Noonday

THIRTY-FIVE

In Bloomsbury, Paul was having a quiet night. He’d played a game of darts, flipped through yesterday’s newspapers and then set out on patrol with Charlie. At the corner of Guilford Street, Charlie stopped to light a cigarette. Shaking the match, he gazed open-mouthed in the direction of the City. Billowing clouds of black smoke, showers of sparks whirled upwards, a broken skyline of buildings stark against furnace red. “By heck, they aren’t half copping it.”

Paul felt the first premonitory tweak of fear. Elinor could be in that. Would be, if she was on duty. Charlie threw away the match and they walked on, their footsteps echoing in the eerie silence. No guns now, no drone of bombers. The All Clear had sounded an hour ago, unusually early. “Don’t worry,” Brian had said. “They’ll be back.”

But they hadn’t been. Not yet. And all the time, over the City, that extravagant, melodramatic, stage-sunset grew and spread, and, with it, Paul’s fear.

Their patrol over, they decided to get a cup of tea and a pasty from the van in Malet Street. God only knew what was in the pasties — no substance previously known to mankind — but at least they were warm. Paul and Charlie joined the back of the queue, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers in a vain attempt to keep warm. Three or four places ahead of them, a woman was talking about an ambulance driver who’d been injured. “Weren’t there two of them?” another woman asked. And then a third voice: “Are you sure they were just injured? I heard they were dead.”

Elbowing people aside, Paul seized her arm. “Who?” He was shaking her. “Who?”

She stared at him, her mouth a scarlet gash in the drained pallor of her face. He tried to calm down. “It’s just, my wife’s an ambulance driver.” For some reason the word “wife” stuck in his throat; it sounded like the sort of thing somebody else would say, and that strangeness, the sudden unfamiliarity of the word, ratcheted up his fear.

“They didn’t say. Just two ambulance drivers had been injured, one of them a woman, that’s all I heard.”

She was lying — he’d just heard her say they were dead. Of course, it might be another woman — Dana or Violet — but somehow, from the very first moment, he knew it was Elinor.

Tearing himself out of Charlie’s restraining grip, he ran all the way to the depot in Tottenham Court Road and down two flights of stairs to the basement, which was deserted, except for three telephonists who fell silent as he entered. They looked nervously at each other. A middle-aged woman, who seemed to be the supervisor, came out of the office and stood in front of them. If he had any doubt, that dispelled it. He’d become somebody to be frightened of, as the bereaved always are.

“We can’t be certain, we really don’t know who it is.”

He could tell from the way her gaze slithered down his face that she did. “Where?”

“Wine Office Court, but it’s no use going there,” she called after him. “They’ll have taken them to Bart’s.”

She followed him into the corridor, shouting something about an ambulance in the yard, so he veered abruptly to the left, burst through the swing doors into the parking area at the back. Sure enough, there was an ambulance about to leave. He ran along beside it, banging with his clenched fist on the door. The vehicle slowed and an elderly man with pouches under his eyes peered down at him.

“Can you give me a lift? My wife works here. Elinor? They’ve taken her to Bart’s.”

To his own ears, he was gobbling, gabbling, not making any sense at all, but the man nodded. “Oh, yes, I know Elinor. Hop in.” As Paul settled into the co-driver’s seat, the man added, “I’m off to Bart’s anyway. They’re evacuating. We’ve all got to go.”

The journey was a blur. Paul leaned forward, willing the driver to go faster, as they bumped slowly along, occasionally swerving to avoid craters in the road. With every mile, after the first, the orange glare grew until the sky was every bit as bright as noon. Everywhere, fires were raging, many of them out of control. Paul couldn’t take it in, street after street burning. Only the details registered. Once, he looked down and saw a pigeon flapping about in the gutter with its wings on fire.

A hundred yards from the hospital entrance, the driver slowed to a crawl. Ambulances were queuing bumper to bumper all along the road. At first, Paul thought they might be delivering casualties, but then he saw that most of them were empty. They were here to evacuate the hospital. He reached for the door handle.

“Hang on,” the driver said. “I’ll try and get you a bit closer…”

“No, it’s OK, I’ll be all right.” Paul jumped into the road and raised his hand. “Thanks, mate.”

As he started running along the line of ambulances, the wind caught him, flattening his trousers against his legs. Looking down the hill, he saw a wall of fire advancing on the hospital — he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been evacuated already. The hot wind was snatching up bits of flaming debris and hurling them from one building to the next. At any moment, you felt, the hospital would be engulfed. Elinor. He had to find her and get her out, take her miles and miles away from here.

Inside the entrance, he stared wildly around him, until a passing nurse pointed towards the stairs. No lifts: the doors were all half open, frozen at the point the electricity had failed. He ran upstairs. No lights on the stairs, no lights in the corridor either, except for a couple of smoking oil lamps that signally failed to penetrate the gloom. He groped his way along, a hand on the wall. Nobody seemed to be trying to bring patients down, so evidently the evacuation hadn’t started yet.

