The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Wonderful stuff, tea,’ Grey said, and Finlay thought to himself. ‘Amazing what men can accomplish on a humble mug of tea. Even on the promise of tea.’

  ‘My father was there,’ Finlay said, surprised at himself for saying it. The two men had stopped walking. ‘My father was at the front. In France.’

  ‘I know he was,’ Grey said. ‘Your father fell among the many brave Irish, men and boys, who fell at Beaumont Hamel. He is buried at Thiepval and I believe you have visited the grave twice, with your mother and your brother Tom, the first time in ’thirty and then again in ’thirty-six.’

  ‘The second visit was in ’thirty-five,’ Finlay said. ‘My mother is a student of politics, as I’m sure you also know, and she saw the war coming. We went in ’thirty-five, because she said she didn’t know when we’d be able to go again.’

  ‘We are arranging for you to see your mother,’ Grey said. They were walking again, Grey as always setting the pace of their progress. ‘For practical purposes, you cannot leave London. For the purposes of this visit, you can spend a day somewhere on the Kent coast. It’s only a day return on the railway. But in the circumstances, it’s the best we can offer.’

  ‘I’m grateful.’

  They walked a while in silence. Abruptly, Grey let out a bark of laughter.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was just thinking. About tea. Men will do almost anything for tea, Finlay. But what men will do for a ration of rum is the devil’s own business.’

  The Prospect of Whitby looked exactly the same. Probably it wore more dust, more detritus, in its old folds of brick and wood than it had before the conflict. And the river, low and still at its back, was a black puddle sunk under vaunting wharfs. The damage to the broken line of warehouse buildings on the far bank seemed no greater or less to Finlay than it had the last time he had been here. He felt that he should have been able to take comfort in the pub, standing mullioned, four-square and staunch. Or if not in the pub, then in the river and its vast, rhythmic indifference to the passage of time and the machinations of men. His mind sought permanence, but failed to find its buttressing strength. He had entirely lost his appetite and entered the pub feeling only a dark thirst for beer.

  ‘Would you really intern her?’

  Grey had pushed away his breakfast things and propped his elbows on the table. His chin rested on one thumb and a cigarette burned between his fingers. Finlay looked beyond him, out of the window at the barque, stranded, he thought now, rather than berthed, at its mooring there. The big sail, half-heartedly gathered in, sagged under its weight of soot. The rigging and the deck were black. The question had arrived without preamble. It hadn’t needed any. She was, after all, a large part of what they had in common.

  ‘Well? Would you?’

  ‘Maybe I said that for effect.’

  ‘That’s not helpful,’ Grey said. ‘Saying things for effect.’

  ‘You lot do it all the time.’

  ‘Her mother is Polish,’ Grey said.

  ‘A countess, I suppose.’

  ‘No. But a wealthy and vociferous patriot.’

  Finlay didn’t say anything. He drank more beer. It was his second pint and was going down with a dark, easy insistence. His belly was empty, but the beer was filling it.

  ‘Her mother lives in Chicago,’ Grey said, ‘a city whose population includes a great many residents of Polish origin. Some of them, and these are her friends, remember, hold considerable political sway. All of them are angry and indignant about what has happened to their homeland. We’re in a bit of a fix. We need all the American help we can get. You can see why gaoling Sophia Lange’s daughter might prove counter-productive.’

  Finlay didn’t say anything. He was wondering at what point, in Grey’s mind, a bit of a fix got bad enough to merit serious words.

  ‘Do you really think that she’s a security risk?’

  ‘Like I said before, I am not qualified to judge.’

  Grey picked a stray tobacco fragment from between his lower teeth. Finlay looked over Grey’s shoulder, thinking, it’s a funeral ship. That’s what it is.

  ‘Are you planning to see her again?’

  ‘Yes,’ Finlay said. ‘Since you don’t intend to intern her in the meantime, I’m going out for a drink with her tomorrow night.’

  Grey said nothing. He frowned and looked at his wristwatch.

  ‘When do I get to see my mum?’

