Riptide

§ 11

Claridge’s put Cal on the sixth floor-a large, comfortable room-table, chairs and a small sofa at one end, a big bed at the other, and its own bathroom. And all for four dollars a day. The window gave a good view of the western sky and, if the building opposite had been a tad lower, a better view across Grosvenor Square to Hyde Park. He could see a barrage balloon floating serenely over the square. Cal dumped his suitcase-in the absence of able-bodied bellhops (there’d been dozens last time, all in little red waistcoats, now all in khaki, he assumed) he’d lugged his own bags-and threw open a window. It was May 10^th-it wasn’t exactly summer, it wasn’t even spring, it was plain chilly, but he wanted air, fresh and cool. There was a full moon in heaven tonight-he rather thought this was what the English meant by a bomber’s moon. He’d no clear idea of what to expect in an air raid, but he found out soon enough.

He’d kicked off his shoes, thrown his jacket across the room and lain back on the bed. He was too tired to sleep, besides, the London air carried a whisper of anticipation on its wings. Forty-five minutes later he heard the wail of the air-raid sirens. He slipped on his jacket, grabbed his shoes and stepped into the corridor. He’d read about this. Wasn’t this where everyone headed for the cellar until it was all over? Sang songs and drank sweet tea?

A maid was dashing along outside his door. He caught her.

‘What happens now?’ he said.

She stared at him. ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t follow…’

‘I mean do we all get directed to the shelter?’

‘Well… if you like… I can do that… but most people don’t bother.’

‘What do they do, then?’

‘Well, sir, the women mostly put in earplugs and go to bed, and the men use it as an excuse to gather on the ground floor and play pontoon and drink half the night.’

Cal had no idea what to do now. He hadn’t brought any earplugs and he’d never played pontoon.

‘Is it safe up here?’

‘God knows, sir. It’s a modern building. Steel ribs an’ all. But if Jerry’s got your name on a bomb, well, goodnight Vienna. Look-you’ll be as safe here as anywhere. Just don’t use the lifts, eh? Takes an age to get people out of lifts if the electric goes off.’

She continued her dash and vanished down a rabbit hole. Cal put on his shoes and looked around for the stairs. It might at least make sense to find the shelter. He pushed open a swing door at the end of the corridor. The wallpaper and the wooden moulding vanished and he found himself in a shaft of concrete stairs, painted walls and steel railings, looking down the pit. He looked up. A glint of moonlight. There must be a door or a window up there. He climbed the stairs.

The door to the roof was open. He stepped out. A voice cried, ‘Shut the goddam door! Don’t want the whole goddam world to follow you up here, do you?’

A short, bald man sat on a folding canvas chair. A US Army greatcoat draped over his shoulders. Striped flannelette pyjamas and slippers peeking out from under it. On his shoulders two stars glinting in the light of the full moon. It was General Gelbroaster-General William Tecumseh Sherman Gelbroaster. In his mouth was an unlit cigar of a length to make Winston S. Churchill jealous, and across his knees a rifle of a length to make William F. Cody jealous.

Gelbroaster scanned the skies.

‘You ever shoot buffalo, boy?’

‘No, sir. A few ducks in the Ozarks. Nothing bigger than that.’

‘I shot buffalo. When we had buffalo to shoot, that is. My daddy took me hunting with him the first time in ‘99. Nebraska. I was fourteen. Gave me this gun when I was sixteen.’

He paused, hoisted the gun and drew a bead on some imaginary object in the sky.

‘How far up do you reckon these Nazis are?’

‘I really don’t know, sir. Ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand feet.’

Gelbroaster kept the gun tucked into his shoulder, his cheek along the stock, his finger delicately wrapped around the trigger.

‘This gun’ll fire a bullet more’n half a mile. What’s that come to in feet?’

‘About three thousand.’

Gelbroaster lowered the rifle.

‘Damn. Damn damn damn!’

He looked straight at Cal for the first time.

‘Have we met?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Washington?’

‘Zurich, sir. Captain Cormack. Zurich consulate.’

‘Cormack?’ he looked Cal up and down. It felt to Cal like am inspection.

‘You old Senator Cormack’s grandson?’

‘Yessir.’

