The Undertow (19 page)

A truck thunders along the Bayswater Road at her back, and she flinches at the whoosh and grit as it passes. After that, it’s quiet.

She steps down from the gateway, and into the gardens.

And it’s lovely, the air just a shade cooler than her skin as she walks along the waterside, the sweet smell of roses and lilies. She leaves the pool and makes her way out across the open grass, through the trees.
Asking for trouble
, Mrs.’s voice nags in Ruby’s head,
A woman on her own
. And there is something in that. But if she can go to work in the morning all by herself, in the pitch dark, winter and summer alike, what with double summer time, then she can cut across the grass on a Sunday afternoon, and save her poor old feet a few extra yards and the hardness of the path in these worn old shoes.

She’s climbing the slope, following the narrow path alongside the allotments. The ground is dry; the dust kicks up onto the toes of her shoes. She stops and tugs off her gloves, brushes the shoes off gingerly, then rubs her hands together. Her feet throb inside the old slack leather. She could just slip her shoes off and run barefoot through the
grass—it’s not like she’s got any stockings on anyway. And she’s lifting a foot, reaching down to hook off her shoe, when something shifts just beside her, making her start. An old man steps out from between the bean rows. He’s stooped over, like an umbrella handle, squirting away at his bean blossoms with a little brass sprayer just like Mrs. does. He nods to her.

“Good evening,” she says, in her best voice. Because these are the royal gardens, after all, and you’d get a better class of allotment holder here. She draws her jacket round her. She climbs up past the plots, shoes still on, still chafing her.

Past the Albert Memorial, she lights up a cigarette and catches the first notes of the music, cool, inviting: a gorgeous ripple of the violins up and up and then down. The bandstand appears from out between the trees like a gingerbread cottage, twisted candy-cane pillars and sugar-frosting paint. The thrill is the same as it was when, her hand squeezed tight inside her father’s, they would climb the wide stone steps leading up into the concert hall. The swags and moulding and fairy-gold and tobacco smoke and crush of the lobby, and then the passages that lead up and up and the stairs that get narrower and steeper until they’re so high that they are almost in the heavens, and you could almost touch the plaster cherubs.
In the gods
, her father would say, and it really felt like that, holy, and they’d thread their way towards their seats in almost darkness, the glowing space of the concert hall swelling giddily beneath them. You tiptoe, speak in whispers, don’t touch anything, as if the spell could be broken as easily as a spider’s web.

But it’s all gone. Turned to dust, and the dust blown clean away. She’s here now, alone, in the park, quite grown up, no-one here to hold her hand. And it wasn’t meant to be like this. And for a moment, one of those fleeting moments that she allows herself, she feels like she’s carrying the emptiness around with her like a bundle in her arms, where the child should be.

Behind the bandstand the trees are thick and full. Some of the deckchairs have been drawn into pairs, and people sit intimately islanded in pools of empty grass; others have been dragged into clusters under trees as, earlier, people sought relief from the heat of the day. The nearest seats, facing the bandstand and away from her, bulge with anonymous weight. She drops her cigarette, crushes it out with her toe, grinding it carefully into the dry soil. Squints at the faces that are turned her way.

Bold little madam
, Mrs. would say, if she knew.

But she won’t say. Because she won’t know.

Because there’s nothing
to
know. She’s not a fumbling in the park, grass stains on your petticoat kind of girl.

She turns to the right, moving round the outer edge of the seating. There are empty chairs here and there, their canvas rippling in the breeze. The first is in too much shadow, and looks chilly; the next is too close to a cosy-looking couple whose crossed knees are almost touching. A man notices her, tries to catch her eye; an odd-looking old fellow in a ratty brown suit. She’s not seen him here before—she evades his look, keeps moving on, weaving through the chairs, the music coiling around her. Here and there are real solitary listeners, people here simply for the music: eyes shut like fairytale sleepers.

She’s come back round the seats, back to almost where she’d started. Not a soul in uniform today. And then she thinks: is it happening? Has the second front been opened up? The idea is like cold water in her face. There’ve been rumours but there are always rumours, and she makes it a point of honour not to listen to them. Billy’s last leave: there was a quarter bottle of whisky, a party, the mayfly life they have together. He’d been nice. She’d thought that at the time: he’s being nice. Did he know something, or even just suspect?

