The Fall
Page 24
The doctor slithered down into the pit. “Nurse, I’ll need morphine,” he called.
Another rescuer was trying to maneuver a piece of wood into the hole, lying on his side and pushing and shoving. The wreckage shifted and the man stopped. “Keep it steady, George,” his companion warned. He called into the darkness, “Don’t you worry, darling, we’ll soon have you out.”
Diana loaded a syringe and went down to where the doctor crouched. There was a moment of awkward scrabbling, the cleaning of a patch of flesh somewhere on the vast and dusty thigh that belonged, it seemed, to Ma Philips. From within her tomb, the woman moaned. She was calling for someone; she was crying someone’s name. Edith or Edie or someone. Maybe it was Eddy. The doctor took the syringe and held it upright for a moment, the liquid beading on the end of the needle. It was a moment of strange and ritual calm. Then he slid the needle into her exposed thigh and pushed the plunger home.
“Righto, Doc,” the rescuer said. His face was black with grime. In the light from the fire, his eyes shone like those of a Halloween mask. “We’ll get her out as quick as we can. Give us fifteen minutes.” He turned back to the task, reaching in to pull bricks out of the gap, his mate trying to work a prop into the space to take the load. Diana and the doctor climbed gingerly back to where Bert waited at the top with the stretcher. The doctor held out his hand to help her up. “Well done, Nurse,” he said.
That was the moment when there was noise at the heart of the wreckage below them. They looked around. There was a groan from the rubble, as though the pile of debris were an animate being breathing out its last: it groaned and its rib cage deflated and a small cloud of dust spewed out of the narrow mouth like foam bubbling up from its lungs, and when the dust cleared, nothing was there that had been there before, neither the two heavy-rescue men, nor the narrow space, nor the single, dusty leg.
Someone shouted. The man in charge of the rescue began yelling orders. Men pushed their way past Diana and the doctor. Overhead, but somehow detached from all this sudden movement, there was the rushing wind of a falling bomb, the noise rising in pitch to a shriek, the thing falling three or four streets away, falling not with an explosion but in a sudden and incongruous silence.
Diana made her way off the rubble. At one point she slipped on something and fell. Exhaustion covered her like a blanket. Perhaps she could just stay there in peace, lying on the ruins of this anonymous house with the rescue men shouting and struggling down in the pit. Perhaps she could sleep.
Doctor Dewar pulled her to her feet. “Come on, Nurse, gird your loins.” He might have been calling the Picts to war. With his arm around her for support, they went on down the pile of debris to the street, where injured people were waiting beside the ambulance. There was one old man lying on a stretcher and a few others with lesser wounds. It was like a scene from the First World War, like those photos you saw of shattered houses on the western front. Except these ragged figures were not soldiers who had just staggered back from the shelling, they were women and children and old men who had been pulled out of their own houses.
“Get this lot out,” the warden shouted. “There’s another ambulance on its way.”
They loaded the ambulance with the wounded. “You’ll be all right,” Diana assured them. “We’ll have you in hospital in no time.” She could hear the men tearing at the ruins of Ma Philips’s house. Antiaircraft guns were firing. Shrapnel clattered on the asphalt farther down the street. She was trying to immobilize a woman’s broken arm and bandage a child’s gashed head. They smelled. The injured people smelled, a foul blend of sweat and urine and feces. They probably had lice. They certainly had scabies. “You don’t look well, Nurse,” the doctor said as he climbed in after her.
“I’m fine.” She smiled to show just how fine she was.
“Hold tight,” Bert called, and the ambulance moved off. Squeezed between the casualties and the doctor, Diana was overwhelmed by tiredness. She felt her head go over onto the doctor’s shoulder, and she didn’t have the strength to lift it. The doctor didn’t object, didn’t shift, didn’t seem to mind. The engine roared in her ears, and the motion of the vehicle lulled her into a soporific state on the borderline between sleeping and waking. And all around her, crouched on the opposite bunk, jammed along the narrow passage between the stretchers, were the people of Bethnal Green.
