But it is over the docks, as yet. No incidents on his patch. So far. He is able to make the rounds of his shelters unhindered by crisis calls. The tube station is full, but quiet, except for a bunch of soldiers on leave who have stocked up with booze; the self-appointed shelter marshal, a termagant of a woman, will crack down on them if necessary. Branton Street are complaining because their hurricane lamp won’t work. The Lunt Square cellar is badly flooded again and they are having to bale out.
He hears the hesitant throb of planes and takes cover in a doorway. He can tell that they are high and heading for the river. They have all become connoisseurs of these sights and sounds that were undreamed of a year ago and will now be for ever before the eyes and in the head. The unearthly, awesome effects of the big fire nights when the whole sky is a brilliant orange, with the plump shapes of balloons floating against it as clear as by day, and incandescent columns of smoke boiling upwards, grey-black touched with red. The scarlet blizzards of sparks, the drifting clouds of red embers; the silver arcs of water jets against the banks of smoke. The shrill descending whistle of high explosive bombs, and then the dull prolonged boom, shuddering away into silence. The shattering thud and blast of a land-mine, after which the pavement lifts under your feet, the whole place rocks. The fire-bells, the high moan of the hooters, the crunch of tyres on glass-strewn streets.
The night skies. In which moon and stars have become a backdrop, eclipsed by the brilliance of a different display. Chandelier flares drifting down like lanterns, drenching streets and buildings in a pure white glare. The long hard beams of the searchlights, feeling around in the black sky, seeming to fence with one another, and then coming together in great tents at the apex of which is the caught firefly of a plane, circled with shining shell-bursts. While down below on the ground people grope about in the dark, feeling their way by the glimmer of shrouded torches, the white-painted landmarks of kerbs and tree-trunks, the thin crosses of colour on blacked-out traffic lights.
There is a torch jerking towards him now, insufficiently muffled, and just as he is about to shout an angry warning he recognizes the voice of a colleague from the ARP post. ‘That you, Jim? There’s a girl having a baby in the Ransome Street shelter.’
‘Try to get an ambulance down there.’
‘The phone’s gone dead on us.’
They meet up in the middle of the black street. ‘Bloody heck!’ he says. ‘Get to the Casualty Post, then, and ask one of the nurses to come over. I’ll go and see what’s to be done.’
The Ransome Street shelter is one of the small concrete sub-surface ones. There are thirty or so people in there, crowded up on benches in the dim light from the hurricane lamp. They have got the girl laid out on rugs and coats on the floor at the far end. As Jim enters he hears her give a yell, and a rustle runs through the people who have clustered up by the door to make space. An old man is sucking up tea from a tin mug. He says, ‘Well, here’s a fine to-do then.’ Someone else is murmuring that she shouldn’t be here anyway, if she was that far gone, and is reproved by a neighbour.
‘She was evacuated, and she come back because her mum was ill, and then her mum was bombed out two nights ago.’
He edges down the narrow aisle along the floor gritty with sand spilled from the sandbags that bank the shelter. The girl is not more than twenty or so; fair hair falls lankly from a sweat-stained face. She is gasping and chewing her lip. He says lamely, ‘Don’t worry, there’s a nurse on the way.’ And then another contraction comes; she clutches at the women who are beside her and screams again. And the others in the shelter tut and mutter, in sympathy and in unease, unnerved by that primeval sound of a woman in labour.
‘It’s all right, my lovey, it’s all right.’ One of the women turns to Jim. ‘It’s not going to be long now. Can’t you get us an ambulance?’
He belts out into the night again to see if the nurse is coming, and finds her, stumbling her way on foot, and brings her to the shelter. She is a brisk effective powerhouse of a woman, honed to a fine point of compassionate authority by years on the district in Stepney. She sweeps up the occupants of the shelter, sorts the men into a group by the door, isolates the girl and the self-appointed midwives, despatches Jim back to the ARP post for more blankets, a primus stove, kettles and water.
