The Greatcoat

by Helen Dunmore

  Charlie had laughed at her: ‘They’d shoot you, Is.’

  She hadn’t known there was a bomber station so close to Kirby Minster. But of course, that would be why they had widened the road. There must have been lorries pounding over it day and night, servicing the thousands of people who lived out here in their temporary city. Air crew, ground crew, Waafs, everyone from wing commander to cleaners. Already Isabel was walking forward, past the guardhouse. Some of the fence was down. The silence of the deserted airfield folded round her.

  Everything was still, but for the wind sifting across concrete. Thistles, dock and willowherb sprouted from cracks. Bramble snaked out of the long grass, and coiled up the fence. Isabel heard her aunt’s voice in her head. They were standing close together, the three of them, watching the mud churn as the flat farmland became an airfield.

  ‘That’s going to be the control tower. They direct the aircraft from there.’

  ‘Where will the aircraft go?’ It was Charlie’s voice now.

  ‘They’ll be dispersed all around the perimeter,’ said her aunt authoritatively. ‘They have to do that, in case of German attack. If the aircraft were in one place, they could be destroyed by a single enemy raid. The bomb store is camouflaged, too.’

  ‘What are all those buildings?’

  ‘Admin. Barracks. They have everything they need here.’

  Isabel tested the words in her mouth. Admin. It sounded mysterious, powerful. ‘Do they have houses to sleep in?’ she asked babyishly. Charlie grinned and lightly kicked her leg.

  Aunt Jean frowned. ‘They sleep in Nissen huts,’ she said briefly.

  Aunt Jean knew everything, because she was on the parish council. She wrestled every bit of knowledge to herself, and gave it out sparingly, to those who deserved it.

  Soon the village was full of airmen, as if her aunt’s predictions had made them spring into being. There was only one pub, and everybody went there, shouting and singing and spilling out into the summer darkness with beer mugs in their hands. Isabel and Charlie would hang about the green on their bikes, doing endless circuits, watching, listening. Some people in the village grumbled about the invasion, but not Aunt Jean. Strict as she usually was, she had endless tolerance for these young men, and would take to task those who complained about heavy drinking, shadowy couples enlaced by the walls of the village hall, or a young flight lieutenant tearing through the village on his motorbike. On Sundays Aunt Jean invited air crew to tea, to give them a taste of home, she said. Isabel couldn’t help knowing that there was nothing very homely about Aunt Jean, or the stiff way in which she set out the best tea things on little tables in the sitting room, instead of comfortably around the kitchen table. Isabel and Charlie were always warned to say that they didn’t want any cake. ‘It’s the least we can do for them,’ Aunt Jean said.

  On still nights they could hear the aircraft starting up, taxiing, waiting for take-off. Isabel thought of the flight sergeant who had caught her watching hungrily as he took another piece of apple sponge. He had laughed and said, ‘On second thoughts …’ and put it onto her plate. Aunt Jean hadn’t been pleased, but Isabel ate it up quickly, before she could be stopped, and all the men laughed.

  Isabel was twelve now, Charlie thirteen. They were old enough to understand what was happening, Aunt Jean said, and she let them listen to the radio reports of the bombing raids. They knew what it meant when Alvar Lidell intoned that ‘one of our aircraft failed to return’. When the men were on operations, the pub was almost empty.

  We used to talk about ‘the airfield’, as if it were the only one in the country, thought Isabel. But there were dozens, all over Suffolk and Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and East Yorkshire. She looked around her, at the silent, sleeping landscape at peace in the autumn sunlight. There’s probably a village near here, too, she thought, with a pub that used to be packed with men in uniform. Now there are only farm-workers again.

  Isabel shaded her eyes and scanned the wreck of the airfield. She could pick out the control tower, hangars, admin buildings, roads, Nissen huts. The main runway disappeared into the distance. They hadn’t demolished the buildings; they hadn’t bothered. They had just left everything to the weather.

  A cloud of birds was pecking at something on the ground. They lifted for a second and she saw that it was a dead rabbit, and then they went back to it again, businesslike, working methodically at the soft parts.

  Isabel glanced quickly behind her. Of course there was nothing there. It was the atmosphere of the place, that was all.

