Coventry (9 page)

The stone walls are scattered like broken, human music across the countryside. Used to mark boundaries, they were made from clearing the fields. The size of the stones gets progressively smaller as the walls get higher. The large stones are all at the base of the wall, and the walls themselves are only as high as my waist. Perhaps this is as high as a man can lift a stone without strain. Perhaps this is as high as a man can lift a stone without having to raise his hands above his heart.

The walls are like language. They are like fine tracery with the light behind them, like lace, and, in a sense, they are no different from these words—each one lifted slowly into place and balanced on this page.

 

Coventry was once a walled city, and two city gates survive, with a piece of wall running between them. Harriet stood for an hour in a garden one summer, where there was still a good section of the wall intact. The people who lived in the house had trained fruit trees to grow up the wall, their branches creeping tentatively out among the stones, like fingers reaching for a hold on a rocky climb. Harriet ate a pear and tried to count the stones, lost count, standing in the sunny garden with the sweet taste of pear filling her open mouth.

The walls would be of no help now, thinks Harriet, approaching the door of the Anderson shelter. Who could have imagined that the attack that would bring down Coventry, all these years later, would be coming from above? It is always the thing that you can’t imagine that is your downfall, she thinks, pushing open the door and stepping into the warm darkness of the shelter. Because the thing you can’t imagine happening is what you can’t ever guard against.

“Oh, Harriet,” says Jeremy, and she can tell from his voice, from the relief in his voice, that he is glad to see her back.

She holds out the saucepan triumphantly toward him. “Tea,” she says. “No milk, I’m afraid, and we’ll all have to drink from the one pot—but it is hot enough, and it is tea.”

“You’re a marvel,” says Marjorie. She takes a sip of the tea, bends to offer the pot to the girl who has just been stitched up.

Jeremy takes a sip from the saucepan of tea when it is handed off to him. “That was a bit mad,” he says. He reaches out and touches Harriet on the arm. “You’ve cut yourself.”

“I was caught in a blast.” Harriet looks down and sees that her forearm is slippery with blood.

“Sit down,” says Jeremy. “I’ll wrap it up for you.” He leads her to a bench and she dutifully sits down, holding her arm out before her for him to bandage.

“What colour does it look like to you?” she asks.

“What?” says Jeremy.

“The blood.”

“Darkness.”

But this isn’t right. Harriet thinks of the salty taste of blood, the slickness of it, and the heat. How it is protected inside the wall of your body, and how when that wall of flesh is breached, it rivers out, moves along a course of its own choosing. She thinks of the bloody chest of the dead man.

“Blood isn’t darkness,” she says. Blood is the fruit of darkness.

Jeremy is quiet for a moment, and then he leans down and kisses Harriet’s arm; his lips touch her blood.

“Yes,” he says, “I can see what you mean.”

Maeve tries to imagine Jeremy safely tucked away in a bomb shelter. She tries to imagine that he is not afraid, that he is not alone. But thoughts of him sitting calmly underground, chatting to the other inhabitants of the shelter, quickly turn into memories of him as a child, terrified and crying. Her memory of him moves swiftly from childhood to manhood and back again.

Maeve stands up, runs her hands over the eiderdown to smooth it, and then goes downstairs. She should eat something, but she’s not hungry. She should crawl under her dining table to shelter, but she’s too restless to settle.

She stands at the window in the sitting room, watching the flashes of light in the sky above the garden. For the first time she wishes that she knew who Jeremy’s father was so there would be someone to share her worry, someone to stand beside her here at the window and reassure her.

Jeremy’s father was one of several soldiers in the last war. Maeve had not had what one could call a proper relationship with any of them. They were soldiers on leave when she had met them, and she was swayed by the intensity of their feelings for her—feelings she realizes now were motivated by their fear that they would die shortly on the battlefield. She had not loved them, but she had believed that each one of them had loved her, and she felt tenderness toward them because of this.

Now she barely remembers their names.

