III.
It was an overcast morning on the sixteenth of July, nineteen-forty-seven when I received in the post a letter from Florence. It was out of turn, and without the customary handmade envelope and calligraphic address. Disappointment, and even a note of concern, turned quickly to delight. She was coming to London! She would, wrote Florence, arrive in a fortnight to see her cousin in a play in Covent Garden. Mother and Father Barclay were also coming, and looked forward to seeing me, should I happen to be free. And indeed I was free, not that that was greatly in point. I would have cancelled luncheon with the Pope if it meant being in London to see them. I felt, reading that letter, as a minor nobleman of old upon receiving word that his queen and her court will do him the honour of visiting. My pride swelled and I was full of apprehension.
I tidied my bedroom there and then, without stopping to consider why Mr and Mrs Barclay, or even Florence, would ever have reason to see it. I daresay they had not heard of Camberwell, or if they had, were not inclined to visit. I spent a month’s allowance on a proper haircut, and borrowed my father’s razor in order to shave, and to this day there is a small, ivory-coloured scar below my chin, marking that attempt for posterity. My parents were bemused by the abrupt cosmetic change in their eldest son, but they too were eager to meet, and to thank, the Barclays. Very few parents of evacuees ever had the chance to meet their children’s wartime fosters, face to face. But where to stage this coming together? My father wanted to buy Mr and Mrs Barclay a drink at our local pub, a little way off Peckham Road, but my mother insisted it was too seedy, and she was right. Our “local”, though proclaiming to welcome families, was the sort of pub you took a knife to, just in case. It was also a nest of black marketers. We would meet the Barclays in town, said my mother, at a proper restaurant and close to the Wyndham’s Theatre, where the Barclays’ cousin’s play was being shown. I was instructed to telephone Fersen Hall to organise the meeting. We did not have a telephone in our house at that time, but a neighbour two doors away did, and she was very generous with whoever wished to use it.
It was strange to hear their voices again after a silence of more than two years. I spoke to Mrs Barclay first. (Mr Barclay, she explained, had walked right past the ringing telephone but had refused to answer it. He was suspicious of the technology, which was by that time quite established.) Once the initial pleasantries were performed she listed the various changes on the estate: a new steeplechase route to avoid the waterlogged valley-floor; a dairy barn pulled down to make room for a holiday cottage; the latest crop rotation; the village fair; the berry-laden brambles and the dizzying heights of the bulrushes. So, Arcady lived on! The proverbial trees continued to fall with an almighty clatter, out of earshot. I closed my eyes and promptly was transported backward, five years earlier, to an evening on the riverbank, beneath a cloudless tangerine and denim-coloured sky; to the smell of cut grass and pear blossom; to the foaming brook; to the steady, menacing drone of wasps and the rumbling of a harvester in some faraway field, scything corn in the last light. Had it ever existed, this Arcadian cliché? Had I dreamed those summers, the heat and the fertile rushes, in order to escape the red-bricked monotony of Camberwell? I sometimes wondered, only half-seriously of course, whether it had all been a figment of my imagining. The only proof – up to the point of that telephone call – were Florence’s sporadic and bizarre letters, which normally did not include a return address, or references to the farm.
I realised suddenly that my mind had wandered when matters of the present broke in. Mrs Barclay’s speech had wheeled around to the upcoming London trip. Where and when could we meet? she asked, and I relayed my mother’s instructions. Once she had noted down the time and venue for our dinner, Mrs Barclay gave the telephone over to Florence, whose tuneful but aimless singing I had heard in the background during my conversation with her mother.
“Hello Florence.”
“Hullo to you.”
The conversation continued for five minutes along those lines, and was not as anticlimactic as its brevity might suggest. Nothing profound was said, it is true, but we were busily searching for familiar notes in one another’s voices. Her voice, though a little deeper and more clipped than before (mine too), was largely as I recalled it. She had retained that gorgeous, mild lisp and her laugh, when it came, was a careless trill. And she had not lost the habit of thinking aloud – talking as though to herself.
When the fateful evening came my household was like the penultimate scene in a theatrical farce, with all the characters in a state of confusion and uproar. My mother was applying her lipstick in the hallway, using for a mirror the polished obverse of my most recent subject prize medal. My father was in the kitchen by the sink, scour in hand, exorcising a mustard stain from the sleeve of his aged and frayed corduroy jacket. Lily the dog, a Jack Russell terrier, was rushing excitedly between the two of them, creating all sorts of nuisance. I, by contrast, was a picture of serenity and composure – hair combed, tie tied and shirt buttoned – but only for having taken the entire afternoon to prepare myself. I had even studied a map of the Covent Garden area so as to appear well-informed should the Barclays ask for directions.
