Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (38 page)

How would I describe the world? By describing something, doesn’t the thing itself cease to exist? How would I decide what to marry—this shade of grey with the low-slung clouds of November. Not precise enough. This shade of grey is cigarette ash. That shade of grey is water running over clay. Not vivid enough. That shade of grey is old mortar between old bricks.

Jeremy is quiet beside her. Harriet puts a hand on his arm. He had rolled up his sleeve when he was working in the aid shelter. His skin is soft under her fingertips, softer than her own.

“We should go,” she says.

Harriet and Jeremy move away from the library, continue on down Hertford Street. Home is not far now. From inside some of the shops there is a sound like artillery fire. It takes a while to determine that it is the noise not of gunfire but of the tinned goods in the shops exploding. They pass a row of houses burned to nothing but their frames, and yet on the windowsill of each house is a cat, curled up, nose to tail.

Cats stay with the building, thinks Harriet. Dogs go with the people. They have seen many dogs scuttling along the streets, pressed tight against the walls, tails between their legs, or nosing through the rubble, looking for their owners. Jeremy has put his hand out to several of the dogs, but they are too skittish to come near. But the cats seem relaxed, sitting in their places like sentinels.

The route they are travelling means that they will get to Harriet’s house before Jeremy’s. Harriet wishes she had taken them another way, but the other ways were blocked. She doesn’t feel ready to arrive at her house yet. She feels better able to deal with Jeremy’s impending grief rather than her own. She has less to lose.

A bomb explodes a little way in front of them. Harriet can feel the blast of hot air push her backwards. She puts her hands over her head to protect herself.

The bombs falling on the city are an unnatural phenomenon, and yet they have to be thought of through past experience. The people of Coventry have lived through storms. They have listened to the bass notes of bells, and so the bombs become all of these things. The bombs feel to Harriet like an earthquake shaking the ground, lightning striking the earth, the deep, sonorous toll of a bell.

When something is unnatural, there is no new language for it. The words to describe it must be borrowed words, from the old language of natural things.

This must be how it was for Owen, thinks Harriet. This never knowing what will happen next, this living in constant peril. She is worn down by one night of it. She can’t imagine how Owen must have felt after days and days of living like this. Maybe he wasn’t killed in the trenches but crawling away from there. One of the customers of Bartlett’s Coal had fought in Ypres. He had told Harriet once that the ground near the trenches was packed with so many bodies that it was as springy as a mattress.

A few years after Harriet had gone to Ypres, the town was rebuilt. A memorial was constructed at the Menin Gate. Harriet saw photographs of the rebuilt church, the buildings in the centre of the town repaired and looking as though they’d never been bombed. It was a shame, she thought, that they’d seen fit to do that. Not that she couldn’t understand the need of the people who lived there to go on with their lives, to have back what had been taken from them; but she had thought that the ruined town was a much better memorial to the dead than the rebuilt one. There was a dignity and a sorrow in the desecrated buildings that wasn’t present in the redone models. They spoke more directly to what had happened there. There was more truth in them.

What will happen to Coventry? she thinks. Will there be anything left to rebuild, to memorialize? It is so hard to tell how much of the city has been destroyed, how great the damage is. But so much seems to be gone, and the bombers just keep coming back. There will be nothing left by morning. And what of the next night? The Germans could keep it up until everything and everyone is extinguished.

“Let’s go,” yells Jeremy into her ear, and she realizes that the bombing has moved off, moved away from them. She stands up stiffly, her arm aching, struggles through the rubble.

The smoke-shrouded moon shines high above them now, straight overhead. The sky is as red as blood.

They reach the end of Berkeley Road without incident, and then it happens, the moment that Harriet has been dreading. They turn the corner and begin to move down toward her house. They hurry past where Mrs. Patterson’s house used to stand, just a crater there now. The rose hedge that used to front the garden has been completely buried in rubble. The house next door to Mrs. Patterson’s is standing, and the one next to that.

“Which one’s yours?” shouts Jeremy.

