Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (35 page)

Outside, the world blooms and fades, flaring bright and then subsiding. The ground trembles and the noise of the exploding bombs is deep and guttural, something felt as well as heard, something that resounds through Maeve’s body like a heartbeat. There is the cough of the ack-ack guns and the drone of the bombers. They’re flying so low over the city that when Maeve looks up she can actually see, in one bomber, the outline of the German pilot in the cockpit.

The street is still passable. Only one house is down, on the corner, and the debris is confined to the radius of the building. But beyond, toward the centre of the city where Jeremy is, things must be much worse.

What seems strange to Maeve is not the downed house but the deserted street. She has never been on it when it has been empty of people and traffic. Maeve runs down the centre of the street. She gets to the corner, tries not to look at the destroyed house because she is afraid of seeing a body, and turns onto her street.

Nothing has been hit. All of the houses are intact. Maeve runs the rest of the way home, pushing open the iron gate and racing up the path to the front door. It is absurd to think that Jeremy would have been able to make it back from the middle of town so quickly, but she barges into the house calling his name and rushing up the stairs to check his room.

He is not there. She sits down on his sloppily made bed. The room is mostly in darkness, but the moon outside the window lights the row of tin soldiers that Jeremy keeps on his window ledge. He saved up his pocket money to buy them when he was a boy. They are turned to face one another, rifles raised, bayonets attached. There’s a Gatling gun in the midst of them that shoots real matchsticks. For the first time, Maeve realizes that the tin soldiers are modelled on soldiers in the last war. They are Jeremy’s last station of childhood, and the sight of their frozen combat unnerves her. She turns her attention to her son’s bed, pulling the sheets tight, plumping the pillow, smoothing the eiderdown. The pillow still holds the shape of Jeremy’s sleeping head.

Maeve had gone to a good school. She was expected to go on to university and, if not that, at least to marry well. She was the only child of older, wealthy parents, and there was a lot of expectation placed upon her.

She had done nothing of what her parents had wanted and very little of what she herself had wanted. But she knows that she has been happy. Her life has been perfect. Even on the bad days there is always something to cleave to, something small, the way the leaves show their undersides in the rain or the way the rain falls in great veils, sweeping down from the darkened sky.

Of course, a great deal of the reason for her happiness has been Jeremy. Every time she looked at him he just seemed so solidly good. She was always glad to see him, always interested in his news, always hopeful for his future.

Maeve sits down on the neatly made bed. She thinks of all the places she and Jeremy have been. What their life has consisted of. There was the pub where she was a barmaid. The Bucket of Blood, so named because it had once been an abattoir. The low stone building still had the stench of death about it. Maeve would sometimes wake in the night and swear she could hear the bellow of cattle, could feel their fear rising up through the floorboards of her bedroom.

At the plant nursery, where she went next, Maeve and Jeremy lived in a hired caravan in the field just behind the nursery. The caravan had a musty smell that never went away, no matter how often Maeve hung out the bedding in the sun or scrubbed down the wooden walls of the interior. They had to cook over an open fire outside, and Maeve mostly didn’t bother. They ate cold food, and once a week she would take Jeremy to a pub for a hot evening meal. That was the only time they were ever warm, those Friday evenings at the pub.

The caravan ran with damp. They had to sleep in a tangled knot in the centre of the bed or else the water running down the walls would soak the bedding. Field mice regularly made nests in their stored clothes and chewed through the tea towels. Once, they came home to find a badger sitting calmly on the caravan steps as though he lived there.

The field they walked through to get from the nursery to the caravan was muddy, full of furrows, and Maeve was forever scraping the thick clods of mud from the soles of their shoes. Water for washing had to be hauled from the nursery, and so they washed less than they should. Jeremy looked feral after a couple of months in the caravan.

It was better at work than it was at rest. At the nursery, Maeve liked walking between the potted roses, inhaling their scent. She liked the sway of the saplings in the breeze. She liked the way everything flowered, on time, even though nothing was planted in the earth.

