Charlie’s voice from the stairs. “Paul, that you?”
So he’d heard it too. “Yes, don’t worry, it’s all right.”
Paul struggled to sit up, to free himself from the slime of sweat. Looking down at the fat, pallid face, he was inclined to doubt the evidence of his ears. His eyes. She seemed to be unconscious. He pushed up one eyelid, even shone the torch into her eyes, but there was no response.
“Paul, you still in there?” Brian this time.
“No, I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“Don’t worry, mate. Soon have you out.”
It was what they said over and over again to people who were injured or trapped, only now they were saying it to him. He’d become a victim, no longer one of the team.
“You OK? Only we thought—”
“Fine!” he shouted back. Easier to say that than try to explain what he didn’t understand anyway. More questions; ignoring them, he turned back to her. Her lips moved, but the voice was, once again, not hers. Even in this hot, stuffy darkness, he was drenched in a cold sweat, his own this time. It was a relief when she fell silent.
It took nearly an hour of heaving and shoveling to clear the stairs. They were almost through when a rescue squad arrived and tried to take over. A row broke out as to why the wardens were in the building at all. Paul heard a squeaky, querulous voice laying down the law, or trying to, then Charlie: “You can go fuck yourself, mate, we’re not budging.”
All this time, Paul had been listening to a constant trickle of plaster dust, the minute creaks and rustles and sudden heart-stopping lurches as the stricken building shifted its center of gravity. Another bottle of water was passed through. He gave some to her, relieved when she seemed to be swallowing, before taking several huge swigs himself. Grit everywhere: between his teeth, in his nostrils, in his eyes. He seemed to be breathing dust. A voice from the past: a doctor he’d consulted a few years ago in Harley Street, after one particularly bad winter. “You have to take better care of your chest. Have you thought of spending the winter abroad?” He was laughing, still laughing when Charlie’s head appeared, level with the floor. “Glad you think it’s funny, mate.”
Paul could cheerfully have kissed him. Charlie inched forward, pressing down hard with his hands before trusting his weight to another foot of sagging floor. When, finally, he reached Paul, he clapped him on the shoulder, then looked down incredulously at the prone woman. “By heck, the size of her.” He was whispering, but the sound registered on her face.
“Do you think we can get her down?” Paul asked.
“Bloody got to, mate. Can’t leave her here.”
“Get some of the others?”
Charlie shook his head. “Floor won’t take it.” He crawled round to Bertha’s other side and wiggled his hands underneath her till his fingers were clasping Paul’s in a desperate, painful grip. “Right. Count of three.”
As soon as they tried to move her, she started to moan but also, embarrassingly, to apologize. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault, love,” Charlie said. “Blame Hitler.”
Finally, they managed to drag her farther away from the wall. Paul got behind her, put his hands under her armpits and heaved her into a semi-upright position, aware, but in a totally detached way, that at one point they formed a perfect, if grotesque, pietà. Then they half dragged, half carried her across the floor, and lowered her through what remained of the doorway into Brian’s waiting arms. Still, in between screams and moans, she kept apologizing for her weight. “I’m sorry, I’m so heavy,” she said. “I can’t help it, I hardly eat a thing.” “Sure you don’t, love,” Brian said. He’d make a joke of it later, but he was tender with her now.
At last, the top of her head disappeared into the darkness and they were able to stand up. Charlie indicated to Paul that he should go down the stairs first.
“No, you go.”
Left alone, he took a last look round the room at the detritus of poverty and squalor that had once been a home, then turned and followed Charlie down the stairs.
Then things began to move quickly. Bertha was heaved onto a stretcher and carried downstairs, not easily—it took four men, and even then they grunted and strained. Mercifully, she’d stopped apologizing and lay with her eyes closed, unconscious or dead. Behind them, Charlie was still arguing with the man with the squeaky voice. In the end he simply turned his back and walked away. “Bloody little Hitler.”
