The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Quite a brutal haircut you’ve had since your last visit, Chief Fire Officer. It reminds me of the heads of those statues from imperial Rome. Except that you don’t quite have the imperial nose.’

  ‘My nose was broken a few years ago.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘A difference of opinion with someone intent on buggering me.’

  ‘I take it he failed.’

  ‘He succeeded in breaking my nose. Is your conversation always like this?’

  ‘I find the English have a remoteness. It’s very dreary. Sometimes it amuses me to try to overcome it.’

  Finlay nodded. ‘Like a child smashing the ice on a pond.’

  ‘No, Chief Fire Officer. Not like a child at all.’

  For a moment the room was silent and still. London was dumb beyond the vaulted glass of the Absalom dome. Finlay was sensitive to how much the darkness impinged upon them all. He was suddenly and desolately aware of the soft, pale, flaccid life that was the only kind of life that thrived in darkness. He fancied he heard the drone of impending aircraft. Then he remembered that the atrium was soundproof. He listened again. It was the thrum of piped water under pressure.

  ‘Our plumbing hasn’t been what it was since it was connected to the new boiler or generator or whatever it was you had us install,’ said Rebecca Lange. ‘One of your conscientious objectors did the work. I might say, not very conscientiously.’

  Finlay did not reply.

  ‘Perhaps he thought the task unnecessary.’

  ‘As you did?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘For reasons I don’t understand, you use a lot of power in this building. You were generating that power with an engine that ran on petrol. Petrol is very volatile and the fumes it produces even more so. In Absalom House, you stored your petrol supplies in metal drums. It does not take a huge increase in the ambient air temperature to turn a drum filled with petrol and petrol fumes into a bomb. The diesel engine is much safer and should be just as efficient.’

  ‘Except that your conchie made such a shitty job of fitting it.’

  Finlay was aware of the problem. Most of the men who combined ability with good will towards war work were wearing a combat uniform, or were already engaged on essential projects. His own work timetable had got bogged down for lack of available manpower and tasks grudgingly carried out often by men without the skills to complete them adequately. He had discussed his schedule in detail with Grey as soon as he had assessed the buildings in his charge and set out his requirements and they had been sanctioned. Finlay had planned to work predominantly through the days while he checked on the progress of his fire precautions and then, on their completion, switch to nights, on permanent standby through the duration of the night raids. But it had not worked that way. It had not worked because sowing chaos and confusion was one of the principal objectives of the raids.

  ‘Jerry believes so utterly in order, he thinks that nothing enervates his enemy so much as random assault,’ Grey had said to him. ‘But we know that Jerry is not a random animal. These raids are planned. Targets are specific, charts plotted, missions logged and flightpaths painstakingly mapped.’

  ‘How does that help us?’

  ‘It doesn’t. Not without high-level infiltration.’

  ‘Which I take it we don’t have.’

  ‘We need something that will enable us to detect the massed bomb formations earlier.’

  ‘Better eyesight?’ Finlay said. ‘Sharper hearing? Clairvoyance?’

  But Grey had just smiled.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Rebecca Lange asked him now.

  ‘How nice it would be to go for a drink, Miss Lange. Just to stroll through the streets and find a pub and sit down and have a drink and a conversation.’

  ‘The English don’t have conversations. They have chats.’

  ‘I’d like a conversation. And a drink.’

  ‘If you are inviting me for those, you had better call me Rebecca and not Miss Lange.’ She stood. ‘What shall I call you?’

  ‘Anything but Chief Fire Officer,’ he said, standing. He was aware of the accelerated pulse of an artery pressing against his tunic collar. He put on his cap. ‘Just Finlay would be comfortable.’

  They stood there for a moment in the dark. He could feel her heat.

  ‘I am very sorry, Rebecca, for my conduct during our prior meeting.’

  ‘I am too, Finlay,’ she said. ‘I can on occasion be something of a bitch.’

  She was able to conjure a taxi from somewhere. He did not ask her how. He wanted to settle into the swift slipstream of the woman’s headlong momentum, not to hinder her impulsive progress with the sort of detail that had dogged his own every day since his unwilling delivery from the desert.

