The Rescue Man Read online

  ‘I read your article in the Engineer the other week,’ said McQuarrie eventually, his basilisk gaze never seeming to flinch. That he declined to elaborate on this declaration was characteristic, so Baines was obliged to fill the void.

  ‘Yes, that piece is about the only thing I’ve managed to complete all year,’ he replied, though even this self-deprecating sally sounded a little garrulous in present company. McQuarrie had perfected a disconcerting tactic of listening and then, by way of reply, silently leaning back and eyeing his interlocutor as if from a great distance. In those few seconds any hope of conversational intimacy would disappear. He was doing it now, so Baines pressed on, explaining his work on the architectural study and his other recent preoccupation. It occurred to him that the publishers had more than likely been recommended his name by McQuarrie himself.

  ‘There’s surprisingly little work been done on Peter Eames,’ said McQuarrie. ‘A remarkable man. To have produced those designs before the age of twenty-six – you could almost forgive him his, shall we say, overweening arrogance.’ He articulated the last two words with disgusted relish.

  ‘I suppose once you become convinced of your own genius, the idea of other people’s requirements seems … irrelevant.’

  McQuarrie nodded slowly. ‘I think it was other people’s money that became the problem. The library he wanted to build would have cost a king’s ransom. He admits it himself in his diaries.’

  ‘Diaries? I didn’t know they’d been published.’

  ‘They haven’t. They moulder uncatalogued in the Liverpool Record Office. I dare say they’ll let you read them – it’s not as if there’s a waiting list.’

  A club underling had sidled over and whispered to the old man, who looked at Baines.

  ‘You’ll join me in a sherry?’

  Baines readily agreed, and in the meantime listened to his former teacher’s laconic update of university news. When the drinks arrived, he sniffed his glass doubtfully.

  ‘It’s poor stuff from South Africa, I’m afraid,’ said McQuarrie. ‘They can’t get it from Spain because of the war.’

  Mention of one war inevitably brought them round to discuss the abysmal prospect of another. Odd to think it was only last September when they were rejoicing in the streets. The crisis had come, but the disaster had been averted. Or, as it seemed, postponed. Now that Hitler had jackbooted his way through the rest of Czechoslovakia it was impossible to think they could escape a second time.

  ‘Regarding your work on the city,’ said McQuarrie, thoughtfully, ‘I suppose there’s still a great deal to do?’

  Baines nodded, and began to describe the multiform nature of the enterprise, how it entailed not merely dating the buildings of note but recording their pedigree and specifying any architectural anomaly or quirk that seemed germane. On top of all that, he was required to make sketches of the major buildings he documented. Baines, the recording angel, had felt his wings begin to droop.

  ‘Well,’ said McQuarrie, after silent consideration, ‘there’s no getting around the historical research. But you could save yourself some time if you leave off the sketching.’

  ‘The publishers insist on illustrations.’

  ‘I’m sure they do. So give them photographs instead – they’re going to become standard for that kind of book soon in any case.’ Baines could see the charm of the idea but worried that his paymasters might baulk at the expense. There was also a practical drawback to consider.

  ‘I don’t know how to take photographs.’

  McQuarrie regarded him pityingly. ‘For God’s sake, man. How difficult do you think it is? You take the cap off the snout, point it in the right direction and make sure nobody walks in front of you.’

  Baines fell silent. What he couldn’t explain to McQuarrie – what he could barely explain to himself – was this nagging disposition to delay, to postpone, though he now had an inkling that, with the world on the brink, it was perhaps the futility of action in itself that had mesmerised him. His thoughts turned to the discovery of the joiner’s workshop earlier that week, those men hurrying off to fight for king and country in the summer of 1914. Did they suspect, did even one of them suspect, that they would never come back? It was intolerably sad. And now, twenty-five years later, he would be following them into – what, exactly? Terror incognita. He glanced down at the newspaper, its headlines the writing on the wall.

  ‘I dare say there’ll soon be more pressing engagements than architectural histories,’ he said, trying to keep the note of bitterness out of his voice.

