Grey stared at the pale amber colouring his whisky glass.
‘They went over in three lines with their rifles pointed towards the enemy trenches, their bayonets bright in the sunshine burning through the smoke left across no-man’s-land by our artillery barrage.’
‘And you went with them?’
‘I led them. Proudly. I was damn sorry for the first fifty yards of our advance that I hadn’t brought that bloody sword.’
The advance was slow. Steady. The German machine-gun fire that greeted it was a low, distant puttering. It did not sound loud, like violence. But it was persistent. Wincing into fire, Grey could see muzzle flashes from maxim guns dug in at regular intervals behind redoubts strung along the length of the forward German trench. The advance continued. Grey became numbly aware of spaces opening to his right and left as the lines seemed to waver and fall at the edge of his vision. They continued onwards. Men fell silently. They flopped to the ground, the life eagerly leaving them before their bodies lay properly on the earth. Grey walked on, a rifle heavy between his hands, aware of the air being rent to his right and left, above him, on the shuddering undulations of the ground beneath his feet. Still they advanced. There was fire from the woods to their left now and Grey sensed rather than saw the flank wither as men were jerked from life in the murderous crossfield of fire. A lieutenant came over to say something and a burst of machine-gun rounds turned the words to bright blood and he fell clutching his throat. The advance continued. Some of the men were seeking cover and returning fire, a dwindling, staccato sound against the withering fury of the fire into which they continued to walk. And then, with a raucous shriek, the German bombardment began. The air above them turned yellow in flashes and grey with the weight of churning explosive and the burst and zip of shrapnel. Grey was rocked from his feet by a blast of percussion at his back. He crawled, holding his rifle, over the lip of a shellhole. There were men there already, some of them groaning and writhing and red and in parts bone-white with new wounds. On the forward lip of the crater men were trying to fire their rifles and dying in swathes as the German machine-guns targeted them in lateral sweeps.
‘It’s a fucking catastrophe,’ someone said.
Grey looked to his right and saw Sergeant McKay, filthy, blood-encrusted, his eyes wide with anger and indignation, trying with his hands to push bright entrails back into the belly of a boy in a uniform.
‘He’s dead, Sergeant,’ Grey said.
‘We’re all fucking dead, sir.’ McKay said. And he spat at the ground as the world screamed and shuddered in poisonous explosions of bright ochre and gloom above them.
It was after four o’clock in the morning and the night bombardment had finally petered out when McKay drove Finlay back to Coptic Street. Finlay sat up beside him in the front of the car. McKay drove carefully and well, his huge gauntleted hands light on the big steering-wheel. He had shifted seven or eight pints of stout, once invited by Grey to share their table, but it was obvious that a mere gallon or so of beer impinged not at all on the man’s sobriety or alertness.
‘It’s in Stepney, that place Babcock showed you last night,’ he said to Finlay. ‘There’s two of them there. One of them used to be a margarine store before the war.’
‘That’s the one I was in. It stank of stale grease.’
‘I’m sure neither of them is too fragrant. The other one is run by a dwarf who used to be an optician. East End hunchback. Only in England, eh, Master Jack?’
Finlay smiled at the nickname. McKay was being proprietorial presumably because he had once fought Finlay’s father to a bloody standstill. Should he, on the same basis, start calling the Government killer ‘uncle’?
‘Scandal is that neither of them is safe,’ McKay said. ‘Decrepit railway arches supported by girders that look solid enough but provide no defence against bombs. Anything carrying above eighty kilos of HE and the whole fucking lot will come down around their ears. Not that some of the cunts in there deserve any better.’
They had reached Coptic Street. Finlay put a hand on the door handle and then looked at the Colour Sergeant. ‘You’d do anything for him, wouldn’t you.’
It was not a question. The engine ticked under the bonnet. Mechanical order was sweet music to his ears, Finlay realized, after the screaming chaos of the raids. The discreet burble of Babcock’s Norton; the expensive tremble of a Whitehall Bentley with the transmission in neutral.
