by Pat Barker
—
EVEN IN A few days, her memory of the square had started to fade. She struggled now to remember what number 35 had looked like, what color its front door had been. Next year she supposed buddleia and rosebay willow herb would throng the empty spaces where people had once lived. She closed her eyes. Everywhere—every step she took, every step anybody took—was the crunch of broken glass.
The time bombs’ detonation had inflicted further damage on their house, but at least they were allowed access to the square. They could see at first hand the extent of the damage by climbing cautiously over the outer fringes of the rubble. She could even see into her kitchen. The dresser had somehow become jammed at an angle to the wall. She caught a glint of knives and forks, the blue-and-white fragments of a serving dish. They would be able to get a few things out, but it wasn’t pots and pans she wanted, it was the paintings from her attic studio, the portraits of her father and Toby. All gone. And, with them, so much of her past.
She and Paul picked their way around the ruin separately. At one point, she saw him straighten up and look around, and the expression on his face was, unmistakably, one of relief.
She slid down the last slope of rubble and waited for him in the road.
“Well,” he said, coming across to join her. “Worse than you thought?”
She couldn’t look at him. “I don’t think I can face another B&B. I think I’d be better off in the country.”
A hint of satisfaction. “I’m sure that’s right.”
Straggling apart, they walked away from their house, past the crater where two nights ago one of the time bombs had exploded. Trudging along with her eyes on the road, Elinor was startled by an unexpected flash of light, and looked up to see sunshine streaming through a gap in the terrace. The light gilded the tops of trees and bushes that only a week ago had been struggling to survive in deep shade. Oh, yes, all kinds of opportunities for new growth. Only not for her.
She stopped and looked around her, wanting to remember the moment. Then, needing reassurance, she glanced at Paul, but against that dazzling shaft of light he’d become merely a silhouette, featureless.
It might have been anybody standing there.
SEVENTEEN
Left alone in London, Paul felt increasingly restless. Partly this was because of his constant involuntary searching for Kenny. He scanned the faces of children he passed in the streets, and somehow, despite the raids, London seemed to be full of children. He watched them during the day, playing in the parks—the schools were still closed—or queuing outside the Underground stations. Children were often sent on ahead to claim the family’s favorite spot; you would see them, laden with sleeping bags and blankets, sometimes laughing and messing about, but waiting for hours.
Paul’s studio was only ten minutes’ walk from his station, so on the nights when he was on duty he went straight to the School of Tropical Medicine basement after finishing work, and played cards or darts till the sirens went and it was time to go out on patrol.
The evenings when he was not on duty were more of a problem, because he found it quite impossible to stay indoors during a raid. He could remember feeling exactly like this during the last war. Very often at night he’d shunned the comparative safety of the dugout for walks between sentry posts. Anything was better than the dank, grave-smelling murk of life underground, where a single candle, guttering in the blast from an exploding shell, would send panic-stricken shadows fleeing across the walls. The dugout was safer, yes, but it never felt safe. Now, he felt the same way about the public shelters. On the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he walked miles through the blacked-out city, sometimes not getting home till two or even three in the morning, by which time he was too exhausted not to sleep.
The darkness turned London into a palimpsest. That knot of boisterous young men by the crush barriers, they were probably soldiers home from Dunkirk, or just possibly stragglers from Boudicca’s army. After all, from the perspective of the poor bloody infantry, one cock-up’s pretty much like another. You had a sense on these nights of long-buried bones working their way to the surface: London’s dead gurgling up through the drains. Perhaps in these thronging shadows the living and the dead met in fleeting, unconscious encounters. Why not? How would you know?
On one of these walks, he found himself in a side street near Coram’s Fields. On the corner there was a pawnshop, its three brass balls suspended over the pavement, a symbol so evocative of his youth he had to cross the road for a closer look. In the window, as he’d expected, were rows and rows of little white cards offering rings—most poignantly, wedding rings—for sale. Probably they’d been pawned over and over again until some worsening of an already desperate situation meant they couldn’t be redeemed. Ah, redeemed. The religious language of pawnbroking had always fascinated him.
