The Shell Seekers (41 page)

"Macaroni cheese."

"You make the best."

"It is boring. Boring to cook and boring to eat. I don't blame them for complaining."

He said, "You have too much to do."

"No."

"Yes. You are tired and fed up."

She looked up and met his eyes. After a little, "Does it show so much?" she asked him.

"Only to me, who knows you so well."

"I am ashamed. I hate myself. Why should I be discontented? But I feel so useless. What am I doing? Making nets and cooking meals. I think of women all over Europe, and I hate myself, but I can't help it. And if I have to go and queue for another hour for an oxtail that some other person has just bought, I think I shall start to .have hysterics."

"You should go away for a day or two."

"Go away?"

"Go to London. See your house. Stay with the Cliffords. Reassure yourself." He reached out and put his hand over hers, covering it with earth from the potato patch. "We listen to the news of the bombing, and we're horrified, but disaster relayed is often more frightening than the horror itself. The imagination bolts, the heart sinks in dread. But, in truth, nothing is ever so bad as we think it is going to be. Why don't you go to London and find that out for yourself?"

Looking, already, more cheerful, Sophie considered this. "Will you come too?"

He shook his head. "No, my dear. I am too old for junketings, and junketings are exactly what you need. Stay with the Cliffords, giggle with Elizabeth. Go shopping with her. Get Peter to take you out to lunch at the Berkeley or L'Ecu de France. I believe the food there is still excellent, despite all the shortages. Call up your friends. Go to a concert, the theatre. Life goes on. Even in London in wartime. Especially, perhaps, in London, in wartime."

"But will you not mind if I go without you?"

"I shall mind more than I can say. Not a moment will pass when I shall not miss you."

"For three days? Could you bear it for three days?"

"I can bear it. And when you come back you can spend three weeks telling me everything you have done."

"Lawrence, I love you so much."

He shook his head, not refuting this, but simply letting her know that she had no need to tell him. He leaned forward and kissed her mouth, and then got to his feet and went to the sink to wash the mud from his hands.

The night before she was due to catch the train to London, Sophie went to bed early. Doris was out, gone to some hop in the town hall, and the children already asleep. Penelope and Lawrence sat up for a little, listening to a concert on the radio, but then Penelope began to yawn, put away her knitting, kissed her father good night, and made her way upstairs.

The door to Sophie's bedroom stood open, the light still shone. Penelope put her head around the door. Sophie was in bed, and reading.

"I thought you came up early to get your beauty sleep."

"I am too excited to sleep." She laid down her book on the eiderdown. Penelope went to sit beside her. "I wish you were coming with me."

"No. Papa's right. You'll have much more fun on your own."

"What shall I bring back for you?"

"I can't think of anything."

"I shall find something special. Something that you never dreamed you wanted."

"That'll be nice. What are you reading?" She picked up the book. "Elizabeth and her German Garden. Sophie, you must have read that a hundred times."

"At least. But I always go back to it. It comforts me. Soothes me. It reminds me of a world that once existed and will exist again when the war is finished."

Penelope opened it at random and read aloud. "What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them." She laughed and laid the book down again. "You've got all those things. It's just the leisure you're missing out on. Good night." They kissed.

"Good night, my darling."

She telephoned from London, her voice joyous over the crackling line.

"Lawrence. It's me. Sophie. How are you, my darling? Yes, I am having a wonderful time. You were quite right, nothing is as bad as I thought it would be. Yes, of course, there is bomb damage, great holes in terraces of houses, like teeth knocked out, but everybody is brave and cheerful and carrying on as though nothing had happened. And there is so much going on. We have been to two concerts, we heard Myra Hess at lunch-time, so perfect, you would have loved her. And I have seen the Ellingtons and that nice boy, Ralph, who was studying at the Slade; he is in the RAF now. And the house is fine, standing up to all the bangs and thumps, and it is so lovely to be back, and Willi Friedmann is growing vegetables in the garden. . . ."

When he could get a word in edgewise, "What are you doing this evening?" Lawrence asked.

"We are going out for dinner with the Dickinses; Peter and Elizabeth and I. You remember them, he is a doctor, he used to work with Peter . . . they live out near Hurlingham?"

"How will you get there?"

"Oh, by taxi, or tube. The tubes are extraordinary, the sta-tions full of sleeping people. They sing and have lovely parties and then they all go to sleep. Oh, my darling, there are the pips. I must hang up. Love to everybody, and I'll be home the day after tomorrow."

That night, Penelope awoke with a terrifying start. Something— some sound, some alarm. The baby, perhaps. Had Nancy cried out? She lay listening, but all she could hear was the frightened thudding of her own heart. This gradually subsided. Then she heard the footsteps crossing the landing, the creaking boards of the staircase, the click as a light was switched on. She got out of bed and went out of her room and leaned over the bannisters. The hall light burned.

"Papa?"

There was no reply. She crossed the landing and looked into his bedroom. The bed was disturbed, but empty. She returned to the landing, hesitated. What was he doing? Was he ill? Listening, she heard him moving about in the sitting room. Presently all was still. He was wakeful, that was all. Sometimes when he was wakeful, he did this: took himself downstairs, built up the fire, found himself a book to read.

She returned to bed. But sleep eluded her. She lay in the darkness and watched the dusky sky beyond the open window. Down on the beach, a flood tide murmured, rollers shushing in on the sand. Listening to the ocean's stirring, she waited, wide-eyed, for the dawn.

At seven, she got up and went downstairs. He had switched on the radio. There was music. He was waiting for the early-morning news.

"Papa."