Whenever Jeremy asked about his father, Maeve simply said he had been a soldier who had died in the last war. She has no idea what happened to those men she bedded with such sweet urgency, but all of them could well have been killed.

Maeve has never really been in love. She has waited for a relationship, but it has simply never happened. The fact of her son keeps most men away, and the ones who do come near want sex. Maeve is always insulted by the assumption that just because she has had a child out of wedlock, she is easily persuaded to bed.

Maeve has never questioned her life. Things happened or didn’t happen. She didn’t care about the reasons. But now, standing here, she wishes she’d known Jeremy’s father, that she’d married him, that they’d made a home together. Yet she knows that that wouldn’t have necessarily kept Jeremy safe. Having another person to love, having a family, would just mean that she would have more to lose on this terrible night.

“I want to go home now,” Harriet says to Jeremy. “I don’t have much, but I want to see if it’s still there. I want to make sure Wendell Mumby is safe. Besides, I don’t want to die in an Anderson shelter.”

Jeremy has finished wrapping her arm in the piece of chintz, tied a neat knot just below her elbow to hold the fabric in place. “I’ll come with you,” he says. He seems more fond of her since she returned from her quest for tea.

When they tell Marjorie Hatton that they must be off, she thanks them and shakes their hands solemnly, as she did when she first met them. The gesture seems both formal and intimate, as is everything to do with the war, everything that is happening to Harriet on this night.

“It’s not going to stop,” says Jeremy when they step out the shelter door and see the surge of fire on the horizon. “It’s not going to stop until there’s nothing left.”

They head back down the passage to High Street.

“Let’s go through the park,” says Harriet. “It’s quicker.” She leads the way. The streets are more deserted now. Harriet is amazed at how quickly she has become used to seeing dead bodies. We must be in shock, she thinks. All of us, all of Coventry. We must all be in shock.

There is an explosion near enough to them so that the wall of heat from the blast slams against them and knocks them flat. They lie there, Jeremy half on top of Harriet, protecting her with his body.

Harriet’s ears ring from the blast. She’s lying face down in the road. She can taste the damp stone, and her eyes water from the grit and dust.

Jeremy is lying with his chest across her back, and even though she is afraid, his weight is comforting. When the air has settled and he scrambles up, Harriet misses the feeling of his body lying across hers.

The water mains have been hit. The electrical supply is knocked out. The phone lines are down. The buildings that haven’t collapsed have their windows gone. Blackout curtains hang in rags from the window frames. The buildings that have suffered direct hits release debris into the air—bricks and bits of wood, slate tiles, a glittering crescendo of window glass. Harriet and Jeremy run through the streets with their arms covering their heads to ward off the wreckage.

In the park there are incendiaries standing upright in the grass, like candles. There are a couple of fire-watchers in helmets trying to put them out, kicking them over and stamping on them. By the time Jeremy and Harriet stumble over to help, the incendiaries have been extinguished. It is still impossible to talk without shouting. It is easier not to talk, and they weave across the grass in silence.

The leaves have burned black on the trees. The limbs are twisted and full of clothes, caught there like strange birds in the upper branches. The clothes must have blown up there from a bomb blast.

Harriet remembers the morning of November 14. How beautiful it was, all sun, and only a little wind to remind her of autumn. It was early closing. It was a Thursday. She had gone round to the shops before lunch, and she had felt lucky because she was first in line at the butcher and got sausages.

Maeve walks through her darkened house. She drags her fingers along the walls, feeling the nicks and bumps in the wallpaper that she didn’t know were there. The house isn’t familiar enough to her yet to allow her to walk around freely with the lights off. She needs to touch the walls for guidance.

The texture of the wallpaper feels like the sand on the beach where Maeve remembers having a picnic once, between the wars. She was with a man she barely knew, and she was waiting for him to kiss her while Jeremy raced behind them, in and out of the surf. She had been dragging her hand back and forth through the sand beside her while she waited for this man, whose name she has forgotten, to get up enough courage to lean across the picnic blanket toward her.

