The next morning he went to his usual telephone box in King’s Cross station in order to call May, who he knew would be worried by what was happening. The concourse was heaving with people, many of them trailing suitcases and an air of orderly agitation. In the distance floated the vacant sound of slammed doors and the shriek of whistles. While he waited for the telephone he watched the crowds milling about; exhausted-looking mothers half dragged their children towards the platforms, porters were scurrying about in a sweat and one queue at the ticket office had become distinctly rowdy. He thought back to the first week of the war and the evacuation of children at Lime Street. This time the mood was different: by now people had seen what bombs could do. Ironic, he thought, that he was getting settled into the place just as everyone else seemed to be abandoning it. He had got inside the telephone box when an argument he had half noticed at a ticket booth broke into shoving, and then into a fight; the glass blocked out most of the sound, and when a policeman waded into the melee it felt like he was watching a silent film. Jack picked up on the third ring.
‘Hullo, stranger. Where are you?’ He sounded pleased to hear from him.
‘Still in London. King’s Cross station. Right now I’ve got a ringside seat at a fight going on at the ticket office. There’s a big panic here to get out of town.’
‘I’m not surprised. I presume you’ll be going with them.’
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I still haven’t found her …’
He heard Jack sigh down the line. ‘Oh, Thomas. What’s the – have you ever considered that she might not want to be found?’
He had. A silence fell between them. Jack had pulled a sceptical face when Baines had first told him of his plan, but he hadn’t tried to dissuade him; they knew one another too well for that. Jack cleared his throat in a businesslike way.
‘Have you tried the Slade? The in-laws?’
‘I’ve tried everywhere I can think of.’
‘Then I see no point in your staying. These rockets – once the Hun find their range –’
‘I saw one yesterday – passed right over the house. My landlady told me it fell about a mile away, so I went up there to have a look. Must have been quite a size, the blast area looked enormous.’
Jack snorted in exasperation. ‘And you’re staying put …’
Baines paused. Hearing Jack’s voice was making him homesick. ‘I’ve got to find her. I can’t get on with my life until I do.’
‘But you might not –’ Jack checked himself, unwilling to voice what he knew they were both thinking. Baines decided to muffle the moment with vagueness.
‘I know, I’m tempting fate. Just do me a favour. Tell May I’ve tried to call her but couldn’t get through. Tell her I’m fine –’
‘– and that you’ll be back home soon.’
Jack was never going to plead. They said their goodbyes, and he rang off. He stepped out of the telephone box to find the police re-establishing control of the scene, though there was little they could do about the creeping atmosphere of anxiety. It was as if the city were being visited by a plague whose touch fell on people – young or old, rich or poor, innocent or guilty – with terrifying haphazardness, a plague borne on the back of huge steel-winged locusts. This wasn’t like the Blitz, that night-flurry of attack and counter-attack whose periods were marked by the sirens whining the all-clear. Back then the ack-ack guns and the roving fingers of searchlights at least furnished the illusion of a defensive front. This time there was no enemy up there to fight, they simply flew unannounced out of the clouds then nosedived towards earth. The sound of the rockets – ‘doodlebugs’ as they were being called – seemed to have been devised by a fiend. It was a low, vicious metal drone that would suddenly stop, and in the ten, twelve seconds of silence you would get out of the window’s eyeline, hit the floor and hope the annihilating payload would pass you. The taut, apprehensive faces Baines passed in the street seemed to have found a middle ground between acceptance and helplessness.
Yet farce had not entirely exited the scene. Baines had gone for tea one afternoon at the Russell Hotel. The lounge where he sat reading had entered a slow mid-afternoon torpor, stirred only by the discreet clink of spoon on china. A waiter was clearing a table at the bay window that fronted the square when, from a distance, a steady buzzing drone gathered, approached – and stopped. The waiter, discarding his loaded tray with a hysterical clatter, had dived for the floor, and when the shout of ‘Bomb!’ went up the rest of the lounge’s occupants followed suit, Baines included. He had time to brace himself, waiting in the awful pregnant silence, as he counted to ten, to twenty, to thirty … A full minute went by before he heard voices outside the lounge carrying on as normal. Then he saw the waiter – the canary in the coal mine – stand up and peer out of the window. The head barman was furiously upbraiding another of his staff, and people had started picking themselves up, quite cautiously, from the carpet. He heard a man’s voice, half laughing, say, ‘A motorbike – a bloody motorbike!’
