The Rescue Man Page 5

  ‘Hullo? Do please come up,’ a muffled voice called from above. Baines crossed the room and ascended a staircase at the back. The provisional bareness of the ground floor could not have been in sharper contrast to its neighbour upstairs: framed photographs crowded out every inch of the walls right up to the cornices, most of them individual portraits – brides and soldiers staring hopefully into the lens – though here and there he spotted group photographs of football teams, begowned students, even Boy Scouts. There was no order to their arrangement, they seemed merely to have filled whatever space had become available. A chaotically untidy desk occupied most of the far wall, above which his eye was drawn to a large photograph, evidently a kind of centrepiece around which the motley jumble had congregated. Its sitter was a woman, arms folded across her chest with her face turned confidently, almost defiantly, to the camera. He studied her: the jawline was strong, the cheekbones too, and the glinting obsidian eyes carried the suggestion of a challenge. It looked like a face with character, though Baines wasn’t sure if that character would be much to his liking.

  A door in the corner swung open and from it emerged a man wiping his hands on an old cloth. His face lit up pleasantly as he caught sight of Baines. ‘Hullo there,’ he said, striding forward and raising his hand in a half-salute. ‘I’m Richard Tanqueray. Sorry, I’d offer you my hand but it’s soaked in emulsion – just been stumbling around the darkroom.’ Baines introduced himself. ‘I haven’t made an appointment –’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Richard airily. ‘We’re not overloaded with work at the moment. Though I dare say that’ll change once this war starts – soldiers coming in with their sweethearts, and what have you. Awful to say it, I know, but photographers do a roaring trade when there’s a chance people might be parting for good.’

  He was about forty, stocky in an athletic way, and seemed to squint as his gaze focused. His neat, toffee-coloured hair fell over his brow, framing a smooth-cheeked, well-fed face of a kind Baines always associated with ex-public schoolboys. He wore about him an air of suppressed jollity, as if in permanent expectation of a joke that might crack his sides.

  The bleak echo of ‘parting for good’ still hung between them, and Richard suddenly looked embarrassed.

  ‘Good heavens, I’m sorry – you’re not army, are you?’

  Baines smiled. ‘No. Not yet, anyway. Nor have I come to have my portrait taken.’

  ‘Phew! Thought I’d put my foot in it there. So what can I …?’

  Baines outlined his brief, while Richard nodded with the benign encouragement of a teacher listening to a bright pupil, interrupting with an occasional pertinent question. As he did so, Baines wondered at this new decisiveness. Perhaps something in the air was motivating him.

  Richard was proving quite amenable to the idea. ‘In a way it’s surprising that nobody’s done it before – I mean, made a proper photographic record of the city. I suppose in its heyday it must have been quite a place.’

  ‘As grand as any port in Europe,’ Baines agreed. ‘In the late eighteenth century they compared it to Venice.’

  ‘Hmm. It’s changed a bit since then.’

  ‘I should say so. I’ve just been doing some research at the library,’ said Baines. ‘Have you by any chance heard of Peter Eames?’

  ‘Afraid not. Ought I to have done?’

  ‘No. He was an architect, little known, worked in Liverpool during the 1860s. He designed Janus House on Temple Street.’

  ‘Ah, now that I do know. One of my favourite buildings – he did that?’

  Baines nodded, feeling an almost proprietary pleasure in Eames since his recent investigation of the journals, entombed for years until he had them hauled from the vaults that afternoon. But it saddened him to think of the many people, like Richard, who admired Janus House without having the faintest notion of its creator. He thought of Ruskin’s observation: ‘In no art is there closer connection between our delight in the work, and our admiration of the workman’s mind, than in architecture, and yet we rarely ask for a builder’s name.’

  ‘Well, consider me at your service,’ said Richard, glancing at his watch. ‘How about we shake on it over a drink? I might as well close up for the day – you’re the only soul that’s been in this afternoon.’

  They walked down the stairs and through the echoing ground-floor room. Richard gestured at its spartan furnishings with an air of apology. ‘We’ve been thinking of setting up a little gallery – at the moment it’s used for portraits.’

  It was the second time he’d used ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. Baines assumed there was a partner in the background, or else a band of assistants who helped out during busier times. He waited while Richard locked up, a routine he had evidently performed too often to have remained quite careful: Baines noticed that while his new associate chatted on he was about to leave one of the smaller keys still inserted in its hole at the base of the door. He plucked it out and handed it to its owner, who mimicked a wince of anguish, like a silent comedian who’d just tripped the alarm.

  ‘Oh, Tanqueray, you bloody fool,’ he said, in cheerful self-rebuke. ‘Not the first time I’ve done that – the place got burgled too!’ It seemed that he was determined to find something hilarious even in this unhappy memory.

  They sat drinking Higsons in the snug of a dusty old pub on Seel Street. Richard smoked a cigar, its roasted, acrid stench poisoning the air quite agreeably. He became even more expansive as he rehearsed a little of his own history. His cultivated voice, naturally amplified by his army background, caused one or two drinkers at the bar to turn and stare. He had been born in London to a military family, and had served as a captain on the Western Front, catching the worst of it at Ypres.

