The Report (13 page)

More ticking, then silence. “The Home Guard were not called out on March third,” Morrison said. “There was no antiaircraft response that night because there were no planes.”

“But the people heard—”

“The people panicked,” Morrison interrupted.

“Why? What scared them? They’ve never panicked before. Something must have set the crowd off.”

Morrison was quiet. Then he asked Laurie to ring him if he needed anything. “We’re looking forward to the results of your inquiry.”

But Laurie couldn’t stop. “Almost everyone I know deplores it when the poor are mistreated or ignored, but it continues to happen. Why is that?”

Morrison sounded angry. “We knew all along these stations weren’t ideal or even appropriate for shelters. The official policy is dispersal, as you well know. And yet the people wanted large shelters. Now that the unthinkable has happened—”

“But it wasn’t unthinkable! One entrance to a shelter for ten thousand? They tried to get improvements to the entrance and were turned down, apparently.”

“Mr. Dunne.”

Laurie asked to be remembered to all the members of Morrison’s family, every one of whom he named correctly, then put the phone down. He knew now for certain that he was being asked to investigate one thing while leaving something else entirely in the dark. He looked over at the Taverner, on his chair, and it occurred to him for the first time that he might not be able to complete a record of the Bethnal Green disaster that approached its depth and accuracy, an encyclopedia of fish.

When the baby came home with Ada, he was four months old, as near as anyone could tell. He was very good and quiet, quieter than either of Ada’s girls had been at the same age. He had round, dark eyes, a beautiful mouth, and a wide-open belly button, a little crater, not the tight swirls of her daughters. Ada asked her midwife about it, and the midwife said it meant he wouldn’t keep secrets.

“He won’t have them, or he won’t be able to?” Ada asked.

“He won’t want to,” the midwife replied.

But Ada worried that it somehow meant the twist and clamp of the cord had not completely severed the connection to his mother.

They made a bed for him in the drawer they’d used for the girls and kept him on the floor by the window. Every morning Ada washed him in a tub filled with warm water from several kettles. She’d forgotten just how busy life was with a baby, but Tilly was helping again, and Robby was managing the shop. Friends often stopped by with food. Mr. Levin from across the hall brought a loaf of bread and a small outfit wrapped in muslin that had been his as a child. He said he’d been away the night of the accident but had followed the aftermath closely. She was astonished. She had very few baby clothes and nothing for a boy, but why had he saved these precious things? Why weren’t the little shirt and trousers with his mother? The questions felt too late for someone she’d been living across the hall from for years. And so they stood together, looking down at the sleeping baby in silence.

As word spread, other neighbors came by.

“He’s sweet.”

“You’re kind.”

“I wish I could help, but with my three still at home …”

Then one morning she went to the door, and the man who’d been at the bottom of the shelter stairs was there, the one who had helped her on the landing. He introduced himself. “Bill Steadman,” he said softly, red in the face and out of breath. He held out a white baby blanket tied in a blue ribbon. She took it, thanked him, and closed the door. Everyone who had brought the baby something was either a friend or a neighbor, and she hadn’t invited any of them in. Why should she treat him differently? Still, she froze, unable to walk away from the door, unwilling to let him know she was still there. She could hear him breathing, waiting. He cleared his throat.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t have to worry. I will never say anything.”

Ada held her breath. She stayed balanced forward on her toes so that the floorboard beneath her wouldn’t squeak. When she heard his soles retreating in the gritty passage, she sank to her knees, her head against the door. Tilly found her there.

“Mum?”

Ada smiled and scrambled up. “Look what someone just brought!” she said.

“Who?”

Ada turned the blanket over, pretending to look for a card. “Oh, well. Just put it with the other things.”

No one knew the baby’s name. The other orphans were identified by relatives in the area who came forward with church records even if they couldn’t adopt them. Mrs. Barton-Malow checked the register of births but couldn’t find anything conclusive about this baby. His mother, she thought, must have given birth alone.

“You’ll have to name him,” Mrs. Barton-Malow said to Ada before she left the orphanage.

Ada shook her head. So much had been taken from this baby; she didn’t want to take his name, too! She remembered Raisa as she’d looked the spring before, when she first started coming into Ada’s shop. She wore long, shapeless dresses and must have already been pregnant. Once, maybe because it was spring, maybe because the pregnancy sickness had passed and she was feeling better—who would ever know?—she had smiled at Ada and patted her stomach.

“Raisa,” Mrs. W. said suddenly, moving her hand up to pat her chest.

“Ada.”

Mrs. W. smiled. But what she said next, Ada didn’t understand, and the woman’s face turned anxious.

“Growing?” Mrs. W. said. “Growing. Garden?”

“No,” Ada said, shaking her head.

