by Pat Barker
It took a great deal of reversing, and not a little shouting, before they were able to get out of the queue. Paul tried to persuade Elinor to lie on the bunk, but she said she couldn’t lie flat and so they sat, side by side, jolting and swaying as Dana swerved to avoid obstacles in the road. Lights flashed in the small windows and, once, there was a great clattering on the roof as more incendiaries fell—or perhaps it was just shrapnel from the ack-ack guns that seemed to have started up again, though Paul couldn’t remember hearing the sirens.
Nearer home, the orange glow in the windows faded to black, and he was glad of it. Not long after, the jolting and bumping stopped. Footsteps sounded along the side of the ambulance, then Dana opened the door and pulled down the steps. Paul helped Elinor down onto the black, glistening pavement. She looked around her, then up to the windows of her flat. Dana kissed her good-bye, Derek slapped Paul on the shoulder, and then the two of them set off to rejoin the queue outside Bart’s. Paul watched the red taillight diminishing into the dark, and the street seemed suddenly very quiet. The guns seemed to have stopped again, so probably it had been a false alarm.
Elinor was still looking up at the windows of her flat. There must have been times in the last few hours when she’d thought she wouldn’t see it again. Her hands were so cut and bruised he had to fish the keys out of her pockets while she stood holding her arms away from her body, as helpless as a small child.
He thought she might find the stairs difficult and got behind her to push, but she snapped: “It’s my hands, Paul. Not my feet.” A brief glimpse of the old Elinor that came as an enormous relief.
Once inside the flat he settled her onto the sofa, then went into the kitchen and filled the kettle for tea. He kept glancing through the open door. She was sitting hunched forward, though more upright perhaps than she had been in the hospital. Her hands were held straight out in front of her. When the kettle boiled, he added a generous dollop of brandy to the tea, and carried the mug through to her.
As she drank, he looked at her more closely. She had several cuts to her forehead, though none very deep. Her hands were worse than her face. He fetched a pillow and blankets from the bed, thinking, as he pulled the counterpane back, that he caught a whiff of Neville, but he couldn’t be sure and anyway it hardly mattered now. She snuggled into the blanket, but still wouldn’t lie down. She was sitting right on the edge of the sofa, trying now and then to flex her spine, but still with her shoulders rounded.
He kept assessing her, noticing symptoms in a completely detached way. At the same time, he was terrified of losing her, though he knew it wasn’t a rational fear. Most of this was shock. At times her eyes went completely blank. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, a thought was forming: that this helplessness of hers might be his opportunity. She needed him now; she’d have to take him back. Only then he looked up and caught her watching him. Not so fast. So she came and went: one moment, totally alert; the next, blank and limp.
“What happened?” he asked during one of her more alert spells. He knew she’d have to get it into words, probably tell the story over and over again, until its sting was drawn, but all he got back was a shrug. Too soon. So they sat in silence by the bluish light of the little popping gas fire until he thought he saw her eyelids start to droop. Then, just as she seemed about to drop off, she started awake again. “There were horses,” she said. “Galloping towards us. Their manes were on fire.”
Dray horses, they’d be. Probably shire horses, and they were huge. A brewery stables must have caught fire.
For a long time, it seemed that was all she was going to say. He warmed up a tin of soup, but she didn’t drink much of it. Her breathing seemed to be getting easier, though, and her color was definitely better. It might even be possible to get her to bed.
“I kept waving at him: Go back, go back.” She pushed her hands repeatedly against the air, and the movement brought on a fit of coughing. When it was over, she went on: “I could see the firemen were pulling out, but he didn’t seem to understand, he just kept coming, and then the wall came down and all I could see was smoke and…”
Silence, for a time. Did she know? Feeling his way forward, he asked: “Did you see him again?”
She shook her head. Then, obviously afraid of the answer, she asked, “Did Derek say anything?”
“No.”
“I hope he’s all right.”
Injecting scorn into his voice, he said: “ ’Course he’s all right! You know Neville—he’ll outlive God.”
She seemed willing to accept that, for the time being at least. He took the bowl and spoon from her. “You know, I think you’d be better off in bed.”
“Yes, I think I would.”
Leaning on his arm, she hobbled into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, while he knelt to take off her boots. She was shivering again, with shock or cold, so he got her under the blankets as fast as he could. It took several arrangements of all four pillows to get her comfortably propped up. “I’ll be next door if you need anything.” He hesitated. “You will call me, won’t you…?”
She nodded, without opening her eyes.
He went back into the living room, rolled up his overcoat to use as a pillow and stretched out on the sofa. It was too short for him, and lumpy besides—he doubted if he’d get much sleep. He closed his eyes, and saw shire horses galloping towards him with their manes on fire, as if the impossible had happened and the membrane dividing his brain from hers had become permeable. What lovers are supposed to want—except they weren’t lovers anymore.
Perhaps he’d nodded off, because it seemed only a second later that he felt a jogging at his elbow, and opened his eyes to find her bending over him.
“Oh for God’s sake, Paul, you can’t possibly sleep like that. Come on, get into bed…We are married, after all.”
That “married” was pure, unadulterated acid. Nevertheless, he got up and followed her.
Lying beside her on the bed he thought perhaps she’d drifted off to sleep, but then she said, “I keep seeing him walk towards me, you know that walk he has—and then that awful sound. It was like the building was screaming.” She turned her head and looked at him. “Why didn’t he go back?”
A long silence. He thought, hoped, she’d finished. So they lay, side by side, not speaking, not even looking at each other, while the long hours of darkness passed. He remembered the old couple on the bed, lying there as if they were stretched out on a tomb, with the silence spreading out around, while outside the fires raged and the bombs fell. How he’d pulled back the counterpane and found them holding hands. Elinor’s breathing was quieter now. Something of the tension had gone from her shoulders and neck. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. Perhaps he slept. Finally, towards dawn, he became aware that he was awake, and so was she. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I might get a little dog.”
