Visibility (36 page)

At other times she would close her eyes and either sleep or simply pass out—Herbert could hardly tell the difference—and he would think that they could stay like that for a long time, ambulance or not.

When she opened her eyes again, she would try and do the deep breathing exercises she used in diving, and sob tears of frustration when she found that she could not, so clogged were her lungs. It was all she could do to sip at the water that the dairy ladies brought.

People wrapped Herbert in blankets, took his sodden clothes away, and returned with them bone dry and smelling of coal smoke.

The fire brigade arrived after an hour and a half, by which time the entire block of flats was ablaze.

It was something of a miracle, Herbert thought, that the fire had not yet spread to the adjacent buildings.

Finally the ambulance turned up, a woman walking ahead of it with a flare to light the way. Two ambulancemen hopped down from the cab and walked over to where Hannah was lying.

Herbert should not have shouted at them, for they were only trying to do their job in the most trying circumstances imaginable; but equally he was by now past caring.

“You take three hours, and you walk?” he screamed. “Run, damn you!”

The older of the men looked at Herbert, and Herbert saw that he was just as close to exhaustion as Herbert was, maybe more so. His eyes were almost as
red as Hannah’s, and his skin sagged from his face in great, tired, canine folds.

He was too dignified to reply.

He and his mate, equally shot, picked Hannah up with as much care as they could.

When Herbert accompanied them round to the back of the ambulance, he could see why they were so enervated.

There were four other patients already in there, all the far side of sixty: two women, one of them flat out on a stretcher, the other crying softly into the collar of her dressing gown; and two men, slumped against the sides.

“We don’t have no radio, you see, guv’nor,” the ambulanceman said. “So we’re out of contact from the moment we leave until the moment we get back, unless we can find a phone. You were last on our route. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“Didn’t they tell you it was serious?”

“Everyone says theirs is serious, sir.”

They found a space for Hannah along one side. Herbert climbed in next to her, earning himself a reproachful tut from one of the old men already in there, and made himself as comfortable as possible, still clasping Hannah’s cane.

“Rodney, you want to drive?” said the ambulanceman. “I’m all in.”

“Sure thing, Derek.”

Derek joined them in the back and closed the doors on them.

Herbert heard the engine start and they set off, so slowly that it was several minutes before he was sure they were moving at all.

Derek checked on the prone old woman, asked everyone else how they were doing in a tone that suggested that he could do little about any answer they chose to give him, and let out a sigh that spoke eloquently of the kind of day he’d had.

“Do you have any oxygen?” Herbert asked.

He shook his head and gestured toward empty compartments above the stretcher.

“All gone, sir. No oxygen, no dressings, no morphine, no blood. We’re out of everything except the petrol to keep this thing running.”

“Are we going back to the hospital?” Herbert said, and, when Derek nodded, added: “How long will it take?”

“It’ll take as long as it takes.”

“That’s not very helpful.”

“Maybe not, sir, but it’s the truth.”

The journey that followed made the hours spent watching over Hannah on the floor of the Welsh dairy seem like the most idyllic of summer afternoons. Every few minutes, the ambulance would brake without warning, presumably to avoid an obstacle, real or imagined, which had loomed suddenly through the fog.

Only the prone woman seemed oblivious to this. The rest of them would crack their heads against the metal walls with moans, curses, sobs, screams, or silent eye rolls. Each time, too, Rodney would get going again with a bunny hop and a revving of the engine that sent exhaust fumes scudding into the rear compartment.

Herbert’s poker-induced headache had gone during the race through the fire and the ministering to Hannah, or maybe he had simply forgotten about it.

Now, however, it was back with a vengeance. With each new sudden emergency stop, and every belch of carbon monoxide, he felt another dart being wheedled with expert sadism into his skull.

He would have preferred a session of trepanning, he really would.

He had no idea where they were, or which direction they were heading. He wondered whether the trains to Auschwitz had been this hellish, and on balance decided that this was not the time to ask Hannah.

