If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  The little shed was dim inside, almost murky, divided by a partition into Home, and Away. Warren went to the right, Away. He liked the special smell coming up off the dry wood. An umpire’s coat hung on a peg. Hundreds of cricket studs had jagged the floor into fibres. The slatted walls smelt of resin and plimsolls and silence. Last summer he had scored three runs against Braintree, in his pads and whites and batting gloves, and the fellows had clapped when he came in.

  A bench seat ran all round the inside of the changing-room. He pressed his nose against the dusty window to look back up at the school on the rise, half pretending he was in another wooden hut, a flimsy shelter inside a rose garden – he could just see the back of the schoolhouse next to it, the roofs and dormitory windows, where the boys still lived. Circling above it were rooks, dark specks coming his way. They grew larger and then veered off, disappearing, leading his eye over the high bank to his right.

  There was a route across the railway tracks because one wet day in their gaberdine raincoats the boys had taken it. Someone had put a penny on the line. A further turning led eventually to a wild thicket, and he was sure he could find that route again – now that he’d lost everything: the winter evenings sitting on the study window ledge with the old wireless, the games in the yard, the big boys making model aeroplanes in the upper-form workshop with its smells of dope and the miniature petrol engines buzzing and spitting as they ran, the midnight feasts. He looked down at his fingers. They needed attention. Matron was due any day to come round and cut the boys’ nails, sitting on each bed in turn, holding his hand in hers.

  The boys he’d known were brave, and briefly he’d been numbered among them. It was all over, he knew it. And now his only chance was to make his way east to search for his aunt, and for that other figure, the man he’d once known, who’d held him up in the light. But he’d left the Comforter behind.

  IT WAS A simple enough task. It was one of her duties. All she had to do was type a letter. She’d done it often enough before.

  The heavy machine sat on her desk in front of the metal window. Its bank of keys showed the alphabet white on black. Somebody had marked indelibly across its bodywork ‘WAR DEPARTMENT, PROPERTY OF IOO GROUP, RAF’. She had only to play it – just as she might a piano. And yet she could not get started. It made her almost beside herself with a kind of pent-up fury. The squadron crest at the top of her sheet of paper mocked her from the triangular eye of the platen carriage.

  Her hut window at Oulton looked directly over part of the base where the Americans of the 803rd parked their Flying Fortresses. They were the B-17s and B-24s scheduled to assemble over the North Sea for the hitherto unimaginable thousand-bomber raids. The first in the line of huge planes was so close she could virtually see the rivets that held it together. It cocked its perspex nose up against the wide Norfolk sky, its machine-guns poking the June air from under the bombsight panel. A naked, poster-painted woman sprawled next to her name: Donna Louise. From just behind the nose-compartment windows, the teeth in Donna Louise’s bright blonde head flashed a million-dollar smile back at Clarice.

  Clarice punched her fingers down as hard as she could on to the keys. The big khaki typewriter rattled and ratcheted. When the chime rang at the end of her line she collared the return lever so harshly that the carriage almost crashed through its stops. It was a routine letter to a boy’s mother and she had the format by heart. The station commander’s records were clear and uncomplicated; there should be no further difficulties.

  It was not until she was about to type the word ‘instantaneously’ that she hesitated again. Her fingers hovered. The word formed and reformed itself in her mind. Just for the moment, she couldn’t for the life of her recall how to spell it. There was an ‘e’ instead of an ‘i’. But she wasn’t quite sure where. ‘Killed instantaneously’.

  It would come to her. She had only to wait a second while her thoughts cleared. The solution was certain to pop into her head. After all, she’d written the word countless times before without a hitch – ‘instantaneously’. It was part of a formula, necessary, professional. Of course, she knew how to spell it. It was just for the moment that … It was just at the minute she was unable … She was just now having trouble focusing …

  There was a sensation on her cheeks. When she put up her hand she found she was crying. It made her furious. So many tears in a war – why should she have to cry them? It made her simply incandescent with rage that she was sitting at her desk with her face streaming, unable to finish a straightforward, simple, stupid, bloody letter.

