by Derek Beaven
He stilled his nerves, tried to gather his wits, used his monthly letter to promise her an account of his crime – as soon as he could think straight. Meanwhile, he sought to describe the feelings he had for her. He made light of the danger he was in. Pentonville was still far out of the main flight path, he said. Most particularly he asked if she’d managed to find Phyllis and Jack.
Sometimes shrapnel and spent cartridges spattered past the window. He and Hemmings would stare at their own picture-framed patch of night sky. How brilliantly it flared. The reflection of searchlights flickered on the wall opposite, bright enough to scribble his notebooks by. ‘Oh, that’s what you fucking get up to, then?’ Hemmings remarked. After that Vic dared to write openly. His journals grew fierce with reflected fact.
And by daylight, too, he noted the wry smiles, the grim camaraderie. He started talking to people. If the shocked hand could hardly stir the tea, the tongue joked bravely and struck up friendships.
She sent another letter, and they kept him waiting the regulation four weeks to receive it. November – the chance of invasion long past; only this nightly punishment remained as intense as ever. No, she said, she had not found Phyllis or Jack. Ripple Road had been empty, she said, boarded up, and she’d gone from Barking straight back to Suffolk. She repeated her request to know exactly what was the crime that had caused him to be locked away. He read a disconcerting anxiety between her lines.
All he could think of was Jack. Had Phyllis listened to his advice and ridden out to the cabin with the child? He held the letter and shook his head. Surely even Phyllis, if she’d done as he’d asked, would have sent him word that they were both safe at Laindon. Surely she would, if only because, for once, she had done as he’d asked.
The details didn’t add up. And Clarice was insisting he tell her his crime. He guessed how it might have been once upon a time for his old man, imprisoned in the trenches and quite helpless, trying to compose a letter home while the latest rolling barrage came ever closer. Mistrustful of his wife, he wrote back again to Clarice, first giving her the address of the cabin: ‘Bayview’, Plot 91, Laindon, Essex. It sounded both grand and foolish – the name-plate had fallen off years ago. Somehow, he doubted she’d ever find the place, even if he dared ask her to go and look.
Then he tried to answer her request. The crime flickered in and out of his head, so hard to pin down. He wanted to hold on to her. She needed to know – yes, he could understand that. But he was afraid to encounter the details. His offence had to do with property, he said. He wrote of his concern for Jack, and tenderly, at length, of his love for her.
The Blitz continued unabated, pausing only when there was low cloud. By the time they gave him Clarice’s reply it was well into December. Neither she nor her father had heard anything from Phyllis. Why did he not explain himself? She loved him but was uncertain what would become of her. Or, indeed, of the whole world. Please, Vic.
The full account of his crime lay in a cellar of his recollection like something that would explode if he touched it. It had lodged itself down there since the trial and got buried under dream and delusion. Digging it out would dig out the shame, too; yet he took prison notepaper to his cell and set himself to the task.
One freezing midnight he was trying to tell Clarice the truth. The sirens had just gone again and the Dorniers and Heinkels were right overhead. Then the whole prison seemed to jump. The cell walls, the floor, the pipework all shuddered. So also did Vic’s bed frame. High up, the bulb, lit only by the raid, was left swinging wildly on its six inches of flex. He never heard the explosion, and he only remembered the whistling sound afterwards.
A house in Wheelwright Street, round the back of the prison, had been completely demolished – so they said. In the nights that followed, there were about eight other very near misses, and most of the prison windows were shattered. It should have been so simple, this plain confession of his crime, yet even now it kept slipping through his fingers, and his letter still hedged and wandered, snagged this time on whether to implicate Tony or Phyllis. When the robbery’s anniversary, Christmas, came – without respite – it was the fact that his victim was a Jew. He was convinced she’d hate him.
Only during the convulsive six-hour incendiary raid of 28 December did his vision finally shift. By the odd light of those apocalyptic fires everything became clear, and he found himself able at last to set into the body of his letter what it was he’d actually done:
There is no excuse. I went with another man to break into someone else’s house. I put some valuables in a bag and the next thing I knew we were discovered. Someone got hold of me, but I managed to escape. I ran right into the arms of the police.
