Coventry (15 page)

She did her observation work on her lunch hour, hastily bolting her sandwiches on the walk out to the verge. The wrens came and went with a frequency she found disquieting, and, at the end of the week, when Harriet stayed late at the office to type up her description, she found her week’s work had distilled down into a single sentence.

Flight is rhythmical, a sped-up version of the human heart perhaps.

What would she say about this moment? She looks around at the other people streaming down the centre of the road, at the ragged shells of buildings, some still smoking, at the fine mist falling over the city.

I have lost everything, and yet what I mind losing most is the acquaintance of the young man I just met tonight. How strange that is, and how liberating. Perhaps I will feel differently when this is over and I’m expected to return to some semblance of normal life. Perhaps then I will miss my flat, my clothes, the assorted books and paintings I have collected over the years.

Broadgate is a rubbish tip. The rain makes everything seem more desolate, although it also seems wrong that the sun should shine on this day. I can’t help thinking in selfish terms—
There’s the butcher’s where I used to line up for bacon. There’s the cinema where I would sometimes go
—but surely everyone is thinking in selfish terms today? Surely everyone is thinking about what they have lost, and what is perhaps still recoverable.

“That’s where the church was,” says Harriet. “We sheltered in the basement and then an unexploded bomb slid down the steps and we had to get out.”

The church is now a broken heap of stone.

An ambulance wails. The vehicle weaves up the street, dodging piles of rubble. The crowd parts to let the ambulance through. A few people cheer as it wobbles past.

“Couldn’t that have happened?” says Maeve. “Couldn’t an ambulance have come by and evacuated the shelter? Couldn’t Jeremy have gone with the injured people to some safer place?”

Harriet doesn’t say anything. They didn’t see an ambulance the whole time they were wandering about. It seems unlikely that one would have been able to get through the city at the height of the bombing. And how would the ambulance get to the shelter? The shelter was invisible from the street. But there seems no explanation as to where Jeremy is. If he did make it back to the aid station, and the aid station was hit soon after, Maeve’s right, his body would still be there, as would the bodies of the injured people, some of whom, Harriet remembers, couldn’t move. It’s not as if she has seen anyone going around removing the dead from under their burial mounds of rubble.

If Harriet were to remake the world, how would she do it? Would she have a guidebook, something like
The Nomenclature of Colours,
to classify what exists on this new morning in Coventry? What made that book work so well was the constant reference to nature, how the natural world was used to define colour, to ground it. With so much of the city destroyed, what could be used in place of nature? Memory, thinks Harriet. The book she would write would be a catalogue of lost things.

As they get closer to the cathedral, the crowd pushes in on them. Everyone seems to be instinctively headed for the same place. The cathedral is the heart of the city, and it seems natural to Harriet that they are all be tumbling back toward it on the morning after the bombing.

Maeve grabs hold of Harriet’s sleeve. “I don’t want to lose you,” she says.

“You won’t lose me.”

They are almost at the cathedral, but there are so many people blocking them that Harriet can’t see the building. She looks up for the spire, sees nothing but the head of the man in front of her and knows that the cathedral has been gutted.

There is nothing left of the roof. It has collapsed into the centre of the building, and the walls have crumbled. The windows are gone, but the window arches remain. Smoke is still trickling from the beams. They jostle nearer, Harriet actively pushing through the jam of people ahead of them.

“Look,” says Maeve, pointing upward, and Harriet looks up to see that someone has tied two of the charred beams together in the shape of a cross and hung it over the altar.

It seems as if all of Coventry is in the ruined cathedral. Some people are weeping openly, some walk along with their heads bowed. The men have removed their hats. The children are silent. Everyone seems dazed, stumbling forward over the rubble that fills the space. The ground feels hot through Harriet’s shoes, and much of it is impassable. As they get closer to the altar, Harriet can see that someone has written
Father Forgive
behind the cross of burned wood. Around the altar are placed glass jars with wildflowers in them.

