The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  They let her have the big room because it’s all she has now. Her whole life is in one room: an armchair, a wardrobe, a bed and a suitcase. The room is hers, but the house is Billy’s and Ruby’s. She hopes that they will stay here, for a while at least.

  The blue suitcase still stands at the end of the bed. That’s where she keeps the picture book. She’s discovered, over these past few years, that she can stand to lose almost everything but that.

  The suitcase is solid, with its beech struts and its strong blue lacquered cardboard. It will keep her picture book safe. It will last.

  In her quilted dressing gown and bare feet, carrying her brass water-spray, she goes out along the grass path, between the strawberry bed and the potato patch. The twisting runner beans offer their leaves up to the sun, like outstretched palms. The first fronds of new beans are pushing their way out of their green caps. The vines are dotted here and there with scarlet flowers. She huffs a cool mist softly on the remaining blossoms. Even this early in the day, bees are already busy all over the plot. Industrious and content. She makes her way down to the glazed lean-to, and pours her mix of liquid compost on the tomato plants. They are coming on well, swelling, blushing here and there with red.

  Keep busy, that’s what you have to do. That’s what makes you happy.

  Indoors, she boils the kettle and makes tea. She scrapes dripping over a slice of toast. There are bits of meat in the dripping, which flake satisfyingly across the gritty staleness of the bread.

  First she will drop in to church. Check that it’s still standing. A quiet prayer and say hello to the Reverend. Then work. Late tonight to deal with the overtime slips, so she can’t do a stint at the WVS canteen, but she’ll make up for it tomorrow. Her work there, looking after other women’s boys, is done in the hope and expectation that another woman somewhere else is looking after hers. Then in the evening she’ll get that golliwog finished off while she listens to the radio. It does her good to see the finished parcel, ready to go off for those poor children. A dolly, a few vests, a warm jumper. There is a lot to be thankful for, when you think about it. Sometimes, as she sits at her knitting, she’s so deep in counting her way through the niceties of the pattern that she loses all sense of herself, and time passes very easily indeed.

  Amelia is the first one in at work, as usual. She’s got a little while before anyone else arrives. The only sound is the creak of the timbers as the roof warms up in the sun.

  She slides open her desk drawer; it smells of India rubber and ink and sharpened pencils. She lifts out a small rectangle of mirror. A brisk turn of the head from side to side, a pat at her curled hair. The mirror is spotted, like some kind of mould is growing between the glass and the backing. She smiles—an artificial monkey grin—and turns her head to examine more closely the crow’s feet and the lines that run from her nose to the corners of her mouth. She raises her eyebrows to watch her forehead corrugate. A good man can look beyond these things. A good man would see her finer qualities. A good man already does, she thinks: she’s almost certain of that.

  Her handbag lies in her lap. She puts down the mirror to twist open the metal clip.

  She lifts out the lipstick, a gold-coloured cylinder about the length of her thumb. She’s never owned one of these; she didn’t used to hold with paint. But times change, so why shouldn’t she? She’ll put it back, of course she will: leave it for Ruby to find down the back of an armchair, or under the bath. She just wanted to try. The case is cool in her hand. She pulls off the cap, twists up the stick of coloured grease. There’s just a stump left: hardly worth making such a fuss over. It’s dark red. The red of veinous blood, of the deepest folds of damask roses. Amelia holds the tiny mirror in her left palm. She paints her lips. The lipstick smells how Ruby smells: oily, perfumed, sharp. She tilts her head to one side. Lips together, a red smile. She tries a pout. She’s not sure about the paint. It seems to make her face uneven, as if her eyes have faded away. But nothing ventured.

  She lays the mirror back down in the drawer, places the lipstick beside it, and eases the drawer shut.

  She flaps the newspaper open; her eyes flicker over the headlines and down into the text. Rome has fallen—in the space of a day, it seems. She skims on through the columns: a neat, clean victory, the major monuments undamaged, the Vatican spared. He’ll have read the paper on the Tube, and will arrive here pleased, and she can be pleased too, ready to share his pleasure. She scans on through the columns. Sifting.