The next job Maeve took was as a dressmaker’s assistant. At the dressmaker’s, part of the work was to make the customers feel good about the dresses they were having fitted. Most of this involved lying. Maeve would stand to one side, with pins bristling out of her sleeves for pinning up the hem of the dress being fitted, and she would have to flatter the woman who was buying it.
That colour looks so lovely on you,
she would say, when in truth the woman was a hog and had chosen fabric that was the exact colour of hog skin.

But Maeve remembers the dusty light of the shop at the end of the day when she locked up. She remembers the dresses, half made, holding the evening light inside them, like lanterns, as she pulled the door of the shop closed and looked back at them through the window. They always seemed more beautiful empty than they did when they were filled with a human form, and this was the sad truth she wished she could tell the customers but was never brave enough to do so.

What kind of life had she given Jeremy? What kind of life had she given herself? If they survive this night, she will never move again.

Harriet and Jeremy see the horses on High Street. Three horses running down the road, their manes lifting through the smoke, their hooves knocking on the cobblestones. Three night horses. The horses run right past them, close enough to touch. They are running away from the fire and the bombing, running toward the open fan of countryside outside of the city.

Above them, Harriet can hear the bombers. The planes come in waves and sound exactly like that, like the pulse and pound of sea on the sand, a muffled, rhythmic heaviness. She doesn’t look up, even though, on such a clear night she might be able to make out the shape of the planes. But they have been warned not to watch bombing raids, not to gaze upward, as the pilots might see the reflection of their faces in the light of the fires and use their faces as guides to drop their bombs.

The horses are gone now, disappearing into the smoke and the dust, into the frantic darkness. Perhaps their stable burned down and they escaped; or perhaps the horses were set free by their owner. On their own they have a better chance of surviving. Their flight is swifter than human flight. Their instincts are sharper.

The Old Palace Yard, where Harriet has sometimes come to concerts with Wendell Mumby, is a heap of rubble. She remembers the untidy Tudor beauty of the building, how the upper storey leant out over the lower storey, how the panes in the upper storey windows shivered with age. It was a building full of sombre wood and streaky light. Harriet remembers the smooth feel of the stair railing, how it slid under her hand as she ascended to the second floor.

“Look,” cries Jeremy. He seems to be less afraid now, to have taken on new energy.

There are two men stumbling along in front of them. Each holds on to an end of a door. Lying on the door is a woman. Her clothes are torn and her head is twisted unnaturally on her body. They disappear into the smoke up ahead.

Now that Harriet has seen one body she suddenly begins to notice that all around them are the dead and injured. In their flight down High Street they pass the bodies of dead men and women, limbs visible, soft shapes beneath the hard shift of the collapsed buildings. They see a child’s body lying in the road, thrown there by the blast of a bomb. Even though she has lived through the other, earlier raids, Harriet can see that this one is much worse. She never saw bodies before. Those raids were over quickly, leaving their targets destroyed but much else intact. This raid seems intent on destroying everything.

At one point Harriet hears an ambulance siren, but never sees the actual vehicle. The rescue services don’t seem to be able to push through the wreckage.

“This is worse than the other raids,” yells Jeremy, echoing her thoughts.

The farther they stumble through the centre of the city, the more Harriet understands how catastrophic is the damage. Buses are on their sides. The tramlines are ripped up, the steel rails twisted as easily as the wire of a coat hanger.

Harriet’s mother used to recite something about the trams. Harriet remembers how it frightened her when she was young, the sight of her mother’s face leering over her bed in the dark.

Mama, Mama, what is that mess

That looks like strawberry jam?

Hush, hush, my dear, ’tis just Papa,

Run over by a tram.

Is she losing her mind?

“Over here,” yells Jeremy. He’s kneeling down beside a pile of bricks. Harriet hears the high-pitched whine of a bomb falling, cringes and covers her head, but the bomb explodes a few streets over. She coughs from the dust, scrambles over to Jeremy, who is frantically digging through the bricks. “I saw his hand move,” he says, and Harriet looks down and sees a man’s hand, palm open to the night, and the rest of the man covered in debris.

She gets down on her hands and knees and begins pulling rubble off his body.

He’s a man not much older than Harriet, but by the time they get him free, he’s dead.

