Into the Blue

by Robert Goddard

‘Why do you want to go back there, my friend?’ said Kostas, when Harry told him he was returning to England.

  ‘It’s where I come from.’

  ‘You are too old to go back, Hari.’

  ‘You’re never too old.’

  At this, Kostas resorted to what he thought he knew best about England, despite never having been there: the weather. ‘Vrehi poli.’

  ‘You get used to it:

  ‘Kani krio.’

  ‘The question is: will you drive me to the airport tomorrow morning?’

  But Kostas had not given up yet. ‘This is a mistake, Hari. A grand mistake.’

  Yes, Harry thought, it is precisely that: a grand mistake, perhaps the grandest he had ever made. ‘Will you drive me there?’

  ‘You will regret it. It will be too late and you will regret it.’

  ‘That’s the story of my life.’

  ‘You will wish you listened to me.’

  ‘I expect I will.’

  ‘You should stay here.’

  ‘Will you drive me to the airport or not?’

  Kostas narrowed his eyes and stared into the middle distance. ‘Tee ora fevgi to aeroplano?’ It was his way of saying yes.

  Harry telephoned Dysart again and was again answered by a recorded voice. This time he left a message, a stumbling, inadequate message which can have conveyed very little.

  Just as he was leaving the villa, he thought he heard a movement on the upper floor. A splash or a rustle: he could not be certain. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened intently. There was nothing. His ears, or his nerves, had deceived him. He turned to go.

  Then he heard it again. Faint and fluid. Incontestably there, above him, inside the villa. He walked slowly up the stairs, the blood thumping in his head. The light was fading fast outside. It was that uncertain hour of grey, deceptive twilight, that interlude between day and night when nothing can quite be relied upon.

  Water dripping, cascading into more water, as when a body rises from a bath. And some liquid shadow moving on the ceiling to warn him. A message, or a meeting pre-ordained. No need to go on. No need to believe it. No need, now he had reached the top of the stairs, to turn his head and look along the landing towards the open bathroom door.

  Heather naked rising from the bath, running her hands through her hair, water flowing across her body, lapping every curve before retreating, dripping from elbows and knees, beading on breasts and hips. Pale flesh, offered mysteries and a smile as cold as marble.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep to the path. And I won’t be long. It’s just that I can’t turn back now, can I?’

  Harry reached out and silenced the alarm. With it faded also the pattering feet of a departing dream. He did not know whether he had heard anything as he left the villa last night or not: he had not stayed to find out.

  It was five a.m. and pitch dark on the last day of November. It was time to go. Time to rouse Kostas and catch a plane to England. Time to end a nine-year daydream and begin an open-ended search. With an unexpected sense of exhilaration, Harry climbed from the bed.

  12

  NOT UNTIL HE was aboard the flight from Athens to London did Harry begin to appreciate the significance of what he had done. Next to him, two Greeks argued about politics. On the other side of the aisle, two Englishmen swapped sales figures. Far below, the Alps slipped majestically by. And Harry, chain-drinking duty-free gin, stared about at the plastic upholstery of the plane and the artificial smiles of the stewardesses, whilst a bewildering sensation of unreality crept upon him. Speed was just a green digital fiction on an overhead display, movement a bird’s eye cavalcade of snow-crusted scenery. He was not going anywhere, least of all home. It was too quick, too easy, too shorn of effort.

  But it was true. Within a couple of hours that seemed like minutes, he was standing by a luggage carousel at Heathrow Airport, sobered by grime and noise, befuddled by the swiftness of his journey, thinking: Kostas was right, damn him; there are some exiles that should never be ended.

  With Heather’s rucksack on his back, his strapped-shut suitcase in one hand and a duty-free carrier bag in the other, Harry filed bemusedly through customs and traversed the synthetic wilderness of shops, escalators, snack bars and travelators, blinking at the brightly-lit signs, gaping at his fellow bustling humans. Was this really England? he wondered. How could he have forgotten what it was like? How could he have supposed that it would seem like home?

