The Greatcoat (7 page)

She looked down at herself deprecatingly, although
she
could tell from his intentness that it was her he saw, not the flour.

‘Baking day?’ he asked, with a comical lift of his eyebrows, as if she couldn’t possibly have any such thing.

‘I’m making a steak-and-kidney pudding, but it’s the first time, and the pastry’s gone wrong.’

‘Better not stand around on the doorstep,’ he said, glancing behind him.

Of course he shouldn’t, she realised. Anyone might see him. She stepped back into the hall, and moved to one side so that he could pass her. Easily, familiarly, he crossed to the door of the flat. She had left it open. It was too late to stop him now, even if she wanted to. He entered, turned to his right, went straight through the living room to the bedroom and sat down on the bed, heavily, hands on knees, head forward, like a man who had run a race. She said nothing. After a moment, he got up again, took off his cap and unbuttoned his greatcoat.

‘Fog’s worse than this out at the airfield,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ she said. Her thoughts moved strangely, down paths that were foreign and yet entirely familiar. They were paths that had revealed themselves quite suddenly, as if a light had been shone inside her. She was Isabel Carey, and yet these were thoughts that Isabel Carey had never had. She knew what he meant, and she ought not to know it.

‘Fog,’ she repeated. ‘That’s good, isn’t it? You can get some sleep tonight.’

He shrugged. ‘The men want to get on with it. We did an air test first thing to check the starboard inner. Nearly pancaked poor old bloody Katie in a cabbage field, and then ops were scrubbed and we were stood down.’ A muscle in his cheek twitched, but he turned it into a smile.

‘I’m sure it was a perfect landing,’ she said, ‘but you do look a bit ropey. Would you like a cup of tea?’

Another smile. ‘Haven’t you got anything stronger?’

‘Wait a minute.’ She ran to the sideboard. There was half a bottle of gin left. She poured him a glass and looked at it doubtfully. It was huge.

‘Aren’t you having a drink?’ he asked her, taking his.

‘Oh – I don’t know. I don’t really like gin.’

Again, that comical quirk of his brows. ‘Don’t you? You could have fooled me.’

She poured a second, smaller measure for herself. He raised his glass to her and threw back the gin. Instantly, he looked better. Isabel took a swallow from her own glass. It was slightly warm: the sideboard was too close to the fire. And oily – greasy, almost. Phil’s father had given it to them. His mother had tutted; she didn’t believe in spirits, she said. Although how you could fail to believe in something that was real, Isabel didn’t know.

‘Have another,’ she said, proffering the bottle. She felt so much at ease. Maybe it was the effect of the gin, but it seemed perfectly natural to have a man in RAF uniform drinking with her in the middle of the day. The question of where he was stationed and what he was doing here could be sorted out later.

‘Aren’t you going to take off that apron?’

‘I’ve got to finish the pudding.’ There was flour on the rim of their glasses, where she’d touched them. She wiped her hands on the apron, and poured out his second drink. ‘Let me take your coat,’ she said, as if he had just arrived, an invited guest.

His coat, when he handed it to her, was warm. She folded its bulk and laid it on the bedroom chair. He was taking off his boots. With a sudden movement he threw himself down on the bed, full-length, staring up at the ceiling.

‘You don’t know how good this feels,’ he said, and then he was silent, lost in thought. ‘To be indoors, in a proper house, not those bloody huts. When I was a kid I used to wish they’d let me sleep outside.’

‘In a tent, you mean?’

‘I wanted them to pull my bed out under the stars. I’d have my sheets and blankets and Mum’s eiderdown, and a hot water bottle if it was snowing – and I’d let the snow fall on my face. You know when you look up into a snowstorm it’s like looking into a
tunnel
and the flakes go round and round inside it?’

‘Did it ever happen?’

‘Not likely. Now I shouldn’t care if I never went outside in my life. Come over here and lie down.’

‘I told you, I’m covered in flour.’

‘It’s only your apron.’

‘And my hands.’

‘I don’t care. They’re
your
hands.’ Already his eyes were half shut. She saw how deadbeat he was. Marked, weary skin. He smelled of cigarettes, sweat, metal, the soap he’d scrubbed himself with before he came to her.

