Noonday

TWENTY-NINE

The first call came just before one in the morning. Elinor had been lying on one of the sofas reading grubby, tattered magazines, unable to sleep, thinking about Paul, the look on his face, the way he’d walked off down the street. She’d known he’d stop at the corner and look back and she’d gone inside so he wouldn’t see her standing there. A petty power-play, a means of hurting, of establishing control: she and Paul had never carried on like that, and now they did. Sad. Her mouth was dry and stale; she was too tired to think straight. It was almost a relief when the telephones started to ring.

She was working with Dana Kresberg tonight. She liked Dana, and was rather intrigued by her. As an American, Dana could so easily have sat out these nights very comfortably in the Savoy; she could have gone out onto the balcony after dinner, with a number of American journalists, watching the night’s raid almost as if it were a firework display. And why not? This was not, after all, their war: or not yet. But Dana had chosen, instead, to become involved, to risk life and limb night after night, driving an ambulance through bombed and burning streets, and Elinor had never asked her why. Hatred of fascism? A love of adventure? Compassion for trapped and suffering people? An addiction to danger, perhaps? Everybody’s motives were a great mixture, but, unlike Londoners, Dana didn’t have the most basic motivation: defending your home. And that made her stand out in the team of drivers working out of the depot in Tottenham Court Road.

Dana’s great advantage was that she was outside the English class system. Elinor watched, with some amusement, as Dana negotiated its various ravines and rapids with the assurance of a sleepwalker. She even got on with Derek James, whose years as a taxi driver had given him an encyclopedic knowledge of London’s back streets, which was invaluable. But he had a chip on his shoulder. Well, it was more like a log, really. “Timber yard,” said Kit, whose public-school accent made him the preferred butt of Derek’s not-always-funny jokes. But Derek accepted Dana totally; was, in fact, almost mesmerized by her.

Tonight, though, Elinor and Dana were working together. Around about 12:45 a.m., their turn came. They grabbed their tin hats — very useful for shielding exposed wounds from plaster dust or putting out an incendiary, but almost certainly useless at protecting the brain from falling bricks — and pulled on the black greatcoats that reached to their ankles and impeded their movements much as a suit of cardboard armor might have done. It was Elinor’s turn to drive and that pleased her. She and Dana each thought the other drove like a lunatic, and possibly they were both right. But then, perhaps, in these conditions there was no other way to drive. Oncoming vehicles were mere pinpricks of light, little, piggy, red eyes looming out of the night. Crashes were frequent in the early part of the evening, before burning fires illuminated the streets. Dana kept ringing the bell, its clang-clang adding to the baying and yapping of antiaircraft guns. Elinor crouched over the wheel, peering through the windscreen for new craters that had not yet been marked by blue warning lights. Dust sifted in through the open windows and settled on their shoulders. More seriously, it formed a film over the windscreen, blurring what little vision they had. But even in this darkness, Elinor recognized the familiar streets. She was driving along the route she’d walked three hours before, turning the corner, now, into Bedford Square.

“This is it,” Dana said.

Elinor pulled up at the curb. They clambered down onto the road and started walking towards the scene of the incident. Two blue lights stood on the rubble-strewn pavement and the usual crowd had gathered. One house had been badly hit. The houses on either side were damaged, but they’d been empty, a warden told them. One belonged to an old couple who’d gone to stay with their married daughter in the country; the other to a middle-aged couple, but they definitely wouldn’t be in there, he knew for a fact they always went to the shelter. “It’s an old lady lives in that one. Two daughters and a—”

“Yes, I know,” Elinor said.

It was Dorothea Stanhope’s house. She knew the names of the younger women and the child, but in the stress of the moment they escaped her.

A handful of men was edging warily onto a scree of rubble. Nothing was visible of them but dark backs and bent shoulders; they were all hunched over as if that could protect them from falling ceilings. Elinor pushed to the front, trying to see what was going on. She noticed the mean, sneaky smell of domestic gas, mixed with the stench of high explosive. Paul said it was very like the stink of decomposing bodies on a battlefield, and she wondered what it did to him to smell that here. At home. In London. And then she thought: Bugger Paul. Everybody was coughing and covering their mouths. That smell got into your lungs, irritating the mucous membranes of nose and mouth, and then there was the fine dust that repeated blasts sent swirling invisibly into the air.

One of the men on the scree raised his hand, calling for silence. Everybody stood and listened, they hardly seemed to be breathing. Nothing. They started to look at each other, shoulders beginning to slump, but then it came again. Somebody inside the ruined house, from under the collapsed floors and ceilings, was crying out: a thin, reedy wail; an old woman’s voice, by the sound of it, although fear and weakness could make anybody sound old.

