If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  A handbell rang. The guard called from the front of the hall. She stood, picked up her gloves and handbag. Vic stood too, unable to bear losing her once more. He longed to reach out and touch her. He belonged where she didn’t. ‘What do you think will happen?’ he said. ‘About the war,’ he added awkwardly, as though already presuming too much.

  ‘If we can hold out,’ she replied, ‘there’s the faint chance the Yanks will come in. That’s what they say. A lot of influential Americans don’t want to get involved. Who can blame them? But the other day Roosevelt sent fifty destroyers. I suppose it’s something.’ She held out her hand, but the warder called out.

  ‘Clarice. Dearest. You’ve seen where I am, what I am. Will I see you again?’

  ‘I couldn’t get you out of my mind. All that time I missed you so.’ She looked away.

  He felt dashed. Her answer was inconclusive. He said, ‘They’ve got to go to the cottage, the two of them. She can take the tandem on her own. Will you tell her that?’

  ‘Phyllis? I’ll try. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come, after all.’

  She turned, then hesitated, looking puzzled. Her mouth twitched. ‘I’ve been sitting in the porter’s office rehearsing my lines, would you believe.’ Her gloved hand went up to her eye. ‘I went out for some lunch – then came back.’ She glanced at him and looked away again; then continued, her own voice faltering. ‘You’ll think me such a fool … You’re married, for heaven’s sake. Decent girls don’t do this sort of thing.’ The hint of a laugh. ‘It’s all been so strange. The war turns peace inside out, doesn’t it? Vic, I don’t know what to say either.’

  He watched her prepare to turn and walk out of the room. ‘I fell in love with you, Clarice.’

  The screw came across to chivvy her out. ‘All right, miss. Come along, then.’

  ‘I love you, Clarice,’ he said again. People were looking.

  The screw was taking her arm, steering her. The little crowd made up of departing wives, mothers and sweethearts swept around her.

  ‘Then what are we going to do?’ Her voice was anguished. ‘What are we going to do?’

  SHE PICKED HER way eastward. The smoke from at least twenty fires made a dull black haze over the dull black buildings. The filtered sunlight was unearthly. Balloons still floated, like futurist clouds. She loved him; the prison divided them, and there was no more she could do.

  A section of the overground District line was running again, an act of defiance. She sat tight until the train’s brakes screamed. Through the netted aperture in its window she read the sign for her station. The doors slid open. In Barking’s main street a crowd blocked her path. People stood silent in rows, and beyond them wreckage was plain to see. Emergency vehicles – she’d grown used all afternoon to the clanging of their bells – were drawn up: a police car, two ambulances, a parked fire engine. Men in helmets and uniforms emerged from the shrouded centre of activity. Some wore armbands. Water dripped from the tops of their thigh boots, and there was water under her own feet. She was asking directions.

  In a parade of similar properties a small shop had its display windows boarded up. Every ledge was covered with a thick layer of black dust. Above the door a sign read ‘Wilmot, Trade Weights and Measures’, and under a gable end with symmetrical plaster mouldings of Art Nouveau foliage, a small window, shatter-proofed with tape, showed unlined yellow curtains.

  In the half-light of the shop’s interior two tea chests stood amid the assortment of weighing machines and greengrocers’ scales. Upstairs there was dark linoleum, and on the ugly, cluttered table a bowl of innards remained uncovered, while the ever-present flies zipped back and forth. Jack wore a grey shirt tucked into baggy grey flannel shorts; Phyllis drew on a cigarette and pointed to the banisters with her other hand. ‘We went under there. They said on the wireless the church bells were a mistake. There’s been no invasion. Just this … raid. There were hundreds of people in Woolworth’s basement … Up the High Street. They drowned, apparently. It collapsed on them when it was hit. A burst water main, Saturday shopping. I think the neighbours …’ She paused. Her hair had traces of fine white plaster dust.

  The housecoat hung open showing the white slip underneath. A small pink rosebud was embroidered at the centre of the bust. ‘Tony … My husband’ll be here directly. In fact, I thought you were him.’ The hand that flicked ash into a saucer on the table shook slightly but persistently. Clarice noted how the fingers were reddened. A large enamel basin had clothes soaking in it. And then from below there came the rattle of a door knocker. Phyllis flinched.

