The Past and Other Lies (37 page)

‘Invincible, me!’ he declared and, grabbing both of Caroline’s hands he pulled her towards him to kiss her, but as he did so a huge bomber appeared over the horizon behind him, its engines throbbing, and Caroline realised the sound had always been there, in the background, steadily growing louder and louder. It was a Wellington, you could tell by the sound of the engine, by the silhouette of its fuselage against the sun. A British aircraft, not the enemy’s, one of our own, and as William’s lips almost brushed hers his hands slid away,
he
slid away, so that no matter how much she reached, she couldn’t quite touch him. At the same time the Wellington roared overhead so that it filled the sky, filled the whole world—only it wasn’t flying overhead, it was flying directly at them. Caroline screamed though no sound came and she ducked but even as she crouched there on the ground, hugging her knees, she knew, with a dull, sickening awareness, that it wasn’t her who should duck, it was William. She opened her mouth to warn him.

‘William!’

The word hung heavily in the air, almost visible, and Caroline found herself sitting up in bed in the half-light of a late afternoon in winter and William was dead.

She looked at the clock by her bedside: five o’clock. Another three hours till the nightshift started. Two hours until she needed to leave the house.

William. She had dreamed of William and his face... his face had been...

She tried to remember what his face had looked like, his nose, his eyes. His mouth. But she had already forgotten in the time it took to wake from a dream. Or perhaps, in the dream, his face had been a blank. She had had the dream before, many times, not quite the same each time, but the main elements were there—William talking, laughing, about to kiss her, about to say something very important. The bomber, the roar of its engine deafening. Herself screaming silently, reaching out, trying to say something, to do something. Then nothing.

Sometimes it was herself building the aircraft, sending it on its way. The bomber she herself had meticulously—lovingly—welded.

It was just a dream, a subconscious visualisation of a scene she had not witnessed. The only witnesses, so Mr Davenport had reported to Dad a few weeks afterwards, had been an AA gunner and the pilot and the navigator of the Wellington. They had returned to the airbase—William’s airbase—at dawn from a night bombing mission over Germany. One wing and the undercarriage of the Wellington were damaged and they had flown, out of control, onto the airstrip, slamming into a pillbox, clipping two stationary Mosquitoes and finally coming to rest against a retaining wall. Both pilot and navigator had been badly bruised; the navigator had sustained a wrist fracture and a dislocated thumb, the pilot a nasty cut above the eye that had required several stiches. The AA gunner in the pillbox had leapt to safety. The only casualty, then, had been a member of the ground crew, Airman William Davenport, a rigger, who had been working on the fuselage of one of the downed Mosquitoes and who had been killed instantly.

Killed by the RAF and a Wellington bomber.

At the time Caroline had been working in the machine shop at the aircraft factory, fitting glass covers to instrument panels. Now, two years later, she was part of Orange shift, an all-woman crew who churned out a Wellington every week. It was ironic, if she thought about it. Mostly, she didn’t think about it.

She lay in bed and contemplated the ceiling in the half-light. She could hear Mum in the kitchen downstairs requesting assistance with vegetable peeling and Deirdre’s petulant reply. A door slammed followed by Mum’s anxious insistence not to be so noisy as they’d wake Caroline. Someone was whistling at the kitchen sink, a vibrant man’s whistle, off-key but strong. Not Dad, Dad didn’t whistle—and besides, it was too early for him to be home from work. Uncle Clive then, and he was whistling ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts’, switching to a hum as though he had closed his mouth to shave. Uncle Clive was preparing to go out and soon the odour of cheap eau-de-cologne would snake its way up the stairs and into the small back room she shared with Deirdre.

She should get up. Tea would be ready soon and it was cold lying here in bed despite being almost fully dressed. But she lay where she was. Eventually—after the smell of boiling spinach and carrot and potato and eau-de-cologne had reached her, after Mum had called upstairs that tea was ready, after she had heard the front door open and close and Dad announce his arrival in the hallway, after Uncle Clive had whistled his way down the hall and out the front door—she got up.

