The Undertow (23 page)

Down below, in the workshop, his footsteps echo across the concrete floor. She recognises them immediately. And then there’s the clatter of the women’s shoes as they follow him in, and the busy, noisy
bustle of their voices as they head for the cloakroom. She can hear his footsteps even through the noise of the other women; their different weight, their purpose.

She drops the duster onto the filing cabinet top, checks her hands: they’re clean. Nail polish, would that be the next thing? Shine her nails up like berries. His footsteps tap their way up the wooden stairs. Like Fred Astaire. His twirling tails, his neat combed hair, his polished shoes clicking as he dances up the steps.

He’s there, a dark ghost against the milky glass. The jacket shoulder crushing against the pane. The handle turning on this side too.

And that little familiar kick of surprise. The thrill of him. And his eyebrows flick up and he gives her one of his quick, foxy smiles from under his clipped moustache, turning to the hatstand as he shrugs off his duster coat. But he has that poise, that polishedness, of someone like Astaire, or Max Linder. And you don’t often see that, not in real life. He hooks up his coat, then takes off his trilby and sets it on the curved antlers of the hatstand above. Tugging each jacket cuff into place, he makes his cufflinks flash gold. He’s not really that much younger than her. He’s in his mid-forties, she’d say. Hard to tell, really—he keeps himself so nice, so neat. Groomed like a horse. Curry combs and brisk rub-downs.

“Have we started?” he asks. “Did you hear?”

She can hear the voices still, in the cloakrooms: the girls getting sorted, getting out of their coats and hats, and washing hands and scrubbing nails and soaping arms up to the elbow, and into their protective clothing, gloves and masks and turbans over the hair.

“Not yet, Mr. Jack. The girls are just in.”

He turns round and smiles at her. And it makes her heart swell. Because it’s a warm look, a kind look, direct.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Sorry?”

“France,” Mr. Jack says.

She’d been going to say Italy. Rome, yes; Rome, the victory in Rome. She can’t get into step with him.

“France?”

“They’re on their way. They may even be over. That’s what I heard.”

“There’s nothing in the papers. Nothing on the news.”

He taps the side of his nose. “Little bird.”

If it’s France, if they’re crossing to France, does that mean Billy?

“Your friend, the one in the RAF?” she asks.

He shakes his head. He’s not prepared to say. But she can see that he’s excited. All she can think of is the camp that Billy’s written from the last few times. The rain hard on the corrugated roof. Is he still there? Is he in transit somewhere? Or is he now, already, out at sea? Mr. Jack is talking about the fine brave boys. Her own fine brave boy, and how proud, and oh poor thing, how worried she must be. But she can’t listen, her skin is creeping all over, and her head is light like a balloon and she wants to sit down. Did Billy know this was coming and not tell her? How could he not tell her a thing like that?

“I’ve so many good friends in the services, I know something of what you feel.”

He takes hold of her hand, squeezes it. She holds onto it, almost swaying.

“If it wasn’t for my trouble, I’d be there myself. I’d be doing my bit.”

“You are,” she says, almost automatically. “You are doing your bit. You know you are. Where would we all be without you?”

She has said this so many times.

His expression changes. His gaze drops, lingers on her lips.

He’s noticed. The lipstick.

But Billy. Her head swims. What about Billy? How can she find out where he is, what is happening to him?

“Good news, though,” he says. “Great news. A second front opened up and just at the right time. Stick it to ’em just as they’re reeling after Rome.”

“Good news,” she agrees.

“But keep it to yourself, eh?” he says. “Keep mum.”

She nods, blinking. He squeezes her hand again, and lets it go. It falls to her side. He grins his swift little toothy grin, and she has lost completely what he was saying, apart from
Keep mum
. Motherhood and silence: why the same word?

“Well,” he says. “Well well. Tea?”

“Tea.”

“Good show.”

He turns away, rubbing his hands together, surveying his desk—blotter, inkpot, pen—all neatly laid out and clean. He draws out his chair, sits down. She goes to the little pantry to make tea on the gas ring, and stands there as the kettle boils, and thinks of Billy, out there on the water, out there on the sea.

