Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 27

  “I’m unbelievably selfish,” she says to Jeremy, but he appears not to have heard her.

  “I work at the Triumph plant,” he says. “I’m training to be a motor mechanic.”

  At a time when the rest of the country faces massive unemployment, there is work to be found in vehicle production at Coventry. There are factories for the production of automobiles, Lancaster bombers, and tanks.

  “It’s what they’re coming for, isn’t it?” says Harriet. “All the factories. It’s why we’re being bombed.”

  The crying child will not shut up. The sobs are more frantic, quicker.

  “You make it sound as though it’s my fault,” says Jeremy.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  And then Harriet knows why the crying child is fraying her nerves. The noise of the sobs, their rhythm, reminds her of the ack-ack guns the Coventry defence is using tonight against the German bombers. Harriet can’t abide the noise of the guns, is glad she hasn’t been able to hear them over the noise of the bombing raid. The guns make her think of Owen, dying in that muddy field in Belgium.

  Harriet can’t bear to think of Owen. “Tell me about your job,” she says to Jeremy.

  “I’m apprenticing. And we only moved here this summer, before the raids started, so I haven’t been at it long.”

  “Tell me anyway,” says Harriet.

  Jeremy stretches his legs out. He has long legs, like Owen.

  “I’m learning about engines,” he says. “I’m learning how things work.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  Jeremy hesitates for a moment. “I like to think that an engine is a system, like a heart. The hoses are veins; the oil is blood. The engine valves are the valves of a heart, opening and closing, producing energy for the engine to run.”

  “What don’t you like about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There must be something,” says Harriet impatiently. The child’s cries seem to be increasing in volume with each breath it takes.

  “I suppose,” says Jeremy, “what I don’t like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine.”

  Just like us, thinks Harriet.

  Underneath the child’s crying there is a new sound, the low keen of someone moaning. Harriet can’t tell who is moaning, but it sounds as if it’s coming from the dark fold in the far corner of the room. Farther away, muffled, but still distinct, are the thuds of the bombs landing, the crash of buildings falling.

  I can’t stand this, she thinks, we could be buried alive, and when Jeremy says, “What?” she realizes that she has said it out loud.

  It amazes Harriet that she stayed in Coventry; though it wasn’t so much that she has stayed as that there never seemed a good time to leave. At first she couldn’t go because it was the last place she’d been with Owen. It had been their first place together—the small flat on Berkeley Road—and how could she leave those last traces of him that rivered through those rooms? Then she’d stayed for his family, but she and Owen hadn’t been married long enough for her to have become close to his parents, and after a few years they seemed to forget all about her. But by this time she had the job at the coal merchant’s and a routine to her days that brought her comfort. She bicycled to work, walked out to the shops at lunch, cooked herself an egg for dinner or a bit of mackerel or some potted meat on toast. And by this time she had begun her discovery of Coventry, had started to research the history and explore the city and surrounding countryside. She had become attached to a place where she’d never imagined living by imagining life there before her.

  At the library she discovered that Coventry was once part of a Roman road that went from Leicester to Mancetter. She spent a day walking up and down the old Roman riverbed of what had become Cox Street and wrote her description of it that evening.

  Water running underground sounds like a woman crying. People often mistake streams beneath their houses for ghosts. The land on which St. John’s Church is built is right where a lake used to be and the church is prone to flooding. There is a word I remember from my childhood—guzzle—a low, perhaps damp spot on an estuary or inland from a beach, as far inland sometimes as to be a field, where the sea can enter if it chooses. It is a place that is really a ghost, because it exists only under certain conditions, when water remembers where it has gone and what it has touched; when it imagines what shape it once filled and held. When it remembers who it used to be.

  There is a sudden crash and clatter, and a large metal object, smoke and dust spilling from it, skids to a stop at the bottom of the stone stairs.

  “It’s a bomb,” cries one of the men. “Don’t move.” And then, realizing as everyone in the shelter is realizing, that it is an unexploded bomb, he yells, “Get out. Get out before it goes off.”

  “Don’t panic,” says Jeremy to Harriet and then to the roomful of people.

  The bomb blocks the section of floor in front of the basement steps. The cylinder has been dented by the tumble down the church stairs. Harriet can see the crumple of metal in the muted light of the oil lamp and thinks she can hear a hissing coming from the interior of the bomb. She stands up slowly and treads carefully, pressing herself against the damp stone wall of the basement in order to get past it.

  She is one of the first to get out, to emerge into the cacophony of the city, which suddenly seems, absurdly, like a safe place. Jeremy is right behind her, and behind him follows the rest of the group. There is no explosion. The bomb must be defective or has simply refused to detonate on impact. No matter, everyone who was in the church basement disperses. In the shelter, they were in it together. In the chaos of the bombed city, they return to being strangers.

  For a moment Harriet thinks that Jeremy will leave, will scatter with the others, but he stays with her. And then she remembers that he doesn’t know how to find his way through the city without her.

  The air is so filled with dust it is hard to breathe. Harriet inhales and chokes. She can smell something strange, the odour of cooked meat. It is the smell of roasted pork. There must be a butcher shop burning nearby.

