The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (72 page)

Mrs. Lucy came back to the table. “I’ve applied for reinforcements for the post,” she said, standing her papers on end and tamping them into an even stack. “Someone from the Town Hall will be coming to inspect in the next few days.” She
picked up two bottles of ale and an ashtray and carried them over to the dustbin.

“Applied for reinforcements?” Swales asked. “Why? Afraid Colonel Godalming’11 be back with the heavy artillery?”

There was a loud banging on the door.

“Oi siy,” Swales said. “Here he is now, and he’s brought his hounds.”

Mrs. Lucy opened the door. “Worse,” Vi whispered, diving for the last bottle of ale. “It’s
Nelson.” She passed the bottle to me under the table, and I passed it to Renfrew, who tucked it under his blanket.

“Mr. Nelson,” Mrs. Lucy said as if she were delighted to see him, “do come in. And how are things over your way?”

“We took a beating last
night,” he said, glaring at us as though we were responsible.

“He’s had a complaint from the colonel,” Swales whispered to me. “You’re done
for, mate.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Mrs. Lucy said. “Now, how may I help you?”

He pulled a folded paper from the pocket of his uniform and carefully opened it out. “This was forwarded to me from the City Engineer,” he said. “All requests for material improvements are to be sent to the district warden, not over his head to the Town Hall.”

“Oh, I’m so
glad
,” Mrs. Lucy said, leading him
into the pantry. “It is such a comfort to deal with someone one knows, rather than a faceless bureaucracy. If I had realized you were the proper person to appeal to, I should have contacted you
immediately.”
She shut the door.

Renfrew took the ale bottle out from under his blanket and buried it in the dustbin. Violet began taking out her bobby pins.

“We’ll never get our reinforcements now,”
Swales said. “Not with Adolf von Nelson in charge.”

“Shh,” Vi said, yanking at her snaillike curls. “You don’t want him to hear you.”

“Olmwood told me he makes them keep working at an incident, even when the bombs are right overhead. Thinks all the posts should do it.”

“Shh!” Vi said.

“He’s a bleeding Nazi!” Swales said, but he lowered his voice. “Got two of his wardens killed that way. You
better not let him find out you and Jack are good at finding bodies, or you’ll be out there dodging shrapnel, too.”

Good at finding bodies. I thought of Jack, standing motionless, looking at the rubble and saying, “There’s someone alive under here. Hurry.”

“That’s why Nelson steals from the other posts,” Vi said, scooping her bobby pins off the table and into her haversack. “Because he does
his own in.” She pulled out a comb and began yanking it through her snarled curls.

The pantry door opened and Nelson and Mrs. Lucy came out, Nelson still holding the unfolded paper. She was still wearing her tea-party smile, but it was a bit thin. “I’m sure you can see it’s unrealistic to expect nine people to huddle in a coal cellar for hours at a time,” she said.

“There are people all over
London ‘huddling in coal cellars for hours at a time,’ as you put it,” Nelson said coldly, “who do not wish their Civil Defence funds spent on frivolities.”

“I do not consider the
safety of my wardens a frivolity,” she said, “though it is clear to me that you do, as witnessed by your very poor record.”

Nelson stared for a full minute at Mrs. Lucy, trying to think of a retort, and then turned
on me. “Your uniform is a disgrace, warden,” he said, and stomped out.

Whatever it was Jack had used to find Colonel Godalming, it didn’t work on incendiaries. He searched as haphazardly for them as the rest of us, Vi, who had been on spotter duty, shouting directions: “No, farther down Fulham Road. In the grocer’s.”

She had apparently been daydreaming about her pilots, instead of spotting.
The incendiary was not in the grocer’s but in the butcher’s three doors down, and by the time Jack and I got to it, the meat locker was on fire. It wasn’t hard to put out, there were no furniture or curtains to catch, and the cold kept the wooden shelves from catching, but the butcher was extravagantly grateful. He insisted on wrapping up five pounds of lamb chops in white paper and thrusting them
into Jack’s arms.

“Did you really have to be at your day job so early, or were you only trying to escape the colonel?” I asked Jack on the way back to the post.

“Was he that bad?” he said, handing me the parcel of lamb chops.

