Day (12 page)

Alfred put his hands in his pockets. There was a moment when it seemed no one would move.

drop

Time was, I could have hidden you anything.

But hiding for yourself is different, harder, and then you wonder after a while if the good things you've tucked away are still there, or if they mightn't just as well be off with someone else, for all the use they are to you. There were things, in the end, that you didn't even want, that were intended for a person you couldn't be any more.

Like when the camp was breaking up in the snow: the goons had emptied out the stores and gone through the filing system and suddenly everyone got back the valuables of a man from years ago. Alfred had his fountain pen returned – the one his mother saved to buy him. She knew that he'd want it, although he'd never said.

About to march out into frostbite and Christ knew what, and Ringer looking fraught beside me and suddenly I've got a fountain pen again – most useful.

Holding the fat weight of it in his hand and keeping away from the thought of his mother dead now, or himself sitting up to learn his lessons, caring about prepositions and tangents and collecting certificates.

And letters.

That had been his letter-writing pen. His lucky pen. Notes to his ma: tell her where he was, give her the happiest version of how he was getting along, and then suddenly more, needing words that hadn't been invented, words he didn't know were already hiding, ready in his skin.

Letters to Joyce.

Real letters, and a fight to make them carry what they should, not to scare her, but to keep her, not to love her too plainly, but to touch her enough.

Apologise for the terrible handwriting and check on the spelling of everything and the commas, apostrophes, all the punctuation, practically each fucking chicken scratch that made it to the paper, he'd study and puzzle at because she'd be sure to notice his mistakes and think him stupid, half soaked. She wouldn't say so, but she'd know he wasn't right for her.

Joyce.

The finest thing you hide the longest.

But what am I hiding now? Only that she's gone.

Off with someone else.

I think.

Didn't want me, anyway – with or without someone else.

But it had seemed that she did.

She'd been there before the crew, before the skipper. Back when his days were full of unfamiliar pawls and pins and springs and learning silhouettes, stripping mechanisms, feed opening components, judging wingspans, angles of attack. The bod who taught them aircraft recognition gave them slide shows – Me 109s and FW 190s and girlie shots mixed in to hold their interest, which Alfred didn't think much of. There you were trying to be quick, knowing you had to be, concentrating, and then you're studying some dancing girl's tits, or some Jane Russell-type of bint smirking past you, it muddled your feelings: that restlessness to do with firing and your memory already too tight and thinking of the magic-lantern shows in the chapel Sunday school and a sweat rising under your knees at so much flesh which you had never seen in life and did not think you ever would.

Except in London – everyone got everything in London. You'd heard about that. In gossip, in jokes, in personal health and hygiene lectures, you'd heard about that. It was all on offer there – hooch and private clubs and dreadful diseases and women selling it in the streets, professionals and amateurs out round Piccadilly Circus and dreadful diseases and Soho – God help you in Soho – and dreadful diseases and nicer girls in dances and maybe WAAFs – you were slightly used to WAAFs – and when you were a man in uniform, you could do quite well. If you didn't worry, if you didn't think about guilt and the dreadful diseases and imagine you might be doomed from the very start, then you might let yourself be talked into going and even be hardly surprised when you stroll off the train at King's Cross station and really are there – in London, with a bit of money and looking quite fine for a short-arse in your Best Blue and not everything about you is so very short, as it turns out – another thing you've learned in uniform – so you've no cause for dejection and there you are, all equipped for most things you can think of – which isn't much – and up in bloody London.

Which meant Alfred, with his forty-eight-hour pass, had gone with four gunnery training mates to his nation's capital and seat of government, because they all had to go and try their luck.

Looking for an easy way to test it – no harm meant and no ammunition required.

Although two of the lads had girls there and family and they pretty much disappeared once they'd supped a pint and made everyone come down Putney way because that was convenient for their houses, even if it meant that Alfred didn't see the sights – or not so that he noticed – only bombed-out buildings here and there and a patch of the river.