They came off duty at dawn. As Diana went to the washroom, the doctor called: “Nurse Sheridan.”
She stopped. “Yes?” She was too tired to go over to him, too tired even to use his title. She wondered what she might have forgotten. The morphine had been returned to the poisons safe; the saline drips had been put away; she’d put the syringes in for sterilization and the splints back in the cupboard. All that kind of thing had been done. What was it now? For God’s sake, was he going to criticize her for falling asleep in the ambulance? This was the first time he had been out with one of the crews as far as she knew. Was he one of those idiots who threw his weight around?
“I was wondering…” That thick Scots accent. He looked awkward. He’d never addressed a word to her really, outside what was necessary. Now he looked awkward and embarrassed. His freckles stood out against the flush of his skin. “I was wondering whether you might have dinner with me sometime. If it’s no trouble.”
She tried to smile. She felt ill and she felt tired and she wanted to get home. Home wasn’t the word. She wanted to get back to the Warrens’, to some kind of bath, to her bed. She tried to smile. “Really…”
“If it’s any problem…”
“It’s no problem. It’s just that —”
“You’re spoken for?”
Spoken for. What a quaint phrase. Scottish, perhaps. “Not that.” She thought of Guy. She thought of the child growing within her. Absurdly—she found it easy to think absurd thoughts—she wondered whether the doctor might even be able to solve her present problem. Sometimes I think three impossible thoughts before breakfast. Who had said that? The White Queen. “It’s just that…” What was it just? “I don’t even know your name.”
He grinned with relief. Almost boyishly. “It’s Alan. Does that remove all the obstacles?”
“No, not really.”
“How about Thursday?”
“That’s my day off.”
He looked sheepish. “I know that. I had a look at the duty roster.”
“But I’m busy on Thursday. I’m sorry.”
“Next week, then?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”
“Good,” he said, not quite crestfallen. “Good.”
She walked away to the washroom, to wash her hands and face in tepid water and change from her overalls into her ordinary clothes. She thought about Dewar. Why had she rebuffed him? Many doctors had joined up, but Dewar was medically unfit, so the rumor went: only one lung or something. “One lung, one kidney, maybe only one ball” was Bert’s opinion. “Like Adolf himself.” But she hadn’t rebuffed him for a silly rumor like that, for God’s sake. He was a pleasant enough man, brave and dependable. She had rebuffed him because she was frightened; she had rebuffed him because she quite liked him; she had rebuffed him because she was carrying another man’s child. It wasn’t that she was spoken for: she was far worse than that.
The journey back on the Tube was dreadful. The train stopped in a tunnel for half an hour, with the lights low and her ghost face staring back at her through the glass from the black tunnel wall. Panic bubbled up in her throat like nausea. Eventually they moved on to the next station, and the doors slid open to allow in a belch of foul air. The remnants of the night’s sheltering were there for all to see, a litter of newspapers and cardboard boxes and other, nameless, trash. The train waited there for a further twenty minutes. When finally she got back to the Warrens’ house, she had to rush to the bathroom to be sick. She came out to find Mrs. Warren in the kitchen, watching her with a thoughtful expression.
“You all right, dear?” the woman asked.
“Quite all right, thank you.”
But Mrs. Warren stood in her way. She had a cigarette in her mouth. She always had a cigarette, and she spoke through it so that the thing wagged up and down with her words and the smoke formed a kind of veil before her face. “You been pukin’ in there?”
Diana blushed. “I didn’t make a mess or anything…”
“I’m sure you didn’t. And I’m sure it weren’t anything you ate, neither.”
“I expect it was, Mrs. Warren. Those terrible sandwiches they give us at the post.” She tried to edge past, but the woman just stood there, her vast bulk filling the space between the table and the cupboards, her arms folded beneath her breasts as though they needed that extra support.
