He sees a burnt-out bus with its nose in a crater, a tree from whose branches flaps clothing blown from the window display of a shattered shop. The city is full of such flukes and oddities. He stops to buy cigarettes and then again to push into the bright curtained fug of a pub for a quick half pint. Five minutes snatched from the night ahead, a stay of time in which to gossip, swap news, and then smack the glass down on the counter and out into the last grey glimmer of daylight and the final half mile to his post.
It is midnight before the sirens go, and they are starting their third hand of whist, and had thought to be settled in till morning. The first two hours are quiet; the throb of aircraft once, high, and then bangs and thuds, far off, down at the docks somewhere, and the sky lit for a while. He does the rounds, checks his shelters. Nothing to report. Back to the post for a cup of tea. Out again. He finds a drunk huddled in a doorway and hauls him to a shelter. The eastern sky is glowing now; there are fires down there, and he can hear the Woolwich guns. It is hotting up. He heads for the post again to see if there are any messages.
He hears aircraft. That slow insistent drumming. Getting louder, nearer, a whole bloody great wave of them, flying low. He ducks into an entrance, where he stands, peering out and up into the black sky that shows nothing but which roars and drums, louder and louder. They are right overhead.
The first of the sticks falls several streets away. Jim drops at once to the ground and lies with his hands clasped behind his head, waiting. He hears the second, nearer, a whoosh and a thud that leaves his ears ringing, but no slow groan of falling bricks and masonry – it has smashed harmlessly into the road. And even as he registers this the third is on its way – a whistle hurtling downward with such force that it is as though it did not fall but were sucked from the sky. There is an almighty bang, and then absolute silence. He lifts his head. His ears clear and he hears the long shudder of a building in collapse, and bricks pattering down. And at last silence again; a different silence.
He picks himself up and hurries down the street. There is broken glass everywhere, and rubble, and as he makes his way through, shining his torch to right and left, he sees gaping blown-out windows, pocked façades and, at last, the seat of the blast. The building on the corner is not there any more. It has compacted like a concertina; five stories have condensed into a pile of brick and timber out of which – as he swings the beam of the torch up and over – there rear twisted iron girders and the intact party walls at either side. The whole thing fumes with dust. There is a smell of gas. And underneath the lot is a cellar shelter in which, half an hour ago, he counted eight people.
The cellar has a reinforced ceiling. Chances are, they have survived. He shouts into the rubble, but can hear no reply. He heads for the post to report and to order out the Heavy Rescue, and sees on the way that the next street is cratered and that the first of the stick has demolished a derelict warehouse further on. At the post, the switchboard girls are in action already. Another warden has reported an incendiary fire and a suspected UXB. The whist cards lie on the table, beside half drunk mugs of tea.
He reports. Joan on the switchboard gets busy again.
‘Our Heavy Rescue’s out over in Spitalfields. They’re going to log us next but it could be some time. They’ll see if there’s any can come in from Westminster.’
He curses. ‘I smelt a gas leak. Call up a fire engine, too, and the casualty station. And keep at them, Joan.’
He rounds up a couple of sub-wardens, and the three of them plunge out again. It is noisy everywhere now. The wave of planes has passed, but the city has flowered in their wake, dappled with fires, echoing with sirens and hooters.
As they reach the pile of rubble they see one side of it twitch and judder, settling. The sky is bright enough from reflected fires to see the structure of the debris, and they start gingerly to shift timbers and bricks, looking for a way in. Jim shouts again, and this time there is a muffled cry. Encouraged, excited, they burrow faster, they find the bottom of the stairs, which shields a black cave of dirt, dust and splintered timber, and Jim gets his head and shoulders through. He shines his torch. The rubble is looser here, there are tunnels and passages. And he can hear them now. Someone moaning, and a man’s voice: ‘You going to get us out of here, mate?’
He tells the voice not to worry, to hang on. He is bright and calm, feeling no such thing. He has seen that there is a route down, twisting through timbers and blocks of masonry. He backs out to tell the others. ‘I can bring them out. Anyone that can move.’
