Impossible Things (51 page)

“What’s that?” Morris said jovially. He had taken off his tin helmet, and below the white line it left, he looked like he was wearing blackface in a music-hall show. “You’ve got to toast my boy at least. Just imagine. My Quincy with a medal.”

Mrs. Lucy rinsed out the porcelain tooth glass and handed it to Vi, who was pouring out the wine. They passed the goblets round. Jack took the tooth glass.

“To my son Quincy, the best pilot in the RAF!” Morris said, raising his goblet.

“May he shoot down the entire Luftwaffe!” Swales shouted. “And put an end to this bloody war!”

“So a man can get a decent night’s sleep!” Renfrew said, and everyone laughed.

We drank. Jack raised his glass with the others, but when Vi took the bottle round again, he put his hand over the mouth of it.

“Just think of it,” Morris said. “My son Quincy with
a medal. He had his troubles in school, in with a bad lot, problems with the police. I worried about him, I did, wondered what he’d come to, and then this war comes along and here he is a hero.”

“To heroes!” Petersby said.

We drank again, and Vi dribbled out the last of the wine into Morris’s glass. “That’s the lot, I’m afraid.” She brightened. “I’ve a bottle of cherry cordial Charlie gave me.”

Mrs. Lucy made a face. “Just a minute,” she said, disappeared into the pantry, and came back with two cobwebbed bottles of port, which she poured out generously and a little sloppily.

“The presence of intoxicating beverages on post is strictly forbidden,” she said. “A fine of five shillings will be imposed for a first offence, one pound for subsequent offences.” She took out a pound note and laid it on the table. “I wonder what Nelson was before the war?”

“A monster,” Vi said.

I looked across at Jack. He still had his hand over his glass.

“A headmaster,” Swales said. “No, I’ve got it. An Inland Revenue collector!”

Everyone laughed.

“I was a horrid person before the war,” Mrs. Lucy said.

Vi giggled.

“I was a deaconess, one of those dreadful women who arranges the flowers in the sanctuary and gets up jumble sales and bullies the rector. The Terror of the Churchwardens,’ that’s what I used to be. I was determined that they should put the hymnals front side out on the backs of the pews. Morris knows. He sang in the choir.”

“It’s true,” Morris said. “She used to instruct the choir on the proper way to line up.”

I tried to imagine her as a stickler, as a petty tyrant like Nelson, and failed.

“Sometimes it takes something dreadful like a war for one to find one’s proper job,” she said, staring at her glass.

“To the war!” Swales said gaily.

“I’m not sure we should toast something so terrible as that,” Twickenham said doubtfully.

“It isn’t all that terrible,” Vi said. “I mean, without it, we wouldn’t all be here together, would we?”

“And you’d never have met all those pilots of yours, would you, Vi?” Swales said.

“There’s nothing wrong with making the best of a bad job,” Vi said, miffed.

“Some people do more than that,” Swales said. “Some people take positive advantage of the war. Like Colonel Godalming. I had a word with one of the AFS volunteers. Seems the colonel didn’t come back for his hunting rifle, after all.” He leaned forward confidingly. “Seems he was having a bit on with a blond dancer from the Windmill.
Seems
his wife thought he was out shooting grouse in Surrey, and now she’s asking all sorts of unpleasant questions.”

“He’s not the only one taking advantage,” Morris said. “That night you got the Kirkcuddys out, Jack, I found an old couple killed by blast. I put them by the road for the mortuary van, and later I saw somebody over there, bending over the bodies, doing something to them. I thought, he must be straightening them out before the rigor sets in, but then it comes to me. He’s robbing them. Dead bodies.”

“And who’s to say they were killed by blast?” Swales said. “Who’s to say they weren’t murdered? There’s lot of bodies, aren’t there, and nobody looks close at them. Who’s to say they were all killed by the Germans?”

“How did we get onto this?” Petersby said. “We’re supposed to be celebrating Quincy Morris’s medal, not
talking about murderers.” He raised his glass. “To Quincy Morris!”

“And the RAF!” Vi said.

“To making the best of a bad job,” Mrs. Lucy said.

“Hear, hear,” Jack said softly, and raised his glass, but he still didn’t drink.

