The Silent Forest

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘What about Freya Boreman? She’s still on our list of possible workmates and friends. We know she went to school with Sarah. I’ve tried ringing her, but only her maid or husband ever answer my calls.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m working on it.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Ever since Sam introduced us.’

  John thought about leaving his hard wooden chair to buy them both more drinks, but he could scarcely see past all the people as their legs crowded the row of green painted beer barrels that supported the bar.

  ‘Never seen so many women having such a good time in a pub before.’

  Jo lit a cigarette between her freshly painted fingernails.

  ‘Why shouldn’t we be entitled to the same drinks as men? We’re doing just as much in this war as you.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean I was complaining.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you weren’t, John.’

  He smiled. What she said was perfectly true, but after three year’s absence many husbands and lovers had not yet seen home and many women were becoming increasingly lonely, depressed or downright restless as the strain took its toll.

  ‘So Jo, how’s “The Woman’s League of Health and Beauty” coming along? Are you feeling like a new person yet?’

  ‘It turns out they’re particularly strong on bust exercises.’

  ‘Ouch. So how do you do those, exactly?’

  ‘We whirl our arms about like frantic windmills which is supposed to strengthen our pectoral muscles. Of course, being pregnant, my breasts just keep growing larger anyway.’

  ‘Some way to go then?’

  ‘You can scoff, but it should improve my hourglass figure.’

  ‘Not if it kills you first.’

  ‘You’re the one to talk.’

  ‘I don’t understand it. Everyone else seems to be losing weight since rationing, whereas I’m still twenty stone.’

  ‘You see, John, you’ll be doing the Superman press-up yet.’

  ‘Superman?’

  ‘Sorry, I forgot not everyone gets to read American comics. You alternate your knee out to your elbow as you lower your chest towards the floor.’

  ‘How is your boyfriend, by the way?’

  ‘He’s practising shooting guns in the Forest of Dean.’

  ‘Your romance is still on, then?’

  ‘Mostly off, if my parents have their way. Enjoying a one-night stand with a black man from Mississippi is a big no-no in their eyes. Not quite right for a posh Cotswolds girl by a long chalk.’

  Sensing thin ice, John switched back to the subject in hand.

  ‘Why are we doing Bruno Smith’s dirty work for him anyway?’

  Jo frowned.

  ‘Because who else will?’

  ‘That’s meant to make me feel better, how?’

  ‘Think of it this way. Before Bruno we had nothing.’

  Friday December 6, 1940

  I’m on my knees with my back to the wall. The tunnel repeats and magnifies the chorus of voices in endless echoes. There’s absolutely no sleep to be had in here tonight – once one infant starts crying, another does the same. I can’t hear myself think for all the screams that mock and taunt me; they wrench at my brain as if they would tear it apart.

  Will nobody in this rocky hole let me forget that a few weeks ago I was also a wife and mother?

  Everyone warned me that this place would be hell.

  I should never have come.

  It’s a very bad idea.

  Fact is, there’s nowhere else safe in Bristol to go. Those pathetic, little brick shelters that continue to pop up like mushrooms on pavements all over the city are cracking whenever a bomb explodes too close – rumour has it that penny-pinching builders have skimped on proper mortar to cement the walls. In a direct hit, everyone gets blown to smithereens. Besides, there aren’t nearly enough of them to protect so many needy people.

  So Portway Tunnel it is for me. A railway once ran through here at the side of the Avon Gorge. It’s not an official bomb shelter, at all – no sign even advertises its existence. I found it through word of mouth alone. Hundreds of people are braving this stone bore to feel secure, they huddle together in the gloom like primitive cave dwellers. That’s what blanket bombing does to us all: it bombs us back to the Stone Age.

  I can barely see anything, but I feel icy water run down the walls. Everyone’s wheezing and coughing in this winter cold. There’s literally no space to lie down and no respite from the awful smells of dirty nappies, urine, sweat, damp bedding and even people’s filthy clothes. Sandbags exude their own peculiar stench at the tunnel’s entrance. It smells like dead dogs to me.

