The Report (15 page)

It was easier to abandon his reticence on the subject of Bethnal Green than he’d imagined. Indeed, Laurie noted with curiosity how much he wanted to discuss Ada and Tilly; the poor, lost clerk Bertram; Warden Low, too, though he couldn’t bear it for long. He could still picture the inquiry room, large and pleasant, but worried that when he saw it again in the film, he wouldn’t recognize it. It might be a community center by now, or a nursery school.

Laurie and the mighty William had come for what was now billed as an “old-fashioned” lunch. Both men suspected these events were numbered, for a variety of reasons. He took a sip of claret and nodded at Smith, who limped into the grill room, his knee still bandaged from the tent disaster. Smith would have taken the nod as a sign of Laurie’s sympathy, but it pleased Laurie to see evidence that Smith was still required by more than the rules of the club to stay out of the river. When he turned back to William, he heard that the seven-year-old granddaughter, Lucy, big sister of new baby Will, was getting a pony for her birthday.

Laurie sighed. It was not that he didn’t want to hear about his friend’s grandchildren; it was that every time they came up, Laurie searched William’s eyes for some sign that he understood the sad predicament of Laurie’s life. No children, no promise of grandchildren. He had one good report to his name, a handful of legal decisions. He had helped rebuild Coventry Cathedral after the war. These were his legacies. In Coventry, he and Armorel had worked alongside a number of young Germans. They didn’t say much to each other, but they didn’t have to. The fingerprints on the stones were enough. Maybe he’d visit the church again. Maybe Barber would want to film there.

He and William ate in silence for a few moments, until William said, “You’d rather I didn’t talk about the children?”

Laurie stared. He heard the next words in his head before he said them and was surprised. Had the times affected him more than he’d thought?

“I just wonder, William, if you ever consider my feelings on the matter?”

William swallowed. He apparently did not have the new vocabulary at his disposal, and Laurie dearly wished he had let the whole thing be.

“Never mind,” he said quickly. “What kind of pony is Lucy getting?”

William smiled, and just like that, the subject was history, as if nothing had ever been said. This, at least, men of their age could still manage. The sea of disappointment inside Laurie began to subside, the cold depths settling, smooth and glassy once again.

When he next had a chance, during the main course, he told William about Barber, the interviews, the retrospective he was planning. He wanted to ask William what he thought of such exercises, though he thought he knew what his friend would say:

The risk is the story being sensationalized for a modern audience.

(Of course.)

The reward will be proof that your work is still relevant.

(Yes. Quite nice. Let’s have a drink to celebrate.)

But before he could speak, William coughed and said, “A retrospective? Wasn’t that all done up a long time ago?”

Laurie stared. “Done up?”

“Well, I mean, wasn’t that your claim to fame, as they say? A bit dismal to relive our glory days. Wasn’t there a program before?”

“No. This is the first.”

William must have heard the annoyance in his voice. He wiped his mouth and sat straighter. “Good, then,” he offered. “Don’t suppose they could manage it without you. The report was groundbreaking for its time, wasn’t it?”

Laurie ordered the cheesecake for dessert and moved off into the den for coffee.

William found him some time later, dozing over a newspaper. He sat down and surprised Laurie with a question. “Look, Lucy’s parents want to know if you’ll be Will’s godfather.”

“But they don’t know me.”

“They know about you.”

Laurie said his reputation as a magistrate hardly qualified him for such ecclesiastical duty.

“Because you’re my friend,” William said, and then Laurie was embarrassed because it seemed the request was coming from him and he meant it.

“This one is to be mine,” William explained. “In a sense. Named for me. I asked.”

“I see.” Laurie drank some coffee and considered. “Well, then, no.”

William was shocked.

“I no longer offer moral guidance, you see. All done up a long time ago.”

William stared. “You needn’t be like that.”

Thank goodness for the documentary, Laurie thought. It felt like something new in his pocket, just when everything else in his life had turned old and dull.

After William had gone, Laurie glanced around the den. He hoped Barber would need half a dozen interviews or more, William be damned. And with the boy tomorrow, he would speak more definitely. Hadn’t he earned the right to speak in pronouncements? It was an absolute surprise to him that the report had become his lasting achievement. He’d known it was important at the time, but that it would be the main work in a life lived over so many decades? He wished someone had warned him. He’d tried to bring to later problems the same mixture of empathy and insight he was supposed to have had in Bethnal Green, but it seemed he never again had the two in quite the same proportion. Sometimes he’d had insight but his empathy was off. Other times empathy flooded him but his reasoning grew confused. Like a mathematician in decline, he could only remember how it had felt to work at his best; the ability was gone.

