Even at the Ritz the dining times had been doubled up to accommodate the new martial schedules. Alistair looked in through the tall windows and saw ladies laughing around cake stands and samovars, beside tables of men who were still finishing lunch. When port and macaroons were simultaneously visible in W1 then something dreadful was coming down the line, surely. Why did people seem so unconcerned?
Alistair loosened his tie in the heat and walked down to the Embankment, taking the side streets to avoid the bedeviling crowds. Now that his small tasks were done, he felt surplus and foolish. He sat on a bench and frowned at the Thames. An oily tide was coming in from the estuary, setting up a confused chop against the river’s flow. The white gulls lurched about on it, looking seasick and hot.
He had imagined it would take all afternoon to meet with his bank manager, his tailor and the family’s lawyer, but in the event he had only been a few minutes with each before he had been on his way again. They had all received him cordially, but with glances at the clock. He had the impression of being closely followed around town by some more important and indefinable presence that had made a proper appointment. Perhaps the war was good for business. Perhaps it would be even better if it weren’t for all these soldiers in the way.
Alistair watched the queasy gulls squabble and bob. In the hot afternoon he lurched in and out of time. He had telephoned and got a room at Robertson’s but he still held off posting his note to Tom, deciding to wait until he felt steadier. He didn’t much fancy seeing his old colleagues at the Tate, either. The only thing worse than finding the place depressing and empty would be to discover that they had brought the pictures back after all. He didn’t feel like seeing anyone he knew. The city had him on the back foot.
He watched the brown water swirl. On the way back from Dunkirk, crossing the Channel in a wet mist lit with flashes of white and red, they had picked up a downed RAF man in a tiny yellow rubber dinghy, waving. Alistair had helped him to climb up the netting into their little boat. Shivering, still in his parachute harness and Mae West, the man’s face and arms were black with oil. He gave a salute, which Alistair returned. Alistair found the man some blankets and a tarpaulin to keep the wind off. It turned out that between them they had the makings of a smoke—the airman’s pipe was undamaged and Alistair’s tobacco dry. They shared the pipe at the foot of the mast, without speaking.
After a while Alistair said, “How was the water?”
“Brisk,” said the RAF man. “How was France?”
“Crowded.”
Both men looked into the sun that was rising now through the mist.
Alistair got up from the bench, which he told himself was real, and walked to Soho. He had hours to kill before he could reasonably go to his hotel. Like the ball in a bagatelle he bounced from café to cabaret, while London continued to look him straight in the eye. As if it had battled the tanks itself, in its spiv hat and spats.
There was cold iron armor massing, just a few miles away across the Channel. Any other city would be chewing its knuckles and digging a hole to hide in. Alistair wanted to yell at people: The bullets actually work, you know! What they did not understand was that the city could be extinguished. That every eligible person could die with the same baffled expression that he had seen on the first dead of the war, in those earliest shocking days before the men had learned to expect it. I’m so sorry—I think I am actually hit.
Night came, and it was still hot. In the blacked-out streets Alistair mingled with the uniformed men. They sought each other out for the comfort of it but they did not speak. Some men, like him, walked aimlessly, while others prowled the midnight dances for the pale excitable girls who were out before their shift, or after it—the latter being considered the more waltzable proposition. With Mars and Saturn in the same heaven, the young women air-raid volunteers wore silk beneath their tunics, and hair spray under their tin hats. The uniformed girls winked at Alistair. Sick of himself, he found that all he could do was salute them.
He supposed he should go and see a show. But all the cinemas were showing patriotic movies and all the theaters were full of dislocated men like him, stretched too thin across time. There were musicals with Broadway stars and dancing troupes, set in Monte Carlo, Ceylon, and Siam. London was perfectly prepared to give him a night out anywhere on earth, and yet all he wanted from his city was the thing that didn’t seem to be on offer: the possibility of coming home.
At midnight, in the dark, in the silence that ought to have been filled with churches striking the hour, Alistair carried his duffel bag to Waterloo. He waited overnight on the platform and at dawn he caught the first train out to his parents’ home in Hampshire. It would be quiet out there. He would go for long walks. In the countryside, surrounded by the oaks and the marsh harriers and all the other singular things, he was sure he would feel himself again.
June, 1940