Coming Home

  He was laughing at her. ‘But what?’

  ‘You could always take yourself out for a meal. The Royal Court Hotel perhaps?’

  ‘That would be no fun at all.’

  ‘If I'd known you were coming…’

  ‘I know, you'd have baked a cake. Don't worry. I have used my foresight. My mother helped me pack a little nosebag.’ He gave the canvas sailing-bag a kick. ‘This is it.’

  Judith peered down into it, and saw the gleam of a bottle. ‘At least you've got your priorities right.’

  ‘There was no need for me to lug it up the stairs. It weighs a ton. I'd have dumped it in the kitchen, only when I saw the lights, my first thought was to find out who was here.’

  ‘Who could it have been, but me? Or Athena. Or Loveday. Rupert's in the desert, and Gus is in the Far East.’

  ‘Ah, but there are others. Nancherrow's become a home-from-home, a sort of non-stop canteen for young service officers. They come from Culdrose and the Royal Marine Training Camp at Bran Tor. Anyone special, whom Diana takes a shine to, she presents them with a key.’

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘So the club is no longer so exclusive. Do you come here often?’

  ‘Not very. Weekends, sometimes.’

  ‘And this is one of them?’

  ‘Yes. But I have to get back to Portsmouth tomorrow.’

  ‘I wish I could stay. I could take you out for lunch.’

  ‘But you can't.’

  ‘No. I can't. Do you want a drink?’

  ‘There's nothing in the cupboard.’

  ‘But ample in my ditty-bag.’ He stooped and heaved it up, and it clanked a bit and looked enormously heavy. ‘Come on, and I'll show you.’

  He led the way downstairs again, and they went into the little kitchen, and he dumped the bag on the table and commenced to unload it. The brown linoleum felt chilly under bare feet, so Judith sat on the other end of the table, and it was a bit like watching somebody open a Christmas stocking. One had absolutely no idea what goody was coming out next. A bottle of Black and White whisky. A bottle of Gordon's gin. Two lemons. An orange. Three packets of potato crisps and a pound of farm butter. A slab of Terry's dark chocolate, and, last of all, a sinister blood-stained parcel, the outer wrapping of which was newspaper.

  ‘What's in there?’ Judith asked. ‘A severed head?’

  ‘Steaks.’ He spelled it out. ‘S-T-E-A-K-S.’

  ‘Where did you get steaks from? And farm butter? Your mother isn't dabbling in the Black Market, is she?’

  ‘Grateful patients. Is the fridge on?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. Any ice?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  He opened the fridge and laid the butter and the bloody parcel alongside the tiny meagre rations which Judith had already placed there, then removed a tray of ice-cubes. ‘What do you want to drink? A whisky would do that cold good. Whisky and soda?’

  ‘There's no soda.’

  ‘Want a bet?’

  He found it, of course, a siphon stowed away in an obscure cupboard. From another cupboard, he took glasses, then manhandled ice-cubes out of their tray, poured the whisky, squirted in the soda. The drinks fizzed deliciously, and he handed Judith one of the tall tumblers.

  ‘I looks towards you.’

  She smiled. ‘And I raises my glass.’

  They drank. Visibly, Jeremy relaxed, letting out a satisfied sigh. ‘I needed that.’

  ‘It's good. I don't usually drink whisky.’

  ‘There's a time for everything. It's cold down here. Let's go upstairs.’

  So they went, Judith leading the way, and made themselves comfortable by the fire, Jeremy settling himself in one of the armchairs and Judith curled up on the hearthrug, close to the warmth. She said, ‘Heather Warren was here today. We made toast for tea. That's why I came up from Portsmouth. To see her. We had lunch together and then went to a concert, but she had to catch a train and go back to her secret Department.’

  ‘Where was your concert?’

  ‘The Albert Hall. William Walton and Rachmaninoff. Heather was given the tickets. But, please, tell me about you. What's been happening?’

  ‘Routine stuff.’

  ‘You've had leave.’

  ‘No, not really. I had to come to London to see their Lordships at the Admiralty. I'm getting promotion. Surgeon-Commander.’

  ‘Oh, Jeremy…’ She was delighted and impressed. ‘Well done. You'll get your brass hat.’

  ‘It's not official yet, so don't go ringing people up and telling them.’

