The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (74 page)

“Yes.”

Swales came back. “He’s a spy, that’s what he is,” he said. “Hitler sent him here to kill off our best men one by one. I told you his name was
Adolf von Nelson.”

The Kirkcuddys were farther to the left. The rescue squad had to widen the tunnel, cut the top of the Anderson open, and pry it back, like opening a can of tomatoes. It took till nine o’clock in the morning, but they were all alive.

Jack left sometime before it got light. I didn’t see him go. Swales was telling me about Olmwood’s injury, and when I turned around, Jack was
gone.

“Has Jack told you where this job of his is that he has to leave so early for?” I asked Vi when I got back to the post.

She had propped a mirror against one of the gas masks and was putting her hair up in pin curls. “No,” she said, dipping a comb in a glass of water and wetting a lock of her hair. “Jack, could you reach me my bobby pins? I’ve a date this afternoon, and I want to look my
best.”

I pushed the pins across to her. “What sort of job is it? Did Jack say?”

“No. Some sort of war work, I should think.” She wound a lock of hair around her finger. “He’s had ten kills. Four Stukas and six 109’s.”

I sat down next to Twickenham, who was typing up the incident report. “Have you interviewed Jack yet?”

“When would I have had time?” Twickenham asked. “We haven’t had a quiet
night since he came.”

Renfrew shuffled in from the other room. He had a blanket wrapped round him Indian style and a bedspread over his shoulders. He looked terrible, pale and drawn as a ghost.

“Would you like some breakfast?” Vi asked, prying a pin open with her teeth.

He shook his head. “Did Nelson approve the reinforcements?”

“No,” Twickenham said in
spite of Vi’s signaling him not to.

“You must tell Nelson it’s an emergency,” he said, hugging the blanket to him as if he were cold. “I know why they’re after me. It was before the war. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. I wrote a letter to the
Times
.”

I was grateful Swales wasn’t there. A letter to the
Times
.

“Come, now, why don’t you go and lie down for a bit?” Vi said, securing a curl with a bobby pin as she stood up. “You’re
tired, that’s all, and that’s what’s getting you so worried. They don’t even get the
Times
over there.”

She took his arm, and he went docilely with her into the other room. I heard him say, “I called him a lowland bully. In the letter.” The person suffering from severe sleep loss may hallucinate, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.

“Has he mentioned what sort of
day job he has?” I asked Twickenham.

“Who?” he asked, still typing.

“Jack.”

“No, but whatever it is, let’s hope he’s as good at it as he is at finding bodies.” He stopped and peered at what he’d just typed. “This makes five, doesn’t it?”

Vi came back. “And we’d best not let von Nelson find out about it,” she said. She sat down and dipped the comb into the glass of water. “He’d take him like
he took Olmwood, and we’re already shorthanded, with Renfrew the way he is.”

Mrs. Lucy came in carrying the incident light, disappeared into the pantry with it, and came out again carrying an application form. “Might I use the typewriter, Mr. Twickenham?” she asked.

He pulled his sheet of paper out of the typewriter and stood up. Mrs. Lucy sat down, rolled in the form, and began typing. “I’ve
decided to apply directly to Civil Defence for reinforcements,” she said.

“What sort of day job does Jack have?” I asked ha

“War work,” she said. She pulled the application out, turned it over, rolled it back in. “Jack, would you mind taking this over to headquarters?”

“Works days,” Vi said, making a pin curl on the back of her head. “Raids every night. When does he sleep?”

“I don’t know,”
I said.

“He’d best be careful,” she said. “Or he’ll turn into one of the walking dead, like Renfrew.”

Mrs. Lucy signed the application
form, folded it in half, and gave it to me. I took it to Civil Defence headquarters and spent half a day trying to find the right office to give it to.

“It’s not the correct form,” the sixth girl said. “She needs to file an A-114, Exterior Improvements.”

“It’s
not exterior,” I said. “The post is applying for reinforcing beams for the cellar.”

“Reinforcements are classified as exterior improvements,” she said. She handed me the form, which looked identical to the one Mrs. Lucy had already filled out, and I left.

On the way out Nelson stopped me. I thought he was going to tell me my uniform was a disgrace again, but instead he pointed to my tin hat
and demanded, “Why aren’t you wearing a regulation helmet, warden? ‘All ARP wardens shall wear a helmet with the letter W in red on the front,’” he quoted.

I took my hat off and looked at it. The red W had partly chipped away so that it looked like a V.

“What post are you?” he barked.

“Forty-eight. Chelsea,” I said, and wondered if he expected me to salute.

“Mrs. Lucy is your warden,” he said
disgustedly, and I expected his next question to be what was I doing at Civil Defence, but instead he said, “I heard about Colonel Godalming. Your post has been having good luck locating casualties these last few raids.”

“Yes, sir,” was obviously the wrong answer, and “No, sir,” would make him suspicious. “We found three people in an Anderson last night,” I said. “One of the children had the
wits to bang on the roof with a pair of pliers.”

“I’ve heard that the person finding them is a new man, Settle.” He sounded friendly, almost jovial. Like Hitler at Munich.

“Settle?” I said blankly. “Mrs. Lucy was the one who found the Anderson.”

Morris’s son Quincy’s surprise was the Victoria Cross. “A medal,” he said over and over. “Who’d have thought it, my Quincy with a medal? Fifteen planes
he shot down.”

It had been presented at a
special ceremony at Quincy’s commanding officer’s headquarters, and the Duchess of York herself had been there. Morris had pinned the medal on Quincy himself.

“I wore my suit,” he told us for the hundredth time. “In case he was in trouble I wanted to make a good impression, and a good thing, too. What would the Duchess of York have thought if I’d gone
looking like this?”

He looked pretty bad. We all did. We’d had two breadbaskets of incendiaries, one right after the other, and Vi had been on watch. We had had to save the butcher’s again, and a baker’s two blocks farther down, and a thirteenth-century crucifix.

“I
told
him it went through the altar roof,” Vi had said disgustedly when she and I finally got it out. “Your friend Jack couldn’t
find an incendiary if it fell on him.”

“You told Jack the incendiary came down on the church?” I said, looking up at the carved wooden figure. The bottom of the cross was blackened, and Christ’s nailed feet, as if he had been burnt at the stake instead of crucified.

“Yes,” she said. “I even told him it was the altar.” She looked back up the nave. “And he could have seen it as soon as he came
into the church.”

“What did he say? That it wasn’t there?”

Vi was looking speculatively up at the roof. “It could have been caught in the rafters and come down after. It hardly matters, does it? We put it out. Come on, let’s get back to the post,” she said, shivering. “I’m freezing.”

I was freezing, too. We were both sopping wet. The AFS had stormed up after we had the fire under control and
sprayed everything in sight with icy water.

“Pinned it on myself, I did,” Morris said. “The Duchess of York kissed him on both cheeks and said he was the pride of England.” He had brought a bottle of wine to celebrate the Cross. He got Renfrew up and brought him to the table, draped in his blankets, and ordered Twickenham to put his typewriter away. Petersby brought in extra chairs, and Mrs.
Lucy went upstairs to get her crystal.

“Only eight, I’m afraid,” she said, coming back with the stemmed goblets in her blackened hands. “The Germans have broken the rest. Who’s willing to make do with the tooth glass?”

“I don’t care for any, thank you,” Jack said. “I don’t drink.”

“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 queue 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 heat, 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 got 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 got 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.”