It was quarter to six.

Downstairs, Mum was looking distinctly on edge. She stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen with a ladle in her hand. She started when Caroline appeared in the doorway, turning abruptly away.

‘Mum, I’m popping out with Anne and Doris,’ called Deirdre from the hallway and immediately Dad, who was hanging up his coat and hat, looked over and stood up straight.

‘You’ll do no such thing. Tonight’s a school night. You’ll stay in and do your homework.’

‘But—’

‘And if you’ve finished your homework you’ll help your mum in the kitchen. I’ll not have any daughter of mine out after dark.’

Deirdre appeared in the kitchen doorway, changed from her school uniform into a blouse and slacks, a faint red smudge around her mouth as though she had recently put on then removed lipstick. Her face was red.

‘But that’s not fair! Caroline—’

‘I’ll not enter into a discussion on this. Go to your room, Deirdre.’

Deirdre clenched her fists and her face became redder and she glared at Dad and then at Caroline, then she pushed roughly past and thudded noisily up the stairs.

Caroline wondered briefly if it really was Anne and Doris waiting for Deirdre outside. Don’t be daft, she chided herself, the kid was only twelve for God’s sake. It was tempting to go after her with some of the older-sister put-downs she’d used to such good effect over the years. It even crossed her mind to go upstairs and see if Deirdre was alright. But in the end, she said nothing. She went nowhere. None of it seemed remotely important.

‘Evening, love. Good kip?’ said Dad, standing at the kitchen sink washing his face.

‘Don’t you want your tea, dear?’ said Mum, hovering in an unsettling manner. ‘I called up half an hour ago.’

‘Not hungry, I’ll just take my sandwiches with me.’

‘But I saved you some brown soup.’

Mum really did look as if the fate of the brown soup was uppermost in her mind and Caroline sat down, saying nothing. Mum took this as assent, grabbed a clean bowl and poured a quantity of watery grey liquid into it.

‘Here you are,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘And there’s bread in the bread bin. And the potatoes are still warm in the oven. Don’t forget to have a nice warming cuppa, too.’

‘Don’t mollycoddle the girl, Bertha,’ said Dad sharply. Normally Mum would have flushed at this and scurried away, but this evening she barely seemed aware of Dad. Instead she looked at her watch and, when she looked up, she looked straight at Caroline.

‘I’ll just pop out, then,’ she said unexpectedly, and Dad looked up from the evening paper.

‘Mrs Larkin at number twenty-one,’ said Mum by way of explanation. ‘Said I’d feed her cat while she’s at her daughter’s.’

Caroline picked up her soup spoon and dipped it in the uninviting liquid, fully absorbed for a moment by the swirling patterns her spoon made on the greasy surface of the soup. Mrs Larkin had gone to her daughter’s a week ago and this was the first time Mum had mentioned anything about feeding her cat.

‘
This is the BBC Home Service with the six o’clock news
,’ said the announcer on the radio, followed by six crisp pips.

Caroline glanced at the kitchen clock. Still an hour before she needed to leave.

The front door closed quietly behind Mum and Caroline looked up from her soup. Dad reached over and flicked off the radio, listening in the sudden silence, his head on one side like a spotter in a watchtower. Upstairs Deirdre thumped angrily about, making some sort of aggrieved-twelve-year-old’s point. Then the thumps ceased and the house fell silent.

Caroline stood up and went into the hallway, snatching up her coat and opening the front door.

‘I’m off, Dad,’ she called over her shoulder.

Outside night had come quickly and a blast of freezing air hit her like a piece of bad news. The blackout usually plunged the street into total darkness but tonight the full moon and a clear sky meant that, for once, she could see where she was going.

She pulled the front door shut behind her to prevent the light from the kitchen breaking the blackout but she stayed in the doorway, her eyes drawn across the road to where number twenty-eight stood empty. The downstairs windows had long ago been boarded up to keep out looters and other undesirables. But there was a window at the back of the house that was unboarded and had been forced open. You could get in easily enough if you knew where to look.

