—29—
Nina rang to invite me to lunch, and I gladly escaped to meet her at Selfridges.
It was a gloomy, misty morning, which leant a sense of safety to the journey, for the bombers rarely flew in such weather.
My fellow Tube passengers were a silent lot, each of us cloaked in the armor of stoicism.
If one didn’t think too hard about it all, it was just possible to make one’s way through the day.
The tearoom was an oasis of calm, familiar, and my nerves unwound the minute I entered the room. I found Nina already seated, beautifully dressed as ever, with a tilted hat on her smooth hair. I kissed her. “Hello, darling. How are you?”
“I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” she said. “Did you?”
“No.” It had been a wretched night, with endless bombings. “Even mother with her morphine was restless.”
“Did you hear about Balham Station? Jonathan stopped in to shave and shower this morning, and I gather it was dreadful.”
“What happened?” The waiter soundlessly laid down my teapot and cup.
“I didn’t quite gather all the details, but between an enormous bomb and a bus crashing, some waterlines were broken and flooded the station. Hundreds of people were sheltering there.”
“Dear God.” An exhausted place between my shoulder blades pinched hard. I rolled my neck a little, trying to loosen it. “Nothing is safe, really.”
“I suppose not.” She picked up the menu and scanned it desultorily. “Oh, I do long for a sole Véronique. And a decadent plate of oysters.”
“Mmm. Cheese tartlets and a lobster salad.”
“And ice cream.”
“And those little petit fours.”
Nina sighed. “I suppose I’ll indulge myself with Woolton vegetable pie.”
“Same for me.” I set the menu aside. “It’s lovely to see you, dear, but I felt a sense of urgency in your telephone call. Is everything all right?”
“No,” she said, and her eyes shone, almost as if she would weep. “Helen is terrified, and she wants to return to her home outside Bath. She feels she will be safer.”
Helen was her longtime lover, a woman she’d been involved with off and on since the late twenties.
I’d often felt the union was tilted more toward Helen’s benefit; she was a lush beauty, some years younger, and Nina was impossibly in love with her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as a good friend should do. “I know you’ll miss her terribly.”
“Whatever shall I do with myself during the raids? Jonathan is always gone, and the servants are there, but I’m essentially alone in the fortress.”
“Come to us, if you like.”
She shook her head. “Jonathan would not approve at all. The place truly has been fortified as well as anything could be. Perhaps you and your mother should come to me, instead.”
“I should dearly love that, but my mother cannot make the trip.”
At this, she looked genuinely aggrieved. I reached for her hand. “You will only be alone, not abandoned. Perhaps you should set up a course of study to distract yourself. Or take up knitting,” I added slyly.
She laughed. “Don’t be beastly. I shan’t knit unless I’ve not even a scrap of fabric to cover myself.”
“Mother knits when she feels well enough, but mostly she’s been sleeping.”
“It must be dreadfully hard on her, all the commotion.”
“She is in decline,” I said honestly. “The doctor comes when he can, but there’s little for him to do. Her liver is failing.”
“Oh, darling Elsie, I am so terribly sorry. She is the central light in your life.”
It startled me. I would have chosen another for that pillar. “One of them, certainly.”
“Your prince is a fantasy, my dear. It’s easy to love someone at a distance.”
I frowned, slightly embarrassed at the acuity of her comment. I didn’t think I spoke of him very often. “We’ve been friends for decades,” I said. “No more.”
“Peter mentioned his letters recently, that they arrive in clutches of three or four, every week.”
“Peter mentioned the letters?”
“Tanveer has ever been a pebble in his shoe.”
Because I had once left him and gone to India when we were in Cairo. I had intended never to return.
Until my hand was forced, once again. A hollow memory of my return to England rustled, and I could not bear it, not just now. “Tanveer worries about us, Mother and I. He asked if I would write every day, so I have been doing so.”
“As one would, with a dear friend.” She sipped her wine with a droll lift of an eyebrow.
“I wrote many, many letters to you when I was in Cairo and India,” I said.
She gave me a piercing gaze, holding her manicured fingers on the condensation of her glass. “We have shared everything, Elsie. Why are you so cagey about him? Do you think I’ll judge you?”
A fair question. I had an image of a carved box, inlaid with ivory, that held this secret thing, the thing we barely acknowledged even to each other anymore. “It is the only thing that really belongs to me.”
“Not your paintings?”
“Yes, of course the paintings.” I grappled with what I meant, what I could say without giving away that sense of private connection, a thing that both lived in the world and not.
“But paintings are meant to be public. Even if they’re vulnerable or revealing, the entire purpose of them is to communicate with someone else. ”
She inclined her head. “I am quite sure I have never loved anyone as you love your work.” That arched brow. “Or your prince.”
Both were a blessing and a kind of curse. “Maybe you will one day,” I said. “But perhaps it’s easier not to.”
“I don’t think you believe that for a single moment.”
I thought of leaving him in India the last time, and the sound of his voice on the phone the morning after the first horrible raid. “It does seem foolish sometimes.”
She reached across the table and covered my hand. Fiercely, she said, “Never.”
We picked through our lunch. Outside afterward, we paused. The weather was misty but not pouring. “I would like to walk back,” Nina said. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all. That sounds wonderful. I’ve hardly had enough walking the past month.
” We put up our umbrellas and window shopped as we always had.
Some windows had been patched where they cracked, others were taped as a protective measure, but it was still possible to look at the goods within. Such as they were.
I stopped in a stationery shop and bought airmail paper. The clerk said, “Good luck to him,” as if all airmail letters went to troops. I merely said thank you.
The streets held a somber tone, vaguely deserted, people hurrying along with their heads down.
We passed a section of a block that was a pile of rubble, shops standing fine on either side, a hole in a park where a small bomb had made a crater.
Everywhere a mucky grime lay over the windowsills.
“I wonder how long it will take them to destroy the entire city?” I said aloud.
“Churchill will stop them long before that happens,” Nina protested. “Already the tide is turning.”
“Is it?” I said lightly.
As if to underscore the thought, the sirens went off. We were miles from home, and I did not know the neighborhood well. “What shall we do?”
“Let’s find a Tube station. What’s near?”
“I have no idea. Eventually we’ll come to something.”
But it was hard to stay calm when we heard the drone of the planes, on their way, and then directly overhead, and I saw one drop a bomb at some distance.
I shoved Nina into a doorway and barreled in behind her.
We watched it fall, and another behind it.
Nina clutched my arm so tightly I knew there would be bruises.
When it landed, the explosion shook the walls surrounding us, and we both ducked, trying to contract our bodies.
Nina screeched, her hands over her ears.
The second one fell, a touch closer, and dust shook down on our heads.
My heart beat too hard through my neck, and I looked left and right to see if I could find a route of escape.
Smoke rose over the roofs of the buildings across the street, and the bells of a fire engine rang out.
The planes droned away, followed by the rattling of guns, and I grabbed Nina’s wrist. “Let’s go. ”
A man in a heavy blue raincoat ran by. “Shelter this way.”
We ran after him. The planes droned closer again, circling back, and another bomb landed with an enormous clapping explosion. “In here!” the man cried, and we ran with relief into the Tube station, clattering down the stairs in the din.
Nina held on to my hand with a painful grip. “What about the waterlines? Will we drown like those poor people at Balham Station?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But at least we might have a chance down here.”