by Nevil Shute
He told her, and impressed on her again the necessity for reticence. She rang off, and went back to her lunch in the dining-room, but she ate nothing more. Presently she went up to her room, and threw herself down upon the bed. There were nearly two hours to wait till she could go to Haslar.
In that two hours she changed a good deal. She was only twenty and life had never hit her very hard. The war had been a great game up till then. People got killed, of course; she knew that in the abstract. But not people that you knew, people that really belonged to you. For the first time she faced the fact that Oliver might have been killed that day—in fact, had probably escaped it very narrowly.
Later she went to Haslar, and heard from an over-garrulous sick-bay steward that two-thirds of Harebell’s complement had, in fact, been killed, including the captain. She saw Oliver for about two minutes, white and motionless in bed, his head red on the pillow, smiling at her with his eyes, but drowsy with the drugs that they had given him for shock. Then she went back to the hotel.
She sat for a time in the lounge, hoping that some other officer’s wife would come in that she knew, that she could talk to. But no one came, and presently she went and dined alone. By nine o’clock she was in bed, but not to sleep.
The appalling nature of the disaster that might have come to her shook her very much. She came of Yorkshire stock, accustomed to face facts; she now faced the fact that she had very nearly lost Oliver. She might still lose him; she had heard of deferred shock. She simply could not visualise what life would be like without him. Oliver had always been there, ever since she could remember. They always had done things together, all their lives. All their lives they had given their spare time to each other. All of their lives, unknowing, they had been in love.
She lay for hours, blindly miserable, hating all ships, and the war, hating the Royal Clarence Hotel, and the grill-room, and the drinks, hating Portsmouth and the Navy. If only they could be back in Yorkshire as they had been once, forgetting all this beastliness! All their lives they had been so happy there. She saw Chalmers’ greystone house, and she saw the Bodens’ greystone house, and she remembered all the fun that they had had together, with all the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, for so many years. And now, in contrast this.…
She cried a little into her pillow, and presently she cried herself to sleep.
She did not sleep for long. She was awake again by about four; she got up and sponged her face. Then she lay down again, grave and thoughtful. She knew quite well now why everything had been fun up in Yorkshire in those days. It was because her father had been in love with her mother, and George Boden had loved Mrs. Boden, and there had been lots of children. People without children lived in flats and places like the Royal Clarence Hotel, but when you had a family you had to do things differently. A family meant you had to have a house, and the bigger the family the bigger the house—a big greystone house in Ilkley or in Burley, with lots of children and young people in and out of it. That was what she wanted now, with all her heart and soul.
They had avoided children; she now felt that they had been very wrong. Marriage without kids was a silly business, an affair of flats and cocktail-bars that held no solid Yorkshire happiness. A family mean home and happiness. And anyway, she thought with grim realism, if they had a baby there’d be something left for her if Oliver were—killed.
Oliver did not die; in fact, he made a very quick recovery. She used to go and sit with him each afternoon; he had a cabin overlooking the garden quadrangle, bright with spring flowers. And suddenly one afternoon she said: “Nolly, I vote we have a crack at a kid pretty soon.”
There was a pause. “They slobber,” he said gently.
“I know they do.”
“And they get sick all over you.”
“I know.” She was holding his hand.
“It must be pretty lousy for you, all alone and doing nothing all day,” he said. “If that’s what you want, it’s all O.K. with me.”
She said: “You’d like it too, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’d be rather fun.”
He temporised. “They smell just terrible …” he said.
“Not if you manage them right.” She made an appeal to his better instincts. “I mean, it’d be just like haying a puppy and seeing it grow up into a decent dog.”
“You wouldn’t like to have a puppy instead?” he enquired. “You’d see the results quicker.”
She said: “I won’t be fobbed off with a puppy.”
He said: “All right—have it your own way. I was only trying to help. If we don’t like it we can always leave it on a doorstep, and get a puppy.”
