The Rescue Man Page 11

  ‘This,’ she said, beaming, ‘is my baby brother. David, this is our friend Tom.’ As they shook hands, Baines for a moment wondered if he was being let in on some dubious practical joke. How could this … boy possibly have kidded his way into the air force? He seemed no more than seventeen, and the sparse little moustache he evidently hoped would make him look older was having quite the reverse effect. He looked for reassurance to Bella, but she was still gazing proudly at David.

  ‘You’re on leave, then?’ said Baines.

  ‘Yes, just for the weekend. I didn’t have anything else to do, so –’

  Bella mock-slapped his arm at this. ‘Don’t be naughty. What he meant to say was he couldn’t bear for another week to go by without seeing his dear old sis.’

  A sharp pop came from the kitchen and Richard emerged with a bottle of champagne. ‘I think a toast would be in order,’ he said, slopping the fizz into glasses. ‘Here’s to – the young flying ace!’

  David smiled shyly as they clinked. To Baines it felt as though they were marking the end of something. The champagne itself seemed valedictory – it might be the last they drank for a while if France were to capitulate.

  They ate liver sausage for dinner, with semolina for pudding. Richard recounted the day’s practice response at Bootle and its bathetic conclusion. ‘… and through the dark this voice pipes up, “’Ave you gorra ciggy on yer?”’ Baines laughed along, though what really amused him was Richard’s hopeless imitation of Scouse. Outsiders never got it right, they confused it with the donkey-bray flatness of the Black Country. Scouse was grating in a different way, he thought, that abrasive nasal whine mixed in with a dose of chronic catarrh. But he thought he might miss it if it ever disappeared. He spent most of the dinner covertly studying David, quieter and more diffident than his sister, though physically their resemblance was strong. He had her dark eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones, and used his hands in the same languidly expressive way. He was no longer in his teens, it seemed; his twenty-first birthday was coming up in September. As Baines watched Bella teasing David, her face lit from within by a glow of fondness, he was caught unawares by a sudden piercing jab of envy. It was to do with being an only child, perhaps, with never having known that intimacy of endurance that bound siblings to one another like veterans from a long and difficult campaign. Or so he told himself.

  But still he listened to them talking and laughing as he and Richard cleared the plates. They were reminiscing about a holiday together on an island Baines had never heard of, and Bella was gaily recalling a favourite anecdote about their trouble with a local shopkeeper. The irrecoverable nature of this past, as distant as Saturn, suddenly bore down on him, seeming to constrict his chest. If only he had known her when he was a young man – how different his life might have been. He felt quite dizzy, and excused himself. In the bathroom he splashed water on his face, and tried to calm the furious acceleration of his heart. What on earth was the matter? He sat down on the edge of the bathtub for a minute or two, and steadied himself. After a while he heard a tap at the door, and Richard on the other side.

  ‘Tom? Are you all right in there?’

  ‘Fine, yes. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  ‘Righto.’ He heard the footsteps retreating.

  When he returned to the table he lightly dismissed Bella’s expressions of concern. ‘I hope it’s not the sausages?’

  He laughed. ‘No, really, it was – nothing.’ Just a terrible existential ache, he thought.

  ‘Well, the news today would give anyone a turn,’ said Richard, bringing a second bottle of champagne from the kitchen. ‘Another German invasion on the same day we get a new prime minister. Quite a comeback for Churchill, though.’

  ‘You’re not opening that to toast him, are you?’ said Bella.

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to me,’ he replied. ‘But I have to say – the old boy did keep warning us about Germany. He would never have stood for Munich like Chamberlain did.’

  ‘If France falls then we’re really in for it,’ said David, and a gloomy silence briefly settled on them. Baines looked around the table and cleared his throat by way of announcing a change of subject.

  ‘I’ve been wondering,’ he said, ‘about the photographs. I mean for the book.’

  ‘Have the publishers changed their mind?’

  ‘No, and they won’t as long as there’s a war on. But is there any reason why we shouldn’t exhibit them? They’re so good, it seems a shame to let them gather dust.’

