Their Finest Hour and a Half (46 page)

‘If you're staying can you do your blackouts?' called Shipton, from the roof-hatch, and Catrin realized that the dusk was creeping in, and she was sitting with her nose six inches from the paper, and she rose – a little stiff – and went over to the window. The sky was a deep violet, and cloudless. She drew the blinds, and pulled the heavy curtains across, and switched on the light and looked again at what she'd written. She took a pencil and altered a word or two, and then rubbed out the alterations and left the pages on Buckley's desk, together with the Scotchman's new line. The siren sounded before she had even reached Oxford Street.

Edith was rubbing almond oil into her cuticles, and thinking about how bony the backs of her hands were looking. The skin was white and smooth, but the sinews protruded like the ribs of an umbrella – old hands; they seemed to have aged overnight when she wasn't looking. And she had found a white hair in her comb the other week. So that was the pattern from now on, she supposed: one white hair after another and then the slow creep of liver spots across her knuckles. She replaced the stopper on the bottle of oil, and reached for her cold cream. From somewhere outside she could hear the odd pop of distant shell-fire – not near enough, yet, to worry about. Inside the house, Arthur had been busy in his hobbies room for most of the evening; she'd heard the tap of a hammer and there was a strong smell of varnish permeating the upper floor. She had called to ask what he was making, but his reply had been rather vague.

She applied a dab of TCP to a pimple on her forehead, tucked her hair into a stockinette cap, put on her night-gloves, and was just about to switch off the light when there was a tentative knock on the door.

‘Edith, dear . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘You're not asleep?'

‘I was just about to go to bed.'

‘Oh, were you?'

‘Is anything the matter?'

‘No, no. I just wondered if I could come in to see you.'

‘Oh.' She looked at herself in the mirror, her head resembling a boiled egg in a cosy, her face as shiny as a plate, every inch of her body covered with sensible, hard-wearing fabrics, and she thought of the nights that she'd put on lipstick and brushed her hair and smelled of French Lilac as opposed to antiseptic. ‘Yes, if you want,' she said, reluctantly.

Arthur poked his head around the door. ‘You don't mind?'

‘Mind what?'

‘Being disturbed?'

‘No, of course not.' There was no hint from his expression that she was looking in any way different from usual, a fact that she found exasperating. He was fully dressed and had a smear of varnish across his nose; this did not appear to be the long-awaited conjugal visit.

‘I've got a present for you,' he said.

‘A present?'

‘A surprise. I've been working on it for quite a few weeks. Would you like to see it?'

‘All right,' she said, ungraciously.

He opened the door more widely and disappeared back into the hall for a moment before re-entering the room with an object in his arms. It was a plywood box, about a foot and a half tall and a foot wide, with a solid top, and a shallow arch cut into the bottom of each of the four sides.

‘What is it?' she asked.

‘I'll show you.' He placed it on the floor and plugged it in and turned off the bedroom light. In the sudden darkness, the guns seemed louder, and then there was the snap of a switch, and a dim blue light appeared around the base of the object, illuminating a yard or so of floorboard on each side.

‘It's a safety-lamp,' said Arthur. ‘You can leave it plugged in in the downstairs hall, you see, and then if you get back after dark when I'm not here, you'll have a source of light even before you put up the blackouts.'

But I carry a
torch
, she thought, and was seized by the urge to laugh hysterically, for it appeared that while she'd been waiting (evening after evening) for her husband to come and make love to her, he had been engaged in the manufacture of something that looked like a sentry-box designed for a gnome, and then she felt her throat contract and found that she wasn't laughing at all.

‘Edith?' said Arthur. ‘Whatever's the matter?'

She took off her night-gloves and wiped her eyes. ‘Nothing,' she said and sat down on the bed because she was suddenly crying so hard that she could hardly breathe. The main light went on again and there was Arthur, his kind, round face lengthened by worry, and she wanted to strike him for failing to understand, for thinking that she might want a fretwork lamp instead of a husband.

