At last, the top of her head disappeared into the darkness and they were able to stand up. Charlie indicated to Paul that he should go down the stairs first.
“No, you go.”
Left alone, he took a last look round the room at the detritus of poverty and squalor that had once been a home, then turned and followed Charlie down the stairs.
Then things began to move quickly. Bertha was heaved onto a stretcher and carried downstairs, not easily — it took four men, and even then they grunted and strained. Mercifully, she’d stopped apologizing and lay with her eyes closed, unconscious or dead. Behind them, Charlie was still arguing with the man with the squeaky voice. In the end he simply turned his back and walked away. “Bloody little Hitler.”
Outside, fire hoses snaked across the street and pools of black water reflected the sullen, red glare in the sky. Paul followed the stretcher across to the ambulance. He recognized Neville’s bull-necked shape as he jumped down from the cab and came round to open the door. They exchanged a few words; terse, impersonal. At the last moment, Paul turned back. “Where you taking her?”
“Guy’s.”
Paul raised a hand in acknowledgment, splashing through a puddle of stinking water on his way to rejoin the team.
—
THE ALL CLEAR went just after five o’clock. Back at the depot, they stared into thick white cups of dark orange tea and found little to say. Paul tried to look back over the events of the night, but everything before Bertha and after Bertha was a blur. Of course everything would be carefully timed and tabulated in the incident log, but it certainly wasn’t tabulated in his brain.
After a few minutes, Charlie stirred and stretched his legs. “You know what the Chinese say, don’t you?”
“No,” Paul said, obligingly. “What do the Chinese say?”
“If you save somebody’s life it belongs to you. I mean, like you become responsible for that person. Mind, I think it might just be if you stop them killing themselves, I’m not sure. But it’s not a very nice thought, is it, when you think of some of the people we’ve saved? I mean, that poor old bugger pissing in a bag, imagine having him around for the rest of your life.”
“He was all right,” Brian said. “Happy as Larry. No, the one that’d worry me is that woman tonight. God, the size of her. And she’d pissed herself.”
“I’ve met her before,” Paul said. “She’s a medium.”
“Is she?” Charlie said. “Me mam was a great one for the spuggies. Couldn’t see anything in it meself.” He looked up. “Ah, here they are. We thought you’d got lost.”
Walter came towards them, rubbing his hands, his cheeks purplish with cold. “By heck, it’s nippy out there.”
Paul finished his tea. He didn’t fancy going round to the van for pasties with the others. The ambulance drivers went to the same van and he didn’t much fancy bumping into Elinor’s friends. Outside, he stood on the pavement taking in deep gulps of air. Alive. It wasn’t so much a thought as a pulse that throbbed in every vein in his body. His heart was beating so hard he could see the quiver in his fingertips. A voice hailed him: Sandra. Had she been waiting for him? The thought that perhaps she had, produced more throbbing, but farther down.
“Bad night?” she asked.
“So-so. How about you?”
She shrugged. “All right.”
People were watching them. He saw Charlie and Brian exchange a sly grin, then look away, but he didn’t care. His previous — very minor — infidelities had been conducted with iron discretion, but not this one. Part of the feeling of being outside time was that nothing seemed to matter very much. Nothing he said or did now would have consequences. If he’d stopped to think about it, even for a second, he’d have known at once it wasn’t true, but he felt it to be true.
So they linked arms and walked the few hundred yards to his studio. Neither of them said very much. He was amazed by the new day, intensely aware of all those for whom it had never dawned: the dead, lined up on mortuary slabs or lying, still unrecovered, under mountains of rubble. He felt their bewilderment, the pain of truncated lives. So what right did he have to despise Mrs. Mason, her ignorance, her superstition, when in his own experience he knew how porous was the membrane that divides the living from the dead?
Leading the way up to his studio, he remembered the stairs to Bertha Mason’s room, the moment when he’d realized he couldn’t move, that in all probability he was going to die there, without dignity, without purpose, like a fox in a stopped earth, and the minute he unlocked the door he turned and caught Sandra in his arms, his mouth groping for hers. They fell onto the rumpled divan and there the long night ended, in kisses and cries and, finally, at last, at long last, sleep.
TWENTY-TWO
He couldn’t get her out of his head.
Not Sandra; he’d loved every minute of their time together, but after she’d put on her clothes and gone home, he scarcely thought of her. No, it was Bertha Mason he couldn’t forget. Bertha, on the table, blank-eyed, fag end stuck to her bottom lip; Bertha, on the platform, whirling black silk bloomers around above her head; Bertha, in his arms, piss dripping down her legs and forming a puddle on the floor. And that voice: the voice in the darkness that couldn’t have been hers, and couldn’t not have been hers. There she was: old, fat, mad, quite possibly dying — utterly repulsive — and he couldn’t forget her.
You know what the Chinese say, don’t you?
Perhaps Charlie’s remark about becoming responsible for the life you save was preying on his mind. Whatever the reason, he knew he had to see her again. She might, of course, be dead by now, or she could have been discharged from hospital, sent to some hostel for people made homeless by the bombing, but on the whole he didn’t think so. She’d been in too bad a state for that. No, with any luck she’d still be in Guy’s. If she was alive.
Arriving at the hospital in the late afternoon, he was directed to the third floor. Grim corridors, no natural light, though great efforts were being made to cheer things up: there was even a vase of flowers on a table at the center of the ward. A nurse pointed to a screened-off bed at the far end. Pushing the screen slightly to one side, he saw Bertha sitting up in bed with her head bandaged, looking like a huge, abandoned baby.
“Hello, Mrs. Mason. How are you?”
He’d brought some flowers from the garden of his ruined home: bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, past their best. He couldn’t see a vase to put them in, so simply laid them at the foot of her bed, where their graveyard smell quickly spread and filled the small space inside the screens.
At first glance, he thought she looked better than he’d expected: she’d lost that lard-white color; but when he looked more closely, he realized the redness of her cheeks and chin was anything but healthy. He touched her hand — shaking it seemed too formal — and found her flesh hot and clammy. He said, “I don’t know if you remember me, I was one of the—”
“Yes, hello.”
He could tell she wasn’t sure. “I was in the room with you the other night. After the bomb.”
Her eyes widened. “So you were. You asked me what I was frightened of.”
He couldn’t remember asking her that. In fact, he was sure he hadn’t. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said to injured people in an air raid.
“People think, oh, she knows a lot about the afterlife, she believes in it, so what’s she got to be frightened of? If they knew what it’s like down there at the moment they’d be bloody frightened. Bedlam, bloody bedlam. People running round in circles, half of ’em don’t even know they’ve passed.”