by Lissa Evans
The stethoscope lay coiled on the floor where the doctor had dropped it and Donald stooped to pick it up. Could you listen to your own heart? He looked at the clots of wax on the earpieces and decided against it, on the grounds of hygiene. The man who’d fainted was sitting on the chair with a cloth to his head.
‘All right,’ said the doctor, returning, ‘where were we?’ He took the proffered stethoscope, glanced at Donald and then wrote something on the card. ‘Right, Mr Fielding, you’re all done,’ he said. ‘Take this to the office. And try to lay off the cream buns, or you’re going to find basic training a nasty old shock.’
Donald stared. The doctor waggled the card impatiently. ‘Take it, man.’
‘But you haven’t done my heart,’ said Donald.
‘What?’
‘You didn’t listen to my heart.’
The doctor looked at him as if he were a lunatic. ‘Your heart,’ he said, ‘is there.’ He jabbed a finger at the left side of Donald’s chest. ‘Where on earth did you think it was?’
‘No, I mean you didn’t listen to it properly.’
‘I didn’t what?’
The doctor’s voice wasn’t loud, but his tone turned every head within earshot.
Donald struggled to think; sweat had broken out across his back. ‘I mean . . . you’d only just started listening when that bloke fell over. You didn’t listen for very long. Just for a second or two.’ The smell of his own armpits rose like the morning dew. ‘I thought you needed to do it for a bit longer, like.’
‘Take the card, Mr Fielding,’ said the doctor.
One more try, thought Donald.
‘My dad had a bad heart,’ he said. ‘He dropped stone dead when he was twenty-five. And I’ve been feeling a bit queer lately.’
‘Really? I’m so sorry to hear that. Try drinking less beer and getting off your colossal arse occasionally. Next!’
Laughter rolled across the room. Donald gripped the card between damp fingers, and walked towards the desk at the end. His pulse was racing so fast that it seemed to stumble over itself. What if he were actually to drop dead from the shock of passing his medical, that would be rich, wouldn’t it?
‘He didn’t listen to my heart,’ he said to the clerk. ‘I’m not fit.’
Without speaking, the man took the card, peered at the notes and then embarked on some very slow typing, ash from his cigarette dropping on to the keys.
‘The doctor didn’t do it properly,’ said Donald. ‘I’m not right, I know I’m not.’
‘You and the rest of the bloody world,’ said the clerk. ‘You don’t know what unfit is. See this?’ He leaned forward and hauled down one of his lower eyelids to expose a moist crescent the colour of spam. ‘Anaemic. They still passed me B1, the stinking bastards, so don’t talk to me about not being fit.’ He poked at a few more keys, and then tossed the card on to a pile. ‘You’re all done,’ the clerk added. ‘A2. You’ll get a letter about when and where to report.’
Outside, Donald went and stood in the shadow of a wall and tried to calm himself. It was hotter than when he’d gone in, and breezeless; he felt as if he could slice the air like a block of cheese. Every minute or so, another man would exit glumly from the drill hall; the pub opposite was a roar of voices, all outrage and bravado.
He saw Fielding before Fielding saw him, he saw him crossing the road, the greasy little head looking up at the drill hall and then down at his watch. Donald placed a hand over his breast pocket and felt the bundle of notes, solid beneath his palm. He had earned it, hadn’t he? It wasn’t his fault that the doctor hadn’t done his job. He stepped out of the shadows.
‘Jesus, you were bleedin’ hours,’ said Fielding. He jerked his head towards a side street and they rounded the corner. ‘Everything all right?’ he hissed. ‘They failed you?’
‘Didn’t go to plan,’ said Donald.
‘What?’
‘Doctor didn’t examine me properly.’
Fielding’s face seemed to ice over. Donald found himself talking faster.
‘He hardly listened to my chest. He had to go and pick up this bloke who fainted. And then he just wrote on my card. He didn’t even—’
‘You mean you passed the medical?’
‘I kept asking him to have a listen but—’
‘You fucking passed? Give me my money,’ said Fielding.
‘But it wasn’t my fault—’
One of Fielding’s hands shot out and pinned Donald’s neck against the wall, while the other expertly ransacked his jacket and removed the bundle of notes.