  The whole region was ringed by fires. In the open back of the lorry Clarice sat opposite her cousin. Phyllis crouched in her best clothes – her navy suit, silk stockings, open-toed high-heeled shoes in dark taupe suede, and, perched sideways on her head, an elegant matching hat trimmed with velvet ribbon. The man – she insisted doggedly on referring to him as her husband, though she no longer called him Vic – was starting the lorry with a handle.

  Jack held Clarice’s arm as the airstream whipped round the cab’s edges, buffeting them both. Wedged in with the tea chest and suitcases, Phyllis clung to the pretty hat with one hand. The men Tony Rice had brought with him, Figgsy and Pat, sat at the rear corners, not catching Clarice’s eye, but sheltering roll-ups in their palms, and occasionally shouting to one another phrases she couldn’t understand. Jack looked up at her, his eyes questioning.

  She spoke to him, above the din of the lorry. ‘You must have been a very brave boy when the bombs fell, Jack. It would have been quite terrible. You must have been so frightened.’

  He stared back, not answering. Then his mouth opened, but he glanced away at the two men slouched in the corners of the tailboard, and closed his lips again. She cupped her hand to the child’s ear. ‘Yes, Jack. I did see your daddy,’ she said. ‘I saw him in Pentonville. And he was well, and sends you his love.’

  The ride, diverting for damage, took them an hour. A stark new house lay just beyond a town’s edge. It stood back from the main road in an untended compound. Weeds and fragments of concrete, wire fenced, gave on to an open field, in the middle of which sat an abandoned cement mixer. Its glowing grey-white shape amid the scrub stole attention away from the new home. It looked like a piece of minor ordnance left by an army’s retreat.

  As Tony, the husband, turned the key to open the front door, they were greeted by smells of new paint and unaired distemper. ‘Upminster,’ he announced. ‘A laddie owed me.’ He looked Clarice up and down and smiled as though in triumph. She hated him.

  When the sirens went again, Clarice was with Phyllis and Jack next to the cement mixer in the back yard. The skies were empty. They waited, all three of them, amidst the strewn builders’ rubble. Soon, out of the East, the leading planes appeared, drawing towards them above the all-too-convenient river. She caught hold of her cousin and the boy, gripping them tightly by the arms. Frantically, as if each were possessed by the same impulse, they tried to twist away. They were her own flesh and blood. She reminded herself of Vic’s concern, and made them look up. ‘See,’ she said, suppressing the tremor in her voice. ‘They’re missing us. It’s all right here. We really are just out of the line.’ A single anti-aircraft battery opened up ineffectually a mile or so to their right.

  Phyllis’s arm had gone quite limp. Jack was burying his face in Clarice’s skirts. She led them round the raw concrete path to the front of the house and held them up, still tightly, an arm around each. Together, they watched until the first wave of bombers, crossing the whole sky to the western horizon now, had passed on to the docks and the crowded East End houses. A drumming began. ‘It’s all right, Jack,’ she said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  Jack looked back at her. ‘Auntie Clarice …’

  ‘You could come to me,’ she said. ‘You do know that, don’t you? You could come to me.’ She hadn’t realised the husband was standing next to them, appearing as if from nowhere.

  ‘Why would he want to do
that, eh?’ His fine lip curled. ‘Isn’t what I provide good enough for him? We stick together, our lot, don’t we, Jack?’ he said across her. ‘Maybe we never had two ha’pennies to rub together. Sometimes we’ve gone hungry, I can tell you that. But we look out for one another. You understand me, don’t you, Cousin Clarice?’ His tone mocked her. ‘We always will. The kid knows where he’s well off. Don’t you, Jack?’

  Clarice stood her ground. She noticed his good suit, hardly creased from the lorry or the move, his smart tie, set in the crisp, perfectly starched collar. He was an attractive man. There remained always something particular about him that made her want to allow for him. She should overcome her dislike. By his own lights he did his best. Hadn’t he just rescued his family – as he saw it – and her along with it?

  She caught his eye and smiled. ‘I just thought it was the least I could do,’ she said. ‘To offer to help the child.’

