Come the Hour (6 page)

They found the bathrooms. ‘There’s tea in the dining hall at four o’clock,’ Rita said. ‘I’ll come and get you. Which is your room?’

They found the dining hall and had a cup of tea. The room was busy with young women chatting, reading, drinking tea and eating cake.

‘They all look very intelligent,’ Rita whispered. ‘I hope I can keep up.’

‘Me too, Tessa said.

After tea they explored a little. They found the common room, furnished here and there, Tessa saw, with the kind of faded chintz that they had at home. She smiled. Very comfortable, very English. They walked a little in the garden, beginning to look wintry now, but still pretty, a nice place to study in the summer.

‘We’d better go in,’ Rita said. ‘We mustn’t be late for Miss Pritchard.’

They assembled with the other newcomers in Miss Pritchard’s room. She was small and round, with grey hair pulled back into a bun. She was smiling and welcoming, but still managed to appear intimidating.

She gave them a list of college rules and went through them one by one. They were to sign out if they went out in the evening and were to be back in college by ten o’clock. They were not to leave the university boundaries without special permission. All male visitors were to be out of college by six o’clock. They were allowed to dine out of Hall twice a week; any more often than that would need special permission. Behaviour was to be ladylike and decorous at all times.

‘Do remember,’ Miss Pritchard said, ’that there are at least ten male students for every woman at Cambridge, and consequently you may be overwhelmed with invitations.’ This produced a few giggles. ‘As if we’re going to have time,’ Rita whispered.

They had dinner in Hall that evening, among all the older,
confident-looking
girls, then signed out and went for a little walk along the Backs, a walk that took them along the river behind Queens’ and King’s.

‘What a plethora of rules,’ Rita said. ‘All men to be out by six o’clock. I can’t see myself ever having a man in my room. I haven’t worked my fingers to the bone to get here for that, although …’ She didn’t finish the sentence.

Tessa laughed. ‘I might have my brother. He’s here too.’

‘Oh,’ Rita said. ‘How nice for you.’

They walked into town the next day and then walked through the streets with their maps, locating their departments and lecture rooms: Physiology, Anatomy, Pathology.

‘That’s the anatomy department,’ Rita said. ‘We’re starting dissection on Monday.’

‘I know,’ Tessa said. They were to do dissection in twos. They had already decided to put their names down to work together.

‘We’ll stick together,’ Rita said, ‘then you can catch me if I faint.’

Charlie settled into his room on his staircase in college. There were two other students on the same staircase. One was a zoologist, a rather austere young man who seemed to be mainly interested in insects. The other was fair and stocky, and judging by his accent, came from the north. ‘Third year engineering,’ he said when Charlie introduced himself and asked him what he was reading. ‘Aeronautical engineering mainly. My name’s Arthur Blake. I’m just going to have a cup of tea in my room. Come and have one if you like.’

‘Aeroplanes,’ Charlie said later. It was a statement, not a question. ‘I suppose they’re the thing of the future.’

Arthur looked at him over his cup, a long, slightly surprised, considering look, as if he thought Charlie might be a creature from another planet. ‘You might say that.’ He took a large bite of a biscuit and then a swallow of tea. ‘Especially the way things are going.’

‘What things?’

‘War things. What about you? What are you reading?’

‘History,’ Charlie said.

Arthur gave him the same look again. ‘You should know the way things are going then. They say history repeats itself.’

Charlie had a sudden memory of the Air Ministry building in Berlin – huge, threatening. Nothing in history had ever been quite like this; no destructive power had ever been so huge. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

Arthur smiled. ‘Manchester. We manufacture history up there.’

Charlie was startled. He had never quite thought of the Industrial Revolution in those terms. It was true, he thought. History, certainly of Britain, had been made of steel and coal and ideas and invention and taking them with them around the world, trade, building an empire. He recorded history, he thought. Arthur, perhaps, made it.

Later Charlie went to meet his tutor and got a timetable and a pep talk and a glass of sherry as it got towards time to dine in Hall.

He saw Arthur in Hall, sitting with a group of young men with the
same earnest, no-nonsense look about them. Probably all bright boys, he thought, with county or state or college scholarships. They seemed to know where they were going, much more than he did.