  ‘But you told your mother?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I'm joining a new ship. A cruiser, HMS Sutherland?’

  ‘Still in the Atlantic?’ He shrugged. He was being cagey. ‘Perhaps they'll send you to the Mediterranean. It's about time you got a bit of sun.’

  He said, ‘Have you heard from your family?’

  ‘Not since the beginning of the month. I don't know why. Except that the news is so ghastly.’

  ‘Are they still in Singapore?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘A lot of women and children have left already.’

  ‘I haven't heard.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘It's a quarter past eight. We'll listen to the “Nine O'Clock News”.’

  ‘I don't know if I want to.’

  ‘It's better to know the truth than to imagine the worst.’

  ‘At the moment, one seems as bad as the other. And it's all happened so quickly. Before, when things were really bad, like Dunkirk time, and in Portsmouth during the bombing, I used to comfort myself by knowing that at least they were safe. Mummy and Dad and Jess, I mean. And when we were all queuing for rations and eating horrible scrag ends of meat, that they were all right, with lovely food and being looked after by masses of servants, and meeting their friends at the club. And then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and all at once none of it's true any longer, and they are in much greater danger than I have ever been. I wish now that I'd gone to Singapore, when I was meant to. Then, at least, we'd all be together. But being so far away, and no news…’

  To her horror, her voice had started to shake. No point in trying to say any more, perhaps breaking down in useless tears. She took another sip of her whisky, and stared into the hot bluish flames of the gas-fire.

  He said, gently, ‘I suppose not knowing is the worst torment of all.’

  ‘I'm all right. Usually I'm all right. It's just that this evening I'm not actually feeling very well.’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  ‘I'm sorry.’

  ‘Why should you be sorry?’

  ‘We never see each other, and then when we do, I've got a wretched cold, and I'm too jittery to listen to the news, and I'm not very good company.’

  ‘I like you just the way you are. However you are. My only regret is that I have to leave you so early in the morning. We're together, only to be almost instantly torn apart again. But I suppose that's what bloody war is all about.’

  ‘Never mind. We're together. I was so glad it was you, and not some man I'd never met…one of Diana's favoured few.’

  ‘I'm glad it was me, too. Now…’ He got to his feet. ‘Your spirits are low, and I'm starving. What we both need is a good hot meal, and perhaps a little incidental music. You get back into bed and I'll take charge of the galley.’ He went to the radiogram and switched on the wireless. Dance music. The distinctive strains of Carroll Gibbons relayed live from the Savoy Hotel. ‘Begin the Beguine’. She imagined the diners leaving their tables, crowding onto the floor.

  ‘What's on the menu? Steaks?’

  ‘What else? Cooked in butter. I'm only sorry that there is no champagne. Do you want another drink?’

  ‘I haven't finished this one yet.’

  He held out his hand, and she took it, and he pulled her to her feet. ‘Bed,’ he said, and turned her and propelled her gently in th
e direction of the bedroom. She went through the door, and heard him go downstairs, running expertly as though he were descending a ship's ladder, but did not instantly get back into bed. Instead, sat at the dressing-table and gazed at her pallid reflection in the mirror, and wondered why he had not remarked on her service haircut, a crisp little bob so different from the long, honey-coloured locks of her youth. Perhaps he hadn't even noticed. Some men didn't notice things like that. She was feeling a bit woozy. Probably the whisky on top of the boiling-hot bath and the aspirins. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. Rather detached. She combed her hair, and put on a bit of lipstick, and some scent, and wished that she had a beautiful frilly bedjacket — the kind that Athena and Diana always wore — that dripped with lace and made one look vulnerable and frail and feminine. The old Shetland sweater was scarcely romantic. But this was Jeremy, so did she want to look romantic? The question caught her unawares, and there didn't seem to be any sensible answer, so she got up from the dressing-table, and plumped and stacked the pillows and got back into bed again, and sat there, sipping whisky and savouring the delicious smells of hot butter and rich steak that were beginning to emanate from downstairs.

  ‘Begin the Beguine’ was finished. Now, Carroll Gibbons, at his piano, played the melody of an old Irving Berlin number. ‘All the Things You Are…’

  You are the promised touch of Springtime…

  Presently, she heard footsteps ascending the stairs once more. The next moment Jeremy appeared at the open door. He had taken off his jacket and tied a workmanlike butcher's apron over his dark-blue sweater.

