The Report (10 page)

“At first the people didn’t want me to touch them,” Woon said, “but a nurse who was there told them I was a doctor, and then they allowed it.”

“How did she know you were a doctor?”

“I assume she saw that I knew what I was doing.”

“Of course.”

“I treated a number of cases of shock. Quite a few cataleptic reactions.”

“Cataleptic reactions?”

“A state of mental paralysis brought on by acute fear. The person is apathetic, cannot talk or move, looks like a dead man. Only the frightened eyes are alive. It can be quite disturbing to bystanders.”

“I can imagine. What other injuries did you see?”

“Crushed kidneys. Burst lungs. A few cases of mild cerebral hypoxia.”

“And what are the symptoms of that?”

“Confusion, decreased motor control, fainting, cyanosis.”

“Cyanosis?”

“A blue discoloration of the skin.”

“I see. And could that be confused in any way with the signs of a gas attack?”

“No.”

“Are the symptoms of mild hypoxia reversible?”

“Usually.”

“This has been very helpful, Dr. Woon. May I ask, why didn’t you come forward sooner?”

“I did. The authorities at that time weren’t interested.”

“I see. I’m sorry.”

Dr. Woon shrugged.

That evening the reporters caught Laurie on his way home. They asked about the first two days of testimony.

“I am very tired,” was all he said, and this was printed in all the evening editions.

Some people stayed in Bethnal Green, some went away, some went away and came back again. Not everyone who wanted to leave could, of course. But it was also true that not everyone who wanted to stay was suited to the new life. The difficulty of living in a place after a disaster is frequently underestimated. Attendance at the locals went up, even on nights of a raid. How could the bombers pinpoint the pubs, as the early war propaganda said?
The German pilots couldn’t even find St. Paul’s. So Bethnal Greeners, many of them, gathered and drank. In the bookstores, Bibles sold out as fast as publishers—limited by the paper shortage—could supply them. Evidence, some said, that people were looking for help. Proof, according to others, that faith can overcome the market.

St. John’s had few Bibles, so Rev. McNeely referred the people who came looking for one to the Book of Common Prayer, several in every pew. He always took care to point out the complete Psalter within the BCP, but the people looked as if they were being asked to consider what they wanted in a different color. They tilted their heads this way and that as if thinking about whether it would match what they already had. And they wanted to know if, like the soldiers at the front with their Penguin paperbacks, they might rip out that section and pass it along. Just until a complete Bible was found?

The people seemed to pity McNeely. A church without Bibles was another hardship of war, they thought, like the dearth of oranges and hairpins. But, as far as McNeely knew, the church had never had Bibles for browsing. If you had one in church, you had generally brought it yourself.

In the days after the accident, McNeely gave away twenty-three prayer books and three hymnals and vowed after the war to make a change: in his church there would be a Bible in every pew. Why not? Perhaps in the Church of England’s noble effort to clarify the mysteries of the service, the comfort in the original source had been overlooked.

He kept the church open constantly, desperate to make it a haven, not because of, but rather in spite of, its proximity to the disaster. If he did not succeed, he worried the place would become a carcass, a hollow vault guilty for its failure to intervene. This was not rational, of course. How could a building prevent a tragedy? And yet how could the crush have happened in the shadow of a church? His church. Oh, why had the diocese sent him to Bethnal Green? His background was rural and his degree second-rate! He prayed for courage.

McNeely stood before the altar many evenings, great bunches of rosy willow herb absorbing his sneezes. He was allergic to the flower, but, as it grew well on bomb sites, along with yarrow, buddleia, and Oxford ragwort, the altar guild used little else. Later in the summer the bouquets were pretty, tall and graceful, but he looked forward to the end of the ban on flower transport. He hoped the altar guild did, too, and did not become attached to what they had begun to call the church’s wartime look.