“There anything you want to tell me, young lady?”
“Tell you?”
“Yes, darling, tell me.” Her voice was larded with sarcasm. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”
Diana felt the fabric of her defenses tremble beneath the woman’s gaze. “Trouble?”
“Yeah, trouble. Don’t think I can’t tell, puking like you are every morning, looking all weepy and everything. I’m not a bloody fool. You’re in the club, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean —”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. Up the spout, in the family way, whatever you want to call it.” The cigarette waggled. “It weren’t my Roland, was it?”
Who was Roland? Was her awful husband called Roland? Diana shook her head. Could the dreadful Mr. Warren really be called Roland? The name was so ridiculous and the idea of his being the father so incongruous that she wanted to laugh, to laugh or to weep, she wasn’t sure which, the two being on either side of the same coin, which was the currency of misery.
“Well, that’s a blessing, that is. So what are you going to do about it, then? Does the father know? Does he even care? Or are you all on your own?”
And Diana’s defense against tears or laughter finally fell to pieces, and she began to weep. She had managed greater control with Meg, except after that awful visit to the doctor called Man-deville, but now in Mrs. Warren’s kitchen she broke down and wept, and was powerless to do anything when the woman herself, still with that cigarette in her mouth, moved forward (she moved with a curious swaying motion, thrusting one massive hip forward first, following it with the other, as though she were wading through water) and embraced her. Mrs. Warren smelled. It was a strong, rancid smell of old frying oil and sweat. “There, there, dearie,” she said, holding Diana to her huge breasts. “You have a jolly good cry. That’s what you need. And when the crying’s over, then we’ll see what we’ll see.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Meg on the phone. She was almost shouting. “I’m not letting you get into the grips of some awful backstreet abortionist. Look, I’ve told you I’ve got this other address. We’ll go and see on Thursday.”
So Thursday came—the day she might have been going out with that Scottish doctor, the day she might have relaxed and slept in a bit and then enjoyed herself in the afternoon, going to the cinema maybe, going for a meal. Thursday came and she met up with Meg and they took the bus. The place was somewhere south of the river, somewhere out at Camberwell. “He’s a medical man, so it’s all right,” Meg assured her.
“Medical man? What’s that mean? Another doctor?”
Meg looked a bit nonplussed. “Actually, he’s a dentist.”
“A dentist?” It seemed ridiculous. There was something comic about it really, something downright absurd. “What’s a dentist got to do with it?” They began to giggle. Sitting there on the bus as it crossed the river and traipsed out through the dreary purlieus of Kennington, the giggling turned to laughter. “What’s so bloody funny?” asked the conductress. She spun tickets out of her machine with casual dexterity, like a conjuror producing flags of all nations from a top hat. She was older than them, somewhere in her forties, with lots of makeup and dyed blond hair piled on her head.
“My friend’s got to see the dentist,” Meg said.
“Don’t see what’s so bloody funny about the dentist. Dentist’s a bloody tragedy, if you ask me. I’d rather be bombed out than have to face the dentist.”
They almost enjoyed the journey. Bomb damage seemed to finish at the Elephant and Castle, more or less. It was a cold November day, but the suburban streets were flooded in sunlight and gave an illusion of warmth from inside the bus. When they got off at Camberwell Green, the conductress even gave them a wave. “Hope you don’t have to have any extractions,” she called. Which suddenly didn’t seem very funny.
The road they were looking for was tucked behind a church. SAINT BOTOLPH’S, CHURCH OF ENGLAND it announced on a board. It was almost like being in the country: the church with its spire and a stretch of green grass, the plane trees at the back, London planes with their bark patterned like camouflage. There were freshly dug graves in the churchyard, without headstones. Meg consulted a scrap of paper on which the address had been written. “Tear it up and throw it away when you’ve finished with it,” the person who’d given it to her had said, as though they were spies and this was a secret contact, which it was in a way. “Here we are. This is the street.”
