Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle

by Helen Humphreys

  Jeremy could be all the way back to Marjorie Hatton’s by now. Or he could be sheltering somewhere. Or he could be dead. Harriet wishes she could have him back. What if something happens to him? It will be her fault.

  Instead of the wall circling the interior of Coventry, there are now just roads that lead out from the centre, like spokes in a wheel. They exit the city where the original gates for the walled city used to stand. The city gradually begins to fall away. There are trees and grasses along the road the evacuees are travelling on. In the starry distance Harriet can see the dark slant of the fields.

  “What’s your name?” asks the woman walking beside her.

  “Harriet.”

  “Do you think you could have a go, Harriet? My arms are tired.” The woman drops her hands from the pram, and Harriet obediently steps in to push.

  “What do you have in here, rocks?” The pram springs are flattened out and the body seems to be grinding against the wheels.

  “Tins,” says the woman, looking suspiciously right and left, as though expecting people to jump out of the hedgerow, leap upon her, and steal her hoard of sardines or snook.

  I suppose, thinks Harriet, straining against the handle of the pram, that the choice is always between sentimentality and practicality. A photograph or a tin of ham? The family silver or pots to use for carrying water?

  “Do you think the bombing will last all night?” asks Harriet.

  “How should I know?” says the woman.

  The war has not improved people’s tempers. All this talk of how it brings out the best in people is simply rubbish, thinks Harriet. Miserable people are made more miserable by the war’s deprivations and dangers. Happy people can still return to being relatively cheerful. But everyone, regardless of temperament, is weary of the fighting, and nervous that they are losing the war. The fall of Coventry will be a big victory for the Germans. If Coventry could be bombed to pieces, then why not London? Surely that is how it will go, that is what will happen next.

  The night is darker away from the fires of the city, away from the moon’s reflection off the buildings. It is easier to talk, the farther they get from Coventry, and Harriet can hear conversations start all around her, like small fires catching on a roofline.

  People gradually leave the procession. When they reach the first set of fields, many walk out of line to sleep in the grass. Harriet can understand how people are weary, but it still seems too close to the city for safety. She keeps going. Just past the first fields she passes the pram over to another willing helper.

  It feels good to walk without debris underfoot, to take a long stride down the centre of the road. She feels as though she could walk forever, that she might very well continue on to Birmingham. And then, the moment she thinks this, she suddenly feels incredibly tired, as if she could collapse on the road and sleep for a year. She looks over at the man who has replaced her pushing the pram, wishing that she could scoop out the contents and curl up inside it herself.

  She drops out at the second set of fields, and no one says a word when she leaves the group. The grass is wet. She can feel it whisper against her ankles as she walks into the field. The dew is coming up. It seems bizarre that life will continue as usual, regardless of the destruction of Coventry.

  All throughout the field are the forms of people sleeping in the grass, covered by coats and blankets. Some people are leaning up against the hay stooks, talking and smoking; a few people are walking slowly about the field, looking for friends and relatives perhaps.

  Harriet stands near the edge of the field, looking for somewhere to lie down. It is cold away from the bombing, and she is glad that she’d had the presence of mind to borrow a coat from Jeremy’s house. She wraps her arms around herself, tips her head back to the heavens. The sky is still dark, too early for there to be any sunlight leaking in at the edges. She sees the rattle of stars overhead, the first stars that have been visible all evening. The bombing continues, a soft thud thud over the distant city.

  Harriet sits on the ground, her arms still tight around herself. She is dizzy with tiredness, but she finds it too cold to sleep, too cold even to sit for long on the grass; so she gets up again and starts walking through the field. Perhaps someone has made a small fire that she can warm herself by. Perhaps someone will be kind enough to share a blanket. She wishes that she’d had the nerve to pinch something from the woman with the pram.

  She grows tired from walking and sits down again. She closes her eyes and then wakes, shaking off the cold, and dozes again, dreaming of Jeremy.

