Riptide

by Lawton, John

  Kitty was shuffling around the room in a slow, sad dance for one. Caught in her own little riptide.

  She came to rest in front of him – still tearful – and, though the taller, managed to rest her head upon his shoulder.

  ‘When was it, Fred? When was ’e killed?’

  ‘It was the seventeenth, I think. A month ago to the day, all but a few hours.’

  Her arms slipped around his neck. Troy braced himself immovably. I won’t dance. Don’t ask me. He half expected her feet to resume their half-hearted shuffle. They didn’t. She swayed gently, leant into him, and aimed her words somewhere into his chest.

  ‘So this is the anniversary of Al’s last night on earth?’

  ‘I suppose so. If you think a month is any kind of an anniversary.’ It was three months to the day since she’d dropped him, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. He wasn’t counting.

  ‘I been lucky in this war. So far. I never lost anyone. None of me family. All me old boyfriends are still alive. Two of ’em even made it back from Dunkirk. I knew people who died – the bombs and that – but they weren’t people I lost. I just knew ’em, sort of. Al Bowlly dying was like losing someone. Really it was.’

  She was right. She had been lucky. They’d both been lucky. But Troy would not have been the one to say so. They could lose all, lose everyone before this war was over. To say so seemed rather like inviting it.

  ‘I don’t want to spend the night alone,’ Kitty said. ‘Not tonight of all nights.’

  Troy said nothing. He’d heard her say this before. It was line one of Kitty’s chat-up routine.

  Kitty took his right arm and slipped it around her waist. Troy did not move. She wriggled until he could escape no longer the obligation to enfold her shoulders with his left. She looked at him, eye to eye, as she stooped. Her cheeks were still wet. She kissed him lightly, and buried her head in his shoulder, singing softly to herself.

  ‘Riptide. Caught in a riptide, torn between two loves, the old and the new. Riptide. Lost in a riptide, where will it take me, what shall Ido?’

  Troy said nothing. Telling Kitty what to do had always been a waste of time.

  § 34

  ‘St What?’ said Cal.

  ‘Alkmund. It’s Saxon. And it’s a whopping great church, one of the biggest in Shoreditch. They cleared out the crypt last November. Got rid of the dead to make room for the living.’

  Stilton had stopped the car. Cal got out into another urban desert. The church stood like a redwood in wilderness – little else did, for what Cal estimated to be a couple of blocks in any direction.

  ‘Is it safe?’ he asked.

  Stilton stared up at the spire.

  ‘Probably not. But where is, apart from down the Underground? Half a million tons of masonry held up by flying buttresses and prayer. Thing is, it feels safe – it’s well . . . reassuring.’

  ‘Give me sacred steel and God’s good concrete any day. We going in?’

  Outside the main porch they passed a group of people sitting on a tomb. Cal heard the plummy tones of upper-class English voices. He’d heard that the English all ‘mucked in’, as they put it, but this lot were not the sort who looked as though they’d spend the night in a crypt except as a gag at Halloween. They were overdressed, as though they’d slipped out in the interval from a West End theatre, and they appeared to be sipping wine and eating sandwiches. Stilton’s feet clattered on the stone steps ahead of him.

  ‘Leeches,’ he said, cryptically.

  ‘Leeches?’

  ‘Well – mebbe not. More like voyeurs. Ghouls. Toffs coming East from Mayfair to see how the other half live.’

  ‘Die, how the other half die,’ said Cal.

  ‘Aye – whatever. Can’t stand the sight of ’em. They should all have summat better to do.’

  The crypt was on a scale Cal could not have anticipated – somehow he’d thought the word implied low and small. This was a cathedral beneath the streets, a cavern twenty feet high stretching into an infinity of half light, criss-crossed by arches, fragmented by alcoves. And full of people. Cal could not begin to guess. A thousand seemed arbitrary but suitably large. A sea of humanity pinpointed by flashes of light – a cigarette being lit, a portable stove fired up – punctuated by a thousand different noises and a dozen different smells. It hummed, literally and metaphorically. Only when Stilton shook him by the arm did he realise he’d stopped, and was just staring – not, he hoped, open-mouthed.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Do you, Walter, do you?’

