The Night Watch (24 page)

The waiting about, Kay thought, was the hardest part; she had never got used to it. When the Warning went, at just after ten, she actually felt better. She stretched in her chair and yawned, luxuriously.

'I'd like a couple of simple fractures tonight,' she told Mickey. 'Nothing too bloody, I've had enough blood and guts for a while. And no-one too heavy. I nearly broke my back last week, on that policeman in Ecclestone Square! No, a couple of slim little girls with broken ankles would just about do it.'

'I'd like a nice old lady,' said Mickey, yawning too. She was lying on the floor, on a camping-mattress, reading a cowboy book. 'A nice old lady with a bag of sweets.'

She had just put the book aside and closed her eyes when Binkie, the station leader, came into the common-room clapping her hands. 'Wake up, Carmichael!' she told Mickey. 'No snoozing on the job. That was the Yellow, didn't you hear? I should say we've an hour or two before the fun starts, but you never know. How about making a tour of the fuel stores? Howard and Cole, you can go too. And put the water on, on your way, for the bottles in the vans. All right?'

There were various curses and groans. Mickey climbed slowly to her feet, rubbing her eyes, nodding to the others. They got their coats, and went out to the garage.

Kay stretched again. She looked at the clock, then glanced around for something to do: wanting to keep herself alert, and take her mind off the waiting. She found a deck of greasy playing cards, picked them up and gave them a shuffle. The cards were meant for servicemen, and had pictures of glamour girls on them. Over the years, ambulance people had given the girls beards and moustaches, spectacles and missing teeth.

She called to Hughes, another driver. 'Fancy a game?'

He was darning a sock, and looked up, squinting. 'What's your stake?'

'Penny a pop?'

'All right.'

She shuffled her chair over to his. He was sitting right beside the oil-stove, and could never be persuaded away from it; for the room-which was part of the complex of garages under Dolphin Square, close to the Thames-had a concrete floor and walls of whitewashed brick, and was always chilly. Hughes wore a black astrakhan coat over his uniform and had turned up the collar. His hands and wrists, where they projected from his long, voluminous sleeves, looked pale and waxy. His face was slender as a ghost's, his teeth very stained from cigarettes. He wore glasses with dark tortoiseshell frames.

Kay dealt him a hand, and watched him sorting delicately through his cards. She shook her head. 'It's like gaming with Death,' she said.

He held her gaze, and extended a hand-pointed a finger, then turned and crooked it. '
Tonight
,' he whispered in horror-film tones.

She threw a penny at him. 'Stop it.' The coin bounced to the floor.

'Hey, what's the idea?' said someone-a woman called Partridge. She was kneeling on the concrete, cutting out a dress from paper patterns.

Kay said, 'Hughes was giving me the creeps.'

'Hughes gives everyone the creeps.'

'This time he was actually meaning to.'

Hughes did his Death-act, then, for Partridge. 'That's not funny, Hughes,' she said. When two more drivers passed through the room, he did it for them. One of them shrieked. Hughes got up and went to the mirror and did it for himself. He came back looking quite unnerved.

'I've had a whiff of my own grave,' he said, picking up his cards.

Presently Mickey came back in.

'Any sense of what it's like out there?' they asked her.

She was rubbing her cold hands. 'A few wallops over Marylebone way, according to R and D. Station 39 are out already.'

Kay caught her eye. She said quietly, ' Rathbone Place all right, d'you think?'

Mickey took off her coat. 'I think so.' She blew on her fingers. 'What's the game?'

For a time there was relative silence. A new girl, O'Neil, got out a First Aid manual and started testing herself on procedure. Drivers and attendants drifted in and out. A woman who by day was tutor in a dancing-school changed into a pair of woollen knickerbockers and started exercising: bending, stretching, lifting her legs.

At quarter to eleven they heard the first close explosion. Shortly after that, the ack-ack started up in Hyde Park. Their station was a couple of miles away from the guns: even so, the booms seemed to rise up from the concrete into their shoes, and the crockery and cutlery, out in the kitchen, began to rattle.

