After the Cabaret (17 page)

There was a whistling sound, very close. The young woman stiffened in Ted's arms and buried her head in his shoulder. The woman with the tea froze.

There was an enormous crash, the walls and floor shook, glass shattered, as if every window in the house had been blown out. The coloured panes at the top of the front door cascaded on to the tiles below. Through the gaps, smoke and fire were visible. The woman with the tray walked up a few stairs. ‘I think that was a direct hit on the house opposite,' she said. ‘They're Poles, mostly.' The eyes of the other two were on the gaps in the window frames of the front door. She turned, ‘Oh dear,' she said. ‘That's number forty, all right. Don't you start rushing over there. Let the firemen handle it.'

‘I wasn't going to,' Ted said. ‘No point in being a hero and getting killed with Jack to look after.'

‘Better a live coward than a dead hero, that's what I say,' she remarked, putting the tray on the stairs. ‘Not that I'm calling you that, of course.' She poured the tea, with a slightly shaky hand, then glanced back. ‘Pity. I liked them coloured panes. Never be able to replace them now.'

‘I'll see if I can get some glass tomorrow. It'll only be plain, of course,' said Ted, taking a cup. ‘Here you are, Mrs Hedges. Have a cup of tea.' The young woman straightened up and took the tea, but as she did so another bomb, further off, fell and her hand wobbled so that half the contents of the cup spilt in the saucer and on to her lap. The older woman listened. ‘I think they're going back,' she said. ‘Here – drink your tea. It'll calm you down.' She poured more into the cup.

‘I'm sorry,' said the young woman. ‘It's my nerves. They're getting worse.'

‘It's not surprising, in your condition,' said the older woman. ‘My goodness, you do look pale. Try to keep calm. Where's your husband now?'

‘Africa – they call it Syria.'

‘You can say that for this war – you certainly catch up with your geography,' the woman said. There was a chorus of crashes.

‘I reckon I ought to go and wake the woman upstairs,' Ted said.

‘She won't be pleased. She don't want to talk to anybody, air-raid or no air-raid. She's a bit peculiar.'

‘You said they were going away, Mrs Brown,' the young woman said.

But the bombardment went on. ‘That's Victoria Station,' said Ted. ‘It'll be chaos in the morning.' Mrs Hedges was hiding against his chest once more.

‘Your old man'll get some leave soon, I expect,' Ted told her. ‘Maybe you'll have had the baby by then. Think of the look on his face when he sees you both.'

‘Then you'll be able to sleep in the hall, with the rest of us,' Mrs Brown told her.

There was another loud screaming whistle. She spoke on, to cover the noise, ‘Romantic, eh? You and your husband, the baby, me, this gentleman here and his sister—'

There came another horrendous crash, followed by a vibration.

‘Bloody hell,' said Ted, looking at Jack's sleeping form, huddled in blankets. ‘It beats me how that boy can sleep through all this.'

‘Used to it,' said the older woman. ‘Kids can get used to anything.'

They could hear bombers overhead. There were more explosions.

‘This is the worst raid I've ever been in,' said Ted. ‘If it's like this all over, there won't be much left of the docks tomorrow. I'm still worried about that woman upstairs.'

There was a loud hammering on the door. ‘Anybody in? Open up!' Mrs Brown went to the door. A black-faced fireman stood in the entrance. Beyond him others were playing hoses over the flaming house opposite. ‘Someone's seen an incendiary land on your roof,' he said.

‘Bloody hell!' cried Ted. He let go of the young woman and swept Jack into his arms.

‘We'll put it out, mate,' the fireman reassured him. ‘Just let us get the hose upstairs.' He and another fireman ran up with it.

‘There's a woman asleep in the top room,' called Mrs Brown.

‘Don't worry, we won't wake her!' one of the firemen cried.

And the raid continued. The firemen came down. They quickly drank a cup of tea handed to them in the hall by Mrs Brown. One observed, ‘That woman upstairs wasn't pleased. You'd have thought we'd come to rob her. We're on the roof, she's down below the trap-door, swearing at us and all sorts. There's a bit of a hole in your roof now. Could have been worse.'

‘What about …?' Mrs Brown asked, nodding at the house opposite, where firemen were still working on the blaze. Rescuers were already digging in the rubble. One stood by, holding a mongrel dog.