  ‘Early next week. Will you sleep with Rebecca Lange?’

  ‘If I can. I like women.’

  ‘Yes. Well. She’s certainly one of those.’ Grey looked over Finlay’s shoulder into the gloomy body of the bar and widened his eyes in the slightest of acknowledgements. Finlay turned and saw a figure standing in the at-ease posture in a double-buttoned camel coat, almost a silhouette in a sudden mote of sunlight cast through one of the window panels at his back. It occurred to Finlay then that Grey’s driver, whom he had seen previously only at the wheel of Grey’s Bentley, had the build and carriage of a prize-fighter. He turned to look again at Grey, whose green eyes flamed and flickered in the beam of sudden brightness.

  Grey said, ‘Do you remember much about your father?’

  ‘Not much. A little. I was four when he went away to fight and six when he was killed, so I don’t remember much.’

  ‘It must be a tall order to be the son of a hero.’

  ‘They were all heroes,’ Finlay said. ‘You of all people should know that.’

  ‘They didn’t all win medals. I’ve read the citation, Finlay. Your father was a hero all right.’

  Finlay said nothing. He could sense the bulk and menace of the figure in the shifting motes of pub light to his rear. He could smell the yellow insistence of the powdered egg scrambled on Grey’s discarded breakfast plate, mingling with the odour of dead cigarettes in his ashtray.

  ‘You must have been raised by women.’

  ‘My mum. My aunts. Like most of my pals. It seemed for a while there weren’t many men left in the world.’

  There was a silence, then. Flushed with beer and fatigue, Finlay felt vaguely irritated at the pointless direction in which Grey had steered their conversation. The smell from the table was nauseating and the looming figure at his back made him nervous and more irritated for feeling the nervousness.

  ‘What were you angry about this morning, Captain Grey?’

  For an instant, Finlay thought that Grey intended to strike him, so brightly did the light of fury dance in his expression. Instead he rose, ground out his cigarette, grabbed his overcoat from the back of his chair and put on his hat with a stiffening pull at the brim.

  ‘You can fuck Rebecca Lange to kingdom come, for all I care, Chief Fire Officer. But there are two things that you do not do. Under no circumstances do you leave your post at full alert. And never, ever, do you address me by military rank. Am I clear?’

  ‘The telephone went dead,’ Finlay said, thinking as he said them that the words sounded forlorn, even pathetic.

  ‘I know it did,’ Grey said, speaking in his own furious aftertow as he made his way towards the door. ‘Even though I’m damned if we’ve been able to find out why.’

  Finlay walked back to Liverpool Street, where fire fighters were still damping down and the air was acrid with the spent malice of the previous evening’s bombs. He descended to his cell and scrubbed with the sliver of soap that was all that was left of his precious bar of Palmolive. The hot water and the scent of the soap dissipated the stale smoke still clinging to the room after Grey’s night vigil. After scrubbing, Finlay towelled himself dry and then took to his cot and slept. When he woke, the luminous dial of his watch told him that it was after five in the afternoon. He felt refreshed and ravenous. Above, the light would already be fading and the sun descending in terminal decline. Finlay groped for and found the switch to the lamp on his bedside table.

  ‘Blinder, Babcock,’ he said.

  A plate of sandwiches had been placed under a napkin on the table alon
g with a Thermos flask and a small jug of milk. Finlay unscrewed the Thermos and poured some of its contents into the cap. It was coffee; hot, sweet and blessedly authentic. He poured milk into the brew and gulped greedily. He took the napkin off the sandwiches and bit into one. The bread was crusty, fresh, thick fritters of fried sausage meat slathered with brown sauce between its doorstep slices.