Bursting through swing doors onto a ward, he was dazzled by the sudden blaze of light. Emergency generator? His brain had time to form the thought, before he realized the truth. The staff had simply thrown open the blinds to let in the light of the blazing City. Doctors, nurses, even surgeons were working in the glare of the firestorm that was roaring up the hill towards them.

Paul ran from bed to bed, thinking: No, this is wrong, it’s all wrong, she can’t be here. These patients had all been admitted, and he knew there wouldn’t have been time for that, but he couldn’t get anybody to answer his questions, they were all so busy, so intent, but then at last he stopped a porter who told him, “You want to be downstairs, mate. Casualty’s in the basement.”

So he skidded down two flights of stairs, along another corridor, and burst into a huge room, lit by dozens of oil lamps whose coils of brown smoke hung heavy on the air. Doors opened off to the left into smaller rooms; he could see beds, wheelchairs, tables, chairs, and torches held in gloved hands casting circles of light onto other gloved hands that were stitching wounds or applying dressings to burns.

Along one side of the main room, the injured were queuing for attention: white-faced, babbling, mute, shaking uncontrollably. The more seriously injured lay on trolleys in a corridor farther along, many still and silent, a few writhing with the pain of burns. One — an elderly woman with wispy gray hair and an open mouth — unmistakably dead.

He saw a warden he knew slightly near the back of the queue and asked him if he’d seen Elinor, but the man was too dazed to answer. Paul abandoned him, and began walking up the line, scanning every face, but there was no Elinor — and nobody else he knew to ask. At the head of the queue, he saw there was another smaller room: rows of benches crowded with people. He started walking along the rows, looking at face after face, panicked that when he saw her—if he saw her — he wouldn’t recognize her. He kept seeing the old woman on the trolley: the open mouth, the staring eyes. Part of him was convinced the corpse was Elinor. It had been nothing like her, and yet he had to stop himself running back to make sure.

Still another room opened off this one. Here, three rows of benches faced a blank wall; people sat staring vacantly into space, waiting for somebody to come and claim them. He heard his voice calling “Elinor?” over and over again. Perhaps there was an echo, because the walls seemed to bounce the name back at him: Elinor, Elinor.

And then he saw her, sitting at the end of a bench, looking straight ahead. “Elinor?” She seemed to have trouble focusing on him. “It’s me. Paul.” He knelt down and reached for her hands, but she pulled them back. “Are you all right?”

The question seemed to plop into a deep well. She glanced from side to side and moistened her lips. “They say I can go.”

Her face was gray; she had the hunched shoulders and anxious expression of smoke inhalation. She wasn’t fit to be turned out. He looked round, angrily, but so many of the injuries he saw were worse than hers. And of course with an evacuation imminent they’d be clearing out anybody who could walk. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

“Where’s Kit?”

“Were you working with him?”

She nodded.

“He’s fine. Queuing up outside, I think.”

He was thinking he might beg a lift from the ambulance driver who’d brought him here, if he could find him, but in the event he didn’t need to. A crowd of frustrated ambulance drivers had gathered outside the hospital entrance, and among them were Dana and Derek, who detached themselves from the group and came towards him. “Is she all right?” Dana asked.

“She’s alive.”

Until he heard himself say the word, he hadn’t known it was true, and immediately he was flooded with relief, but he still had to get her home.

“Don’t worry,” Dana said. “We’ll take you. If we can get out, that is.”

Paul helped Elinor into the back of the ambulance, then turned to look at Dana, who was waiting to close the door. He mouthed: Neville? Dana shrugged, but Derek, who was standing a few feet behind her, shook his head.

It took a great deal of reversing, and not a little shouting, before they were able to get out of the queue. Paul tried to persuade Elinor to lie on the bunk, but she said she couldn’t lie flat and so they sat, side by side, jolting and swaying as Dana swerved to avoid obstacles in the road. Lights flashed in the small windows and, once, there was a great clattering on the roof as more incendiaries fell — or perhaps it was just shrapnel from the ack-ack guns that seemed to have started up again, though Paul couldn’t remember hearing the sirens.

Nearer home, the orange glow in the windows faded to black, and he was glad of it. Not long after, the jolting and bumping stopped. Footsteps sounded along the side of the ambulance, then Dana opened the door and pulled down the steps. Paul helped Elinor down onto the black, glistening pavement. She looked around her, then up to the windows of her flat. Dana kissed her good-bye, Derek slapped Paul on the shoulder, and then the two of them set off to rejoin the queue outside Bart’s. Paul watched the red taillight diminishing into the dark, and the street seemed suddenly very quiet. The guns seemed to have stopped again, so probably it had been a false alarm.

Elinor was still looking up at the windows of her flat. There must have been times in the last few hours when she’d thought she wouldn’t see it again. Her hands were so cut and bruised he had to fish the keys out of her pockets while she stood holding her arms away from her body, as helpless as a small child.