Those were the bald facts. As soon as he’d written them he wondered why it had been so hard. They showed precisely what he was, and wasn’t, guilty of. He’d been justly imprisoned. He sent it off to her.
AND THEN, STRANGELY, the very next week, he was informed of his impending release. The bars of his cage melted. It was the call-up. On 10 February 1941, they were letting him go. They needed manpower.
He was dumbstruck. He found himself exchanging a flurry of hastily scribbled notes with Clarice as they attempted to make their arrangements. So promptly was Vic outside, in fact, so immediately cast upon his own devices, that he stared and blinked like a newborn. The north wind found blunt-razored skin on his cheeks. It chilled the exposed backs of his hands, and searched his close-cropped hair. Like the soldier in the song, he had no hat to put on. He looked along the street. People were going about their daily lives. He looked up. The winter sky, hung with its barrage balloons, was an intense blue quite unlike anything he’d seen from the exercise yards. So sheer was the low morning light that he stepped backwards. An angle of glass blazed at him. He strode forward. Then his knees buckled and he was nearly sick. A passer-by in uniform told him to mind where he was going. ‘Sorry. Sorry, mate,’ he said. The airman clicked his teeth. Vic steadied himself. ‘Just got out.’ He grinned.
A gust drilled at his back. It penetrated the thin raincoat, the same one he’d worn behind Tony Rice on the motor bike. Already, he was shivering. The shoddy, wide Caledonian Road with its few cars and occasional pedestrians felt like a crevasse. To shift the weight of his prison notebooks, he slung the holdall he’d been arrested with higher on to his shoulder, and dug the other fist against the flimsy lining of his pocket. He had twenty-four hours – the time within which he was allowed by his Licence of Remission to report to the regimental depot in Leytonstone. His fingers closed around the key to Ripple Road – where his child had not been on the first night of the Blitz, so Clarice had said. The noise of two army lorries passing beside him was unbearably loud, and another gust played havoc with the skirts of his coat.
He craved a tailor-made cigarette, but couldn’t go into a shop. At the pillar-box outside a labourers’ café he checked below his left lapel, peering awkwardly down and pressing the fabric with his left hand. Sunlight opened the fine dun weave like a lens, and made a faint outline of the package beneath. Her letters lay against his chest, folded in his inside pocket. He had two loves, two already conflicting destinations: Clarice and Jack.
Now, he kept his head low and made the road a tunnel to get through, seeking out the patches of shadow along the left-hand side and clawing his way along. His progress was slow. By the time he’d covered the mile or so to the main intersection, he was breathing heavily. He edged away from the corner of Gray’s Inn Road towards Marylebone. The traffic was again too loud, the glare from the sun; and the enormous twin stations – St Pancras, King’s Cross – overbore him with their illuminated architecture. People hurried past, taking no notice.
Only then did the disconcerting fact strike him that this place was undamaged. No part of it appeared to have been the least affected by the pounding he’d heard night after night in his cell. The Victorian thoroughfare, and all the prosperous buildings opposite, stood untouched. Apart from one or two windows boarded up and some
missing tiles, nothing had changed, nothing at all. It occurred to him that the whole dark complex of locks and cells in which he’d spent so long had been no more than a brainstorm. Bombs had never fallen; Clarice had never come. Some imaginative kink had slipped Pentonville in between one minute and the next, and made him lose his mind. Phyllis would be at home with Jack, like a wife in a magazine. He stood beside the St Pancras taxi rank, trembling, so disorientated he was unable to move.
A purely physical impulse carried him. It took him back across the York Way lights, where the soundless passing of trolleybuses marked Euston’s transition to Pentonville Road, and pushed him towards the East End. Here and there the tramlines still lay, gleaming in the brilliant light, and Vic began at last to see signs of damage severe enough to vindicate him – houses torn out, whole roofs missing.