  The two small water closets are proving woefully inadequate. I can’t say for sure, but there has to be at least one thousand adults and children in here while the war rages on in the world above us.

  I’ll try to sleep again in the morning. For now, though, I’ll drink another bottle of beer. Better some fuzzy stupor than the sight of my baby in my husband’s arms.

  The trouble with dreams is that they’re so silent.

  I see the flames but can’t hear them crackle.

  It’s like drowning in that river of blood that flows down the street in the rain. I’ll never get there in time….

  Before that falling rafter strikes me down.

  …to my burning daughter.

  By day this place – and my nightmares – can be better kept at bay. It’s not a lot to be going on with. One young man coughs violently beside me and spits red phlegm into his handkerchief. That’s the scariest thing. Who knows how many of us are already dying from tuberculosis?

  SEVENTEEN

  That sudden noise of something shattering was too close for comfort. Blacked out windows made it hard to tell if it was night or morning. Jo sat up in bed, still grinding her teeth. Her head ached. There was no smell of smoke. No fire. It wasn’t a bomb exploding. So was it only she, not her house, who was shaking?

  The half open door to her bedroom still exerted a terrible hold on her dreams – grievous shadows massed there like fretful friends, forever stoking painful memories that she could never satisfy. Or, rather, they became in the cold winter air the awful suggestion of something worse.

  ‘Jack? Emmy? Is that you?’

  There was no unsecured way into the house.

  Not that she knew of.

  Not even for ghosts.

  She threw off the bedcovers and listened hard. Nothing. Only an empty beer bottle slid off her pillow and bounced about at her feet on the floor’s bare boards.

  ‘Bella?’

  An owner might indulge a dog with a great deal of attention and comfort, but in return she expected her to be at her side in her hour of need. It was like an unspoken pact, especially when she had the mother of all hangovers. There was something gloriously selfless about what a dog would do. So she was decidedly aggrieved to see no sign of her on the blankets or in her basket.

  ‘Hey, Bella? Hey, girl? Where are you?’

  She didn’t pretend that she could go back to sleep now. Upending a brass Arctic Lamp complete with sprung loaded candle from her bedside table, she raised it aloft like Thor’s hammer. Was this really such a good idea? She was shivering as it was.

  Most likely Bella had simply knocked over her water bowl.

  That’s not what she’d heard.

  ‘Who’s there, damn you?’

  She used her bare toes to open the door. She did it like a blind person would. Next, she worked her free hand crablike to the gaslight on the landing wall and turned up its flame inside its grubby shade. Made sense. She shouldn’t have. Not then. At the tips of her toes lay an enormous brown rat. It moved not a muscle yet seemed no less conscious for all that. Its astonished gaze mocked her pitilessly. Her heart fluttered. Her brain swam.

  There was not a trace of blood on its fur, no slur of red from its long front teeth as she stepped over it and ran, hell for
leather, downstairs.

  Once she was in the scullery she had to force herself to be rational. Something had to be sufficiently big and square to throw over the slumberer, tail and all? If the rat revived and shot beneath her bed she might never get it out again, or equally unhelpfully, it would die under the floorboards and stink to high heaven.

  She settled on her new metal sink basket from the Army and Navy Store. There was something else. She finally thought to rip a piece of thick cardboard from the box of groceries that she had bought only yesterday.

  The possibly stunned rodent had not closed its beady black eyes upon her return.

  Not that she chose to linger.

  She threw the bowl over the body and slid the cardboard beneath it in a sandwich that she could transport more easily to the rubbish.

  She had just lifted the ashbin’s lid in the backyard when Bella raced up the steps from the cellar.

  ‘Is this your doing?’ cried Jo. ‘It is, isn’t it? Next time, don’t bring it to me, don’t leave it on the landing.’