  Later, on the train down to London, she still couldn’t for the life of her see why they’d placed her on compassionate leave. What incensed her most was her own failure. A letter, the simplest of things. Not to be able to do one’s work – it was deeply humiliating. The stupid train would keep stopping for no reason; she should really go straight back to Oulton. At the base she was useful, she was needed. Apart from the letter, there were countless things she had to attend to which just wouldn’t get done if she weren’t there. The letter was nothing. There were the operations schedules, and duty rosters and a hundred and one administrative issues that only she knew how to deal with properly. She was the one who’d set up the systems, after all. If Marjory Peters or even Yvain tried to take over, they wouldn’t know how to read the service charts. For heaven’s sake, they’d order the wrong parts for the wrong planes. One little thing could ground the whole squadron. She’d have to telephone as soon as she got in to Liverpool Street.

  It had all started – the bouts of uncontrollable crying – after she’d written the letter to Vic, describing what had happened to her. From Vic she’d heard nothing in return. Did he still care for her? Could he ever forgive her? Was he alive, or dead? She’d needed, briefly, to lean on Yvain. But she would have pulled herself together. Why hadn’t they at least given her the chance?

  Now her files would get hopelessly muddled, and she’d have to spend weeks when she came back sorting everything out. Why couldn’t Wing Commander Hedges get it through his thick military head that there’d truly been no need to send her away? She was needed. Didn’t they realise there was a war on?

  Outside Liverpool Street Station, exactly where she’d heard the first raid of the Blitz, the CP had fly-postered a wall: ‘Comrades … This Imperialist War … Strike Now! Support the Miners! Action on Right to Strike NOW!’ Just there, by a spook coincidence, she heard her first flying bomb. She recognised at once the curious puttering engine note: it was just like its own rumours. And, just as had happened before, everyone in Bishopsgate stopped what they were doing – and seemed not to want to be the first to take cover. The pilotless machine passed overhead under the hazy clouds. Officially it didn’t exist. Thirty seconds later its engine cut out and the sound of its explosion made the paving-stone judder under Clarice’s feet.

  She walked down to Fenchurch Street. On the train for Laindon, through the heart of the East End, she caught glimpses of the Thames through the missing parts of Shadwell. The river was busy again, now that the seas had been made safe. American ships in various colours lay along the battered wharfsides. Dockers were at work. Another distant explosion rattled the glass in the carriage door. And then her eye was caught by a row of old dismasted sailing barges, hooked up between two buoys against the opposite bank, straining at the current. How it hurt to think of Vic. Really, she had no business coming down here. Behind the barges, against the ruined wharves and dark chimneys of the Surrey shore, a tier of lighters, huge sullen things, were strung one to another, floating quarries, three abreast. And then the train veered northward behind warehouses, shutting the river out, and on past the potholed side-streets and bombsites of Stepney and Limehouse. In back yards, headscarved women hung out washing on bits of string, attended by their frightful staring children. Beside Burdett Road, a demolition crane and bulldozer were at work where a roofless slum terrace abutted the railway embankment. And there, right next to the tracks, a girl stood with a b
aby in a piece of blanket. The girl stared up at the train as it passed. Three other children waited next to a broken wall behind her. All were filthy, without shoes.

  She hated them. Bluestockings like Yvain expected everyone to think nobly of such class victims. They’re comrades, Clarice. I’ve always envied you, Clarice. You really know working people, Clarice. She shook with disgust. She was glad the slums had been blown to pieces. And now she welcomed the flying bombs. Because vermin like Tony Rice stood a chance of being exterminated. She wanted it wiped out, the filthy mark that had been left inside her.

  The train crossed the mud flats of the River Lea and ran on between the gasworks and the Abbey Mills sewage beds. She hated Phyllis. She hated Vic because he so obviously now hated her for getting raped. Especially she hated herself, who’d tried to save him from the cesspit he’d plunged himself into, but had succeeded merely in allowing herself to be contaminated. Most of all she hated Jack – because if she hadn’t had to go and find him and his viper of a mother in the first place, then the harm would never have been done. Everything she’d ever attempted had turned to ashes and disgrace.

