by MARY HOCKING
A young voice asked, ‘Are there people in there?’
A woman’s voice replied, ‘I don’t suppose so, dear. Come away.’
A whistle was being blown; and now men were shouting as they moved carefully amid the rubble. Peter Kelleher called out to them. Someone scrambled in their direction. ‘Have you any idea how many people were in here?’
Kelleher spoke as though he was working it out at a desk. ‘Eight at a table in the centre. The waiter, the proprietor. I don’t know about kitchen staff.’
The man said, ‘Strewth!’ He looked down at Louise and Daphne. ‘All right, my loves. We’ll have you out soon.’
A flask of tea was produced. Louise longed for it, but Ivor said, ‘Better not. Or you really will choke.’ He did not have any either; whether for the same reason, or for her sake, she did not know.
The ambulance came. A doctor crawled over to Daphne and remained with her, although she appeared to have no need of him or anyone else. The men worked very slowly. If there was to be any hope for those who had been completely buried, they must be careful not to bring down further masonry.
Louise said, ‘This happened to my father.’ She must talk about her father. Ivor listened. Afterwards, she joked about this, saying he had had very little alternative, the way they were placed; at the time, she was comforted. Daphne lay peacefully through it all, composed and enigmatic as an Asian god. She would be recalled as having behaved in an exemplary manner. It isn’t fair, Louise thought: Why couldn’t I have gone out like a light?
Little bits of plaster spattered her face and she cried out. Ivor said, ‘Keep your eyes and mouth closed.’ She realized she had lost her dinner. Oh well, better that way than being sick and choking. God, but she was in a mess!
After a time, she began to feel much better and seemed to be floating free of the masonry. Light-headed, she whispered to Ivor, ‘What an introduction!’
He answered, lips close to her ear, ‘It does away with the preliminaries, I’ll say that for it.’
He was quick-witted and effective. She thought how much she liked this in a man. And his laughter! Was he laughing now? Laughter bore her upwards . . . A long way away, someone was saying, ‘Let her be. It’s probably better for her that way.’ She went round and round and up and up.
As the men set about the immediate task of setting them free, Louise realized that Ivor was hurt; his pain shot through her own body. She had an arm free now; she held his head against her shoulder. She soothed him, and seemed to carry them both away on a spiralling ascent. Afterwards, she could not remember what she had said to him, and was embarrassed. But it was too late by then.
In the ambulance, she came to herself and protested, ‘The children! I must get back to my children!’ They assured her that a message had been sent to her home, but she continued to feel desperately concerned about the children.
Irene, on this particular evening, was thinking of finishing with Angus. The idea of finishing inevitably heightened her feelings, so there was a sense in which she was close to loving. Had she finished with him, she would have admitted subsequently that he had not a lot to talk about, had few interests, was, in fact, rather dull. In future years, one of her sayings would have been, ‘Never believe still waters run deep!’ repeated with gaiety untinged by bitterness. Should things not go well with her, she might have been tempted to regret lost opportunity, to wonder whether she had made a mistake. Common sense would soon have asserted itself, however, reminding her that, in fact, there was little to regret – other than the anticipation of pleasure never realized in his company.
When he arrived, the children were asleep. The two adults were alone. In profile, Angus looked more handsome than ever in his static way, like a sketch for the Byronic hero, with his strong patrician nose and wry mouth. Full face, one noticed that the pointed chin weakened the lower half of the face and gave an impression of instability. It soon became apparent that their aloneness had inhibited him still further. As he talked, he looked round the room warily, swivelling his eyes without moving his head-just as if Louise might be hiding somewhere to catch him out in an indiscretion! Irene promised herself that at the end of the evening, she would tell him she saw no point in their meeting again. And yet . . . This inability of his, frustrating though it might be, was undoubtedly intriguing. The face promised a sensuality the eyes flinched from. Someone so deeply wounded must have been through experiences more harrowing than those which befall the ordinary person. He was a man who invited endless speculation.
