Coventry (14 page)

Maeve has rushed across the street to check for survivors in the collapsed house.
There won’t be any,
Harriet wants to shout, but she follows Maeve. The naked body of a man lies tangled in the rubble. The clothes have been burned off his body. There are just strips of cloth around his wrists from the cuffs of the shirt he’d been wearing.

Before Harriet can stop her, Maeve runs to the house next door. It’s still standing, but the front door has been blown off its hinges.

Inside are a man and woman sitting at a table, and underneath the table a boy plays with a wooden train. Maeve feels such relief she rushes toward them. The faces of the couple at the table are stopped. The boy under the table is frozen, his hand holding onto the front carriage of his train. They’re all dead.

“Bomb blast,” says Harriet in Maeve’s ear. “It burns the air to nothing. The force of it must have collapsed their lungs.”

Maeve allows herself to be led out of the room. “The boy,” she says to Harriet when they’re in the hall.

Harriet steers Maeve out of the house. “We’ll find him,” she says.

“We went through the park,” says Harriet. “Here, through this gate.” She pulls Maeve into the park. There are more trees down in the park, and fewer people. There is no one stamping out incendiaries as there had been earlier. The extinguished flares lie in the grass like used firecrackers.

The clothes are still in the trees, webbed between the branches. The clothes make Maeve think that everything is underwater, that they are walking on the bottom of a riverbed. These clothes have been borne along by a swift current, and then have snagged here, on these branches.

It is quieter in the park, thinks Harriet, and then she realizes that it is quieter altogether.

“We found a horse in here,” she says. “And a woman who was dying.”

Maeve is reliving Jeremy’s night. It is like one of those kaleidoscopes she used to have as a child. She would hold it up to her eye and turn the tube just a fraction of an inch, and the glass pieces would shift and form a completely different image.

“The horse was white,” says Harriet. She looks over to the little copse of trees where the woman’s body is likely still lying. How long ago that seems now.

“How old was your husband when he died?” asks Maeve.

“Eighteen.”

“And how old were you?”

“The same.”

It is definitely quieter. They seem to be speaking without raising their voices. Harriet turns to Maeve near a splintered tree, its branches torn off and hanging from the trunk by thin hinges of wood. There is the smell of new, green wood as they walk past it.

“I didn’t do a good job of forgetting him,” she says.

Maeve has known other women such as Harriet Marsh, women who have suffered a loss in the last war and never properly recovered from it. “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” she says.

“I’m not blaming myself,” says Harriet. “Not for that anyway.” They cross the last bit of grass, walk out of the park.

“It’s not far,” says Harriet. “I’m recognizing more than I thought I would.” Much is as it was when she and Jeremy struggled through the city. She leads them carefully down another street. There is so much debris everywhere, great piles of bricks and wood, broken bits of furniture. Fires burn in the spaces between buildings. Maeve looks down at the dark of Harriet’s shoes, just slightly ahead of her, and she concentrates on that, on following the curve of Harriet’s heel, as she leads them back to Jeremy.

As they are walking past a mound of wreckage that used to be a house, Harriet hears the muffled screams of a woman or child coming from underneath the pile of bricks.

“Can you hear that?” she says to Maeve. They stop by the smoking ruin.

“Yes.”

“Here, do you think?” Harriet starts to climb up the pile. Maeve stays on the street.

The screams sound again.

“No, over there.” Maeve points to the left of Harriet and begins to clamber up the wreckage herself.

“Where are you?” yells Harriet, but there is no response. The sound of the screams is lifting up, out of the wreckage, but her own cries aren’t managing to crawl down through the debris. Voices, like heat, rise to fill the space above them.

“Tell us where you are,” yells Maeve. Both women are now on their hands and knees, scrabbling through the bricks like terriers after rats, tossing the broken pieces of the house aside in their frantic attempt to get to the buried voice.

But the voice suddenly stops, and no amount of shouting will make it cry out again. Maeve paws through the rubble. A bomb shelter can just as easily become a grave, she thinks. Maybe it is safer to be out on the streets, in the eye of the storm. Maybe Jeremy would have died this evening if he hadn’t been rushing through the streets with Harriet.