But only O'Neil, the new girl, exclaimed at the sound. Everyone else simply got on with what they were doing without looking up-Partridge pinning her paper patterns a little more swiftly, perhaps; the dancing-tutor, after a moment, putting down her clubs and going off to change back into her trousers. Mickey had taken off her boots; now, lazily, she pulled them on again and began to lace them. Kay lit a cigarette, from the stub of an old one. It was worth smoking more cigarettes than you really wanted, she felt, at this stage, to make up for the frantic time to come, when you might have to go without for hours at a stretch…

There was the rumble of another explosion. It seemed closer than the last. A teaspoon which had been travelling eerily across a table, as if pushed by spirits, now flew right off.

Somebody laughed. Somebody else said, 'We're in for it tonight, kids!'

'Could be nuisance raiders,' said Kay.

Hughes snorted. 'Could be my Aunt Fanny. They dropped photograph flares last night, I swear it. They'll be back for the railway lines, if nothing else-'

He turned his head. The telephone, in Binkie's office, had started to ring. Everyone grew still. Kay felt a quick, sharp stab of anxiety, deep in her breast. The phone was silenced, as Binkie picked it up. They heard her voice, very clearly: 'Yes. I see. Yes, at once.'

'Here we go,' said Hughes, getting up, taking off his astrakhan coat.

Binkie came briskly into the common-room, pushing back her white hair.

'Two incidents so far,' she said, 'and they're expecting plenty more. Bessborough Place, and Hugh Street. Two ambulances and a car to the first; an ambulance and car to the second. Let's make it'-she pointed from person to person, thinking it over as she spoke-'Langrish and Carmichael, Cole and O'Neil, Hughes and Edwards, Partridge, Howard… All right, off you go!'

Kay and the other drivers at once went out into the garage, putting on their tin hats as they ran. The grey vans and cars stood parked and ready; Kay climbed into the cabin of hers and started its engine, pressing and easing off the accelerator pedal, warming it up. After a moment, Mickey joined her. She'd been to Binkie, to pick up the chit that would tell them more precisely what was needed and where they must go. She came quickly-hopping on to the running-board and climbing into the cabin as Kay moved off.

'Which one did we get?'

' Hugh Street.'

Kay nodded, swinging the van out of the garage and up the slope to the street-going slowly at first, so that Partridge, in the car behind, could catch up and follow, then putting her foot down. The van was an old commercial one that had been converted at the start of the war; she had to double-declutch with every gear change-a rather tiresome business. But she knew the vehicle and all its quirks, and went smoothly, confidently. Ten minutes before, playing cards with Hughes, she'd been almost dozy. At the ring of the telephone there had come that stab of anxiety around her heart. Now she felt-not unafraid, because only a fool would be unafraid in a job like this; but awake, alert, alive in all her limbs.

They had to go north-west to get to Hugh Street, and the route was a grim one, the shabby houses at the heart of Pimlico giving way, with dismal regularity, to patches of devastated land-to mounds of rubble, or hollowed-out terraces. The ack-ack guns still pounded on; between bursts of fire Kay could make out, too, the dreary throb of aircraft, the occasional whistle and whizz of bombs and rockets. The sounds were very like those of an ordinary Guy Fawkes night, from before the war; the smells, however, were different: not the simple-minded smell-as Kay thought of it now-of ordinary gunpowder, but the faint stink of burning rubber from the guns, and the putrid scent of exploded shells.

The streets were deserted, and lightly fogged. In raids, like this, Pimlico had an odd sort of haunted feel-the feel of having until recently swarmed with lives, that had all been violently extinguished or chased off. And when the guns stopped, the atmosphere could be even weirder. Kay and Mickey had once or twice walked along the edge of the river after their shift was finished. The place was uncanny: quieter, in its way, than the countryside would have been; and the view down the Thames, to Westminster, was all of humped, irregular masses-as if the war had stripped London back, made a series of villages of it, each of them defending itself against unkown forces, darkly and alone.

They arrived at the top of St George's Drive and found a man-a Police Reserve-looking out for them, waiting to direct them to the site. Kay raised her hand to him, and wound down her window; he ran over to the van-ran lumpishly, because of the weight of his uniform, his hat, the canvas bag that was strapped to his chest and swung as he moved. 'Around to the left,' he said. 'You'll see it all right. Keep well out, though, because of glass.'

He ran off, then, to flag down Partridge and say the same thing to her.

