Their Finest Hour and a Half (9 page)

*

No, thought Edith, re-reading the letter. Things were bad in London and worse in Wimbledon, but it hadn't yet come to working for Elsie Breen's wages minus keep. Though if she closed her eyes she could see the long empty curve of sand along Badgeham Bay and almost feel the cold, clean wind. She'd spent every holiday there as a child. She could still remember the sense of boundless space.

In Number 40, there was no space at all. Three and a half ceilings had come down and until Mrs Bailey could find a carpenter, a plasterer, a tiler and a general labourer to cart away the debris, the remaining occupants were confined to two bedrooms, one containing Mrs Bailey, and the other Pamela and Edith. ‘This is
my
part of the room,' Pamela had declared, indicating an area which included bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers and access to the door.

‘Don't be silly,' had been Edith's feeble reply, but she'd
felt
feeble, her salvagable possessions in a sad little pile on a chair, her hip bones aching from the row of cushions she was using as a makeshift mattress. The whole house felt coated in dust and jammed with clutter, no surface free, no square of carpet that she could keep clear and call her own. It reminded her of the lodgings she'd lived in during her first years in London – sticky landings, shared kitchens, stains on the ceiling, tiny oddly-shaped rooms with six corners and two doors, horrid furniture, the upholstery whiskery with horsehair, the crevices stuffed with stubs of pencil and boiled sweets and ancient farthings. Mrs Sumpter's advertisement had saved her from all that, and now poor Mrs Sumpter was lying beneath a bunch of carnations in the ochre clay of Wimbledon Municipal Cemetery, and Mrs Bailey was busily assauging her grief by putting up the rent.

‘There's repairs to pay for,' she'd pointed out, reprovingly, as if Edith had been caught axing the roof-tree and punching out the windows. In the frowsy atmosphere of the shared bedroom, with the blackouts trapping in the last heat of the summer, Edith would lie awake and listen as Pamela talked in her sleep, her cool clear voice ordering some little minion to buy her sweets and magazines and packets of hair grips, or complaining about the meanness of the teachers. Once Edith heard her own name mentioned: ‘There's old birdy Beady coming . . . old greedy Beady.'

‘
Greedy?
' she'd thought. ‘But I've never been greedy.'

Sometimes she felt breathless, hemmed in, and her mind would sketch a large and empty room with lime-washed walls and a wooden floor that echoed as she walked across the boards.

At work she'd had interest and sympathy, oceans of it, far exceeding the little trickle that normally accompanied a colleague's misfortune or illness. ‘Edith has
been bombed
,' had been the awed whisper the Monday after Wimbledon had caught it, and there'd been a stream of visitors to the wardrobe room, each wanting her to recount her story. And she hadn't minded at all; it had been rather exciting to have the normally aloof Head of Moulds shaking his head in wonder as she told of her dive into the snapdragons. Dolly Clifford, in particular, had been awfully solicitous, plying Edith with cups of sweet tea and putting out a steadying hand whenever she stood up or turned around sharply.

‘I feel quite well,' Edith had been moved to say at one point.

‘I once heard of a man—' Dolly paused dramatically, and then put a hand to her lips and turned away. ‘I shouldn't,' she added, over her shoulder.

‘Shouldn't what?' asked Edith.

‘Shouldn't tell you.'

‘Well, you needn't.'

‘But I think, perhaps . . . you should
know
.'

Edith had been reattaching paste pearls to Ann Boleyn's stomacher – children
would
keep ducking under the ropes and pulling them off – but she paused, needle in hand, and looked at her colleague warily; most of Dolly's stories began, ‘I once heard of a man', and none of them had happy endings.

‘He was in his bathroom when the gas geyser exploded,' said Dolly, her voice charged with doom. ‘And he was thrown twenty yards through an open window and landed in a hedge. Not a scratch on him. He said he'd never felt better. The next day someone asked him if he wanted milk in his tea, and he gave a nod and dropped dead. When they cut him open they found that the blast had sent a razor blade straight into his neck, and when he'd nodded, the razor had moved and cut his spinal column right in half, all the way through.'

In the momentary silence that followed she swung the hinged ironing board down from the wall and kicked the legs into place.

‘Did his head fall off, then?' It was Nora, one of the juniors, who asked the question, though it had crossed Edith's mind as well.

‘Don't be silly,' said Dolly, huffily, hefting her iron and dabbing it with a wetted finger. The hiss and crack were satisfactory and she stretched George Washington's lace jabot across the board, covered it with a damp cloth, and applied the iron.

‘I feel quite well,' said Edith again, more to reassure herself than anything, though her hands were not as steady as usual and she kept dropping the pearls and having to pounce on them before they rolled off the table. ‘I'm just awfully sad about Mrs Sumpter. And then there's all the horrible mess – you should see it . . .'

‘There's one thing I
do
know about bombs,' said Dolly, through a veil of steam, ‘and that's that they never fall in the same place twice, so you'd be wise to stay put, however much of a trial it might be. Now who's that?' she added, at yet another knock on the door.

‘Just me,' said Miss McNally, Head Coiffeuse and Chief Thorn in the Side of Wardrobe, a woman who thought that people came to Madame Tussauds in order to see the wigs. She was smiling, not an activity that came naturally to her. ‘I've come to talk to Miss Beadmore about her terrible ordeal – that is, if it won't upset her too much . . .'