It is hotting up, out there. He can see a reef of smoke now, to the east; they must be getting it bad in the docks. He picks his way sightless through the darkness, expert now, knowing by feel the siting of kerbs or lampposts, sensing the imminence of breaches in the road surface. He halts for a moment at the end of the road to get his breath, and looks up, as you always look up these days, at the treacherous sky, the sky that was once a simple matter of sun, moon and stars but which now deals out fire and destruction. It is a fine clear night, and he can see stars now, glittering behind the sweeping searchlights and the white blossoms of shell-bursts. And the moon, nearly full, poised somewhere above Greenwich: cold, perfect and inviolate.
Back at the post they are all cursing at the loss of the phone, running hither and thither with messages. When he announces he must take the primus they are further demoralized; the cups of thick sweet tea that punctuate the night are what keeps everyone going. Pleading life and death (an appeal that has perhaps lost its edge, these days) he gathers up primus and utensils, plus all available blankets including that belonging to the post’s resident cat. While he is doing this they all pause at the distant crump of a bomb, half a mile away perhaps, and wait for the rest of the stick seconds later – more crumps, and the boom of some buildings in collapse. And then he sets forth once more.
At the end of Ransome Street, yards from the shelter, he pauses, alerted in some uncanny way. He looks down the length of the road, to the wide scoop of sky at the end. And against this darkness he sees a block of even denser darkness, a drifting oblong, something light and wayward as thistledown, that floats slowly and lazily over the roof line, cruising to earth. For seconds he is mesmerized. He simply stands there, and then his wits respond, he throws himself face down, hands clasped over his head.
There is a great flash of white light. And then a noise like a colossal, supernatural growl that consumes and deafens. And the pavement recoils. It comes punching up at him – once, twice, again. He is sliding helplessly across the road, caught in a current of blast that is like some monstrous tide; he drifts ten yards, and washes up against the wheels of a car. He lies there, battered, his ears ringing. He lifts his head, looks down the street, and sees in the distance that the whole of one of the dark masses of house frontage is bellying out, bulging as though shoved by an invisible hand, and then it simply dissolves, flooding downwards, and now debris is pattering down all around – a building fragmented, reduced to a shower of dust and rubble.
He eases himself onto his hands and knees. The shelter is intact. The land-mine has demolished the end of the street, but the shelter is undamaged, and so is he. He waits till the debris has ceased to fall and then he gets up and hurries for the shelter. It is quiet now. There is a great stillness, as though for a minute the place were holding its breath. He pushes open the door of the shelter and as he does so he hears this sound, this single sound. The thin, determined cry of a new child.
Nine
‘Mr Halland?’
‘Speaking.’
‘Mr Rutter would like to talk to you.’
‘Well, I’m afraid I don’t particularly want to speak to him,’ said Matthew. ‘So would you kindly …’
‘Good morning, Mr Halland,’ said Rutter. ‘I got an apology to make to you. I was talking a bit out of turn the other day.’
‘Don’t mention it. And now if you’ll excuse me …’
‘I got a tendency to go straight to the point, know what I mean? I got no time for messing about.’
‘Quite.’
‘People can get me wrong and I don’t blame them. I get carried away. My girlfriend says I should count to ten before I open my mouth, and she’s about the only person
can use that sort of talk with me and get away with it. Her and my mum. Eighty-six, my mother is, and treats me like I was in short trousers – you’d laugh, Mr Halland.’
Wincing at this unsolicited glimpse of Rutter’s private life, Matthew broke in. ‘Look, what exactly is the purpose of this call?’
‘I’d like you to come up to my place so we can have another little chat. We got off on the wrong footing before.’
‘No thanks,’ said Matthew. ‘I’m allergic to dogs.’
Rutter laughed merrily. ‘All right, then. What about a little lunch at the Caprice?’
‘Frankly, no.’
‘You’re playing hard to get, Mr Halland.’
‘No. I’m being realistic. This is all a complete waste of time.’
‘Mr Halland, we’re both businessmen, right? I got a simple proposition to put to you.’
