Reeve-Ellis drives a Triumph Imperial, a big old car from the pre-Modernist early thirties with rusty wings and a vegetable smell inside given off by the cracked leather seats. It creaks and rattles as he drives, indicating fitfully, jerking from side to side along the night-empty London streets. He’s found me an old jacket to put over my shoulders, a doggy-haired tartan blanket to put across my legs. He got PC K2910 and T3308 to clean me up in the toilets of that deserted office before sending them home, although I’m still hardly presentable.
“Who was that phone call from?”
“After what you’ve been through, old man…” He says, stabbing at the brake as a taxi pushes ahead of us from a junction. “You really don’t want to know. Believe me. Just count yourself as bloody lucky…”
I get a glimpse of my face reflected in the windscreen. Red-eyed, shining with a cold sweat in the passing windows of the big shops along Oxford Street. I sway against the car door as he takes a corner too rapidly, the tyres squealing, and pain sweeps over me and London dims.
Reeve-Ellis finally parks his Triumph at the back of a clump of large buildings with flaking Regency windows, then climbs out and opens my door and waits for me to struggle out, clearly irritated by his new role as chauffeur. Viper’s nests of piping curl overhead. There are many dustbins. Steel tanks. The parched smell of incinerators.
He leads me through sheet-rubber swing doors into a long corridor where people are rushing, white on white in breezes of laundry starch and Dettol. He barks at a staff nurse. Clearly busy, she swivels to face him, ready to shout back until she sees the gold identity card he’s holding. Then I’m found a wheelchair, and borne into the presence of a doctor in what I suppose must be one of the London teaching hospitals. The doctor’s manner as he examines me is brisk and irritated. He explores my hand, my arm, without bothering to meet my eyes, and listens to my heart and lungs, then asks if I’m not under treatment already. Reeve-Ellis sits amid the kidney bowls on a corner table. Outside, I can hear the rumble of trolleys, the chatter of nurses, raised, angry voices. Life is, after all, still going on.
“You know how busy we are,” the doctor mutters. “Half the drunks in London have celebrated Trafalgar Day a day early…”
“Just get a move on,” Reeve-Ellis says, checking his watch. “There’s a good man. We need to be out of here. You can save the Hippocratic rubbish for someone else.”
Two extra nurses are summoned to hold me as the doctor unravels a gauze and prepares to set my fingers. One of them clicks her tongue as, gasping and sobbing, I sink to the floor and try to crawl away. “You men!” she chuckles, gathering me up as easily as a heap of laundry. “You’re all the same! You’ve got such a low threshold of pain…” The mole in her cheek is dotted with tiny dark hairs. I do my best to count them in the moment before the bandages whisper and the light on the ceiling pours down and through me.
It’s nearly dawn when Reeve-Ellis drives me back through London from the hospital. The street lights are fading and milkmen are leading their wagons from the dairy whilst vans and handcarts head towards Covent Garden, Smithfield and Billingsgate. A few night-time revellers wander home, trailing mists of silk, cigarette smoke, laughter. The brightening sky shines greyish-pink on the Thames as we cross Westminster Bridge and I swallow another of the new thicker tablets I’ve been given. They taste bitter. Sweet.
At the New Dorchester, the remnants of a fancy dress party are lingering. A Black Knight is clanking around in the remains of his armour whilst Robin Hood is arguing mildly about some aspect of room service with Reception. A body-stockinged Lady Godiva sleeps against Henry VIII’s shoulder on the stairs. They all glance at Reeve-Ellis and me without surprise as we move towards the lift. We fit in here, Reeve-Ellis and I. He’s come as what he is, and I’m a War veteran—or some symbol of the NHS—with my sling, my gaunt face, my hospital gown. Or perhaps I’m the last guest at The Masque Of The Red Death.
Reeve-Ellis punches the button for the lift. Instantly, it slides open.
“The message,” he says as the lighted numbers rise, “is that you carry on as before.”
“What?”
“Today, old man, you still get to see John Arthur…”
We arrive at my floor. He follows me to my room. The lights come on—far too bright—as he closes the door. The bed has been made and Tony Anderson’s half bottle of Bells has been put back in the cabinet, but otherwise nothing has changed since I left here a day ago. The nymphs still cavort across the ceiling. Saint George is at prayer in his forest.
