Their Finest Hour and a Half

by Lissa Evans

  Ambrose scraped the rubbish back into the bag, and as he did so, there was another rattle from the skies, like the lowering of a vast Venetian blind, and then a trio of crumps, not all that far away. The few remaining glasses in the cupboard tinkled in unison.

  ‘Cerberus?’ called Ambrose. For a moment he could hear the clatter of toenails on the stairs before they were drowned by another burst of shell-fire and another stick of bombs, the last of them so appallingly near that the whole house seemed to give a little jump. The kitchen door swung open of its own accord, and when Ambrose pushed it closed, it thudded against the jamb instead of latching, and when he tried the door of the larder, it took a considerable tug to open it at all, which meant (almost certainly) that every single frame in the house had sprung – again – and probably half the roof slates were gone as well, and oh! he was sick of it, the loathsome repetition of it all, and thank God he had had the foresight to agree to Lundback’s request for tutelage, since it was only the ruby presence of the bottle of port under the sink and the topaz glint of its peaty neighbour that lightened the current darkness. Gratitude could be a truly marvellous thing.

  He poured himself a generous whisky, and drank it rather quickly. The kitchen floor was shaking beneath his feet. He had never heard a night like it, one explosion after another, as if Goering had built a platform above the city and was simply rolling the canisters over the edge, bang, bang, bloody bang.

  He poured another measure, and this time tried to savour it, but there was a noise that kept catching his attention, one noise in a night full of noises, a strange, high warbling on a note quite different to the usual falling whistle of the bombs. He went out into the hall and cocked an ear and realized that it was coming from inside the house, and it was a horrid sound, a ragged shriek. And, oh hell, it had to be Cerberus, Cerberus flattened by a toppled tallboy or Cerberus eviscerated by a shard of glass, and though both of those images passed through his mind as he hurried up the stairs, they were superceded by a vision yet more horrific, that of Sophie receiving the news.

  The noise was coming from the box-room. The door was slightly ajar but Ambrose had to give it a violent shove to gain entry, carving a furrow across the floorboards. He hardly ever used the room – had never bothered to put up blackouts – and the first thing he saw was a glassless window full of light: search beams interlacing, and the wink of shells, and in the middle distance, the leisurely fall of a flare, its phosphorous cluster turning darkness into brilliant noon, so that Cerberus, standing below the window with his head tipped back and that unearthly yodel issuing from his mouth, cast a stilt-legged shadow as long as the room.

  Back in the kitchen, Ambrose examined the dog from nose to tail, wetting a finger to lift away fragments of glass that glinted in the brindled coat, but finding no trace of blood and no obvious injury. The howling had stopped, but Cerberus’s body was vibrating like an idling engine. He was panting, open-mouthed, and shifting from foot to foot as if standing on a heated surface, and although his gaze moved restlessly, nothing seemed to catch his eye (or nose) – not a piece of bacon, nor even a square of chocolate – and when Ambrose rubbed a little whisky on to the piebald gums it might have been water for all the response it produced, and it was strange, it was very strange, to see an animal in such a state, for God knows one had seen men like this, standing blank and shivering on the Salient. Fear; it had been fear, of course – or, rather, a stage beyond fear, an involuntary shift to a place in which the blast of a whistle, or an officer’s shout, or even a pointed revolver were meaningless; it was as if the mind itself had gone into hiding. There’d been nothing at all that one could do for such men apart from getting them away from the front line. The lucky ones had been labelled shell-shocked. The others . . .

  Ambrose peered into the dog’s bulging eyes. ‘Good chap,’ he said, experimentally. ‘Tayer hintele.’

  Jerry was still hurling it down outside, no end to it, and the quietest possible place seemed to be the cupboard under the stairs, and Ambrose cleared a space, and wrapped the dog in a coat and tucked him between his knees, and sat on the floor in the utter blackness with a cigarette in one hand and the bottle of whisky in the other. It was, indeed, a little quieter in here, but the extra layers of wood and plaster had the odd effect of filtering out certain notes, and heightening others, so that for the first time that evening he could hear the machine-guns of the night-fighters as they chased a thousand feet above his head. Lundback would be up there again next week, hurtling through darkness, defending Finland against the Russians. Ambrose raised the bottle to him, and then took another nip.