  You’re being absurd, she said to herself. She was in the habit of giving herself a good talking-to from time to time. Charlie used to call her a scaredy-cat when she wouldn’t follow him on his wilder expeditions. ‘You’re just a little scaredy-cat,’ she said aloud.

  The more she looked, the more the immediate impression of a place fit for use faded. Doors were hanging off. There was broken glass that caught the light. Maybe boys from the village came up here and smashed things, now that they could. Or courting couples—

  No. No one would come here for love. It wasn’t that sort of place. It would run down a little more and then it would be returned to farmland, like other ‘hostilities-only’ bomber stations. They would plough up the runways, the dispersal aprons and the perimeter tracks. The shadow of them would be all that remained, like the shadow of an Iron Age fort in photographs taken from the air.

  No one in the world knows where I am, thought Isabel again, and this time she shivered a little, because the wind had turned cold now that the autumn afternoon was slipping away. Briskly, as if someone were watching her, she turned and walked away at a steady pace, not looking back. She passed through the gates and was back in the lane. When she reached a curve and the airfield was hidden behind her she walked faster, with the breath of fear on her back, until she was only just not running.

  Once the minster came into view, she slowed. She began to regret her own cowardice. You could have gone further, she told herself. You could have gone into the mess huts. You could even have climbed up to the top of the control tower. There was no one to stop you.

  Chapter Two

  PHILIP WAS GOING to get a car; it was essential with such a big country practice. ‘There’s the chance of a Ford Prefect,’ he told Isabel, with a quirking smile that hid his pride.

  ‘But how can we afford it?’ asked Isabel.

  ‘It’s ancient. It belonged to one of Dr Ingoldby’s patients.’

  ‘Is he going to let you have it cheaply?’

  ‘The old chap’s dead, and his wife doesn’t drive. I went out to see the car yesterday. It’s in wonderful condition, Is! I shouldn’t think they’ve had it out of the garage for years. It’ll need new tyres and a complete overhaul, but then it’ll go like a bird.’

  Isabel did not drive. Perhaps she would learn, but even then, Philip would need the car every day. Once morning surgery in town was over, he would drive miles and miles between scattered villages and isolated farms. It was bare, lonely, rich country. Dr Ingoldby said that Philip had the right stuff in him. He would bat through evening surgery, and then go out on night calls without a murmur. The long hours seemed to stimulate rather than exhaust him. He could get up fresh from four or five hours’ sleep, while Isabel blundered around the stove, barely able to speak. Clean-shaven, already in his shirt and tie, Philip looked as if he belonged in a different world from the muddle of the flat. Sometimes, after these early wakings, Isabel would go back to bed in the afternoon, close her eyes and whirl down and down into a pool of darkness from which she woke unrefreshed.

  If you’re lonely, it’s your own fault, said Isabel to herself.

  Dr Ingoldby’s wife thought Isabel was a nice little thing and asked her to tea in the big, grey house with its shining floors and walled fruit garden. But Janet Ingoldby was fifty. Years of life with Dr Ingoldby had made her guarded, and she said nothing in many words. She talked about her house and her children as if they were a very difficul
t knitting pattern which Isabel might one day be qualified to follow.

  ‘Are you fond of sewing?’ enquired Janet Ingoldby.

  ‘I used to make my own dance dresses.’

  Janet Ingoldby frowned at the thought of this. ‘You might care to join the sewing circle. But I hear you are bookish. I’m afraid there’s not much of that here.’

  Philip also wanted Isabel to join things. The thought of her solitude nagged at the back of his mind, until he forgot it in the intensity of his days. There was a young wives’ circle. Later there would be the Mothers’ Union. Once Isabel had a baby, everything would fall into place.

  Every night the landlady trod back and forth, back and forth above Isabel’s head. There was no guessing why. She seemed to go nowhere but the shops, and she had no visitors apart from the butcher’s and baker’s boys. She got up early and went to bed late. She criss-crossed the upstairs rooms like a guard on patrol.