  ‘Rathbone Place,’ she told the driver.

  Lightless, almost blind, the car hugged the dark kerb as they crawled along Gresham Street and then nosed along Aldersgate and groped towards Clerkenwell Road. A light rain had started to fall and the cab windows were open an inch on either side of its passengers to prevent their breath from steaming the glass. Passengers as well as driver shared the responsibility of trying to navigate safely the hazards of the blacked-out city. Stretches of the journey were visited by a darkness so absolute that the sounds, and more particularly the smells, seemed acute and pressing in the confined space in which they travelled. Finlay was shockingly aware of his proximity to Rebecca Lange. He could smell her scent, hear her breathing, taste the lingering sweetness of Virginia tobacco on her breath. Once, the silk of her leg brushed the uniform serge of his thigh, sending a jolt of unexpected sensation through him.

  ‘Are we going to one of your regular haunts?’

  ‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘I cannot think in English, blind.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She found his arm and lightly squeezed his bicep. Then she squeezed it again, as if to check that the shape she had found through his sleeve really did have the familiar density of flesh. He felt her hand fall away.

  There was a bitter smell through Finlay’s inch of open window as their taxi fumbled along Theobalds Road. He recognized the odour of charred timbers from a fire put out by hoses. Burn and drench mingled in his nostrils with the smell of singed fabric and scorched paint. We must be passing a bomb site and its adjacent fire breaks, Finlay thought, feeling again the odd, vertiginous sensation he had felt passing a similar absence of mass on the Strand. It was forlorn and dizzying, as though a whole block, all its tumult and life, had been torn from there. He was forced in the profound darkness then to remind himself that buildings were just buildings and did not possess souls. The car trundled up New Oxford Street to the junction with Charing Cross Road. Throughout the journey, both passengers had been sitting in thrall to the sound of the air-raid siren. Everyone did everything by night sensitive to the siren’s drear, despairing wail. So when they turned right off Oxford Street, into the dead-end of Rathbone Place and it had not come, Finlay wondered if Rebecca shared the same sense of exhilaration as he did at their freedom so far from the huddle and tedium of sheltering from bombs.

  ‘Account,’ she whispered to the driver after they had got out and closed the door. Finlay could just see the man nod as he put the cab back into gear and receded without payment into the surrounding darkness. Faintly, Finlay thought that he could hear piano music. He followed the click of Rebecca Lange’s heels to a door. She pushed against the door, which opened on to a tiny vestibule. She closed the door behind them, adjusting its heavy black-out curtain. Then she pulled open a second door, opposite the first, and they went through it, emerging from their closeted space into the full sound and antic fury of a crowded London pub.

  Crowded was not quite right, Finlay thought, as they found a small table and two chairs, easily enough, against a broad drape of black-out curtain on the far side of the bar from the entrance they had used. The bar itself was four deep with shouts and gesticulation, but the pub’s hinterland, in contrast, was p
opulated by small huddles and the odd lone drinker. Finlay went and fetched them each a drink. His first impression had been created, he realized, by the sheer flamboyance and disparity of the individuals who made up the throng at the bar. There was a woman there with a monocle screwed into one eye socket. She was smoking a cigarette through an amber holder the length and thickness of a crochet needle and wore her hair not much longer than a man would. He noticed that almost none of the men wore a tie. They reminded him a little of a group of Polish pilots he had seen on home leave in a pub in Crosby, the Poles regulars there while they learned to fly British fighters at the Freshfield aerodrome. Except that the Poles had worn their clothes better pressed and had been clean-shaven and buffed their shoes to a shiny brilliance before they ever left their barracks. A woman in a tight dress of orange leopardskin and a grey fur stole whistled from the bar at Rebecca Lange and then winked. The whistle made one or two heads turn and Finlay saw nods of acknowledgement and greeting which Rebecca responded to with a wave.

  ‘What’s the occasion?’ he said as he sat.

