Coventry: A Novel

by Helen Humphreys

  COVENTRY

  ALSO BY HELEN HUMPHREYS

  LEAVING EARTH

  AFTERIMAGE

  THE LOST GARDEN

  WILD DOGS

  THE FROZEN THAMES

  COVENTRY

  HELEN HUMPHREYS

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  Copyright © 2008 by Helen Humphreys

  All rights reserved

  Excerpt from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin.

  Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.

  Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Devon Zahn

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Humphreys, Helen, 1961–

  Coventry / Helen Humphreys.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07353-9

  1. Women—Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939–1945—England—Coventry—Fiction. 4. Coventry (England)—Bombardment, 1940–1941—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.H822C68 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008037349

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  FOR MY PARENTS

  Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

  The sun-comprehending glass,

  And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

  Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

  —PHILIP LARKIN

  CONTENTS

  NOVEMBER 14, 1940

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1914

  MARCH 5, 1919

  NOVEMBER 14, 1940

  MAY 26, 1962

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NOVEMBER 14, 1940

  The swallow arcs and dives above the cathedral. Harriet Marsh watches it flicker through the darkness ahead of her as she walks along the cobblestones toward the church. The bird moves in the night air with all the swiftness of sudden feeling, and Harriet stops at the base of the ladder, tracking the flight of the lone swallow as it shivers up the length of the church spire.

  It is only when she is climbing the ladder that she remembers it is the middle of November. Swallows typically leave Britain by the end of October. This bird has stayed behind too long, will surely perish in the coming cold. Harriet stops halfway up the long ladder, looks for the bird, as though to warn it. The swallow has already disappeared.

  The church roof is a dark tarpaulin hung from faulty stars.

  “Bomber’s moon,” calls the boy from the roof of the chancel. His is the roof next to Harriet’s and she can see him strutting up and down upon it. The lead tiles are slick with frost and she is afraid he will slip and fall, but she can’t call out to warn him because she isn’t meant to be here. She is wearing Wendell’s overalls and his tin helmet. When he bundled his fire-watcher’s uniform into her arms, he said, No one will know you’re a woman. He said, It’s only for one night.

  The moon is full and bright, and the ground below the cathedral is white with frost. Harriet has never seen anything so beautiful. The ground glitters like the sea and smells of earthy cold.

  There are four fire-watchers on the cathedral, each on a separate roof of the building. They all wear overalls and a tin helmet. Each one has a bucket of water, a bucket of sand, and a stirrup pump with a thirty-foot hose for directing water into the flames. Harriet hopes she won’t have to use her stirrup pump because Wendell warned her it was really a three-person job, and he only gave her the most cursory of descriptions as to how it worked.

  The moon has lit the city, and even though people have cinched their blackout curtains tight against the night, Harriet can clearly see the outline of every house. The brilliance of the moon unnerves her.

  In Coventry, and in all the other British towns and cities, people wait anxiously for morning. Since the beginning of September the Germans have been engaged in a massive air offensive against England. There have been raids on London, Southampton, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester. There has even been talk of a full-scale invasion.

  Between the middle of August and the end of October there have been seventeen air attacks on Coventry. The most serious damage from the bombing raids was the destruction of the Standard Motor Works, but Harriet remembers more clearly the Sunday night in August when the Rex Cinema was hit. She had plans to see the new picture playing there that night—Gone with the Wind. She was late leaving her flat, and by the time she reached the cinema it had been bombed.

  A major industrial town full of motor works and armament factories, Coventry is a prime target, and everyone who lives here knows this. Some people are so nervous of an air attack that they have taken to driving out of the city in the evening and sleeping in their cars in the countryside. Almost every night the air-raid sirens sound and there are fire-watchers walking the roofs of the city. The fire-watchers are old men and young boys. Twice a week, Wendell Mumby, the elderly man who lives in the flat below Harriet’s, climbs up a ladder to this roof on the cathedral and keeps watch. This is the first night he hasn’t been able to come, and all because Harriet washed the front hall of their building and Wendell slid in the passage and twisted his knee. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to climb the ladder to the cathedral roof and begged Harriet to take his shift instead.

  I’m here because I feel guilty, thinks Harriet, as she walks gingerly across the slippery roof. I could fall off and break my neck, I could get blown up, all because I wet-mopped the front hall too vigorously.

  “Look!” cries the boy on the chancel roof, and Harriet stops watching her feet and looks out at the glowing horizon. She hears the drone of planes approaching.

  “Fire!” yells the old man on the south chapel roof.

  From the cathedral roof Harriet can clearly see the neighbouring spires of Christ Church and Holy Trinity Church. She can see the dark hunch of roofs and the rivering streets between them, but after that the buildings fall off into shadow. The fire appears as a small orange smudge in the distance. It seems so far away that Harriet feels more relief than worry at first, until she remembers that most of the large factories in Coventry are on the outskirts of the city, right where the fire begins to bloom across the horizon line.