‘You fat fucker,’ said Fielding, letting go. Donald crouched down, purple commas punctuating his vision, his windpipe feeling as if someone had shoved a flue-brush down it.
‘Lucky for you it’s all there,’ said Fielding, somewhere above him. ‘You lousy cheating bastard, I could have you razored, I know chaps what would turn your face to fucking rags for a fiver. I’ve had blokes with their legs broke for less than what you’ve done, I’ve had . . .’ the words dissolved into gasps. Donald blinked up through the drifting shapes. Fielding was weeping. ‘My Joanie,’ he said, ‘how am I ever going to leave my Joanie?’ He pushed the notes into his trouser pocket, turned to go and then, almost as an afterthought, swung back and kneed Donald in the face.
Donald lay and watched the shoes disappear around the corner. A ribbon of blood slid across the pavement. After the first blast of pain had eased, he lifted a hand and began, delicately, to explore the new shape of his nose.
5
‘Hitler’s invading tomorrow,’ whispered Harvey Madeley during register.
‘You said that last week,’ said one of the Ferris twins, ‘and then he never.’
‘He was supposed to, but it rained. My uncle told me, and he’s in the RAF and he knows.’
‘So why couldn’t Hitler do it in the rain?’
‘’Cos his tanks are made of cardboard,’ hissed Roy Pursey from the row behind.
‘No—’
‘And he’d promised all the Nazis an ice cream when they reached London.’
‘When you’re ready,’ called Mr Waring, smacking the board with a ruler. Dust bloomed upward. ‘May I remind you that there are only three days left of the current term, and I would rather they were not utterly wasted. It would be a hollow victory indeed for the Allies if, at the end of their endeavours, none of the rising generation could multiply, parse, punctuate or even spell the word “victory”. Madeley, spell the word “victory”.’
‘V I C K—’
‘Spelling test,’ said Mr Waring. ‘Who has a pencil?’
Roughly half the class raised a hand.
‘Pass them to the first four rows. First four rows pass your English primer, if you possess one, to the back of the class. Back of the class turn to “A Spring Day” on page thirty-seven and begin silent reading. Pay particular attention to adverbs.’
There was a clatter of desktops. They were no longer being taught in the tin chapel, but in a proper classroom in St Mark’s Church of England Primary. The evacuees attended in the morning and the local children in the afternoon, the daily cross-playground transition a blur of spit and fisticuffs. Roy Pursey had stuck a pen in the arm of a farm-worker’s son who had called him a nit-brained Cockney bed-pisser, and had received ten strokes of the cane from the headmistress, a woman who looked as if she made a living bending railings in a circus. Roy had claimed, unconvincingly, that it hadn’t hurt a bit.
‘Democracy,’ said Mr Waring, in his dictation voice. ‘De-mo-cra-see.’
Noel glanced at ‘A Spring Day’, judged it unreadable (. . . and as sweet vernal zephyrs dance betwixt blackthorn and rustling rowan, that roguish fellow, the robin, tilts a curious head o’er the lea . . .), and sat with his eyes fixed on the wall-clock. An odd, unfamiliar feeling uncurled within him: for the first time in nearly a year, he was actually looking forward to something.
‘Fascism,’ said Mr Waring. ‘Fash-ism.’
Research, h
e’d decided, was the key. Vee had failed to plan sufficiently; she was a stranger to lists, a martyr to panic and whim. By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail, as Mattie had liked to quote, and Noel had spent the last two afternoons in the newspaper room in St Albans Public Library, listing (in code) every cause for which house-to-house collections had been made, and comparing the resulting revenues. Lord Baldwin’s Fund for German Refugees had done spectacularly badly in Hertfordshire, as had the Civil Service Distress Fund. Anything with ‘Soldiers’ or ‘Lads’ in the title had fared better; ‘Benevolent’ was another winner, ditto ‘Comforts’, while the word ‘Orphans’ had released a cascade of small change into the collecting boxes of Harpenden. Local names also seemed to hit the spot: The South Mimms Parochial Church Blackout Fund had raised a surprising amount, given its narrow appeal.
‘Tyranny,’ said Mr Waring. ‘Ti-ra-nee.’
