Wake: A Novel (13 page)

The thought of London, with all that khaki everywhere, is almost as grim as being here. Can we go somewhere else? Somewhere green? Somewhere neither of us know? I want to sit in a field with you by my side and look at nothing but green.

She was working in an office then, high above the Strand, ticking lists of goods from the docks against government orders, and it was as dull as death. Her nearest neighbor was a large, clammy woman one desk over who came in every day from Horsham and whose chatter consisted mainly of the minor calibrations of the train services that invariably made her late. The day she received Fraser’s letter Evelyn went out on her lunch hour and bought a map at Stanford’s, wedging it under the shipping orders where no one could see. Then she studied it all through the fetid afternoon, while flies threw themselves against the windowpanes, six floors up.

She searched the map, looking for nothing but green, and picked a village at random, somewhere between London and Hastings, on the main line from Victoria. On the map it was surrounded by fields, and there was a patch of deep blue, a lake or a reservoir, nearby, about the size of her little fingernail. Perhaps, she thought, they’d be able to swim.

When the day came, the weather was stifling. Far from escaping uniforms, the train was stuffed with men and their girls on their way to the sea. Fraser had arrived early in the morning, on the train from Edinburgh, just in time to cross London and meet her. She had almost walked past him at the station. He caught her arm, and she stopped, stunned. She hardly recognized him. He looked ten years older. Hollow with exhaustion. She saw in a moment that the plan was ludicrous. She wished they’d simply decided to stay at home.

He slept the whole way down, his head lolling and rolling on his neck. Every so often a fractured singsong would break out, and he would wake with a start, and look frightened and confused, and then see her beside him, and squeeze her hand and smile, and go straight back to sleep. She pulled a book from her bag and tried to read, but the print jumbled before her eyes. There was something desperate behind the strained jollity in the smoky carriage, filled with the sour smell of khaki and bodies and heat. The window was stuck shut, and the train kept getting held up for no reason between stops. It made her even more uneasy, being held like that, in the middle of the country; the lushness of the green foliage pressing against the windows seemed shocking, sinister—the summer in full, unconscious bloom.

She shook Fraser awake as they arrived at the little station she had chosen and they bundled off the train, which pulled away in a cloud of smoke and steam, leaving them staring at each other in the silence, strangers suddenly, adrift.

He shook out a cigarette and lit it. “I was dreaming,” he said eventually.

“Really? What of? Can I have one, too?”

He passed the cigarette over and lit another for himself. “I’m not sure.” He shielded his eyes, looking out over the other side of the tracks to where fields stretched away into the distance. “Something nasty, I think.”

The wheat was high. The sun was at its peak. The air was the temperature of blood. He was a tall man but looked shrunken, under the beating sun, diminished, in a way she had never seen before. She had the terrible conviction that something would happen to them, out here, in the countryside; that she wouldn’t be able to save him if anything did.

“We don’t have any water,” she said. Useless. How could they have come away without any water? Or any food? She had had days to plan this. What had she been thinking of, all those days? Now they were out here, and they were unprepared, and something terrible was bound to happen to them, and coming here had been the only thing he had said he wanted to do.

“Well,” he said, turning to her with a smile, “at least if I die of thirst I won’t have to go back to France.”

As they passed out of the station, he reached for her hand and they walked together down a hill, past a small terrace of redbrick cottages whose gardens were foaming with summer flowers. A cat dozed in the shade of a tree. Somewhere in the distance church bells chimed the quarter hour. At the bottom of the hill they turned into a lane where the trees touched, forming a canopy overhead. Their footsteps were the only sound on the cool earth road.

They were silent, but her mind was racing. It was always like this: after all those letters—then having his real physical form before you and clamming up.

She sifted things and rejected them. It seemed impossible to ask anything about France. She thought she should ask about Scotland, after his parents, how it had been to go home, but she couldn’t think of how to begin.

“Shall I get out the map?” she said eventually. “It’s in my bag.” She had brought that at least.