That dated the general as far as Cal was concerned. A younger man, a man under fifty, would have been much more likely to ask if he were Congressman Cormack’s son. His grandfather had retired in 1922.

‘You new in town?’

‘Got in less than two hours ago, sir. As a matter of fact, you sent for me.’

‘I did? Well, I’m sure I had a reason.’

He chose not to remember the reason and scanned the night sky once more.

“Three thousand feet, you say? I’m never gonna get to hit one, am I?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Pity. In the last war I got three German biplanes over France. I was a young sharpshooter in those days. Took a shot at Von Richthofen, tore a piece out of his fuselage, but I couldn’t bring him

In the ear of the mind Cal heard Reggie’s voice telling him to remember the Lusitania.

‘Perhaps, sir, you should wait for the declaration of War?’

Gelbroaster considered this.

‘That’s a technicality, son. We haven’t declared war, that’s just a matter of time. But we’re here. And there’s a war on. Seems a mite unfriendly to our hosts not to lend a hand. If you’re invited to a neighbour’s house for dinner and the kitchen goes up in a whole mess of burning chicken fat, you help out with the buckets, don’t you? Of course we could cut and run, like Joe Kennedy did. Moved his wife and kids out of London when the first bombs fell, got himself recalled at the first opportunity, and told all America that England was done for. Or we could stay and fight. Which is it to be? You a runner or a fighter?’

‘I’m a fighter, sir. But as we’ve only the one gun between us I’d be happy to load for you.’

Gelbroaster rose up. Five foot eight inches of pure belligerence. No fool like an old fool. He pointed the gun skyward. Cal heard a whispered ‘Geronimo’ and then the boom of the gun ringing out like a hand-held howitzer.

‘Sonsovbitches,’ Gelbroaster said softly, and slipped the rifle into the crook of his arm. ‘Glad to have you aboard, son,’ he said to Cal, patted him on one shoulder and set off to the roof door.

The whine grew and grew. Cal had heard it the second the report of Gelbroaster’s shot had died away. Still it grew. Stopped Gelbroaster in his tracks. He turned. They stared up. A German bomber bursting red and yellow flames-a billowing trail of black smoke-spiralling out of control, spinning down to earth somewhere in the region of Hyde Park. Then a huge, woolly ‘whumpff as the plane and its unspent payload of bombs exploded.

Gelbroaster looked at the gun. Incredulity fading fast. Looked out at the orange glow on the western skyline where the plane had crashed.

‘Maybe I’m younger’n I thought,’ he said wistfully, then, lungs full and spirits rallied, he bellowed to the heavens, ‘Root hog or die!’

Cal stayed. The bombers came in waves. He sat in Gelbroaster’s chair and watched the Blut und Eisen version of July 4^th light up the sky and shake the earth around him. Away in the south, London burnt fiercely. Closer to home he could see incendiaries bursting in buildings in the little streets of Mayfair, feel the weight of the near-misses as high explosives crashed around him. He felt oddly free from fear. The rational part of his mind told him that the next bomb after a near miss could well be a direct hit, and while the hotel was a relatively sound structure, ‘steel ribs an’ all’, he was in a most exposed position-and the rest of his mind overruled, in thrall to nothing more cerebral, nothing less visceral, than the thrill of it all.

Each part of the spectacle had its own colour. Ack-ack shells burst white in the night, little puffs of man-made cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky-and if they were close enough they showered shards of metal rain on to the streets below, adding atonal, clattering, tinkling music to the show. Tracer bullets fired by night-fighters shot across the sky, a dozen differing shades, like a pool rack dispersed by the cue ball, shooting red, shooting white, shooting green. Incendiaries burst blue and orange and then took on their hue from whatever they consumed. Oil and rubber burnt black. Wood burnt red and orange. And the searchlights roved like giant’s fingers, crossing and criss-crossing and reminding him pointlessly of the opening of every Twentieth Century Fox movie he’d ever seen.

It was the English’s own ack-ack drove him in. He watched a random pattern of shards hit the roof some thirty feet away, a hard rain, striking sparks, bouncing back, dancing like fireflies, racing towards him to stop only six or seven feet clear. He fell into bed in the small hours, curtains wide, to be woken by the light three hours later. For a moment he could not remember where he was. He had been dreaming of an Appalachian journey he had made with his father when he was ten, along the borders of Kentucky and the Carolinas, through the Cumberland Gap. He opened his eyes and could not place the cream walls and the chintzy furniture. Where were the knotty pine boards, the Shaker chairs? Then the smell focused him-cordite and burning, everything burning-paint, wood, rubber-and flakes of ash fluttering by his sixth-floor window. London burning.

