by Susan Sallis
His nervousness was catching, because my voice came out very shakily and all I said was, ‘I wondered whether I could see Uncle . . . I mean, Mister . . . Carfax.’
‘Oh. I don’t know, actually. I’ll go and find out. Can you wait a moment?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve got all day.’
He smiled briefly and was gone. I used to come here often with Dad when we were going places with Uncle Gilbert and Aunty Maxine, but it was before this chap’s arrival, and since the war we hadn’t gone out much. I hadn’t seen him before; I knew I would have remembered him. I could hear him taking the twisting old stairs two at a time; he must be fit. And younger than I had at first thought, otherwise he would have been in the forces. He was down in record time, smiling and showing those teeth unabashedly.
‘I’ll take you up,’ he said, and indicated that I should go ahead of him.
‘You go first,’ I came back firmly. I was wearing last year’s dirndl skirt, much too short. He hesitated, then nodded and went upstairs slowly, trying to look over his shoulder to check I was still there.
Uncle Gilbert waited at the top. ‘Well done, Tom. Well done.’ He never changed: words like bluff and hearty applied whether he was covering a wedding or a funeral. He wouldn’t have done for Mum; Maxine could cope with him, she called him her teddy bear. He hugged me now. ‘Rachel Throstle, I believe? Come to start her training? Or to tell me she’s changed her mind about journalism and wants to be a famous actress instead?’ He hugged me into his office, which overlooked the lane. Then, with his spare arm, he gestured the boy he had called Tom to follow us in. ‘Come on, Tom. Come and be introduced to this young lady. She’s my goddaughter and wants to work for the Clarion – can you imagine that?’ Tom made sympathetic noises, which seemed to say that he too wanted to work for the Clarion. Uncle Gilbert sat me in a swivel chair and whizzed me round; he still thought of me as ten years old. ‘This is Tom Fairbrother, Rachel. He’s waiting for his call-up papers and thought he would see what it would be like to . . . guess what?’
‘Work for the Clarion,’ I said obediently. I did so much wish Tom Fairbrother wasn’t there, so I could tell Gilbert that I didn’t want to go back to school in September and ask if I could start working for him instead.
Anyway, Uncle Gilbert suddenly turned into the owner and editor-in-chief of a local daily newspaper and perched on a corner of his desk, rubbing his hands together as if it was mid-winter.
‘Right. Quite a bond already, wouldn’t you say? So I’ve got a job for you both. Serious stuff, but nothing like throwing you in at the deep end. The raid on Sunday night. Two bodies found in the rubble. The police are cagey. I want to know why. Ask the neighbours who they were. You’ll find the survivors – most of them – still camped out in the Guildhall. Why didn’t this particular couple go to the shelter like everyone else? Plenty of warning – the alert went off half an hour before the bombs fell.’ He clasped his fingers and rubbed his wrists together. ‘I want an angle on this story. I want people to look beyond the air raid to its victims. See if you can find something heart-warming. Maybe they were looking for a pet before they went to the shelter. Maybe they’d gone back for something.’ He stood up abruptly. ‘Off you go. See what you can find.’
I hadn’t heard much after the first part. Definitely two bodies. One of them was – must have been – our spy. Fritz. The other . . . who was the other? I looked at Tom uncertainly. His plain, open face was suddenly animated; he was excited. What about my talk with Uncle Gilbert? I half stood up and Uncle Gilbert leaned forward and slapped my bottom.
‘Jump to it, Rachel! I’ve got no one else who can ferret out information – all my reporters are in the army, I’ve got compositors who are sixty and over or . . . you two.’ He aimed another slap but I skipped out of the way. To say I felt undignified conveys nothing at all.
‘Uncle Gilbert,’ I bleated.
‘And if you’re going to work here I’m known as the Gaffer.’ He held me back and said quietly, ‘Tom’s a bit of an orphan. Be nice, OK?’
I nodded and followed Tom Fairbrother downstairs. Uncle Gilbert – the Gaffer – was a strange mixture. Thank God Mum had met Dad in time.
