The Rescue Man Page 6

  Baines admired this straightforwardness in him; it was so different from his own hesitant weighing up of pros and cons. Richard never seemed to waver about anything; once he saw his course of action he simply went ahead and did it. If he was prey to the occasional absent-minded lapse (‘oh drat!’) he would instantly correct it and move on. Baines assumed that this decisive cast of mind had been forged in the crucible of the trenches; to have been a captain as Richard was, to have had that many young recruits relying upon him every day to keep them alive, in the kind of hell where he had barely learned to keep himself alive – that would surely have been the making, or breaking, of a man. The responsibility of it suddenly reared up before him – vicarious, horrific – and not for the first time he thanked his stars that he had been born too late ever to have known it.

  Having finished with the town hall, Baines conducted Richard south along Castle Street, the spine of the business district. He pointed out for attention, amid other looming temples of commerce, C.R. Cockerell’s massive, imperious Bank of England, the Adelphi Bank with its copper domes and finials, now oxidised to green, the Renaissance fripperies of Victoria Chambers and Leyland & Bullin’s Bank. The confidence and scale of these buildings spoke so clearly of a different age – an age of rapacious mercantile energy. They had been conceived and constructed by men who had thoroughly grasped the power of money and decided that there was no need whatsoever to build small. At the teeming junction of St George’s Crescent and Lord Street, Richard conscientiously waited for the buses and trams to pass before he could get a shot of the Victoria Monument. Beneath it a man was emerging up the steps and past the railings. With a half-smile Richard turned to Baines.

  ‘I wonder whose idea it was to position a statue of our dear old Queen over a public lavatory.’

  ‘Only in Liverpool,’ said Baines, who happened to know that this was formerly the site of a church, and before that the thirteenth-century castle for which the street was named. Everywhere he looked he sensed the ghosts of time past, their presence insistently alive to him still. The transient landscape of the city, its inexorable susceptibility to change, both thrilled and depressed him.

  As they proceeded down South Castle Street, he glanced in the window of a clockmaker’s, Barnard Levy, ‘Office, Ship and House Clocks in variety’. A handwritten notice beneath apologetically announced the shop’s imminent closure. He stopped, sidled into the doorway’s embrasure and peered at the owner’s name discreetly etched on to the glass, and below it the proud pendant: Est. 1851. It would not make its centenary. ‘How wags the time …’ Baines placed his hand on the rust-coloured brick of the wall, warmed by the afternoon sun, and wondered how soon this establishment would be forgotten, its brief candle snuffed out. At moments like this, when he found himself forlorn at the disappearance of a place before it had actually gone, he thought he might be suffering from a kind of preemptive nostalgia. It seemed he was better suited to elegy than to history.

  ‘Anything the matter?’ asked Richard.

  Baines shook his head. ‘No, it’s nothing important. Just do me a favour, would you – take a photograph of this shopfront?’

  Without further question, Richard took a step back, lined up the shot and clicked.

  They walked on into Canning Place, where John Foster’s colossal Customs House dominated the view. It seemed to have been there for ever, but Baines knew that, as always, it had actually supplanted something else – in this case an enclosed commercial wet dock, the first of its kind in the world.

  ‘There’s one more place we should do,’ said Baines, ‘and then we’ll call it a day.’ Round the corner stood John Cunningham’s astonishing Sailors’ Home, a neo-Jacobean fantasy started in 1846 as a philanthropic venture to save impoverished seamen from grog shops and grasping landlords. It had been derelict for some years, but Baines had finagled a key from the nightwatchman to one of the basement entrances. Once inside they navigated a series of echoing stone corridors that led to the kitchens, the air still and frowsy with a hundred years of institutional cooking. It was difficult to resist a sense of trespass as they climbed a winding staircase to the first floor, where a long glazed court stood enclosed by galleries on five storeys, with doors ranged along each level.

  Baines turned to Richard. ‘Impressive, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes – though it does have the look of, well, a prison.’