  ‘How can people live like this?’

  ‘Well – how can they?’

  ‘Believe me, Calvin, this is a damn sight better than it was last autumn. Then there’d be two and a half thousand people crammed in here. That was before the government had the sense to open up the Underground at night. Mind, they only did that ’cos folk from round here defied the authorities. Went in and wouldn’t leave. There was talk of ’em even being turfed out by the coppers. You can imagine how well that went down. But it’s fine now. Us and the toffs. We understand one another a bit better. A few ghouls notwithstanding.’

  Stilton pointed upwards with his finger, back towards ground level.

  ‘What’s the smell?’ Cal asked. ‘It’s pretty . . . pervasive.’

  ‘Chemical lavvies, lad. Imagine how pervasive the smell was before we had them. Now – let’s be getting on.’

  ‘Sure. What do I do?’

  ‘Wait here till I find Hudge.’

  ‘Wait? Walter, I’ve spent a week waiting.’

  ‘Do you know what Hudge looks like?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then leave this bit to me. I’ll not leave you out when I think there’s summat you can do. Trust me.’

  Stilton took out his torch and walked off into the crowd. Cal felt stranded again. High and dry in a cavern that smelled like an accident in a high school chem lab. If Walter wanted him to wait, he’d do it outside. He didn’t much want to feel like a voyeur either.

  On the surface, the small group of late night revellers had broken up. Only one woman remained, still perched on the tomb with, he noticed for the first time, a leather, squarish shoulder bag and an armband on her black jacket bearing a discreet red cross.

  ‘Are you lost?’ she said in an accent that rhymed lost with forced.

  ‘No, we – I mean the Chief Inspector and I – are looking for someone.’

  ‘Good Lord – I say, you’re an American, aren’t you? You’re the first American I’ve had pop down to see me.’

  He hadn’t popped down to see her. He’d come up into the night for a breath of fresh air.

  ‘All sorts of chaps pop down, but I don’t think we’ve had an American down here since, well . . . since the autumn. Ed Murrow came. The chap who broadcasts for CBS. Do you know Ed Murrow?’

  ‘We’ve met. I wouldn’t say I knew him.’

  She hopped off the tomb. A small woman, no more than five feet tall.

  ‘Daisy Hopton,’ she said cheerily.

  Daisy, Poppy. Did the English upper classes name all their daughters after flowers?

  ‘Calvin Cormack. Would that be Miss or Missis Hopton?’

  ‘Neither, darling – Lady Daisy, actually.’

  ‘You’re married to a lord?’

  ‘No, Daddy’s one. Lord Scowbrook. That’s in Derbyshire. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it?’

  ‘’Fraid not. Do you have estates there?’

  ‘No. Not so much as an allotment or a shed. All our land’s in Devon. But then all the Duke of Devonshire’s is in Derbyshire, so it all sort of comes out in the wash.’

  Cal had heard of the Duke of Devonshire – who hadn’t? Half the women he met in Washington before the war wanted to marry a duke’s son or an earl’s. He knew one who’d memorised the name and title of every eligible eldest son in Debrett’s. Being a congressman’s son didn’t count for much among the belts and garters.

&n
bsp; ‘Look, there’s bags left over. Would you like something to eat?’ It was tempting. Walter had eaten his breakfast. He’d skipped lunch just waiting for him to show.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘A little smoked salmon and a glass of sherry perhaps?’

  She unwrapped a sandwich for him. It was white bread. White bread was scarce. It was prized.

  ‘You just have to know the right people,’ she explained.

  Cal sipped at his sherry, looked around at the ruins half hidden in the darkness, felt the mixture of chemical sterility and human heat still wafting up the stairs from the crypt.

  ‘What exactly do you do here, Lady Daisy?’ he asked.

  ‘I sort of run a first aid post. I have my little bag of tricks, as you can see. And I have a tin trunk full of bandages and iodine and . . . stuff . . .yes,stuff, I’ve got lots of stuff, stuff of several different kinds, I should think. Absolutely oodles of stuff.’

