The Undertow (22 page)

The waiter returns, carrying a broad silver platter, his upturned fingers like spreading branches. He slides the dish down onto the table.

“Your lobster.”

The coral beast lies on a bed of shredded green. A whole butterhead lettuce has been sacrificed to make its bed. There are nutcrackers, and two small dishes of glistening mayonnaise.

She smiles, just at the utter extreme incongruity of this. Food comes in tins and packets and small papery bundles. It’s divided into careful portions—equal shares that once gone are gone. But a lobster, a whole lobster, to share? So very far from rationing, so very far from kosher, that it seems so incongruous that it seems almost a joke. Mayonnaise—what is that made with? Is that made with milk? She doesn’t even know.

“Fantastic,” Ruby says.

She lifts a pair of nutcrackers. She has no idea where to start. She watches his tactics for a moment, then manages herself to dislocate a claw and crack it open on her plate. The flesh falls into strands between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, firm and sweet and melting and intensely savoury. She has missed so much, she realises. What else has she missed?

“So where’s home?” he asks.

She swallows reluctantly.

“Hard to say, nowadays.”

He makes a sympathetic face. She lets him imagine the bomb damage, the flames, her beautiful imagined house in Kensington in ruins.

“You staying with friends?”

That works as an explanation. She nods. “Little place,” she says. “Out at Mitcham.”

Was that wrong? Does that mark her out? But he seems unconcerned.

“Drop you off there later, if you like.”

She looks up at him, leaving her fork wedged into the pink carapace. “You have a car?”

“It’s Ministry.”

The prospect is like sinking into velvet. A car ride home.

“But the petrol?”

He purses his lips, wafts her concerns away. “Not even out of the way.”

She traces the route out from her house, beyond.

“So that’s, what, you’re heading south? Kent?”

His face buttons itself up. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Ah,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Walls have ears?”

“They certainly could.”

The engine throbs like a happy cat. Her head feels soft and fuzzy with wine. The leather seat creaks as she reaches out to touch the lustre of the walnut panelling. The windscreen wiper swooshes rhythmically. The rain is softer now; it seems almost not to fall any more, as if the air itself were saturated to stillness. She is torn between this new vision of the city at speed—spinning by white terraced townhouses, through the lush shadowy green of the park, shooting suddenly out across the river and under the grey wide sky, all veiled with rain—and the internal stillness of the car, the scents of oil and leather and the warm, well-dressed, breathing length of the man next to her. She’d like to ease off her shoes, but she daren’t risk the smell.

South of the river, and he begins to need directions. The streets narrow and close in. She finds she doesn’t know the way and is forced to guess. There are moments of clarity when they hit a patch around a Tube station, or cross a bus route, and are back within her frame of knowledge. Further south, and the streets begin to widen a little more, as they move into the newer houses built after the First War. Houses fit for heroes: what heroes need is a plumbed-in bath and a gas cooker and hotwater geyser and an outdoor lav and a handkerchief of back garden.

It hits her then. Not that Mrs. will see him, though that would itself be irredeemably bad, but that he will see Mrs., her hair done up in
rollers, and the pokey little front garden, and the path that’s poured concrete, and the cheap brick housefront with its single bay and its two narrow upstairs windows, and the milk-bottle holder that Billy made, with the red enamel chipped at the base where it’s hit the concrete path too many times.

They spin out across the Common, the road lined with dripping trees. The car is still a car, the handsome man still drives, the wet road still peels away underneath the wheels, but it is over.

“Can you—?” she says.

He glances across at her.

“Can you stop the car here?”

He pulls in. The car settles into silence; the windscreen wiper hangs still. The Common is deserted, wet, the light dim. Ruby watches the water land, bead, run down the slope of the windscreen.

“I want you to know, I don’t normally do this kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Get into cars, with strange men.”

“Am I strange?”

“You are to me.”

He shrugs. “What’s normal anyway, nowadays?”

“I wanted to say. I had a good time.”

“I’m glad.”

She is glad, too. Even though it is now over, things had been, for just a little while, how they should be.

