by Sarah Waters
‘Hey!’ someone called behind her. ‘You, without a hat! Are you crazy?’
She thumped the flashes on her shoulder. ‘Ambulance!’ she shouted, panting. ‘Ambulance!’
‘Hey! Come back!’
But after a second, the voices faded. The wind had turned, and she found herself, suddenly, smothered in smoke. She got out her handkerchief and pressed it to her nose and mouth, but kept on running; the smoke came on in gusts, so that she passed, for a hundred feet or more, through alternate states of blindness and stinging light. Once she was caught in a shower of sparks, which singed her hair and burnt her face. A moment later she fell, and in getting to her feet lost her sense of direction: she ran forwards a couple of steps, and met a wall; turned, went on, and seemed almost at once to meet another…Finally, something came hurtling towards her head—a piece of burning paper, she thought it was, as she dodged away. Then she saw that it was a pigeon, with blazing wings. She put out her hands and ran from it, stumbling in horror, dropping her handkerchief, drawing breath as a new wave of smoke came against her face, and starting to choke. She staggered forwards—and suddenly found herself in space and heat and chaos. She put her hands on her thighs, and coughed, and spat. Then she looked up.
She had come very close to the heart of the fire; but recognised nothing. The buildings about her, which she ought to know; the running firemen; the pools of water on the ground; the snaking hoses—everything was lit with a garish, unnatural intensity, or hidden by leaping black shadows. She tried calling to a man, but he couldn’t hear her over the roaring of the fire, the throbbing of the pumps. She went to somebody else, taking him by the shoulders, bellowing into his face: ‘Where am I? Where the hell am I? Where’s Pym’s Yard?’
‘Pym’s Yard?’ he answered, shaking her off and already moving away. ‘You’re in it!’
She looked down, and saw cobbles beneath her boots; gazing around again, she began to make out little familiar details. And she realised at last that the warehouse, Palmer’s, must be right here, ahead of her, not quite at the centre of the blaze; and that the reason she could not make out the shape of her own building was because a side and part of the roof of Palmer’s had fallen and flattened it.
The knowledge undid her. She stood, unable to act—simply gazing into the flames. Once a fireman caught hold of her arm and pushed her: ‘Get out of the way, can’t you?’ But she took the three or four steps he made her take, and then stood slackly again. Finally someone called her by her name. It was Henry Varney, the Goodge Street warden. His face and hands were black with smoke. The sockets of his eyes were white, where he’d rubbed them. He looked like a stage minstrel.
He was gripping her by the shoulders. ‘Miss Langrish!’ he was saying in amazement. ‘How long have you been here?’
She couldn’t answer. He began to walk her away from the fire. He took off his hat and tried to put it on her head, and it was hot, like a roasting-dish. ‘Come away from the flames,’ he said. ‘You’re burnt, you’re—Come back from the flames, Miss Langrish!’
‘I came to get Helen,’ she said to him.
He said again, ‘Come back!’ Then he met her gaze, and looked away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The warehouse—the place went up like tinder. The shelter caught it, too.’
‘The shelter, too?’
He nodded. ‘God knows how many were in there.’
He had led her to the sill of a broken window; he made her sit down, and squatted beside her, holding her hand. She said to him once, ‘They’re sure, Henry, about the shelter?’
‘Quite sure. I’m so sorry.’
‘And nobody was saved?’
‘No one.’
A fireman came over. ‘You ambulance people,’ he said roughly to Kay, ‘should have cleared out of here bloody forty minutes ago! There’s nothing for you, didn’t you hear?’
Henry stood up, and said something to him; the man ducked his head and moved off. ‘Christ,’ Kay heard him say…
Henry took her hand again. ‘I’ve got to leave you, Miss Langrish. I hate to do it. Won’t you go to the First Aid post? Or, is there someone—a friend—I could send for?’
She nodded to the fire. ‘My friend was in there, Henry.’
