The Weight of Numbers (11 page)

When she came downstairs she found him sitting in the armchair by the radio. His grin was fixed and ghastly, his lips as white as his clenched knuckles. ‘Dick?' she said, in a small voice. He turned to her. His smile grew more terrible. ‘Ah! Ha ha!' It was not laughter so much as a struggle for breath. He sprang open from the waist like a flick knife and rocked upright on heavy, scuffed shoes. He led her outside.

A cab passed them; Dick hailed it. ‘Let's paint the town red!'

In the taxi, he tried to relax.

‘Oof,' he said.

‘Aah.'

‘What you been up to, then, baby?' he said.

‘A bomb came through Lyons' roof last week,' she told him. ‘The ovens were out of action all day.'

‘Ha,' he said.

The week before, walking back from the pub, when he asked her what she did for a living, Kathleen had bit her tongue against the disappointment – she had so been looking forward to meeting Sage again – and told the truth. She was training to be a waitress.

‘A fireman came to defuse it, then a soldier.'

‘Ho—' He opened his mouth to laugh, and there was something shapeless about the set of his lips, something ragged, like a wound.

‘There was plaster dust everywhere,' she said, warming to her theme. ‘We stayed open, though. We served soup…'

He began humming.

She broke off.

‘What?' he said.

‘You were saying?'

He shook his head vigorously. ‘Ah. No. Tell me,' he said, and just as she was about to speak, ‘Soup. Yes. And?'

She drew breath to speak.

‘It'll be right again,' he said.

‘What will?' said Kathleen.

He blinked at her. ‘It will,' he said. ‘I will.' He tried to smile – and if it was not quite a smile he made, at least it was not a rictus. ‘Ha!' He had surprised another pun. ‘I'll
right
myself!'

They turned down St Giles High Street. Dick said to the driver, ‘This'll do.'

East of St Giles, the bomb damage was immense. Tall brick terraces straggled towards St Paul's, pale under a biscuit of crumbled plaster. Dick and Kathleen avoided the pavements; walls that had not yet been pulled down slanted dangerously over them. You could see the cathedral sometimes, far in the distance, down long, treeless vistas. She could not imagine where he was taking her. She began to be afraid.

The smell of wet plaster, on the contrary, seemed to give Dick a lift. He swung her hand, back and forth, as though they were walking along a promenade.

‘Ow. Dick.'

He let go, grinned at her and skipped ahead.

‘Dick?'

He capered in the blacked-out streets.

‘Dick, where are we going?' Kathleen's ankle was sore. Her shoe was rubbing it raw. She had not worn walking shoes. Her feet hurt. ‘Dick,' she called after him. ‘Dick!'

She felt a hand on her arm. Startled, she struggled. There he was – right beside her. ‘Easy there, now,' he crooned, stroking her arm. ‘Easy!' As though it was she who had slipped ahead of him.

They turned north, then east again, then north – was it north? They could have been anywhere, going anywhere.

‘Do you know where we are, Dick?'

‘Easy does it,' he said. The word he had used to soothe her stuck to him like a burr. He could not shake it off.

‘Easy as pie,' he said.

‘Easy virtue, eh?' He laughed, and caught her up in his arms.

Kathleen hung there, looking up at him, afraid of him. There was a moon tonight. His head blocked it out. His head loomed over her, a silhouette, a blank.

‘Here,' he said, ‘don't cry, baby. Don't cry.'

He set her down without kissing her. He took her hand and stared up the road.

‘Dick,' she said, in a small voice, ‘that's the way we've just come.'

Dick shrugged. He took her hand, pulling her gently along, retracing their steps, then turned, at random, to the left.

They weren't going anywhere. She understood that now.

The fronts down one side of the street were all torn away, revealing doll's house interiors. Wallpaper shone in the moonlight.

He tightened his grip on her hand. ‘Oh, that's better,' he said, ‘to be moving, that's better. I feel so tight afterwards. You know? Damned tight. Feel.' He stopped suddenly, snatched her hand and pressed it to his upper arm, the muscles there, the knots. The tremors running beneath his skin.

Plaster crunched under her heel.

‘After what?' she said.

‘After the shocks,' he said. ‘After he shocks me. My pal the trick cyclist. My pal, ha!'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' she sobbed.

