Shute, Nevil (7 page)

After the meal the Littlejohns got up to go. ‘Early to bed,’ said the builder. ‘Maybe we shan’t get so much sleep later on.’ He looked out into the wet night. ‘Still, it doesn’t look much like a raid tonight.’

The little woman said to Joan: ‘It’s been ever so kind of you, I’m sure.’ She hesitated. ‘If you want the baby looking after any time, Mrs. Corbett, it would be a real pleasure. Quite took to me she did, didn’t she?’

They went away; Corbett stood looking after them thoughtfully. ‘Brighton in August,’ he said. ‘I just can’t understand it.’

Joan shook her head. ‘They’re such-such genuine people,’ she said. ‘I don’t say I want to see an awful lot of them, but they’re terribly nice in their own way.’

She yawned. ‘It will be good when things get settled dawn and we can get some maids again,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of washing nappies for the baby.’

Again they got out baskets with the gasmasks, food, and drink, and left them in the hall. Then they went up to bed.

In the dark, rainy night they woke to a shattering concussion, near at hand.

Corbett did not hear it consciously. He found himself suddenly awake and standing near the door of his bedroom, his hands pressed to his ears which were aching with pain. In the nursery upstairs he heard the children begin crying; he ran up to them, to help Joan.

As he opened the door there was a blinding flash outside that lit up the room through the green curtains, and another concussion. The glass from the nursery windows fell tinkling to the floor; the children redoubled their screams. Joan was busy with the baby; he moved forward and touched her on the shoulder. ‘Get Baby out into the trench,’ he shouted through the din. ‘Stay there yourself. I’ll get the others dressed and bring them out.’

There was another concussion, this time farther off. Joan slipped on shoes and a raincoat over her pyjamas, picked up the child and wrapped it in a shawl, and ran downstairs. Corbett turned to the other children.

‘Come on, Juggins,’ he said gently to his screaming three-year-old son. ‘Be a brave soldier and get dressed. Big men like you aren’t frightened of a few little bangs. Where did they put your combinations?’

Another bomb fell near at hand; he touched both children, thinking to quiet them. Then he picked up a woollen garment from a chair. ‘Come on, old matt,’ he said. ‘Get into this, and we’ll go and find Mummy.’

Phyllis, his six-year-old daughter, stopped crying instantly. ‘That’s my combies that you’re giving John,’ she said, snivelling indignantly.

Corbett forced a laugh, ‘I’ll give him all your clothes unless you put them on yourself,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll have to wear his.’

He got the children dressed without much trouble after that. Bombs continued to fall in the more distant parts of the city; he hurried the children down through the house and into the garden, only stopping to get a pair of shoes and a coat for himself. Joan was in the trench; he passed the children down to her.

‘This is a bloody picnic,’ he said sourly.

She laughed shortly. ‘You’re right. It’s terribly muddy here, Peter. If you could get a couple of chairs it might be better.’

He went back to the house and got the chairs, slid them down into the trench beneath the car, and followed them. Then he took the baby from Joan and sent her back into the house to dress; the child was crying steadily, confusing his thoughts. While Joan was away one or two more salvoes fell, not very near at hand, towards the centre of the city. Presently she returned, bringing with her the children’s mackintoshes and gum-boots.

Corbett gave the baby back to his wife, went back into the house and dressed himself. Then he went round the house opening what windows still had glass left in them; the wind and rain blew freely through the rooms, soaking beds, furniture, and carpets. He tried the wireless set, but found it dead; evidently the current had failed again, or was cut off from the city.

He went back to the garden. Before getting down into his trench he went and looked over the garden wall; in the dim light he could see the bulk of the Littlejohn’s car standing above their trench. ‘Littlejohn!’ he called. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Mr. Littlejohn. He climbed up out of his trench and came over to the wall. ‘Is everything all right with you?’

‘So far,’ said Corbett. The bombs were still falling in the city; away to the south they heard the sharp crack of guns.

‘It’s a terrible thing, this,’ said the builder. ‘There don’t seem to be any of our own aeroplanes up, do there? Or searchlights, neither. I suppose them guns are antiaircraft guns.’

‘I suppose so.’ They surveyed the sky. ‘I can’t hear any aeroplanes at all,’ said Corbett.