‘Looks bad,' he said. ‘Soon as it cools down we'll get Spot the Wonder Dog on to it. He can find anybody who's buried but it's too hot for his paws at the moment.'

This cheered pale-faced Jack. ‘Can I watch?' he asked.

‘Better not,' said the fireman, with a warning look at Ted. ‘Well, time to go. Thanks for the tea, missus.'

Overhead the moon shone brightly, a bomber's moon, gleaming over the burning house, the firemen, the digging rescuers and the man with the dog, which strained at its leash. Planes sounded overhead, flashes shooting from their guns. Golden ack-ack fire pierced the dark sky. The horizon was orange.

Mrs Brown, Ted and Jack, hand in hand, stood near the front door, Mrs Hedges behind them on the stairs.

‘You bastards,' said Ted, looking up. ‘Pardon my French, Mrs Brown.'

Mrs Brown had lived for thirty years in the house,
which had been emptied of its established inhabitants in the course of a year. She liked the Simcoxes. ‘It's excusable,' she said.

‘You said bastard, Ted,' Jack said. ‘And you said the Germans was only the same as us – fighting the bosses' war.'

‘Yeah, the bastards,' said Ted.

And as if on cue the All Clear sounded.

‘I can't believe it's over,' said Mrs Hedges weakly, from the stairs.

‘It's been a night and a half,' Ted agreed. ‘Better get some sleep, I suppose,' he said to the younger woman. ‘Will you be all right, love?'

‘Yes, thank you, Mr Simcox,' she said.

‘You'd better call me Ted, seeing as we've spent the night together.'

She gave a wan smile.

‘Still no sign of the mysterious lady upstairs,' he said. ‘How can she be managing, with a hole in the roof?'

‘She's a funny one,' said Mrs Brown, and they all went to bed, to sleep for a few hours until morning.

Vi and Sally came arm in arm through the dawn as the firemen were still putting out the last blazes. The silent streets were dusty and blocked with rubble, warm from the fires. Curtains still hung at the windows of roofless buildings, a bed hung half-way out from the broken floor of a house. Ambulances passed. A soldier, with a kit-bag over his shoulder, walked up the road, his arm round a woman with a pram.

Here and there was the smell of fire. Elsewhere was the
acrid yet stale odour of old buildings suddenly destroyed, as though the stench of years of food, sweat and breath had been released from the brickwork.

The sun was rising into the blue summer sky. As they turned into the corner of Vi's street, Sally grasped her friend's shaking arm, but although two houses in the road had been destroyed and several others damaged, Vi's was intact.

Vi stopped in the road outside. ‘Thank God,' she said, looking up at the house. She grasped Sally's arm. ‘My knees have gone. I can't move.'

In the silent house Ted and Jack were asleep in the same narrow bed in one room. Sally and Vi made themselves as comfortable as possible in the other, which contained the curtained-off kitchen. Vi was on the divan she normally slept on, Sally on the couch.

Next morning, Vi was sobbing. Most of a week's rations for the three of them – butter, bacon, tea, a bag of sugar, three eggs and a jar of jam – had gone from the food cupboard. Her winter coat had also disappeared. After they had discovered that the mysterious upstairs tenant had vanished – there was a view of blue sky through a hole three feet across in the roof and the carpet was soaked with water – they decided she had crept down after all the others had fallen asleep, stolen into the Simcoxes' rooms, put their food and Vi's coat into one of her suitcases, and left.

For Vi, somehow, this was the last straw. Crying, she said she couldn't go on. Mrs Brown made them all a cup of tea and they drank it round her big polished table in the basement flat. At last Vi calmed down and said, ‘How
could she? How could anybody be so rotten? I tell you, though, any more of this and our Jack's going to be evacuated again. There's no way we can go on like this – bombed every night, people's homes being destroyed, gas and electric mains shattered night after night. We'll all end up sleeping under the stars and cooking over open fires in the street. That's what'll happen. That's what it'll be like.'

‘I don't want to go back to that vicar,' Jack protested. ‘It was horrible.'

