Morning falls on the minor ruins; a little wind has blown in the night, an odd little cool capricious wind, a wind for winter, not for June. The bodies lie ruffled in their beds, sleeping, yes, but discontented, tossed into awkward frowning angles, grey or yellow in the morning light, lips pulled tight with a slant of dread, as if the little wind was just a warning.
At the Empire, the chambermaid has a shock when she pulls the curtains in a ground-floor room, for Major Kirk has changed in the night, the old man is dried and shrunken, he lies across the bed in a frozen lurch, as if he had made a last gallant struggle, but the smell in the room is death, she knows.
Grace does the impossible: she sleeps till after half-past eight, and the sharp little wind blows in through the window (she never sleeps without an open window) and lifts a white hair across her forehead, as if it were worried she would not wake, but Grace has been given no dispensation, Grace has to wake and suffer at last, Grace has to lie there as her heavy lids lift and try once more to absorb the pain.
She can’t. She crumbles back to sleep. And dreams of Ralph. He looks the same as ever, but has moved a little further off, she is looking at him as if through glass, as if she were a woman at an exhibition and she daren’t press close, there are too many of them, and the sorrow wakes her up again.
But it isn’t true. He was mine, mine.
Luckily Arthur has left for work, banging around more clumsily than usual, Arthur not singing or whistling this morning, Arthur cutting himself as he shaves – Arthur has gone, without saying-goodbye; lucky for some of Arthur’s dreams, for even Arthur couldn’t look at Paula lying in bed with her head on one side, the flesh puffed up with misery, fallen across towards her ear, the forehead ridged with angry lines, and think her beautiful. It’s a thwarted, childish, needy face, unchanged from the face that hid in the darkness when Arthur stumbled in at four, cheerfully drunk, smelling of whisky, and tripped on the rug and fell on Paula, which he thought was a joy and a miracle for the split second before she screamed. And went on screaming, wild with rage even after she’d realised it was him.
Now she sighs as she drifts back to life and a gnawing sense of damage done. ‘You clumsy fool. Where the hell have you been?’ she’d spat at him, beside herself, and she could almost hear his brain creak in the dark, he was silent for a good half-minute, and when he did speak he was trying to adjust to something gigantically, globally unfair. ‘Me? Where have I been? What about you?’
‘You stink of whisky!’ (She’d meant something else; I was worried; I was frightened; hold me, Arthur.)
‘I’m allowed to have a drink.’
‘Who were you with? Where’s Sally – poor little girl, as soon as I turn my back you farm her out somewhere so you can get pissed!’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘Well tell me, pig! You’ve been seeing some woman!’
‘If you know so much I don’t have to tell you. And stop shrieking. You sound barmy. I’d almost forgotten what you were like ...’
Last night everything was passionate muddle. This morning the facts are uncomfortably clear.
– I suppose I forget what I’m like, as well. I am a bit barmy. I always was. Grace told me I used to have awful tantrums to make my mother take notice of me; not that it worked. And I do it still. Because I feel safe to do it with Arthur. He’s a better mother than my mother ever was. So I do it if ever I feel abandoned, if ever I feel hurt.
And usually Arthur could deal with her. He held her somehow. He enclosed her. Absorbed whatever it was she felt. He was usually ready to be stronger than her at the moment she needed to be weaker than him.
But last night it was all too much. She’d gone too far, at the wrong moment, and he didn’t rise to the occasion. He didn’t play the game she knew, the game that always made things right.
(So maybe the game didn’t always work. Maybe things had to go another way.)
– But we didn’t make up. He wasn’t nice to me. He didn’t let me fall asleep in his arms. He just stopped talking and slept himself.
The last thing he said had salted her guilt. ‘I’ve been train-watching. Got that? And I didn’t have a clue if you were ever coming back. I couldn’t get in touch with you. Now I’m going to sleep. I have to leave at six-thirty.’
She’d listened as his breathing steadied, and then, afraid he had gone beyond her, she’d said in a voice that was small and rueful and hardly hers at all, ‘I didn’t go anywhere. I went to my flat. I was mad at you. I didn’t answer the phone,’ and she would have gone on and said about the baby, but he didn’t answer, Arthur was asleep, and Paula was stuck with it, she was alone.
Now there was a hard awakening. Time for Paula to think about change. Time for her to feel her way towards being a parent, as well as a child, whether or not there’s a baby inside her, for Arthur must be getting tired of always playing mother.
But Arthur has other things on his mind. Arthur has hardly given Paula a thought since he pushed through the doors of the Albion, where the minor damage of this chilly morning has gone much further, where wreck has run wild.
The lobby is strewn with glass and blood. He blinks, frowns, rubs his head, looks again and the vision holds. Apart from the mayhem, everything’s quiet. Blood and glass and silence.
God. There’s been a murder here.
Then he sees the body, or rather a leg and a foot poking out of the top of the stairs going down to the dining-room, and he runs to see where the rest of the man sprawls down the staircase, blood on the shirt, blood on the hands, much more of it on the chalk-white face, an upside-down face daubed over with red. There’s a smashed bottle at the foot of the staircase, lying in a pool of dark on the carpet. The lights have blazed on these stairs all night.
Arthur’s on his knees with his head against the sodden shirtfront, listening for a heartbeat, before he sees that it’s Ian. And then he hears the heart’s dull beat and the breath which comes in reluctant roars and smells like a fire in a whisky still, and fear begins to give way to anger, for he starts to divine that this wasn’t a murder, it wasn’t an attack, Ian must have gone on a drunken bender. Yet the smeared face looks entirely innocent when he has wiped away the blood, losing itself in a drugged sleep, stripped of its nervous watchfulness.
Arthur sighs as he gets to his feet and starts to assess the damage. Why is he surrounded by psychotic children? Why is he always clearing up their mess?
The worst things are probably the till and the mirror. The till was the last non-computerised till in London, a lumbering grey metal monster with keys which had always looked indestructible, and had therefore never been replaced. Only now it is destroyed. It is full of great dents, the drawer hangs open, limp and disjointed, its back broken, and the keys stick out at bizarre angles; others have snapped like twigs. And the mirror, which had for decades reflected vanity, panic, lust, despair as the guests passed by and inspected themselves, the rather elegant thirties’ mirror inscribed with the legend The Albion, the mirror which had sealed its fate by staring across at Reception last night so unforgivingly – and Ian, desperate, must have stared back – most of the mirror now lies on the carpet in great dramatic pieces of ice, a giant jigsaw for the very young, a heart with a crack in it, a simplified swan. Beside it the axe from the store-room. Ian had run amok with the axe.
Why didn’t I see this coming, he asks himself, gingerly picking up the biggest piece of glass, then realising he has nowhere to put it, replacing it clumsily, cutting his hand, just a little cut but it stings like spite; why didn’t I see how wild he was getting. He told me often enough. He said he was a nutter. He asked me not to leave him in charge at night. But I didn’t take him seriously. I wanted to think he would be all right. I’m an optimist. And where does it get me?
At six-thirty-five one chambermaid, then another, then the third, comes in, is appalled, and raises her hands in Hispanic lament, but they soon set to with their normal energy, clearing up the mess other people have made.
