Monday morning. Jago tried to picture a million men and women from London’s suburbs crowding into trains to make their way to the metropolis for the start of another working week. These days, of course, they might discover their regular line to Waterloo, Victoria or whatever other destination they had in the city had been bombed overnight. When they finally arrived, there was every chance of finding their familiar workplace obliterated by high explosives. The one thing that would be constant, however, was that when their alarm clock rang it would be Monday morning. They’d have had their day of rest and it would be the start of a new working week.
Jago wondered what it would be like to be a solicitor’s clerk or an office manager, knowing that every Sunday was a day off. It wasn’t that way in the CID – you simply worked the hours that the case required. True, he hadn’t had to work all day yesterday, but even so, the days all seemed to merge into one. Maybe he’d get a day off next week.
Going out for the evening with Dyers yesterday had turned out to be a pleasant break from work. They’d spent a couple of hours or so catching up on past times and treated each other, as it now seemed to him in the harsh light of day, to perhaps just one or two more drinks than they should have done. That could have been what helped him sleep, but whatever the reason, today he’d woken a little later than he’d intended. That was his excuse for troubling Rita for nothing more than a cup of tea and a couple of rounds of toast for breakfast today, but he knew he had other reasons for not wanting too much of a conversation.
He knew the pose well. Rita had positioned the cup of tea carefully on the table before him and then arranged a plate, a rack of toast, a small dish of butter and another of plum jam around it, and placed a knife at right angles to the edge of the table. She’d nudged the sugar bowl a little closer, then taken one step back. Now she stood with her hands folded across her pinny, head cocked slightly to one side and chin drawn back, her eyebrows knitted in the stern, inquisitorial expression she would use with a naughty boy caught red-handed from whom an explanation was due.
“Well,” she said, as if he should have confessed by now, “what is it?”
“What’s what?” he said.
“You’re not yourself. You look down in the mouth. Is something on your mind?”
“There’s always a lot on my mind, Rita. It’s part of the job.”
“This doesn’t look like the job to me. I’ve seen you sitting there thinking before, but not with that sad look in your eyes. That’s a look that tells me there’s a woman in it somewhere. You be honest with me: are you sweet on that American girl?”
“You don’t beat about the bush, do you?”
“If your friends won’t talk straight with you, who will?”
“I know, and I appreciate your concern. I’m not sure I can give you an answer, though.”
“You don’t give much away, do you? Sometimes I think you keep all the doors into your life locked and barred. You don’t want to let anyone in.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“You’ve been hurt, haven’t you? I can tell. People change when they’ve been hurt – whatever it is, they don’t want it to happen again, so they put up all the defences they can. Is that you?”
“I don’t know, Rita, but it’s kind of you to care.”
“Of course I care.”
“I think I’ve just had a bit of a shock – something’s happened that I wasn’t expecting. I can’t tell you the details, but it’s rather taken the wind out of my sails.”
“That’s all right, dear, you don’t need to give me chapter and verse. I understand. I sometimes think I’ve understood everything everyone suffers in the whole world since I lost my hubby. There’s some shocks nothing can prepare you for, and nothing can help you with.”
“You know, Rita, I don’t know if your Walter ever told you any stories about France, but I’ll tell you one of mine. We’d been in a reserve area for a while but then we got orders to move up to the front line. This was when I was still a private, and over the previous few weeks I’d palled up with another lad in the same platoon. One morning we were standing in the trench, having a chat and a smoke – I used to in those days – and he was laughing at some joke he’d just cracked. We were waiting for the lieutenant to blow his whistle. Moments later we’re over the top and advancing on the German line. Next thing I know, he’s dropped to the ground just three feet to my left, lying on his back, not moving. I looked down. He was dead: shot in the side of his head.”
“Walter only got home once on leave before he was killed,” said Rita. “He didn’t talk about it much: not one for stories, was Walter.”
“Most of the things he saw probably couldn’t be told, Rita,” said Jago. “Do you know what I couldn’t get straight in my head that day? It was that one moment he was a person, talking, laughing, thinking, and the next he was just a piece of dead flesh. He wouldn’t ever do anything again. The thing that was inside him that made him a person had gone, disappeared somewhere, ceased to exist. I didn’t really know much about him, but he was my pal, and I’d lost him.”
“My mum used to say she sometimes wondered if it was better not to love anyone, then you wouldn’t have to grieve when you lost them.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t as though I loved him: he was just a friend I’d known for a few weeks. There were plenty of men at the front who lost brothers; some of them more than one. I had none to lose, but I had lost him. And the thing I couldn’t understand was that he was gone, just like that, in the blink of an eye. It happened again lots of times later, but I think after that I never got close to anyone. I made sure I didn’t get too friendly, because I didn’t want the pain of that loss again.”
Rita looked at him more gently.
“I know you don’t want to tell me, and I don’t want to intrude, but that American girl – she’s all right, isn’t she? Hasn’t been caught in an air raid or something?”
Jago looked up and gave her a smile.
“No, she’s fine. But there’s more than one way of losing someone, isn’t there?”