He pressed her hand, and moved away; and in a second he was running, calling out…The fire, however, had reached its peak before Kay had arrived. Flames no longer leapt into the sky. The roar had lessened; the heat, if anything, was greater than before, but the warehouse walls burned shrunkenly in the midst of the blaze, and soon, with a final gust of sparks, they shivered and collapsed. The firemen moved from one spot to another. The water ran filthily across the cobbles, or rose as a thick acid steam. Once the ground gave a series of rumbles and thuds, which must have come from the dropping of bombs nearby; but the blast, if anything, worked on the scene as a riddling by a giant poker would have: the fire flared up brightly again for ten or fifteen minutes, then began to die. One of the engines was switched off, and its hoses reeled in. The fierce light faded, along with the clamour of the pumps. The moon had set, or been covered by cloud. Objects lost their sharp edges, their look of unrealness; little details faded back into the shadows, like so many moths folding up their wings.
No one came to Kay again, through all this time. She might have been gradually reabsorbed into the darkness, too. She sat with her hands on her thighs, simply gazing into the hot, still core of the burning building; she saw the fire change colour, from fathomless white, to yellow, to orange, and to red. The second engine was turned off and driven away. Someone called to someone else that the All Clear had gone, that the roads were opened.
She thought of roads, of movement, and could make no sense of it. She lifted her hands to her head. Her hair felt strange—it was coarse, had been singed by sparks. The skin of her face was tender where she pressed it; she dimly remembered someone telling her she was burnt.
Then Henry Varney came to her again, and touched her shoulder. She tried to look at him—tried to blink—and could hardly do it, for her eyes had been dried, been almost baked, by the heat of the fire.
‘Miss Langrish,’ he said—just what he’d said before; only now, his voice was gentle, and choked and queer. She watched his face, and saw tears running down his cheeks, making crooked white channels through the soot. ‘Can you see?’ he was saying. ‘Will you look?’ He’d raised his hand. She understood, at last, that he was pointing.
She turned her head, and saw two figures. They were standing a little way off, and seemed as still and as speechless as she. The dying fire lit them, picked them out of the darkness: what she noticed first was the unnatural paleness, in that filthy place, of their faces and their hands. Then one of the figures took a step, and she saw that it was Helen.
She covered her eyes. She didn’t get up. Helen had to come to her and helped her to her feet. And even then she wouldn’t take the hand from before her face; she let Helen embrace her, awkwardly, and she laid her brow against Helen’s shoulder and wept like a child into her hair. She didn’t feel pleasure or relief. She felt only, still, a mixture of pain and fear so sharp, she thought it would kill her. She shuddered and shuddered, in Helen’s arms; and finally raised her head.
Through the stinging film of her own tears, she saw Julia. She was hanging back, as if afraid to come any nearer; or as if she was waiting. Kay met her gaze, and shook her head, and began to weep again. ‘Julia,’ she said, in a kind of bafflement—for she could understand nothing, at that moment, except that Helen had been taken, and now was returned. ‘Julia. Oh, Julia! Thank God! I thought I’d lost her.’
1941
Viv was on a train, somewhere between Swindon and London—it was impossible to say where exactly, for the train kept stopping at what might or might not have been stations; and there was no point trying to see from the windows, for the blinds were down and, anyway, the station names all painted over or removed. Viv had been sitting for the last four hours with seven other people in a second-class compartm
ent meant for six. The mood was awful. A couple of soldiers kept larking about with lighted matches, trying to set fire to each other’s hair; a po-faced WAAF officer kept asking them to stop. Another woman was knitting, and the knobs of her needles were striking the thighs of the people sitting next to her. One of them—a girl in trousers—had just said, ‘Do you mind? These slacks weren’t cheap. Your needles are making snags in them.’
The knitting woman had drawn in her chin. ‘Snags?’ she was saying. ‘You don’t think there are rather more important things to worry about, just now?’
‘No, I don’t, as it happens.’
‘Well, I’d like to know what sort of slacks you think you’d be able to buy if the Nazis were to invade.’
‘If the Nazis invade, I don’t suppose I’ll care about it one way or the other. But until they do—’
‘The Nazis would marry you off, all you girls like you, in no time,’ said the woman. ‘How should you like to have an SS man for a husband?’