‘I really cannot conceive of any proposition of yours that would be of interest, I’m afraid, Mr Rutter.’
A sigh. More in sorrow than in anger, it would seem. ‘I think maybe I’ve caught you on a bad morning, my friend. I’ll be in touch.’
Click.
The glass engraver lived and worked in a converted warehouse on the waterfront at Wapping. She was called Eva Burden, and had been recommended to Matthew by a colleague. The address was elusive: he cruised for ten minutes around an area of demolition, of uninhabited new constructions slung about with estate agents’ signs and of uncompromising blank façades until at last he found a door with the name scrawled on a card beside the bell.
She was a small dark woman in her late fifties. ‘Come up. Sorry about all the stairs.’
They emerged at last in a bright studio room overlooking the river. Matthew, going to the window, saw the Greenwich ferry and heard the tannoy quacking its commentary. ‘Very choice view you’ve got.’
‘I was lucky – I came here early on. I couldn’t possibly afford this place now.’
She made coffee, talking about soaring property values, about her neighbours – the original adventuring colonizers of these derelict sites now superseded by the wealthy young of the City. She shrugged: ‘I’ll be dislodged eventually – if only by my own greed. I could make lots of money if I sold, they tell me. But I’d rather stay – where else could I have so much to look at?’
Her speech had an otherness – a suggestion of elsewhere. Vowel sounds; something curious about the rs. Matthew said, ‘Have you always been a Londoner?’
‘I’m German by birth. I came here when I was eight, in 1939. The Kindertransport.’
Of course. That faint unquenchable whiff of Europe. Tenacious and emotive. Looking at her – this middle-aged, oddly vibrant woman in trousers and a sweatshirt – Matthew saw a child with a cardboard suitcase on a station platform.
‘Perhaps that’s why I’m attracted by the river. Refugee mentality. The way to somewhere else.’
‘I should think the river draws most people.’
They sat at a table by the window, looking out. The City Airport hovercraft, a dapper swirl of white and blue. A rowing eight. Gulls. A piece of drifting timber. Plastic bottles.
‘Once I saw a corpse,’ said Eva Burden.
‘What did you do?’
‘Phoned the police. They sent out a launch. And it wasn’t after all. It was some sacking and bits of wood. I felt very foolish. They said it happens all the time. People expect bodies in rivers.’
‘No doubt with good reason. But I envy you. If I lived here I’d never be able to take my eyes off it.’
‘Off what?’
‘The water,’ said Matthew. ‘Principally.’
‘Ah, yes. Water. When I was a child they used to take us to this beach, and I would look and look at the sea, knowing that where I came from was somewhere out there. I saw it as an island. A small German island with my town, my house, my parents, exactly as I left it all.’ She stared across the table – dark intense eyes under a black fringe streaked with grey. ‘You don’t have a map in your head, as a child. Later, you have the globe – the seas and the shapes – and you can’t ever get back to that emptiness, that mystery. Knowing that there are other places, but not knowing where they are, or how to get there.’
Meta Incognita. The country which has not been discovered and which therefore has no name. The place which lies beyond the sea card, which may be ten leagues off, or fifty, or a hundred. The country of ice and snow, of bears and seals, of savages and of gold. The unmapped, unknown, treacherous coastline which lurks somewhere beyond the mists, over the edge of the seas.
‘So you want a ship, for this building of yours? What sort of ship?’
‘Something along these lines …’ Matthew spread his books and photocopies on the table.
‘I see. An Elizabethan ship. Fine. Lots of possibilities. I shall enjoy this, I think. How big? And what is the background? I’ll have to come and look at the site, of course.’