McKay sighed to himself.
‘You would not believe how hot it was the day it all went to pot. A hot and sunny day, full kit, one water bottle apiece. We were cut from brigade to about battalion strength in less than twenty minutes. Eighty per cent dead or wounded, still under constant frontal assault from machine-guns and mortars. Heavy and accurate enfilade fire from the wood on our flank. Gommecourt, the wood. Imagine it, Master Jack.’
Finlay tried to imagine it, as he had tried many times before. But once again, it defeated his imagination.
‘I found myself in a shellhole with about twenty other blokes. The captain among them. Bit of mud in the bottom of the shellhole. It had rained a fair amount in the days prior to the assault. But what scant water there was, it was spoiled by bits of corpses and undrinkable.
‘The captain took command. He promised he’d get us back to our lines in the hour before the dawn. He was as thirsty as any of us, as tired, as shocked at what had become of us. But he left that shellhole nine times as we waited for the hour before the dawn and gathered another dozen of our surviving lads in doing so. And then he did as he swore he would and got us home. Nobody else, certainly none of the boys, really thought we would escape from that horrible fucking wilderness of wire and dead men. But we did, thanks to him.’
‘How did he find his way back?’
‘Took a reading from the stars. Navigated by starlight. Clever man, your Captain Grey. Bravest I’ve ever met.’
The two men sat in silence for a moment.
‘It’s probably less common than you imagine, is courage,’ McKay said: ‘you growing up with it.’
‘With the memory of it. With the mementos. Enduring its cost,’ Finlay said.
‘He went out again after bringing us back to our lines,’ McKay said. ‘He could not believe that so many had died. Just over a hundred men returned, out of the entire battalion. He found them lying in rows, he said. Row upon silent row in the darkness, like sleep. And he came back and wept. Cried like a child.’
‘How were the other officers?’
‘There were no other officers. None of the other officers survived it. The captain was the only one.’
It had begun softly to rain. McKay switched on his window wipers and they swished fan patterns on to wet glass in darkness.
‘Did he say anything?’
‘Not to me. He said one thing to Babcock, when Babcock went to fetch him a bottle of whisky. He told Babcock that nature abhors a vacuum. That was all he said. And I’ve never known him talk about it again until tonight.’
McKay looked at Finlay.
‘I grew up a workhouse foundling. You grew up in the shadow of your father. But I’ve seen you walk into burning buildings, Master Jack, like it’s a regular occurrence. Me, I didn’t know what courage was until Captain Grey showed it to me in a shellhole in France. And you’re damn fucking right. I would do anything for him.’
McKay pulled off a gauntlet with his teeth and reached across Finlay into the glove compartment and pulled out a booklet, tearing a chit from it.
‘That’s your travel pass,’ he said. ‘If neither of us has any luck, I’ll be seeing you again.’
She was asleep. He had half-expected an angry vigil of Scotch and Benzedrine with records spilled across her rugs and the Irishman snoring on a sofa to a jazz soundtrack, but there she was, tucked up in bed, the counterpane revealing bare shoulders and her hair pulled upward in sleep behind her head, exposing a filigree of fine blonde curls under its weight, at the nape, when he found her lighter in the darkness and i
gnited its flame to look at her. She turned, awakened by the light, reaching for him.
‘In a few hours I have to go away.’ He held her.
‘Where?’
‘To a place called Barmouth. Just overnight. It’s in Wales. On the coast. A train ride.’
‘Why must you go?’
‘To see my mother. Her house was destroyed in the raids and Grey has sent her there.’
‘When?’ She was awakening, pulling strands of hair from her face with her fingers.
‘A few hours.’
