The Rescue Man

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘Tom’s just bought one of your photographs, Bel,’ she said brightly.

  Bella, still frozen to the spot, didn’t seem to hear her. She looked almost hypnotised with fright.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d had a son,’ said Baines. This seemed to jolt her out of her trance. She bent down to pick up the boy, and held him protectively against the curve of her hip. Then her eyes were back on his, and as he looked at mother and child he knew – knew it more certainly than things which he had made a serious effort to know. He swallowed and said,

  ‘Is he – is George …?’

  He had to hear her say it. Her mouth quivered, and her head dropped. Then, softly but clearly, she said, ‘Richard – couldn’t.’

  He felt the room begin to close on him; there seemed less air to breathe. ‘Oh God, God … Bella, what’ve you –’ He sensed the chair behind him, and fell back into it. He thought he was going to be sick. ‘What have you done?’ He kept repeating these words, he couldn’t help himself. He heard Nancy say to Bella with schoolmarmish impatience, ‘Will you please tell me what’s going on?’

  George, alert to the sudden drop in the social temperature, had launched into an impromptu aria of dismay. Baines could hear Nancy and Bella talking in short, fierce half-whispers to one another, an exchange brought to a close when Bella hissed, ‘Just do it – please,’ and then he heard Nancy shepherding George out of the room. The door closed, but the recent heated words still charged the air. After some minutes Baines looked up. Bella was sitting on the sofa opposite, silent, her eyes glassy with tears. He didn’t know where to begin.

  ‘How old is he?’

  Her voice sounded gluey in her throat. ‘He’ll be three, in November.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Would you – were you ever going to tell me?’

  ‘I wanted to. So many times – I – I wrote you letters. And couldn’t send them.’

  A thought jolted him. ‘Did you think I was dead?’

  She shook her head. ‘I saw you in hospital – twice. You were still … not awake. The doctor I spoke to told me you were going to come through.’

  ‘How nice of you to visit. Did you bring flowers?’

  Bella bowed her head. ‘I know you’re angry –’

  ‘Too right I’m angry. Where did you go? Why did you go?’

  He had stood and taken a few steps towards her, and she flinched as if expecting him to strike her.

  ‘I came down to London – Richard’s parents wanted him buried here. A few days after the funeral I discovered I was …’

  ‘Pregnant,’ he supplied, baldly. ‘And it just slipped your mind to tell me.’

  She paused, resigning herself to his sarcasm, and said quietly, ‘I wanted to tell you. More than anything. But I just couldn’t go back to Liverpool, knowing what I’d done to Richard, and carrying your child. Can you try to understand that? The guilt I was – it felt as if I were being buried alive under it. And I thought that if I wrote to you –’

  ‘– you knew I’d come and find you.’ He could not keep the sneer out of his voice.

  ‘I was always afraid that you would. And, I suppose, I … always hoped that you would. The whole time I was pregnant I longed for you to be there, I kept thinking – if only I could talk to him now. I imagined the look on your face when you saw it was a boy – our boy.’

  This was too much. If she had put up a fight, met his hostility with some righteous fire of her own, he could have taken a miserable pleasure in grinding her down. But her quiet, cowed tone, and now this, a confession of maternal tenderness, were much harder to bear than an attempt to defend herself.

  He felt winded by the sudden self-realisation: he was a father, and this was the mother of his child. That boy in the next room … a miracle! Yet still he sensed the venom stirring within his blood, provoking him, and he heard himself say, ‘If you could know the kind of pain you caused me – if you could feel what it was like – I wonder how you’d manage to live with yourself.’

  He watched Bella’s face for a moment, and felt an appalled satisfaction as she trembled at his words. Then he scooped up his hat and said, ‘I’ll let myself out.’

  He was through the door and hurrying down the stairs. This blasted limp … He hit the pavement and was moving as quickly as he could down Compton Terrace, oblivious to the traffic’s roar as he dodged across Highbury Corner, the blood ringing in his ears. He was just going to keep walking, it didn’t matter where. He wasn’t even going to think about it. There was another long terrace abutted by a promenade lined with trees, and he had started along it when he heard Bella’s voice calling him. He didn’t turn round. After a few moments he heard her footsteps hurrying to catch up.

