The Rescue Man

by Anthony Quinn

  Oh, there’s a lull in my life.

  The moment that you go away,

  There is no night, there is no day.

  The atmosphere in the Gents was rather less refined than the one he had just left. The tiled floor had recently been scrubbed yet failed to mask the stink from the urinals. He locked himself in the single cubicle, lit only by the filthy squares of frosted glass through which he could hear the noise of the street carrying on above. On the glazed brick wall beneath the cistern someone had scrawled I LIKE THE GIRLS WHO DO, and beneath it a respondent had added ME TOO. This little exchange had been crudely trumped by another hand, which had declared in incongruously neat capitals: I WANT TO FUCK THAT WAITRESS. There could only be one. The baldness of the language, and the ammoniac stench in his nostrils, stirred him – he found he was reluctantly, seedily aroused. He briefly considered … No, the prospect of a slow Wednesday afternoon spent fiddling with his cock in a cafe toilet would be too demoralising even for him.

  He buttoned up and unlocked the door. In the smeared mirror above the basin he found a face with a sombre interrogative gleam in the eyes. Below the right one he could see a cicatrice, half an inch long, a result of the wound’s inexpert stitching at the time. It did not have the glamour of a Heidelberg duelling scar, but he felt nonetheless grateful for its persistence. He returned to the room, careful not to let Dark Eyes catch him staring. After another ten minutes of his sidelong surveillance she paid her bill, gathered her things and got up to leave. Baines quickly called for his own bill and forty-five seconds later was pushing through the revolving doors on to the street. Crowds were streaming around him at the confluence of Waterloo Place and Central Station, but he saw the swing of her distinctive brown-and-blue checked coat as she advanced up Ranelagh Street. A rugged little March wind was blowing east and obliging people to clap a hand to their hats. Dodging awkwardly past an oncoming tram he kept a distance from the woman, who had stopped to look in a shop window before she turned into Great Charlotte Street, still a building site almost three years after the bombing had demolished its south end.

  On St George’s Place she stopped again and took out her compact for another quick primp. Then she turned into the Imperial Hotel, to meet the person, he supposed, for whom she’d been checking her make-up. This was perhaps the moment he should abandon his pursuit: he had no idea why he was following her anyway. With a sigh he walked into the lobby of the Imperial – and straight into her. The expression on her face wasn’t friendly.

  ‘Why are you following me?’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t, not exactly –’

  ‘Don’t lie. I saw you, at the Lyceum, and I’ve just seen you outside here.’ He was just wondering how she had spotted him when she held up her compact, with its telltale mirror. Canny, he had to admit.

  ‘I’m sorry … I just –’ He thought he might as well say it: ‘You reminded me of someone I used to know.’ She pursed her lips in a sceptical pout, and Baines shrugged helplessly. ‘I know that sounds like a line, but it’s the truth. Look, sorry, I’m honestly embarrassed. I don’t make a habit of following young women – sorry, ladies – at all, and if you don’t want to talk I’ll go right now and … not pester you again. Sorry.’

  She looked hard at him for a few moments. ‘Well, you can stop saying “sorry”. What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘… I don’t know, really.’

  She remained guarded, but he felt a slight thaw in her frostiness. People were passing through the lobby on either side, not even glancing at them. Now that they were up close he could see faint crow’s feet about her eyes – was she a little older than he thought? With another appraising look she said, ‘What happened – to your leg?’ So she had noticed his limp, too.

  ‘Er, I fell, during a raid. There was a double snap below the knee. Hasn’t healed properly.’ He hoped she wouldn’t ask about the scar.

  She paused again, then said, with a wary inquisitiveness, ‘Do I really remind you of someone?’

  Baines nodded. ‘Very much.’ She must have heard something in his voice, because her expression changed again.

  ‘You said “used to know”. She’s not … dead, is she?’