We consulted awkwardly as soon as we got outside and into the lane. He – Tom – actually offered to drop me off at the arcade where I could drink Camp coffee while he investigated on his own! I declined that, and said that we should go and see the survivors first of all. We got to the Guildhall and enquired about them. They were all at work and would be back in their temporary quarters after six that evening. It was then just gone eleven in the morning.
‘What about the children?’ Tom asked. ‘It’s still the school hols.’ The way he said hols was pretty ghastly.
The woman in charge said, ‘No children.’
‘None at all?’
‘Probably evacuated or something. Not really the sort of place for children, is it?’
Tom looked totally crestfallen. I said defensively, ‘No. Not as it’s right opposite the park where there are swings and a slide and a roundabout.’
Tom smiled gratefully, but the receptionist – or typist or whatever – leaned out of her cubby hole and waved us away. ‘Enough of your cheek, madam! These people deserve a little privacy, if you don’t mind!’
So we left and made for Spa Road.
The police cars had gone but there were big wire screens around the crater and barriers all along the terrace. And . . . people. Not many, but definitely some. I saw a glimpse of flowered material flipping through a broken doorway, and a second later an arm came out of what remained of a window and dropped a suitcase out to where the pavement had been. I looked wildly at Tom.
‘Surely not scavengers?’
He pursed his mouth over those teeth. ‘Don’t know about that. Could be the owners collecting what they can of their belongings.’ He shrugged. ‘Just ordinary things like pyjamas and toothbrushes.’
I looked back at the houses and tried to imagine I had lived in one of them. They looked horribly unsafe, but if you actually lived there . . . Mum would not have let me go in but probably she and Dad and Mr Myercroft would have scrambled over the rubble and collected what they could. Books; especially books.
Tom murmured in my ear, ‘There’s a boy down there, too, looking for shrapnel.’ That was another thing. You couldn’t stop ten- and eleven-year-old boys from collecting shrapnel.
I ducked under the barrier. ‘We’d better go and have a look, then. Before they wreck everything.’
He looked at me over the red and white planking and gave that small tremulous smile. ‘That was a very good example of irony.’ He glanced up at the tottering buildings. ‘In the circumstances.’
I laughed, and he looked at me with surprise – hadn’t I laughed since I’d met him? – and laughed too. Then he joined me on the inside of the barrier and we started to clamber over the mounds of bricks and wood and glass and . . . an odd slipper and a broken chamber pot . . . it was awful. If it hadn’t been that we wanted to get into the houses quickly, before anyone could start shouting at us, we would have just stood there looking; and I think perhaps I would have cried.
The boy was in the crater itself, where there were probably rich pickings to be had; maybe part of a fin from a bomb would still be identifiable. One of my London cousins was the proud possessor of a fin. The boy looked up and frowned disapprovingly.
‘You shouldn’t ought to be ’ere,’ he said.
‘We’re looking for somebody,’ Tom called back.
‘They’m mostly billeted out now.’ He jerked his head. ‘Couple of sisters in there looking for their stuff.’
‘We’ll ask them,’ Tom said equably, and began edging around the crater to the side of the house. There was a jagged hole in the wall; Meriel had been dragged out of that hole just yesterday morning. I wished now that I had asked the warden where he’d spotted that incriminating tie. Had he said it was by the staircase? Tom scrambled through the hole, turned, and leaned out
to help me. He had very long legs, longer than mine, which was most unusual. I put my foot on a pile of bricks, grabbed his hand and pushed off. The bricks rolled, cascaded with me on top of them, and I ended up clutching him around the waist and doing a frantic quickstep across a dusty floor, where we ended up crashing into a sink. Tom took the brunt of all this impetus on his back.
I panted, ‘Oh Lord. Are you all right?’
‘’Course. Another few inches and it wouldn’t have been so good.’
I glanced sideways. The draining board attached to the sink had broken and a long skewer of wood pointed across the room like a spear. I shuddered.
Tom tried to laugh. ‘You can see the reason behind the barriers, can’t you?’
I moved away and began brushing myself down. I thought of that boy down in the crater; supposing this house started to collapse on top of him?