Arthur is pierced by a pang of regret as the massive, lethal pieces of glass are muffled in newspaper and carried away. Perhaps they made up a message, a semaphore from below the surface, telling him something he needed to know, something that pierced to a heart of things that he had lost touch with along the way, a rhythm he no longer heard (for he knows why Paula treats him like this ... a sudden paroxysm of pain; she no longer loves him; she’s bored. How could she be happy with a man like him? She guessed at the blood behind the door, she saw the flash from the edge of the future).
‘Too beeg,’ Anna squeaks from the head of the stairs. Arthur sighs, and goes to lift the ordinary body. That was his function in life: to bear.
Grace gets up in a rush, fails to imprison all her hair in grips, hurries stiffly in to breakfast aware she’s impersonating a dotty old woman but what does she care what she looks like? What does she care what she eats? She is only afraid of missing breakfast because it would be a sign of despair.
And Grace does not despair. She is reeling, but she will not despair; she has given herself instructions, seeing a hint of droop in her bedroom mirror.
Why is she hurrying, all the same? There’s a quarter of an hour before breakfast ends, what is she escaping from? (and her clumsy foot catches a table-leg on the way to her table in the window.) Sitting down, she holds the arms of her chair and clings to them until she’s steady. That and the sea, the sea, the kindness of its purblind gaze, the light grey clouds scudding over it, everything carrying on the same, as if her life had not been changed, except for that little shift in the weather, nothing much, a small sharp breeze.
And she tries. A slow deep breath. She tries.
She has to learn it was not important, the little track that her life had made, the small dark corners she had not seen. It was all nearly fifty years ago. If Ralph had lived, after all. If he came in now in the flesh and passed me, I’d look straight through him, he’d be an old man, I’d be an old woman, there’d be nothing left.
And yet she keeps feeling that someone has died, and Kirk, she sees, is not in breakfast, a middle-aged couple are sitting there, perhaps she is looking at the wrong table, the woman is fat with an orange, irrelevant, greasy face that she stuffs with toast, Grace looks again carefully, no, he’s gone, but Major Kirk is a resident, it’s an absolute outrage, their taking his table ... she’s going mad; she closes her eyes, for perhaps he had died, and sees Ralph’s body lying there, of course he had died, he was right to go, anyone could see he was tired of life, but somehow Grace had failed to notice, somehow Grace had not been told, and so she had failed to make the effort, and now he has gone, her love, her Ralph.
But he wasn’t your Ralph at all. He died loving someone else. Don’t lie to yourself. The truth is what matters, you always fought about that with Ralph, he didn’t see why you were so ‘pedantic’, he didn’t see why you were so ‘stiff-backed’ ...
What was the truth, in any case? Perhaps she wasn’t so honest. The last time she saw him was a solid lie, every move, every breath she took was an act. (Grace realises she hasn’t touched her coffee, and sips it, weak and black.)
He left in the spring of ’39. One final row as they lay in bed seemed no more final than all the others. She’d left for school that morning with the familiar feeling of dry despair. Coming back she found canvases stacked on the stairs. Inside the flat it was chaos; Ralph and Bunny, his closest friend, were sorting his books away from hers.
Then pride took over. She didn’t ask questions. She hadn’t even asked where he was going. She went and sat in the kitchen, trying to stop her legs from trembling. In a minute, she’d made some tea, and forced herself to sit and drink it, staring at the columns of stupid print.
Sometimes they passed the kitchen door; from the corner of her eye she watched Ralph’s profile; it never seemed to turn towards her. She’d scanned the pages, act to the end, tinkled the teaspoon in the cup, checked her hair in the kitchen mirror – in the last two years she had worn it up, though Ralph had begged her to keep it loose; she’d tucked the last tendrils back into place, driven the hairgrips firmly home.
‘Are you all right, Madam?’ She realises that she’s sitting there with her eyes squeezed shut, clenching her fists, clenching her jaw.
‘Perfectly,’ she answers, crisp and cross, forces a smile, then tells the young waiter, ‘The coffee is a little cold.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll bring you another pot.’
And that was an act, as well. It salved her pride, like all the rest.
But in the end she had not been proud. She had next seen Bunny in ’45. All she knew was that Ralph was dead. They passed each other one night in a little road near Trafalgar Square; it was blackout, and almost dark; but she spotted him just in time, as he lit a cigarette on the edge of the pavement; she stood there trying to get her breath, then ran across the road to catch his arm (five years before she had refused to so much as lift her head from her cup of tea).
‘Bunny?’ she’d said. ‘Ralph’s friend Bunny? It is you, Bunny. Bunny, it’s Grace. Please talk to me. Please, you have to. I’m desperate.’
They’d ended up in a dirty café with shadeless bulbs behind the blinds.
‘It’s hard for me to believe you,’ he told her, grimacing vilely at the barley coffee. ‘You didn’t seem to turn a hair. Ralph couldn’t stop talking about it, how you sat there reading your paper and drinking your cup of tea.’
‘Acting,’ said Grace. She had nothing to lose. ‘It was the only way I could stop myself screaming.’
‘You should have screamed. He didn’t want to go ... he didn’t really want to volunteer, either. The Spanish war put him off all that. But I do think he wanted to die.’
‘Don’t say that,’ she’d begged him. ‘Please.’
‘I can still hardly bear to talk about him. He had so much talent ... such a bloody waste ... and talking to you, of all people. I’ve felt ever since – if you want to know the truth – all of us felt you had blood on your hands.’
‘But that’s absurd,’ she’d cried. ‘I’m a pacifist. I always was. I didn’t even know he was going ... I tried to dissuade him in ’36 ... I won’t accept the blame for his death. He wanted to be a hero ...’
‘He did die a hero. You can’t change that. The citation said “conspicuous gallantry”.’
In the long years that followed, their talk fragmented, reformed into a nagging chorus. You didn’t turn a hair ... Ralph couldn’t stop talking about that ... I do think he wanted to die ... all of us felt you had blood on your hands ... accept the blame for his death ... accept the blame for his death.
Grace finds she is walking along the front, pulling a strand of hair from her lips that the freshening wind has fretted across, walking faster than she has for years, and running above her, outstripping her, the clouds have started to sprint again, the film of her life is on fast forwards.
Suddenly she stops. It’s enough, she thinks. Of course it is. Of course it was always far too much. She turns her face to the wind from the sea, narrows her eyes at the fitful sunlight, and when she’s used to it she stares; at the stony beach, how it shines, then darkens, at the lines of waves, white-tipped and fast, strong-backed, taller, fiercer waves than those which lulled her through the week, and the hundreds of thousands of separate stones, their size, their roughness, their comforting reality, and knows that a lie is the thing that’s died, knows that she has been set free.
For if Ralph slept with someone else. If there was an Italian woman, after me. If he loved her, even. And painted her. Before he went to Monte Cassino to die. It was awful, and yet it absolved her. She hadn’t sent him off to die. Her failure of love had not been final.
At last she can reject that guilt, and the gulls fly over very fast in a casual arrow that breaks apart, and they fall to the sea as windblown snow, the white sun brilliant on every feather.
Arthur is talking to his old friend James, the ever-genial Pennington, but today he is sounding cagey, on the phone. Arthur is ringing from the Albion. He needs authorisation to buy a new till. He tries to tell the story as a bit of a joke, but James doesn’t seem to find it very funny.
‘We needed a new till, in any case,’ Arthur insists. ‘It was out of the ark.’
‘Hmm. Arthur, we should have a drink. Tomorrow morning. Meet me then.’