  ‘You are an over-dramatic idiot,’ Isabel told herself. She would get a grip, and start living: it was what she had come here to do. She opened Early Days and stared at its brisk pages with unseeing eyes. There was a cabbage lurking in the kitchen cupboard, the size of a man’s head. There must be a way of cooking it which would not saturate the flat with the dank smell of winter days at school. As if a teacher had called her to attention, Isabel bent over her book. Words jumped at her from the text: haggis, tripe, liver and onions. There was a picture of a cow, standing at grass, and on it were drawn all the cuts of meat it would provide. Isabel turned the pages. She would make a cake. Philip liked cake, and the smell of baking. He would open the door and say, ‘This is like coming home.’ Home was not a word she would use herself yet, but she liked to hear him say it. One night he’d said to her, ‘Have you written to your family yet, Is, to tell them about the flat?’ Her face must have shown blank, because he added quickly, ‘Of course not, you’ve been too busy.’

  ‘You are my family, Philip,’ she’d said.

  Every day it grew colder. Often there was fog, and then the first frost came, writing on the windows and blackening the last few flowers. All the leaves fell from the trees. Philip had to crawl along the lanes with his headlamps full on, nosing his way through the blind whiteness. At night, Isabel piled on all the blankets. Often she went to bed before Philip was back, huddled around her hot water bottle, not daring to stretch out into the icy reaches of the bed.

  ‘If only coal would come off the ration, I might have some chance of getting this place warm,’ she said to Philip. ‘It’s all the draughts. Listen to how those windows rattle.’

  ‘We won’t be here for ever,’ he assured her. ‘I meant to tell you, Dr Ingoldby says he can get us a load of logs from one of his patients—’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘He’ll fill the car boot for two shillings.’

  But the logs did not materialise. Perhaps they went elsewhere, or else the patient died. One day, as Isabel was filling a scuttle with coal from the bunker allocated to the flat, the landlady came out. Mrs Atkinson’s own bunkers were padlocked: one for coke and one for coal. She peered inside Isabel’s coal bunker and clicked her tongue.

  ‘That’s to last the winter. There’ll be no more once it’s gone,’ she warned grimly.

  Nosey old bitch, thought Isabel. She never wanted to look Mrs Atkinson in the face; a quick sideways glance was enough. The landlady was all grey: grey pinafore, greying hair rolled up tightly in a style that had been out of fashion for ten years, seamed face, pursed lips with tiny wrinkles all around them. It was impossible to guess how old she was.

  ‘The kitchen sink keeps blocking,’ said Isabel coldly.

  ‘Haven’t you got a plunger?’

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ said Isabel, losing her nerve.

  ‘I should think you’d know if you had one or not.’

  ‘Is it not supplied? This is a furnished flat,’ said Isabel with a flash of fire. My God, she thought, it’s come to this. Standing in a backyard, arguing the toss over a sink plunger. She’s only our landlady, she has no right to talk to me like this.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, moving towards the yard entrance. For a moment it seemed as if the landlady wouldn’t budge. She was a big woman, a powerful woman; close up, Isabel could see that she wasn’t so old. She was staring at Isabel with peculiar concentration, as if there were something the landlady wanted of her, and wasn’t sure that she would get. There was a faint, sour smell of sweat. ‘Excuse me,’ said Isabel again, with more emphasis, as she made to step past Mrs Atkinson, and this time the other woman did stand aside, but not as if Isabel had won the battle of the bunker: no. Her whole face was a jibe, a jeer, so intent and watchful was she, as if every atom of Isabel’s being were exposed to her.

  ‘I don’t like that woman,’ Isabel said to Philip when he came home.

  ‘Who?’ he asked absently, putting down his case.

  ‘Our landlady. Mrs Atkinson. If there ever was a Mr Atkinson. Perhaps she’s got a fancy-man tucked away upstairs. She never lets him out, of course. No one else sees him – he exists for her alone,’ and she smiled at her own fantasy, thinking of the landlady’s grey face and upright body.

  But Philip frowned. ‘He’s dead. She’s a widow. Her husband was—’

  ‘One of Dr Ingoldby’s patients, I suppose,’ said Isabel. ‘I’m surprised any patients still come to him, so many seem to die—’

  ‘You mustn’t say that, Is!’