Presently he was up and about, walking with difficulty, and later they went back to Yorkshire for three weeks’ leave. In that time the battle of Flanders reached its climax and everybody who was fit to handle a boat went over to Dunkirk; in Yorkshire they knew little of what was going on. Oliver was irritated and upset when he discovered from the newspapers what he had missed. His leave, which had been pleasant enough when it began, now irked him, and he began to write letters to the Admiralty for another ship.
He applied this time to be posted to a trawler in the Humber or Mersey area, in order to be closer to their home if Marjorie were going to have a baby. He did not get it; he was posted instead to a trawler in the Forth, based on Port Edgar. Marjorie went up there with him and stayed in the Lothian Hotel, overlooking the Firth of Forth, with the other naval officers’ wives; Boden was able to spend about two nights a week on shore with her.
The work was more interesting, and more what he had joined the Navy to do. His ship was H.M.T. Grimsby Emerald, and the commanding officer, a middle-aged lieutenant R.N.V.R., was a bank manager in civil life and had been in trawlers in the last war. They used to go sweeping up and down the Forth in pair with another trawler, and now and again they had the satisfaction of creating a shattering explosion on the sea bed. Then they would heave-to, drop a bucket over the side for the harvest of stunned fish, repair the sweep, and go on, hoping to do it again. It was pleasant enough during the summer months of June, July, and August. From time to time Marjorie would go in to Edinburgh and come back with a copy of the Nursing Times or else a little book on Infant Management; these she would read in bed at night and sometimes read out bits of them to Oliver if he were there.
Presently it became necessary for her to go to London, to visit a particular shop in Bond Street. This, she explained to Oliver, was all part of the ritual. Only the experts of the Radiant Cradle Company Ltd. knew the ins and outs of this most difficult and intricate affair, and if you got the wrong sort of wool, for example, the baby would develop something horrible and die. Then they would have to start all over again, which would be troublesome.
Oliver said again: “Much better have a puppy. They’re hardier,” and took her in to Edinburgh to put her in the sleeper for London. The Battle of Britain was then just beginning, and London had had about a month of raids. Oliver’s sister, Helen Boden, had a little flat up at the top of an old house in Dover Street, and Marjorie had reckoned to stay with her there. On account of the raids, and at Oliver’s insistence, she changed her plans and sent a telegram to a school friend who lived outside at Harrow to invite herself to spend a couple of nights with her.
There was no answer to that telegram before she left Edinburgh, but that did not worry them. Oliver took her to the Waverley grill-room and they split a bottle of burgundy to make her sleep, and then they went to the train together. In the cramped, delicately furnished little sleeper he took her in his arms and kissed her.
“So long, old thing,” he said. “Look after yourself.”
She said a little tremulousy: “So long, Nolly. Don’t go and bump another mine before I get back.”
He left her, and the train carried her away into the night. He went back to his duty in Grimsby Emerald, and Marjorie arrived in London next morning, fresh and cheerful after a good night. The train was three hours late, on account of the raid
s, and everybody seemed to think that it had done very well to lose so little time.
She had heard nothing from her friend at Harrow, and so rang her up. It seemed that there was trouble; mother had bronchitis and there was a trained nurse sleeping in the spare room. Marjorie was really very glad. Honour was satisfied; there was now no alternative to sleeping in Helen’s flat in Dover Street, and it would be great fun if there was a raid.
She went to Dover Street and saw the caretaker who lived down in the basement, a Mrs. Harrison. Helen, it seemed, had gone to Yorkshire for a few days, but she had left word with Mrs. Harrison that Mrs. Boden might turn up to use the flat, so that was quite all right. Marjorie went up to the top floor and unpacked her things; she had slept there before. Each time she used the flat she envied Helen again, for living free and independently in London in a real flat of her own, in Dover Street.
She went out, and walked down Piccadilly, looking in the shop windows. She bought a warm blue scarf for Nolly in the Burlington Arcade because it took her fancy, and she bought a little silver cigarette-lighter at Dunhills’, which she would keep for his birthday in November. Then she had lunch at the Chinese restaurant, partly for the novelty and partly because it was quite cheap, and she was Yorkshire bred.
