The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Constable Rennie,’ the man said, without looking. ‘Mr Whittle. Mrs Halliday.’

  ‘Brigadier,’ the three of them said together, like a slightly ragged chorus.

  ‘Would you care for a game of bar billiards, Brigadier?’ Margaret Finlay said.

  The Brigadier turned to her. His body suggested a sort of spontaneity, as if he were responding to the invitation with nothing more than nonchalant surprise. But the plastic made his face rigid and impossible to read. And his pale eyes were alert and cold. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,’ he said.

  ‘Margaret Finlay of Liverpool. And this is my eldest, John, who serves with the London Fire Brigade.’

  The Brigadier didn’t look at Finlay. He didn’t take his eyes off the mother. ‘I’m afraid bar billiards isn’t my cup of tea at all, Mrs Finlay,’ he said. He said it with a finality that was followed by a silence. Even the knitting had stopped. Finlay looked at the ARP warden, whose finger was white at the knuckle over the Sten gun’s trigger guard.

  Margaret Finlay said, ‘May I ask you where you got your wound?’

  ‘Place called Beaucourt, Mrs Finlay. French town. Hamlet, really. I doubt you are familiar with the name or with the place.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, I am. My husband fell at Thiepval.’ The silence this time was shorter.

  ‘Good God,’ the Brigadier said. ‘You are Colour Sergeant Patrick Finlay’s widow. Constable Rennie?’

  ‘Brigadier?’

  The burr of the policeman’s dialect spoke to Finlay of hops and cider apples and bigotry. His mother was right, he was sure. There was a bullet primed already in the rifle’s breech.

  ‘You have dragged me away from a perfectly good game of golf for nothing.’

  ‘Can’t be too careful, Brigadier.’

  ‘I still think you ought to check their papers,’ the woman from the tea-room said, her voice a peevish whine. She nodded at Margaret Finlay. ‘That one was most disrespectful about Mr Churchill.’

  ‘Yes, well. This is still a free country. We are fighting a war to keep it that way.’

  ‘I think they’re Fenians,’ the woman persisted. ‘I think you should ask to see their papers.’

  Quietly, so that only her son, standing beside her, heard, Margaret Finlay said, ‘It would be instructive to know on what authority.’

  The Brigadier appeared to rise an inch in his shoes.

  ‘Papers can be forged, Mrs Halliday. One thing you most definitely cannot counterfeit, however, is the regimental history of the Irish Guards.’

  He replaced his cap and with his heels together, bowed shortly at Margaret Finlay.

  ‘Madam,’ he said.

  Finlay saw that his shoes, brown brogues, were skirted with freshly mowed grass which adhered to the damp leather. The Brigadier turned, the ARP man opened the door for him, and he was gone. The policeman put his rifle over his shoulder and the tea-shop woman got to her feet, stuffing her knitting into her big, wood-handled bag. They shuffled in an ungainly struggle of winter clothing and weaponry out of the door.

  ‘Fetch me a large brandy, Johnnie. There’s a good boy.’

  ‘That mouth of yours will get you into trouble, mum,’ Finlay said, sitting back down with their drinks. He said it quietly. The Neptune barman was one of those background functionaries almost defined by absence, like the referee in a boxing match. But the man was present, somewhere.

  ‘He should have looked at our papers, though.’

  ‘You said it yourself, mum. On what authority?’

  Margaret Finlay sipped from her glass. She didn’t say anything for a while, and then she smiled.

  ‘The number of people from this town he employs. The size of the house he lives in and some of them earn a living helping maintain. The extent of his disfigurement. Locally at least, I’m sure the golfing brigadier doesn’t want for authority. And he should have looked at our papers.’

  ‘He should,’ Finlay agreed.

  ‘He was one of them, wasn’t he?’ his mother said. ‘Like White. Like the Major, and your Mr Grey.’