‘Can I get you a hot-water-bottle?' he asked. ‘A cold compress? A . . . a . . . a cup of cocoa?'

She could only shake her head.

‘A glass of water?' He reached for the tumbler on her bedside table, and as he did so it seemed to shiver away from his grasp, and the curtains bulged inward and barked glass across the floor, and it was only then that they heard the tremendous smash of the bomb that seemed loud enough to have landed on their doorstep and yet which must have been a good quarter-mile away, since only the windows had gone, and the whole sky was full of engine noises, and Arthur shouted ‘downstairs' and made a grab at her arm. He turned off the bedroom light as they left the room, and Edith glanced back and saw the blue glow of the gnome's watchtower, and beyond it the gaping hole of the window and the moon like a dish of milk above the rooftops.

As Catrin hurried up the steps from the tube, three fire-engines tore past, one after another, and the AA guns were hammering full pelt, and she hesitated and almost turned back, except that she hated being underground during a raid. If she couldn't hear any noise at all then she was always half-afraid that when she re-emerged there would be nothing left – a smouldering plain. Instead, she ran for the sandbagged entrance of the Odeon, and handed over one and ninepence without even asking for the name of the main feature, and was ushered to a place in the packed stalls between a girl who was knitting and a sailor who squeezed her thigh as soon as she sat down, apparently by way of greeting. He said, ‘Oh, don't be like that' when Catrin shoved his hand away, and then he offered her a cigarette, and she took it and looked up at the screen and saw James Stewart stepping out of a stagecoach holding a canary cage in one hand and a parasol in the other. There was a shout of laughter from the audience, and the girl who was knitting said, ‘Oh I
love
him, honestly I do', and then turned and kissed her boyfriend, as if to assure him of her fidelity.

‘What's the picture called?' whispered Catrin to the sailor.

‘It's called “Are you doing anything afterwards, darling?”'

‘It's called
Destry Rides Again
,' supplied someone behind her, and Catrin swivelled to mutter her thanks and realized that people were still drifting into the auditorium, filling every seat – standing, even, at the back – and that each time the heavy doors were pushed open, they admitted a burst of noise from the streets. Something colossal was happening out there, a night to rival the worst of nights, and she kept staring at the doors, unable to break her gaze until a roar from the screen pulled her round again, a roar that was taken up by the audience and spiced with wolf-whistles as Marlene Dietrich rolled across the floor of a saloon engaged in a cat-fight of fantastic length and vigour.

‘Oh, that's the biz,' said Catrin's neighbour, slapping his own leg this time. ‘
That's
the biz, that is,' and someone shouted, ‘It's Gert and Daisy!' and the new Sheriff of Tombstone, mild but determined, waded through the chaos and tipped a bucket of water over the brawling women, and the fight was over, and a voice from the balcony called ‘Shame!' And the audience erupted again, and Catrin felt herself being pulled along by the crowd, caught up in a vast and vocal caravan determinedly heading Westward for the evening, and for an hour or two there was enough applause, there were enough celluloid gunshots and gusts of laughter and galloping music, enough songs and fist-fights, enough glamour and wit and plot and spectacle to blot out the real barrage, and for a short while, the theatre seemed safer than any shelter, and the noise inside was like a shield, keeping the night at bay.

‘Oh, for Christ's
sake
,' said Ambrose. He upended the carpet bag over the kitchen table and picked through the repulsive contents – a tangle of doggie necessities all coated in a slippery mixture of hair and flea powder – but there were no loose pills sifting between the litter, and no spare bottle of Bob Martin's Tablets for Canine Fits and Hysteria, and since there was nothing remaining in the first bottle but a plug of cotton wool, it signalled an absolute bloody disaster, as the only way of getting Cerberus through a raid was to administer two tablets hidden in a piece of sausage, and thus render him unconscious until the following morning. Without this medicinal cosh he was an utter liability, squeezing into one hiding place after another and disgracing himself on the lino.

Ambrose scraped the rubbish back into the bag, and as he did so, there was another rattle from the skies, like the lowering of a vast Venetian blind, and then a trio of crumps, not all that far away. The few remaining glasses in the cupboard tinkled in unison.

