The Rescue Man Read online

  He reached the end of the landing and entered his old bedroom, its squared-off neatness and smell of beeswax announcing its faithful upkeep, as if waiting for his return. On the old mahogany chest of drawers stood two framed photographs, the larger one of himself as a ten-year-old boy, jockeyishly small, mounted on a horse, with George – his trainer – holding the reins and gazing off into the middle distance. The smaller one was a sepia portrait of a man standing proprietorially behind a seated woman, their faces slightly stiff and anxious-looking from the long exposure times of nineteenth-century photography. Baines’s eye was always drawn to the same details, the woman’s sweet-sad expression, and beautiful pale hands folded on her lap; then the glint of the man’s watch chain across his waistcoat, and the thick beard worn (it seemed to him) in an attempt at disguise. Two remote Victorian strangers: his mother, his father. He picked it up and stared at them, hoping to detect some trace of himself in a facial contour, in the glimmer of an eye. But they remained to him stubbornly unclaimable.

  He heard the door creak behind him, and there was May, her features crinkled in that characteristic smile of sympathy, with something else mingled in there. Fear, perhaps. She scuttled, almost shyly, into the room, and saw the photograph still in his hands. The ghost of his parents, seldom discussed in all their years together, now stood like an awkward secret between them. Baines didn’t know what he was going to say until the words were out of his mouth.

  ‘What was she like, May?’

  Startled by the question, May hesitated a moment, then recovered her poise. ‘Beautiful,’ she said, ‘… you can tell. She – she would have been very proud of you.’ Would she? Baines tried to see beyond the formula of the sentiment, wondering in what her maternal pride might have consisted. She would hardly have been proud of his achievements, because he hadn’t done anything. He supposed May had used the phrase as another way of saying she would have loved you. He wanted to believe it, but, doubting Thomas that he was, the unspoken subjunctive if she were alive would always block his way. If she were alive. But she had died, before he had known what her love felt like, and before she had known him as anything other than an infant. Would she have loved him as a fifteen-year-old – as a thirty-six-year-old? He looked again at the face on the other side of the glass, and had the queer feeling that he, not she, was the one marooned, helpless.

  ‘You can have that, if you’d like,’ May said gently, indicating the photograph.

  Baines shook his head. ‘No. Thanks. I like the thought of it being here – sort of watching over the room.’ He decided that saying anything more would only confuse or upset her, so he adopted a lighter tone. ‘I was actually looking for that old box of junk I used to keep under my bed.’

  ‘In the wardrobe. The key’s there.’ May made to leave, then stopped. ‘Tom …’ He waited, sensing their reticence with one another as a bond, and a burden. ‘I do love that brooch you gave me.’

  Baines smiled. ‘I’m glad – really glad.’

  He returned to the garden to find Jack flirting pleasantly with Millie. His beer glass was full once more, and he was carving the air with his cigarette in a knowing imitation of George Sanders. He winked over her shoulder as Baines approached.

  ‘Find what you wanted?’

  In answer Baines held up an old chrome-plated torch, a trusty companion of his boyhood when he used to pretend to be a secret agent and go sneaking through other people’s gardens in the dark.

  ‘Millie here’s been telling me she’s just signed up for the women’s auxiliary ambulance corps.’

  The girl looked no more than eighteen years old. Baines felt a sudden dismay at what she might have to endure. ‘That’s brave of you, Millie. I know George and May would be awfully sorry to see you go.’

  She blushed, disarmingly. ‘Well, we’ve all got to do our bit,’ she said. There was something rehearsed about the line, but her guileless schoolgirl alto lent it charm.

  ‘I can’t think of anything nicer than having you in an ambulance,’ said Jack. Millie giggled uncertainly, performed a little bob and excused herself. Baines shook his head and sighed.

  ‘You sound like one of those McGill postcards.’

  ‘Come on, she’s a nice-looking girl. You’d be very glad of seeing a face like hers if you ended up on a stretcher.’

  ‘Hmm. How is Evie, by the way?’