  He said nothing in return, merely looked at her, half smiling himself. She felt disconcertingly understood.

  Later, unpacking with Phyllis, a family photograph emerged from a tea chest. It was wrapped in some pages of the News Chronicle: the Tylers, her mother’s relations. She saw her grandmother, and Phyllis’s mother; and the corpulent father; the two younger sisters Moira and Beryl, and the spoilt, sullen brat of a brother, Morris; beside them all her own mother, Mattie, fey and young.

  Phyllis gave her little laugh, almost as though she knew exactly where Clarice had been earlier in the day. ‘Love, eh!’ she said. ‘Look where that gets you. Where it got me, I should say.’

  ‘You did love him, then?’ Clarice lifted her eyes and the unacknowledged fact of Vic Warren hung between the two women, undenied. For a precious moment, Phyllis seemed like a lustrous insect on the wrong leaf. Clarice studied her cousin for her true colours.

  ‘I KNOW I can trust you.’ Phyllis spoke cautiously.

  Clarice made no reply.

  Phyllis shifted her posture and fidgeted with her ring.

  ‘Tony’d kill me if I …’ She gave the little laugh again.

  ‘I know you’ve only done what was for the best,’ Clarice said.

  ‘What they say. “When a lovely flame dies”.’ Phyllis breathed out cigarette smoke through her nose and then sang, shy, self-conscious:

  They said, ‘Someday you’ll find

  All who love are blind,

  When your heart’s on fire, you must realise

  Smoke gets in your eyes.

  Clarice could hear the men grumbling outside by the lorry, and the slap, slap of the boy’s shoes as he ran back and forth on the concrete. Then Phyllis put her hand to her forehead. ‘A fright like me needs a man who can keep her in order. All I want is a quiet life, a bit of peace. You have to settle for how you are, and for how things are.’

  ‘You knew all along?’

  Phyllis made no reply. She perched on the edge of a packing case and fumbled inexpertly with a packet of Players. Her fingers still shook.

  ‘Vic thought you might have gone to the cottage.’

  Phyllis sneered sarcastically and the trance was broken. ‘The cottage. Well, we do have a cottage in the country, it’s true, my husband and I. Out Laindon way.’ She lit up the fag. ‘Bayview,’ she said. ‘Not that you can see the sea; or the muddy old river, even. But Upminster’s a nice area, don’t you think? Refined.’

  Clarice sighed. The shutters had gone up.

  ‘It’s convenient for town. And everything’s modern here,’ Phyllis continued. She looked out of her new sitting-room window in the direction of the continuing raid. ‘I don’t think I could bear the country, after all. You have to be so careful these days, don’t you? People around you just can’t depend on. People who aren’t, you know, normal.’ There was no way through.

  The solitary pitch-black train was a miracle – as if that one moving point on the rail could make her believe London hadn’t happened. Clarice caught the connection to Manningtree nearly at midnight, and from there plunged into the dark on Ethel Farmer’s unlit bicycle towards father, home, and the two small estuaries between which she’d come to live.

  She was in pain. She’d blanked out a scene – Tony.

  As she rode, almost gasping, her lungs oddly constricted, she thought of the bodies that had been drowned in the Woolworth’s cellar. She imagined the women and children panicking down there in the sealed room as the water poured in. It was as if they alone were the answer to the question of Vic Warren’s crime and she was furious with her family, furious with the whole pack of them.

  Only at home did the missing image of her journey back from Phyllis’s properly develop. Only then did it imprint itself, as it were, in her mind. ‘Not good enough for you, aren’t we? Don’t talk posh enough. You fancy me all right, Miss fucking Pike. You fancy me fucking rotten.’ He was giving her a lift. So indebted had she felt – not least for her safety – she hadn’t felt the right to cause a scene.

  At the same time she’d been intimidated by the almost lightless road ahead. As he’d rammed the shuddering, unladen lorry into narrow country corners or nearly drifted the rumbling back wheels, making the inadequate engine whine and protest, she’d hardly dared move or breathe.

