The Report (16 page)

By the end of the inquiry, Laurie had called and examined eighty witnesses and imagined the night of March 3 so many times that when he closed his eyes, he heard the pounding of feet slowing from a run to a walk to a shuffle. He saw girls in long braids, boys in short trousers, the hands of mothers trying to keep them moving.

The weather remained cold and gray, most often the sky nothing but layers of cloud. Laurie’s notes were scattered wildly; his hair and clothes were a mess. When Armorel brought the tea tray, he would pat his forehead, hoping to smooth the hair and his thoughts. She’d never seen him like this—he knew that. They were both accustomed to his work behaving like a good prisoner, always quiet and on schedule. It must have been his imagination, but as he worked in the study and Armorel sewed in the drawing room, it seemed the house groaned from the strain of this new battle. Or perhaps the bombs had shaken the building’s foundations after all, as their friends who left had warned.

He’d interviewed shelter wardens, police constables, superintendents and inspectors, local officials and regional officials. He’d talked to ambulance drivers, light rescue workers, heavy rescue workers, and volunteers from every other service drawn out that night. He’d questioned medical professionals who were either on the scene or who had admitted and examined casualties at one of several local hospitals. He’d spoken to surveyors, engineers, and technical advisors. Most of all he’d tried to listen to the average Bethnal Greener, as many of them as would come before the inquiry. He let all of them talk until they were done. The airing of grievances was important—he knew the good it could do—but now his head was full, and no clear picture of the night had emerged.

On March 19 Laurie worked at home, going out only once, for a short walk in the park. He would have liked Armorel to have accompanied him, but she was busy. He’d seen many small gray boxes around, ingenious creations of cardboard and felt, and assumed that meant the stitching had progressed from the countryside into Hamburg. According to the RAF, the German women were also sewing, and they were ahead. Before the war, while England was at peace, growing slow and fat on the false assurances of distance and victory, the German women had kept busy. But the landscape of Berlin had been completed, contributing to the enormously successful mission earlier in the month. Hamburg, Armorel said, was not far behind.

In the park without Armorel, Laurie counted people. He found himself compulsively counting, the numbers mesmerizing him. Ten, fifteen, twenty-five. What did those amounts look like? If he heard a bomb had killed ten people, he drew imaginary circles the next day: that woman on the bench, the man by the water, those children playing jump rope, the boys feeding ducks. Ten people. Gone.

Even so, he couldn’t make sense of one hundred seventy-three suffocated in a heap.

At five o’clock he returned, poured himself a drink, and watched Armorel stitch. He imagined their son, Andrew, a small speck on someone else’s landscape and asked if there was anything he could do to help, to speed the project along. She shook her head. The sewing, he knew, was keeping something at bay for her, the black worry that would seep in without constant work. Periodically she asked about the inquiry, and he told her what he could. Once she said, “Mothers and children should have a separate entrance at the biggest shelters, don’t you think?” and he’d made a note of it.

Back in his study, Laurie put on a recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Bach’s complete preludes and fugues. He began to pair a witness’s position in the crush with what he or she had considered the main cause of the disaster. If a person had been behind or in front of the mass on the stairs, he or she likely made furious claims: a mysterious new bomb, a gas leak, a Jewish panic. If the person had been in the stairwell, there was less certainty about anything, just a terrible bewilderment. Laurie had thought the chart might bring out an essential theme, the way Richter found inner voices in Bach. He was sure there was something here about tragedy, blame, and responsibility, but he couldn’t see it.

The next day it snowed. At his desk early, Laurie watched the flurries for a time, impressed by the silence. He’d never considered snow stealthy, but that was what struck him now. How could something so extensive happen so quietly? Why was the sound of rain more reassuring?

He pressed his eyes and tried to concentrate.

During the inquiry he’d filled two notebooks, thirty-five loose sheets, and one napkin from a pub on Russia Lane. All of it was a mess. Half the testimony contradicted the other. The crowd was quiet; the crowd was loud. The constables and wardens had worked hard; the constables and wardens were nowhere to be seen. There was light on the stairs; the stairs were dark. There was a loud blast no one had ever heard before; there were no unusual sounds that night. There were only a few Jews in the crowd; the crowd was filled with Jews.