Mrs. W. left quickly. Had she wanted Ada to know her name meant “rose”? Or was she telling her she was growing a baby? When Ada told Robby about it later, he said maybe Mrs. W. knew the English liked to garden.

After that, whenever she came into the shop, Ada tried to catch her eye, say hello, but Raisa had gone back to being quiet, almost furtive. Ada thought there might be something wrong with her. There was something hard about her eyes, something cold and faraway. Perhaps this made sense, given what she’d been through. But it had seemed to Ada that she would have tried harder.

Mrs. Barton-Malow was touching the baby’s cheek. “What about Justin?” she said, and Ada was very surprised to see that she was crying.

“Did you know a Justin?”

Mrs. Barton-Malow nodded. “It’s such a nice name.”

When Ada got the baby home—after paying a series of fees to Mrs. Barton-Malow, all of which sounded official, most of which she didn’t understand, and none of which she could have afforded without the money Tilly got from the reporter—she tried whispering names in his ear, sure that if she hit on the right one, or something close, she would see some kind of recognition. She went through all the Jewish names she could think of, then opened the Bible and started at the beginning. Nothing. Mostly he slept. She could rouse him by tickling his feet, but then he would just spit up and frown.

After three days Ada called Rev. McNeely. He agreed to come but seemed uncomfortable and didn’t want to name the baby.

“Why not?” Ada asked.

“Mum,” Tilly warned, sitting on the floor, rocking the baby to sleep.

“Perhaps there’s a male relative—,” he tried.

Ada shook her head.

“Mum,” Tilly said, hoping to help Rev. McNeely. “Didn’t you have any boy’s names picked out?”

“We would have named a boy for your father.”

All three stared at the baby, who was nearly asleep.

“There is the story of Paul,” McNeely offered.

Ada and Tilly waited.

“The apostle. He was Saul, a Jew, but when he became a Christian, he changed his name to Paul. After he fell off the horse.”

He shook his head and blushed. It was an extremely inadequate retelling, but he didn’t know how to fix it. He couldn’t very well ask Ada not to baptize the boy, and yet he was astonished at how ambivalent he felt. But she was a grieving mother; he felt battered and wordless in her presence. The best thing to do, he thought, was give the boy a name from a story that reflected his heritage.

When Robby came home that evening, Ada had dinner almost ready. She’d managed to buy a piece of fish, and not whale meat but cod. She paused in her cooking and looked through to the lounge. Tilly was reading. Paul was asleep in the basket. “Go and see your son,” she said, and felt a subtle shift. Your son. Robby was confused by the turn their lives had taken—she knew that—but he didn’t have the will to resist.

“So, a copy of the plan the Bethnal Green local council sent to the Regional Commissioners for approval has turned up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just this morning. Quite remarkable. You are a member of this local council?”

“That is right.”

“Well, the plan is here, which solves one mystery. But now we have another one. This plan does not actually address the problem of the entrance stairs.”

“Sir—”

“A steep, often dark set of stairs. Did it not occur to the council that a rush of people might have trouble navigating them?”

“Of course. That was obvious, so—”

“So the plan was to strengthen the gate, a gate that could not have been closed against a large crowd. Is it not a matter of critical importance to consider the possibility of a rush by a crowd?”

“Yes, sir. I would agree. We were just following the advice of the borough engineer.”

“You are the borough engineer to the Bethnal Green Council?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long have you held that position?”

“About four years, sir.”

“Could you tell me about the work you did for the local council?”

“Yes. It was on the minds of the local council and their staff that there might be trouble at the shelter entrance.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“That crowds might come along and endeavor to gain access, and that when the gates were closed, the hoarding would not hold.”

“And region turned down the scheme you proposed?”

“Yes.”

“And that plan—correct me if I’m mistaken—proposed strengthening the existing gates?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The idea, then, generally, was to close those gates in the event of a rush?”

“Well, I think the idea was to close one gate at a time.”

“Tell me, which way do the gates open?”

“Inward, sir.”

“Yes, inward. So you thought, If a crowd comes along, we’ll just close the gates until they calm down a bit?”

“With hindsight, sir, I see that with a very big crowd, you cannot close gates of that nature in a rush.”

“But is that not exactly what you were asked to consider?”

“How long have you been a Regional Commissioner, Mr. Gowers?”

“Since the beginning of the war. May I just say before we really get started that I think undoubtedly the entrance to the Bethnal Green shelter should have been improved upon? But whether you can blame those who dealt with it—that is to say, the local authority or the Regional Commissioners—in the atmosphere of the time is difficult to say.”

“I am not really concerned with blame.”

“I understand. I used the wrong word.”