The late evening sun, falling aslant the trees, cut soft swathes of mellow light across the living room. Angus talked about Stalingrad. ‘Not much mention of the fitting there in the press.’
He was beginning, Irene noted, to be gratified by the shortcomings of country and individuals alike. Yet he did not strike her as a bitter person, but rather as someone who found refuge in constantly confirming the general unsatisfactoriness of life. The great battles to be fought – whether at El Alamein or Stalingrad – would not move him. He felt safer with defeat: it demanded less of him. What am I doing sitting here, if I can see these things in him? she wondered.
‘I don’t suppose there is much in their press about our Russian convoys,’ she retorted.
He smiled at this indication of her incapacity to understand his feelings. He is mean and miserly, she thought angrily; he would rather be excluded from love than risk sharing himself. And so their friendship might have ended, but for the knock on the door. The knock was tentative – not Louise returned home early and having forgotten her key.
Irene looked at Angus. He seemed disconcerted, perhaps unsure of his position in Louise’s house should the caller be a neighbour. It was Irene who went to the door.
The man on the doorstep was small. His was the smallness of someone who has not had the opportunity to develop; his impoverishment, intellectual and physical, was the one thing about himself he sought to project. The impression of deprivation was so strong one imagined for him reach-me-down clothes, although in fact he was not poorly dressed.
It was a warm evening and windows were open; the sound of dance-band music carried on the still air. A neighbour was mowing his lawn. Irene and the small man held their positions. Did Louise have lame ducks? she wondered. In case this were so, she tempered firmness with a brief smile as she said, ‘I am afraid Mrs Immingham is not here.’
The sun was going down beyond the roofs of the houses opposite, and the heavy foliage of the trees already darkened the street. The man peered into the interior of the house, looking to where Angus stood in the doorway of the living room, ‘if I might have a word with you. Captain Drummond?’ His dismissal of the woman was the more offensive for being instinctive rather than deliberate.
Irene was so startled that she continued to stand with her hand on the door, preventing him from entering. In a garden near by children were playing, and a ball bounced into the street; a portly dog ambled after it. Angus said awkwardly, ‘if you wouldn’t mind, Irene? It won’t take a minute.’
Absurd though it seemed afterwards, throughout the scene which followed the thought which was uppermost in Irene’s mind was that this was Louise’s home. Although nothing was said – or, as far as she could judge, done – to which Louise might properly have objected, Irene had a strong sense of betrayal when she saw the small man sitting in Louise’s fireside chair. It distressed her beyond reason and accounted for her refusal to leave the two men alone in the room. There was something here she must guard. She made a mental inventory of the objects put in her trust: the photograph of Guy in army uniform, smiling shyly from the work table; one of James’s soldiers lying in the hearth; Catherine’s little red sandal half-hidden under a chair; the theatrical prints which Louise collected, neatly framed and badly hung . . .
Her presence upset Angus. He might, earlier on, have taken little notice of the pleasing effect of late sunlight falling into the room; but of the dimming of the light, there was no doubt of his awareness.
He sat still. He seemed always afraid of movement, as though it gave away things about him; but his eyes turned constantly to the figure of Irene. She was wearing a dark green dress which merged all too readily in the fabric of the settee. Gradually, as the dusk deepened, the precise outline of her form was lost, so that only the oval of the face remained clear. In a few moments that, too, would recede and the whole person would be muffled in shadow. There was a light switch in the skirting board beside him. If only he could lean forward, at one touch the light would come on; she would be there, in
all her precious clarity, beneath the standard lamp. But the tension in the room was considerable. It immobilized him, as so often he had been immobilized in the dining-room of his home, not daring to turn his head to look at the clock to see when his father would allow them to rise from the table. The past held him in its bony grip. The last thing he saw clearly of Irene was her eyes, which looked enormously alarmed – or was she angry? How little he knew what to expect of her.