He turned to the sheet in his typewriter. There he’d begun:
It will, I think, be convenient to give you at once the more important measurements of the part of the shelter involved.

He stared out the window again. He’d nearly recalled the man Steadman for a second interview, to see if he could corroborate what Tilly had told them, but decided he didn’t want to. He didn’t want Ross to hear the story again. He didn’t want to reduce the disaster to just another example of there being too many Jews in the East End. This was not the story he wanted to tell; nor was it the one the city needed to hear.

He turned back to his typewriter.
I am satisfied the wardens responded well and did what they could once the accident was under way,
he wrote.
In a matter of seconds, the jam was complete across the full width of the landing.

Jam? Was he really going to call it a
jam
?

He thought through the sequence. The alert sounded just after quarter past eight. Between 8:27 and 8:28 a woman fell. Would she have fallen if the stairwell hadn’t been so dark? Would she have been able to get up and go on if there hadn’t been so many people? The constable who should have been in place earlier didn’t arrive until 8:35. By then the calamity was irreversible.

Laurie tried music, choosing his favorite recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Melody, all melody, seemed to speak to him of the tragedy. He was listening to Chopin and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, their works somehow hinting at how the memory of this event would one day feel.

He turned to the newspaper clippings he’d saved, among them the March 2 story in the
Daily Herald
about the raid on Berlin. Witnesses had mentioned many times the Halifax captain’s breathless description of the mission:
A minute or two after ten o’clock, I saw the first flares drop. A cloudless sky and excellent visibility enabled the crews to recognize their exact targets on the streets in Berlin. Bomber after bomber dropped its load, and we watched the fires break out and spread until they became a great concentrated mass.

The precision of this attack had worried the Bethnal Greeners, and by March 3 the area was preparing for a terrible German response. It seemed unfair to Laurie to label as panic such imaginative empathy. There were just too many people, all of them with these fires in their thoughts—a crowd thinks in images. Then someone fell on a dark staircase, and the rest kept coming.

He put in a fresh sheet of paper.

If the purpose of a report is to explain what caused a tragedy, then I should begin with maps and diagrams and endeavor at once to describe the particulars of the accident in detail. But if perhaps the better purpose of a report is to understand a tragedy, then I should begin with a woman in a crowd, surrounded but alone.

He sat back in his chair. These felt like the truest words he’d written so far. He stood and paced the room. He was a man who reputedly understood the lives of others, so why not start here? With this poor, overburdened woman.

She was a woman in a crowd, surrounded but alone.

It didn’t sound like a report, but it was how he wanted to begin.

She was a woman in a crowd, surrounded but alone. When the crowd flowed into the stairwell …

He looked up to see ash and debris suddenly mixed with the snow falling over the park. Fearful for the report, this promising beginning, he stood and shouted for Armorel. He was gathering papers madly, certain that there was a fire, that they’d have to evacuate, when she ran in and assured him it was only a gardener burning the last of the winter brush.

She looked at him quizzically. “Are you all right?”

Relieved, he sat down. “Armorel! I’m as well as I’ve been in days.”

He worried how he would address some of the more specious rumors and allegations. He wondered how to include some of the most useful complaints and suggestions. And yet for the first time he felt he was on the right track. He wrote a quick note to Ross, asking him to get the clerk’s notebook. He would use Bertram’s list. It would have details he’d need to fill out the narrative he was imagining, and it would help the boy to turn it over. He’d seen many times that people needed others to understand and accept the manner in which they tried to make amends.

When Sarah asked Rev. McNeely to visit her husband, he came immediately, expecting to find a man in bed, but Low was in the tiny back garden, working at turning the soil. McNeely’s first thought was that perhaps, in her concern, Sarah had exaggerated her husband’s symptoms. But when McNeely approached and saw Low’s round glasses sliding down his gaunt face, he knew she had not.

Low smiled and welcomed him. It was obvious he knew why McNeely had come.

McNeely hesitated. He didn’t know whether to help Low or encourage the exhausted man to take a rest.

“I’m sure Sarah’s planning tea,” Low said without stopping. He squinted up at the first-floor window, where Sarah’s pale face flashed and disappeared.

“She’s worried about you,” McNeely said.

“I know.”

