Homing (22 page)

“I’m in disgrace with Mummy,” she said.

“So I gather.” He set down his coffee cup and prepared to give her his undivided attention. “I was kind of surprised myself. It’s a good chance for you to see Williamsburg, isn’t it?”

“Now, don’t
you
start!” said Mab.

“I’m probably wrong,” Jeff said, “but I happen to think it’s better this way.”

“You mean you think he won’t come.”

“When I left France I thought he would. There is something about defeatism that spreads and penetrates. I shall never understand what happened over there. As a matter of fact, I don’t understand what has happened here, either. But now I’ve got a funny sort of feeling that he is not going to take England.”

“Well, of course he isn’t!” said Mab, and he sat looking at her in silence a long moment.

He was still readjusting to Churchill’s Island. He had returned to London in time, he thought, to assist at the end of the world. And once there, he found England happily convinced that it was “just going in”. When he expressed surprise, Bracken had said only, “The English are tough. You’ll see.”

Jeff’s first retreat from France before Dunkirk had been more or less official in nature, and he had crossed the Channel in a British destroyer. There had been, for all the haste and confusion, morale—dignity and discipline and decency. Since then, returning to Paris only a day before the Germans overran it, he had seen France crumble from the top down. Instead of barricades and mounted guns he had found only deserted boulevards, shops with all the shutters drawn, hotels which refused admittance—and instead of gunfire, a great silence. He had made his way on foot to the office of the permanent Paris correspondent, arriving there hungry and angry and incredulous. He was not expected, and was freely advised that unless he meant
to wait for the Occupation—which the Boss in London would not approve—he had better get going. For a moment he had hesitated. But the Paris story would be covered, and the Government had gone South. He was able to locate and join a car full of fellow journalists who were headed for Tours and bedlam, where Press Wireless still functioned, at eightpence a word.

Stocking the car with what food and drink and petrol they could buy at Tours, they had set out the next day for Bordeaux, to which the Government had preceded them. They travelled by roundabout lanes away from the main highways, which were choked with hysteria and horror. They passed sunny villages whose inhabitants seemed still unaware that the Germans were in Paris. But as they neared Bordeaux the panic there overflowed and swamped them. They had stopped for coffee at a small café when Pétain’s voice came over the radio in the kitchen, announcing that he had asked the Germans for terms. The waitress who served them was in tears, and the gilt letters which spelled
American
War
Correspondent
on the shoulders of their uniforms drew hostile glances in the hot, frantic streets.

Through the Embassy they got passage on a small Dutch cargo boat which was on its way back from South Africa. The harbour at Le Verdon was bombed as they steamed out, with roughly eight times the ship’s normal complement aboard. And although few could have survived a hit in the circumstances, the exhausted passengers on the crowded decks remained almost indifferent to this final hazard. Food was short, and they lived on two skimpy meals a day for an endless, blistering voyage. At Falmouth a group of cool, smiling women from the WVS had met them with tea and sandwiches. Looking into their serene faces, Jeff could only conclude that no one in England had been listening to the news from across the Channel.

Not so, but quite otherwise, said Bracken. Look around you. And Jeff saw the Home Guard drilling with wooden guns, and the sentries and barbed wire in Whitehall, and the old carts and ploughs strewn on the fields against troop-carrying planes, and the guerrilla warfare school at Osterley….

And now Mab, as tough as any of them.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Why aren’t you afraid?”

“But I am!” She glanced over her shoulder towards the stairs. “I’m terrified. Don’t give me away.”

He made a rueful shrug of laughter, with an affectionate smile.

“You don’t believe me, do you,” she accused him. “Well, it’s
true. I’m not like the rest of you. I’m a coward. I’m only praying that by the grace of God it won’t show when the time comes.”

“Well, believe it or not, by the grace of God it usually doesn’t,” he said.

“What happens?” She was watching him intently, for now he had been there, he had heard bombs, and seen people die, in France.