“Look at that,” says Jeremy, pointing to the medals that the man wears pinned to his chest, perhaps in an effort to save them. “Mons. Ypres. The Somme. He went through all that and he died like this.”

Harriet thinks of the medals she was given after Owen died; the medals he had earned but never received. It felt, at the time, as though she was being awarded the medals for sacrificing her husband to the war. She gave the metal stars and ribbons to Owen’s parents.

A man emerges from a lane supporting another man. “Help me,” he says when he sees Harriet and Jeremy. “I can’t carry him much farther.”

Jeremy rushes forward and hoists the injured man up against his shoulder.

“Where can we take him?” asks Harriet. She is sure the hospital has been flattened by now.

“I don’t know,” says the able-bodied man. “But I can’t leave him. He’s my friend.”

The injured man appears to be unconscious, his head is slung down against his chest. Dragging him through the streets will make them more vulnerable to being hit. Harriet doesn’t want to risk her own life to save a stranger’s. She knows this is selfish, but she doesn’t care.

The two men carrying the door appear again. This time there is a young girl lying on the wooden stretcher. What happened to the first woman? Harriet rushes back to her little group.

“Hurry up,” she says. “We need to follow those men with the door.”

The would-be ambulance attendants do not go far. As they disappear down a passage at the end of a row of shops, Harriet follows them. At the back of the shops, sitting on the bare patch of land beyond the dustbins, is an Anderson shelter with perhaps half a dozen people sitting or lying on the ground in front of it. The men with the girl on the door tip her off onto a bit of clear ground and then shuffle back up the passage.

Harriet runs back to the others.

“It’s a bomb shelter,” she says to Jeremy. “Just behind the shops. Looks as if it’s been turned into a kind of aid station.”

The Anderson shelters have been given out by the government to anyone in Coventry who has wanted one. They are made of curved pieces of corrugated sheet metal that bolt together and are meant to protect against flying debris but they are not sturdy enough to survive a direct hit.

A young woman strides out of the shelter. She has her hair tied up in a kerchief and a first-aider’s satchel slung across her shoulder. She looks up at Harriet and Jeremy, at the man Jeremy is helping to drag toward the shelter.

“Oh, god,” she says. “Not another one. All right. Lay him down. Make sure he’s breathing. Keep him comfortable. I’ll get to him when I can.” She kneels by the girl who has just been dumped off the door, looks up at Jeremy and Harriet in their fire-watcher uniforms. “Could you help me carry her inside? I’m all by myself here.”

“Sorry.” The man who is helping Jeremy to carry the injured man untangles himself from his burden. “I left my family. I need to be getting back to them,” and he grimaces apologetically as he scuttles off.

“Of course we’ll help you,” says Jeremy. He gently lowers the injured man to the ground, lays him on his back, and takes off his own coat to use as a pillow under the man’s head.

“Are you a doctor?” asks Harriet.

“Nurse,” says the woman. She stands up, offers her hand, first to Jeremy and then to Harriet. “Marjorie Hatton. I was taking shelter here and a bomb fell on those shops. Some people managed to drag themselves out and I salvaged some of the bolts of fabric for bandages.” She waves her hand toward the length of cloth wound tight around a man’s chest. “Chintz,” she says. “Not sure he’s going to think much of those pink flowers when he wakes up.”

Harriet is always suspicious of people who seem unnaturally cheerful.

Another wave of bombers passes overhead and Marjorie Hatton ducks through the doorway of the shelter.

“We can’t stay here,” says Harriet. “What about your mother?” She doesn’t want to go inside the shelter. She doesn’t want to help the wounded. She can’t explain this to Jeremy without sounding cruel. She has had enough of death. One of the injured reaches out in his pain and delirium and grabs hold of her ankle. She has to shake hard to dislodge him.

“My mother can take care of herself,” says Jeremy. “She’s good at that. It’s me she’ll be worried about.” He moves to follow Marjorie into the shelter, looks back at Harriet. “And you don’t need to stay here on account of me.” He leaves her standing alone. Harriet follows Marjorie and Jeremy into the bomb shelter. She is annoyed that Jeremy could so easily dispense with her.