The time bombs’ detonation had inflicted further damage on their house, but at least they were allowed access to the square. They could see at first hand the extent of the damage by climbing cautiously over the outer fringes of the rubble. She could even see into her kitchen. The dresser had somehow become jammed at an angle to the wall. She caught a glint of knives and forks, the blue-and-white fragments of a serving dish. They would be able to get a few things out, but it wasn’t pots and pans she wanted, it was the paintings from her attic studio, the portraits of her father and Toby. All gone. And, with them, so much of her past.
She and Paul picked their way around the ruin separately. At one point, she saw him straighten up and look around, and the expression on his face was, unmistakably, one of relief.
She slid down the last slope of rubble and waited for him in the road.
“Well,” he said, coming across to join her. “Worse than you thought?”
She couldn’t look at him. “I don’t think I can face another B&B. I think I’d be better off in the country.”
A hint of satisfaction. “I’m sure that’s right.”
Straggling apart, they walked away from their house, past the crater where two nights ago one of the time bombs had exploded. Trudging along with her eyes on the road, Elinor was startled by an unexpected flash of light, and looked up to see sunshine streaming through a gap in the terrace. The light gilded the tops of trees and bushes that only a week ago had been struggling to survive in deep shade. Oh, yes, all kinds of opportunities for new growth. Only not for her.
She stopped and looked around her, wanting to remember the moment. Then, needing reassurance, she glanced at Paul, but against that dazzling shaft of light he’d become merely a silhouette, featureless.
It might have been anybody standing there.
SEVENTEEN
Left alone in London, Paul felt increasingly restless. Partly this was because of his constant involuntary searching for Kenny. He scanned the faces of children he passed in the streets, and somehow, despite the raids, London seemed to be full of children. He watched them during the day, playing in the parks — the schools were still closed — or queuing outside the Underground stations. Children were often sent on ahead to claim the family’s favorite spot; you would see them, laden with sleeping bags and blankets, sometimes laughing and messing about, but waiting for hours.
Paul’s studio was only ten minutes’ walk from his station, so on the nights when he was on duty he went straight to the School of Tropical Medicine basement after finishing work, and played cards or darts till the sirens went and it was time to go out on patrol.
The evenings when he was not on duty were more of a problem, because he found it quite impossible to stay indoors during a raid. He could remember feeling exactly like this during the last war. Very often at night he’d shunned the comparative safety of the dugout for walks between sentry posts. Anything was better than the dank, grave-smelling murk of life underground, where a single candle, guttering in the blast from an exploding shell, would send panic-stricken shadows fleeing across the walls. The dugout was safer, yes, but it never felt safe. Now, he felt the same way about the public shelters. On the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he walked miles through the blacked-out city, sometimes not getting home till two or even three in the morning, by which time he was too exhausted not to sleep.
The darkness turned London into a palimpsest. That knot of boisterous young men by the crush barriers, they were probably soldiers home from Dunkirk, or just possibly stragglers from Boudicca’s army. After all, from the perspective of the poor bloody infantry, one cock-up’s pretty much like another. You had a sense on these nights of long-buried bones working their way to the surface: London’s dead gurgling up through the drains. Perhaps in these thronging shadows the living and the dead met in fleeting, unconscious encounters. Why not? How would you know?
On one of these walks, he found himself in a side street near Coram’s Fields. On the corner there was a pawnshop, its three brass balls suspended over the pavement, a symbol so evocative of his youth he had to cross the road for a closer look. In the window, as he’d expected, were rows and rows of little white cards offering rings — most poignantly, wedding rings — for sale. Probably they’d been pawned over and over again until some worsening of an already desperate situation meant they couldn’t be redeemed. Ah, redeemed. The religious language of pawnbroking had always fascinated him.
When he was a boy, his grandmother had owned a pawnshop, conducting business with her usual rapacity. Many of her clients were pawning goods in order to pay the rent on the ramshackle properties she owned. Yet Gran hadn’t been the bloated capitalist of socialist theory, but a half-literate working-class woman who’d got many a black eye from her handsome, philandering husband until she stopped loving him and learned to hit back — or rather, since she was a tiny, birdlike woman, to wait till he was too pissed to know what he was drinking and then jollop him till his arse bled.
Paul’s first job had been behind the counter of her shop: he’d done his homework in between customers. When he leaned forward, he could see his reflection in wood that had been polished to a hard conker-shine by the weight of human misery that passed over it. But it was a job, a proper job, and he had been proud of it.
God, how it all came flooding back. He was about to move on when he saw a notice in the bottom-right-hand corner of the window. Bertha Mason, materialization medium, would be giving a seance at eight o’clock this evening. The accompanying photograph was creased and grainy — obviously cut from a newspaper — but there could be no mistaking the woman. It was the Witch of Endor, no less. He bent down to make sure, but, yes, it had to be. There couldn’t be two women in London who looked like that. Eight o’clock — just time for a pint of beer and a sandwich. He thought he might as well give it a go, as much from nostalgia as anything else, though he was curious about the woman who had made a disagreeable but powerful impression on him. He wasn’t finding her easy to forget.
—
RETURNING AN HOUR later, he stepped into a shop whose smells stripped away the intervening years till he was fourteen years old again. A single bulb cast a pallid light over the detritus of hopeless lives: musty-smelling clothes hung from racks, some, with pink tickets, waiting to be redeemed; others, with blue tickets, up for sale. Racks of shoes pressed out of shape by other people’s bunions, dresses with other people’s sweat stains under the arms, a hatstand from which hung a solitary bowler hat, shiny with age. Despite the downtrodden, shabby air of it all, he kept experiencing exquisitely painful tweaks of nostalgia. Not for when he was a child serving in the shop for the first time — no; for a year or so later, when he was a pimply adolescent with hairs on the palms of his hands. The hairs hadn’t been real hairs, of course — they were what you were threatened with if you didn’t stop doing it—and try as he might he never could stop. There were some mornings when he could virtually have combed those hairs.
There’d been a girl called Gemma Martin who’d come in every Monday morning on her way to work to pawn her father’s Sunday suit. Long blond hair, the greenish color of unripe wheat, and slightly prominent blue eyes. Gran didn’t like the Martins. “I knew her mam when her knickers were that raggy she was ashamed to hang them on the line. And as for her nan — she used to sew bacon fat in her vest and bloomers every December, didn’t take them off till March. I’ve seen dogs follow her down the street.” The Martins, he gathered, gave themselves airs: a worse crime than murder in Gran’s book.