Noel had also spent some time deliberating where the collection should take place. There was something peculiarly memorable about Vee; she seemed to move like the actors in silent films, all jerks and freezes. They needed to go somewhere where there was no possibility of her being recognized or recalled, a place where strangers were not unusual and where neighbours didn’t necessarily compare notes. After a great deal of thought, and a thorough perusal of local train routes, he had decided on the North London suburb of Cricklewood. ‘That’s a long way,’ Vee had said, fretfully, but she hadn’t objected – had, in fact, seemed relieved to be told rather than asked.
She’d been in a sort of daze since Donald had arrived home after his unlucky stumble over a sandbag, his shirt soaked with blood. Instead of going to work he had gone to bed with a wet cloth over his face. Mr Croxton had banged on the door at seven o’clock, and when Vee hadn’t answered, he’d stood outside in the road and shouted that he had had enough, he’d have got more work out of a dead Wop and he was sacking Donald and giving three days’ notice on the flat. Vee had run downstairs then, and had stayed away for some time, returning with a stain on her apron, and the news that the notice had been extended to a fortnight. She had then cried, briefly and violently, before starting work on a pile of hatbands.
‘Liberation,’ said Mr Waring. ‘Lib-er—’ He let out a long sigh as the horrible clamour of an iron triangle filled the air.
‘Air-raid, sir!’ shouted Harvey Madeley.
Outside in the corridor, someone began to swing a wooden rattle.
‘Air-raid, sir, with gas!’
‘Thank you, Madeley. Pencils down, close your books. Proceed without undue panic to the shelter.’
As the class stampeded for the door, Mr Waring stooped to pick up a primer that had been knocked to the ground.
‘Still here, Bostock?’ he asked, straightening up. ‘You need to hurry.’
‘It’s only a drill, sir,’ said Noel. It was a daily occurrence. The headmistress would at this moment be standing beside the playground shelter, a stopwatch in her mighty fist; the current record was a minute and thirty-two seconds.
‘It won’t always be a drill, you know. The ports are already getting it.’
Noel shrugged, uncomfortably. He didn’t like to talk about the war as if it were actually happening; it felt like a betrayal of Mattie.
‘Not’, added Mr Waring, ‘that St Albans will be particularly high on the list of future targets for the Luftwaffe, hence our sojourn here. Do you have your gas mask?’
Noel nodded, shielding the top of the case with his hand, to conceal the handle of the collecting box.
‘Cut along then. I shall follow after inspecting the classroom thoroughly for stray incendiaries.’ Mr Waring glanced around ostentatiously and then sat on the edge of the desk and began to fill his pipe.
Later that day, as Vee and Noel left Cricklewood station, there was a sound overhead like ripping cloth, and an aeroplane crossed eastward, followed by a second, and then a third, and though Noel had never consciously learned their names, he knew by now that they were Spitfires, in the same way that he knew that when a bird hung trembling in the air it was a kestrel. A lacy trail unravelled slowly in the sky behind them.
‘I don’t know . . .’ said Vee, for the umpteenth time. She appeared to be sleepwalking, her face the colour of an unwashed pillowcase, her eyes half-closed. She had slept for nearly the whole of the short journey, while Noel had studied the map that he’d discreetly ripped out of the street-atlas in the library.
‘I didn’t ought to have left Donny in the state he’s in,’ she said. ‘Anyhow, I should be out looking for new lodgings. And then there’s those hatbands . . .’ A hundred and fifty of them to make by Friday, khaki and maroon, ugly colours. ‘It’s the military look,’ Vic Allerby had said, delivering the ribbon. ‘Ladies don’t want flowers no more, they want to look like they’re in the bloody army.’ She’d worked on them through the night, but her hands had refused to memorize the folds and tucks, so she’d had to concentrate on each one as if it were the first. By sun-up, she’d still only finished fifty-eight and in the primrose light she’d seen the sweat-marks her fingers had left on the ribbon. She’d have to dust them with baking soda, and then brush them so they looked like new or she wouldn’t get paid. She had lined up that particular worry in front of all the others; it was small, manageable even, as opposed to the bloated impossibilities of the summons and the eviction.
‘We’ll start along here,’ said Noel, and Vee followed him like a dragged sack.
