A warden came up and stood beside them, watching the rescue workers still passing chains of buckets down the line. He was sucking something, a boiled sweet, perhaps, or else just his gums. “It’s all very well saying Londoners can take it,” he said. “But can they? How much more of this can anybody take?”
It was the forbidden question; neither of them answered it.
The old woman was brought out an hour later, garrulous with shock, but unhurt. Her daughter, injured but alive, was pulled out a few minutes later.
“Where’s my granddaughter?” the old woman kept asking. She was still clutching her jewelry box, bright, acid-drop sunshine showing up the age spots on the backs of her hands. Dana tried to wrap a blanket round her thin shoulders, but she wasn’t having any of that. “Where’s my granddaughter?”
“She’ll be all right,” somebody said. “They’ve taken her to hospital.”
Dorothea obviously didn’t believe it. She stood looking from face to face. “I hope she didn’t suffer.”
Elinor said, “I think it would have been very quick.”
The old woman looked at her and nodded. Then she turned to her daughter, held out her hand and together the two of them climbed into the ambulance. Elinor got into the driver’s seat, checking with Dana that the two women were securely fastened in before bumping along the brick-strewn road in the direction of University College Hospital. There, she and Dana helped the two women into the entrance and handed them over to the porters, before walking out again into gritty sunshine and a song of birds.
Elinor stumbled as they walked back to the ambulance. As she reached up to open the door, Dana pushed her gently to one side. “My turn,” she said. “And I’ll drop you off.”
Standing on the pavement outside her new home, Elinor thought only about having a bath and falling into bed. Her skull seemed to have been rinsed in icy, bone-numbing water. She was incapable of thinking, or feeling, anything.
THIRTY
At some point he must have slept. He woke to find a cup of tea going cold on the table beside him and his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. For a moment, it was a normal day. He lay, gazing placidly at what little he could see of the ceiling, but then memories of the night before began to surface. Out of a vortex of darkness emerged the broken body of a small child lying on the pavement. He’d picked her up, yes, and carried her to the ambulance. Her mouth had fallen open to reveal the two adult teeth at the front, not quite through yet, still shorter than the baby teeth on either side. He remembered Anne at that stage: the “wobbly tooth” she’d insisted he feel half a dozen times a day, long before it was actually wobbly at all.
And then there was the gap, the all-important gap, the visit from the tooth fairy, Anne smiling, baring her teeth to show her friends. She’d been late losing her baby teeth. And for a long time afterwards, he’d noticed her running her tongue along the edge of the grown-up tooth, which was uneven, not smooth as adult teeth are after years of biting and grinding. That little girl, last night — Livvy, was it? Her two precious grown-up teeth would never be worn smooth.
He lay in bed in the darkened room and thought of Anne, whom he hadn’t seen now for over a year. She sent him letters, of course, in the neat, joined-up writing she was so proud of, and drawings that were becoming more accurate and less imaginative all the time, but none of that made up for the lack of her physical presence. She used to get into bed with him in the mornings and her freshly baked smell made him ashamed of the sourness of his early-morning breath. “I’m smooth because I’m new,” she said. “And you’re wrinkly because you’re old, but it doesn’t matter, I still love you.” All this in an American accent, which never failed to take him by surprise. Somehow, he’d always assumed she’d speak in the same way as her parents, but she didn’t: she sounded exactly like the children she played with in kindergarten. He was smiling to himself, as he thought about the strangeness of it: his little American daughter.
Until last night, it hadn’t occurred to him that he might die and never see her again. Now, suddenly, all that ungrounded confidence disappeared, swirled away like dirty water down a plughole, leaving only a gleaming white emptiness that was the certainty of his own death.
Get up. He was doing no good lying here. And it was late, oh my God, it was late.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, he made himself a pot of tea, swishing the first gulp of hot liquid round his mouth before spitting it out. No use, he could still feel grit between his teeth. The sun strengthened, casting his shadow behind him across the tiles. God, he was tired, he was never not tired, he couldn’t remember what it was like not to be tired, and yet when he closed his eyes all he saw was the child lying on the dirty pavement. Some kind of pattern on her nightdress, he couldn’t quite remember: pink bows, was it, or teddy bears? Rags twisted into her hair. Anne hated rags — but then next day you had ringlets, like Shirley Temple, and that was still the way little girls wanted to look. Only for Livvy there’d been no next day.
He wondered about Elinor, how she was managing to cope with it. And then he thought: Why not go and see her? After all, she was single now. And even if she hadn’t been, they worked together; there was no reason he shouldn’t go to see her in exactly the same way he might have arranged to meet one of the men for a drink. Yes, it was a good idea. He’d tidy himself up a bit and go.
—
AN HOUR LATER, he was standing outside Elinor’s house. A shaft of sunlight, breaking through a gap in the terrace opposite, twinkled on the doorknocker. Across the road, an old man was setting off to walk his dog, a busy, bright-eyed terrier that stopped to sniff at every lamppost. Unexpectedly, Neville felt a spurt of exhilaration. At one point the previous night, while he was working on the scree, clawing at the bricks with his bare hands, a landslip had started. A lump of flying brick had struck him on the forehead. Nothing much, hardly worth bothering about, but it could have been. And now here was sunlight streaming through a gap in the terrace, a gap where no gap should have been. All over London, now, were little patches of illicit gold. Plants long stunted by deep shade sprouted new leaves, grew and changed shape in the unexpected light. Something lawless about all this: as there was about the interiors of houses, where a bomb ripped off the front or side of a building, leaving bedrooms, toilets, bathrooms recklessly exposed.
He rang the doorbell, wondering, now he was on the brink of seeing her, whether he was doing the right thing. She’d be asleep, almost certainly asleep, and not thank him for waking her, but then he heard her voice. Backing off a few paces, he looked up at the top of the house and there was Elinor, her head and bare shoulders framed in an open window.
“Kit.” Her voice was blurry with sleep.
“I hope I didn’t wake you?”
“No, don’t worry, I should’ve been up long since. Is anything the matter?”
“No, I just thought we deserved some of this.” He held up a bottle of whisky.
“What, at this hour?”
“It’s nearly one o’clock.”
“Good Lord, is it really?” She looked across the road where the old man with the dog was showing an interest. “Look, I’ll come down.”
She came to the door wearing a navy-blue silk wrap, her hair slightly damp and brushed straight back. “Come in. Mind the glass.”
“When did this happen?”