An hour or more later he was wandering past the British Museum when sudden fat raindrops began to spot the pavement. In a side street of antiquarian bookshops and tiny galleries he saw the protective hood of a shop’s awning, and hurried to take cover from the downpour. He stood there for some minutes watching the rain thrash the cobbles, filling the gutters so quickly that when a motor car swooshed by it sprayed the pavement and caused a woman passing too close to the kerb to shriek. For a while he browsed the outdoor tray of weather-warped paperbacks that seemed almost to beg to be taken away. Directly across the street a photographers’ gallery had its lights blazing against the pewter-grey afternoon; he gazed idly at the prints spotlit in the window, monochrome society portraits, school of Beaton, mixed in with more gritty and realistic studies of urban life, school of Brandt. His eyes roved among them but kept returning to a smaller photograph in the window’s bottom right-hand corner. It started out as no more than a shape, its detail blurred through the curtain of rain in front of him. There was something about it – the light, the composition – that nagged at him, like the lone fragment of a dream that just survives into consciousness before dissolving. It was still pelting down but curiosity made him hang on to his hat and dash through the puddles to the other side. The rain had formed long rivulets that streamed and broke at different angles over the window, and though it wasn’t an ideal setting in which to examine it he now knew the photograph for certain.
He entered the gallery, setting off the tinkling bell over the door, and shook a few glistening raindrops from his sleeves. A young woman, invisible from the street, stood up to greet him; from the unpeopled stillness and her ingratiating smile Baines sensed it had been a quiet trading day. The photograph, plainly mounted in a slender beech frame, was removed from the window and propped on a dimpled leather sofa. The assistant took a few appraising steps back, as if she were belatedly revising its worth. The picture, taken at street level, was of a boy, perhaps six or seven years old, with a plump lower lip and a solemn level gaze that seemed to acknowledge the lowly background against which he stood – a dilapidated terrace, a charwoman on a step looking away from the camera, a dog trotting over the cobbles. Baines remembered just then that the child had worn no shoes.
‘The photographer,’ he heard himself say, ‘it’s Bella Tanqueray, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right,’ she said brightly. ‘You know her work?’
‘Yes. I was there when she took that photograph. Pitt Street, Liverpool – 1st September 1939.’
The woman looked at him, astonished. She walked back to the photograph and picked it up to examine an inscription on the reverse. ‘You’re quite right. 1st September 1939 is its title.’ She handed it to Baines, who held it stiff-armed in front of him for a few moments. He was thinking of that day, the day they met, the wide-legged trousers she wore, the long talk they had at the Kardomah, the first time he heard her laugh. That Germany had invaded Poland that morning seemed, in his fugue-like perspecti
ve, a mere footnote.
‘We hope to do a show of her Liverpool photographs soon,’ the woman was saying. ‘Perhaps we could let you know …’
Baines nodded absently. He still had the picture of the boy in his hands.
‘You’ll take a cheque for this?’ he said to her. It was priced at four guineas. She really was making her way in the world. While the assistant trussed up the photograph with brown paper and string she chattered gaily on about Bella, whom she had got to know a little over the last couple of years – a real find for the gallery, and such a nice lady. As he signed the cheque he said, without looking up, ‘Would you just remind me where she’s living at the moment?’
