The Very Thought of You (20 page)

In the summer of 1940, Roberta arrived in Yorkshire with her usual swoop of joy and laughter. Anna’s happiness at seeing her mother was boundless. She reached out to hug her, and the pair swung along, mother and daughter, holding hands on their river-meadow walk.

Anna was so proud to show off Ashton Park to her mother: the river, the lake, the old palm house in the woods, the gilded saloon which her mother admired so much, and the classrooms. Finally they climbed the stairs to her dormitory, where her mother sat on her bed to test the springs.

“Plenty of bounce,” she announced, before checking the view. “And you can see the park from your window—”

“Pretty isn’t it?”

“It’s
perfect.”

Her mother knew just how to see a place. Pictures were noticed, and details of statues and clocks that Anna had never given much thought to; everything took on a new grace.

Roberta was given a small bedroom at Ashton for the weekend, and their first day together was one of undimmed pleasure. But by Sunday morning the ache of parting was already threatening Anna’s happiness. Her elation at her mother’s presence gave way to a ticking clock, counting the moments before she would lose her once more. She felt sick at the prospect. At tea, she was unable to swallow her bread, such was her dread of her mother’s return home.

When Roberta gathered up her small bag and said goodbye, Anna crumpled into her arms. Deep sobs shook her skinny frame.

“Please don’t go, Mummy, please don’t, please don’t go.”

“Train travel is restricted now, sweetheart, so I can’t get here often. But I’ll come back again, I promise. When they give me some more leave from work.
Soon.
”

Anna was inconsolable. For twenty minutes Roberta tried to soothe her weeping daughter, while Mr Stewart hovered nearby.

“It unsettles them, when they see their mothers,” he murmured to Roberta. In the end, it was he who led Anna away, releasing Roberta to catch her bus to York station.

There, she resolved that she would not come back again too soon: her daughter was thriving, and this visit had only upset her.

It was a relief to see her so cheerful and well
, she wrote to Lewis on the train.
We’re lucky she’s found her way to such a glorious house! Much better for her to be safe there, far away from German bombs
.

Or was that an excuse? Roberta felt a prick of guilt. As her train rolled south to London, she thought of her daughter
crying herself to sleep in her dormitory, while she was off enjoying herself at the BBC, and not a plane in sight.

But it was not long after her visit that London was finally attacked by a wave of German bombers. The long-awaited Blitz began on the night of 7th September, 1940 – Roberta marked it on the kitchen calendar. At first the raids were far from her home, in the East End and the docks. But in the following weeks no part of the city was left unscarred by collapsed buildings or cratered streets.

Roberta made up her bed in the cellar, though it was hard to sleep through the wailing sirens and thundering night skies. Londoners slipped into a twilight life of fitful sleep, with waking dreams seeping through them, until they all felt disembodied by exhaustion. With all its lights switched off, London was transformed into a city of darkness. People stumbled through unlit streets, and night life was reconvened below ground. For the hedonistic, there were subterranean clubs and dance floors, open all hours. For the anxious, there were underground platforms packed with sheltering crowds.

With the arrival of dawn, the skies would be empty once more, revealing the destruction of the night before in all its charred strangeness. Fires from broken gas pipes persisted into the morning, with flames flaring a violet haze in the daylight – like lost souls leaking away into the sky, Roberta thought.

Meanwhile, everyone in Broadcasting House seemed more determined than ever to keep the show running. Roberta worked long hours, then relaxed with her friends in the pubs of Fitzrovia, before returning home in the dark and reluctantly finding her bed in the cellar, waiting for that night’s dance of death.

She was glad now that Anna was not with her. She thought with pleasure of her daughter running around in that beautiful park.

30

On the evenings when Elizabeth was senseless with drink, Thomas felt free to think about Ruth without any anxiety that his face might betray him. That night Elizabeth had passed out on their bed by ten o’clock. She would perhaps wake in the early hours and stumble into bed after undressing; or she would lie there as she was until morning.