She reaches out across the cool dim air between them. She puts her hand to his cheek, and turns the handsome man towards her, and kisses him.

She clicks the front door open, steps in, and just stands for a moment, on the threshold, listening up the dark stairs. Mrs. has gone to bed, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’ll be sleeping. She could still be lying there, eyes wide open, hair all twisted up in rollers. But the house is silent, stuffy and dark. She steps in fully, and eases the door shut behind her, then toes off her sodden shoes.

Hung over the rack in the back kitchen, her jacket will dry by the morning. The crocks are lying out on the drainer and the pig bucket stinks unemptied. At the back door she stuffs her feet into the old communal slippers, grabs the ragged umbrella and slip-slops her way down
the garden path under its shelter. A hedgehog trundles along between the cabbages, stops to snuffle up a slug.

In the spidery cool of the outhouse, she hoiks up her skirt, lets her knickers slide down around her ankles and sits down on the old wooden toilet seat. Rain clatters on the bare slates above. The outhouse smells of damp plaster, urine, bicarb.

His skin too good to be real. A bloom like on a plum. The smell of him—piny, leathery, soft. His warm hands on her cool flesh.

She doesn’t fret about trouble that might come of it: the events of the evening seem like a dream, proceeding according to their own inevitable logic. Repercussion-free. And it’s not like she’s going to do that kind of thing again.

She pees, and tugs a square of newspaper from the copper loop: an advertisement for Robinson’s rhubarb cordial. The paper is thin and soft; it gets thinner and softer year by year, as the war continues, which, on the bright side, is better for the lav. She dabs herself dry.

It’s only later, when she’s lying in bed in her winter-weight pyjamas, smelling lanolin and wool and feeling the welcome weight of extra blankets, that she remembers, with a lurch, her wedding ring. She eases herself back out of bed, creeps down the stairs, heart thumping, and lifts her handbag off the hall floor, where it would have annoyed Mrs. when she saw it there in the morning.
Fell right over it; nearly broke my neck
.

Back in her room, she fishes out the bundled glove; her ring’s still there; she slips it on. And there, at the bottom of the bag, almost forgotten, is the bundled, bloodied handkerchief. The earlobe still inside.

Is it pride, she wonders, this sense of warmth, this satisfaction? The knowledge that for once, for just one evening, she bent the world to her will?

She rummages for the old tobacco tin in her bedside drawer. A few threads of tobacco still linger in the metal seams; it gives off a faint scent of her father, of childhood. The contents are all useless, unrelinquishable things: two odd earrings, a broken tin brooch of her mother’s. She presses the bundle into the tin, squeezes the lid back on. She drops the tin into the drawer, pushes the drawer shut.

Lying back again, she heaves the heavy blankets over her. Her hand brushes over her hipbone and comes to rest in the warm declivity of her belly.

AMELIA LIFTS THE BLACKOUT CARDBOARD
from the window. The sunshine makes her blink and frown. Today is another day without Billy. Today is another day in which something terrible might happen to him. Today is another day to get through in the hopes of better days to come.

She rubs at her eyes. Below, the small front garden soaks in the morning sunshine. She unclips her rollers, pulls them out of her fine pale hair.

They let her have the big room because it’s all she has now. Her whole life is in one room: an armchair, a wardrobe, a bed and a suitcase. The room is hers, but the house is Billy’s and Ruby’s. She hopes that they will stay here, for a while at least.

The blue suitcase still stands at the end of the bed. That’s where she keeps the picture book. She’s discovered, over these past few years, that she can stand to lose almost everything but that.

The suitcase is solid, with its beech struts and its strong blue lacquered cardboard. It will keep her picture book safe. It will last.

In her quilted dressing gown and bare feet, carrying her brass water-spray, she goes out along the grass path, between the strawberry bed and the potato patch. The twisting runner beans offer their leaves up to the sun, like outstretched palms. The first fronds of new beans are pushing their way out of their green caps. The vines are dotted here and there with scarlet flowers. She huffs a cool mist softly on the remaining blossoms. Even this early in the day, bees are already busy all over the plot. Industrious and content. She makes her way down to the glazed
lean-to, and pours her mix of liquid compost on the tomato plants. They are coming on well, swelling, blushing here and there with red.

