by Derek Beaven
‘D’you mean killed?’ Vic gasped.
The officer punched him in the stomach. ‘Don’t answer me back, son. You collect your gas mask from the stores and carry it at all times. Go on. Get your bath and hair-cut, you dozy bastard, and have that stripe taken off of your lip. Where do you think you are? Fucking Hollywood? Next.’
His remand was to a converted workhouse in Middlesex. Its reception room had a barred window which looked out on to frozen fields. Vic held the bars while the pain in his gut swelled and receded.
He’d received no news for days. Stuck inside cells or handcuffed in police vans he’d heard sirens go off; sometimes he’d heard the rumble of planes. Rehearsals, they were nothing out of the ordinary, but now he strained his ears for distant explosions. In the queue he steadied himself against the registration bench. The man had lied – but if London had already been gas bombed, or fire bombed, who would smell poison or char, here to windward? The queue edged forward. He needed to be resolute. The man must have lied, and for the moment, surely, the kid was safe.
He surrendered the clothes he’d been living in since Christmas Eve. With a sliver of soap from the floor, he cleaned up in the trough. The icy water was scummed, already used by the morning’s other entrants. The washroom echoed. Raw men were milling about, blue-white and misshapen in the light through frosted glass.
In the corridor beyond, at the induction process, he made his responses through teeth that kept chattering even after he was dressed in his prison clothes. The officers gave him a gas mask and took him off to a dormitory. Then there was a meal. He hardly noticed it, nor the conversations around him. He endured the first hours, the faces in strange corridors, the feeling of dumb suspension which he remembered from a lad – having taken a wrong turning, maybe, suddenly caught out on the wrong, dockside street. Figures loomed, and melted past. Voices sounded out of cells, out of entrances, out of the air. He watched his lip, his step. Locks opened in front, doors crashed shut behind him.
In his dormitory that first night he slept, or half slept, wrapped by a shapeless darkness. The dawn merely shook its alarm bell on more of the same, the next morning, the next afternoon. So the days passed. So they seemed to lose their integrity as days even. They blurred together into a first week; and then, with the constant bitter cold, into a first fortnight.
He was resolute. My father was at home with adversity and knew exactly how to cope. He knew how to rough it with his prison comrades as he’d done through the Depression years with his workmates at Everholt’s. Maybe he’d dreaded a mob, but folk came and went every day; no one was long term. And if some wore a squared-up bravado, the majority still didn’t know the ropes: most were men from his own background. The screws were tough local men, who did their job. No one picked on him and surprisingly, the prison routines began to calm him.
There were no German bombers. Their own planes flew overhead in skeins and gaggles. So did birds from the neighbouring gravel pits. The Thames was only a mile or so away, in these parts a tame domestic thing which self-respecting Londoners would visit only for holiday excursions to Windsor Castle; its craft flimsy pleasure boats, its watermen lock-keepers, or swan-uppers, or dredging crews. Now it threw up freezing mists. My father could get some rest in his bed; for, whatever Jack’s peril, the prison held no wakeful child.
Nor was there immediate pressure on him – his case wasn’t due until the middle of April. His face relaxed, gained colour. He put on the lingo of the East Ham marshes, and that way he was accepted. For his fair dealing and sharp personality he even gained a measure of status. Vic Warren was a good laugh, sometimes, a good enough bloke. Sometimes, he was able to believe as much himself, acclimatised among the damned and the doomed.
When he wasn’t doubling about, or spud bashing, or washing up, he liked to walk the field, braving the cold as far as the wire and back. He took pleasure in the stubborn weeds that grew around the perimeter, their resilient greens, their blackened flower stalks, frosted seed heads. As for the Epping Forest incident, he thought nothing of it. It seemed almost as though it had never happened. The trains chuffing up to London, and down again towards the Surrey stockbroker belt, held the vacant clockwork of toys.
Then Phyllis came to visit. ‘Well, we’re coping,’ she said. Her carefully made-up features stole eyes, turned heads. She took off her damp hat, and tried to do something with the rain-soaked ends of her hair.
‘We?’