  McQuarrie looked at him appraisingly, and waited before he spoke. ‘That may be so. Which makes your job all the more urgent. A year, two years from now, some of these buildings may not be here. For all we know, “here” may not be here. This could be the last chance to set them down as history. I would advise you not to waste it.’

  Baines nodded, his mind’s eye clouded with ashes and rubble. He could go for days, sometimes, without thinking about it. But it was always there, a spectral blur, and once it slouched back into view he could think of nothing else.

  Their interview was over. McQuarrie rose from his chair, and allowed himself a thin smile.

  ‘I’m sure this will strike you as Presbyterian talk, son, but work is the best defence against worry. I’ll search out what I can on Eames, you keep on with this book and, God willing, we’ll get through whatever Mr Hitler decides to throw at us.’

  Baines took his proffered hand, and thanked him for his time, touched by a suspicion that his old teacher, as undemonstrative a man as he’d ever known, had been trying to cheer him up. As he walked out on to the street he replayed their conversation in his head, and wondered if he had only misheard McQuarrie calling him, with unlikely tenderness, ‘son’.

  * * *

  Baines had never sensed the foundations of his life to be secure, for a reason he at first considered obvious: he had not had parents to love. When he thought about his mother all he could retrieve was the image of a young woman sitting on a sofa, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. He had always presumed this was his mother, but he could never be sure. She had died at twenty-eight of TB, and the care of her only child, aged three, devolved upon her much older husband, a dutiful but distant man who seemed at a loss as to what this diminutive stranger might require of him. He was an assistant manager at one of the large city banks, and on his wife’s death had buried his grief in overwork. His brother’s wife, May, looked after the boy during the day, an arrangement that became permanent when Baines’s father died, of a heart attack, five years after his wife.

  Now, as he approached middle age, without any prospect of a wife or family of his own, Baines wasn’t sure if the fault lay in himself, some hairline flaw in the structure of his personality. It seemed to him he would have been a solitary sort with or without the trauma of orphanhood. It haunted him, when he could bear to think about it, that he had never wept for the loss of his parents. He reasoned that this had been because he had not known his mother, and had barely got to know his father. His only resource had been the unwavering kindliness with which George and May submitted to the role of his guardians. Their first duty in that capacity had been to take him to his father’s funeral. Even from the distance of nearly thirty years he could remember the coldness of the church, the smell of candle wax and furniture polish, the mournful wheedling of the organ while the priest droned mechanically through the exequies. Then, at the graveside, George bending down and whispering to him as the diggers waited discreetly at a remove: it was his moment to pick up a handful of earth and throw it into the neatly excavated rectangle. Its pitter-pattering on the wooden box below sounded a kind of farewell. Years later he learned from George that he and May had argued about bringing him to the funeral at all; May had worried that it might be too upsetting an experience for an eight-year-old, but George had insisted.

  Were they surprised to see the boy so self-possessed and dry-eyed before his father’s grave? Perhaps.
But it was surely no less surprising when, a few years later, they did see him break down for the first and last time. One afternoon in the autumn of 1914 Baines had called in at the stables on his way home from school, only to find the place deserted. He couldn’t understand it, though the wild heartbeat in his chest as he hurried homewards warned of disaster. May met him at the door, and through his heaving sobs he learned of the horses’ fate. It was not only young men who were being pressed into service on the Western Front. George, distraught on his own account, hadn’t been able to tell his nephew of the calamitous requisition. When he returned that evening and they read the anguish in each other’s face the boy clung to him, and bereft of words to articulate his sorrow he wept – wept out his soul.

  The bar of the Imperial Hotel was beginning to hum with a Saturday-evening clientele thirstily catching up with off-duty stewards and deckhands from Cunard – a liner must have recently docked. Through the fug of Woodbines and pipe smoke Baines spotted Jack at one of the back tables; he had evidently just been telling one of his risqué jokes, because the two women he was entertaining had fallen about with shrieks of outraged laughter. One of them was Evie, Jack’s dismayingly pretty girlfriend, the other a woman Baines didn’t recognise, though she was the first to catch his eye as he approached. He knew at that instant he had been set up for the night.