  Barrage balloons, huge and whalelike, are tethered just above the remaining roofs of the buildings. She hears the clang of fire engine bells but no engines. They must be stuck behind the rubble that is starting to crowd the streets.

  Wires are down and flames leap like dancers in the empty window frames of bombed shops. A river of fire runs down the street.

  “Look out!” yells a man near Harriet. “It’s from the dairy.”

  Harriet realizes that it’s a slick stream of burning butter. To her left is a crater with a double-decker bus in it.

  “Stay away from the buildings,” says Harriet. She has to yell to be heard above the noise of the bombing. “Stay with me.”

  They need to get out of the middle of Coventry. They have a better chance of survival on the smaller streets, the ones farther away from the centre of the city. Harriet reaches for Jeremy’s hand and they run, lungs full of smoke and dust, lungs full of the dead air of the city, down the middle of Bayley Street.

  The bombing shakes the ground so that the people fleeing through the streets stumble as though drunk. The trembling earth shifts them one way, and then another, and Harriet finds herself reaching out to steady herself on walls that are no longer standing. She falls in the street, picks herself up from the shaking ground, and falls again. Her leg is bruised. The combination of debris, noise, and the shaking ground makes her lose her bearings. The hot waves of air pull her hair straight back, push the air out of her lungs.

  She tightens her grip on Jeremy’s hand. We are the lucky ones, she thinks. The ones who have escaped. The unlucky ones were sheltering under their furniture, or crouched in their cellars, when the whole house dropped to its knees, drowning them in bricks and beams
, burying them under everything they once held dear.

  The singing has subsided and a melancholy gloom has descended over the inhabitants of the bomb cellar in The Coachman. Maeve prefers the melancholy to the singing. At least it’s quieter. She is worrying about Jeremy as she listens to the rhythm of the bombs falling overhead, trying to decide if there has been any break in the action.

  “Sounds like it’s intensifying,” says the publican, and Maeve has to agree that it is getting worse.

  They have been instructed by the government to seek shelter during an air raid, but there has never been any mention of what to do if the air raid doesn’t end. What if the city is destroyed? Is it the best choice to remain entombed in the basement of a pub? Maeve’s house is literally around the corner. Surely she has a good chance of getting back there, and once she is there she can shelter under her massive oak dining table. Perhaps Jeremy has returned to the house while she’s been in the pub basement.

  She stands up.

  “What are you doing?” says the sparrow man.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “You can’t do that. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I live close by, and I need to get back home to my son,” says Maeve.

  “I can’t let you go,” says the publican. “We need to stay in the cellar until the all-clear.”

  “Are you going to stop me?” asks Maeve.

  There is a silence, and in the silence, while the publican ponders whether he should physically restrain her, Maeve nimbly steps over the people in her way and bolts up the cellar staircase.

  The pub is as it was when they left it to stumble down the cellar stairs. The tables still hold the pint glasses, each one containing its measure of beer. The fire still burns, casting wires of light out into the room. The front window is still intact. Everything looks the same, but when Maeve passes the table where she had been sitting, she puts a hand down on the wood, and when she lifts it up it is covered in dust. She briefly considers finishing her pint, but the dust dissuades her from this.

  Outside, the world blooms and fades, flaring bright and then subsiding. The ground trembles and the noise of the exploding bombs is deep and guttural, something felt as well as heard, something that resounds through Maeve’s body like a heartbeat. There is the cough of the ack-ack guns and the drone of the bombers. They’re flying so low over the city that when Maeve looks up she can actually see, in one bomber, the outline of the German pilot in the cockpit.

  The street is still passable. Only one house is down, on the corner, and the debris is confined to the radius of the building. But beyond, toward the centre of the city where Jeremy is, things must be much worse.

  What seems strange to Maeve is not the downed house but the deserted street. She has never been on it when it has been empty of people and traffic. Maeve runs down the centre of the street. She gets to the corner, tries not to look at the destroyed house because she is afraid of seeing a body, and turns onto her street.

  Nothing has been hit. All of the houses are intact. Maeve runs the rest of the way home, pushing open the iron gate and racing up the path to the front door. It is absurd to think that Jeremy would have been able to make it back from the middle of town so quickly, but she barges into the house calling his name and rushing up the stairs to check his room.

  He is not there. She sits down on his sloppily made bed. The room is mostly in darkness, but the moon outside the window lights the row of tin soldiers that Jeremy keeps on his window ledge. He saved up his pocket money to buy them when he was a boy. They are turned to face one another, rifles raised, bayonets attached. There’s a Gatling gun in the midst of them that shoots real matchsticks. For the first time, Maeve realizes that the tin soldiers are modelled on soldiers in the last war. They are Jeremy’s last station of childhood, and the sight of their frozen combat unnerves her. She turns her attention to her son’s bed, pulling the sheets tight, plumping the pillow, smoothing the eiderdown. The pillow still holds the shape of Jeremy’s sleeping head.

  Maeve had gone to a good school. She was expected to go on to university and, if not that, at least to marry well. She was the only child of older, wealthy parents, and there was a lot of expectation placed upon her.