“I am concerned with responsibility. If I say I’m going to give you a piece of fruit but hand you a vegetable, wouldn’t you correct me? Or would you just hand it back and say, ‘This is not a fruit’?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“The local council proposed the wrong solution for the right problem, but all you did was refuse the plan. Why didn’t you make a counterproposal? Why didn’t you tour the site with a member of the local council and see what they were talking about?”

“You mean hand them an apple when they’re holding a potato?”

“For God’s sake.”

“With hindsight, I wish we had.”

There was nowhere to go, no holiday to take, unless perhaps you walked to the old Weavers Fields, or went to the movies, or picked your way to the shipping docks along the Thames. Rain and steady funerals kept spirits low. A shop would be open one day, closed the next; no one knew why or when it would reopen. The problem was this: the people had girded themselves against the war, but they had trusted the shelters. After the disaster their confidence in everything was chilled.

Some in Bethnal Green were eager for the report, sure it would reveal something to help them make sense of the senseless. Others felt only suspicion. The inquiry, they believed, was merely an exercise in distraction, something authorities did in order to avoid accountability. How could someone not present that night tell them what had happened?

In general, though, tempers were beginning to cool. The influx of money had that effect. So astonishing was it to see improvements being made to the shelter entrance that many people forgot what it meant: if these changes could be authorized now, couldn’t they have been authorized earlier? It was typical of government bureaucracy: repairs proceeded, no one ever admitting that repairs were necessary. New walls for a protective surround, new lighting, new handrails down the sides and center. Everything was shiny, well made, and well installed. The money came from the borough council and several anonymous donors from the West End.

McNeely’s parish adamantly refused the government’s offer of a mass funeral. But he suspected they’d embrace a memorial service held on the two-week anniversary of the event. He considered an all-night vigil, but memories of the poorly attended overnight watch during Holy Week last year persuaded him against it. “Can you not stay awake with me one hour?”—Christ’s words to his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane—had not compelled his flock as much as he’d hoped. Better to plan a short service, then perhaps a march. He’d get them on their feet, move them through the streets again so that they could regain their confidence. He checked with the air-raid protection officials, who insisted that—the powerful communal grief notwithstanding—he could not walk through the streets at night with candles. If he wanted to distribute candles, he’d have to hold the service earlier. Even then, the officials told him not to exceed one candle per ten demonstrators.

He made signs and put them up all over the neighborhood. He took out a small ad in the
Observer,
which by chance appeared the same day the coroner announced his verdict: the final evidence was sufficient to dispel the idea that there had been a stampede. Also, absolutely nothing suggested that a certain section of the populace had been targeted. For better or worse, the coroner said, the names of the victims represented a thorough sampling of the people of the East End.

Nevertheless, a number of Fascist slogans appeared overnight on walls and doorways. There were a few injuries and arrests and the mood of a demonstration without the chaos of one. McNeely hoped the service would dispel the tension.

The afternoon arrived overcast and foggy. The ceremony was to begin at four o’clock, and by three-thirty the nave was full. People began to fill the aisles, sides first, then the center. McNeely greeted officers of the local council, two local MPs, and sizable contingents of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, the Red Cross Nursing Association, the local police. Groups sitting together in pews that looked full were asked to squeeze together to fit in two or three people more. At five minutes to four, the vestibule began to fill with the overflow of people, and McNeely worried late arrivals wouldn’t even be able to get in the door, precipitating horrible memories of that night, which he was trying to mend. Still, no one seemed upset or anxious. The crowd easily numbered a thousand, but grief had made them slow and solemn. At ten past four, McNeely squeezed through the back of the crowd and looked outside. No one was waiting. He offered a short prayer of thanks and closed the door.

The bishop of the diocese spoke first, and the point of his rather simple sermon was to establish a connection between the damaged church they were in—he gestured at the plain glass windows, the splintered organ—and the damaged people in the pews. McNeely watched heads pop up here and there as his congregation looked around at the mended rafters, the taped windows. He hoped the bishop wouldn’t take the idea too far; no one wants to look at the physical evidence of war or imagine it applied to them. Some in the parish might remember when the church had looked worse: walls sheared off, part of the roof gone. McNeely had made repairs himself as much as he could and applied for public money for the rest. But the eye wants to complete a picture, not tear it down. At bomb sites he’d heard people talk about the books that should have been on shelves, or where a certain table had been, while standing before the open shell of a house. The bishop was reminding them of what had been lost.

A reading from Corinthians followed, then a psalm, and at that point McNeely noticed the congregation beginning to shift in the pews. A few people started whispering. A series of family members of people killed in the accident spoke next, including a woman who’d lost her husband and daughter, a man who’d lost his wife and two sons; and maybe it was because of the bishop’s sermon, but when these poor people stood at the pulpit, all you could see was the damage, what had been lost. This man had had two young sons. The father spoke so softly, the murmuring in the church grew louder. The temperature inside was rising, shoes began to scrape at the floor, and then a man near the back—it’s always near the back; if you’re going to say something incendiary, you want to know what’s behind you—stood up and cried, “Your sons deserve a public inquiry!”