A bus took us into town, and the reunion was made on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Field, in Trafalgar Square. A rainstorm had cleared only minutes before, and the flagstones glimmered pleasantly. Mr Barclay had aged visibly in the past two years. His thinning hair was bright white and he had put on weight too; his neck bulged a little over his checked shirt collar. But he came forward with a youthful bound to shake my parents’ hands, and then he clapped me father-like on the shoulders.
“Terrific to see you, my boy. It’s been too long.”
Mrs Barclay stood back demurely, awaiting introduction, but embraced me as soon as she had the chance. She smelt of perfume, and beneath that of bread dough and potato peelings. I sensed an unfamiliar weakness in her grip. Florence was not there, having gone to collect their tickets from the theatre’s box office, saving time after the meal. We met her at the restaurant, a recently opened brasserie on Drury Lane. I had obtained a copy of the menu in advance, and my parents approved. It was obvious from the prices, said my father, that the restaurant’s margins came from the wine. To keep the bill down he would feign teetotalism.
Florence aged sixteen was a vision. Even my mother drew breath when she saw her, and I too was thunderstruck, though outwardly managed to appear unmoved. She had practically transfigured. It had been only two years – from what hidden pool had this finery erupted, ripe and whole? I felt cheated, almost. It was Florence Barclay of course, and yet it wasn’t, which goes to show that beauty is measured in millimetres: the bridge of one’s nose; the distance between one’s eyes; a single hair’s breadth is the yawning cavern between mediocrity and the sublime. She was very tall now, as tall as me, and terrifically lithe. Improbable cheekbones framed a thin, straight noise and tapered to a narrow and delicate chin, and once awkward features – those vast grey eyes and a high forehead – had persevered and won out.
She wore lipstick, mascara and the barest trace of rouge above her hollow cheeks. She had tanned skin the colour of pale fallow, and her thick black hair was coiled in tresses and piled on her crown, so much of it I wondered how her neck could stand the weight. What had happened to the doe-eyed, boyish, mud-spattered urchin I left behind in Gloucestershire? Florence of the hedgerow and the cabbage patch. In just seven hundred days the sapling had rocketed to full height and bloom, and what a blissful turmoil she had whipped up. I could barely speak, her beauty was so agitating. I said nothing, of course.
Presently we were seated and wine bottles appeared before us, conveyed by sturdy, white gloved hands. Despite an age differential of nearly fifteen years, Mr Barclay and my father quickly found common ground in a love of angling – my father occasionally fished with a club near Staines Bridge – and Mrs Barclay and my mother talked at length about, of all things, house cats. It transpired that Marmalade, the Barclay family’s tom, had passed away at the age of ten. I did not let on but was secretly very pleased by the news. Marmalade had been a haughty, vicious beast, and I had nightly prayed the foxes would get him. (I had even locked him out of the house once, hoping to expedite his murder, but to no avail.) Mrs Barclay was debating, she said, purchasing one of the kittens of a neighbour’s brood of Blue Shorthairs, but was worried that Ailsa might not take to it. At this point Florence interjected, explaining that “Ailsa” was the name of a runt Cumberland piglet she had adopted a month or two before. It was house-trained up to a point, she said, and rather territorial.
“What will you do with her once she’s big?” I asked her.
“Big? Oh, I don’t know. She can come with me I suppose.”
“Come with you where?”
“Wherever I go. I heard that Oxfordshire has a forest full of truffles. Mummy knows an Oxford college bursar. Perhaps he might let us take an undergraduate’s room over summer. We could hunt for truffles in the morning and sell them in the market in the afternoon.”
“You and Ailsa?” I asked, and she nodded.
“Why,” exclaimed my mother, still half-believing the piglet story to have been an elaborate joke, “they’ll not let you keep a pig at the university!”
Mrs Barclay nodded her head in agreement. “I’m not sure the porters would approve, Florence, “ she said, “even if Geoffrey allowed it.”
“Then I shan’t go,” replied her daughter, quite serenely. “I can’t imagine I would like a place which disapproved of Ailsa.”
Afterwards, on the train home, my mother asked me – gently, careful not to offend – if Florence, though clearly a delightful girl, was “entirely right in the head”. My father guffawed.
