The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (73 page)

“I’m ARP,” I said hastily. “Jack Harker. Chelsea.” I held up the teapot. “They sent me down with this.”

It was a torch. He flicked it on and off, an eye blink. “Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had a
good deal of looting recently.” He took the teapot and placed it at the end of the line next to the evening bag. “Caught a man last week going through the pockets of the bodies laid out in the street waiting for the mortuary van. Terrible how some people will take advantage of a thing like this.”

I went back up to
where the rescue workers were digging. Jack was at the mouth of the shaft, hauling
buckets up and handing them back. I got in line behind him.

“Have they found them yet?” I asked him as soon as there was a lull in the bombing.

“Quiet!” a voice shouted from the hole, and the man in the balaclava repeated, “Quiet, everyone! We must have absolute quiet!”

Everyone stopped working and listened. Jack had handed me a bucket full of bricks, and the handle cut into my hands. For a
second there was absolute silence, and then the drone of a plane and the distant swish and crump of an HE.

“Don’t worry,” the voice from the hole shouted, “we’re nearly there.” The buckets began coming up out of the hole again.

I hadn’t heard anything, but apparently down in the shaft they had, a voice or the sound of tapping, and I felt relieved, both that one of them at least was still alive,
and that the diggers were on course. I’d been on an incident in October where we’d had to stop halfway down and sink a new shaft because the rubble kept distorting and displacing the sound. Even if the shaft was directly above the victim, it tended to go crooked in working past obstacles, and the only way to keep it straight was with frequent soundings. I thought of Jack digging for Colonel Godalming
with the bannister. He hadn’t taken any soundings at all. He had seemed to know exactly where he was going.

The men in the shaft called for the jack again, and Jack and I lowered it down to them. As the man below it reached up to take it, Jack stopped. He raised his head, as if he were listening.

“What is it?” I said. I couldn’t hear anything but the ack-ack guns in Hyde Park. “Did you hear
someone calling?”

“Where’s the bloody jack?” the foreman shouted.

“It’s too late,” Jack said to me. “They’re dead.”

“Come along, get it down here,” the foreman shouted. “We haven’t got all day.”

He handed the jack down.

“Quiet,” the foreman shouted, and above us, like a ghostly echo, we could hear the balaclava call, “Quiet, please, everyone.”

A church clock began to chime, and I could hear
the balaclava say irritatedly, “We must have absolute quiet.”

The clock chimed four and
stopped, and there was a skittering sound of dirt falling on metal. Then silence, and a faint sound.

“Quiet!” the foreman called again, and there was another silence, and the sound again. A whimper. Or a moan. “We hear you,” he shouted. “Don’t be afraid.”

“One of them’s still alive,” I said.

Jack didn’t
say anything.

“We just
heard
them,” I said angrily.

Jack shook his head.

“We’ll need lumber for bracing,” the man in the balaclava said to Jack, and I expected him to tell him it was no use, but he went off immediately and came back dragging a white-painted bookcase.

It still had three books in it. I helped Jack and the balaclava knock the shelves out of the case and then took the books down
to the store of “valuables.” The guard was sitting on the pavement going through the beaded evening bag.

“Taking inventory,” he said, scrambling up hastily. He jammed a lipstick and a handkerchief into the bag. “So’s to make certain nothing gets stolen.”

“I’ve brought you something to read,” I said, and laid the books next to the teapot.
“Crime and Punishment.”

I toiled back up the hill and
helped Jack lower the bookshelves down the shaft, and after a few minutes buckets began coming up again. We reformed our scraggly bucket brigade, the balaclava at the head of it and me and then Jack at its end.

The all clear went. As soon as it wound down, the foreman took another sounding. This time we didn’t hear anything, and when the buckets started again, I handed them to Jack without looking
at him.

It began to get light in the east, a slow graying of the hills above us. Two of them, several stories high, stood where the row houses that had escaped the night before had been, and we were still in their shadow, though I could see the shaft now, with the end of one of the white bookshelves sticking up from it like a gravestone.

The buckets began to come more slowly.