“Get some rest,” Reeve-Ellis advises as he stands in the doorway and I wonder as the world spins if I shouldn’t spit at him, claw at his eyes. “Watch the parades on television. I’ll make sure that someone sees you’re sorted in time…”
“Those people—the photographs you showed me.”
“I don’t know.”
“And what about you?”
“Me?”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of what, old man?”
I gesture wildly about me, nearly falling. “Hell.”
“If there is a hell,” Reeve-Ellis says, reaching to grasp the handle of the door, “you and me, old man—we’d probably hardly notice the difference.” Then he closes the door, leaving me alone once again in my plush room here at the New Dorchester. My wristwatch on the bedside table has stopped ticking, but the electric clock on the wall tells me it’s just after six in the morning. I press the button that makes the balcony curtains open. Dawn light from the Thames ripples and flashes.
I make the effort to slide back the wardrobe doors with my left hand and check my suitcase. The scent of my rooms wafts from inside. Everything has been left so neatly that it’s almost a surprise to find that the pistol is missing. I take another of my new tablets and study the label on the bottle to compare them with my old ones. The handwriting is indecipherable, but how would my body react if I took both together? Six of each, perhaps, or ten? A round dozen of the older, smaller ones—if I could get the screw cap off? Would that be enough to do it? And the little anti-inflammatories, I could take a handful of those, too. The label says you should take them after meals, so they must be bad for your stomach. On the other hand, I really can’t face the idea of any more pain…
I gaze at the stained glass frieze of Saint George. There’s dragon’s blood, I notice now, on his praying gauntleted hands. I’ve been left alone—so perhaps they’re expecting this of me; a bid at suicide. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been given these tablets, and they’re simply watching to make sure that I make a proper job of it. But wouldn’t they have killed me already? Do they want me dead, alive, or stuffed and framed like some grisly hunting trophy when I’m presented to John Arthur? I’m still holding the new bottle. I throw it across the room with my clumsy left hand. Somehow, raining tablets as it describes a slow arc, it actually hits the stained glass frieze. But it bounces off with a dull clunk, nothing is broken, and the pain caused by the sudden excess of movement falls like a sledgehammer on my right hand.
Weeping, I scuttle across the floor, picking up tablets. Then I ease myself flat onto the bed, which is the only possible way I can lie with this sling. Beyond my windows, a barge sounds its horn and lozenges of light ripple and dance with the nymphs on the ceiling. Big Ben sounds the fall of another hour. I’d press the button on the headboard that makes the doors slide back, were I able to reach it from here. I’d like to smell the Thames on what feels like this last of all days; I’d love to hear it innocently lapping.
I think of clouds over the sheep-dotted Cotswold hills, dissolving into rain, forming springs and streams, then rivers with fairy-tale names like Windrush and Evenlode that swell and meet until, brown and wide, dipped by willow branches, punt-poles and the beaks of wading birds, twirling beer-bottles, dead leaves and blossom, hissing over weirs past the mouths of factories, the Thames finally reaches Oxford. There, as it passes beneath Osney Bridge and Aldgates, it is briefly called the Isis in honou
r of some forgotten Latin pun before it hurries on. Here in London, it has fostered trade, cholera, prosperity and the muse of a thousand poets. There were bonfires upon it in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, so hard did it freeze…
I see myself in front of a class of students, speaking these words. Francis Eveleigh is there—he’s a young boy, no more than ten, and for some reason his arm is in a sling. And Cumbernald, and Christlow, and Reeve-Ellis, and Walter and Ursula Bracken and my acquaintance and the many other faces that have filled my life are there also. I smile down at them as they sit with their scabbed elbows and knees, their grubbily cherubic faces and their whole lives an unspoilt territory before them. Mischief and the looming playtime are forgotten for a while as they listen. For once, my words carry us on together. I’m a teacher, I want to tell them through the tears that threaten to engulf me. That’s all I’ve ever been. These are my only moments of greatness. So listen, just listen. All I want to do is to tell you one last tale…
17
MONDAY 21 OCTOBER 1940. TRAFALGAR DAY. John Arthur’s fiftieth birthday, his silver jubilee. A bank holiday. The birthday, also, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of many reprobate poets the British have taken to their hearts once safely dead.
