If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  He yanked the side of his mattress up against himself and reached a hand down under his own weight. The school notebook with its slight nap, worn to the touch, was lodged on the wire support. He extracted his pencil from its wedge in the corner of the bed frame. Sitting up with all the practised adaptation of a blind man, he fingered for the cornered page, settled his stub against the paper, and, between his faint notches, began a line of careful but completely invisible characters.

  A phrase lingered in his mind: ‘the six-footed serpent’. The vision had been intoxicating, magnificent. A man was preaching from the pulpit above the left side of an aisle, the sermon a rousing affair, full of gesture and rhetorical effect. The people in the nave listened intently, craning forward in their Sunday best, worthy men, soft-haired children, the wives in coloured hats. At one point they applauded, and were on the point of bursting out in chorus; but Vic was aware of a region below the tiled floor’s emblematic designs, beneath the stones and brass plates inscribed To the memory of. In the crypt the sinners groaned in hell. He saw them, strapped to a huge upright gear which rolled and creaked on its axle like the wheel in a wooden fair. The scene, so crabbed and medieval, was like an old woodcut; and still the preacher preached on, in his suit and gown, speaking eloquently of the modern world and the life to come. His meaningless words thumped and spattered above, like opinionated rain.

  An engraving came to life. A naked man, mute, appealed directly out of torment. Eyes bulging, he stared at Vic, trying to speak. Clamped on to his back, partly concealed, and gripping the arms from behind, a hideous shape forced him to stagger. Flames started up through cracks in the dungeon floor. Some inkling crossed Vic’s mind of a plate in a library book. His gas mask hung from the foot of his bed. He sniffed, wondering whether to put it on, and turned the page of his notebook to write up the next part of the dream. Beyond the preacher now, he was approaching the altar by himself. Some significant image, a womanly thing, dominated the roseate apse. Tears filled his eyes. He could only sink to his knees; at which point the dream had ended.

  He stowed the book back in its hiding place beneath him. The dream was a prize specimen, a collector’s item. Flies, fat bluebottles, zigzagged back and forth over the bucket. The bed wire hurt his hand. Hemmings turned over, his very real and swinish breath interrupted by the spectre of a phrase, ‘Bag deem Wensdy.’

  Vic fell back to sleep. A face in a cockpit was surrounded by a ring of flames. There was a man in the cell. It was Hemmings pissing into the bucket; but feathers, the white-tipped pinions of some American eagle, hung from the outstretched sleeves. He was awake again, thinking of the motor bike and the injured Jewish man. There was no other sound than his own blood pulsing and the rough breathing of his companion.

  A glimmer of light came from the barred window in the top of the whitewashed wall. The scribble of birdsong touched the eaves of the silent prison – even Hemmings had snored himself out. There were no more dreams. Except one half-formed thing that was scared away by the screw hammering on the door at six fifteen. ‘Hemmings! Warren! Hands off cocks! On with socks!’ The weight of the prison was crushing.

  IN THE MORNING, of course, everything was in its place. There’d been no assault, no bell-ringing; at breakfast, the invasion was once again conjecture. She announced her intention. ‘I don’t mind going to Granny Tyler for a night or two. It’ll break the monotony, at any rate.’

  Her father mopped his moustache on a crumpled handkerchief. ‘You, my dear, can be extremely provoking. Still …’ The sentence was left unfinished.

  As it turned out she had to waste a whole day applying for a coastal region pass. Neither she nor her father had encountered that formality before. To be first turned away at Manningtree Station dismayed her, and she wondered what was she thinking of. She’d hardly seen a prison, let alone been inside one. What if the train was hit in a raid? Supposing she didn’t love him after all? What if he’d committed some really loathsome crime and she still did? Surely, the boy Jack had made it up; or Dolly had muddled it.

  She filled in forms and queued in Ipswich for her documentation, which took yet another day to come through. Therefore it wasn’t until the 7 September, the Saturday, that Clarice drew into Liverpool Street in a train that had been several times delayed.