“What?”
“Just a thought.”
He got out of bed and pulled the blackout curtains back. Sparrows were chirruping and fluttering in the gutters, there were footsteps and voices in the street below, a hum of traffic. Glancing back at the bed, he saw that Elinor was lying with one arm across her face. He waited a moment, hoping she’d take it away and look at him, but she didn’t. Then he pushed the windows open, as wide as they would go, letting in the clear, cold air of a new day.
THIRTY-SIX
Ever since the raids ended, she’d been recording the progress of the ruins. If she’d ever thought about ruins at all, before the destruction of her house, she’d have said they were static, unchanging, or if they did change, it would be the work of centuries, decades at least, of wind and rain and scouring ice. But these ruins changed week by week, even day by day. And so, every morning, she set out to draw them; she scribbled notes as well in the margins of the drawings, diary entries, or sometimes just lists, mainly lists of the flowers and plants she found growing in the gardens of wrecked houses, but also, increasingly, out of the walls of the derelic
t buildings themselves. There seemed to be no crack so narrow, no fissure so apparently barren, it couldn’t support the life of some weed or other. She even, as the days lengthened, became attached to particular plants: a clump of bright red flowers growing out of a sagging gutter, too high up to be identified, but bobbing about on the slight breeze, like the flowers in a mad woman’s hat. And then, a few doors down—although now there were no doors—a great pool of forget-me-nots caught in the hollow of a wall. Remember
These ruins were all close to home; gaps in terraces she’d known intimately as a student, walking every day to and from the Slade. There were far more impressive ruins surrounding St. Paul’s, most of those created in a single night: the night Kit Neville died. Her grief for Kit was unexpectedly sharp and deep, and she wasn’t ready to revisit the courts and alleys they’d walked down together on the night he died.
In good weather, she stayed out all day, filling one sketchbook after another, though she had no idea where this project might be leading, if indeed it was leading anywhere. It was some time now since she’d done a big painting. There’d been the dead child on the pavement, and another ambitious project after that: children queuing outside Warren Street Underground station to claim their family’s place on the platforms. Clark hadn’t liked either. “It’s not the quality of the work, it’s…” And his voice had trailed away into silence.
Every afternoon, around about five o’clock, she packed up and went home, sometimes stopping at one of the barrows at the corner of Store Street to buy vegetables for dinner. There wasn’t much choice, but the cauliflowers and carrots were usually all right. And the apples, though wizened and rather small, hardly bigger than crab apples, were good enough for apple pie. Tonight, she was cooking for two, which these days was quite a pleasant experience. Paul was coming to supper. They saw each other regularly, met for drinks or tea and buns, even went on outings to Kew Gardens or Richmond Park, often accompanied by that wretched little dog he’d bought, a brown-and-white Jack Russell terrier, rather unimaginatively called Jack—not even Russell, which might have been marginally better. She knew Paul would have liked more than occasional outings with her. He’d more than once hinted they should start thinking about living together again, but she’d grown to value her independence. Living alone is a skill, and she seemed to have reacquired it. She actually enjoyed having nobody but herself to consult. And yes, of course there were times when loneliness crept up and bit her on the backside, but she had plenty of teeth—and she was learning to bite back.
The barrow boys—always “boys” though some of them were old men—were mainly market gardeners from Kent. She’d got to know a few of them, though these, today, were new. Two men, one elderly, the other middle-aged—their profiles so similar they could only be father and son—and a ginger-haired boy, white-faced and gangly, with surprisingly big, raw hands. She watched him weighing potatoes, dropping one very small one into the pan to make up the weight. Then he poured them into a paper bag, twisting it briskly to produce two nice, neat ears, and handed it across to the customer. As he did so, he half turned towards her, and she saw that it was Kenny.
It couldn’t be.
But it was.
At last it was her turn to be served. She asked for a cabbage and a pound of apples. “Oh, and carrots,” she said, all the time staring at him, thinking: No. He’d grown, my God, he’d grown, and the shape of his face had changed, but he was at the age when boys do change—sometimes almost beyond recognition. He hadn’t noticed her yet. He was so busy scooping and weighing and pouring into bags and then giving the bags that final, expert twist. You could see the pride he took in his own skills. There he was: doing a proper job, earning money. In his own estimation, at least: a man among men.
When she came to pay, he looked her in the face for the first time, and suddenly blushed, shedding, in the process, several months of growth.
“Hello, Kenny.”
What to say next? We thought you were dead? Well, why not—it was true. Glancing over his shoulder—evidently chatting to the customers was not encouraged—he said, “Me mam couldn’t stick it in there, she couldn’t breathe, she got herself into a right old panic, we had to come out…”
She whispered, “Do you know how many people died?”
“Yes, I heard.”
“So what did you do?”
“Walked all the way to me nanna’s in Bermondsey. Then she got bombed and we got on the back of a lorry and went to Kent.” He kept looking over his shoulder. “And I got this job.”
“You’re busy.” She handed the money over. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
“Glad” wasn’t the word. She could have burst out singing.
At the corner, she stopped and looked back, watching him move on to the next customer, and the next. Then, smiling, she turned into Gower Street and began walking home, burdened by drawing pads and pencil cases and shopping bags, but still quickening her pace until she was almost running. She couldn’t wait to get home and tell Paul.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pat Barker is most recently the author of Toby’s Room and Life Class, as well as the highly acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the Booker Prize. She lives in the north of England.