Late
"Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
Charlotte has been scanning the pavements these past twenty minutes, between glances at her watch and at the posters of the new releases, and yet Elena still appears out of nowhere, in a pistachio linen dress and crocheted gloves, straw hat clutched in her hands. She’s looking flushed and irritated.
“There you are!” Charlotte says.
“I am so sorry.”
She pulls El to her, holds her slight frame close, breathes in her scent: roses and lemon sherbets and cigarettes—essence-of-El. She is warm and slightly damp in Charlotte’s embrace. Charlotte lets her go, looks her over. That familiar unkempt beauty, like a scruffy Snow White. Her impish green eyes. And, today, a line between her brows.
“What’s wrong?”
“Just that I’m outrageously late,” El says. “And after treating you so abominably, putting you off and putting you off, I wasn’t sure you’d wait.” El claps her hat back on her head, then digs her hands into her pockets, squinting in the low September sun. “I’m so sorry, Lotts. Can you ever forgive me?”
“Already have. Always will.”
“You’re too good.”
“Au contraire,” Charlotte says. “Shall we go in? We can still catch the feature.”
El glares up at the grand frontage of Tussaud’s Cinema, as though it were to blame for the afternoon’s delays and frustrations. “You know, to tell you the truth, I don’t really want to spend what’s left of the day sitting in the dark.”
“It is glorious,” Charlotte says, touching her own hat brim, the better to shade her eyes. “The park, then?”
“Yes. Why not?”
Charlotte offers her arm. They walk along, linked, skirts rustling together, in the drenching honeyed sun. Omnibuses and taxis and vans rumble by; the air tastes of traffic fumes. Charlotte asks about work, about family, about any fun she might have had, and though El replies, she seems somehow out of step, at one remove. They turn into the shade of York Gate, past the cool white-columned façades, and Charlotte looks sidelong at her friend. That line between her brows hasn’t gone away.
“D’you know who I saw recently?” Charlotte tries.
“No?”
“The Astonishing Vanessa.”
El brightens. “Vanessa Cavendish?”
“Is there any other Vanessa worth the mention? She was giving her Ophelia. You know, those Shakespeare matinées at the Vaudeville?”
“Was she good?”
“Was she good? She was heartbreaking. Beautiful. Brilliant. Everything one would expect.”
“I’m glad for her,” El says. “She’s earned it.”
They cross the road and enter Regent’s Park; the air is cooler, cleaner here. The greenness soothes the eyes.
“I managed not to loiter round the stage door and swoon all over her,” Charlotte says. “I took myself straight home, dignity intact.”
“I’m sure she would have been pleased to see you.”
Charlotte laughs. “She wouldn’t have known who I was.” Two years their senior, Vanessa Cavendish had moved through the stuffy clamour of school with the otherworldly elegance of a wading bird, intent on something no one else had even thought of looking for. “Do you remember what she said, when her parents wanted her to be presented as a deb, and do the season, but she was pegging away at auditions, determined to get a first job?”
El snorts.
“I loved that,” Charlotte says. It was a phrase too filthy and outrageous to be whispered in its entirety by the drop-jawed Lower Fifth of the day, or even said out loud now, in public, between the two of them, all grown up at twenty. Gaps had to be left. Words mouthed rather than spoken. “I really loved that.”
They pass the boating lake, the water glimmering.
“Still,” El says, “you should have said hello.”
“Oh no. I don’t think so.”
“You should,” El insists. “You should have told her she was wonderful. People never mind being told they’re wonderful.”
“She wouldn’t have known me from Adam, and I’m not sure I could have borne it.”
“You might be surprised. You had your own glamour about you at school.”
“Ha!”
But Elena wasn’t, it seems, joking. She adjusts her hat, becomes impatient, pulls it off again and fans her face with it. Her cheeks are pink blots in an otherwise pale and waxy face.
El had been in Paris, acquiring polish, while Charlotte had been wearing a little off in London. She’d dashed back from France when it became clear that war was coming; they’d knocked around happily for those quiet early months of the war. And then things had become suddenly hard and real. Charlotte had had the awful news about Eddie, and then El had become so busy. She has a junior post at the Ministry of Supply; by her account, it’s just a fetching-finding-and-filing kind of job, but it seems to devour her every waking moment. This is the first time Charlotte hasn’t been put off, let down, or plain stood up in months. Charlotte’s father had secured a senior position in the same department when it was formed; he, by contrast, seems to have plenty of time to do just as he pleases.
