The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  The pavements were wet, but it was no longer raining. A bright moon silvered the cold edges of cloud in a sky full of the brittle, cruel onset of winter. Finlay stopped at a tea wagon on Waterloo Road.

  ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’

  ‘I queued,’ he thought to himself. He thought then of Albert Cooper. He was on Albert Cooper’s ground. Not exactly, but near enough for the inexactitude of sentiment. His turn eventually came and he drank his tea alert to the gathering wail of the siren and the distant, foreboding throb of German engines. But neither actually sounded. It was quiet.

  Finlay stopped walking half-way across Waterloo Bridge. From this vantage-point, in odd dabs and caresses of moonlight emerging from shifting cloud, you could convince yourself that London slumbered peaceful, and intact. In the distance to his left, moonlight filigreed the spires and fancies of the House of Commons and its fairy-tale clock tower. To his right, he could see almost as clearly as in daylight the dome of St Paul’s. They had hit the cathedral twice. Neither bomb had exploded. The second had been an 8oo-pounder. Finlay knew that Richard Nevin had been a member of the fire crew that had winched the second bomb from the cathedral vaults. It had crashed through the front steps and travelled twenty-five feet through ancient masonry and sanctified space. They had tunnelled after it through gas mains, electrical cables and finally through the black, sucking mud into which the missile further descended when they tried to tether it. Christ alone knew how the thing had not detonated. Finlay rested his arms on cold stone and looked at the river. Under the exposed moon he could make out ropes of current towing urgent water forty feet below. It ran in braids and coils of tidal force that stippled the surface and forced water, white, caroming up the bridge buttresses.

  Frederick Lange had seen energy harnessed by the hydroelectric turbines of a dam he had built on a glacial lake in the Austrian Alps. And this had inspired in him an interest in energy itself. But it must have been an abstract interest, because it had nothing to do with water turbines, Babcock said, or electricity. Now Frederick Lange was dead, or at least, had disappeared. His daughter was engaged in work that might be voluntary and that she described as translation, but was definitely secret. Either she deliberately lied about her father, or she had been misled about him. She carried out her clandestine work in a building of his design that was one of five Finlay had been tasked to protect, if he could, from the ravages of fire. And those buildings had nothing in common but for a certain geometric elegance, should you draw intersecting points between them on a map. He pictured in his mind the pentagram he had described in pencil on his own map. Maybe it was magic they were involved in after all. Hadn’t Newton himself spent more time studying alchemy than astronomy? Finlay recalled reading something to that effect on the reverse side of a cigarette card, or in a comic book. His own scientific knowledge was pitiful, dismally limited to fire and how to put fires out. He knew the precise temperature at which almost everything that would support combustion would start to burn. He knew sufficient about water pressure to instigate and command the effective play of power hoses over a blaze. He never needed to hesitate over the choice between fighting fire with water or with foam. He knew about volatility and he understood as well as any man alive the way to fight a noxious, or a chemical, or an explosive fire. About the science of energy, he knew nothing. He looked at the water toiling beneath his feet and allowed his vacant mind to scan the plans of Absalom House. They were transparently anodine, blank with maddening mystery.

  It must be a runic thing, he thought, resuming his journey. Absalom House was built on a ley line and gathered dormant energy from the stars, or from deep under the earth. Then of course there was the Absalom dome. A picture came into his head from a film he had seen, Victor Frankenstein, frazzle-haired and mad, channelling lightning from an electrical storm through a humming transformer and jolting life into his grotesque creation. Finlay was entertaining himself with more of this nonsense when he turned on to the Strand and was stiffened into motionlessness by the sound of a stricken aircraft. Then he saw it, sparks and white flames engulfing its huge shadow not sixty feet above his head as it juddered from the north, across the Strand, towards the river. It must have just come out of a stall, Finlay realized, to have flown, burning, in silence. Its engines had re-engaged literally above him and he felt their volume judder through him as he registered the twin swastikas painted on to the underside of the wings and identified the stricken aircraft as a Heinkel bomber. Its undercarriage was half-down and rubber from its burning tyres descended and blazed a path of dripping fire that lit the road. Then with a groan the aeroplane had passed beyond view and there was a coughing lurch and its engines ceased. He saw something tumble, ablaze, cartwheeling over the road. The object came to a halt in a welter of sparks against the obdurate stone of a Strand building and he saw that it was a chair, leather and horsehair burning furiously, a steel frame giving the thing identifiable shape. Finlay heard something tear the sky in spasms and felt an intense joy at the metal, strafing sound. Our ground-to-air has brought this fucker down, he thought. Yes! And then, while he was constructing his next thought, he heard the smack and then the rumble and roar of impact as the bomber descended into collision. Some poor mother’s son, more likely sons, entered his mind unwelcome, interloping, momentary, before he banished the speculation. Our ground-to-air brought that fucker down. We have not lost this war, he said to himself, skirting shards of metal as the chair debris skittered and contracted, in the angle of pavement and edifice, with unaccustomed cold. A part of him wanted to scrutinize the wreckage closely, better to appreciate the actual fabric of the enemy. But more of him wanted to travel on and Finlay was too acutely aware of just how rare in his life had become the luxury of personal choice, to linger.