  There’s a clatter of a key in the door downstairs. It echoes through the empty building and makes her straighten, makes her face fall sober. She folds the paper briskly, opens a lower drawer and places it in and lifts out a duster—a scrap of old stripy towel from home. She slips through the glass door into the inner office, his office, and dusts down his desk and chair, straightens his blotter and pen. She likes to be surprised in here; caught in the act of caring for him.

  It’s clean work, and that’s something she likes about the place, the bright cleanness, though the dust in the air can give her a bit of a catch in her chest sometimes. They make medical supplies: field dressings, bandages, lint and wadding. Thousands and thousands of surgical dressings, and it makes her dizzy and upset if she lets herself think about the wounds that they are needed for. The girls’ gloved fingers work like spiders, shaping and stitching and wrapping and packing into boxes and the boxes into crates. The drivers fill their trucks with crates and they grind away out of the yard, and she doesn’t like to think of it, where the wadding ends up, the amount of cotton lint that they process here, the sea of blood that there must be out there, to need all that cotton to sop it up.

  Down below, in the workshop, his footsteps echo across the concrete floor. She recognises them immediately. And then there’s the clatter of the women’s shoes as they follow him in, and the busy, noisy bustle of their voices as they head for the cloakroom. She can hear his footsteps even through the noise of the other women; their different weight, their purpose.

  She drops the duster onto the filing cabinet top, checks her hands: they’re clean. Nail polish, would that be the next thing? Shine her nails up like berries. His footsteps tap their way up the wooden stairs. Like Fred Astaire. His twirling tails, his neat combed hair, his polished shoes clicking as he dances up the steps.

  He’s there, a dark ghost against the milky glass. The jacket shoulder crushing against the pane. The handle turning on this side too.

  And that little familiar kick of surprise. The thrill of him. And his eyebrows flick up and he gives her one of his quick, foxy smiles from under his clipped moustache, turning to the hatstand as he shrugs off his duster coat. But he has that poise, that polishedness, of someone like Astaire, or Max Linder. And you don’t often see that, not in real life. He hooks up his coat, then takes off his trilby and sets it on the curved antlers of the hatstand above. Tugging each jacket cuff into place, he makes his cufflinks flash gold. He’s not really that much younger than her. He’s in his mid-forties, she’d say. Hard to tell, really—he keeps himself so nice, so neat. Groomed like a horse. Curry combs and brisk rub-downs.

  “Have we started?” he asks. “Did you hear?”

  She can hear the voices still, in the cloakrooms: the girls getting sorted, getting out of their coats and hats, and washing hands and scrubbing nails and soaping arms up to the elbow, and into their protective clothing, gloves and masks and turbans over the hair.

  “Not yet, Mr. Jack. The girls are just in.”

  He turns round and smiles at her. And it makes her heart swell. Because it’s a warm look, a kind look, direct.

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Sorry?”

  “France,” Mr. Jack says.

  She’d been going to say Italy. Rome, yes; Rome, the victory in Rome. She can’t get into step with him.

  “France?”

  “They’re on their way. They may even be over. That’s what I heard.”

  “There’s nothing in the papers. Nothi
ng on the news.”

  He taps the side of his nose. “Little bird.”

  If it’s France, if they’re crossing to France, does that mean Billy?

  “Your friend, the one in the RAF?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. He’s not prepared to say. But she can see that he’s excited. All she can think of is the camp that Billy’s written from the last few times. The rain hard on the corrugated roof. Is he still there? Is he in transit somewhere? Or is he now, already, out at sea? Mr. Jack is talking about the fine brave boys. Her own fine brave boy, and how proud, and oh poor thing, how worried she must be. But she can’t listen, her skin is creeping all over, and her head is light like a balloon and she wants to sit down. Did Billy know this was coming and not tell her? How could he not tell her a thing like that?

  “I’ve so many good friends in the services, I know something of what you feel.”

  He takes hold of her hand, squeezes it. She holds onto it, almost swaying.

  “If it wasn’t for my trouble, I’d be there myself. I’d be doing my bit.”

  “You are,” she says, almost automatically. “You are doing your bit. You know you are. Where would we all be without you?”

  She has said this so many times.