The street was lined with tall, shabby houses.
He’d come here with Mattie, two years ago. They’d been visiting a friend of hers, a woman always referred to as ‘poor old Alice’, who lived in a single room on the top floor of number three. Noel remembered the cluster of bell-pushes beside the door, and the odd feel of an interior that was both full and peculiarly empty, its inhabitants rustling behind closed doors. At the time, he’d been working his way through Agatha Christie, and as Mattie and Alice had sat drinking their milkless tea, and reminiscing in a rapid, slangy shorthand – ‘Livvy Kerr wasn’t quite the thing, was she?’, ‘Gung-ho but lacking in fibre, had the screaming ab-dabs when they locked the cell door’ – he had imagined setting a crime novel here: Murder on the Fourth Floor, with a visiting boy detective who’d have to interview the finite number of suspects before fingering the occupant who had crushed Alice’s skull with a half-size marble bust of Mary Wollstonecraft.
The doorbell had rung halfway through the afternoon, and poor old Alice had hurried down to answer it. ‘A fellow selling brushes,’ she’d said, returning. And then, one by one, in a series of muffled brays and buzzes, the salesman had rung all the other bells in the house. ‘Second floor back’s the one he wants,’ Alice had said. ‘Her son hawks almanacs, she never says no to a salesman.’ Six inhabitants; six chances in every house.
Another aeroplane passed eastward: blunter, more lumbering than the Spitfires.
‘They say Hitler’s going to invade today,’ said Vee, vaguely. Someone in a shop had said it; they were dropping Nazis dressed as vicars, you had to look out for a man of the cloth who couldn’t say his ‘w’s. Thy vill be done.
‘Here,’ said Noel, nodding at the next house along from Alice’s, ‘we’ll begin here’, and he took the collecting box out of his gas-mask case. He had glued a square of card to the front of it, and then made a stencil and inked the lettering himself.
Vee glanced over her shoulder.
‘It’s a busy road,’ she said.
‘That’s good.’
‘Is it?’
‘Better than an empty one. Hiding in plain sight is a recognized form of camouflage.’ He looked at Vee in her charcoal coat. The whites of her eyes were a raw pink.
‘Here,’ he said, giving her the box to hold.
‘What do I say?’ she asked, in a sudden panic.
‘Just say what we’re collecting for.’
He reached upward and pressed the bottom bell.
They waited for what seemed like a long time, and t
hen footsteps scraped along the passage. The door opened, and a one-eyed man blinked down at them, a scar raking his face from empty socket to chin.
‘Yes?’
Vee jumped, and there was a rattle from the box; Noel had primed it with a shilling in coppers.
‘Dunkirk Widows and Orphans, Cricklewood District,’ she said, in a yelp.
The man let out a sigh, and reached into his pocket. He took out a shilling and slotted it in, then extended a palm and patted Noel heavily on the head. ‘Good lad,’ he said. It wasn’t until the door closed again, that Vee realized she’d been holding her breath.
‘Another one?’ she asked.
‘Wait a moment.’ Noel counted to ten, and then pressed a second bell. This time the footsteps were brisk. A young woman answered the door, pert-faced, curly-haired, her mouth pursed as if to receive a kiss, her stomach tautly rounded beneath a flowered apron.
‘Yes?’
‘Dunkirk Widows and Orphans, Cricklewood District.’
For a moment her expression was unchanged, and then the lips trembled. She put a hand to her mouth to still them. ‘I’ll fetch my purse,’ she said, between her fingers.
She gave a handful of coppers, and then called them back and added a sixpence. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said, before closing the door.
Vee looked at Noel; she felt slightly breathless. ‘Another one?’
Without answering, he rang the top bell. They waited a long, long time. Vee tilted the box and listened to the slither of the money. ‘Do you think . . . ?’ she began, and then straightened up as she heard footsteps.
‘Can I help you?’ It was an elderly man, with wire-rimmed spectacles and a wheeze, and a book in one hand, his place marked with a thumb.
‘Dunkirk Widows and Orphans, Cricklewood District.’
The man looked from Vee to Noel and back again.
‘Is this your son?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Vee, uncertainly.
‘Why isn’t he at school?’ His question was plaintive rather than accusatory.