The Greatcoat

by Helen Dunmore

  There was nobody beside her. Isabel passed her hand over the bedclothes and thought she detected his warmth, but it might have been the heat of her own body. Perhaps he had made a hollow in the bed; but then the mattress was so old that it went naturally into peaks and valleys. With a swift movement she rolled over and pressed her face to the pillow where he had laid his head. Yes, he was still there. Cigarettes; a smell of engines; something men put on their hair. The greatcoat was lying in its usual place on top of the bedclothes.

  Isabel swung her legs over, got up and went to the kitchen. The important thing was to finish making the steak-and-kidney pudding. She tied on her apron and as she did so she heard the landlady’s footsteps overhead. She must have come home while I was asleep. All the way to the window Mrs Atkinson walked, went back to the door, and then to the window again. The usual tread, too heavy to be ignored. Isabel switched on the radio, tuned it to the Light Programme and turned the volume up high on Music While You Work. Harry Leader’s sax soon took care of the footsteps. Isabel hummed along loudly as she poured a cup of hot water into the sticky gravy, stirred it and set the pan back on the hob. She rolled out the pastry again and this time it held together, flaccid but obedient. The recipe text danced: Grease the basin … line the basin … pour in prepared meat and gravy … cover and seal …

  She did it all. She was a young married woman in her own kitchen, listening to the radio as she prepared her husband’s meal. No one, watching her, could imagine anything different. Pour boiling water into a large saucepan, place prepared pudding basin on the trivet, cover, leaving the lid askew. Steam for two and a half hours, adding more boiling water at intervals.

  By then he would be home. It would be Philip sitting opposite her, no one else. He would praise the pudding, no matter how it tasted, because she had made it.

  The door to the bedroom was ajar. What a ridiculous arrangement it was, to have the kitchen off the bedroom. It was the way the house had been divided; she supposed that once it had all made sense, when it was whole. It annoyed her, the way things got broken up so that they couldn’t fit together properly any more.

  If you lay on the bed and the door was open, you could watch someone who was standing at the stove. She refused to turn. He was there again, she was sure of it. He had come back without her hearing him. He was still lying on the bed, but he was awake now, and refreshed. Some colour had returned to his face. His arms were folded behind his head and he was watching her.

  His name was Alec. She knew it now. It had come into her mind as she slept beside him, as if he had whispered it into her ear.

  ‘Alec,’ she said, turning. As she’d thought, he was there. His eyes were narrowed, to watch her more closely. They were dark blue; navy, almost.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  Suddenly a low vibration turned into sound. He moved his head sharply. It was the same heavy sound she had heard before, coming closer. The deep thrumming of four Merlin engines as the aircraft came low, ready for landing. She and Charlie used to identify them when they were miles away, before the adults could hear them. A Lanc.

  Alec was sitting bolt upright. His expression had changed completely: he was preoccupied, anxious, charged for action. He swung himself off the bed and came to her. He stood very close – too close – and again she was afraid.

  ‘Alec,’ she said, ‘what is it?’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘But you haven’t said—’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘You haven’t told me your surname.’

  His face held nothing for a second but blank astonishment. ‘What are you talking about, Is? What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Your surname,’ she insisted.

  ‘What is this, some kind of a game? You’ve been a bit queer all day.’ He cupped her cheek with his hand, and at that moment she discovered that she knew it, of course she did, how could she have asked Alec such a stupid question?

  ‘Sorry. It’s probably the gin,’ she said. His touch was so intimate that it gave her gooseflesh.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he repeated.

  ‘I know.’

  His boots were on, and his greatcoat wrapped around him. He set his cap on his head, and he was gone. She heard the door bang, and ran out into the hall after him, pulled open the front door and looked right and left up the street. There was no one. The fog pushed towards her, and she shivered. You couldn’t even see the minster clearly. How would the Lanc ever land safely? As she thought this, she realised that the noise of its engines was fading. Fading, and then gone.

