not?’ Violet had said, already feeling the clench of anxiety in her stomach that always accompanied any attempt to challenge him. This discussion took place in the Piccolo, a café near Liverpool Street station: he had only time for a short meeting before catching a train back to his barracks near Colchester. It was January, and the radiators were on full blast, steaming up the windows – though the one they were sitting by produced more noise than heat, for which Violet, in her woollen winter coat, was grateful.
‘Oh, come on, Birdy,’ he said, his eyes fixed on his spoon, idling in the froth of his coffee, ‘let’s not fight.’
Birdy was a name he had started calling her one night coming back from the pictures. They used to go every Friday to the Streatham Astoria, a place Violet loved. It was like an Egyptian palace, she thought, with its columns and murals and friezes in red, green and gold; even in the ladies’ toilets there was a wall-painting of a figure bathing in a lotus pool. They’d seen a movie about a female internment camp in France, in which the prisoners put aside all their differences to help hide a group of shot-down British airmen from the Nazis: it was called Two Thousand Women. One of the women was played by Jean Kent, who Eli always said Violet looked like. In the film, this character was called Bridie, and Eli said, on exiting the Streatham Astoria, that he was more convinced than ever that Violet looked like her, so he swapped round the I and the R and started calling her Birdy. It made no real sense, but formed part of a happy memory, and so had stuck.
She looked away, hurt by the implication that they were a couple who regularly fought, the truth being that their relationship – or, at least, what sense of their relationship she could garner from an engagement conducted so far mainly in letters and snatched meetings – ran very smooth, certainly compared to what she had seen in other couples. Gwendoline and her husband rowed so much that Violet sometimes wondered if Henry, a conscientious objector, wasn’t trying to fight his own war within the confines of their tiny flat in Shoreditch.
She also knew, however, that their freedom from fighting depended on her assumed complicity; so felt the fist in her stomach tighten, even before she decided to continue:
‘Is it … is it because you’re Jewish?’
He looked up, his face set behind the shield of his trademark grin, the one that brought his nose over his mouth, making him look, Violet thought, Jewish. ‘Of course it’s because I’m Jewish.’
‘But your mother wasn’t. Was she? Catholic, you said. So it doesn’t matter, anyway.’
Eli lit a cigarette. He still had the Zippo. There was too much petrol in it, and the flame seemed to cover half his face, making Violet back off.
‘And you’ve told me you don’t believe in religion, anyway.’
‘I don’t.’
‘So what difference does it make?’
He frowned. The lines on his face, very pronounced in the grey light falling through the window, joined up to form circles, like contours around a mapped hill. She had noticed now many times how Eli’s facial lines served to exaggerate – to underline – his every mood.
‘Well, when I say I don’t believe in religion, what I mean is: I don’t believe in it. Any of it. So getting married in a church – a building which only exists because one thousand nine hundred years ago the Jews got so fiddly about the pissy little dos and don’ts of God-bothering that a whole new mutant religion had to be born out of its already exhausted old womb – that seems to me even more hypocritical than doing it in a synagogue …’
The radiator between them coughed and shook violently, like an old smoker waking up. Eli looked at it with interest.
‘What about me?’ Violet said. ‘What about what I want?’
He glanced at her, surprised. She felt her own eyebrows forming virtually the same expression: the idea of Violet introducing her desires into their conversation – indeed, the idea that Violet had desires, or, at least, desires that could be put up in conflict with Eli’s – was as startling to her as it was to him.
‘Birdy,’ he said, putting his two hands on the one of hers that was resting on the table: she felt their enveloping weight and warmth. ‘What’s more important? Getting married, or where we get married?’
She looked at his eyes, scanning them for insincerity. In this instant, their deep brown seemed to her the opposite: the substantial brown of leather book covers and panelled walls. And if eyes are the windows to the soul, like her mother was always saying, then substance, tangibility, something in Eli’s soul to hang on to, was what she needed to see in those windows. She knew that his words could as easily have been said by her to him – he was the one who didn’t want to get married in a church – but this fleeting moment of Eli being serious – serious, for once, about them – was more important.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said, adding her other hand to the hand pile on the table. Their four hands together, his two in between hers, looked like a sandwich in which the dark meat filling could not be contained by the two small slices of white bread. The radiator croaked again, and then gushed, as the hot water inside forced its way along the cast-iron coils.
‘It must be like a coral reef,’ said Eli, looking away from her towards the sound.
‘Sorry?’
‘Inside the radiator. The water’s having such a hard time getting through it, heating it up – inside, it must be studded with rocks of fur and scale, sprouting off the sides and up off the bottom, like a coral reef.’
Violet looked towards the heating implement. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Have you got a pen?’
She shook her head.
‘What, nowhere? Not in amongst all the God knows what you carry in your handbag?’ Underneath its normal New York insouciance, his voice betrayed, a hint of petulance.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, picking her handbag up off the floor and starting to file through it anyway. ‘You’re the one who wants to be a writer.’
‘I know.’ He opened his palm. ‘But I’m also the one who can’t keep hold of anything.’
She tutted, although smiled at the same time, pleased at the notion of coupledom – you’re this, I’m that, my weaknesses, your strengths – that this declaration assumed.
‘Why don’t …?’ Violet began, about to suggest asking the waitress, but before she could finish he had leant across the table, his pinched waist awkwardly angled against the Formica edge, and extended his long index finger towards the window. On the fogged-up glass, he wrote: Inside the radiator, a coral reef.
‘What use is that?’ she said, as he sat back in his chair, surveying his handiwork with a satisfied air. Various other diners in the Piccolo were looking round from their tea and cakes and staring. Violet felt annoyed by this action. When he had written on the ceiling in the Eagle it had felt spontaneous, a sheer outpouring of self, but this had an element of self-consciousness about it, of deeply considered writ-erliness. It felt contrived. ‘Are you going to telephone a glazier? To cut the window out for you?’
She noticed you could now see through the window, or at least through the bits of window revealed by his letters. This fractional view obscured the daily commotion of the Liverpool Street forecourt, lending its towers