“He nearly took my head off when I said you’d heard him shouting. Said he didn’t call for help. Said he was digging himself out.” The white butcher’s paper was so bright,
the Luftwaffe would think it was a searchlight. I tucked the parcel inside my overalls so it wouldn’t show. “What sort of work is it, your day job?” I asked.

“War work,” he said.

“Did they transfer you? Is that why you came to London?”

“No,” he said. “I wanted to come.” We turned into Mrs. Lucy’s street. “Why did you join the ARP?”

“I’m waiting to be called up,” I said, “so no one would hire
me.”

“And you wanted to do your bit.”

“Yes,” I said, wishing I could see his face.

“What about Mrs. Lucy? Why did she become a warden?”

“Mrs. Lucy?” I said blankly. The question had never even occurred to me. She was the best warden in London. It was her natural calling, and I’d thought of her as always having been one. “I’ve no idea,” I said. “It’s her house, she’s a widow. Perhaps the Civil
Defence commandeered it, and she had to become one. It’s the tallest in the street.” I tried to remember what Twickenham had written about her in his interview. “Before the war she had something to do with a church.”

“A church,” he said, and
I wished again I could see his face. I couldn’t tell in the dark whether he spoke in contempt or longing.

“She was a deaconess or something,” I said. “What
sort of war work is it? Munitions?”

“No,” he said, and walked on ahead.

Mrs. Lucy met us at the door of the post. I gave her the package of lamb chops, and Jack went upstairs to replace Vi as spotter. Mrs. Lucy cooked the chops up immediately, running upstairs to the kitchen during a lull in the raids for salt and a jar of mint sauce, standing over the gas ring at the end of the table and turning
them for what seemed an eternity. They smelled wonderful.

Twickenham passed round newly run-off copies of
Twickenham’s Twitterings.
“Something for you to read while you wait for your dinner,” he said proudly.

The lead article was about the change in address of Sub-Post D, which had taken a partial hit that broke the water mains.

“Had Nelson refused them reinforcements, too?” Swales asked.

“Listen to this,” Petersby said. He read aloud from the news sheet. “The crime rate in London has risen twenty-eight percent since the beginning of the blackout.’”

“And no wonder,” Vi said, coming down from upstairs. “You can’t see your nose in front of your face at night, let alone someone lurking in an alley. I’m always afraid someone’s going to jump out at me while I’m on patrol.”

“All those
houses standing empty, and half of London sleeping in the shelters,” Swales said. “It’s easy pickings. If I was a bad’un, I’d come straight to London.”

“It’s disgusting,” Morris said indignantly. “The idea of someone taking advantage of there being a war to commit crimes.”

“Oh, Mr. Morris, that reminds me. Your son telephoned,” Mrs. Lucy said, cutting into a chop to see if it was done. Blood
welled up. “He said he’d a surprise for you, and you were to come out to”—she switched the fork to her left hand and rummaged in her overall pocket till she found a slip of paper—”North Weald on Monday, I think. His commanding officer’s made the necessary travel arrangements for you. I wrote it all down.” She handed it to him and went back to turning the chops.

“A surprise?” Morris
said, sounding
worried. “He’s not in trouble, is he? His commanding officer wants to see me?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say what it was about. Only that he wanted you to come.”

Vi went over to Mrs. Lucy and peered into the skillet. “I’m glad it was the butcher’s and not the grocer’s,” she said. “Rutabagas wouldn’t have cooked up half so nice.”

Mrs. Lucy speared a chop, put it on a plate, and handed it to Vi.
“Take this up to Jack,” she said.

“He doesn’t want any,” Vi said. She took the plate and sat down at the table.

“Did he say why he didn’t?” I asked.

She looked curiously at me. “I suppose he’s not hungry,” she said. “Or perhaps he doesn’t like lamb chops.”

“I do hope he’s not in any trouble,” Morris said, and it took me a minute to realize he was talking about his son. “He’s not a bad boy,
but he does things without thinking. Youthful high spirits, that’s all it is.”

“He didn’t eat the cake either,” I said. “Did he say why he didn’t want the lamb chop?”

“If Mr. Settle doesn’t want it, then take it to Mr. Renfrew,” Mrs. Lucy said sharply. She snatched the plate away from Vi. “And don’t let him tell you he’s not hungry. He must eat. He’s getting very run-down.”

Vi sighed and stood
up. Mrs. Lucy handed her back the plate, and she went into the other room.