  He queued to change his drachmas for pounds. Then he queued to buy an Underground ticket to Paddington. Aboard the train, he became acutely aware that the passenger to his left was reading an Arabic newspaper, the passenger to his right a London guidebook printed in German, and that the two youths opposite him were talking to each other in what sounded like Swedish. Harry stared at the blue and red Underground symbol on the window, framed between the youths’ heads, and tried to remember the England he had left nine years ago. It had been no better, he told himself, nor very much different. His reaction now was merely the disorientating effect of a sudden transition from sleepy out-of-season Lindos. He closed his eyes, wishing he could open them to see that blue unchanging sky.

  He woke to the spluttering of a dying engine, a draught from an open door and sallow, unexpected daylight. Stumbling out onto the platform, he confronted the station nameboard. Cockfosters: the end of the line. Then he noticed that he was one item of luggage short. He peered back into the carriage, but to no avail. That he had fallen asleep was bad enough. That someone had stolen his duty-free litres of gin and retsina was altogether too much. He aimed an idle kick at a plastic bench leg and muttered under his breath: ‘Welcome home, Harry.’

  * * *

  Eight p.m. was not late afternoon, as Harry was well aware. He was also aware that, if he had devised a way of presenting himself at his mother’s door that would most antagonize her, several hours late and the worse for drink was probably it. As he walked down Station Road, Swindon, trying and failing to steer a straight course along the pavement, he asked himself why he had made such an obvious mistake. All-day pub opening was to blame, he suspected, compounded by the excellence of English beer, which seemed one facet of his native land unspoilt by the passage of years. If not the only facet, as he had noisily and persistently informed several fellow-customers in the pubs where he had seen out the afternoon and seen in the evening.

  At least the dark, soaring boundary wall of the railway engineering works was there, on his right, to offer some sombre consolation. His mother had spoken in a letter of the works closing, but he could see no evidence of it. There was the main entrance, locked at this hour, naturally, but apparently unaltered, and there, on the other side of the road, was the reassuring bulk of the Mechanics’ Institute, where, as a child, he had screamed himself hoarse at many a pantomime witch. Crossing Emlyn Square, and resisting the idea of calling in at the Glue Pot for old times’ sake, he headed for home.

  Falmouth Street was empty and silent. There were lights at the windows, but not a soul abroad. Harry walked down the centre of the road, listening to the sound of his own footfalls, glancing to right and left as he went, listing in his mind the occupants of each house as they had been when he grew up there. As a schoolboy, he had composed a poem featuring every one of their surnames. It had not rhymed of course, but it had scanned pretty well.

  Suddenly, he found himself standing at the door of number thirty-seven. He dropped his suitcase and fumbled in his pocket for the key. All those times, all those thousands of times, he must have performed the same action before, in school blazer, in working suit, in sports jacket on Saturdays, in RAF tunic home on leave, were instantly revived, momentarily relived. He slid the key into the lock. Home. Where one starts from, as the poet said. Another poet, that is. Back from school, with time to brew tea before Mother got in from the laundry. Back from the office, with one too many on board to escape her vigilant nose. Back from a windswept airfield in Lincolnshire, with Chipchase for riotous company. Back f
rom wherever, whenever, he turned the key, pushed the door open – and pulled up sharply as the chain snapped taut to exclude him.

  ‘I can’t afford to take risks at my age, Harold. There are some queer folk about these days, and no mistake. Come to that, you look pretty queer yourself. The sun’s turned your hair stark white. It makes you look, well …’

  ‘Old, Mother?’

  She reached up and pinched his cheek. ‘If you’re old, I’m ancient. Now, take the weight off while I fetch your supper. It’s been under the grill these two hours past, so don’t expect cordon blue.’

  ‘I said not to cook anything,’ he called after her as she stumped off into the kitchen.

  ‘Sit yourself down,’ she called back, her voice contending now with a rattle of pans and plates. ‘There’s a place set.’