  ‘No one can hear us except Mrs Atkinson. She likes you, you know. As soon as you come in, she’s flat on the floor listening to us. She probably uses a glass to magnify the sound of our voices.’

  ‘She’s not that bad.’

  ‘Isn’t she? My God, Phil, what’s that?’

  It oozed in his hand. A bloody packet, like a wrapped-up heart.

  ‘Steak.’

  ‘From one of the patients?’

  Philip nodded.

  ‘But no logs yet?’

  ‘If we drive out to Ellerton at the weekend, they’ll fill up the boot.’

  ‘That’ll be one in the eye for Mrs Atkinson. Us with a roaring fire and nothing she can do to stop it.’

  ‘We won’t be here long, Is. If we can keep on saving like this, we’ll have the deposit for our own house by the end of next year.’

  ‘I don’t like her, Phil,’ said Isabel again, wishing he could believe how serious she was. ‘Can’t we find somewhere else? There must be other flats.’

  ‘With two big rooms like these? You’ve got no idea, Isabel. We were lucky to get it.’ He thought, but did not say, that it hadn’t been Isabel who had tramped from house to house, looking at pokey rooms with lethal cookers and tiny, inadequate grates, breathing in damp and mildew and the faint, unmistakeable smell of bedbugs. Isabel had no idea. He didn’t want her to have any idea, ever.

  We’ll have children, thought Isabel. I’ll have a baby and we’ll move to a house in one of the villages. A house in the country, with a garden for the pram. I’ll put the baby to sleep under the rowan tree. She seemed to see herself looking out of a sunlit kitchen doorway, checking that the baby was fast asleep. But even there, she wasn’t alone. Above her head, someone was still walking to and fro.

  That night they fell asleep in each other’s arms. Hours later, it was cramp in her right hand that woke Isabel. Philip had rolled over and was lying on her arm. Carefully, she freed herself. She had fallen asleep warm, but now she was cold again. The blankets had gathered on Philip’s side of the bed, as they always did.

  She would have to find something more to put on the bed. She would search the cupboards. She couldn’t spend the rest of the night shivering like this. Isabel got up, felt for her slippers on the lino and wrapped Philip’s dressing gown tightly around her. She drew back the curtain and stared out at the yard and the tall house backs. There were frost-flowers on the inside of the window, blooming from the corners. A cat skidaddled along a wall, fast as a whippet. It was three in the morning.

&nb
sp; Isabel tiptoed into the living room, and put on the light. There was still a little warmth from the fire, but they no longer banked up the grate at night. There wasn’t enough coal left. Shortages, restrictions, rules and ration books, coupons and exhortations … It had all been going on for as long as Isabel could remember, and there seemed no reason for it ever to stop. People grumbled that if the government had its way, there’d be coal rationing for ever. You’d never guess who won the war. We’re worse off than they are in Germany, they said.

  There was a tall, built-in cupboard in the corner of the room. Isabel had filled most of its shelves with books, because there were no bookcases in the flat. On the top shelf were a pair of pre-war quality curtains that Aunt Jean had given her.

  ‘I could use one of those as a bedcover,’ Isabel thought. But there was another box cupboard above, with a separate door, too high for Isabel to reach. Philip had put his old textbooks up there. She remembered him saying that there was some other stuff in the cupboard, but he’d shoved it to the back.

  ‘What kind of stuff?’ she’d asked, idly curious.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t look. It felt like old clothes or something. Heavy, anyway.’

  That top cupboard was just the kind of place where the landlady might store possessions that she didn’t want her tenants to use. It could be clothes, but it might be blankets. Perhaps even a quilt? Isabel was seized by an urge to explore the cupboard. All at once, she was lit up with energy. After all, whatever was there belonged to the flat, and should be for Isabel and Philip to use.

  But first, she would have a look at the curtains. She fetched them down and unfolded them. They were thinner than she remembered; when she was a child she had hidden in their folds, imagining herself safe and warm. But they were ordinary lined cotton curtains and would be no use as bedcovers. Isabel folded them up again, disappointed, but also faintly excited. There was good reason for her to search the top cupboard now. She could almost hear herself saying to Philip: I thought Aunt Jean’s curtains might do, but they were hopeless. Wasn’t it lucky that I thought of looking up at the top?