V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,11

could see and hear, and which would only start to fall once its fuel ran out, potentially giving you time in the silence to try to find cover; or the V2, which struck without warning. Most said the V2. It preyed on one’s nerves just as much as the V1 but offered not even a chance of escape. And it was also eerily futuristic – the harbinger of a new era, produced by an enemy who was supposed to be beaten. It made you wonder what else Hitler might have up his sleeve.

Kay contemplated the smear of smoke for a few more seconds, took a couple of steps backwards, then turned and began walking rapidly in the opposite direction, threading her way between the onlookers gawping at the sky, heedless of who she knocked into and the curses they shouted after her.

The distinctive double bangs had reverberated across London. The Saturday shoppers she passed had their heads down; their faces tense, their voices muted. When the V2s had first started landing in September, the authorities had put out a story that the huge blasts were caused by exploding gas mains. Nobody believed it. (‘Have you heard about the Germans’ new secret weapon – the flying gas main?’) It was only in the last two weeks that Churchill had announced the truth in Parliament. A thin film of anxiety had settled over the city.

Kay hurried westwards, past Holborn station, Tottenham Court Road … There was a relief in the simple mechanical activity of putting one foot in front of the other. She knew a lot about the V2 – size, range, fuel, payload, launch sites; she had watched it grow before her eyes over the past eighteen months as a laboratory technician might watch cancerous cells multiply under a microscope. Her mental state was three parts panic to one part cool professional evaluation: if the Germans could land a pair of rockets on London in the space of little more than an hour, it suggested they might have increased their deployment and a whole new phase of the offensive was under way.

In Oxford Circus, a car backfired. She ducked instinctively, like everyone else. When they straightened, they exchanged rueful looks and resumed their separate journeys.

In the end, she walked nearly four miles, all the way to Paddington station. The next train to Marlow was in thirty minutes. She went into the ladies’ and studied her face in the wide communal mirror. No wonder people had been looking at her oddly. She had white plaster in her auburn hair and on her face like a powdered Regency tart, streaks of soot on her cheeks, a smoke smut on her nose, a trickle of dried blood from the cut on her temple. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and filthy. A dirty weekend, she thought, and laughed out loud – it was exactly the sort of stupid joke that Mike would make – then gripped the edge of the sink and started to cry.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ A middle-aged woman in a headscarf at the next basin was looking at her in the mirror with concern.

‘Yes, fine, sorry.’ She turned on the tap, ducked and splashed her face with cold water, watched it turn black and swirl away, keeping her head down until she had recovered. She found an empty cubicle and locked the door, put her suitcase on the toilet seat, pulled her dress over her head and took out a pale blue shirt and black tie. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons. She did them up wrongly and had to start again. She tugged the heavy blue skirt over her hips and fastened it, shook out the matching blue jacket with its single braided band on the sleeves and tried to smooth away the creases. She buttoned it up and tightened the belt.

Back at the sink, hairgrips in her mouth, she put up her hair. Her fingers came away covered in dust. There was nothing she could do. Her cap would cover the worst of it. She applied the make-up she had bought for the weekend, as advertised by Merle Oberon in that month’s Vogue (‘Just a few seconds with Max Factor “Pan-Cake” and you’re glamorous!’), dabbing it thickly over the cut. It stung like hell. She added some lipstick, adjusted her cap and tucked away a few stray hairs. She stuck out her chin and peered into the mirror, and a formidable woman who seemed a complete stranger