“At the end of that row.” Harriet can’t look for fear of what she might see. She looks down at the ground instead, at her feet moving carefully around the bricks and bits of broken wood. “Look for me,” she says to Jeremy. “It’s the last house in the row. Mine was the flat on the top floor. Wendell Mumby lived below me.”

“It’s gone,” Jeremy says. “The last half of the terrace is gone.”

Harriet looks up then and sees immediately that there is nothing left of her house, or the one beside it, or the one beside that one. The wall still surrounds the garden, but the garden is entirely gone.

“Wendell,” she says. Jeremy has his arm around Harriet’s shoulders and she leans into the hollow of his collarbone. Jeremy smells of smoke and camphor. His skin is gritty against Harriet’s face.

She is afraid that she will find the body of Wendell Mumby in the rubble, but if he is there, he is well buried under the bricks and broken pieces of furniture. Her flat has collapsed into the ground-floor flat. Even so, she finds precious little that has remained intact.

“Look for my wedding photograph,” she tells Jeremy. “It’s in a silver frame.”

They are moving cautiously over the debris. Even with the bright of the moon it is still hard to see properly.

“You’re married?” says Jeremy.

“Was married. My husband died in the last war.”

In the photograph, Harriet and Owen are standing at the door of the church. She has the bottom of her dress gathered in her hand because they’re about to go down the stone steps. Owen is wearing a morning coat. The photograph has stood on Harriet’s bedside table since he died. Every night she goes to sleep looking at it, and every morning she wakes up doing the same.

They don’t find the photograph. All they find is a small wooden box covered with shells that Harriet had kept buttons in. The buttons are gone, but the box has remained whole. They find pages of books and fragments of crockery. Jeremy unearths a bent spoon, straightens it, and hands it to Harriet. Not knowing what to do with it, she puts it in the box covered in shells.

“Mrs. Marsh,” calls a voice, and Harriet looks down from the hill of rubble to see her neighbour Mr. Carter from the other end of the terrace.

“Have you seen Mr. Mumby?” shouts Harriet.

Mr. Carter shakes his head. “No,” he says. “But I have your cat. I have Abigail.”

The Carters’ house is as it ever was, not even a window blown out. It seems miraculous to walk inside and see all the cups and saucers intact, sitting on the shelves the way they always have.

There’s a hurricane lamp on the worktop, and candles burning for light. Mrs. Carter pours them water from a large saucepan on the floor. “You’re welcome to shelter here with us until morning,” she says.

The elderly Carters and their equally elderly collie, Jack, have been lying on a mattress under their heavy oak dining table for protection against the bombs.

“The cat won’t come near the dog,” says Mr. Carter, leading them into the kitchen. “She prefers the upstairs landing window. We found her sitting on the wall of your garden.”

Harriet leaves Jeremy in the kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Carter and bolts the stairs two at a time. Abigail, just as reported, is curled up on the ledge of the window at the top of the stairs. She meows when she sees Harriet, and Harriet bursts into tears. It is not that she is overly fond of the cat. She was a stray that Harriet took in and initially they merely tolerated each other. But Harriet has grown attached to her and now, except for that vulgar box coated in shells, she is the only thing she has left. She reaches out her hand and strokes the cat’s head, rubbing behind her ears as Abigail likes. When she takes her hand away, it is dusty with ash.

“What happened to Wendell?” Harriet asks Abigail. “Where did he go?” Abigail meows again, and then gets down to the serious business of grooming her right back leg.

Jeremy is crouched under the table with the Carter family. The plates rattle on the shelves as a bomb explodes nearby. The dog appears to be asleep.

“He’s deaf, poor lamb,” says Mrs. Carter.

“Lucky dog,” says Jeremy.

The dog kicks out his legs in his sleep, dreaming of running.

“No sign of Wendell?” Harriet asks.

“We haven’t see him,” says Mrs. Carter.

Another bomb goes off. Chunks of plaster fall from the ceiling onto the table. Everyone flinches, even though they’re not hit.

“I can’t believe my house is gone,” Harriet says to Jeremy. She keeps alternately forgetting and remembering this fact. She feels disembodied.

“Poor lamb,” says Mrs. Carter, patting Harriet’s knee.