  Harry submitted meekly and moved to the table. The same old gate-leg, the same utility chairs, the same EPNS cutlery, even the same Cathedral Cities of England place-mats: he wondered if Rochester really looked like that anymore. The gas fire sizzled familiarly behind him. The smell of his mother’s cooking – wholesome, unsophisticated and totally unique – reached him as a long forgotten memory.

  He made brave inroads into the congealed stew, while his mother drank tea and watched him for signs that he had, as she would naturally assume, ‘let himself go’. She made no reference to the beer on his breath, which represented a substantial concession, nor yet to what they both knew had caused him to leave Rhodes, which was her normal way of dealing with anything ‘unpleasant’. Harry, for his part, was surprised how spry and alert she was looking. He had not seen her since her less than successful visit to Rhodes three summers ago, when he had detected signs of failing powers. Now he thought perhaps that had just been the effect of the heat.

  Contrary to Harry’s addled impression, the railway engineering works had closed. A few months ago, ‘A’ shop – ‘where your dear father was killed’ – had been demolished. The Mechanics’ Institute was to make way for a luxury hotel, ‘according to the Advertiser’. And the Council wanted to sell off the estate – ‘over our heads’ – to a private landlord. This last she had taken as a personal affront. She had lived in the Railway Village all her life, had been born just round the corner in Exeter Street, had moved to Falmouth Street as a young bride fifty-six years ago and had remained there ever since; now, in her dotage, ‘some Rachman type’ was set to turn her out. Harry tried to sound reassuring despite having no good reason to doubt her prediction.

  As she carried the plates out, she noticed the bags standing in the passage. ‘Is this your suitcase, Harold?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘And your rucksack?’

  ‘Ah … no.’

  ‘Then whose is that?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Heather Mallender’s.’ She came back into the room and stared at him. ‘It contains her belongings. I intend to return them to her family.’

  She deposited the plates back on the table, sat down and fixed him with a flushed and purposeful glare. Recognizing the signs of an imminent ‘once and once only’ statement, he fell silent. ‘I shall say this once and once only, Harold. I am certain, absolutely certain, that you did well by this girl and that there is no foundation, absolutely no foundation, for what some of the papers have suggested. That Korea was the worst, but never mind. I shall stand by you through thick and thin. Now there’s an end of it. We shan’t talk of it again.’ With that, she bustled back towards the kitchen.

  Korea? What the devil could she mean by … The Courier. The rag Minter had claimed to work for. He got up and pursued her into the kitchen. ‘What did The Courier say, Mother?’

  ‘I never buy the thing,’ she replied, irrelevantly. ‘You think I can afford fifty pence every Sunday for an armful of wastepaper?’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘I’d not have known if Joan Tipper hadn’t made a point of showing me. You may be sure she regretted trying to goad me.’

  ‘But what did it say?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Come on, Mother.’

  Abandoning the sink for a moment, she turned and faced him with a tight-lipped frown of determination. ‘I told you just now and I meant it: we shan’t talk about this subject again. I’ve said my last word on it. Now, go and sit down while I serve afters.’

  ‘Afters?’

  ‘Treacle pudding. What else?’

  What else indeed? Harry retreated.

  Harry made no attempt to assist with clearing the table or washing-up after his meal; he knew better than to do that. Leaving his mother to her laborious routines, he lumbered into the front parlour, feeling tired and bloated, and switched on the television. Then he returned to the passage, stepped across to the row of pegs where his jacket was hanging and slipped the quarter bottle of scotch he had bought before leaving London from the pocket he had turned towards the wall. His mother kept only cooking sherry on the premises, a fact he had not forgotten.