  He’d stopped, in the darkness, and forced her. She recalled her fingers clenched on to the lorry’s window ledge, and the glint of the razor, and how he’d spoken, all the while in strangely eloquent and coldly flattering detail about what he was doing, and how she’d had it coming, along with all the other posh, stuck-up cunts like her. And she recalled how the words had formed a chain that seemed to have no meaning other than that her life and all her hopes were ended. And then he’d threatened her, vilely, but almost as though it weren’t necessary – as though now he knew and was confident she’d neither do nor say anything to anybody. He’d folded the razor and dropped her at the station. ‘Brentford. All right?’ It was a sneering goodbye.

  The word ‘rape’ formed itself in her mind and then melted again – exactly as the incident itself had done. The thing had happened, and then temporarily dissolved. For the intervening hours since he had put her out of the lorry’s cab, the thing had not happened. Even now she could hardly believe in it, nor account for the physical state she was in.

  At last the cramps in her chest let go. As her breathing deepened, each detail held so steady there could be no doubt left. She knew she’d been singled out, and was distraught. Surely, on top of everything else, it was just too much. Why her? She’d done nothing wrong. And what had become of people – her own people? Were they suddenly beasts? She’d tried to find Vic; they’d tried to bury him. She’d shown her feelings; Tony had raped her. So it was love they’d wanted to do away with. Yes, she was sure of that now, for the peculiar cruelty of her rape was that it proved genuine the one thing it so ruined. Why had he? How was love so great a threat that the whole world must jar and shudder? Again and again she tried to make sense of it. Eventually, she slept, and her dreams were dark.

  When she opened her eyes in her bed at Pook’s Hill the dawn was glimmering, but she couldn’t imagine the day to come. It was as though she’d been sent back to school and some remorseless old textbook had been opened, whose pages would tell of nothing but the passage of armies and the slaughter of thousands. She slept again for hours, and, reawakening, felt only disgust. In the days and nights that followed, as London was progressively ripped up, she cursed her body, still stained with blood and filth, scrub as she might. For what her desire had conceived as something truly valiant, redemptive, had brought forth nothing but this bitterness.

  To her father, she glossed clean over the discovery of Vic. As for the incident in the lorry, she tried to tell him but her voice wouldn’t let her. She deleted the offence, behaved as though nothing had happened.

  It was the drowned who wouldn’t go away. She saw inside their smashed houses, their half bedrooms. She remembered one perverse sink still hanging off a wall. There were dark, peeling corners, cobwebby festoons under broken
floors, shaken chimneys, summer weeds exposed through newly shattered courtyards where washing still flapped on the line. She hated England, the England of Phyllis’s family photograph, her own family. She remembered staying with them, and the sneer on the face of that tobacco-stained, beery tyrant of a father, with his waistcoat, watch-chain, and belt; and she doubted even Vic for his involvement with them all.

  She couldn’t get her minutes to hang together – as though some mechanism at the centre of the world had been smashed. She felt estranged from her father through no fault of his own. It was a condition she had no name for, nor could he make it better.

  One thing gave her momentary hope. It was on the fifteenth, when the German daylight raiders were cut to pieces over St Paul’s. She sat down to write a letter.

  Dear Vic,

  I must know what it was you did.

  IV

  A Secret America of the Heart

  NIGHT AFTER NIGHT the bombing crackled and burst. Vic had virtually no view of it, and no means to shelter from it. Nor did the authorities keep their prisoners well informed. In the cells, the sounds were always mysterious. First came the sirens. Then that sinister drone of engines, sometimes so loud and overdriven it seemed the planes were brushing the roof tops. Next the ear-splitting ack-ack, and the kettledrum of hits, the distant thuds, the incongruous jingling of bells, drawn like silver combs through the matted atmosphere. The cell brimmed with noises – maddening percussion.

  They told him it was mostly in the East: Limehouse, Wapping and Rotherhithe. The targets were strategic; the shelters were working well. There was no cause for exaggerated alarm on account of anyone’s family, certainly not for panic.

  Then Clarice’s letter arrived, and in it no news of Jack. Hadn’t she found Phyllis, then? What if Ripple Road had been hit, and she was just trying to protect him? He considered her request: I must know what it was you did. Yes, he must tell her. But the boy? Why hadn’t she mentioned him? Then the detonations circled round, dancing towards him, retreating south, or west, swirling north as if a nightly thunderstorm had taken up residence above.