  Rebecca took a cigarette from a packet in her bag and tapped it on the table-top. He realized that she was waiting for him to light it for her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t carry matches.’

  She took a gold lighter from her bag and lit the cigarette herself and blew out smoke. ‘Occasion?’

  ‘Event. Celebration.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘There are as many women here as men.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is a public house.’

  She looked at him through eyes narrowed by smoke. Then she laughed, wagging a finger. ‘I should have spotted the accent. The flat vowel sounds. Remiss of me. You are a northern boy, aren’t you, Finlay? A provincial.’

  Finlay felt himself stiffen and then made an effort to relax. Perhaps she was entitled to a joke at his expense. He leaned across the table, confidentially. ‘Tell me. Did they ever catch that Jack the Ripper?’

  She leaned towards him with a conspiratorial look on her face but was interrupted by a scrape of chair leg and the bulk of someone sagging into a seat next to hers and whatever it was she had intended to say stayed unspoken.

  ‘Becks,’ the man said. He was big-faced and florid and breathing heavily. There was beer, wet between the fullness of his short upper lip and his nose. Then Finlay saw that it was not beer, but sweat. Aware of Finlay’s scrutiny, the man turned to him and gave him the slightest of nods, taking Finlay in for much longer than the duration of the nod.

  ‘Becks,’ the man said again. One syllable was enough to spell Dublin to Finlay.

  ‘Darling,’ Rebecca said. She squeezed the shoulder nearest her through the man’s overcoat and a smile jabbed in his face. He took her cigarette packet out of her bag and picked up her lighter from the table, lit the cigarette and dropped the lighter into his pocket. Finlay put the heels of his hands against the table to rise but Rebecca covered one of them with hers as she tilted her head at him slightly and smiled. Finlay emptied his weight back into his chair. The man exhaled in Rebecca’s direction.

  ‘I don’t think your pretty new pal likes me,’ he said.

  Rebecca said nothing. She squeezed Finlay’s fingers. The thrill of her touch mingled in him with dissipating fury.

  ‘Pretty boy would probably like to knock my teeth so far down my throat that I’ll be chewing the rest of my life through my arsehole,’ the Irishman said.

  Finlay breathed and said nothing.

  ‘Pretty lost his tongue?’

  ‘I’m sure you’d rather suck than chew.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Rebecca said.

  Finlay turned to her. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’

  ‘A Liverpool man.’ the Dubliner said. ‘Am I right in thinking you’ve an Orange Lodge in Liverpool?’

  ‘Stop it, please,’ Rebecca said.

  Finlay looked at the Dubliner. ‘Am I right in thinking that the first bomb exploded in this country in this war was an Irish bomb, planted by Republicans outside a Bayswater shop?’

  The Dubliner stared and smoked. ‘Whiteley’s of Bayswater. Hardly a mere shop.’ He picked up Finlay’s glass and drained it. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  The Dubliner rose to his feet and lumbered away.

  Finlay reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold Dunhill lighter. He smiled and slid it back to its owner across the table.

  ‘How on earth did you do that?’

  ‘You need to go to the right school. Is that character really a friend of yours?’

  ‘He is quite charming sober. And he’s a wonderful writer. You should read him. Once there’s paper for books again, he’s bound to attract a major publisher.’

  ‘They’ll be publishing him posthumously if his manners don’t improve.’

  Rebecca laughed. ‘What is an Orange Lodge?’

  Finlay sighed. ‘In nineteen-sixteen, my father was killed in France, fighting for this country. Three years later, his widow’s mother was evicted from her home in a Tipperary village by a British army of occupation. It’s quite possible men my father served with put her cottage to the torch. What’s certain is that men risked their lives trying to bring my father back to our lines as he died in no-man’s-land of his wounds. History is more complicated than that writer fellow thinks. Perhaps he ought to read more. What’s the matter?’

  Rebecca was looking at him with an expression of amazement.

  ‘That’s the first thing I’ve heard you say that wasn’t connected with fire prevention,’ she said.