‘Cerberus?' called Ambrose. For a moment he could hear the clatter of toenails on the stairs before they were drowned by another burst of shell-fire and another stick of bombs, the last of them so appallingly near that the whole house seemed to give a little jump. The kitchen door swung open of its own accord, and when Ambrose pushed it closed, it thudded against the jamb instead of latching, and when he tried the door of the larder, it took a considerable tug to open it at all, which meant (almost certainly) that every single frame in the house had sprung – again – and probably half the roof slates were gone as well, and oh! he was sick of it, the loathsome repetition of it all, and thank God he had had the foresight to agree to Lundback's request for tutelage, since it was only the ruby presence of the bottle of port under the sink and the topaz glint of its peaty neighbour that lightened the current darkness. Gratitude could be a truly marvellous thing.

He poured himself a generous whisky, and drank it rather quickly. The kitchen floor was shaking beneath his feet. He had never heard a night like it, one explosion after another, as if Goering had built a platform above the city and was simply rolling the canisters over the edge, bang, bang, bloody bang.

He poured another measure, and this time tried to savour it, but there was a noise that kept catching his attention, one noise in a night full of noises, a strange, high warbling on a note quite different to the usual falling whistle of the bombs. He went out into the hall and cocked an ear and realized that it was coming from inside the house, and it was a horrid sound, a ragged shriek. And, oh hell, it had to be Cerberus, Cerberus flattened by a toppled tallboy or Cerberus eviscerated by a shard of glass, and though both of those images passed through his mind as he hurried up the stairs, they were superceded by a vision yet more horrific, that of Sophie receiving the news.

The noise was coming from the box-room. The door was slightly ajar but Ambrose had to give it a violent shove to gain entry, carving a furrow across the floorboards. He hardly ever used the room – had never bothered to put up blackouts – and the first thing he saw was a glassless window full of light: search beams interlacing, and the wink of shells, and in the middle distance, the leisurely fall of a flare, its phosphorous cluster turning darkness into brilliant noon, so that Cerberus, standing below the window with his head tipped back and that unearthly yodel issuing from his mouth, cast a stilt-legged shadow as long as the room.

Back in the kitchen, Ambrose examined the dog from nose to tail, wetting a finger to lift away fragments of glass that glinted in the brindled coat, but finding no trace of blood and no obvious injury. The howling had stopped, but Cerberus's body was vibrating like an idling engine. He was panting, open-mouthed, and shifting from foot to foot as if standing on a heated surface, and although his gaze moved restlessly, nothing seemed to catch his eye (or nose) – not a piece of bacon, nor even a square of chocolate – and when Ambrose rubbed a little whisky on to the piebald gums it might have been water for all the response it produced, and it was strange, it was very strange, to see an animal in such a state, for God knows one had seen men like this, standing blank and shivering on the Salient. Fear; it had been fear, of course – or, rather, a stage beyond fear, an involuntary shift to a place in which the blast of a whistle, or an officer's shout, or even a pointed revolver were meaningless; it was as if the mind itself had gone into hiding. There'd been nothing at all that one could do for such men apart from getting them away from the front line. The lucky ones had been labelled shell-shocked. The others . . .

Ambrose peered into the dog's bulging eyes. ‘Good chap,' he said, experimentally. ‘
Tayer hintele
.'

Jerry was still hurling it down outside, no end to it, and the quietest possible place seemed to be the cupboard under the stairs, and Ambrose cleared a space, and wrapped the dog in a coat and tucked him between his knees, and sat on the floor in the utter blackness with a cigarette in one hand and the bottle of whisky in the other. It was, indeed, a little quieter in here, but the extra layers of wood and plaster had the odd effect of filtering out certain notes, and heightening others, so that for the first time that evening he could hear the machine-guns of the night-fighters as they chased a thousand feet above his head. Lundback would be up there again next week, hurtling through darkness, defending Finland against the Russians. Ambrose raised the bottle to him, and then took another nip.