Coventry (13 page)

The barn was in the field behind her parents’ house in Sussex. She had been down recently on a reluctant visit, leaving Jeremy to fend for himself for the weekend. She had been sitting in the garden in the weak autumn sun, having tea and listening to her father lecture her (again) about the wasted life she had chosen for herself. To stop herself from screaming, or even from talking back, Maeve had drawn the sweet collapse of the barn. Part of the roof had fallen in, and the timbers around the windows were swayed with the strain, but the barn was solidly holding on to the idea of itself as an upright building. The door was buckled but still inside the frame. The posts at the end of the barn were stubbornly vertical.

The drawing of the shingle beach was from that same visit. Maeve had told her father that she was on a later train, and had arrived at the station early and walked over to the beach. The tide was out and the shingle was wet and oily, tangled with seaweed and decorated with the odd jellyfish. Part of the beach had been cordoned off by barbed wire in case of invasion, but the section that was still used by the fishing fleet had been left open, and Maeve had walked along the stony ground for a while and then had parked herself by one of the fish huts in order to sketch the scene. What she liked was the look of the stones, how they rolled the eye toward the sea, how the sea pushed the stones back up onto the beach. It was a kind of violence, the way the water and rock interacted with each other. Each rock had been worn smooth by the constant tumble of the sea, but there had been no surrender. This was not a willing intimacy but a forced one.

The drawing of Jeremy was done quickly. He is in profile. He was with his mother at the pub for a drink. They were sitting by the fire because the evening had been cold, and the light from the fire threw shadows onto Jeremy’s face that, when sketched in, make him look older and more miserable than he had indeed been that evening. The drawing is of the side of his face, one shoulder, and his arm raised at the elbow with a beer glass held in his hand. Maeve is not fond of the drawing. Jeremy looks too much like her father in it, and she feels that she has got the shadows in his face completely wrong. But she does like the ease with which he holds the pint glass. His hand is strong and it is wrapped around the glass confidently, fingers spread and flexed against the surface. She has thought about redoing the drawing just as that, as the image of her son’s right hand gripping his glass of ale.

There are hundreds of people, a slow procession of human traffic, drifting down Warwick Road like smoke. Some of them carry suitcases, some wheel prams and wheelbarrows stuffed with boxes. A woman walks by carrying a man’s hat full of tinned beef. A man balancing a birdcage on the handlebars of his bicycle passes Harriet. She joins the line, stepping in behind a woman who holds the hands of two young children, one on either side of her.

“Where are you going?” Harriet asks the woman next to her who’s pushing a pram loaded with clothes and books.

“Out,” says the woman. “I’ll walk to Birmingham if I have to, but I won’t go back.” She gestures to the pram full of belongings. “This is all I have left, and some of it is damaged.”

“I have nothing either,” says Harriet. “My cat survived, but I left her with my neighbours.”

The woman nods in sympathy and Harriet can’t think of what to say next. She misses Jeremy already, and she feels badly about how they parted. They walk in silence for a while. Harriet bows her head and concentrates on following the hem of the coat of the woman in front of her.

Jeremy could be all the way back to Marjorie Hatton’s by now. Or he could be sheltering somewhere. Or he could be dead. Harriet wishes she could have him back. What if something happens to him? It will be her fault.

Instead of the wall circling the interior of Coventry, there are now just roads that lead out from the centre, like spokes in a wheel. They exit the city where the original gates for the walled city used to stand. The city gradually begins to fall away. There are trees and grasses along the road the evacuees are travelling on. In the starry distance Harriet can see the dark slant of the fields.

“What’s your name?” asks the woman walking beside her.

“Harriet.”

“Do you think you could have a go, Harriet? My arms are tired.” The woman drops her hands from the pram, and Harriet obediently steps in to push.

“What do you have in here, rocks?” The pram springs are flattened out and the body seems to be grinding against the wheels.

“Tins,” says the woman, looking suspiciously right and left, as though expecting people to jump out of the hedgerow, leap upon her, and steal her hoard of sardines or snook.