  Finlay laughed. He could not remember the last time he had laughed and doing so now felt like a kind of liberation. When he looked, Rebecca was smiling at him and he saw a release in the smile that had not been there before. Maybe tonight they would be spared the caterwaul of the air-raid siren. As he rose to fetch fresh drinks from the bar, he was surprised at how ardent was his wish for that release.

  ‘There’s still the matter of your atrium,’ Finlay said.

  ‘Ah. My atrium. I knew there would be a point, Chief Fire Officer, at which we would have to come back to that.’

  The pads of his fingers searched for and found the geometric cuts in the crystal of his whisky tumbler. A feeble night light in an ocean of darkness suggested a tiny rectangle of gold in the motioning surface of his drink. Somewhere within himself, Finlay knew that he was trying to summon pain to his still tender hands to bring sobriety. He put the drink down on the low glass table separating him from Rebecca Lange.

  ‘I ought to go.’

  ‘Yes. You ought. I’d go further and say you ought to have gone.’

  ‘You know – of course you know – your English is almost perfect.’

  She laughed. Her laughter was heavy with tobacco and drink. ‘Don’t insult me with almost.’

  ‘You smoke too much.’

  ‘Everyone smokes too much. It’s the Benzedrine. It’s the times in which we live.’

  ‘Your use of the word “provincial” gives you away. Gave you away tonight, at least.’

  ‘It was last night.’

  ‘“Provincial” is an adjective in England. Rarely a noun.’

  For a time she said nothing. Then, ‘That must have been a formidable school you attended, Finlay.’

  They had left The Wheatsheaf and drifted between other north Soho pubs: The Fitzroy Tavern, The Marquis of Granby, The Black Horse. The same shabby, disparate, dandified mood prevailed in each of these places. It seemed to Finlay as though their clientele drank with an air of gloomy defiance, as though there was something heroic in getting properly drunk in the black-out’s fugitive, miserly light, shuttered and still vulnerable at the defenceless heart of the city. Finlay did not find the mood contagious. His last, abbreviated evening in a pub had been with Albert Cooper in The Windmill, where Albert had told him thirsty fire fighters found the insipid beer and even the glasses they
drank it from in short supply at the end of their shifts. So Finlay did not share what he assumed to be the prevailing conviction among the men in the pubs Rebecca took him to. He did not think wearing an open-neck shirt while you drank too much an act of gallantry or subversion. But he did, for the night, enjoy the company that Rebecca provided and the company she kept. He had not spent time before with such talkative, picturesque people and he appreciated their novelty.

  Over their last drink, late, at a pub called The Highlander, Finlay asked Rebecca where it was she lived. He offered to walk her home and she accepted. There was enough starlight, through a skein of high cloud, for them to see by. Finlay was still educating his eyes to the absence of light and could make little but abstract geometries of the edgings of silver he saw on slate, marble, iron and stone. But Rebecca was expert at reading the dark and she guided them confidently to their destination.

  Her home occupied the top floor of a four-storey block behind the British Museum. An enclosed stone staircase zigzagged up to her door. Ascending the steep steps, Finlay was reminded of Grey’s assertion that these days all the significant people lived in holes in the ground. Rebecca locked the door behind them and then illumination crept with a hiss around the walls, defining the dimensions of the space they were in. Finlay turned and saw Rebecca adjusting a tap on the wall.

  ‘Gas lanterns,’ she said.

  He looked around. The room seemed enormous after the black claustrophobia of the streets. His senses returned swiftly, but the space was still much bigger than the average sitting-room. Its furniture seemed to Finlay very much at one with the Barcelona chair. The floor was teak and scattered with rugs, and pictures, thick with pigment, portrayed a world wholly unfamiliar to him on her otherwise bare walls.

  Rebecca went over to a gramophone player, hitched her skirt and sat on her haunches sifting through the piles of records scattered underneath it. The long and slender outline of her thigh curved hard against her skirt and her skirt hugged tightly across her hips. Her hair had fallen forward and as she shuffled through the record sleeves, all that Finlay could see of her face was the pale set of her jaw and her painted mouth, moving in silence as she read the titles to herself.