‘Me and Jack. Some man in a council van wanted to evacuate us again. I told him thank you very much but we had our own arrangements. I thought you might need some cigs.’ She passed a packet over. The wind outside moaned its way past the walls and into the courtyard; sleet spattered against the windows.
‘I’m so glad you came.’
‘Well, I have missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you, too, Phyllis.’ He heard the pitiful gratefulness in his own voice.
‘Tony was really cut up.’ She stroked her hair again, and looked about her in the visiting room. ‘About what happened. You know. Is that stove all the heating they’ve got?’
‘I was so stupid. Such a fool. I blew it.’ He scanned her face for signs of agreement.
‘Tony thought he owed it to you, you know, to see me and Jack right. He’s been a real friend, Vic, helping out with the rent and such. He’s given me a bit of spare cash. He said whatever he has over he’ll try and see it comes my way. If he can.’
Vic shook his head. He noticed the cigarettes in his hand and stowed the packet away. ‘I really am so sorry.’
‘Well. It can’t be helped, now, can it.’
‘But there’ve been no attacks?’
‘Attacks?’ She touched her hair again, her fingers inadvertently probing the temple.
‘Air raids. Bombing.’
‘Oh. No. Nothing.’ It was her turn to stare at him, intently, her eyes clouded in the delicate face. ‘It hasn’t really amounted to much, this war.’
Vic dropped his gaze and hugged his jacket around him. ‘It’s been on my mind a bit, that’s all. I’ve completely spoiled everything, haven’t I?’
‘There’s no need for that, Vic. Look, I’m sorry too. Didn’t make it easy for you, did I?’
‘But it’s my responsibility.’
‘No, Vic. Just one of those things, eh? Faults on both sides.’
‘I suppose war’s like prison. It’s a state of mind, isn’t it?’ He spoke earnestly, blindly. Under his fingers, beneath its accumulation of grime, the table was brindled with the unmistakable grain of oak. He stroked the wood without thinking. ‘The thing itself comes into being in its own good time. Something was waiting to happen, wasn’t it?’
‘Well, I don’t know about that. Look, I can’t stay long. Jack. …’
‘You know I still … love you, don’t you? You mean everything to me. You know that. Don’t you?’ Another squall from outside dashed on to the panes. He was ashamed of the place’s smells, of ice-cold sweat and latrines, of carbolic and grey stew.
‘Yes, Vic. I do.’
‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s all right.’ Phyllis looked at him squarely.
‘I’ll do all I can … to make it up to you. When this is over. Look after you.’
‘I know you will, Vic.’ She picked up her bag.
‘Can you forgive me, then?’
‘There’s nothing to forgive.’
He clung to her presence. ‘At Tony’s job I don’t know what got into me. I don’t remember much about it, to tell the truth. Just panicked. Such a stupid, stupid thing, as though I almost wanted to get found out. Even on the motor bike, on the way there, I wouldn’t lean enough into the corners, as though I wanted the wheel to go away from under us. As though I actually wanted to ruin it and get myself caught – or killed.’
‘Well, you did, didn’t you? Vic, I really have to go.’
‘Yeah. You’re right to be angry with me. What have you told him?’
‘W
ho? Tony?’ Her eyes flicked.
‘Jack.’
‘Oh. You know … Daddy’s coming soon. Vic, my train …’
‘Of course. If there’s a real alert, you’ll both go out to Laindon.’ He tried to impress the point on her. ‘Take the tandem. You promise, now. Straight away.’
‘Of course we will, Vic. You know we will.’
She let him touch her hand to his lips, and then she left.
AFTER SHE’D GONE, he cursed himself again for a fool, and walked out in the slanting rain. Three perimeter trees stood black against the railway embankment. He waited for her train to pass, face dripping, collar soaked, but a warder came to round him up.
Back inside, the damp brick and whitewash, the icy tiles, the caged light bulbs and concrete floors all bore in on him. He longed to dash his head against the refectory wall, or into the iron pipes that ran beside the serving hatch. He brought himself to his dormitory and threw his body down on his bed to weep, shaking there, powerless, with his face buried against the one threadbare blanket. The men at the other end of the room, Griffith, the much tattooed ex-infantryman, and Docherty, the little one-armed bookie’s runner from Hackney Wick, let him get on with it; and he cried until someone came to fetch him for work.
