by Sarah Waters
‘We’ve sent for lights,’ the warden said, ‘but the fellows have been digging for half an hour. One’s managed to get himself pretty badly cut.’
‘How long,’ Kay asked, ‘before they get to the basement?’
‘I’d say an hour. Maybe two.’
‘And the girl who’s caught?’
‘Yes, take a look at her, will you? She seems all right, but that might be shock, I don’t know. She’s over there. One of the men is with her, keeping her spirits up.’
He showed Kay where to walk. She left Mickey to see to the man who’d got cut, and began to pick her way to the back of the site. Her steps broke glass; once a board gave way beneath her and she sank into a mess of plaster and wood almost to the thigh. The crack of the board as it snapped was a sharp one, and she heard a girl cry out at the sound.
‘It’s all right,’ said someone, softly. Kay flipped up her torch and made out the figure of a man, squatting on the rubble twenty feet away. He had his arms on his knees, his ARP helmet pushed matily back; he saw Kay coming, and lifted his hand. ‘Ambulance? We’re here. Watch out for the doodah, look.’ He gestured to an object in her path: pale, gleaming, oddly shaped. It took her a moment to realise that it was a lavatory. ‘Been blown clean out of its moorings,’ said the man, straightening up. ‘Lost its seat, though.’
He reached forward to help guide Kay over the last stretch of chaos; and as she drew nearer to him she noticed something at his feet. She took it to be a heap of curtains or bedclothes, at first; but now, as she watched, the bedclothes seemed to billow or bulge, as if inflated from beneath; and an arm and a white face showed—showed as palely, almost, as the displaced lavatory. It was the girl who was trapped. She was covered in a film of plaster, and buried to the waist by a mess of beams and bricks. She was pushing herself up by her arms, to look at Kay. Kay went to her side and squatted, as the man had.
‘I say, you are in a fix.’ She gave the man a nod, and he went off.
The girl put her hand on Kay’s ankle. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘can you tell me?’ Her voice was gritty, and light with fear. She coughed. ‘Are they coming to get me out?’
‘They are,’ said Kay, ‘just as soon as they can. Right now, however, I have to see if you’re all right. May I feel for your pulse?’ She took the girl’s powdery arm. The pulse was quick, but pretty strong. ‘There. And now, will you mind very much if I just shine this torch into your eyes? It won’t take a moment.’
She put her fingers to the girl’s chin, to steady her face. The girl blinked in apprehension. The rims and corners of her eyes were pink as a rabbit’s against the white of the plaster dust. Her pupils shrank from the probing of the light. She seemed young, but not as young as Kay had thought her at first; perhaps twenty-four or -five. She turned her head before the beam of the torch was lowered, and tried to peer across the site.
‘What are they doing?’ she asked, of the men.
‘They think there might be people,’ Kay told her, ‘a woman and a boy, trapped in the basement of your house.’
‘Madeleine and Tony?’
‘Are those their names? Are they friends of yours?’
‘Madeleine is Mrs Finch’s daughter.’
‘Mrs Finch?’
‘My landlady. She—’
She didn’t go on. Kay guessed that Mrs Finch was the woman who’d been killed. She began to feel the girl’s arms and shoulders. ‘Can you tell me,’ she said as she did it, ‘if you think you might be injured?’
The girl swallowed, and coughed again. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you move your legs?’
‘I think I could, a minute ago. I don’t like to try, in case it topples the stuff and it crushes me.’
‘Can you feel your feet?’
‘I don’t know. They’re cold. It is just the cold, isn’t it? What else could it be? It’s not something worse, is it?’
She’d begun to shiver. She was dressed in what must have been a nightdress and dressing-gown, but the ARP man had put a blanket across her shoulders for extra warmth. Kay drew the blanket tighter, then looked around for something else. She found what might have been a bath-sheet; but it was sodden, and black with soot. She threw it away, then saw a cushion, its horsehair stuffing spilling from a gash in its velvet case. She put this against the girl’s side, where she thought the sharp edges of rubble might be cutting or pressing against her.
The girl didn’t notice. She was peering across the site again. She said, in an agitated way, ‘What’s that? Have they switched on lights? Tell them they mustn’t!’