  When she wakes, the field of people seems the dream. Harriet is reminded of a Russian novel she recently read. If this were a Russian novel, she thinks, there would be a horse in the field and an argument. There would be several loaves of bread and a long declaration of love.

  She thinks this, and then she sees a horse grazing quietly a few yards away from her. She moves closer, sees that it is a donkey, not a horse, but she is still unnerved by the sight of it. The good thing about books is that they remain themselves. What happens in their pages stays there. Harriet does not like the idea of the story bleeding through into real life. She trusts a story, and doesn’t trust real life. But what makes her trust a story is the knowledge that it will stay where it is, that she can visit it but that there is no chance it will visit her.

  Harriet feels like a sentry, patrolling the field. She feels like one of Jeremy’s soldiers, walking stiffly up and down the window ledge in his bedroom. She looks around for fire. Suddenly she sees the glow of something on the far side of a haystack. It seems mad to have spent the whole night avoiding fire, only to be seeking it out now, but Harriet is too cold to dwell on irony. She strides toward the haystack.

  But it’s not a fire, it’s a woman with a torch. She is wrapped in a coat and scarf, leaning up against the haystack, shining her torch down on the book that lies open on her knees. She startles when Harriet rushes toward her.

  “Watch it,” she says. “You’ve made me drop my pencil.”

  Harriet looks down at the book again and sees that it isn’t a book with words. It’s a sketchbook. As the woman turns the torch about, looking for the dropped pencil, Harriet can make out the drawing of a rabbit.

  She picks up the pencil from the grass by her left shoe and hands it over to the woman.

  “Sit down,” says Maeve. “You’re swaying on your feet.”

  Harriet drops down beside the woman. “Did you lose your house?”

  “My son. He was fire-watching tonight, like you.” Maeve recognizes the uniform Harriet wears under her coat.

  All around them in the field is the flare of other conversations. Sparks drift over the grass toward them. Maeve hears the words surrender and headless.

  “I’d already lost everything in the last war, when my husband died,” says Harriet. “And I thought there wasn’t anything left for me to lose in this one. But I was wrong.”

  Harriet tilts her head back to the stars. There’s a sharpness to the light. The stars look as though they have been nailed fast to the heavens. It was impossible to see any stars in the burning city. There was too much smoke. She can still feel the softness of Jeremy’s skin when she ran her hands over his back. She can taste his mouth.

  Maeve thinks that Harriet might be crying, and she raises her torch to see if this is true and sees instead the brown wool jacket she left hanging in the front hall of her house.

  “I think you’re wearing my coat,” she says. “How can that be?”

  “Your son gave it to me,” says Harriet.

  Maeve has sat in this field for hours, waiting for Jeremy to appear. But now this strange woman has shown up, knowing her son. After they exchange names, and Harriet tells her story of struggling with Jeremy through the city, Maeve isn’t so prepared to sit still and wait for morning.

  “Would you draw me a map so I can find my way to the aid station?” she says to Harriet.

  “The city is burning,” says Harriet. “You can�
��t go back there.”

  “I did the safe thing once,” says Maeve. “And it was a mis take.” Maeve thrusts her sketchbook toward Harriet. “Please.”

  “I really don’t think I could,” says Harriet. “So many of the places along the way will be destroyed by now.” She can feel the worry from Maeve, buzzing like an electrical current from her skin. “I can’t draw you a map,” she says. “But I could take you there.”

  “Are the fires still bad?” asks Harriet of a man jostling past them.

  “Hasn’t let up for a moment,” he says. “You won’t want to be going back to the city just yet.”

  But Maeve feels relieved to be doing something. She feels relieved to be moving again, to be going back toward where she knows Jeremy has so recently been.

  “You didn’t have to come with me,” she says to Harriet. “I don’t want to put you in any danger. I’ll be all right on my own.”

  “You wouldn’t know where to go,” says Harriet. She mumbles something.

  “What?”

  “And I wouldn’t know what to do otherwise.”