When he was a boy, his grandmother had owned a pawnshop, conducting business with her usual rapacity. Many of her clients were pawning goods in order to pay the rent on the ramshackle properties she owned. Yet Gran hadn’t been the bloated capitalist of socialist theory, but a half-literate working-class woman who’d got many a black eye from her handsome, philandering husband until she stopped loving him and learned to hit back—or rather, since she was a tiny, birdlike woman, to wait till he was too pissed to know what he was drinking and then jollop him till his arse bled.
Paul’s first job had been behind the counter of her shop: he’d done his homework in between customers. When he leaned forward, he could see his reflection in wood that had been polished to a hard conker-shine by the weight of human misery that passed over it. But it was a job, a proper job, and he had been proud of it.
God, how it all came flooding back. He was about to move on when he saw a notice in the bottom-right-hand corner of the window. Bertha Mason, materialization medium, would be giving a seance at eight o’clock this evening. The accompanying photograph was creased and grainy—obviously cut from a newspaper—but there could be no mistaking the woman. It was the Witch of Endor, no less. He bent down to make sure, but, yes, it had to be. There couldn’t be two women in London who looked like that. Eight o’clock—just time for a pint of beer and a sandwich. He thought he might as well give it a go, as much from nostalgia as anything else, though he was curious about the woman who had made a disagreeable but powerful impression on him. He wasn’t finding her easy to forget.
—
RETURNING AN HOUR later, he stepped into a shop whose smells stripped away the intervening years till he was fourteen years old again. A single bulb cast a pallid light over the detritus of hopeless lives: musty-smelling clothes hung from racks, some, with pink tickets, waiting to be redeemed; others, with blue tickets, up for sale. Racks of shoes pressed out of shape by other people’s bunions, dresses with other people’s sweat stains under the arms, a hatstand from which hung a solitary bowler hat, shiny with age. Despite the downtrodden, shabby air of it all, he kept experiencing exquisitely painful tweaks of nostalgia. Not for when he was a child serving in the shop for the first time—no; for a year or so later, when he was a pimply adolescent with hairs on the palms of his hands. The hairs hadn’t been real hairs, of course—they were what you were threatened with if you didn’t stop doing it—and try as he might he never could stop. There were some mornings when he could virtually have combed those hairs.
There’d been a girl called Gemma Martin who’d come in every Monday morning on her way to work to pawn her father’s Sunday suit. Long blond hair, the greenish color of unripe wheat, and slightly prominent blue eyes. Gran didn’t like the Martins. “I knew her mam when her knickers were that raggy she was ashamed to hang them on the line. And as for her nan—she used to sew bacon fat in her vest and bloomers every December, didn’t take them off till March. I’ve seen dogs follow her down the street.” The Martins, he gathered, gave themselves airs: a worse crime than murder in Gran’s book.
What with Gran’s beady eyes and vitriolic tongue, it had taken him nearly six months to s
ummon up the courage to ask Gemma out. Oh, but it was worth it. And the reason he found all these smells erotic was that one evening, hours after the shop had closed, he’d managed to persuade Gemma to go nearly all the way, on a pile of unredeemed coats.
It was five to eight; he ought to be taking his seat. A thin man with round spectacles appeared and guided him past the racks of clothes and up a rickety staircase. At the top was a small landing packed with people waiting to buy tickets. More people were coming up the stairs behind him. Since that basement in Agate Street he’d hated overcrowded spaces and might have left, only at that moment the couple in front moved on, and he was level with the table. A woman with mournful brown eyes was taking the money, attempting to look deeply spiritual while counting notes with the help of spit on a well-practiced thumb. He handed over a ten-shilling note, was given a ticket and asked to surrender his blackout torch.
“Why?”
She looked at him. “When the medium’s in a trance, her eyes are very sensitive to light.”
“But there’s hardly any light.” Blackout torches were notoriously dim.
Rolling the notes into a wad, she snapped an elastic band tight around them. “Very sensitive.” He gave her the torch.