There is a reek of gas. Jim edges back into the hole, with the other men shining torches behind. He creeps into the smashed bowels of the building, under a girder, over splintered joists. It is quite quiet in here, except for the shifting of the rubble, which ticks and mutters around him, a continuous shudder of uneasy weight, settling, slipping, and all the time the light spatter of falling plaster, and a trickle of water from a broken pipe. And the someone down there underneath who is moaning.
He is tense with the expectation of a gas explosion. And he can smell scorching now, too. Somewhere, the rubble is smouldering. He keeps talking, to reassure those buried, to distract himself: ‘Have you out in a jiffy now, not to worry. Heavy Rescue blokes are coming along behind. Nice cup of char waiting for everyone at the wardens’ post. Won’t be long now.’
And then he is into the corner of the cellar and sees that the ceiling has held up at one end but that it slopes down into a compacted ruin from which protrude a pair of legs, a hand, and a head, the face a shining mess of blood. He swings the beam of the torch away and finds a woman lying on the floor, grey with plaster, like the cast of a person. Dead. A man is slumped against the wall, who looks up, blinks in the torchlight, and groans. And someone else is moving towards him on hands and knees, and another is stirring under a fallen beam.
He brings them out, one at a time, the three men who can make it, guiding them up through the rubble, expecting every moment that the whole pile will shift, shunt, and seal them all down there. He comes out, gulps the air, and goes back in. Until they are all out, except the plaster woman, and the legs, the hand, the head.
He leans up against a wall, knackered. The ambulance has come, and gone. The firemen are hosing down. There is nothing more that he can do here, but for several minutes he stands, watching the black outlines of figures move to and fro against the mound of smoking shards. A building fragments into an inconsiderable heap of great density. Likewise, corpses always seem smaller than living people, but heavier.
It is well past dawn, and quite light, when at last he leaves the post. The All Clear went some while before, but there was checking of shelters to be done, and the night’s log to be made up. So that when eventually he swings onto the saddle of his bike, and pushes off across the city again, it is raw, chill morning. The clouds have rolled over now, too late; there is a grey pall everywhere, and rain pouring down.
He senses that all is not right before even he turns into the square. Something reaches him as he rounds the corner: a charge in the air itself, a portent of change, of inexorable event. And there are too many people about; a fire-hose snaking along the pavement.
He comes into full view of the terrace, and sees. He sees what he has seen so many times but which now, here, is different. Unutterably different. The void where there should be a solidity; the confusion on the ground; the moving figures.
He approaches. They are concentrated around one particular point in the rubble – the black glistening firemen, the rescue squad. And then someone steps aside, and he sees. He sees that they are uncovering a child, the upright body of a child, the head tilted back as though looking up to the sky, the face and neck washed white by the pelting rain. A child. His child.
He stands there. He has become, it seems, nothing but a pair of eyes, seeing this. He knows only this here and now, this sight. And it comes to him, in a long moment, that there will never be a time when this has not been – the small cold statue of her there, and
the rain falling, and the leaves piled up under the plane trees.
Fifteen
Matthew woke, in some timeless stretch of the night, to a profound sense of melancholy. He swam up from a dreamless sleep to absolute wakefulness, and lay there in the dark in deep unease. He felt himself tenuously inhabiting his body, poised beside an abyss. Nothing to be done, nothing, nothing. The pity of things. He stared into it, mourning. And then slowly the feeling ebbed and he began to hear the sounds of the London night. The rumble of an aircraft, an accelerating car, a sudden burst of laughter under the window, the tap of high heels on the pavement. He listened to the receding wail of a police siren, to a barking dog. He stepped back from the abyss, savoured the ground under his feet.