Jack found four people in the next three days. I did not hear any of them until well after we had started digging, and the last one, a fat woman in striped pyjamas and a pink hair net, I never did hear, though she said when we brought her up that she had “called and called between prayers.”

Twickenham wrote it all up for the
Twitterings
, tossing out the article on Quincy Morris’s medal and typing up a new master’s. When Mrs. Lucy borrowed the typewriter to fill out the A-114, she said, “What’s this?”

“My lead story,” he said. “ ‘Settle Finds Four in Rubble.’ ” He handed her the master’s.

“ ‘Jack Settle, the newest addition to Post Forty-eight,’ ” she read, “ ‘located four air-raid victims last night. “I wanted to be useful,” says the modest Mr. Settle when asked why he came to London from Yorkshire. And he’s been useful since his very first night on the job when he—’ ” She handed it back to him. “Sorry. You can’t print that. Nelson’s been nosing about, asking questions. He’s already taken one of my wardens and nearly gotten him killed. I won’t let him have another.”

“That’s censorship!” Twickenham said, outraged.

“There’s a war on,” Mrs. Lucy said, “and we’re shorthanded. I’ve relieved Mr. Renfrew of duty. He’s going to stay with his sister in Birmingham. And I wouldn’t let Nelson have another one of my wardens if we were overstaffed. He’s already gotten Olmwood nearly killed.”

She handed me the A-114 and asked me to take it to Civil Defence. I did. The girl I had spoken to wasn’t there,
and the girl who was said, “This is for
interior
improvements. You need to fill out a D-268.”

“I did,” I said, “and I was told that reinforcements qualified as exterior improvements.”

“Only if they’re on the outside.” She handed me a D-268. “Sorry,” she said apologetically. “I’d help you if I could, but my boss is a stickler for the correct forms.”

“There’s something else you can do for me,” I said. “I was supposed to take one of our part-times a message at his day job, but I’ve lost the address. If you could look it up for me. Jack Settle? If not, I’ve got to go all the way back to Chelsea to get it.”

She looked back over her shoulder and then said, “Wait a mo,” and darted down the hall. She came back with a sheet of paper.

“Settle?” she said. “Post Forty-eight, Chelsea?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “I need his work address.”

“He hasn’t got one.”

He had left the incident while we were still getting the fat woman out. It was starting to get light. We had a rope under her, and a makeshift winch, and he had abruptly handed his end to Swales and said, “I’ve got to leave for my day job.”

“You’re certain?” I said.

“I’m certain.” She handed me the sheet of paper. It was Jack’s approval for employment as a part-time warden, signed by Mrs. Lucy. The spaces for work and home addresses had been left blank. “This is all there was in the file,” she said. “No work permit, no identity card, not even a ration card. We keep copies of all that, so he must not have a job.”

I took the D-268 back to the post, but Mrs. Lucy wasn’t there. “One of Nelson’s wardens came round with a new regulation,” Twickenham said, running off copies on the duplicating machine. “All wardens will be out on patrol unless on telephone or spotter duty.
All
wardens. She went off to give him what-for,” he said, sounding
pleased. He was apparently over his anger at her for censoring his story on Jack.

I picked up one of the still-wet copies of the news sheet. The lead story was about Hitler’s invasion of Greece. He had put the article about Quincy Morris’s medal down in the right-hand corner under a list of “What the War Has Done for Us.” Number one was, “It’s made us discover capabilities we didn’t know we had.”

“Mrs. Lucy called him a murderer,” Twickenham said.

A murderer.

“What did you want to tell her?” Twickenham said.

That Jack doesn’t have a job, I thought. Or a ration card. That he didn’t put out the incendiary in the church even though Vi told him it had gone through the altar roof. That he knew the Anderson was farther to the left.

“It’s still the wrong form,” I said, taking out the D-268.

“That’s easily remedied,” he said. He rolled the application into the typewriter, typed for a few minutes, handed it back to me.

“Mrs. Lucy has to sign it,” I said, and he snatched it back, whipped out a fountain pen, and signed her name.

“What were you before the war?” I asked. “A forger?”

“You’d be surprised.” He handed the form back to me. “You look dreadful, Jack. Have you gotten any sleep this last week?”

“When would I have had the chance?”

“Why don’t you lie down now while no one’s here?” he said, reaching for my arm the way Vi had reached for Renfrew’s. “I’ll take the form back to Civil Defence for you.”