* * *
The following morning, a Saturday, the sky was clear, and showed even a watery, apologetic sunlight. Baines had put on the one suit he had packed, and was now regretting it; he had wanted to look prepared, but the plain blue worsted made him feel like a solicitor, or a tax inspector. And what, in any case, was he prepared for? In his anxiety he missed the turning he should have taken off ‘the Cally’ (Mrs Gorse’s diminutive) and overshot his route into Holloway Road. He turned right and began walking back south, taking out for the seventh or eighth time the compliment slip on which the gallery assistant had written down the address. Bella’s address, there in his hand. When he had looked for it on his map the night before he was surprised to see how close it was, not much more than a mile between them. At any time in the last three weeks they might have passed one another in the street. He tried to imagine the look of astonishment that would have seized her. He was nearing the junction of Highbury Corner, and the sickness at the pit of his stomach seemed to have burrowed deeper. Trams were rumbling past him, clanging their bells. He saw a Boots chemist on the corner. Would a bottle of smelling salts be a good idea?
For a while he loitered among the crowds streaming out of Highbury station, its high dramatic blaze of finials and gables and turrets outlined sharply against the bluish-white sky. Now that he was here, dawdling near the street where she lived, he felt almost paralysed with indecision. Three years of wondering had led to this. He glanced at the faces of passing strangers, oblivious to his flutter of nerves, as strangers generally were. A news-stand board sombrely blazoned the headline MORE DEAD IN FLYING BOMB ATTACKS. He lit a Player’s and dragged deeply on it, then began walking. Compton Terrace was a row of tall Regency houses that ran parallel to Upper Street, divided from it by a narrow strip of public garden and hedged around with railings. It had the air of a genteel neighbourhood that had fallen on difficult times. The brickwork looked carious, and weeds sprouted between the pavement flags. A clock stuck out its face like a nosy neighbour from the tower of the chapel halfway down. Number 33 had shallow steps rising to a pedimented front door. He tapped the dull brass door knocker against its plate and waited, like someone about to jump into a freezing pool. It was impossible, he thought, to knock uninvited at a door and not make it sound like an order. In the cloudy window before him a pair of net curtains hung, untwitched.
There was nobody answering. Just then, from the near end of the terrace a woman was approaching, with a young child stomping along at her side. Baines waited on the step while she drew nearer; she was tall, long-striding, and for a moment or two he thought it was Bella, much changed. He realised he was mistaken, yet in the same instant her face seemed oddly familiar to him, its chiselled contours, the bone structure. The eyes. He had come down from the top step, where his presence seemed to demand an explanation, for the woman had come to a halt. She looked at him uncertainly. Baines removed his hat and turned it nervously in his hands.
‘Hullo, I wonder if –’ He swallowed, and gestured at the door behind him. ‘Does Bella Tanqueray live here?’
Her face relaxed, and she said, ‘Yes, she does. You are –?’
‘Tom – Tom Baines. I’m a friend from – when she was in Liverpool.’
‘Tom,’ she repeated, blankly, and nodded. ‘Hmm, I – I think she’s mentioned you.’ The vagueness of this cut him deeply, but he betrayed nothing in his expression. The woman had extended her hand.
‘I’m Nancy. Bella’s sister. We live together – with this little sprite! Say hullo, George.’ She turned and ruffled the boy’s dark hair. He giggled and promptly hid behind her skirt. Baines, trying to catch the boy’s eye, raised his hand in silent salute. He now felt desperately awkward in the suit.
Nancy swept the child into her arms, and said, ‘Would you like to come in and wait? Bella’s been running errands this morning.’
This would be a surprise for her to come home to. ‘Thank you. If it’s not too much trouble …’
Baines followed a short way behind Nancy and the boy, who had wriggled out of her arms and was taking the stairs on his own, heaving himself up like a mini mountaineer. Their flat occupied the middle two floors of the building. In the living room long sash windows looked down on the tree-lined garden, through which the continuous honk of traffic could be heard. A large gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace turned its steady gaze on him, and sensing his intrusion he ducked out of its range. On the opposite wall he recognised, like an old friend, the Nicholson portrait of Bella. Nancy had gone into the kitchen to make tea, while George was busying himself in the far corner with paper and a quiver of coloured crayons. Occasionally he would turn and fix Baines with a frank interrogative stare.