  ‘I see what you mean, though the architect actually modelled it on a ship’s quarters – they’re meant to look like cabins, not cells. It was his way of making the sailors feel at home after their years at sea. And I can’t imagine there’s a jail in the land that features this sort of thing,’ he added, tapping the elaborate cast-iron mouldings of dolphins and mermaids wrought upon the galleries’ columns and balustrades.

  ‘Is this place quite safe?’ asked Richard, looking up towards the vaulted glass roof.

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘Good, because a shot from up there is what we need.’ He pointed to the top tier, and headed off to clatter up the iron stairwell. As his steps grew more distant Baines, out of habit, made a quick sketch of a wrought-iron sea nymph, her tail curled suggestively around the diagonal struts; he marvelled at the mind that had conceived this delightful frivolity, and at the hand that had rendered it so intricately. He was still absorbed in it when he was jolted by a call from above, and looked up to see Richard seated vertiginously on a supporting cross-beam that ran along the uppermost storey.

  ‘Ahoy there! Looking fine from the crow’s nest, cap’n!’ he boomed.

  Baines, far from being amused, was riveted to the spot in horror. His first thought – how the hell had he managed to climb up there? – was quickly displaced by a panicky hollowness in his stomach, that awful warning bell of nausea.

  Richard, the camera slung around his neck, didn’t appear to notice how precariously he was perched; from this distance he looked as nonchalant as a boy in a tree house, his legs swinging freely into the void. Baines felt an instinct to call out and warn him of the danger, but he checked himself for fear of startling his friend and thus precipitating the very thing he wished to avoid. And what would he shout in any case? ‘Come down from there’ sounded farcically old-maidish, even if it expressed his very particular urgency. As Richard continued to edge around the beam, his progress faintly punctuated by the clicks of the shutter, Baines looked away, unable to hold out against the pressure of memory – that falling figure, arms uselessly grabbing at air while the legs seemed to be flailing away on an invisible bicycle. Down, down it flew. He had kept that image locked away in the vault of his consciousness for years, and suddenly there it was, bursting unbidden into his mind’s eye. He kept his head down, and muttered to himself, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t …’

  After an eternity, or perhaps a few minutes, he heard footsteps clanking down the stairs, and then Richard was beside him, blithely reporting on the view from the crow’s nest.

  ‘The light was falling just so when I –’

  ‘It wasn’t the light falling I was worried about,’ said Baines quietly.

  Richard heard something in his tone. ‘Erm, are you all right?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I was just reminded of something, from years ago …’ He stopped, unwilling to retrieve it. ‘What the hell were you playing at?’

  ‘Tom,’ Richard laughed, ‘I didn’t know you cared.’

  ‘I don’t. It was just a bloody long way down, that’s all. If you want to join a trapeze act, that’s fine, but I’m not particularly keen to watch someone break their neck.’ In his distraction his voice had become hard and querulous, a tone that was as unpleasant to him as it was unfamiliar. There was silence between them. Richard, chastened, was fiddling abstractedly with his camera lens, and Baines, watching him, felt too relieved to stay sullen.

  He sighed with schoolmasterly forbearance. ‘You stupid mutt. Let’s go and get a drink.’

  They turned back through the court’s heavy swinging d
oors and down again into the basement kitchens, leaving the nautical ghosts upstairs to wait out a fresh course of eventless days.

  The last Sunday of August was May’s sixtieth birthday, and George had organised a gathering of friends and neighbours in the evening to celebrate. The Elms, the house they had lived in since they were married, was a stuccoed Victorian villa set back on a leafy hill road east of Sefton Park. Baines had grown up here and still dropped by, usually on a Saturday afternoon, to have tea and listen to the football results on the radio while George did the pools. Or else he would sit in the living room and listen to May unburden the week’s gossip, a digest which might focus on her recent bridge evening or the failing health of a priest whose dreariness Baines could recall even from his own distant years as a churchgoer. Both George and May were severely Catholic, but unlike her mild-mannered husband May combined religious devotion with a brand of indignant socialism – she loathed Chamberlain – which Baines supposed an oddity among the well-heeled parishioners of Mossley Hill. How she squared this outlook with marrying into money and keeping a house with servants had never been clear to him, but he felt it would be the purest impudence on his part to engage her in a debate on political inconsistency.