  The mid-afternoon skies were cabled with barrage balloons. Still she felt confident that she’d left danger behind, and might, like Londoners, go about her business. The raids over London had so far seemed nominal, almost incidental – all the way it was simply the prison that had preoccupied her.

  She looked at her watch. The delays had upset her plans. It was bound to be after visiting hours. She was half relieved. It was late, too, for department stores. Her best plan would be to catch a bus straight out to her grandmother in Mile End, for what real difference would a day make? On the crowded platform, she toyed with the idea of a news theatre, or a film. She thought of Vic. She thought how foolish she might appear. Emerging between the stacked sandbags of the station concourse and into Bishopsgate, she stood for a moment there on the pavement. All at once a haunting, mechanical tone rose from behind the rooftops opposite. It was the alert. It levelled out to a prolonged wail, far louder and more unsettling than the sirens she was used to hearing go off from the Ipswich quayside or from Bucklesham Wood. Some of the people around her stopped and stared upwards. Clarice looked too, taking her cue from them.

  There was nothing to see. A woman said it was another false alarm, most like. A second agreed: twice in half an hour. An elderly gentleman was more circumspect, yet made no move. Nobody seemed quite to know what to do, nor how precipitate to be this time. No one carried a gas mask.

  Then, leaking into the siren sound, from far off over the dirt-stained, sun-warmed buildings, came a peculiar rhythm of crumps and bangs. It was as though her thoughts and actions had acquired a strange music, some eastern accompaniment. She imagined an idle hand drumming its giant fingers. Almost immediately, a drone, felt rather than heard, rose, and continued on, as if it had always been there: a remorseless, depressing grind, swelling beside the station and throbbing into the shadows through which traffic still passed. And suddenly planes were above her, slow-moving black crosses in the hazy sky. They held a formation out of the blue to her right, one wave and still another crossing the urban gully. She stood transfixed, like the crowd beside her; and all the while the distant explosions continued, beating out the same dull, thumping tattoo.

  ‘The docks!’ The man next to her spoke, almost a whisper. At his voice, bodies moved around her, scattering. Clarice moved too; but she wasn’t in the least scared. She was amazed how calm she was. One direction she might have taken was exploding; very well, she’d go elsewhere, back into the station. Perfectly composed, she walked down into the tube. And incredibly, the man behind the underground ticket window was still at his post. In fact, everything was quite normal. Travellers were passing the queue she stood in. No one was running. No one here below seemed yet to have grasped that the sword brandished so long over the city was falling. She said the first destination that came into her head.

  ‘Pentonville, please.’

  ‘Bona fide traveller, are you?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I am.’

  ‘King’s Cross, The Angel, or Caledonian Road?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pentonville Road or Pentonville Prison?’

  ‘The prison,’ she said.

  ‘Caledonian Road. Fourpence.’

  It was on the train that she discovered her body shaking. Still, she had no sense of danger. It was as though her link with her own sensations was anaesthetised. Clattering along in the dark tunnel, insulated from the facts, and from the other passengers, what she did feel was embarrassment. Should she mention what was going on above ground?

  At King’s Cross she scuttled for her connection and was horrified by the trip, trip sound of her own high-heeled shoes. She expected any moment the white tiles above her to be ripped by warheads.<
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  Then, too soon at Caledonian Road, she forced herself to get into the lift. A stray thought plagued her: her eardrums would shatter from the blasts. She’d failed to bring earplugs or wear a cork on a string for her mouth. The blood would spoil her blouse, and her tailored jacket. In the ticket hall a crowd of people milled. Station staff herded them one way. Two wardens and a tin-hatted official marshalled them back again with shouts. She saw the sandbags of the station exit framing the outside light and made a movement towards it. A ticket inspector blew a whistle. He shouted at her. Didn’t she realise there was a raid?

  She was breathless; the floor seemed about to give way beneath her. ‘I want the prison, please.’

  The man was scornful. He swore, and told her she wanted her head looking at. But she insisted, and he let her go.