  ‘Oh, Babcock, you marvel,’ Finlay said around a mouthful of pulped food. He lay back on the bed and belched and chewed in the beige light of his lamp as the coffee thudded through him, bringing fresh alertness to his rested brain and body. He ate all the sandwiches and drank the Thermos dry. Then he brushed his teeth and flattened his hair with wet fingers. His hair was growing out in tufts and needed to be properly cut. He dressed, thinking about his breakfast with Grey. He could make no sense of it. Either it was an attempt at conviviality from an unconvivial man, or it had been pointless. Deciding it had been pointless, he opted to dismiss it from his mind. There had been something unpleasant about the episode that made it temptingly easy for Finlay to dismiss. They were letting him see his mum. He would retain that detail alone as the long and the short of it.

  He did not think there would be a raid that night. It was what the Germans wanted people in London to think, he knew. The aftermath of a big raid left people too exhausted, in their imaginations, to anticipate a raid of the same magnitude and intensity coming upon them again so soon. Some part of the collective mind pleaded for the decorum of a respectful gap between such awful visitations. And some other part of the collective mind was generally lulled or seduced into providing it. Then, when the raid came, and there was no gap, and the following raid was even more awful than what had preceded it, a kind of bewildered, disappointed outrage was inflicted above and beyond the pain and sense of loss and desolation people expected to have to endure. It was this that had old men shaking clenched fists and mumbling toothless curses at the sky. It was this that caused the outbreaks of sobbing that spread with epidemic speed in the shelters and would not be stopped.

  But tonight, Finlay did not think that there would be a raid. His intuition told him this and his intuition was something Finlay had learned to trust. He decided he would pass a quiet night by looking at the plans of the five buildings in his charge. He was curious as to the nature of the work that went on within their walls. He thought that the blueprints might offer some clue, some defining pattern that would make the nature of their function apparent and the mystery of their secret purpose plain.

  A half-finished letter to his brother lay on his draftsman’s table. Finlay remembered full well that he was not allowed to post a letter to his brother. He intended to give it to his mother and have her communicate in her own words the sense of what it was he was most anxious to say to Tom. Now, he gathered the incomplete pages and placed them between the pages of a book he returned to its shelf, anonymous among the other volumes.

  When first in his possession, he had taped each of the blueprints to his walls. But that had been to familiarize himself with their precise layouts with only one consideration on his mind. That sole consideration had been fire. He thought of his buildings in terms of risk, of prospective rate of spread, of intensity, of capacity to fight, of salvage and, of course, of escape. The actual function of the building had never been a consideration; not even when he had inventoried in his mind the inflammable character of their known contents. Thus a library might teach, but it would definitely burn, and it was the burning only that Finlay had concerned himself with. He had ordered the summary dumping of the petrol generator that provided independent power to Absalom House only because the spare cans stored as its fuel reserve were so volatile a risk. He had never asked himself why a building of modest size required such a generator. He had not had the time for speculation beyond the immediacy of his tasks. But he had that now. He had rolled the plans and bound them in a bundle with a ribbon. Now he fetched them and untied the ribbon bow and unfurled the first of them, raising the tilt of the desk and anchoring the plan flat with strips from a roll of masking tape Babcock had brought him when he had delivered him the desk. It was the smallest of his buildings, the priest’s house designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and built at the end of the seventeenth century in St Helen’s Place.

  It was three hours before Finlay twisted his wrist and glanced at his watch in a gesture of capitulation that told him the time was just after ten. His neck ached and forcing his eyes to focus closely brought a dull rumble of pain to his skull. He was thirsty. And he was as clueless as to the nature of what went on in his quintet of City buildings as he had been when he had first sat down. He stood and stretched and went over to the sink and ran the tap and then gulped water. The pumped air and the artificial light that dried the air made him always thirsty when he spent any amount of time down here. He paused with his backside rested against the sink and wiped his mouth absently with the heel of his hand. He went over to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the spines until he located what he wanted. Finlay pulled free and then unfolded a large map of metropolitan London. He draped the map across his raised table and located the area he was looking for. Then he marked five dots on the map with a pencil and stood back and looked at them. And he folded his arms across his chest and laughed out loud as a knock tattooed against his door.

  ‘Come in,’ Finlay said, gathering and folding the map back in on itself.

