The Rescue Man Read online

  June [1865]

  I heard Frank creaking up the staircase again at about two o’clock this morning. Since his homecoming from the West Indies he has been resident with us in Hope-pl., & we have become acquainted, too well, with the peculiar hours he keeps. It remains a mystery to me what he has been at, though whenever I have been working late in the study & caught his return he wears on him the strong smell of grog and tobacco. I hardly mind for my own sake, but his nocturnal crashings have awoken the child, and seeing Emily’s piteously drawn face the next morning has induced me to plead with him for a softer footfall on his midnight entrances. Each time he seems contrite, & vows to be quiet as a mouse – but he soon forgets these solemn assurances & returns in the small hours with all the consideration of a thunderclap. Today I had stern words with him (the child was roused from sleep again) & suggested that he should continue here for another two weeks, & in the meantime seek accommodation of his own. He agreed to this, and thanked me for my forbearance in such an earnest, good-hearted way that I felt a dreadful pang of guilt immediately thereupon, & almost called him back to say that I spoke in jest, that our house was his for as long as he pleased. But I did not.

  29th June [1865]

  Rawlins has come to my aid once again. A friend of his recently vacated rooms in Mount-street, & let slip that the landlord was in need of a tenant. Knowing of our troubles, John secured the lease, & today, after completing negotiations, Frank took possession of the place. The rooms are tolerably furnished, though the walls quite bare, so in the afternoon I brought round some small paintings and sketches from Hope-pl. to hang. As I approached the house I happened to look up & caught Frank staring blankly out of the window: before me rose the vision – I cannot account for it – of a prisoner locked within his cell. He did not see me, but when I entered the room he greeted me with a smile that fleetingly recalled the genial and innocent youth I once knew. He seems to have money enough, the most part of it from gambling I should say, & perhaps he is in his mysterious way happy. Yet I am oppressed with a feeling, justifiable or not, of having abandoned him.

  7

  AS BAINES STEPPED out of the van he glanced up at the sky, where a number of planes were circling. Their formation was so regular that they reminded him of the silvery flying boats he had watched revolving on a merry-go-round as a child. It had just struck midnight, and the thunder of the ack-ack guns was still going strong. Now and then the darkness was spattered with a white enfilade of bursting shells. The shattered pub to which his rescue squad had been called was just off Canning Place, and the scene that met them disclosed a kind of strangeness that was quickly becoming familiar. The front wall of the building had been mostly torn away, leaving it exposed like a doll’s house; on the first floor, a toilet stood open to inspection, and next to it a bedroom, with a few pictures still clinging to the walls. Below, the rubble of mangled masonry and charred wood that filled the interior was hissing from where the firemen’s hoses had been busy. A staircase zigzagged from the top floor and ended, abruptly, in a puzzle of twisted ironwork about three feet above the bar.

  ‘Right, you lot wait here while I talk to the warden,’ said Rafferty, the squad leader, his breath pluming in the chilly November air. He was standing with his hands on his hips, surveying the damage. A tall, square-faced, heavily built man in his early fifties, he carried himself with an air of righteous complacency; Baines wondered if he’d once been in the army. The order was met with sullen silence by the two men who had just emerged from the back of the van. When Rafferty was out of earshot, one of them muttered to the other, ‘I’m tellin’ yer, la’, he used to be a copper. He’s got that mean look about ’im, I can spot ’em.’ This was Farrell, who, perhaps because he was of an age with Rafferty, resented his authority more keenly than the rest. A thickset, pugnacious-looking builder, he had dark curly hair and a face that seemed in permanent need of a shave. The other man, Liam Mavers, turned to Baines. ‘What do you reckon, Tommy? D’you think Rafferty lives in Letsby Avenue?’

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s where coppers come from – let’s-be-’avin’-you. D’you gerrit?’

  Farrell laughed, as if at an old joke.