  Out of the train window, Finlay watched dusk descend over the Kent fields. The landscape offered stunted hedgerows, pasture and the occasional glitter of the sea, orange under the October glow of descending sun. The train rattled and cajoled its way towards London. Finlay sat alone in his carriage, feeling a vague sense that he should be pondering the mystery of Absalom House and the contradictions in the histories he had heard concerning its absent creator. It was not his business unless he chose to make it so. And if he did, it was still none of his business. His mind was occupied, anyway, not with her absent father, but with Rebecca Lange. His mother had observed in Whitstable that there was more than one England. Casting his mind back to that night in Bloomsbury, at the conclusion of a day spent in his mother’s company, he felt that they were women who inhabited different worlds.

  His concussion had denied him sleep. He had lain for a long time under goose feathers stitched into a sort of swollen, fleecy counterpane and the warmth of the bed had almost lulled him into unconsciousness. But lust and pain from his weeping eye contrived together to deny him rest and in the small hours he climbed from the warmth of his bed and wandered naked into her sitting-room and opened the curtains and watched silver beams carved by vigilant searchlights set a pattern of defiance in the night sky. After a while it was hard for Finlay to see the searchlights as anything but a sort of dumb, empty display of rhetoric and so he drew the heavy drapes and blinked against absolute darkness and then saw a flicker of light from under Rebecca’s bedroom door.

  With infinite care he opened the door. The light was cast by a single candle, its flame small but resolute on her bedside table. Finlay almost expected Rebecca to sense him and to waken and turn, indignant at his trespass. But she did not.

  She was sleeping naked, on her stomach, her arms splayed to either side of her body, flushed gold in the light from the candle, ochre deepening into dark shadow at the nape of her neck, in the cleft of her spine and dividing the pale rise of flesh at the base of her back, where the bedclothes bunched and gathered. To Finlay the room smelled tawny with liquor and tobacco and pooled wax and the scent of Rebecca’s recumbent flesh and the subtle, pervasive perfume she wore. His father had brought spices home from the docks sometimes and now Finlay recognized the base of Rebecca’s perfume as cinnamon. He stood in the door-frame and breathed the breath of her bedroom in for a while. The still light of the candle seemed to embrace her as she slept, holding her at the centre of encroaching shadow and diminishing brightness, shaping her hair in coils and ribbons of darkness and light.

  Finlay groaned and his head sank back into the greasy velveteen upholstery of his train compartment. His eyes opened and he blinked and brought a hand up to his brow. He could not have said how long it was he had stood at the threshold of her secrecy and watched Rebecca Lange. But he remembered now that the candle in her room was guttering when she stirred, dreaming God knows what dream, and spoke audibly, urgently, in sleep and in German. He had been fascinated rather than excited by her during his clandestine study. But when she spoke those words, the forbidden language sounded strange and savage coming from her lungs, through her throat, to her lips. And despite his concussion and the pain from his leaking eye and his voyeuristic guilt, he had felt then the strong tug of arousal. His only surrender to instinct, though, had been to blow the candle out.

  The train was labouring through dim suburbs when the act of waking told Finlay that he must have fallen into fitful sleep. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. He could taste beer and brandy, stale on his breath. The incident in The Neptune came back to him. He wondered, then, for a moment, if the whole thing had not been engineered by Grey as some sort of lesson, or entertainment. But he dismissed the idea as the same sort of self-important notion that had persuaded him he was being followed on those occasions he had heard footsteps echoing his at Aldwych, and on the Strand.