As he watched the waiters come and go with drinks and mints, he began to doze off in the chair. Maybe he’d find a copy of the report and reread it. He could edit it and annotate the margins, change what he wanted. Right or wrong, that should be a benefit of old age.

Laurie and Ross met at the town hall for a final review of the shelter. On the way there they talked of their families. Ross told Laurie his wife had evacuated to Hertfordshire with their young children. Laurie said his daughter was home, bedridden with pneumonia. He was about to mention his son when he realized he was too anxious about Andrew to do so.

“You have a boy, too?” Ross asked after a moment.

Laurie nodded.

Wet cobblestones reflected white in the sun, and here and there wisteria was beginning to bloom, pale lavender cascades, graceful and delicate on the broken buildings. Laurie watched the passersby, their cheeks red and chapped, eyes watery and bright. They tied their scarves in bunches around their necks, but their bodies and overcoats were thin, leaving them strangely top-heavy. Queues everywhere were long. He thought of how in testimony, many of the people said the crowd the night of March 3 had shared a quiet sense of purpose. Of course others—the authorities, mainly—insisted the crowd was unruly, out of control. The discrepancy between these accounts bothered him.

In front of the shelter, Ross spoke with the constable on duty, while Laurie looked at the new handrails and bulkhead light, now ensconced in a steel cage. If only someone had treated the local council’s plan for a new entrance as more than a routine application for the expenditure of public funds. But was everyone supposed to live with a mind full of potential horrors? He walked slowly down the steps, painted now with whitewashed strips along both sides and the center, until he stood at the bottom of the first flight, looking back up toward the entrance. The sunlight made a jagged geometric pattern along the left side, and in the sky above the entrance, he could just see the white, shuttered cupola of St. John’s. The stairs were relatively new but looked old. They seemed to him apologetic, but perhaps that was just the effect of the new paint and his imagination. The cement was damp, as if recently cleaned, and the metal handrails had a seawater smell that transferred to his hand as he walked back up. A torn sandbag hunched nearby, half its contents strewn about in anticipation of more snow.

As Ross and Laurie walked back in front of St. John’s, they saw the minister sweeping the church steps.

“Reverend McNeely,” Ross said. “He’s been quite a lot of help since the disaster.”

When they approached, McNeely looked up and smiled. “Mr. Dunne,” he said. “I’d been hoping to see you around the area a bit more. I’ve wanted to meet you.”

Laurie liked the man’s eyes, dark and full of what struck him as an unusual mixture of wisdom and worry.

“We’re very eager for your report.”

Laurie nodded.

“We’re desperate for a story, you see.”

“I’ve thought of that,” Laurie said, just as Ross said, “Reverend, with all due respect, we’re not telling stories. The report will be the truth.”

McNeely smiled at Laurie. “I do hope then that the truth won’t be the one I heard in the pub yesterday. A new German weapon is to blame, they say. A beam that incinerates everything for miles around.”

“How can they think that?”

“Nothing burned,” Ross said incredulously.

“We listen better than we observe, obviously,” said McNeely. “It’s the only explanation for the persistence of rumor.”

“Were you near the crush?” Laurie asked.

McNeely shook his head. “God spared me a role.”

“You have certainly played a role,” Laurie said.

“I don’t know.” McNeely squinted at his church in the sunlight. The doors needed paint; the broken weather vane dangled. “I don’t know what it means.” He turned back to Laurie. “Maybe you’ll come for a service sometime?”

“I’d like to. Perhaps after the report is published, if the area will still have me.”

McNeely smiled. “Forgiveness without understanding is like faith without proof,” he said. “Difficult, but many in Bethnal Green are quite good at it, I’ve found.”

Ross and Laurie continued west on the Bethnal Green Road. They passed a grocery’s with a bushel of bananas on display, and Ross, recognizing an opportunity, pointed at them. “These are rare around here. I’d like to buy a few, if you don’t mind.” Laurie agreed, and they stepped inside. Tilly Barber stood behind the counter.

“Is your mother here?” he asked.

The girl shook her head.

Ross paid for his bananas, and Laurie glanced around the shop. “Well, what else is good?”