And then she sees him. The handsome man. Her hand grasps the back of the nearest deckchair; one of two vacant seats together. She sinks down into its canvas sling.

That last night. Almost like things were in the early days. He’d been gentle with her. She’d thought, the war suits him. But maybe there was more to it than that.

The handsome man is about ten yards away, across the open grass. She straightens her skirt over her bare knees, looks up at the musicians.

Anyway.

In a minute she will let herself glance over, but right now it’s best just to listen, and to be seen to be absorbed in the music, and let him look at her unhindered, if he wants to look. She’s never seen him in uniform. She thinks maybe he was wounded at Dunkirk, and that he’s something high up and hush-hush.

A hand grips the back of the other empty chair.

“May I?”

She nods permission without looking round. She gets a vague impression of bulk, brown suit, shabbiness. The old fellow. He sinks down in the chair next to hers. A pair of heavy legs cross themselves, and a big brown brogue, worn into holes, nudges into the space in front of her seat.

He’s going to want to talk, she knows. They always want to talk.

The legs uncross, weathered hands come down to straighten the trouser creases, and then the legs recross in the other direction. Then the man leans forward. She keeps her eyes on the bandstand. He bounces a foot, hems. She presses her knees together, angles them away. Doesn’t look at him.

The band is made up of very old and very young men, and women. A boy of maybe fourteen frowns at the violin tucked under his chin; a white-haired cellist plays with her eyes closed. The sound swells from the bandstand out into the park, flexible, transparent, vast and delicate.

Ruby lets out a long breath. It helps, just to be here, at the centre of this act of pointless beauty. Though the point is, of course, the beauty itself; the reassertion that beauty is a thing worth the effort of its making. Because it puts the dirt and dust and shabbiness at arm’s length for a time; it holds them all together: musicians, listeners, passers-by; it connects them.

Shuffling and creaking, throat clearing from the seat next to hers. She keeps her gaze fixed on the cellist: how lost to everything she looks. And Ruby’s just losing herself in the music again too, when the man heaves himself into her line of sight.

“G’d afternoon,” he says.

She gives him one of her looks. A nod and a tight smile. Then she turns her attention back to the bandstand. He just sits there, leaning forward, studying her. His face is a blur in the corner of her eye. She gets the impression that he’s smiling. Then, after a long while, he sinks back into his seat.

She eases herself round slightly, making a little more distance between them. Up on the bandstand the girl on the viola takes over; the instrument is gloomy, gorgeous. Without thinking, Ruby clips open her bag and cigarette case and tucks a ciggie in between her lips. Inevitably, there’s a heave and creak from the seat next to her; her heart sinks. He looms round to offer her a light. The flame is transparent in the daylight. He’s so quick, she thinks he must have just been waiting for his moment.

And there’s no alternative, not really; even though Ruby knows, with all the experience of fifteen years or thereabouts of men thinking her beautiful, that nothing, not even a light, is ever given without expectation of something in return.

She leans down to the leathery cup of his hand and sucks up the
flame. The smell of him. Old carpets, sweated mattresses, cheap rooms, drink. He watches her, closely; she can feel him studying her—his eyes running up the side of her cheek and over her hair and down her throat towards the top button of her blouse, which she wishes she’d done up now.

“Thank you,” she says.

He smiles. Stained teeth, side ones gone, and his face pulling itself into wrinkles. And then she notices. His left ear is just a twirl of sheared-off flesh, like fungus ripped off a tree.

It’s not the worst she’s seen, not by a long shot, so if he thinks he can play on her with that he’s mistaken. There was a man who’d pass the shop, when she was little, who wore a painted tin mask. His forehead and the bridge of his nose were ordinary dull flesh, and his eyes where his own, but they looked out over rosy, shiny, painted cheeks, like the face of a clockwork toy. What it covered, that mask, she couldn’t help but wonder. A great gaping hole, it’d have to be: the rubbery pink inner flesh that you wouldn’t normally see. Her mother would drag her back from the window, scold her for staring. As a child, she couldn’t understand that—isn’t it better to look, to meet his eyes, to acknowledge the suffering, to sympathise with the damage done, rather than flinch and look away and pretend that there is nothing wrong, nothing worth noticing at all?

