1940
COMMITTEE ROOM, THE MIRRORMAKERS’ CLUB
Jonathan sat at the Committee Room table, staring at the piece of paper in front of him. At the first two words, addressing the director of the Club:
Dear Mayhew,
It was the Second Great Fire of London.
He was giddy with tiredness, still dressed in his grimy shirtsleeves, his jacket cast aside in some other place, he could not remember where.
I write to tell you of the service your people have done here tonight.
He wrote an account of all that had happened, and he did it without any of his usual rhetorical flourishes, but with poor phrases, fumbling for words. When he closed the letter, he saw his black fingerprints, the marks on the white paper, and sighed. Mayhew would see them as a sign of emotion, perhaps even instability, he thought, and they would invalidate the contents. He had best rewrite the letter when he was clean and more in control of himself. But he doubted his ability to make real what had been gone through. He began to rethink how he would do it, and sure enough that raw emotion was being distilled out. Some present should be made to them, in honour of their contribution. He had separated the others from him. Already, in his mind, he had directed things, and they had worked for him. He put the letter in his pocket, and walked out, across the landing, and down the main staircase, through the green door, into the vaults.
He moved silently, and looked at the oblivious faces of Peggy, Bill and Livy, who had fallen asleep where they lay, on their pallet beds. Livy’s hair was dark and tangled on the pillow. Her face: defenceless, and innocent, a grey smudge across her left cheekbone. Her glorious eyes were closed; he thought how pallid her face looked without them.
*
As the others slept, Christian had not yet reached his small flat, his gas ring, or his bed, only thought of these ordinary things with longing. He was still outside the Club on the road in the merciless morning light, inhaling the breath of the smoking City, having been attracted by a member of the rescue team who had just been assessing the remains of the building on the corner, and who recognized him from a previous visit. The man turned him around, and pointed out an area of damage to the Club. ‘It will need scaffolding,’ he said.
Christian swore under his breath. A bomb had made a half-hearted hole in the bottom corner of the Club. It was the exact place that he had leaned against, to catch his breath, when he had seen Livy again all those weeks ago. Christian and the man stood and peered down. It had taken the surface of the pavement up, and below was a passage, the height of a man, which, Christian presumed, had been dug around the building as a form of protection from damp. He crouched down and peered into the hole. ‘Do you have a torch?’
It was produced. Kneeling, Christian shone it into the hole. ‘It’s not so bad.’ He put a hand in, pushed aside some of the rubble. ‘It’s smaller than you think. Wait a minute.’ He got down, heedless of his clothes, levered himself a little way down into the large crack, a blow from a pagan god. Livy’s goddess, he thought, was annoyed at being disturbed.
‘Be careful, sir.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned.’
‘What’s wrong?’
Christian turned off the torch carefully to conserve the battery, climbed out and got to his feet. He hardly knew how to describe what he had seen: the delicate white shapes, and their separation against the dense interrupted clay soil of London.
‘There’s a skeleton.’
‘Not a body?’
‘No, that is, not a new body. We don’t need heavy rescue here. Whoever is there has been dead for a very long time.’
The man took his torch back and rolled his eyes. ‘That’s all we bloody need.’
*
By the time Christian had finished his conversation with the man, and had shone the torch several times into the pit so that he knew he was not mistaken, Peggy had risen from her bed and opened the doors to the Club. Christian had been standing, looking out at the ruined City landscape, when he heard the click and groan of the doors. Turned, and met her smile with his own.
‘Still here?’ she said, looking down at him on the pavement. ‘I fell asleep, but only for a few minutes. And now I feel too tired to sleep.’
‘I’m not sure I could sleep either.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on, if the water’s on,’ she said to him. He let her go without a word, and walked slowly up the steps in her wake. She had left the scent of cinders behind. The tiredness was beginning to catch up with him.