  The drone was as before; the street deserted. Cars and lorries stood where they’d been abandoned by their drivers. She looked southward along the wide channel of the Caledonian Road. The bombers were clearly visible, flying upstream in tight formation. Now they broke, climbed, and wheeled away into the sun.

  CLARICE STEADIED HERSELF, and walked towards them. She came upon the prison suddenly. Forbidding, set back from the main road behind a preliminary wall, it appeared rather ashamed of itself, sullen, stained. She made her way boldly down the cobbled drive inside the first barrier. She came to a great studded gate, like the entrance to a castle, with a minute postern door sealed in it. She knocked, and rang the bell. But they wouldn’t let her in. And all the while the planes came overhead and the unbelievable crackle and drum continued from the other side of the city.

  She walked up and down the street outside. A man wearing an armband blew his whistle at her from his bicycle; she nodded and waved. A woman yelled from an opposite window, calling her a silly cow and ordering her to get under cover. Clarice crossed and stepped into a doorway.

  The raid continued. She regarded the sheer quantity of aircraft in the churned sky. She vied only with a couple of tarts for possession of the street. She walked for an hour, more, until the raid had spent itself. Back and forth, as the city came to life again, she passed the prison three times; and then wandered away into the evening on aching feet – until the bells of a church started ringing, and were taken up there, and there, and yet again there. The invasion had started.

  Then the pavement was all eggshell, and she realised that her grandmother’s house had been under the flight path of the attack. It dawned on her that she’d been witness to a catastrophe so great that whole fixtures and assumptions of her life had been recast. She had nowhere to go. What was dangerous and what wasn’t? The sirens wailed for the all-clear while the bells still rang, the two sounds clashing with one another.

  The corner of Holloway and Tufnell Park Roads held a wretched little flea-pit Odeon. They were showing a film she’d never heard of. She bought herself a ticket in order to rest a while, and found the smoky interior bizarre, the show going on, with the crackling soundtrack, the projector whirring behind her and the blue beams spreading above her head. When she came out it was quite dark, and she’d hardly any recollection of the film she’d just sat through, nor of how long she’d spent there.

  Near the prison there was a labourers’ café. A sign outside told the way to Highbury Fields. She ordered egg and chips, and sat sipping her tea, listening to accounts from the other customers of what had been happening. They said the docks were on fire, that the Germans had landed. They talked as though she’d always lived there. She explained her life to a couple of road menders. Another man, a brewery worker, knew the names of every ship in the P&O fleet, and the Blue Funnel Line, and could remind her of the details of those she’d sailed on herself.

  She became absorbed in talking. Before she knew it, hours had gone by. Her watch must be wrong; but at her ear it ticked, the delicate little beat. Nowhere near ten o’clock, surely. Sirens warned again, and a gaggle of people crowded outside. In the blackout they were shadows beside her, looking up at the sky and trying to read it. The East glowed red, but soon enough, across the sprinkle of constellations directly above her, droning outlines tracked now from this direction; and now, as she waited, transfixed, from that. Once again she heard the irregular muffled beat of explosion after explosion.

  They were bombing their earlier fires. She said as much, only to find that her companions had melted away. Then a stray fell with an immense crack not so very far from where she stood, perhaps only half a mile off. She edged along the lightless pavement. If there were shelters locally, she’d no idea where they might be. The fear returned sharp as a blade. The one certainty that loomed against the illumination of distant fires was the prison.

  From the sidestreets another stray bomb echoed. So loud. At the great door she rang the bell for the second time that day – a pauper at the workhouse, a beggar at the gate; and to her surprise the postern opened and a hand beckoned her. They let her sit in the office. ‘Owing to the unusual circumstances,’ the porter said, and grinned. He had a pipe in his mouth. She noticed his stained teeth.

  Eventually, she fell asleep in a leather chair in the dimly lit cubby-hole, hardly seeing the hand that lifted the mug of cocoa out of her slackening grip lest it spill on to the pleats of her mauve serge skirt.

  ‘VIC, I DON’T know what to say.’