She glances over at the handsome man. He’s watching the band, not her. Hat tipped forward on his head now. Smoking. There aren’t many men left, nowadays. The rate they’re getting through them, they’ll soon be issuing coupons. You’d have to save up long and hard if you want a decent one. They’ll have to lend them around, like party dresses and stepladders. Or just not bother at all. Like all those women left over from the last war, chumming up together and sharing flats and doing good works and some of them never had a man in their lives. Or like Mrs.: still in mourning for someone she hasn’t laid eyes on in thirty years. She’s loving this war, though, with her garden and her volunteering at the WVS canteen and her important little office job. Happy as a sandboy she is, now. For all she’s
tormented
with worry about Billy.

Ruby closes her eyes, draws deep on her cigarette. The old fellow is leaving her alone—so maybe a good long look was all he wanted. A bit of attention, bit of a leer.

She lets the music and the smoke wind all around her. Lets her deep-seated fatigue claim her. The air breathes cool on her face, and her eyes
sting behind her eyelids. The cigarette hangs forgotten between her gloved fingertips, drips its ash onto the grass. Her closed eyes still register the stir of branches, the paleness of the sky, and she still feels the breeze on her skin. On the cusp of sleep, she steps into a certainty—she knows that she’s been dreaming, everyone has—a collective, epic, confusing dream, in which hours and weeks and years seem to have passed, and the world changed irrevocably in blood and dust and broken stone and fire. When they wake, disoriented and blinking and desperate for a cup of tea, it will be to the sound of lost sons playing toss-ha’penny in the alley, and uncracked parlour walls, and a pat of yellow butter softening in the dish, and they’ll be dazed by the normality of it all. Ruby will surface to find Billy sleek in the deckchair next to her. Summer suit and glacé shoes and the malty smell of success. A pink little boy sitting on his knee, plump in a turquoise jumper that Ruby’s knitted out of smooth new wool.

The music closes sweetly like a box.

Her eyes feel wet. She blinks a little, runs her hands up her arms, fuddled. Her flesh is cool. The musicians are rifling through their sheet music. She can’t quite clear her head of the images. Billy as he should have been. Their little boy.

But then the branches buck and toss. The leaves are dragged back, showing pale undersides. For a moment Ruby can’t work out what’s going on, then there’s a clatter like a handful of gravel, and Oh, a woman exclaims, and the first drops hit Ruby’s powdered skin, and then it’s hammering down. The musicians stuff away their flapping scores; the audience scatters, clutching umbrellas, clamping hats to heads. Ruby dashes for the shelter of a tree, shaking out her headscarf. The rain crashes down through the leaves; already they hang limp and defeated from their scarlet stems. Drops thump right through her clothes to touch her skin like fingertips.

She flips the headscarf on, knots it under her chin. In an instant the rain has become a grey curtain, cutting her off from the world. What’s her best way out of here? High Street Kensington: that would be her nearest Tube. If she runs for it, she’ll get soaked before she gets halfway there. If she stays here, she’ll get soaked anyway and still have to make it to the Tube. So, she’ll run for it. She tucks her bag under her arm, wraps her jacket round herself in preparation. But then she hears something—a call, though she doesn’t make out the words. She looks round and sees a man coming towards her, the odd fellow from earlier,
hunched into the downpour, with no umbrella. He calls out something again. Hard to make out.

“What’s that?”

He comes closer, ducking in under the ragged canopy of the tree. She rubs at her arms.

“I said, there you are. I thought, now that’s a piece of luck.”

“Sorry? What?”

“It’s you,” he says. “And here we are.”

She wipes the rain off one cheek, then the other. “I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. I don’t know you.”

“But I know you.” He taps the side of his head. “Never forget a face.”

She looks at him in total blankness. Either he’s lying, or he’s got a screw loose, but either way it isn’t good and she’s not going to hang around to find out which. She gathers herself to duck out into the rain.