She came bursting out of Leman Street to make a great curve to her left, and at last was in Cable Street. And then stopped and stared and knew that this had been entirely what she had expected. It had to be. There couldn’t have been any other outcome. From the moment she had left Norland Square, she told herself with a sick certainty, this was what I expected. I knew, somehow I knew –
She began to run again, until she was up to the edge of a depression in the ground which was almost deep enough to be called a crater, and which had on its far side a heap of battered remains of the building, great slabs of concrete and piled dusty bricks, and, incongruously, a broken table lying helplessly on its back with the legs in the air like a stranded tortoise, and she thought – it’s mine. From my office. Oh, God, it’s my table. And she stood and stared over the rubble, trying to see, and a
warden shouted ahead somewhere and she looked up, almost frightened to see what was beyond.
And for one moment felt a stab of hope. It was the restaurant that had gone with the office over it, but the building alongside where the kitchens and the shop were was still standing. Fire licked along the crest of the roof, but there were firemen up there and hoses played elegant dancing arcs of water across the darkly orange sky above. If she’d been in the kitchens she’d be all right, Poppy told herself, almost whispering the words aloud If she’d been in the restaurant – and then caught her breath in a half-sob, half-shout as a warden appeared out of the hubbub and looked out towards her.
‘Hey, you,’ he bawled angrily. ‘Take cover – ’
‘Tom?’ she called, recognizing him even under the layer of soot that covered his face. ‘It’s me – Mrs Deveen – do you know who was here? Can I come and see what’s up and who was here? I just got here – ’
The man peered at her in the fitful light, as a couple of firemen went by her hauling another hosepipe, and she stepped sideways to keep out of their way and almost slithered into the crater, and the man Tom cursed loudly and came slipping and stumbling over the pile of rubble to reach her.
‘I told you to take cover – oh, Gawd, Mrs D – I didn’t hear what you shouted – didn’t know it was you. Listen ducks, nothing you can do. The place got a direct hit – I’m that sorry.’
‘Who was here?’ she said and her voice amazed her by its steadiness. ‘I must know – who was here?’
‘Place had almost shut for the night, according to the man we got out. Old fella – head waiter?’
‘Horace,’ she said and caught her breath. ‘He came over tonight to help out.’
‘He’s all right,’ the warden said quickly and then, amazingly, laughed. ‘Dead annoyed, mind you. They took him off to the hospital to get his broken leg sorted out and he was cursing a treat. He was just counting up the tips or something – the tronk, is it? – anyway, sharing out the moolah, he said, and the bloody Huns come and scattered the lot. Steamin’ mad he was – ’
Poppy managed to laugh. It was so very much a Horace sort of thing that, and the relief of hearing the irascible old man had been up to form, in spite of his injury, was huge. But there had been others there and she caught her breath again and said,
‘Tom – my aunt was here tonight, wasn’t she?’
‘Mrs Braham?’ Tom said and swore again. His language was rich and rounded and seemed to help him. ‘Here, Dave!’ he bawled over his shoulder. ‘Dave! Mrs Deveen says as how the old girl’s in there – any luck looking?’
‘No one on the ground floor or the upper ones,’ a hidden voice roared back, barely audible over the sound of the spluttering hoses and the crackling of flames greedily eating wood and throwing an incongruously cheerful kitchen-in-the-early-morning sort of scent into the air. ‘ – take another look – ’
‘The cellars?’ Poppy said then and tried to follow Tom as he turned to clamber over the rubble towards the distant shouting voice. ‘She may have been down there. It’s pretty deep – she could be all right, but we’ve got to get her out – ’
‘Leave it to us, for Gawd’s sake, Mrs D –’ The warden turned and looked down at her and she saw him brilliantly outlined against the smoky light of the fire that was now taking hold of the kitchen and shop building and which seemed to be defeating the sweating, shouting firemen. The sound of crackling wood had become an ominous roaring now. ‘We got enough to sort out without having another civilian down there to worry over – we’ll look for her, trust me – Cellars, you say –’ And he turned and slithered away to the other side of the heap of rubble, leaving her staring impotently after him.
It seemed to be an eternity that she stood there waiting. There was nothing else she could do. To have insisted on following Tom would have been stupid. He was right to tell her she’d be in the way. But she couldn’t go away, either, and she stood there, her head thrown back, staring up at the roof where the years of Jessie’s and her own hard work seemed to be about to be slowly eaten away into a cloud of white ash and broken bricks, and waited.