He went to the bathroom, returned, pulled the curtain aside and stood looking out into the street. Roosting cars, the dark frontage of the terrace opposite, with here and there the glow of a lit window, dustbins, rubbish skip, bike chained to a railing, and a single figure hurrying away in the distance. The alien but companionable world of others. He got back into bed, and waited for sleep, calm now but affected in some way he could not identify, as though there were some knowledge he had received and lost again.
There had been no more dead rats. Matthew’s car remained intact. But he found himself irritatingly jumpy. He inspected his front door with suspicion each time he returned. He swung about at the sound of following footsteps. When the phone rang he would snatch off the receiver and hold it to his ear in silence until he heard the puzzled interrogation of a friend, a colleague, his mother.
It looked as though the bullies were losing interest in him, as predicted. In which case no doubt harassment was simply transferred elsewhere. He found himself thinking a great deal about Rutter, both in frustrated rage and a kind of detached interest. Cities will always favour people like him. They fatten on opportunity; they are spawned by the place, and then shape it to their own advantage. It seemed the supreme irony that their labours should so long outlast them, in terms of what is built and what is destroyed. And eventually, of course, history makes its own reassessments – ruthless greed becomes entrepreneurial skill, opportunism becomes farsightedness and acumen. The ravished landscapes and blighted lives, incapable of testimony, slide into oblivion. Finally, the statues are erected; the bold, visionary figures arise in bronze upon their plinths.
It was hard to imagine Rutter commemorated in bronze, or bestowing his name on streets and squares, but more startling re-interpretations of a man’s endeavour are plentiful. As it was, it was easy to see him as an apt incarnation of the spirit of the times, licensed to do what he would by an official creed of self-advancement and economic adventurism. Those responsible did not, to be fair, have such as Rutter in mind – they simply created a promising environment. It would then seem curious, if not perverse, to penalize the growths most fervently responding.
He would think savagely of Rutter, as he drove to the office, or down to Blackwall. And then the thought would be overridden by the merciful vagaries of the attention, as he was distracted by a professional problem, by the dictation of his diary, by the teasing image of Sarah Bridges.
*
He waited for her outside the National Portrait Gallery, on a Sunday afternoon. The time and place were at her behest. She had hesitated in the face of his proposals – dinner, a walk by the river – and replied that in fact she had been intending to go to the Gallery to check up on a picture of Byron, in connection with the magazine. Possibly he might like to come with her? They could have tea somewhere afterwards. He wondered if he was being fobbed off.
And so he waited. Ill at ease. A touch apprehensive. Exhilarated. And so, ten minutes into anxiety time (she has changed her mind; there is a misunderstanding about where or when), he saw her, poised at the far side of the zebra crossing, head turned to assess the traffic, a gust of wind blowing her hair across her face.
The exchange of greetings. He scoured hers for a significant warmth, and could not find any. Friendly, cheerful, but, he felt, neutral.
The entry into the Gallery. The choice of a route. And now they are digested by the place, in that odd ambivalent state of those who are alone together in a crowd, conducting a dialogue and yet preoccupied by what they have come here to do. They have come to look at pictures. They look.
They go first to Byron, where Sarah satisfies herself that an unattributed illustration she has come across does indeed represent this portrait. Then, by previous agreement, they climb stairs and begin to wander through the Gallery, which Matthew has not visited for several years.
Under these circumstances, it is inevitable to drift apart, to come together for comment and discussion, to separate again. Matthew moves from one painting to another, through a pageant of reference and association, thoughts scudding through the head, seeing, watching, noting.
Eyes. The painted eyes upon the walls which return the gaze of the living eyes which pass before them. The painted eyes are old, young, blank, alert, but all have the serenity of their condition – caught at a single moment, endowed with an artificial permanence. The living eyes are lustrous, rheumy, fresh, jaded; they blink and peer, they steal glances from side to side, and across the room.
She is wearing pale trousers and a dark brown jacket. She has a way of standing with one foot at right angles to the other, like a ballet position.