“You find you have a sort of extra gadget,” he explained. “They call it adrenalin, I think. But they’re only guessing. It’s really just your own personal gadget, and it works. I promise you it will work.”

“So that nobody knows you’re afraid?”

“So that you don’t disgrace yourself,” said Jeff. “So that sometimes you even surprise yourself.”

“How do I know I’ve got one too?”

“I’ll bet you,” said Jeff, and took out a half-crown and laid it on the mantelpiece. “Let it stay there. If ever you have hysterics—it’s yours, I lose.”

“Oh, Jeff, if only we could be together now—!” She went to him blindly and buried her face against his coat, while he held her, his cheek against her hair. “The worst part is worrying about you,” she said, muffled. “Nothing will happen to us down here in the country, unless the invasion actually comes off. But in London you’ll be in the front line, whatever happens! Every time they drop a bomb on London I’ll wonder about you—and you can’t be forever ringing up to say you’re all right! I promised myself that if you just got back to England I could bear the rest. But it’s hard to make do with that. It’s hard!”

“I know,” he said, holding her.

“If only I could be in London
too
—” she heard herself saying to her own astonishment, for she had always believed she was thankful—and ashamed—that she was not obliged to be in London. Now it seemed to her suddenly that the one thing that mattered was to be beside him, wherever he went—so that if anything happened to him she would be there, so that she need not sit helplessly miles away waiting for second-hand news. The world might be coming to an end, but all the more reason not to lose sight of him now—because if Jeff were going to die she had to die too, beside him where she belonged….

“That would be worse for me,” he said quietly, and she looked up at him, in his arms. “I can worry about you less if you’re here at Farthingale,” he said, appalled to find that his voice was
not quite steady. Her eyes—the green eyes of Tibby’s portrait—were swimming with tears, which dazzled him—her lips were set against the working of her small throat. He felt her trembling from head to foot, and it ran through his own body from hers, like a current….
Tibby—it felt like this with Tibby
…. He was keyed very high with controlled nerves, he had gone short of sleep for weeks, braced for an ordeal which no one could predict. And now he recalled suddenly, in a dizzy wave, a night in Boulogne when a bomb came down in the square outside the hotel and he had come to lying on the floor in the approved air raid posture, face down, hands locked behind his head, and in the reverberating silence of the wrecked room had distinctly heard himself saying aloud:
“I will come back to you, never fear—you are mine, Tibby, I want you—”
In the press of more recent sensations he had forgotten that light-headed interlude at Boulogne. The
Times
man had come shouting down the corridor to rescue him, and they had prudently retired, shaken but unhurt, to the basement shelter where restoratives were available. Now, in Virginia’s drawing room, he heard his own voice again saying, “I will come back to you, my darling, never fear—” and checked himself on the brink of the abyss, a ringing in his ears.

“Jeff, I want to say a sort of charm, do you mind?”

He shook his head, unable to speak, and voluntarily she drew away from him till only their hands still held, warm and strong, between them.

“‘There shall no evil befall thee,’” said Mab, looking into his eyes. “‘For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.’” Then she bent, and laid her lips against his hands that held hers. Neither of them was aware that Tibby had spoken again across the generations, the same words Julian had heard in the Sprague parlour in Williamsburg the night before the army marched to Yorktown.

“Mab—” Jeff drew her to the sofa and made her sit down beside him, her hands in his. “Mab, I feel very humble, I don’t deserve all this.”

“It isn’t something we can choose or refuse,” she said simply. “I was born loving you, that’s all. We can’t do anything about that now.”

“No,” he agreed gently. “There’s isn’t a thing we can do about it. Remember that part of it, won’t you, Mab.”

L
IFE IN
London itself at first remained fantastically normal, and many evacuation areas heard sirens and bombs before London had so much as an alert. But even at Dover, which was being shelled now as well as bombed, the British were staying put. Well, if they think they can
scare
us, people said, sweeping up glass and digging each other out of débris.

