Night of Triumph (2 page)

Had
there been a nightingale? Or a lark? Had there been something? Had she failed to hear something at this vital moment? Elizabeth felt that she would never cease to reproach herself.
How awful.

All this was weeks ago. Of course, they had agreed to meet since then. There was no difficulty with their engagement, or as she preferred mentally to term it, their ‘understanding’,
but she was still rather mortified. All this was difficult for Philip. He was, as her father put it to her, a ‘man’s man’ and so a courtship would always be delicate. Their
marriage itself would be delicate. And perhaps there had been a bird. Perhaps he had heard a bird. Perhaps she should have just said, yes, I hear a bird. To agree, to be agreeable, wasn’t
that the secret of marriage, of life itself? Oh, she hoped she hadn’t ruined everything! And yet, it wasn’t her fault.

Was it?

Mr Ware turned over in his single bed, half-listening to the wireless, entirely audible from the room next door. His pleasant drowsiness was marred only by the puffy, greasy
eiderdown coming into scratchy contact with his unshaven face. Somehow the surface of that eiderdown stayed very cold, no matter what body warmth was available to it. Mr Ware sank back down into
sleep.

He was dreaming that there was still a war on. It was a happy dream. He was dreaming of horseflesh. He was dreaming of his own flesh, and that of dozens of others. He could feel an unevenness
under his feet: a roughness caused by rubble, bomb damage, dislodged bricks, great shards of shattered glass, cables, fire tender hoses. He could feel the soles of his boots on all this, and for
him it was solid ground: it was where he could thrive. If the surface of the ground was going to become smooth again, well, that was a poor lookout for Mr Ware. There had been chances for him,
these last six years. Opportunities. Already, at the age of twenty-six, he was richer than his father had ever been.

Mr Ware was not afraid of the war: he was not afraid of dying. On the contrary. Other people were afraid of dying when they saw him. He was not a violent man, but he carried a miasma of violence
and chaos around with him, like the slipstream of a speeding, badly laden truck – the sort of truck, in fact, which was going to have its contents systematically looted when stationary at a
depot.

Mr Ware smiled, at the water-level of waking.

Yes, that was it. All his own strength and resources had been substantially deployed over the past few hours. But tonight was going to be his last chance. VE Night. A final
bacchanal of wrongdoing. Mr Ware had never hated the Germans or the Japanese: it was a conviction that he had semi-seriously considered declaiming to the conchie board. But it was more, of course,
that he didn’t hate them any more than any other foreigner, or any more than men from Liverpool, or Glasgow, or people from south of the river, or people from the other side of the Kilburn
High Road, or his wife.

The sharp contact of one of his vertebrae with that of someone else reminded Mr Ware that he was actually in bed with his wife. She had her back to him; they were curled foetally, away from each
other, or as foetally as they could manage in such a narrow bed.

Mr Ware had had sex with three people in the past week, and none of them was his wife. She was always pestering him for conjugal relations. She’d wanted to get married when he got back
from Italy. He had obliged. Now she wanted a baby. He had said all right. This theoretically meant refraining from all contraceptive procedures, but they had never used any in the first place, and
this decision in fact coincided with the dwindling of their actual marital relations to zero. The business of trying for a baby seemed in practice to mean simply raising their levels of fretful
resentment.

He was properly awake now: gazing at the ceiling, which bulged downwards like a shallow hammock, or, turning, he could look over at the wall, from where he could hear the wireless, or down at
the floor’s uncarpeted boards, where he could see the chamber-pot, with some sparkling droplets at its rim. Or over at the window dressing table where, in deference to his wife, Mr Ware had
placed a stately three-glass mirror, a sort of hinged triptych, whose outer glasses could be swung in and out at various angles so that her hairdo could be objectively scrutinised. Mr Ware
sometimes used it to inspect his bald patch. Like everything else in this flat, it was stolen.

Grumpily, he pulled the greasy, cold eiderdown over to his side some more, which disclosed his wife’s naked legs, which had thin scars from where she had had to wear splints as a child
– to cure rickets, she’d told him. He had never minded those.