This evening someone was inside the house.

The blackout curtains had been removed by the Davenports when they’d left and now a figure in the front upstairs bedroom was clearly visible, a figure standing perfectly still so that she almost didn’t notice him. Until the figure turned and, stupidly, struck a match to light a cigarette.

William was tall, fair-haired, his shoulders not broad, but strong. He smoked his cigarettes expansively, with big gestures and great gusts of smoke.

But William was dead and the Davenports were gone.

As the match flared and the figure’s face was momentarily lit up she saw a thin moustache, a silk scarf, the gleam of hair oil. Uncle Clive.

Caroline remained where she was, watching from the doorway. It was cold and she was late. And as she watched, another figure appeared in the front bedroom. Uncle Clive turned sharply, his cigarette casting a pale glow over the face of the newcomer.

Mum.

A quarter of a mile away the bells of St Mary’s struck distantly, carried on the breeze in the clear night air. It was six o’clock.

At six o’clock on Tuesday evening Caroline was standing in the doorway of number fifteen staring up at the window of number twenty-eight opposite. At one minute past she was lying on her front beneath the rosebushes, covered in broken glass, a roaring in her ears that blotted out all else.

As the roaring did not subside, Caroline remained where she was, her hands over her head, and at the same time tried to dig herself into the earth.

A rocket had landed, that much was obvious. A V-2, it would have to be, because she had heard nothing, no buzzing of engines, no drone suddenly cutting out overhead. Just a silent, moonlit night. And then—nothing.

The roaring changed in timbre and Caroline lifted her head. At first, all she could see were millions of tiny, flickering lights in her eyes because she had squeezed them shut so tightly. After a dizzying moment the flickering lights sorted themselves out into a single mass of orange and yellow and the roaring in her ears gradually became a roaring associated with the orange and yellow.

She pulled herself up to her knees unsteadily, a shower of glass and dirt cascading around her. She tried to brush it away but her hand wouldn’t do what she wanted. It was shaking too much.

There was smoke, too, great pillars of it, and she put a hand to her face, already choking. The orange and yellow light, roaring and crackling, lit up the whole street. She had to raise her arm to shield her eyes from the light and the heat where a moment ago it had been frozen darkness. The sky was lit up like a brilliant sunset and now she saw the flames and the houses on fire. And the houses were oddly misshapen, stunted. Roofs, whole walls had gone as though a giant had walked right through and crushed them.

Already, people—neighbours, air-raid wardens, fire crews, the police, you couldn’t say for sure who—were there, in the street, running, shouting, doing things. An ambulance crew, a fire tender. People were helping.

Getting to her feet, she stumbled along the front path and paused at the gate. Ahead of her the street glistened with broken glass. Bricks, timbers, roof tiles lay strewn all about. Three houses near the corner with Nelson Avenue had gone. There was nothing there but smoke and a gaping black hole. The houses on either side of the hole were on fire, the flames by now leaping thirty, forty feet into the night sky. Both had lost their roofs. The walls supporting what remained of the timber joists and tiles were warped and buckled from the blast and in imminent danger of toppling right over.

Now, only now, did she think to look behind, at the house. At
their
house. Dad was standing, leaning against the doorway, his face frozen, ashen, bathed in the flickering orange glow of the flames.

Someone screamed, a high-pitched, girlish scream. Looking up, Caroline saw the window of Mum and Dad’s room. The glass had gone, only jagged shards sticking out of the frame, and in the window Deirdre’s ghostlike figure peering out and pointing. She pointed across the street and Caroline turned to see what Deirdre was pointing at.

Caroline’s eyes went straight to the upstairs window of the front bedroom at number twenty-eight where, only a minute before, two people had stood. Now the glass was gone, the window frame buckled, the roof above had come crashing onto the first floor and there was no sign of anyone.