  ‘Tom,’ she called again, ‘please stop.’

  He kept walking. A couple passed by, their eyes first on him, and then over his shoulder at the person in his wake. Emerging from the bower of trees he now approached a sloping green, where people were enjoying a rare glimpse of June sunshine. She was now almost behind him.

  ‘Tom,’ her voice came, slightly out of breath. ‘Please. If you ever loved me …’

  That stopped him. ‘What do you want?’ he said, tonelessly.

  ‘Please don’t leave like this.’ Her face was lit by an anguished radiance. He had never seen anyone look so beautiful and so pitiful at the same time. He wanted to say something vicious again, but he knew he had shot that bolt. Bella had looked winded by the cruelty of his words, and now he could no longer tell if he was angry or remorseful. Was it forgiveness that he sought, or the power to forgive? He thought of what Mrs Westmacott had told him about Eames – his magnanimity towards his betrayer. In the end you had to forgive.

  ‘We did an awful thing to him, Bella.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, touching his sleeve.

  ‘I was there. I watched him die.’ His eyes tried to blink them back, then hot tears were running down his cheeks. She led him over to a wooden bench, its corporation-green paint flaking along the slats. They sat, and held each other for a long time without speaking. When he looked up she was gazing at him.

  ‘Tom. I’m so sorry.’

  Baines only nodded. His throat ached too much to talk. He felt her hand on his cheek, and thought of all the days and nights he had yearned for that touch. At times he had persuaded himself he hated her, and had rehearsed in his mind the brutal execrations he would heap on her for what she had done. But now here she was, holding his hand, and what he felt more than anything was a simple gratitude that she was alive. Alive, when others he loved, or might have loved – his mother and father, Alice, Liam, Richard – were not.

  He felt her squeeze his hand suddenly. ‘Tom, will you stay here, just for five minutes? Please?’ Her face was close to his, beseeching. He shrugged, and said that he would, but having stood up she seemed afraid to leave him.

  ‘You won’t just – walk off?’

  He looked at her, touched by her uncertainty. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  He watched her receding figure, an urgency in her long stride. That loping athletic walk he had admired the first time they met. As he sat on the bench, Saturday cyclists and promenaders passing in front of him, he considered the years that had separated them, the brooding, the useless waiting. Why had he waited for so long? Did he really believe he could forget? He was still lost in this reverie when he heard a child’s shout from along the way. It was George, trying to grab at a pigeon; just as he bent down and reached out, the bird would strut ahead with a hurried little flutter of alarm. A short distance behind walked Bella and Nancy, amused by the boy’s doggedness. He turned and waved at George, who seemed to be wondering where he had seen the man on the bench before. He halted on his stubby little legs and waited, until Baines waved again and called his name. Then with a wary expression he approached, walked right up to him and stared, with a child’s artless candour. His eyes were a greenish-blue, with long, almost girlish lashes: his mother’s eyes. He was still staring, transfixed by somethi
ng on the stranger’s face, and then Baines realised what it was. He took the boy’s hand – as light and smooth as a plum – and gently helped his finger to trace the line of the scar beneath his eye. The boy’s mouth, slightly ajar, broke into a gummy smile.

  He smiled back. ‘Georgie,’ he said.

  Before they parted later that afternoon, Bella had explained that she was going with Nancy and George to stay with old friends near Oxford for the weekend. It was a long-standing arrangement. They would get the train from Paddington that evening and return on the Monday. He was secretly distressed by this news, but then reassured when Bella insisted on his coming to lunch at Compton Terrace on the Tuesday – they would spend the day together. She gave him their telephone number (unlisted, it transpired) and told him to call on the morning, just to make sure that they had got back safely. On returning to his lodgings from Highbury Baines passed Mrs Gorse on the stairs and realised he was whistling.