“They’re clearly overworking you,” Charlotte says.
El gives the kind of wry shrug that suggests a common understanding, but really Charlotte has no idea.
“That’s what Mother says,” El replies. “But then, as far as she’s concerned, any work is too much work for me. She considers me constitutionally unsuited to it.”
“Has she told you that you’ll spoil your eyes?”
“And my complexion.” El lifts a gloved hand to her flushed cheek. “How’s yours?”
“My complexion?”
“Your work.”
“Dull. Which, coincidentally, is also true of my complexion.”
“I don’t believe you,” El says. “If you’re there, it can’t be dull.”
“No defence of my complexion then?” Charlotte asks.
A small cheeky smile, which does Charlotte’s heart glad.
“Believe it or not,” Charlotte goes on, “some things are beyond even my capacity for nonsense. But it’s work. And a wage. And that still has a certain charm to it. It keeps the wolf from the door.”
El draws breath, but doesn’t speak. Charlotte squeezes her arm to her.
“What is it, duck? What’s wrong?” she gently asks.
“Oh,” El says. “I’m just out of sorts. I’m sorry; I’m not the best company.”
“No, my dear, you absolutely always are.”
They pass the tethers of a barrage balloon; it hangs high above the park, casts a long shadow. Sheep crop the grass. In the allotments, the old fellows move from plant to plant like bees. The first leaves are on the turn.
El taps Charlotte’s forearm with her free hand. “Do you know what I miss most right now at this moment?”
A tug of grief. Because what Charlotte misses most right now is Eddie, and it seems Eddie hasn’t even crossed El’s mind. But Charlotte plays along, says what she’s supposed to say: “Oh, I love this game.”
“What I miss most right now, at this moment, is having you come and stay the night.”
“Just like we used to,” Charlotte says. “Sweets till we’re sick, cigarettes smoked out the window, and scaring ourselves witless with ghost stories.”
“I was thinking more gin and confidences.”
“I’m free tonight.”
“I can’t tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Sorry.”
“Oh well,” Charlotte says, trying not to feel quite so crushed.
Still arm in arm, they follow the strains of music towards the bandstand, passing men in uniform, men in city suits; Charlotte can feel the slide of eyes over her, but doesn’t look back. And neither, she notices, does El; she’s all tucked away and inward.
Charlotte can’t quite let it go.
“Can’t you just, you know, do less?” she asks. “Change roles? If you had a word with him, I’m sure my father would—”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking.”
“But he’s your boss, isn’t he, more or less?”
“It wouldn’t be appropriate. I have three or four bosses to go through before him. I really can’t ask him for anything.”
“Well, just you wait till he wants something off you, then you’ll know all about it.”
El nods but doesn’t speak. Charlotte shouldn’t have brought up work again; it doesn’t help. She ushers the conversation back onto a more cheerful tack.
“Well, we simply must find the time somehow. So long as I let Mrs. Callaghan know in advance, I’m not going to get into bad odour at my digs if I’m out overnight. And as for you, you need a change. You clearly do. You’re not exactly in the pink.”
“Just too much going on, that’s all. Sometimes I feel like my head is full of flies.”
“You know what.” Charlotte turns to El with sudden conviction. “We both have to get some proper official leave; you must be overdue; I know I am. Then we could dash up to the house in Galloway.”
“Would that journey count as really necessary, though?”
“I don’t see why not, if the property needs checking on, to see it’s secure and up to scratch on ARP. And if we’re up there anyway, who’d even know if we indulged in a bit of hiking and swimming and a thorough raid of the wine cellar . . .”
“That,” El says, turning to Charlotte with at last a proper smile, “sounds like very heaven.”
Charlotte beams. There she is. Got her back. “Sooner rather than later, then. We must make a proper plan. It’s only a matter of time before the old place gets rented out, or requisitioned.”
“Yes. Let’s. Just give me a couple of days—”
“You clear the decks, and we’ll go. Now that I’ve thought of it, I believe I shan’t be able to get through the winter without it.”
They both fall silent, move into shade. They pass the gun emplacement, where men from the Anti-Aircraft unit are working. One of them straightens up, wiping his hands on a rag. He’s just a lad, maybe not even twenty, and Charlotte has never seen him in her life, but this conjunction of uniform with a light athletic build and a certain easy vigour can catch her like this sometimes. Right in the solar plexus. It sends her staggering back to Eddie, on her doorstep in battledress, popped by to say cheerio.