A short time later, as our bus hurtled by Streatham Hill Theatre on its right, he said to me: “Son, she’s a watercolour, that girl. Do you know what I mean by that?” I shook my head. Imaginative, if not often profound, metaphors were a speciality of his. “What I mean is she’s all fey charm and beauty, but no substance. Like a watercolour. You’re smitten is clear enough. I saw the way you looked at her, but trust me, she’d slip through your fingers.”
I did not put much in store by his comments. I think it was his way of putting me off her, perceiving – quite correctly – that on a physical level if nothing else, she was far out of my league. I mulled on that physicality and decided at length that it was an un-self-conscious, unexploited prettiness, and all the prettier for being so; all the more seductive for its being open-faced and absent-minded.
Apparently she did not realise, as her fellow diners had, that she ought to have been in Vogue, or Tatler, draped in mink, adorned with pearls; elbows on bony, jutting hips. These fevered thoughts, and others much more distasteful, ran through my head in the moments before she kissed me hello, and would continue to run in the moments, days and years which followed. At the beginning it was a mere infatuation, albeit quite intense, coupled with and confused by an enduring brotherly regard. But it was a light torture; endurable and almost pleasant in its way. And what I would not have given, just five years thence, to return to that scene and remain there, in the bearable, larval stage of obsession. For in hindsight was it not the best time of all? Spring with all her promises, before summer’s unforgiving heat.
The Barclays were staying with friends of theirs near Regents Park, and before we parted ways after dinner I had arranged to meet Florence in the park the following morning. I had practically insisted on it. She was due to return home with her parents on the twelve-ten from Paddington station, after which we would doubtless return, following a summer hiatus, to penned correspondence. It felt inadequate. What purpose did our letters serve, after all, if not place-holding for literal closeness? And here we were within the same city limits, beneath the same rainclouds and sunbursts. A crow setting off from my window would be at hers in just twelve minutes. She was so close I could almost feel her. The ratchet wheel had turned, and absurd though it sounds, in order to justify – if justify is indeed the right word – the tenderness of our letters, I was determined to contrive some intimate moment between us, nothing more than a half hour stroll, or a seat in the shade of a tree. Dinner, though pleasant enough, had seemed more like a familial reunion – a formality between distant cousins, when one set passes through the county of the other. I could not bear to simply return to letters.
The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn for a paper round which technically belonged to my younger sister, but which I occasionally covered. The sky was overcast, and there was a chill in the air. The spell of unbroken warmth was, so it appeared, on the verge of turning. Escorting me on the round was Philip, a neighbour and former school-friend, though from three years above. He too had been evacuated to Gloucestershire, on the very same train as me and billeted to a cottage just a mile or so from Fersen Hall in the direction of Cirencester, only he returned to London after a matter of weeks, desperately homesick. His was a sweet, simple, unadventurous soul. The extremities of our paper round – Denmark Hill in the West, Peckham Rye in the East – marked the boundaries of his universe. Everything outside these limits was, to Philip’s mind, a barbarous hinterland, devoid of kindness and comfort, inhabited by the alien and unfamiliar. But within those limits, there was not a feature he did not know like his own back garden. Every street and alleyway, every paving slab and wooden fence was beloved, and burnt into his memory.
Philip knew of Florence from our conversations, but as a rule did not approve of women. Females, he said, were frivolous, vain creatures, and “a toxin to virtue”. Where he had learnt such a phrase, and whether the lesson was drawn from personal experience, I could not say. But his advice to me was to make as great an effort as possible when, in a matter of hours, I would see her. There was nothing to lose, he said: overplay my hand and there was all summer to cool down, but underplay it and I would be haunted by what I could have done. To give Philip his due, it was sound advice. After all, it is surely better to regret one’s action than one’s inaction.
It was raining hard by the time I reached Marylebone, a bus and a train from Camberwell. I had a pre-war map, crumpled and sodden, which I held over my head as an umbrella. My brown loafers were almost black with wet, and the socks inside were filthy. I found the café, just off Spanish Place, and settled at a table in the window.