‘Then we have a few hours.’ She was unbuttoning his tunic, fumbling with the buckle of his tunic belt. They had a few hours. Beyond that, nobody really knew how long anybody had. Under the covers, Rebecca was warm, tawny, naked. Finlay undressed and slipped into bed beside her feeling that he would live more through the coming hours than he had in the whole of his life. He felt a lifelong solitude slip wearily away from him. He was with Rebecca. It had taken Rebecca to bring to him the overwhelming need, he felt now, truly to share.
‘Do you love me?’
‘I love you,’ she said.
‘Do you trust me?’
She murmured something in her own language and then her mouth found his.
Thirteen
Frail snow petals formed in the freezing air outside and melted on the warmth of the train windows. Melting snow petals bleared the landscape, falling down the glass in ripples, like waves on a seashore of visiting grief. Finlay drew a line through grimy condensation in an effort to see further. It was sunset and the train rocked and moaned through a mournful passage of hills. The carriage in which he sat was almost empty. The train was a short hybrid of freight and passenger transportation. The freight was a cargo of torpedoes. Finlay had recognized their cylindrical shape under taut tarpaulins, their tiny propellers wrapped in greased paper tied with wire. Perhaps the cargo carried by this particular train had put passengers off travelling on it. Trains were frequently enough strafed and bombed.
Finlay had always thought the orange sunsets of October, incandescent with diminishing fire, one of the compensations for the losing of summer light. Even after his reluctant return to England, amid the raids, he had taken solace of a sort in the gorgeous auguring of the autumn nights.
A single soldier had guarded the wagon stacked with its cargo of torpedoes. He stood in his greatcoat and tin hat, motionless on the railway platform, the butt of his bayoneted rifle planted between his feet, his face lost to shadow. Rain edged the blade of his bayonet and dripped in heavy droplets from the rim of his helmet. He was as solid and lifeless as a statue, this sentinel, the folds of his greatcoat as dignified as bronze. He reminded Finlay of memorials familiar in many a town and city throughout England of what everyone now called the ’fourteen-eighteen. And so it was as the miles whiled wearily by, the spectre of this sentry lulled into Finlay’s restless mind Grey’s boys, slumbering in death outside the village of Serre in no-man’s-land.
They had died on a July morning twenty-five years ago. Through a quarter-century they had never seen the diminishing fire of another autumn sunset. They had died as boys, he thought, who would never ride bicycles or fish ponds again or put their coats down for goals in a game of football on the park.
But the boyish things were small, insignificant, in the scale of the adulthood they had been robbed of. They would never know the mad intoxication of attraction. They would not know intimacy and its slow, delicious nourishment of the soul. Rebecca had insisted on assembling in the morning what scant provisions she had and making them into a meal for his journey. She had fumbled on a dressing-gown and moved drowsily about her dark kitchen, hair in unravelled ropes of gold across her shoulders, eyes watchful of his. Now, without appetite, he unpacked his food. She had filled thick slices of black bread with cheese rinds and pickled cabbage. She had found from somewhere a half bar of chocolate. Finlay had refused her offer of a bottle of wine and bought ginger beer from a kiosk at the railway station. She had slipped a pewter flask of whisky into his coat pocket as they kissed goodbye. And it was from this that he drank now as the train rocked and the darkness encroached outside and the carriage filled with the bitter aroma of pickling vinegar.
Finlay walked the couple of miles from the train station to where his mother had been lodged, the route mostly along a coastal path, with the sea booming to his right like artillery fire in the darkness. She let him in herself and led the way up the stairs by candlelight to her rooms. They were warm and Finlay could see that they were spacious, even in the confining light allowed by candle wicks. Grey had done her proud.
‘Would you like tea, son?’
He shook his head.
‘A drink? There’s beer—’
‘Sit down, mum.’
Margaret Finlay sank into a chair.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he? Our Tommy is dead.’
Margaret Finlay’s face swam in agony. She gripped the arms of the chair that held her with swollen knuckles and she bowed her head.
‘You should have told me,’ Jack Finlay said. His voice broke. ‘You should have told me, mum.’