  Baines had brought Jack along, partly for the company and partly because he knew that George and May were fond of him; indeed, they appeared to regard Jack as his saviour from a life of pathetic loneliness. It was baffling enough to them that their adopted son had remained unmarried; that he might not have any friends at all was a misfortune too dismal to countenance, and they would greet Jack with a warmth that contained a quiet but plaintive note of gratitude. This amused Baines, and saddened him, for he realised that his tendency to solitude, however naturally it came to him, would always be a source of anxiety to them.

  ‘Hullo, you two!’ said May, almost singing her welcome in the hall. She flung her arms around Baines, who smelt on her a florid new perfume that made him want to sneeze.

  ‘Happy birthday, May,’ said Jack, adding with a gallant twinkle, ‘Looking quite radiant, if I may say.’

  ‘Ooh, listen to this one,’ she laughed, ‘trying to charm the old dear! Is he like this with all the girls?’

  ‘No, only with you,’ said Baines, confused between teasing and flattering her. May’s bun-shaped face glowed with delight. Plucking glasses of dry sherry from a salver, she conducted them through the house into the garden, where people were milling about in small clusters. George, dapper in a checked jacket with a dark knitted tie – it was his uniform – came over and shook hands with them. He was a neat, wiry man, not much taller than his wife, and wore about him a shy, slightly defeated air. He looked at the puny glasses of sherry in their hands.

  ‘I bet you lads would rather be drinking beer. I’ll ask Millie to fetch you some from the cellar.’

  ‘Sherry is fine, George,’ said Jack, but George was already consulting one of the housemaids. They took in the rest of the greying crowd, several of whom Baines recognised from his Mass-going days.

  ‘I suddenly feel quite youthful,’ Jack whispered to Baines.

  ‘Beer’s what we need,’ he replied, throwing back his sherry very quickly.

  The garden, somewhat parched by the August heat, was one of the most beautiful Baines had ever known. He loved its nooks and bowers, the elm trees that thronged protectively around them, the little strip of bald turf where George had taught him how to play a forward defensive and bowled slow off breaks to him for hours on end. He loved the dip in the lawn, and the way it drowsily sloped down towards the fence; he had even come to love the rattle and rumble of the trains below, heading into and out of Mossley Hill station. It was a place inseparable from his childhood, a refuge of long, solitary afternoons passed in moping, or in his endless drawings, and completely guarded from the smallest obligation to others.

  ‘What do you reckon, Tom?’ George was saying, and Baines broke the surface of his reverie to find a circle of politely expectant faces turned upon him. His attention had just been caught by a fallen apple at his foot, its skin showing brown discoloration where wasps had ravaged it.

  ‘Sorry, I was miles away –’

  Jack, shooting Baines a wry look, stepped in to help. ‘These gents were discussing what sort of chance we stand in an air raid. Walter, I should add,’ he nodded at a stout, suety-faced man, ‘doesn’t even think the Luftwaffe will be able to make it over the Pennines.’

  Baines was temporarily at a loss – he had only tuned out for a couple of minutes, it seemed, and now he was suddenly obliged to catch a low one at slip.

  ‘I’m afraid the Luftwaffe are only too capable of reaching here. We know that much from what they did in Spain.’

  Walter wrinkled his nose in silent demur and pressed on: ‘People shouldn’t be worried by the bombing of Spain. For one thing, those peasant houses would have been very poorly constructed. Our bricks and mortar will stand up to that pounding. I’m in the building trade, so I should know.’

  Baines, inwardly wincing at the man’s self-satisfaction, remembered something Richard had told him. ‘I hope you’re right, though an army friend of mine says that a direct hit from a 500-pound high-explosive bomb will probably destroy any building you care to mention.’

