The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  I ran to shelters at night, sometimes fleeing along dark streets with other faceless wraiths. Sometimes I decided that a warm bed was worth the risk, lying with the pillows over my head, my body curled up as though by making myself small I could escape the attention of those buzzing death machines in the sky. Sometimes, as I told you, I watched from Primrose Hill. But none of this is special. None of it is new. It was the same for everyone. The way our hearts raced and our palms grew sweaty as the sirens began to shriek; ash in our hair, in our eyes, in our throats; the stench from burst gas pipes; the dust that blocked out the sun; the smell of burning timber and burnt flesh; broken glass crunching like seashells under our feet; the mouldy air in the Anderson shelters; the stench of cordite from the anti-aircraft guns. But you will have read of all this before. I do not know how to make my story unique for you, how to make it stand out from what you already know.

  That was always my dilemma as a journalist. Conflicts affect thousands of people but as soon as people become numbers, they lose their individuality, making it easier for us not to care. I used to feel a grumpy, unforgiveable impatience as I spoke to exhausted refugees huddled under leaky tarpaulins in ad-hoc camps and realised there was nothing new in what they were saying, nothing noteworthy enough to lift my story, to get me a place on the front page. Then later, when exhaustion held sleep at bay, I would remember the pleading, desperate faces and my hostile, self-centred reaction and I would cry, indulgent tears of helplessness and shame. I had a reputation for being a hardened war reporter, a woman who could stomach anything, but really it is not the stomach one has to worry about, is it?

  I have no desire to make you cry with my stories of the Blitz. That is not my goal. Or perhaps I am worried that my stories would not move you at all. Why should you care? I mention the Blitz only to remind you that we were all living in a rarefied world where death was ever present and life all the more precious and reckless for it. I am, consciously and cynically, preparing you for what comes next.

  One evening in March 1943 – the Blitz was over but there was still the odd bombing raid – I had an early dinner with Penrose in a small restaurant on England’s Lane and then we headed towards Primrose Hill. I was giggly and lightheaded from the stomach-stripping red wine. Penrose was in a particularly ironic mood, telling tales from absurdist planning meetings at the Ministry.

  “Peterson, of course, was furious. He slammed the table with one of his pudgy fists and roared: ‘Will someone give me one bloody good piece of news that we can illustrate with a pretty girl and stick on a bleeding poster before this country dissolves in its own self-pity!’ Well, I say roared but it was more like a strangled squeal, really.”

  I laughed so hard I stumbled. Penrose’s arm shot out and then his hand stayed below my elbow.

  “You’re always stopping me from falling over,” I said with unforgiveable inattention.

  He was silent for a moment and I blushed as I realised that I had pushed a door I had sworn would remain shut.

  Before I could laugh it off, he said quietly, “That I am. I’ll be here whenever you need me, Lina. You know that.”

  “Let’s go to the top of the hill,” I said quickly, pulling away from him and rushing up the path. “Come on, it’s perfectly safe. It’ll be light for at least another hour.”

  In the wan rays of the setting sun, the city looked more insubstantial than ever, as though its roofless homes and gutted ruins might be pulled up and away by the rose-tinted flying whales dotting the sky.

  “It looks like a mirage,” I said. “Too fragile to stand up to everything that has been thrown at it.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Penrose said. “Every time our lads bomb Berlin or any other German city, Hitler will send the Luftwaffe back. The Blitz might be over and London might still be standing but there’s a long way to go. I’ve even heard rumours that Hitler has a super weapon up his sleeve. Some kind of rocket that’ll be a hundred times worse than anything we’ve seen so far.”

  Suddenly, I felt exhausted as though I’d hit a wall. Maybe it was the run up the hill. Maybe it was Penrose’s words, the thought of the fear we had yet to experience after four long years of holding our breath and expecting the worst. I was in front of Penrose and, overcome by it all, I allowed myself to lean back for a second. I swear that’s all I did, Diane. I merely moved my weight to the back of my feet and let myself tilt backwards. The slightest of shifts in a world where everything was moving so fast, and yet it was enough. His arms came around my waist and I didn’t move.