After the Wednesday noon service, McNeely swept the nave. Two dozen parishioners had attended the ceremony, not bad for Lent, a difficult season in war. He took off his robe and reached for the roll he kept at the back of the shelf in the sacristy. He kept bread and other emergency refreshments stashed in various places around the church. After a few bites and a bit of water from a thermos, he felt better and resumed his postservice duties. At the altar he took the cup of leftover Eucharist wine and headed out to the garden behind the church. There, in an evergreen bed along the back wall filled mostly with varieties of juniper and trimmed with bulbs that came up in early spring, the ashes of a longtime St. John’s parishioner were scattered. In life she’d been a repentant alcoholic, but before she died Mary Casey Cole asked McNeely if he would, after every service, drench her ashes in the leftover wine. He promised, and every time he carried out the duty, he hoped that one day someone might sift his own ashes with sugar.

“There you go, Mary,” he said, shaking the last drop of wine from the chalice. He turned and saw Bertram Lodge watching him.

“What was she after, then?” Bertram said. “The blood or the wine?”

McNeely smiled. “Ah, well.” He didn’t want to reveal Mary’s secret. He held out his arm and guided Bertram to the back step of the church. The two sat down.

The responsibility of tending to a parish felled by such a large tragedy was beginning to overwhelm McNeely. How much easier it would be to stay mobile, he thought, like the priests who followed the rescue units, attending to people here and there, bomb by bomb. The injuries were horrific, the deaths gruesome, but at least everything was visible. His congregation seemed to be suffering more mysteriously.

“Is there anything you need?” McNeely asked.

“Bertram Lodge,” Bertram said, and put out his hand.

“I know. We’ve met before, Bertram.”

“May I call you Lewis?”

“Of course. You have before.”

Bertram thought a moment. “No. I don’t think I can. But nice of you to say so, Reverend.”

McNeely noticed that the boy’s nails were chewed to the quick; his hair was so unwashed, it looked damp. He looked away to consider another approach, but his gaze fell on a bird. These sad little mounds, wings neatly folded, heads back, were not uncommon since clear glass had replaced the blown-out stained glass in the transept. The birds flew into the reflected trees and usually died instantly. This one must have been dead awhile. Ants, not legions, but enough, were swarming the eyes, forcing him to think they must be sweet.

“I’d like to ask you something,” Bertram began.

“All right.”

“Do you think He was there?”

McNeely waited, silently asking God to gather this boy to him.

“If it had been the church, the old crypt, that everyone was trying to get into? Would He have been there?”

“Oh, Bert. I don’t think the place would have made a difference. We have to believe God always tries to be with us.”

Bertram smiled. “No. He has requirements.” He rubbed his hands together. “I’m so sorry I pushed. I know I did before I
had to.”

McNeely didn’t know what to say.

Bertram pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. On it was a short note in a woman’s handwriting and, at the bottom, a fairly good portrait of Bertram.
I won’t lose you,
the note said.

“She’s worried about me,” Bertram explained.

“I see.”

Bertram sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t believe in God. I hope that doesn’t hurt your feelings. I didn’t before the accident, either.”

“God isn’t supposed to test us, Bertram. At least, not more than we can stand.” He didn’t say that in Bertram’s case, he wondered what He was doing.

McNeely was about to suggest that a special service, perhaps the Reconciliation of a Penitent, might be of use, but just then Bertram noticed the dead bird. He put the notebook down very gently. Then he scooped up the little bird with his hands. He carried the bird to the back of the garden, and just about exactly where McNeely had given Mary a drink, he set the body down.

“Did she like birds?” he called.

“I don’t know,” McNeely said.

Bertram turned and walked back, his arms held out awkwardly at his sides.

“Would you like to wash your hands?” McNeely asked.

Despite all Bertram’s signs at the town hall and the hospitals, a few packages of clothes and pocket items remained. Bertram blamed grief and confusion, but Clare said she believed there was a growing sense of guilt associated with the tragedy. People were trying to disassociate themselves from it. “That’s why they haven’t claimed the packages,” she said.

“Then what are we doing?” Bertram asked. They’d left the flat together to deliver several of them.

“Your job. You need to finish this. The families will be grateful, too, whether they know it now or not.”