Harriet leans back on her heels, looks over at Maeve. “It’s no use,” she says. But Maeve just keeps going, and Harriet has to stumble across the pile of bricks and grab her by the arm to make her stop. “She’s gone,” she says.

Maeve lifts her hands from the warm bricks. She can’t feel her fingertips. Her nails are torn and bleeding.

“Come here,” says Harriet. “Come here.” And she takes Maeve’s hands in her own, covers them, holding them still.

Harriet is touched by Maeve’s desire to save everyone. It reminds her of Jeremy’s eagerness to help at the aid station. She starts to cry, sitting on top of the destroyed house, holding Maeve’s hands in her own. She feels herself sway and settle, sway and settle, like a building hit by a blast. It’s Maeve who has to help her up from the rubble.

“This is the passage,” says Harriet. They have come to the bombed-out row of shops. “The Anderson shelter is just through here.” She goes first down the alley and Maeve keeps close behind her. She is finding it hard to breathe.

The sky is lighter. Everything is more distinct, swims up to fill in the dark of the city.

The shelter has been hit. There’s a huge hole in one side of it and the roof has exploded out; big ragged strips of metal shear up toward the sky. Maeve remembers the literature for the Anderson shelter saying that it would survive anything except a direct hit.

“No,” says Maeve, and she breaks into a run, reaches the shelter first, and puts her head through the hole in the side. “Jeremy,” she yells. “Jeremy.”

The shelter is deserted. There is no one in it, just torn remnants from the bolt of chintz that Marjorie Hatton had used for bandages.

Harriet sits down on the ground outside the shelter, drawing her knees up to her chest and hugging them. She can’t believe Jeremy is dead. He must be somewhere else.

All around her the sky is lightening. Harriet can see the broken beams and the hanging plaster from the backs of the bombed-out row of shops. The sky is grey and a thin drizzle is sieving down. She wraps her borrowed coat tighter around herself.

What if he never made it here but got lost on the way? What if, by the time he got here, the shelter was already bombed?

Maeve comes back out.

“We should try the hospital,” says Harriet.

“Wouldn’t it have been hit?”

“We should try anyway.”

Harriet can feel the mist on her face, how it is starting to slide down the back of her neck. She remembers standing in the rain at Ypres, by that section of broken stone wall, how she knew so completely that Owen had died there. Here, she doesn’t feel anything.

Maeve stands in front of Harriet. Her heart is beating so fast she can hear it as though it is beating outside her body.

“I want to go home,” she says. “Will you take me?”

Inside, Maeve’s house is exactly as she left it, and she knows the moment they walk through the front door that Jeremy isn’t there. Still, she looks around, races up the stairs two at a time to check the bedrooms.

When she comes back down she finds Harriet in the kitchen sitting at the table. Maeve walks into the room, accidentally kicking a potato that’s lying on the floor. It rolls into the cabinet by the sink. She kicks another potato, on purpose, and it skids under the table, hitting the wall with a smack.

“He’s not here.”

“No,” says Harriet. She didn’t think he would be.

“What about my note? Did he find my note when you were here? Did he read it?”

“What note?” asks Harriet, and Maeve can see that the kitchen is such a mess that her note, carefully placed on the kitchen table has disappeared, lifted into the air perhaps by a bomb blast and blown into some other part of the house.

Maeve leans against the door frame.

“Are you hungry?” asks Harriet.

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Should we eat something?” Harriet is hungry but doesn’t want to make a point of it. She can tell how upset Maeve is. It feels petty to ask for a piece of bread.

Maeve moves over to the larder, finds some candles and lights them, sticking them to a saucer with the drips of hot wax. She brings them over to the table where Harriet sits. The light shivers up the wall when a bomb detonates.

She finds some cheese and biscuits and a tin of sardines. There are two bottles of ale on the larder floor and she brings these to the table as well.

“Helps with my drawing,” she says as she slaps one of the bottles down in front of Harriet, making her jump.