Outside, fire hoses snaked across the street and pools of black water reflected the sullen, red glare in the sky. Paul followed the stretcher across to the ambulance. He recognized Neville’s bull-necked shape as he jumped down from the cab and came round to open the door. They exchanged a few words; terse, impersonal. At the last moment, Paul turned back. “Where you taking her?”
“Guy’s.”
Paul raised a hand in acknowledgment, splashing through a puddle of stinking water on his way to rejoin the team.
—
THE ALL CLEAR went just after five o’clock. Back at the depot, they stared into thick white cups of dark orange tea and found little to say. Paul tried to look back over the events of the night, but everything before Bertha and after Bertha was a blur. Of course everything would be carefully timed and tabulated in the incident log, but it certainly wasn’t tabulated in his brain.
After a few minutes, Charlie stirred and stretched his legs. “You know what the Chinese say, don’t you?”
“No,” Paul said, obligingly. “What do the Chinese say?”
“If you save somebody’s life it belongs to you. I mean, like you become responsible for that person. Mind, I think it might just be if you stop them killing themselves, I’m not sure. But it’s not a very nice thought, is it, when you think of some of the people we’ve saved? I mean, that poor old bugger pissing in a bag, imagine having him around for the rest of your life.”
“He was all right,” Brian said. “Happy as Larry. No, the one that’d worry me is that woman tonight. God, the size of her. And she’d pissed herself.”
“I’ve met her before,” Paul said. “She’s a medium.”
“Is she?” Charlie said. “Me mam was a great one for the spuggies. Couldn’t see anything in it meself.” He looked up. “Ah, here they are. We thought you’d got lost.”
Walter came towards them, rubbing his hands, his cheeks purplish with cold. “By heck, it’s nippy out there.”
Paul finished his tea. He didn’t fancy going round to the van for pasties with the others. The ambulance drivers went to the same van and he didn’t much fancy bumping into Elinor’s friends. Outside, he stood on the pavement taking in deep gulps of air. Alive. It wasn’t so much a thought as a pulse that throbbed in every vein in his body. His heart was beating so hard he could see the quiver in his fingertips. A voice hailed him: Sandra. Had she been waiting for him? The thought that perhaps she had, produced more throbbing, but farther down.
“Bad night?” she asked.
“So-so. How about you?”
She shrugged. “All right.”
People were watching them. He saw Charlie and Brian exchange a sly grin, then look away, but he didn’t care. His previous—very minor—infidelities had been conducted with iron discretion, but not this one. Part of the feeling of being outside time was that nothing seemed to matter very much. Nothing he said or did now would have consequences. If he’d stopped to think about it, even for a second, he’d have known at once it wasn’t true, but he felt it to be true.
So they linked arms and walked the few hundred yards to his studio. Neither of them said very much. He was amazed by the new day, intensely aware of all those for whom it had never dawned: the dead, lined up on mortuary slabs or lying, still unrecovered, under mountains of rubble. He felt their bewilderment, the pain of truncated lives. So what right did he have to despise Mrs. Mason, her ignorance, her superstition, when in his own experience he knew how porous was the membrane that divide
s the living from the dead?
Leading the way up to his studio, he remembered the stairs to Bertha Mason’s room, the moment when he’d realized he couldn’t move, that in all probability he was going to die there, without dignity, without purpose, like a fox in a stopped earth, and the minute he unlocked the door he turned and caught Sandra in his arms, his mouth groping for hers. They fell onto the rumpled divan and there the long night ended, in kisses and cries and, finally, at last, at long last, sleep.
TWENTY-TWO
He couldn’t get her out of his head.
Not Sandra; he’d loved every minute of their time together, but after she’d put on her clothes and gone home, he scarcely thought of her. No, it was Bertha Mason he couldn’t forget. Bertha, on the table, blank-eyed, fag end stuck to her bottom lip; Bertha, on the platform, whirling black silk bloomers around above her head; Bertha, in his arms, piss dripping down her legs and forming a puddle on the floor. And that voice: the voice in the darkness that couldn’t have been hers, and couldn’t not have been hers. There she was: old, fat, mad, quite possibly dying—utterly repulsive—and he couldn’t forget her.
