Laura knew that Toby had created a shelter in the deep basement kitchen of the big house. When they went to see it later that day, she found it claustrophobic, despite its size. Toby had had the ceiling reinforced with railway sleepers and the windows were all thickly covered with sticky tape; while he had also included a Morrison shelter, like a kind of table under which they could all sleep on mattresses when the raids started. ‘As safe as St Peter’s, I should think,’ Toby said, referring to the church nearby where many of his neighbours went at night.
She did not want to move into this house. Walking through it with Toby and Edward felt intrusive; it was all wrong being in Sybil’s house without Sybil. True, it had changed so much since the first time she had entered it. With that tape over the windows and its railings gone, even the face it presented to the outside world was a downcast one, and inside it was almost empty, most of the rooms closed and shrouded in dust sheets, dark patches on the walls and light patches on the floors where the pictures and rugs were missing. Still, she felt out of place in its cold, grand spaces. But it would be graceless of her to tell Edward that she did not want to live there, especially as it would be so much easier for him to be nearer to Whitehall. So they took possession of one of the bedrooms that overlooked the square and, for the fourth time since she had arrived in England, Laura unpacked her trunk and laid her clothes into different patterns in different drawers.
The first few times that Laura came back into the house in the afternoons, opening the front door with her own key and walking into the hall whose parquet floor, bare of rugs, now showed scuffs from the many heels that walked up and down it, she could not help remembering the fear and expectation she had felt the first time she had entered it, and she averted her glance from the reflection in the hall mirror almost nervously. Sybil wrote occasional letters to Laura about local affairs in Sutton, and whenever Laura received them she felt a surge of guilt, as if Sybil were observing her and noting how poorly Laura was looking after her home.
Laura had not realised that Toby would assume that she, Laura, would take responsibility for running the house once she moved in. There was only one general maid now in the house, unlike the large staff they had had before the war, although another woman came in daily to do the heavy work, the scrubbing and the washing. The live-in maid, Ann, spent her days working slowly from top to bottom of the three floors they were using, and Laura came to realise, hearing her brush and pan on the stairs before breakfast and the plates clattering in the kitchen after supper, that her hours were excessive and that the work was beyond her ability and that of the daily. But rather than trying to give her any direction, or take on other staff, Laura instead allowed old standards to be left behind. Dust collected in the unused rooms, and the formal meals gave way to one course, left on the table by Ann for them to help themselves.
If the very absence of Sybil – the fear of what she might think if she could see Laura’s failures – made her uneasy, so did the presence of Toby. Like the rest of the group, he was apparently loquacious, even humorous, but it was always a humour that seemed to exclude, dedicated to highlighting anything that marked out somebody’s difference or failure. So, although he seemed to laugh at the scratch dinners that appeared, beneath his comments about the eternal mutton hash, Laura knew he was scornful of her failure to run the household more effectively. And although there was the constant appearance of politeness between the brothers, she was aware that in Toby’s presence, Edward’s defences were always up, and that the constraint of living in this way seemed to make it harder for Edward to slip into intimacy with her, even when they were alone.
What’s more, on the nights of bombardment, even the solitude of their bedroom was out of bounds. Instead, they had to seek the unquiet haven of the basement shelter, where it was not only Toby and Ann who shared the space with them. Between them, Toby and Edward seemed to know dozens of people who had not left London, or who had to visit London, but had been bombed out of their homes or whose houses had been shut up and let out for the war. Many nights, before the sirens sounded, there was someone extra drinking whisky in the ground-floor living room and, after the alarms went off, bedding down on a spare mattress in the basement.
Even Winifred came, one or two nights when she was working late at the Ministry of Food, while for a time Alistair was quite a regular visitor. He had joined a searchlight battery in west London, but most of his energy was still taken up by writing for various periodicals and a novel that didn’t seem to be going very well. Once Laura read one of his articles in a weekly magazine, in which he had described the work of the air wardens over a few nights, and was surprised by his ability to turn the horrors of the blighted city into a narrative that ran like a surreally comic film. In the spring, Giles started coming down to London for meetings at the Air Ministry, and he too tended to stay in Chester Square on those nights.