It was a suburban road with semidetached houses, each one a mirror image of its next-door neighbor. Bay windows painted in white. Gardens with roses pruned back to mere sticks. They counted the numbers, even down one side, odd down the other. “Twenty-five,” Meg said.
But there wasn’t a twenty-five; there was neither twenty-five nor twenty-seven, which would have been its next-door neighbor, its mirror-image twin. There was just a pile of blackened rubble: a low wall, a gate, and a path with crazy-paving leading up to a pile of bricks and plaster, and through the gap a twin garden with a fence down the middle and the twin humps of two Anderson shelters. On the gate of twenty-seven there was a scrap of faded, rainwashed paper with a new address. But on number twenty-five, nothing.
A woman was watching them from a nearby garden. She had been lifting potatoes, and her hands were caked in mud. “You want the dentist?” she called.
“Do you know where he is? My friend’s got a terrible toothache.”
“I’m sure she has.” The woman laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “I’m afraid you’re too late.” She nodded toward the rubble. “He was underneath it all. A week ago. Blew all my windows out, it did. If you want to pay your respects, you’d better go back to Saint Botolph’s.” She turned back to lifting potatoes. Overhead, distant aircraft drew white contrails against the blue. The day was sunny and bright, but the wind was in the east and bitterly cold.
3
MRS. WARREN’S FRIEND was called Maud. What her surname was, neither woman ever said. Just Maud. Diana had expected her to be large like Mrs. Warren — the name Maud seemed to suit large and fat — but Maud was actually small and thin, with a slight squint and a slight limp and a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She had raw red hands, as though from long hours spent in soapsuds. “You never seen me, right, dearie? Not only don’t you know who I am, you never even seen me.”
A very experienced lady, so Mrs. Warren said. And clean, she emphasized: clean.
“Ten quid,” Maud said. “That’s all. Special price for friends, right?” She waited, wearing a smile that she might have used for a simpleton. “On the nail, dearie. Okay?”
Diana didn’t understand. There were many things she didn’t understand. “The nail?”
“In advance, love.”
“Oh, yes. My purse is up in my room.”
“I think we can wait while you run and get it.”
She would never forget this. As she climbed the creaking stairs, she knew that she would never forget all this — the two women in the kitchen with their caustic politeness, the stairs creaking as they bore her weight, the wall of the stairwell with its gray flock wallpaper. This would be there in her memory forever, a part of her more certain than the baby inside her.
Diana smiled at her. She wanted to please; she wanted to like Maud, love her even. She wanted the woman’s voice to be mellifluous, flowing like honey, soothing and loving. But she didn’t know what Maud meant. “Ready?” she asked. “How?”
Maud sighed. “Knickers, dear. Take your knickers off and get on the table. You’re a nurse, aren’t you?”
“An auxiliary.”
“Well, you ought to know about it all then. What is the modern generation coming to, Mrs. Warren? That’s what I want to know.”
Maud had an old leather shopping bag. Her reticule, she called it. Out of it she took rubber tubing and a syringe and other pieces of apparatus: a cheese grater and a bar of Lifebuoy soap and a bottle of disinfectant. Dettol. A kettle whistled in the background. “Hot water, please, dear,” said Maud to Mrs. Warren. The big woman mixed hot and cold, and rolled up her sleeve to display a forearm as large as a ham and as white as dough. She dipped her elbow to test the water. Maud began to grate soap into the water, bright-pink curls, like parings of living flesh. All the time she hummed, expelling air through her teeth in a breathy, toneless whistle — “The Mountains of Mourne” over and over. The smell of carbolic filled the room. Never again was Diana able to hear the tune or smell carbolic soap or Dettol without conjuring up that moment in the kitchen of the Warrens’ house, with fear plucking at her diaphragm and the scrawny woman grating pink soap into a dish.