And then suddenly there was action, loud action, and she strained forwards to try to see what was happening and frustrated by the heaping of the rubble which obstructed her view, made up her mind and began, slowly and awkwardly, to climb it.
Her feet slipped and twisted on the broken bricks and timbers which lay drunkenly across it and she almost fell on her knees at one point, but managed to regain her balance just in time. And got to the top of the pile of rubbish that had once been the
best restaurant in the East End to stand staring down on the other side.
It was like a scene on a stage. At the rear the glow of the fire and at ground level, the bulk of the building with its roof ablaze, and in front of that a little group of slowly moving people lit by flashes of light from above as the fire on the roof leapt up in response to the sudden bursts of breeze that came swooping over the roof tops from the river. She stood frozen into stillness, watching as they inched their way across the remains of the pavement and blinked as the heat made her eyes smart and run tears and rubbed them and stared again.
Two people carrying a stretcher and on it a figure that didn’t move. Behind them another stretcher with three men carrying it this time, and a figure that seemed to be moving a little. Or was it an optical illusion due to the leaping firelight? And then she knew it wasn’t. She could see arms waving about and hear the sound of voices, but it was hard to hear properly for the roaring of the fire was now very loud. She strained her eyes and ears even more, but it was useless. There was only one thing to do and she did it.
She slid precariously down the other side of the rubble heap, bringing a good deal of it down with her, and tearing her legs painfully on bits of twisted metal that stuck out of it, until she was on reasonably safe ground and then, holding her hand in front of her face, because the heat from the fire was now almost searing, pushed towards the stretchers.
By this time they’d reached the edge of the cleared area, where an ambulance stood waiting, its doors gaping wide, and as she came up to it, the bearers began to push the first stretcher with its still burden into it. And then she was there at last, standing beside the second stretcher with its three bearers and she looked down at it, almost too frightened to focus her eyes and saw the glimpse of red under the rough blanket and swallowed hard.
‘Jessie,’ she said very softly and the head on the stretcher moved and then turned and the husky voice said, ‘Poppela – I knew you’d come, dolly. I knew you would –’ And then stopped in a little sigh.
Poppy was crouching beside her, trying to see in the unreliable light and the man behind the stretcher said kindly, ‘She’s all right as far as we can see, lady. Friend of yours?’
‘My aunt,’ Poppy said, and set her cheek against Jessie’s. ‘She’s my aunt and the best woman in the world. She’s not too hurt – ?’
‘Legs seems funny,’ the other stretcher man said. ‘Couldn’t feel nothing when we moved her. There was this thing across her back. They’ll sort her out at the hospital though. She’s on her way – ’
Poppy got to her feet then and peered into the ambulance where they were settling their first passenger, arranging the blankets neatly across the stretcher and she called out, ‘Who’s that?’
‘No idea,’ the stretcher man said, and looked down at her. ‘Might you know if you was to look?’
‘Yes –’ she said breathlessly, trying to think who it might be. Lily? Had she stayed late tonight? One of the waiters or the chef? And, fearful and unwilling, she climbed into the ambulance, not wanting to look.
The stretcher man stood aside courteously and she wanted to giggle. It was just as though he were one of her own waiters showing a customer to a table, and she almost expected him to use a napkin to flick an imaginary speck of dust away. But she controlled herself and looked down at the face on the stretcher.
The eyes were half open and the hair was rumpled over them. It made him look, down one side of his face, like a child who had fallen asleep so suddenly he hadn’t even had time to close his eyes properly. But the other side of his face showed no expression at all. It couldn’t. It was a mass of bloody tissue which had been torn from the bone so deeply that she could see a white gleam in the depths, and experienced though she was in seeing battlefield wounds, the sight made her head swim and her belly heave with nausea.
‘Do you know him, lady? It’d help for the labelling,’ the man at her side said and she looked at him and again at the stretcher and shook her head to clear it.
‘Yes,’ she said dully. ‘I know him. His name is Bernard Braham.’