‘Saturday?’ says Arthur. ‘I’m off on Saturday.’
‘I really would like to see you, old man.’ (And Arthur realises, uncomfortably, that it isn’t an invitation, it’s an order.) ‘Things we ought to talk about,’ James continues, a tiny edge to his long-familiar voice that mixes drawl and strangulation, ‘other options we ought to consider ... How full have we been, this summer?’
‘Eighty per cent,’ says Arthur. ‘Well, seventy-five, maybe. Libyan bombing, you know. Yanks stayed away in droves.’
‘Winter?’
‘What?’
‘How full in winter?’
‘You never used to be interested ... Sixty, seventy per cent, maybe.’
‘We could be a hundred per cent all the time. Ever thought about screwing the DHSS?’
‘Screwing the DHSS?’ Arthur repeats, mystified.
‘Homeless. You know. You must have read about it. It’s an excellent wheeze, I believe. They put these homeless families in. You can drop all the frills like the bar and so on, and charge ad lib. You can’t go wrong. The councils have to cough up, old boy.’
Arthur is speechless, breathless. ‘That’s not a hotel,’ he gasps. ‘That’s not a hotel you’re talking about. I couldn’t do my lunches. I’ve read about them in the papers, yes –’ but James over-rides him as Arthur mutters ‘– they sound like hell. You’re not serious?’
‘We’ll discuss it in detail tomorrow. Think about it in the meantime. I’ve got a few other ideas up my sleeve.’ And then his voice smoothly changes gear, dozy, drawly James again. ‘I’m seeing my boy this evening.’
‘Rupert?’
‘No, Alexander.’
‘How did he like the first year at Christ Church?’
‘Didn’t I tell you? He turned it down. Said the dons were earning less money than a dentist. Decided to join a firm in the city. Clever little bugger, he’s doing rather well. Doesn’t miss a trick, my Alex. He’s started telling me what to do.’
Arthur wonders if it was Genius Junior who put up the DHSS idea. He hopes Sally doesn’t turn out like that. If she does, she won’t think much of her father.
Phyllis, back from her night at her mother’s, takes a call on another line, staring sadly at the long white scar that Ian’s axe has left on the plastic.
‘Albion Hotel?’
‘Arthur, please. Give me Arthur.’
So that bitch Paula has turned up again. She didn’t sound sour, as she often did. She sounded – lively. Even happy. (No wonder; Paula had been dancing round the room.) Phyllis pretends not to recognise her voice.
‘It’s Paula, Phyllis. Just hand me to Arthur.’
Phyllis at her most prim. ‘I can’t at the moment. He’s on the other line.’
‘I don’t care. Interrupt him.’
‘I don’t think I could do that, Miss Timms. You see, he’s talking to Mr Pennington.’
‘Oh James,’ says Paula with an easy contempt that is deeply galling to Phyllis.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Timms. I’ll ask Arthur to phone you. As soon as he’s finished with Mr Pennington.’
Phyllis puts the phone down.
Paula laughs and struts down the hall, trying to do Phyllis with her bottom sticking out, then the jubilant notes in the reggae music that thunder round her living room make her start dancing again – but carefully, since the Health Centre says she is having a baby. ‘Timms, Paula? The result is positive,’ Paula is pregnant, no further doubt, dance with me gently, little baby, and the window rattles in sympathy, but then she realises it’s the wind, a rustling, marvellous wind is blowing, rocking the creamy, showy blooms of the Indian Balsam tree in the road, and everything is so alive, the rocking trees, the blowing birds, the clouds that pass like flying lace, white lace over darker lace, the blood that swells and falls in Paula, the child she’s carrying, Arthur’s child, that Paula stands and cries again, cradling herself and yes, my baby, yes, my love, I knew you were there, dance, my sweet, we’ll tell your father.
‘Tomorrow, then. Be there at eleven.’ It’s James who puts the phone down on Arthur, and after he’s gone Arthur sits and broods for a good ten minutes before leaving the office. Things are getting colder, he realises. Not just at home, but here as well. Perhaps he won’t be wanted any more. Suddenly he longs to talk to Sally. Sally loves him. She’s at the minder’s.
Phyllis gets him the number. ‘By the way,’ she says as she begins to dial. ‘Your friend called’ (that special note of irony). ‘She wanted you to call her back.’
Yes, he thinks sourly, she would. She wants me to make the running, as usual. Wherever he looks, today, there are problems, and Paula is the least tractable. She could wait. ‘I’ll speak to my daughter first.’
‘Of course, Arthur.’ Phyllis approves.
Sally’s minder, Stephanie, sounded slightly fussed. ‘She’s quite all right, Mr Fraenkel. Well maybe a little bit tired today.’
Guilt pierces Arthur with a red-hot pin (she missed her Daddy, she could not sleep.) ‘I’d like to have a word with her, please.’
‘Daddy,’ says Sally. She sounds overjoyed. The next moment, she sounds depressed. ‘Can I come home tonight?’ (As if he never let her come home. The pin wiggles between his ribs.)
‘Course you can. I’m coming to collect you.’
‘Now? Daddy come now?’ Sally’s ecstatic again.
‘No,’ Arthur sighs. ‘The usual time. Daddy’ll come when it’s time for tea.’
‘Sally’s frightened,’ she wails, and in the background he can hear Steffie’s voice, trying to placate her.
‘What’s the matter, darling. Tell Daddy.’
‘Gonna be a nurrican,’ she’s crying, then Arthur hears wails as the phone is removed and Stephanie’s talking again, too much, with Sally’s unhappy voice underneath.
‘It’s nothing to worry about, Arthur, I’m afraid I had the radio on, I didn’t even know she was listening, and there was this special weather report, I’m sure it was nonsense, it was local radio, but someone was talking about hurricanes, Sally asked me what ‘hurricane’ meant and I foolishly told her, didn’t I, and now she seems to be in some kind of state, she’ll be quite all right when she’s had a sleep ...’
Arthur holds the stream of sound away from his ear and tries to think. Of course there wouldn’t be a hurricane, nothing like that ever happened in England, but he couldn’t bear Sally to be afraid. He wishes he didn’t have to work, he wishes he didn’t have to earn money, he wishes he could just be a decent father, he isn’t even a decent father. He wants to get out of the Albion, with the ghost of the mirror darkening the wall and the guests glancing nervously at the battered till and the bloodstains they couldn’t remove from the carpet ...
‘I’ll come and collect her now,’ Arthur says, but just as he says it the doors push open and two policemen come in, ‘Mr Fraenkel?’ – and he knows they want a statement from him about Ian, who’s sleeping it off at the station, ‘I’m sorry, something’s come up,’ he sighs, ‘I shan’t be able to come till tea-time,’ I’ll never escape, or do what I want to, my life will be wasted in this sodding hotel. At least Ian managed to break out. I know why people smash things up.
Bruno’s back on the treadmill today, back in the office doing paper-work, shipshape in his suit and tie, and he narrows his pale lashless eyes at the light, tries to make them fierce and keen, squares his shoulders against the chairback and then swings round to face the mirror, preparing himself for Judgement Day, for Haines had called when he was in Seabourne, Haines is waiting and Bruno must come. But Bruno hasn’t returned the call. Bruno is repressing a sense of panic.