  For a few minutes the fire-watchers live up to their name—four dark figures stamped against a moonlit sky, standing sentinel on the roof of the cathedral while the edges of the city begin to curl up and burn.

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1914

  The restaurant is dark and noisy. Harriet pauses in the doorway, trying to get her bearings. The last of the daylight leaks past her, and the people seated in the darkened room look over to where she stands with the door still open behind her.

  They are two different places, thinks Harriet, stepping into the building. Outside, under the windy sky. Inside, with the tables holding a wreckage of glasses, the tilt of flame in the grate. One place is solitary. One place is social. Harriet is not sure which world she prefers, but Owen has already spotted her and is waving her over to a table in the corner where he sits with his parents.

  Harriet can tell, even before anyone speaks, that the evening isn’t going well. Owen’s father has his hat on his lap, fingers worrying the brim. Owen’s mother stirs her tea in tighter and tighter circles.

  “Harriet,” says Owen, his voice overflowing with relief. He springs to his feet and pulls a chair out for his wife. “I thought you’d never get here.” His f
ingers brush Harriet’s shoulders as she sits down, and even in that small touch she can feel his desperation.

  “Have you ordered?” she says brightly. “Has anyone looked at the specials?”

  There’s a board on the wall at the end of the room with the daily specials chalked onto it in thick white letters.

  Harriet knows that Owen’s parents don’t approve of what their son has just done, or of his marrying so young, but it still seems rude that they are sullen and unhappy every time the four of them have a meal out together. It isn’t fair. Harriet presses her leg against Owen’s under the table, and he presses back.

  “Well, I’m famished,” she says. “I hope there’s steak and kidney pudding tonight.”

  “Mummy,” says Owen. “What will you have?”

  “I haven’t had much of an appetite lately,” says Owen’s mother. She clatters her teaspoon down on her saucer.

  “Nothing?” says Owen. “I know you like the liver.”

  “And you also know that I can’t eat when I’m upset. You know that very well.”

  “Emily,” says Owen’s father sternly, as though reprimanding a child.

  There’s a silence during which Harriet tells herself not to blurt out something she’ll regret later, but she is only partially successful.

  “Owen is doing this for all of us,” she says. “And I’ve never been more proud of anyone.”

  Owen’s father looks over at Harriet, and then at his wife. “She’s right,” he says. “If I was young enough I’d be in uniform myself.”

  Harriet tries to carry Owen over the threshold. He had carried her across the night before and done a better job of it. For someone so thin, Owen Marsh is surprisingly heavy, and Harriet sways and stumbles as she struggles with her husband into the sitting room of their rented flat on Berkeley Road. Last night he had carried her slung in his arms like a sleeping child, but she can only manage to clasp him around the waist and shuffle him along, a few inches off the ground.

  “You’ll never make it to the bedroom,” says Owen. They’re both drunk. After Owen’s parents had left the restaurant, Owen, in his new uniform, had been stood a pint by practically everyone in the room.

  “Of course I will,” says Harriet, but she promptly drops him by the fireplace and then falls on top of him.

  It is Owen’s last night at home. In the morning he is to be shipped out to Europe. He will travel by train and ship to France and receive basic training there, behind the lines, before being sent into battle. Britain has only been in the war for a month, and Harriet and Owen have only been married for two. It all seems very fast. But she believes him when he says it will all be over by Christmas, and she is proud of her husband’s ardent patriotism.

  “Did a spaniel buy me a drink?” asks Owen. “Tonight when we were out, was that a spaniel in the corner by the bar?”

  “Dogs have no money,” says Harriet. “And no pockets to keep their money in.”

  “He had a spaniel nose, all turned up at the end.”

  “The end?”

  “What?”

  Harriet and Owen start giggling, and then fall asleep on the floor of the sitting room, flopped over each other like puppies in a litter. They wake to the dark and start to make love where they lie, on the patch of carpet in front of the cold fireplace.

  The wool of Owen’s uniform is stiff and unyielding. The buckle on his belt requires two hands to undo.

  “I hope I never have to get out of this in a hurry,” he says.

  Their bodies fit together perfectly. When they kiss, their chins notch exactly against one another. It seems miraculous to Harriet that she has been given this much happiness, and even more miraculous that she is learning to take it for granted.

  Owen kicks away the last pieces of his uniform and rolls on top of Harriet, squashing the breath out of her. Over his shoulder she can see the sky lightening in the window, changing the shape of the darkness every few moments. Now it looks like the mane of a lion. Now it looks like a sail.

