To Say Nothing of the Dog

by Connie Willis

  The boy darted out. The sergeant picked up the phone. “Have you seen a young woman with red hair?” I said before he could dial the fire brigade.

  He shook his head, holding his hand over the receiver. “Most likely place she’d be is in one of the shelters.”

  A shelter. Of course. The logical place to be during an air raid. She’d have had more sense than to stay out in this. “Where’s the nearest shelter?”

  “Down Little Park Street,” he said, cradling the phone. “Go back along Bayley and turn left.”

  I nodded my thanks and took off again. The fires were getting closer. The whole sky was a smoky orange, and there were yellow flames shooting up in front of Trinity Church. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky, which was getting brighter by the moment. It was getting colder, too, which seemed impossible. I blew on my icy hands as I ran.

  I couldn’t find the shelter. A house had taken a direct hit in the middle of the block, a mound of smoking rubble, and next to it, a greengrocer’s shop was on fire. Everything else in the street was silent and dark.

  “Verity!” I shouted, afraid I’d hear an answer from the rubble, and started back up the street, looking closely for a shelter sign on one of the buildings. I found it, lying in the middle of the road. I looked around helplessly, trying to determine which direction the blast might have blown it from. “Hello!” I shouted down stairway after stairway. “Is anyone there?”

  I finally found it at the near end of the street, practically next to the cathedral, in a half-basement that offered no protection from anything, not even the cold.

  It was a small, grubby room without any furniture. Possibly two dozen people, some of them in bathrobes, were sitting on the dirt floor against the sandbag-lined walls. A hurricane lamp hung at one end from a beam, swaying wildly every time a bomb landed, and under it a small boy in earmuffs and pajamas was playing a game of cards with his mother.

  I scanned the dimness, looking for Verity, even though she obviously wasn’t there. Where was she?

  “Has anyone seen a girl in a white nightgown?” I said. “She has red hair.”

  They sat there as if they hadn’t heard me, looking numbly ahead.

  “Have you any sixes?” the little boy said.

  “Yes,” his mother said, handing him a playing card.

  The bells of the cathedral began to chime, ringing out over the steady roar of the ack-ack guns and the whoosh and crump of the high explosives. Nine o’clock.

  Everyone looked up at the sound. “That’s the cathedral’s bells,” the little boy said, craning his neck at the ceiling. “Have you any queens?”

  “No,” his mother said, looking at her hand and then at the ceiling again. “Go fish. That’s how you know our cathedral’s all right, if you can hear the bells.”

  I had to get out of here. I plunged out the door and up the steps to the street. The bells rang out brightly, chiming the hours. They would do that all night, tolling the hours, reassuring the people of Coventry, while the planes droned overhead and the cathedral burned to the ground.

  The knot of people had moved across the street from the south door for a better view of the flames shooting up from the cathedral roof. The two youths were still at their lamp-post. I ran up to them.

  “It’s no good,” the tall one was saying. “They’ll never get it out now.”

  “I’m looking for a young woman, a girl—” I said.

  “Ain’t we all?” the short one said, and they both laughed.

  “She has red hair” I persisted. “She’s wearing a white nightgown.”

  This, of course, got a huge laugh.

  “I think she’s in one of the shelters round here, but I don’t know where they are.”

  “There’s one down Little Park,” the tall one said.

  “I’ve already been to that one,” I said. “She’s not there.”

  They both looked thoughtful. “There’s one up Gosford Street way, but you’ll never get there,” the short one said. “Land mine went off. Blocked the road.”

  “She might be in the crypt,” the tall one said, and, at my expression, said, “The cathedral crypt. There’s a shelter down there.”

  The crypt. Of course. Several dozen people had taken shelter down there the night of the raid. They’d stayed down there till eleven while the cathedral burned over their heads, and then been led out up the outside steps.

  I tore past the gawkers to the south door and up the steps. “You can’t go in there!” the woman in the kerchief shouted.

  “Rescue squad,” I shouted back and ran inside.

  The west end of the church was still dark, but there was more than enough light in the sanctuary and the chancel. The vestries were ablaze, and the Girdlers’ Chapel and, above, the clerestories were pouring out bronze colored smoke. In the Cappers’ Chapel, flames were licking at the oil painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Burning pages from the order of service were floating above the nave, drifting and dropping ash.

  I tried to remember the layout from Lady Schrapnell’s blueprints. The crypt lay under the St. Lawrence Chapel in the north aisle, just to the west of the Drapers’ Chapel.

  I started up the nave, ducking the fiery orders of service and trying to remember where the steps were. To the left of the lectern.

  Far forward, in the choir, I caught a glimpse of something moving.

  “Verity!” I shouted and ran up the nave.

  The figure flitted through the choir toward the sanctuary. I caught its flash of white among the choir stalls.

  Incendiaries clattered on the roof, and I glanced up and then back at the choir. The figure, if it had been a figure, had disappeared.Above the entrance to the Drapers’ Chapel, an order of service, caught in the updraft, danced and dipped.

  “Ned!”