They’re close together under the table. Harriet has to keep shifting on the mattress to avoid coming into contact with Mrs. Carter or Jeremy. Mr. Carter keeps patting her shoulder. She is getting a cramp in her calf from the unnatural way her legs are bent. Her arm aches and her throat is sore. Wendell is gone. Her house is destroyed. The cat is safe. This is the sum total of her life.

“I should go to my house,” whispers Jeremy in her ear. “I need to find my mother.”

Harriet feels immense relief when he says this. She found the Carters boring before the war, and even though she is grateful for their kindness, she is eager to get away from their well-meaning blandness.

The donkey’s name is Amos. He is not impressed with the bombing, or with the long night perambulation he is being forced to undertake. Periodically he stops dead in the road and the man leading him has to lean his weight backwards on the rope to get Amos moving again.

Maeve likes the irritable donkey, his stubborn refusal to do as he is bidden. She likes the undulations of his leg and shoulder muscles as he walks. She likes the smooth grey wall of him, less than an arm’s length away from her own body. She looks at him as much as possible, trying to memorize him so that she’ll be able to draw him later on.

No one talks. The line of evacuees just moves forward, each step taking them farther away from Coventry, farther away from this terrible night of destruction and death.

Maeve eats her apple and gives half to the donkey. His teeth are big and yellow; even in the moonlit darkness she can see their tarnish. He must be an old donkey. He takes the piece of apple from the flat of Maeve’s hand and stops to eat, chewing with his mouth open, as all animals do.

Jeremy would have liked Amos, thinks Maeve, and then she reprimands herself for using the past tense to think about her son. Jeremy
will
like Amos.

When Maeve first came to Coventry five months ago, she had a little money saved from her last job and didn’t have to work right away. She put her energy into setting up the house and getting Jeremy settled into his job at Triumph. She was waiting to hear if she’d been accepted to work as a postman; with so many men away they were taking women. But this hadn’t happened yet. She spent her days looking after domestic duties and then, in the afternoons, she worked on her drawing. Not since she was a young girl had she had such a calm routine. This autumn had been almost a rest because the pace of her days had been so relaxed.

Maeve thinks of this now, as she’s walking along the road, the city slowly dimming behind her. She has been happy with the rhythm of her days. It is not as though she’s greedy for happiness, but she wishes that she’d been able to recognize it completely when she had it.

Maeve remembers the light in the front room in the afternoon, how it crawled from the settee to the sideboard to the fireplace mantel. She remembers the creak on the staircase when Jeremy thudded down in the morning, the slower creaking as he ascended at night. She remembers the clink of milk bottles on the stone steps, the sputter of sausages under the grill. There was always a breeze in the garden when she was hanging out the wash. It filled the sheets as though they were sails.

These were ordinary moments. They were not filled with meaning, but they were Maeve’s life. Nothing that will come after tonight will be her known world. If she and Jeremy survive tonight, there will be the struggle of beginning again. This is hard enough at the best of times, but in the middle of a war it will be almost impossible to bear.

Maeve wipes the tears away that have started down her cheeks. She has slowed without realizing it, and is no longer keeping pace with Richard or the donkey. She has fallen behind. She is alone among this moving wall of strangers.

Harriet and Jeremy pass the fallen house of Mrs. Patterson and turn the corner. Harriet feels enormous relief at leaving her wrecked house behind. Wendell Mumby is buried under the rubble of it. It has become his grave. The invincibility she felt earlier in the evening seems to have evaporated. She thinks it is likely that Jeremy’s mother is dead too, and that she and Jeremy could be killed before the night is over. They are foolish to be out on the streets of Coventry when almost everyone else is hiding from the bombs. But when they were in that church basement earlier, Harriet had felt claustrophobic, and surely the cellars will be like ovens, with the city on fire above them. It feels better to be above ground, to be moving about, to see what is happening, rather than just imagining it. It would be better to die outside than trapped in a cellar with people she doesn’t like or know.

Jeremy’s street is perhaps five minutes away. Harriet does not know what will happen when they reach his house. If the house has survived, and he finds his mother, what will become of Harriet? Will he simply thank her for being his guide and expect her to disappear back into the night?