  He stared across the table and knew why he’d kept her image in his heart. It wasn’t her beauty, though that to his starved eyes seemed astonishing. But now that he heard it, he realised that everything had preserved itself in her voice. Her speech called his heart out.

  When they’d first met, he and Clarice had been immersed, the pair of them, like birds in a duet of chatter. He could have declared anything, anything he wished. She would have received it, taken it to herself and sent it back to him. Before Clarice, he’d never truly spoken to anyone; nor, for all Phyllis’s singing, truly heard anyone. Now he was tongue-tied.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vic. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. I’ve pushed myself on you. I thought …’

  He forced out a sound. ‘No. Please. I was sure you were thousands of miles away. Now you’re crying.’

  ‘No. You are.’

  The tears spilt over. He dashed them away and looked at her. Slightly dishevelled, her blonde hair was escaping its pins; her lips were barely reddened. The natural skin of her face showed through what must have been a hasty powdering. He blinked back more tears.

  She rummaged in her bag and dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. A guard’s voice warned her off. The lapels of her dark green jacket were crumpled. Embarrassed again, Vic looked around him. He hadn’t been in the visiting hall since his parents had come. Now it was Clarice who sat opposite him at an identical oak table. It was the same government issue, too, across which he’d faced Phyllis during his remand.

  The vault buzzed with flies. It contained the echoing, awkward talk of severed intimacy. Officers stood around the perimeter, under the barred windows. They reminded Vic of his grammar school, the gowned teachers in East Ham. He caught up with himself. He slid a glance at Clarice’s gloved hand, looking for the ridge of a ring under the fabric. He wondered, ashamed, what he must look like to her, with his shaving cuts and stained clothes.

  ‘We had to come back.’

  He blinked again.

  ‘From Malaya. I chose to come,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure why.’

  ‘When they said there was a visitor I thought it would be Phyllis, or Mum and Dad.’

  ‘Phyllis came to us. To Daddy and me. Turning up like this out of the blue – it was something Jack said.’

  ‘You’ve seen Jack? There were bombs last night. Is he all right? They’ve gone to the cottage, haven’t they?’ The words tumbled out almost angrily, and he was upset with himself, for she was the last person in the world he would wish to offend.

  ‘I don’t know. It was the spring when they came down to us. I haven’t seen them since then. Vic, I hardly knew I meant to be here. I almost didn’t intend …
The bombs, you see … all last night. They let me stay in the porter’s office. They say the docks … They let me shelter here.’

  ‘You’ve been in the prison? In here? Overnight?’

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised. Don’t say, no place for a lady. Or you’ll sound like my father.’ She smiled.

  Vic plunged his head into his hands.

  ‘I’ve said something wrong?’

  He heard her voice. Slowly he raised his head, and shook it quietly from side to side. ‘You smiled. I’m so sorry … Clarice.’

  Speaking her name recaptured what had passed. He felt so poor, so acutely corrupt. He thought how he must stink of the slop bucket. He couldn’t look, unable to make sense of her: the cut of her clothes, her hair, the way she sat. She was lost as she always had been.

  ‘Vic, I did so want to see you.’

  ‘You say you’ve seen Phyllis,’ he repeated. ‘They’re alive, then.’

  ‘Well, yes. That is …’

  ‘After last night?’

  ‘Daddy wanted me to see her. Then the bombing started and I came here. To see you instead.’ There was a note of hesitation in her voice. ‘Vic. I didn’t know if you really existed.’

  ‘I do exist,’ he said with a sudden forced laugh. ‘I’m doing three years for the stupidest thing in my life.’

  ‘In Malaya something happened … Daddy lost what he had – which wasn’t much. That’s how it’s been. There was the old house in Suffolk, you see. But when Jack mentioned his father was in here, I had to come. Phyllis and her husband …’

  ‘Her husband!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Please. Tell me.’

  He listened like a child. She spoke of Suffolk and the car, of Jack in the Haymans’ wooden house, of Phyllis and the man playing tennis. Then of the enchantment she’d been under after the fall of France. She and her father had two guns for the invasion. The East End was on fire.