Elizabeth did not want him to seek help for her. It was not that she was an alcoholic, she’d say: she merely resorted to drink a few times a week, only in the evenings, usually in the bedroom. Drunkenness enveloped her swiftly after a bottle of wine. If she added spirits, she would pass out. It was a secret ritual, behind closed doors, her dependence on alcoholic oblivion.

While she slept, Thomas sat still in their room, piecing together tranquil thoughts of his love for Ruth. When was the moment he had first known? using Stendhal’s metaphor, when had his love first “crystallized”? The feeling had crept up on him, it was not something he had pursued. At first he had only opened up a crack in himself – but still the tenderness had taken root, until that single moment came when he realized he was in love.

Looking back, Thomas believed this moment had struck on a rainy March day, when the teachers had gathered in the library. He could remember every beat of that afternoon. There was a confusion of chairs as they all assembled for the staff meeting. Thomas was placed next to his wife, and there, seated at a nearby table, was Ruth – casually placed in his line of vision. She did not say much, but sat very still and straight.

He watched her and wondered, with guilt, if she could read his mind. She never looked his way, nor did he expect
her to, though he felt a strange pull between them – or was he just imagining that?

Obliquely, he gazed at the quiet grace of her face; an aura of light seemed to gather at the curve of her cheek, and he found himself transfixed.

Time stalled as the voices talked on; he did not want to leave that room, he wanted the meeting to go on for ever with its soft drone, just so that he could remain there watching her.

How had he ever lived without such feelings, he wondered. Her hair, tucked behind her ears, had come loose on one side. And when she moved her hand, his heart rose – the thought of a caress from those fingers.

That was the day he had recognized Ruth for what she was: the first woman he had ever wanted to love. How could he not have known this at once? It had taken him weeks, months, to understand that her face, her soul, her actions, were everything that he had ever craved in a woman.

Yet that had been just the beginning. First there had been the joy of recognition, the secret elation of love, but dejection soon followed, as he faced the folly of his feelings.

He thought of other people, everyday people on streets, who met and courted, and knew that they loved each other, and married and procreated. Perhaps that was how it had seemed with him and Elizabeth, yet all the while it had been a pretence. And now – he felt for Ruth all the things a man should feel, but he was unable to say so. How could he blight the life of this young woman, when he had nothing to offer her? And yet he could not stop himself thinking of her, and hoping for her, and longing to hold her in his arms.

Elizabeth stirred on their bed, and Thomas watched her with dispassionate eyes. He was sorry for her, and felt culpable too. But it was distant pity, long since sieved away from his own griefs. He saw her fine dark features, but these
left him cold now, because she was outside him, had no place in his heart.

He might feel guilty about Elizabeth, but she could never uproot his feelings for Ruth now, however foolish they were.

31

At break time, Anna would race to the Marble hall to wait for the post. Hillary Trevor, the eldest girl, collected the letters from Mr Stewart, and all the evacuees thronged round her as she called out their names.

Maltby... Rothery... Price... Rimmer... Hill... Todd...

Small arms popped up through the crowd, letters were passed back to answering hands, and children slipped away to window seats or garden benches to read their letters from home.

My dear Anna,
We have had cloudy days this week, which has been a boon
because it is trickier for the German planes.
Not so many air raids lately and London has come back to life again,
everyone smiling on the streets, helping each other.

For the rest of her life, Anna never quite lost that childish daily hope of getting something in the post. Letters always reminded her of those wartime messages from her mother, those treasured bulletins which reassured her that another life was still waiting for her at home. There was that surge of excitement in the roll call, which might suddenly throw up her own name,
Sands!
Then a cream letter with her mother’s handwriting would dance across raised arms to her, and she would carefully prise it open and savour her mother’s words.