  They were briefly silent. Then another friend of George’s, a bespectacled fellow named Stan, piped up: ‘I dunno about bombs, but if these blackouts get any worse someone’s gonna cop it under the wheels of a tram. I was crossing Lime Street the other night and out of nowhere this tramcar suddenly bears down on me – no lights, nothun.’

  That the absence of lights was precisely what constituted a blackout didn’t seem to have occurred to him. Walter, eager to stoke the fires of grievance, now said, ‘What I can’t understand is all this practice with the bloody air-raid sirens. I mean, they could just warn us in advance without having to tear us from our beds with that racket.’

  Jack chuckled at this. ‘You know, I don’t think the Germans will “warn us in advance” about their bombing schedule. They’ll want the element of surprise.’

  Walter and Stan both heard the thin note of flippancy and looked at Jack with pursed disfavour. Baines half hoped that they might challenge him, and then find themselves out manoeuvred when Jack played the ace, the unanswerable ace, of his own war service. But at that moment May intruded defusingly into their midst, eager to share some happiness with George.

  ‘Look what Tom’s given me for my birthday!’ she cried to her husband. It was an antique garnet brooch Baines had seen in an old-fashioned jeweller’s window on Lord Street; he had gone in to take a closer look at it and been wavering as to its suitability when he noticed the handwritten tag within the box’s velvet lining – the maker’s name, and the date, 1879. It was sixty years old, like May, though he decided to withhold this pleasing coincidence from her for the present lest she combusted with the excitement. Holding the trinket against her blouse May looked around at her bemused admirers. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? Gay as a wasp in a window.’ Baines and George had heard this vivid locution before, but Jack couldn’t suppress a startled bark of laughter.

  ‘That’s a good one, May,’ he said, tickled by the line. Walter and Stan had both slunk off in search of an audience more congenial to their peevishness. Baines felt relieved that a useless argument had been sidestepped, and doubly so once Millie approached them with a tray of Higsons.

  ‘Must have cost you a fortune,’ May continued, still marvelling at her gift. Baines merely smiled, unwilling to contradict what he deemed close enough to the truth. In the end, he thought, it was better to give than to receive: the feeling of beneficence was more satisfying than that of gratitude.

  ‘I hope I didn’t offend your guests just then,’ said Jack to George, who shook his head.

  ‘Don’t worry, they just like a good moan. I think they’re on edge – well, we all are. Old fellers like us don’t take easily to change.’

  May sighed sympathetically. ‘Everyone’s anxious, pre
paring for the evacuations. Dora’s going to send her two young ones off to Wales.’ Dora was their housekeeper, a large, jolly woman who’d been with the family for years.

  George said, ‘They offered to build us a shelter in the garden, but we thought the cellar would do for us.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be patrolling round here soon with the ARP, so if you wouldn’t mind me dropping by …’ Jack said, raising his beer.

  ‘Any time you’re thirsty,’ said May, squeezing his arm. She turned to Baines. ‘Have they signed you up yet, love?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m going to a Civil Defence recruitment at the Municipal Buildings the week after next. I’ll find out then.’

  The evening drifted on. The shadows of the trees were beginning to darken across the lawn, and Baines watched as a pair of swallows chased one another through the tangle of branches. He and Jack sat on the edge of the garden overlooking the drop to the railway line.

  ‘One more cigarette, and then I’m off,’ said Jack.

  ‘I’ll join you, I just need to collect something first.’

  He stood up, brushed the grass from his trousers and headed towards the house. There were still plenty of guests about, reluctant to draw a veil over the warm, late-summer evening. He spotted Walter in the thick of another heated debate in the living room, so quickly diverted his course round the side of the house and entered via the kitchen. He gained the wide staircase, then stopped to look at the two rows of bookshelves holding George’s collection of Wisdens, the earliest dating from the 1890s, most of them still uniformed in their custard-yellow jackets. The hours he had spent poring over them!