“Although,” Charlotte says, blinking, “I’d understand. If you really are too busy.”
El squeezes Charlotte’s arm. “No, we’ll do that, Lotts. That’s what we’ll do. I promise.”
But Charlotte hears the silence underneath the words, and feels the swelling space between El’s life and hers, and knows that since it’s been this difficult to snatch an afternoon in London, then a few days in Scotland will be close to impossible.
“I wonder, should we see if they have ices?” Charlotte asks.
“You, my dear, are a genius.”
Charlotte returns to Gipsy Hill in the cool evening. On Woodland Road, Mrs. Suttle picks green beans in her front garden. Children pelt past, all nailed boots and flying pigtails; one of them—little Hedy Ackerman—turns to give Charlotte a wave, not looking where she’s going. Charlotte flinches; the child will surely fall and hurt herself. But Hedy turns away and runs on heedless with her friends, and Charlotte, breathing the scent of late roses from Mr. Pritchard’s garden, pushes through her gate, walks up the tiled path and in through the front door.
This place is just familiar enough to be comfortable, but still strange enough to notice: the smell of malt and boiled milk and wet wool; the back window with its panes of wine-red and green and amber glass, now criss-crossed with gummed scrim; the pert but lazy progress of the grey cat along the cream-and-terracotta tiles.
Mrs. Callaghan, who is settled in at the telephone, cardigan wrapped cosily round her solid self, is listening to her sister up in Liverpool, who rings weekly from a telephone box on the corner of Edith Road. The telephone set, like the hot-water geyser and the glass-fronted bookcase stocked with cloth-bound book-club classics, is a relic of Mrs. Callaghan’s much-missed and often-cited Better Half, who was, Charlotte has been told, always Interested In Things.
Mrs. Callaghan raises a hand in greeting, continues with her oohs and mms. Charlotte waves in reply, leans in to lift the notepad from the hall console. The notepad is scrap paper stitched together with wool, so that messages are recorded on the inside of a tea packet or flour bag, or have a strip of yellowed envelope-gum down one side. It forms, Charlotte thinks, a slowly changing collage of Mrs. Callaghan’s days. There is a note for Mr. Gibbons, from his sister in Southampton, telling him that all is well and not to worry—even though she’s never met the woman, Charlotte feels a stab of concern for her down there in a coastal zone—but there are no messages for Charlotte. Which is how she—on the whole, generally, most days—prefers it, so she can’t gripe about it now.
She puts the pad back, joins Mrs. Callaghan in a farewell wave, and climbs the stairs, through the music playing from Mr. Gibbons’s rooms, to her attic. He has lovely things, Mr. Gibbons does. Lovely music, lovely clothes.
Charlotte unlocks the door with her own key, locks it behind her, drops her bag. There is still something wonderful in this. She sinks down on the edge of her bed, runs her fingers over the flowered rayon. Fifteen square feet of bare boards, sloping distempered walls, and a cast-iron fireplace where Charlotte can toast a teacake when so inclined. It still feels like a miracle, that she can pay her ten shillings a week and have the skylight room all to herself.
She kicks off her shoes, unclips her stockings, tweaks them off, then washes them in her basin and drapes them over the back of her chair to dry. The only problem is that weekends can be long.
Get yourself married, her sister would say.
Get yourself out to Longwood, her father would say.
Charlotte shudders.
To think she could be holed up in El’s room for gin and confidences, if it weren’t for all the other things that El is busy with.
Barefoot, she climbs onto her bed to fit the blackout card over the skylight, then hops down to pull the blind and curtains over the front casement.
She will turn up someone. Do something. Tomorrow.
If only go and see Hamlet at the Vaudeville again. And this time, maybe loiter at the stage door afterwards, and tell Vanessa Cavendish she’s wonderful.
She steps into her slippers, grabs her cardigan and patters downstairs, past the now-untenanted telephone, all the way to the basement kitchen, from where she can hear the wireless muttering. A cup of Horlicks and a bit of chat off Mrs. Callaghan. She can depend on that. That’s guaranteed.
The Saturday
The problem, Charlotte supposes, is that she had only looked so far as Friday, and the flicks with El.
Copyright © 2023 by Jo Baker. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