Peggy had descended into the vaults by the time he had reached the Stair Hall. He looked around at the building he had helped to save: at the walls lined by coloured marble, at the white marble staircase in its grandeur, and up at the dome. He saw dragons, and coats of arms, and the arms of the City of London. Although this building was special to him, he could think of a dozen similar. It was civic, he thought, it was impersonal. It was not a place that witnessed life and death, like a church or a register office. He heard the green door to the basement open and close.
‘Christian?’ Livy came out, rubbing one hand across her eyes. She was still dressed in the clothes she had worn the night before, and there was a smut on her face. He stopped himself from reaching out and rubbing it away. Behind her was Whitewood, with his tie on – his tie on, Christian thought – and he felt a sudden searing jealousy that the man had been down there, sleeping near Livy. He struggled to control it, not to let it show on his face.
‘There’s bones in the building,’ he said, with an imitation of a smile. ‘Like a Gothic novel.’
Livy blinked and frowned. ‘What?’
Christian explained what he had found: Livy and Jonathan stared at him. ‘I can only see part of it.’
‘What can you see of the body?’ Her voice was urgent; she looked even paler than the moment before.
‘Not much. The top half. The top of the skull, some of the vertebrae, but some earth has fallen in.’
Jonathan had come up behind Livy, and put his hand on her shoulder. Christian stared at that hand, at that impression of ownership. The sudden anger he felt startled him. Dispassionately, he thought he might strike the man: knock him down. But it was the tiredness, he thought; he had to remember it was the tiredness.
‘Show me.’ Her voice was insistent, strong.
‘Is that a good idea?’ Jonathan, pulling her back.
Christian held out his hand. She walked towards him. And, just briefly, he brushed her elbow before he ushered her towards the front door.
*
As Livy walked through the Stair Hall and into the darkness of the Entrance Hall before that large rectangle of light, to step outside for the first time in many weeks, she felt the building retreat from her, felt it shrink away, so that her focus was on the light, and on reaching the bones which Christian had described to her. She walked without a glance at the beautiful walls, without a thought of their detail, without even thinking of the painting of Charlotte and its cool, contained beauty. She walked towards the anarchy of something. His words had broken through something, torn something open as easily as parachute silk. Her muscles were tired, but she was awake, and she knew she had given everything, and something had begun to stir inside her.
She went down the steps, blinking at the light, and let Christian pass her. He and Jonathan were speaking but she did not listen to them. She did not glance from left to right. They turned the corner.
A vast hole in the pavement: a darkness.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.
‘Crouch down,’ said Christian. ‘I’ll shine the torch. Don’t ruin your slacks.’
Jonathan murmured something: she heard the tone of disapproval. He took a few steps away from them, turned his back, and lit a cigarette.
Livy did as Christian said, narrowed her eyes: caught sight of something briefly in a wavering flash of torchlight as Christian swung it; rolled back onto her heels.
‘The skull,’ she said. Put her hands back on the London pavement, to support her weight. The icy dampness of the London stone travelled through her hands, her arms, and into her trunk. And she felt it, she really felt it. Felt it, she realized, in a way that these bones could not feel. And it struck her: Charlotte, in the painting, the golden light behind her, the white skin, the pinpoint of light in her eyes, and that smile, just beginning.
Charlotte was dead. Henry was dead. Ashton was dead. They lived in their letters, in the words, in the flat surface of canvas and paint as hard and bright as enamel, but these things were all just things, as dead as these bones, they were more dead than the London earth, for at least that was teeming with life. The thing that they had been was gone, burned out, released.
And they seemed to speak to her, these people, in unison. As though Henry had put down his pen and looked at her, as though Charlotte brushed her hair with the silver-mounted brush, and leaned to look in the mirror in her portrait, her face beside Livy’s. And Ashton – oh, poor Ashton, never thinking of anyone but himself, never imagining he could ever die, just fighting death, and time, and imagining himself as permanent as a diamond. Christian said her name and touched her shoulder, and as she turned to look at Jonathan – insolent, proud, untouchable – Henry, Charlotte and Ashton turned to her, as though they sensed her presence in their world, a shadow in the corner of the room, there just for a moment.
They said it to her.
Life or death. Decide.