The interest dwindled rather quickly. Perhaps it was because she didn't tell the story well enough, didn't add the gruesome flourishes that Dolly would have managed so well. Perhaps it was because she couldn't banish the disbelief in her own voice as she spoke of an incident so dramatic that, surely, it must have happened to someone else. In any case, alerts were coming more frequently now and other people were beginning to acquire stories of their own: Mr Clay, the curator of the Chamber of Horrors, had been third on the scene when a Spitfire had downed a German fighter in a field outside Harrow, and had seen the incinerated corpse of the pilot; Dolly's neighbour's niece in Liverpool had injured her back in a raid and would never walk again; Miss McNally's elderly cat lay panting with fear under the stove every time the wobbler sounded, and had to be put down. Every day, Edith's own little tale was shuffled further down the pack. In the evenings, if the sky was silent, she sat in the lounge with Pamela and Mrs Bailey, trying to read while mother and daughter snippily discussed the merits of the latter's return to Leighton Buzzard, and if one or the other happened to look at Edith during those hours it seemed it was only by chance, in passing, in the same way that they might glance at the mantelpiece, or at the framed picture of the jaunty dog smoking a pipe, or at Mrs Sumpter's empty chair.

*

September 1940

The two juniors, Pearl and Nora, looked so much alike that they might be mistaken for sisters. Both were sixteen, toothpick-thin, with washed-out complexions and pale blue eyes. Both looked as if they scarcely possessed the energy to lift a pin, but presumably shared some powerful hidden dynamo, since they worked like billy-o, talked all day, and went dancing every single evening, apparently popping home only for the purpose of having an argument with their respective parents about the impropriety of staying out until all hours.

They talked about lipstick and hairstyles and shoes and royalty, and whether John Clements was better-looking than Leslie Howard, and how many times they'd been to see
Gone with the Wind
, and who they'd seen it with. They talked about current boyfriends and ex-boyfriends and prospective boyfriends and boys with whom they couldn't possibly bring themselves to dance (no never, honestly, I
couldn't
, never mind how many times he asked me). They talked about what Ronnie said to Audrey and to Audrey's friend Freda just before Audrey slapped Ronnie and went off with Freda's ex-boyfriend Alan. They talked about the hilarious time when they'd walked the wrong way in the blackout and ended up nearly falling in the river, and about how that queer man had approached them behind the Palais and they'd thought he was going to try some funny business before he opened his coat and tried to sell them a slab of Bourneville so old that the chocolate had gone white.

What they never talked about was the actual war. ‘We don't need to know anything,' Pearl had said, ‘it's nothing to do with us,' and she had been utterly unembarrassed by the incident in May, when the waxwork of Chamberlain had been hauled off to the History of British Politics gallery while that of Churchill had taken his place in the Tableau of the Allies just in front of De Gaulle and General Sikorski. Pearl had stared at the pugnacious red face for a good five seconds and then said, ‘I know him. Isn't he the one in
My Little Chickadee
?'

Nora had shrieked with laughter at this, but since she herself had once identified the undressed dummy of Herman Goering as, ‘The fat one in the Three Stooges', she had little grounds on which to sneer. But it was Goering who came for Nora in Bermondsey on Saturday the seventh, sending a skyful of bombers to the docks in broad daylight, and it was Nora who had the story to beat all stories when she came into Tussaud's, only a few minutes late, on the Monday morning.

She sat on the very edge of the chair, her eyes bright, her face even paler than usual, and she counted on her fingers: ‘My gran's house is gone, my nan's house is gone, my auntie Kate's house is gone, my friend Sadie's house is gone, my old school is gone, the house on the corner of our street is gone, and the two old ladies who live there are still underneath it, and there was a dead body on the pavement just outside our front door that was blown from two roads away!' And then someone new would come into the sewing-room and Nora would uncurl her fingers and count again: ‘My gran's house is gone, my nan's house is gone . . .'

Even from as far away as Wimbledon, it had been possible to see the russet light in the sky to the east as the docks burned, and it had been there again the night afterwards, a Looking-Glass sunset that began after dark and lasted till dawn. Edith had spent both nights with the Baileys in the dank back-garden shelter, wrapped in an eiderdown, sleeping in snatches, taking tiny comfort from the fact that the war seemed to have moved on, that Wimbledon had been nudged by the toe of history, and then abandoned for mightier targets. Such as seven-stone Nora, she thought now, with a spasm of guilt, as the girl told her story again.

‘My gran's house is gone, my nan's house is gone . . .' She'd refused the unprecedented managerial offer of an afternoon off (‘My mum says I'll be safer in town than what I am at home') but as the day passed and the repetitions multiplied, she seemed to sit ever more upright, her voice tighter and faster, one hand tugging at the fingers of the other.

‘Nora,' said Edith at last, driven to decision, ‘could you give me a hand with the A and R?'

‘Oh no,' said Dolly. ‘I don't think we need to bother Nora with work today, do we? Pearl can do it.'

‘I'd prefer to have Nora,' said Edith, which was no more than the truth, since Nora was better than Pearl at spotting the tiny loose threads and crumpled corners and spots of grease from inquisitive fingers that, cumulatively, unless Assessed and Rectified on a regular basis, would spoil the splendour of the costumes.