couldn’t quite see her house, though she could see that a house three doors farther up had been virtually demolished — that must be where the bomb had fallen. So her house — hers and Paul’s — had to be badly damaged. It couldn’t not be.