A bus for West Ham stopped only a few yards ahead; but he was too shy of a crowd, and continued his slow journey on foot, past the Angel, and the Canal Basin, eventually past Shepherdess Walk. There’d been fires. Around him all the windows were shattered and a crater was fenced off in the paving. At the City Road junction with Old Street, where the route bent round, three properties had come out as if surgically, like teeth. Light gleamed on the cracked charcoal of a fallen roof timber.
Further down he saw Bunhill Fields. The terrace on his right was open like a doll’s house, with every room on show in its separate furnishings, pictures and lamp brackets. He lit a roll-up. In the lee of Chiswell Street he found protection from the wind, though the air smelt of char. Inching west again towards Smithfield, he followed the tang.
Only twenty-five yards along, the frontages on the other side of the narrow road gave way to a picket fence. The scene made him gasp. Between himself and St Paul’s, more than half a mile away, nothing remained except ruined stacks and the burnt-out shells of buildings. A fire-storm had reduced the heart of the capital to desolation.
He pulled at his cigarette. The black cathedral hunkered, strangely huge, seeming to escape its proportions. The great dome stood naked, the single cross silhouetted against the sun. Everywhere else an incinerated landscape stretched, a mass cremation of masonry. Walls were like blackened stumps of bone; rafters lay in heaps. The uncanny stench of burnt centuries forced its way into his nostrils; and there was the smell, too, of actual flesh, he thought, until a gust of wind swept the idea away. He finished his tobacco and threw the butt over the fence. Everything he’d heard in prison, the nightmare of the Blitz, was true. Here was the proof. He should immediately try to find his son. He put a hand to Clarice’s letters in his breast pocket.
A woman clippy took his fare, a cigarette held between her lips, and in twenty minutes he was in Limehouse. The Centre and the Cut seemed intact, the rest was a shambles. The bus stopped briefly, then continued along East India Dock Road. Poplar and South Bromley had been hammered. Entire streets had been destroyed. It was a wonder that the main road was open and that people were going quietly about their business. Over Hackney Marshes a streak in the sky was thickening with the ominous yellow-grey of impending sleet.
From the muddy River Lea at Canning Town there remained the long trudge up the Barking Road. Ruin was everywhere. But he’d no time to check his own parents’ house. It was only Jack he thought of as he walked through his own childhood: Plaistow, East Ham, Wallend, the next-door villages, merging into each other with their rows of densely packed and vulnerable little working-class houses. There was that strange smell again, of exploded dirt. At one point the route was roped off where a house had toppled into a flooding crater. The utility services were on hand, stanching the flows from the previous night. He saw the bodies of a family being loaded by ambulance men into a converted Green Line bus.
Ripple Road was boarded up, just as Clarice had said, but the tandem was there. He slung the holdall over his shoulder and cycled out to Laindon, pumping the perished tyres every mile. Points of snow were in the air. With fading strength, he pushed the heavy machine on as fast as he could. After Upminster the countryside was bleak, its brown shades whitening, and the exertion couldn’t warm him. As he made the long slow climb up into the Langdon Hills, Spitfires from Hornchurch roared now and then between the fat snowflakes.
Either Phyllis would be at the cabin with Jack, or Clarice would. That had been the arrangement Clarice had suggested in her most recent letter. He’d sent her precise directions and a map drawn from memory. Now, dog tired, chilled to the bone, he pressed forward. The higher ground was already carpeted; the lane curled round under the laden trees. When he reached the little wooden house, he simply let the bike fall into the snow-laced, straggling briars. There was no sign whatever of habitation. The place looked completely empty and his heart sank. His son had been stolen; his lover had baulked at his crime. He was a fool to have hoped it might be otherwise. Exhausted, he pushed open the door.
‘Vic!’
THE WHITE ENAMEL bowl rocked back and forth over the blue flame with a click, click, to the water’s rhythm. Clarice rinsed and warmed the flannel once more. Then she laid it to Vic’s naked shoulder, drawing the cloth down, smoothing his chest and side. In washing his body, she felt she was wiping the grave dirt from him, rinsing away death and corruption. It was under her hands he’d come back to life.