  ‘I think we should,’ said Bella, steepling her fingers as if about to pray. ‘We’ve always talked about turning the ground floor into a gallery.’

  They spent a few minutes debating a title for such an exhibition. Baines and Richard both favoured something evocative of the city’s grandeur.

  ‘How about “The Glory that was Liverpool”?’ said Richard. Bella wrinkled her nose in disdain.

  ‘Pompous, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘We could call it “Liverpool: Venice of the North”,’ said Baines. ‘They say that in the eighteenth century the dock system rivalled the canals. And there’s a lot of Italian Renaissance-style buildings around the business district.’

  Bella still looked sceptical. ‘When I think of Venice I see canals and gondolas. Even Liverpool doesn’t get that much rainfall.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Richard, tolerantly, ‘let’s hear your ideas, my darling.’

  ‘I think it should convey both sides of the city, the wealth and the poverty. We could use pictures of the slum courts side by side with the grand public buildings. Something like, I don’t know, “A Tale of Two Cities”?’

  ‘Mm. They might notice it’s been used before,’ said Richard. ‘And besides, shouldn’t it be celebrating the place rather than highlighting its social problems? Tom, don’t you agree?’

  Baines did agree, though he knew Bella was right, too, about the divided nature of the city. He thought just then of the barefoot boy who’d followed them around that morning – the morning he’d first met Bella. For her it had been a catalyst. She had continued on her own initiative to photograph not just the inner-city dereliction but the poor, densely populated districts of Scotland Road and Vauxhall Road. Could a portrait of Liverpool really ignore the fact that great numbers of its people lived in chronic poverty?

  ‘I take Bella’s point,’ he said, carefully. ‘But I think the emphasis should be on the architecture.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Richard. ‘Let’s concentrate on the majesty of the place instead of harping on about the slums and the plight of the poor.’

  Bella looked hard at him. ‘If showing some photographs of the conditions in which people live is “harping on”, as you call it, then maybe we should have more of it. I mean, God forbid that we actually try to show something truthful.’

  There was a rising note of anger in her voice that Baines hadn’t heard before. Even Richard looked slightly taken aback. Bella’s face had flushed, and her eyes glittered like warning lamps from beneath her darkened brow. She seemed about to say something else, but then stopped herself and got up from the table. The atmosphere she left behind was momentarily strained, and Richard continued to pick absently at the foil on the champagne. David, who had observed his sister’s flare-up without comment, said softly, ‘I don’t know the place at all well, but whenever I see Liverpool on the map I always think of it as – the City by the Sea.’

  Baines and Richard looked at one another. City by the Sea: it was simple, but somehow affirmative. And the combined sibilance of the first word and the last fleetingly suggested the motion of the tides.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Baines, nodding at David.

  ‘We have our toast, then,’ said Richard, forcing the cork from the bottle’s neck with a mighty blam.

  Bella didn’t return, and once the champagne was finished David also turned in for the night. Richard and Baines sat on the floor looking through the first sheaf of photographs, which together formed a k
ind of collage of Castle Street back in that ominous August. They heard midnight tolling from a distant church.

  ‘I’d better be off soon,’ said Baines.

  ‘Have a nightcap first. Got some Scotch.’ Having risen to his feet, Richard looked like a man trying to keep upright on a tilting deck. ‘Sorry ’bout that thing with Bella. She’s quite the socialist, isn’t she?’

  ‘I suppose she is.’

  ‘Has a whole crowd of lefty friends down in London. All over the place, really. Art school breeds them, you know.’ He stopped, and looked round. ‘What did I get up for?’

  ‘Scotch.’

  ‘Ah.’ He stalked off to the kitchen, and returned with glasses and a bottle of Dewar’s. He broke the seal and began to pour.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Baines, ‘just a finger for me.’ The measure Richard handed over was at least three times that.

  ‘But of course she comes from radical stock,’ said Richard, doggedly pursuing his theme. ‘Not sure about her father, but her mother marched for women’s suffrage. Went to prison for it!’