  Jack made the introduction. ‘Brenda, this is Tom Baines,’ he said, flicking a glance at Baines that might have contained a request to play along. Brenda extended her hand with a coquettish smirk.

  ‘Pleased to meet yer.’

  She too was pretty and in her mid-twenties, though made up in a coarser way than Evie; dark, eager eyes greeted him from a heart-shaped face whose pale Liverpool-Irish complexion was offset by alarmingly crimsoned lips. Her powder and paint had been so thickly applied that Baines was put in mind of some rare tropical bird – one that expected to be admired, and perhaps adopted as a pet.

  ‘You’ve arrived just in time to get the next round in,’ Jack said brightly, raising his empty pint glass. Jack was drinking Higsons; the girls, on enquiry, both asked for a gin and French. Baines turned and threaded his way to the bar. While he was waiting to pay, he found Jack leaning conspiratorially against his shoulder.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind about this,’ he said, nodding back to their table. ‘She’s an old friend of Evie’s, and a really nice lass. Been very lonely since her feller shipped out a few months ago.’

  Baines had an intuition, even on their short acquaintance, that Brenda had never been lonely in her life. He didn’t know whether he felt amused or aggrieved that this little get-together had been engineered for his sake rather than hers. Jack, something of a swordsman in his prime, was fascinated by Baines’s habitual monkishness, and would occasionally take it upon himself to play his matchmaker.

  ‘So, what d’you say?’ said Jack.

  ‘I’m lost for words.’

  ‘Come on. we’ll have some laughs. She likes you, anyway – she thinks you look like Joel McCrea.’

  Baines laughed, and Jack clapped him on the back, joining in.

  Brenda, a secretary at a shipping insurance firm, was talking volubly about the sailors whose arrival in port after months at sea would turn the place into a regular boom town.

  ‘They’ve got wads of money thick enough to choke a horse,’ she said. ‘But you have to get them quick or else they’ll lose it all at cards in a weekend.’

  She looked around the bar, as if she were minded to lasso one of their number right then and there. Her voice was fiercely Liverpudlian, containing something droll in its sing-song intonations but also something querulous: it was an accent that carried even in its simplest declaration a note of complaint.

  ‘They can be randy beggars, though,’ she continued, giggling. ‘I was out with one feller last week, who’s tippen back the ale like prohibition’s starten tomorrer. We’re just there talken about his last trip and next thing I know he’s, like, all over me!’

  Baines wasn’t certain if this should be construed as a warning or an invitation. He thought he must seem very dull to her, despite the professed likeness to Joel McCrea. He looked, covertly, at Evie, who was laughing along with the story of Brenda’s amorous assailant. An uncommon girl, really. Jack, as long as Baines had known him, had made a habit of treating his girlfriends with a cordial remoteness; their pleas for attention seemed to slide off him like mercury from a plate. Baines recalled him joking that he preferred women with long faces, because once you made them miserable you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Evie was not the plaintive kind, yet she also seemed quite indifferent to the wiles of ‘keeping a man’: it perhaps explained why she and Jack had been together for three years or more. She worked as an editorial assistant at the Echo. Baines loved her disarming, old-fashioned air of graciousness, and the way it enhanced her expressive, mobile face and lively almond-shaped eyes. He loved the ease with which she talked to people, friendly with everyone yet favouring no one. Indeed, all he could object to in her was the fact of her being Jack’s girlfriend, and there was nothing to be done about that.

  Evie was at that moment trying to form a line of communication between him and Brenda.

  ‘Tom and Jack have been friends since they were at the School of Architecture together. Tom’s a historian – he’s even written a book.’

  ‘Really?!’ cried Brenda. ‘Must have a look in Smith’s for it.’

  ‘Please let me save you the trouble,’ said Baines. ‘It was a very small print run, and I’m afraid you’ll never find it in Smith’s.’