He remembers now what he’s tried to forget, that when he last met Haines a month or two ago he’d felt on the verge of being misjudged, Haines’s large brown eyes behind clever glasses seemed to look through Bruno’s fragile shell and see some boneless thing inside (but Bruno flexes his well-tuned muscle), a novice who might not know anything at all (but Bruno is on the verge of such knowledge!), a dreamer, even, all words, no action (but very soon Bruno will do such deeds ...) He will do far more than they ask of him, he will do such things as will surprise them all.
In the first place, he’s going to visit Stirling’s home. ‘Visiting’ vacant premises is easy. And the premises are vacant till tomorrow evening when the old bag is scheduled to return from Seabourne and rendezvous at last with Timms.
And surely there – surely then – he runs his fingers through his pale red hair in something more than anticipation, something which shakes him to the bone, he drags the nails across his scalp, pulls at some strands, he wants them out, lifts them clean from the bloodied roots – surely at last in Stirling’s home he will find the wealth of clinching evidence, the photographs, letters, documents which will win astonished respect from Haines?
For Bruno deserves it. Bruno is hard. Bruno shows all his teeth in the mirror. He holds the uprooted hair in his hands. When it comes to the crunch, Bruno won’t play games.
But he sees a movement behind him in the mirror and swings around in unconsidered relief, for Elsa has recovered from her sudden flu, Elsa has come in after all – but it isn’t Elsa, nor anything human, it’s just the big tree outside the window waving its branches furiously, and he sneers at it in extreme dislike, and turns his back, it’s beneath contempt, but something jerks him round again; the glass in the window has a very faint hum as if a great shaking is growing in the distance.
Something strange. The hairs prickle. It’s growing dark as it used to once in the winter afternoons when his father came home and tracked down Bruno in the empty house and the voice came first, ‘Bruno! Bru-no! It’s your father! Come here and take what’s coming to you!’ and wherever he hid the voice would find him, his father pulled him out from his hiding-place and shook him till he could no longer hear, no longer see, no longer breathe, could only crawl, but not far enough.
He snaps the light on in a frenzy. Why do they leave him alone like this? Why have they always left him alone? There must be a way (and he’s holding his hands, clenching his fingers to feel his hands), there must be a way – he can’t finish the sentence, he forces his eyes to the pile in his in-tray, there’s work to do, lots of credit card checks, thousands of people applying for credit, and that (he’s laughing) is good for business, since hundreds of them will get into debt, and debt-collecting is what he’s good at ...
There must be a way, for he’s nearly thirty, he’s lived alone since he was sixteen, and no one has touched him voluntarily, they’ve touched Brunnhilde but never him (and he drives his nails through the palms of his hand) – there must be a way of getting close. And the words flash up in front of his eyes: kill, maim, suppress.
As Bruno used to beat his toys until they no longer stood up to him, and when they were limp, when they lay there passive, he dared to creep up for his kiss.
Grace peers through the window of the Martello Muncher – no one in sight, what can it mean? – and sees a couple kissing, a waitress’s uniform and a customer, two young bodies pressed together, yellow hair against a dark shoulder, and smiles a little, for a kiss is a kiss, a kiss is a sweetness she hardly ever sees – but they go on kissing, and her smile dies, for don’t they care if anyone spots them? Grace walks round and opens the door, grateful to slip in out of the wind, and at once the yellow head breaks away and she sees it isn’t a girl at all, it’s a middle-aged woman with chemical hair.
‘We’re closed,’ she says, not very agreeably. ‘There’s a notice.’
‘I didn’t see it.’
The man, who’s not much younger than the woman, is more loquacious. ‘Closed for repairs.’
‘That’s rather odd, in the middle of the season.’ But Grace spots that one of the half-dozen giant panes of glass in the window is smashed, cobbled over with cardboard, and the tables aren’t laid. ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘Has there been an accident?’
‘Accident!’ he snorted. ‘That was no accident. The Muncher got done last night,’ he continues. ‘Police don’t say much but we think it was boys. There’s a gang of boys go breaking in everywhere.’
‘No respect,’ the blonde woman says, and Grace finds herself nodding her head in agreement, grateful to join the gloomy accord.
‘I mean this was a Martello tower,’ the man says. ‘You know what those were. Stone Age forts. Well, medieval. Got the Seabourne War Museum in the basement. They protected England, the Martello towers. Now they get done by a load of boys.’
The woman feels he’s stealing her story. ‘I came in at eight, as usual, and the mess, you wouldn’t believe your eyes. Glass all over the floor, of course. And they took whatever was in the till.’
‘Dreadful,’ says Grace, and ‘disgraceful,’ but inside she’s feeling something very strange, a desire to laugh, a desire to dance.
‘It wasn’t just that though, was it,’ the man cuts in, warming to the tale, for something has happened to them at last, something that would get into the local papers, and both of them have become more real. ‘It was the mess they made. It was pointless. The little buggers took out all the eggs, she must have had five dozen eggs in that fridge, and they smashed ’em on the counter.’
‘Of course,’ says Grace and then realises she has said the wrong thing, she has felt the wrong thing, for this is an outrage. ‘Of course that’s the sort of thing they do, alas,’ she added hastily. ‘The young.’
‘I’m not old,’ the woman says sulkily. ‘I never wanted to go and smash things. They’re going abnormal, these days. You can’t imagine how slippy it was, I was skating about all covered in eggshell.’
‘Terrible,’ says Grace, as sternly as she can, but she’s fighting a desire to become hysterical, there’s something phoney in their solemn tone, the Muncher, after all, was ugly and hateful, no wonder the boys threw eggs around it. Why had she never, in a very long life, thrown eggs at anything or anyone? Pamphlets were much less satisfying. Why had she never broken out? Why was she always so English?
And why are the English such hypocrites, always simulating what we ought to feel? They didn’t feel gloomy really, those two. They’d got a day off work, after all, and they were kissing, forgetful of everything else, until she arrived to be an audience (and why did I object to their going on kissing? I kissed enough in my day). ‘I was going to visit the War Museum,’ she says, after a little pause.
‘You won’t get in there today,’ the man tells her, with melancholy satisfaction. ‘They smashed the door down there, an’ all.’
‘The War Museum! I ask you,’ the woman repeated, theatrically disgusted, and once again Grace hears it as comedy, she’d bet a hundred pounds that woman had never set foot in the War Museum. Or any other museum.
Why should she, after all?
And Grace wonders, briefly, disloyally, whether she herself really wanted to visit the chilly rooms with their odour of sanctity. Somewhere in there was a photo of her brother Eddy, and she always went to see him, to press her fingers against the cold glass. It was all a charade, quite pointless. The photo didn’t even look like him, he looked bluff and hearty, he was acting a soldier, and she was acting a sister in tears.
And most of my life I was acting a widow. If only I’d known that I’d been divorced.
‘Well, goodbye,’ she says, with a surge of good cheer, recalling that she’s off to the Lighthouse, she doesn’t need lunch, she’s too old for that, her body survives and is not demanding, nor is there time, for it’s already afternoon; and she’s glad, in the end, to be going alone, it would have meant something different to go with Paula, something different to go with Ralph. She’s ready for anything, even death. But it isn’t so easy to slip out of the door, she has to push it open in the face of the wind, and the wind has the force of a giant hand which tries to hold her back from flying.