  Baines had heard Bella talk of her mother’s campaigning spirit, but he hadn’t heard anything about prison. For some reason it touched him that she’d withheld that bit of the story. It made her seem at once more human and more glamorous.

  Richard smiled ruefully. ‘If she ever found out that I drove a bus during the General Strike she’d – well … explode.’

  ‘I’ve not seen her that heated before,’ said Baines.

  ‘Tonight wasn’t just about that,’ Richard reflected, frowning. ‘I think she’s on edge, worrying about David. They’re very close.’

  ‘He seems such a kid. Quiet, too. He reminds me rather of … someone I know.’ Baines had actually been reminded of himself at that age – reticent, self-contained – but he thought better of confessing it.

  ‘A kid, yes. A kid who’s had about twenty flying hours, and now they expect him to take on the Luftwaffe.’

  ‘That’s madness.’

  ‘That’s war, old boy. Get used to it.’

  They talked desultorily for another hour before Baines slipped away, having extinguished Richard’s cigar and left its owner snoring quietly in an armchair. He walked out into a night steeped in tall, inky shadows. The streets had seemed emptier, eerier, since the pubs had been forced to close early. The windows along Seel Street, hung with blackout curtains, stared down sightlessly. Under this inky canopy the walk home was strewn with hazards, even with a torch to hand; he kept reading reports of people knocked down and killed by trams or cars spilling out of the dark. It had become necessary to rely on one’s ears almost more than one’s eyes. He encountered nobody on his way home; even the late-night coffee and pie stall he used to pass on Berry Street had gone.

  As May lurched on the news continued rolling from across the Channel like distant thunder. Beneath the mood of apparent calm Baines felt a kind of hysteria about to break. Even when the Wehrmacht had crushed Norway and Denmark in April the war seemed to be happening somewhere else. Now it was heading right towards the front door, and every day was bringing fresh disaster. Holland had surrendered, the French and Belgian armies were outflanked and on the run. The hopes of a counteroffensive from the British Expeditionary Force had failed utterly: the Germans were tearing through France, there was nothing to stop them. Only the evacuation from Dunkirk offered a brief respite from the gloom – a miracle in the midst of catastrophe – before the rumours of invasion started up. Hitler would invade, they said, it was simply a matter of when.

  Baines saw photographs of the Wehrmacht in Paris, marching past the Arc de Triomphe, and he was jolted. They seemed absurd and frightening at once. Now he tried to picture them, as if in newsreel montage, goose-stepping down Lime Street on their triumphal procession towards St George’s plateau – he imagined that would be the place they’d stage it. Cut to the Führer emerging from the long motorcade with a salute and that shy smirk, then mounting the steps of St George’s Hall, its long portico spiked with swastika flags. Around him would swirl his retinue of ministers and men of war, blankly obsequious, all clad in the goon-squad livery of black and grey; then in close-up you would see the double lightning flash of an SS badge glinting on a collar, or the death’s-head on a cap, as party dignitaries craned forward to shake the man’s hand. Another cut to Hitler, now staring like a mongoose from the podium, finger slashing the air as he announced the latest step in his Thousand Year Reich … and that was where Baines’s imaginary film whited out, as if stalled by a faulty projector. He realised this was because every time he had seen footage of Hitler delivering a speech there would invariably be vast cheering crowds in attendance, their arms raised in stiff salute, their faces lit up in a frenzy of obeisance. Heil, Heil!

  That wasn’t going to happen here. Liverpudlians could be a strange, unpredictable lot, but one thing he felt for certain was that nobody could own them. They would never be bullied – he had read somewhere that even the Communist Party had called the city ‘an organiser’s graveyard’ – and they would never bend the knee to anyone. Hitler would always need a crowd, but Liverpool would not provide him with one – therefore Hitler would never come to Liverpool. And therefore would not invade? Baines wasn’t blind to the childishness of this reasoning, but it was oddly reassuring all the same; it encouraged him to believe that, whatever was thrown at them, they would resist it.