  ‘So what’s it about then, your buke?’

  ‘Anglo-Norman architecture,’ he said.

  ‘Tom often keeps us entertained with readings from it,’ said Jack, winking at Baines.

  ‘It sounds very … important,’ Brenda said, gamely, and sensing an end to this topic raised her glass. ‘Cheers, everyone!’

  They clinked glasses, and discussion turned to their immediate plans for the evening. Evie and Brenda wanted to go to the pictures, and were trying to decide between Confessions of a Nazi Spy or The Hound of the Baskervilles. Baines wasn’t keen on either, but since he had read the Conan Doyle stories he steered the vote in favour of the latter. They finished their drinks, and walked out on to St George’s Place, their faces illuminated in the dark by the huge neon sign above the Imperial advertising Guinness. Lime Street was thronged with Saturday-night crowds almost feverish in their quest for entertainment. A gang of sailors, rowdy with drink, passed by and wolf-whistled Brenda and Evie, who smiled complacently.

  They entered the packed auditorium and edged their way along the row to their seats. A newsreel was playing, over which a voice fluted with stiff patrician cheeriness. Mr and Mrs Chamberlain were walking in the park; the Duchess of Kent was inspecting something or other; a ship was being launched amid a hysterical outbreak of flag-waving and hat-throwing. The emollient triviality of these non-events seemed to Baines almost wilful, another instance of a collective determination to ignore the one thing staring everybody in the face.

  Eventually the picture started, and he found himself lulled by its genteel sense of Edwardian intrigue: Holmes discussing his plan of action while the hansom cab bowls along Baker Street. He could have wished, however, that an actor other than Basil Rathbone had been cast in the lead role: his impersonation felt too brisk, too blithe; it missed the deep-set melancholy of the great detective. Watson was merely a buffoon. Baines cast a glance to his right and watched Jack light up two cigarettes and pass one of them to Evie; their plumes of smoke curled romantically across the projector’s tapering beam of light. He shifted in his seat, aware of the rapt stillness around him. Even Brenda’s irrepressible tongue had been silenced by the ceaseless sprockety whirr of the reels.

  He considered her from the corner of his eye. Well, she wasn’t so bad, he thought. Evie certainly liked her – she was disposed to like just about everyone – but he couldn’t for the life imagine wh
y she judged Brenda a good match for him. Of course she had a pleasing look, firmly buttressed by a confidence in her own attractiveness. Too firmly. Baines didn’t consider himself shy, but his demeanour was sufficiently quiet and inward-looking to be mistaken for shyness. His natural tendency when confronted by a personality as bumptious as Brenda’s was to withdraw, to efface himself while louder voices insisted upon their claim to attention. He had a horror of those drinks parties where raucous strangers would dragoon him into talk of ‘the international situation’ and then gabble their own opinion rather than wait around for his. He had learned to recognise the type very quickly, and would make particular efforts to avoid wandering into their eyeline.

  After the film they had called in at the Vines, but finding it even more crowded than the Imperial they took a cab back to Jack’s flat in Falkner Square, and on the way sorted out their views on Holmes and Watson. Evie was confused about the reference, in the final moments, to ‘the needle’ – did Holmes have some kind of illness?

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Jack. ‘Unless you judge constitutional boredom an illness. He was injecting opium.’

  ‘So you mean … drugs?’ asked Brenda, uncertainly.

  ‘When the mood took him, yes. And spending that much time in Watson’s company I expect the mood would have taken him quite often.’

  Baines felt an enlivening sense of vindication: Jack had also been irked by Watson’s oafishness. He paid off the cab and followed the others into the house. Jack’s flat – his ‘bachelor rooms’, as he called them – comprised a rather poky kitchen and bedroom at the back, and a large, high-ceilinged living room at the front with French windows overlooking the square. Its air of studied informality reminded Baines of a stage set. He examined the spotted glass of the mirror above the fireplace.

  ‘Ooh, look at this one, admiren himself,’ cawed Brenda to Evie, nodding at Baines with a pert moue.