  ‘You’re in a merry mood,’ she observed.

  ‘It’s just being here with you, Mrs Gorse,’ he said pertly, and drew an astonished shriek of laughter in response.

  In the meantime he started on the final stretch of The Shadow-Line, convinced that Ransome, the only other man to have escaped the ship’s fever, was about to be mortally felled by his weak ticker. For the captain-narrator the ultimate crisis comes when a blinding darkness envelops the unhelmed ship, and only a few stars glimmer against the sky. ‘It was something I had never seen before, giving no hint of the direction from which any change would come, the closing in of a menace from all sides.’ His crew by this stage have been reduced to shadows, ‘ghosts of themselves’, yet he urges them on to raise the mainsail, taking the lead himself. After an agonising wait – eighteen days of stillness – the breeze suddenly picks up, and the ship makes it to port, flying the signal for medical assistance. The captain had somehow crossed the ‘shadow-line’ from innocence to experience – or was it from arrogance to humility? – and lived to tell the tale. And Ransome, the ‘priceless man’, had survived! Turning back to the title page Baines noticed, beneath the title, Conrad’s salute to the men of his ship’s company – ‘Worthy of my undying regard.’

  He waited with impatient high spirits for Tuesday morning to come round. At ten o’clock he had hurried over to the King’s Cross telephone box, oppressed by a dread that Bella might have changed her mind and bolted once more, never to return. He was still tormenting himself with this when her voice came on the line, and he smiled just to hear it. Yes, she and George had got back late last night – Nancy was staying on in Oxford for a few days.

  ‘Come here about one,’ she said. ‘I’ve bought some lunch – and a bottle of champagne. We can have it in the garden if it stays fine.’ Her attention was momentarily diverted, and he heard her talking to George.

  ‘His nibs is very curious about you,’ she explained. ‘I’m going to hand you over.’ He heard the muffled clatter of the receiver, and then a silent presence at the end of the line.

  ‘…’

  He said a few coaxing words to the boy, who had yet to grasp the two-way nature of the instrument. Bella came briskly back on.

  ‘Sorry about that! But he does look adorable with the telephone pressed to his ear. we’ll see you in a little while.’

  The platforms at King’s Cross were still a termitary of luggage-laden evacuees, pale-faced, a blindfold look in their eyes. Yet he barely registered the crowds as he nudged through the concourse and out to York Way. He was still humming the lines of a ditty he had overheard Mrs Gorse singing that morning:

  I’m just about the proudest man that walks

  I’ve got a little nipper, when ’e talks

  I’ll lay yer forty shiners to a quid

  You’ll take ’im for the father, me the kid!

  He was too restless to go back to his room and wait, so he continued walking north and distractedly roamed the neighbourhoods of Kentish Town and Upper Holloway before swinging round and heading east towards Highbury. How different his mood from Saturday! A humid morning and his aimless footslog had left him rather dry-mouthed, and with another half-hour to kill before he could present himself at Bella’s he looked around for a cafe. As he approached Highbury Corner he thought he might prefer a beer, and turning he saw the Old Cock Tavern, a giant Gothic companion to the station next door. A dray had just arrived and men were unloading barrels through a cellar-drop. Drinkers were standing at the pub’s open doors. He passed a woman selling flowers from a stall. Inside the cavernous gloom of the back bar he shouldered his way through knots of office workers taking an early lunch break and ordered a beer. He took three swift gulps of it, and felt relieved. He picked up a newspaper left on the bar and retired to a corner table, idly eavesdropping on racing talk between two old boys, wearing matching caps. They were jawing on about a veteran jockey of their acquaintance.

  ‘I ’eard ’e ain’t been ’isself since that fall at Kempton,’ one of them said.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed the other dismally, ‘and nor’s the bleedin’ ’orse.’

