Питер Ловси: On the Edge

Rose smiled. ‘I haven’t tried.’

‘Take rationing, then. I couldn’t run my car to the end of the street on the petrol they allow you.’ Antonia said all this with a straight face. She looked at the cigarette in her hand. ‘And the things you have to do for a smoke.’

‘You’ve got a car? ’

She nodded.

‘Who on earth did you marry — a duke?’

Antonia flicked off some ash. ‘You wouldn’t know him. Hector wasn’t one of our crowd. He wasn’t in the services. Reserved occupation. Do you know that air-raid shelter in Chelsea near the Five Bells? We both ducked in there when a V-1 was overhead. It exploded while we were still halfway down the steps and I grabbed him.’ She grinned. ‘I felt better pressed up to his wallet.’

Rose giggled. She’d always found Antonia fun and admired her nerve. She’d never listened to the jealous WAAFs who lost their men to her.

‘Did it take long?’

‘April. We had to wait for his wife to die.’

‘Was she an invalid?’

‘Maudie? No. She drowned.’

Rose caught her breath. The non sequitur , tossed out so casually, perplexed her. She couldn’t think what to say next. It would have been in bad taste to press for more information, and Antonia didn’t volunteer any.

Antonia blew out a thin shaft of smoke and coolly took up the conversation.

‘So you and I end up like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘Two bored housewives wishing we were back in the filter room at Kettlesham Heath.’

‘I don’t know about that. It was no picnic. Night duty. Those beastly earphones. Bending over the map to get our plots down. I don’t know which was worse, the earache or the backache.’

‘Think of the compensations — the boys in the gallery.’

‘Don’t! I daydream far too much.’

‘Listen, Rose, I’ve got to go in a tick. Why don’t we do this again?’

‘Oh, I don’t know if I can.’

‘But you’d like to?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘So we will.’

Antonia took a taxi to Knightsbridge and let herself into a first-floor flat in Basil Street, behind Harrods. A man’s voice called from the end of a red-carpeted passage.

‘Tea?’

‘Just had some.’

‘Who with?’

‘Someone I happened to meet in Piccadilly.’

‘Someone interesting?’ ‘A plotter.’

He appeared at the door, Italian in looks, but taller than most Italians.

‘A what?’

‘One of the WAAFs I knew in the war. We used to push metal arrows around an enormous map.’

‘A plotter.’

Antonia tossed the mink over a satin-cushioned chair.

‘Her name is Rose.’

‘Nice-looking?’

‘Simmer down, man. As a matter of fact she is quite pretty in a pure-bred English way. Soft brown hair in natural curls. Wonderful skin. Bright eyes with long lashes. She’d have made a very presentable deb in her day. I can see her looking out at me from the pages of the Tatler. Have I put you off yet?’

‘Totally and utterly.’

‘Good.’

‘Will you see her again?’

‘Next week.’

He smiled.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Two plotters with nothing left to plot.’

‘Not necessarily. What’s the time now?’

‘Nearly half past four. Thinking about your husband?’

‘Vic darling, don’t make me laugh.’

She started unbuttoning her blouse.

Rose stood by the kitchen table in her apron waiting for her husband to get up from his armchair. The Evening Standard was full of murder again and Barry was lapping up every word. He’d followed each day of the trial of Neville Heath, the man just sentenced to death for suffocating a woman in a London hotel after beating her with a riding switch. It now came out that Heath had committed a second sadistic killing. Most of Britain — the newspapers anyway — had been engrossed by the case, as if the war hadn’t given them enough death and violence. Rose found it sickening, but she was in the minority. And Barry claimed an interest because Heath was an ex-pilot in the South African Air Force who had spent some months with the RAF, attached to 180 Squadron. There was, admittedly, a suggestion of reflected glory about the way he spoke of him.

‘By God, he’s a handsome devil.’

‘Your supper’s getting cold.’

‘You’ve got to admit he’s handsome. Look.’ He held the paper up. Heath was pictured seated between two detectives in the back of a car.

Not my idea of handsome, Rose thought, but a sight better-looking than you, I’ll grant you, with your boozer’s nose and flabby cheeks and overgrown moustache. ‘It’ll be ruined.’

‘They tried to save him from the hangman by saying he was mad. Believe me, this chappie is as sane as you and me. Any man who can pilot a Mitchell bomber must be all right in the head.’

‘Barry, are you coming to the table or not?’

‘I never thought the day would come when a bloody murderer wore the RAF tie at his trial. You give a chap his wings and he behaves like that. Lunatic.’

‘You just contradicted yourself.’

‘What I’m saying is that he wasn’t fit to hold the King’s Commission.’

‘He wasn’t the only one.’

‘Cow.’

‘I didn’t mean you. I’ll say that for you — you were a bloody good officer once.’

He hadn’t listened. He was back with his newspaper. She could have added that he was the world’s worst civil servant, but she didn’t. He knew it.

Why antagonize him? He only passed on his frustration by humiliating her.

When Vic had a short lunch break he would meet Antonia in the Trevor Arms in Knightsbridge, ten minutes or so from Imperial College, where he lectured. He always whistled at the prices but it was the only pub in the district with carpets and soft lighting and barmaids who called you ‘sir’, and Antonia preferred it to anywhere else.

Today he offered her a gin and It instead of the usual shandy.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘What’s all this for, naughty boy? No point in getting me sloshed if you’re going straight back to your boring students.’

‘Is it no, then?’

‘That’s a little word I never use.’

She was getting some looks as usual. She was always being told she had a carrying voice. She leaned back in her chair and winked at a chinless lieutenant who was staring over his shoulder. The Trevor was the unofficial officers’ mess for the Life Guards, who had their barracks next door.

Vic returned with the drinks. ‘Actually I’ve got good news. Well, good news for me in a way.’

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

‘I’ve been offered a two-year temporary lectureship at Princeton.’

Antonia put down her glass. ‘Princetown? Someone’s led you up the garden path, darling. That’s not a university. It’s a prison in the middle of Dartmoor.’

‘Princeton, New Jersey.’

She felt a prickling sensation in her scalp. ‘America?’

He nodded.

‘For two years?’

‘It’s not until next summer.’

She looked into his brown eyes. Mentally he was already over there in New Jersey. She was livid. She couldn’t survive a day without him. He was it . She’d never known a man who excited her more. ‘You bastard! You didn’t tell me you applied for this.’

‘I didn’t think I stood an earthly. Look, Antonia, it’s not the end of the world.’

How little he knew! ‘Judas! Two-faced, scurvy, bloodsucking louse. I’m coming with you.’

He was back in London like a rocket. ‘You can’t do that. You know you can’t.’

‘Who says?’

‘You’re married.’

‘I’ll leave him.’

Those eyes of his opened so wide she could see white all round them. ‘It’s an Ivy League university. I couldn’t turn up there with a married woman in tow.’