Arthur spends two hours with the police. They talk about drugs, and prostitution, neither of which, Arthur assures them, has ever cropped up at the Albion. They talk to Arthur man to man, they swell in their collars, they expand. Arthur is glad to put up with the boredom because it means that he can’t ring Paula, if he’s had to spend two hours with the police, doing his job, being a man.
As the policemen leave, Room 24 flows down the stairs in a tight leather skirt, shaking her yard of blonde hair forward, and both men turn to Arthur and smirk. ‘Nice work if you can get it, sir.’
Sir feels better than he has all day.
‘Arthur.’ She’s standing in Reception. Her voice shifts between husky and silky; today it’s sad, but very near silk. ‘If you’re not awfully busy. The light bulb’s gone in my room, and the ceiling’s too high for me to reach.’
She was two weeks behind with her bill. He hated it when they got behind, hated having to chivvy them. ‘You’ve got a bit behind,’ he says amiably. ‘I should have mentioned it on Monday.’
From silky to husky in a single move. ‘No problem, Arthur. Sorry.’
‘Normally Ian would do this, of course.’
But it’s pleasant, walking upstairs behind her long bare legs, her long blonde hair, the swells and creases of her leather haunches. She smells nice too (and he remembers Paula; he didn’t ring back; more clearly still he remembers her voice, last night’s voice, neither silky nor husky, screaming at him that he stank of drink ... Arthur is much too busy to ring her).
The room, inside, looks very dark, although it’s only tea-time in June, and he looks at the window for a moment, looks at the rectangle of blue-black cloud, and just for a moment he hears the storm, a suppressed howl behind the double-glazing, and then he forgets about the storm, because she comes into the dark to join him.
Grace sees it bobbing round the curve of the cliffs like a tiny toy on a piece of elastic, the boat coming back from the day’s first trip, and her eyes sting as she faces the blast; every second wave it disappears behind a shining wall of spray, then she sees the flash of a yellow oilskin and then they reappear again, pale, tipped faces, waving hands, they were being tossed about like dolls, and very, very faintly, fighting its way through the roar of air and the rush of water, the sound of a dozen voices squealing, and then what sounds like a surge of laughter; and she feels an irrational desire to be in that drenched, chaotic boat, shuddering up then screaming down with all those laughing, suffering people, and she only realises very late as a wild fling of foam from the incoming tide clears the rails of the promenade and spatters the side of her face with cold, that no boat will leave while the sea’s like this, maybe nothing all afternoon. But it doesn’t matter. There’s still tomorrow. Nothing on earth will stop Grace now.
Afterwards there would be months of questions about why there was virtually no warning, why only two or three amateur fore-casters noticed something was about to happen. With all the sophisticated monitoring devices, with every kind of advanced technology, with civil and military experts reporting and every kind of surveillance at work – how did it sneak in under the noses of all those dedicated, highly skilled men, the hurricane which came from the sea and collapsed Southern England like a pack of cards? Perhaps the technology let them down. But what went wrong with their eyes and ears, their ordinary human skills?
Was it because so many people were sitting not looking out of the window, watching electronic blips on screens, telephoning or with headphones on, double-protected from the world outside by tannoyed music and extra-thick glass and cavity walls and double-glazing?
The world outside was no longer of interest to most of the people in England that day, but later that evening it suddenly grew interesting, soon it became the one thing that mattered, that night as they lay there, intensely afraid, they knew that the skin was artificial, that no one was safe, there was no ‘inside’, nothing to keep the world ‘outside’, there was only one infinitely powerful world, one tremendous, unpredictable story in which all the characters were playing dwarfs, and had no words because nothing would help them.
Paula, actually, enjoyed herself until things were pretty far advanced. It didn’t matter that Arthur didn’t ring. Arthur had every right not to ring. She didn’t feel lonely; she wasn’t alone; she had her baby, her glorious secret, she’d hug it to herself till Arthur came home, for she knew absolutely Arthur would come, she had always trusted Arthur completely – well, almost completely, the faintest pang – and Arthur had never let her down.
She loved him. She approved of him. She was sure he would be as wonderful a father to their baby as he was to Sally. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on him.
And as the happiness bubbled through her head and fizzed and whirled among the plants in the garden – the roses bobbing and nodding their heads, the clematis bower sighing, swooning, the hollyhocks straining at the leash as a fine fresh wind poured in through the window – while the world and Paula rejoiced in her baby, Paula was also clearing the decks, Paula was waltzing round the room and sorting out her files and notebooks.
By early afternoon she is hard at work, covering page after page with her strong, round, rather formless hand. Five or six months till the child is born. Since the play came off in April she has done frighteningly little work, but she’ll work as hard as she can till then.
When she thinks about the murder of Hilda Murrell, she still feels an anger that’s paralysing, blinding. That an old lady could be killed, perhaps by a seedy private detective, perhaps by a man who was sexually aroused and left those semen stains on her carpet. That the secret service might have been involved, however far away from the final violence. Or however close: ‘... those involved were men of the British Intelligence Service.’ That that could be said in the House of Commons without the building falling apart, that nobody should be particularly shocked that this could happen in England. That somebody should be snooped on and harassed just because she objected to nuclear power, just because she proudly and openly said so in language that anyone could understand: ‘Many of these very dangerous elements would never have existed at all but for man’s meddling with the very building-blocks of the universe.’ That the snooping should be contracted out to unbalanced, violent men. That someone who’d fought for good all her life should end it fighting off death on her knees
But the story leaves Paula oddly mute, in a blind alley of indignation that leads away from the mystery of fiction. She can’t play games with such a terrible death. She feels there is something very obvious that passionate anger makes her miss ... Sighing, she turns to journalism. Maybe she’s just a journalist.
There are simple things that she wants to say, things she is not too proud to say. That there is a future, that it matters, that we can’t overlay it with a film of waste. That fission products like plutonium will still be lethal in two thousand generations. That the future is the child of us all, a child that’s done nothing and shouldn’t be punished and killed just because it stares at us.
She’s completely absorbed in what she’s writing but she suddenly stops to watch Sally’s ball, a cheerful, red and yellow ball, rolling slowly then faster across the garden, propelled by no ordinary human hand, and she realises something rather grand is happening, a storm of splendid, epic proportions, for look at Arthur’s favourite tree, the plum tree cartwheels its heavy green head, no longer a crown but a blowing fountain, no longer a fruit tree in an urban garden but something reverting, unravelling, and the light has changed, it’s a low blue-green, a light that seems to have blown from the sea, a light of water and of night, but it’s only tea-time, surely ... and then it begins, a patter then stop, then start again, then a heavier drumming, drumbeats gathering, hundreds of them, and it sweeps across in battering sheets as Paula watches the picture dissolve in a shining, curtaining blur of rain.
And that, she supposes, closing the window, enjoying a first deep breath of wet air, that will be more or less that for the day, for usually water damps down a storm. And she gets back to work with a sense of contentment, Arthur and Sally would soon be home, the new baby would come in November, at least a little of the future was known.
But nothing at all of the future was known. The storm got fiercer. They didn’t come home. Arthur, the infinitely trustworthy Arthur, Arthur-the-father-who-could-always-be-relied-upon, hadn’t shown up at Stephanie’s.