On Saturday Charlie came to take Tessa out to tea. ‘We’ll go to the Copper Kettle in King’s Parade,’ he said. ‘They do a good tea there, apparently.’

They met outside the café. Tessa looked along King’s Parade, the narrow street with the grand, beautiful, ancient college buildings on the other side. ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ she said. ‘It is,’ Charlie said. ‘I only hope it’s here for ever.’

They went upstairs in the café and ordered their tea.

‘How are you getting on?’ he said.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve got everything sorted out, I think, and I’ve met a nice girl doing medicine too. Her name’s Rita.’

Charlie took a bite of coffee cake. ‘I wish I could meet a nice girl, but there aren’t too many women about. It’s a bit like school.’

Tessa laughed. ‘Give it time.’

‘I’ve met an engineering student,’ he said, ‘from Manchester. Tough as old boots by the look of him. Probably plays rugby league. He says things about history repeating itself. I think he’s talking about a war.’

Tessa sighed. ‘Some men don’t seem to be able to talk about anything else. It’s all supposed to be settled, isn’t it? That’s what Mr Chamberlain says.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ he said, ‘but Arthur doesn’t think so.’

‘Do you think Arthur knows more than the Prime Minister?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Charlie said.

Tessa and Rita walked down Sidgwick Avenue on their way to the anatomy department and crossed over Silver Street bridge. The morning was chilly. The Cam flowed by, slowly, on the way from Granchester, a few leaves from the overhanging willows turning slowly in the stream. The punts that had been moored there when they arrived were being taken in now for the winter, all the cushions and poles already gone.

They carried their equipment in their bags – a canvas roll with little
pockets containing their scalpels and forceps, a white lab coat and a book: an instruction manual on dissection. Tessa had looked at it the night before. How to take a human body to pieces. How to pick it apart, muscle by muscle, organs, nerves, blood vessels. It all looked very clean and neat in the pictures.

‘Have you ever seen a corpse?’ Rita asked. She sounded apprehensive.

‘No,’ Tessa said. ‘I’ve seen a few mummies in the museum.’

She remembered the first time she had ever seen what used to be a human being, a shrivelled embalmed body, wrinkled and brown, but still having a face that you could recognize as a face. It had given her the creeps.

‘I haven’t either,’ Rita said. ‘Only our skeletons.’ She laughed. ‘My mother won’t have it in the house. She makes me keep it in the garage. She says it gives her nightmares. She’s a bit squeamish.’

Sara thought of the ‘half-skeleton’ she had in her room at the college, a skull, vertebrae, half a ribcage, half a pelvis, the bones of one arm, one leg. Her father had bought it for her, second or third hand, from some ex-medical student, so she could get started on some anatomy. She had inspected the skull in her bedroom at home. The top was sawn off like a lid and attached to the rest with a pair of little hooks. She stared into the empty eye sockets, ran her hands over the smooth bones. Who are you, she had wondered? This person had lived, walked about, had thoughts and feelings. Now he was kindly lending his skull to her. No good thinking about that, she supposed. No good being sentimental, considering what she was about to do.

They arrived at the anatomy department and walked up the stairs to the women’s cloakroom. They put on their white coats. Rita gave her a thin smile.

‘Better get it over with,’ she said.

Tessa was faintly apprehensive. The frogs and the rats hadn’t really prepared her for this.

They walked down the stairs together and through the swing doors into the dissecting room.

The room was brightly lit and smelt strongly of formalin. Several long tables were arranged in neat rows, white-coated figures bending
over them. It wasn’t what Tessa had expected. There were no bodies lying on the tables, just indefinable lumps of something, obscured by the white coats.

They stood uncertainly by the door. A small man in a brown lab coat approached them, clipboard in hand. ‘Names?’ he said.

‘Tessa Fielding, Rita Lane.’

He ran his pencil down his list. ‘You’re on the arm this term,’ he said, in a strong Cambridgeshire accent. ‘In the chest at the back.’

Their eyes followed his pointing pencil. Two large chests stood against the wall at the back of the room. They walked up to them slowly. The lids were standing open. They peered in. One chest was full of arms, the other full of legs.