“Put out your
cigarettes!” the foreman called up, and we all stopped, trying to catch the smell of gas. If they were dead, as Jack had said, it was most likely gas leaking in from the broken mains that had killed them, and not internal injuries. The week before we had brought up a boy and his dog, not a scratch on them. The dog had barked and whimpered almost up to when we found them, and the ambulance driver said
she thought they’d only been dead a few minutes.

I couldn’t smell any
gas, and after a minute the foreman said, excited, “I see them!”

The balaclava leaned over the shaft, his hands on his knees. “Are they alive?”

“Yes! Fetch an ambulance!”

The balaclava went leaping down the hill, skidding on broken bricks that skittered down in a minor avalanche.

I knelt over the shaft. “Will they need
a stretcher?” I called down.

“No,” the foreman said, and I knew by the sound of his voice they were dead.

“Both of them?” I said.

“Yes.”

I stood up. “How did you know they were dead?” I said, turning to look at Jack. “How did—”

He wasn’t there. I looked down the hill. The balaclava was nearly to the bottom—grabbing at a broken window sash to stop his headlong descent, his wake a smoky cloud
of brick dust—but Jack was nowhere to be seen.

It was nearly dawn. I could see the gray hills and at the far end of them the warden and his “valuables.” There was another rescue party on the third hill over, still digging. I could see Swales handing down a bucket.

“Give a hand here,” the foreman said impatiently, and hoisted the jack up to me. I hauled it over to the side and then came back
and helped the foreman out of the shaft. His hands were filthy, covered in reddish-brown mud.

“Was it the gas that killed them?” I asked, even though he was already pulling out a packet of cigarettes.

“No,” he said, shaking a cigarette out and taking it between his teeth. He patted the front of his coverall, leaving red stains.

“How long have they been dead?” I asked.

He found his matches,
struck one, and lit the cigarette. “Shortly after we last heard them, I should say,” he said, and I thought, but they were already dead by then. And Jack knew it. “They’ve been dead at least two hours.”

I looked at my watch. I read a little past six. “But the mine didn’t kill them?”

He took the cigarette
between his fingers and blew a long puff of smoke. When he put the cigarette back in his
mouth, there was a red smear on it. “Loss of blood.”

The next night the Luftwaffe was early. I hadn’t gotten much sleep after the incident. Morris had fretted about his son the whole day, and Swales had teased Renfrew mercilessly. “Goring’s found out about your spying,” he said, “and now he’s sent his Stukas after you.”

I finally went up to the fourth floor and tried to sleep in the spotter’s
chair, but it was too light. The afternoon was cloudy, and the fires burning in the East End gave the sky a nasty reddish cast.

Someone had left a copy of
Twickenham’s Twitterings
on the floor. I read the article on the walking dead again, and then, still unable to sleep, the rest of the news sheet. There was an account of Hitler’s invasion of Transylvania, and a recipe for butterless strawberry
tart, and the account of the crime rate. “London is currently the perfect place for the criminal element,” Nelson was quoted as saying. “We must constantly be on the lookout for wrongdoing.”

Below the recipe was a story about a Scottish terrier named Bonny Charlie who had barked and scrabbled wildly at the ruins of a collapsed house till wardens heeded his cries, dug down, and discovered two
unharmed children.

I must have fallen asleep reading that, because the next thing I knew Morris was shaking me and telling me the sirens had gone. It was only five o’clock.

At half past we had an HE in our sector. It was just three blocks from the post, and the walls shook, and plaster rained down on Twickenham’s typewriter and on Renfrew, lying awake in his cot.

“Frivolities, my foot,” Mrs.
Lucy muttered as we dived for our tin hats. “We need those reinforcing beams.”

The part-times hadn’t come on duty yet. Mrs. Lucy left Renfrew to send them on. We knew exactly where the incident was—Morris had been looking in that direction when it went—but we still had difficulty finding it. It was still evening, but by the time we had gone half a block, it was pitch-black.

The first time that
had happened, I thought it was some sort of after-blindness from the blast, but it’s only the brick and plaster dust from the collapsed buildings. It rises up in a haze that’s darker than any blackout curtain, obscuring everything. When Mrs. Lucy set up shop on a stretch of sidewalk and switched on the blue incident light, it glowed spectrally in the man-made fog.

