The Greatcoat

by Helen Dunmore

  They were gone. The fence dissolved and Isabel clutched at nothing. There was the control tower with its windows broken and obscenities scrawled on the brick. She saw that the corrugated iron roof of the guardhouse had rusted. Every soul had vanished, as if blown away by the wind. But they were still there, she knew that. It was only that, at this moment, she couldn’t see them.

  Alec was at her side.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. ‘I had to see you.’

  ‘Waiting for me? But you can’t have been – you’ve only just this minute left me.’

  ‘Listen. Ops are on for tonight. Briefing’s at four. Nothing’s been said but the gen is we’re off to the big city again. Listen, Issy. I’ll come to you straight after the debrief. It’s only quarter of an hour on the bike. I’ll knock on your window. Swear you won’t go to sleep.’

  ‘I never go to sleep. But be careful on the bike – you won’t have slept – you’ll be so tired—’

  ‘There’s no traffic at that time.’

  ‘You’ll be all right, Alec.’

  ‘I know I shall. Only four more ops to go, counting tonight. Four’s got to be a lucky number – four-leaved clover, remember? – Besides which I’ve got your knickers, air crew, for the protection of.’

  She laughed. He had stolen her pre-war silk knickers, the ones she kept for best because you couldn’t get anything like them these days. Except that there wasn’t any ‘best’ with Geoff and so they’d been hidden away in the back of her drawer, until Alec came. Geoff thought that women who wore fancy underwear were whores.

  The knickers went with him on every op. He wouldn’t let her wash them. She pretended to be shocked, but she knew it meant there was nothing of her that he didn’t want. She hadn’t known it was possible for a man and woman to be like this. His crew thought Alec’s silk gloves were their mascot, and he let them believe it. How tired he looked, she thought. Sucked dry. The bones in his face were sharp. He was due leave again in ten days’ time, but the crew didn’t want leave. All they wanted now was to finish the tour. They wanted it so much that it was like possession. Once Alec had let his guard down and talked of the future: what they might do. He’d be screened for six months at least after the tour. They’d meet in York or Lincoln, depending on where he was posted. They’d get a hotel room. They’d find a way. Those places were full of wives coming to join men on leave. They’d be just another couple.

  He only talked about it once. It was bad luck to talk about the future. No, that wasn’t it, not exactly. He’d tried to explain to her. He had to be 100 per cent here, now, there couldn’t be any part of him that was absent. He had so much in his mind – all his training, all his experience, those nights when you either came back or you didn’t, and if you did you came back with new, sharp, hot fragments of knowledge. It all had to fit together. It had to be remembered instant by instant. He had to hold it all in his mind, so that it wasn’t even like thinking any more, it was all there without him having to think about it. And then his mind was free to do the other things, beyond his training, that might keep them alive. It was that freedom which made him faster by a fraction of a second when Syd’s voice banged through the intercom: ‘Corkscrew port go go go—’

  She thought he looked exhausted. No, he told her, he wasn’t finished yet, not by a long way.

  ‘You’re not getting rid of me that easily,’ he said. Then he was silent, frowning. She knew from his face that there was something more he wanted to say.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s Rod,’ he said. ‘He’s not so good.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s nothing. These bloody stand-downs are getting on everyone’s nerves.’

  He was silent again. He’d told her once that there was another look you saw sometimes. When you saw it you didn’t say anything. Just glanced away again and kept on putting your clobber into your locker or whatever else you were doing. The chop look. She’d asked him what it was. He’d said there was no other word for it: it was what it was. Crew had it when they weren’t going to come back. They didn’t know it, but something in them did and if you were unlucky you glimpsed it.

  ‘The chop look,’ she’d repeated, her face twisting as if she’d tasted something foul.

  ‘That’s it. But I’m telling you, you’ll never bloody see it on my crew.’