  She had done nothing of what her parents had wanted and very little of what she herself had wanted. But she knows that she has been happy. Her life has been perfect. Even on the bad days there is always something to cleave to, something small, the way the leaves show their undersides in the rain or the way the rain falls in great veils, sweeping down from the darkened sky.

  Of course, a great deal of the reason for her happiness has been Jeremy. Every time she looked at him he just seemed so solidly good. She was always glad to see him, always interested in his news, always hopeful for his future.

  Maeve sits down on the neatly made bed. She thinks of all the places she and Jeremy have been. What their life has consisted of. There was the pub where she was a barmaid. The Bucket of Blood, so named because it had once been an abattoir. The low stone building still had the stench of death about it. Maeve would sometimes wake in the night and swear she could hear the bellow of cattle, could feel their fear rising up through the floorboards of her bedroom.

  At the plant nursery, where she went next, Maeve and Jeremy lived in a hired caravan in the field just behind the nursery. The caravan had a musty smell that never went away, no matter how often Maeve hung out the bedding in the sun or scrubbed down the wooden walls of the interior. They had to cook over an open fire outside, and Maeve mostly didn’t bother. They ate cold food, and once a week she would take Jeremy to a pub for a hot evening meal. That was the only time they were ever warm, those Friday evenings at the pub.

  The caravan ran with damp. They had to sleep in a tangled knot in the centre of the bed or else the water running down the walls would soak the bedding. Field mice regularly made nests in their stored clothes and chewed through the tea towels. Once, they came home to find a badger sitting calmly on the caravan steps as though he lived there.

  The field they walked through to get from the nursery to the caravan was muddy, full of furrows, and Maeve was forever scraping the thick clods of mud from the soles of their shoes. Water for washing had to be hauled from the nursery, and so they washed less than they should. Jeremy looked feral after a couple of months in the caravan.

  It was better at work than it was at rest. At the nursery, Maeve liked walking between the potted roses, inhaling their scent. She liked the sway of the saplings in the breeze. She liked the way everything flowered, on time, even though nothing was planted in the earth.

  The next job Maeve took was as a dressmaker’s assistant. At the dressmaker’s, part of the work was to make the customers feel good about the dresses they were having fitted. Most of this involved lying. Maeve would stand to one side, with pins bristling out of her sleeves for pinning up the hem of the dress being fitted, and she would have to flatter the woman who was buying it. That colour looks so lovely on you, she would say, when in truth the woman was a hog and had chosen fabric that was the exact colour of hog skin.

  But Maeve remembers the dusty light of the shop at the end of the day when she locked up. She remembers the dresses, half made, holding the evening light inside them, like lanterns, as she pulled the door of the shop closed and looked back at them through the window. They always seemed more beautiful empty than they did when they were filled with a human form, and this was the sad truth she wished she could tell the customers but was never brave enough to do so.

  What kind of life had she given Jeremy? What kind of life had she given herself? If they survive this night, she will never move again.

  Harriet and Jeremy see the horses on High Street. Three horses running down the road, their manes lifting through the smoke, their hooves knocking on the cobblestones. Three night horses. The horses run right past them, close enough to touch. They are running away from the fire and the bombing, running toward the open fan of countryside outside of the ci
ty.

  Above them, Harriet can hear the bombers. The planes come in waves and sound exactly like that, like the pulse and pound of sea on the sand, a muffled, rhythmic heaviness. She doesn’t look up, even though, on such a clear night she might be able to make out the shape of the planes. But they have been warned not to watch bombing raids, not to gaze upward, as the pilots might see the reflection of their faces in the light of the fires and use their faces as guides to drop their bombs.

  The horses are gone now, disappearing into the smoke and the dust, into the frantic darkness. Perhaps their stable burned down and they escaped; or perhaps the horses were set free by their owner. On their own they have a better chance of surviving. Their flight is swifter than human flight. Their instincts are sharper.

  The Old Palace Yard, where Harriet has sometimes come to concerts with Wendell Mumby, is a heap of rubble. She remembers the untidy Tudor beauty of the building, how the upper storey leant out over the lower storey, how the panes in the upper storey windows shivered with age. It was a building full of sombre wood and streaky light. Harriet remembers the smooth feel of the stair railing, how it slid under her hand as she ascended to the second floor.

  “Look,” cries Jeremy. He seems to be less afraid now, to have taken on new energy.

  There are two men stumbling along in front of them. Each holds on to an end of a door. Lying on the door is a woman. Her clothes are torn and her head is twisted unnaturally on her body. They disappear into the smoke up ahead.

  Now that Harriet has seen one body she suddenly begins to notice that all around them are the dead and injured. In their flight down High Street they pass the bodies of dead men and women, limbs visible, soft shapes beneath the hard shift of the collapsed buildings. They see a child’s body lying in the road, thrown there by the blast of a bomb. Even though she has lived through the other, earlier raids, Harriet can see that this one is much worse. She never saw bodies before. Those raids were over quickly, leaving their targets destroyed but much else intact. This raid seems intent on destroying everything.