You know what the Chinese say, don’t you?
Perhaps Charlie’s remark about becoming responsible for the life you save was preying on his mind. Whatever the reason, he knew he had to see her again. She might, of course, be dead by now, or she could have been discharged from hospital, sent to some hostel for people made homeless by the bombing, but on the whole he didn’t think so. She’d been in too bad a state for that. No, with any luck she’d still be in Guy’s. If she was alive.
Arriving at the hospital in the late afternoon, he was directed to the third floor. Grim corridors, no natural light, though great efforts were being made to cheer things up: there was even a vase of flowers on a table at the center of the ward. A nurse pointed to a screened-off bed at the far end. Pushing the screen slightly to one side, he saw Bertha sitting up in bed with her head bandaged, looking like a huge, abandoned baby.
“Hello, Mrs. Mason. How are you?”
He’d brought some flowers from the garden of his ruined home: bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, past their best. He couldn’t see a vase to put them in, so simply laid them at the foot of her bed, where their graveyard smell quickly spread and filled the small space inside the screens.
At first glance, he thought she looked better than he’d expected: she’d lost that lard-white color; but when he looked more closely, he realized the redness of her cheeks and chin was anything but healthy. He touched her hand—shaking it seemed too formal—and found her flesh hot and clammy. He said, “I don’t know if you remember me, I was one of the—”
“Yes, hello.”
He could tell she wasn’t sure. “I was in the room with you the other night. After the bomb.”
Her eyes widened. “So you were. You asked me what I was frightened of.”
He couldn’t remember asking her that. In fact, he was sure he hadn’t. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said to injured people in an air raid.
“People think, oh, she knows a lot about the afterlife, she believes in it, so what’s she got to be frightened of? If they knew what it’s like down there at the moment they’d be bloody frightened. Bedlam, bloody bedlam. People running round in circles, half of ’em don’t even know they’ve passed.”
She’d said that the first time he’d met her, only now it made more of an impression. She must’ve received a Christian education—of some kind—and yet she’d ended up with a view of the afterlife hardly distinguishable from Homer’s. Shades, shadows; people who’d rather have life on any terms than endure the insubstantial misery of the underworld.
“They haven’t been,” she said.
“Who haven’t?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Lowe. You know, from the Temple?”
The Temple, he supposed, must be the pawnbroker’s. “They probably don’t know where you are.”
“They didn’t come to see me when I was in the nick either, they knew where I was then.” She was making curious mumbling motions with her lips: chewing a vile and bitter cud. “Howard didn’t come either, said he was ill, I knew he wasn’t, he was with his fancy woman.”
“Howard’s your husband?”
“I wasn’t supposed to know about her, but I did, of course, there’s always some kind person’ll tell you.” She looked at him, and her eyes were suddenly sharp. “Won’t be long before somebody tells your wife about you.”
“Is there anything I can get you?”
“No, I’ve got everything I want, thank you. Peace and quiet, that’s all any of us really want, isn’t it?”
Paul stood up at once.
“No, not you. Him.”
He glanced round. “Who?”
She was looking at the chair on the other side of the bed, although her eyes seemed to be focused not on the chair itself but on its occupant. Only there was nobody there.
“Is it Howard?”
“ ’Course it bloody isn’t. Bugger never bloody come when he was alive, he’s not gunna show up now, is he? No, it’s that fella, he keeps coming round, Payne, whatever he calls himself. Telling me what I should and shouldn’t say—only it’s not me saying it—it’s Albert—and I just can’t get him to see.” She was staring at the chair, pleading, justifying herself.
“Why don’t you get Albert to talk to him? Well, he’d understand then, wouldn’t he?” She didn’t seem to have heard. “Is he here now? Albert?”
“God only knows, he’s a law unto himself. I’m fed up with it.” She lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes.
Paul glanced round again, thinking: I should go, but somehow he couldn’t just walk out and leave her here like this. He looked again and saw her face was changing: the jaw becoming firmer, the brow ridges more prominent. How could she do that? She couldn’t, of course. Nobody could. But then how did she change the way he saw her?