The ship is a pinpoint in infinity, and a universe. It is a fragile thing to be smashed in the ice or swallowed by a wave; it is a great creaking ponderous solidity of oak and iron. It is a defiant statement of ingenuity and order, a challenge flung down to the anarchic wastes of water, wind and ice. Aboard, there is language, a social structure, and the means to manipulate the physical world. An astrolabum. A compass. A sea card. A Sphera Nautica. Beyond, there are roaring tides, snow, fog, gales, drifting packs of ice islands, and the blessed elusive certainties of sun, moon and stars. The ship has purpose, and direction. It is powered by human ambition, aspiration, endeavour and greed. And set against this formidable array is the intractable hostility of this blank white quarter of the globe. Which will win? Will the ship vanish into the maw of nature, or will he tame that wild expanse by naming it, by charting it, by giving it position and a shape, by reducing it to a scribble of lines upon a sea card? Martin Furbissher, Ffourbyssher, Frobusher. Frobisshers Streights.
‘The sails are the crux of the design, of course,’ she said. ‘That wonderful swoop. Three swoops. I shall have to be both accurate and a touch stylized. I shall need to exaggerate the sails, don’t you think?’
‘Definitely.’
‘And what about people? Do you want human figures?’
‘No. I think the ship says it all.’
A monstrous apparition, which comes riding out of the ocean, infested with evil spirits shaped like men. Followed presently by fellow apparitions, large and small, crewed by a devilish horde armed with weapons which spit fire and death.
The people watch and wait. They hide behind rocks. They follow the monsters from inlet to inlet. They dance upon the shore and make signs of friendship. They match trickery for treachery, take captive for captive, shed blood for blood.
‘No people, then. Birds? An albatross? A whale?’
‘I’m tempted by the whale,’ said Matthew. ‘Let’s think about that. Albatrosses are Antarctic only, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh dear – natural history isn’t my strong point. What I shall do, of course, is make some rough sketches and then we can go on from there. When I’ve been to the site and can see how the light will fall on it and how the reflections will work. Mind, I must be honest – I’ve got pretty mixed feelings about Docklands. From an architectural point of view. Of course, I haven’t seen your particular building yet.’
‘I’ve got pretty mixed feelings myself,’ said Matthew.
Eva Burden laughed. ‘And we all have to make a living, don’t we? Actually, I’m rather excited about this commission. Even if it is going to adorn a temple of commerce.’
Meta Incognita is inhabited, then. It is populated not only with seals, foxes, wolves, bears and teeming legions of birds, but also with men and women. These people wear animal furs and have skins the colour of a ripe olive which they paint with blue dots. They live in caves in the ground and hunt their food with slings, darts and arrows. They are almost certainly cannibals, and worship some form of magic. They will trade skins for trinkets, knives and bells, but are not to be tru
sted.
These people are ignorant of the significance of gold. They do not mine the gold-bearing ore from the ground, neither are they able to locate the deposits of ore.
‘I’ll finish off on site,’ she said. ‘But the main work will be done here, of course.’
‘With the river as inspiration – very appropriate in this case.’
‘Oh, I’m shuttered off when I’m working – literally.’ And she reached for a helmet, put it on, became for a moment a motorcyclist, a spacewoman, an alien. ‘The glass dust – you mustn’t breathe it in. This thing has a pump, so you get fresh air. Cumbersome but necessary. So I’m not looking much at the river.’
‘Ah, I see. Your drill gives me the shivers. It puts me in mind of visits to an extremely primitive dentist when I was a child.’
She laughed. ‘That’s pretty much what it is.’
Around the room there were examples of her work. A white and haloed saint-figure floating in a great sheet of glass; goblets etched with delicate lettering; butterflies caught in the curve of a bowl. Matthew prowled – inspecting, approving. He visualized her at work: a Pony Express bike courier creating miracles with a dentist’s drill.
‘Has this always been your line?’
‘What a one you are for questions! No – I was an illustrator originally. I’m self-taught. Anyone can do this who can draw.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I always wonder about how people get to be what they are.’
‘And why not? Well, I was a refugee girl who had a certain gift with a pencil, picked up jobs doing commercial graphics, moved into children’s books, dust jackets, any illustration work I could get – then saw John Hutton’s screen at Coventry one day and knew what I really wanted to do.’