  ‘That was a pretty gruesome scrap,’ he said thoughtfully, and then, sensing the inadequacy of the words, shrugged and continued with his story. His father, a colonel who had originally served in India, had been a keen amateur photographer and had passed on the enthusiasm to his son; once he had been honourably discharged from the army, Richard had come to Liverpool and set up his studio.

  ‘Why here?’ asked Baines.

  ‘We used to come up here on leave – officers would stay at the Adelphi – and I suppose I just became fond of the place. The people are an odd mixture, they have a sort of aggressive friendliness which I rather like. But it’s also something about the quality of the light, I noticed it when I started taking photographs – it’s a kind of luminous distance you don’t get anywhere else but here. So it suits us pretty well.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Ah, I should have said – Bella, my wife. She started out as a painter but lately seems to prefer working with me. And I’m afraid to say she’s a better photographer than I am – actually, she’s better at everything than I am.’ He chuckled at his uxorious remark, and seemed to fall into a reverie. Baines leaned into the silence and drained his pint.

  Richard shook off his little trance and turned to Baines. ‘I’m so sorry, here I am boring on about my life while you’re there dying of thirst. Have another?’

  Baines raised his empty glass and smiled in assent. He studied Richard as he waited to be served at the bar. They were not obvious companions, he thought, Richard being a hearty, outgoing, Home Counties type, with a military boom in his voice that he used a little too freely. And yet Baines was surprised to feel something he hadn’t in a long time, possibly since meeting Jack back in the old days: it was the curious sensation of instantly liking a man. He warmed to his modesty, his unbullying camaraderie and genial absent-mindedness; he was touched, too, by this southerner’s affection for a northern city, so heartfelt that he had actually made his home here. Baines would never have contemplated the prospect of living in London, or the Home Counties, or indeed anywhere other than the place he’d been born. It didn’t even seem to him a question of choice – he simply couldn’t imagine surviving anywhere but Liverpool. Everything he needed was here, or at least everything he thought he nee
ded.

  Richard, resettled at their table, was taking great gulps of his pint, which presently he set down.

  ‘One thing strikes me about your photographic project – if done, then “’twere well it were done quickly”, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve left it late,’ said Baines. ‘I’ve been rather paralysed by a habit of – putting things off. With certain events on the horizon …’

  He let the sentence tail off, as though in echo of his inability to follow anything through. Richard nodded slowly, understanding.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I think that we could get started very soon. There are one or two things I need to tidy up first, but if all goes well, what d’you say, this weekend?’

  Baines, adrift for too long, felt the wind starting to pick up and thump his sails. He hadn’t written anything for months, but had explained that away as a consequence of distraction – the news from Europe had knocked him off his stride. Now he thought of a line he had read in Keats’s letters: ‘if I had the teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies I should call it languor – but as I am, I must call it Laziness.’ Yes, perhaps that was more truthfully his affliction, Laziness. With a capital L. He would try one more delaying tactic.

  ‘You do realise the publishers won’t pay much?’

  Richard smiled. ‘If you don’t disdain their fees I don’t see why I should. Here’s to it.’ He raised his glass in an imitation of priestly solemnity, and Baines knew now that he had no excuses.

  3

  BAINES CLIMBED GINGERLY up the last steps and emerged on to the leads, with Richard, more eager-footed, following close behind. They were on the roof of Martins Bank, whose ten storeys towered over the surrounding cluster of buildings. Seagulls wheeled and shrieked overhead, as though alarmed by this unwonted human presence at an elevation they had assumed exclusively their own. At street level the temperature had been mild; up here an importunate wind whipped at their shirts and lifted their hair in comical directions. They surveyed the panorama laid out before them. To the west they could see the Pier Head, the docks, and beyond them the wide curve of the river, the colour of stewed tea. To the east, they looked immediately on to the roof of the town hall, originally an exchange where merchants had transacted business in an open courtyard because the interior was thought too gloomy.

  ‘Marvellous view!’ shouted Richard, joining Baines as he leaned over the parapet. Down below the trams and buses seemed to be floating up and down Dale Street, as dainty as tin models, while pedestrians had shrunk to insects beetling across a tablecloth. Richard, briskly methodical, already had his Leica to his eye and was taking shots over the jagged skyline. Baines began to jot down a few notes, then withdrew to a sheltered corner where the wind could no longer riffle his pages. Richard eventually joined him.

  ‘How did you know about this little eyrie?’

  ‘Through a friend of the family. My father was in banking, and there are a few old gents I can still ask a favour from.’ He offered Richard a cigarette, and they sat smoking for a while in companionable silence.

  ‘Looks like someone’s prepared for the worst,’ said Richard, pointing at a pair of enormous searchlights squatting in readiness. ‘I suppose it’ll be the anti-aircraft guns next.’