‘Wait a bit,’ said the builder. ‘I can hear some now. Listen-very faint. Hear them?’

The wind sighed and the rain drove across the gardens; they stood in silence for a minute, listening. ‘I hear them now,’ said Corbett. ‘They must be at a tremendous height.’

‘Maybe that’s why there aren’t any searchlights,’ said the builder.

‘Searchlights wouldn’t be much good on a night like this. They’d only show them where the town was.’

‘I reckon they know that all right,’ said Mr. Littlejohn grimly.

Another salvo started to fall near at hand, and sent them hurrying to their trenches.

Corbett struck a match and looked at his watch; it was about one o’clock. He settled down on the chair opposite his wife in the narrow, muddy trench and took a child upon each knee. The baby, tired out with crying, had fallen asleep; the other two children slept intermittently.

Joan asked: ‘Peter, whatever shall we do if they start to drop gas-bombs? With Baby, I mean?’

‘I’ve been thinking of that,’ he said. ‘I think the best thing will be for you to stay here with the other two, and I’ll take her up to the nursery and stay there with her. With the windows open, right up at the top of the house like that, I don’t believe you’d get much gas. It’s fifty feet up from the ground.’

They thought it over for a minute. ‘I don’t like you being in the house, Peter,’ she said. ‘I think it’s much more dangerous there than it is here.’

‘You wouldn’t want me to leave Baby up there all alone?’

‘I’d rather she was all alone than have you with her in the house.’

He touched her hand. ‘I’ll take her up there if we think there’s any gas about. At present it’s all high explosive. There’s been no gas dropped yet, or incendiary, either.’

Slowly the hours passed. The rain pattered against the car, and trickled from the wet ground down into the trench. Corbett sat, cramped and stiff, one child upon each knee; they dozed uneasily, waking and crying when the detonations were near to them. The baby slept quietly on Joan’s lap undisturbed by the heaviest concussions; they were anxious about her. She seemed utterly exhausted. They got some relief by stuffing cotton-wool into their ears.

From time to time they heard the wailing of a siren on some ambulance or police car. The sound of distant gunfire was continuous, and very occasionally they heard the droning of aeroplanes. The wind sighed past them and the rain made little liquid noises; no other sounds shared the night with the shattering concussions of the bombs.

At last there came a long interval. Corbett looked at his watch; it was a little after three. He was dazed and stiff. ‘It lasted three hours last time,’ he said- ‘This may be the end.’

Joan stirred beside him. ‘How long ought we to wait?’

‘We’ll give it half an hour.’

Towards the end of that time he got out of the trench and went to the garden wall. Mr. Littlejohn was standing on his lawn, looking about him at the sky.

‘Seems as if it’s over,’ he said. ‘You’d think they’d give an “all clear” signal of some sort, wouldn’t you?’

‘They didn’t give any sort of “take cover” signal,’ said Corbett.

‘That’s so. Seems like they don’t know when it’s coming or when it’s over, don’t it?’

‘Do you think it’s over now?’

‘I don’t know. I believe I’ll get the missus indoors, and chance it.’

Corbett went back to Joan. ‘We’ll give it a few minutes longer,’ he said. He got out the basket of provisions and gave her a drink of whisky; the children drank a little milk and nibbled a sponge-cake.

Presently they got out of the trench, and went back into the house.

Apart from the windows, no more damage seemed to have been done to the house. Corbett helped Joan to put the children back into their beds in the darkness; they fell asleep almost instantaneously. They did not go to bed at once themselves, being hungry; instead, they went down to the kitchen, lit the Primus stove, and fried a little meal of bacon and eggs. They consumed this in the dim light of an ecclesiastical candle; the electricity was dead again. The food made them feel better.

Corbett lit a cigarette from the candle, and stared reflectively at his wife. ‘I don’t know what you think,’ he said, ‘but I’m getting a bit tired of this.’

‘You couldn’t be more tired than I am. How many more raids like this do you think we’re going to get?’

‘Lord knows. I think we ought to think about clearing out into the country.’

She nodded. ‘I’ve been feeling like that, too. But where would we go? To the boat?’

‘It’s the only place we’ve got.’

He gave her a cigarette, and held the candle for her while she lit it; they sat and smoked in silence over the remains of their meal. ‘It’ld be awfully difficult,’ she said at last, sighing a little. ‘I mean, three children on a little boat like that!’