‘You'll do what you're told,' Vi told him grimly. ‘There's a war on. As for you and Sally and Joe Stalin,' she said to Ted, ‘what's Russia doing for us? Helping Hitler out in case there aren't enough Germans to do the work, that's what.' Now she turned to Sally. ‘Don't talk to me about Russia.'

‘They'll fight if they have to,' said Sally.

‘Well, they aren't going to have to, are they?' Vi cried impatiently. ‘No one has to, only us. That's who there is – us British, and the Canadians and Australians and so forth and the Indians and several Africans and Jamaicans and a few people who managed to escape Hitler.'

‘We've got the Gurkhas,' Jack said.

‘Gurkhas! We'd need a million Gurkhas,' she said. ‘It's like a horrible nightmare – all of us crowded on this little island with all the Germans throwing themselves at us.'

‘Don't spread alarm and despondency, Vi,' Ted told her.

‘It's the truth, though, isn't it?' Vi demanded.

‘Something'!! turn up,' Sally said.

‘Oh, shut up,' said Vi, crying again.

But after that last, shattering night the raids diminished. Hitler had attacked Russia and needed much of his air force for the war in the east.

After less than a week in Moscow Greg returned with his head full of the images of domes against dark skies filled with swirling snow, the great river – and the wasted, lined face of the old traitor in his great carved chair in the gloomy flat.

Alistair Bradshaw, bright-eyed and fresh-faced under his fur hat, had seen him off at the airport, bidding him goodbye with a firm handshake and a friendly, ‘Just as well to bail out, Greg. Frankly, I was worried about you and Pym from the first. Then, a couple of days ago, your name came up in discussions I was having with a trade guy here.'

‘What? A Russian? What did he say?' asked Greg.

‘He knew we were together. They've still got eyes everywhere. It's an old Russian custom.'

‘What did he say?' insisted Greg.

‘He just said he'd heard a friend of mine was visiting a long-standing guest of theirs, an Englishman. And that he didn't think it was a good idea. Would I have a word?
By that time Pym had backed off and you'd decided to return to the UK so I didn't think it was necessary to mention it to you. But maybe you should know. I wouldn't worry about it,' he reassured Greg. ‘It's all meaningless paranoia. Russia's not a happy place. But there might be some repercussions, that's why I'm telling you now. I'd forget all about Pym, if I were you. You wouldn't want to get stranded between whatever two or three parties he's manipulating for his own purposes.'

‘Is that what this official said?' asked Greg.

‘Don't worry,' Alistair said. He smiled his broad, deceiver's smile and clapped Greg on the back. ‘Goodbye – it's been fun.'

‘Thanks for bringing me along,' Greg said, picked up his bag and made for the departure gate, feeling much like a child forced to leave a birthday party knowing that once he has left the others will go on playing games and eating cake.

On the long return flight he thought about Pym and his request for assistance in getting back to Britain. It was probably no more than the age-old Russian instinct for repression and secrecy that had caused the authorities to ban Pym from talking to him. Alistair Bradshaw's part in this was obscure. Had he informed the authorities about Greg's visit to Pym? Greg would not have been surprised at such collusion, designed to create a favourable atmosphere between Alistair and those with whom he was trying to trade. Had he got stuck between Russian bureaucracy and Western capitalism? But what about Pym? And would he ever manage to write the book? But at least he'd
done it, he thought, gone to Moscow, met Pym, however unsatisfactorily. He'd done it!

However, by the time he was putting his bags down in his cold, lonely little flat he had begun to feel depressed and rather confused.

There was a message from Katherine – ‘I think I'm going to be able to get to London for a week. Do ring, lots of love.' There was another from his head of department, asking him how he was getting on and saying he had some material Greg might be interested in. Had Greg a fax machine? His mother had called but, thanks to a meandering message from a distraught woman Greg did not know, his tape had run out and her voice on the machine stopped suddenly.

He talked to his mother and was on his way out to hire the cheapest fax machine when his phone rang. It was Bruno Lowenthal, with a heavy cold.

‘Why don't I come over?' Greg asked. ‘I can bring you in anything you need.'

‘No, thank you. Fiona's helping me.'

‘Look,' said Greg, on an impulse. ‘I think I really need to talk to you. I've been in Moscow. I've seen Pym. He wants to come back. He wants me to help him fix it.'