The interruption startled the grieving father.

“Some of the dead were the only remaining relatives of soldiers overseas!” someone else yelled, an unbearable detail recently reported in the press. Heads swung back to the pulpit, where the poor father still stood. He looked concerned, unable or unwilling to be the leader the crowd now craved. The congregation grew still, waiting to see what was going to happen.

“But Morrison won’t tell the soldiers!”

The suggestion that the government would try to hide the accident from these soldiers at the front proved too much. The idea coursed through the room, a visible wave, a contagion. It brought a number of people to their feet. Those in the aisles pressed forward. McNeely signaled desperately to the violin soloist, next on the program, but she shook her head furiously.

“It’s the mayor’s fault!”

McNeely scanned the crowd but didn’t see the mayor.

“Gowers is an ass!”

Shouts and yells began to echo through the church. More than half the people were standing now and in an instant crossed a threshold, some notional boundary of how one should behave in church abandoned. McNeely could feel it. A moment ago decorum reigned, even as the crowd grew passionate. Now a cacophony of insults and accusations filled the nave. Some people near the front were fighting, and on the right a group was trying to press toward one of the exits.

McNeely ran to the pulpit. The father made way for him, and McNeely cried out, “See us!” in a voice so loud and strong, it surprised him.

The crowd quieted a notch, and he took a breath and did it again.

“See us!”

Some of the faces turned toward him showed confusion and anger. But these were not the majority. Most were open, scared, curious about the voice directing them. He felt a jolt run through him.

“That is what you want! To be seen!”

More calm, more quiet. A few people in front sat down.

“To be seen enduring and behaving well, even though your homes are a shambles and your shelters are not safe.”

They were listening. He had a bit of a sermon prepared on the idea that crowds, while sometimes unruly, can also be moved to heroic extremes, but he saw that it would be too wordy, too rational. He had to appeal directly to their emotions.

“You have been victims, but you’ve been made to feel like villains!” There was still some movement in the crowd, but they turned toward him now and strained to hear. He lowered his voice.

“You are victims, not villains! And you can be heroes by standing together and waiting. Wait for the inquiry to finish. Let justice be done.” There was a lone, timid cheer, followed a second later by another one. “It won’t be long. Give the report time. You won’t be forgotten, or asked to endure more without help.”

Most were sitting again, even the people in the aisles.

“And your dead will be remembered. That’s why we are here.”

He nodded at the soloist, who, after a moment, pulled her cardigan close, took a gulp of air, and made her way to the front to play. As the beautiful notes filled the church, McNeely was shaking from his knees to his shoulders, but the storm had passed. He could hear the sounds of people settling down, straightening their coats, quieting children. He allowed himself to breathe in relief and caught the eye of Constable Henderson, sitting near the back. The man looked quickly away, thinking perhaps, as McNeely was, of the powerful sedative effect of even just one authoritative voice in a moment of turmoil.

By the time the pavane ended, McNeely was able to walk steadily to the doors of the church. He led the congregation out of St. John’s and past the shelter entrance. The crowd bulged there, as people paused to look, but it did not stop. McNeely saw Ada Barber with the new baby and took her hand. She started to say something about what had happened inside the church, but he couldn’t hear her. Surrounded by friends and neighbors, families complete and incomplete, they followed the Roman Road to Globe Road and turned left. They took Sugar Loaf Walk through the field and crossed Victoria Park Square. McNeely had intended to bring them out to Cambridge Heath and then turn left back to the church, but the children, giddy from the service and the dancing candles, ran into the Museum Gardens. Within a few moments, the event lost its sense of direction but not its purpose. Many people were smiling.

Ada had begged Tilly to come with her and the baby. The candlelit march, even in daylight, was something she would have loved, but she refused. She chose to sit in their windowsill and watch the day fade from there. She could just see the tip of the St. John’s steeple.

She spent most of her time on thresholds now. Doorways, landings, windowsills. From her current perch she could see up and down Jersey Street. The house directly across from them was gone. On their side of the street, the houses three, five, and ten doors down were heaps of dust and broken masonry, piles of rubble not yet cleared that spilled into the street like piers along a beach. Damaged houses showed new pink tile repairs as bright and obvious as scar tissue. The foggy afternoon gave way to a clear evening, a weather reversal Tilly found oddly discomfiting. She did not like the late-day clearing, and it was not just because of the planes. It had to do with getting used to something, only to have it change.

She put herself to bed, and when Tilly woke in the morning, there was a small white stub of candle next to her pillow.