Baines bowed his head. The words sounded to him as if they might contain a kind of blessing. Glancing up at the mantelpiece he looked again at the photograph that had caught his eye before Mrs Westmacott had entered the room: it was of a young officer in uniform, a sepia relic of the Great War. Without having to be told, Baines knew that this was her son, and, just as surely, that he was dead. The war to end all wars … now here they were in the middle of another. Outside, the late-May afternoon was blurring towards sunset, and parallelograms of light were lengthening along the carpet. He sensed that Mrs Westmacott might be tiring.
‘You’ve been awfully kind,’ he began. ‘I was just wondering – the Eamesiana?’
‘That’s another story, I’m afraid. We had a fire here many years ago, a great shame it was. Pa’s papers went up in smoke, all of his drawings … Thank heavens we’d donated his journals to the Picton. I’ve nothing for you, Mr Baines. I’m sorry.’
She sounded as much. He knew he looked crestfallen, and tried to spur himself to a little gallantry.
‘I can’t be ungrateful, Mrs Westmacott, when I have his dearest legacy right before me.’
She smiled with regal graciousness at the compliment, and took it as a cue to dip into an exuberant flow of anecdotes about her father, and her family, that held him rapt for another hour. When he finally got up to leave and Mrs Fleetwood reappeared to show him out, Baines turned and thanked his hostess.
‘Well – thank you! And I do hope you’ll come again. We don’t see a great many young people in the house, do we, Mrs Fleetwood?’
Baines carried away a strong impression that Mrs Westmacott might actually want him to return: that sort of gregariousness was difficult to feign. He walked back under the arching chestnut trees and started up the road towards the tram stop. As he neared the brow he sensed something come up behind him, and flinched. He turned to find – nothing. That was when he realised there was no longer any use in postponing what he had to do.
17
HE WOKE WITH a start, disoriented for a moment by the darkened room in which he lay. Then its shadowy accoutrements began to coalesce into something more familiar, the narrow window, the melancholy flowered wallpaper, the sloping angle of his bed. It reminded him of a little hotel room he had stayed in, overlooking the esplanade of Llandudno, where he used to take holidays. But this was not there. The desultory rumble of buses and motor cars filtered into his fogged consciousness, and then he knew. He rose from the bed and pulled back the thin blackout curtain to let in the early-morning light. Through the window he could see the spires of St Pancras station poking over the adjacent chimney tops, and beyond that the drone of a vast metropolis was collected out of the air.
Baines had never much cared for London, and London, he soon realised, did not much care for him. He had arrived from Lime Street the previous week without anywhere to stay, his only tip a casual reference by Jack to the abundance of lodging houses in Islington. He emerged from beneath Euston station’s vast triumphal arch and caught a bus to the Caledonian Road, where he spent an afternoon pounding the pavements in search of accommodation. It was not a delightful experience. From the top deck of the bus it reminded him a little of Smithdown Road in Liverpool, a long ascending thoroughfare lined with fish shops, cheap eating houses, furniture sellers, pawnbrokers, pubs – almost one on every corner – with frequent interludes of rubbled ground where bombs had fallen. But where the wrecked streets of his home town retained a poignant dignity, the life of Caledonian Road seemed to him drab, seedy and dispiriting, an impression only compounded when he stepped off the bus and began to apply at those houses that advertised rooms to let. He was not prepared for the London manner, which occupied a narrow range between hard-faced insolence and brute indifference, and the cawing, metallic voices that bit off words and spat them out half formed were a shock to his unaccustomed ear. He wondered how Wallace would enjoy such an accent.