When he turned to her, he looked distracted, as if she had interrupted something important. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Let’s just keep on walking like this.”

They carried on up the hill. The canopy was less thick now, and whenever a slight breeze got up, the leaves above them would lift and the ground dapple with sudden light. After a little while they came to a gap in the trees, from where they could see out to the country beyond, and she felt a cold sinking; the fields here were not green at all. They were yellow and bland and full of wheat.

“I—” She broke off. Fraser wasn’t looking at her; he had his hand to his eyes. “There,” he said, pointing.

She followed his finger to a copse of trees standing on a small rise, and they set off toward it. There was no room to walk together and so they walked single file, she behind. Every so often he would glance to the left or right, as if something might come at them from the wheat. Eventually, they reached the copse and sat down in the scrubby shade of an oak. He sat with his knees up, his elbows resting on them, staring out over the land, which dropped away a little below where they were sitting. He seemed to relax a fraction, now that they had reached the higher ground, and he lit another cigarette. She fished in the pocket of her cardigan for one of her own. In the fields below them, small birds began to swoop and dive. In the heat, her head was beginning to pound. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He turned to her. “What for?”

He looked so exhausted that her stomach threatened to cave in.

“For this.” She raised her arm vaguely toward the fields. “It’s all a bit…” She wrinkled her nose.

He stared out. Nodded briefly. “Can we go back?”

“Where?”

“London.”

“Already?”

“Yes.”

“But why?” She could hear her voice, rising like a child’s.

“Because this is wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“No. It’s not your fault. I just— I’m just very tired. Can we please just go back?”

“Am I wrong?” The words were out before she could think of stopping them.

Fraser carried on looking down into the valley, as though there was something there that he couldn’t quite make out, as though out in the blue of the distance was something he was struggling to see. “Don’t ask me that,” he said eventually. “That’s not fair.”

She could feel herself wanting to cry, feel it forcing its way up in her chest. She took a deep drag on her cigarette to push it down.

That night, back in London, she lay beside him, wide awake, his weight possessing the narrow bed. He had slept all the long way back on the train, and then again as soon as he had lain down in the flat, and slept through the long, hot afternoon, and then, too, as afternoon turned to evening and the sky turned a dusty navy he slept on—but she stayed awake, all through the short night, and when the sky began to lighten she got up and stood by the open window, listening to the birds. When the sun had been up for a while, she heard him stirring in the bed behind her.

“Evie?”

She stayed with her back to him. It was early morning, but already hot. Two children were playing in the street below, their high, thin voices drifting up on the still air.

“Evie?”

She turned to him.

“Come here.” He had propped himself up on his elbows. His face was slack, generous with sleep. The pillow had imprinted creases on the side of his cheek. “Come here,” he said again. “I’m sorry, Evie, please.”

A breeze from the open window touched the back of her neck. She crossed the room toward him. He reached out, but she didn’t go to his arms; instead she climbed back onto the bed and brought her legs up and curled around herself, their faces inches apart.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again, pushing her hair away from her forehead and tucking it behind her ear. She saw there was a sheen of sweat, gathered in the slight depression above his top lip. She put her finger to that place, and then brought it back to her mouth. It tasted salty; the tang of sleep. He kissed her cheeks then, one after the other, and unbuttoned the shirt of her pajamas and held her there, against his chest. Then he closed his hand around her neck and brought her toward him.

“Is this all right?” he said to her.

“Yes,” she said.

Afterward, she lay with her head on his chest. Above her she could hear the crackle of his cigarette paper as he inhaled. The sun was reaching into the room, touching and warming the soles of her feet, and the sounds of the morning traveled up from the street below, the way that sound travels in the summer—percussive, as though the city were a drum, tightened by heat.

They went outside then, to the park, and walked up the hill to this bench. There were two hours to go until he got his train. He closed his eyes and she watched them, flickering beneath the lids, the grooves underneath them a little less black.

“You know,” he said, “the men out there. Sometimes I think they’re ridiculous.”