  Back in the front parlour, the television had warmed up. Some kind of political discussion before a studio audience was in progress, which Harry reckoned would do as well as anything. He looked for the glasses but they were not in their normal place, or rather the cabinet they were stored in was not. Casting about for its new location, Harry noticed an attaché case standing open beside his mother’s armchair, with Commonweal School headed paper visible at the top of the piled contents. His curiosity aroused, he knelt down by the case and tilted the lid forward. As he had anticipated, the initials S.R.B. were embossed on the cracked leather. It was his father’s old work case, the repository for as long as he could remember of valuable family documents. Harry smiled. Knowing that he was coming, his mother must have fetched this down from her bedroom in order to sift through her keepsakes of his childhood. There were his school reports, tagged together in date order. And there his certificate of baptism: St. Mark’s Church, September 1935. ‘You screamed from start to finish.’ And there …

  The Evening Advertiser, Saturday 22 March 1947. Harry lifted out the yellow, crinkled newspaper, unfolded it and confronted the well-remembered record of his one obscure moment of unsullied glory:

  A dramatic rescue act yesterday by a Swindon schoolboy saved the life of an abandoned baby. Harold Barnett, aged eleven, of 37 Falmouth Street, was returning home from school at about 4.15 when he stopped to do some train-spotting in St. Mark’s Church yard and noticed a cardboard box standing on the down-line about half a mile from Swindon station. By the time he had made out what the box contained, a Cardiff-bound express was approaching, gathering speed rapidly as it left the station. Showing considerable presence of mind, young Harold wriggled through a gap in the churchyard fence and plucked the box and its helpless cargo from the train’s path, thus narrowly averting a tragedy. The baby, only a few days old, is said to be recovering well in Victoria Hospital. The police have appealed for the mother to come forward as soon as possible. They believe the baby was either thrown from a moving train or placed deliberately on the line in an attempt to bring about its death. They praised young Harold’s conduct and described him as ‘a brave, quick-witted and resourceful lad who is a credit to his school and his family’.

  Where did it all go wrong? Harry wondered. The quick wits, the resourcefulness, the presence of mind: when exactly did he lose them? Lost them he surely must have, for otherwise he would not have left school to become a mere Council clerk, would not have presided over the bankruptcy of Barnchase Motors, would not have allowed Roy Mallender to get the better of him. His ribs gave a sympathetic twinge at the very thought and he struggled to his feet. Suddenly, the voice of Alan Dysart cut across Harry’s dismal reflections. He turned round to see Dysart pictured on the television, seated in a swivel-chair and flanked by what looked like fellow-politicians of contrasting persuasions, expounding with his customary ease and fluency the government’s attitude to some issue of the moment.

  ‘I’ve listened with great interest to Den
is Rodway’s remarks,’ he was saying, in the barbed and languid tone that was so peculiarly and persuasively his, ‘and I’m sure all of us who have our country’s security at heart are grateful to him for reminding us so vividly of the reasons why his party must never be allowed to impose its policies on the nation. Some of us who shout less and think more than most of Denis’s colleagues happen to believe that patriotism is neither outmoded nor unworthy. In fact …’

  Spontaneous applause from the studio audience caused Dysart to pause. He leaned back slightly in his chair and inclined his head in acknowledgement. He did not smile but he did not resist. His measured response to the judgement of the people was a perfect compromise between pride and humility. Rodway, anyway the fellow Harry took to be Rodway, squirmed with resentment and it was easy to see why. Dysart had nothing to prove or deny. War hero, terrorist target, lucid thinker, pyrotechnical debater and honest, handsome, dedicated patriot: he was all things which his opponents could least refute.

  Harry slumped down in the armchair and took a swig of scotch from the bottle. Failure, he supposed, was every man’s prerogative. Yet not every man had been shown the example he had of how to wrench meaning and worth from a life, how to hone a character to a fine point of high achievement. What was the secret of Dysart’s success? Inherited wealth? An advantage, certainly. Luck? That must come into it. Or something else? Whatever it was, Harry had either never acquired the commodity himself or had lost it somewhere along the way. Quick wits, resourcefulness and presence of mind stood contradicted by the record of his life. There remained only bravery. And to that, in the hope of it still hiding somewhere within him, he drank a silent toast.

  13

  WHERE ‘A’ SHOP had been, a plain of faintly smoking rubble stretched away into the middle distance. It seemed barely credible to Harry, as he surveyed it from the Rodbourne Road entrance on a cold grey morning, that so stark and sudden an end could have come to a building which he remembered as a vast, grimy and implacably permanent fixture in the life of the town.