Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (42 page)

“Helps with my drawing,” she says as she slaps one of the bottles down in front of Harriet, making her jump.

Maeve takes a sliver of cheese and lays it carefully on top of a stale digestive biscuit. “Did Jeremy have a nap?”

“A nap?”

“His bed is unmade. I know I straightened it when I came back here from the pub.”

It seems only good manners to lie.

“That was me,” says Harriet. “After he left I had a bit of a rest.”

They eat in silence for a while.

“Why did you let him go?” asks Maeve.

“He wanted to go. He wanted to help.” Harriet pushes her plate away, her appetite suddenly gone. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she gets up from the table and goes into the sitting room.

Maeve takes the plates over to the sink, stands there for a moment, remembering the old order of things—eat, wash up, dry the dishes with a linen tea towel, put the plates carefully back on the shelves. Everything has been broken into fragments by the bombing, even the slow chain of habit has come apart. Maeve hadn’t realized how much her days had depended on an outside structure to support them.

She finds Harriet standing by the broken front window in the sitting room, staring out over the garden. The sky is lighter above the stone wall. Dawn is coming, and perhaps she is imagining it, but Maeve thinks the bombing is less frequent.

“Does it seem quieter to you?” she says to Harriet.

“Yes, I suppose it does.” Harriet turns from the window. “I remember you,” she says.

“From where?”

“We rode a bus together at the start of the last war. The first double-decker in Coventry.”

Maeve looks hard at Harriet. She does remember the bus ride. She remembers the young woman who chased the bus through the streets with her so they could board. She remembers the tea, and the promise to return the next day. She remembers giving Harriet a sketch of the cathedral. But this woman bears little resemblance to the lively young woman she remembers.

“I wanted to come back,” she says. “But it proved impos sible.”

“I waited,” says Harriet. “I waited for everyone.” She looks out over the stone wall, thinking of her flattened house and garden one street over. “That morning I met you, I had just been to the station to see my husband off to war.”

“I remember.”

“He died the next month. At Ypres.” Harriet turns to Maeve. “Jeremy reminded me a little of Owen.” She is quiet. “All he was trying to do tonight was to get back to you. He wanted to find you, make sure you were safe.”

“Where shall we look for him now?” asks Maeve.

“I don’t know.”

There’s a mist settling over the garden wall. Strangely, it almost seems like any other morning.

“Let’s go back to where you started,” says Maeve. “Let’s go to the cathedral.”

The all-clear sounds when they’re back on Broadgate. Almost immediately people appear again, emerging from shelters and cellars, from under their dining-room tables, from inside their fortified garden sheds. They come out into the street, brushing dust from their clothes and removing saucepans from their heads. They are like animals emerging from their burrows, blinking in the daylight, looking around as though seeing the world for the first time.

The air is still thick with dust, and there is the smell of gas hanging in the streets. There is also the smell of smouldering wood and the faint hiss of fire. Children rush about in their pyjamas and slippers, having gone into the shelters dressed for bed. An old man lies on a blanket near a gutted house, waiting to be picked up by an ambulance.

Maeve and Harriet stand in the street with the gathering crowd. Everyone looks at the burned-out shops, at the piles of brick and stone, the shattered glass crunching underfoot.

“I don’t really feel alive,” says Maeve, and Harriet knows what she means. The world they left is unrecognizable, not a place they want to inhabit. It feels like a sort of afterlife. They are their own ghosts.

The crowd of people stand for a while in the street and then they start to move together, to trickle down Broadgate, in the direction of the cathedral.

Harriet thinks of her descriptions. They must have burned up when the bomb fell on her house. There is nothing left of anything she wrote, and yet, walking down Broadgate, with the all-clear ringing in her ears, she finds that she remembers more of what she’d written than she thought.

For a week once, in springtime, Harriet watched a nest of wrens. She crouched on the verge beside the road and documented the activities of the family of birds in the hedgerow opposite. Several times during the week’s surveillance she was mistaken for a tramp by passersby and told to move on. A child threw a rock at her from a bicycle, and she often lost the feeling in her legs from the awkward way she was forced to squat so the birds wouldn’t notice her and be alarmed. She developed a rash from something scratchy on the verge.

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 cathe

dral. 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.