  ‘And you tend to the wounded?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘There hasn’t been a raid for almost a week, and if people make it in here, they usually arrive before it starts. Short of a direct hit we don’t get a lot of injuries. I’ve taken splinters out of fingers, bathed a few cuts, but the biggest thing I’ve ever done is set a broken leg in a splint. Between raids they tend not to want to know me. I believe “fiercely independent” is the cliché. Does tend to make one feel a bit redundant.’

  ‘Thenwhy do youdoit?’

  ‘Well, one has to do one’s bit . . . and besides . . .’

  Poppy Payne’s words came unbidden to Cal’s lips.

  ‘Besides, there’s no Season.’

  ‘How very perceptive of you, darling. Yes, that’s it in a nutshell. No Season. I mean, one would get awfully bored wouldn’t one?’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘And in the meantime I pursue this exercise in democratic futility.’

  This threw Cal. He’d not the faintest idea what the woman meant. Just when he thought he’d got her pegged as a do-gooding social butterfly she tossed in a polysyllabic from an Economics Major. He thought better of saying anything.

  ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘you hear all this guff about all being in the same boat. How the Blitz has formed us into a classless society. Isn’t true, of course. In fact it’s complete roundies.’

  Roundies? Almost involuntarily Cal glanced at his shoes. He’d always called them roundies – it was military school slang. Complete shoes? It didn’t make sense?

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Bollocks, darling. Complete bollocks. And you still don’t know what I mean, do you? Men’s roundies – balls, darling, complete balls. We’re one nation, strictly for the duration. We tolerate one another without liking one another. When this war’s over the poor will probably eat us.’

  They were eating smoked salmon and white bread and sipping dry sherry. Suddenly it seemed to Cal less like a novelty and more like a skirmish in the great British class war. Now, he’d really no idea what to make of this woman. Kitty wasn’t exactly simple – but compared to this she was simplicity personified.

  ‘Your copper’s taking his time,’ she said.

  ‘A lot of people to look at.’

  ‘Who are you looking for? A criminal of some sort? God knows there’s enough of them down there.’

  ‘No – a nark, I believe that’s the term.’

  ‘A nark?’

  ‘A Mr Hudge.’

  ‘Darling, why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Little chap, no taller than me? Club foot? Sort of clumpy limp?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. Walter never described him. I just know the name – Hudge.’

  ‘Actually, darling, it’s Jaroslav Hudcjek. But Hudge is generally all most people can manage, so Hudge it is. I know Hudge, everyone knows Hudge, although I think the news that he’s a rozzer’s nark might come as a bit of a shock to more than a few people round here . . .’

  ‘You could always keep that to yourself.’

  ‘Discretion is my middle name, darling – or at least it would be if it weren’t Phoebe. As a matter of fact I even know where the little blighter lives.’

  ‘So do we. Got bombed out on Saturday.’

  ‘And by Tuesday he’d got himself somewhere else. I’m way ahead of you, darling.’

  ‘And you know where this somewhere else is?’

  Daisy Hopton led him out of the churchyard and pointed off to the east, towards the only building still standing in the rubble desert. It reminded Cal of Jubilee Street where Stilton lived, but the devastation was the greater and the contrast the starker. This was a slender house, that at some point had been in the middle of a terrace. Standing alone it looked perilous, as gravity-defying as the tower of Pisa. As though someone had swept away everything else and at the end thrust a knife into the ground as a marker. He found himself wondering what kept it up.

  ‘He lives there?’

  ‘You bet. Everyone else got bombed out, the last family left in January, but when it was still standing after Saturday’s raid Hudge decided it was charmed. After all, everything else got flattened months ago, and then pounded to dust only last week. It does look miraculous. Dead lucky, he reckons. You’ll find him in there somewhere.’