  He had never mentioned it again. Now he said, as if he were arguing with someone, ‘He’s a bloody fine wireless op, though.’ She put her arms around him and leaned into his chest. Now the wind had to blow past them, because there was no space left between them.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here. You should go home, Issy,’ he said in her ear, but she knew he didn’t want her to leave him.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she answered, ‘I don’t know how you got off the airfield.’

  For the first time she sensed the outline of something within him, like a vulturous shadow leaping between them. It flapped there in huge distortion, then he folded it into himself again and crammed it down. No, she thought, not distortion. It was real.

  She remembered the words her mother had said long ago, when she had perched on Isabel’s bed to comfort her for a day of troubles that ended in soaked, helpless crying. Her mother had said, ‘Don’t cry, darling. It will all look different in the morning.’ She could remember her mother’s words but not what had come next. Had Isabel stopped crying? Or maybe it had never happened, any of it. Her mother had been gone for so long that Isabel was beginning not to know where memory ended and making her up began.

  It will all look different in the morning. Nothing worse could be said. He knew what had to happen before there was morning for him. She held him close. She knew the odds too but they couldn’t apply to Alec. He was so much here and so much himself; present, as they used to say at school when the register was called. How could someone be present and then ripped out of life in a few hours’ time? But there was nothing easier. He knew it, and he’d made her know it.

  The night-fighters would come in from underneath to attack the belly of the Lanc on the inward run when she was bombed up. That’s why you had to keep weaving, so the rear-gunner had a chance of spotting them. Last week they were waiting for the bomber stream over the Dutch coast, beneath thin cloud cover. They got a Lanc on his port side, two hundred feet below. It came at him in a ball of light. Pulse after pulse of explosion rocked them. There was no plane, no men, no parachutes, no nothing. Already he was corkscrewing. Syd’s voice on the intercom, more peevish than anything: ‘Fuck it I’ve gone blind.’ Metal rattled on the fuselage – flak or Lanc debris, he didn’t know. He was up to altitude again and he hauled her into the second dive. When they levelled out there was Syd’s voice in his ear, back to normal, as if nothing had happened, ‘Keep weaving, Skipper.’

  A shard of metal had smashed the Perspex and Syd had been cut across the head, which filled his eyes with blood. It took him half a minute to realise he had to wipe it away. Later Laney crawled back with a bandage. They took the mickey out of Syd for days: Fuck it I’ve gone blind.

  He told her these things and she kept them in her mind. When she heard the engines starting up across the fields she listened. She heard them on the taxiways and she heard them take off but she made a blank of the time between take-off and landing. When she could, she left the farmhouse, went into town and waited for Alec there.

  ‘If I don’t look after the lodgers, they’ll give notice,’ she told Geoff. He didn’t argue. It was good money the lodgers paid. She’d hired a girl to look after William, on the strength of it.

  The other one’s memories swarmed in her head, and then they faded. She was Isabel again. Alec pushed her away from him and looked into her face. She wondered what he saw.

  ‘I’ll knock on the window. Listen out for me. You remember that day when you wore Syd’s jacket?’ he asked, as if it were long ago.

  ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘As soon
as this is over, we’ll go to the coast,’ he said. ‘You and me on the old bike. I know a place where we can go.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she said. Time swung and then righted itself. How long ago was it really, since they were together in the hut? To her, it seemed no time at all. He had been with her, he had gone, he had come straight back to her. But to him, it was part of their shared history.

  It didn’t matter. It could be as long ago as he wanted. She was wasting time, struggling to understand things in a way that wasn’t Alec’s. It didn’t make any difference. He was here, and soon he wouldn’t be. A minute could be a year, if it would take that look off his face.

  ‘Just think, Issy, if it could always be like it was in the hut, when we didn’t have our watches. As if there wasn’t any time.’

  ‘But if there wasn’t any time, then I’d never be able to see you.’