‘Daddy!’ shouts Sally at the top of her voice. Perhaps the storm has killed her Daddy. She refuses to put her coat on ready. She refuses to sit down and read a book. She throws the offending book at the wall, and topples the minder’s geranium, which falls to the ground and lies on the carpet in a mess of earth and broken pot. The minder manages not to get cross. Then Sally refuses to go to the toilet. ‘Daddy!’ she screams, and clings on to the sofa, and suddenly it happens as Steffie foresaw, a little trickle, then a growing dark stain, and the other little boy that Steffie looks after, who’s drinking his milk and watching TV, turns and points – ‘Sally done a wee!’ – and knocks the milk all over the table, and the howling wind roars through the minder and she hits Sally hard on the side of the head, something she’s never done before though her father regularly did it to her, and everything inside the house goes quiet except the muttering of the TV: then Sally starts to howl in steady rhythm, Steffie says sorry, Arthur rings at the door.
By seven, Bruno is trying to hide. In the little terrace in Kensal Green the window next to the lighted, coloured window where Paula looks out on the night has dropped its neutral, slatted blind, but every so often the thin slats gape, every so often a pale, uncomprehending eye peers through. There is nothing alive in Bruno’s yard but something clatters, endlessly, and he punches the wall with irritation every time it bangs again. But he doesn’t go outside to see; he is double-bolted, double-locked, and all he can do as the dustbin lid laughs at him from the dizzy dark is bruise his knuckles on the inside wall, the wall that divides him from the next-door house, the wall that protects him from evil, chaos.
But Grace is happy on her final night. She will stay in Seabourne till tomorrow afternoon, and she sees herself rounding the shining rocks in the little boat, the sun will be out, Grace will be sitting high in the bow and it will rise before her, larger than life, more powerful than Grace’s death, the Lighthouse, having survived the storm, and at last she’ll see how wild and steep are the rocks on which they had to build, she’ll understand how brave they were, those builders from the beginning of the age, dreaming foundations on those slippery stones, hacking and sweating the dreams into facts, scrambling across between the tides, clambering up at the very last minute above the hiss of the rising water; not giving up till they nearly drowned; she would bow to them and the Lighthouse keeper.
And their vision lasted, the work was good, for the Lighthouse had stood for eighty-three years, nearly the whole of Grace’s lifetime, and how many storms had it survived? How many human lives had it saved?
As the noise grew worse, as the rattle from the window was all but drowned by the roar outside, as the crash and grind of the water on the pebbles turned into something that could shake the hotel, Grace thought of the light pouring over the water, the regular turning of the mighty beam. It could only reach out a certain space; it could only touch the edge of the void, but it would hold the human world together, it would bring the human ships safe home, and she drifts away down the shining pathway, drowsily thinking all here, all one.
But two hours later she wakes again in the darkest night she has ever known. Something is battering hard at her window, somebody’s trying to get in, she remembers the sickening feeling yesterday that somebody was following her, she remembers the phonecalls, the breathing silence, and the void is here in the room all round her as Grace turns into a pit of terror ...
Even after she’s awake enough to realise the banging is nothing human, a shutter or drainpipe that’s broken free, the blackness doesn’t drain away. Out of that emptiness her worst memory of Ralph rises to drag her down, Ralph’s fist banging the table, banging and banging, that empty noise, the evening before he went away (and Grace no longer wants to think about this, but how could she ever evict the ghosts? They sat there still, they would never stop quarrelling).
‘No one could call thirty-seven young,’ he’d shouted at her as she ate her apple and he finished the bottle of wine. ‘You’re not too young for a child, you know. Neither of us is. We’re getting old ...’
‘I don’t feel old,’ said Grace. ‘There’s still so much I want to do.’ And yet she had known it was slipping away, had perhaps already slipped too far, whatever things she’d once wanted to do. She had known it for years, since he’d gone to Spain and reappeared with the sketch-books that formed the basis of his Civil War triptych; ‘Dunne’s greatest work’, they said in the thirties. Grace knew how good they were as soon as she saw them. And the passion of envy was a revelation, because they would never say it of her, ‘Grace Stirling’s greatest work,’ and it was her own choice not to go with him (the girls at school depended on her, someone had to keep paying the rent), her own choice to make sacrifices, long after Ralph stopped needing them, for she’d lost the knack of living for herself, she’d lost the habit of believing in her writing. A new kind of statement, duller than the old, had replaced ‘I’m going to be a great writer’: ‘I used to want so much to write’, ‘I once believed I’d be a writer.’
‘I want a child,’ he’d roared, slamming his glass of red wine on the table, wasting a little rain of blood. ‘I’m wasting my time with you. You’ve never really loved me!’ (She’d heard his voice as the voice of a drunk, faintly slurred, with a sob in it, and his nose had looked almost as red as his cheeks.) ‘Not the way I love you.’
‘I’ve had a long day at school.’ She’d used her clipped, schoolmistress’s voice. ‘I don’t want a drunken argument.’
‘I’m not drunk, you bitch, I’m asking you something. Begging you, if you like. You reduce me to this, drinking and begging,’ and his fist came down on the table, banging at her again and again.
‘You’re full of self-pity, aren’t you.’ She couldn’t bear him to say she reduced him; hadn’t she tried to make him grow? Hadn’t she given herself for him? And sudden anger made her spit it out: ‘Baby boy wants a baby.’
‘And you. You’re bloodless. You’re all dried up. You’re turning into a stick insect,’ and in the same second, the wine-glass flashed, something wet and dark shot over her front and the bloodstains lay solid and dark across her lap and down her narrow thighs and she never knew if he threw it at her or whether it jumped as he punched the table, she only knew she heard someone screaming, someone screamed in terrible pain and after a second she knew it was her but when he came and knelt at her feet she stopped abruptly; she was quite all right, she didn’t want to talk about it, she found these quarrels such a strain ...
I should have screamed when he left, next day, screamed and screamed and gone on screaming.
She hears Faith’s screams outside on the landing and realises they are not her own.
At twelve, Faith was suddenly wide awake. She had looked at the dial of her watch in the dark and thought with a little quiver of dread I think it’s starting, I think it is, and it couldn’t be nearer the middle of the night, a funny little pain, a funny little cramp, she would have said it was a period backache but of course this couldn’t be a period ... then the cramp drifted off into the dark and she drifted with it on a wave of relief, just for a moment she had thought it was real and then her plans would have all fallen through; she meant the baby to be born in the morning; Faith would go down to Reception and ask one of the snooty receptionists (none of them spoke to her) to order her a taxi; she’d make the Housekeeper’s mouth drop open – ‘Mrs Emmett, I’m just off to have a baby’ – she would strip off her sweaty nylon overall and cap, leave them in a pile with her broom in the foyer, and the taxi would carry her away from them all, ‘Hospital, please, I’m about to have a baby!’ Rehearsing it again, remembering their faces, she’d fallen asleep on a dwindling pain.
None of it worked when Faith woke next at a quarter to two and the pangs had grown sharper and closer together; she doesn’t know much about having a baby but she knows for sure that this is it, and outside the window, all round the room, underneath the eaves and rocking the roof beams, the gusts of wind have grown sharper too, the wind is a high unholy scream, sharper and closer, not gusts any more, not pangs any more but almost continuous, all through her back and down her thighs, underneath her belly, rocking her rib-cage, and she realises she’s forgetting to breathe, but why is everything going so fast, her mother had said it took years with the first ...