Robin stood at the far side of the casualty waiting hall, pre-tending to look through the bundles of patients’ record notes she had in her hands, but in fact watching Hamish. She had to talk to him; that ten minutes she had spent listening to Chick as they came out of Night Nurse’s breakfast to go on duty had shown that. He deserved an apology. But the trouble was, if she apologized would he read more into it than she intended? Could he perhaps think she was being the same as her half-sister? The mere idea of that was enough to make her feel hot with shame. She couldn’t bear to let him think so. Yet, equally, she couldn’t bear to let him go on thinking she had been rude and hateful and didn’t want him to be her friend any longer. She sighed. Whatever she did she was in trouble. Devils and deep blue seas just weren’t in it.
Chick came out of her cubicle with a swish of the curtain behind her and made her way to the sterilizer in the corner, making a detour in order to pass Robin and as she went she hissed, ‘Ass! talk to him now. Tell him I told you what he told me – that your Chloe lied like a Persian rug and then some – he’s entitled to know. And the longer you put it off the harder it’ll be – go
on
!’ and then caught Sister’s eye as she went bustling across the waiting room and smiled beatifically at her. Robin, also seeing Sister, was forced into action. She couldn’t just stand here watching Hamish any longer.
He had just finished scrubbing the walls of the soiled cubicle when she went in, and was about to start on the floor. It smelled foul – beer and worse – and she wrinkled her nose a little, wishing they could talk somewhere else, somewhere quiet and decent and –
‘I’ll be away from here in about five minutes, Nurse,’ he said in his soft burr, not looking at her. ‘If you need the cubicle urgently – ’
‘I don’t need it, Hamish,’ she said. ‘I need you.’
He went on mopping the floor in long practised strokes and then hauled the mop into its bucket and screwed it into the squeezer. He didn’t look at her.
‘I thought you didn’t want to speak to me,’ he said at length.
‘I was wrong.’ She managed somehow to keep her voice steady. It really was difficult. ‘I have to apologize.’
There was a long silence and then he looked at her, and just for a moment leaned on his mop. ‘Well, Who’d ha’ thought it? And you so convinced I was some sort of – of – ’
‘Don’t say it,’ she said swiftly. ‘Please don’t. I – it wasn’t entirely my own fault. My half-sister – Chloe – she always manages to – ’
‘Ah, Chloe,’ he said thoughtfully and started mopping again and Robin sidestepped to get out of the way. ‘Poor soul.’
Robin stared at him. ‘Poor soul?’ she echoed. ‘She’s about as pathetic as a shark!’
‘Oh, you’re wrong there! She’s had a bad time of it one way and another, you know – ’
‘I know a lot about Chloe!’ Robin said and began to feel angry again. How could he defend her when she’d told such a thumping lie, and made her, Robin, so miserable? ‘More than you possibly can – ’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Outsiders sometimes see a good deal more of what happens in families than the members of it do.’
‘Oh, I see!’ Robin was sardonic now. ‘She’s been telling you tall tales about how unkind everyone is to her and how Ma and David didn’t let her do this and that when she was younger and how they stopped her from spending her money and – ’
‘Were they? Unkind? I’d doubt that. From what I’ve seen of your mother.’ He was leaning on his mop again. ‘Certainly Chloe said nothing derogatory about them.’ He looked reflective then. ‘Unless it’s derogatory to say that her family are all stick-in-the-muds and boring and have no fun in them and so forth. But there. I’m the same sort, so I don’t think it’s a bad way to be. I dare say you know she thinks that – ’
She stared at him. ‘Well, yes. She says it all the time. She said nothing else about us?’
‘Not a word. That’s why I’m so sorry for her.’
‘Indeed.’ Again she let the sardonic note sound.
‘Aye,’ he said with equanimity, ignoring her edginess. ‘A lonely creature when all’s said and done. Wants so much to be part of you all, and simply doesna’ know how to be. So all she can do is dig away at you and try to deal with her jealousy that way. As I said, poor soul.’
Robin was silent. This was a version of her half-sister she had never seen before, but she had to admit that there was some sense in what he said. At family events of any kind Chloe was always rather on the outside looking in. They had tried to make her comfortable with them, of course they had. David alone was too generous a character to do otherwise, and Robin knew her mother had been trying for years to be closer to Chloe. But whatever they did there was always that air of remoteness about Chloe and over the years perhaps they had all rather stopped trying, had turned their backs on her –