And after lunch she went to the Radiant Cradle Company in Bond Street and spent two hours with them. She came out a little dazed, having spent a good deal of money on little bits and pieces that were obviously necessary. Having a baby, she thought was a terribly expensive matter, but quite fun. Everybody in the shop had been so very, very nice to her. Her heart warmed to Radiant Cradle Company.
She went back to the flat and made herself a cup of tea, feeling rather at a loss. It was fun to be alone in London, but she felt she wouldn’t like to have too much of it; she was almost glad to be going back to Port Edgar the next day in spite of the boredom when Oliver was at sea. It would be awful fun if he could come to London next time with her. She could not think of anyone in London at that moment that she knew, so when her tea was finished she went out and saw a film.
She came out of the cinema at about seven, on a warm September evening. There had been a raid warning while she was in it, but ten minutes later the All Clear had sounded, and when she came out there was nothing unusual to be seen. She knew little about London restaurants except the Piccadilly Hotel, and she did not feel like going there alone. So she went back to the Chinese restaurant again and had another peculiar meal, and so back to Dover Street in the gloaming.
The warning sounded again as she went in, at about nine o’ clock, and gave her a tremendous thrill.
It was hot in the flat beneath the roof, though all the windows were wide open. She took off her shoes and her dress, put on a kimono and went and leaned out the window. There were a few searchlights stabbing the evening sky and a low rumble of gunfire in the distance to the south; she listened to it with pleasurable excitement. Perhaps it would develop into a real blitz, with fires and bombs and everything; something to brag about when she got back to the Lothian Hotel. In the street below her people seemed to be scurrying quickly to their homes.
The blue sky darkened into night; at about ten o’clock the first bombs fell. Overhead, very distant, she could hear the faint noise of an aeroplane; from that time onwards the drone was continuous. Whatever aeroplanes they were, she thought they must be flying at a very great height, five or six miles, perhaps. She wondered if they were German bombers or British fighters; there was no means of telling which.
Presently bombs began to fall all over London, some not more than half a mile away, it seemed to her. There was a glow of fire towards the east, and several times from Piccadilly she heard the clang and rumble of fire engines coming from the west. The gunfire from the park not far away was continuous; each time that one particular gun fired her window rattled and the floor shook a little beneath her feet. Splinters of shell fell down from time to time upon the roofs with a sharp rattle, and once a large piece, probably a fuse, fell with a great crash of slates not far away. She kept back under cover after that, and only gazed diagonally upwards through the window at the little bursting stars spattering the sky above.
After a time it seemed to her that her top room was not the safest place of all to be in at that time. She opened the door of the flat and went downstairs in her kimono to see what anybody else was doing. She found a little knot of people sitting on the stairs of the bottom flight; there was no cellar or shelter to the house. She went upstairs again and fetched a cushion and her eiderdown, and came down again to join them, sitting most uncomfortably upon a stair.
The raid went on and on, the detonations sometimes distant, sometimes very close at hand. She stayed down there on the cold stairs for over two hours, weary and bored and rather cold, and most uncomfortable. At about one o’clock the bombing and gunfire died away, and for the first time there was no sound of aircraft overhead.
Somebody said at last: “Sounds like the end. Give it another ten minutes.” Ten minutes passed, a quarter of an hour. There had been no All Clear, but people started drifting up to bed; Marjorie went up too, took off her clothes and put on her pyjamas, and slipped thankfully between the sheets. In five minutes she was asleep.
A second wave of bombers came half an hour later, and the gunfire began again and woke her up. She did not stir from bed, being very tired. She lay and listened to the raid for nearly an hour, and presently dozed off again, accustomed to the noise.
