Riptide (7 page)

He paused, hoisted the gun and drew a bead on some imaginary object in the sky.

‘How far up do you reckon these Nazis are?’

‘I really don’t know, sir. Ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand feet.’

Gelbroaster kept the gun tucked into his shoulder, his cheek along the stock, his finger delicately wrapped around the trigger.

‘This gun’ll fire a bullet more’n half a mile. What’s that come to in feet?’

‘About three thousand.’

Gelbroaster lowered the rifle.

‘Damn. Damn damn damn!’

He looked straight at Cal for the first time.

‘Have we met?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Washington?’

‘Zurich, sir. Captain Cormack. Zurich consulate.’

‘Cormack?’ he looked Cal up and down. It felt to Cal like an inspection.

‘You old Senator Cormack’s grandson?’

‘Yessir.’

That dated the general as far as Cal was concerned. A younger man, a man under fifty, would have been much more likely to ask if he were Congressman Cormack’s son. His grandfather had
retired in 1922.

‘You new in town?’

‘Got in less than two hours ago, sir. As a matter of fact, you sent for me.’

‘I did? Well, I’m sure I had a reason.’

He chose not to remember the reason and scanned the night sky once more.

‘Three thousand feet, you say? I’m never gonna get to hit one, am I?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Pity. In the last war I got three German biplanes over France. I was a young sharpshooter in those days. Took a shot at Von Richthofen, tore a piece out of his fuselage, but I
couldn’t bring him down.’

In his mind Cal heard Reggie’s voice telling him to remember the
Lusitania
.

‘Perhaps, sir, you should wait for the declaration of war?’

Gelbroaster considered this.

‘That’s a technicality, son. We haven’t declared war, that’s just a matter of time. But we’re here. And there’s a war on. Seems a mite unfriendly to our hosts
not to lend a hand. If you’re invited to a neighbour’s house for dinner and the kitchen goes up in a whole mess of burning chicken fat, you help out with the buckets, don’t you?
Of course we could cut and run, like Joe Kennedy did. Moved his wife and kids out of London when the first bombs fell, got himself recalled at the first opportunity, and told all America that
England was done for. Or we could stay and fight. Which is it to be? You a runner or a fighter?’

‘I’m a fighter, sir. But as we’ve only the one gun between us I’d be happy to load for you.’

Gelbroaster rose up. Five foot eight inches of pure belligerence. No fool like an old fool. He pointed the gun skyward. Cal heard a whispered ‘Geronimo’ and then the boom of the gun
ringing out like a hand-held howitzer.

‘Sonsovbitches,’ Gelbroaster said softly, and slipped the rifle into the crook of his arm. ‘Glad to have you aboard, son,’ he said to Cal, patted him on one shoulder and
set off to the roof door.

The whine grew and grew. Cal had heard it the second the report of Gelbroaster’s shot had died away. Still it grew. Stopped Gelbroaster in his tracks. He turned. They stared up. A German
bomber bursting red and yellow flames – a billowing trail of black smoke – spiralling out of control, spinning down to earth somewhere in the region of Hyde Park. Then a huge, woolly
‘whumpff’ as the plane and its unspent payload of bombs exploded.

Gelbroaster looked at the gun. Incredulity fading fast. Looked out at the orange glow on the western skyline where the plane had crashed.

‘Maybe I’m younger’n I thought,’ he said wistfully, then, lungs full and spirits rallied, he bellowed to the heavens, ‘Root hog or die!’

Cal stayed. The bombers came in waves. He sat in Gelbroaster’s chair and watched the
Blut und Eisen
versionofJuly 4th light up the sky and shake the earth around him. Away in the
south, London burnt fiercely. Closer to home he could see incendiaries bursting in buildings in the little streets of Mayfair, feel the weight of the nearmisses as high explosives crashed around
him. He felt oddly free from fear. The rational part of his mind told him that the next bomb after a near miss could well be a direct hit, and while the hotel was a relatively sound structure,
‘steel ribs an’ all’, he was in a most exposed position – and the rest of his mind overruled, in thrall to nothing more cerebral, nothing less visceral, than the thrill of
it all.