Sleeping during the day had felt luxurious and dissolute at first. Now it was simply part of his working life. Working nights. Coming home in the gleaming dawn with full pockets, or a full
car-boot. Caked with dust. Torn clothing. Off with the gear. Her job was to mend it. Part of her job anyway. Not that she was much good at that.

Mr Ware fell to wondering what the future held for them now. Perhaps London was no good. They could go to Brighton. Or Norwich. Mr Ware wondered, incuriously, what his wife felt about any of
this: the possibility of her being obstructive, making trouble. He would want to do something, she would want something else. She would get in the way.

And of course she would still be on about this baby business.

Over the dressing table was his wife’s collection of newspaper clippings about the Royal Family: George V, Mary, the current King and Queen, their two daughters. It was a mild obsession of
hers. A piece of silliness. But it had sprung from something real enough. Ten years or so ago, Mrs Ware had been a girl, working in a canteen in the YMCA on Great Russell Street, a place with a
sign outside saying ‘Teas’. It was decent enough. Her mother, now late mother, had served behind the counter, and Mrs Ware had been allowed to help out, which she had loved –
another part of her past Mr Ware didn’t like, incidentally. It seemed to mean he was going to be expected to help her set up some similar joint after the war.

One afternoon, a woman had come in with two girls in tow. She was dressed like a sort of nanny or governess, and the two girls were looking around as if they’d never seen anything like it
in their lives. The grownup had bustled forward and asked for one tea and two lemonades; Mrs Ware had instantly recognised the girls as Elizabeth and Margaret. The woman had plonked herself down at
a table, expecting to be served; his mother-in-law had sharply told her she was supposed to collect the drinks herself, but Mrs Ware had brought the lemonades over, just so that she could lean
across and touch the Princesses’ hair. They had reacted as if a gorilla at London Zoo had reached through the bars and taken their ice cream. Her mother had come over and given her daughter a
clip round the ear: for disobeying her order about the drinks, you understand, not touching the royal persons, whom she had not recognised.

But soon there had been uproar, as everyone gathered round their table, wanting to talk to them, shake their hand, touch them. Some chap with a camera had materialised out of nowhere and soon
the woman and her charges had fled. Mr Ware smiled thinly at the memory, and the memory wasn’t even his. That would teach them to try mingling with the common folk, wouldn’t it?

Mr Ware got up, swung his legs over the edge of his high bed, stood, pulled his pyjama trousers up, shrugged on a dressing gown and went out of the bedroom, across the hall and into the
bathroom, hearing the music from next door’s wireless amplify briefly as he did so. He switched the light on with a long string cord, despite it being day: the building faced onto a high
blank wall which blocked out the sun. The bulb gave the room a sickly yellowish wash.

He looked at his face: the sandy, receding hair, bags under the eyes, a slight squint. Instinctively, Mr Ware screwed up his eyes so that this face would go out of focus, went out to the
lavatory to urinate, and then came back and filled up the handbasin for a shave, a basin which was supported from underneath by two wooden struts. The whole thing in the past year had almost
collapsed. Mr Ware then brushed his teeth and went back to the lavatory, stood on the pan, removed the cistern’s heavy china lid with much puffing effort and took out something encased in
sacking. This he transferred to his dressing gown pocket, partly because it was too heavy and unwieldy to stay there, and partly because he just loved touching it.

Back to his room. His wife was still asleep. With a tenderness he never showed in the marital bed, Mr Ware laid his bundle down on the dressing table and unwrapped it: a Luger. The ugly,
rectilinear form of a German pistol. He had been embarrassed about this possession in the last few months, sensing that it showed a want of patriotism. But now, on this day of all days, he
considered that these worries were obsolete. Now was a time to show magnanimity to the defeated enemy, was it not? If it had been a Japanese gun, now that would be different.