Keep busy, that’s what you have to do. That’s what makes you happy.

Indoors, she boils the kettle and makes tea. She scrapes dripping over a slice of toast. There are bits of meat in the dripping, which flake satisfyingly across the gritty staleness of the bread.

First she will drop in to church. Check that it’s still standing. A quiet prayer and say hello to the Reverend. Then work. Late tonight to deal with the overtime slips, so she can’t do a stint at the WVS canteen, but she’ll make up for it tomorrow. Her work there, looking after other women’s boys, is done in the hope and expectation that another woman somewhere else is looking after hers. Then in the evening she’ll get that golliwog finished off while she listens to the radio. It does her good to see the finished parcel, ready to go off for those poor children. A dolly, a few vests, a warm jumper. There is a lot to be thankful for, when you think about it. Sometimes, as she sits at her knitting, she’s so deep in counting her way through the niceties of the pattern that she loses all sense of herself, and time passes very easily indeed.

Amelia is the first one in at work, as usual. She’s got a little while before anyone else arrives. The only sound is the creak of the timbers as the roof warms up in the sun.

She slides open her desk drawer; it smells of India rubber and ink and sharpened pencils. She lifts out a small rectangle of mirror. A brisk turn of the head from side to side, a pat at her curled hair. The mirror is spotted, like some kind of mould is growing between the glass and the backing. She smiles—an artificial monkey grin—and turns her head to examine more closely the crow’s feet and the lines that run from her nose to the corners of her mouth. She raises her eyebrows to watch her forehead corrugate. A good man can look beyond these things. A good man would see her finer qualities. A good man already does, she thinks: she’s almost certain of that.

Her handbag lies in her lap. She puts down the mirror to twist open the metal clip.

She lifts out the lipstick, a gold-coloured cylinder about the length of her thumb. She’s never owned one of these; she didn’t used to hold with paint. But times change, so why shouldn’t she? She’ll put it back, of course she will: leave it for Ruby to find down the back of an armchair,
or under the bath. She just wanted to try. The case is cool in her hand. She pulls off the cap, twists up the stick of coloured grease. There’s just a stump left: hardly worth making such a fuss over. It’s dark red. The red of veinous blood, of the deepest folds of damask roses. Amelia holds the tiny mirror in her left palm. She paints her lips. The lipstick smells how Ruby smells: oily, perfumed, sharp. She tilts her head to one side. Lips together, a red smile. She tries a pout. She’s not sure about the paint. It seems to make her face uneven, as if her eyes have faded away. But nothing ventured.

She lays the mirror back down in the drawer, places the lipstick beside it, and eases the drawer shut.

She flaps the newspaper open; her eyes flicker over the headlines and down into the text. Rome has fallen—in the space of a day, it seems. She skims on through the columns: a neat, clean victory, the major monuments undamaged, the Vatican spared. He’ll have read the paper on the Tube, and will arrive here pleased, and she can be pleased too, ready to share his pleasure. She scans on through the columns. Sifting.

There’s a clatter of a key in the door downstairs. It echoes through the empty building and makes her straighten, makes her face fall sober. She folds the paper briskly, opens a lower drawer and places it in and lifts out a duster—a scrap of old stripy towel from home. She slips through the glass door into the inner office, his office, and dusts down his desk and chair, straightens his blotter and pen. She likes to be surprised in here; caught in the act of caring for him.

It’s clean work, and that’s something she likes about the place, the bright cleanness, though the dust in the air can give her a bit of a catch in her chest sometimes. They make medical supplies: field dressings, bandages, lint and wadding. Thousands and thousands of surgical dressings, and it makes her dizzy and upset if she lets herself think about the wounds that they are needed for. The girls’ gloved fingers work like spiders, shaping and stitching and wrapping and packing into boxes and the boxes into crates. The drivers fill their trucks with crates and they grind away out of the yard, and she doesn’t like to think of it, where the wadding ends up, the amount of cotton lint that they process here, the sea of blood that there must be out there, to need all that cotton to sop it up.