The small man said, ‘It is just that the proof has arrived from the printers and it will have to be back by tomorrow morning.’ He continued with a certainty which emphasized his authority, ‘You will have time to look at it tonight.’ He delayed handing over the brown paper envelope to Angus, fingering it as though power must drain from him once it had left his hands.
Irene witnessed the scene with incredulity. However secret Angus’s office work might be, she was sure it could not involve enterprises of this nature. She was herself now working at the War Ministry in London and knew that HM services do not conduct their business in a manner which could best be described as furtive. Furtive and amateur.
The small man did not want to leave. He seemed to have become interested in his surroundings; turning around, so that he was in danger of falling off his chair, he squinted at the badly aligned prints. He was like a bailiff, about to take possession. He gave a little snigger, devaluing what he saw.
It was possible, Irene supposed, that Angus might be engaged in work requiring him to assume a double identity. In which case, she herself, as she sat here listening to them talking about their silly proof, was now accidentally involved.
At last, gathering himself and the contents of the room together, the man rose to his feet. He handed over the proof and left. The accidentally acquired knowledge remained.
Angus said, without looking at Irene, ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘It was like something out of Dornford Yates!’ He was so unsuited to cloak and dagger nonsense. She hoped there was no idea of dropping him over France.
He said, ‘One of those rather sad little working men’s groups. You know the kind of thing.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Oh well . . . it’s not my niche, either, really, I suppose . . .’
‘How did he know where to find you?’
‘I gave them lectures at one time.’ He vouchsafed this remark as though it was an explanation. ‘Now they like me to keep in touch.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘Probably not, in view of this evening. Do you think you will be able to forget about it?’
‘I shan’t talk about it, if that is what you mean.’ The knowledge was irrevocably hers.
The air raid siren went and he said, ‘I’ll draw the blinds.’
‘No.’ She could not bear to see the room in all its untidy simplicity, the unaligned prints on the wall, the photograph of Guy on the work table. ‘We don’t need to put the light on.’
‘Louise will wonder what is up.’
‘She will think we have been sitting here on the settee holding hands in the dusk, like sensible people.’
He laughed uncertainly and remained by the window, fingering the black-out material. The long summer evening was drawing to a close. Louise would be back soon. Irene felt it was more than the evening which was slipping away. What was she to do? She had lived a rather solitary life with her parents. Now, on the threshold of maturity, it was particularly necessary that her adult relationships should be fruitful; if no man took her hand at this stage and coaxed her forward, there was the danger that she might tend to withdraw from intimacy. As she sat looking at Angus, troubled by what had happened, she had a sense of something in the balance. She had meant to finish with him, and it would have been better had she done so. But he looked so forlorn, it stirred her. Suddenly, she found herself on the far side of the perimeter which had bounded her feelings for him, in a place where there were no calculations – how much, how far, will it work?
‘You’re not a happy person,’ she said.
‘Happy?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What is certain is that I’m no good to a woman. There was a girl once . . .’ He was looking into the street, imagining Katia walking beneath the trees, grown older and more dynamic than ever. More Jewish. ‘I treated her badly.’
‘I don’t believe you would know how!’
He came to her, stung by this. A pulse beat in her throat. She said, ‘Oh, my darling . . .’ Once again, there was someone at the front door. As they sprang apart, the front door opened and the hall light was switched on. Irene said, ‘It must be Louise.’
The door of the sitting room opened and a man stood there. In the light from the hall, they saw a big man with a flat, rosy countryman’s face, crowned by a hard brush of tow-coloured hair clipped close. Irene remembered that Louise had a lodger. ‘It’s Sergeant Fletcher, isn’t it?’
He nodded, and said in a slow voice with a faint country burr, ‘Did I disturb you, missie? Mind if I pull the blinds?’