After three hours of footslogging around some of the dreariest dosshouses he’d ever seen he decided to settle for the next place that offered itself. On seeing a ‘Room to rent’ notice in a house at the south end of the road he knocked at the door, only to be told that it had just been taken. The landlord apologised and directed him round the next corner to an address he described, with a genteel lack of irony, as ‘respectable’. The house turned out to be in the middle of a tiny Victorian crescent just opposite King’s Cross, so tiny, indeed, that it was not even marked on the Bacon’s Large Print Map of London and Suburbs which he had bought at Smith’s. Affixed to its front wall was a parish boundary stone, dated 1855, and the idea of being in two districts at once endeared the place to him. His fatigue gave way to relief on learning that the room he enquired about was still available. The landlady, large-framed, wall-eyed and of an uncommonly sympathetic demeanour, took to Baines almost immediately, their only awkwardness together being the moment he asked if he might have a shelf installed in the room for his books.
‘Wot? You mean – accahnt books?’ she said, apparently suspicious of the idea that her new tenant might be more astute in matters of money than she was. When Baines assured her that it was only a few novels and poetry collections he wanted to store she visibly brightened.
‘Oh – readin’ books!’ she cried, as if the habit were a mild eccentricity she was happy to tolerate. It was an attic room with sloped walls around the dormer, slightly dowdy but reasonably clean. As he was unpacking she knocked at his door and presented him with a book of her own – a rent book. The land-lady’s name was Mrs Gorse, which Baines thought sounded about right. Once his suitcase was emptied, he took off his shoes and lay on the bed, its iron frame neighing in surprise. He lit a Player’s and picked up the book he had started to read on the train down. It was a slim novel by Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line, which Liam Mavers had lent to him back in the Blitz days. He remembered him coming into the depot one night and, without preamble, handing the book over. ‘’Bout time you read this feller,’ was what he said. After Mavers’s death he had not known what to do with it, and was indeed half afraid to look at it. He wondered if that was because he could no longer return the thing to its owner; to send it back to his family without explanation felt somehow callous, and, not having yet read it, disrespectful to Liam. The nebulous air of obligation that hung about the loaned volume began to bother him, so he followed his usual instinct and hid it away.
Three years on, and more, he had found the book again, and now his principal feeling about it was not unease but curiosity. Opening it on the dedication page, he read:
To Borys and all others
Who like himself have crossed
In early youth the shadow-line
Of their generation
With love
He now recalled Liam telling him that Borys was Conrad’s son, who had fought on the Western Front. His bookmark indicated that he had read two chapters. Perhaps he had not begun it at the required pitch of concentration (it had been a crowded train), or perhaps it was because he was new to Conrad, but so far – a young sailor in an Eastern port chucks in his job, then unexpectedly wins his first command of a ship – the story felt unequal to the portentous manner in which it was told. ‘Chapter Three’, he stared at the words, then closed the book. He had to take stock. He was in London, where he had neither friends nor a secure grasp of the geography. Bacon’s Map unfolded teeming swirls and grids of names and streets and parks that sounded familiar yet daunted him in their sprawling multitude. He had last been here in 1934, when Jack persuaded him to make the trip down to watch Lancashire, in their Championship-winning year, play Surrey at the Oval. He had felt no particular urge to return. Now, ten years later, the purpose of his visit was altogether more quixotic. He had not the faintest idea of how to go about finding a missing person. But then Bella was not actually ‘missing’ at all. If Wallace was to be believed she was alive and well and residing somewhere in the city. Not missing. Only – missed.
Baines left the house just before e
leven o’clock. The morning air was still damp from last night’s rain, and Mrs Gorse, arms folded and standing on the front step, shook her head sadly at the unseasonal cold.
‘Can’t ’ardly believe this is June,’ she muttered with a shiver.
Sensing a need to be cheerful, Baines said, ‘Perhaps I brought the weather with me, Mrs Gorse.’
She responded with an aggrieved sigh, as if there may indeed have been a link between his arrival and the dismal start to the summer. He walked on to the Caledonian Road and stopped at a little eating house around the corner. He liked the dark wooden booths, and the clatter from the kitchen which echoed indifferently off the room’s tiled walls. The plate-glass windows wore a coat of condensation from the heat of the monstrous hissing tea urn at the counter. Settled into the mid-morning lull – there were only a few glumly silent customers – he drank overstewed tea and riffled through the newspaper, its headlines blaring reports of the Normandy landings. The mood of the editorials was cautiously optimistic; perhaps at last the war was beginning to turn the Allies’ way. He felt in his breast pocket and removed a small notebook, into which he had copied the telephone numbers of every Garnett – Bella’s maiden name – listed in the London area, on the chance that one of them might be a relative.