Tom said, ‘Let’s find someone and ask questions. Isn’t that what reporters are supposed to do?’
So we ploughed over to the door, which had been forced open about twelve inches – perhaps by Meriel – and squeezed through. We were in the hall; the front door, still intact, was on our left, on our right the stairs swept up in a curve. There was no wall on the other side of the hall: the ceiling was held up by scaffolding poles and planking. Dribbles of flaking plaster and dust came from above somewhere; I thought I felt the whole house move slightly as we crossed the hall to the staircase; I was terrified. There was rubble everywhere and to the left a jagged hole. ‘A quick way to the basement,’ Tom murmured in an obvious attempt to lessen the awfulness.
I said slowly, ‘I think this is where they found it.’
‘Found it?’
‘The tie.’
‘The tie?’
‘Oh . . . I forgot. My friend was sure there was a man under the rubble. And the warden sent in a rescue squad because he found a tie. That was all. A tie.’
‘A man . . . how did your friend know it was a man? And weren’t there two bodies? Didn’t the Gaffer say there were two of them?’
I looked at him helplessly; it was all so difficult.
‘She just assumed . . . because of the tie. And yes, Uncle Gil . . . the Gaffer . . . did say there were two of them. But she didn’t know that, of course. Because there was only one tie.’
It sounded absolutely feeble, and Tom actually drew breath to ask more of his blasted questions, when, at that exact moment, there came a cooee from somewhere, and some bricks fell, followed by a loud ‘Damn!’ Then there was a lot of scuffling and someone saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, watch it, our Doris!’ Followed by steps on the stairs. The house definitely moved.
Tom stepped back to the staircase and held out a hand to someone in a flowered skirt lugging two pillow slips full of something or other. Behind her was someone else. And more pillow cases.
‘Are you the owners of this house?’ he asked very politely and carefully.
‘Not this one, love. Two doors up. We got in through a window and it must’ve collapsed while we were getting our stuff together ’cos it’s gone now. Thought we’d better get out while we could.’ She jumped the last two steps, then screamed as the floor began to give way, grabbed at Tom, and stepped smartly away from the sagging floorboard.
Above her a voice squawked, ‘I told you to be careful, our Doris!’
Doris said, ‘My sister, Mavis. I’m Doris. You don’t live here. The Austrian woman lived here.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘She’s dead and gone. And someone else with her. And she had precious little in the way of worldly goods, if that’s what you’re after.’ The sister, Mavis, came gingerly on to the hall floor, put down her pillow cases carefully and ranged herself next to the incautious Doris. They eyed us disapprovingly while my brain engaged again. This had not been home to Fritz. An Austrian woman had lived here. Fritz had been a visitor. An all-night visitor.
Tom flushed bright red. ‘We were looking for them. That’s all.’
‘In the morgue, that’s where they are.’
‘Yes, well . . .’
I said, ‘We’re supposed to be getting stuff for the Clarion. Any kind of background stuff. We thought it might be . . . atmospheric or something, just to come and see where it happened.’
It sounded ridiculously feeble, but it partially satisfied Doris and Mavis. They nodded at one another. ‘Newspapers!’ Doris commented, rolling her eyes.
Mavis said, ‘Let’s get out of here. It’s not safe, that’s for sure.’ She glanced under the stairs. ‘That must have been where they sheltered. They do say it’s the safest place in most houses.’ She frowned. ‘What’s all that rope, then?’
I’d noticed bits of rope everywhere. I pulled a couple of lengths from the rubble. We all stared uncomprehendingly.
Doris said, ‘There’s your story. Two of ’em were here – maybe her long-lost hubbie turned up. Maybe they felt there was no future any more.’ The house lurched, and the floor dropped two or three inches. I screamed, Doris and Mavis screamed, Tom shouted. We all made for the kitchen and spent precious seconds getting the pillow cases through the narrow gap in the door. As we struggled out through the hole and into the blessed August sunshine, Doris panted, ‘Suicide pact.’
