Andrew Taylor - Bleeding Heart Square

The furniture was old, dark and heavy. The men swore at the weight of it. They rammed a chest of drawers against the newel post on the first-floor landing and left a dent in the wood nearly half an inch deep. It was quite good furniture too, Lydia noticed, old-fashioned and gloomy but rather better than the pieces in her father’s flat. Perhaps it was a sign that Mr Serridge valued Mr Wentwood more than Captain Ingleby-Lewis.

Mr Serridge supervised the work. Pipe in mouth, he wandered from attic to cellar. Lydia, as she passed to and fro between the kitchen, her bedroom and the sitting room, found him staring at her on several occasions. It was unsettling, but not in the usual way when men stared at her. It seemed to her that there was nothing lustful in his face, at most a look of curiosity and concentration, as if he were trying to work out a mathematical problem in his head.

Once or twice, he nodded to her and said, ‘All serene, Mrs Langstone?’

Later that day, a smell of liver and onions spread through the hall and up the stairs.

‘That smells good,’ Howlett said to Mrs Renton as he came down the stairs for the last time with the dog at his heels. ‘I wish I had that waiting at home for my tea.’

‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride,’ Mrs Renton said. ‘Good evening, Mr Howlett.’

He grunted. The front door banged behind him, the hungry-looking assistant and Nipper. Mrs Renton glanced at Lydia, who was coming downstairs with the rubbish.

‘Anyway,’ she said in a confidential whisper, ‘it’s not liver I’m cooking. It’s Mr Serridge’s heart. Shame to waste it.’

Lydia disliked Sundays. She did not believe in God but she had endured for most of her life the necessity of paying her respects to him at least once a week. The Langstones, of course, were churchgoers. When they were in Gloucester-shire, they attended church with the same unthinking regularity that they voted Conservative or complained about their servants. Marcus’s mother said the Langstones were obliged to set an example. Privilege conferred its responsibilities.

But this Sunday was not like other Sundays. It was the eleventh day of the eleventh month — Armistice Day. It was an occasion that Marcus took seriously because the death of his brother Wilfred gave him a personal interest in commemorating the glorious dead. The houses where Marcus lived, the farms and investments that paid for the servants who looked after them, the club subscriptions, the bills from the tailor, the wine merchant and the butcher — all these should have been Wilfred’s. A quirk of fate had given Marcus flat feet, and had allowed Wilfred to be killed. Marcus felt obscurely that he owed his brother something. The observance of Armistice Day was the tribute that Marcus paid to the glorious dead, and in particular to Wilfred.

After breakfast, which Lydia ate alone because her father was still asleep, she went out for a walk. It was a grey morning, but in places sunshine filtered through the mist. She went through the wicket gate into Rosington Place, where she found Mr Fimberry, dressed in black and wearing his poppy, loitering near the noticeboard by the entrance to the chapel. A steady trickle of churchgoers flowed up the cul-de-sac towards them.

‘Good morning, Mrs Langstone.’ Fimberry raised his hat. ‘Are you joining us today?’

‘No, thank you,’ she said politely.

Lydia walked down to the lodge. Mr Serridge was standing by the railings, smoking a pipe and idly watching a small crocodile of St Tumwulf’s girls, the school’s Roman Catholic contingent, filing up to the chapel. He nodded to Lydia but did not speak.

She drifted south and west across London. The closer she came to Whitehall, the more crowded the pavements became, with the current of people flowing more and more strongly towards the white stone Cenotaph. She arrived shortly before eleven.

She could not even see the Cenotaph, let alone the King and the politicians and the generals. A gun boomed on Horse Guards Parade. The sound bounced to and fro among the buildings like an India rubber ball. Then came the tolling of Big Ben. After that, the silence ruled, heavy and stifling. Lydia listened to what noises there still were — the rustle of leaves, a crying baby, several coughs, one defiant sneeze. She thought it probable that Marcus was somewhere in the crowd. Her stepfather, too.

The two-minute silence ended with a shocking crash of gunfire and the roll of drums. The crowd stirred and shifted like trees in strong winds. Trumpeters sounded the Last Post. Suddenly everyone was singing ‘Oh God, our help in ages past’.

Lydia turned and pushed her way through the singing figures and made her way to Trafalgar Square. All those hearts beating as one, she thought — Marcus loved this sort of thing. He liked it when crowds acted together like an enormous animal, united by a single purpose.

She noticed a couple about thirty yards away walking along the north side of the square in front of the National Gallery. The man was Mr Wentwood and he was accompanying a young woman with a slight, elegant figure. Mr Wentwood glanced back and caught Lydia’s eye. He ducked his head in a sort of bow and half raised his arm, as though trying to acknowledge her, but wanting to do so as discreetly as he could.

But the girl had noticed. She too looked back. She had a pretty face and fair hair beneath the black hat. Then people flowed between them and the meeting, if it could be called that, was over almost as soon as it had begun. But it gave Lydia a glimpse of Mr Wentwood’s private life, of a hinter-land that extended beyond Bleeding Heart Square and the Blue Dahlia cafe. The young woman had been very good-looking. A sister, Lydia wondered with an uncomfortable pang, or even a girlfriend?

‘Here,’ Rory said. ‘Have my handkerchief.’

Fenella took it without a word. Turning to face St Martinin-the-Fields, she blew her nose and wiped her eyes. Rory turned away from her and lit a cigarette. Lydia Langstone was no longer in sight.

‘Sorry,’ Fenella said behind him. ‘I’m all right now.’

‘What was it? Thinking of your mother?’

She shook her head. ‘All this.’ She waved a gloved hand towards Whitehall, towards the ebbing crowds: men in uniform, men on crutches, men with medals, wives, mothers and daughters. ‘They say we’re mourning the unforgotten dead, but of course they’re forgotten. All we’re mourning is our own beastly misery. We don’t give a damn about the people who died.’

‘I say,’ Rory said. ‘Isn’t that a bit bleak?’

‘Anyway, it’s pointless,’ Fenella went on. ‘Anyone can see it’s all going to happen again, and this time it will probably be much worse.’

‘Another war?’

‘Of course. You heard what Mr Dawlish was saying at the meeting the other night. The Nazis are just waiting for the right moment. And it’s not just them, either.’

Rory ground out a cigarette beneath his heel. ‘You’re exaggerating. People will never stand for another war. They remember too well what happened in the last one. It’s only sixteen years ago.’

‘I wish you were right. Who was that woman?’

For a moment he was tempted to say, which woman? ‘Her name’s Mrs Langstone,’ he said. ‘I think I mentioned her the other day. Her father has a flat in the same house as mine, and she’s staying with him.’

‘So she must know Mr Serridge?’

‘Yes. But I’m not sure how well. She struck me as a bit of a dark horse, actually.’

‘Why?’

‘She doesn’t really belong in a place like Bleeding Heart Square. I wouldn’t be surprised if she and her father have come down in the world.’

Fenella laughed, with one of those sudden changes of mood that had always amazed him. ‘You sound like your grandfather sometimes.’