The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  “Is that funny?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s just, the day I’ve had.”

  “Really?”

  “Mm-hmm. Terrible.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I lost my lipstick this morning.”

  He pulls a sympathetic face.

  “It’s tragic. I’m serious. They’re like hen’s teeth nowadays.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “I’m bearing up, though. You can see I’m bearing up.”

  “You are really quite inspiring.”

  She smiles. She notices the sweet smell of wet earth. And she can hear the city sounds now—the sticky sound of wet tyres peeling down Kensington High Street, and from somewhere, God knows where, a whiff of coffee. And then, walking out between the trees, there is a couple under an umbrella, and another, hurrying along under their own private canopies, veiled by the rain. Her arm tucked under his, they emerge from the woods, like something from a fairy tale, and join the flow of people, like the raindrops racing down the umbrella and dripping to the streaming ground.

  “So,” he says, “maybe we could get a drink, or are you hungry? Fancy a bite?”

  She just nods; if she tries to speak, she’ll only laugh again.

  It’s just a neat little awning like a pram hood; underneath it, a glass door with a blackout panel fixed in place behind. No name or anything like that. The handsome man, whose name is Edmund Harrison, dips the umbrella to collapse it then shakes it out behind them, grinning at her.

  “I love a good cloudburst, don’t you?”

  The rain falls like a bead curtain behind them. The glass door reflects it all: his clipping the umbrella into its band, tucking it underneath an arm. Everything is different. She has stepped through the looking glass—or, rather, that punch sent her flying, spinning through it, into a different world. She steps sideways to get a glimpse of her reflection, to check what state she’s in. All she can see is a pale thin shape, herself, devoid of detail.

  “Nice little place,” he says.

  His reflection leans in towards him as he goes to open the door, then swings away as he pushes it open. He ushers her courteously, an arm just hovering behind her waist, not touching. And they’re into a dim-lit entranceway, and then stairs descend, and she steps down into the hum of voices and the smell of seafood and cigarette smoke and drink, and a dim low room, all glossy surfaces and dark corners, like an underground pool.

  It is nice. It’s the kind of place she should be used to.

  She must look a wreck. She reaches up to touch her hair; it’s a tangled soaking mess.

  “Half a tick—” he says.

  He heads off towards the bar, into the bustle and hum. She looks around. The walls are teal blue, patched with the glow of table lamps. The tabletops are glossy in their pools of light; cut glass glints. And the people are lovely. Lovely clothes, lovely talk: high, clipped voices like at the flicks. This is how things should be: elegant, ordered; this is the difference money makes. An elderly white-coated waiter goes up to meet Mr. Harrison. She watches as they talk. He’s known here, and he knows how these things are done. A handshake, a gesture across the room, a nod—satisfactory, his expression says.

  Mr. Harrison comes back across the room towards her, smiling, at his ease, in the company of the waiter, looking as though pleasure is a business and must be taken seriously. The feeling is like a first gin and ginger-beer on an empty stomach. Giddy. Lovely. Making her smile foolishly. Which makes her chin hurt where the old man hit her.

  “If I could just—wash my hands,” she says, and feels herself blushing like a girl, as though only she, and no-one else, ever uses the lavatory.

  The ladies’ room is an underground palace of white and green tiles. A bowl of pink roses and a pile of small, square-folded hand towels stand by the basin. She takes off her gloves, checking her reflection in the cool mirror. Smudges, smears, but nothing out of the ordinary for a soaking: her cheeks are rosy, her eyes bright. She lifts up her chin: there is already a faint blue bloom of a bruise, but it is mostly concealed underneath her jawline. There’s a slight bulge on the back of her head too, which hurts when she explores it with her fingertips. She opens her handbag, gets out her comb.

  Her movement causes a displacement of the air, a fall of petals. They land softly on the marble counter, like scraps of washed silk. The roses smell of childhood, of summers visiting relatives in Salzburg.

