Ma.’ A small, sad smile lifted the corners of Vi’s mouth. ‘I found a use for it.’
The smile flickered and faded. Since the arrival of the letter a coldness had grown inside her, and a pain in her throat that wasn’t really a pain but a hard, tight ball of anger. It got in the way when she had tried to cry yet it allowed no room for self-pity. All her feelings had been for Gerry, with the coal-pitted hands, who had never harmed a soul. Gerry, with the bitty hair, whose right foot turned in when he walked. Gerry, who had loved her.
Sighing, she lifted the dustbin lid and watched the brown china pieces slip from the shovel, then raised her eyes to the May sky. It was hard to believe that very soon that innocent sky could throb with the sounds of death. Liverpool was taking a beating, and rumours were free for the asking on every street corner and in every food queue. There had been rioting down by the docks, some said, but no one knew exactly where; and Mrs Norris swore they were throwing the dead into mass graves, and half of them good Catholics without the last rites.
Vi wished she could fire a gun and shoot down those bombers if only for what they had done to Gerry, but it was easy to be brave in this small, precious house when the sun still shone in the evening sky and a west wind blew away the stench of bombing and burning and broken bodies. It was a different matter when the sirens wailed and she hurried, dry-mouthed, into the clammy cold of St Joseph’s crypt. Fear came easily then, even though it was the deepest and safest shelter for streets around. And when the all clear sounded, even though the realization that she had survived yet another night sent relief singing through her, there was the agony of wondering what she would find when she returned to Lyra Street. Mary had told her not to be a fool, to come to her house and get a decent night’s sleep. Mary lived in Ormskirk, and so far they had been lucky there. But Vi needed to be in her own little home. It was all she had left now, so she had thanked her sister and left it at that.
Breathing deeply, fighting sudden fresh tears, she stared at the whitewashed walls of the tiny, tidy yard. Gerry was gone, but his rose still grew there. Last autumn he had planted it.
‘A red rose for Lancashire, girl.’
‘But Gerry, it’ll never grow.’ Not here, she had thought. Not in this airless back yard with its cat-fouled alley, yet now it bore shining green leaves and four fat flower buds – and Gerry would never see them.
The fingers on the clock of St Joseph’s church pointed to eight, though it had long since ceased to chime the hours. Chiming clocks and the ringing of church bells were forbidden for the duration of hostilities, or until the invasion came. They’d ring out loud and clear then.
But maybe there wouldn’t be an invasion. It was nearly a year since Dunkirk, and if they’d been going to come, surely they’d not have waited this long.
The potman at the Tarleton had it all worked out, though. The Germans would invade, he said. The air raids on London and Liverpool and Birmingham and Clydeside were to knock out communications and close roads and railways and make everybody so pig-sick that they’d welcome Hitler with open arms. He’d gone on saying it until people complained and the landlord was forced to tell him that such talk amounted to the spreading of gloom and despondency; it was almost as bad as careless talk and would land him in the Bridewell if the police got to hear about it.
Eight o’clock. Soon it would begin to grow dark, and she hadn’t seen to the house yet.
Since the bombing had started, the ritual checking of number seven Lyra Street had given Vi comfort. It was all she had left of Gerry, now. The ugly little terrace house was her husband, her lover and the child she had never conceived. It was, she supposed, her last link with sanity.
Almost without thinking she reached down to turn off the gas and water taps, then climbed the narrow stairs and pushed open the door to her right, smiling at the riot of roses that covered the walls. Her bedroom wallpaper never failed to give her pleasure. It was like awakening each morning in a garden in the country, though Gerry had cursed something awful, matching up the roses and rosebuds on the uneven walls. They had ignored the seriousness of the news bulletins that night and taken a trip down the Mersey on the Royal Iris to celebrate the finishing of their bedroom, though Mr Chamberlain had told them next day that they were at war with Germany. So Vi called them her last-day-of-peace roses and vowed they would remain there until the war was over, even if it lasted four years, like the last one had done. Now those roses reminded her of Gerry, who had pasted them there, and she wondered if she would ever find the courage to scrape them off.
Sighing, she began to fill a carrier bag with essentials; an insurance, she supposed, in case the worst happened. Shoes first, then a towel, soap and toothbrush; and stockings and knickers, of course, and room enough left for her handbag, gas mask and a warm woolly scarf.
There was nothing to check in the front parlour; hardly anything to say goodbye to, for the room was empty of furniture and must remain that way until the shops would once again have chairs and sofas and rugs and curtains to sell.
Vi walked across the echoing emptiness to gaze at the mantel shelf and the reminders it held of Gerry. A vase from Shanghai; a pair of plates, hand-painted with gold dragons, from Hong Kong and, on his last trip but one, the two goblets. They were heavy and sparkled when she held them to the light, and she thought they were the most beautiful things she would ever own.
‘But whatever’ll we do with crystal glasses, Gerry?’
‘We’ll drink out of ’em, thick ’ead,’ he assured her solemnly. ‘When this old war’s over we’ll have wine every Christmas, and that’s a promise, girl.’
So she had placed them on the mantel with the vase and the dragon plates, and Gerry had promised her two more, next time he docked in Cape Town. Now, not knowing why, she lifted them down. Usually she never took anything but essentials to the shelter, but tonight, after Richie Daly had blundered into her kitchen, she needed the comfort of those glasses. Gently she placed them in the carrier bag.
‘That’s it, then.’ She drew the thick blackout curtains and the nightly ritual was finished. Carrier bag and coat lay on the kitchen table beside the attaché case. Everything was ready and she returned to the yard to sit on the bench beside the rose tree, to sit and wait, eyes closed, and will her clenched fingers one by one into relaxation.
The bombers were late tonight, but there was still time, she supposed. Double British Summer Time added two hours of daylight and the Luftwaffe needed the cover of darkness. But soon the light would begin to fade; then fire watchers would take up positions on rooftops and each air-raid warden and ambulance driver would feel a churning in his stomach. At fire stations and first-aid posts and rest centres, men and women would look up at the sky just as she, Vi McKeown, was doing now.
She closed her eyes, concentrating once again on her tightening fingers, trying not to think of Richie Daly and the Emma Bates; trying not to weep when she thought about the waste of a good life, of fifty good lives.
She was still sitting there when the silence began, those few moments of suspended time that came before the sounding of the air-raid sirens. She had come to recognize that silence, to smell it, almost. It was a void so strange and complete that there was no mistaking it. They were coming again; coming to kill and maim and blast and burn.
Reluctantly she rose to her feet, her breathing loud and harsh, the weariness she had been fighting since the air raids started overpowering her senses. God, but she was so afraid. Afraid of tonight and tomorrow and all the empty tomorrows. It was as if the bombing was draining her of all feeling, leaving her so spent that all she wanted to do was to close her eyes and not open them again until it was all over.
The