Work began again, with renewed vigor. Elinor and Dana ducked underneath the tape and stood on the opposite pavement from the wrecked house. Elinor looked at the bent backs of the men heaving away at the rubble; they were working more methodically now, loading buckets with bricks and lumps of fallen plaster, passing them down a chain. As one of them turned to hand a bucket on, she caught a glimpse of his face and recognized Kit. Somebody touched her arm. She turned and saw Violet, looking haggard, wisps of gray hair escaping from under her tin hat. The gutter was running with water from a burst main, turning plaster dust into a claggy paste that would set hard on every inch of exposed skin. “They’re alive,” Violet said. The tension of that knowledge, the need to work harder and faster, was in every face you saw. At intervals, the rescue-squad leader raised his hand and everybody stopped what they were doing and strained to listen. Violet was right: the frail voice under the rubble had been joined by other voices. One was crying: “My daughter, my baby, where is she?”—edging up into hysteria. They couldn’t afford to let it affect them. The hand fell and they got back to work. The burst water main had turned the road into a slick of slimy mud. A rescue-squad worker, running up to help, slipped and fell.

Bombers went on droning overhead, bursts of orange light obliterating the stars. The men were sawing through a beam that had fallen across a mound of rubble and was impeding progress. Another voice started up inside — not the child’s voice though — they hadn’t heard the child. It was impossible to go on doing nothing. Elinor ran across the road and, clambering up the lower slope, began to talk to the women inside. She felt rather than saw Kit turn at the sound of her voice. She was telling them they’d be all right, they’d soon have them out, no need to worry, not long now…It was what you always said, what you had to say, though in the time she’d been standing there no visible progress had been made. But at least they were alive, or the women were. “My baby, my poor baby,” the mother kept calling out, and the child’s name: Libby? Lizzie? No, Livvy, Livvy, that was it, she remembered now: the little girl was called Olivia. “Livvy, are you there? Where are you, Livvy?” And then again: “My baby, my poor baby.” On and on it went. Unbearable, you’d have said, except that they all bore it.

“All right, love, we’re getting there,” the rescue-squad leader called out. “Not long now.”

Once the beam was out of the way, they were able to start tunneling into the rubble, but it was slow, arduous work since the tunnel had to be shored up and made safe every few yards or so. Elinor thought — she couldn’t be sure — that the rescue workers had managed to pass bottles of water through a gap. If true, it might help the women go on a bit longer, but there was so much rubble to shift, tons of it, she didn’t see how the old woman could possibly survive the night.

At one point, she and Dana were sent to answer another call. One incident led to another, through the long hours of darkness — she could never afterwards remember the precise sequence of events — though there were flashes of acute clarity. Her and Dana leaning against the ambulance, shoulders shaking, bent double, laughing till they whooped for breath. And the joke? They’d been asked to deliver four bodies to a mortuary, but when they got there — after rather a difficult journey — the attendant refused to take them: no death certificates. Off they went to the nearest hospital, where an exhausted doctor who’d been toiling all night in an overcrowded, badly lit basement flatly refused to stop work and sign death certificates for corpses that were nothing to do with him. Back to the mortuary. “Not without a death certificate,” the angry little man insisted, trying to impose his own order on the chaos that was descending from the skies. “He’s going to have a heart attack,” Elinor said, as they left. “Oh I do hope so,” Dana replied. In the end, they appealed for help from a couple of passing air-raid wardens and unloaded the bodies in an alley that ran between two department stores. There they lay, lined up on the cobbles, at a decent distance from the dustbins. There was nothing to cover them with, but Elinor and Dana closed their eyes, and the wardens did the best they could to straighten their remaining limbs.

As she turned to go, Elinor was half embarrassed, half grateful to see one of the wardens do what she couldn’t do — cross himself and say a prayer.

Dana had stayed behind to thank the wardens. Elinor waited by the ambulance for her to come back, saw her shoulders shaking as she approached and reached out to comfort her, only to realize she was laughing. “What? What?” Elinor said. “ ‘Not without a death certificate.’ Oh my God, that is so funny.” Tears were streaming down her face, making rivulets in the beige dust.

By four in the morning, they were back outside the house in Bedford Square. Not long after their arrival, a bomb fell on the other side of the square and the buried women, hearing the crash and feeling the rubble above their heads begin to slide, screamed in shock and fear. Elinor half thought she’d cried out herself, only the bulge in her throat convinced her the cry was still trapped inside. A burst of flame from the fresh bomb site sent shadows fleeing across the square. A third rescue squad arrived, and then a fourth. Kit relinquished his place in the chain that was passing buckets of rubble from the tunnel to the pavement, and came and stood beside her. “Who’s in there?” he asked. “Do you know?”

“Dorothea Stanhope. Do you remember, her husband was viceroy, no, he wasn’t viceroy, something like that…Daughter, daughter-in-law. And a little girl, the granddaughter.”

“How old?”

“Six.”

He said nothing, merely turned to stare at the rubble and the bent, laboring backs. There was nothing they could do now except wait for the rescue squad to break through and start pulling people out. The old woman’s cries were growing weaker, but the voices of the two younger women were still strong, and seemed — unless this was wishful thinking — to be getting louder. The chief rescue-squad leader held up his hand. “Careful. Slow down now.”