At nine, and under clearing skies even though the forecasts had remained doubtful, the church bells begin to ring out all across the country. There had been talk of rain coming in from the North Sea, driven down over Lincolnshire and across the Fens towards London on the tail of an ugly trough that had first been monitored two weeks before by the weather ship HMS Steerpike in the ice-floed waters of the Arctic. But that was just a tease. After a glorious summer of hard work and seemingly endless celebrations, no one ever doubted the perfect autumn day this would turn out to be.
By ten o-clock, as I attempt to turn over once more in my half-drugged haze, trestle tables are being laid in village halls or yet more hopefully on dew-damp greens from Mablethorpe to Montgomery, from Treviscoe to Nairn. Balloons are being inflated and jellies turned out onto plates as the same sun that has already warmed the celebrations in Bendigo, Porbandar and the Christmas Islands clears the last of the clouds overhead. Guardsmen are polishing their buckles and blancoing their straps whilst grooms feed and brush their shining mounts. We British are still unsurpassed at doing this sort of thing.
A steward and the hotel nurse are on hand to help me with the tricky process of bathing and dressing. This, I suppose, is what death must be like. The sleeplessness, the loss of care. Floating, white as angels, their sexless faces intermingle, and their words ebb and flow with the sigh of the river and the buzz of the air conditioning. Fluttering wings, brushing me with fingers, they lift and soap and powder and change me. Then I’m swaddled outside on my balcony in the honeyed light and the cool warmth of this Indian summer and brought late breakfast on a tray. The sightseeing barges drift by on the Thames. The people on board point and wave up at me; this small glimpse of age and mortality amid the New Dorchester’s steel and glass, its winged and muscled statuary. The eggs on my plate have been scrambled into solid little lumps, the bacon has been chopped into pieces that can easily be speared by my clumsily wielded fork. The toast comes in those oily strips that mothers the Empire over call Marmite soldiers. I’m amazed and faintly disgusted to find that I’m ravenously, salivatingly, hungry.
Gathered up like flocks of geese from the vast new airfields in Kent and Sussex as if to make yesterday’s air raid seem more real, the fighters and bombers begin to sweep over London in wave after droning wave. The day-trippers pouring in from Guildford and Luton and Stevenage and Chelmsford will be looking up at the skies as they emerge from the cast iron arches of the great London stations. The traffic across Westminster Bridge is heavy as Big Ben chimes midday and the first of the long salute of guns begins to sound in Hyde Park. Their boom—not twenty-one today, but fifty—resonates over London, across the great buildings of state and through the fresh river air, biting down into the dull dreadful ache of my right hand and the soft cushioning of the tablets that surround it, my sickness and my hunger. I feel the play of the wind on my face, and I hear the voices of angels; both the ministering ones who take my tray from me, and the grinding roar of the New Dorchester’s stone giants that lean across the water, attempting suicide or flight as they support these balconies. And boom, boom, boom… Those guns. It sounds like echoes of the Somme; the rumour of battle.
Then I’m helped back inside where my television set is glowing, giving off a smell of warm bakelite and electricity. My head is supported and my arm is rested in the chair that awaits me before it. I swallow more of the tablets and spread my legs to pee feebly into a surgical jar, feeling the surprising heat of my body bursting through to the glass. Yes, I’m still alive—and the ghosts of Empire are moving on the screen within the big cabinet. From Horse Guards Parade, past Admiralty Arch and along the Mall, comes an endless procession. The camera dances high in an airship’s gondola for a moment, and this massive show of might becomes the jerky movement of toys, then we are amid the seats that have been erected at the west corner of what was once St James’s Park. Below us, on either side of the great triumphal way that now leads to the landmark ruins of the Old Palace Gardens, and with the sunflashing fat diamond of New Buckingham Palace canted to the north, lies a vast heaving sea of hats. Those children who aren’t piggy-back above all the bowlers, trilbies, cloth caps, pill boxes and Queen Wallis’s favoured turbans are marked by cardboard periscopes, flags, balloons.