  Baines kept checking his watch, willing the minutes away till one o’clock. He had just lit a Player’s when the pub went quiet; it was like the moment at a dinner when a polite hush fell and someone rose to make a speech. Then he picked up the noise himself: it was a heavy whirring drone, like an engine running down, the same one he had heard in Mrs Gorse’s kitchen. It could almost have been a plane flying too low. He felt it passing over them, the shudder of it, and seconds later it cut out. The whole room seemed to be holding its breath – but nothing happened. Baines caught the eye of one of the racing boys, who said, ‘Phoo-hoo – missed us! … close one, though.’

  Voices tentatively stirred around them. From the other side of the bar he heard someone laugh. He was thinking about the flower seller he had passed outside – what were Bella’s favourites? – when an ear-splitting detonation shook the walls. They were still vibrating when a tidal wave of soot thundered out of the fireplace and turned day into night (he later realised it was the chimney coming down). Then a huge blast wave sucked the windows out in a sudden whoosh, the net curtains waving the glass goodbye, and the floor seemed to buck beneath his feet. The second rush of air as the vacuum was filled hurled him to the floor.

  He could barely see in front of him, but he heard people coughing, choking inside the maelstrom of smoke and soot. Once he had crawled spluttering out of the door on his hands and knees he realised how lucky he had been to choose the back bar. The side fronting the street had taken the main brunt of it. Already he could hear screaming. Through the blinding pall of smoke he began to take in the effects of the blast, people wandering around dazed, some with their clothes half torn off and their faces scorched and bleeding. The men he had seen unloading the dray were lying dead, so too the flower woman, so too the policeman who had been on point duty at the crossroads. Other bodies lay pooled in blood, twitching out their last seconds of life. He walked through the moaning carnage as if in a dream, brushing past blackened shadows too stunned or too damaged to speak. He kept repeating in his head, for no reason he could fathom, You’ll take ’im for the father, me the kid!

  At first he thought his ears were ringing from the noise of the bomb; then he realised that it was an actual ringing, the sound of an alarm set off inside the bank just opposite. A car had been tossed on its side and smoke was pouring out of its engine. The alarm was still calling him forward. The railings that curved around Upper Street had been flattened as if by a tornado, and now, as he walked towards them, a horrific suspicion began to take hold. The missile had exploded not on the pavement of Highbury Corner but in the public garden on Compton Terrace. Which was now swarming with fire. Windows were bursting on to the street. He felt a hollow acceleration gather in his legs, and when the massive acrid clouds of smoke began to pour from the house he didn’t stop, even though his eyes smarted and his throat gagged. He didn’t stop.

  PART FOUR

  Ending

&
nbsp; 1947

  18

  NOW HE COULD hear the tap-tap of work starting up across the road. He had woken hours before in dull agitation, listening to the dawn chorus while grey light began to leak through the curtains. The sound of the builders meant it had just gone eight. (He hadn’t needed an alarm clock for years.) They had moved on to the next stage in the construction of the Anglican Cathedral, a project begun in 1904. Forty-three years. That was slow going even by Liverpool standards. He was so used to the noise that most of the time he didn’t actually notice it. But he would have welcomed a few hours of peace on a day like this. He rose from his bed and looked out at the half-completed church, the sight line criss-crossed with the long angled necks of cranes. Well, he could hardly rebuke them for the time they were taking, he who had spent his life on the shrinking margins of procrastination and delay. It was never likely that he was going to seize the moment, but somehow the moment had come along and seized him. Was it achievement he felt, or merely relief that a period of self-imposed servitude had come to an end? He couldn’t tell.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table in his vest, braces dangling limply over his trousers like a pair of black eels, when he heard a knock at the door. He knew that no one else would be in at this time of the morning, so he ambled down to answer the summons. On the step waited a woman whom he didn’t immediately recognise.

  ‘Tom?’ she said, blushing. ‘God, I’m sorry – you’re not even dressed.’

  She looked so exquisitely groomed – it was the forces-favourite style of Rita Hayworth – that he was still confounded by her familiar yet unlocatable face. Then the penny dropped: it was Joanna. He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and smiled, amused by her embarrassment.