“A rabbit?” he said.
“No, a hare, I think, although it’s not easy to tell. Do you recognize it?” He didn’t. The hare—or rabbit—sat to attention in a little basket. Its fur was chased, its ears sharp and pointed. Yes, a hare, Teddy thought. “It hung from your pram hood,” Ursula said, “when you were a baby. Ours too. I think it came originally from a rattle that belonged to Mother.” The hare had indeed once provided the finial to the infant Sylvie’s rattle, a pretty thing, hung with bells and an ivory teething ring. She had once nearly poked her own mother’s eye out with it.
“And?” Teddy puzzled.
“A good-luck charm.”
“Really?” he said sceptically.
“A talisman. Instead of a rabbit’s foot, I give you a whole hare to keep you safe.”
“Thank you,” he said, amused. Ursula wasn’t usually one for superstition and charms. He took the hare and slipped it casually into his pocket, where it joined the conker she had given him earlier and which had already lost its glossy newness. He noticed that Ursula’s ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. A monkish thought that he dismissed.
“We’re dying from the moment we’re born,” Sylvie had said, apropos of nothing, as she watched Bridget slouching into the dining room with a dish of stewed apples. “Nothing but windfalls,” Bridget announced. Since Mrs. Glover had retired—to live with a sister in Manchester—Bridget had felt obliged to take on her mantle of disapproval. Apparently, Sylvie had sold the best of the orchard’s abundant apple crop—a fruit, the only fruit, that Bridget didn’t harbour suspicions about. (“She grew up in Ireland,” Sylvie said, “they don’t have fruit there.”) Before he left, Bridget had pressed a small, gnarled, rather worm-eaten apple into his hand “for the journey,” and it now nestled warmly in his overcrowded pocket.
Instead of meeting up with his imaginary friend, Teddy made a round of London pubs and got pretty drunk, being stood free drinks by a host of well-wishers. He discovered how attractive an RAF uniform was to girls, although he had tried to avoid the “Piccadilly flak,” which, he knew from his Atlantic crossing with them, was the GIs’ term for the prostitutes who were to be found around the West End. They were bold, brash girls and he wondered if this had been their trade before or if they had sprung up as part of the inevitable baggage train of war.
Eventually, he found himself wandering around Mayfair wondering where he was going to spend the night. He bumped into a girl, “Ivy, pleased to meet you,” who was also lost in the blackout and they made their way arm in arm, until by chance they came across a hotel, Flemings, in Half Moon Street. There had been much leering from the night-porter that they had laughed about as they lay on top of the covers, propped up on pillows, sharing two large bottles of beer that Ivy had procured from somewhere. “Fancy place,” she said, “you must be a rich bloke.” He was tonight, Izzie had given him twenty pounds—blood money for Augustus—and he felt inclined to blow as much of it as possible while he could. No pockets in shrouds, as spendthrift Izzie was wont to say.
Ivy turned out to be a happy-go-lucky ATS girl on an anti-aircraft battery, on leave from a posting in Portsmouth. (“Oops, probably shouldn’t tell you where I’m stationed.”)
The air-raid siren started up but they didn’t go to a shelter. Instead they watched the fireworks provided free of charge by the Luftwaffe. Teddy was glad that he had caught the tail end of the Blitz.
“Bastards,” Ivy said cheerfully as the raiders flew overhead. She was on “the Predictor,” she said. “Operator number three.” (“Oops, there I go again!”) He had no idea what that was. “Get ’em, boys!” she shouted at one point as shells streaked red across the sky. They spotted a bomber caught in a searchlight. This was what it was like to be on the other end of it, Teddy thought, holding his breath, wondering about the pilot in that bomber. In a few weeks it would be him up there, he thought.
The aircraft slipped out of the searchlight and Teddy breathed again.