‘It's new,' he said.

The back of her heel felt cold and damp. It was bleeding. It was hard for her to follow his story. ‘Oh, the popping!' he cried. ‘The popping in my ears!' Eventually she realized that he was not describing his ‘shocks' now. He was telling her about something else. Something for which the ‘shocks' were a treatment.

Something terrible had happened to him.

He drew the words out painfully, as though he were drawing his fingernails across a blackboard. He had been involved in an accident at sea. An explosion. The vessel had ruptured. It had sunk. Dick had sunk. Dick was trapped with a young rating in a compartment deep in the bowels of the stricken ship. Dick went down with the ship. As he talked, she could feel the popping in her ears, the liquid iciness of the water rising around her calves, her knees. She was there with him in the compartment. She could barely breathe.

How deep was the stricken vessel by the time Dick fought free of the boy trapped there in the compartment with him? The boy had panicked. The boy was clawing at him. How deep when Dick drove the boy's head back one final time, impaling his skull upon the stanchion? How deep when he took his breath, dived, crawled and, at last, his chest on fire, kicked free of the sinking ship?

‘Oh, deep, deep,' he sighed.

You have to scream, he explained. As you rise through water, the air in your lungs expands. You have to scream, otherwise your lungs will burst.

They stood alone in the street: the monochrome dark.

‘Like this,' he said.

He let go her hand.

‘Dick?'

He had lost the sense of her entirely now. ‘Like this,' he said.

She reached up for him. She couldn't see him. She touched his face. She surprised tears.

‘
Eeeeee!
'

She fell back, gasping, fingers in her ears.

He walked on, not looking at her. She followed him. She thought he had forgotten her. After a little while, he went on with his story. ‘How deep?' The question fascinated him. ‘Black it was. Black.' He meant the water. ‘It was daylight when we drowned. But we was too deep, you see. By the time I kicked free. Too deep for daylight.'

He stopped again. They had come out into a square. A bomb had fallen in the very centre, and there were gobs of mud over the road. Leaves. They filled the gutters. The trees stood out white in the moonlight. The branches were bare. It was deep midwinter here.

‘There was stuff in the sea. Bits of stuff. From the ship. Sinking, floating. A jumper, a Bible, a set of false teeth, a child's teddy-bear. Nothing had any colour. Like here. Like this. Now.' He turned a circle in the middle of the street.

It was true: there was no colour here. Not a spot of colour anywhere. No traffic light. No yellow beam from a warden's torch. They were in the world of the movies now. The world of black and white.

A park bench hung in the fork of a tree. It was quite undamaged. The brass plaque on its back winked white.

Far ahead of her Kathleen glimpsed the silhouetted bulk of St Pancras station. She knew where she was. ‘Dick? Dick. Where shall we go?' His stare was vacant, without intelligence. She tried to take his hands in hers but they were fists. She took hold of his arms. ‘Dick.'

He swallowed. He was done.

Was that it? She wondered. Was there really nowhere for them to go? ‘Dick,' she said, in a small voice. ‘Dick, do you want to kiss me?' She thought of his mouth, red like a wound, the suck of it. ‘Do you? Dick?' She leaned into him. She ran her hands up his arms.

The braid on his jacket came away in her fingers.

She picked it off.

It was metal foil.

She let go of him.

It was the foil wrappers from slabs of chocolate.

The white stuff sticking it to his sleeve was cow gum. It clung in crumbs to the material of his jacket.

So.

She let go of his arms. She felt calm. Dead calm.

‘Dick?' she said. ‘Where are you from?'

He gave her an address in Fitzrovia: a road off Gower Street. They were practically there. Perhaps they had been headed there all along.

She asked him, ‘Is this where you're taking me?'

He stared into her eyes.

‘Do you want me to come with you?'

The bloated look was back: his look of need.

‘Dick? Do you want me to come home with you?'

She imagined the sort of place where he might be staying. A bleak furnished room with thin walls.

She looked him in the eye, right in the eye, without passion, with a cool, calculating curiosity. She said, ‘It doesn't matter, Dick. I'll come with you.'

She imagined the tightness of his muscles, the tremors coursing under his skin, the nature of the experiment to which she was now committing herself.