  Chapter Six

  HE’LL COME BACK, she thought. It wasn’t speculation: she was sure of it. How could he not? The flat still breathed his presence, even though it was Philip who sat opposite her, eating the steak-and-kidney pudding. He praised it, as if she were a clever child, and told her that it was as good as his mother used to make.

  ‘I should think so,’ said Isabel, having endured his mother’s meals.

  ‘Did you have a nice time with Janet Ingoldby?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You went for coffee with Janet Ingoldby.’ Again that note of patience in his voice. She was shrinking in his eyes, she thought, while the rest of his life expanded.

  ‘Oh … No, I’d got the day wrong. It’s next week, I think. Just as well, really, because I had a lot of shopping to do and it took hours to make the pudding. I’m fearfully slow.’

  ‘You’ll get quicker.’

  ‘Will I?’ she asked. To her amazement, he was perfectly serious. He didn’t want her to tutor local children in French. He didn’t want her going into other people’s houses, earning money and using her qualifications. He wanted her to learn to cook. He was so handsome, she thought. His face remained dark, remote, romantic, even while he chewed the tough meat and thought about his patients. He was in his own world. He’ll have to be careful, thought Isabel. Some of those patients will fall in love with him. They’ll start inventing illnesses, so that they can see him, and he won’t know why. He’ll tell me that they are hypochondriacs.

  She considered him. You might say he was modest, and praise him for it … But had anyone got the right to be so unaware of his effect on others?

  Philip ate quickly, fastidiously. Isabel knew he wanted to get to his desk. There would be something niggling him – a symptom he wasn’t quite sure about, or a diagnosis he was beginning to doubt. Soon he’d have his books piled around him like a fortress, over which she might hand him a cup of tea. He would glance up at her with that sweet but absent smile.

  She hadn’t known anything about marriage. Her father and mother had vanished while they were still the sun and moon of her world. Her uncle had been away for the whole of the war, and when he returned after fighting his way from North Africa to the north of Italy, it was clear that he and her aunt barely knew each other. The trim, youthful figure who had been on parade on the mantelpiece for six years had become a grey-haired man who lost his temper easily and couldn’t stand noise. She and Charlie quickly learned to keep out of his way. As soon as he was old enough, Charlie had cleared off to the other side of the world.

  But Isabel knew Philip. She had been sure of him. The formalities of the wedding were a thorny thicket that they had to hack through in order to be where they wanted. And they’d done it. Private, ruthless exhilaration had gripped them both as they drove away from the church in his father’s car, on their way to the three days in the Peak District that would be their honeymoon. The figures of his parents dwindled behind them. His mother had already turned to clear away the remains of the wedding breakfast. Aunt Jean staunchly kept on waving, having fulfilled to the letter every detail of her duty and affection to her niece. Philip and Isabel were on their own, and it was all about to begin. It seemed incredible that somehow they had robbed the bank of happiness and now they could spend their treasure as they liked, over the days and years to come. Philip drove, while Isabel sat beside him, watching the road unfurl. From time to t
ime she glanced at his profile, or lit a cigarette for him and put it between his lips. That was in June. It was no time ago, and yet everything had changed.

  ‘That was very nice,’ said Philip, putting down his knife and fork.

  ‘Good,’ she said, taking his plate. There would be more, and better, steak-and-kidney puddings. There would be processions of meals. She would meet more Janet Ingoldbys, with their efficient knitting, their children away at school, their gardens and their good works. Rivers of coffee would be drunk, and mountains of little cakes would be popped, one by one, into the mouths of women gathered to chat. They would soon accept Isabel as one of themselves.

  ‘Any interesting cases today?’ she asked brightly, as she cleared the table.

  ‘Are you all right, Is?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. You seem a bit down.’

  ‘It says in Early Days that the young wife may take time to adjust, after the excitement of the wedding is over.’

  He thought of their wedding, with Isabel in a blue linen dress and coat, clutching a bunch of crimson roses as if they might escape. Her dark, slippery hair swung down, touching the petals. She’d refused to have it waved, or to wear white, or have any fuss.