  As a child, Cal had been force-fed books. It was a maxim of his father’s that they should not forget the old country, be that old country the Scotland of his father’s family or the Germany of his mother’s. What his wife thought of this no one thought to ask. Cal, meanwhile, grew up on a diet of the Brothers Grimm, Goethe, Fontane, Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stepping into the silent gloom of Hudge’s chosen ruin he could not help but remember the scene in Kidnapped when David Balfour visits the House of Shaw and his Uncle Ebenezer sends him in darkness to climb a topless staircase. Cal set foot on the stairs, knowing they too might be topless, or middleless, and at any moment could send him crashing to earth. He wished for a torch. Tomorrow he’d go out and buy one, if regulations still permitted.

  The stairs were intact, as far as the second floor. A chunk of the outside wall was missing – he walked twelve steps on a wooden hill without any visible means of support, and, in a blacked-out back room on the second floor, found what he was looking for. A naked light bulb dangled from the ceiling by a twisted thread of cable. A hammock had been strung across the room from nails banged into the wall at either end. Above this a large black umbrella diverted overspill from a leaky cistern away from the head of the sleeping occupant, a short club-footed man, clutching a book to his chest. Cal looked at the book. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He’d no idea people still wrote books in Latin. Less that anyone might actually read them.

  He must have made more noise than he thought. The eyes opened and a hand grabbed the book, trying to pull it from his fingers. The eyes opened wider. A rapid sentence in indecipherable Czech. Cal let go of the book, and the little man clutched it to his chest like a child grasping a torn shred of comfort blanket.

  Cal spoke no Czech – it had always seemed to him to be one of the alphabet soup languages – but this could hardly be a problem. Most Czechs spoke German, surely?

  ‘Herr Hudcjek. Ich bin Captain Cormack. Amerikaner, mit Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Waaaaaaaaaghhhhh!!!!!!!’

  Hudge rolled from the hammock screaming, banging around the room, his ironshod foot clattering down upon the floorboards. Wittgenstein landed in the dust, pages splayed. The umbrella flew off and landed down in a corner.

  ‘Waaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!’

  He seemed to be circling – he certainly wasn’t making a dash for the door, and at the speed he travelled a dash was probably beyond him. Cal stepped in and headed him off, arms outstretched in what he hoped was a placatory gesture.

  ‘Ich komme von Scotland Yard. Ich arbeite mit Walter Stilton. Verstehen Sie? Mit Walter Stilton.’

  Hudge coll
apsed in the corner. His hands fell upon the umbrella, which now became a shield between him and Cal.

  ‘Nicht schlagen Sie mich!’

  What? ‘Don’t hit me!’ What on earth was he on about?

  A flick of the wrist and the umbrella was transformed from a dripping parachute into a cudgel, with which Hudge began to beat Cal, yelling all the time, ‘Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen.’

  It was like being hit with a rolled-up newspaper, soft and sodden. The blows fell upon his head with a sound like slapping meat. He backed away, blinded by the spray of water in his eyes, all but deafened by the rising volume of ‘Nicht schiessen.’ He backed into a pair of big hands which grabbed him, turned him and shook him.

  ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’

  ‘Walter?’

  Stilton shoved him aside, bent down to Hudge in his corner and spoke softly to him in Czech. Hudge replied in Czech, looking all the time from Stilton to Cal and back again.

  ‘No,’ Stilton said in English. ‘Not German. American.’

  Hudge stared silently at Cal. Then he muttered a long sentence to Stilton, still unwilling to speak English. Stilton looked over his shoulder at him.

  ‘He thinks you’re Gestapo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You woke him up and spoke to him in German. You daft bugger. Did you want him to have a heart attack?’

  Stilton came back to him, one hand on his arm, pulling him away from Hudge into a conspiratorial huddle, a whispered conversation.

  ‘He was in one o’ them camps. Oranienburg, the one near Berlin. He taught theology in university – one morning in 1934 they just came for him. Chucked him in the camp, beat the shit out of him for four months, then turned him out. Jobless, homeless, broke. He got the message. He was on a train to Calais before you could say Lili Marlene. And you have to sneak up on him and talk to him in German.’

  ‘Jeezus, Walter. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘How was I to know you were going to go wandering off on your own?’

  ‘Maybe if you didn’t leave me out of things I wouldn’t have the time to?’

  ‘Well – now isn’t the moment to include you. He’s scared to death. Even says you look like a Nazi.’