Charlotte Gray (7 page)

Ten days had passed since the evening in Ralph's flat. She saw this interval in retrospect as confused and incomprehensible. She viewed life as narrative, because that was how she experienced it. There was the time before an event, and then, the world changed, there was the time after it.

When someone died suddenly or young she always thought: who could have known, who could have foreseen this, on the day other wedding or when we last met, when no one even knew she was ill; yet the cells were already silently about their fatal work? This violent unknowability of life was central to her experience of it, and it was pointless to pretend that it was There chance' or that subtler philosophies were not concerned with anything so vulgar as incident or 'story': any interpretation that was not concerned with random changes had, in her view, begged the biggest question.

This was what made the days of uncertainty in retrospect so baffling. Once her feelings for Peter Gregory had crystallised, she found it hard to picture herself in a previous epoch, while the days of transition themselves seemed lacking in self-awareness, almost comically confused.

She loved him.

How could she once not have loved him?

The night before she had lain in bed and wept. She could not stop crying. She wrapped a pillow over her head so the noise could not be heard outside her room. She dreaded Daisy coming in and offering some salacious, short advice. In her confusion she heard the word 'inconsolable' and knew that it was apt because she did not wish to be consoled: it was more important to have him than to save herself.

Was that 'love'? Was that what it meant? She struggled with the question because she needed to find a word for the feeling that had overpowered her. In identifying it, by whatever surprising word, she might bring it within bounds. Love had never felt like this to her before: not in the tough little loyalty with her brother, not in the resentful affection for her mother, not in the liberating fondness of friends.

In the morning she saw that whatever name she gave the feeling, it had, in any case, become a given of her life: an incident, a narrative development that changed everything. The relief of recognising a new fixed point was qualified by her knowledge of how inconvenient it was.

The last thing she needed was some uncontrolled romance. She wanted to be helpful, she wanted to lead a serious life, not to lie sobbing in her bed for a disembodied yearning. Still less did she wish to see it embodied, with the complication and the fear that all that would entail.

As she walked through Regent's Park she looked at the old people, children, women, non-combatants, but felt no sense of kinship with their cold walks, their individual ties and errands. She felt as though she had stepped outside the normal scope of daily life. Perhaps drug addicts felt this separation from reality, this powerful dissociation that made them both superior and helpless. She wanted to return, to reinhabit a life in which normal forces mediated, yet was unable to quieten in any way the volume of her ecstasy.

When Dr. Wolf returned to his consulting rooms after lunch he failed to offer his usual greeting. Charlotte looked up anxiously from her desk.

"Did you have a good lunch?" she said.

"Perfectly acceptable, thank you, though alas not in the place of my choosing."

"Why was that?"

"Because, Miss. Gray, you failed to book my table."

"Oh my God, I'm sorry. It completely slipped my mind."

"In the normal way I could have eaten at the long table with the other members, but since I had a guest to whom I wanted to talk in private, we were obliged to go elsewhere."

"I'm very sorry, Dr. Wolf. I just forgot."

"Is there something on your mind. Miss. Gray?"

"No, not particularly."

"You've appeared somewhat distracted over the last two or three days. I wondered if something was troubling you."

"No, no, I ... don't think so. I was thinking about the situation in France. It's very sad, isn't it? I used to go there a good deal. I'm worried about some people I know. A family I used to stay with."

"Are they in the Occupied Zone?"

"Yes, they live near Chartres."

"Then I share your concern. Are they Jewish?"

"No. Not that I'm aware of. I suppose it's possible that they have Jewish blood somewhere in the past. But they're ordinary Catholics now."

"I daresay they've made what accommodation they feel is necessary with the occupying power." Wolf's tone was ambiguous.

Charlotte said, "I suppose so. They're quite elderly. I doubt whether they can have much choice."

"At least in the Occupied Zone they can comfort themselves with that knowledge. One can't help feeling that in the Free Zone one would feel more uneasy."

"In what way?"

"Even by doing nothing you would be making a pact with the devil. I think one would feel compelled to take action against the Government."

"One?"

Dr. Wolf smiled.

"I am probably as old as your friends. But you are a young woman of spirit, Miss. Gray." Charlotte said, "Perhaps you're right. I think maybe I would try to do something. It's hard to know what, because it isn't easy to discover what's going on."

"They have sold the honour of the country." Wolf's doubtful tone resolved itself into tetchy certainty.

"That exquisite civilisation that took so long to bring to flower. They're not just Nazis, they're worse than the Nazis, because they're French." Charlotte looked down at the desk.

"Perhaps."

Wolf had gone halfway through the door to his room when he stopped.

"I almost forgot. After you had gone out to lunch there was a telephone call for you. A gentleman. I've written his name down somewhere."

Charlotte watched him disappear into the gloom, then return with a piece of paper.

"A Mr. Cannerley. He says he'll telephone again later."

"Thank you," said Charlotte. Her mouth felt dusty.

"I'm sorry about the table."

Cannerley, thought Charlotte, as the bus jolted along the Bayswater Road. What do I want with Cannerley? Among other things, she resented the way that someone like him who knew 'people' had been able to discover her telephone number. She looked down on to the railings of the park. Across the road the big hotels looked bulky and deserted, their glimmering windows darkened. She was numb and cold when she reached the flat and squeezed past the walnut dresser in the hall. Her plan was to have a bath, then retire to her room "with a book. Cannerley. For heaven's sake.

It took all Gregory's willpower not to telephone.

Luckily, the prospect of a change of job occupied his mind for much of the day; it was liberating, if not quite reviving. He would need to retrain to fly bigger planes, some of which required plain muscular strength: the fabled lightness of touch, sometimes having only to stretch your toes inside your boots to feel the tail twitch ... that wouldn't work. Gregory was happy to leave it all behind and start again. There was something comic about the handling of big planes and something pedestrian about flying with a navigator, but he felt the change was timely, almost decorous.