Kay went on more cautiously. As soon as she turned into Hugh Street there began to come, as she knew there would, specks and smuts upon the windscreen of the van: dust, from pulverised brick and stone, plaster and wood. The light from her headlamps-which was poor enough, because the lamps were dimmed-seemed to thicken, to cloud and swirl, like stout settling down in a glass. She leaned forward, trying to see-driving more and more slowly, hearing the crunch and snap of things beneath her wheels; afraid for the tyres. Then she made out another faint light, fifty yards ahead: the beam from the torch of an ARP man. He slightly raised it, hearing her come. She parked the van, and Partridge drew up behind her.

The warden came over-taking off his hat, wiping beneath it with a handkerchief, then blowing his nose. Behind him was a line of houses, dark against the almost-dark of the sky. Peering through the swirling dust, Kay could see now that one of the houses had been almost demolished-its front compressed, reduced to rubble and beams, as if under the carelessly-placed boot of a roving giant.

'What was it?' she asked the warden as she and Mickey got out. 'HE?'

He was putting his hat back on, and nodded. 'Hundred pounder at least.' He helped them get blankets, bandages and a stretcher from the back of the van, then began to lead them over the rubble, shining his torch about as he went.

'This place caught all of it,' he said. 'Three flats. The top and the middle we think were empty. But the people from the other were all at home-had been in their shelter and were just coming out again, if you can believe it. Thank God they never made it to the house! The man's pretty cut about with glass from one of the windows. The others were all more or less knocked flying, you'll be able to tell how badly. One old lady's got the worst of it: she's the one I think you'll need the stretcher for. I told them all to keep in the garden till you arrived. They ought to have a doctor look at them, really; but Control say the doctor's car's been caught in a blast-'

He lost his footing, then righted himself and went on without speaking. Partridge was coughing because of the dust. Mickey was rubbing grit from her eyes. The chaos was extraordinary. Every time Kay put down her feet, things cracked beneath them, or wrapped themselves around her ankles: broken window-glass mixed up with broken mirrors, crockery, chairs and tables, curtains, carpets, feathers from a cushion or a bed, great splinters of wood… The wood surprised Kay, even now: in the days before the war she'd imagined that houses were made more or less solidly, of stone-like the last Little Pig's, in the fairy tale. What amazed her, too, was the smallness of the piles of dirt and rubble to which even large buildings could be reduced. This house had had three intact floors to it, an hour before; the heap of debris its front had become was no more than six or seven feet high. She supposed that houses, after all-like the lives that were lived in them-were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.

The rear of the house, however, was more or less intact. They went through a creaking passageway and emerged, bizarrely, into a kitchen, still with cups and plates on its shelves and pictures on its walls, its electric light burning and its black-out curtain up. But part of the ceiling had come down, and streams of dust were tumbling from cracks in the plaster behind; beams were still falling, the warden said, and the place was expected to collapse.

He took them out to the little garden, then went back through the house to the street, to check on the neighbours. Kay put up the brim of her hat. It was hard to see, through the darkness, but she made out the figure of a man, sitting on a step with his hands at his head; and a woman, lying flat and very still on a blanket or rug, with another woman beside her, perhaps chafing her hands. A girl behind them was going dazedly about. A second girl was sitting in the open doorway of a shelter. She had a whimpering, yelping thing in her arms-Kay took it at first to be an injured baby. Then it wriggled and gave a high-pitched bark, and she saw that it was a dog.

The dust was still swirling, making everyone cough. There was that queer, disorientating atmosphere that Kay had always noticed at sites like this. The air felt charged, as if with a rapidly beating pulse-as if still ringing, physically vibrating-as if the atoms that made up the house, the garden, the people themselves, had been jolted out of their moorings and were still in the process of settling back. Kay was aware, too, of the building behind her, threatening its collapse. She went very quickly from person to person, tucking blankets over their shoulders, and shining her torch, looking into their faces.

Then, 'Right,' she said, straightening up. One of the girls, she thought, might have a broken leg or ankle: she sent Partridge to look at her. Mickey went to the man on the step. Kay herself went back to the woman who was lying on the rug. She was very elderly, and had taken some sort of blow to the chest. When Kay knelt beside her and felt for her heart, she let out a moan.