The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  Finlay squeezed his mother’s hand. Her eyes were wet.

  ‘The seances have started again,’ she said. ‘All those poor mothers of sons sunk in the convoys. So we’ve got all that again.’ She sniffed and laughed. ‘I’ve started going to St Theresa’s of a night and lighting candles. Even me.’

  ‘There’s no harm in lighting candles,’ Finlay said.

  ‘I just want you and Tommy to come through it and come home,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve had enough taken away from me.’

  ‘Come on,’ Finlay said. He stood.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re going to the pub.’

  ‘I don’t drink during the day, Johnny. Neither should you.’

  ‘It’s a one-off, mum. A special occasion. Come and have a couple of port and brandies. Maybe one of the oyster catchers will sing us a sea-shanty.’

  ‘God forbid.’ Margaret Finlay stood. She winced at the weight of her afflicted ankles and then, with a smile, erased the pain from her face. ‘I’ll come to the pub with you on one condition.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘You tell me truthfully how you came by that black eye.’

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ Finlay said. ‘I slipped holding a power hose and the nozzle kicked and hit me in the face.’

  His mother tilted her head and looked up at him through her eyebrows. Her eyes were as bright as the sea in sunlight and brimmed with mischief. He laughed out loud and took her arm and some of her weight and they set off, slowly, in the shadow of the sea wall towards The Neptune.

  He had picked her up at the door of her flat in Coptic Street at eight o’clock and they had groped their way, the night moonless and blind, through Bloomsbury and into Fitzrovia and The Wheatsheaf, where, through the tobacco smoke and loud babble of excitement and intoxication, he had his first opportunity to look at her face that evening in anything approaching light. The sour mist of countless cigarettes hung around a few feeble overhead globes.

  This miserly illumination made the men in the pub appear mere shades and the women cadaverous. Then he looked at the face in front of him and it did not look like that at all. Rebecca Lange looked poised, her skin nourished, her face, bold-featured, lit as if from within. Finlay supposed that this was beauty. He did not think that it could be Benzedrine. She took off her headscarf and shook her hair and Finlay was relieved to see that it had not turned a bright yellow, as had the hair, it seemed to him, of almost every other woman he saw in London. Rebecca unbelted and unbuttoned her coat with a dip of her head and then raised her head again and pushed back her hair with a hand and looked at him and smiled.

  ‘Get me a drink, Jack. I’m about to expire of thirst on the spot.’

  He inhaled her breath, her perfume. She had not used his name before. He had asked her to call him Finlay. He felt the heavy bulge in his trousers of a trapped erection at the complete unexpectedness of this intimacy and was glad that his own coat remained buttoned. He felt an awkwardness he had not felt since adolescence as he progressed, with burning cheeks, to the bar. He did not worry too much about blushing. He was walking with his back to her and anyway was concentrating on walking normally. His dick felt so hard and constrained it was all Finlay could do not to limp.

  She had found a table and taken off her coat and lit a cigarette by the time he returned with their drinks. As he sat, Finlay became aware that someone was playing a piano in the corner of the room. The piano was loud, the music some jazz tune with a lot of counterpoint that flirted with dissonance but kept meandering back to its strong, resonant theme. It was loud, but the pub was louder with conversation, laughter, screams of recognition, all competing. The tobacco smoke was as thick and bitter in the back of Finlay’s throat as bile. He sipped beer. As though prompted, Rebecca sipped her whisky and soda. He leaned towards her and found he had to shout. ‘Who are these people?’

  She frowned and leaned forward. She was wearing a black dress with slender satin shoulder straps and a low neckline, and leaning over the table plumped her pale breasts against the fabric. ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Homosexuals. Refugees. Writers like your Irishman.’

  She tapped ash onto the floor. ‘And the women?’

  ‘Bohemians. Lesbians. Tarts.’

  Rebecca narrowed her eyes and smoked. She reached for the ashtray and ground out her cigarette.

  ‘Have a real look,’ she said.

  So Finlay did.

  He was sober, and in the merciless light he looked at the people choosing to crowd The Wheatsheaf to its walls, its rafters, its heaving gills, on a Friday night. He looked hard and was shocked by what it was his eyes, rather than his expectations, led him to see.