  It was Babcock. His visitor paused at an odd angle in the doorway for a moment and Finlay could not make sense of his posture. Then he saw that Babcock carried a beer crate under one arm, supporting its weight on his hip. The odd posture was to compensate. ‘Thought you might like to wet your whistle, Mr Finlay,’ he said. ‘The wife’s gone away for a few days, which is just as well because what they’re showing at the Walthamstow Odeon this week represents a criminal absence of entertainment. Anyway, wondered if you were…’

  ‘At a loose end?’ Finlay said. ‘I am, Babcock. It didn’t look as though the Krauts were coming out to play tonight. And so I set myself a project to while away the time and keep mischief at bay. But my project seems to have scuppered itself.’

  ‘What project would that be, Mr Finlay?’

  Finlay looked at the man in the doorway, with his cargo of brown ale and his terminal case of solitude, and pondered briefly how much to confide in him.

  ‘Did you know, Babcock, that the sites of those buildings I am obliged to keep free from fire form, on the map, the exact geometric points of a pentagram?’

  ‘Occultism has never been my strength, Mr Finlay. Neither has strength, come to that, so do you mind if I put this crate on the floor?’

  Finlay sat on the cot and Babcock in the armchair and Finlay drank and let his eyes recover from the fatigue of their earlier work as Babcock rabbited about the most recent events in wireless programming and motion pictures. The brown ale tasted faintly of the rubber seal around its stone bottle-stopper. The taste and the aroma took Finlay, as he half listened, back to his boyhood, when with his mates he would gather scrap metal they called slummy and sell it for pennies and buy beer at Hulse’s corner store and say it was for the dads old Hulse knew damn well few of them had. From Hulse’s it was a short step in his memory to St Theresa’s, where they would take off their shoes and skate in their socks on the waxed floor of the sacristy, waiting in their cassocks and cottas to serve the evening Benediction when Father Carol finally prised himself free of the whisky bottle in the priest’s house next to the church. Tommy Osbaldeston would ring the Angelus, and his feet would rise a foot off the floor with the peal of the bell and answering pull of the bell rope. And sometimes Anthony Ball, who was the best footballer Finlay had ever seen, would pick the lock to the sacristy safe and they would eat the unconsecrated hosts and drink sweet altar wine from bottles with a Vatican seal, giggling at the blasphemous enormity of their secret crime.

  Finlay was journeying through memory, riding the long loop of association, dimly aware of what Grey had recently said about being
brought up by women and wondering what that signified to a man like Grey, when the alert fragment of his mind registered Babcock pronouncing a word he had heard once before, only recently.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Babcock looked at him and Finlay could see from Babcock’s expression that he had been in no way obliged to listen to Babcock’s long monologue on Elstree and Broadcasting House and Hollywood. On the contrary, in fact.

  ‘That word. What was that word you just said?’

  Babcock pondered. There had been so many. ‘Selznik?’ he said. ‘Budget? Gable? March through Georgia?’

  ‘It began with a B. It wasn’t budget.’

  ‘Borehamwood. Brains Trust. Bandwagon. Bette Davis. Bogart.’

  ‘It sounded foreign.’

  ‘Benzedrine.’

  Finlay snapped his fingers. ‘What is Benzedrine?’

  ‘A pick-me-up,’ Babcock said. ‘They’re all on it.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘Selznik and the rest. All the movie people. You can buy it there over the counter. At what they call a drugstore, which is the American for chemist’s shop. Drives ’em all bonkers, apparently.’

  ‘It’s the Benzedrine,’ she had said. ‘It’s the times in which we live.’

  Finlay looked at Babcock, who sat with his hands linked in his lap and an open bottle at his feet, beside the faded orange wood of the crate containing their empties as well as the brown-ale bottles yet to be opened. Babcock was wearing his frayed and faded blue overalls over a shirt with no collar. The soles of his boots were concertina’d with countless resolings and their uppers, though polished, were cratered and gouged into black moonscapes.

  ‘Where did you get the money for the beer, Babcock? If you don’t mind me asking. You strike me as too skint for the black market.’