Albert’s voice: “I’m here all the time, it just doesn’t register; to be honest, not a lot does register, these days. You should see the amount of gin she gets through.”
“She’s not well, is she?” Paul wondered if he was doing the right thing, going along with the pretense—if pretense it was. But he didn’t know what else to do. “She’s not a good color.”
“She’s a goner, if you ask me.”
“Is she really that bad?”
“You’ve only got to look at her.”
Paul nodded towards the empty chair. “Does he really exist?”
“Oh God yes, he’s the one got her put inside—and he’s been nosing around again. Told her she could be tried as a witch, scared the shit out of her. She couldn’t face prison again, nearly killed her last time.”
In the seance a great deal had been made of Albert’s long service on the Western Front, his officer status, but this was a music-hall version of an upper-class accent, and even that was slipping fast. “You know, I met her in Russell Square once.”
“I remember. We’re not all sozzled on gin.”
“She told me there was a boy standing behind me.”
“Well, there is, isn’t there?” Albert sounded bored. “I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know he’s there.”
His voice had begun to slur, vowel sounds elongating until the words became incomprehensible. Paul watched Bertha’s face become puddingy again, a doughy, undifferentiated mass in which once-pretty features were submerged in fat. It had never struck him before, but now he thought that in her youth she must have been beautiful. Was she asleep? She was breathing noisily through her open mouth, her eyes half closed, the whites unnervingly visible.
He could do nothing for her, neither save her life nor wrest her back to sanity. Indeed, the longer he stayed with her the more his own grip on reality would slacken. Reaching an abrupt decision, he stood up and retrieved his hat from the foot of her bed. Yet, even now, he lingered. Suddenly he became aware that in the last few minutes he’d unconsciously changed the rhythm of his b
reathing until it exactly matched hers.
Quickly then, he turned on his heel and walked out.
—
BERTHA LISTENED TO the footsteps dying away into the darkness. Somebody had been there, just now—they’d brought flowers—but she couldn’t remember who. Be glad to get out of this place. Talk about haunted, she’d never in her life experienced such a cluster of unquiet spirits. Now that was a point. Why did they cluster? Something to do with the place, the actual building? Had to be—unless, of course, they recognized a sensitive and were crowding round her. But no, that couldn’t be true, the night sister said they’d been here years.
Bertha had been surprised when she was on the toilet wrestling with constipation. The door was thrown open without so much as a by-your-leave and a woman came in wearing the dated uniform of a nursing sister in the last war. “Hurry up, now,” she’d said. “We haven’t got all day.” She’d been talking to somebody at the sink, totally oblivious to her, Bertha, sat there, needing a bit of privacy.
There was a child as well, a boy who came in and out of a wall where a door had once been. You could see the outline of the door under the paint. She felt sorry for him, he looked so lost, as did the young man in Victorian dress who sat with his back to the wall in the main corridor, sobbing his heart out, poor soul. She’d have helped them if she could, but they just stared through her. The spirits who came to her in seances—manifested—bloody Howard—wanted to make contact. These ones didn’t even know she was there.
The trouble was, she saw them all the time, whereas other people just caught glimpses now and then—the majority, not even that. Though she had once seen a doctor step aside to avoid the small boy as he came through the wall, and she’d thought: You don’t even know you did that. But he had, he’d stepped aside.
Payne was back. She thought it might actually be Payne this time, though she hadn’t heard him come in. On the other hand, she had been dozing, on and off, all day—she could easily have missed him. He was—well, not exactly talking, but words formed in her mind. On and on he bloody went. The school: how did she know how many people had died? Every bugger knows, she said. Just ’cos you say something’s secret doesn’t mean it is. And the boy-sailors on the Royal Oak, how did she know they were dead, when nobody had said the ship had been attacked? And the young men on the beaches of Dunkirk; the men she’d seen crawl out of funk holes in the trenches…“Oh, piss off and leave me alone.” She didn’t know whether she meant the spirits or him.