  Half a dozen of the men in front of the long bar wore fighter-pilot moustaches. A couple of them still had on their uniforms, ties askew, the sky-blue tunics bled to monochrome in the pervading absence of light. He saw a cavalry flash on the shoulder of a greatcoat. Three ratings were talking to a group of young women at the far end of the bar, adjacent to the lavatory. Finlay tried and failed to make out what ship they were from. Then a lavatory door swung open and they were joined by a fourth. He had emerged from the ladies, which his party considered to be a huge joke. Finlay turned to share his conclusion with Rebecca but by now she had turned away and so, instead, he studied her. And with the same objective scrutiny. She had twisted her head towards the bar, to her left, with her shoulders straight against the back of her chair. The pose made her long neck taut under the clean insistence of her jaw and Finlay’s eyes were drawn up from her pale throat, across her cheeks, to the sudden budding of her full, ripe, shockingly crimson mouth. His eyes were moving to examine the one of hers visible when she turned back sharply to face him.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Servicemen. Half the bloody war effort’s here.’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Would you like to sleep with me tonight?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. Light me.’

  He lit her cigarette. She exhaled.

  Finlay sat back in his chair. The pianist was playing some piece of trilling whimsy by Noel Coward or Ivor Novello. To Finlay, they were interchangeable. His coat lay over the back of his chair. Anticipation unfurled through him in a thrill of sensation that sang into his scalp and fingertips. At least he seemed now to have his tackle under control. ‘Why are you smiling like that?’

  ‘When first I saw you, Finlay, I thought you were queer.’

  He could feel his own smile dry into idiocy.

  ‘Why?’

  She pouted. He thought it her first contrivance of the night and felt deflated by it, as though gut-punched.

  ‘Don’t you think it ironic that a man who looks like you do wants to put out fires?’

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

  Her eyes lifted suddenly. There was a commotion to Finlay’s immediate right and her Irishman dumped a chair out of one of his big hands at their table and sat on it. He was sweating freely under an overcoat and was clearly drunk. Drunk, his eyes were challenging rather than furtive, drink contorting everything into a sneer between the damp curls on his forehead and the clump of his chin. Finlay could hear the voices of the pilot officers, grouped around the piano now; raucous verses, a chorus leaden with repetition. The Irishman belched rank, abattoir breath into his face. Finlay wondered, not for the first time, if the man had ever shared Rebecca’s bed. If he still sometimes shared it.

  ‘You again?’

  Finlay said nothing.

  ‘You’re as persistent as a bad habit,’ the Irishman said. ‘But nowhere near so much fun.’ He reached for Rebecca’s whisky. But Finlay had seen the trick before and was too quick. He just pushed the drink a few inches across the table beyond the Irishman’s reach. If he wanted it, he would have to lunge and lose his balance or stand and walk around the table, which would spoil the effect. The reaching hand stopped on the table and withdrew into a heavy fist.

  ‘Let�
��s take this outside,’ its owner said to Finlay.

  Finlay was on his feet and threading through the crowd for the door almost before the sentence had been completed, taking off and folding his tie, unstrapping his wristwatch, putting both into the same jacket pocket. As the pub door closed behind him he blinked and struggled to adjust to the faint, fugitive hints of light he knew must be there somewhere in the night. His shoes slithered over cobbles and he smiled invisibly, remembering what Baxter had always drilled into his men about choosing the ground for a fight. Well, too late for that.

  He heard the swing of the pub door and sensed the advancing bulk of his adversary, breathing hard with drink and aggression. Finlay balanced his feet evenly eighteen inches apart, allowed his weight to slightly favour the front foot and his knees to bend a little. He extended his hands, dropped his shoulders, folded his hands into fists, extended the left slightly, and waited. Alert as he was, he couldn’t help thinking to himself that this was going to be too easy to be as enjoyable as he wanted it to be. He felt the breath and glower of the Irishman come on in the dark and pivoted into a left-hook-cum-uppercut intended to land under the ribcage, force the man’s breath out through his crumpled diaphragm and drop him to his knees. The punch landed. The Irishman’s stomach had the weight and density of a sodden sandbag. Finlay’s fist did not sink, it stopped, and pain blossomed bright in the darkness across his knuckles. He heard the shift of his opponent’s feet and then felt his own cheek slither and graze along wet stone. He knew that he was not unconscious, because he could hear.