I suppose, thinks Harriet, straining against the handle of the pram, that the choice is always between sentimentality and practicality. A photograph or a tin of ham? The family silver or pots to use for carrying water?

“Do you think the bombing will last all night?” asks Harriet.

“How should I know?” says the woman.

The war has not improved people’s tempers. All this talk of how it brings out the best in people is simply rubbish, thinks Harriet. Miserable people are made more miserable by the war’s deprivations and dangers. Happy people can still return to being relatively cheerful. But everyone, regardless of temperament, is weary of the fighting, and nervous that they are losing the war. The fall of Coventry will be a big victory for the Germans. If Coventry could be bombed to pieces, then why not London? Surely that is how it will go, that is what will happen next.

The night is darker away from the fires of the city, away from the moon’s reflection off the buildings. It is easier to talk, the farther they get from Coventry, and Harriet can hear conversations start all around her, like small fires catching on a roofline.

People gradually leave the procession. When they reach the first set of fields, many walk out of line to sleep in the grass. Harriet can understand how people are weary, but it still seems too close to the city for safety. She keeps going. Just past the first fields she passes the pram over to another willing helper.

It feels good to walk without debris underfoot, to take a long stride down the centre of the road. She feels as though she could walk forever, that she might very well continue on to Birmingham. And then, the moment she thinks this, she suddenly feels incredibly tired, as if she could collapse on the road and sleep for a year. She looks over at the man who has replaced her pushing the pram, wishing that she could scoop out the contents and curl up inside it herself.

She drops out at the second set of fields, and no one says a word when she leaves the group. The grass is wet. She can feel it whisper against her ankles as she walks into the field. The dew is coming up. It seems bizarre that life will continue as usual, regardless of the destruction of Coventry.

All throughout the field are the forms of people sleeping in the grass, covered by coats and blankets. Some people are leaning up against the hay stooks, talking and smoking; a few people are walking slowly about the field, looking for friends and relatives perhaps.

Harriet stands near the edge of the field, looking for somewhere to lie down. It is cold away from the bombing, and she is glad that she’d had the presence of mind to borrow a coat from Jeremy’s house. She wraps her arms around herself, tips her head back to the heavens. The sky is still dark, too early for there to be any sunlight leaking in at the edges. She sees the rattle of stars overhead, the first stars that have been visible all evening. The bombing continues, a soft
thud thud
over the distant city.

Harriet sits on the ground, her arms still tight around herself. She is dizzy with tiredness, but she finds it too cold to sleep, too cold even to sit for long on the grass; so she gets up again and starts walking through the field. Perhaps someone has made a small fire that she can warm herself by. Perhaps someone will be kind enough to share a blanket. She wishes that she’d had the nerve to pinch something from the woman with the pram.

She closes her eyes and then wakes, shaking off the cold, and dozes again, dreaming of Jeremy.

When she wakes, the field of people seems the dream. Harriet is reminded of a Russian novel she recently read. If this were a Russian novel, she thinks, there would be a horse in the field and an argument. There would be several loaves of bread and a long declaration of love.

She thinks this, and then she sees a horse grazing quietly a few yards away from her. She moves closer, sees that it is a donkey, not a horse, but she is still unnerved by the sight of it. The good thing about books is that they remain themselves. What happens in their pages stays there. Harriet does not like the idea of the story bleeding through into real life. She trusts a story, and doesn’t trust real life. But what makes her trust a story is the knowledge that it will stay where it is, that she can visit it but that there is no chance it will visit her.

Harriet feels like a sentry, patrolling the field. She feels like one of Jeremy’s soldiers, walking stiffly up and down the window ledge in his bedroom. She looks around for fire. Suddenly she sees the glow of something on the far side of a haystack. It seems mad to have spent the whole night avoiding fire, only to be seeking it out now, but Harriet is too cold to dwell on irony. She strides toward the haystack.