  ‘I can’t ask Charlie to come all the way back from Australia to give me away,’ she’d said. Philip believed that she wanted a quiet wedding because of her parents. It was understandable. Isabel’s mother should be sitting in the front pew, between smiles and tears, while Isabel’s father walked her proudly up the aisle. If they were not there, why go through with the whole performance? The quiet wedding suited Philip well enough, never mind if it didn’t please his mother. To be married to Isabel was all he cared about.

  ‘Come here,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got to do the washing-up.’

  ‘It can wait—’

  ‘Just listen to her! That bloody woman! It’s like living with a gaoler.’

  The landlady was walking again.

  ‘She hasn’t enough to do, that’s what it is,’ said Philip.

  ‘No, it’s not, can’t you see? She’s doing it on purpose. She knows it drives me mad.’

  ‘Why, have you said something to her?’ he asked in alarm.

  ‘Of course I haven’t. But anyone would know, if they were marching up and down on top of other people. Can’t we get somewhere else, Phil?’

  ‘We’d lose money. We paid three months’ rent in advance. We’ve got to save every penny or we’ll never have our own house.’ He wasn’t taking her seriously. His handsome face was worried, but only because she was upset. ‘Forget about her, Is. Let’s go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep for once.’

  Isabel didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Why would anyone walk like that,’ she said, as if to herself, ‘Unless she had a bad conscience?’ Maybe the landlady wasn’t a gaoler. She might be a prisoner. Prisoners walked like that, pacing their cells, so many steps one way and so many steps the other, until they could walk it in their sleep. ‘Perhaps that’s what it is, Philip!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps she sleepwalks. She goes on all night sometimes – haven’t you heard her?’

  ‘No. Besides, somnambulism is much rarer than people imagine.’

  In bed that night Isabel lay stiffly on her side of the mattress. Philip had rolled off her and fallen deeply asleep. Her thighs were sticky, and cold. But I’ll never have a baby, as long as we stay here, she thought. It was as if the landlady’s spirit was everywhere, in the fabric of the house and in the waves of sound that beat against Isabel’s eardrums. Philip said he couldn’t hear it, but she didn’t believe him. He was trying to pretend that there was nothing wrong.

  The darkness of the bedroom brushed against her wide-open eyes. Of course it was not really dark. After a while, the bulk of the chest of drawers and wardrobe shouldered out and became visible. She thought of the blackout, and how there was complete darkness then, pushing itself into mouth, eyes and ears. She remembered hearing footsteps behind her in the blackout when she was walking home. Suddenly she’d realised that they were keeping time with her own. She stopped, and the footsteps stopped too. There was a breathing, waiting silence. She realised that the man was waiting to hear her again, so that he could follow her. Silently, she stooped and took off her shoes. She’d walked on silently, on tiptoe in her stockinged feet, not daring to run.

  The bedroom hung over her, heavy and permanent. They’d come here so lightly, full of their own happiness, setting up camp, accepting that it would do for the time being. They’d both believed that it didn’t really matter what the place was like, because it was temporary. They were on their way elsewhere. Perhaps people always have to think that, Isabel thought. For an instant she allowed herself to think of the places where a woman might end up. She saw her mother’s face, unrecognisable, in the landscape that Isabel had pieced together from newsreel and newspaper articles, after the war in Japan ended. She saw skin and bones, shovelled into a grave that wasn’t deep enough.

  ‘Don’t think of that,’ Isabel whispered savagely to herself. She forced her mind to clear, but her mother came again. This time she was leaning out of the train window, with Isabel’s father behind her. The guard had blown his whistle, and with heavy chuffs the train had begun to move. It was very slow at first, and Isabel could easily keep up with it as she pulled her hand out of her aunt’s grasp and began to run alongside the carriage. Her mother wasn’t waving. She stared intently into Isabel’s face. Isabel ran faster, wreathed in the train’s smoke, hearing her aunt call out behind her. The train was moving faster now and her mother’s face became a pale disc with dark hair blowing around it. Now Isabel seemed to be running backwards as the last carriage overtook her, and her mother was gone. Isabel was at the very end of the platform, out in the sunshine. There was fireweed growing beside the track. She looked back, and in the darkness under the station canopy, there were Aunt Jean and Charlie. Aunt Jean said something, and Charlie began to run towards Isabel.