  His expression changes. His gaze drops, lingers on her lips.

  He’s noticed. The lipstick.

  But Billy. Her head swims. What about Billy? How can she find out where he is, what is happening to him?

  “Good news, though,” he says. “Great news. A second front opened up and just at the right time. Stick it to ’em just as they’re reeling after Rome.”

  “Good news,” she agrees.

  “But keep it to yourself, eh?” he says. “Keep mum.”

  She nods, blinking. He squeezes her hand again, and lets it go. It falls to her side. He grins his swift little toothy grin, and she has lost completely what he was saying, apart from Keep mum. Motherhood and silence: why the same word?

  “Well,” he says. “Well well. Tea?”

  “Tea.”

  “Good show.”

  He turns away, rubbing his hands together, surveying his desk—blotter, inkpot, pen—all neatly laid out and clean. He draws out his chair, sits down. She goes to the little pantry to make tea on the gas ring, and stands there as the kettle boils, and thinks of Billy, out there on the water, out there on the sea.

  He will be afraid. This is what she cannot bear. Her little boy will be scared, and there is nothing she can do to make it any better. She wants to sink down onto the lino, and press her face into her hands, and just sob and sob and sob at the unfairness of it all.

  She just touches the damp away from her lower lids.

  She makes tea. She gets through the moment, and will get through every moment that follows, through all the days to come, until she hears from Billy. Until she knows he’s safe.

  The English Channel

  June 5, 1944, 4:30 p.m.

  THE SUN IS OUT, at least; not warm, but making the sea sparkle. It’s choppy, but it’s blue and clean; you could dive right in. They lean over the side of the craft, watching England shrink. Green downs, chalk cliffs, the fungal growth of seaside towns. Little craft beetle along behind them. Up ahead, the big ships power on. A brownish haze of diesel fumes hangs over the waves.

  They’re under way. It’s now too late to even blow a hole in your hand: you’d have to take the hole all the way to France and back with you.

  “You know what the Mad Bastard said,” Alfie says, looking back towards the shore. “About if we got killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not to worry because there would be plenty more men coming along behind?”

  “Yes.”

  “I loved that. I thought that was the dog’s bollocks.”

  Billy snorts.

  Alfie kicks idly at the base of the rail. His jaw is blurred with stubble; his eyes are shadowed and there are deep lines at the corners, like the creases in a slept-on sheet. He has three kids, Alfie. He’s looking back towards the country and his kids.

  The wake churns blue and glassy and crested white. There is a kind of calmness now, from fatigue, and from being under way and stuck with it.

  “You ever think about what if Hitler wins?” Alfie asks.

  “Ten yards and all that,” Billy says. “Tight focus.”

  “Yeah.” Alfie still looks back across the water, to the land. “Point. But.”

  “What?”

  “The stuff they’d get up to, the Nazis. Stuff they’d do. We’d get special treatment. We’d be punished for all the trouble we’ve been to them. For not just rolling over and playing dead.”

  “True.”

  “And your missus, being Jewish and all that. You hear stories.”

  “Don’t like to think about it.”

  “I do. I mean, I don’t like to, but I think it helps.”

  Billy squints at him.

  “The missus, the kids, I mean,” Alfie continues. “I can’t live with it, the idea of them suffering. And it helps to think that: if you can’t live with something, you might as well die trying to stop it.”

  Alfie just gazes back towards the land. This is love, Billy sees. This is what love looks like. The deep lines at the eyes. The frown, the anxious gaze.

  “I’m not saying you have to die,” Alfie adds.

  Billy feels his throat tighten. “Good.”

  “Look, I’m not being all bollocksy about this. It’s just the trade-off, the price you’re prepared to pay. I just think, if you can think like that, it helps you stop yourself from blowing your own hand off.”

  Billy bites at his lower lip. What’s the asking price, he wonders, for a second chance?

  They both stare back at the receding coast. The colour leaches from the land.

  Ruby. Always Ruby. Whatever else, always her.

  If he gets his second chance, things will be different. If he can do this for her, then surely he can do the smaller things? He can be kind. He can be cheerful. He can make the world a better place for her every day. He can forget about what he can’t have, and think of what he’s already got.