Each part of the spectacle had its own colour. Ack-ack shells burst white in the night, little puffs of man-made cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky – and if they were close enough they
showered shards of metal rain on to the streets below, adding atonal, clattering, tinkling music to the show. Tracer bullets fired by night-fighters shot across the sky, a dozen differing shades,
like a pool rack dispersed by the cue ball, shooting red, shooting white, shooting green. Incendiaries burst blue and orange and then took on their hue from whatever they consumed. Oil and rubber
burnt black. Wood burnt red and orange. And the searchlights roved like giant’s fingers, crossing and criss-crossing and reminding him pointlessly of the opening of every Twentieth Century
Fox movie he’d ever seen.

It was the English’s own ack-ack drove him in. He watched a random pattern of shards hit the roof some thirty feet away, a hard rain, striking sparks, bouncing back, dancing like
fireflies, racing towards him to stop only six or seven feet clear. He fell into bed in the small hours, curtains wide, to be woken by the light three hours later. For a moment he could not
remember where he was. He had been dreaming of an Appalachian journey he had made with his father when he was ten, along the borders of Kentucky and the Carolinas, through the Cumberland Gap. He
opened his eyes and could not place the cream walls and the chintzy furniture. Where the knotty pine boards, the Shaker chairs? Then the smell focused him – cordite and burning, everything
burning – paint, wood, rubber – and flakes of ash fluttering by his sixth-floor window. London burning.

He opened the windows and stretched out a hand. A wisp of ash landed on the palm of his hand, like catching an autumn leaf. It was paper, charred and weightless. The print still legible. The
ghost of message and meaning. He blew gently on it as though on a dandelion head and watched it fragment to nothingness before his eyes, and as the tiny specks of grey wafted out over London he saw
the city under a haze of ash, every breeze eddying by with the dust of a night’s destruction, and over in the south the orange glow of sunrise. Sunrise? In the south-west? London burning.

He dressed quickly, skipped bathing and shaving, and went out. It was as though he had wandered into the art gallery of the half-waking mind. At seven-thirty on a Sunday morning London was a
hive of activity, men in blue, men in khaki, backs bent to shovels and piles of debris, half in and half out of the half-houses, twisting and wriggling through the ruins, seeking out the trapped,
the living, the dying and the dead – wires and pipes bursting from the ground like the spilt entrails of a gored beast, pools of water sitting motionless upon the tarmac, curls of grey smoke
rising up into the spring sky from the brickfields of flattened buildings, engines of pumping, engines of rescue, engines of demolition, all the machinery of antiwar – and it was as though
Bosch had met Breughel, Bosch had met and merged with Avercamp, in the limitless vista of the busy human landscape, the hurly-burly of a gruesome-beautiful urban-pastoral.

He drifted across Mayfair, down Half Moon Street, southwards, across Piccadilly and the Royal Parks, eastwards, and found himself an hour later upon one of the Thames bridges. The one by the
Houses of Parliament that led to the big hospital on the southern bank. He could not remember its name, if he ever knew it.

Parliament had been hit. It was smouldering and smoking fiercely. He wondered what the English felt. How would he feel if the Capitol had been blasted, the White House burnt? An Englishman told
him. Just when he needed a native there was one ready to hand, drifting along the bridge from the opposite direction, pinstripe suit hastily pulled on over inch-stripe pyjamas – he could see
the red and white flannelette sticking out from the cuffs, draped over sockless shoes like ludicrous spats. He too had neither washed nor shaved, and maybe not slept, he was eye-bleary and
chin-fuzzy. He stared about him, another man in or out of the dream. He and Cal all but collided, back to back.

Cal took a stab at it. ‘Byron?’

‘Wordsworth.
Upon Westminster Bridge
. 1802. I don’t think he meant “open to the sky” to sound quite so vulnerable as it does today, what?’

‘I guess not,’ Cal replied.

‘You’re an American?’

‘I’m not wearing the uniform for fancy dress.’

‘Eh? What? No. I mean, yes. Of course not. Sorry, there are so many uniforms in London these days. ARP, Home Guard, Heavy Rescue, Free French, Free Poles . . .’

‘Free Americans?’

‘Are you?’

‘Just a joke,’ said Cal.

‘No but seriously, are you?’

‘Am I what?’

‘Here. I mean here to fight? “
Lafayette nous sommes ici
” and all that . . . whatever it was Pershing said?’