Over the potato peeling, he thought of his dad in the trenches, and was wretched again. The porter brought him another sackful to do, but the normally brusque head cook said no, to give the bugger a break. So Vic huddled gratefully by the kitchen door in the lee of the outside wall and lit one of Phyllis’s cigarettes.
The tarmac delivery bay lay like a little school playground between the high block walls. In his head there was Clarice’s voice, not Phyllis’s, that time they’d talked at Phyllis’s mother’s house off the East India Dock Road. It was the first time they’d met, and he’d immediately wanted someone so out of his league, someone whose words had glittered so touchingly. Clarice had been the girl he hardly knew and could never have. Her essence was so desirable it shook him even now. He had known her. There’d been time to speak if none to waste, meeting here, talking there. It was all over in a flash. They’d found each other at the wrong hour, the wrong place.
And now he was being punished for it. He drew on the cigarette. There was no pleasure in the tobacco, and it was soon finished. He was distraught; oceans away in Malaya, she’d long since forgotten him.
It took a succession of racked and identical days, maybe even another fortnight, until Vic leant against the same wall by the same kitchen door, taking another break. There’d been a fresh fall of snow that glared white in the yard under a hard blue rectangular heaven. Smoke reeled and snaked from the glowing tip of his fag. He began to grasp where he was and what had happened to him.
He saw the mercilessness in Phyllis that he so readily forgave, and had pitied. How could he insist he loved her, and mean it, when it was precisely her own lack of pity that showed she didn’t, couldn’t love him?
It was a week later he told himself the story of their intimacy right from the start. He questioned her suicidal impulses. He’d imagined they were genuine. He glimpsed how a recurring private torment to which he stood pledge for his son was the defining scene of their marriage. And how well he’d marginalised it. How effectively he’d always shoved aside the part of him that had endured her, night after night poised shivering at the window in her flimsy cotton, threatening to jump, refusing to let him sleep, or escape.
Another day he realised how he’d even traded his job to protect Jack. Washing up in the kitchen, hands scalding with carbolic soap and the copper-heated water, he spun the knives out with a wipe of the dishcloth to clatter on the enamel tray. He scrubbed the crusted edge of the rectangular metal pie dish with a small piece of wire wool. The water slopped in minute spelks of rusted steel. They were almost a pleasure. He almost needn’t love his wife.
The bad winter slackened its grip and once more the grounds’ dull green was visible. No one visited. Phyllis sent a letter saying she’d had to take a job skivvying, and couldn’t afford the train fare. His mother was unable to come because Percy’s gas lung was playing up. But a sliver of Vic was at peace. Where the grass sneaked under the barbed-wire perimeter – though it ran only as far as the embankment for the Waterloo line – he stood and thought of Clarice. Then he went back to his duties, hearing the prison racket all around him, chilling his fingers in the muddy water of the chipped vitreous sink.
There’d be a reckoning for it. In his bed that same night he expected her to turn up – Phyllis. She’d appear. She’d fly in. He expected to open his eyes to find her hand there on the window frame. He expected to hear her threatening to throw herself out if he failed to submit to her banal, hours-long, Agatha Christie script, after sex or sometimes after its refusal: ‘Why don’t you kill me then, if you hate me so much? Why don’t you get rid of me? That’s what you want, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’, the voice that wasn’t her fault speaking through her, demanding Vic turn murderer, kill her, mutilate her. Always a mere word would set her off. It was his permission that held her life and she’d do the rest herself, if he wasn’t man enough. He put out a hand. She was there, next to him, under the blanket.
Eyes wide open, gasping, he sat up in the bed, fending off the past. His chest still thumping, he levered himself up on his elbows. Very slowly he was reassured. The faint starlight outlined the dormitory window and he once more took pleasure in the iron bars. What kept him in kept her out.
COME FOR THE weekend, and bring your husband, if he can get away. It’ll be lovely. And I’m quite simply desperate to see young Fack.