Maeve takes a sliver of cheese and lays it carefully on top of a stale digestive biscuit. “Did Jeremy have a nap?”

“A nap?”

“His bed is unmade. I know I straightened it when I came back here from the pub.”

It seems only good manners to lie.

“That was me,” says Harriet. “After he left I had a bit of a rest.”

They eat in silence for a while.

“Why did you let him go?” asks Maeve.

“He wanted to go. He wanted to help.” Harriet pushes her plate away, her appetite suddenly gone. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she gets up from the table and goes into the sitting room.

Maeve takes the plates over to the sink, stands there for a moment, remembering the old order of things—eat, wash up, dry the dishes with a linen tea towel, put the plates carefully back on the shelves. Everything has been broken into fragments by the bombing, even the slow chain of habit has come apart. Maeve hadn’t realized how much her days had depended on an outside structure to support them.

She finds Harriet standing by the broken front window in the sitting room, staring out over the garden. The sky is lighter above the stone wall. Dawn is coming, and perhaps she is imagining it, but Maeve thinks the bombing is less frequent.

“Does it seem quieter to you?” she says to Harriet.

“Yes, I suppose it does.” Harriet turns from the window. “I remember you,” she says.

“From where?”

“We rode a bus together at the start of the last war. The first double-decker in Coventry.”

Maeve looks hard at Harriet. She does remember the bus ride. She remembers the young woman who chased the bus through the streets with her so they could board. She remembers the tea, and the promise to return the next day. She remembers giving Harriet a sketch of the cathedral. But this woman bears little resemblance to the lively young woman she remembers.

“I wanted to come back,” she says. “But it proved impossible.”

“I waited,” says Harriet. “I waited for everyone.” She looks out over the stone wall, thinking of her flattened house and garden one street over. “That morning I met you, I had just been to the station to see my husband off to war.”

“I remember.”

“He died the next month. At Ypres.” Harriet turns to Maeve. “Jeremy reminded me a little of Owen.” She is quiet. “All he was trying to do tonight was to get back to you. He wanted to find you, make sure you were safe.”

“Where shall we look for him now?” asks Maeve.

“I don’t know.”

There’s a mist settling over the garden wall. Strangely, it almost seems like any other morning.

“Let’s go back to where you started,” says Maeve. “Let’s go to the cathedral.”

The all-clear sounds when they’re back on Broadgate. Almost immediately people appear again, emerging from shelters and cellars, from under their dining-room tables, from inside their fortified garden sheds. They come out into the street, brushing dust from their clothes and removing saucepans from their heads. They are like animals emerging from their burrows, blinking in the daylight, looking around as though seeing the world for the first time.

The air is still thick with dust, and there is the smell of gas hanging in the streets. There is also the smell of smouldering wood and the faint hiss of fire. Children rush about in their pyjamas and slippers, having gone into the shelters dressed for bed. An old man lies on a blanket near a gutted house, waiting to be picked up by an ambulance.

Maeve and Harriet stand in the street with the gathering crowd. Everyone looks at the burned-out shops, at the piles of brick and stone, the shattered glass crunching underfoot.

“I don’t really feel alive,” says Maeve, and Harriet knows what she means. The world they left is unrecognizable, not a place they want to inhabit. It feels like a sort of afterlife. They are their own ghosts.

The crowd of people stand for a while in the street and then they start to move together, to trickle down Broadgate, in the direction of the cathedral.

Harriet thinks of her descriptions. They must have burned up when the bomb fell on her house. There is nothing left of anything she wrote, and yet, walking down Broadgate, with the all-clear ringing in her ears, she finds that she remembers more of what she’d written than she thought.

For a week once, in springtime, Harriet watched a nest of wrens. She crouched on the verge beside the road and documented the activities of the family of birds in the hedgerow opposite. Several times during the week’s surveillance she was mistaken for a tramp by passersby and told to move on. A child threw a rock at her from a bicycle, and she often lost the feeling in her legs from the awkward way she was forced to squat so the birds wouldn’t notice her and be alarmed. She developed a rash from something scratchy on the verge.