  ‘How do you like your steak done?’

  ‘I can't remember. I haven't had one for such ages.’

  ‘Medium rare?’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘How's that drink?’

  ‘I've finished it.’

  ‘I'll get you another.’

  ‘I shall get falling-over drunk.’

  ‘You can't fall over if you're lying in bed.’ He took her empty glass. ‘I shall bring it up with your dinner, in lieu of champagne.’

  ‘Jeremy, I don't want to eat my dinner alone.’

  ‘You won't.’

  He produced the meal in a surprisingly short time, carrying the heavy tray upstairs, and setting it down on the bed beside her. Usually, when people brought one meals in bed, like breakfast, they forgot something. The marmalade, or the butter knife, or a teaspoon. But Jeremy didn't appear to have forgotten anything. The steaks, on red-hot plates, were still sizzling, served with potato crisps and tinned peas that he had found in the store cupboard. He had even made gravy. There were knives and forks and salt and pepper, and a pot of fresh mustard, and napkins, except that they weren't proper linen napkins, but two clean tea-towels, which was all he had been able to find. As well, two replenished drinks.

  She said, ‘Why should it be re-plenished? You never say to someone, “Will you plenish me a drink.”’

  ‘True.’

  ‘What's for pudding?’

  ‘Half an orange, or a jam sandwich.’

  ‘My favourite. The best dinner. Thank you, Jeremy.’

  ‘Eat the steak before it gets cold.’

  It was all quite delicious and immediately restoring. Jeremy had been right. Judith had not realised that she was hungry, and feeling so low in health and spirits, sorely in need of solid sustenance. He had cooked her steak to perfection, blackened and seared on the outside and rosy-pink in the middle. It was so tender that she scarcely had to bite it, and slipped easily down past her painful throat. It was also extremely filling. Perhaps, after months of coping with dull, unappetising food, her stomach had shrunk.

  Finally, ‘I can't eat any more,’ she told him. ‘I'm completely stuffed.’ She laid down her knife and fork, and he took away her plate, and she lay back on the pillows in total satisfaction. She said, in cockney, ‘Mikes a luvverly chinge from Spam,’ and he laughed. ‘I haven't got space for pudding, so you have the orange all to yourself. You never cease to surprise me. I didn't know you could cook.’

  ‘Any man who's ever sailed a small boat can cook, even if it's only to fry a mackerel. If I can find some coffee, would you like a cup? No, perhaps better not. It'll keep you awake. When did you start this cold?’ All at once, he had become professional.

  ‘This morning, in the train. My throat began to be sore. I think I caught a germ from the girl I share a cabin with. And my head aches.’

  ‘Have you taken anything?’

  ‘Aspirin. And I gargled.’

  ‘How does it feel now?’

  ‘It's better. Not so bad.’

  ‘In my suitcase I have a magic pill. I got them in America, brought some back. They look like small bombs, but they usually do the trick. I'll give you one.’

  ‘I don't want to be knocked out.’

  ‘It won't knock you out…’

  From beyond the open door, the programme of dance music was coming to an end, and Carroll Gibbons and his orchestra were playing their sign-off tune. A second or two of silence, and then the chimes of Big Ben tolled out, slow and sonorous and, by association, laden with doom. ‘This is London. The “Nine O'Clock News”.’ He looked at Judith inquiringly, and she nodded assent. However dire or grave, she must listen, and would be able to cope, simply because Jeremy was there, sitting an arm's length away from her; a man both compassionate and understanding. As well, strong and companionable, his presence creating an extraordinary feeling of security. It was trying to be brave and sensible on one's own that was so wearing. Two people could console each other. Two people could share. Could comfort.

  Even so, it was all fairly grim, just about as bad as she'd feared. In the Far East, the Japanese were closing in on the Johore Highway. Singapore City had suffered its second day of bombing…trenches and fortifications being dug…fierce fighting on the Muar River…British aircraft continued to bomb and machine-gun Japanese invasion barges…Australian territory under attack…five thousand Japanese troops on the islands of New Britain and New Ireland…small defending garrison forced to withdraw…

  In North Africa, in the Western Desert, the First Armoured Division driven back in the face of General Rommel's advance…a two-pronged attack on Agedabia…an entire Indian division faced encirclement…

  Jeremy said, ‘Enough,’ and got up and went through to the sitting-room and switched the wireless off. The cultured, dispassionate voice of the news reader was stilled. Presently, he returned. ‘Doesn't sound too good, does it?’