  ‘I’d say he’s more like a sergeant major,’ said Baines. ‘You notice how straight he holds himself?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s from the poker he’s got rammed up his arse,’ said Farrell. ‘I mean, you ’eard what he just said – “You lot wait ’ere.” Like, where the fuck does he think we’re gonna go?’ He shook his head in disgust. Mavers smiled. ‘You should feel sorry for him. I bet he secretly knows we all hate him.’

  Mavers generally took this philosophical approach. He was about Baines’s age, and had worked on building sites with Farrell for years. His quiet smile and penetrating blue eyes expressed most of what he thought about the folly that passed for the world. Nobody had addressed Baines as ‘Tommy’ since he was a boy, but in Mavers’s sardonic Liverpudlian undertone it sounded all right. Baines was rather intrigued by him. Farrell, on the other hand, he wasn’t sure about; it was always the way with moody types. One day he would be cracking jokes and palling up with everyone, the next he had turned darkly, even dangerously, aggressive, and then people would try to keep out of his way. Tonight he seemed somewhere in between.

  Rafferty had returned from his consultation with the warden.

  ‘Well, as far as they can tell, there’s nobody left upstairs, and the first-aid people are standing by. Ambulances have just gone with the casualties.’

  ‘How many?’ asked Mavers.

  ‘Seven dead and twelve injured. The landlord and six of his regulars – seems they had a lock-in and hadn’t bothered taking shelter. The warden thinks there might be people in the cellar.’

  He delivered this inventory in a neutral tone. It was odd, thought Baines, how only a few months could make talk of death sound so casual.

  ‘There’s no chance of findin’ the cellar doors under that,’ said Farrell, nodding at the ton of debris that had spilt over the street.

  ‘Probably not,’ said Rafferty. ‘Which means we’ll have to look for the staircase inside. There should be one behind the bar, if we can get to it.’

  Baines lifted his gaze to the top of the building, where on one side a Dutch gable and a solitary dormer remained intact. It was a late-Victorian redbrick palace on four storeys, a grand old pub that had probably once been a favourite among sailors and dockers. Its brewery signage had split clean in half, so that Warrington Ales now became two: WARRING and, at an angle, TON ALES. Suddenly there was a shivery sound from above, and a warden shouted, ‘Everyone back!’ Tiles had loosened from the roof and now plummeted down the side of the pub, shattering on the cobbles.

  ‘Watch out for them, lads!’ someone called over.

  ‘Yeah, fat chance we’ve got if one lands on us,’ growled Farrell.

  The heavy drone of the planes was beginning to fade, which Baines noted with relief. There was nothing a rescue worker hated more than having to explore a building while another attack was going on above them. Rafferty, holding a storm lantern, led the way into the cavernous smoking mouth of the pub. They clambered over the wreckage, the air mingling damp soot with pulverised brick and warm beer, and made it to the saloon bar at the back of the building. The lamp revealed partial devastation: all the windows had been blown out, and the blackened ceiling dripped with water from where the firemen had been at it. But the bar counter itself and the beer taps seemed to have been untouched. Farrell picked up a bar stool, shook off the dusting of glass splinters and sat down.

  ‘All right, who’s gettin’ the ales in?’ he said. Baines and Mavers chuckled indulgently.

  ‘That’ll do, Farrell,’ said Rafferty. ‘Have a look behind there and see if there’s a door.’

  Farrell swung his huge frame over the counter and disappeared for a moment. They could hear his boots crunching over the glass, and then saw the thin beam of his torch return.

  ‘Nothun ’e
re,’ he called.

  Rafferty took up the lantern again and shone it into the far corner, where a door was partially occluded by a piano that had been hurled across the room and landed, at an angle, against it. They heaved it away and the instrument fell with a crash and a high muffled chord, as if a drunk had just bellyflopped across the keys. The door turned out to be locked.

  ‘Mavers, on you go,’ said Rafferty.

  Mavers stepped forward, handling the pickaxe that he had kept slung across his back. He gave the door an exploratory tap with the steel beak of the axe, then looked round.

