“All right, love, we’re getting there,” the rescue-squad leader called out. “Not long now.”
Once the beam was out of the way, they were able to start tunneling into the rubble, but it was slow, arduous work since the tunnel had to be shored up and made safe every few yards or so. Elinor thought — she couldn’t be sure — that the rescue workers had managed to pass bottles of water through a gap. If true, it might help the women go on a bit longer, but there was so much rubble to shift, tons of it, she didn’t see how the old woman could possibly survive the night.
At one point, she and Dana were sent to answer another call. One incident led to another, through the long hours of darkness — she could never afterwards remember the precise sequence of events — though there were flashes of acute clarity. Her and Dana leaning against the ambulance, shoulders shaking, bent double, laughing till they whooped for breath. And the joke? They’d been asked to deliver four bodies to a mortuary, but when they got there — after rather a difficult journey — the attendant refused to take them: no death certificates. Off they went to the nearest hospital, where an exhausted doctor who’d been toiling all night in an overcrowded, badly lit basement flatly refused to stop work and sign death certificates for corpses that were nothing to do with him. Back to the mortuary. “Not without a death certificate,” the angry little man insisted, trying to impose his own order on the chaos that was descending from the skies. “He’s going to have a heart attack,” Elinor said, as they left. “Oh I do hope so,” Dana replied. In the end, they appealed for help from a couple of passing air-raid wardens and unloaded the bodies in an alley that ran between two department stores. There they lay, lined up on the cobbles, at a decent distance from the dustbins. There was nothing to cover them with, but Elinor and Dana closed their eyes, and the wardens did the best they could to straighten their remaining limbs.
As she turned to go, Elinor was half embarrassed, half grateful to see one of the wardens do what she couldn’t do — cross himself and say a prayer.
Dana had stayed behind to thank the wardens. Elinor waited by the ambulance for her to come back, saw her shoulders shaking as she approached and reached out to comfort her, only to realize she was laughing. “What? What?” Elinor said. “ ‘Not without a death certificate.’ Oh my God, that is so funny.” Tears were streaming down her face, making rivulets in the beige dust.
By four in the morning, they were back outside the house in Bedford Square. Not long after their arrival, a bomb fell on the other side of the square and the buried women, hearing the crash and feeling the rubble above their heads begin to slide, screamed in shock and fear. Elinor half thought she’d cried out herself, only the bulge in her throat convinced her the cry was still trapped inside. A burst of flame from the fresh bomb site sent shadows fleeing across the square. A third rescue squad arrived, and then a fourth. Kit relinquished his place in the chain that was passing buckets of rubble from the tunnel to the pavement, and came and stood beside her. “Who’s in there?” he asked. “Do you know?”
“Dorothea Stanhope. Do you remember, her husband was viceroy, no, he wasn’t viceroy, something like that…Daughter, daughter-in-law. And a little girl, the granddaughter.”
“How old?”
“Six.”
He said nothing, merely turned to stare at the rubble and the bent, laboring backs. There was nothing they could do now except wait for the rescue squad to break through and start pulling people out. The old woman’s cries were growing weaker, but the voices of the two younger women were still strong, and seemed — unless this was wishful thinking — to be getting louder. The chief rescue-squad leader held up his hand. “Careful. Slow down now.”
Elinor craned forward, as the workers paused. For a long moment nobody moved, but then the teams began inching forward again. A hole had opened at the center of the rubble and the two halves of the beam had been used to reinforce the sides. Then came another long, familiar, shrieking descent. The ground shook and a cataract of loose bricks and mortar cascaded down the sides of the slope. One of the rescue workers threw back his head and yelled, “FUCK YOU!” at the sky. Then he caught sight of Violet standing there. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t see you, love.” “Oh, please don’t apologize,” Violet said, in her daughter-of-the-vicarage accent. “My sentiments precisely.”
The old woman’s cries seemed to be getting louder again — either the rescue squad was getting closer or her own sense that help was at hand had renewed her strength. Perhaps, after all, she’d be the first one out. Suddenly, they all went quiet again. Men with sweat-streaked faces stopped and stared at each other, white eyes startling in their grimy faces. A child’s head had appeared through a hole in the rubble. Nobody moved. For a long time, it seemed, nobody moved. Then the rescue-squad leader fell to his knees and, placing his hands on either side of the head, gently persuaded it to rotate, so that first one shoulder then the other and then, in a great rush, the whole body fell out of the hole. Still, no cry. People looked at each other, unable to accept the truth, but the body was small and floppy and it made no sound.
Dana, one hand across her mouth, ran to fetch a stretcher. Elinor followed to help. Only when they returned, did they see the dead child lying on the pavement. They knelt on either side of her and, not looking at each other, prepared to lift her onto the stretcher. Nobody spoke. From inside the ruined building, a voice cried out: “Livvy? My baby. Oh, my baby.”
Neville looked down at the little body. “My daughter’s that age.” It sounded almost casuaclass="underline" the sort of remark you might make outside the school gates. Then, bending swiftly down, he gathered her into his arms and carried her to the ambulance.
The mother was brought out half an hour later, thickly coated in dust, bleeding from a deep cut to her head, but otherwise surprisingly uninjured. “My baby,” she kept saying. “Where’s my baby?” “Won’t be long now, love,” one of the rescue workers said. Elinor wrapped a blanket round her shoulders, thinking she and Dana should take her to hospital rather than let her travel in the back of Neville’s ambulance with her dead child. But Elinor didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what she would have wanted if this unimaginable pain had come to her. Neville took the decision for her. “You take the mother,” he said. “I’ll stay here.” He gripped the woman’s arm and helped her up the steps. “Come on, let’s get you to hospital.”
“But my daughter?”
“Don’t you worry, love. They’ll soon have her out.”
Wrapped in a red blanket, too shocked to argue, she sat down on the bench. Dana climbed in beside her and put an arm round her shoulders.
At the last moment she started to struggle, trying to throw off the blanket and jump down into the road. “I want Livvy.”
Dana restrained her. “I know, I know.”
—
THE ALL CLEAR sounded as it started to get light. The dawn wind, tainted by the smell of high explosive, brought with it the assurance they were still alive. The rescue workers breathed deeply once or twice, then got back to work.
Elinor and Dana, returning from the hospital, stood shivering against the garden railings, taking in, for the first time, the full extent of the devastation. In this thin light it looked worse than anything they’d imagined in the dark, and yet both knew that in a few days, a week at most, they might walk along this terrace and hardly notice the gap.