He will be afraid. This is what she cannot bear. Her little boy will be scared, and there is nothing she can do to make it any better. She wants to sink down onto the lino, and press her face into her hands, and just sob and sob and sob at the unfairness of it all.

She just touches the damp away from her lower lids.

She makes tea. She gets through the moment, and will get through every moment that follows, through all the days to come, until she hears from Billy. Until she knows he’s safe.

THE SUN IS OUT
, at least; not warm, but making the sea sparkle. It’s choppy, but it’s blue and clean; you could dive right in. They lean over the side of the craft, watching England shrink. Green downs, chalk cliffs, the fungal growth of seaside towns. Little craft beetle along behind them. Up ahead, the big ships power on. A brownish haze of diesel fumes hangs over the waves.

They’re under way. It’s now too late to even blow a hole in your hand: you’d have to take the hole all the way to France and back with you.

“You know what the Mad Bastard said,” Alfie says, looking back towards the shore. “About if we got killed?”

“Yes.”

“Not to worry because there would be plenty more men coming along behind?”

“Yes.”

“I loved that. I thought that was the dog’s bollocks.”

Billy snorts.

Alfie kicks idly at the base of the rail. His jaw is blurred with stubble; his eyes are shadowed and there are deep lines at the corners, like the creases in a slept-on sheet. He has three kids, Alfie. He’s looking back towards the country and his kids.

The wake churns blue and glassy and crested white. There is a kind of calmness now, from fatigue, and from being under way and stuck with it.

“You ever think about what if Hitler wins?” Alfie asks.

“Ten yards and all that,” Billy says. “Tight focus.”

“Yeah.” Alfie still looks back across the water, to the land. “Point. But.”

“What?”

“The stuff they’d get up to, the Nazis. Stuff they’d do. We’d get special treatment. We’d be punished for all the trouble we’ve been to them. For not just rolling over and playing dead.”

“True.”

“And your missus, being Jewish and all that. You hear stories.”

“Don’t like to think about it.”

“I do. I mean, I don’t like to, but I think it helps.”

Billy squints at him.

“The missus, the kids, I mean,” Alfie continues. “I can’t live with it, the idea of them suffering. And it helps to think that: if you can’t live with something, you might as well die trying to stop it.”

Alfie just gazes back towards the land. This is love, Billy sees. This is what love looks like. The deep lines at the eyes. The frown, the anxious gaze.

“I’m not saying you
have
to die,” Alfie adds.

Billy feels his throat tighten. “Good.”

“Look, I’m not being all bollocksy about this. It’s just the trade-off, the price you’re prepared to pay. I just think, if you can think like that, it helps you stop yourself from blowing your own hand off.”

Billy bites at his lower lip. What’s the asking price, he wonders, for a second chance?

They both stare back at the receding coast. The colour leaches from the land.

Ruby. Always Ruby. Whatever else, always her.

If he gets his second chance, things will be different. If he can do this for her, then surely he can do the smaller things? He can be kind. He can be cheerful. He can make the world a better place for her every day. He can forget about what he can’t have, and think of what he’s already got.

“You know what,” Billy says. “I’m thinking of getting a tattoo.”

RUBY TAKES THE CIGARETTE
and bends to light it at Evelyn’s match. Evelyn’s nails are coral pink and she half wonders where she got hold of nail polish nowadays—some Yank, no doubt.

The first drag of smoke tastes strange, and makes her shudder. Evelyn lights up her own cigarette, blows smoke, talks.

They lean back against the brick factory wall, in the one remaining slab of sunshine in the whole dark yard. Ruby lets the smoke spool up into the air. She can feel the ghost of his touch still. His hands on her hips. His lips on her breasts. Him inside her. Her cheeks flush up, but it’s okay because that could just be the sun. She squints into it.

Anyway: she got away with it. Mrs. has no idea.

Evelyn’s talking. Ruby turns her attention to her friend, trying to pick up the thread, like twisting the dial on a radio, the voices pulling themselves together out of static. She watches Evelyn’s thick lips, blurred with crying, the lipstick worn to a thin stain. Ruby wonders if she could borrow a dab of it herself. Evelyn is a generous sort. That’s what gets her into such a pickle with men.