  He looked down, considering. ‘It sometimes feels that way. I haven’t seen her in a long time.’ Now her own gaze fell, and she seemed to regret her directness. The war had given people a kind of permission to ask questions like that. He sensed that a moment had to be grasped. ‘I know you must think me very odd, but I would so appreciate your company for a little while – just to talk. I wouldn’t … try anything.’

  The shadow of a smile passed over her face. ‘I’ve heard that one before, too,’ she said wryly, and glanced at her watch. ‘You’re in luck – I’ve got an hour before I meet someone off the train. So …’

  ‘I know you drink tea,’ he said, gesturing to the entrance of the hotel lounge with a hopeful smile. With a quick disbelieving shake of her head she murmured her assent, and they walked through.

  That May, nearly three years ago, the planes returned for a seventh night of bombing. Then, the next day, just as the city seemed likely to be obliterated in this unrelenting holocaust, the skies were clear. Though they would return intermittently through 1941, the Blitz was over, and the Nazis turned their focus to the war in the East. At the time Baines had been oblivious to this or any other development. For three and a half weeks he struggled, lost in a semi-conscious delirium, while the doctors and nurses of the Royal Infirmary laboured to keep him alive. The last thing he could remember from the night of the blast was Farrell lifting him clear of the wreckage, and his head being carefully cradled – then he had blacked out altogether. What followed was, he later realised, a coma, but it was not the kind of merciful oblivion that he had hitherto associated with the word. It was instead a wild and terrifying phantasmagoria from whose depths he would occasionally fight free, only to be plunged once more into its turbulent pit. Faces, real and imaginary, danced before his eyes, while in his ears a babel of voices clamoured for attention yet offered nothing to him of comfort or even coherence. Richard was the figure who stalked his dream life the most, often in the grotesque shape of an animal that had been savagely mauled in a slaughterhouse and then bizarrely allowed to roam free. A schoolteacher of sadistic bent – a figure who had not troubled his consciousness for thirty years or more – became vividly present, and revealed himself unimproved by time. More mysterious was the recurring image of a man he had never seen before; he was roughly of his own age, in a high collar and greatcoat, reaching out a hand in supplication but apparently unwilling to speak. He had the impression of falling through dark, liquid fathoms in the company of this man who, in spite of his plaintive expression, seemed to act as his protector; for some reason Baines knew that he would be safe with him.

  Whatever paltry shelter his mind sought to hide beneath, he was defenceless against the tumultuous carnivals of pain that rioted through his body. He gradually pieced together what had happened to him that night. The HE which had speared through the roof and exploded in the mission hall had blown first Richard, then him, then half of the back wall down into the basement. His right knee, with the tibia and fibula below it, had shattered; his right wrist was broken; four of his ribs had snapped – the daggers he felt in his chest had been their sharp ends probing the tissue of his lungs. If Richard had not hauled the broken wall off him they would almost certainly have punctured the lungs and then collapsed them. In spite of other lacerations, he had been lucky. There was only bruising to his spine, the shrapnel had missed all of his vital organs and the loss of blood, though serious, was not fatal. Unlike Richard, whose wounds had killed him.

  One of his most grievous torments in the aftermath of that night arose from the unlikeliest source. Adrift as he often was in the shadowlands between waking and dreaming, he began to hear a sound that made his flesh bristle and his heart crouch in fright; it was a slithery clicking that seemed to come at regular intervals of the day, and i
n his mind’s fevered eye he saw a wall in slow, agonising collapse and great black clouds of dust suddenly closing in, choking the life out of him. The sound excruciated him, for he knew that he should have identified its cause and taken precautions – thus might he have saved lives. Liam. One afternoon he had woken to find May, who had been keeping a daily vigil by his bedside during the hospital’s visiting hours. He could hear her whispered prayers, but there was something else there, too – the soft insistent clicking, so horribly like that brick wall just before it fell. At that moment he realised it was May’s rosary beads that were clicking through her fingers, counting off the devotional quota she hoped might be the key to saving his life. He called to her, and as she dipped her face towards his he saw such a look of tender concern that he baulked at asking her to stop. When George came in the evening Baines explained in halting, broken phrases the anguish he was undergoing, an account so garbled to his own ears that he feared its point had been entirely lost. The penny must have dropped, however, because the next afternoon May was there, but her rosary beads were not. The matter was never mentioned between them; and the nightmare of that disintegrating wall slowly began to recede.