  The line of evacuees starts to thin as they near the city, and the people coming along the road from Coventry look blank and sombre. Many walk with their heads down. Some are crying. The road ahead is straight and level, but it feels as though Maeve and Harriet are descending into the city.

  “It will be much worse than it was when you left,” warns Harriet.

  “I don’t care,” says Maeve. She would crawl through the broken city if it meant that she might find Jeremy.

  In front of Maeve is a landscape of toppled buildings and mountains of rubble. Smoke and dust rise from the streets and she finds it difficult to breathe, her eyes start to run from the stinking, acrid air. It is far worse than she had imagined. Nothing looks familiar to her.

  There is still the roar of planes in the sky above them. A bomb explodes nearby. There is a blast of heat, and a spray of debris rains down. They drop behind a broken wall.

  “Put your hands over your head,” yells Harriet, and Maeve does as she’s told. Something hot hits her knuckles and slides off. A chunk of rock smacks against the outside of the wall and rolls into the street. She thinks she can hear someone crying, but when the bits of exploding building have stopped pelting down, she doesn’t hear it any more.

  “Let’s wait here for a moment,” shouts Harriet.

  The building across the road from them suddenly shivers down like water. There were probably people in there, thinks Harriet.

  Maeve has rushed across the street to check for survivors in the collapsed house. There won’t be any, Harriet wants to shout, but she follows Maeve. The naked body of a man lies tangled in the rubble. The clothes have been burned off his body. There are just strips of cloth around his wrists from the cuffs of the shirt he’d been wearing.

  Before Harriet can stop her, Maeve runs to the house next door. It’s still standing, but the front door has been blown off its hinges.

  Inside are a man and woman sitting at a table, and underneath the table a boy plays with a wooden train. Maeve feels such relief she rushes toward them. The faces of the couple at the table are stopped. The boy under the table is frozen, his hand holding onto the front carriage of his train. They’re all dead.

  “Bomb blast,” says Harriet in Maeve’s ear. “It burns the air to nothing. The force of it must have collapsed their lungs.”

  Maeve allows herself to be led out of the room. “The boy,” she says to Harriet when they’re in the hall.

  Harriet steers Maeve out of the house. “We’ll find him,” she says.

  “We went through the park,” says Harriet. “Here, through this gate.” She pulls Maeve into the park. There are more trees down in the park, and fewer people. There is no one stamping out incendiaries as there had been earlier. The extinguished flares lie in the grass like used firecrackers.

  The clothes are still in the trees, webbed between the branches. The clothes make Maeve think that everything is underwater, that they are walking on the bottom of a riverbed. These clothes have been borne along by a swift current, and then have snagged here, on these branches.

  It is quieter in the park, thinks Harriet, and then she realizes that it is quieter altogether.

  “We found a horse in here,” she says. “And a woman who was dying.”

  Maeve is reliving Jeremy’s night. It is like one of those kaleidoscopes she used to have as a child. She would hold it up to her eye and turn the tube just a fraction of an inch, and the glass pieces would shift and form a completely different image.

  “The horse was white,” says Harriet. She looks over to the little copse of trees where the woman’s body is likely still lying. How long ago that seems now.

  “How old was your husband when he died?” asks Maeve.

  “Eighteen.”

  “And how old were you?”

  “The same.”

  It is definitely quieter. They seem to be speaking without raising their voices. Harriet turns to Maeve near a splintered tree, its branches torn off and hanging from the trunk by thin hinges of wood. There is the smell of new, green wood as they walk past it.

  “I didn’t do a good job of forgetting him,” she says.

  Maeve has known other women such as Harriet Marsh, women who have suffered a loss in the last war and never properly recovered from it. “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” she says.

  “I’m not blaming myself,” says Harriet. “Not for that anyway.” They cross the last bit of grass, walk out of the park.