Everyone looked at her. She jerked her head back. ‘They din’t know the bombs was coming, did they? They ’ung themselves from the stairs. Safest place, indeed!’ She laughed. She was making a joke.
Neither of us commented on this; Tom was scrambling down to pull the shrapnel kid up to the street and I was struggling with four bulging pillow cases and a length of rope. But we both knew that was probably how it happened.
Six
WE WENT TO the milk bar, sat on the high stools and ordered raspberry milkshakes. The milk bar had stayed in business all through the war and there were usually queues a mile long for their drinks, but it was a dead time of the day – two thirty – and a Tuesday, so we got seats and our drinks.
By this time being with Tom was not unlike being with Meriel. Part of me was perfectly relaxed with him, I could talk nonsense and not be embarrassed; I was almost sure that later on I would be able to tell him that I might well have hounded that poor man to his death. But for now, as a reaction to that pathetic, disintegrating building and our possibly narrow escape from it, plus the somehow comic addition of Doris and Mavis and their bulging pillow cases, we needed relief, and Tom set the tone for it.
‘Mr Carfax – sorry, the Gaffer – needs an angle.’ He spoke nasally, like a reporter in an American film. ‘So how’s about we stick with the Doris theory?’
‘Which was?’ I asked like an obedient sidekick.
‘Suicide pact. Star-crossed lovers. Middle-aged Romeo and Juliet. He’s married to someone who—’
‘Doesn’t understand him?’ I spluttered.
‘Exactly.’
‘He’s Austrian and he met his wife when she was on a Tyrolean holiday and . . . somehow . . . got married.’ I pulled a face. ‘That makes him a bit of an idiot.’
‘Well, he might have been. But how about if she was dotty about him but he saw the marriage as a way of getting out of Austria and into England?’
‘Brilliant. And she keeps him well under her thumb – very jealous woman.’
‘I’ll say. Congenitally jealous.’
I giggled and blew bubbles into my wonderful milkshake. He smiled. He liked to make me laugh, already I knew that. He went on, ‘The war came. Life no fun in England. Wife ashamed of him because he is Austrian. And he meets—’
‘The Other Woman,’ I pronounced solemnly.
We shifted on our high stools and drank to the bottom of the tall glasses. As I placed mine on the counter I had one of those little moments when for an instant time stands still. No, not really that. It is gathered into a droplet, like rain, like tears, and you are allowed to see it separately and to know that it is precious. So in my head I photographed everything: the milk bar, the high stools, the creamy pink residue of the milkshake in its tall glass, and Tom, sitting
knee to knee with me. Such an ordinary, gangling sort of boy, waiting to go into the army or the air force, waiting to be torn out of this particular picture.
He put his glass next to mine and said in his ordinary voice, ‘I heard the Gaffer tell you I’m a bit of an orphan. Please don’t worry about it. My mother died when I was about three and I don’t remember her at all.’
I gulped and nodded and just stopped myself from saying, ‘That’s all right, then.’
He smiled and stopped caring about hiding his teeth. He looked . . . lovely. ‘It’s great getting this assignment today. The Gaffer knows my dad – he’s a cartoonist in civvie street. The Gaffer said he could use my help while I’m waiting to be called up. And to team up with you . . . he’s showing us what fun it can be.’ He paused and let his smile die. I thought he was going to come out with the next bit of our special report. But he said, very simply, ‘Thank you, Rachel. I haven’t had so much fun since my dad was reported missing.’
I heard myself make a little sound, a whistle-breath. But no words came. No mum and maybe no dad. ‘A bit of an orphan—’
He said very quickly, ‘Where do you think they met? Romeo. And Juliet.’ It came out as a rhyme, as a Shakespearian couplet. We both laughed; it sounded slightly forced, but it was a proper laugh.
I said, ‘Obvious. The overseas league place. It’s in Park Avenue. She used to slip over to make the tea. Remember Mavis or Doris said she was Austrian.’
Tom nodded. ‘He went there to get away from his wife.’
I clapped my hand across my mouth at a sudden, amazing thought. I knew I mustn’t voice it. But I would have to tell Meriel. I would just have to.
He said, ‘What’s up?’