  Of all his trials, however, the one that most oppressed him through his waking and his sleeping hours was the disappearance of Bella. Once he had clawed his way off the critical list he had expected, or rather he had hoped, that she would make an appearance at his bedside. He had been too close to the grave himself at the time to attend Richard’s funeral, an occasion that would have been fraught enough even without the guilt of what he had done. The long days of convalescence dragged by, and still she didn’t come. He wanted to write to her, but his wrist was broken, and dictating a letter was out of the question. Finally, when he could tolerate the suspense no longer, he yielded to the inevitable and asked Jack whether he had seen her. Baines had not told him about what had happened between himself and Bella – his natural close-mouthed instinct militated against it – so he had kept his tone as neutral as possible. He felt shabby about this, because Jack had been a Samaritan to him during his worst days, keeping him company and sometimes bringing Evie along when he thought the patient most needed cheering up. At his request Jack had gone to call on her at Slater Street and pay his respects to the grieving widow, but returned to Baines’s bedside with the news that the studio was locked up and a notice to let hung in the window.

  At first he was afraid that she might be dead; nearly fifteen hundred people had been killed during the May Blitz, and for someone in his febrile condition it required no great imaginative leap to believe she might have been among them. Jack had looked through the lists on his behalf and found no mention of her name, but as to hard evidence of her whereabouts he kept drawing a blank. The gallery assistants had been as mystified as anyone else: all they knew was that Richard was dead and Bella had vanished. In the end his facade of calm cracked, and having sought a refuge one afternoon in a distant corridor of the infirmary, he had raised his glistening eyes to find Jack standing there, looking down at him in his wheelchair. Prompted by shame and the relief of disclosure, he poured out the story, faltering only when he reached the account of his and Richard’s Calvary in the rubble of the mission hall. It was the single time he had confessed it, how he had lain there trying – and failing – to remember the terrible betrayal he had visited on his friend, and the apology, however inadequate, he needed to articulate. The shock of the blast had short-circuited his memory that night, but now it had returned to harrow the long days ahead when it was too late for apology. Jack, squatting by the arm of the wheelchair, had listened as patiently as any confessor ever had, and when the penitent could speak no more he said in a voice that held both pity and an odd optimism in it, ‘He did forgive you, though – by saving your life.’ Baines nodded, his eyes stinging, but he was inclined to wonder if that act of forgiveness might not also have contained within it the slow-acting poison of revenge.

  Was that what Bella had felt too? So complete was her vanishing act that he could only assume it was. As the weeks turned into months his conviction that she would at least send word began to fray. Disbelief slowly soured into frustration, and rage. Discharged at last from the hospital, he spent his early convalescence at the Elms, where George and May nursed him so attentively he wanted to scream at such unmerited kindness. He longed for solitude, and as soon as he could get up on crutches he asked George, over their protestations, to take him back to Gambier Terrace. There, at least, he could languish in his misery uninterrupted. Visitors to the flat seemed impressed by his resilience, which he himself knew was simply the effort required to conceal his monumental depression. Most days he sat for hours without opening a book, and his solitary walks, except when they took him to Jack’s flat in Falkner Square, were aimless. The only time he felt roused from this torpor was that moment in the morning as he sat by his window, waiting for the postman’s footfall in the street. As it approached he went out to the head of the stairs and leaned over the banister, listening for the snap of the letter box; if it went he would hobble down the stairs, ignoring the pain of the ill-knit bones in his leg, and examine the cage into which the post had dropped. Occasionally there was a letter for him – but it was never from her. One day, six or seven months after her disappearance, he had made his morning descent to check the post and, on finding nothing, had laughed at the clockwork monotony of his disappointment. That was when he knew she wasn’t coming back.