  “Anyway, enough of that whingeing, as Peterson would say. Let’s jolly ourselves up,” he said, as though what was happening was of no consequence. But he didn’t let go and he didn’t step back.

  “Tell me where you would most like to go in the world, if you could go anywhere. Let’s turn our frowns upside down.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You go first,” I said. I knew I should move away. I should break his hold but I was so comfortable in his arms. I had not realised until that very moment how desperate I was to feel a heart beating alongside mine.

  “Very well. I’ve an uncle, Uncle Percy, he’s in his 70s now and he’s been living in Kenya for the last 20 years. Has a little farm for himself in a place called Nyeri. Since I was a boy, he has sent me the most wonderful letters. I swear to you, Lina, I can smell the heat and the eucalyptus trees when I open the envelopes. He writes of safaris and horse riding and hunting and fishing and the birds and the waterbuck coming onto his land and it sounds so idyllic. Sometimes he sends me pressed flowers, jacaranda blossoms and those gorgeous frangipani blooms. I imagine he must live in a kind of Eden. That is where I plan to go. I won’t stay here when this is over. I’ve made up my mind. It’s time to get out of Europe.”

  He edged sideways and his lips brushed my ear.

  “It’s a dream, I know. But I’m entitled to dream, aren’t I? Aren’t you?”

  I could make any number of excuses, Diane. I was bone-tired after four years of war. I was hungry for physical contact. It had been months since I had seen Robert, who was now somewhere in the deserts of North Africa. I was only 23. I was not yet married. I was scared and exhausted and life seemed so, so short. In a world full of death and hate, surely every kind of love was permissible. Shouldn’t we take love whenever it presented itself? More than that, it was surely my duty as a proud British citizen to encourage cheer wherever I found it. We were being told: Freedom is in peril. Defend it with all your might. This was a kind of freedom too, was it not?

  You will certainly mock me, Diane, but I was not alone. Illegitimate births shot up between 1939 and 1942 and the same for sexually transmitted diseases. Crime statistics also rocketed higher during the Blitz, although you do not hear about that very often. It did not, and still does not, suit the sanitised, heroic narratives we spun out of that trauma.

  What do you make of my efforts to excuse what I did, Diane? Don’t worry. Whatever you are thinking, I’ve thought it all before. There is no criticism you can throw at me that I have not levelled at myself. Because in the end, everything I have said was true for everyone and while there was infidelity, there was also its opposite. Loyalty is only proven in the testing and I failed.

  Penrose pulled me closer, entwining my hands in his. He started to kiss my neck, sending shivers down my spine. I kept my eyes on the skyline and refused to think. I had done too much of that: thinking about rationing, about blackout curtains, about where to shelter, about how many bombs must fall before I would be hit, about how to calculate the odds of Robert’s survival, about whether the war could ever, ever end. I was worn out by my merry-go-round thoughts.

  As the sun sank to our right, it broke through the clouds that had shielded us all day, gilding London’s shattered spires and broken towers so they looked like they belonged to a fabled, lost city. I could hear birds trilling the end of the day, shouts from the men swarming over the anti-aircraft battery below and the soft sound of traffic hissing around the edges of t
he park. We were out of time, out of place, up on our hill. Penrose turned me around and we kissed, slowly at first, both of us hesitant but then when I didn’t pull away, his lips grew more urgent and I found a matching desire in mine.

  “Come home with me, Lina. Please.”

  I could have ended it then. A kiss is not so bad, not in wartime. But I didn’t. I went home with Penrose, both of us silent and tense as we ran through the park, caught a bus and then walked the short distance from the stop to his home in Marylebone. He lived on a street of tall, austere houses, all sparkling windows and boxed geraniums apart from the last one, which looked like a giant toddler had taken a hammer to it. The front wall of the top two floors was missing. I could see a crumpled bed and a dresser, still covered in squat tubs of cream for skin that no longer needed them.

