The Midnight News

For Rebeccabecause you know why CONTENTS Dedication Title Page Epigraph Late The Saturday And Sunday The Boy Who Feeds the Birds Slight Comforts Firewatching Pearls Bodies Clive Cold Paper Room Burning Shadow Café Bleu Doing Better Darn Fog Close Cornflower Blue Peachy Rue Breath Dinosaurs Dressing Up Summer Fields Fish Letter Pioneers Taking Tea with the Dead Winter Woods Hawthornes Giving Up The Most Love Always A Season For Dying Acknowledgements Credits Also by Jo Baker Copyright ‘… the wicked had stayed and the good had gone …’ Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of The Day 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