He opened the windows and stretched out a hand. A wisp of ash landed on the palm of his hand, like catching an autumn leaf. It was paper, charred and weightless. The print still legible. The ghost of message and meaning. He blew gently on it as though on a dandelion head and watched it fragment to nothingness before his eyes, and as the tiny specks of grey wafted out over London he saw the city under a haze of ash, every breeze eddying by with the dust of a night’s destruction, and over in the south the orange glow of sunrise. Sunrise? In the south-west? London burning.

He dressed quickly, skipped bathing and shaving, and went out. It was as though he had wandered into the art gallery of the half-waking mind. At seven-thirty on a Sunday morning London was a hive of activity, men in blue, men in khaki, backs bent to shovels and piles of debris, half in and half out of the half-houses, twisting and wriggling through the ruins, seeking out the trapped, the living, the dying and the dead-wires and pipes bursting from the ground like the spilt entrails of a gored beast, pools of water sitting motionless upon the tarmac, curls of grey smoke rising up into the spring sky from the brickfields of flattened buildings, engines of pumping, engines of rescue, engines of demolition, all the machinery of antiwar-and it was as though Bosch had met Breughel, Bosch had met and merged with Avercamp, in the limitless vista of the busy human landscape, the hurly-burly of a gruesome-beautiful urban-pastoral.

He drifted across Mayfair, down Half Moon Street, southwards, across Piccadilly and the Royal Parks, eastwards, and found himself an hour later upon one of the Thames bridges. The one by the Houses of Parliament that led to the big hospital on the southern bank. He could not remember its name, if he ever knew it.

Parliament had been hit. It was smouldering and smoking fiercely. He wondered what the English felt. How would he feel if the Capitol had been blasted, the White House burnt? An Englishman told him. Just when he needed a native there was one ready to hand, drifting along the bridge from the opposite direction, pinstripe suit hastily pulled on over inch-stripe pyjamas-he could see the red and white flannelette sticking out from the cuffs, draped over sockless shoes like ludicrous spats. He too had neither washed nor shaved, and maybe not slept, he was eye-bleary and chin-fuzzy. He stared about him, another man in or out of the dream. He and Cal all but collided, back to back.

This city now doth, like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open to the fields and to the sky.

Cal took a stab at it. ‘Byron?’

‘Wordsworth. Upon Westminster Bridge. 1802. I don’t think he meant “open to the sky” to sound quite so vulnerable as it does today, what?’

‘I guess not,’ Cal replied.

‘You’re an American?’

‘I’m not wearing the uniform for fancy dress.’

‘Eh? What? No. I mean, yes. Of course not. Sorry, there are so many uniforms in London these days. ARP, Home Guard, Heavy Rescue, Free French, Free Poles…’

‘Free Americans?’

‘Are you?’

‘Just a joke,’ said Cal.

‘No but seriously, are you?’

‘Am I what?’

‘Here. I mean here to fight? “Lafayette nous sommes ici” and all that… whatever it was Pershing said?’

Cal was astounded by the question. Did he think America had quietly and unobtrusively declared war on Germany? What answer did the man want? That he’d seen Gelbroaster unilaterally declare war only last night? That the rest of the nation might take a while to catch up with an old lunatic from Arkansas? Who would believe him? Or was he, a sockless civilian in jimjams, giving Cal, a man in uniform, the white feather? Was age-a man of fifty-five or so addressing a man of twenty-nine-was age the gulf between them, rather than nationality?

‘I’m with the embassy,’ he said, and knew it sounded like a cop-out, a truly lame remark.

‘The embassy?’

He paused, looked about him.

‘I see,’ he said, with no sense arising in Cal that he saw anything but the devastation of the Mother of Parliaments that was bringing tears to the corner of each eye. He brushed them away and without looking at Cal said, ‘You will excuse me, won’t you,’ and walked slowly back the way he had come, towards the great orange haze south of the Thames, the false dawn of conflagration. London Burning.