  It did not surprise him
that the disfigured brigadier had heard of his father’s exploits at Mons and Neuve Chapelle. Officers were often jealous when the gallantry of other ranks was recognized and given tangible reward. His father’s name must have earned a sort of status, even notoriety, among those glory-hunters who had spent their leaves reading the military despatches in the London Gazette; or studied at leisure, in later years, accounts of the war on the Western Front, from plush armchairs in their hand-tooled, calf-bound military histories. It could not be expected to occur to them that his mother had slept without a man in her bed since the age of thirty-two. They would know nothing of the enervating dread of awaiting the hammer of a bailiff’s fist at their door. They would not have suffered the shameful heartbreak of having to send their children to school in shoes with cardboard soles. His mother was right. There was more than one England. And Finlay thought it had been a far easier thing to fight for in the abstract, in the desert, under the command of Baxter, the cantankerous Scot. The train clanked and wearied into some dark siding, trying to insinuate its way along a platform still intact at one of London’s shattered railway stations. He had given his mother twenty pounds, pressed the money into her protesting palm and held the notes there as she hugged him goodbye. He had expected from that token gift the selfish consolation of feeling better about her. Twenty pounds would not buy absolution, but he had hoped it would bring respite. It hadn’t, though. Finlay still felt, in his troubled soul, the bad man he had always suspected himself to be. The train stopped with a lurch of finality. He groped for his coat and the door handle. In darkness, he would have to find out where he was.

  Eight

  Their summons sat on the night table beside the telephone. He was to present himself the following morning at ten. There would be tea and biscuits and intricate new details in the mosaics wrought so elaborately in each of their vaunting windows by the percussive violence of bombs. They would talk in a code, as they always did, for which birth and education had provided them, whilst denying him, the key. They were at an advantage. But central to their whole narrow, comfortable, unshakeable view of themselves and their influential position in determining the nature of things was the God-given right and necessity of advantage.

  It was not so much a code, when Finlay thought about it, as a map. Talking to them was like studying a relief map full of dense and complex contours shaped in irony and understatement and sometimes just in frank, emphatic, plum-vowelled, cornflower-blue-eyed lies. He was sure, for one thing, that Grey wasn’t a civilian. He was bloody certain of it. Drunk on brown ale and fatigue, he had fallen wholesale in the moment for Babcock’s collusive tale of mutinous goings-on among the generals. Sober, though, this seditious conspiracy unravelled itself in his mind. Babcock was a man, after all, proven to be untruthful even to himself. And while Finlay’s mother had laboured Churchill’s failings to him often enough, the accommodation of treachery seemed an unlikely addition to her angry catalogue. Babcock had been making mischief. He was jealous of Grey, still the scurrying batman seeking to chivvy and wheedle favour, resentment hardening in him at the indignity of each volunteered service and errand. In his suggestion of intrigue and cabals, he’d been merely foggying the picture, pulling Finlay’s leg. But Babcock had been reliable, he felt certain now, about Grey’s exalted rank.

  Finlay remembered the word and the meaning of the word from learning catechism at Sunday School and the word was omnipresent and you didn’t get to be as omnipresent as Grey after chucking in the army over a few hundred unexpected corpses from Burnley or Durham. The man was a poof, but Finlay didn’t think him a sentimental poof. Grey was wearing civvies on the outside only. Inside, he was strictly Brass. He was Top Brass. Finlay was sure of it. He took another gulp from his glass. He was fucking sure of it. Jesus, Finlay said to himself. He was sounding like Babcock. At least, he was sounding like he imagined Babcock would sound as far as Finlay was, now, into the bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch with which Babcock, because it could have been no one else, had provided his quarters while he was visiting his mother in the wind-cursed, weary old war limbo of Whitstable.

  ‘Whitstable,’ Finlay said to nobody. He stretched his legs out from where he sprawled in his armchair. ‘What a fucking shithole fucking dump.’

  Hearing his own voice made him feel low. He despised himself, suddenly, overwhelmingly, for the mock-heroic of his own profane, blustering words. It wasn’t Whitstable’s fault. They had chosen Whitstable, probably, because you could get to the place by train and because the Luftwaffe were unlikely to launch a mass raid on a town chiefly significant for oyster beds. They had chosen it as a meeting place for him and his mother because Whitstable, to them, was amenable and safe. What really worried him, deep down, in a part of his mind that no amount of hard drink seemed able to infiltrate, was how little his mother had talked of his brother Tom.