The seance room was cramped and stuffy, lit only by three small, red-shaded lamps set at intervals along the far wall. An usher guided him to a seat near the back, though he noticed there was a whole row of vacant seats at the front. It was so dark he could hardly see to get to his seat and had to apologize constantly for trampling on people’s toes. When, finally, he was settled, he took a deep breath and looked around. Eight rows of chairs faced a stage on which stood some kind of cabinet, not unlike a nightwatchman’s box. Black curtains had been pulled back to reveal a wooden chair with arms. He noticed another chair near the front of the stage, which seemed to have black clothes draped over the back. The room was about two thirds full, and it was well past eight o’clock, but for a long time nothing happened, except whispers and coughing and more muttered apologies as late arrivals tripped over people’s feet. He could see slightly better now. In the third row, he noticed a middle-aged shelter warden, Angela Langdale, very jolly-hockey-sticks, but rather nice, with a lot of mousey-fair down on her upper lip and a genius for organization. When he was on patrol, he often called in at her shelter for a cup of tea and a cigarette. Next to her was Sandra Jobling. Now that was a surprise. He didn’t think of Sandra as the sort of person who went to seances, but then he didn’t think of himself as that sort of person either.
The thought of a cigarette, once planted, quickly blossomed into a craving, though when he looked around he saw that nobody else was smoking. Perhaps the organizers were so wedded to darkness that even the striking of a match seemed threatening? He tried to ignore the craving, but it wouldn’t go away, so he repeated the stumbling and apologizing, receiving in return some decidedly disgruntled looks.
Downstairs, he found the front door locked, but there’d be a back entrance and almost certainly a yard. He pushed between the racks of clothes, releasing a smell of mothballs which made him want to sneeze, and found himself in another much smaller room, hardly more than a passage really, with three doors opening off. The first door led into a broom cupboard containing an ironing board, a bucket and a mop. The next door opened onto a room where at last, at last, there was enough light to see by, though what he saw defied belief. He stood, rooted to the ground, jaw unhinged, gawping like an idiot.
Bertha Mason sat, naked, on a table, facing him, surrounded by three middle-aged women, all dressed in black, but he had eyes for nobody but her. The sheer size of her: chins, neck, breasts, belly—all pendulous—the sagging, wrinkled abdomen hanging so low it almost hid the fuzz of black hair beneath. Like a huge, white, half-melted candle she sat, eyes glazed, a fag end glued to her bottom lip. She made no move to cover herself, just sat there, breathing noisily through her open mouth. He stared, he couldn’t stop himself, until one of the women darted forward and slammed the door in his face.
Dazed, he opened the third door and blundered out into a small yard where he lit a cigarette, dragging smoke into his lungs like oxygen. What he felt was neither pity nor revulsion, but something altogether more complex. An image was taking shape in his mind: the Willendorf Venus. That featureless face beneath elaborately styled hair, vestigial arms, roll upon roll of fat, each roll resting on the one below, vestigial legs, no feet. But it’s not negative: she has no eyes because she contains the world; she has no feet because everything comes to her. It’s an image of power.
At least Bertha Mason had a face, though it had been completely blank. Was she in a trance? Had to be, something like that. He crushed the remains of the cigarette beneath his foot, taking his time, grinding it away to nothing, then went back upstairs to the crowded room, where a buzz of expectation was running along the rows.
His seat had been taken. The back rows were full so he crept down the aisle and took a seat on the end of the front row. Nobody challenged him, though he saw that all these seats were marked “Reserved.” Evidently only known supporters were allowed as close to the platform as this.