  “It’s not far,” says Harriet. “I’m recognizing more than I thought I would.” Much is as it was when she and Jeremy struggled through the city. She leads them carefully down another street. There is so much debris everywhere, great piles of bricks and wood, broken bits of furniture. Fires burn in the spaces between buildings. Maeve looks down at the dark of Harriet’s shoes, just slightly ahead of her, and she concentrates on that, on following the curve of Harriet’s heel, as she leads them back to Jeremy.

  As they are walking past a mound of wreckage that used to be a house, Harriet hears the muffled screams of a woman or child coming from underneath the pile of bricks.

  “Can you hear that?” she says to Maeve. They stop by the smoking ruin.

  “Yes.”

  “Here, do you think?” Harriet starts to climb up the pile. Maeve stays on the street.

  The screams sound again.

  “No, over there.” Maeve points to the left of Harriet and begins to clamber up the wreckage herself.

  “Where are you?” yells Harriet, but there is no response. The sound of the screams is lifting up, out of the wreckage, but her own cries aren’t managing to crawl down through the debris. Voices, like heat, rise to fill the space above them.

  “Tell us where you are,” yells Maeve. Both women are now on their hands and knees, scrabbling through the bricks like terriers after rats, tossing the broken pieces of the house aside in their frantic attempt to get to the buried voice.

  But the voice suddenly stops, and no amount of shouting will make it cry out again. Maeve paws through the rubble. A bomb shelter can just as easily become a grave, she thinks. Maybe it is safer to be out on the streets, in the eye of the storm. Maybe Jeremy would have died this evening if he hadn’t been rushing through the streets with Harriet.

  Harriet leans back on her heels, looks over at Maeve. “It’s no use,” she says. But Maeve just keeps going, and Harriet has to stumble across the pile of bricks and grab her by the arm to make her stop. “She’s gone,” she says.

  Maeve lifts her hands from the warm bricks. She can’t feel her fingertips. Her nails are torn and bleeding.

  “Come here,” says Harriet. “Come here.” And she takes Maeve’s hands in her own, covers them, holding them still.

  Harriet is touched by Maeve’s desire to save everyone. It reminds her of Jeremy’s eagerness to help at the aid station. She starts to cry, sitting on top of the destroyed house, holdin
g Maeve’s hands in her own. She feels herself sway and settle, sway and settle, like a building hit by a blast. It’s Maeve who has to help her up from the rubble.

  “This is the passage,” says Harriet. They have come to the bombed-out row of shops. “The Anderson shelter is just through here.” She goes first down the alley and Maeve keeps close behind her. She is finding it hard to breathe.

  The sky is lighter. Everything is more distinct, swims up to fill in the dark of the city.

  The shelter has been hit. There’s a huge hole in one side of it and the roof has exploded out; big ragged strips of metal shear up toward the sky. Maeve remembers the literature for the Anderson shelter saying that it would survive anything except a direct hit.

  “No,” says Maeve, and she breaks into a run, reaches the shelter first, and puts her head through the hole in the side. “Jeremy,” she yells. “Jeremy.”

  The shelter is deserted. There is no one in it, just torn remnants from the bolt of chintz that Marjorie Hatton had used for bandages.

  Harriet sits down on the ground outside the shelter, drawing her knees up to her chest and hugging them. She can’t believe Jeremy is dead. He must be somewhere else.

  All around her the sky is lightening. Harriet can see the broken beams and the hanging plaster from the backs of the bombed-out row of shops. The sky is grey and a thin drizzle is sieving down. She wraps her borrowed coat tighter around herself.

  What if he never made it here but got lost on the way? What if, by the time he got here, the shelter was already bombed?

  Maeve comes back out.

  “We should try the hospital,” says Harriet.

  “Wouldn’t it have been hit?”

  “We should try anyway.”

  Harriet can feel the mist on her face, how it is starting to slide down the back of her neck. She remembers standing in the rain at Ypres, by that section of broken stone wall, how she knew so completely that Owen had died there. Here, she doesn’t feel anything.