“Where can we sit?” McNeely asked.

Low gestured to the back step of the ground-floor flat. “They don’t mind,” Low said, indicating the flat’s residents. “They used to sit on my bench.” He pointed to the corner where an old wisteria vine—the last vestige of Low’s former flower garden—grew. “But I used the wood for scrap some time ago.”

“We’ll sit on a new bench after the war,” McNeely said. When Low didn’t respond, McNeely lowered his voice. “James, is there anything I can do?”

“Any word from Bertram?”

“No.”

“He’s just gone? Where would he go?”

McNeely shook his head.

Sarah brought out the tea and left it on a small, chipped tray from which the men could serve themselves. She looked at James anxiously, but he smiled at her. She thanked McNeely for visiting, then went back inside.

“How’s Clare?”

“Strong as ever.” He looked at Low. “Actually, very upset. But she’s keeping busy, doing a lot of drawing. I think she’ll be all right.” They were quiet a few minutes. Finally McNeely said, “What about you?”

“Sarah and I are planning to adopt one of the orphans.”

McNeely grabbed Low’s arm.

“We haven’t done anything yet,” Low said quickly. “There are a few things I need to get in order first.”

McNeely knew he’d embarrassed Low. He took his hand away and tried to sit very quietly.

Low told him about the strange experience of sending a letter of resignation that no one appeared to notice. “At first I thought they must be busy with all the other matters related to the tragedy. But then the story got in the papers and people started to talk about the light on the stairs, and still no word from Morrison or news that I’d resigned. Then Dunne called me before the inquiry, and I thought, This is it.” Low turned to McNeely, baffled.

“But nothing happened.” He shook his head. “I actually began to reconsider. That night I tried going back to the shelter. It had reopened, and the deputy wardens were managing pretty well in the absence of any other instruction, but I thought I’d go back, at least until I had some kind of official word about what I was supposed to do.”

“You’d like me to find out what happened to your resignation?” McNeely asked when it looked as if Low had finished.

“But do you know what happened?” Low continued. “I couldn’t get there. Couldn’t walk down those steps. Couldn’t stop seeing all those people. I tried every day after that, and each time I turned around farther away. My own kind of creep-back, I’m afraid.”

It was obvious the man was grieving, haunted. “You are not to blame for this tragedy,” McNeely said.

“If I’m not to blame, then I’m not responsible for all the other nights when people were safe.”

“Well, I think that’s somewhat true. At some point we trust to Providence.”

“You do that.” Low finished his tea. “What I know is this: I replaced a lightbulb that night, pretty sure of what the people would do, but I did it anyway. I was tired of their small concerns. I knew the light could barely be seen from the street. I knew that either way it wouldn’t make any difference to a German pilot!” He choked, his voice reduced to a horrified whisper. “I wanted to prove it, I think. I wanted to show them.”

“This accident was not your fault,” McNeely said.

Low looked up but seemed to see nothing in McNeely’s face that could convince him. After a moment, he spoke again. “Please make sure the people know I sent that resignation the morning after the accident. The mail seems to have let me down.”

“What does Mr. Dunne say?”

“I assume he doesn’t know.”

McNeely smiled. He would ask Dunne someday if preparing a report for the government felt as futile as offering faith during war.

Low stood and began pulling on his garden gloves.

“James,” McNeely said. “Wait for the report. It may explain more than you think.”

“I’ll wait,” he said after a moment. “But I don’t know what the report can tell me that I don’t already know. I was the chief warden. The shelter was my responsibility.” He looked up at his flat. He smiled and waved at Sarah. “You give something a name, and it takes on a certain size in the mind. ‘Front hall,’ even if it’s no more than two steps and a mat.” He dropped his arm and looked around his modest garden. “ ‘Arbor,’ ” he said, pointing at the old wisteria vine that arched halfway over nothing. “ ‘Shelter.’ ” He stared at McNeely, his eyes wide, desperate. “How can I live with that?”

McNeely was about to answer when he saw Low look the length of him, his face suddenly changing into a sneer. “And if you are homosexual, as they say, how do you live with that?”

“You are not yourself,” McNeely said.

The minister watched Low’s back and shoulders as he walked away. He could see the hurt in their angles even as Low returned to digging furiously in the soil.