The lady of the ten-shilling notes mounted the stairs and announced in a markedly nasal voice that she would now invite a member of the audience—“chosen at random”—to step up and examine the medium’s clothes. The randomly chosen one, who’d been sitting in one of the reserved seats on the front row, shook the clothes, turned them inside out, ran her fingers ostentatiously along every seam, and then, with a brisk nod, handed them back. The garments were ceremoniously carried out and returned, shortly afterwards, with Mrs. Mason inside them, wheezing from the climb upstairs. Her breathing was so bad Paul was inclined to shout: Oh for God’s sake, stop messing about, call a doctor! She had to be helped onto the platform. Once there, she took a moment to get her breath, then entered the cabinet, where she lowered herself into the chair and let her head fall back, shortly afterwards emitting a succession of grunts and snorts as the curtains, with a great rattling of brass rings, were pulled across. Raggedly at first, then with more conviction, the audience began to sing “Abide with Me.”
Paul didn’t know what to expect. Fraud, yes, of course: only he’d thought it would be subtle. Skilled. What followed was fraud, all right, but blatant, crude, embarrassingly unconvincing fraud. He didn’t understand how anybody could possibly be taken in by it, but people were. One woman looked positively radiant as she recognized the face of her dead son, though, to Paul, the returning spirit was very obviously a papier-mâché head stuck on the end of a broomstick and draped in cheesecloth; cheesecloth which smelled strongly of fish.
Mrs. Mason had two spirit guides. The one who appeared most frequently, who acted as a kind of impresario, was Albert, who’d apparently seen service on the Western Front, and had passed over, as he put it, on the first day of the Somme. Albert’s voice was convincingly masculine; his public-school accent much less so. This was no more than a music-hall imitation of a toff and even that was starting to slip a bit. The other guide, who popped up from time to time, was a little girl of truly awful sweetness who would keep bursting into song: Shirley Temple, but without the talent. Paul was sickened by it. No, quite literally: he felt sick. Probably he should have walked out, but the memory of that naked figure, the wheeze of her labored breathing, held him back. Instead he closed his eyes, determined to detach himself from the proceedings.
But then the curtains were drawn back. Mrs. Mason, looking decidedly the worse for wear, announced she would give a few individual messages. The audience leaned forward: this was the moment they’d been waiting for. Their turn.
It was the usual trite, banal rubbish. At one point she looked directly at Paul, and he tensed, afraid she was going to give him one of her messages, afraid, irrationally afraid, of what the message might be. At that moment he realized this visit of his was not curiosity about Mrs. Mason, or a trip down memory lane, but something more driven, less rational: part of the endless, e
xhausting search for Kenny, which still went on even though he knew there was no hope of finding him. He wasn’t detached from this: he was just like all the other people here.
He was afraid of her. It was a relief when she turned her attention to the back row, to yet another middle-aged woman with a missing son. A voice began to speak, every bit as convincing as Albert, but offering no banal message of comfort: no reassuring platitudes. The beach at Dunkirk, dunes being sprayed with bullets, sand kicked up into the air, cracked lips, no water, his friend dead in the sand beside him—not a British plane in sight. Where were they? Where were the British planes? The words dwindled to an angry mutter before finally winding down into silence. Seconds later, along came Shirley Temple and “The Good Ship Lollipop.”
But now, suddenly, a commotion broke out near the back of the room. People started turning round, trying to peer into the darkness, one or two of them even stood on their chairs. A tall woman, wearing mannish tweeds, strode down the aisle, shining a forbidden torch on the stage—and not a blackout torch either: a proper prewar flashlight. Mrs. Mason ran back into the cabinet and, with a rattle of brass rings, pulled the curtains across. No sooner had she disappeared than the tall woman leapt onto the platform, pulled the curtains apart and revealed an empty chair. Mrs. Mason was on her knees, waving a doll with some kind of vest or camisole attached, and still prattling away in that awful cutesy-pie voice as if unable to grasp what was happening.
The tall woman grabbed the doll, Mrs. Mason refused to let go, and an ugly tug of war ensued in which the doll’s head came off. Everybody was on their feet now, riveted by the squalid battle. At last, Mrs. Mason managed to wrench herself free and again ran back into the cabinet, where she could be seen trying to stuff the doll’s head up her skirt. At that moment the overhead lights came on, dazzling everybody. Transfixed by the sudden glare, Mrs. Mason was still for a moment, then leapt out of the cabinet, roaring with anger.