  Time passed. For a while there was a lull, and Cerberus seemed to settle down, but then the ack-ack started up again, and so did the canine quivering, and what was really needed in these circumstances, thought Ambrose, was a gramophone. There had always been music playing in the dugouts – Gilbert and Sullivan and Nellie Melba and the dripping notes of the Gymnopédies, and comic songs, always comic songs, raucous and invigorating, a coarse bellow of defiance. Ambrose cleared his throat and tried to remember the words of ‘The Spaniard That Blighted My Life’, and failed to get beyond line three, but the effect on the dog was immediate – a cessation of the shaking, an interested shift in position, a hot dry nose shoved into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Oh, you like that, do you?’ asked Ambrose.

  He had another bash at ‘The Spaniard That Blighted My Life’, more successfully this time, and followed it with ‘The Galloping Major’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ and ‘Stop Yer Tickling, Jock!’ before shifting the mood with a reproachful chorus of ‘I Was a Good Little Girl Till I Met You’. By this time, Cerberus was resting his chin on Ambrose’s chest, and had accepted, with some light lip-smacking, a second application of whisky to the gums.

  ‘You’ll appreciate this one,’ said Ambrose. ‘It has canine interest, one might say. You’ll know Keating’s, of course, the flea powder?’

  There was a response, of sorts, a slight snuffle.

  ‘What I’m about to sing was known as the Keating’s song. For reasons that shall become obvious. You know, we used tins of the stuff at the Front. “Dear Ma, please send chocolate, Punch and Keating’s.” Just a moment.’ Ambrose wet his own lips from the dregs of the bottle. ‘It’s to the tune of “Let Us with a Gladsome Mind”,’ he added. ‘Altogether, now –

  Keating’s powder does the trick,

  Kills all Bugs and Fleas off quick;

  Keating he’s a jolly brick,

  Bravo! long live Keating!

  Keating he’s the man who knows

  How to bring us sweet repose

  When in sleep our eyelids close!

  Stop the Fleas from biting!

  So if you would soundly sleep,

  Keating’s Powder always keep;

  Peace and comfort you will reap!

  Is not that inviting?

  If all folks would use the same

  See each tin bears ‘Keating’s’ name

  Fleas would stop their little game

  And their midnight meeting.

  Ambrose repeated the last line, drawing out the final note plangently. There was a moment of silence and then a long, moist snore from Cerberus.

  ‘Tins of the stuff,’ said Ambrose. ‘Simply tins of it.’

  Arthur could hear Edith, but not see her. She seemed to have stopped crying, but there was an occasional catch in the rhythm of her breathing. The Morrison shelter was nearly five feet wide and she was lying quite a long way away from him. If he wanted to place a comforting hand on her shoulder, there was a sort of no-man’s land to negotiate first, a commando crawl across the bedclothes that seemed rather more dramatic a preamble than the subsequent gesture would warrant. Instead, he stretched out an arm towards her and found that he could just about touch her elbow with his fingertips. He wriggled them slightly, in what he hoped was a sympathetic fashion, and in response, Edith moved her own arm out of reach.

  He wished he could think of some
thing to say. Outside, it had gone rather quiet, though the all-clear had not yet sounded. He could remark on that, perhaps. Or he might talk about the windows, venturing the sort of comment that the chaps at the studio made: ‘Stinking bloody windows have gone again’. He mouthed the words, and knew that he’d sound foolish speaking them aloud; that sort of square-jawed utterance had never fitted well into his own mouth. So he stayed silent, three and a half feet from his wife, and he thought of Norfolk and of the conversational back-and-forth that they’d achieved so quickly, and which almost as rapidly had gone again, and he felt as if he’d been given a present and had inadvertently, clumsily, broken it.