The argument went on. Viv turned her head from it. In the place to her left was a younger girl, a well-to-do girl of about thirteen, gawky and earnest. She had an album filled with pictures of horses; she kept passing it across the compartment to her father, a naval man with braid on his sleeve. ‘That one’s just like Cynthia’s, Daddy,’ she’d say as she did it. Or, ‘This one’s like Mabel’s, he’s a dear thing, isn’t he? This one has exactly White Boy’s head; White Boy’s just a shade fuller in the flank, that’s all…’
Her father would glance at the picture and grunt. He was filling in the blanks in a crossword puzzle in a newspaper, tapping with his pen against the page. But for the past couple of hours, too, he had been trying to catch Viv’s eye. Every time she looked his way, he’d wink. If she crossed her legs, he’d let his gaze travel up and down her calves. Once he’d got out his case of cigarettes and leant across to offer her one, but the po-faced WAAF officer had stopped him and said, ‘I’m afraid I’m asthmatic. If you’re going to smoke, I’d appreciate it if you could do it in the corridor.’ After that he’d sat back and smirked horribly at Viv, as if the WAAF had made conspirators of them.
‘Look at this great brute, Daddy. He’s like the fellow we saw at Colonel Webster’s that time. Daddy! You’re not looking!’
‘For heaven’s sake, Amanda,’ he said irritably now, ‘there are only so many ponies a father can take.’
‘Fathers must be pretty silly, then, that’s all I can say. Anyway, they’re not ponies, they’re horses.’
‘Well, whatever they are I’m bored to death of them. And there, look—’ Viv had got to her feet. She was going to the lavatory. ‘This young lady’s bored to death of them, too. I shouldn’t be surprised if she’s so bored of them she’s going to find an open window and throw herself out of it. I might very well join her.—Is there something,’ he said to Viv, rising and touching her arm, ‘I can help you with?’
‘No, thanks,’ she answered, shaking him off.
‘Daddy,’ his daughter cried, ‘how rotten you are!’
‘It would be kinde, kirche,’ the knitting woman was saying to the trousered girl, ‘and no more running about in a pair of slacks, I can tell you that—’
Viv stepped unsteadily to the door of the compartment and slid it back. She looked down the train, hesitating a little, because the corridor was crowded. A group of Canadian airmen had boarded at Swindon: they were propped against the windows or sitting on the floor, playing cards and smoking. The blue of their uniforms was intense in the indigo light of the train, and the smoke from their cigarettes made them appear as if wreathed in drifting bolts of silk; they looked, in fact, for a single moment, quite beautiful and unearthly.
But when they saw Viv beginning to make her way along the narrow passage, they started into life—drawing back elaborately so that she might pass, scrambling to their feet. The bolts of silk seemed to billow, to tear and unravel, about the sharpness of their movements. There were whistles and calls: ‘Whoops!’ ‘Look out!’ ‘Make way for the lady, boys!’
‘Are those loaded, Mary?’ said one of them, nodding to Viv’s chest. Another put his arms up to steady her when the motion of the train made her sway: ‘Shall we dance?’
‘Want to powder your nose?’ a boy asked, when she reached the end of the corridor and looked around. ‘There’s a place right here. My pal’s been keeping it warm for you.’
She shook her head and pressed on. She’d rather not go to the lavatory at all, than go with so many men outside the door. But they grabbed at her hands, trying to pull her back. ‘Don’t leave us, Susie!’ ‘You’re breaking our hearts!’ They offered her beer and swigs of whisky. She shook her head again, smiling. They offered her chocolate.
‘I’m watching my figure,’ she said at last, pulling away. They called after her: ‘So are we! It’s beautiful!’
The next corridor was quieter, the one after that quieter still: some of its lights had failed, and she passed along it almost in darkness. There were more servicemen here, but they must have started their journey sooner than the others: they didn’t want to joke, they sat with their knees drawn up, their greatcoats belted, their heads lowered, trying to sleep. Viv had to pick her way around them, stepping awkwardly, reaching for holds on the walls and windows as the train shuddered and rocked.
At the end of this corridor there were another two lavatories; and the lock on one of them, she was relieved to see, was turned to Vacant. But when she caught hold of the doorknob and pushed, the door only moved a little way inwards and then was thrust hurriedly closed again. There was someone behind it: a soldier, in khaki; she got a glimpse of him in the mirror above the sink, turning his head. She saw the look of alarm on his face as the door was opened; she thought she’d caught him peeing, and was embarrassed. She moved back, to the junction of the carriages, and waited.