Meanwhile, methodical as a white mouse in a laboratory, Hitler pursued his terrible pattern. After the war of nerves and prophecies of doom came the bombing of shipping and the Channel ports, the attacks on the forward aerodromes, the surprise spot-bombing to confuse and scatter the defending forces—all gathering momentum as July ran into August. The RAF had its own pattern, prompt and deadly, rising to meet each new onslaught, taking toll, taking losses.

Unmoved except to derision by horrendous German threats to “make England blind and deaf”, they set about arming their fortress with a kind of grim gaiety that got things done. The beaches bristled with barbed wire and blockhouses, concrete road blocks went up, every field and golf course that provided landing room for a horsefly was ploughed into ridges or strewn with derelict vehicles and machinery. It was everybody’s war. And “You can always take one with you”, became a kind of password.

Jeff had been fascinated and amused. What he had
experienced
within himself, he saw now happening to a whole country. When it came, you stood up to it. More than once in France it had seemed to him as though his heart hit the roof of his mouth, during the long downward scream of the bombs, but when the bang was over and the walls had bulged and settled back again and the floor had ceased to heave, his heart was still there on the job, still in the groove. He wasn’t an invalid, he wasn’t even a handicap case, he didn’t have to depend on the bottle of pink
stuff in order to stay on his feet—he could take it just as well as people who didn’t have dicky hearts. And this was in itself a miracle.

“That’s not to say I never turn a hair or bat an eye,” he told Sylvia after his second return from France. “I’m not bragging, understand that. I’m all green around the gills, no doubt, but I don’t have to lie down flat the way I used to if I so much as tried to catch a train.”

“Oh, stuff,” said Sylvia, pleased. “You’ve been catching trains ever since I married you.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said earnestly. “If you hadn’t married me, I’d probably have my knees under a nice safe desk in the New York office.”

“And you’d probably live longer,” said Sylvia.

“Not necessarily. I wasn’t a very good risk a few years ago.”

“And now you’re just as good a risk as anybody in London.”

“Just about. No more. No less. But it’s not my heart I’ll die of.”

She came and sat down on his lap, rubbing her cheek along his.

“It’s been good, hasn’t it,” she said. “Even with all this hanging over us, hasn’t it been
good
!”

“Honey, there’s no need to sound as though it was over!” he objected, cradling her.

“I never said it was. But even if there wasn’t any more—oh, Jeff, nobody’s better off!”

“So you wouldn’t trade me for some guy with a red band on his cap and three rows of ribbons?”

“Nope.”

“Thank you,” said Jeff politely.

Even
if
there
wasn’t
any
more.
She could not have told why she said that, so casually, without apprehension—except that the future no longer stretched ahead to a comfortable three score and ten, the future was
now,
before whatever was coming arrived. The future was what you could make out of whatever you had left, for it was no longer possible to assume that everything would be the same a year, a month, a week from now. There was only today, and what you already had. Tomorrow might not be so good. Tomorrow, in fact, might not bear thinking of. But today, thought Sylvia, nobody was luckier, nobody was better off. And because tomorrow couldn’t change that, couldn’t spoil what had already been, because that much was already perfect, inviolate, and safe, tomorrow could come, and do its worst. You were still ahead.

And this, though she did not know it, was the turning point of Sylvia’s war. Like Jeff, in her own way she had crossed the bridge and left panic behind. Like Jeff, she knew without
ringing
any bells or blowing any trumpets that by the grace of God she could take it.

On August fifteenth, when Hitler had promised to enter London for his triumph, he hadn’t even dropped a bomb on it, and people were laughing about a German broadcast which described the English population as fear-crazed. “It’s a British panic—they’ve got it backwards,” said one of the American correspondents at the Savoy. On the twentieth, Churchill’s ringing tribute to the boys of the RAF somewhat explained why Hitler was delayed—the English still owned the air over their island. On the twenty-fourth German bombers actually got to London and the sirens went, and there were bombs at last, and casualties. But the Germans had losses too. Three to one in planes, fifteen to one in personnel. He’ll have to do better than that, people said, digging out.