  ‘You really do want to go?’

  It was a statement of fact, not a question.

  ‘I do. Yes, sir. I do.’

  It was White. It was White only. The windows had been repaired. More accurately, they had been replaced. The new ones were opaque and tough-looking. Maybe they were bomb-proof, Finlay thought, as Grey had insisted Winston was. Their new windows allowed a sort of second-hand, sufficient light, but no view. Finlay regretted the absence of their former, exalted vista. He had enjoyed the expansive sky, its comedy of errant barrage balloons.

  Tea?’

  ‘I’ll have a cup if you’re having one, sir.’

  ‘Biscuit?’

  ‘No, sir. Not unless a biscuit is obligatory.’

  White sighed. He spread his hands across the unblemished blotter covering the centre of the desk. He pressed a button on his telephone and they sat in silence until, after a short interval, tea was brought. Tea was poured. Milk and sugar were proffered. Presently, both men sipped. White sighed again.

  ‘What is it you miss, Chief Fire Officer?’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  There’s bull, I suppose,’ White said. ‘Buffing buttons and belt-buckle and cap-badge. Whitening belt-webbing. Spit and polishing of boots. Scouring your mess tin and cleaning and shining generally, for kit inspection. Keeping the breach of your rifle spotless, keening your bayonet blade.’

  Finlay said nothing.

  ‘Drill, then. Perhaps you are that rare martial perfectionist who craves the collective percussion of boots on a parade ground. Bayonet practice. Obstacle courses and cross-country runs.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Is it men? Do you revel in the company of men in the confines of a barracks hut? Do you find a fulfilment there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pale buttocks. Vaseline. Acceptance and understanding, dark and manful. Do those words suggest to you a sort of bliss?’

  Finlay did not know what to say.

  ‘You need not be ashamed,’ White said. ‘Really, you needn’t.’

  Finlay said nothing. He sipped tea. White sat. Finlay had not yet seen him blink.

  ‘You were in a gunnery unit, of course. I forgot. Forgive me. Where
they teach you to love your gun, rather than to fuck your comrades. And did you, Finlay? Did you unrequitedly love your gun?’

  ‘Our guns were rather old, sir. Somewhat unreliable. They were more in need of constant care than deserving of affection.’

  There was a silence. White’s anger was of a different order from that of the Immaculate Major, which Finlay now recalled, on an earlier occasion, confronting in this room. White’s anger was altogether of a different magnitude.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I’m buggered if I know, sir.’

  White brought his hands up off the blotter and pushed his fingers into his cheeks. ‘Three days ago you tendered your written resignation from the Fire Service and reapplied to join a unit of the Royal Artillery.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sir.’

  ‘After all we have told you. About your value to us.’

  ‘Negligible, sir. With respect. I have done everything possible to those five buildings in terms of fire prevention and the retarding of fire. I have drilled the staff of each building. I have drilled the auxiliaries. I have lectured on the specifics to the Chief Officers of each and every Fire Station in the remotest proximity, in the direst emergency, to those buildings. I don’t want to wait. I want to fight. I want to fight until this war is won and then when the enemy is defeated, if I survive the fighting, then I’m sure I’d be honoured to return to London and the Service.’

  White looked at him. ‘I understand there was some unpleasantness last night at a tea wagon not far from Waterloo Station.’

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘We are not having you followed. That’s only one of your many conceits. There was a Home Guard Captain at the scene and he made a report.’

  ‘I was spat at in the queue,’ Finlay said. ‘Corporal from the Lancashire Fusiliers. Hawked and gobbed in my face.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. The Home Guard Captain pointed a pistol at my chest before I could do anything. I made it fairly plain, verbally, that I thought the Corporal should have stayed in Lancashire, sir. Specifically in an anatomical location. Then I took my hanky from my pocket and wiped phlegm off my face.’