Maeve stops by the kitchen door. The house shakes from a nearby blast and she puts both hands out to steady herself against the door frame.

It was a perfect day, she thinks, that day at the seaside. There was sun and good food, the tension of waiting to be kissed, the happiness of watching Jeremy running through the waves. What she had felt was not the usual hurry to be on to the next moment but a desire to linger where she was.

Maeve wouldn’t have minded dying then, when she was happy like that—except for Jeremy. But not now, she thinks, pushing off from the kitchen doorway and drifting back into the hallway. Please, not now.

Harriet and Jeremy are nearing the end of the park. They have come more than half a mile perhaps and are nearly home. Remarkably few trees are down or on fire. It seems, except for the heavy thud of the bombs falling around them and the smoky light rising over the city, almost normal.

“What’s that?” shouts Jeremy, pointing to a misty shape by a thicket of bushes.

At first Harriet thinks it’s a trick of the light, but the shape moves its head and she can see that it is a horse. A white horse, head down, feeding on the grass. Maybe it is one of the horses that passed us in the street, she thinks. They instinctively move toward it, walking slowly over the grass to where it stands, oblivious.

“Look there,” says Jeremy in Harriet’s ear. “To the right of the horse, by that tree. Isn’t that a person?”

A woman sits up against the tree, her head slouched forward against her chest. She has long blonde hair, with patches of dark that Harriet can see, once they get closer, are blood. She wears clothes that suggest she was on her way home from the office—a skirt and blouse. A cardigan lies beside her on the grass, and her shoes are gone. One of her legs is bent unnaturally back.

“It’s broken,” says Jeremy as they get closer.

The horse, now sensing them, throws its head back and whinnies. The woman jerks upright at the sound. Harriet and Jeremy kneel down on either side of her.

“I think I’m seeing things,” whispers the woman. “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.”

They crouch down beside her. Now that they’re close to her, Harriet can see how matted with blood the woman’s hair is.

“It’s a horse,” says Jeremy. “You’re not seeing things.”

“How did you get here?” asks Harriet.

“Dragged myself,” says the woman. She shakes her head and blood splatters across Jeremy’s face. “I’m dizzy,” she says. “Can’t seem to clear my head. And cold.” Harriet puts a hand out and touches the woman’s skin. It’s colder than the air around them.

“She’s freezing,” she says to Jeremy. They both move closer to the woman, trying to warm her with the heat of their bodies.

“I don’t think we should move her,” says Jeremy. “I don’t think we could get her back to Marjorie’s.” He doesn’t say the words
in time,
but Harriet knows what he means.

“Is it really a horse?” says the woman.

“I think so,” says Harriet, but she’s not sure about anything any more. The horse could be a mirage. It seems a ghostly apparition, and the way it is calmly feeding seems out of step with the panic of the evening.

“How strange,” says the woman. Her head lolls to one side and she slips down in one movement onto Jeremy’s lap. He cradles her head in his arms, looks up at Harriet.

“What do I do?” he asks.

“I think you’re doing it,” says Harriet.

It takes a long time for the woman to die. Her breath becomes ragged, and then it bubbles in her throat and Harriet thinks she is dead, but the breathing starts up again, and then stalls, goes quiet. They sit holding her until she grows completely still. It is suddenly quiet in the park, a pause between the waves of bombers overhead.

They pick up the woman as gently as they can. Jeremy carries her by the shoulders, and Harriet lifts up the woman’s feet. The weight of the dead woman is the same weight as the sacks of coal she would sometimes help move out of the storage room at work. They stagger over to the small copse of trees just behind them, lay her down on some soft grass. Harriet folds the woman’s arms across her chest.

“We should say something,” says Jeremy, but they stand there, beside the dead woman, and there seems nothing they can say. For all her descriptions, for all her careful search and rescue of words, Harriet can think of nothing that would equal this moment. No half-forgotten prayer from childhood. No lines of poetry.

When they come out of the trees the horse is gone. They walk over to the spot where it had stood. There is nothing to show that it was ever there—no indentations in the grass.