The parade is endless. Fizzing out at me from the television in shades of dizzy grey, it turns at Palace Gardens and marches back along the far side of the Mall, drums beating, trumpets blaring, hooves clopping, limp flags aloft. The Fourth Infantry. The Gurkhas. The Northamptonshire Youth Branch of the Empire Alliance. Bowler-hatted veterans from the War. Fresh-faced young lads performing bare-chested feats of gymnastics. The Metropolitan Police. The Knights of Saint George. They all cruise past the shuffling ranks of dignitaries like ships beside a gull colony. The Royal Marines Lilliburlero meets and clashes with the Boy’s Brigade’s Rule Britannia. John Snagge’s voice flows over it all; not so much a commentary as a litany. I search in vain for Christlow, for Tony Anderson, for PCs T3308 and K2910, for that stationmaster in summery Leicestershire, for my acquaintance. But everyone in the Empire is here, or sharing, like me, through these dizzying wires, the humming valves, the ever-dancing lines. We are all invited.
The King sits with the Queen beside him, fuzzy yet clearly visible in his white uniform, his white gloves. Pointedly, a gap still remains between him and Deputy Prime Minister Arkwright, who’s puffing at his pipe. It’s typical of the man to delay his entrance, but to do so on this of all days seems more like wilful arrogance than his usual humility. The slant that John Snagge’s putting on John Arthur’s delay, though, is the usual one of his being busy. There’s no sense of concern because nobody doubts that he will soon appear. I can well imagine, in fact, what a delicious luxury it must be for John Arthur to sit in the book-lined calm of his Downing Street study, working quietly through papers with swift strokes of the pen whilst the yearning sea-roar of a whole nation and Empire drifts through the sash windows. A final glance at the softly ticking clock, a dab of the blotter, a pleading peek around the door from a trusty aide as the waiting Rover thrums outside and the chauffeur grinds out his last cigarette. It’s hard to imagine a greater moment of power. Where to after this, Francis? Oh, Francis—despite everything, I almost feel as if I can almost understand…
Then he arrives. The cameras, startled, zoom, blur, fill with light. As the sunflash clears and the outlines on the screen begin to darken and gain shape, he’s there—John Arthur in a plain grey suit, white shirt and dark narrow tie, stepping carefully past a brace of feather-hatted Colonial Governors and Duchesses, then the EA Inner Circle of Smith, Mosley, Toller, Arkwright, his back slightly hunched like any late-comer at the local Gaumont as he settles into his seat beside the King and exchanges a brief word, smiling,
checking his programme. Even John Snagge is silent, and I can’t help but feel sorry for the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service who are passing the top of the Mall at this point with their bosoms wobbling in their cardigans, and for the Chelsea Pensioners who come after. Even here, a full mile away in this hotel, the air has become electric, crackling and yet silent beneath all this processional noise. Tens of thousands of hats, as if choreographed by some great ballet, have swivelled in just one direction. Every eye, every camera, and with it, the attention of the whole world, shifts. I hear my own throat make a sobbing noise. The word is whispered. He’s here. Here… At last… It fills us with the soft thickness of tears and longing.
The latter part of the parade is more military. It’s hard not to be impressed by grey-black tanks of such shining bulk that they leave burning trails behind them on the television, and artillery, and more aeroplanes, bombers this time, swooping low; perhaps the same tarpaulin-draped machines I saw at Penrhos Park. The sound of their engines reaches me first overhead, trembling the warm air through my balcony windows, then fading to a buzz only to rattle out once again from the television’s loudspeakers. Through everything, even in all the long minutes when he’s not on the screen, my thoughts remain fixed on that one distant figure, that pin-dot of a man who can be blocked out by an outstretched thumb, or covered by a fly as it wanders across the television glass. He seems so frail out there, so small. I keep asking how it’s possible for one man to change anything. And would I have killed him? I don’t know. I don’t know. Already, that dream seems as lost and remote as the Summer Isles.
The procession finally ends at half past four with a final massive boom, and gouts of cordite and tank exhaust threaded by streamers. Very Lights then begin to crackle over Hyde Park, softening up the skies in preparation for this evening’s barrage of fireworks. The sound of it washes out across all London, fading like the smoke into one single noisy fog. The air in my room is cooler now, and the sky outside my balcony doors is already darkening as members of the New Dorchester’s staff return to re-cosset me, their pale voices and fingers seeming to emerge from the screen. I fight them off for a final glimpse as the camera shifts once more towards John Arthur. He’s getting up from his seat now, making his way between a blur of other dignitaries, pausing momentarily, raising his hand towards the camera and the crowds to wave before he heads off to make the speech the BBC will broadcast live to the whole Empire and the fearfully listening world. I let out a yelp as my own right hand twists in sympathy.
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