It seems impossible that Harriet was once standing on the roof of this building, that she walked up and down, under the stars and above the frosted ground.

Maeve feels as though she’s going to collapse.

“Wait,” she says to Harriet. “Stop.” The cheerful optimism and bravery has drained out of her since entering the cathedral. She feels afraid.

“I need a minute,” she says, and she and Harriet walk over to the side of the cathedral, out of the moving crowd.

Harriet has a hand on Maeve’s arm to steady her, turns to look at the crowd gathering behind them, thinking that perhaps Jeremy might have made his way back here too, that he might be standing in this mass of people, recalling how he once stood on the roof, how he paced with Harriet under the heavens, guardians of the city. In that moment when Harriet turns to look for Jeremy, she sees Marjorie Hatton. She’s moving slowly forward in the middle of the throng.

It is harder to push against the crowd than to be carried along by it, and Harriet struggles to fight her way through to Marjorie. But soon she is there, and has the nurse by the sleeve.

“Marjorie,” she says. “Remember me? Harriet Marsh?”

Marjorie Hatton looks confused, and then recognizes her. “I’m glad you made it,” she says.

“Jeremy,” Harriet says. “Do you know what happened to Jeremy?”

Marjorie lowers her head, and Harriet feels cold with fear.

“He found a bus,” says Marjorie. “A sort of ambulance bus, on his way back to my shelter. I mean, it was a regular bus that had turned into an ambulance, with a driver who was taking the wounded to hospital. We were loading my patients into the bus. Jeremy had just gone back for the last one when he was hit by the blast.”

“Hit?”

“Killed,” says Marjorie Hatton. “We pulled him into the bus and took him to hospital with the others, but he was already dead. I’m so sorry.”

Harriet stands still in the centre of the cathedral. All around her people move forward to look at the altar, to place flowers in the glass jars there.

Jeremy, like Owen, has left her. She shouldn’t have let him go. She should have kept him with her, kept him safe. She puts her hand into her pocket, finds the miniature fire that he gave her. It is cold to the touch.

In this grey morning, the tide of living people rises around her.

Harriet can see Maeve leaning against the wall. She begins to move forward, toward Maeve, already shaping the words she knows she has to say.

And then, right in front of Maeve, Harriet sees her neighbour, Wendell Mumby. He is standing talking to two men under what used to be the chancel roof and is now just a patch of grey sky. Wendell Mumby has his sleeves rolled up and his good tweed cap on. He throws his head back as Harriet is watching and laughs at something she can’t hear.

Maeve sees Harriet moving back toward her through the crowd. Harriet is moving with purpose. She has something to tell Maeve, and Maeve can see by the look on Harriet’s face that she knows something.

She remembers watching Jeremy leave the house yesterday afternoon for his fire-watching duties, how she had stood at the window in the sitting room as he sauntered up the road. He liked wearing the uniform. It put a bounce in his step. At the corner, confident his mother was watching, he turned and bowed.
Cheeky monkey,
she had thought.

Harriet is there, has taken Maeve’s hand in her own, is already saying the words that Maeve will have to carry with her forever. But she isn’t listening. She’s high up, on the top of a double-decker bus, flying through the streets of Coventry. The sun is warm on Maeve’s hands where they grip the seat in front, and the spirited girl she has just met is beside her, whooping with joy. It seems to Maeve that her life is perfect. There is nothing else to want.

H
arriet steps into the new cathedral. She has taken a train to Coventry, up from her small flat by the sea in Newhaven, and she is tired from the journey. She has come straight from the station, for fear of being late for the ceremony, and hasn’t had a chance to look around the city yet. But she can see that it is unrecognizable. In the twenty-two years since she was last here, the main part of Coventry has been completely rebuilt. Harriet finds the new architecture ugly, certainly no replacement for the seventeenth-century buildings that used to occupy the space.