‘Filthy night,’ he murmured.

‘Did you get much sleep?’

He shook his head from side to side, slowly, luxuriously. ‘Three hours. This pillow smells of you.’

She was at the top of an endless slide, clinging to the rail, looking down at the fall. He was a stranger, but she knew him. Every word he spoke and every shadow of his expression fitted patterns she had never seen before but which had always been there, beneath the skin of her life.

‘Who are you?’ she breathed. Instantly, his eyes flew open and he gave her a brief, brilliant smile, as if they shared a joke. Philip is much more handsome, she thought. But this man was looking into her face, her eyes, as if they knew each other so well they didn’t
have
anything to explain. They could be silent if they chose. He was utterly exhausted. In the fog of her mind a name was forming: his name. Soon it would be close enough to pull it to her, like a handle to open a door.

She stepped backwards. Her heart thudded in her throat. He had flung his right arm up and his face was perfectly still, as if sleep had caught him in the middle of a breath. She kept backing away, through the door, into the kitchen where her suet pastry still lay on the table. She lifted the saucepan off the gas and peered inside. The meat had cooked too long, and the gravy was as sticky as toffee. Isabel turned off the gas, untied her apron and brushed the flour off it, over the sink. She had placed a tiny mirror there and her face stared back at her, pale and startled, with bright eyes. She bit her lip, hard, until it hurt and the skin went white. It was real, then. She was this person, Isabel Carey. On the wall the little clock, which Philip had rescued from his dad’s Jowett before it was scrapped, said ten to eleven. Isabel watched the clock for a full minute, to be sure that time was moving, and then she left the kitchen.

He was still there. Fast asleep, deadbeat. No wonder, she thought, and then checked herself. Why was it no wonder? But she knew. Everywhere she looked, more of his life appeared from the shadows.
Charlie
used to let her watch while he developed film in his improvised darkroom under the stairs. First there was nothing and then the detail swam into view as he lifted the negative in triumph from its bath of fluid and hung it up to dry. All she had to do was look.

Isabel kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed beside the man, on top of the covers. He gave out heat steadily, like an engine, while his weight pressed the mattress down. He was heavier than Philip. At the thought of Philip a pulse of alarm went through her, and then vanished. He was out for the day at least. He’d be miles away. She thought of Philip’s profile, as she’d often turned to watch it while he was driving. She could study every inch of him because he so rarely felt her gaze and turned to her.

The man’s greatcoat lay folded on the chair, but her greatcoat,
the
greatcoat, was no longer there. A thin counterpane covered the blankets, as it had done when Isabel and Philip first moved into the flat. Isabel was lying on top of the bedclothes but she wasn’t cold. There he was, on Philip’s side of the bed, next to her, on his back. She put out her hand and touched his shoulder. The fine wool of his uniform was pleasant against her skin. She felt as if she’d known its touch for a long time. Here they were, the two of them. He’d been outside for a long time, but
now
he was here in her bed. She thought of the tapping at the window that had broken into her dreams. Maybe, on other nights, he had tapped and she hadn’t heard. He had been waiting for far too long.
I shouldn’t care if I never went outside in my life
, he’d said. Philip was different. He grumbled sometimes when the telephone rang and he was called out, but he liked it too. He would whistle under his breath as he fastened his collar, because the world needed him.

It was as quiet as those days when snow begins with a few desultory flakes and then thickens, thickens until the sky is full of it, muffling streets, cars, houses, footsteps. Isabel had moved a little closer to the man in uniform. Her body seemed to know how to curve itself to his heat. She was quite safe: she knew he wouldn’t wake. She would let him have his sleep.

Time went by. Intently and silently, time fed on the peace of the bedroom. Isabel was asleep.

She woke at three. It was already dusk outside the window. No, it was fog, wrapping itself around the lilac that grew in the backyard, close to the window. Branches pressed up to the glass, dripping wet.