  He shook his head, smiling as if he knew something she did not. ‘If there wasn’t any time, then you would always be able to see me,’ he said. ‘You still don’t understand, do you? I’ll always come to you.’ He gave her another gentle push. ‘You’ve got to go, or they’ll find me here with a popsy when I should be in the briefing room. They’d take a very dim view of that. LMF, old boy.’

  The rims of his eyelids were red. ‘LMF?’ she asked.

  ‘Lack of moral fibre, sweetheart. Gets you carted off to scrub bogs in the back end of beyond. They make sure we know all about LMF.’ He pushed her away again, this time almost angrily.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ she said, holding his eyes. ‘It’s me, remember?’

  He sighed, and pulled her back to him. ‘I know. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ll see you in the morning.’ His voice was sure but his eyes stared past her into the dusky winter afternoon. ‘It gets dark so early now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She leaned up and kissed him quickly, by the ear, so that she could not taste him too deeply, want him again, pull him to her and never let him go.

  Around them the airfield spread out in dereliction. ‘Look, Alec,’ she said. How much she wanted him to see that everything he feared had ceased to exist. There were no more ops to be flown. There were no Lancs to fly them. The dispersals were empty. The concrete runways and taxiways were broken up and full of weeds. It was all over.

  He was looking, but she didn’t know what he saw.

  ‘Look,’ she insisted, but instead he caught her in a close, fierce embrace and she felt herself melting, her mind changing. Again she saw the grey farmhouse, her home, and the green door. Out of sight, a baby was crying, on and on. My baby. Isabel jerked herself away from him. ‘Look!’ she told him, taking it all in with a sweep of her arm.

  ‘You know what, Issy, I’m going to try and slip you past the guardhouse,’ he replied instead. Now they were walking arm in arm, towards the wide-open entrance. There were brown tufts of last summer’s grass. He propelled her ahead of him through the desertion.

  ‘There’s no one on guard,’ she said.

  ‘The boys owe me a few favours,’ he answered.

  They were through, inside the airfield. Alec walked briskly.

  ‘We’re going to the mess,’ he said.

  He knew it was impossible. He knew as well as she did that he could never get her past the guardhouse and into the mess. Even wives had to live an hour’s drive from the airfield. He knew it, and so, she guessed, this time he must also see the dereliction that permitted it. He must know that there was no one to challenge him.

  They went into the mess, pushing aside the door which hung off its hinges. Others had been here before them. Sections of the lino had been cut up and taken away. There were no tables.

  The bar was still there. Alec leaned against it, taking a handful of coins from his pocket. She stared around as he rapped on the counter and ordered their drinks.

  ‘Not a bad band,’ he said. ‘We’ll dance, shall we, when you’ve finished your drink?’

  She watched dead leaves scuffling over the floor. All the windows were broken, and it was as cold in here as it was outside. It smelled of musty earth. Alec stood with her, calm, untroubled by the fact that they had no drinks in their hands. After a while he said, ‘Shall we dance?’

  They revolved for a while, to music Isabel couldn’t hear. It was easy enough to follow his lead as he steered her expertly, to avoid the other dancers. After a few minutes, he let go of her. He looked around, his face knitting with anguished bewilderment. She did not even dare, this time, to ask herself what he saw. She dropped her eyes as he struggled to regain his calm.

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ he said at last, ‘I must press on. Can you find your own way home?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  Chapter Nine

  ISABEL CUT THE cake and put a slice on Philip’s plate.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ She poured more tea for both of them and sat back. She was so tired. She yawned, stretching her arms and twisting her shoulders luxuriously as a shudder of fatigue went through her.

  ‘Early bed tonight,’ said Philip. He was getting this clipped way of talking to her. She supposed it came from keeping his surgeries to time when patients grew loquacious. How they must yearn to talk, stuck out on those lonely farms … She shuddered again and her eyes watered.