A lorry had come, bringing a single lamp and a little generator, and the R and D men had fitted them up and set them running. They’d tried to keep the lamp dim by stretching a square of tarpaulin above it; but light was leaking across the site, changing the look and the feel of things. Kay glanced about and saw quite plainly objects that, a moment before, had baffled her eye: an ironing-board with broken legs, a bucket, a little box to which someone had pasted shells…The lavatory lost its nacreous glamour and showed its stains. The walls of the houses rising up on either side of the heap of rubble were revealed to be not walls at all, but open rooms, with beds and chairs and tables and fireplaces in them, all intact.
‘Tell them to turn off the lights!’ the girl was still saying; but she was looking around, too, as Kay was—as if understanding, for the first time, the nature of the chaos in which she was trapped, and perhaps seeing fragments of her old life in it. Then, ‘Oh!’ she said. The men had begun to hammer. She shuddered with every thud. ‘What are they doing?’
‘They have to work quickly,’ said Kay. ‘There might be gas, or water, you see, filling up the basement.’
‘Gas or water?’ asked the girl, as if not understanding. Then she winced, as another thud came. She must have been able to feel the blows through the rubble. She began to cry. She rubbed at her face, and the plaster grew thick with her tears. Kay touched her shoulder.
‘Are you in pain?’
The girl shook her head. ‘I can’t tell. I don’t think so. It’s just—I’m so frightened.’
She put both her hands across her eyes and at last grew silent and almost still. When she took the hands away and spoke again her voice had changed, she sounded calmer, and older. ‘What a coward you must think me,’ she said.
Kay said gently, ‘Not at all.’
The girl wiped her eyes and nose on a corner of the blanket. She made a face against the taste and the feel of the grit on her tongue. She said, ‘I don’t suppose you could give me a cigarette?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t, while there might be gas.’
‘Of course not. Oh!’ The men were hammering again. She held herself rigid.
Kay watched, growing rigid, too, in sympathy. ‘I think you must be in pain,’ she said at last. ‘There’s a doctor coming. You must be brave just a little bit longer.’
Then they both turned their heads. Mickey was making her way towards them, her boots making boards crack, as Kay’s had.
‘Blimey!’ she said, seeing the lavatory. Then she made out the figure of the girl. ‘Blimey again! You are in trouble.’
‘You’ll forgive us,’ Kay said to her, ‘if we don’t get up?’ She turned back to the girl. ‘This is my great friend, Miss Iris Carmichael. Did you ever see anything less like an iris in your life? Be nice to her, and she might let you call her Mickey.’
The girl was looking up, blinking. Mickey crouched and took her hand, squeezing her fingers. ‘Not broken? Glad to hear it. How do you do?’
‘Not so well just now,’ said Kay, when Mickey got no answer. ‘But soon to be better. But, what a rotten hostess I am!’ She turned back to the girl. ‘I never took the trouble to find out your name.’
The girl swallowed. She said awkwardly, ‘It’s Giniver.’
‘Jennifer?’
The girl shook her head. ‘Giniver. Helen Giniver.’
‘Helen Giniver,’ repeated Kay, as if trying it out. Then:
‘Mrs, or Miss?’
Mickey laughed. She said softly, ‘Give the girl a break.’
But, ‘Miss,’ said Helen, not understanding.
Kay shook her hand, as Mickey had, and introduced herself. Helen looked into her face, then turned to Mickey. ‘I thought you were a boy,’ she said, beginning to cough again.
‘Everyone does,’ answered Mickey. ‘I’m used to it. Here, have some water.’
She had brought a flask. While Helen drank, Kay fished out an injury label from her jacket pocket, and filled in various details; she attached the label to Helen’s collar. ‘There. Just like a parcel, you see?’ Then she and Mickey stood up for a moment, to watch the men at work on the demolition.
The men moved with what seemed maddening slowness: for there was something queer, Mickey said, about the way the house had fallen, and it made the job a stickier one than they’d supposed. But at last they put their hammers aside and fixed ropes to a flattened section of wall, and began to pull. The wall was raised, and stood eerily upright for a moment; then the ropes tugged it backwards and it toppled and broke, sending out a new cloud of dust.