“The potatoes are freshest,” she said. “Nothing else, really.”

“Half a pound, then.” He studied her face. “Do you remember before the war?”

“A little bit. My sister—” Tilly stopped and put her hand over her mouth. It was her mother’s gesture.

“Go ahead.”

“My sister didn’t. She never saw the moon.”

“Because of the blackout.”

Tilly nodded.

“Did you describe it to her?”

Tilly nodded again.

“Often?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, then you were a good big sister. She was lucky to have you.”

Tilly smiled.

Although he’d promised to arrive earlier, Bertram came home from the Salmon & Ball near midnight, drunk. He was carrying, and stroking extravagantly, a small, underweight cat. Wary of his welcome, he stayed by the door, his coat on.

“They say it’s blind,” he said softly. “The blokes down the pub.”

Clare came over and touched the warm, slightly damp ears. It was raining outside, and the animal, Bertram explained, had insisted on keeping its head out of his coat on the way home. Clare lifted the cat out of his hands and put it on the floor.

“It’s been hanging around the pub since the accident,” Bertram said.

Clare watched the animal exploring the room in a manner decidedly less fluid than that of most cats she’d seen. It was a tortoiseshell, the fur a motley pattern of orange and black and white. The face, particularly, seemed mismatched, half-orange, half-black, with some white around one side of the mouth, almost as if it were wearing a mask that had been bumped askew.

“That doesn’t make any sense, Bert. They linked it to the accident so that you’d take it. Why would the accident have blinded a cat?”

Bertram shrugged and weaved. “I just thought I’d bring it home. That way if something happened to me, you’d have it to take care of.”

Clare looked at the animal again. “I don’t like cats.”

“Oh.”

Clare hung up his coat and walked him to the sofa. Bertram’s dreams—heavily populated and full of voices, he’d told her—were leaving him tired and sad. She knew the regulars at the Salmon & Ball had started saving a stool for him at the end of the bar. She’d seen it. The stool had two full-length legs in back and two shorter ones in front to accommodate the step up to the back room. The game was to get the bloke who sat there to drink too much, forget, and scoot back from the bar, with predictable results. Bertram hadn’t disappointed them yet.

“Bertram,” she said. “You’ve got to stop this.”

“Why don’t you like cats?” he asked, bleary, innocent.

She stroked his cheek. “They’re too independent.” Bertram nuzzled his head into her hand. He was falling asleep.

She smiled and ruffled his hair, waking him. His eyes opened, and she told him Mr. Dunne had requested his list. She saw the news slowly permeating the drink. He smiled.

“This is what you’ve been waiting for, Bert,” she said.

“I’ll take it tomorrow.”

She had things she wanted to tell him. She thought of waking him up with coffee. She could turn off the lights and open the window; a blast of cold air might bring him back. But while she was thinking, he tipped to the right, fast asleep. She settled his head on a pillow, took off his shoes. She covered him with a blanket, then turned off all the lights, opened the heavy curtain, and sat by his chest on the sofa.

She loved this reversal of the blackout—black inside and out, so that you could open your curtain. It felt like bending the rules, although it wasn’t, as long as you didn’t forget and turn on a light. The blackout seemed to her useless; surely the German pilots knew how to find London and her landmarks by now. Yet every night the city turned itself into a dark blanket beneath the sky, hiding and waiting.

How do you black out a home? She’d thought a lot about it at the start of the war. How do you blot out every bit of light and warmth? Bertram said you had to think of yourself as an animal or an insect, a drone of some kind, working away at the edges of a honeycomb. Fill this crack, gnaw, gnaw, cover that gap. In those days of the war, everything was preparation; spirit and determination ran high. But the blackout materials were heavy and inconvenient, and once the blackout became a reality, many just kept their windows darkened all the time. Now sometimes even she didn’t open the curtains during the day.

She leaned over and kissed Bertram’s lips. They tasted sweet, a little beery. She thought of his notebook, his careful record, the way he’d cared for the last carried objects of a group of people in a particular time and place. “It’s war work, Bert.” She pressed her hand to his chest, hoping he would feel the warmth in his sleep. “Just as much as anything else. You did it.”

She put a bowl of milk out for the cat, lay next to Bertram, and went to sleep. In the morning, Bertram was gone, and the cat was licking her hand, hungry again. He’d left her the notebook for Dunne and a pair of shoes with beautiful green soles that looked almost new.