by Pat Barker
I walked a little farther along the road, and then I just stood and stared at the door. My brain was whirring away, trying to come up with an innocent explanation. I just wanted it to go away. Only of course there was no explanation except the obvious, and I couldn’t bear to think about that, so in the end I didn’t think at all, just tottered off, feeling ancient, frail, as if my bones had turned to glass.
Now I wonder why I didn’t bang on the door, force my way up the stairs. But it never occurred to me to do that.
Instead, I went to the house, which was probably the worst thing I could’ve done. All the outer walls are intact, but the roof’s in a bad way, ceilings collapsed on the floors below. And open to the weather because of the roof, so it’s bound to deteriorate quite rapidly. I cried. But also I was following Paul and the girl upstairs, into the studio, onto the bed. We made love on that bed once. I wonder if he remembers that when he’s rolling round on it with her?
I felt naked, shivering in the sunlight, everything stripped away, not just the house, Paul as well—all gone. And if you take away all the relationships, the possessions, the achievements of somebody’s adult life, what they’re left with—what I’m left with—isn’t youth. I noticed I was walking differently—more slowly, a bit hunched over. I had to force myself to straighten up.
It was a mistake to go to the house—or perhaps not—perhaps I needed that final brutality to be able to stop feeling. Because I did stop. I went to a Lyons Corner House and sat over a pot of tea and gradually the numbness spread. I remembered the first weeks after Toby died, how unfeeling I was, how ruthlessly efficient. I don’t think I’ve ever been as efficient as that in my entire life. Well—until now.
I drank the tea, paid the bill, checked to see how much money I had in my purse and set off. Two hours later, I’d found a flat on the top floor of a house in Gower Street, two doors down from where I used to live as a student. Huge rooms; one of them, at the back, has wonderful light. I can imagine myself painting in there. Then there’s a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, all good-sized—and it’s unbelievably cheap. Of course it’s cheap because it’s lethal, right at the top of the house, in an area that’s seen a lot of bombing, but I don’t care about that.
I’m quite clear. This is about survival now. This has the power to destroy me and I’m not going to let it.
But I keep replaying that scene. Paul and the girl kissing, the pretended tug of war, his mock surrender, them going back into the house together. Oh, and then I follow them up the stairs…It’s like a film I’m being forced to watch, but there’s no emotion. I seem to have run out of that.
It’s a strange feeling. Rather like the cordoned-off roads and squares where a time bomb’s fallen. You look across the tape at sunlit emptiness, but you’re not allowed in. And you know there are other quiet, roped-off places, all over London, but you also know the life of London goes on, the people, the traffic, all that roar and bustle forcing itself down side streets and alleys, finding new channels, new ways through. And I think my life’s going to be like that. I’m not going to be roped off.
It would have been so easy after seeing Paul and that girl to creep back to the cottage, try to pretend it hadn’t happened, convert my mother’s bedroom into a studio and paint there. Happy children removed to safety, playing on the village green. Do what Paul wants. Do what Clark wants. Hide. And I think: No. This is my place, my city, and I’m not going to let anybody force me out of it.
TWENTY-FIVE
He thought perhaps it was the third incident of the night, but could never afterwards be sure. A pub had been hit—he remembered that. They’d got it roped off and were waiting for a heavy rescue squad to arrive. Three houses adjoining the pub had collapsed and there was minor damage to several others farther up the road. The people who lived in these houses were safe in shelters, presumably; though in for quite a nasty shock when they came out.
Then somebody called from across the street to say there was an old couple living in one of the damaged houses. They turned to see a stout, middle-aged woman with her hair in neat rows of curlers, the metal glinting in the light of flares, as aggressive as shark’s teeth.
“She’s got arthritis, walks with a stick.”
Charlie said: “We’d better just have a look.” She was so obviously the sort of woman who knows everybody’s business they couldn’t afford to ignore it.
Stopping outside the house, Charlie bent and shouted through the letter box. No answer.