  Owen’s skin is soft and he smells of cigarettes and stale beer. Harriet licks his shoulder and then bites it, making him flinch. He has made the mistake of pinning her before she has removed her panties, and he is exerting great effort to do this now but not getting much result.

  “Help me out,” he begs, leaning his forehead, exhausted, against Harriet’s. “Your uniform is even harder to get out of than mine.”

  In the morning, Harriet makes tea while Owen shaves. She brings her cup of tea from the kitchen, stands in the doorway of the bathroom, watching him. He is a careful shaver, thorough. At eighteen he has only been shaving for a few years, and he still treats it as though it is a privilege. He dips the razor in the basin of hot water after every stroke. Every few strokes he pauses to regard himself in the mirror, turning to the right and then the left to make sure he hasn’t missed a hair. He is beautiful, with his dark hair and blue eyes, and Harriet thinks that he is much more beautiful than she is, and this thought suddenly makes her afraid.

  “Your tea’s getting cold,” she says.

  “How do I look?” Owen turns toward her, holding the dripping razor. He hasn’t finished dressing, wears the trousers of his uniform but is bare-chested, his skin flushed from the steam in the bathroom.

  “Lovely. Like a rose.”

  Owen grins. “Flatterer. How much time do we have before my train?”

  Harriet grins back. “Now it’s your turn to carry me over the threshold.”

  They have decided to treat the morning like an ordinary morning, but they can’t find their usual banter as they walk to the station. Owen’s hand is clammy in Harriet’s, and she keeps tripping on the pavement. Her head hurts from the drink last night and the brightness of this morning. She barely sees where they are going.

  The station is noisy, lively with soldiers and their families. There’s a small military band playing at one end of the platform, and the train is already in, hissing and shaking like a live thing. The soldiers on board are whooping from the open windows, raucous with nerves and emotion.

  Harriet grips Owen’s hand tightly in her own. She had thought there’d be more time than this in which to say goodbye.

  There are flags hanging above the station platform, above the cluster of families, each family encircling a young man in uniform.

  “I wish your parents had come,” says Harriet.

  “I don’t.”

  “But it’s wrong for them not to see you off.”

  “It isn’t, if one of them doesn’t want me to go. Besides, the war won’t last long. Everyone knows that.”

  Owen suddenly glances around in alarm at all the people on the station platform. “Harriet,” he whispers. “I’ve never even been to Europe.”

  Harriet looks down at the kit bag he carries in his hand. She had slipped a pair of her panties in this morning, while he was busy shaving—those panties he had struggled so hard to take off her last night. Despite her anxiety it makes Harriet smile to think of Owen finding them there when he is in France.

  “Do you love me?” she asks, but the train whistle blows and Owen doesn’t hear the question. Or maybe he does. He drops his bag and embraces Harriet so passionately that she can’t ask him again. For a brief moment she holds on to him. His body feels so thin and fragile under the bulk of his uniform. Then he sprints down the platform, looking for an open carriage door. The train pulls out of the station with one long, last blast of the whistle.

  Outside the station, Harriet realizes that she doesn’t quite know how to get home. Coventry is Owen’s city, not hers, and they have only been living here since they married in July. She hasn’t been to the station before, has always relied on her husband to navigate for them. Now Harriet stands at the corner of Eaton and Park, not sure which way to turn. She’s too shy to ask the people pushing past her, so she looks up, finds the spire of St. Michael’s, and heads toward that. The spire is the tallest shape on the horizon, and if she walks to the church surely she will rec
ognize a landmark in the central section to guide her home.

  Maeve rubs the back of her neck and thinks that the closer one is to something, the less one really sees of it. She lays her pencil down. She’s getting a crick in her neck from looking up at the medieval spire, and she has realized she’s too close to it to draw it properly. But if she’s entranced by something, Maeve wants to be right next to it. She doesn’t want to back up and allow other objects to fill her vision.

  What a tease perspective is. She should have stuck with one of the arched windows.

  She crosses the cobbled street to get a better angle on the spire and, sure enough, a young woman soon blocks her view of it.

  “Pardon me,” says the woman. “I wonder if you can help me? I’m looking for Berkeley Road.”

  The woman is roughly the same age as Maeve. She has dark hair pinned up under a straw hat decorated with flowers, and she’s wearing a pale yellow dress, silk stockings, and shiny black shoes. She looks dressed up for a wedding.

  “Sorry,” says Maeve. “I’m not from here. I’m a visitor, same as you.” She has come to Coventry to stay with her old school friend Charlotte, only to find out too late that Charlotte has invited Maeve to act as a cover so that she can spend all her time with her suitor, a soldier named Frederick Pearce.

  “But I’m not visiting,” says the young woman. “I live here. We moved north a few months ago so my husband could go into business with his father. The bicycle business,” she adds. “He signed up, and I was just at the station, seeing him off.”