  Bella barked happily and wagged her wiry black tail. She let her tongue hang out while she pricked up her ears at her urgent interrogation. However, the sight of genuine fright in her otherwise belligerent owner did impress her. It proved that some jobs were better done by a dog than a human.

  But Jo had no time to stand and brood. It was necessary to scour the perforated sink basket with bleach and boiling water – she had to wash away every trace of dirt and disease; she had to do it before she threw up all over the scullery floor.

  That’s when her eye settled on the nearby window. Its old metal handle had been left open. She didn’t examine it for long. She didn’t need to. Clearly somebody had entered the house by way of the makeshift kitchen – that sound of something breaking a few minutes ago had been the sound of them taking a screwdriver to putty and glass as they chiselled out a pane. Whoever it was had squeezed past the mangle and helped themselves to some of her precious, homemade honey biscuits from her cake tin. It could have been worse – they could have gone off with her date and nut loaf, or her sultana pudding.

  Bella was too busy sniffing for more vermin in the cellar to notice.

  Jo lit a gaslight in the parlour and waited while its incandescent light grew brighter inside its mesh mantle.

  Had she really been burgled?

  It was hard to say.

  She had no idea.

  Everything seemed to be where she had left it, except for her notebook. In it, she had jotted down everything she and John had discovered so far about Sarah Smith and her unexplained car crash.

  That was missing.

  EIGHTEEN

  Something wasn’t right. She had a bad feeling about it, which she couldn’t entirely pass off as vertigo. A climb this high inside the cathedral could not be rushed. It was a mad thing to do. Yet here she was, thought Jo, edging her way along its narrow, elevated galleries at practically roof level, while all those people on the pavement of the vast, echoing nave far below her looked tiny.

  Ever since she had eaten eggless pancakes for breakfast she had suffered from gut-wrenching nausea. She couldn’t altogether blame it on the hundreds of twisting, stone steps, however, since it had been the same when she was carrying Emmy. Perhaps they should call it morn, noon and height sickness.

  All the same, to gaze into the void before the biggest East Window in England was to fly like a bird. To peer at the gaps in the planks where beautiful stained glass should have been, was to feel as if she could walk on clouds this far above so many sculpted arches, jambs, mullions, perpendicular tracery panels and scalloped capitals.

  She could have been in the gods of a vast medieval theatre. Stretching before her from boss to boss in the minster’s ceiling were fifteen carved angels, each one with a different musical instrument accompanying the great Gloria in Excelsis in the blue vault of heaven.

  Only the fact that the window was missing, like a hideous wound, was a sad reminder that the whole country was at war.

  The next tiny room proved equally frustrating – she and Bella found no one and nothing except a Last Judgement ‘doom’ once used as an altar-piece in one of the chapels of the nave. The dramatic, post-Reformation picture was due to go to London in the New Year for repair, or so she’d heard. Painted on wood in tempera on oak planking, Our Saviour sat on a rainbow. On his left was a lily, a symbol of mercy, that was directed towards the saved, while on his right a sword pointed at the cursed.

  Not stopping to study the poor lost souls being cast into hell – it could have been a depiction of her stomach right now – she ducked and squeezed all the way round to the north ambulatory, only to find her path blocked by the mysterious mechanical paraphernalia of the 32-foot organ stop.

  No joy there then, but she could hardly be expected to wait about forever.

  She stifled a curse or two and retraced her steps back to the small choir-gallery known as the Abbot’s chapel. There, she looked down into the Lady Chapel below. She didn’t know what else to do.

  Suddenly, Freya Boreman stepped from the shadows. She was dressed in her long, beige-coloured coat and toffee brown, felt hat whose peak she carefully tilted over one eye. She carried her dog next to a zippered, circular handbag with ‘Prystal’ plastic, twist-ring handles which had to be American. Ruby’s eyes grew bigger and bigger.

  ‘So glad you could make it, Fire Guard Wheeler. I didn’t have great hopes.’