In the patch of freshly exposed ground there seemed only more rubble and a mess of twisted pipes; but a man moved quickly forward to the pipes, took up a brick, and gave a series of taps on the lead. He held up his hand. Another man called, sharply, for silence. The little generator was switched off, and the scene grew dark again, and still. There was the drone, of course, of aeroplanes, the thudding of the guns from Hyde Park and elsewhere; but those sounds had been there, it seemed incessantly, for the past six months: you filtered them out, Kay found, as you filtered out the roaring of the blood in your own ears.
The man with the brick said something too low for Kay to catch. He gave another tap on the pipes…And then, very faintly, there came a cry, like the mewing of a cat, from beneath the rubble.
Kay had heard such sounds before: they were thrilling and unnerving, much more so than the sight of blasted limbs and muckedup bodies. They made her shiver. She let out her breath. The site had grown noisy and alive again, as if in response to some small electric charge. The generator was started up, and the light switched back on. The men moved in and began to work with a new kind of purpose.
A car drew up, bumping over the broken road, a white cross gleaming from its bonnet. Mickey went to meet it. Kay hesitated, then squatted again at Helen’s side.
Helen was bracing herself awkwardly against the rubble. She’d been straining to listen, too. ‘Those voices,’ she said, ‘that was Madeleine and Tony, wasn’t it? Are they all right?’
‘We hope they are.’
‘They will be, won’t they? But how can they be? Mrs Finch—’ She shook her head. ‘I saw them taking her away, before you came. We’d been out in the kitchen. She wanted her glasses, that was all. I said I’d run up and get them for her. They were on the table, beside her bed. I had them, right here—’ She held up her hand and looked at her palm, then gazed around, as if suddenly bewildered. ‘She didn’t want me to go,’ she said. ‘She wanted Tony to do it, she wanted Tony to go.’
Her voice had begun to shake. She looked at Kay, her eyes wide open. Then, ‘Listen,’ she said suddenly. ‘Listen, would you mind very much if I were to hold your hand?’
‘Mind?’ said Kay, moved by the simplicity of the request. ‘Good heavens! I would have offered it at the start; only, you know, I didn’t want to seem forward.’
She took hold of Helen’s fingers and began to chafe them between her own; then she raised them, and breathed on them—breathed slowly, steadily, on the knuckles and the palm.
Helen kept her gaze on her face as she did it, her eyes still wide. She said, ‘You must be so brave. You and your friend. I could never be brave like that.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Kay, still chafing her hand. ‘Is that better? It’s easier to be out in the fuss, that’s all, than sitting home listening to it.’
Helen’s fingers were chill and dusty in her own, but the palm and the pads of the fingertips were soft, yielding. Kay pressed them harder, then let them go. ‘Here’s the doctor,’ she said, hearing cracking boards again. And she added quietly: ‘That was a secret, by the way, about its being easier to be out.’
The doctor was a brisk, handsome woman of forty-five or so. She was dressed in dungarees and a turban. ‘Hello,’ she said, seeing Helen, ‘what have we here?’
Kay moved away while the woman squatted at Helen’s side. She heard her murmur, and caught Helen’s replies: ‘No…I don’t know…A little…Thank you…’
‘Impossible to tell the extent of the trouble,’ said the doctor, joining Kay again, wiping dust from her hands, ‘until the legs are freed. I don’t think there’s any blood loss, but she seems pretty feverish, which might be from pain. I’ve given her a shot of morphia, take her mind off things.’ She stretched, and grimaced.
Kay asked, ‘Bad night?’
‘You might say that. Nine dead from a shell on Victoria Street, four gone at Chelsea. One here, I gather? We were told this blasted woman and her boy would be out for us to take a look at; no time to hang about now. There’s a chap with his hands blown off, apparently, over in Vauxhall.’
As she spoke, a demolition man called out that there was no more fear of gas, and automatically she reached into her pocket and brought out a packet of cigarettes. She opened it up, and held it out.
‘Give me two, could you?’ said Kay.
‘You’ve a nerve.’