And so Mab’s birthday had come round again, in a world at war. Jeff sent regrets that he could not take his eye off Hitler long enough to come down to Farthingale and drink her health. He also sent a hamper of goodies from Fortnum’s, and a parcel of books from Hatchard’s for blackout reading. Hitler took no particular notice of the day.

At the end of the month, however, he made another speech—he would raze British cities, he said, in retaliation for recent visits from the RAF to the Reich, which had apparently begun to get under his skin. Let him get on with it, then, people said. Three months since Dunkirk, a year since the declaration of war, and no invasion yet, they said. If he can’t do it now he can never do it. What’s he waiting for?

There was a general feeling that the mid-September tides and moon would be his last chance this year, and that now he must make his try. Along with what Bracken called the
Come-on-damn
-you attitude, a growing tightness in the midriff had begun again, as the London raids got heavier. He was due to spring something new again. He always had something up his sleeve. Now for the secret weapon. Gliders full of troops, some thought. Gross-Channel destruction on an undreamed-of scale was mentioned seriously. Or gas.

As September came in, the pattern changed. He had given up trying to destroy the ports, to knock out the aerodromes, to kill
off the RAF He had gone to work on London’s nerves. Day and night now the sirens went. At first people watched the dogfights from the streets, cheered the Spitfires, and scattered from machine gun bullets when the German planes flew low. Harrod’s Store got a hole in its roof which upset its sprinkler system, and its shoppers got the giggles.

Even with the nervous ones, the strange adaptability of the human fabric began to operate. It was almost impossible to be frightened to death half a dozen times a day. You finally had to eat and sleep and work, without bolting into a shelter every time there was a warning, even without rushing up to the roof to see the fun. Theatres and restaurants resumed their routine, functioned steadily right through the alerts. People began to ask one another casually if the raid was still on, because they had forgotten to listen for the All Clear—though you could always tell by looking at the nearest policeman, he wore his gasmask round in front at the ready, if there was a raid on….

But Hitler was getting down to it now. His time was running out. He was always a dirty fighter, anything could happen now….

The household in Upper Brook Street was having tea, that first Saturday afternoon in September. Bracken had happened to come home early, it was Sylvia’s day off, and Dinah was just arriving from her office at the WVS when the sirens went. Only Jeff was absent.

“They’re at it again down the river,” Dinah said, in the queer moment of dead silence which always seemed to follow the first howl of the alert. “I thought I heard crumps even before I started for home. Apparently they’re coming up this way now.” She poured her tea with a steady hand, and carried it to the window, still wearing her hat. “It’s getting pretty noisy towards the south.”

“Churchill paid a visit to Dover the other day,” Bracken said. “Maybe they’re going to raze it in retaliation.”

“They’re nearer than Dover,” said Dinah, and the telephone rang, which, when a raid had started, meant something pretty drastic.

“Blast,” muttered Bracken as he reached for it. “I’d just got settled in.” The conversation was very brief. “Man can’t even get a cup of tea any more,” he complained. “Take it easy, now—I’m off.”

“What’s happened?” Sylvia set down her cup with a clink. “Where are you off to?”

“The East End. Something’s up. If you get hold of Jeff ask him to get in touch with the office.” He collected his gasmask, for they were being done again, and his tin hat, and kissed his womenfolk, and was gone.

“I think,” said Dinah when the door had closed behind him, “that this is going to be a nasty one.”

“Just in time to spoil dinner,” Sylvia remarked, for one had to say something. She wondered if any amount of familiarity with the sound of the siren would ever eliminate that first sick crunch in the stomach. It was humiliating, degrading, and silly, and she was perfectly sure that it didn’t happen to anyone else. Not that one could ask.