When she lifted her head, her face was wet with tears. ‘They asked me not to. They told me that your job was very important to the war effort. We cannot lose this war, John.’
‘When did he die?’
‘August.’
Finlay had his head in his hands.
‘I’ve had letters from him written since then.’
‘I wrote them,’ his mother said. ‘Grey suggested I should and God forgive me, I did.’
Finlay rocked and shuddered with his head in his hands. ‘Oh Jesus. Jesus.’
‘They needed you to fight fire. You’d have been no good to them grieving. They’re not bad men. They’re better than you think. Stronger.’
Finlay said nothing. He moaned and rocked and the salt stung his eyes, closed against the heels of his hands.
‘Tommy didn’t suffer, John. It was all over very quickly. There was no suffering.’
It hit Finlay like a blow, then, that this was his mother, who had lost her husband and her baby to war, trying to comfort and apologize to him. He got up and went across to her and, kneeling before her, hugged her hard, gathering her hair in his hands and pulling her head to his chest. They were like that for a long time, while candles guttered in the room and surf from the sea boomed like a barrage down on the shore.
Grey was waiting on the platform when his train pulled in to Paddington.
‘I take it you are rested after your leave.’
‘In the pink, Captain,’ Finlay said. ‘Never better.’
‘Topping,’ Grey said. ‘We understand Jerry is about to put on a really big show.’
They had been walking the length of the platform, weaving between files of troops towards the ticket barrier and concourse beyond.
‘You mean bigger than that raid the other night? The one you spent in The Prospect?’
Grey stopped. It was late afternoon and in the last, feeble light through the vaulted station roof he looked almost translucent with fatigue. But Finlay no longer worried about how tired, or gaunt, or desperately in need of rest and nourishment Grey appeared to him. Grey was unkillable, he realized now. By all the laws of physics in which he had once so delighted, Grey should have died in the storm of metal that greeted his battalion outside Serre. But Grey had lived. Grey was indestructible, Finlay had decided, his frail and sometimes louche appearance only nature’s ironic joke.
‘You can’t go back to Liverpool Street,’ Grey said. ‘Your quarters there are a tomb under forty feet of water.’
‘Babcock was right then.’
‘Babcock?’
‘About that tributary of the Fleet,’ Finlay said.
Grey laughed.
‘Since the Fleet’s nearest course is a mile away from where we put you, it would have to be some tributary. We don’t know where the water came from, frankly. But since you are above rather than beneath it, it’s of no impor
tance now. Go to Moorgate. Talk to Pearson, who is expecting you. They’ll feed you there. Wait for the air-raid warning. Concentrate on Absalom House.’
‘Just Absalom?’
‘Just Absalom, Chief Fire Officer. Absalom House is the only one of your buildings left.’
Grey did not offer Finlay a lift to Moorgate and the warning siren sounded when he was still trying to struggle through queues for a bus to take him in the direction of the City. As people scattered and the streets cleared, he simply took off his coat and discarded his gas mask and started to jog through the streets eastwards, towards the rumble of approaching aircraft. He was at the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road when he saw a motor cycle half-concealed under a rain cape in an alleyway. The engine, when he touched the cylinder head, was still warm. He kicked the bike over and it rumbled into fitful life and he rode it as fast as it would travel to the Moorgate station.
An ARP warden brought the news that Absalom had been hit by incendiaries as Finlay changed into a uniform. Bigger bombs, high explosives, were detonating by the time he reached the scene aboard the first fully manned appliance. They seemed to be targeting Liverpool Street again. The Absalom blaze lit up the third and fourth floors in twin necklaces of fierce yellow and ruby light through its windows. Two more appliances arrived. Finlay got three hoses playing on the burning floors from the pavement and brought two extension-ladder-mounted hoses into play before going in with hammers and axes at the head of a crash crew on the ground floor.
The Fire Fighter Page 23