Evelyn is upset not because one of her fellas has let her down, but because she and Joan have had a blow-up. Evelyn lodges with Joan and, Ruby’s gathered lately, might have a bit of a crush on her too: it seems she just can’t bear Joan’s disapproval. But this morning they collided on the stairs, Evelyn on her way down to work, and Joan on her way back, tired from her stint at the ARP station. And Joan gave her hell, Evelyn tells Ruby, because she’d come home after Joan was asleep on Sunday night, but it wasn’t that late, not really, but she had been with a fella. And Joan called Evelyn a tart, asked her who she’d been up to no good with this time, if she even knew his name, and made her cry.

“Was it Reggie?”

Evelyn blows a plume of smoke up into the air. “Reggie?” She shakes her head. “No. This was …” She squints, thoughtful.

“Someone else.”

Evelyn nods. “Haven’t seen Reggie in months. He wrote to say all leave had been cancelled. But I ’spect he’s just visiting his missus instead.”

“Really?”

Evelyn rolls her head round against the wall, crushing her hair into the brick, and fixes Ruby with her pale grey stare. “They can get away with anything nowadays, the men can. Say what they like and who’s to know?”

“Just haven’t seen many men in uniform around.”

Evelyn’s mouth falls agape. Her voice drops to an awed whisper: “Do you think it’s happening?”

“The second front? Maybe.”

It makes sense. The emptiness of the town, the quiet. There have been rumours, but you don’t listen to rumours, do you?

Billy’s gone, she thinks. Just like that. Without her even knowing, he’s crossed the water, and is gone.

Evelyn’s rubbing at her arm, trying to be comforting, but her strong red hands are hurting. Ruby realises she must have gone white. Must be having a bit of a turn.

“I’m all right.”

Evelyn frowns, and reaches her arms around her friend, and holds her. Her bosom presses in underneath Ruby’s, soft and strange. Ruby smells setting lotion and dirty hair. Evelyn lets her go.

“It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

What does Evelyn know? What the bloody hell does anybody know any more?

“Yes,” Ruby says, and tries a smile. “Of course.”

“Pecker up now. Doesn’t do to upset yourself.”

“You’re right,” Ruby says. “ ’Course you are.”

And she smiles, but all she feels is irritation: with Evelyn, with herself, with all of it. That life just keeps dishing this stuff out and they’re expected to keep on spooning it up and swallowing. She blinks away the film of wet from her eyes, takes a final sip from her cigarette, and pulls herself together. Because you have to; because there is, after all, no choice: you can’t be permanently hysterical, so you might as well
not bother getting started. She wonders, just for a second,
What if I’m pregnant?
Because there was Billy, on the last night of his leave, and there was the handsome man last night; and what a pretty pickle that would be. But she dismisses the idea: not now, not after all these years. After the blue baby, she expects childlessness.

She drops the cigarette butt onto the cobbles and presses it in between two stones with her toe. No wonder her shoes are so wrecked, she thinks: the blasted cobbles at this place.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get back to it. They’ll put the radio on. We’ll catch the news.”

Evelyn nods. She heaves herself away from the wall. Ruby leads the way back into the clattering workshop.

AMELIA SITS AT
her narrow desk, under the dim light from the internal window. Her blunt fingertips sort and arrange the thin yellow overtime slips. She listens to the noises from the workshop below, the way they change as the working day ends. The clack and rattle of manufacture lessen and then cease, and voices take up the space instead, at first a thread, then another, a tangle of voices, a matted clot of noise.

At lunchtime he waved the early edition at her, and called out, “No news!” quite cheerfully, as if that somehow confirmed things, or was reassuring. He had the radio on in there all day—the mutter of it, the faint music.

When William died, the world folded up on itself, turned to dust, and blew away. There should be exemptions for widows of the last war. They should let their boys off from fighting in the next.

She should just get home to Ruby. If Ruby’s heard the rumours, she’ll be worried too.

She has the overtime slips in order. She lifts out the payment sheet, with details of staff seniority, specialisms, rates of pay. She sets to working out who’s owed what.

It’s quiet now below. She hears Mr. Sanderson draw the bolt across on the inside of the door, and then the shuff and tap of the long-headed broom as he starts to sweep up the cotton dust through the shafts of end-of-day sunshine.