Kay laughed. ‘The first’s for me; the other’s medicinal.’ She lit them both from the woman’s lighter, and went back to Helen. ‘Hey,’ she said gently, ‘look what I have.’
She put a cigarette between Helen’s lips, then took one of her hands and held it, simply, as before. Helen’s eyes, as she narrowed them against the smoke, were darker, and her voice had changed again.
‘How kind you are,’ she said.
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘I seem to be drunk. How can that be?’
‘It’s the morphia, I expect.’
‘How nice that doctor was!’
‘Yes, wasn’t she?’
‘Should you like to be a doctor?’
‘Not much,’ said Kay. ‘Should you?’
‘I know a boy who means to be one.’
‘Yes?’
‘A boy I was in love with.’
‘Ah.’
‘He threw me over for another girl.’
‘Silly chap.’
‘He’s gone into the army now. You’re not in love with anyone, are you?’
‘No,’ said Kay. ‘Someone’s in love with me, as it happens. A grand person, too…But that’s another secret. I’m thinking of the morphia, you see. I’m counting on your not being able to remember any of this.’
‘Why is it a secret?’
‘I promised the person it would be, that’s all.’
‘But you won’t love him back?’
Kay smiled. ‘You’d think I would, wouldn’t you? But, isn’t it funny—we never seem to love the people we ought to, I can’t think why…’
‘Don’t let go of my hand, will you?’
‘Never.’
‘Are you holding it? I can’t feel it.’
‘There! Do you feel that?’
‘Yes, I feel that. Keep it like that, will you? Just like that.’
They smoked in silence, and presently Helen seemed to doze: the cigarette smouldered forgotten in her hand, so Kay took it gently from her fingers and smoked the last of it herself. The demolition work went on. From time to time the drone of planes and the thump of shells grew louder; there were spectacular flashes in the sky, green and red, and tumbling flares. Now and then Mickey came over, to sit beside Kay and to yawn. Two or three times Helen stirred, and mumbled, or spoke quite clearly: ‘Are you there?’ ‘I can’t see you.’ ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m here,’ Kay answered, every time, and squeezed her hand a little harder.
‘She’l
l be yours for life,’ said Mickey.
And then, finally, the demolition work revealed a fallen staircase, and when this was raised by a winch the woman and her son were found beneath it, almost perfectly unharmed. The boy came out first—head-first, as he must have come out of the womb; but rigid, dry, dusty, his hair an old man’s. He and his mother stood quite stunned. ‘Where’s Mum?’ Kay heard the woman say. Mickey went to them with blankets, and Kay got to her feet.
Helen felt her move, and woke, and reached for her. ‘What is it?’
‘Madeleine and Tony are freed.’
‘Are they all right?’
‘They seem to be. Can you see? Now the men will come and free you.’
Helen shook her head. ‘Don’t leave me. Please!’
‘I have to go.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘I must go, so the men can free you.’
‘I’m afraid of it!’
‘I have to drive the woman and her son to the hospital.’
‘Your friend can do it, can’t she?’
Kay laughed. ‘Look here, do you want to get me chucked out of the service?’
She put her hand to Helen’s head, to brush back the dusty hair from her brow. She did it casually enough; but the sight of Helen’s anxious expression—the large, darkened eyes, above the plaster-white cheeks—made her hesitate.
‘Just a second,’ she said. ‘You must look your best, for the R and D men.’
She ran to Mickey, and returned to Helen with the flask of water. She fished out her handkerchief, and wet it; and began, very gently, to wipe the dust from Helen’s face. She started at her brow, and worked downwards. ‘Just close your eyes,’ she murmured. She brushed at Helen’s lashes, and then at the little dints at the side of her nose, the groove above her lip, the corners of her mouth, her cheeks and chin.
‘Kay!’ called Mickey.
‘All right! I’m coming!’
The dust fell away. The skin beneath was pink, plump, astonishingly smooth. Kay brushed a little longer, then moved her hand to the curve of Helen’s jaw and cupped it with her palm—not wanting to leave her, after all; gazing at her in a sort of wonder; unable to believe that something so fresh and so unmarked could have emerged from so much chaos.