  ‘I’ll make some fresh tea,’ she said, getting up, but she stole a look at Philip over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen. He was bent over his slice of cake, cutting it absorbedly. She saw the dark sweep of his lashes. ‘No man should have eyelashes like that,’ she’d said to him the second time they went out. Or perhaps it was the third … He’d been surprised. He’d laughed awkwardly, as if he wasn’t sure it was a compliment, and she’d felt awkward too. The subject had lapsed. She’d understood then that you couldn’t tell a man to his face that he was handsome. There’d been other awkward moments before Isabel had learned what Philip liked her to say and what he didn’t. She was too impulsive. He liked her to be calm.

  What if she turned back to him now and said, ‘Here’s your tea. I spent this afternoon in a hut in the middle of the fields, with another man.’?

  ‘Isabel has a great deal of imagination,’ one of her school reports had said. ‘She must take care to distinguish between fact and fiction.’ Aunt Jean had frowned over that. She said nothing, but Isabel knew she’d been branded as a liar. The injustice of that report burned in her for years.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ Philip called through.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Leave all that. Come and have a look.’

  He led her through the front door, down the steps and to the car. The street was cold and dark, but when he opened the boot there was enough light from the street lamp for her to see a parcel filling the space, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. Philip took it out. ‘Here you are,’ he said, and laid it in her arms. It was soft and light. She looked over the bulk of it at Philip, smiling thanks, but at that moment she saw, beyond him, the landlady. Mrs Atkinson stood there with one hand on the railing and one foot on the bottom step. She was watching Isabel and Philip intently.

  Isabel had been on the point of pulling off the string to open the parcel, but now she said to Philip, ‘Let’s go inside.’ She raised her voice, so the landlady would hear her, and, sure enough, Mrs Atkinson went quickly up the steps and vanished inside the front door. Philip had noticed none of this.

  ‘All right,’ he said, a little disappointed. He had liked her eagerness to open his present.

  Isabel glanced up the staircase as they came in, but no one was there. Just the usual dank smell of polish, Jeyes Fluid and old food. It seemed so everyday, but she knew it wasn’t so. The house had tricked her before and it wanted to trick her again. She had the sense of a held breath. Something – or someone – was hungry. Their hunger wanted to grip Isabel and pull her in.

  ‘Lock the door, Philip,’ she said when they were back in the flat. ‘I left it on the latch
.’

  But the landlady had a key. What if Philip were to fix a bolt on the inside of their door? Isabel knelt by the hearth with the parcel. Carefully, she undid the string, rolled it up and unfolded the paper. Philip stood by, looking down on her as if she were a child opening her Christmas presents under the tree. A puffy mass of silk swelled out of the wrapping. It was an eiderdown, covered in roses and trellises of leaves.

  ‘I thought it would keep you warm,’ he said.

  The eiderdown expanded, pushing itself free. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘I had to go all the way to York,’ he said proudly.

  ‘You were in York today?’

  ‘Yes. I had to tell you a white lie, I’m afraid, Is, when I said I’d be out making calls.’

  ‘Oh … Did you go on your own?’

  ‘What an extraordinary question. Of course I did. Who on earth would I go with to buy an eiderdown?’

  ‘Fancy you having a secret.’

  ‘A nice secret, I hope. I had to order it. You won’t be cold now.’

  ‘No.’ She folded the eiderdown carefully, lifted it, and took it through to their bedroom. It billowed, unwieldy, as she spread it out. The roses were bigger and redder than any rose she’d ever seen. They rioted over the bed.

  ‘It looks very cosy,’ said Philip from the door.

  ‘Yes, it does. It was very clever of you, Phil. Thank you.’

  It was hideous. She could smoke in bed and set fire to it, perhaps.

  ‘I’ll leave you in a bed of roses in the mornings,’ he said, rather sentimentally. Philip never talked like this – what had come over him? Isabel busied herself with tucking in the sheets and patting everything smooth. But it was no good. Her hands hated the silky, insinuating touch of the eiderdown. She stood up and said, ‘There’s a good play on the wireless tonight. Let’s listen in.’