He thought she might find the stairs difficult and got behind her to push, but she snapped: “It’s my hands, Paul. Not my feet.” A brief glimpse of the old Elinor that came as an enormous relief.

Once inside the flat he settled her onto the sofa, then went into the kitchen and filled the kettle for tea. He kept glancing through the open door. She was sitting hunched forward, though more upright perhaps than she had been in the hospital. Her hands were held straight out in front of her. When the kettle boiled, he added a generous dollop of brandy to the tea, and carried the mug through to her.

As she drank, he looked at her more closely. She had several cuts to her forehead, though none very deep. Her hands were worse than her face. He fetched a pillow and blankets from the bed, thinking, as he pulled the counterpane back, that he caught a whiff of Neville, but he couldn’t be sure and anyway it hardly mattered now. She snuggled into the blanket, but still wouldn’t lie down. She was sitting right on the edge of the sofa, trying now and then to flex her spine, but still with her shoulders rounded.

He kept assessing her, noticing symptoms in a completely detached way. At the same time, he was terrified of losing her, though he knew it wasn’t a rational fear. Most of this was shock. At times her eyes went completely blank. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, a thought was forming: that this helplessness of hers might be his opportunity. She needed him now; she’d have to take him back. Only then he looked up and caught her watching him. Not so fast. So she came and went: one moment, totally alert; the next, blank and limp.

“What happened?” he asked during one of her more alert spells. He knew she’d have to get it into words, probably tell the story over and over again, until its sting was drawn, but all he got back was a shrug. Too soon. So they sat in silence by the bluish light of the little popping gas fire until he thought he saw her eyelids start to droop. Then, just as she seemed about to drop off, she started awake again. “There were horses,” she said. “Galloping towards us. Their manes were on fire.”

Dray horses, they’d be. Probably shire horses, and they were huge. A brewery stables must have caught fire.

For a long time, it seemed that was all she was going to say. He warmed up a tin of soup, but she didn’t drink much of it. Her breathing seemed to be getting easier, though, and her color was definitely better. It might even be possible to get her to bed.

“I kept waving at him: Go back, go back.” She pushed her hands repeatedly against the air, and the movement brought on a fit of coughing. When it was over, she went on: “I could see the firemen were pulling out, but he didn’t seem to understand, he just kept coming, and then the wall came down and all I could see was smoke and…”

Silence, for a time. Did she know? Feeling his way forward, he asked: “Did you see him again?”

She shook her head. Then, obviously afraid of the answer, she asked, “Did Derek say anything?”

“No.”

“I hope he’s all right.”

Injecting scorn into his voice, he said: “ ’Course he’s all right! You know Neville — he’ll outlive God.”

She seemed willing to accept that, for the time being at least. He took the bowl and spoon from her. “You know, I think you’d be better off in bed.”

“Yes, I think I would.”

Leaning on his arm, she hobbled into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, while he knelt to take off her boots. She was shivering again, with shock or cold, so he got her under the blankets as fast as he could. It took several arrangements of all four pillows to get her comfortably propped up. “I’ll be next door if you need anything.” He hesitated. “You will call me, won’t you…?”

She nodded, without opening her eyes.

He went back into the living room, rolled up his overcoat to use as a pillow and stretched out on the sofa. It was too short for him, and lumpy besides — he doubted if he’d get much sleep. He closed his eyes, and saw shire horses galloping towards him with their manes on fire, as if the impossible had happened and the membrane dividing his brain from hers had become permeable. What lovers are supposed to want — except they weren’t lovers anymore.

Perhaps he’d nodded off, because it seemed only a second later that he felt a jogging at his elbow, and opened his eyes to find her bending over him.

“Oh for God’s sake, Paul, you can’t possibly sleep like that. Come on, get into bed…We are married, after all.”

That “married” was pure, unadulterated acid. Nevertheless, he got up and followed her.

Lying beside her on the bed he thought perhaps she’d drifted off to sleep, but then she said, “I keep seeing him walk towards me, you know that walk he has — and then that awful sound. It was like the building was screaming.” She turned her head and looked at him. “Why didn’t he go back?”

A long silence. He thought, hoped, she’d finished. So they lay, side by side, not speaking, not even looking at each other, while the long hours of darkness passed. He remembered the old couple on the bed, lying there as if they were stretched out on a tomb, with the silence spreading out around, while outside the fires raged and the bombs fell. How he’d pulled back the counterpane and found them holding hands. Elinor’s breathing was quieter now. Something of the tension had gone from her shoulders and neck. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. Perhaps he slept. Finally, towards dawn, he became aware that he was awake, and so was she. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I might get a little dog.”

“What?”

“Just a thought.”

He got out of bed and pulled the blackout curtains back. Sparrows were chirruping and fluttering in the gutters, there were footsteps and voices in the street below, a hum of traffic. Glancing back at the bed, he saw that Elinor was lying with one arm across her face. He waited a moment, hoping she’d take it away and look at him, but she didn’t. Then he pushed the windows open, as wide as they would go, letting in the clear, cold air of a new day.