Tessa took in a breath. If she was ever going to feel queasy, she thought, this moment was surely it. It didn’t happen and the moment passed. She glanced at Rita who had gone a bit pink, but otherwise seemed unmoved.

The arms had luggage labels tied around the wrist and they searched through until they found the one marked ‘Fielding and Lane.’ They carried it to an empty table, laid it down and looked at it. The hand was large and strong looking, worn with labour, the fingers slightly curled in. Obviously a man.

‘I wonder who he was,’ Rita said. ‘I wonder how he ended up here?’

Tessa glanced at her. They obviously had the same thoughts. ‘I expect he left his body to science,’ she said. She almost smiled at the thought. Leaving one’s body to science sounded so grand. It conjured up thoughts of great scientific advances, medical breakthroughs, not two nervous girls poking at it with a scalpel. ‘We’d better get started.’

They got out their scalpels and opened their books at the chapter marked
The Arm
.

‘Remove the skin as far as the elbow,’ it began. They got to work.

Charlie began to enjoy Cambridge. He enjoyed the work he was doing. He joined a chess club and a music-appreciation society. He enjoyed the way that autumn tinted the trees along the Backs by the river and winter brought clear frosty nights and brilliant starry skies. He delighted in the ancient buildings, unchanged for hundreds of years.
He could feel the presence of his ancestors before him, the walls polished by centuries of English fingers, the stones worn by centuries of English feet. He would walk sometimes by the river at night, or stand in the soft gas lighting on Garret Hostel Bridge, watching the mysterious shadows under the gently swaying willows. In the evenings the college bells pealed together, summoning the students home to dine in Hall. To Charlie they seemed to be the voice of this ancient town. The thought that all this had been here for centuries filled him with a deep, almost spiritual contentment.

Then, sometimes, he would lie in bed at night, thinking, or perhaps trying not to think. In that first conversation Arthur had looked at him as if he knew nothing, and as if he, Arthur, had some kind of inside knowledge. Perhaps he had. In any case, Arthur had brought him up against something he preferred not to think about. ‘History repeats itself’, Arthur had said. History now seemed to him to be a succession of struggles for power, of wars and battles, victories and defeats; the survival of the strongest, or of those with the strongest determination. He had a sense that Arthur and his group of blunt, earnest young men, were staring resolutely into a future that he, Charlie, was trying to avoid.

One morning when they met on the stairs, he said, ‘Do you really think there’s going to be a war, Arthur?’

Arthur smiled, a mirthless grin. ‘Read your history books, old boy.’

‘What would you do,’ Charlie persisted, ‘if it happened?’

‘What I’m training to do,’ Arthur said. ‘Keep ’em flying.’

Charlie stared at him. ‘You think it would be a flying war?’

Arthur gave a gusty laugh. ‘Where have you been? Ever heard of the German raids on Spain, on Guernica? Mussolini bombing native villages in Abyssinia? Do you think it’s going to be knights in armour on horseback, waving swords and rescuing maidens?’

Charlie felt abashed and foolish.

Amy and Dan read the morning newspaper and laughed. In America Orson Welles had broadcast a radio play – an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds
. Apparently hundreds of listeners thought that it was true that the Martians had invaded, and they fled into the streets in panic.

They laughed, but Amy was not really amused. What would happen if there were a real raid on London? Would the people panic, run away from the city? Would the roads be blocked with streams of refugees like those they had seen in France in the last war, women and children and old people, desperate and afraid?

‘Do you think the play would have panicked people here?’ she said.

Dan laughed. ‘I don’t think so. I think we’d be out there, hitting the Martians with our umbrellas.’

Umbrellas, she thought? Is that all we’d have?

Dan kept the smile on his face. He tried not to think about the million cardboard coffins the government had apparently stockpiled.

The news from Germany grew ever darker. They read the newspapers in horror. In November the Jews were attacked in the cities, their homes ransacked, their shop windows smashed, men beaten by mobs in the street. The Nazis launched their first aircraft carrier; they built more and more E-boats.

‘It can’t go on,’ Dan said.