His head was turned slightly away. The eyes were closed. She couldn’t tell whether he was asleep, now. The breath lifted softly back and forth in his ribcage. His taut white skin with its tangle of hairs rose and fell under her touch. ‘Vic, dearest.’ She bent to kiss him, over his heart, and his eyes flickered open. She read the fear in them. ‘It’s all right, darling Vic.’ With her free hand she smoothed the hair back over his forehead. ‘You can sleep if you want to. You can rest now.’
Suddenly he was wide-awake. ‘There isn’t time,’ he said. He was staring up beyond her, and trembling. She felt the ridges of agitation under her palm. He tried to sit up. ‘Surely there isn’t time,’ he said again. ‘Jack …’
‘There is, darling. Time enough. In fact, we’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘I’ve got to go back. My son.’ His voice was full of urgency. And then he looked at her, and his eyes softened as he realised who she was. He smiled. ‘But I want to keep hold of you. I want to make sure you’re here, I’m here.’
‘I am here, Vic. And you’re so tired. Come on, you can rest. You haven’t got to go back. You must rest.’ She smoothed his brow once more and watched the eyelids droop as he fought his exhaustion. There was a pause. Then he gave a long sigh and the breathing deepened. She dried his shoulder with a corner of the shirt he’d taken off, and covered him with a blanket where he lay, on the worn mattress’s thin, black-striped ticking on the floor of the little cabin.
The dusk was blue-white, underlit by the snowfall. Outside, the flakes, as they drifted past the window-panes, were already shadows on a leaden swirl. She lit a hurricane lamp – it reminded her of another life – and stood it on an orange box. Then she took her own clothes off, and crept shivering in beside Vic under the blankets. She put her arms around him, and drew herself against him. He stirred and turned over on his side. Then she pressed herself all along the length of his back, and placed her knees into the crooks of his knees.
So she rested and thought, of how she had gone down into the darkness to fetch him, and how, at the cost of her own rape, she had brought him back. And here he was wasted and frightened, with the tatters of the underworld plainly still upon him. But he was the same Vic she had fallen in love with. That love, and its determination, had brought them together, against all odds. Now even the fact of the rape, the horrible sense that Tony Rice was somehow still present inside her and that the whole world had been tainted with a grubby evil – she felt all that recede and quieten from her. It sank away. In its place came this delectable calm.
When she’d arrived at the cabin before the snowstorm to wait for him, she’d found the clustering rose briars, like tangles of barbed wire grown up around the miniatu
re garden. She’d had to fight her way past them. Now she thought of the rose flower, even in the depths of winter. The image surfaced, a great beautiful damascus bloom, open and scented. She could even smell the Arabian perfume, and feel the heat of another exotic, alternative climate. And upon the rose in her mind’s eye lay the snow of this English afternoon.
When he awoke she made love to him. There was all the while the sense of him still emerging. He was overcautious and intemperate at the same time. She guided his awkwardness, and took him into her, pressing herself back into the thin mattress and reassuring him once more that there would be time after all.
Afterwards she let her head fall back, and the feelings streamed in her body. She remembered something of her trance, back in the weeks of the previous year – when it had seemed her mute will alone kept the invasion at bay. She wanted to hold Vic there because it was safe. If they spoke he’d become too vulnerable. And perhaps she would, too.
Vic slipped himself off her and curled up by her side. His arm remained stretched loosely over her stomach, his hand touching the base of her breast. ‘Clarice, darling,’ he murmured, and kissed her neck.
She edged her own arm beneath him and felt for a moment that he was her child. Then in spite of her earlier confidence, she felt time rushing in on her. He would be straight off to the army. What then? Shell fire and the front line awaited him. And his son …?
In the evening, with their clothes hugged tight about them, they walked out into the snow. The night sky had cleared completely. Its winter moon hung, two days before the full, a clipped coin above the oaks. In the frozen blackout the array of stars was like brilliant dust.