  But this did not prevent him from thinking about her, and he could pass whole afternoons absorbed in recreating conversations they had had in the very living room where he now sat. This was the sofa she had lounged upon, this was the window she had looked from, this was the clock whose chimes she had heard – and in the end it was the clock that had to go, because in those long vacant afternoons he had started to think he could hear the sound of her minutes, and the measuring of her hours. The raids, which had thinned out during the year, ceased entirely by January 1942, though not before three bombs fell one night around Upper Stanhope Street and killed fifteen people. A kind of normality slowly returned, both to his own life and to the city’s. He had set about revising the text of his Liverpool book to accommodate the drastic changes the city had undergone in the last year and a half, though he had little appetite for the work. The streets were cleared, tramlines were repaired, and the shops began to fill again, but the pounding it had taken from the Blitz was not easily concealed. While a few bomb sites in the centre were enclosed by hoardings or else turned into a parking place for motor cars, elsewhere dereliction reigned, and mournful spaces strewn with bricks and broken concrete were now home to weeds and grass. This was probably the result of a native slovenliness, though Baines sometimes wondered if the city had deliberately allowed its desolation to remain uncovered, like an open wound – a reminder to all of its suffering.

  Its broken demeanour rather suited his own mood. He traced in these ruined streets and levelled spaces a companionship of loss, and he felt more affectionate towards the place than ever. Indeed, it was the continuing survival of certain buildings that caused him the keenest pain; if he happened to be walking along Dale Street he would quicken his pace past the Kardomah, the cafe he always associated with the day they met. As for the Lisbon, scene of the last time they had dined in public, he would no more willingly have entered there than he would have thrust his hand in a fire. These things he could avoid. What he hadn’t been able to suppress was a behavioural tic – it had lately become quite compulsive – of glancing behind him. It had first manifested itself as a blur at the corner of his eye, and he would turn in the expectation of someone, or something, just behind his shoulder. Invariably, there was nothing. At first he had dismissed it as a mere psychological reverberation from his injuries, and it did disappear. In the last few months, however, it had returned, and often, as he walked the streets, he would have the maddening sense of a shadow just out of view behind him. Reluctantly, it had become one with the name that had not ceased
in three years to toll through his head. Bella. Bella.

  The main bar of the Philharmonic was beginning to fill with a lunchtime crowd. A fire was crackling away in the grate, a counter to the whippy spring wind snapping the air outside. Baines, having arrived early to secure his favourite table in the smaller of the two dark wood-panelled snugs, idly turned his gaze from the pub’s ornate ceiling to Jack’s face as he stood at the bar waiting to be served. Having cultivated his thin and slightly spivvy moustache for three (or was it four?) years he had, without warning, shaved it off. Its removal had subtly altered his face, made his top lip seem somehow denuded, as though it had been exposed by chance rather than choice. Baines had delighted in mocking it during its tenure – the gingeriness was his principal goad – but now that it was gone he realised he might miss it, as one misses a familiar but unloved bit of furniture.

  ‘What’s the beady look for?’ said Jack, as he placed their Higsons on the table, in the careful manner of a magician about to perform a trick. Baines shook his head non-committally, and lit his first Player’s of the day.

  ‘So – tell me about this girl you met,’ Jack continued. Her name, he learned over their cup of tea at the Imperial, was Joanna, and she worked as a fashion buyer at Bon Marché. Even wartime deprivations couldn’t sabotage the Liverpudlian passion for shopping.

  ‘Oh, she’s just … someone. We had a chat. She’s got some feller, he’s in Burma fighting the Japs.’ Baines was already regretting his casual mention of her.