They came in the spring. Clarice was exquisitely nervous. Bring your husband–it was flagrant, yet after three torn-up drafts she still hadn’t been able to leave it out. Ever since her father’s initiative beside the fire on the night of their arrival in Suffolk, she’d indulged a fantasy that she and Vic were leading parallel lives. She’d already overleapt the greatest impediment – that of distance. Now Vic would be making up the last few miles to her. It was a persistent romanticism – she knew it. But all she wanted was to be allowed to speak to him again.
From her bedroom she could just see the crest where the road from Ipswich levelled off. Clouds scudded, and a hint of rain passed the window like a moist breath. She would go down to see about the meal. But she couldn’t take her eyes away. She would change her dress. But she couldn’t leave the window-seat.
Finally, though, into a notch between smudges of hedge, a car rose and was immediately lost to view behind the first cottage of the street. Only then did she hear the burble of its powerful engine. She hurried downstairs adjusting her blue cotton frock as she went, fixing the grips that held her hair. She stood waiting out on the front drive. The sound of the engine came again as the car dipped into the hollow of the water-splash. She heard it accelerate, and suddenly brake. Then at last it swung in through the gap in the garden hedge. It drew to a halt, an open-top roadster, with a stylish maroon sweep in the black side panel. The gravel crackled beneath its wheels. Vic, in his coat, cap and driving goggles, was here … surely.
She was a jangle of anticipation. He was getting out. He was standing no more than ten yards away from her. Something was amiss. Something felt bad. Everything. Why had she written?
She’d been wrong, completely wrong. When he removed the cap and faintly stagey goggles, her spirits were thrown into confusion. It wasn’t him at all. The man saluted in her direction. She felt completely bereft.
Phyllis, shedding headscarf and sunglasses, seemed unsure how to release the door catch. The man stepped round to free her, and Clarice thought she caught the name Tony, as Phyllis looked up at him. Then at last she was out of the car and the couple approached her, their faces set in greeting.
There was no question about Phyllis. Phyllis was strikingly dressed, in a long coat with a grey fur collar. It was partially unfastened, revealing the neat salmon-pink jumper beneath and the jet beads at her throat. Her face was immaculate, the hair fet
chingly waved. She looked quite stunning. But the man … Clarice searched his face for as long as was acceptable. He returned her gaze, unwavering.
Then her fingers were in his grip. She stammered, ‘I thought it was supposed to be Victor.’ She forced a laugh.
The couple glanced at each other. Phyllis frowned. The husband dropped Clarice’s hand and seemed nonplussed. They stood on the gravel, all three of them, awkward relations. The little boy climbed by himself out of the car, from the engine of which a hot, oily smell hung in the air, until another gust of breeze dashed it away.
It was the man who spoke decisively. ‘That’s right. Vic Warren.’
The lie was unashamed. It was obvious, almost flaunted, and with it disappeared a whole scheme of things that Clarice had known and built her security on.
‘Pleased to meet you, Miss Pike.’ He flourished his driving cap and shook hands again; an assertive, smartly dressed fellow with a pure, almost glamorous face. His voice held a trace of a London accent.
‘Oh, but I think you did meet Vic before, didn’t you?’ Phyllis said. ‘At my mother’s. You probably don’t remember. Why should you? Slumming it with us lot. Probably couldn’t wait to get out of there and back to Malaya.’ She gave a laugh. ‘I was expecting, wasn’t I? Before we were married.’ Phyllis looked cheekily up at the man. ‘Seems like ages now, doesn’t it? We’ve all been through so many changes. And this war …’
‘Please. Call me Clarice.’ She felt her own smile, polite, automatic. The car behind them ticked as it cooled.
‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘Clarice it is. I’ll get the suitcase.’
‘And my scarf and hats, please. Victor,’ Phyllis called.
Clarice gazed at the car. ‘My! It looks brand new.’
He was hoisting their suitcases out of the boot. He met her eye across the length of the smart leather interior. ‘Riley Lynx. Picked her up last week. A problem getting hold of the gas. Still, we made it here all right.’ A smile curved on his fine lip.