  Almost from his first conscious understanding of the interaction between family, friends, neighbours – and this understanding had come to Finlay surprisingly late – he had been aware of the strong and widely shared supposition that his mother was ‘gifted’. Gifted did not mean good at playing the piano, or sketching likenesses. Gifted, to everyone who had whispered the word in Finlay’s proximity in Finlay’s boyhood, had meant psychically adept. His mother had always denied it. She had never, to his knowledge, so much as studied the pattern of tea-leaves left at the bottom of an empty cup. She had never read a palm, never owned a tarot pack. But her mention of the seances had omitted, he knew, the relentless nagging and cajoling and imploring she would be facing now in the neighbourhood to hold a seance of her own. Throughout the entirety of the life he could remember having lived under his mother’s roof, there had been oddities, enigmas, inexplicable events, atmospheres, coincidences, occasional thick, heavy forebodings. Individually he had ignored them all, in unspoken collusion with his brother, once his brother became old enough to acknowledge and be scared by them and happy to agree to ignore them too. But if you looked at these phenomena collectively, they amounted to a catalogue of the unexplained and inexplicable. Finlay remembered the time he had been awoken by the sound of singing in the kitchen and descended the stairs with Tom, and in the moonlight through the tiny kitchen window they had seen sitting at the kitchen table the spectre of their dead father, polishing his bayonet and blithely roaring some sentimental song. The shock had been in the detail. Finlay had been able to smell the black brew in his father’s mess tin on the table, a mingling of hot, strong tea and stale bacon fat. He had smelled Brasso on the bayonet pommel and blade and the cold odour of steel under the polish. There was blood in the singing. Bright, coppery, it coloured the song as it bubbled from the fatal wound in his father’s throat.

  The song had been a lullaby and that’s how Finlay had known, peeking through the door crack into the kitchen from the bottom of the stairs, that the apparition had not been real. It existed in his mind, where his father only ever sang lullabies to his infant boy. At the age of nine, when he saw this thing, it did not sit right with John Patrick Finlay that a man putting a shine on a killing weapon would croon a lullaby while he did so.

  Then the apparition turned its head and smiled and winked at its watching sons.

  Reason had been no comfort to Jack at the time or after. The ghost had frightened the life out of him and did so often, later, whenever he conjured it in the dark, tormenting himself, as children will.

  In the here and now, Finlay shivered and gulped good whisky. Its flames answered the craving for escape from the chill settled inside his brain and belly. He had imagined that, of course. They both had. He and Tom had only imagined their father come back to sing in the kitchen in their house in Stanley Road. But Margaret Finlay, over the course of a singular day in Whitstable, had not mentioned her second son anything like enough to her first-born for comfort.

  The train had terminated at Waterloo. In darkness, piled sandbags could not soften the sound echoing against marble, iron and glass in the great hall of railway space bey
ond the ticket collector. Finlay eased through knots and columns of men in greatcoats and packs, carrying rifles. He sensed rather than saw this mass of men and was glad it was too dark to see the disdain he felt his civilian clothes would provoke on their individual faces.

  The smell of wet wool heated gently by paraffin stoves brought a strange comfort to him, a sort of nostalgia. It was similar to the smell after a match, as his father and his father’s friends warmed themselves in a Bootle pub after a rainy afternoon spent watching the Reds from the Kop at Anfield. He could smell hair tonic and tobacco breath and coke embers and piston lubricant and leather and canvas webbing and gas-mask rubber and boot polish and occasional wafts of cologne signalling officers and the sour lack, everywhere, of hot water and soap. Amazing how important smell had become in the prevailing absence of light. Then his body tensed at the insistence of his brain, forcing him out of reverie. He had caught the train they had instructed him to catch. He was back, so he was back on duty. Alert to the sound of the sky, he walked to the entrance of the station, past the scrolled names of Southern Railway men who had fallen in what those who had survived it were now calling the ’fourteen-eighteen. He could not see, of course, the gold leaf etched into stone commemorating its long list of dead on the ornamental tablet as he passed underneath it. But he looked anyway.