Читать книгу Death and the Butterfly - Colin Hester - Страница 16

Seven

The candle blew out and the tiny underground bomb shelter was dark, cold. They could hear the bombs whistling one after another as they fell to earth, howling like marauding Huns at the gates. Mrs. Tranter struck a match, and her face illuminated, blue and undulate as if inhabiting a gas flame. She rose as best she could, bent double, the roof of corrugated iron looming mere inches above her doubled-over spine. She two-stepped the dying match to the candle and managed to light it again and the shelter filled with wickering light.

She wagged out the match. The bombs that had whistled fell poom! poom! poom! and Susan’s mother, sitting on the liner of the floor with legs splayed, propped her back against the post of twin bunks stacked low and tight as dresser drawers. She swung her purse onto her lap and from within salvaged a near-gone packet of Woodbines and snapped the purse shut and took out a cigarette and said:

“They’re getting closer.”

“D’you need the candle?”

“Ta. Thanks,” her mother said.

She took the candle in its Arabian brass holder and lit her cigarette and passed the candle back to Mrs. Tranter.

Mrs. Tranter set the candle on top of the small army trunk that sat in the middle of the floor. “Where’s Mac, then?” she asked.

“He’ll be here soon,” her mother said.

“Mum?” Susan asked.

“What, love?”

“Can we read Phillip’s letter again?”

“No, love. We shouldn’t have read it that once. Wait for your father.”

She was silent.

“How is Phillip?” Mrs. Tranter asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Flying. And he’s found a girlfriend,” her mother told Mrs. Tranter.

“Mum?”

“Yes, love?”

“Are there any cakes left, then?”

“Yes.”

Her mother took a deep drag of her cigarette, then let the smoke out slowly.

“May I have one? Please?”

“If you have a sandwich first,” her mother said.

Again they could hear the staggered whistle-whistle-whistling as another cluster of bombs dropped from the sky, then the poom! poom! poom!

“What’s left?” Susan asked.

There was a cake tin on the floor liner just by her mother, and her mother, her cigarette’s smoke a dizzying contrail, took the tin and placed it in her lap and clawed open the lid. She poked inside. “Paste,” she said.

“What kind?”

Her mother looked. “Sardine and tomato,” she said.

Susan said nothing.

“Well?” her mother said.

“Is that all?”

“Yes, love, that’s all. What’s wrong with sardine and tomato?”

“It’s just . . . well, it gives you terrible breath.”

Her mother didn’t say anything.

“We’ve corned beef?” Mrs. Tranter offered.

“Corned beef?” her mother said.

“Jimmy. He sends tins of it from Canada.”

Her mother crushed her cigarette in the nearby glass ashtray. “Corned beef,” her mother repeated.

“Yes.”

“How—how’s Etta?” her mother asked.

“Getting shuffled about. Now they’ve got her billeted with a family of Catholics.” Mrs. Tranter thought for a moment. “You have to wonder what she’s eating.”

“Probably sardine-and-tomato-paste sandwiches, Mrs. Tranter,” Susan said.

“Susan,” her mother scolded, “don’t be full of yourself.”

“Oh that’s all right, Cless,” Mrs. Tranter said, smiling, studying Susan. “She’s lovely enough to get away with it.” Mrs. Tranter became thoughtful, then looked away. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, “sometimes I think having my Etta here would be better than all the way up in Scotland.”

The whistling of the bombs intensified.

“At least she’s safe,” Susan’s mother said. “If Mac would let me, I’d send Susan here to my great uncle’s brother-in-law’s in—”

That’s when these bombs hit Poom! Poom!! Poom!!! closer and closer until BA-BA-BOOM! The iron roof above them shook and groaned as if tearing, and the candle went black and the earth beneath the liner trembled and shifted with a turbulence so powerful that it actually lifted them and moved them about on the floor liner as if they were afloat, and then it quelled; the shocks, they quelled and became subdued and there was an incredible ringing in their ears that with their hands covering them in the pitch blackness they fought to muffle but could not.

Moments passed. The three of them suspended from sound and earthly sensation. Then the ground finally became reliable and familiar in its motionlessness and her mother called, “Susan? Susan?” through the settling din. “Susan!”

The darkness thick and absolute; no near-blindness this but blindness and its beyond.

“I’ll—I’ll get the candle,” Mrs. Tranter said. “Wait. Here. Where? Oh God—God!”

“What?”

“The matches.”

“Susan!” her mother called again.

“Yes—yes, Mum.”

“For God’s sake! Why didn’t you answer?”

“I—I couldn’t hear,” she said. “I couldn’t hear.”

“The bloody matches,” Mrs. Tranter said. “I can’t find them. This is hell.”

“Not quite yet,” her mother said, “I’ve some—” The ringing went away enough for Susan to hear her mother grope for her purse, find it and snap open its clasp to then rummage. “Damn!” her mother said.

“I’ll go up to the house,” Susan said.

“No! No you won’t,” her mother said.

“I should go,” Mrs. Tranter said. “After all—”

“No,” her mother interrupted. “Don’t you see? There is no house. We’ve been hit,” she said. Her voice dropped to a whisper, yet one without a trace of self-pity: “Hit.”