He put up a hand, motioning her to be silent. The music faded. The time signal sounded. "This is London. The seven-o'clock news and Alvar Liddell reading it." The calm voice, im-passionate, objective, told them what had happened. Told them of last night's bombing raid on London. . . . incendiaries, landmines, high explosives had all been showered upon the city. Fires still burned, but were under control . . . the docks had been hit. . . .

Penelope put out her hand and switched the radio off. Lawrence looked up at her. He wore his old Jaeger dressing-gown, the stubble on his chin glinted white.

He said, "I couldn't sleep."

"I know. I heard you come down."

"I have been sitting here, waiting for the morning."

"There have been other raids. It will be all right. I'll make tea. Don't worry. We'll have a cup of tea, and then we'll ring Oakley Street. It'll be all right, Papa."

They tried to put a call through, but the operator told them that, after last night's raid, there were no lines to London. All morning, hour by hour, they tried to get through. Without success.

"Sophie will be trying to ring us, Papa, just as we are trying to ring her. She'll be just as frustrated as we are, and just as anxious, because she knows that we are worried."

But it was midday before the telephone finally rang. Penelope, chopping vegetables for soup at the kitchen sink, heard the bell, dropped the knife and ran for the sitting room, wiping her hands on her apron as she went. But Lawrence, sitting beside the instrument, had already picked up the receiver. She went to kneel beside him, leaning close, so as not to miss a word.

"Hello? Cam Cottage here. Hello?"

A buzz, a squeak, a strange burring sound, and then, at last, "Hello." But it was not Sophie's voice.

"Lawrence Stern speaking."

"Oh, Lawrence, this is Lalla Friedmann. Yes, Lalla from Oakley Street. I couldn't get through before. I have been trying for over two hours. I—" Her voice suddenly broke and stopped.

"What is it, Lalla?"

"You aren't alone?"

"Penelope is with me. It's . . . Sophie, isn't it?"

"Yes. Oh, Lawrence, yes. And the Cliffords. All of them. They have all been killed. A land-mine fell directly on the Dick-inses' house. There is nothing left. We went to see, Willi and I. This morning, when they had not returned, Willi tried to ring the Dickinses, but of course it was impossible. So we went ourselves to find out what had happened. We had been before, one Christmas, so we knew the way. We took a taxi, but then we had to walk . . ." Nothing left. ". . . and when we reached the end of the street, it was cordoned off; nobody was allowed there, and the firemen were still working. But we could see. The house had disappeared. Nothing there but a great crater. And there was a policeman and I spoke to him. And he was very kind, but he said there is no hope. No hope, Lawrence." She began to weep. "All of them. Dead. I am so sorry. I am so sorry to tell you."

Nothing left.

Lawrence said, "It was good of you to go and look for them. And good of you to ring me up. . . ."

"It is the
worst thing I have ever had to do
."

"Yes," said Lawrence. "Yes." He sat there. After a little, he hung up, his twisted fingers fumbling as he tried to replace the receiver. Penelope turned her head and laid it against the thick wool of his sweater. The silence that ensued was empty of everything. A vacuum.

"Papa."

He put up a hand, stroked her hair.

"Papa."

She looked up at him, and he shook his head. She knew that he wanted only to be left alone. She saw then that he was old. He had never seemed so to her before, but now she knew that he would never be anything else. She got to her feet and went out of the room and closed the door.

Nothing left.

She went upstairs and into her parents' bedroom. The bed, on this ghastly morning, had never been made. The sheets were still awry, the pillow dented from her father's sleepless head. He had known. They both had. Hoping, keeping up their courage, but filled with deadly certainty. They both had known.

Nothing left.

On the table at Sophie's side of the bed lay the book that she had been reading the night before she went to London. Penelope went and sat there and picked up the book. It fell open in her hands at that well-worn page.

"What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily."

The words dissolved and were lost, like figures seen through a rain-washed window. To find happiness so easily. Sophie had not only found happiness, but radiated it. And now, there was nothing left. The book slipped from her fingers. She lay down, burying her streaming face in Sophie's pillow, the linen cool as her mother's skin, and smelling sweetly of her scent, as though she had, just a moment before, gone from the room.

10

ROY BROOKNER

Although a competent games player and a wizard of keen-eyed speed on the squash courts, Noel Keeling was not a man addicted to physical labour. At weekends, if dragooned by his hostess into an afternoon of tree-cutting, or communal gardening, he invariably took on to himself the least arduous of tasks, gathering small branches for a bonfire, or cutting the dead heads off the roses. He would volunteer to mow the lawn, but only if the machine was one he could ride, and made a point of seeing that another person—usually some besotted girl—trundled the wheelbarrow of grass cuttings to the compost heap. If things grew really tough, with fence posts having to be sledge-hammered into rocky ground, or an enormous hole excavated for a newly acquired shrub, he had perfected the art of slinking indoors, where he would eventually be discovered, by exhausted and indignant fellow-guests, at ease in front of the television, watching cricket or golf, with the Sunday newspapers strewn, like leaves, all about him.

Accordingly, he laid his plans. The whole of Saturday would be spent, quite simply, nosing around, sifting through the contents of every trunk, every box, every battered lopsided chest of drawers. (The actual heavy work, the pushing and heaving, and humping of rubbish down the two narrow flights of stairs, could be safely left until the next day, with the new gardener to act as labourer, and Noel having to do nothing more strenuous than give the orders.) If he was successful in his search and came upon what he was looking for ... one, two, or even more of Law-rence Stern's rough oil sketches . . . then he was going to play it very cool. These might be interesting, he would say to his mother, and depending on her reaction would carry on from there.
Might be worth having some expert to cast his eye; I've got this chum, Edwin Mundy . . .