Once the Putney lads had gone Alfred was left with a bloke known as Ditcher – although he'd never ditched – and a quiet type called Blamey, none of them sure of where they were once they'd walked a bit off from the pub in London's odd, charged dark, a fat moon lifting overhead. They'd walked back towards the Thames, they hoped, in a chilly night and had gone far enough to be highly browned off with not finding it when Blamey hailed a cab and a car did stop – but maybe not a cab – and in got Ditcher and Blamey and then, before they could do a thing about it, some other chap had climbed in after from the off side and everyone shouting as the doors slammed and the car drove clean away.

Which left Alfred in the dark and sobering rapidly. He gave up on the river, then found it, crossed it, wandered along by himself fretting he should have used this time to see his ma, check that her letters weren't phoney and she really was doing all right.

He'd not been clear about where his party had hoped they'd spend the night – the YMCA, a French madam's boudoir and requesting a serviceman's discount at the Ritz had all been mentioned. He was beginning to feel lonesome, childish, tricked, but then Goering took a hand and the sirens went up for a raid, the hot columns of searchlights starting to topple and sweep, ticking round for bombers.

They look for our boys, we look for theirs.

He'd stumbled on the right way for a shelter: one of the brick-built ones that looked a shoddy job, materials skimped, which was funny, because the area seemed presentable from what he could tell in the whining black. He remembered thinking one direct hit would knock down the whole lousy effort. But maybe serve them right – maybe they'd demanded a local shelter – could you do that, if you'd got the money, influence? Seemed you could do most things if you were that kind – the five courses at the Ritz and bugger the rationing kind – so why not demand somewhere for yourself, or maybe for your staff, if you didn't just run for your country house and stay there in a funk?

Count on a war to bring out the finest in people.

He went inside anyway, perhaps out of curiosity – and because if your number's up, it's up, and you could be sitting in a fine, deep Underground station and have a sewer blown apart above you and then drown as easy as anything, choke in shit, or maybe you'd only fall on the steps going down and crush yourself, crush everybody, no matter what you were worth.

He'd turned through the blast protection and then been knocked against the wall. Couldn't work out for a moment why he'd never heard the bomb – then realised this bundle had swiped round and clocked him when he wasn't expecting it. This bundle carried by a woman's voice.

‘I'm so sorry. Did I hurt you?'

But she hadn't hurt him, he was only surprised. ‘No, I'm –'

And the bundle unravelling then and dropping: a quilt, a book in a plain paper jacket, a glasses case, a packet that suggested sandwiches.

I wanted to know what book. Already trying to know people by their books. Stupid habit.

She'd managed to keep hold of her Thermos. ‘Thank the Lord.' Joyce. ‘Oh, dear.' Standing close, almost against her – like being, all at once, in a warm room and happy. Joyce.

Green coat buttoned to the top and her hair not exactly brushed, very deep black, and the largest eyes, these huge dark eyes. Joyce. He sees her and feels untroubled, slowed.

She was a place to live. My place to live.

Joyce. And already he's looking too much and can't stop, but she hasn't noticed, is busy with flustering over her things, so he'll just keep on. Even when he crouches to help her he keeps on, takes in her shoes – good but scuffed – and her ankles, her legs, the start of her legs, the calves, the way they take his thinking out of words and into a panic: thin, thin, dizzy air.

He hands up the case for her glasses but doesn't lift his head, because he is blushing and appalled. He wants to run somewhere with her. And he wants a few days to consider, to gather himself. And he wants things he cannot say.

‘Oh, that's – You're most awfully kind.'

Felt like a creature, a wammell. Heat and shame and enjoying the shame. Hotter because of it.

Raising the quilt that is warm from her arms and heavy and sweet-scented, he stands and he folds it and can't think if he should hold it tight or else far away from himself, because both of the choices would seem rude.

And you're a good boy, remember. Hold hard on to that.