‘It would be possible,’ he said. ‘Put Phyllis and John in the companion bunks, and rig up a sort of cradle in the forecastle for the baby.’

‘Over the lavatory, I suppose.’

‘That’s right. Then you and I could sleep in the saloon.’

She shook her head. ‘It would be awfully difficult. There’s such a lot of washing to be done for the baby, and you know what it is, carrying water on board. Besides, what would we do for milk?’

‘Use tinned milk. But anyway, we’d be at Hamble. That’s in the country. You might be able to get milk more easily there than here.’

‘You should be able to.’

‘As regards the water,’ he said, ‘It seems to me that wherever we are we’ll have to start carting it before long. I haven’t noticed any water coming in here yet, except the rain. I don’t know how much there is left in our tank upstairs, but I bet it’s not much. We might get better water there than here.’

He paused. ‘You couldn’t wash the nappies out in salt water, using salt water soap?’

Joan wrinkled up her nose. ‘Not much. What about this, though? Suppose we sailed the boat up a river-right away from the sea? Where she’d be floating in fresh water?’ She paused. ‘We’d have all the water that we wanted, then.’

He sat for a minute, deep in thought. ‘It’s an idea,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you’d find a river like that on the south coast, though. A river deep enough to float our boat, where the water wasn’t salt.’

He got up from the table. ‘Let’s sleep on it,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a decision in the morning.’

She lingered for a moment in the dark, shadowy entrance hall as they made their way upstairs. ‘It’s horrible even to think of leaving,’ she said slowly. ‘I mean-this is our home.’

He took her hand. ‘Never mind. It won’t be for long.’

She went up to the nursery to sleep with the children. He turned into his own room and took off his shoes and coat, then he threw himself on the bed in his clothes and pulled the blankets over him. Very soon he was asleep.

He slept late. Joan, taking the children downstairs to cook their breakfast, looked in on him; she did not wake him. It was not till ten o’clock that he awoke, thrust his feet into his shoes, and went downstairs.

‘You should have waked me,’ he said to Joan. ‘I’d have given you a hand.’

She smiled at him. ‘Come and eat your breakfast.’

He rubbed a hand over his unshaven chin. ‘Have you heard anything of Littlejohn?’

‘Not this morning.’

‘I’ll just go in and see if they’re all right. Then I’ll come along. You can leave the washing-up-I’ll do that.’ He had no thought of going to his office.

He went out to his front door. In the street he met Mr. Littlejohn returning to his house, grey and troubled. He said: ‘You’ve heard the news?’

“No,’ said Corbett.

‘Cholera,’ said Mr. Littlejohn.

Corbett stared at him, wide-eyed.

‘There’s been an outbreak of Cholera, down Northam way. Over seventy cases, so they say. They’ve got patrols on all the roads. Nobody’s got to leave the city till he’s been inoculated.’

When living dangerously, there comes a time when extra risks are taken as a matter of everyday occurrence; the mind has become inured to them, and they are hardly thought about. Corbett was not particularly upset by the news that he had heard. He questioned Littlejohn about it, but the builder knew no more than the bare facts, which he had got from a policeman that he knew.

Corbett went back into his house and sat down to his breakfast. After a little reflection, he came to the conclusion that there was no point in trying to conceal the cholera from Joan. He finished his meal, lit a cigarette, and asked her:

‘Do you know anything about cholera?’

She stared at him, puzzled. ‘Cholera? It’s a thing they get in India. Black men die of it in heaps. And pukka sahibs go and stop it. Why?’

‘We’ve got it in Southampton.’

She stared at him. ‘Cholera?’

He told her what he had heard from Littlejohn.

‘What is cholera?’ she asked. ‘Is it catching?’

He said dryly: ‘I imagine so.’ And then he said: ‘This must be what Gordon meant.’

She was puzzled. ‘But you don’t have cholera in countries like this, Peter. It only happens in the East, doesn’t it?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Look and see if there’s anything about it in the encyclopaedia.’

He went and fetched the volume from the drawing-room; together they bent over it.

Five minutes later, he stood erect. ‘Well, that’s it,’ he said, a little heavily, ‘There seems to have been plenty of epidemics of it in this country before. Bunches of them. It comes from water contaminated with sewage.’