Finished with his tea and cigarette, he headed for King’s Cross station, his pockets jingling with coins, and found a public telephone box at the side of the concourse. He then spent an hour going through the list, calling each number, drawing a blank every time. Then he remembered that Richard’s parents lived in Maida Vale. If Bella had kept up with her in-laws, there might be a chance they would know of her whereabouts. He called the operator, who told him that there was a Colonel Tanqueray listed as resident in Hamilton Terrace. Baines asked her to put him through. As he listened to the peremptory repeated brr-brr, he wondered what he would say if the Colonel or his wife should answer. He had written them a letter of condolence three years ago in which he described, at some pain to himself, Richard’s heroic conduct on the night of his death, but had received no reply. Perhaps they no longer lived there. The monotony of the unanswered rings was becoming hypnotic, and eventually he rang off.
Emerging from the station to find the sky darkly smudged with cloud he began to walk south, his mind dimly imprinted with the central slice of Bacon’s Map he had studied the night before. He crossed Euston Road into Judd Street and thence Hunter Street, where he paid silent homage outside number 54, the house where Ruskin had been born in 1819. He turned right into Russell Square and past the two big Victorian hotels, the Russell and the Imperial, as solid and serene as a pair of old dowagers. He lost his bearings for a while in the backwaters of Bloomsbury before he joined the sluggish flow of traffic into Kingsway. Here and there he passed charred skeletons of buildings, but London had tidied up its damage much more efficiently than Liverpool; there were very few of the forlorn bomb sites you saw up there. When he reached the broad crescent of Aldwych he realised he was very near. Ever since Wallace had mentioned his encounter with Bella on the Strand Baines had been curious to go there himself, simply because she had been there so recently. After three years she had become, in absence, somewhat mysterious to him, and walking down this bustling thoroughfare, with its growling traffic and stolid air of business as usual, he found himself listening out for her invisible footsteps.
Having wandered without much purpose around the warren of streets north of the Strand he eventually caught a bus at Charing Cross bound for the Finchley Road. When he spotted Lord’s cricket ground he stepped off and walked around its boundary wall, brooding on the irony that his first visit to the ground should coincide with the one period in its history when no cricket was being played. The streets bordering St John’s Wood and Maida Vale, he noticed, were far quieter and leafier than most he had seen, and the gentility of Hamilton Terrace seemed a world away from the Caledonian Road. Here the scars of bomb damage looked almost surreal; blackened stumps that interrupted rows of imperial white stucco. Baines checked the address and, mounting the steps, rapped on the door. The sash windows on the ground floor were shuttered, while their blackish, glassy neighbours above stared down blindly. He knocked again, and something in the mere repetition of his tattoo told him there was nobody home. As he was turning away he heard a click and the creak of a door from below, and looking over the railings into the well of the basement he saw the face of an old lady peering up at him. Through the white candyfloss hair he could see her pink scalp.
‘Hullo,’ he called. ‘Is this – the Tanqueray house?’
‘Yes. But they’re not here – the place has been empty –’ She had come halfway up the steps, and paused. ‘Are you a friend?’ The voice was tremulously grand.
‘Er, I was a friend of their son.’
‘Oh, Richard. So sad … such a nice young man. It wasn’t long after that the Colonel died too. Mabel went orf to the country a few months ago.’
‘Do you have an address for her?’
‘No, I’m sorry. You’re the second person to ask me that lately – a young lady called here a few weeks ago, brought some flowers.’ Flarze, she pronounced the word. ‘She said they were for Mabel, to mark an anniversary. Well, I told her that she’d gorn, so she gave them to me instead.’ She permitted herself a whinnying little laugh at the memory. Baines’s mind was racing, calculating: a few weeks ago would have been Richard’s anniversary, 7 May.