  ‘Give us some room, will yer?’ he said, and the other three took a few steps back to allow him a full swing. The pickaxe rang against the wood, tearing and splintering the panel nearest the handle; several more blows made a hole large enough for him to put his arm through and unlock the door from the other side. A staircase dropped steeply into the dark. Rafferty held his lamp out, throwing bulbous shadows against the damp brick wall.

  ‘Hullo? Anyone down there?’

  A woman’s voice, which sounded as though it came from the bottom of a well, rose in answer. Her words were impossible to decipher, though the distress in her tone was clear enough.

  ‘Could you speak up, love?’

  The voice came again, now an anxious gabbled echo. Rafferty turned back and muttered, ‘Can’t hear a bloody word she’s saying. Right then, Baines, Farrell – follow me. Mavers, stay here and listen out for any sounds.’ He meant sounds that threatened collapse; by now they all knew stories of rescue workers who had been buried under houses that had fallen during their search for survivors; knew also how little chance they had of escaping a building once it had begun its final disintegration.

  As they reached the bottom of the staircase they trained their torch beams over the cellar, a chaos of broken plasterwork and tumbled bricks. The floor was pooled with ale, still seeping from punctured kegs and shattered bottles.

  ‘Over here.’

  The woman’s voice quavered from behind a sort of barricade of fallen masonry and crates. Baines, who was nearest, pointed his torch in the direction the voice had come from and began stepping, sloshing, through the beery, ankle-deep flood. As he came nearer he realised that something had broken through the ceiling; it must have been a toppled chimney stack, because the damage it had brought in its descent was riotous. His beam swept the littered floor in front of him, and then he spotted it, not a chimney stack at all but a steel cylinder in grey-green casing, snouty and heavy like a prize-winning marrow, its tail fins set at a jaunty-looking angle. He had not seen one in its unexploded state before. His heart, which had been drumming, was now trying to beat down the walls of its cage. He swallowed, and called to Rafferty and Farrell.

  ‘You might care to look at this.’ He wanted his heart to stop swelling, it was constricting his chest. He felt Rafferty’s sudden halt as he came up beside him. And now Farrell saw it too.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ he said, softly. ‘What are the chances …’

  Baines experienced an unbidden cartoon image of them as a trio of pith-helmeted explorers in a jungle, picking their way single file through the undergrowth and popping their eyes, like the Three Stooges, as they came face to face with the beast. The image dissolved. ‘If that’s a delayed action –’ said Rafferty, and stopped himself, as though speculation at this point was useless. They had no choice but to hope it was a dud. Baines felt his legs carrying him on towards the objective that had brought them down there. Tucked into an alcove behind the barricade – he understood its purpose now – were two women and two teenaged children, a boy and a girl, all of them coated in soot and plaster dust. They cowered, blinded by the torchlight, and he briefly forgot his fear as he took in their piteous, stricken faces. Perhaps that was the secret to keeping on, he thought, the sight of people more terrified than you were.

  ‘Hullo there,’ he said, his voice steady. ‘Is anyone hurt?’

  The younger of the two women nodded. ‘Irene, me sister, she sprained her ankle when she fell. We can’t move her.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Rafferty. ‘Let’s get you all out of here. Farrell, d’you think you can carry this lady?’

  Farrell stepped forward, and crouched down by the woman with the injured ankle. ‘Here we go, love. You put your arms round me neck, like that –’ As he scooped her up the woman whimpered, and then quietly began to weep. ‘Is this yer mum?’ he asked the boy and the girl, who nodded.

  ‘Let’s get her to the ’ozzie, then.’

  Rafferty led the way back, shepherding the children, then Farrell carrying the woman, then Baines with the sister, whose name was Joyce. As they stepped past the bomb, he felt her hands tighten on his arm. She knew how close they were, then.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ she said in a fierce whisper, ‘I just can’t understand it.’

  ‘What is it? What can’t you understand?’ asked Baines, though an instinct told him that he knew what it was. Joyce wouldn’t say anything else until they had ascended the staircase and were hurrying back through the mounds of debris. Out on the street another ambulance had arrived, and the first-aid team were standing by for any casualties. The woman in Farrell’s arms was looking around in disbelief at the gutted pub.