  “You know what,” Billy says. “I’m thinking of getting a tattoo.”

  Ravensbury Works, Tooting

  June 5, 1944, 4:45 p.m.

  RUBY TAKES THE CIGARETTE and bends to light it at Evelyn’s match. Evelyn’s nails are coral pink and she half wonders where she got hold of nail polish nowadays—some Yank, no doubt.

  The first drag of smoke tastes strange, and makes her shudder. Evelyn lights up her own cigarette, blows smoke, talks.

  They lean back against the brick factory wall, in the one remaining slab of sunshine in the whole dark yard. Ruby lets the smoke spool up into the air. She can feel the ghost of his touch still. His hands on her hips. His lips on her breasts. Him inside her. Her cheeks flush up, but it’s okay because that could just be the sun. She squints into it.

  Anyway: she got away with it. Mrs. has no idea.

  Evelyn’s talking. Ruby turns her attention to her friend, trying to pick up the thread, like twisting the dial on a radio, the voices pulling themselves together out of static. She watches Evelyn’s thick lips, blurred with crying, the lipstick worn to a thin stain. Ruby wonders if she could borrow a dab of it herself. Evelyn is a generous sort. That’s what gets her into such a pickle with men.

  Evelyn is upset not because one of her fellas has let her down, but because she and Joan have had a blow-up. Evelyn lodges with Joan and, Ruby’s gathered lately, might have a bit of a crush on her too: it seems she just can’t bear Joan’s disapproval. But this morning they collided on the stairs, Evelyn on her way down to work, and Joan on her way back, tired from her stint at the ARP station. And Joan gave her hell, Evelyn tells Ruby, because she’d come home after Joan was asleep on Sunday night, but it wasn’t that late, not really, but she had been with a fella. And Joan called Evelyn a tart, asked her who she’d been up to no good with this time, if she even knew his name, an
d made her cry.

  “Was it Reggie?”

  Evelyn blows a plume of smoke up into the air. “Reggie?” She shakes her head. “No. This was …” She squints, thoughtful.

  “Someone else.”

  Evelyn nods. “Haven’t seen Reggie in months. He wrote to say all leave had been cancelled. But I ’spect he’s just visiting his missus instead.”

  “Really?”

  Evelyn rolls her head round against the wall, crushing her hair into the brick, and fixes Ruby with her pale grey stare. “They can get away with anything nowadays, the men can. Say what they like and who’s to know?”

  “Just haven’t seen many men in uniform around.”

  Evelyn’s mouth falls agape. Her voice drops to an awed whisper: “Do you think it’s happening?”

  “The second front? Maybe.”

  It makes sense. The emptiness of the town, the quiet. There have been rumours, but you don’t listen to rumours, do you?

  Billy’s gone, she thinks. Just like that. Without her even knowing, he’s crossed the water, and is gone.

  Evelyn’s rubbing at her arm, trying to be comforting, but her strong red hands are hurting. Ruby realises she must have gone white. Must be having a bit of a turn.

  “I’m all right.”

  Evelyn frowns, and reaches her arms around her friend, and holds her. Her bosom presses in underneath Ruby’s, soft and strange. Ruby smells setting lotion and dirty hair. Evelyn lets her go.

  “It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

  What does Evelyn know? What the bloody hell does anybody know any more?

  “Yes,” Ruby says, and tries a smile. “Of course.”

  “Pecker up now. Doesn’t do to upset yourself.”

  “You’re right,” Ruby says. “ ’Course you are.”

  And she smiles, but all she feels is irritation: with Evelyn, with herself, with all of it. That life just keeps dishing this stuff out and they’re expected to keep on spooning it up and swallowing. She blinks away the film of wet from her eyes, takes a final sip from her cigarette, and pulls herself together. Because you have to; because there is, after all, no choice: you can’t be permanently hysterical, so you might as well not bother getting started. She wonders, just for a second, What if I’m pregnant? Because there was Billy, on the last night of his leave, and there was the handsome man last night; and what a pretty pickle that would be. But she dismisses the idea: not now, not after all these years. After the blue baby, she expects childlessness.