  “A close call,” I said as we walked past. I was relieved to have something other than what we were doing to talk about. The blasted home on that graceful street stood like an abomination. A rotten tooth in an otherwise pristine mouth.

  He nodded.

  “They were lucky. An elderly couple, the Prescotts. They died in each other’s arms. A direct hit.”

  We walked on.

  “Is this yours?” I asked as he climbed wide steps to a black door.

  “My sister’s,” he said. “She’s been evacuated with her children. Her husband is fighting in Africa, I can’t remember where right now. Anyway, I don’t want to think about all that,” he said, pulling me inside and slamming the door.

  “Tonight, the war stays outside. Okay?”

  I had a vague impression of a large, airy lounge and then we were upstairs, in the bedroom and he’d pulled the blackout curtains and we were just two faceless people making silent, slightly sorrowful love in a darkened room on a broken street.

  “Are you okay?” he asked me afterwards.

  “It’s a little late for that,” I replied.

  “I know. I just… I mean, you shouldn’t feel bad, you know. You’re not married. And who’s to say…” His voice trailed off.

  “I hardly think Robert is being besieged by nubile young women in whatever desert he’s stuck in, if that’s what you mean,” I replied, more caustically than I had intended. I knew I shouldn’t be angry with Penrose. This was not his fault. It was not my fault. There was no fault. But I still felt dreadful. I still feel dreadful, Diane, if you can believe me.

  I remember the exact date. It was March 3rd. I remember it because of what I learned later. While Penrose and I were making love, 173 men, women and children were suffocating to death on the narrow rain-slicked steps of the Bethnal Green tube station. It was the worst civilian disaster of the war and for two days, not a word of it leaked out. They hushed it up because it was too horrible to bear, even for people who had learned to cope with so much. And then there was also blame to be apportioned. People knew the entrance was unsafe. They had been told this. Official neglect was not a story the authorities wanted told, not when we were all supposed to be pulling together.

  Apparently, a woman holding a baby fell at the bottom of the steps, a man fell over her and then all along the stairs above, people started to fall. At the same time, they said, an anti-aircraft battery opened up across the street, trying out a new system, which blasted 60 rockets into the air simultaneously. Nobody had heard the terrifying sound before so the people at the entrance panicked and surged forward. They didn’t know someone had fallen down. The people already in the tube didn’t know anything was happening on the steps above them. In just seconds, scores of people were piled upon each other, parents crushing the breath out of their children even as they tried to save them, bodies turning mauve as the air was sucked out of them. After two days, the news made it into the papers but the location was not given and nor was the death toll.

  To me, that incident embodied the essence of that war. Pointless deaths, fear, horror beyond enduring, secrecy and lies told to keep spirits up. You might think my transgression would pale in comparison. You’d be wrong. In my mind, what happened at Bethnal Green magnified what we had done at 17 Marylebone Lane. It amplified my feelings of shame. Irrational, I know, but I can only tell you what I felt and still feel. I have not the wit to break down the complex chemical and electrical signals that caused my brain to twin these two completely separate events. Unless we decide it was my conscience. I do have one, Diane, although I will be the first to admit that I have muted it as much as possible over the years. But as I age, I find its power is increasing even, or perhaps especially, as my rational mind’s supremacy wanes. I have too much time on my hands now and it appears my somewhat enforced idleness has breathed life into my moribund moral sense. I suppose that is why I am writing to you as well.

  I do not believe Robert ever found out about our affair, for want of a better term, and I do hate the corporate banality of that word. But that is not the point. I knew, and in the end what my relationship with Penrose told me about myself was damaging enough: I was weak, faithless, fickle and needy. It was all true but I did also love Penrose, in a fashion. I loved his solidity, the fact of his survival, his immediacy. These qualities may seem superficial to you, Diane, but you were not there. You did not experience life on the edge of oblivion as we did. What would you do if you thought… No, that is not accurate… If you truly believed, with good reason, that you could die tomorrow. Would your love for Paul survive that test? It is, of course, an impossible question. You might well say your love would but you will never know. It doesn’t take much, Diane. That is what we all forget. Until it is too late.