It was still difficult not to telephone this woman. It had been hard enough not to invite her to go with him when he left Ralph's flat. He had been led to expect that the invitation emanated from his friend Michael Waterslow. He kept expecting Michael to appear and felt deceived when it became apparent that this Ralph and the drunk Miles, were the only other men. They produced some food at about ten o'clock, then Ralph played the guitar. They had made a sort of bolognaise out of tinned meat and spongy carrots to go with some spaghetti the girl with the dark hair had found in Ralph's cupboard. It was repulsive, but by that time Gregory, who had been instructed to bring whisky but found himself the only person drinking it, was too drunk to care.

And the girl, the woman. Charlotte. She had an astonishing nervous intensity. They talked for three hours on the sofa, at the end of which he felt as though he had been subjected to a violent electrical charge.

Her force seemed to him magnificent, particularly as it was filtered by such a diffident manner. A roue's reflex in him swiftly calculated factors of propriety and emotion, passion and control, and what the amorous consequences might be; but, intrigued though he was by the idea, he was more charmed by a solemn sweetness in her. She did believe in things, and said so, then seemed to find her superior education mocking her desire for earnestness. She did laugh too, sometimes at the traps she inadvertently set for herself and sometimes at the things he told her. He found himself becoming confidential. He was able to check this tendency, though only with difficulty; and when he heard himself talking to her in intimate terms about his childhood in India he thought he had better leave. There was an awkward exchange on the landing outside the flat. In the light of the shade less stairwell bulb he could see the even brown colour of her eyes as she determinedly held his gaze.

"I have enjoyed talking to you. I have to go back to the squadron tomorrow. I'll ... Perhaps we'll meet again at Michael's or ..."

He had not meant to get in touch again.

Charlotte was sitting on the sofa of the sitting room, her shoes off, her arms round her thighs, her chin on her shiny knees. The flame was flickering up the cracked filaments of the fire, turning them from white to blue to glowing orange. She was staring at the colours, trying to feel some warmth through her feet. Fires always reduced her to the condition of childhood.

It was five o'clock and she was back from school; she was allowed to set a match to half a dozen corners of the newspaper and watch it curl into the spliced kindling. The draught of the nursery fireplace sucked the flame up into the pyramid of coal, where it smoked and faltered, momentarily defeated.

Before this there was a time when the flames were making bridges from one part to another and Charlotte, like other schoolgirls, saw the different fires within the fire, the struggles, extinctions, gathering blazes, as emblems of her life. Then her mother arrived with a teapot and put it on the table behind her; the catching coal was starting to give a uniform red glow.

Charlotte turned away.

The gas fire in the flat had raised a patch of pink in her cheek. She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her high forehead. She was confused. The telephone rang. Dick Cannerley wondered if she'd care to join him for dinner one evening this week. To decline the invitation Charlotte would have to claim to be busy every night, so she decided to make a strategic concession. It was better to accept straight away than to be bullied into it: if she went once, she needn't go again.

Charlotte replaced the receiver and went back to the sofa. She was already doubting the wisdom of her acceptance. On the other hand, what did she have to lose?

There was a pattern in her thinking which had become irksomely familiar to her over the years. She felt herself now entering this sequence, which began with a sense of powerlessness, then gathered into a positive despair from which she could not be roused for days and sometimes weeks.

She stood up and went to her bedroom. She must do something to save herself.

One of the hardest drinkers in Gregory's squadron was a man called Leslie Brind. The high point of his evening came when he reached up to the beam in the lounge bar of the Rose and Crown and took down the glass yard. Walter, the beaming barman, was happy to fill it with the ale of his choice and watched admiringly as Brind lifted it to his lips. Since he liked as many people as possible to place bets on his ability to drain it, he usually waited till just before closing time to perform this feat. By this stage he would have been drinking steadily for three or four hours, yet the sudden 'boost-override', as he called it, after an emergency function on the Hurricane, had no apparent effect on his behaviour: he simply became a little more bonhomous as he collected his winnings.

His income from drinking was not, however, enough to balance his expenditure on drinking, and he was forced to sell his little open-top car to pay off some of his more persistent creditors. The buyer was Borowski, who paid only a few pounds for it on the grounds that, as he pointed out to Brind, it did not actually go. To a man of Borowski's mechanical ability, however, this was no more than a challenge: after two week-ends under the bonnet he coaxed out signs of life. He enlisted the help of his fitter to cut down and weld a part from another car when the manufacturer could not supply the spare he needed. On the third week-end he arrived outside the cottage in which Gregory was billeted.

"We're going for a spin," he said, as Gregory's head appeared from an upstairs window.

"For God's sake, Borowski, I didn't get to bed till six." Borowski merely hooted the horn until Gregory's unshaven figure appeared from the cottage, pulling a scarf round his open neck and kicking his feet down into flying boots as he crossed the gravel.

"Hmm. That fuel smells suspiciously high octane to me," he said as he climbed in.

"Don't ask."

"I wouldn't let Landon get down-wind of it."

"I thought we might go up to town," said Borowski.

"It's far too bloody cold for that. Haven't you got a hood?"

"Poor old Greg. Always the bad circulation problem."

"Always."

Borowski put the car into gear, revved up and dropped the clutch, so that a hail of gravel pattered into the leaded lights of a downstairs window of the cottage. After half an hour, Gregory persuaded Borowski to pull in at a pub off the Hog's Back. They were the first customers of the morning, and a thin fire in the grate had not begun to warm the empty bar. They sat on either side of the mantelpiece, holding whisky and ginger ale in chilly hands.