  That woman; that damned woman. She was walking again, with venomously light tread, as if she could judge to a nicety exactly how much noise would keep Isabel awake, without disturbing Philip. She knew that Isabel was lying on the other side of the floor, helpless to avoid her. We’ll never get away, thought Isabel. She’ll make sure of that.

  But she could rebel. In one sweep she was out of the bed, gathering round her body not her own dressing gown, but the greatcoat. She tiptoed over the lino, into the living room, and silently through to the door that opened into the hall.

  There was the moon, in the fanlight over the front door. Following her own moon-shadow, Isabel crept upstairs. She had never been upstairs to the landlady’s floor, not once. Mrs Atkinson had always come down to them. There was a cheap wooden door, put in when the house was converted, Isabel supposed. Behind it were the landlady’s quarters, and the stairs to the attics. Isabel could see that the wooden door opened outwards. She raised her fist and rapped hard with her knuckles.

  The house went still, listening. The footsteps stopped. Isabel waited. After a few seconds, she heard footsteps again, this time coming towards the door. There was the sound of a bolt being drawn back, and then a key in the lock.

  Isabel slid back against the wall, close to the door’s hinges. She spread herself out until she was only a deeper darkness within the darkness of the landing. She barely breathed.

  The door was flung open. Isabel put out her hand and caught the brass of the Yale latch so that the door would not rebound from her body. As it opened, it hid her.

  ‘Is it you?’ came the landlady’s voice, oddly eager, oddly young. Isabel heard her take a step forward, out onto the landing. ‘Is it you? Where are you?’

  She was at the banisters, looking down into the hall. Isabel moved sideways a fraction. But it was not the landlady at all. She must have a guest staying with her. No wonder the voice had sounded so different. This woman was young. She leaned forward so that h
er hair swung and shone in the moonlight, and called again into the well of the hall, ‘Is it you?’

  Isabel did not move. After a minute the woman turned. Now she had her back to the moon, and there wasn’t enough light for Isabel to see her face. Her head was bowed. She walked back to the flat’s entrance and pulled the door shut behind her. Isabel heard the snick of the lock, and then the bolt sliding across.

  The landing and hall still quivered with the words the woman had called out so eagerly, but in soft, cautious tones, as if afraid somebody might overhear. Is it you? Where are you? It was a younger and sweeter voice than the landlady’s, but the accent was the same, and the voices bore a family resemblance. Even the shape of the slender body that leaned over the banisters wasn’t entirely strange. The landlady must have a young relation staying with her. A niece, perhaps.

  Isabel waited, in case someone was listening and waiting on the other side of the door. There were no more footsteps. As silently as she had come, she tiptoed down the stairs and back into the flat.

  Philip was still sleeping. Isabel spread out the greatcoat and lay down under it. A strong, subtle electricity filled her, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She could have walked for miles down moonlit lanes, all the way to the airfield. Her heart throbbed, but not with fear. It was Alec. He was gone, but he still possessed her thoughts, charging them, making her tingle from head to foot. Wherever he was, she knew that he was hungry for her. When Philip lay on top of her, smiling down into her eyes, Alec was there too. He’d watched, standing at some distance from the bed with his arms folded. Those dark-blue, almost navy eyes of his had seen so much that they could be surprised at nothing. His face was still young, but not his eyes.

  Chapter Seven

  EACH NIGHT, ISABEL tucked the greatcoat around her, before she fell asleep with her back to Philip. Alec came in the afternoons, or late at night when Philip was out on call. He never stayed long. Sometimes it was a bare minute, sometimes half an hour. He tapped on the window. When she opened the house to him he would enter like a sleepwalker, unsmiling, so weary he could barely speak until he’d had the first drink. Sometimes he sat on the bed, knees apart, head bowed, hands on knees, as he’d done the first time.