The next day, Sunday, Keith and Teddy caught an early train to Fox Corner, where Sylvie had made a great fuss about inviting them to lunch. Keith was enthusiastic, he had visited before and charmed Sylvie. He also knew how well stocked her larder was. Ursula declined to come with them. “Mother can have you all to herself,” she said and laughed rather wickedly.
Teddy took Keith round to Jackdaws to meet Mrs. Shawcross, who was always keen—keener than Sylvie, perhaps—to meet any members of Teddy’s crew who came down to Fox Corner with him. He was able to tell her that he had seen Gertie, and Mrs. Shawcross said, “How exciting, but I worry about her so. One thinks about Amy Johnson, you know.” Millie was “briefly” in residence and flirted outrageously with Keith. “That girl ought to be chained up,” he laughed when they finally escaped her clutches. “Not my type,” he said. He was still rather smitten with Hannie, Bea’s friend. “Can’t imagine taking her back to the sheep station though,” he said. Keith never doubted that he would be going back to Australia, and Teddy took a lot of comfort from his certainty. “She’s Jewish, you know,” Keith said.
“I know.”
“First Jewish person I’ve met,” Keith said, as if amazed. (“Jewess,” Sylvie would have said.) “It must be nice to fall in love,” he added, revealing a surprisingly romantic side. “Follow your heart and all that.”
“Steady on,” Teddy said. “You’re beginning to sound like a matinée idol” (or a woman). Months later, Teddy himself “fell in love.” He followed his heart and it led him up a blind alley, a dead end, but he didn’t mind that much.
A romantic interlude.
Julia. She was tall and fair, neither of which were attributes that Teddy usually found attractive in a woman. “A natural blonde,” she pointed out. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those,” Teddy said. “Now you have,” she said and laughed. She threw her head back when she laughed in a way that could have been crude but was actually charming. She wasn’t one of those women who covered their mouths when they laughed but then she had nice teeth, creamy and very pearly. (“Good breeding,” she said. “Good dentistry too.”) She laughed a lot.
She had been to school with Stella and Stella had told Teddy to “look Julia up” when he was in London, which was selfless of Stella. “Don’t fall in love with her,” she warned (priming the pump). “She’s broken the hearts of better men than you.” Even though Stella didn’t know a better man than Teddy.
Teddy didn’t want to die without falling in love and, as he expected to die at any given moment, he undoubtedly forced the hand of Cupid into giving him a taste of wartime romance. He was ripe for it.
Julia was in the ATS, working in a garage in central London, driving Army lorries. There was always a smear of oil or grease on her and her fingernails were filthy. Nonetheless she always turned heads. It came as naturally to her as the blonde hair. She was the sort of girl who always had good restaurant tables, good theatre seats, the sort of girl who people gave things to. There was something dazzling about her, a kind of glamour that spelled people. Spelled Teddy. For one whole week.
She “wangled” some leave after their first dinner together. First night together too. (“No point in hanging about, darling,” she said, unbuttoning his uniform jacket.) She was the kind of girl who could wangle leave. “Pa knows everyone.” Pa was an “adviser to the government,” whatever that meant, but let his only golden child run wild and free. She was twenty-two, not a child. Mummy was dead. “So sad.”
Julia had “pots of money”—Pa was also a lord. Teddy had been at school with the sons of plenty of lords and wasn’t put off by her breeding, although he couldn’t help but be a little impressed by the enormous mansion near Regent’s Park that was the family’s “London house.” They had “an ancestral pile” in Northamptonshire and “a place” in Ireland. “Oh, and an apartment in Paris that some disgusting Gauleiter is currently occupying.” Pa had moved out, staying somewhere in Westminster, and Julia had a flat in Petty France.
The London house was shut up for the duration. Everything had simply been left where it was, shrouded in dust-sheets. The enormous chandeliers still hung from the ceilings beneath their covers, looking like awkwardly wrapped presents. Valuable paintings had cloths hung over them as if the house was in mourning. An odd assortment of dust-sheets and old bed linen—and some not so old—had been flung over the furniture. Teddy discovered a Louis XV couch beneath a candlewick counterpane, a magnificent Louis XIV Boulle commode draped in a sheet, a writing desk that had apparently belonged to Marie Antoinette with an eiderdown stuck on top of it. He found a Gainsborough beneath a tea-towel. He fretted for their safety. “Aren’t you worried about these things?”
“Worried?” (It wasn’t a word in her vocabulary, she was criminally carefree, it was what attracted him to her.)
“That someone will steal them or they’ll be destroyed by a bomb?”