From nearby St James’s came the hourly chimes, drifting dimly in the hissing rain, and then later the half-hour chimes. The morning was slipping away, and with no sign of Florence. I had enough change for a second cup of tea, but only if I was prepared to walk the first leg of my return journey. However, the proprietress, an aproned Juno, took pity on me, and I was given a hot cocoa on the house. In those days cocoa was a relative luxury, but it was scant consolation. Florence still had not appeared and since I hadn’t the address of the Barclay’s friends, with whom they were staying, there was nothing I could do but wait. On a sunnier day I might have strolled conspicuously about the residential squares nearby, hoping to run into them, but it was no such day. Down came the rain – down, down, streaks as thick as vernal grass in a meadow, but leaden grey. Rivulets had swelled and burst their narrow banks, and the flagstones were awash. Whirlpools had formed above sewers; the gutters were flooded.
Sometime later, when the worst of the rain did let up, I walked to Paddington Station, thinking I might see the Barclays on their way to the train, but I could not. The concourse was teeming and the air was thick with noise and evaporation. Wide-brimmed hats, furled umbrellas and the struts of towering luggage dollies, pushed by uniformed porters, made it impossible to discern a familiar face. All of London seemed to have crowded into the terminal that afternoon. Perhaps the Barclays were there, perhaps they were not, but at length I returned to Camberwell, utterly deflated.
I will not bore you with an account of the remainder of that summer, for little of note occurred and certainly nothing relevant to our story. I confided in my friends (but not Philip, for I knew I couldn’t bear his quiet triumphalism) and we resolved that Florence, at best, was a scatter-brain who had overlooked our meeting, and at worst was a heartless conniver. In all honesty I never doubted her heart, but also struggled to see how she might forget an arrangement in so short a time, given its obvious – albeit unspoken – poignancy. But we young men were every bit as fickle as we imagined women to be. Heartache was put to one side and fresh, pretty faces emerged to fill the void.
With newfound seniority my friends and I came to enjoy a greater degree freedom at school and at home, and we were invited to drawing rooms in Kensington and Bloomsbury, in splendid houses of stuccoed or redbrick façades and pillared porticos, where girls of our acquaintance held tea parties on the weekend. Beneath watchful motherly eyes we convened around polished tables, and spread strawberry jam on scones with bone-handled knives, and drank Ceylon tea from porcelain cups. It was like a game of dressing-up, and for these girls it was a training ground. My father teased me for social climbing, but was secretly very pleased. He firmly believed in the bettering power of education, and hoped that I would be first in the family to have a degree. These plummy-voiced daughters of civil servants and diplomats, whose older brothers had been at Dulwich or who had boarded at schools in the countryside, were now – almost without exception – reading at Oxford or Cambridge, and dutifully I raised my own ambitions to match. I was a penniless scholar, said my father, who would “seize the world by the throat” and discard all limitations.
But of course nothing turned out so simply, for there was one girl who had seized my especial attention. Her name was Mathilde Siedliska. She was half-French and half-Polish (“which half’s the bottom half?” ran the joke amongst my friends), and she was rumoured to be a princess from an exiled royal dynasty. This was almost certainly not true, but it was the kind of allurement which hooked us in those days. (She did have a wealthy aunt in New York, but I imagine those are ten a penny in certain circles.)
Mathilde was not classically beautiful, nor especially elegant. She was outspoken in all matters: the less she knew of a subject, the more ferociously she argued her position. She was bullish and pouting, almost lewd, and – I prayed – deeply sinful. She was plainly different to the other girls, who sipped and tittered placidly, cooing like doves on a perch. They were caricatures of saintliness, who competed amongst themselves to be the most genteel, most correct hostess. I even found in one home in Russell Square, when snooping on my way to the bathroom, a miniature, well-thumbed guide to “etiquette and proper form”, authored by a countess. The page marked with a ribbon instructed the reader on how to politely stir milk into one’s drink: three times clockwise, three times counter-clockwise, and never permitting the spoon to touch the cup. Such lunacy! But as I said: Mathilde was different. She was two years older than Sophie, her flaxen-haired second cousin, who hosted with the greatest regularity and finesse. Mathilde drank her tea and stirred it just as the countess’s manual prescribed, but always with a subtle smirk, as one who perceived the charade for what it was. She spoke of modern painters, and of the musicians whose records played on the gramophone, as if she knew them. And perhaps she did. She was tanned, and wore garish jewellery. Her lips were plump and sensuous. She was known to smoke cigarillos from the Philippines. I could not have pointed to the Philippines on a map, but she had gone there for a holiday recently, she said, with her father, who we gathered was someone important in the French diplomatic corps. (Why, I wondered, was everybody’s father in the diplomatic corps? It seemed to betray a lack of imagination.)