The next time Rodney piled on the anchors, the old man next to Herbert toppled onto his shoulder; but this time he did not groan or cry out.

Nor did he move when the ambulance started again.

Scarcely believing what he thought had just happened, Herbert raised his hand and placed the back of it against the old man’s mouth, counting out the seconds: five, ten, twenty, and still nothing, not the slightest breath.

“Derek,” Herbert said.

The ambulanceman looked at Herbert with scant interest. “Yes, sir?”

“This man’s dead.”

“I daresay he is.”

It seemed that Derek and Herbert were destined to be at loggerheads on just about everything. “That’s all you can say?” Herbert asked with incredulity, spacing out his words in flabbergasted sarcasm. “You
daresay-he-is?”

Derek sighed again; the short, sharp exhalation of the misunderstood. “Sir, I’ve been on duty for more than twenty-four hours without a break. If this man is dead, and I’ll grant you it looks like he is, then he’s the fifth
person to pass away in the back of this ambulance in that time. There’s not a lot I can do about it. Nor you neither.”

“But we must do
something.
”

“Like what, sir?”

Derek was not being facetious, Herbert could tell that in his voice. He was merely pointing out, with extreme reasonableness, that extraordinary circumstances made a mockery of ordinary norms.

“What will you do with the body?” Herbert asked.

“Drop him off at the mortuary, sir. Same as all the others.”

What had things come to, Herbert thought, when an ambulance made the mortuary as regular a stop as the hospital?

“He wasn’t the first, sir, and he won’t be the last,” Derek added.

Ten minutes later, as if to prove Derek right, the old woman on the stretcher ceased what sporadic movements she had been making.

No fuss, no agonized death cry; simply there one minute and gone the next.

Hannah had been silent for quite some time, drifting in and out of consciousness. Now, suddenly, she vomited copiously on to the floor, and then began to foam at the mouth, looking at Herbert with wild eyes which were no less frightening for being sightless. She lashed out, first with one arm, then with both, and finally with her legs as well, and even Derek and Herbert together could hardly subdue her.

“What’s going on?” Herbert yelled.

“Seizures are quite common with smoke inhalation,” Derek shouted back. Somehow, knowing that offered Herbert no comfort whatsoever.

Still holding on to Hannah with one arm, and checking that Herbert was not about to relinquish his grip, Derek unstrapped the old woman’s body from the stretcher and rolled it as gently as he could onto the floor; gently for the sensibilities of the other two patients, who were watching this turn of events with a sort of resigned horror.

Derek and Herbert maneuvered Hannah on to the stretcher and managed to get her limbs tucked under the straps; not that these would hold her if she was really determined, but it was better than nothing.

She thrashed around a little more, and then stopped as abruptly as she had begun.

For a dreadful moment Herbert feared the worst, but then he heard her breathing and realized that she had passed out once more.

“What else?” he gabbled at Derek. “Coma? Death? We can’t stop it here, can we?”

Derek shook his head. “Only when we get to the hospital, sir.”

The ambulance came to yet another sudden stop, and even as the thought of what Herbert was going to do came to him, he was already opening the rear door, notion and action fused into one. He ran round to the front of the vehicle, yanked open the driver’s door and climbed in.

“Derek, I …,” Rodney began, and then saw Herbert. “What the hell are you doing?”

Herbert shunted him hard along the bench seat. “Where are we, Rodney?”

“You’re mad. Get out of here.”

“There are two people dead back there, Rodney, and that might not be the end of it. So tell me where the hell we are.”

A blob of light in front of them shrank and died; the warning flare extinguished.

A few seconds later, the flare woman appeared at the window, as blackened and grimy as the rest of them.

“Bloody typical,” she began, too exhausted, as Rodney had been, to instantly register the presence of a stranger. “Right in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge”—
Blackfriars Bridge?
Herbert thought. Blackfriars Bridge! They were miles from Soho. The fog was not so much causing havoc as flipping the world upside down—“and that’s the last of my flares gone.”