“You don’t know that, Mum,” Susan said. She crouched over as much as she could manage and stood and half-crawled to the corrugated shelter door. With some effort she pushed the door up and open and back.

With the City under complete blackout, in the dark October sky there was a breathtaking extravaganza of light and sound. Search lights swung and columned and skimmed the sky’s dark and starry ceiling, slinging their beams back and forth, catching here and there an enemy wing, a tail, and the anti-aircraft guns would spark and punch blindly at it. The search lights all arced and pulsed and swung not as if they originated from the ground but as if they were tethered to the stars themselves and were hung in godly spectacle above both the Germans and the English, both sides a rapt and willing audience. And of course there was the whistling of the bombs’ descents and the poom! poom! when those whistlings died. And to the east, the mandarin glow of inexhaustible fires.

“Susan,” her mother hissed. “Susan.”

“It’s like—like when they’re on the trapeze,” Susan said, “at the circus.” She vaulted herself up and out and stood on the grass of the back garden. Ahead of her, through the totally black pitch of night, their house still stood. No more than a shadow but still standing. “It’s not us, Mum,” she called back down to the shelter. “Come see!”

“There!” Mrs. Tranter announced. “The matches!”

And Susan turned in time to see back down into the bunkered shelter as Mrs. Tranter struck a match and, cowling it with her hands, conveyed it to the candlestick. Light again filled the domed burrow and her mother came to the entranceway. “Who, then?” her mother asked.

“Ours, I should think,” Mrs. Tranter declared.

Susan looked about. “It’s not Mrs. Tranter’s either,” she told them.

“Alfred’ll be pleased,” Mrs. Tranter said, “if anything could please him.”

Susan looked again at her house. Through the kitchen window she could see the faintest of glows, a soft yellow, and it seemed to move. “Mum?” she said.

“Yes, love?”

“Did you—”

“What?”

Her mother stood bent over down in the shelter’s opening. The whistling descents of the bombs were more distant now and Susan began to walk through the encompassing darkness up the path and under the clothes line towards the house.

“What, love?” her mother called. “And where d’you think you’re going?”

“Did you leave a candle on or anything?”

“No. And come back here. Susan!” her mother called in a loud whisper. “Susan!”

“There’s a light on,” she whispered loudly back to her mother. “In the kitchen.”

She reached the window. There was a flower bed beneath it, the flowers now mere dark and petal-less stalks—no more flower-like than plumbing or wiring—and setting her hands on the windowsill she leaned across the flower bed and looked inside. That’s when she realized there was no glass in the panes. Until this close, it had been too dark to notice. And there was the smell of smoke.

Again from the top of the bomb shelter her mother called with hushed stridency:

“Susan, come back here.”

“There’s smoke,” she responded.

She went around the corner and tried the door. Its pane was gone too, cleanly as if it’d been removed by glaziers. She reached in and turned the dead bolt and pushed, and there was a scratching sound. That was the door brushing across the glass that her sandals crunched and crackled as she went in. A light, red and pointed, moved and flitted like a firefly over by the table.

“Hello?” she called. She stepped closer. Someone was there and it was her father. Just sitting there in the darkness, a cigarette burning in his hand. She could smell the half-wine half-whiskey smell of sherry and she said, “Dad?” He made no reply. He didn’t smoke the cigarette, only held it. Then he sobbed. And her mother was at the back door with the candle. “Mum,” Susan said.

“The panes have all been blown out,” her mother said. “Wait until your father gets home.”

“Mum,” Susan said again, “he is home.”

Her mother entered, crushing with her shoes more glass. “Mac?” she asked Susan. “Where?”

Susan stepped aside and her mother came and stood by the table. The candlelight was tall and pale and the light leaned upon the wall and upon the ceiling and also too upon her father who was bent over now, his head in his hands, the smoke from his cigarette fluttering as it rose through the candlelight like a tiny scarf in a breeze. Her mother didn’t say anything. She just set the candle on the table. By it was the sherry bottle and a glass and an ashtray and beside these scattered and everyday monuments was an envelope—yellow even in the candlelight with the wide stripe of blue reading priority—and beside it the telegram it had with scant ill earlier conveyed.

Her mother looked at these things—the bottle, the glass, the envelope—then stared at the telegram. Stared at her husband, her husband crippled with sorrow. “No, Mac,” she said. “Don’t, Mac—please.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding, “yes.”

“No, Mac,” her mother said defiantly, “I won’t hear it. I won’t.”

“It came to me at work,” he said, his voice breaking.

“I won’t hear it, I told you.”

Susan picked the telegram up.

“I won’t hear it,” her mother said, desperately looking back and forth at the two of them, “won’t hear it from either of you!”

Susan read, silently, and as word-for-word carefully as though bearing forth the decree of her own demise:

His Majesty’s Government regrets to inform you that Flight Lieutenant Phillip Charles William . . .

“Put it down, Susan!” her mother demanded. She was shaking.

. . . Flight Lieutenant Phillip Charles William McEwan was reported missing. Our deepest . . .

“Please, Susan,” her mother now pleaded softly, “put it down. Please?”

. . . reported missing. Our deepest sympathy.

“Down,” her mother repeated to herself.

And then Mrs. Tranter was at the back door, asking:

“Are you all right, Cless? Cless? Susan?”

“Down.”