He stood up. “There’s no need to see me out.”
She shook her head. Going down the stairs, they didn’t speak at all. As she opened the front door onto the steps, she tried to think of something to say, but her mind had gone blank.
On the pavement he turned and looked at her. “Take care.”
She nodded. “And you.”
It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
TWENTY-NINE
The first call came just before one in the morning. Elinor had been lying on one of the sofas reading grubby, tattered magazines, unable to sleep, thinking about Paul, the look on his face, the way he’d walked off down the street. She’d known he’d stop at the corner and look back and she’d gone inside so he wouldn’t see her standing there. A petty power-play, a means of hurting, of establishing controclass="underline" she and Paul had never carried on like that, and now they did. Sad. Her mouth was dry and stale; she was too tired to think straight. It was almost a relief when the telephones started to ring.
She was working with Dana Kresberg tonight. She liked Dana, and was rather intrigued by her. As an American, Dana could so easily have sat out these nights very comfortably in the Savoy; she could have gone out onto the balcony after dinner, with a number of American journalists, watching the night’s raid almost as if it were a firework display. And why not? This was not, after all, their war: or not yet. But Dana had chosen, instead, to become involved, to risk life and limb night after night, driving an ambulance through bombed and burning streets, and Elinor had never asked her why. Hatred of fascism? A love of adventure? Compassion for trapped and suffering people? An addiction to danger, perhaps? Everybody’s motives were a great mixture, but, unlike Londoners, Dana didn’t have the most basic motivation: defending your home. And that made her stand out in the team of drivers working out of the depot in Tottenham Court Road.
Dana’s great advantage was that she was outside the English class system. Elinor watched, with some amusement, as Dana negotiated its various ravines and rapids with the assurance of a sleepwalker. She even got on with Derek James, whose years as a taxi driver had given him an encyclopedic knowledge of London’s back streets, which was invaluable. But he had a chip on his shoulder. Well, it was more like a log, really. “Timber yard,” said Kit, whose public-school accent made him the preferred butt of Derek’s not-always-funny jokes. But Derek accepted Dana totally; was, in fact, almost mesmerized by her.
Tonight, though, Elinor and Dana were working together. Around about 12:45 a.m., their turn came. They grabbed their tin hats — very useful for shielding exposed wounds from plaster dust or putting out an incendiary, but almost certainly useless at protecting the brain from falling bricks — and pulled on the black greatcoats that reached to their ankles and impeded their movements much as a suit of cardboard armor might have done. It was Elinor’s turn to drive and that pleased her. She and Dana each thought the other drove like a lunatic, and possibly they were both right. But then, perhaps, in these conditions there was no other way to drive. Oncoming vehicles were mere pinpricks of light, little, piggy, red eyes looming out of the night. Crashes were frequent in the early part of the evening, before burning fires illuminated the streets. Dana kept ringing the bell, its clang-clang adding to the baying and yapping of antiaircraft guns. Elinor crouched over the wheel, peering through the windscreen for new craters that had not yet been marked by blue warning lights. Dust sifted in through the open windows and settled on their shoulders. More seriously, it formed a film over the windscreen, blurring what little vision they had. But even in this darkness, Elinor recognized the familiar streets. She was driving along the route she’d walked three hours before, turning the corner, now, into Bedford Square.
“This is it,” Dana said.
Elinor pulled up at the curb. They clambered down onto the road and started walking towards the scene of the incident. Two blue lights stood on the rubble-strewn pavement and the usual crowd had gathered. One house had been badly hit. The houses on either side were damaged, but they’d been empty, a warden told them. One belonged to an old couple who’d gone to stay with their married daughter in the country; the other to a middle-aged couple, but they definitely wouldn’t be in there, he knew for a fact they always went to the shelter. “It’s an old lady lives in that one. Two daughters and a—”
“Yes, I know,” Elinor said.
It was Dorothea Stanhope’s house. She knew the names of the younger women and the child, but in the stress of the moment they escaped her.
A handful of men was edging warily onto a scree of rubble. Nothing was visible of them but dark backs and bent shoulders; they were all hunched over as if that could protect them from falling ceilings. Elinor pushed to the front, trying to see what was going on. She noticed the mean, sneaky smell of domestic gas, mixed with the stench of high explosive. Paul said it was very like the stink of decomposing bodies on a battlefield, and she wondered what it did to him to smell that here. At home. In London. And then she thought: Bugger Paul. Everybody was coughing and covering their mouths. That smell got into your lungs, irritating the mucous membranes of nose and mouth, and then there was the fine dust that repeated blasts sent swirling invisibly into the air.
One of the men on the scree raised his hand, calling for silence. Everybody stood and listened, they hardly seemed to be breathing. Nothing. They started to look at each other, shoulders beginning to slump, but then it came again. Somebody inside the ruined house, from under the collapsed floors and ceilings, was crying out: a thin, reedy wail; an old woman’s voice, by the sound of it, although fear and weakness could make anybody sound old.
Work began again, with renewed vigor. Elinor and Dana ducked underneath the tape and stood on the opposite pavement from the wrecked house. Elinor looked at the bent backs of the men heaving away at the rubble; they were working more methodically now, loading buckets with bricks and lumps of fallen plaster, passing them down a chain. As one of them turned to hand a bucket on, she caught a glimpse of his face and recognized Kit. Somebody touched her arm. She turned and saw Violet, looking haggard, wisps of gray hair escaping from under her tin hat. The gutter was running with water from a burst main, turning plaster dust into a claggy paste that would set hard on every inch of exposed skin. “They’re alive,” Violet said. The tension of that knowledge, the need to work harder and faster, was in every face you saw. At intervals, the rescue-squad leader raised his hand and everybody stopped what they were doing and strained to listen. Violet was right: the frail voice under the rubble had been joined by other voices. One was crying: “My daughter, my baby, where is she?”—edging up into hysteria. They couldn’t afford to let it affect them. The hand fell and they got back to work. The burst water main had turned the road into a slick of slimy mud. A rescue-squad worker, running up to help, slipped and fell.
Bombers went on droning overhead, bursts of orange light obliterating the stars. The men were sawing through a beam that had fallen across a mound of rubble and was impeding progress. Another voice started up inside — not the child’s voice though — they hadn’t heard the child. It was impossible to go on doing nothing. Elinor ran across the road and, clambering up the lower slope, began to talk to the women inside. She felt rather than saw Kit turn at the sound of her voice. She was telling them they’d be all right, they’d soon have them out, no need to worry, not long now…It was what you always said, what you had to say, though in the time she’d been standing there no visible progress had been made. But at least they were alive, or the women were. “My baby, my poor baby,” the mother kept calling out, and the child’s name: Libby? Lizzie? No, Livvy, Livvy, that was it, she remembered now: the little girl was called Olivia. “Livvy, are you there? Where are you, Livvy?” And then again: “My baby, my poor baby.” On and on it went. Unbearable, you’d have said, except that they all bore it.