That was the last Herbert saw of the flare woman, too; her eyes wide and her mouth drooping in surprise as he accelerated away with a sight more smoothness and vigor than Rodney had ever managed.

It was Hannah who had given Herbert the idea. Well, not her as such, but the way in which she negotiated the streets through a combination of fierce concentration and memory. Herbert knew London at least as well as she did, after years of tailing all sorts of undesirables around the city. Until this fog, however, he had never had cause to test his ability to negotiate it blindfold.

He could get to Guy’s pretty much on main roads: straight over what was left of Blackfriars Bridge, and then east on Southwark Street, all the way to London Bridge station. There would be precious few cars on the road, if any. None that were moving, at any rate.

The flotilla of abandoned vehicles was another matter, but at least most of them would be empty.

A risk? Definitely. A calculated one? If one was charitable, yes.

As for those in the ambulance; well, two of them
were dead already, and Herbert had no idea how close Hannah was to joining them.

The only thing he did know for sure was that he would never, could never, forgive himself if he simply sat there and watched her die. Better to do something about it and know that he had tried.

No, he thought, even that would not be enough. He could not conceive of how he would feel if she breathed her last right then. It would finish him.

And so, as in the fire, he went forward because it was the only option.

He set off at a speed which would have been normal in everyday conditions, but which in a whiteout seemed positively suicidal.

Rodney yelled at Herbert that he was insane, he was going to get them all killed.

Then Rodney lunged across Herbert and grabbed at the wheel, but Herbert batted him on the side of the head with a half-closed fist, and Rodney realized that attacking him was simply going to make things worse.

A set of traffic lights appeared suddenly, and Herbert turned the wheel hard left.

The ambulance took the corner with a shriek of tires and doubtless a cacophony of similar sounds from the rear compartment, but Herbert was concentrating too hard to pay them any mind.

There was a slight echo as they passed under the railway bridge which carried the tracks out of Blackfriars mainline station to the north of the river, and Herbert tried to remember how long this road—Southwark Street—was, and which way it curved.

At a rational level, he knew that this was crazy. Visibility was far too poor to avoid objects by braking,
not at the speed he was driving. He had to swerve this way and that, as though the ambulance were a dodgem, bracing himself against the metallic whines as he scraped the side of a parked Vauxhall Velox, and ignoring Rodney’s muttered imprecations as a pedestrian scampered to safety inches from their bumper.

Herbert’s first serious mistake would be their last. If he crashed into something front-on, Rodney and he would both go through the windshield. If he swerved too violently, he would flip the ambulance on to its roof. Either could be fatal.

Would Herbert have killed the others in the ambulance to save Hannah? He could not know. But yes, he was prepared to risk their lives to do so; his too.

It was, by any reasonable standards, a horrendously, arrogantly irresponsible thing to do; but Herbert defied any man who had ever loved to tell him that he would not have done the same.

They weaved between more traffic lights and more parked cars, reliant only on the hope that they were alone and that a higher force was watching over them.

Another booming echo as another bridge came and went overhead; a railway bridge again, he remembered, this one leading to London Bridge and Cannon Street.

He knew that the road veered slightly to the left after this bridge, and so he turned the wheel in that direction; not a moment too soon, either, for just as he did so he caught a glimpse of solid stone wall skimming his window.

My window
, he thought; he had gone all the way over to the wrong side of the road without realizing.

Rodney was looking at Herbert as though he had taken complete leave of his senses.

Herbert could hardly blame him, but he felt very still and empty, like the eye of a tornado; hullabaloo all around him, and yet he was moving along with dull serenity.

Potholes threw themselves beneath the wheels, sending juddering crashes through the ambulance and bouncing Rodney and Herbert on their seats, but Herbert was not going to stop for anything now, not even a flat tire; they were as good as there.

Herbert looked for the last set of traffic lights, at which he wanted to turn right; but they did not come, and still did not come.

When they went under a third bridge Herbert knew that they had come too far, for this bridge was the final approach to London Bridge station, and they wanted to be on the near side of it.