“They don’t usually fly this low,” Neville said. “The guns on the heath force them up.”
This one was very low indeed. There was that awful drone, as intolerable as the sound of a dentist’s drill, in the end so insistent he and Neville simply sat and listened. After a while, it seemed to go farther away, and they relaxed.
Neville looked at his empty glass. “Is she all right?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I haven’t seen her. She’s at the cottage, I think. I thought you might have gone down there.”
“No.”
“So, anyway, Sandra’s a thing of the past, is she?”
“Joined the Wrens.”
“You ditched her.”
“I didn’t, actually, it was never meant to be permanent. She was engaged — sort of.”
“Fair enough; you were married — sort of.”
“You can talk.”
“I’m divorced.”
“So what do you think’s going to happen now?”
“I don’t know. I can tell you one thing though: if you force Elinor to choose between us, she’ll choose herself.”
“Well, obviously, it’s her choice.”
“No, I mean she’ll choose her self. Don’t you see?” Out of nowhere, an immense burst of anger: “IT’S WHAT SHE DOES!”
From somewhere uncomfortably close came the sound of a long, shrieking descent and the chandelier above their heads rocked and jangled.
“I see you still haven’t got that bl-oo-dy th-in—”
The words elongated and vanished into air as the walls buckled and rushed towards them. Then, nothing.
—
SOMEWHERE NEARBY, a tap was dripping. He could feel random drops plopping onto his face and trickling down his neck. Something had fallen across his legs. He tried to bring his arms up to push whatever it was away, but they seemed to be trapped too. After a while, by arching his back and heaving himself off the floor, he managed to shift the weight a little. Another nightmare; he was fed up with them. The ones where you knew you were asleep, you knew you were dreaming, and you still couldn’t wake up were the worst of the lot. This one was particularly vivid. He seemed to be in a kitchen. There were fragments of blue-and-white pottery scattered over the floor. He couldn’t see much because his head was pinned down; he could only look sideways. Dunstanburgh Castle at Sunset was propped against a chair. Turner. Seeing it like that, it was very obviously a Turner. Why would anybody want to hang a Turner in a kitchen? The steam…
He couldn’t make out where the light was coming from. Twisting his neck a painful inch to the right, he saw trees and branches wave. If he could only get out there…He tried wriggling his fingers, then his toes, and found he could move both. The pain, the pressure, was mainly in his chest. Something he couldn’t even see was pinning him down. Flares blossomed and trembled. He was lying out in no-man’s-land, waiting for the flares to die so he could scramble back into the lines. It made sense, more sense than lying squashed like a cockroach on the floor of a basement kitchen.
He heard a movement. Somebody knelt beside him, cutting off the draft of cool air.
“Are you all right?”
He forced himself to find words. “Yes, I think so.”
With the sound of his own voice came a clearer sense of his situation. Not a nightmare, not no-man’s-land, a real place, now. He was in Neville’s house. They’d been talking, shouting, Neville had shouted something, but he couldn’t remember what it was — or why they were in the kitchen.
“Can you move your feet?”
He tried again. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I think there’s a spade in the garden shed. We’re going to have to dig you out. I could go and get it, I suppose.”
“Wouldn’t it be quicker to go for help?”
“Oh. No rush.”
No rush?
And suddenly he was afraid. As if sensing his fear the voice went on: “Do you know, I could kill you now? Nobody would be any the wiser. I could pick up this brick — and why not? It’s a perfectly good brick — and bash your head in.”
He couldn’t breathe. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Why not?”
“There’s got to be a reason.”
“No-o, don’t think so. Because I can. How could anybody prove it hadn’t just landed on your head? Of course I’d have to do it in one blow. Can’t have the same brick landing twice.” He giggled.
More than the words, the giggle terrified Paul, because it was not a sound Neville could ever possibly make. Arching his back, he tried again to lift whatever was pinning him down. Neville made no move to help, but neither did he leave — he seemed to be indifferent to his own safety. And there was real danger — the building could come down on top of them at any minute.
The words “I could kill you now” hung over them.
“Well, your decision,” Paul said. “I suppose.”
Paul closed his eyes and lay still. There was nothing he could do — and anything he said, anything at all, would feed Neville’s rage just as everything fed the London fires. So he gazed sidelong across the floor at the scattered fragments of blue-and-white pottery, wondering where the real cockroaches were and thinking they’d probably survive. It wasn’t looking too good for him.
Not that it mattered. And yet the need to understand remained. “Is this so you can have Elinor?”
Neville had switched his torch on and the beam was shining on the brick in his right hand. Paul tried again to heave the weight off his chest, but pain forced him to stop. Another bomb exploded, not nearby, at the end of the next street, perhaps, but still close enough to shift the balance in the rubble hanging over them. A hissing had started, water spraying from a burst pipe — or gas. “Whole bloody thing’s coming down,” Neville said, but dispassionately.
Paul tried to say something in reply, but his mouth was full of dust and, anyway, what was there to say? He closed his eyes and listened to Neville’s labored breath.
A minute later, he became aware of a light moving across his face. Neville, shining the torch into his eyes, wanting him to respond, to plead. But when Paul opened his eyes the beam was moving haphazardly across the room, fluttering mothlike over collapsed walls and broken furniture. Footsteps clambering over bricks and rubble, and a voice: “Anybody in there?”
The neighborhood warden, his face a pale blur behind the torch. A long, still moment. Then Neville stood up. “Yes, there’s somebody trapped, but I don’t think you’ll need a rescue squad. I think we can get him out between us.”
He sounded brisk, ordinary. The torch shone full in Paul’s face again, and he closed his eyes, but not before he’d seen Neville glance down at the brick in his hand, as if surprised to find it there, and toss it casually away.
THIRTY-TWO
1 November 1940
A plane crashed here last week, on a hill about two miles outside the village. It’s still there, the wreckage, they haven’t started clearing it away. The fuselage is mottled black and gray, like one of those city moths, and there’s ribbon tape all round it. Children wait till dark then slip under the tape, scavenge whatever they can find to take into school and show around the playground. Mrs. Murchison, whom I met this morning in the post office — I think she’s quite lonely now with Rachel and the family away; she must be lonely if she stops and speaks to me — says one of the little horrors turned up at school with the pilot’s thumb in his gym bag. “That’s lads for you!” And then suddenly we were thinking of Kenny, and a silence fell.