  I whirled around. Verity’s faint voice seemed to come from behind me and far away, but was that a trick of the superheated air in the church? I ran along the choir. There was no one there or in the sanctuary. The order of service twirled in the draft from the Drapers’ Chapel and then caught fire and sank, burning, onto the altar.

  “Ned!” Verity shouted, and this time there was no mistaking it. She was outside the church. Outside the south door.

  I tore out and down the steps, shouting her name, past the roof-watchers and the lamp-post-loungers. “Verity!”

  I saw her almost immediately. She was halfway down Little Park Street, talking earnestly to the stout ARP warden, the skirt of her torn long white dress trailing behind her.

  “Verity!” I called, but the din was too great.

  “No, you don’t understand,” she was screaming at the warden. “I don’t want a public shelter. I’m looking for a young man with a mustache—”

  “Miss, my orders is to clear this area of all civilians,” the warden said.

  “Verity!” I shouted, practically in her ear. I grabbed her arm.

  She turned. “Ned!” she said, and flung herself into my arms. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “Ditto,” I said.

  “You’ve got no business being out here,” the warden said sternly. There was a whistle, and a long drawn-out scream, during which I couldn’t hear what he said. “This area is for official services only. Civilians aren’t supposed to be—” There was a sudden deafening bang and the warden disappeared in a shower of dust and bricks.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Warden! Warden!”

  “Oh, no!” Verity said, waving her hands as if trying to push the billowing dust aside. “Where is he?”

  “Under here,” I said, digging frantically through the bricks.

  “I can’t find Him,” Verity said, tossing bricks aside. “No, wait, here’s his hand! And his arm!”

  The warden shook her arm off violently and stood up, brushing dust off the front of his coveralls.

  “Are you all right?” we both said in unison.

  “Of course I’m all right,” he said, coughing, “no thanks to you! Ci
vilians! Don’t know what you’re doing. Could have killed someone, throwing bricks about like that. Interfering with the official duties of the ARP is an infraction punishable by—”

  Planes began to drone overhead again. I looked up. The sky lit up with sharp flashes, and there was another, closer scream of a whistle.

  “We’d better get out of this,” I said. “Down here!” and pushed Verity ahead of me down a basement stairway and into the narrow shelter of a doorway.

  “Are you all right?” I shouted, looking at her. Her hair had come down on one side, and her torn dress was streaked with soot. So was her face, and her left hand had a smear of blood on it. “Are you hurt?” I said, lifting it.

  “No,” she said. “I hit it on one of the arches in the church. It was dark, and I couldn’t s-see where I was going.” She was shivering. “How can it be so c-cold when the whole c-c-city’s on fire?”

  “Here,” I said. “Put this on.” I took off the raincoat and wrapped it round her shoulders. “Courtesy of T.J.”

  “Thanks,” she said shakily.

  There was another crash, and dirt rained down on us, I pulled her farther back into the doorway and put my arms around her. “We’ll wait till this lets up a bit, and then go back to the cathedral arid get out of this and back to a warmer climate,” I said lightly, trying to make her smile. “We’ve got a diary to steal and a husband to find for Tossie. You don’t suppose there’s somebody around here who’d be willing to exchange all this,” I waved my arm at the firelit sky, “for baby talk and Princess Arjumand? No, I suppose not.”

  The effect wasn’t quite what I wanted. “Oh, Ned,” Verity said, and burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “I know I shouldn’t be making jokes in the middle of a raid. I—”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that. Oh, Ned, we can’t go back to Muchings End. We’re stuck here.” She buried her face against my chest.

  “Like Carruthers, you mean? They got him out. They’ll get us out, too.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” she said, looking tearfully up at me. “We can’t get to the drop. The fire—”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “The tower didn’t burn. It and the spire were the only things that didn’t. And I know that dragon from the Flower Committee’s guarding the west door, but we can get there from the south—”

  “The tower?” she said blankly. “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t come through in the tower?”

  “No. In the sanctuary. I stayed there for nearly an hour, hoping it would open again, and then the fires started, and I was afraid the fire watch would catch me, so I went outside and looked for you—”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I knew you’d come as soon as you found out where I was,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “But—” I said, and decided not to tell her we’d tried to get here for two weeks and hadn’t been able to even get close.

  “—and when I got back to the church, the sanctuary was on fire. And the net won’t open onto a fire.”

  “You’re right,” I said, “but we don’t need it to. I came through in the tower, which only got a bit scorched. But we need to be able to get through the nave to the tower, so we’d better go.”

  “Just a minute,” she said. She pulled the raincoat on over her arms and then took the tie belt off and used it to hitch her ripped, trailing skirt up to knee-length. “Will I pass for 1940 now?” she said, buttoning the coat.

  “You look wonderful,” I said.

  We went up the stairs and back toward the cathedral. The east end of the roof was blazing. And the fire brigade had finally arrived. A fire engine was parked on the corner, and we had to step over a tangle of hoses and orange-lit puddles to get to the south door.

  “Where are the firemen?” Verity asked as we reached the knot of people by the south door.