Presently Nancy came into the room bearing a tea tray, and as she set it down said, ‘So, you’re just on a visit here?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I – um, came to see a friend.’
With a sharp little glance at him she said, ‘You picked a fine time to do it.’
Baines gave a kind of grimacing smile in acknowledgement of his implied stupidity. As she poured the tea he studied her; she was beautiful, too, but in a more severe way than her sister. There was a trace of flinty shrewdness around her eyes, and in her tone just now he had heard a slight acidity, the sort of tone that didn’t suffer fools gladly. She had a brisk, practical air about her, acquired perhaps in the raising of a child by herself. She wore no wedding ring.
‘Have you thought about – leaving London?’ he asked, with a nod to the boy.
‘Now and then,’ she admitted. ‘We’ve talked about it. But I’d find it difficult, with the job …’
‘Your job?’
‘Yes. I’m a doctor,’ she said flatly, as though it were something she assumed he would know. ‘I really thought we’d seen the last of the bombs, but …’ She shook her head, and looked rather weary.
‘I was at King’s Cross the other morning,’ he said. ‘It’s getting to be quite an exodus. You’re brave to stay.’
She shrugged, not caring for the compliment, then frowned. ‘So how do you know Bella? Are you one of her party friends?’
Baines wasn’t sure what that meant. ‘Er, I don’t think so. I met her through Richard, when we worked together – he took the photographs for a book I was trying to write. They both did.’
‘Ah, so that’s how,’ she said, returning a look of candid interest. ‘You know those photographs are with a gallery in Bloomsbury now?’
‘I do indeed. I bought one yesterday.’
Her face broke into a smile, and she gave a little clap of surprise. ‘You did? Oh – she will be so thrilled.’ Baines had a very strong intuition that ‘thrilled’ would not be Bella’s immediate response. George, hearing her clap, had tottered over to offer the piece of paper on which he had scrawled a sequence of incomprehensible lines. Nancy examined it reverently.
‘Darling, how lovely,’ she said, turning the picture around, as if in an effort to make her estimation of it true. She added, archly, ‘I think you may have your mummy’s artistic nature.’
Baines took a moment to construe this remark. ‘Sorry – did you say – are you not his mother?’
Nancy chuckled modestly at the idea. ‘No, no. He’s Bella’s son. Can’t you tell?’
He could not. He had not suspected it for
a moment. And now, suddenly, his mind went plunging through furious calculations, starting from the likely age of the boy to the probable period of conception to the dawning possibility – He heard the slam of a door from somewhere below, and Nancy cocked her head in a casual reflex.
‘That’s her now, I think,’ she said. The moment could not have been more exquisitely timed to unseat Baines’s already faltering confidence. He should have left a note and waited for her to contact him. Or not, as she preferred. An occasion he had thought himself ready for was rapidly transforming itself into an ordeal. On hearing the key scratching in the lock, George abruptly hurried out into the hall. Baines heard the door swing open, and a voice greeted the boy. ‘Hullo, you little terror!’ Bella’s voice, unaware of the ghost that awaited her in the next room. A merry smacking kiss was followed by some muffled words between mother and son. Nancy, listening too, flashed a quick complicitous smile at Baines. Bella was in mid-sentence, with George at her heels, as she walked into the living room and saw him standing there. She stopped, absolutely still, and he watched the colour drain from her face. Her eyes flicked in panic at Nancy, as if for a moment she suspected a horrible practical joke at work.
‘Tom … what – what are you doing here?’
Baines, dazed by the moment, heard himself say, ‘You have to ask?’
They stood staring at one another, about fifteen feet apart, like duellists, with Nancy an unwitting second in the middle. Even under its present mask of shock Bella’s face seemed, if anything, more striking than he had remembered it; faint shadows beneath her eyes gave their lustre a poignancy, and the cheekbones stood out lean and sad. There was greying at her temples. The war had aged her, he thought; it had aged everyone. Nancy had perhaps begun to sense that this was no joyful reunion, and jumped into the silence between them.
The Rescue Man Page 36