Limping now, she led him across Southampton Row and around Bloomsbury Square. The gardens were chained shut. They turned off Gower Street. She counted off the houses, looking for a hotel sign.

‘Here we are,' he said.

It wasn't what she'd been expecting. It wasn't a boarding house. It was one of a row of smart Georgian terrace houses. Beside the door, a plaque bore the name of a distinguished-sounding philosophical society.

Dick stood beside her on the polished marble steps, shifting from one foot to another. Out of embarrassment? In anticipation? She said, ‘Are you sure this is the place?'

‘Aye-aye,' he said, and winked at her, as though the whole evening had been one long, terrific joke.

‘Are you going to let us in?'

He sobered up.

‘Dick?'

His eyes grew big with need. ‘Spare us a kiss, love – a little kiss.'

Did he not understand? ‘Inside,' she said. She took hold of his hands. ‘Take me in with you.'

The door opened. A young woman appeared, smoking a cigarette. ‘Yes?'

Kathleen let go of Dick's hands.

‘What do you want?' The woman was tall and gawky-looking; her white blouse, trimmed with a dark material, carried an intimidating hint of education. Smoke from the woman's cigarette wafted into Kathleen's face. It was strong and foreign-tasting, and it made Kathleen want to rub her eyes.

Dick was staring at the pavement. He was scuffing his shoes against each other like a shamed schoolboy.

‘Come along inside, Mr Jinks,' said the woman, without surprise, without ceremony, grinding her spent cigarette underfoot.

Dick stepped inside the hall.

‘Dick?' Kathleen reached out after him.

He did not notice. His eyes were downcast. ‘Good evening, Miriam.'

His use of her Christian name made the woman bridle. ‘Get along, Mr Jinks,' she said.

Suddenly, Kathleen was afraid. ‘Dick!' she cried, sharp, to wake him. ‘Dick! You don't have to—'

‘That's enough out of you,' said the woman called Miriam.

Kathleen peered past her, looking for Dick.

She saw ornate moulded coving; a chandelier; rich red carpeting on the stairs at the hall's far end; closed doors, painted white. An umbrella stand, heavy with men's mackintoshes.

Dick had vanished.

Miriam stood, her hand on the door, her head inclined at an ironic angle, waiting for Kathleen to be done with her inspection. Kathleen tried to make out her face, but the light from the hall held her in silhouette.

‘Goodnight, then.' Miriam swung the door.

‘Wait!' Kathleen's words came out in a great rush. ‘Is he a sailor, really, I mean, whether what he said, I mean, his uniform, but still he could be, or could have been… I want to know.'

The door was shut, and one by one, the lights in the building were going out.

Kathleen has approached her life objectively. In this way she has protected herself, even from bombs and fire storms.

But her experiments are becoming large and unwieldy. They produce results that have no meaning, or that offer up too many meanings. Her experiments keep colliding. Unfamiliar phenomena peel off and spin away, feelings which vanish the moment she stops to analyse them.

The night following her aborted night with Dick, she went with the girls of her boarding house to the Royal Opera House. The opera house hosts regular dance evenings. Shop girls spin and caper amidst gilt and sumptuous red furniture under a dome of perfect blue, like a blackbird's egg.

There was Margaret, in a red print dress, dancing with the policeman from the pub. The smile she gave Kathleen as she rocked past was all mouth; her eyes had no warmth in them.

Kathleen, seated at the edge of the dance floor, folded her hands in her lap, as unfamiliar feelings exploded and vanished inside her like fireworks. It was not that she had liked the policeman. It was not that she had thought of him since that night in the Four Feathers. It was not, precisely, that Margaret had done anything wrong, when she'd steered her new girlfriend away from him that night in the pub. It was not that Margaret had cheated her or, if she had, it was not as though the cheat was very great. It was not precisely anything. It was simply the wreckage left behind when experiments collide: experiments in men, experiments in friendship. Kathleen wondered what conclusion might be drawn from this result.

Sitting beside her she noticed Hazel, a girl from her rooming house, in a new yellow dress which lent her skin a sallow, yielding quality that men seemed to shun. Margaret wheeled by, her face in the shade of the
policeman's massive chin, and Hazel yawned, ‘Kath, love, you ought to watch that cheeky cow.'