And now that he's standing, it's her turn to bend at his feet which staggers him again, the glimpse of her bared neck, while she gathers up her book. He worries that he smells of beer, of the twist in his head, of this new, marvellous burning.

And then because he's a fool and he does want to know what book, ‘That's a long . . . a big . . . What are you reading?'

Shy about it when she answers, ‘Oh. It's, you know,
The Odyssey of Homer
– new translation. I never really paid attention when I was at school. Bit of a dummy. I'm up to where Circe turns them into pigs.'

And his face dying, abandoned out there in front of his thinking, because he cannot nod as if he's read it, cannot move, and soon she will raise her eyes, stop staring at the wallpaper cover she's used to protect her book – she takes care of books – and she will see that he's just an idiot and they've nothing in common at all.

‘Anyway, I remember he gets home safe in the end, gets the girl and so forth . . .'

The end of her sentence tingling in his spine.

And not sure if she was making it sound simple, because then I'd understand – her being kind – or if that was only her way of talking. She seemed kind. Always kind.

She clears her throat neatly and begins edging further into the shelter, chattering on as she draws him in behind her. ‘I don't usually come here – been using the basement, because it lasted through the proper Blitz, so why not. Only then the house two doors along caught it last week and their basement didn't come off very well.' He thinks, hopes, she hasn't noticed he's so much a bloody fool.

And they're walking together after that and finding a space, sitting, this old dear frowning at them sideways and put out, a kiddie starting to whimper elsewhere, people fixing themselves for the night while a man in a long, grey coat gives out Commun-ist leaflets, lots of praise for Uncle Joe and how they're still holding out at Stalingrad after so long. Alfred takes one because Joyce does – except he doesn't know she's Joyce yet – and he folds it up into his pocket.

‘Do you approve?'

There's this shine about her, as if she's a magazine picture, or something religious and he doesn't know why people haven't noticed and can't think why she's bothering with him – not that she truly is bothering, more like passing the time, and there's something about her that's nervous, upset, and it seems that she's speaking against her will. In those astonishing eyes there's a type of question, or a request. He can't read it exactly and maybe his want is making him find what isn't there, but he has the idea that he might be able to touch her hand and that it might calm her if he did and that he should do something to mend her: that should be his job. Of course, he'd forgotten – so tickled with his idea – that she really
had
asked him a question out loud.

‘I said, do you approve? I mean, it doesn't matter if you don't.' She's dipping her words, nearly murmuring – the old dear staring sharply, trying to overhear. ‘I always did think the Blimps and so on could do with getting a good old shake. We'll need things to be fairer when this is all done with, people won't stand for anything else. And we're used to sharing by this time, mucking in. And meeting each other.' She frowns at herself, at her quilt which is resting on his knees. He raises it, but she stops him. ‘If you can bear to keep a hold – I've nowhere else to put it.' She glances around at the shelter, the dim, musty packing of strangers against strangers, grubby bedding, a shady fellow knocking his pipe out and laughing as if he's told an off-colour joke, elbowing his shady friend.

‘Oh, God.' She gives a shiver, very small. It clatters his bones.

Alfred's stomach fluttering and, ‘What's wrong?' Sounding too loud to himself and not quite respectable. ‘That is . . . is there something the matter?'

She shakes her head, ‘No, no,' as if there was water rising to meet her and she hadn't expected it. ‘Would you like a sandwich? I have some. There's spam, or there's jam. My mother made the jam. No way of telling who makes the spam – some Yank, I suppose. Oh, Lordy. You must think I'm cracked.'

Alfred wants her to stop and has cramp in his arm from needing to reach across to her, only then he wouldn't know what he should do – even if she didn't slap him – which she would – and also that aircraft recognition feeling is seeping into him again like sin. It's tearing him: trying to seem presentable and this nasty eagerness, a bad want of her that breeds more of itself and tricks his breathing up and what kind of man can he be that he likes his going wrong, loves that it springs him up, leaves him hiding his lap under her quilt.