“They’ll be in there.” The woman had followed them and was still watching from the other side of the road.
“You get yourself under cover, Missis!” Charlie shouted back. He turned to Paul. “What do you think?”
Paul shrugged. “She’ll know.”
Charlie nodded, blew out his lips hard, then wrapped his hand in his coat and smashed the window. He reached through and fiddled with the catch. Often they were jammed under layers of paint, but this one opened. They climbed in, and found themselves in a neat front room. A vase of red plastic roses stood on a sideboard between photographs of children, a boy and a girl, in school uniform. Flashing his torch, Charlie led the way into the passage and opened the door into the back room.
Charlie went in, Paul followed. And there they were, lying side by side on a bed, the counterpane pulled up to their chins; not curled up, as people normally are when they sleep, nor lying chest to back, spoon-fashion, as so many married couples do. No, they lay on their backs, stretched out, an oddly formal position. Stiff. They might have been lying in a double grave. As indeed they were. They’d have woken by now, if this was sleep.
Paul and Charlie looked at each other, Charlie still breathless after scrabbling through the window. Brian followed them in, grumbling as always, though the words died on his lips as he sensed the intensity of their silence. The three of them moved closer to the bed. The old couple lay there, so married, so ordinary—the woman’s stick had been hooked over the bedpost so she could reach it easily during the night—and yet infinitely remote, like a medieval knight and lady on a tomb, their blank eyes staring at the vaulted ceiling, unmoving, unchanging, as the slow, murderous centuries pass. Paul felt something like reverence and he thought the others did too. Even Charlie was silenced, and nothing ever stopped Charlie cracking jokes.
Automatically, Paul touched their necks, felt for a pulse, shook his head. What had killed them? There were no obvious wounds. Gently, feeling he was invading their privacy, he pulled the bedclothes back and saw, with a stab of pity, that they were holding hands.
“Shock?” Charlie said. He had to clear his throat to produce the word.
Paul shrugged. “Suppose so.”
He’d seen people die of shock before: healthy young men lying at the bottom of a trench with not a mark on them anywhere. Charlie, who he knew had served in France, must have seen it too. Had the old couple heard the bomb come shrieking down? Had he reached out and held her hand to comfort her in the last seconds before it fell? So peaceful, they were. So quiet. Their silence was a force spreading out around them, trivializing the yapping of the guns and the thud of exploding bombs.
Nick had come in through the window and was pushing to the front, eager to see.
“I’d stay back if I were you,” Paul said.
He was tense, expecting Nick to say something utterly crass, but instead he stooped, picked up a cardigan that had slipped onto the floor and, for some reason, draped it carefully over the back of a chair. The others, turning their heads to witness this strange ritual, caught themselves reflected in a mirror, and stood like that, motionless, as if the stillness of the couple on the bed had reached and enfolded everybody in the room.
How long they might have stayed like that Paul never knew. The silence was broken by a whimper that seemed, for one horrific moment, to be coming from the couple on the bed. They looked at each other. The sound did seem to be coming from the bed. Paul shuffled along the wall and felt along the floor. Almost imme
diately his exploring fingers encountered something disgustingly warm and moist, and he snatched his hand back. Nick, meanwhile, was on his knees peering under the bed. “Come on, boy. Come on.” He slapped his thighs, and a small, white-and-brown Jack Russell terrier, ears flattened against its head, crept towards him on its belly. It must have been there all the time, hiding between the bed and the wall, reaching up to lick a still-warm hand.
“Oh, you’ve got a friend there all right,” Charlie said, as the dog leapt up and tried to lick Nick’s mouth.
“Gerroff.” Nick shoved the dog inside his coat and looked at Charlie, obviously expecting disagreement. “Well, we can’t leave it here.”
The dog peered out, its sharp face and bright, amber eyes glinting in the light from Charlie’s torch.
“All right, but it’s your responsibility, mind.” He turned to Paul and Brian. “Come on, there’s nothing we can do here.”