  “There’s no water,” a ten-year-old boy in a thin sweater said. “Jerries got the water mains.”

  “They’ve gone round to Priory Row to find another hydrant.”

  “No water,” Verity murmured.

  We looked up at the cathedral. A good part of the roof was blazing now, shooting up in sparks at the near end near the apse, and there were flames in the blown-out windows.

  “Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral,” a man behind us said.

  The boy tugged at my arm. “She’s goin’, ain’t she?”

  She was going. By ten-thirty, when they finally found a working hydrant, the roof would be completely ablaze. The firemen would attempt to play a hose on the sanctuary and the Lady Chapel, but the water would give out almost immediately, and after that it would just be a matter of time as the roof blazed and the steel rods J.O. Scott had put in to prevent strain on the arches began to buckle and melt in the heat, bringing the Fifteenth-Century arches and the roof down on the altar and the carved misereres and Handel’s organ and the wooden cross with the child kneeling at its foot.

  Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral. I had always put it in the same class as the bishop’s bird stump—an irritating antiquity—and there were certainly more beautiful cathedrals. But standing here now, watching it burn, I understood what it had meant to Provost Howard to build the new cathedral, modernist-ugly as it was. What it had meant to Lizzie Bittner not to see it sold for scrap. And I understood why Lady Schrapnell had been willing to fight the Church of England and the history faculty and the Coventry City Council and the rest of the world to build it back up again.

  I looked down at Verity. Tears were running silently down her face. I put my arm around her. “Isn’t there something we can do?” she said hopelessly.

  “We’ll build it back up again. Good as new.”

  But in the meantime we had to get back inside and into the tower. But how?

  This crowd would never let us walk into a burning church, no matter what pretext I thought up, and the west door was being guarded by a dragon. And the longer we waited, the more dangerous it would be to get across the nave to the tower door.

  There was a sound of clanging over the din of the ack-acks. “Another fire brigade!” someone shouted, and in spite of the fact that there was no water, everyone, even the two lamp-post-loungers, ran off toward the east end of the church.

  “This is our chance,” I said. “We can’t wait any longer. Ready?”

  She nodded.

  “Wait,” I said, and tore two long strips from the already-ripped hem of her dress.

  I stooped and dipped them in the puddle left by one of the hoses. The water was ice-cold. I wrung them out. “Tie this over your mouth and nose,” I said, handing her one. “When we get inside, I want you to head straight for the back of the nave and then go along the wall. If we get separated, the tower door’s just inside the west door and to your left.”

  “Separated?” she said, tying on the mask.

  “Wind this round your right hand,” I ordered. “The door handles may be hot. The drop’s fifty-eight steps up, not counting the floor of the tower.”

  I wrapped my hand in the remaining strip. “Whatever happens, keep going. Ready?”

  She nodded, her greenish-brown eyes wide above the mask.

  “Get behind me,” I said. I cautiously opened the right side of the door a crack. No flame roared out, only a billow of bronze-colored smoke. I reared back from it and then looked inside.

  Things weren’t as bad as I’d been afraid they might be. The east end of the church was obscured by smoke and flames, but the smoke was still thin enough at this end to be able to see through, and it looked like this part of the roof was still holding. The windows, except for one in the Smiths’ Chapel, had been blown out, and the floor was covered with shards of red and blue glass.

  “Watch out for the glass.” I pushed Verity ahead of me. “Take a deep breath and go! I’m right behind you,” I said and opened the door all the way.

  She took off running, with me right behind her, flinching away from the hea
t. She reached the door and yanked it open.

  “The door to the tower’s to your left!” I shouted, though she couldn’t possibly have heard me above the furious roar of the fire.

  She stopped, holding the door open.

  “Go up!” I shouted. “Don’t wait for me!” and started to sprint the last few yards. “Go up!”

  There was a rumble, and I turned and looked toward the sanctuary, thinking one of the clerestory arches was collapsing. There was a deafening roar, and the window in the Smiths’ Chapel shattered in a spray of sparkling fragments.

  I ducked, shielding my face with my arm, thinking in the instant before it knocked me to my knees, “It’s a high explosive. But that’s impossible. The cathedral didn’t sustain any direct hits.”

  It felt like a direct hit. The blast rocked the cathedral and lit it with a blinding white light.

  I staggered up off my knees, and then stopped, staring out across the nave. The force had knocked the cathedral momentarily clear of smoke, and in the garish white afterlight I could see everything: the statue above the pulpit engulfed in flames, its hand raised like a drowning man’s; the stalls in the children’s chapel, their irreplaceable misereres burning with a queer yellow light; the altar in the Cappers’ Chapel. And the parclose screen in front of the Smiths’ Chapel.

  “Ned!”

  I started toward it. I only got a few steps. The cathedral shook, and a burning beam came crashing down in front of the Smiths’ Chapel, falling across the pews.

  “Ned!” Verity cried desperately. “Ned!”

  Another beam, no doubt reinforced with a steel girder by J.O. Scott, crashed down across the first, sending up a blackish swell of smoke that cut off the whole north side of the church from view.