  Inside the bag lies the bloodied, crumpled handkerchief. She just looks at it a moment. Then she peels apart the folds. The thing inside is surprisingly small, about the size of an almond. The blood and flesh has congealed dark along the edge. Three wiry white hairs grow out of it. A wave of nausea, and a kind of delayed surprise at what she can do, if pushed to it.

  Flush it?

  But it’s the ear she told her secrets to. She told it about the baby. The blue boy.

  She bundles up the handkerchief, the cleanest fabric on the outside. She presses it into the bottom of her bag, scoops out her compact and mascara and sets them on the marble counter.

  Another petal falls from the roses, lands noiselessly, cupping one inside the other. She dips one of the small hand towels into the hot water, and soaks it, and wrings it out. She washes her face, wiping away the final smears of mascara, the smudged and clotted powder. The city seems to stretch out from here, from the steaming basin, from the soft drop of rose petals, from the dark tangle of her curls. The rain falling over London, on the grey streets, dampening the nearby Kensington stucco, and further off streaking mustard-yellow brick and soaking the parched ground of parks and making the trees soften and breathe. Here and there are pockets of light, points of connection—Mrs. sitting by the empty grate in Mitcham, the empty boarded socket where the old shop with their flat above had stood, the factory lying quiet and still, Billy out there somewhere in the dark countryside, wherever his camp is, listening to the rain hammering on the tin roof; and the old man walking on through the downpour, muttering curses, handkerchief pressed to his ear. The baby is out there too. They’ll have buried him quietly in the hospital grounds, or in some municipal plot, in the company of other babies who were born but never breathed: a tiny throng of blue humanity, unknowable as angels.

  She rinses out the wet hand towel. The room is still quiet and empty: no sound of anyone on the stairs, so she reaches down and lifts up her hem, and rubs the damp cloth over her thighs, scrubbing away at the ghost of the old man’s hands. The soap smells good and expensive; she’s not sure if the pawn-shop, brownish smell lingers on her, or just in her mind. She rinses out and wrings the cloth again, then drops it into the linen basket. She lets the water go; she watches as it spirals down the plughole, and away.

  Outside, the rain falls on and on, cool and benign and drenching.

  A place like this, she’d want a month to plan an outfit, an afternoon to get ready. But instead she presses powder to her nose, her chin, her forehead and cheekbones, and touches it across the sore patch underneath her chin. She clicks open her mascara, spits on the blacking, rubs the brush into it, runs it through her lashes. Her hair is drying into its ragged curls. She rubs Vaseline between her hands and then runs her fingers through it, softening the curls out into waves. She combs it out and pins it up at the back.

  She smears Vaseline onto her lips, and tries a smile.

  Her wedding ring rolls slippery and loose round her finger. She eases it off to wipe away the Vaseline. She notices the empty space at the base of her left ring finger, where there is perhaps the slightest, faintest of indentations. The handsome man—Mr. Harrison—has only seen her wearing gloves.

  Billy owes her. Life owes her. Tonight is hers.

  She picks up her glove, drops the ring inside, then rolls up the cuff. She tucks the glove into the inside pocket of her bag.

  When the ancient waiter shows her to the table, it is empty; she slides along the banquette; the sleek coolness of the leather brushes the bare skin at
the back of her knees. The waiter hands her a menu. The card is good quality, silky to the touch. She holds it out of the way as he polishes imaginary marks from the tabletop, then lays it down unread.

  A smile keeps pushing at her cheeks, making them bunch up, making her eyes crinkle at the edges, making her chin hurt. He comes back towards her through the blue mist of cigarette smoke. An easy, comfortable stride. And his suit is so good. The fabric with that silky matte finish that shows that money has been spent. He looks like Robert Donat, she thinks. Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Poised, unrufflable, unsmudged.

  He slides in beside her. “Drink?”

  She runs her fingers together casually. “Please.”

  “What’ll you have?”

  She doesn’t know what to order, in a place like this. “You choose.”

  He orders, conferring with the waiter in hushed tones. Wine, and food too. The wine is a revelation: it makes the inside of her mouth expand. She’s conscious of the line where her lips meet, the flesh of them tingling faintly.