  ‘If it wasn’t so fucking dark, I’d give you a kicking, you cunt,’ the Irishman said, whispered, still sounding breathless.

  The next thing Finlay remembered was being helped out of a taxi.

  ‘I can’t carry you. You’ll have to help me get you up the stairs,’ Rebecca said. It sounded more foreign than Rebecca, but it was her, he knew. He came round properly on a sofa in the wide prairie of her sitting-room, to the soughing of gas lanterns on the walls, in the presence of pictures like windows on a world he had never known. She put a glass in his hand. It was brandy. He sipped and swallowed and then felt around his mouth. His teeth were intact and there was no pain from his jaw. Then he felt wetness on his cheek and realized that one of his eyes was entirely closed. It was weeping, tears independent of him, that squeezed their way through the swelling.

  ‘He carries a knuckleduster,’ Rebecca said. She had sat on the sofa beside him and was pressing a cold, wet cloth over the eye swollen shut. ‘He fights a lot. Usually he wins.’

  ‘You could have warned me.’

  ‘I did try. It would have made no difference, would it?’

  ‘It’s like punching a medicine ball.’

  ‘He works on building sites.’

  ‘It shows.’ Finlay sank back on the sofa. His head hurt. Brandy vapour was making him feel a falling, drifting sensation. Of itself it was not unpleasant. But he was uneasy about where it might take him. ‘Can we talk about something else?’

  ‘I don’t think that right now we should talk about anything.’ She was tugging off one of his shoes. Finlay sat up and reached for her. She put a hand in the centre of his chest and pushed him back against the sofa. Either he was weak, or she was strong. Perhaps both.

  ‘I thought you said—’

  Blackness blossomed in Finlay’s head and the brandy fumes filled him with sudden nausea. He swallowed vomit and Rebecca took the glass from his trembling fingers.

  ‘I asked would you like to sleep with me tonight. I did not promise that you would get to do so.’

  Finlay had the cloth over both eyes. ‘You seemed happy enough at the time with the answer I gave.’

  Rebecca took a moment to reply. He sensed that she was weighing words foreign to her with care.

  ‘We all wish to be wanted,’ she said. ‘It is a very human failing.’

  Finlay didn’t say anything. He had never thought of desire as a failing. A weakness, perhaps. And he remembered that lust was a sin. But a failing?

  ‘You have a lump the size of a hen’s egg where your head hit the cobble-stones when he knocked you down,’ Rebecca said. ‘In the one eye I could see, your pupil is dilated to the size of the iris. And the white is not white, it is red. You have a concussion. You need darkness. And rest.’

  She laughed and framed his head between the outstretched fingers of gentle hands. She leaned into him and kissed his mouth, deliciously. Concussed or not, he wanted to inhale her. She broke the kiss. ‘I’m not taking you to bed, Chief Fire Officer. Not tonight. Tonight I’m putting you there.’

  ‘I know the bloke,’ Babcock said.

  ‘You know everything.’ Finlay said.

  Babcock was still grinning. He had looked in at eleven with a Thermos of coffee and two speculative mugs and now, fifteen minutes later, could still not contain his amusement at the yellow-and-purple swelling that disfigured Finlay’s eye. Nor could he conceal his delight at how Finlay had come by his Technicolor mishap.

  ‘If you’d said Kilburn or Camden Town, that would have been a different thing. There they have obstreperous Irishmen by the baker’s dozen. But off Oxford Street? You’re quite sure it was off Oxford Street?’

  ‘The geography is pretty much the only thing I am sure about,’ Finlay said. ‘He decked me outside a pub called The Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place.’

  ‘Then it was him,’ Babcock said. ‘Big drunken fucker.’

  ‘On the nail.’

  ‘Carries a knuckleduster. When he’s looking for an argument, he shoves a couple of telephone directories under his belt.’

  ‘Does he? Crafty so-and-so.’

  ‘And a knife. A skean-dhu he wears down his sock, like the kilties. Proper nasty piece of work.’