  SOME FANTASY OCCUPIED her that Vic might be at the cabin, after all – that all the time he might have been waiting for her. Walking up the hill from the station, as she had so many times in the past, she became almost convinced that as soon as she opened the door she would see him, there, in his uniform, his cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, making some improvement, his figure in a gesture she could already picture, or loose-limbed in his singlet with his tunic top thrown over one of the chairs, at work with his saw, or his hammer and nails. When she entered, he would look up, and smile. Everything would be put right.

  The same tangled briars greeted her, their coils across the path, their flowers blatant in the sultry afternoon. She turned her key and pushed open the door. There was no one there.

  Even so, her stomach fluttered with a curious anxiety. She had to make sure. Couldn’t he still be in the little kitchen, having known she was coming? Might she not even now still find him, before he quite expected her, still setting the jug under his filter and pumping the Primus stove, all in preparation to make her some tea? She crossed the floor he’d painted, and passed the pictures he’d put up, and the camouflage colours where they clashed with the curtains. She would not cry.

  The kitchen was occupied only by the tandem which stood in its usual position under his bag of dreams. She leant across the bike and lifted the bag from its peg. She took it back into the living-room and sat down with it on the mattress.

  Shafts of brilliant sunlight laid fiery squares across the brown PT mats and dull floorboards. She sat staring across at the pictures of America he’d put up for her. The GIs had all gone over to Normandy. And so had Vic. And now she hated even the big painted USAAF bombers at the airbase. She picked out a notebook from his bag, and began to read the scribbled lines, as though that might bring him back again. Then she tore out the page and began ripping it carefully into shreds.

  She didn’t hear the door shift on its hinges. Only when she felt the sun suddenly hot on her neck did she turn round towards the light. In the blinding entrance a figure stood.

  ‘Vic?’ She screwed up her eyes. ‘Is that you? Vic?’ The figure wasn’t Vic at all – how could it be? No – it was a woman. It was Phyllis.

  The cousins stared at each other. Clarice rose to her feet and the scraps of paper fell from her skirt.

  Phyllis took a step inside. ‘What …?’ she said. She carried a handbag in the crook of her arm and was wearing one of her hats, but she was steely, and threatening. Her eyes were narrowed, her shoulders, in the padded black suit, squared. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ She looked quickly around, her eye taking everything in. ‘What’s been going on?’

  Clarice took a step back. ‘I’m on compassionate leave. I just came by to …’

  Phyllis reached behind her and pushed the door shut. ‘Just came by! Someone’s been living here. Someone’s actually been bloody living here. It’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. I haven’t actually.’

  ‘You’ve been here in this bloody little dump. Or something’s been going on. Behind my back.’ She strode over and fingered the chintz curtain, glanced at one of the pictures. The sunlight laid a bright bar beside her. Dust glinted. ‘Oh, I see. I get it. It’s him, isn’t it?’ She gave a gritted little laugh. ‘Not for me, though. It’s for you. He’s done it for you.’

  Clarice spoke up. ‘Why have you come? Are you on your own?’ She gripped the edge of the table, and darted a glance through the window.

  ‘What, frightened I’ve got Tony with me, are you? Frightened I’ve come mob-handed? Over this? You must be joking, dear. I can fight my own battles, thank you very much.’

  ‘Yes, I am frightened of him, actually. I’ve got every right to be. After what he did to me.’

  Phyllis’s eyes widened for a moment. ‘After what he did to you?’

  ‘Yes. After what he did to me.’

  Phyllis looked genuinely taken aback. Then she snorted. ‘You.’ She put her bag down on a chair and came forward, defiant, her slant hat wobbling slightly on her perm. ‘You can sling your hook, dear. This is my property.’

  Clarice made herself stand fast. She held the table hard and returned the stare. She could smell Phyllis’s scent drifting in the air between them. ‘Your property? Why is it yours?’

  ‘What is a man’s is his wife’s. It belongs to me and my husband. That’s why.’

  ‘Your husband,’ said Clarice. ‘That would be the charming Mr Rice, would it?’