  He talks comfortably, used to being listened to.

  The liquid sits above and below her tongue, behind her lips. She doesn’t want to swallow it. Doesn’t want it to be gone. Even though there’s a glassful still in front of her, a gorgeous purply red. She watches his mouth as he talks—his lips are narrow but nicely shaped, the upper lip a seagull’s wings—and she wants to kiss him. Just because the sensation needs sharing. A kiss that would tease at lips and tongue and feel the snag of teeth, a kiss to say This is marvellous, have you noticed how marvellous this is?

  The waiter returns, carrying a broad silver platter, his upturned fingers like spreading branches. He slides the dish down onto the table.

  “Your lobster.”

  The coral beast lies on a bed of shredded green. A whole butterhead lettuce has been sacrificed to make its bed. There are nutcrackers, and two small dishes of glistening mayonnaise.

  She smiles, just at the utter extreme incongruity of this. Food comes in tins and packets and small papery bundles. It’s divided into careful portions—equal shares that once gone are gone. But a lobster, a whole lobster, to share? So very far from rationing, so very far from kosher, that it seems so incongruous that it seems almost a joke. Mayonnaise—what is that made with? Is that made with milk? She doesn’t even know.

  “Fantastic,” Ruby says.

  She lifts a pair of nutcrackers. She has no idea where to start. She watches his tactics for a moment, then manages herself to dislocate a claw and crack it open on her plate. The flesh falls into strands between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, firm and sweet and melting and intensely savoury. She has missed so much, she realises. What else has she missed?

  “So where’s home?” he asks.

  She swallows reluctantly.

  “Hard to say, nowadays.”

  He makes a sympathetic face. She lets him imagine the bomb damage, the flames, her beautiful imagined house in Kensington in ruins.

  “You staying with friends?”

  That works as an explanation. She nods. “Little place,” she says. “Out at Mitcham.”

  Was that wrong? Does that mark her out? But he seems unconcerned.

  “Drop you off there later, if you like.”

  She looks up at him, leaving her fork wedged into the pink carapace. “You have a car?”

  “It’s Ministry.”

  The prospect is like sinking into velvet. A car ride home.

  “But the petrol?”

  He purses his lips, wafts her concerns away. “Not even out of the way.”

  She traces the route out from her house, beyond.

  “So that’s, what, you’re heading south? Kent?”

  His face buttons itself up. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Ah,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Walls have ears?”

  “They certainly could.”

  The engine throbs like a happy cat. Her head feels soft and fuzzy with wine. The leather seat creaks as she reaches out to touch the lustre of the walnut panelling. The windscreen wiper swooshes rhythmically. The rain is softer now; it seems almost not to fall any more, as if the air itself were saturated to stillness. She is torn between this new vision of the city at speed—spinning by white terraced townhouses, through the lush shadowy green of the park, shooting suddenly out across the river and under the grey wide sky, all veiled with rain—and the internal stillness of the car, the scents of oil and leather and the warm, well-dressed, breathing length of the man next to her. She’d like to ease off her shoes, but she daren’t risk the smell.

  South of the river, and he begins to need directions. The streets narrow and close in. She finds she doesn’t know the way and is forced to guess. There are moments of clarity when they hit a patch around a Tube station, or cross a bus route, and are back within her frame of knowledge. Further south, and the streets begin to widen a little more, as they move into the newer houses built after the First War. Houses fit for heroes: what heroes need is a plumbed-in bath and a gas cooker and hotwater geyser and an outdoor lav and a handkerchief of back garden.

  It hits her then. Not that Mrs. will see him, though that would itself be irredeemably bad, but that he will see Mrs., her hair done up in rollers, and the pokey little front garden, and the path that’s poured concrete, and the cheap brick housefront with its single bay and its two narrow upstairs windows, and the milk-bottle holder that Billy made, with the red enamel chipped at the base where it’s hit the concrete path too many times.