“That bomb in Regent Street hasn’t gone off yet,” said Dinah. “You have to go round it.”

They ate a rather silent dinner in the dining room. Bracken did not return and Sylvia began to wrestle again with the familiar necessity to worry about where Jeff was. The maid who served them reported as she brought the coffee that the sky over the City was as pink as dawn, and it wouldn’t be much of a blackout tonight. When they had finished coffee they went out on the front steps to look.

Fires. And rolling black smoke. And a smell of burning. There were tremendous great fires down at the docks, which would act as targets all night long for more German planes. In contrast to what was happening down the river the West End streets were ominously quiet, almost deserted. But even while they stood there a fire company dashed by towards the pink sky.

Their warden passed along his beat, and touched the brim of his helmet with a forefinger.

“Better make yourselves cosy in the shelter tonight,” he said. “They’re really letting go this time!”

But there was nothing directly overhead and they returned to the drawing room and sat down together, with books and cigarettes, trying to get through the evening. Slowly they became conscious of a vibration in the air, like a giant mosquito with hiccups. A.A. guns barked angrily, and the crump of bombs in the distance came nearer as they listened. Midge, who had gone to bed in his swing, woke up, went down briskly for a drink of water, and began to sing. They exchanged amused looks, and Dinah said, “Bother, I suppose we may as well go downstairs.”

Carrying their books and knitting and Midge in his cage, they resettled themselves in the comfortable shelter room, not for the
first time, to wait out the night. Sylvia’s hands were cold, and she felt a little queasy. Jeff had gone down to Dover again that morning, because once you had been to Dover you couldn’t stay away. There was also a conviction among the correspondents that Dover was the place to be when It happened. Sylvia, who would have preferred to have him nearer at hand when the Germans came ashore, told herself once more in exasperation at her own reflexes that she must get used to it. Look at Dinah, she told herself. And Bracken’s out in it too.

Towards midnight, in what seemed to be a lull, they went upstairs again and opened the street door. Instinctively they drew back, as from a furnace. There was no blackout. Reflected from the low billowing smoke ceiling which was the sky, the red glow of fire illumined London like infernal day. The smell of burning was everywhere, and ashes settled in their hair. The lull, if there had been one, was suddenly over. Ack-ack fire, the crump,
crump,
CRUMP of a stick of bombs approaching, the mumble and whine of planes, the patter of falling metal, struck them like a blow.

Dinah closed the door and stood a moment with her back against it in the darkened hall—futilely shutting out the sight and sound of London on fire.

“Well!”
she said, more in indignation than dismay. “What a night!”

They made their way back to the basement room, and in its comforting light they looked at each other silently and sat down. Where did the flames stop? How much longer could they sit there in safety? How would they know? What about the rest of them—Bracken—Jeff—Evadne—Mona—Nigel….

“I’m glad it’s your night at home,” Dinah said at last.

“I don’t know—being on duty helps to hold you up,
somehow
—”

“I was thinking of me,” said Dinah with a little smile. “It helps to hold
me
up to have you here.”

Sylvia could find nothing to say. It was the first time Dinah had left any such opening. Sylvia decided it was probably just tact, to make her feel better.

She watched Dinah light a cigarette, noticing that her fingers were quite steady. Sylvia wanted one herself, but knew her own hands would betray her. She had never learned, because one didn’t discuss it, that everybody had his own secret soft spot of fear—and hers was fire. She had always promised herself that
she could stand up to anything but fire, and her knowledge of incendiary bomb drill was exceeded only by her hatred of it. She knew that you couldn’t beat an incendiary bomb to death, nor kick it into the gutter, nor stand there and watch it. Her lightning swift manipulation of tongs, shovel, and sand was the admiration of everyone. Tonight all London was on fire. It was only a question of time, Sylvia thought, till the flames reached the street outside.

Dinah put a record on the portable gramophone and sat down again, her face set in its serene composure. Almost immediately the house jarred and shuddered from a new impact.