  Robert came home again in July after the Germans had surrendered in Tunisia. He was nut-brown and weary but, more than that, he didn’t know where he was headed next and he didn’t seem to care. Even being, as General Alexander said, ‘masters of the North African shores’ seemed to mean nothing to him.

  “It’s just another rung on a ladder to who knows where,” he said. “We’re climbing but there’s no end in sight. And we don’t even know where the ladder goes. Maybe we’ll all end up in heaven. What do you think, Lina?”

  We were lying on the bed in my room in Swiss Cottage, our arms wrapped around each other, too tired to do anything else. Michelle had taken the children to her mother’s for the weekend and we were blissfully alone. Such solitude was a rarity during the war. We were constantly forced to be with others, either fighting or pulling together or keeping calm or cheering each other up. War had forced us Brits to be gregarious and social. No wonder we were exhausted all the time.

  Robert spent most of his week’s leave sleeping or dozing fitfully, his arms jerking, his face twisting, his mouth forming words that I could never make out. I watched him from my side of the bed, scared to touch him in case I would startle him, trying to convince myself that we were still together even if sometimes it felt like I was looking at a stranger, trying to stifle the guilt I felt over my affair with Penrose, telling myself that I would end it and knowing that I did not have the strength to do so, not while the war continued, not while Robert’s life was not his own or mine.

  What else can I tell you of those years? We tried to survive. We tried to stay human. I loved two men. It was my salvation and my undoing.

  CHAPTER 13

  Robert’s last leave before D-Day came in May 1944. We were all primed for the invasion. The south of England was thronged with American GIs, French, Canadians, men from all over the world. Overpaid, overfed, oversexed and over here. Unspoken was the most important word: Overlord. No one could visit the coast, there were fake camps and dummy ships and trains full of troops heading hither and thither as we all waited for the attack on Fortress Europe.

  At the Ministry, there was a palpable air of excitement and a melodramatic sense of secrecy. Peterson prowled between our desks, shushing any talk as though the walls might have German ears. I knew Robert was taking part. He was due to report for duty in a southern town that had been taken over by the army. The residents were told to leave their homes and
given vague assurances of compensation. We were all too far gone by then to care about compensation. For what? Our homes, our loved ones, the endless minutes spent in fear and trepidation when we should have been laughing, sulking or worrying about which shade of lipstick made our teeth look whiter? You cannot compensate for a cataclysm.

  A few days before Robert was due to rejoin his unit, one of my Ministry colleagues, a wisp of a WAAF called Sarah whose deep-set eyes were prone to well up at the slightest provocation since her fiancé drowned at Dunkirk, invited us out to dinner in Portobello to celebrate her birthday.

  “I wasn’t going to do anything,” she said. “I mean, the bloody bombing seems to have started again and it’s not even a very important birthday. Twenty-four isn’t much of a number but then I thought, what if it’s the last birthday I get? You just can’t know. What if I die next week and I didn’t even bother to celebrate that last birthday. That would be so sad I couldn’t bear it.”

  Her eyes were glistening and she flicked her fingers around her face, pretending to straighten her thick fringe as she brushed tears off her lashes. We were on a cigarette break and I was only half-listening. I was worrying about whether I should get Robert a gift before he left. I wanted to believe that something given in love could somehow carry him through the next few months but I also worried that he might read it as a sign that I believed his luck was running out. That was our problem in 1944, Diane. Those of us who had survived so far. We were sure it was only a matter of time. Our luck was on a two-track race with the war.

  “Don’t be daft,” I said as Sarah’s words registered. “If you die, it’ll be sad anyway whether you celebrated or not. And of course you’ll have another birthday. Lots of birthdays. We must be getting to the end now. All we have to do is hang on. Maybe a few more months. Everyone is saying Hitler is running out of options. Look at what we’ve done to his cities. And we’ve driven them out of North Africa. It can’t be much longer now.”