“We all need to eat plenty of good food and get lots of sleep,” Mrs. Lucy said reprovingly. “To keep our strength up.”

“I’ve written an article about it in the
Twitterings
,” Twickenham said, beaming. “It’s known as ‘walking death.’ It’s brought about by lack of sleep and poor nutrition, with the anxiety of the raids.
The walking dead exhibit slowed reaction time and impaired judgment, which result in increased accidents on the job.”

“Well, I won’t have any walking dead among my wardens,” Mrs. Lucy said, dishing up the rest of the chops. “As soon as you’ve had these, I want you all to go to bed.”

The chops tasted even better than they had smelled. I ate mine, reading Twickenham’s article on the walking dead.
It said that loss of appetite was a common reaction to the raids. It also said that lack of sleep could cause compulsive behavior and odd fixations. “The walking dead may become convinced that they are being poisoned or that a friend or relative is a German agent. They may hallucinate, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.”

“He was in trouble at
school, before the war,
but he’s steadied down since he joined up,” Morris said. “I wonder what he’s done.”

At three the next morning a land mine exploded in almost the same spot off Old Church Street as the HEs. Nelson sent Olmwood to ask for help, and Mrs. Lucy ordered Swales, Jack, and me to go with him.

“The mine didn’t land more’n two houses away from the first crater,” Olmwood said while we were getting on our
gear. “The jerries couldn’t have come closer if they’d been aiming at it.”

“I know what they’re aiming at,” Renfrew said from the doorway. He looked terrible, pale and drawn as a ghost. “And I know why you’ve applied for reinforcements for the post. It’s me, isn’t it? They’re after me.”

“They’re not after any of us,” Mrs. Lucy said firmly. “They’re two miles up. They’re not aiming at anything.”

“Why would Hitler want to bomb you more than the rest of us?” Swales said.

“I don’t know.” He sank down on one of the chairs and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know. But they’re after me. I can feel it.”

Mrs. Lucy had sent Swales, Jack, and me to the incident because “you’ve been there before. You’ll know the terrain.” But that was a fond hope. Since they explode above ground, land mines
do considerably more damage than HEs. There was now a hill where the incident officer’s tent had been, and three more beyond it, a mountain range in the middle of London. Swales started up the nearest peak to look for the incident officer’s light.

“Jack, over here!” somebody called from the hill behind us, and both of us scrambled up a slope toward the voice.

A group of five men were halfway
up the hill looking down into a hole.

“Jack!” the man yelled again. He was wearing a blue foreman’s arm band, and he was looking straight past us at someone toiling up the slope with what looked like a stirrup pump. I thought, surely they’re not trying to fight a fire down that shaft, and then saw it wasn’t a pump. It was, in fact, an automobile jack, and the man with the blue arm band reached
between us for it, lowered it down the hole, and scrambled in after it.

The rest of the rescue
squad stood looking down into the blackness as if they could actually see something. After a while they began handing empty buckets down into the hole and pulling them out heaped full of broken bricks and pieces of splintered wood. None of them took any notice of us, even when Jack held out his hands
to take one of the buckets.

“We’re from Chelsea,” I shouted to the foreman over the din of the planes and bombs. “What can we do to help?”

They went on bucket-brigading. A china teapot came up on the top of one load, covered with dust but not even chipped.

I tried again. “Who is it down there?”

“Two of ’em,” the man nearest me said. He plucked the teapot off the heap and handed it to the man
wearing a balaclava under his helmet. “Man and a woman.”

“We’re from Chelsea,” I shouted over a burst of antiaircraft fire. “What do you want us to do?”

He took the teapot away from the man with the balaclava and handed it to me. “Take this down to the pavement with the other valuables.”

It took me a long while to get down the slope, holding the teapot in one hand and the lid on with the other
and trying to keep my footing among the broken bricks, and even longer to find any pavement. The land mine had heaved most of it up, and the street with it.

I finally found it, a square of unbroken pavement in front of a blown-out bakery, with the “valuables” neatly lined up against it: a radio, a boot, two serving spoons like the one Colonel Godalming had threatened me with, a lady’s beaded
evening bag. A rescue worker was standing guard next to them.

“Halt!” he said, stepping in front of them as I came up, holding a pocket torch or a gun. “No one’s allowed inside the incident perimeter.”