“Only two families
still in
the street,” she said, holding the register up to the light. “The Kirkcuddy family and the Hodgsons.”

“Are they an old couple?” Morris asked, appearing suddenly out of the fog.

She peered at the register. “Yes. Pensioners.”

“I found them,” he said in that flat voice that meant they were dead. “Blast.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “The Kirkcuddys are a mother and two children. They’ve an Anderson
shelter.” She held the register closer to the blue light. “Everyone else has been using the tube shelter.” She unfolded a map and showed us where the Kirckcuddys’ backyard had been, but it was no help. We spent the next hour wandering blindly over the mounds, listening for sounds that were impossible to hear over the Luftwaffe’s comments and the ack-ack’s replies.

Petersby showed up a little
past eight and Jack a few minutes later, and Mrs. Lucy set them to wandering in the fog, too.

“Over here,” Jack shouted almost immediately, and my heart gave an odd jerk.

“Oh, good, he’s heard them,” Mrs. Lucy said. “Jack, go and find him.”

“Over here,” he called again, and I started off in the direction of his voice, almost afraid of what I would find, but I hadn’t gone ten steps before I
could hear it, too. A baby crying, and a hollow, echoing sound like someone banging a fist against tin.

“Don’t stop,” Vi shouted. She was kneeling next to Jack in a shallow crater. “Keep making noise. We’re coming.” She looked up at me. “Tell Mrs. Lucy to ring the rescue squad.”

I blundered my way back to Mrs. Lucy through the darkness. She had already rung up the rescue squad. She sent me to
Sloane Square to make sure the rest of the inhabitants of the block were safely there.

The dust had lifted a little but not enough for me to see where I was going. I pitched off a curb into the street and tripped over a pile of debris and then a body. When I shone my torch on it, I saw it was the girl I had walked to the shelter two nights before.

She was sitting against
the tiled entrance to
the station, still holding a dress on a hanger in her limp hand. The old stewpot at John Lewis’s never let her off even a minute before closing, and the Luftwaffe had been early. She had been killed by blast, or by flying glass. Her face and neck and hands were covered with tiny cuts, and glass crunched underfoot when I moved her legs together.

I went back to the incident and waited for the mortuary
van and went with them to the shelter. It took me three hours to find the families on my list. By the time I got back to the incident, the rescue squad was five feet down.

“They’re nearly there,” Vi said, dumping a basket on the far side of the crater. “All that’s coming up now is dirt and the occasional rosebush.”

“Where’s Jack?” I said.

“He went for a saw.” She took the basket back and handed
it to one of the rescue squad, who had to put his cigarette into his mouth to free his hands before he could take it. “There was a board, but they dug past it.”

I leaned over the hole. I could hear the sound of banging but not the baby. “Are they still alive?”

She shook her head. “We haven’t heard the baby for an hour or so. We keep calling, but there’s no answer. We’re afraid the banging may
be something mechanical.”

I wondered if they were dead, and Jack, knowing it, had not gone for a saw at all but off to that day job of his.

Swales came up. “Guess who’s in hospital?” he said.

“Who?” Vi said.

“Olmwood. Nelson had his wardens out walking patrols during a raid, and he caught a piece of shrapnel from one of the ack-acks in the leg. Nearly took it off.”

The rescue worker with
the cigarette handed a heaping basket to Vi. She took it, staggering a little under the weight, and carried it off.

“You’d better not let Nelson see you working like that,” Swales called after her, “or he’ll have you transferred to his sector. Where’s Morris?” he said, and went off, presumably to tell him and whoever else he could find about Olmwood.

Jack came up, carrying the saw.

“They don’t
need it,” the rescue worker said, the cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. “Mobile’s here,” he said, and went off for a cup of tea. Jack knelt and handed the saw down the hole.

“Are they still
alive?” I asked.

Jack leaned over the hole, his hands clutching the edges. The banging was incredibly loud. It must have been deafening inside the Anderson. Jack stared into the hole as if he
heard neither the banging nor any voice.

He stood up, still looking into the hole. “They’re farther to the left,” he said.

How can they be farther to the left? I thought. We can hear them. They’re directly under us. “Are they alive?” I said.