  The city was still holding its breath as spring lurched into summer. Anxiety had become his companion. It woke in the morning in front of the blackout curtains, hovered by the wireless, read the newspaper over his shoulder, sat on the top deck of the tram, sidled after him into the pub. He heard it within the ticking of his clock, the clanging of church bells, the querulous whine of the air-raid siren. He became used to its presence, until he could no longer imagine his life without it. When Richard started to redecorate the studio in readiness for the ‘City by the Sea’ exhibition, Baines seized the opportunity to distract himself and volunteered to paint the walls of the office upstairs: they were going to need both floors to accommodate the number of photographs. The disagreement about its social emphasis which had provoked Bella’s indignation that night in May had not been mentioned again, though Baines sensed that something was still amiss.

  His suspicion was confirmed one afternoon in late July while he was taking a break from painting the walls. He was at the window, staring on to the backs of the houses, with their chipped slate roofs and blackened brick. Bella was working in the stockroom, arranging the photographs in a loose sequence on the huge work table where Richard did the framing, when she put her head round the door.

  ‘Tom, do you want to have a look at this?’

  Baines went into the stockroom and saw dozens of the high-contrast black-and-white squares lined in neat rows across the work surface.

  ‘I’ve arranged them in roughly the order Richard suggested, starting with the docks, then moving through the business district towards the cathedral, the university, and so on. What do you think?’

  He hunkered over the table, examining what he had only seen previously in discrete batches. Now, set out in tiers, the luminous monochrome and deep focus seemed to take on a symphonic quality, there was a patterning in the light and dark that absorbed the eye. Whether in the gaunt prosperity of a Georgian facade or the melancholy vista down a cobbled street, the beauty of the place impressed itself anew on him, and he was moved. But something felt wrong, and he realised now what it was. He turned to Bella, who had been fiddling in a preoccupied way with her hair, tied today in a glossy ponytail.

  ‘These look wonderful but, er, they’re all Richard’s.’

  ‘Not all, there are a few of yours too. Here’s that lovely one of the horse and cart at the Goree.’

  ‘No, what I mean is – there aren’t any of yours.’

  Bella looked down at the table, her mouth puckering slightly. ‘Yes … I came to a decision. It seemed best to impose a kind of integrity.’

  ‘But
I didn’t – we didn’t mean to throw your stuff out altogether. Honestly, Bella, yours are some of the best photographs of the lot, it would be ridiculous not to include –’

  ‘Tom, please,’ she said, holding up her hand to silence him, ‘don’t fret yourself. I realised that if I was going to stage an exhibition on Liverpool, it would be very different from the one you and Richard have in mind. You both look on the place as this grand seaport, brimming with history and wonderful architecture – it means a lot to you. And that perspective will look odd next to pictures of barefoot children and families in crammed courts with a single lavatory between them. So let’s not mix up the two.’

  Baines felt a surge of gratitude, and beneath that a needling shame that he had acceded with so little fight. Bella’s change of heart in the matter was mystifying, but then he knew he was quite far from understanding this woman at all. He could sense about her an impenetrable force field of sadness; in unguarded moments of repose she could look absolutely forlorn, but then that sudden smile would snap on like a light and she was buoyant once more. Detecting one of these sorrowful moods, he had sometimes been tempted to offer a quiet word of comfort, and had held back. He was too mindful of his own past to make that mistake again.

  He said, ‘If I could find my hat, I’d take it off to you.’

  She smiled. ‘Well, maybe one day I’ll stage my Liverpool exhibition and invite you along …’

  ‘Count on it, I’ll be there. But do me another favour, would you, take out those amateur shots of mine. I’d rather it were a one-man show, and Richard probably would too.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘You said it yourself, better to aim for integrity.’ They looked at the photographs a few moments longer, then Bella said, ‘We should try to get the press here. Maybe ask that rather pretty friend of yours at the Echo to come along.’

  ‘You mean Evie? Yes … is she pretty?’