  ‘I won’t debate the point. I’m gratified for the information, Babcock.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Babcock said, dolefully. ‘He’s another war you’ll be obliged to walk away from. Once I tell Captain Grey.’

  On the train on the way back to London from his visit to his mother in Whitstable, Finlay was preoccupied for a while by the strange scene that had taken place in The Neptune pub. He had been a party to it, central to it, because without the presence of himself and his mother, it would never have been enacted. But already it seemed remote from him, alien, like a film shot in a location he had never been to, featuring actors whose faces and mannerisms he found entirely unfamiliar.

  They had been in the pub for an hour or so. His mother had sipped half-heartedly at a port and lemon and then with more enthusiasm at a second drink as they reminisced and she talked about Tom’s plan to try for a university place on a Naval scholarship once the war had ended. The university plan was a new one on Finlay, but it did not surprise him; any more than had the seminary plan or the one involving medical school. Tom had always been the sort of boy who fulfilled parental ambition. Maybe he would even like university. Certainly he was bright and curious enough for knowledge to study for a degree.

  A third drink anaesthetized his mother’s arthritis enough for them to attempt a game of bar billiards at the vacant table at the rear of the pub, under a window the width of the wall, facing the sea. It was a local game and neither of them had played it before. The dimensions of the table, the size of the balls, the balance of the cues and the strange mushroom-shaped wooden obstacles to potting the ball were all new to Finlay and his mother and the sheer intrinsic daftness of the game struck them both at the same time so that their alternating shots wobbled with hilarity.

  They were playing the decider of a best of three when the pub door opened and a police constable walked in, followed by an ARP warden and the woman both Finlay and his mother recognized as the proprietress of the little high-street tea-shop in which they had spent the first part of their day. The policeman was wearing a long, blue-black gabardine with two rows of buttons embossed with the crest of the Kent constabulary. Rain, or sea-spray, was spattered around the collar and shoulders of the gabar
dine. He was over six feet tall, looked to be in his mid-forties and carried a Lee Enfield rifle at port arms. He stood to the right of the pub door and looked out of the window above their heads. The warden, who was around fifty, had a Sten gun under one arm, hanging from a shoulder strap, his forefinger pressed against the trigger guard. The weapon was clumsy and looked home-made. He stood to the left of the door. The woman, who was not armed, whispered something to the policeman, who nodded without shifting his eyes from their neutral focus through the window on the place over the sea where the island of Sheppey would have been visible on a less turbulent day. Now that he thought about it, Finlay was aware once more of the crash of the sea on the shore, the collision of waves against the sheltering wall outside, the slap of shifting pebbles, wave-borne, colliding with granite. He looked over to the table that had been occupied by a trio of shrimp fishermen, the only other customers, on their arrival at the pub. Now there were two.

  ‘Pound to a penny there’s a bullet already in the breech of that copper’s rifle,’ Margaret Finlay whispered to her son. He ignored the remark. She dug him in the ribs with the heel of her billiard cue.

  ‘Your shot,’ she said.

  Finlay took his shot. They finished their game. His mother sat and Finlay fetched them another drink each from the bar. The woman who had served them in the tea-shop had taken some knitting from a bag and she worked with a busy click of bone needles at a table near the door.

  ‘They used to knit like she’s doing in France during the Revolutionary Terror,’ Margaret Finlay said. ‘While they waited for another victim to be dragged up to the guillotine.’

  Finlay said nothing.

  ‘The toothless hags,’ his mother said, and Finlay was forced to swallow a laugh.

  The policeman and the warden flanked the door. Finlay glanced at the ARP man’s weapon. He had no doubt that it had been knocked together with painstaking study of a Home Guard instruction booklet at a local forge well practised in the hooping of ale barrels, the fashioning of ornamental gates. The thing looked inept and terrifying. The man with his finger on its trigger guard looked afraid. Then the door opened and a middle-aged civilian walked in, wearing plaid socks, plus-fours and a waist-length jacket made of mackintosh material and fastened with a steel zipper instead of buttons up the front. He removed his cap and smiled generally, and in the hard light through the window off the sea, Finlay saw that the entire right side of his face had been subject to some surgical procedure, a reconstruction that left it plastic and smooth from jawbone to eye socket.