“Why?”

“Because they believe in things.” He opened his eyes slowly and took her hand in his. “Even after everything they’ve been through. Most of them believe in God. They all believe in a life after death. I walk among them in the evenings and I know that none of them think they’re going to be killed. None of them.” His fingertip traced the line that curved across her palm. “They tell fortunes.”

Something tightened in her. “Do they?” She tried to make her voice light. “And…what about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever had your fortune told?”

“No,” he said, sliding his hand into hers.

She knew he was lying, though.

The land around them was baked hard, the yellow-green of a London summer. The sun was at its height. She could feel him beside her and inside her, too; the memory of him, of the way they had been in the bed, just moments ago, as though it were still happening: his weight, the scrape of his cheek on hers. His mouth.

“Do you think the same?” she said, eventually. “That you won’t be killed?”

“That’s the thing,” he said with a small laugh. “When it comes down to it I know I’m exactly the same as them.”

He squeezed her hand, and she felt the life in him race through her.

And they sat, with the July sun overhead, and the smell of summer and the insects and the birds and the air full of buzzing, murmuring life.

“Billy,
Billy.
”

Evelyn opens her eyes. Her hands are freezing. A wind has picked up and is blowing the clouds across the low sky below. A yappy little dog is sniffling around her ankles. Behind her the owner calls out its name, his voice thin and high on the wind. “
Bil-ly.
Come on, Bill, boy. Time to go home.”

The little dog scampers away and Evelyn stands, stamping her feet to get some feeling back into them. It is almost dark. She puts her hand to the bench for a moment more, feeling its coarse wood beneath her palm; then she turns her back and sets off down the hill.

Halfway down she stops, pulled up short again at the memory of Rowan Hind.

I want to find my captain.

Captain Montfort.

What did he want with her brother?

She feels a wave of queasy guilt. Pushes it down. There could easily be more than one Captain Montfort. If she helped every lost and hopeless case who ended up in front of her, she would never have any time for herself.

When the punters have gone, when Hettie, Di, and the rest of the dancers have stood straight-backed before the eyes of Grayson (“No slouching during the anthem!”) while the band play the last resounding chords of “God Save the King”; when the clock has struck twelve, the dancers are finally allowed to go home.

“Time, gentlemen, please!” shouts Simon Randall as the double doors to the dance floor swing shut behind them and they are free from Grayson’s gaze. A few of the boys laugh and jostle one another. “If only.” “What I wouldn’t give for a pint right now.”

The girls file wearily back into the dressing room, pull on cardigans, jumpers, and coats, stow dance shoes into bags. There’s never much chatter at this time of night.

“How many?” says Di.

“Twenty.” Hettie slumps down onto the wooden bench. Nine in the afternoon, eleven in the evening. Not bad for a Monday double shift. “What about you?”

“Twenty-four.”

Hettie shrugs. She hardly ever beats Di at this.

“Day off tomorrow,” says Di.

Hettie rouses the energy to nod, bending to unbuckle her dance shoes and rub her feet.

Di is fastening her coat, wrapping her scarf around her neck. “Come on, then. Walk down to the market with me?”

“Not tonight.” Hettie shakes her head.

“Het?” Di sits down beside her, her pale, pretty face puckered with concern. “You’re not cross with me, are you?”

Hettie looks up. How to explain? She feels a bit hollow, a bit empty with all of it. It’s since Saturday. It’s clear that Di is moving toward her future, while she is standing still. And who knows how long Di will even stay at the Palais for now?

“No.” She shakes her head. “I’m—just tired.”

“Come round tomorrow?” Di gets to her feet. “We can have a look round the shops.”

“All right.”

“Bye, then.” Di pulls on her hat, and she and the other girls drift away, their voices echoing down the corridor and out into the night. Hettie stays there on the bench for a minute without moving, staring at the dusty tiles on the floor. She’s slow tonight. Whatever borrowed luster she may have held from Saturday has faded long ago.