The morning was cold, the sun in the wrong place in the sky, or so it seemed to Bertram. It kept surprising him around buildings and between trees, blinding him. Pigeons perched on the sunny corners of buildings, heads drawn down until they shook off the night freeze. Bertram saw a bald man who looked cold, worried. Everyone knew the clear sky meant the raids were likely to resume. The sight of the shiny scalp made Bertram involuntarily tap his own head, but Clare pulled his hand down.

The items they carried had belonged to a blond boy. His clothes were mended, his hair was recently trimmed, Bertram recalled. He could remember too well some of the bodies he’d seen. This boy’s pockets had revealed an ink-bottle cork, a belt buckle, six beads from a necklace, and a ticket from the Museum Cinema.

The address was on a corner, the bottom flat of a three-story terrace house. Bertram lost confidence at the gate, but Clare pushed him through. A man answered quickly, and when Bertram didn’t speak up, Clare said who they were, why they’d come. The man did not stoop or wilt. He just stood in the doorway, very still. Clare gave him a moment, wiping at the tip of her nose with the back of her mitten, then told him again what they’d brought. Sometimes a stillness like his means you aren’t being believed, she’d told Bertram. But what Bertram had observed was the opposite: families who not only believed him but wanted to know more, who had opened their doors and let him in, as if on the other side of disaster there was a return to compassion.

“Please come in,” the man in the doorway said, his voice a whisper.

The house smelled of the end of a meal. Bertram identified fried potatoes and bacon, a burned egg. The parents hastily folded up their bed, giving them all room to sit in the lounge. The mother put on a kettle. While they waited for the tea, the father fetched the boy’s sister from the bedroom (the mother said “their bedroom,” then shook her head but did not correct herself). Bertram, turning to Clare for direction, saw a tautness around her lips he didn’t remember.

“We’re so sorry,” she said.

Bertram nodded. He looked at each of the people in the room—the boy’s mother, bringing the tea tray; the tall father; the sleepy little sister still in her nightgown. Suddenly Bertram fumbled in his coat and took out the parcel he’d wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. It might have been fish-and-chips at another time, in another world. He dropped it on the table next to the teapot.

The mother opened the package quickly. The father switched on the lamp, casting an anxious increase of electric light into the already sunlit room. The mother pushed the tea out of the way and spread the items on the table, patting each one gently with her hands. She rearranged them, her hands beginning to shake. She rearranged them again, her expression changing, emotions moving across her face as though she were conversing, pleading, with the objects. Suddenly she stopped. She looked at the little girl, who, being seen, stepped sideways and grabbed her father’s leg. With tremendous effort, the mother put her hands down on the table, lowered her forehead against them, and was still.

The little sister stepped forward and looked more closely at the beads.

“Would you like something to eat,” the father said, his voice hoarse.

“We never should have let them go alone,” the mother said.

The father looked at Clare and Bertram. “He went to a film that night,” he explained. “With a girl.”

Bertram looked from the man to the woman and remembered the green-soled shoes. But that girl had not been with this boy. “I was there,” he said.

The mother lifted her head. “Did you see him?”

There was so much hope in her eyes. Bertram thought it might stay there if he lied. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think so.”

Clare looked at him.

“Why don’t you—,” the mother began.

“Lila, please,” the father said. “What will it do?”

“I’m sorry,” Clare said. “We have to go. We’re so sorry about your son.”

Outside, Bertram wrapped his arms around Clare before she could say anything. It was all he knew to do, and she’d told him once he was good at it. She pushed him away. “I know you were trying to help them, but you can’t. Not like that.”

He nodded.

They stopped briefly in St. John’s. Clare knelt in a back pew; Bertram sat. Up by the altar he could see Rev. McNeely sweeping. Bertram waved, then glanced at his watch, hoping it was time for the bells. Then he remembered there were no church bells anymore, just as there were no weather reports, no lights at night, no flowers. London was desperate, and he felt so sorry for the streets and buildings, for the people scurrying along them, that a few minutes later, leaving the church with Clare, he clutched his stomach, doubled over, and vomited into the gutter.

Clare rubbed his back until he was finished. “Let’s get you home,” she said.