Mr Ware pulled back the breech into its triangular hump with a click and for the thousandth time wondered, what would it be like? All those men that joined up and saw action – they must
have wondered the same thing, Mr Ware thought. They must have wondered. What would it feel like? To be allowed to do that. He picked up the Luger and felt the serrations of all those tiny raised
goose-pimple points of metal. It gave him a tingle which travelled up his forearm and into his right cheek.

Thirty-five shillings this thing had cost, with another five and six for the Sten gun ammo which he had in another bundle in the dressing table drawer.

He had only fired it once. The chap who had sold it to him had offered to take Mr Ware to Cambridge Heath in the early morning, to an out-of-the way spot, and let him have a bit of a bang.
They’d actually had a couple of drinks the night before. All he’d wanted was to buy some liveners and here’s this fellow asking him if he was in the market for a firearm.
They’d gone to the cinema together after that: Abbott and Costello in
Here Come the Co-Eds
. Then lots more drinks at this club he knew about, and then in the grey light of dawn
they’d gone out to this great big marshy place. He was still three sheets to the wind. Chap had stood behind him while he pulled the trigger. Ear-splitting crack and the recoil made his wrist
feel like someone had hit it with a hammer. It wasn’t like that in the films, was it? A real gun wasn’t nearly as light as the toy pistol he’d once had. A real one weighed you
down; it made you think about it all the time.

But still. After he’d shot it, Mr Ware had incautiously touched the hot barrel and pulled his fingers back. Ow. He’d tried twirling it round his finger like the cowboys and, once it
had cooled down, shoved it into his belt like the American gangsters: it got a bit caught up in his shirt-tail. He and the chap had had a good laugh about that, and they fooled around a bit more.
But when would he use it? Mr Ware supposed that it was tonight or never. He wrapped it up again and got ready to go out.

‘Oh lor’, Hugh, I’m serious. Slow down.’

They were driving up Piccadilly, where the crowds in paper hats swarmed off pavements and up lampposts and, eager to focus their high spirits somewhere, they had pointed and cheered at
Hugh’s Lagonda all the way from the Ritz Hotel, where the two men had just drunk three cocktails each. Hugh cheerily waved and stamped on his accelerator, trying to deter revellers from
actually jumping into the car with them. Taking the wheel with one hand, he shook out another couple of cigarettes from a packet and offered both to his passenger, and fellow Guards officer,
Peter.

‘Light one for me, would you?’

Hugh was master of the Old Etonian’s art of never saying ‘please’; Peter, an Old Carthusian, could never get the knack.

‘Will you
please
slow down?’

A lady and her elderly mother actually jumped out of the way of the Lagonda, just as they reached Swaine Adeney Brigg, where Peter’s mother had once bought him an umbrella, one which a
girl had later borrowed and never returned. The memory swam into his mind at the same moment that the sun went briefly behind a cloud. It surely couldn’t rain tonight, could it?

They stopped at a red light.

‘These people – these are the people we’ve been fighting for,’ said Peter piously, looking about him.

‘Polish, are they?’ said Hugh.

Peter merely frowned and looked over, disapprovingly, at Fortnum and Mason, where once, over tea, a girl had slapped his wrist when he had reached over and put his hand on her knee, at precisely
the same table where twelve years previously his mother had smacked his hand for trying to take an extra profiterole.

He had lit both cigarettes and passed one to Hugh, who drew on it heavily. A woman and a younger man, perhaps her son, were waltzing across the road, apparently in spontaneous response to a man
playing the accordion on the opposite side. There were many more cheers at this. The man was wearing a bowler hat which was splodged with paint in apparently random patterns but which, on closer
inspection, revealed themselves to be an attempt to figure the Union Jack. The car lurched forward again, and Peter put his cigarette down, at knee level, now a little nauseous.

‘Peter, my dear fellow,’ said Hugh, ‘I need you on your most sparkling form tonight. We have a very important task to perform.’

‘What sort of task?’

‘A pastoral task. We shall be
in loco parentis
. And
in loco
a lot of other things besides. No, I’m awfully sorry, no.’ This last was to a boy who had asked for a
cigarette.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We are to be chaperones. Squiring a couple of girls about. Nothing too taxing.’