Noonday

TWENTY-ONE

After the first few hours you lost track of time. He thought it was about three in the morning, but he couldn’t see his watch. In the doorway of a building opposite, a group of people, bombed out of a church basement, was waiting to be found space in other shelters. The usual purgatorial shadows. One of them, a woman, detached herself from the rest and gestured to him to come closer. He crunched towards her over broken glass. She pointed to a house farther down the street, the house she lived in — what was left of it. Her mouth was so caked with dust she had to moisten her lips several times before she could make herself understood. “There’s somebody still on the top floor.”

Brian Temple joined him and peered up at the house. “Well, whoever it is they’re a goner.” He was pointing to the side of the roof that had caved in. “If there is anybody.”

“She seems pretty definite.”

Charlie nodded. “Don’t see how we can ignore it.”

“I bloody do,” Brian said. “I’m sick to death of wild goose chases.”

“We’ll just have a look, right?”

They fetched a stretcher from the back of an ambulance and pushed the front door open. “Rescue-squad job, this,” Brian said. Charlie ignored him. He began creeping up the unlit stairs, testing every tread to make sure it would bear his weight. Brian was probably right, but then every available rescue squad had been called to Malet Street, where a bomb had fallen on a hostel. And the building seemed stable enough, nowhere near as bad as the houses on either side. At intervals, Charlie held up his hand and they stopped to listen. Creaks, an occasional louder crack, the grumbling of an injured building.

“I don’t think there’s anybody here,” Charlie said.

But then, on the third landing, they heard a groan and realized it was coming from a room above the attic stairs. These were narrow, room for only one person, and so steep it would be more like climbing a ladder. Charlie gestured to the others to stay back. Halfway up, there was a bend, and there he had to stop: a beam had fallen across the staircase, leaving only the narrowest of apertures. He shone his torch down onto their faces. “So who’s the thinnest?” This was a joke. He was grinning at Paul.

Right. Paul took off his coat and helmet, lay down, poked his head under the beam and started pushing with his heels, wriggling into the airless tunnel, inch by painful inch — a bit like being born but in reverse. Once, he got stuck and called back, “This isn’t going to work,” but then Charlie gave his backside a tremendous shove, his left shoulder broke through and he found extra space. Burrowing into the dusty darkness, mouth and nostrils choked with dust, eyes smarting, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on, but then, unexpectedly, he felt cool air on his face and neck and guessed the room beyond was open to the sky.

At least, now, he could see, and what he saw, when he finally managed to crawl into the room, was a woman with her nightdress rucked up to her thighs, lying across a mound of rubble. One leg was dark, covered in dried blood, the other fish-white. He couldn’t see her face or upper body, but the size of the thighs alone told him she was heavy, quite possibly a dead weight. She wasn’t moving. He tried not to hope she was dead. Dead, she could wait till morning. Alive, she was a nightmare.

As he’d thought, the roof was open to the sky. Searchlights probing banks of cloud cast a shifting light across the debris. Table, more or less intact — she must have been sheltering under that when the ceiling came in — bed broken, chair smashed, sink smashed, chamber pot mysteriously intact — and feathers everywhere. A blizzard of feathers. Bright orange flashes — three as he watched — lit up the room, each accompanied by the thud of high explosive. The walls shook. A saucepan skittered across the floor and came to rest by the sink.

Still not knowing if she was alive or conscious, he started saying the usual comforting words. “Don’t worry, love, we’ll soon have you out.” Reaching her ankle, he thought he detected warmth. Not much, but then for God knows how long she’d been lying in a room open to the sky. He crawled along her side till he was level with her shoulders and felt for a pulse in her neck. Irregular, but no mistaking it — she was alive. He tried to assess how badly injured she was, calling out to Charlie on the stairs that he thought she might have broken her leg. He didn’t like the angle of that knee.

Her eyes flickered open. “Hello, love,” he said. “Well, this is a right pickle, isn’t it?” A moan from the white-crusted lips. “Do you think you can stand?”

Before she could answer, a lump of plaster fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing his head. “Fucking hell.”

Charlie from the stairs: “You all right?”

“Never better.”

“We’re going to have to dig you out.”

They’d never get her down the stairs, not without moving that beam. Lying flat on his back, he stared through the hole in the roof. Flares blossomed and faded, each casting a trembling light across the floor. He listened to the sounds of scuffling and scraping on the stairs, then, propping himself up on his elbow, found himself gazing straight into her eyes. Christ, she was sweating, a slippery, cold sheen bringing with it the stench of fear and pain. “Not long now, love. They’ve just gone to get the shovels, they’ll have us out in no time.” No response. “I’m Paul. What’s your name?”

“Bertha.”

Was it her? My God, it was. He remembered her labored breathing as she climbed onto the platform, and thought: She’s not going to last.

A few minutes later came a renewed scrabbling on the stairs and Charlie’s hand appeared, waving a bottle of water. Paul crawled across to get it, and trickled some into her open mouth until she choked and turned her head away. Then he moistened his own lips. He’d have liked to take a good swig but he didn’t know how long he’d have to make the bottle last. He could hear shovels now, digging into the rubble. By rights, they should have left the building and waited for a rescue squad, but he knew they wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t rest till they got her out.

Bertha lay motionless, her eyes closed, breathing through her open mouth. He’d wriggled into the narrow space between her and the wall and now lay pressed against her vast bulk. The film of sweat between his body and hers was acutely unpleasant. In the circumstances they were in, that shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. He tried to ease himself away from her, but there was no room, and whenever he moved she groaned.

“Yeah, I know,” a man’s voice said. “She turns my stomach too — all that lard.”

Paul froze, then made himself turn towards the voice. She looked different. Where before, there’d been only double chins and flabby cheeks, there was now the suggestion of a jaw. How could anybody change physically, like that?

“So, you know, go easy on her.” The voice was beginning to slur into silence. “She’s a poor beggar.”

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 divides 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.