  Jo came to her senses at once and wiped sweat off her brow.

  ‘Why… would… you think I might not come?’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t bother.’

  ‘It’s been a while since the funeral. I was about to ring you.’

  Bella growled.

  Jo frowned at her and mouthed a few silent words.

  Will you give it a rest?

  Bella continued to stare hostilely at the Chihuahua. No pet worth its name could call itself a proper dog when it rode about like a baby on its owner’s arm.

  Freya did her best to smile at her, but to what extent it amounted to a concession, it was hard to say. It was within the hushed confines of the cathedral that her haughty reserve suited the occasion very well.

  ‘You know, Mrs Wheeler, you really ought to look after yourself a lot better. I was afraid you were going to have a heart attack just now.’

  ‘I’ll have you know that I’m trying every fitness programme I can find.’

  ‘You’re following fads. It’s not the same. Never mind me, though. Did you bring it with you?’

  ‘….?’

  ‘You did promise.’

  ‘Of course, how rude of me! You’re here for Sam’s ABC of trains.’

  ‘You did say you’d send it to me by now.’

  ‘I haven’t had time. Let me nip home at once and fetch it.’

  ‘No matter, it can wait.’

  ‘That is the reason you asked to meet me up here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘It would have been easier to go for a drink in ‘THE MONKS’ RETREAT bar’, you must admit. We still could.’

  ‘We could, yes.’

  ‘So why don’t we?’

  Freya glared at her. What else was she waiting for? Why did she not say? There could only be one way to describe her. That word was uncompromising.

  ‘I just want to take this chance to say thank you again for looking after Sam. I might never get another.’

  Jo blushed some more.

  ‘I’m here to help if I can.’

  ‘That’s good to know.’

  ‘I mean it. I do hope we can be friends?’

  ‘You’ll regret it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s not easy having a boy like Sam. To most people, he’s awkward, pedantic and pre-occupied with the steam engines that run by our house, but you are one of the few people I’ve met who sees him for who he really is.’

  The words hun
g heavily on the air, thought Jo. They only emerged at all because Freya impelled, dragged and forced them from her throat – like some bloody, tubercular bacillus. She reached for a cigarette and held out the packet to her. Freya’s eyebrows met in another frown. She was not a smoker. Not here, anyway. Next minute, that half of her face shaded by the tilt of her hat lit up in the flare from her lighter. Enigmatic she may have been, but this was no game. Hers was a particular kind of reserve, a most careful silence. Her left eye was black and bloody in the new illumination.

  Jo sensed the horrid crimson slash creep between them. It cast its spell to attract, fascinate and threaten until she could no longer be immune to its sinister presence.

  ‘You flatter me, Mrs Boreman. The thing is, I can’t say I entirely know the lad…’

  ‘On the contrary, you know exactly what I mean. I see it in your eyes. You’re prepared to be his friend whereas… whereas…’

  ‘I’m all in favour of that.’

  ‘Whereas my husband James isn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure he loves Sam as much as you do.’

  Freya stared fixedly into the void below. There was not the slightest hint of self-pity, but there was panic, an emotion hard won since she lived her life in such perpetual alarm? It might have been desperation or a call to arms.

  ‘I can’t rightly talk about it now.’

  ‘You didn’t climb hundreds of steps for nothing.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘So I’m listening.’

  Seconds later Freya recovered, but talked very low. Perhaps she was aware of how far her voice might magnify and carry, so near were they to the Whispering Gallery and its vocal trickeries.

  ‘James takes Sam poaching deer in the Forest of Dean. It’s both illegal and dangerous, yet he won’t listen to my worries.’

  ‘So what don’t I understand?’

  ‘James’s hunting expeditions are all based on the idea that he can ‘cure’ our son, Mrs Wheeler.’

  ‘Please call me Jo.’

  ‘The way he talks, you’d think that he was about to remedy some dreadful evil, not that I expect you to understand.’