  Edith heard him take off his spectacles and start to polish them. ‘I can’t think why you’re doing that,’ she said, sharply. ‘It’s pitch dark. How on earth are you going to tell if they’re clean?’ and she could hear a nasty needling tone to her voice, and she had never felt like this before, had never possessed the desire to deliberately goad someone, and there was a horrid sort of satisfaction to it. She could hear Arthur breathing cautiously.

  ‘You clean them at least forty times every day,’ she said.

  There was the tiny sound of Arthur’s lips meeting and then parting, once and then twice, as he shaped an answer.

  ‘I suppose it’s just a habit,’ he said. ‘But they do get smudged.’

  ‘They only get smudged because you keep fiddling with them. You’re always adjusting them and putting them on and off and wiggling the arms – it’s completely pointless, you do it all the time, and that’s why the lenses are always covered in fingermarks.’

  There was a pause. ‘Oh,’ said Arthur, and his tone was that of someone receiving an interesting and welcome piece of news. ‘I had no idea. I shall certainly try and stop it, in that case,’ and Edith felt a rush of shame, for how could she choose to hurt someone who took nastiness and converted it into useful and beneficial information? Spite required a victim, and he was not one of those; he would never fight back, but neither would he crumble. She could say anything. She could say anything at all to him.

  ‘The all-clear’s not sounded yet,’ said Arthur.

  Edith shifted on to her side, so that she was facing towards her husband.

  ‘Windows have gone again,’ he added. ‘Lousy things. Lousy blooming things.’

  ‘Arthur . . .’ said Edith.

  ‘Yes?’ He sounded eager, delighted to be addressed.

  ‘I would like to discuss why we haven’t yet shared a bedroom.’

  In the tremendous pause that followed, she could hear the guns on the common starting up again.

  ‘Yes . . .’ said Arthur, at last. The word was almost a sigh.

  Edith waited a moment longer, hoping that he would say more, but it was clear that, having launched the topic with a statement whose frankness had stunned even herself, she was obliged to continue.

  ‘I didn’t ever imagine that you’d be the type of man who . . . who had . . . had sexual intercourse with a great many women. So if you’re not, then it doesn’t matter in the least bit. You needn’t think that I mind. Because I haven’t, either. With men. Or a man. At all, I mean. So it’s not that I have any . . . any . . .’

  She was becoming aware of a series of furtive sounds coming from Arthur’s side of the shelter; he was cleaning his spectacles again, she realized, and she reached across and carefully took them from his hands.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Arthur. ‘Perhaps – I was thinking – perhaps I should take up cigarette smoking instead.’

  ‘So what I was saying,’ continued Edith, determinedly, holding the spectacles to her chest as if they were a talisman that might help her to get through this ghastly conversation, ‘is that we shouldn’t worry about not being as experienced in these matters as—’

  She stopped. Her ears were popping. There was an odd, abrupt shift in the air, a mute percussion, and then the most extraordinary noise: a slithering and cracking as if an enormous pile of plates were gently toppling over in the room above.

  ‘What’s . . . ?’

  And then a gentle, insidious rustling and a series of innocuous thuds, like apples dropping on to grass, and then a whole avalanche of apples, and the squeal and rip of timber and the thunderous slide of masonry as the house, with dreadful slowness, settled on top of them.

  Coughing, she couldn’t stop coughing, her throat was lined with stinging grit. Her nostrils too, and her eyes were full of it, and she could hear Arthur just beside her, coughing too, and they coughed and retched together and wiped their eyes with filthy fingers, and banged their heads on the buckled ceiling of the Morrison, and tried to catch their breaths in an atmosphere that seemed more dust than air. And when, after minutes, or possibly hours, Edith managed to open her eyes, she could still see nothing at all. She stretched out a hand, and touched a broken lath, sharp as a skewer, that was poking in through the wire-mesh of the side-wall, and she pushed her fingers between the wires and felt a jumble of plaster shards.