The lavatory door stayed shut for almost another minute. Then she saw the knob being slowly turned, and the door was drawn back, as if cautiously. The soldier put out his head, bit by bit, like a man expecting gunfire. When he caught her eye, he straightened up and came out properly.
‘Sorry about that.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Viv, still a little embarrassed. ‘The lock’s not broken, is it?’
‘The lock?’ He looked vague. He was glancing about from side to side, and now began to bite at one of his fingernails. His fingers, she saw, had short crisp hairs on them, dark as a monkey’s. His cheeks were bluish: he needed a shave. His eyes were red at the corners and rims. As she moved past him he leant towards her and said, confidentially, ‘Haven’t seen the guard about, have you?’
She shook her head.
‘They’re like ruddy sharks.’
He took his hand from his mouth as he spoke, raised the thumb of it to suggest a fin, and moved it as a fish might move through water; then opened and closed his fingers: Snap. But he did it in an unexcited sort of way, still glancing about from side to side; finally biting at the nail again and frowning, and moving off. She went into the lavatory and closed the door and locked it, and more or less forgot him.
She used the toilet—stooping, rather than sitting on the stained wooden seat; swaying about again with the rocking of the train, feeling the pull of the muscles in her calves and thighs. She washed her hands, looking into the smeary mirror, going over the details of her face—thinking, as she always did, that her nose was too narrow, her lips too thin; imagining that, at twenty, she was getting old, looked tired…She redid her make-up and combed her hair. The single hairs and bits of fluff that got caught in the teeth of the comb she pulled out; she made a ball of them and tucked it away, neatly, in the bin under the basin.
She was just putting the comb back into her bag when someone knocked at the door. She took one last look in the mirror and called, ‘All right!’
The knock came again, louder than before.
‘All right! Just a sec!’
Then the handle was tried. She heard a voice, a man’s
voice, trying to force itself into a whisper. ‘Miss! Open up, will you?’
‘God!’ she said to herself. She could only suppose it was one of the Canadians, larking about. Or it might, at a pinch, be the father of the horse-mad girl…But when she drew back the bolt and opened the door, a hand came around it to keep her from shutting it again; and she recognised the short black hairs on its fingers. Then came his khaki sleeve, his shoulder, his unshaven chin, and bloodshot eye.
‘Miss,’ he said. He’d taken off his cap. ‘Do me a favour, will you? The guard’s on his way. I’ve lost my ticket and he’ll give me hell—’
‘I’m just coming out,’ she said, ‘if you’ll let me.’
He shook his head. Now he was keeping her from opening the door, as well as from closing it. He said, ‘I’ve seen this bloke and, honest to God, he’s a tartar. I heard him earlier on, tearing a strip off some poor devil who had the wrong sort of warrant. If he knocks and hears my voice, he’ll still want his ticket.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’
‘Can’t you just let me in till he’s gone past?’
She looked at him in amazement. ‘In here, with me?’
‘Just till he’s gone by. And when he knocks, you can slip your ticket under the door. Please, miss. It’s a thing girls do for servicemen all the time.’
‘I’ll bet it is. Not this girl, though.’
‘Come on, I’m begging you. I’m in an awful squeeze. I’ve got compassionate leave, only forty-eight hours. I’ve spent half of that already, freezing my—Well, freezing my feet off, on Swindon station. If he throws me out I’m done for. Be a sport. It’s not my fault. I had the ticket in my hand and put it down for half a minute. I think some Navy boy saw me do it—’
‘A minute ago you said you’d lost it.’
He touched his hair distractedly. ‘Lost it, had it pinched, what’s the difference? I’ve been dodging up and down this train like a ruddy lunatic, in and out of lavatories all the way. All I’m looking for is someone tender-hearted to give me a bit of a break. It’ll be no skin off your nose, will it? You can trust me, I swear to God. I’m not—’ He stopped and drew back his head; then his face reappeared, he gave a hiss—‘Here he comes!’—and before she could do anything about it he had made a scuffling rush into the lavatory, bundling her back into it in the process. He shot the bolt and stood with his ear at the crack of the door-frame, his lower lip caught between his teeth.