Cal was astounded by the question. Did he think America had quietly and unobtrusively declared war on Germany? What answer did the man want? That he’d seen Gelbroaster unilaterally declare
war only last night? That the rest of the nation might take a while to catch up with an old lunatic from Arkansas? Who would believe him? Or was he, a sockless civilian in jimjams, giving Cal, a
man in uniform, the white feather? Was age – a man of fifty-five or so addressing a man of twenty-nine – was age the gulf between them, rather than nationality?

‘I’m with the embassy,’ he said, and knew it sounded like a cop-out, a truly lame remark.

‘The embassy?’

He paused, looked about him.

‘I see,’ he said, with no sense arising in Cal that he saw anything but the devastation of the Mother of Parliaments that was bringing tears to the corner of each eye. He brushed
them away and without looking at Cal said, ‘You will excuse me, won’t you,’ and walked slowly back the way he had come, towards the great orange haze south of the Thames, the
false dawn of conflagration. London burning.

Reggie slept in on Sunday. He had no curiosity about the raid. Of course it had sounded like a big one, but when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. He had
declined to take advantage of the Savoy’s bomb-proof shelter, had bunged wax ear-plugs into his ears, several shots of malt whisky down his throat, and slept the sleep of the brave, oblivious
to the booming guns and falling bombs. He awoke late, took breakfast in bed, soaked leisurely in his bath by cheating on the national bathwater limit and about noon felt ready for a stroll.

He headed for Chester Street, as he did once in every while, to gaze at the ruins of his house. He had bought the house in 1927 with the last of his inheritance. It was, in a way, his dream
house, in that he had dreamt of such a house long before he was in a position to buy one – had dreamt about it when he was away from it, and dreamt about it now he had lost it. It fulfilled,
and simultaneously thwarted, a persistent adolescent fantasy – that he would one day find the perfect place and somehow lose it – a bit like the lost domain of
Le Grand Meaulnes
.
That his personal lost domain should turn out to be his own house was irony piled upon irony.

Now they were using it as an emergency water tank. Civil Defence had dug the rubble of the house out of the basement and flooded it. Of course, he still owned it. The site was his, and once the
war was over he could rebuild. How do you rebuild a dream? This house had survived the imaginative flights and dire conformities of both his wives. Up on the first floor he could still make out the
pattern of the wallpaper in his bedroom. His second wife had chosen it. It was such a pity. The Luftwaffe had managed to demolish his house and still the bitch’s awful taste was left
plastered to the wall for all to see.

‘Reggie?’ said a voice behind him.

It was his next-door neighbour, Clive Powell, a retired cavalry general from the last war. An old fool of the first order, a bow-legged believer in the efficacy of horse against tank who would
not have been out of place at the charge of the Light Brigade. And he was wearing a uniform. What lunatic had taken him off the retired list?

‘They brought me back, y’know. I’m in the Home Guard now.’

That explained part of it. The uniform was his old Great War cavalry khaki. His general’s tabs removed
and three captain’s pips set in the epaulettes. Shoulder flashes, clumsily sewn on, spelt out Home Guard. Privately, Reggie thought the Home Guard the best place for men like Clive. They
could still wear a uniform, they could prance around giving orders to men too old or, in a few cases, too young for the armed services, in the certain knowledge that they could do little harm. They
were the front line in a battle that would never happen. The Battle of France had been a pasting for the British, the Battle of Britain the hard-fought, costly victory of the few. There would be no
battle of London. All the same, he had to admire the old boy’s modesty. Most generals would have held such a vast drop in rank to be an insufferable indignity and sat out the war in their
clubs. Old Clive was doing his bit, at least.

‘I’ve a platoon of railway clerks from Victoria station,’ Clive went on. ‘The odd porter, and a stoker, but mostly clerks. Just finished a morning’s drilling.
Absolutely bloody hopeless, but there you are. If the Hun ever make it to Victoria the worst they could do is sell ’em the wrong ticket. Send them to Penzance when they want to go to
Preston.’

He broke into song.

‘Oh, Mr Porter, what shall I do? Me Panzers are in Birmingham and me Führer’s stuck in Crewe. Time for a cuppa, Reggie?’