  White looked thoughtful. ‘The chaps who cut coal suffer much the same sort of abuse,’ he said. ‘Miners are not provided with a lapel button such as those the merchant seamen on the convoys are given to wear. It’s damned unfair on them.’

  Finlay tried to imagine a chap mining coal.

  ‘We could get you a lapel button, I suppose. Perhaps the wisest thing would be simply to keep you, for the duration, out of civilian clothes.’

  ‘What happened last night happened after I tendered my resignation. With respect, sir, being spat at is nowhere near the point.’

  White brought both hands down on to the desk-top with a thud that jerked Finlay to his feet at attention. His eyes fixed, for fear of looking at the inferno of White’s furious face, on a framed chart behind White on the wall. It was a plan of a ship, one of the iron-clad merchant vessels of the previous century, described in section from its keel through each of its dividing decks to its superstructure. And then Finlay had it. Absalom House had a concealed floor. It was so fucking obvious! The disparity that had nagged away, without his consciously knowing it, between the height of its rooms and the exterior dimensions of the building allowed for a hidden floor. Finlay looked at the section of the old ship hung on the wall behind White’s head and it all became abundantly clear. There was a floor in the building that did not appear on the Absalom blueprint; at which the lift did not stop, to which the turns of the stairwell did not correspond, in which God alone knew what went on. Unless Babcock knew, because Babcock seemed to know a lot about Frederick Lange. Unless Rebecca Lange knew, and had lied to him in a language foreign to her with the fluent conviction that could only come from long practice. White was roaring. Finlay recognized the ship on the wall. She was the Great Eastern. He was aware of the undistinguished, even pathetic, fate the vessel had met. But he thought that unlike Brunei’s iron-hulled folly, doomed by ambitious design and preposterous tonnage, he was likely to weather this particular storm.

  Finlay stood and concentrated his gaze on the plan of the ship on the wall; on riveted iron plates and immense boilers and steam turbines designed to churn those great bronze screws through ocean water. His eyes focused on bulkhead and funnel, on mast, sail, winch, girder, anchor and chain; on the vast intricacy of the floating city that comprised a great ship. His mind pondered the power that would be needed to urge motion, speed, direction, out of inertia. It was the lurch into life from idleness to propulsion. It was the lurch into life. Power. Energy. Absalom’s hidden floor. White raged at the edge of Finlay’s senses and Finlay pondered Brunei’s flawed leviathan as his vile breakfast conspired with his nerves, rebelling against his stomach and forcing a series of sour belches from his throat.

  He had breakfasted with Nevin.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Nevin had said, bravado apparently intact, as Finlay slid his plate on to their table and sniffed at its charred contents.

  ‘It may have been welsh rarebit, once, Nevin said. ‘But that was before last rites and cremation. I can probably find you an urn for anything you don’t eat.’

  Nevin did not look good. He was eating porridge. His hands were shaking so badly that it was difficult for him even to manipulate a spoon. Finlay thought that the porridge had been not so much chosen as necessitated by the need for the spoon. A knife and fork would have been beyond the tremors Nevin was failing to conceal. As if to prove the point, Nevin reached halfway to the salt cellar on the table-top between them and then pulled his hand back, as if he had changed his mind. Finlay picked up the salt and reached across and shook some over Nevin’s bowl.

  ‘Much obliged, Errol.’ He gestured at his side plate. ‘Maybe you could spread a bit of margarine on to that piece of toast and chuck it at me, the way the kids chuck sprats to the seals at London Zoo. I could probably catch it after a few practice tries.’

  Nevin smiled, but the smile came out all wrong. It stretched his face into something ghastly, the smile of a clown from some morbid circus dream. Finlay sawed with the serrated edge of his knife at the culinary pyre on his plate. The knife was light in his fingers, its blade like counterfeit steel, dull-edged, inadequate to its task.

  ‘Didn’t they give you a bayonet in the army?’ Nevin said.

  ‘They did.’

  ‘You should have hung on to it.’

  Finlay put his knife and fork down on the table and picked up the charcoal-coloured construction from his plate, pulled it apart and bit into the smaller of the two resulting pieces. It was hard, resisting his bite. When he bit through it, it tasted like the dead, damp aftermath of fire.

  Nevin watched with interest. ‘You’ve your own teeth then,’ he said.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have?’ Finlay said, chewing, wishing he wasn’t.

  ‘Scouser. Borstal boy. Just assumed you’d have had a full set by now. No offence.’