Elinor craned forward, as the workers paused. For a long moment nobody moved, but then the teams began inching forward again. A hole had opened at the center of the rubble and the two halves of the beam had been used to reinforce the sides. Then came another long, familiar, shrieking descent. The ground shook and a cataract of loose bricks and mortar cascaded down the sides of the slope. One of the rescue workers threw back his head and yelled, “FUCK YOU!” at the sky. Then he caught sight of Violet standing there. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t see you, love.” “Oh, please don’t apologize,” Violet said, in her daughter-of-the-vicarage accent. “My sentiments precisely.”

The old woman’s cries seemed to be getting louder again — either the rescue squad was getting closer or her own sense that help was at hand had renewed her strength. Perhaps, after all, she’d be the first one out. Suddenly, they all went quiet again. Men with sweat-streaked faces stopped and stared at each other, white eyes startling in their grimy faces. A child’s head had appeared through a hole in the rubble. Nobody moved. For a long time, it seemed, nobody moved. Then the rescue-squad leader fell to his knees and, placing his hands on either side of the head, gently persuaded it to rotate, so that first one shoulder then the other and then, in a great rush, the whole body fell out of the hole. Still, no cry. People looked at each other, unable to accept the truth, but the body was small and floppy and it made no sound.

Dana, one hand across her mouth, ran to fetch a stretcher. Elinor followed to help. Only when they returned, did they see the dead child lying on the pavement. They knelt on either side of her and, not looking at each other, prepared to lift her onto the stretcher. Nobody spoke. From inside the ruined building, a voice cried out: “Livvy? My baby. Oh, my baby.”

Neville looked down at the little body. “My daughter’s that age.” It sounded almost casual: the sort of remark you might make outside the school gates. Then, bending swiftly down, he gathered her into his arms and carried her to the ambulance.

The mother was brought out half an hour later, thickly coated in dust, bleeding from a deep cut to her head, but otherwise surprisingly uninjured. “My baby,” she kept saying. “Where’s my baby?” “Won’t be long now, love,” one of the rescue workers said. Elinor wrapped a blanket round her shoulders, thinking she and Dana should take her to hospital rather than let her travel in the back of Neville’s ambulance with her dead child. But Elinor didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what she would have wanted if this unimaginable pain had come to her. Neville took the decision for her. “You take the mother,” he said. “I’ll stay here.” He gripped the woman’s arm and helped her up the steps. “Come on, let’s get you to hospital.”

“But my daughter?”

“Don’t you worry, love. They’ll soon have her out.”

Wrapped in a red blanket, too shocked to argue, she sat down on the bench. Dana climbed in beside her and put an arm round her shoulders.

At the last moment she started to struggle, trying to throw off the blanket and jump down into the road. “I want Livvy.”

Dana restrained her. “I know, I know.”

—

THE ALL CLEAR sounded as it started to get light. The dawn wind, tainted by the smell of high explosive, brought with it the assurance they were still alive. The rescue workers breathed deeply once or twice, then got back to work.

Elinor and Dana, returning from the hospital, stood shivering against the garden railings, taking in, for the first time, the full extent of the devastation. In this thin light it looked worse than anything they’d imagined in the dark, and yet both knew that in a few days, a week at most, they might walk along this terrace and hardly notice the gap.

A warden came up and stood beside them, watching the rescue workers still passing chains of buckets down the line. He was sucking something, a boiled sweet, perhaps, or else just his gums. “It’s all very well saying Londoners can take it,” he said. “But can they? How much more of this can anybody take?”

It was the forbidden question; neither of them answered it.

The old woman was brought out an hour later, garrulous with shock, but unhurt. Her daughter, injured but alive, was pulled out a few minutes later.

“Where’s my granddaughter?” the old woman kept asking. She was still clutching her jewelry box, bright, acid-drop sunshine showing up the age spots on the backs of her hands. Dana tried to wrap a blanket round her thin shoulders, but she wasn’t having any of that. “Where’s my granddaughter?”

“She’ll be all right,” somebody said. “They’ve taken her to hospital.”

Dorothea obviously didn’t believe it. She stood looking from face to face. “I hope she didn’t suffer.”

Elinor said, “I think it would have been very quick.”

The old woman looked at her and nodded. Then she turned to her daughter, held out her hand and together the two of them climbed into the ambulance. Elinor got into the driver’s seat, checking with Dana that the two women were securely fastened in before bumping along the brick-strewn road in the direction of University College Hospital. There, she and Dana helped the two women into the entrance and handed them over to the porters, before walking out again into gritty sunshine and a song of birds.

Elinor stumbled as they walked back to the ambulance. As she reached up to open the door, Dana pushed her gently to one side. “My turn,” she said. “And I’ll drop you off.”

Standing on the pavement outside her new home, Elinor thought only about having a bath and falling into bed. Her skull seemed to have been rinsed in icy, bone-numbing water. She was incapable of thinking, or feeling, anything.