Faces. Tudor faces, Restoration faces, eighteenth-century faces, Victorian faces. Faces forever hitched to their time, defined by dress and ornament, by the conditioned strokes of the painter’s brush. Faces which prompt a thousand flickering unspoken responses from all these viewing eyes, the undreamed-of inheritors.
She is looking around now. Looking, it would seem, for him.
Take, for instance, the 375 faces which look out from ‘The Reformed House of Commons, 1833’ by George Hayter, a remarkable gathering, a complacent thriving company in their wing collars, their high-buttoned waistcoats, the fettering garb of the day. Locked away there in their perpetual present, oblivious to the streaming narrative of subsequent event, which pours through Matthew’s mind as he observes them.
And now she is at his side. ‘My goodness!’ she says, considering the picture. And then, ‘That, of course, is a splendid con. A fake.’
‘Fake?’ enquires Matthew, turning to her, his mind no longer on the Reformed House of Commons.
‘It’s a moment that never was. He painted the individual portraits in his studio, so there was never a time when they were like that at all.’
Matthew nods. He points out that of course there is a sense in which this is true of any portrait. What we see is the refinement of many things that the painter saw – expressions, emotions, manifestations of personality. Again, a form of invention. ‘Like when you try to remember someone’s face,’ he goes on. ‘What you conjure up is an impression, which may be short on accuracy. For instance, I hadn’t noticed your mole.’
Her hand goes up to her cheekbone and touches – for an instant – the mole. She smiles. ‘But why should you?’
He does not reply. They continue to look at each other until, at the same instant, both break off unnerved. Matthew turns back for a last survey of the 375. Sarah says briskly, ‘On. We’ve hardly seen anything.’
They pass through the Romantics again, where she hovers over Byron for a further minute. They go down the stairs, together now, and are plunged at once into the splendours and sobrieties of the nineteenth century. Matthew is halted by Gladstone and Disraeli, near life-size; Sarah roams ahead.
A portrait, of course, is also a relationship. Two people are involved. There are the eyes that look out, but there were also the eyes that observed and recorded. Disraeli gives an impression of ill-concealed boredom, commemorating perhaps a not entirely successful entente between painter and sitter.
She is no longer in sight. The room is bereft.
He wonders what she is looking at. What he sees and what she sees is the same, and unimaginably different. His Disraeli is
not hers. He thinks of all the images on these walls, lodging this afternoon in a hundred disparate heads. That earnest Japanese lady, the lanky Scandinavian youth, those noisy girls. And what does Sarah see when she looks at him, as she did just now?
She is beside him again, urgent. ‘I’ve found something special for you. Come.’
She leads him to another room. ‘There!’ she says. ‘Your ichthyosaurus man.’
And there indeed is Richard Owen, fresh-faced and young. Not the whiskered head that accompanied the Chinese dinosaurs.
‘So it is,’ says Matthew. He pays his respects. Then turns to Sarah. But what he says is not what he had intended; it springs reckless to the lips at some signal that he sees in her eyes. ‘I’ve been afraid you didn’t really want to meet me today.’
‘Oh, but I did.’
They stand in front of Richard Owen, whom they no longer see. Who has served his purpose, poor man. Until, again, they are unnerved, and step apart.
‘And there’s Darwin,’ says Sarah. ‘Looking like Lear.’
She crosses the room to consider Darwin, while Matthew ponders an opened volume of The Origin of Species, displayed under glass along with Past and Present, On Liberty, Culture and Anarchy. Somehow, he is not able to give appropriate attention to the Victorian achievement.
They move on, in an unconsidered progress. Here is Macaulay, in his study, fingering his spectacles. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I was afraid you’d mind coming here. But I really did need to check up on Byron. I’ve not had a chance all week.’
‘I’ve been meaning to come here for ages.’
Her smile. But living eyes are so charged that you have to look away, eventually. It is easier to meet the benign but judgmental gaze of Henry James, before whom they have now arrived.
‘He looks like a person you’d love to have as an uncle,’ says Sarah.
‘Do you have uncles?’
‘Only one and I don’t much care for him.’