‘Did this lady – was she tall, with dark hair?’ he asked her.
‘That’s her! She seemed awfully upset that Mabel had left without her knowing.’
‘Did she leave you her address?’
‘Oh, no. We talked for a minute or two and … then she was orf.’
So Bella had been here, too. He sensed that he was getting closer, that the distance she had put between them was slowly shrinking. He was going to find her, whether she liked it or not. The old lady was still watching him. There was a faint loneliness in her gaze, and as they dallied over talk of the weather he wondered if the occasional word with a stranger might be the centrepiece of her day. After a few minutes they ran out of things to say; as he tweaked the brim of his hat in parting he felt rather sorry that he hadn’t also had flowers to give her.
The following day brought rain, so he kept to his room and read The Shadow-Line. From being slightly bored with it he now found himself mysteriously enthralled. The narrator, still in the early days of his command, discovers that the first mate is morbidly obsessed with the previous captain, an unregenerate villain who filched the ship’s store of quinine before he died. This act of treachery rebounds on his successor when, caught in a dead calm, the crew is laid low with fever. ‘I have been decoyed into this awful, this death-haunted command,’ writes the young captain, stricken with pity for his ailing men and almost despairing of their situation. Yet he finds hope in the steadying presence of Ransome, the ship’s cook, whose grace and resolute character are the more admirable for his own personal vulnerability – a weak heart. As the crisis mounts their courage is tested ever more severely; the captain hardly knows how he will get them back to port. But it was Ransome, with his ‘faint, wistful smile and friendly grey eyes’ who preoccupied Baines, and brought unbidden to his memory the face of Liam Mavers. He had never known anyone so brave, and yet so unassuming in his bravery, and he realised that without his example he would not, could not, have endured the horrors of heavy rescue. He could not think about Liam very often, otherwise he would not be able to stop himself. He had not seen Mike Wo or Farrell since the May Blitz, but their faces, their voices, had never deserted him. Did they think of Liam? He felt sure that they did – we carry the dead with us.
He had set forth on another of his aimless perambulations one morning when he passed a newsboy on Euston Road excitedly crowing a headline. Bombs had fallen in London, but according to the paper they had not been dropped by a plane. He recalled something Wallace had said about a ‘robot’ missile which could fly over long distances. Coul
d it really be launched from the other side of the Channel with any accuracy? The next few days proved that it could. By the middle weekend of June the suburbs of south London and Kent were under sustained attack, and casualties were mounting. (In his head Baines always doubled the number reported in the press.) On Sunday morning he was in Mrs Gorse’s kitchen when he heard a low, growling noise that made the window hum in its frame; it sounded like a steam train dragging up a hill. He opened the door and went into the back garden, in time to see what looked like a burning enemy aircraft disappear across the sky with flames spitting from its tail. It must have been winged when it broke through the air-raid defences. He went back inside and finished off his breakfast.
He was reading the paper an hour later when Mrs Gorse burst through the door in a state of exhilarated outrage. Her meaty arms wobbled as she thumped her basket down on the table and stared at Baines, who tried to hold her divergent gaze. It was disconcerting not to know which of her eyes he was supposed to catch.
‘Oh those bleeders! Only gone and dropped a bomb on the Essex Road.’
‘You saw it?’
‘Nah, but I ’eard it. I went down there to look. Awful it was, you could smell it a mile off. Bodies layin’ on the street. Gawd knows ’ow many dead!’
‘I saw something about an hour ago – I thought it was … a plane on fire.’
‘Nah. Policeman says to me it was one of them new robot things. I says ’ow can they drop a bomb when there’s no plane? ’E says, they’re sendin’ ’em from France an’ they don’t need no pilots or nuffink.’ Mrs Gorse shook her head in a mime of scandalised disbelief. Baines felt for her, having heard the story of the raid that killed her husband, a fireman, three years before. Aside from a short spell in February London had been free of attacks since the May Blitz of ’41. Now it seemed they would have to get used to them all over again. Those bleeders.
The Rescue Man Page 35