There was nobody beside her. Isabel passed her hand over the bedclothes and thought she detected
his
warmth, but it might have been the heat of her own body. Perhaps he had made a hollow in the bed; but then the mattress was so old that it went naturally into peaks and valleys. With a swift movement she rolled over and pressed her face to the pillow where he had laid his head. Yes, he was still there. Cigarettes; a smell of engines; something men put on their hair. The greatcoat was lying in its usual place on top of the bedclothes.

Isabel swung her legs over, got up and went to the kitchen. The important thing was to finish making the steak-and-kidney pudding. She tied on her apron and as she did so she heard the landlady’s footsteps overhead.
She must have come home while I was asleep
. All the way to the window Mrs Atkinson walked, went back to the door, and then to the window again. The usual tread, too heavy to be ignored. Isabel switched on the radio, tuned it to the Light Programme and turned the volume up high on
Music While You Work
. Harry Leader’s sax soon took care of the footsteps. Isabel hummed along loudly as she poured a cup of hot water into the sticky gravy, stirred it and set the pan back on the hob. She rolled out the pastry again and this time it held together, flaccid but obedient. The recipe text danced:
Grease the basin … line the basin … pour in prepared meat and gravy … cover and seal
…

She did it all. She was a young married woman in her own kitchen, listening to the radio as she prepared her husband’s meal. No one, watching her, could imagine anything different.
Pour boiling water into a large saucepan, place prepared pudding basin on the trivet, cover, leaving the lid askew. Steam for two and a half hours, adding more boiling water at intervals
.

By then he would be home. It would be Philip sitting opposite her, no one else. He would praise the pudding, no matter how it tasted, because she had made it.

The door to the bedroom was ajar. What a ridiculous arrangement it was, to have the kitchen off the bedroom. It was the way the house had been divided; she supposed that once it had all made sense, when it was whole. It annoyed her, the way things got broken up so that they couldn’t fit together properly any more.

If you lay on the bed and the door was open, you could watch someone who was standing at the stove. She refused to turn. He was there again, she was sure of it. He had come back without her hearing him. He was still lying on the bed, but he was awake now, and refreshed. Some colour had returned to his face. His arms were folded behind his head and he was watching her.

His name was Alec. She knew it now. It had come
into
her mind as she slept beside him, as if he had whispered it into her ear.

‘Alec,’ she said, turning. As she’d thought, he was there. His eyes were narrowed, to watch her more closely. They were dark blue; navy, almost.

‘What?’ he said.

Suddenly a low vibration turned into sound. He moved his head sharply. It was the same heavy sound she had heard before, coming closer. The deep thrumming of four Merlin engines as the aircraft came low, ready for landing. She and Charlie used to identify them when they were miles away, before the adults could hear them. A Lanc.

Alec was sitting bolt upright. His expression had changed completely: he was preoccupied, anxious, charged for action. He swung himself off the bed and came to her. He stood very close – too close – and again she was afraid.

‘Alec,’ she said, ‘what is it?’

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘But you haven’t said—’

‘Said what?’

‘You haven’t told me your surname.’

His face held nothing for a second but blank astonishment. ‘What are you talking about, Is? What’s the matter with you?’

‘Your surname,’ she insisted.

‘What is this, some kind of a game? You’ve been a bit queer all day.’ He cupped her cheek with his hand, and at that moment she discovered that she knew it, of course she did, how could she have asked Alec such a stupid question?

‘Sorry. It’s probably the gin,’ she said. His touch was so intimate that it gave her gooseflesh.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he repeated.

‘I know.’

His boots were on, and his greatcoat wrapped around him. He set his cap on his head, and he was gone. She heard the door bang, and ran out into the hall after him, pulled open the front door and looked right and left up the street. There was no one. The fog pushed towards her, and she shivered. You couldn’t even see the minster clearly. How would the Lanc ever land safely? As she thought this, she realised that the noise of its engines was fading. Fading, and then gone.

HE’LL COME BACK
, she thought. It wasn’t speculation: she was sure of it. How could he not? The flat still breathed his presence, even though it was Philip who sat opposite her, eating the steak-and-kidney pudding. He praised it, as if she were a clever child, and told her that it was as good as his mother used to make.

‘I should think so,’ said Isabel, having endured his mother’s meals.