But it’s not a fire, it’s a woman with a torch. She is wrapped in a coat and scarf, leaning up against the haystack, shining her torch down on the book that lies open on her knees. She startles when Harriet rushes toward her.

“Watch it,” she says. “You’ve made me drop my pencil.”

Harriet looks down at the book again and sees that it isn’t a book with words. It’s a sketchbook. As the woman turns the torch about, looking for the dropped pencil, Harriet can make out the drawing of a rabbit.

She picks up the pencil from the grass by her left shoe and hands it over to the woman.

“Sit down,” says Maeve. “You’re swaying on your feet.”

Harriet drops down beside the woman. “Did you lose your house?”

“My son. He was fire-watching tonight, like you.” Maeve recognizes the uniform Harriet wears under her coat.

All around them in the field is the flare of other conversations. Sparks drift over the grass toward them. Maeve hears the words
surrender
and
headless.

“I’d already lost everything in the last war, when my husband died,” says Harriet. “And I thought there wasn’t anything left for me to lose in this one. But I was wrong.”

Harriet tilts her head back to the stars. There’s a sharpness to the light. The stars look as though they have been nailed fast to the heavens. It was impossible to see any stars in the burning city. There was too much smoke. She can still feel the softness of Jeremy’s skin when she ran her hands over his back. She can taste his mouth.

Maeve thinks that Harriet might be crying, and she raises her torch to see if this is true and sees instead the brown wool jacket she left hanging in the front hall of her house.

“I think you’re wearing my coat,” she says. “How can that be?”

“Your son gave it to me,” says Harriet.

Maeve has sat in this field for hours, waiting for Jeremy to appear. But now this strange woman has shown up, knowing her son. After they exchange names, and Harriet tells her story of struggling with Jeremy through the city, Maeve isn’t so prepared to sit still and wait for morning.

“Would you draw me a map so I can find my way to the aid station?” she says to Harriet.

“The city is burning,” says Harriet. “You can’t go back there.”

“I did the safe thing once,” says Maeve. “And it was a mistake.” Maeve thrusts her sketchbook toward Harriet. “Please.”

“I really don’t think I could,” says Harriet. “So many of the places along the way will be destroyed by now.” She can feel the worry from Maeve, buzzing like an electrical current from her skin. “I can’t draw you a map,” she says. “But I could take you there.”

“Are the fires still bad?” asks Harriet of a man jostling past them.

“Hasn’t let up for a moment,” he says. “You won’t want to be going back to the city just yet.”

But Maeve feels relieved to be doing something. She feels relieved to be moving again, to be going back toward where she knows Jeremy has so recently been.

“You didn’t have to come with me,” she says to Harriet. “I don’t want to put you in any danger. I’ll be all right on my own.”

“You wouldn’t know where to go,” says Harriet. She mumbles something.

“What?”

“And I wouldn’t know what to do otherwise.”

The line of evacuees starts to thin as they near the city, and the people coming along the road from Coventry look blank and sombre. Many walk with their heads down. Some are crying. The road ahead is straight and level, but it feels as though Maeve and Harriet are descending into the city.

“It will be much worse than it was when you left,” warns Harriet.

“I don’t care,” says Maeve. She would crawl through the broken city if it meant that she might find Jeremy.

In front of Maeve is a landscape of toppled buildings and mountains of rubble. Smoke and dust rise from the streets and she finds it difficult to breathe, her eyes start to run from the stinking, acrid air. It is far worse than she had imagined. Nothing looks familiar to her.

There is still the roar of planes in the sky above them. A bomb explodes nearby. There is a blast of heat, and a spray of debris rains down. They drop behind a broken wall.

“Put your hands over your head,” yells Harriet, and Maeve does as she’s told. Something hot hits her knuckles and slides off. A chunk of rock smacks against the outside of the wall and rolls into the street. She thinks she can hear someone crying, but when the bits of exploding building have stopped pelting down, she doesn’t hear it any more.

“Let’s wait here for a moment,” shouts Harriet.

The building across the road from them suddenly shivers down like water. There were probably people in there, thinks Harriet.