As they closed the door behind them, Nick pointed a stern finger at the dog. “Piss on me, you little fucker, and you’re dead.”
—
THE ALL CLEAR sounded early that night; the raid had not been a particularly bad one. And yet, meeting at the wardens’ station at the end of the shift, everybody seemed subdued. Nick was slumped in an armchair, staring into space. Charlie came up carrying two steaming mugs of tea and put one on the table in front of him. “What about that dog, then?” He nudged Nick’s arm, trying to rouse him, but Nick turned on him a totally blank stare. “What dog?”
Charlie and Paul exchanged glances. Somebody shouted across to Paul: did he want a cup of tea? But he shook his head. More than on most mornings, he was glad to get away.
At the top of the steps, he paused for a moment, wondering what he should do. No Sandra now. She’d left two days ago, to his mingled sadness and relief. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He’d seen so many more horrific things than that old couple, but he knew they were going to haunt him, possibly for quite a long time. Do something—that was the thing. Keep busy. Perhaps he might have a walk round to the house, see what else he could find in the rubble. He was driving down to the cottage at the weekend and it was always nice to have something to give to Elinor.
Scrambling around among the broken bricks and charred timbers, he unearthed some knives and forks—apostle teaspoons, she was quite fond of those—but the real treasures were the paintings—and quite a few of them had survived. No time for that today though. Something was niggling at the back of his mind and he couldn’t think what it was. He thought about the old couple—but no, it wasn’t that. It was something more recent, something he’d noticed. He straightened up and looked down the street. An elderly man in an antiquated tweed overcoat had stopped in front of the noticeboard and was jotting down one of the addresses. That was it, something on the noticeboard. He threw down the brick he was holding and went to see.
And there it was. Elinor’s handwriting. An address in Gower Street. At first, he couldn’t take it in. He knew perfectly well she wanted to return to London—they’d argued about it only last weekend—but it had never occurred to him that she might move without consulting him. Or even telling him. It was—well, impossible. Unless…
There’s always some kind person’ll tell you. Won’t be long before somebody tells your wife about you.
Who could’ve told her? Well, almost anybody—he hadn’t been particularly discreet. Anybody, really, who was sufficiently malicious, or perhaps just incensed on her behalf. Neville knew. No, he wouldn’t.
It didn’t matter who. He had to think straight; he had to get this right. He didn’t know for a fact that Elinor was aware of his affair with Sandra, or that moving back to London was an expression of her anger. There were all kinds of reasons why she might have decided to return. His affair with Sandra had receded so rapidly into the past he felt it was hardly worth bothering about. The two days since their last meeting might have been years for all he cared. It was easy to think that, because it was over and had meant so little, it couldn’t have any impact on his life—or Elinor’s. No, it was equally likely she’d just grown tired of the constant arguments and had decided to present him with a fait accompli. That was entirely possible.
His first impulse was to rush round to Gower Street and ask her, but if she knew about the affair this would inevitably lead to a confrontation, and he didn’t feel ready to face that. No, perhaps he should wait, get rested—that was the most important thing—and then, this evening, he’d come back here and find something—ideally, not knives and forks—a painting or a drawing—and lay it at her feet. That would be the best, the wisest, thing to do.
TWENTY-SIX
21 October 1940
I’d forgotten what living in furnished rooms feels like—the smell of other people’s lives: transient lives, passing through. The way the silver plating’s always worn off the forks, the cracks in the bone handles on the knives. Oh, I can’t put my finger on it exactly, except here I’m a student again. Single. Oh, yes, single.
I’ve put my address on the board by the house. If Paul’s still trying to retrieve stuff he’s almost bound to see it and then he’ll realize I haven’t told him about the move. He’ll know I’ve found out about her.
I lived two doors down from here when I was a student at the Slade. Sometimes when I’m walking down the street I fancy I see her coming towards me, that girl. The girl who lived for days on end on packets of penny soup, made her own clothes, walked everywhere. She doesn’t seem so far away now. In fact, I walk through her ghost every time I cross the floor.