  ‘None taken, I’m sure,’ Finlay said. He swallowed, thinking the reflex rash, even dangerous, when he considered what it was that was now on its way through his system. ‘I could tell you that I owe the present state of my pearlies to the fresh food I was able to steal as a thief and a Liverpudlian, which as you know are one and the same—’

  Nevin nodded.

  ‘—from the docks down the road. But it wouldn’t be true. The truth is that, like every Hollywood star, I have invested a portion of my fortune in dentistry.’

  Nevin dropped his spoon into the congealing mess of his porridge. ‘I can’t eat this. Not even a Jock could stomach this slop.’

  ‘I thought you were a Jock.’

  ‘Londoner. Born and bred.’

  ‘Nevin’s a Jock name.’

  ‘So is Finlay,’ Nevin said. ‘If you think about it.’

  Finlay got to his feet. ‘More tea?’

  ‘I don’t mind if I
do.’

  Finlay walked over to the canteen counter and smiled at the woman standing closest to the tea urn and gestured with his fingers for two cups. She took a big metal pot off the counter and revived the stewed brew inside it with a blast of steam and boiling water from a tap on the urn. The woman wore her hair in a peroxide fan spread over her shoulders, hoisted up from the nape of her neck by a folded scarf secured by a knot on the top of her head. Finlay could not fathom the seemingly universal popularity of this style. He thought it looked unflattering at best and on its older wearers positively sinister. The great swathes of yellow hair looked dead and bleached the features. He took the two mugs she slid across the counter and thought that Nevin’s would provide less refreshment than struggle, one more morning ordeal in the man’s convulsing hand.

  ‘We thought we had it tough. Do you remember?’ Nevin said, staring at his untouched tea.

  Finlay sipped. The brew was weak and scalding. ‘We did. Sometimes.’

  ‘Nah. Cake walk. All of it.’ He reached for his mug and retracted his hand. ‘No comparison.’

  ‘Did you hear any reports of crashed aircraft last night?’

  ‘Ours or theirs?’

  ‘Theirs.’

  ‘One. Heinkel. Came off second-best against a Hurricane over Gravesend. Lost its compass, lost its bearings. Came down over one of the Southwark wharves. The pilot was the only one of the crew to survive the dogfight, but he was badly wounded, apparently. They reckon he knew he’d bought it and was trying to bring the aircraft and its full payload of bombs down on top of Bankside power station.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Nevin said. By diverting himself with his story, he had successfully manoeuvred his mug into a position in front of his face, where it shook only slightly. His elbow was braced on the table. ‘Your Jerry, Errol, is nothing if not single-minded.’

  After hearing the last of the stricken bomber, Finlay had crossed the Strand and walked along Wellington Street. His route was as dark as the sky maintained it. He passed and saw nobody. He negotiated the labyrinth bordering Covent Garden by touch, by moon, by memory. He continued as the route, despite its straightness, became Bow Street and then Endell Street. He crossed St Giles High Street into Dyott Street and emerged on to New Oxford Street, turning left for Tottenham Court Road. He had turned into Rathbone Place and was actually engaged in the blind door elaboration of entering The Wheatsheaf pub before it occurred to his conscious mind that this had always been his destination. Finlay quickly realized that outside the incandescent orbit of Rebecca Lange, he could be easily anonymous in here. Nobody spat at the supposed cowardice suggested by his civilian clothes. Perhaps two thirds of the men in the pub, and almost all of the women, were dressed as people had dressed for a casual evening out before the war. There were uniforms, some of them, Finlay saw, denoting surprisingly high rank. And for a Monday night, almost all of the women and some of the civilian men wore the scruffy flamboyance Finlay had thought such a novelty on his first visit. Whatever his prejudices, whatever the depth of his instinctive contempt for anything that defied his preconceptions and so intimidated him, he had to admit that in their contrived, bedraggled way, they were a stylish lot. And better than that. Tonight their general effect was to enable him to hide in plain sight at the bar, where he sipped a surprisingly satisfying pint of bitter as he waited. Shaping his lips to the drink, he felt the stickiness of phlegm not properly cleaned off tightening the skin of his nose and cheeks. Never mind. Washing would wait. Washing was no longer the luxuriant pleasure it had been before the final sliver of Grey’s abducted Palmolive bar had finally slipped into nothing between his fingers. Perhaps Babcock’s brother-in-law had access to proper soap. Finlay would have to ask. Don’t ask, you don’t get, as his mother, who had never in her life asked for anything, was fond of saying.