  Baines nodded, and looked up at the nonchalant blue vacancy of the August sky. It still seemed inconceivable to him that this would be the vantage from which destruction rained. But everyone knew that war would be fought in the air. It had already happened in Spain; now it would happen here.

  Richard was peering over at the town hall again.

  ‘The old girl must be Britannia,’ he said, nodding at the helmeted stone figure holding a spear and seated astride the dome.

  ‘Possibly – though some reckon it’s Minerva, the goddess of handicrafts. Or, if you read Virgil, the goddess of war.’

  ‘That would be more helpful, in present circumstances,’ said Richard, drily.

  ‘Well, the building needs a protector – it’s had quite an unfortunate history. The town hall they built here in 1673 collapsed seventy years later. Then John Wood replaced it in the 1750s and that one was gutted by fire in 1795. They might have saved it, too, but a winter frost had frozen the water pipes – they just had to watch it burn.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s cursed.’

  Baines, warming to his tutorial mood, turned back to the Pier Head and pointed out the spire of St Nicholas’s, another site of disaster in 1810.

  ‘The church tower was known to be in need of repairs, but the structure was judged safe enough to stand the ringing of bells. One morning a procession of kids from a charity school came in for morning service – the bell ringers had just started when the whole tower collapsed and fell into the nave. Twenty-three children were killed outright, and a handful of adults with them.’

  ‘Good grief,’ Richard muttered. ‘What a … that’s horrifying.’

  Baines was silent, worried that his zeal for history might have been mistaken for mere ghoulishness. As a boy he would wander for hours through cemeteries, examining the lichen-covered gravestones and their carved inscriptions. Dearly Beloved … Departed this Life … Taken to Heaven … Some of the stones had been worn smooth by time, leaving no trace of the names and dates of the departed. He became obsessed with the idea that, once the name on a grave had faded to nothing, the dead person would never be remembered again. Only gradually did his morbid fascination with what was disappearing transfer itself from churchyards and cemeteries to the larger concerns of history and architecture. Now, instead of gravestones, he looked at buildings for the signs of age upon fading traceries, for the dilapidation of pediment and pilaster, for the ceaseless weathering of masonry. He sometimes wondered if he could only love a thing once its doom was certain.

  He stole a sidelong look at Richard, who had also fallen silent. His pensive frown was a sufficiently uncommon sight for Baines to assume that something was troubling him. He waited, and eventually Richard cleared his throat to speak.

  ‘I recently met up with an old friend from army days, he’s working for Civil Defence now. We talked about what’s going to happen, of course, and the measures they had in mind. He said that Liverpool would take a heavy battering, what with the docks, its strategic importance for the Atlantic, and so on. The bombing of populated areas is also inevitable, and civilian casualties are likely to be … severe. Well, briefly, this friend is involved in mobilising the Air Raid Precautions Services to work in tandem with the fire brigade and the ambulance crews. They need rescue workers, and so to do my bit …’

  ‘You’ve volunteered.’

  Richard nodded slowly. ‘But here’s the thing. He also said that for rescue operations they were planning to recruit structural engineers, architects and the like – people who understand about buildings. Those collapses you were describing just then reminded me. You’re exactly the kind of chap they’re after.’

  Baines paused. This was not the way he had envisaged contributing to the war effort. ‘I had thought of joining up. Maybe the infantry.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ asked Richard.

  He had pondered this too often not to have an answer ready. ‘Mostly out of guilt. Unlike you, I’ve never had to face danger before, I’ve never known what it is to feel my life might end at any moment. It’s that thing Johnson says to Boswell, “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.”’

  Richard looked at him, and said gravely, ‘Tom, listen to me. For one thing, they’ll probably consider you too old to enlist. For another, if it’s danger you want – or think you want – then rescue work will provide more than you can bear. Maybe more than any of us can.’

  ‘It’s the waiting I can’t stand. I’d rather see the worst in front of me than have to … imagine it.’

  ‘We won’t have much longer to wait, according to the papers. Look, allow me at least to give my friend your name. He’s a good egg, Jimmy Andrews – I’ve known him twenty years or more
. He’ll explain what’s required far better than I can.’

  Baines was surprised at the idea of being too old for military service. In the accelerating mood of emergency he had assumed that nothing short of blindness would disqualify someone from joining up. He had not relished the prospect, but nor had he seriously considered the possibility of evading it. That the decision might now be taken out of his hands was obscurely disappointing, like waiting with your pads on to go out to bat and then finding your captain had suddenly chosen to declare. It was not that you wanted to face that whippy fast bowler, merely that you had braced yourself to do so.

  He had drawn up a rough plan, dividing a map of the city centre into a diamond shape, then marking the major buildings in each quadrant that were to be photographed. The first quadrant, bounded by Chapel Street to the north and Canning Place to the south, Strand Street and North John Street to the east and west, contained such an abundance of Victorian architecture that he feared Richard might feel rather overburdened. When he mentioned this, however, Richard shrugged in his tolerant way and said, ‘My father used to say that photographers should be like artillerymen. Aim properly, shoot quick and scram. The advice seems to have worked for me so far.’