She clutches for the light with a sweating hand. Tries it again. It doesn’t work, and Faith has been cursed, for why should the bulb go now of all times? God must be punishing her for sin – and she drags herself across to her window to draw back the curtains and let in some light. But there is no light beyond the curtains; no lights along the promenade, nothing to show where the edge might be, no light to be seen on the length of the pier, in the howling dark she can see no pier, and Faith is howling, for it’s all gone black, her baby comes at the end of the world, and she prays not to God but to her mother, who’d loved her until she began to grow up, help me, help me to have the baby, I don’t want to hurt it, show me how ... And for a long moment, the agony stops.
She manages a thought. Of course, it’s a power-cut. A power-cut, not the end of the world. She grits her teeth and gropes for her clothes, her shoes, at any rate, a dressing-gown. If she can get downstairs to the floor below, the lift will carry her down to Reception and something is telling her hurry, hurry, she manages to feel her way through the door and as the next band of contractions starts she is pinned to the spot by a thunderous crack, then a shuddering, growing roll of sound that contorts around the knots of her body and she knows that the Empire is falling down as she claws up out of the well of pain and pushes herself to the narrow staircase, trying to get the baby out.
Grace is old, but she hears the voice in the dark, something that saves her from herself, not herself but another in pain, a real person, not a ghost, and she rises, slowly but without a second thought, pulls herself up and out of bed, she’s eighty-five but alive and human and she isn’t floored when the light doesn’t work but walks through the night down the Lighthouse beam to the huddled form of Faith in the dark, not screaming, now, but panting hard, clutching the wall, trying to speak. Grace knows at once from the strange, hoarse whisper – ‘Help me, please, I’m having a baby’ – it’s the cross little girl, the chambermaid, and Grace is as young as she ever was as she half lifts her, half holds her up and together they stumble into Grace’s bedroom.
‘Matches,’ Faith says, ‘In my pocket.’ She strikes one and they see each other, her gleaming with sweat, Grace white as paper, and why, Faith thinks, does it have to be her? – but another wave comes, Faith drops the match and in the falling flash of pain she sees the eyes are wet and alive and then there’s pain and nothing else, she grabs Grace’s arm and squeezes so hard that Grace is proud it does not snap, it does not bend, her bones are old but they withstand and she takes the matches from Faith in the dark and lights another while she tries to remember, what does she know about having a baby, newspaper, one used newspaper, she wasn’t quite sure what one used it for but she reaches across for the old Observer, nearly sets it alight as she flaps it open with her one free hand, spreads it chaotically across the carpet, and Faith gets down upon her knees, ‘I must go and get help,’ but Faith can’t answer, the panting turns to rhythmic cries, no longer panicky, cries not screams, rising and falling like a cow lowing, and when they have diminished to pants again she says, ‘Yes, get help,’ and then, ‘No, don’t leave me, it’s coming now, I can feel it coming, oh God, God help me, it’ll never ... I can’t ...’ ‘You can,’ says Grace, who knows nothing at all but something lifts her, she believes what she says, ‘You’re very brave, it will be all right,’ if the matches last out, and she strikes another and sees the dark girl at her feet, kneeling there with her head tipped forward, almost touching Grace’s knees then resting on them its heavy weight, and her knees are surely too sharp, too brittle, but they have grown strong and wide as stone; and she sees again, sweeping over the water, finding the two of them, wrapping them round, the steady, turning beam of light, touching them and sweeping on, the match goes out and the beam has gone but Faith says, ‘I think I can hang on – if you go now – there’s a Dr Glossop – floor below – I clean for him –’
‘What number room?’ Grace holds her head, queer to hold what she cannot see, strokes her hair, but no answer comes and she lifts Faith’s face in the blind darkness, ‘You’ll have to remember which number room,’ and she manages to pant out ‘Sixty ...’ but the rest is inaudible, the pains are coming and this time her voice is not the same, more of a grunt than a cry this time, a rough barking, an animal sound, the sound of someone pushing and straining, ‘I’ll have to take the matches, I shan’t be long,’ and Grace is off, barefoot, in her nightgown, adrenalin driving her down the landing before she notices how strange it is, the feeling of carpet on her bare feet for at home she always wears her slippers, and even as the storm explodes around her, battering the bones of her head with sound, part of Grace thinks how nice it feels, her sole on the carpet, how real, how young, but then she comes to the top of the stairs; stairs are different, steep and frightening, she feels the Empire lean and tremble; slowly, clutching the banister, trying to remember when the staircase turns; step by step, she tells herself; step by step, don’t be afraid though her head is spinning and she almost falls but she sees herself walking along the gangplank towards the boat, steadily forwards, step by step she’s lived eighty-five years, step by step you manage to survive and that, in the end, was what counted; she had survived and Ralph had not, and the girl must survive, she must have her baby, and eighty-five years of being a lady don’t stop Grace standing on the second-floor landing, a lighted match in one steady hand, roughly in the middle of the doors in the 60s, and shouting more fiercely than the storm, louder than she shouted at the girls in school, ‘Dr Glossop! Dr Glossop! We need a doctor! Dr Glossop, wake up!’ and as the match dies her voice grows louder and she adds, and for all she knows it’s true, ‘Dr Glossop! A woman’s dying out here,’ and because the words fill her with superstitious horror, she tries to say, ‘Someone’s having a baby,’ but some strange connection fires in her brain, and the words break from her into the tempest, ‘I’m having a baby, come quick!’
So what does he think, the small, fat man who opens the door with a torch in his hand, what does he think of the crazy old woman who stands and yells in the middle of the landing, a bag of bones with coal-black eyes that flash and burn in the narrow torchlight? – ‘Dr Glossop, I’m having a baby.’
‘We’re having a baby. I can’t believe it.’
The storm scoops out a place in its heart and weaves it round with layers of sound, a nest, and in it, safe and warm, Arthur and Paula lie with Sally who’s crept in to join them, afraid of the noise, Arthur and Paula lie with their children, one of them still only hearing the storm as the dullest thunder a long way behind the immediate weather of rushing juices, thumping heartbeat, roaring breath, the weather of the body that keeps it alive.
‘I can’t believe you’re having my baby.’
‘Is it for me?’ says Sally. ‘My baby. Want it.’
‘Course it’s for you, as well,’ Paula says. ‘You can play with it. You can help with it.’
Sally, Arthur-in-the-middle, Paula. They are all back. They are all here. Arthur is happier than ever in his life. He feels like a tree; they are under his branches (all over the country they’re falling like skittles, but Arthur won’t know that till morning).
‘If I go to sleep, Daddy,’ says Sally. She’s dozing off in any case, sucking her nightie, hard to hear through the warm wet cotton, hard to hear through the crumbling heavens, clattering windows, crashing tiles, ‘If I do. Will you make it stop?’
‘You go to sleep, my love,’ says Arthur. ‘It’ll stop of its own accord by morning. It’s only a storm. We’re safe in here.’
‘Nurrican,’ says Sally indistinctly, and sleeps.
‘Did she say “never again”?’ asks Paula. They are whispering now, the two of them, turned together, in each other’s arms.
‘Room 24 made a pass at me today.’
‘You serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, I’m not surprised, you’re very attractive. But what a cheek. Doesn’t she know you’re married?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘You are ... in all but name we are.’
‘In that case, my wife had gone off and left me.’
‘Were you tempted?’