  They spin out across the Common, the road lined with dripping trees. The car is still a car, the handsome man still drives, the wet road still peels away underneath the wheels, but it is over.

  “Can you—?” she says.

  He glances across at her.

  “Can you stop the car here?”

  He pulls in. The car settles into silence; the windscreen wiper hangs still. The Common is deserted, wet, the light dim. Ruby watches the water land, bead, run down the slope of the windscreen.

  “I want you to know, I don’t normally do this kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Get into cars, with strange men.”

  “Am I strange?”

  “You are to me.”

  He shrugs. “What’s normal anyway, nowadays?”

  “I wanted to say. I had a good time.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She is glad, too. Even though it is now over, things had been, for just a little while, how they should be.

  She reaches out across the cool dim air between them. She puts her hand to his cheek, and turns the handsome man towards her, and kisses him.

  She clicks the front door open, steps in, and just stands for a moment, on the threshold, listening up the dark stairs. Mrs. has gone to bed, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’ll be sleeping. She could still be lying there, eyes wide open, hair all twisted up in rollers. But the house is silent, stuffy and dark. She steps in fully, and eases the door shut behind her, then toes off her sodden shoes.

  Hung over the rack in the back kitchen, her jacket will dry by the morning. The crocks are lying out on the drainer and the pig bucket stinks unemptied. At the back door she stuffs her feet into the old communal slippers, grabs the ragged umbrella and slip-slops her way down the garden path under its shelter. A hedgehog trundles along between the cabbages, stops to snuffle up a slug.

  In the spidery cool of the outhouse, she hoiks up her skirt, lets her knickers slide down around her ankles and sits down on the old wooden toilet seat. Rain clatters on the bare slates above. The outhouse smells of damp plaster, urine, bicarb.

  His skin too good to be real. A bloom like on a plum. The smell of him—piny, leathery, soft. His warm hands on her cool flesh.

  She doesn’t fret about trouble that might come of it: the events of the evening seem like a dream, proceeding according to their own inevitable logic. Repercussion-free. And it’s not like she’s
going to do that kind of thing again.

  She pees, and tugs a square of newspaper from the copper loop: an advertisement for Robinson’s rhubarb cordial. The paper is thin and soft; it gets thinner and softer year by year, as the war continues, which, on the bright side, is better for the lav. She dabs herself dry.

  It’s only later, when she’s lying in bed in her winter-weight pyjamas, smelling lanolin and wool and feeling the welcome weight of extra blankets, that she remembers, with a lurch, her wedding ring. She eases herself back out of bed, creeps down the stairs, heart thumping, and lifts her handbag off the hall floor, where it would have annoyed Mrs. when she saw it there in the morning. Fell right over it; nearly broke my neck.

  Back in her room, she fishes out the bundled glove; her ring’s still there; she slips it on. And there, at the bottom of the bag, almost forgotten, is the bundled, bloodied handkerchief. The earlobe still inside.

  Is it pride, she wonders, this sense of warmth, this satisfaction? The knowledge that for once, for just one evening, she bent the world to her will?

  She rummages for the old tobacco tin in her bedside drawer. A few threads of tobacco still linger in the metal seams; it gives off a faint scent of her father, of childhood. The contents are all useless, unrelinquishable things: two odd earrings, a broken tin brooch of her mother’s. She presses the bundle into the tin, squeezes the lid back on. She drops the tin into the drawer, pushes the drawer shut.

  Lying back again, she heaves the heavy blankets over her. Her hand brushes over her hipbone and comes to rest in the warm declivity of her belly.

  Denham Crescent, Mitcham

  June 5, 1944, 6:45 a.m.

  AMELIA LIFTS THE BLACKOUT CARDBOARD from the window. The sunshine makes her blink and frown. Today is another day without Billy. Today is another day in which something terrible might happen to him. Today is another day to get through in the hopes of better days to come.

  She rubs at her eyes. Below, the small front garden soaks in the morning sunshine. She unclips her rollers, pulls them out of her fine pale hair.