I shook off his arm. “I’m all right.”

I walked back to Civil Defence. The girl who had tried to find Jack’s file wasn’t there, and the first girl was. I was sorry I hadn’t brought the A-114 along as well, but
she scrutinized the form without comment and stamped the back. “It will take approximately six weeks to process,” she said.

“Six weeks!” I said. “Hitler could have invaded the entire Empire by then.”

“In that case, you’ll very likely have to file a different form.”

I didn’t go back to the post. Mrs. Lucy would doubtless be back by the time I returned, but what could I say to her? I suspect Jack. Of what? Of not liking lamb chops and cake? Of having to leave early for work? Of rescuing children from the rubble?

He had said he had a job, and the girl couldn’t find his work permit, but it took the Civil Defence six weeks to process a request for a few beams. It would probably take them till the end of the war to file the work permits. Or perhaps his had been in the file, and the girl had missed it. Loss of sleep can result in mistakes on the job. And odd fixations.

I walked to Sloane Square Station. There was no sign of where the young woman had been. They had even swept the glass up. Her stewpot of a boss at John Lewis’s never let her go till closing time, even if the sirens had gone, even if it was dark. She had had to hurry through the blacked-out streets all alone, carrying her dress for the next day on a hanger, listening to the guns and trying to make out how far off the planes were. If someone had been stalking her, she would never have heard him, never have seen him in the darkness. Whoever found her would think she had been killed by flying glass.

He doesn’t eat, I would say to Mrs. Lucy. He didn’t put out an incendiary in a church. He always leaves the incidents before dawn, even when we don’t have the casualties up. The Luftwaffe is trying to kill me. It was a letter I wrote to the
Times
. The walking dead may hallucinate, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.

The sirens went. I must have been standing there for hours, staring at the sidewalk. I went back to the post. Mrs. Lucy was there. “You look dreadful, Jack. How long’s it been since you’ve slept?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s Jack?”

“On watch,” Mrs. Lucy said.

“You’d best be careful,” Vi said, setting chocolates on a plate. “Or you’ll turn into one of the walking dead. Would you like a sweet? Eddie gave them to me.”

The telephone pipped. Mrs. Lucy answered it, spoke a minute, hung up. “Slaney needs help on an incident,” she said. “They’ve asked for Jack.”

She sent both of us. We found the incident without any trouble. There was no dust cloud, no smell except from a fire burning off to one side. “This didn’t just happen,” I said. “It’s a day old, at least.”

I was wrong. It was two days old. The rescue squads had been working straight through, and there were still at least thirty people unaccounted for. Some of the rescue squad were digging halfheartedly halfway up a mound, but most of them were standing about, smoking and looking like they were casualties themselves. Jack went up to where the men were digging, shook his head, and set off across the mound.

“Heard you had a bodysniffer,” one of the smokers said to me. “They’ve got one in Whitechapel, too. Crawls round the incident on his hands and knees, sniffing like a bloodhound. Yours do that?”

“No,” I said.

“Over here,” Jack said.

“Says he can read their minds, the one in Whitechapel does,” he said, putting out his cigarette and taking up a pickax. He clambered up the slope to where Jack was already digging.

It was easy to see because of the fire, and fairly easy
to dig, but halfway down we struck the massive headboard of a bed.

“We’ll have to go in from the side,” Jack said.

“The hell with that,” the man who’d told me about the bodysniffer said. “How do you know somebody’s down there? I don’t hear anything.”

Jack didn’t answer him. He moved down the slope and began digging into its side.

“They’ve been in there two days,” the man said. “They’re dead and I’m not getting overtime.” He flung down the pickax and stalked off to the mobile canteen. Jack didn’t even notice he was gone. He handed me baskets, and I emptied them, and occasionally Jack said, “Saw,” or “Tin-snips,” and I handed them to him. I was off getting the stretcher when he brought her out.

She was perhaps thirteen. She was wearing a white nightgown, or perhaps it only looked white because of the plaster dust. Jack’s face was ghastly with it. He had picked her up in his arms, and she had fastened her arms about his neck and buried her face against his shoulder. They were both outlined by the fire.

I brought the stretcher up, and Jack knelt down and tried to lay her on it, but she would not let go of his neck. “It’s all right,” he said gently. “You’re safe now.”