And this wallpaper. She’d have had that off the wall in no time. She’d have hated it, the dreary, dingy Victorian fussiness of it, the horrible yellow pattern—paisley, I suppose, a sort of cross between a flower and a praying mantis. No, she’d have been sloshing wallpaper stripper all over that, scraping away at it till her hands ached. How much energy I must have spent over the years, battling with Victorian wallpaper. Well, not anymore. Let it stay. You see wallpaper like this all over London where the sides have been ripped off houses. The Luftwaffe’s doing a much better demolition job than I ever could.
And I’d like to talk to Paul about it but, of course, there is no Paul.
I had to go to the shelter last night. While the house was still standing, I could use the hall, convince myself it was safe. Not here: it’s a death trap, so off to the shelter I must go.
The usual crowd, mainly women. There’s an old couple who play chess. Rather sweet, really. Oh, and there’s the major, a military gentleman with peppery blue eyes. No nonsense, no emotion, none of that. Only he has this absolutely marvelous mustache—a beautiful red-gold color. Titian. He takes tremendous care of it, not in public, of course, but you can imagine him, in private, combing and trimming it. In some strange way—in defiance of biology—all the major’s feminine qualities, his vulnerability, his gentleness, are distilled into that mustache. The rest of him is very properly hard, masculine, decisive. And of course he thinks he’s boss. Angela, the shelter warden, manages him very well. She always consults him, very deferentially, before going on to do exactly what she was planning to do anyway.
Angela’s tremendous. I wouldn’t like her job. The facilities are totally inadequate. We’re still using latrine buckets behind blanket screens—why didn’t they realize? Paul says they thought the raids would be quite short, though very destructive—thousands dead. Instead of which we have long raids—thousands homeless.
But it really is high time I stop referring to Paul as the great authority.
On the rare occasions when I’ve been here before—generally because Paul bullied me into it—there was an immensely fat woman with very beautiful blue eyes—harebell blue. You don’t see that very often. But she wasn’t there last night. She used to tell fortunes on top of a suitcase, ordinary cards, not tarot. Always good news: unexpected letters, legacies, tall, dark, handsome strangers.
I used to feel sorry for her, especially in the heat. It can’t be much f
un. And the latrine bucket was harder for her than for most. Her knees wouldn’t take the weight, she had a terrible time of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody quite as fat. I think you can always tell if somebody’s always been fat. And she hadn’t. There was a thin girl in there. I thought, when she looks in a mirror she doesn’t see herself. A bit like Kit, in a way.
Anyway, she wasn’t there last night—Bertha, that’s her name—and apparently she hasn’t been for quite a while. I asked Angela if she knew what had happened to her. She looked round and lowered her voice. “She got bombed, they took her to hospital, but she died a few days later. Poor woman, she was in no state to stand up to anything.” I think of her lying upstairs in a pokey little room somewhere, frightened but too tired or too breathless to get to the shelter. Or too embarrassed. I hope she didn’t die because she couldn’t use the bucket, but it’s only too probable. If I’d known where she was I’d’ve gone to see her.
Our other notable personality is Dorothea Stanhope, who’s using the shelter at the moment because she’s having the cellar plastered, and a new floor laid. It’s going to be wonderful when it’s finished, only she can’t get the workmen so it’s taking longer than she thought. There she sits, with her jewelry case clasped in skeletal hands, diamonds worth an absolute fortune dangling from long, leathery earlobes. She has two daughters. Actually, I think it’s an unmarried daughter and a daughter-in-law. The daughter, fresh-faced but no longer young—what can one say? A complete doormat—having failed in what, I suspect, for Dorothea, is the sole business of a girl’s life: getting a rich husband. “Gel,” as Dorothea says. I don’t know if she says “Injun” because I’ve never managed to bring the conversation round to the Wild West, but I’d bet quite a bit of money she does.
