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Now the table was always at full stretch with sometimes sixteen or twenty chairs and stools around it.
The basement flat was large and often Frances did not know who was camping out there. Sleeping bags and duvets littered the floor like detritus after a storm. She felt like a spy going down there. Apart from insisting they kept it clean and tidy – they were taken by occasional fits of 'tidying up' which it was hard to see made much difference – she did not interfere. Julia had no such inhibitions, and would descend the little stairs and stand surveying the scene of sleepers, sometimes still in their beds at midday or later, the dirty cups on the floors, the piles of records, the radios, clothes lying about in tangles, and then turn herself around slowly, a severe figure in spite of the little veils and gloves that might have a rose pi
Frances leaned out of the window to see if light was spilling down the steps from the kitchen: yes, they were all there then, and waiting for supper. Who, tonight? She would soon find out. At that moment Joh
In the time it took her to walk slowly, stopping at the desk to look at the two fateful letters, reaching the door, still taking her time, begi
Slowly, collecting herself, down the stairs, and then, smiling, she stood in the open door of the kitchen. Against the window, standing with his arms spread to take his weight on the sill, stood Joh
Joh
'Don't bother,' said Frances. 'I really didn't expect anything else.' At which the boys turned their eyes to her; their concern for her made her even more self-reproachful.
She stood by the oven where various dishes were shortly to reach their moments of truth. Joh
Colin, needing some sort of anchor of fact, interrupted to ask, ‘But, Dad, I thought the contract...’
Joh
A cautious glance over her shoulder showed Colin’s face a knot of anger, bewilderment, resentment. Andrew, as always, seemed insouciant, even amused, though she knew how very far he was from that. This scene or something like it had been repeated throughout their childhoods.
In the year the war began, 1939, two youngsters, hopeful and ignorant – like those around the table tonight – had fallen in love, like millions of others in the warring countries, and put their arms around each other for comfort in the cruel world. But there was excitement in it too, war’s most dangerous symptom. Joh
So that had been Frances's introduction to politics, or rather, to Joh
Meanwhile he was in Canada attending to the RAF fliers being trained there. By now he was an officer, and doing well, as his letters made clear; then he came home, an aide to some bigwig, and he was a captain. He was so handsome in his uniform, and she so attractive in hers. In that week they married and Andrew was conceived, and that was the end of her good times, because she was in a room with a baby and was lonely, and frightened, because of the bombing. She had acquired a mother-in-law, the fearsome Julia, who, looking like a society lady in a nineteen-thirties fashion magazine, descended from her house in Hampstead – this house – to show shock at what Frances was living in, and to offer her space in her house. Frances refused. She may not have been political, but with every fibre she shared her generation's fervent desire for independence. When she left her home, it was for a furnished room. And now, having been reduced to little more than Joh
And the days and nights dragged by, and she was as far from the glamorous life she had been enjoying as ifshe had never left her parents' home in Kent. The last two years of the war were hard, poor, frightening. The food was bad. Bombs that seemed to have been designed to wreck people’s nerves affected hers. Clothes were hard to find, and ugly. She had no friends, only met other mothers of small children. She was afraid above all that when Joh