  ‘Roy, me husband,’ she said, forlornly, ‘is he all right? Is he safe?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine, love,’ said Farrell, ‘just calm yourself now.’

  Joyce, hearing this exchange, whispered again to Baines. ‘Her husband’s the landlord – is he –?’ He looked at her, trying to compose his features, but she read it in his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly.

  She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. After some moments she spoke again.

  ‘We heard such a big blast when we were down there. Then that other one flew down into the cellar – I could tell what it was, but we couldn’t move because of Irene. I just kept praying that it wouldn’t go off.’

  ‘It was very brave of you,’ said Baines. ‘Most people would have panicked – you did the right thing, trying to take cover.’

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ she said, returning to her refrain. ‘We heard it fizz. Why didn’t it go off?’

  ‘It still might. You – we – were just lucky.’

  ‘Luckier than poor Roy. How am I going to tell them? Those kids don’t have a father any more …’

  A medical attendant approached them holding a blanket, which Baines took and draped around the woman’s shoulders. Farrell had surrendered the landlord’s wife to the stretcher-bearers, who were now lifting her into the ambulance.

  ‘You might want to go with them to the hospital,’ said Baines.

  ‘Yes,’ Joyce replied absently, and began walking away. Then she seemed to collect herself, and turned back to him.

  ‘Thanks for –’ she started, but was unable to say more. Baines held out his hand, and she looked at him with a tear-stained half-smile as she shook it.

  They left the ruined pub just as the bomb-disposal team were arriving, and then answered a number of less dramatic emergencies through the night. They rescued an elderly couple trapped in a house on Great George Street, and later, at a distillery on King Street, they recovered a fireman who had survived a sixty-foot fall from his ladder. As a lavender dawn light crept in over the city and their shift ended, the full extent of the night’s raids became apparent. The streets had a gaunt, exhausted look, as if they had just taken a violent beating – windows that had been black-eyed, facades punched through, roofs stamped on and battered without mercy. Rafferty, driving back to the depot, had to keep twisting the wheel of the van to avoid gigantic bomb craters and heaps of debris, the result of a collapsed wall or a blown-out shopfront. Even at this hour people were stoically toiling to clear the rubble, sweeping up glass that sounded like the tide running over a shingled beach. It was cause for a satiric cheer from Farrell that Rafferty had made it back without puncturing a tyre.

  They tramped into
the depot and found members of another rescue squad playing darts.

  ‘Put the kettle on, la’, I’m fuckin’ parched,’ said Farrell to no one in particular as he flopped into an armchair. Rafferty ignored him and went to the office where he sat to type up his incident reports. Mavers ambled over to the sink and filled the kettle from the tap.

  ‘You wanna brew, Tommy?’ he asked.

  Baines, his eyes already closed as he slumped on a couch, croaked, ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  He must have fallen asleep immediately because a few minutes later Mavers was waking him with a gentle tap on his shoulder. A mug of steaming tea had been set on the arm of the couch. Farrell was blowing smoke rings and flicking the ash into his upturned helmet. Baines wasn’t sure if he had the energy to lift the mug to his mouth. Farrell began describing the close encounter they had had in the pub cellar some hours before.

  ‘The prof ’ere spotted it first. He says, cool as a cucumber, like, “You might care to look at this –” and ’e’s pointen at this huge-fuckin’ bomb!’

  Farrell, who gave nicknames to everyone as a matter of course, had decided to call Baines ‘the professor’ after learning that he had written a buke. The fluting imitation of his voice was a travesty, but Baines was too tired to care.

  ‘That pub must have had a curse on it,’ said Mavers. ‘Think about it – what are the chances of two bombs landin’ on yer the same night?’

  ‘That’s what I said! If that one had gone off it woulda been Goodnight Vienna – for all of us.’

  When he next woke Farrell and Rafferty had both gone. Mavers had his feet up on a chair and was reading a book, his brow furrowed in slightly disbelieving appraisal. He looked over at Baines.