  ‘I didn’t hear it,’ she said, hoarsely, ‘I didn’t hear the bomb,’ and Arthur coughed halfway through his answer so that she only heard the words ‘directly overhead’ and ‘sound-waves’, and it didn’t matter anyway, because here they were, sealed into the remains of 12, Cressy Avenue, like King Tut into his tomb, and she could feel panic creeping under the skin of her forehead and encircling her neck, and then Arthur said, ‘They’re certainly awfully well-made, these shelters,’ in the tone of a house-agent talking to a client, and the panic ebbed very slightly.

  ‘But how will we ever get out?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure that the rescue services will be on to us.’

  ‘But what if we run out of air?’

  ‘It’s actually quite difficult to make an air-tight seal, even if that’s what you’re trying to do. You’ll find that there are always little gaps and—’

  ‘And what if there’s a fire? That’s what Dolly warned us about.’

  ‘This wasn’t an oil-bomb, though, it was a high-explosive, so we should be—’

  ‘Did you turn off the gas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, definitely.’ The final word turned into a series of rusty coughs, and then into some painful heaving, and Edith tried to pat him on the shoulder and instead whacked him on the nose, and by the time that it had stopped bleeding (Arthur used her stockinette cap, turned inside-out, to staunch it), she was feeling a tiny bit more like her usual self.

  ‘I wonder when they’ll start digging for us . . .’ she said. There was absolute silence without their metal cage. ‘All of our things gone. My clothes. Your mother’s pearls.’

  ‘Your pearls,’ corrected Arthur.

  ‘My pearls. Your house.’

  ‘Our house. Doesn’t batter,’ he said, dabbing at his nose again, ‘still alibe. Thad’s the main thig.’

  ‘But this is my third bomb. Third. They’re never supposed to fall in the same place twice. Perhaps it’s the person and not the place, perhaps it’s – I can smell something,’ she added.

  ‘Gas?’

  ‘No, not gas.’ It was a rich smell, not unpleasant, and it was beginning to edge aside the vinegar reek of the explosive. ‘Pipe tobacco,’ she said, in disbelief. ‘It is. Can you smell it?’

  Slowly, Arthur took the balled-up cloth from his nose. ‘Yes,’ he said, his mouth barely moving.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Edith.

  ‘Yes.’ Wills’s Pirate Flake – red and yellow packets with a picture of a villanous-looking buccaneer on the front.

  ‘Is it a rescuer?’ asked Edith, hopefully.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who is it?’

  ‘My father,’ said Arthur. And yet when the old man had died he had scrubbed and scrubbed the walls and ceiling to rid them of their sticky amber coating, and had painted them with two coats of white and then two of pale blue emulsion; he had made the room fresh and clean again, and yet . . . ‘It must have been in the plaste
r,’ he said. ‘All the smoke from his pipe. Years of it.’

  ‘You hadn’t told me that he smoked a pipe.’

  Arthur moved to adjust his spectacles and found that they weren’t there. The smell of tobacco was very strong, and in the utter darkness it was easy to think that his eyes were shut, and that when he opened them, the sick-room would be there again, the bed occupied, a tray to be collected, a basin emptied, the curtains opened, the curtains closed, a broken cup picked up, sheets changed, floor mopped, tea wiped from the wall . . .

  ‘You could tell me, you know,’ said Edith, quietly.

  ‘Oh, well, there isn’t . . .’

  The silence was complete; the compacted layers of his house were shutting out the night, and he and Edith might be the only people left in London.

  ‘He had awful pain,’ said Arthur.

  The German shell had fallen into the dugout and burst directly in front of his father, and had shattered his pelvis, and filled his bowels with shrapnel, and so it was not like the bandaged heroes in the newspapers, nor like the boy at school whose father had lost an arm. It was a dismal, whispered, never-healing injury, with consequences that were daily and excruciating, and which only worsened over time.

  ‘He hated being crippled,’ said Arthur. ‘He was often angry.’

  And that, already, was more than he had ever told anyone.

  ‘In the end he wouldn’t have a nurse. A professional nurse, I mean.’

  His father’s voice a gurgling roar: Get that fucking bitch out of the fucking house, the fucking little whore is laughing at me, damn her fucking blue eyes.