  ‘You know very well who I mean. It’s mine and Vic’s.

  It’s mine, and you can bloody get out.’ Phyllis advanced on her high heels. ‘Because I’m entitled, aren’t I? I’m bloody entitled, I should think.’ She thrust her face close. Clarice felt the force of her. Phyllis could always put her in the wrong.

  ‘I haven’t been …’

  But Phyllis changed. She turned on her heel. Now she was familiar, almost. She touched the oil stove, she rested a finger on the top of the radio where it stood on its painted crate. Vic’s notebooks lay spilt from his bag across the mattress. ‘I came out here to get a bit of peace,’ she said. ‘That’s all I want. That’s all I ever wanted. A bit of peace and a quiet life. I came out here because things were finally getting on top of me. You know? I can handle most of it, Clarice. I have handled it, haven’t I, most of the time? But my dear husband as was was always going on at me that if there was real danger I should take the kid and come out here.’ She breathed out through her nose, half smiling, half contemptuous, confiding. ‘Well, now it seems the kid’s gone missing and the boys in blue are out looking for him. And my husband as is is not best pleased. To say the least. You get the idea? So I’ve just come myself. Because it’s not my fault and I’ve had enough.’ Phyllis looked tired, even abstracted for a moment. ‘These buzz bombs or whatever they are. I just can’t be doing with them, somehow. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Missing? Then you haven’t got him? Jack’s gone missing?’

  But Phyllis ignored her. She was indignant again. Once more her face altered, and her eyes clouded. ‘But what do I bloody find, here in my property – yes, in the little place I’ve had in the back of my mind all along in case things got really bad? I mean desperate. I don’t find woodworm and rot. Not spiders and cobwebs, and a dirty little corner for me to hide in where no one will think to look.’ She tossed her head. ‘No. I find my blue-eyed cousin, and the place all patched and tarted out like a barracks boudoir.’

  She advanced again, and then paused. Clarice put her hand to the wall behind her. Her body wanted to flatten itself against it. She tried to stop her right knee from quivering. Her cousin took another step towards her. ‘And I put two and two together, Clarice – as I might, Clarice, because I’m not a fool – and I put what I do know, with what I don’t know, and I realise that all along I’ve not had anything – anything �
�� but it’s been taken off me. Do you see that? And I’ve met some people in my time, Clarice, but out of all of them – yes, out of the lot of them – the person that’s had the most off of me, when I really come to think of it … And this is the most surprising thing in the world, isn’t it, my dear little innocent cousin … when you really come to add it all up – that even before I half started or had the beginning of a chance, there was someone there before me. And that someone was you, wasn’t it, Clarice?’

  Despite herself Clarice felt ashamed. So powerful was the offence in Phyllis’s tone that she could have believed her. Even the sound of a train passing far off caught her ear accusingly. She’d had no business to poke her nose in. She was the tramp, the tart who went about wrecking families, stealing women’s husbands.

  ‘Yes, it was you,’ Phyllis went on. ‘Who could believe that? You know, it wouldn’t have surprised me, deep down – now that I come to think of it – it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit if you hadn’t have got Jack here with you, already. Before I even showed up.’

  The mention of the child freed Clarice from her spell. ‘He isn’t here. Why should I have him?’

  ‘Because you always wanted him! Because he was mine!’

  ‘Because I showed a child a little bit of kindness!’ The rage that had been burning inside her all day suddenly flared. ‘You’re his mother!’ she cried. ‘Vic told me what it was like. You never lifted a finger for Jack. If you had, he’d be running to you, wouldn’t he! But you’re a selfish, spiteful woman, Phyllis, just as you were a selfish, spiteful girl. I tried to like you. I tried to make allowances. I didn’t want to take anything from you.’

  ‘You took my husband!’

  ‘And you wanted him? Really wanted him?’

  ‘He was mine, and you took him!’

  ‘He wasn’t yours. You can’t own people, to torment them and get them shut up. Your sort of person only wants someone to hurt. You’re a bloodsucker, Phyllis. A liar and a bloodsucking whore.’