She woke to the shrill scream of the bomb that hit the house next door, an instant before it burst. She had no time to do anything, hardly time to realise what the noise denoted, before the appalling thing happened. Her bed was lifted bodily up into the air and slammed down again upon the floor, and a great pressure blast came on her that made her cry out with the pain in her ears. Then, as she watched, the solid wall at the end of her room split and crumbled and dissolved in shreds of plaster, and was gone, and a thick, choking cloud of dust was over everything that made her gasp for breath. She lay petrified with fright in bed; then something happened to the roof above her. A half-ton coping stone came crashing through the ceiling and fell down on to the lower half of the bed. The bed collapsed down on to the floor and she lay pinned there, stunned with the shock and with the pain in both her legs.
She struggled to sit up and the pain bit and gnawed her legs, piercing, unbearable. She lay back white and trembling, and fearful of what this might mean to her. She thought: “This is the sort of thing that gives people a miscarriage”; indeed, it seemed to her that people had had miscarriages for something rather less than she had got. She felt that she must try to lie back quietly, and rest. Presently, when she was a little calmer, she would cry out, and somebody would come.
Below her, in the street, there were confused noises of men shouting and the rumble of falling masonry and brick. Slowly the thick choking dust began to settle; it settled thickly on the ruins of her bed, upon the sheets, upon her arms, her face, her hair. As the cloud slowly cleared she found that she could see straight out ahead of her where the wall used to be; she looked into a torn, incredible gap, vacant, that had been the house next door. Above the shattered roof of the next door but one she could see the stars pin-pointing in a deep blue sky.
Suddenly, from the stairs outside the door behind her head there was a sound of scrambling, and a man’s voice. It was calling:
“Is anyone up there in the top rooms? Is anybody up there?”
She answered weakly: “Yes, please. Me. I’m here.”
“Which room are you in?”
“In the front, on the top floor.”
“Can you get out on to the landing, where I can see you? Come carefully, because the stairs are down.”
She said: “I can’t move. There’s something lying on my legs.”
There was a momentary pause. Then the voice said: “All right, lady—take it easy. I’ll come up to you.”
The scrambling noises recommenced. She heard a voice say: “Bert
, there’s a woman up on the top floor. I’m going up. Stand from under, case the whole bloody lot comes down.” And presently, crawling upon his belly on the floor that swayed and teetered beneath his added weight, a man came to her.
She saw him faintly in the starlit darkness, through the fog of dust. He was a very dirty man, in a tin hat and a blue boiler-suit, with an armlet bearing the letters A.F.S. He was a man of about fifty, still lean and athletic. He said: “This floor isn’t quite what it might be. Come on, lady. Let’s get out of this toot sweet.”
She said: “I can’t move, I’m afraid. I think both my legs are broken. Look.”
He switched on an electric torch and examined the wreck of her bed. He tested the weight of the coping stone with his hands: it was utterly beyond his power to shift it. In three weeks of intensive raids this man had learned a great deal, had amassed a sad store of experience. He knew that there was only one thing that could save this girl. A doctor must come up, alone, because the floor would bear no more than one, and amputate both legs where she lay. And he must do it quickly.
He said: “Look, lady, I’m going down to fetch my mate to give a hand with this. We’ll get you down okay. Just lie there quiet and stick it out, and don’t move round more’n you’ve got to. I’ll be back inside ten minutes.”
Then he was gone, and she was left alone again.
She heard him slithering and scrambling down the staircase well. His visit had comforted her, had eased her fears; she knew now that everything was going to be all right. The little noise of the incendiaries, the six or seven quick plops as they fell among the wooden ruins of the roofs and floors, passed her unnoticed; she heard the growing clamour in the street, but did not understand.
A sharp, bitter smell of smoke was blown to her. In sudden fear she raised her head and saw, arising from the ruins of the house next door, a tongue of flame. She stared at it dumbfounded. Then she realised it meant the end.
In those last moments she was agonised by thoughts of Boden, and of their dependence on each other. She cried: “Oh, Nolly dear, I’ve gone and let you down! Whatever will you do?” The smoke came pouring up the staircase well and gushed around her, products of combustion, stifling and merciful. In a few moments she lost consciousness.