Near my office is Regent’s Park, and I often stroll there at lunch. I feed the wintry ducks and think of all the times we have done that together. I hope school is going well, and that you are eating enough. I miss you my darling, and I long for us all to be together soon, as I’m sure we will be. Keep safe, my Anna, and say a prayer for your father. He wrote to me from Egypt, where he had three days’ leave in Alexandria and said he had bought a gift for you.

Write to me soon my dearest, and all my love, Mummy.

Anna could glimpse her mother’s face in the shape of her writing, and love spilled through her as she read her words. She tucked the stiff envelope into her pocket and it pressed against her leg all day, reminding her that she had been written to, that she belonged to somebody.

Some of the evacuees never got letters, but they still could not resist hovering on the outside edge of the letter crowd with forlorn eyes. Yet even for those who were remembered, there was still a dull ache of homesickness which never really eased, running like a buried river through their daily lives.

December, in particular, was a time when many of the children grew sad, and in the years to come, Anna would never forget her wartime Christmases so far from home. But she would remember, too, how generous the Ashtons were, always making sure that every evacuee had a gift under the tree. And how on Christmas Day itself they all shared a hearty lunch, with the rare treat of roast chicken and crispy potatoes, with plenty more vegetables from the grounds.

Yet none of those consolations could ever quite staunch the Christmas-night tears in the dormitories. The remembrance of home, of mothers, of fathers. The emotional wasteland of their lives without them. It would take years for many of them to dare to love again.

* * *

The New year of 1941 brought a spell of bad weather to Yorkshire, and Ashton Park was cut off for several days by drifts of snow. Thomas found himself more removed than ever from his old diplomatic colleagues, with little or no sense of what was going on in London.

“
We are packing up our house here
,” Norton reported in his last letter, “
and preparing for my new posting in Switzerland. We leave in a few weeks.
”

It was difficult to gauge any sense of the war’s progress from a wireless in snowbound Yorkshire, Thomas reflected, as he wheeled himself to his study window. But perhaps that was a blessing.

The children had all rushed outside to build snowmen and roll great snowballs down the grass banks. They were unstoppable, despite the cold. Thomas watched them from his window, though his thoughts were elsewhere. Ruth had gone home to visit her parents for Christmas, but since her return she had behaved like a stranger to him. Their relationship, always tenuous, had reverted to stilted formality, as if any flicker of feeling had been erased.

“Did you find your parents well?” he asked at lunch, on her first day back.

“Yes, thank you – very well.”

“And what do they make of your work here?”

“They’re relieved, I think, to see me out of London.”

“It was our good luck that you ended up here—”

“If you’ll excuse me, I must finish some marking.”

“No coffee?”

“Not today, no thank you.”

Thomas found himself unable to reach her. Lessons began again and school life rolled on, yet every day he grew
more agitated by their distance. He longed to speak to her more freely, but the bad weather had long since ended their poetry classes, and there was little excuse for extended conversation.

“There’s a new copy of
Horizon
in the library, if you would like to see it?”

“Thank you, but I already have so many unread books stacked beside my bed.”

“There’s an article about Hopkins which I thought might interest you—”

“I’ll remember to look out for it. Thank you.”

Had he lost her? Twice she shied away from the empty seat beside him at lunch, crushing him with a suspicion that she might be avoiding him. He began to feel his disability acutely; his legs felt wasted, his arms weak. He struggled to keep his back straight, and took to crossing his knees in staff meetings, to show that he still had feelings, nerves, life in his legs.

Self-doubt infected his every thought. How could she ever care for a man such as him? How could he have ever imagined that she might?

He watched her as she walked out of rooms, or passed by windows. The lightness of her walk.
I can’t take my eyes off you
, he told her silently in the dining room, when her face was turned the other way.

He thought of her all day, every moment, and began to fear that he was losing his mind. She was in the crack of the floorboards, and the window pane, and the lines of every book he read. He was heart-sick, soul-sick, mind-sick. His eyes saw nothing but inward images of Ruth walking, turning, smiling. The first euphoria of love had passed. Now he was consumed by longings which he feared he could never declare.