Coventry Cathedral was the only cathedral in Britain to be destroyed in the war. The decision to rebuild it happened the day after the bombing, but it has taken all these years to make that decision a reality. The new cathedral is modern, with great sheer walls inspired by Norman architecture, but which remind Harriet of all the other modern buildings she has driven past in the taxi from the train station. What has drawn her to the new cathedral is that they have incorporated the ruins of the old cathedral in the building of the new, have attached the two, so that one can walk through the splendour of the rebuilt church and then out to the roofless shell of the old St. Michael’s.

Harriet gets tired easily these days, even though she tries to keep herself fit by striding along the beach or, on good days, walking up onto the top of the cliffs to stumble along the backs of the hills. She has travelled up from Sussex and she is glad that all that is required of her today is to enter the cathedral and sit down for the opening ceremonies.

The inside is beautiful, much more beautiful than she could have imagined from the exterior. Harriet slides into a pew at the back of the church and spends the entire length of the ceremony looking at the magnificent stained-glass window. The blue in it is a colour so deep it seems to have drifted up from the bottom of the ocean to roost there, on the wall of this church. Coventry blue.

When Harriet steps into the old cathedral, it is as though no time has passed at all. The debris has long been cleared from the floor and the stones are swept clean. But everything else is the same as it was the morning after the bombing. The window arches are still empty of glass. The roof is still gone. There are benches placed discreetly around the outside walls, and Harriet moves to one of these and sits down.

There is the wall that Maeve was leaning against when Harriet had to tell her that her son was dead. There is the place in the sky where she once walked up and down on the roof with Jeremy Fisher.

It has taken Harriet all this time, twenty-two years, to try to write about that night, and she hasn’t done it properly yet. She has traded her descriptions for poems, and has had some success publishing them. She has a book that did modestly well in the reviews, and she is working hard on another one. Her poems have been included in anthologies and broadcast on the wireless. What Harriet has been searching for in her poems are the words to make sense of what happened on that night in November all those years ago.

She keeps in loose touch with Maeve Fisher.
I promise I will always let you know where I am
is what Maeve said, and she has been as good as her word. She moves around a lot. Right now she is living on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland.
The light is beautiful,
she had written to Harriet recently.
And the strict, shadowed cliffs rising up from the sea are exactly how I feel.

There are a lot of people milling about in the old cathedral. Almost as many people as there were on the morning after the bombing. There are some in their sixties and s eventies, some who, like Harriet, must have been there the night of the raid. They don’t talk much, just walk slowly around the walls, or sit on the benches, like Harriet, watching the crowd.

Harriet still looks for Jeremy. Everywhere she goes she scans the faces, searching him out. It has become a habit and she can’t rest until she has done it now, looking quickly and anxiously at the visitors to the new cathedral. Of course, he isn’t here. But there is something in the act of looking for him that keeps his memory alive for Harriet. In the end, that is what she has been left, and this is her way of keeping faith.

The day is a lovely one, the air soft and the sun sliding in and out of the clouds. Harriet likes this time of year, how long the light stays in the evenings, how green the fields are. She closes her eyes to feel the warmth of the sun on her face, opens them and sees, falling through the air above the cathedral, a single swallow. It seems delighted with all the space, climbing and diving, scissoring through the open window arches.

Harriet buys a postcard of the new cathedral, and on her way back to the station in the taxi she writes to Maeve. They are not the right words to give her, not yet, but they are closer than she has ever been before.

Maeve walks away from the jetty. She heads uphill, to her cottage, but when she reaches the front gate she hesitates and keeps going, up toward the fields sewn sloppily together by the low stone walls that cover the island. In the pocket of her bulky cardigan is the bundle of mail she has collected from the boat. There is a postcard from Harriet in with the letters and bills. It seems wrong to go indoors, into her dark kitchen to read the card. She will find somewhere to sit down, in the sun, so she can fully appreciate Harriet’s words.