  ‘Do you think Singapore's going to fall?’

  ‘It'll be a disaster if it does. If Singapore goes, then all the Dutch East Indies will go as well.’

  ‘But surely, if the island is so important, has always been so important, it should be dependable?’

  ‘The big guns all point south, over the sea. I suppose no one ever expected an attack from the north.’

  ‘Gus Callender's there. With the Second Gordons.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Poor Loveday. Poor Gus.’

  ‘Poor you.’

  He leaned down and kissed her cheek, then laid a hand on her forehead. ‘How do you feel?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don't know how I feel.’

  He smiled. ‘I'll take the tray away, and tidy up the kitchen. Then I'll bring you your pill. You'll be all right in the morning.’

  He went, and Judith was left alone, supine in the warm, downy bed, surrounded by Diana Carey-Lewis's own, carefully chosen luxury: filmy draperies, rose-patterned chintz, the soft light of lamps. It was strangely quiet. The only sound, the falling rain beyond the drawn curtains, and then the rattle of a pane in the first gust of the rising wind. She thought of the wind as though it had an entity, blowing in from the west, covering square miles of empty country before it hit the darkened city. And she lay still, staring at the ceiling, thinking about London and about being in the middle of it, at this moment, on this night, a single human being in a metropolis of hundreds of thousands. Bombed, burn
t, and battered, and yet still pulsing with a vitality that sprang from the people who inhabited its streets and buildings. The East End and the dockyards had been nigh destroyed by the German bombers, but she knew that still there stood small terraces of houses, and in them families gathered in snug front-rooms, to drink tea and knit, and read newspapers, and talk and laugh and listen to the wireless. Just as others congregated each evening on the platforms of the Underground, there to sleep as the trains roared to and fro, because it was a bit of company, a bit of a party, and certainly more fun than being on one's own.

  And there were the people out of doors on this bitter January night. Anti-aircraft gunners, and fire-watchers on roof-tops, and ARP wardens sitting by telephones in draughty, makeshift huts, smoking fags and reading Picture Post to pass the long hours of duty. There were servicemen on leave walking the dark pavements in twos and threes, looking for diversion, finally plunging through the curtained doorway of some likely pub. She thought of the prostitutes in Soho standing in doorways, out of the rain, and shining torches down on their fish-net legs and stilt-heeled shoes. And, at the other end of the scale, young officers, up in town from remote airfields and Army bases, dining their girl-friends at the Savoy, and going on to dance the night away at The Mirabelle or The Bagatelle or The Coconut Grove.

  And then, quite suddenly, without volition, without meaning to, she started to think about her mother. Not as she was now. Not at this very instant, half a world away, in hazard from every sort of mortal danger, panicking, probably terrified and certainly confused. But as she had been. As Judith remembered her last, at Riverview.

  Six years. But so much had changed. So much had happened. Joining up had happened, and The Dower House, and before that, the dark winter that Judith had spent with Biddy at Upper Bickley. The war had happened, and the golden years of Nancherrow, which she had always imagined would continue forever.

  Riverview. Part and parcel of the end of childhood, and so, deeply nostalgic. Riverview. Temporary, maybe; rented, and never their own, but for those four years, it had been home. She remembered the slumbering garden on summer evenings, when the blue waters of a flood-tide slipped in from the open sea to drown the mud-flats of the estuary. And how the little train, all through the day, clattered along its shore, shuttling to and fro from Porthkerris. She remembered getting off that train after school, and climbing the steep, tree-shaded path up to the house, bursting in through the front door, calling Mummy! And she was always there. In her sitting-room, with tea ready on the table, surrounded by her pretty bits and pieces, and everything smelling of sweet peas. And she saw her mother sitting at her dressing-table, changing for dinner, combing her hair and dusting scented powder across her insignificant nose. And heard her voice, reading a book to Jess before bedtime.