A fractional pause, then, ‘No.’ He loves her too much to want to hurt her feelings, but he thinks, ‘Yes, more than you can ever imagine, and I stayed in her room for nearly an hour, it took me that long to make up my mind; I wanted her to stroke me and flatter me, I wanted to be wrapped in that long yellow hair, I wanted to do what other men had done, all the men who’ve traipsed up those stairs. I wanted to do whatever I liked, I knew she would let me do what I liked. All the time I was there I had an erection. I wanted to be a different person; I wanted to have some fun. But the window shattered, without any warning. I was sitting on her bed, we were drinking tea, and suddenly everywhere was noise and glass, and we started to clear it up together but the room was cold, I thought about death and it wasn’t the storm, it might have been her, she’s so very pretty with those wide blue eyes but she might have had it in her bloodstream. And so I pretended that nothing had happened. I was bluff and hearty and I went away. I didn’t do it. Thank you, God.’ He isn’t religious, but thank you God. Happy, happier, happiest.
‘I shall tell Grace about the baby tomorrow,’ Paula says, thinking Grace’ll have to get to like him now. She’s never given Arthur a chance. ‘Let’s move, Arthur. Before she’s born. Or him, as the case may be. I hate living near the railway line. I know it’s only a tiny risk. But if anything happened to the kids ... How do they cope with it, those parents. Near Windscale, and the kid gets leukaemia, and they’ve stayed in the area because it was convenient ... They never thought it would happen to them.’
‘Don’t talk about it. Of course it won’t.’
‘That’s what everybody says.’
Only Paula can’t bear to think about it either, not in relation to these two children ... But she’s doing her best, she is doing something, writing about it, and today it went well. Lying here, pressed against his chest, his shaggy, Arthurian, barrel-like chest, she can’t hold out against happiness.
‘Pity you’ve got to go away tomorrow,’ he whispers, stroking her heavy hair, then gently, tenderly over her nipples, it all seems different, she seems brand new, for every part of her is pregnant – ‘We could have celebrated all day.’ Then he remembers. ‘No we couldn’t. I’ve got to have a drink with James.’
And when he’s recounted Pennington’s plan for turning the Albion into a hostel, Paula and he agree; this is the chance he’s been waiting for; Arthur will tell James where to stick it, he and Paula will start a new life, they’ll sell the house and buy cheap in the north – ‘What’s the point of that? Let’s get out of England, nothing’s getting better, let’s get out and go abroad’ – ‘So many people are saying that. Nothing’ll get better if everybody quits’ – but wherever they go, it will be all right, he has other talents, he’ll make them work, and he’s just beginning to make love to her, ‘Are you sure it’s all right? It won’t hurt the baby?’ when there is a series of shuddering crashes so fearfully loud and near at hand that Sally moans a little in her sleep and Paula at last begins to be frightened, and whispers, as Arthur noses inside her, gently, firmly, pushing inside, ‘We’re not going to die? After all this? We are going to survive the night?’ and he replies, on a swell of tenderness, slipping inside the place he likes best, ‘I wouldn’t let you die. Nobody’s going to die tonight.’
(He’s wrong. That night there were many deaths. It wasn’t what they expected, in England. Disasters are never what people expect, in Britain, in Europe, or distant Russia, earthquakes, floods, the horizon on fire. although all human beings die, each death is a horrible surprise. The silent towns, the abandoned fields, the children shivering on railway platforms, no one anticipated Chernobyl, it wasn’t what they expected, in Russia.)
‘Don’t let the baby die,’ Grace prays, and she hasn’t prayed since the Second World War when she’d prayed every day that Ralph wouldn’t die. The doctor is here, and the doctor’s wife, and her long thin room has become very small as the shadows press back into the beam of the torch and Faith hunkers down on the old Observer, pressing her baby down towards the earth. Grace has suddenly become very useful. She’d felt superfluous, standing on the threshold, till Dr Glossop wanted Faith on her back, and Faith refused, fighting his hand, ‘Not on my back, it hurts on my back, my mother had Fion like this, I was with her,’ but Glossop just went on pulling at her, and his wife, who was holding the torch for him, tried to help her husband turn her. Grace knew nothing but she knew about bullying, she also read Glossop as lower middle class, and she’d summoned her most commanding voice – every vowel was pure Compton Hall, Grace’s voice when she was Head Girl – ’I think you’d better let her do as she wishes,’ and she pushed past the doctor, she actually pushed, and began to stroke Faith’s hair off her forehead, it was sopping wet, and Faith breathed, ‘Thank – you’, and then the grunts began again, but it sounded to Grace as though they were quieter.
‘The contractions are weakening,’ Glossop hisses. He has his hands between Faith’s legs. ‘She’s getting exhausted. She ought to lie down,’ and even his wife, who is clearly in awe, is aware this isn’t a helpful statement and contradicts weakly, ‘She’s doing very well. She’s doing her best, dear.’
‘Aargh,’ says Faith, and ‘O-o-o-oh, I can’t,’ but it somehow means the opposite, she half rises from her knees, her head goes up, she starts to push down on a shuddering cry and Glossop is panicking ‘Don’t waste your breath, try not to shout, it just wastes effort,’ but the roaring breath pushes on and on and Grace hears herself saying, ‘Go on, go on,’ and then Glossop squeaks like a little boy, ‘It’s the head! the head! I don’t believe it,’ and then something huge and coated with torchlight is hanging down between Faith’s thighs, there’s a long high howl of nasal outrage, a tiny animal’s, new to the room, and Glossop is helping the shoulders out and then there is suddenly a small bright wriggling pot-bellied thing which falls like Icarus but big hands catch it, and Grace, unthinking, touches its skin, and everyone and the storm is crying.
And minutes later the porter arrives, with a hurricane lamp, blankets, a kettle, a medicine chest in which Glossop delves, and in this bright light Grace sees Faith transformed, no longer tiny-eyed and cross, rosy, smiling, shining wet, two nakednesses pressed together, holding the boy to the mound of her stomach, (so it doesn’t go flat, I thought it went flat,) but the biggest surprise is the amount of blood, on the naked bodies, the Doctor, the carpet, and now Grace sees it has soaked the paper, ‘Dunne’s Dark Lady’ is drenched in fresh blood.
‘I think the wind’s going down,’ she says. Blood on her hands, blood on her feet, wonderful blood all down her nightdress. ‘It doesn’t want to frighten the baby.’ She feels like a girl at a midnight feast which has turned out immeasurably better than expected.
‘The sea came in,’ says the porter. ‘Bloody washed in through the Empire door. I couldn’t do anythink to keep it out. The roof ’s come down. And the sea came in.’
The storm goes down too late for Bruno.
He had tried above all things to stay on his feet, if you can’t fight be ready for flight, but he couldn’t hold out; the storm didn’t stop; he felt the house collapsing round him, terrible noises of cracking and slipping, foundations shifting, roofs pulling off, the eyes close in round the creaking walls and he is to be exposed and naked, and then he will die, the watcher watched – and the lights went out, and Bruno lay down, flat on the floor in his mohair suit, flat on the floor so the wind couldn’t catch him but he’s still afraid that the roof will fall down and Bruno crawls underneath the table, telling himself that he’s only being sensible, Bruno hides with his fingers in his ears, Bruno tries to think of concrete and steel and the perfect safety of banks and accountants, but when the crescendo of crashes comes he has to stifle the weeping child, since no one will come to comfort him, no one will hold him in her arms.