He pulled the blinds and then switched on the standard lamp. He did these things very deliberately, continuing to look amiable, but making no apology for his intrusion. He was not unused to making his presence felt in other people’s rooms. He said, ‘I saw that joker leave here. I wondered if anything was wrong. Just say the word, m’dear, and I’ll . . .’
Irene said, ‘No, it’s quite all right.’
He made no move to go. It was difficult to tell whether he was stolid or stupid. Physically, Irene found something threatening about him, so massive and inflexible, with that well-scrubbed face and the small, light eyes.
Angus said, ‘He had to pass a timetable to me – nothing important. Something to do with evening classes. I told him where he could find me.’ Irene thought it odd that he found it necessary to give this man the explanation he had refused her.
The policeman turned his head and looked at Angus. There was a pause while he committed the face to memory. ‘Oh, I see, zurr. Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it?’ He spoke in the mindless way of one not at all convinced. ‘It just so happens I knows the rascal. You want to watch out for our Charlie, zurr.’
‘Thank you, I will.’
‘Proper little Bolshie, he is.’
‘Really?’
How long he would have stayed had they not heard the sound of oncoming planes, Irene had no idea. He said, ‘Probably on their way back. But you never know. I’d best go to the station. I never wants to be off-duty when there’s a raid on. Got a gammy leg, you see. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be fighting the bastards.’
When he had gone, Irene said, ‘I bet he enjoys digging out the bodies!’
Angus looked at her in surprise.
‘He’s the sort of blind zealot storm troopers are made of. Didn’t you feel it?’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘All policemen are nosey.’
Irene turned out the light and drew back the blinds. ‘Let’s watch, shall we?’ The fanlight window was open; the evening breeze wafted into the room the smell of newly-cut grass. One or two people were at their front gates, looking up at the searchlights weaving about the sky. Angus came and stood beside Irene. She said, ‘Why did you tell that little man where to find you?’
‘As I said. The evening class timetable. There go the Scrubs guns!’
James called out. Irene went to him. Catherine was still asleep.
‘Where’s Mummy?’
‘
She’s out, darling. She’ll be back soon.’
There was a noise like a great tearing of silk above the roof of the house, followed by a muffled explosion. Catherine turned on her side, and snuffled into her pillow. James was frightened. Angus had come into the room. ‘I’ve found one of your soldiers,’ he said. ‘Shall we go and see if we can find the others?’ He lifted the boy from the bed and carried him into the sitting room. Irene followed and drew the blinds. Angus, surprisingly tender and understanding, was making a good job of amusing James.
‘I’ll make tea,’ she said.
They had had tea and she was washing up when Fletcher returned. He came and stood in the doorway to the kitchen. ‘I’ve got bad news.’ His little eyes fixed on her face as if it was a nice cream bun he was about to consume.
When he had told her, she said, ‘Sergeant Fletcher, I would offer you tea, only James is in there, and I don’t want him to know there is anything wrong.’
Fortunately, he reacted with genuine benevolence to this. ‘I don’t want to upset the little fellow. And anyway, I’d best go back and help. Now, don’t worry, m’dear. I’ll keep you informed.’
James was asleep in the crook of Angus’s arm, one hand clutching a toy soldier. They discussed what they should do in whispers, then Irene tiptoed away to telephone her parents.
Her father answered the telephone. ‘Do you want me to do anything?’ he asked, when she explained. ‘I could go along there and see how things really are.’
‘No, no.’ Enough had happened for one night, without his taking any risks. ‘But perhaps if Louise isn’t back by the morning. Mummy could come round.’
As she put the receiver down, she suddenly realized that she had not told Angus that Louise had gone out to meet Daphne. She sat on the stairs for a few moments, feeling overwhelmed by the demands of the coming hours.
They managed to put James back in his bed without waking him. Then Irene told Angus about Daphne. He looked at her so incredulously he might have forgotten he had a sister; had his face not gone so white, she would have thought he did not care.