  ‘She’s in the very pink of health, I’m pleased to say,’ replied Jack, with a smile, ‘though it’s all hands to the pump now at the Echo. Whenever there’s a panic they always seem to telephone the newspaper. She’s had to take calls from people asking all sorts of odd questions – someone recently wanted to know where they could get a gas mask for their dog.’

  ‘Good Lord. What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, she told them that pets won’t be issued with gas masks, and a dog couldn’t use one in any case – it relies on its sense of smell.’

  Baines chuckled. ‘Smart girl.’

  Their goodbyes done, they walked through the darkening streets and into Sefton Park, avoiding the trenches that had been dug around the perimeter. The absence of street illuminations meant that moonlight was now working overtime as a guide. The park looked rather haunted in its nocturnal attire of blue-black and silver. For a while they walked in silence across the grass, the night so soft that the only sound to be heard was their own breathing. Baines felt the thickening gloom prompt him towards a confidence.

  ‘I had a moment, just a flash, about that night at the Adelphi – first time in years, to be honest.’ Jack looked at him as they walked abreast, but said nothing, so Baines pressed on. ‘I was in the Sailors’ Home, working with Richard – you know, the photographer – he was perched up high on a beam, and I had this moment, it just sprang out at me …’

  Jack waited again, and then said, ‘I remember talking about it at the time, and what I said then still holds. There was nothing you could have done. You know –’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Baines cut in quickly, feeling almost reluctant to be absolved. ‘I know it wasn’t my fault.’ But the self-justifying words excruciated him, and he wished he had not raised the matter at all, even with Jack. He looked up, and his eye was diverted by something so outlandish that his confessional mood evaporated as quickly as it had descended. At the west edge of the park he could see a row of barrage balloons, their skins lustrous amid the gloaming; they bobbed with the woozy, graceful menace of jellyfish through a reef.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Baines, stopping to contemplate these ethereal globes, and above them the night sky glistening with stars. ‘Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?’

  Jack looked, and nodded slowly. ‘As gay as a wasp in a window,’ he murmured.

  4

  THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY morning Baines arrived at Slater Street to collect Richard for their next perambulation. On seeing that the blinds had been pulled down over the front windows he wondered if the studio was closed, but he tried the door in any case. It was unlocked, and he walked in to find a little flurry of activity: a young man in a Fair Isle sweater was fixing a light bracket on the wall, while two army officers stood self-consciously against a hessian backcloth. A cluster of arc lights formed an audience around them, the white glare of their inspection harsh and stagy. A woman, with her back to him, was talking to another assistant holding a flash, and only noticed Baines once she had fixed the tableau to her liking.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, ‘are you Tom?’ He nodded, and she smiled with a sudden reflexive brightness, like a hostess gamely determined to remember every guest. ‘I’m Bella – Tanqueray. Richard’s gone for the day. Can you bear to wait for ten minutes while I finish this?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. He recognised her as the haughty-looking woman in the photograph he’d seen on his first visit to the studio, only she didn’t seem in the least haughty now. Her face was longish, with notable cheekbones and very dark eyebrows, but instead of the challenging gaze he remembered from her portrait he
saw an indulgent readiness to be amused. Her hair was different, too, mid-brown with faint streaks of blonde, and bundled into a loose chignon. More surprising still were the blue wide-legged slacks she wore; he hadn’t seen many women in trousers before. He realised he was staring.

  He sat down on a window seat and pretended to flick through the Daily Post. Bella, having finally coaxed her subjects into eye contact, ducked to the tripod to line them up in her lens. The soldiers, somewhat bovine in their demeanour, now straightened before the camera’s judgement. They looked to be in their early twenties, both with their hair cut en brosse, spiked like a newborn chick; the jaw of the taller one was shadowed with acne. Something about their eyes, and their unspoken familiarity with one another, made Baines think they might be brothers. Such callowness – but then he thought of Jack and Richard being packed off to the Western Front, at an even younger age perhaps than these two. There was a sudden explosive crump, and the smell of magnesium permeated the air. Blinking away the flash, he glanced again at the newspaper, its headlines shrill with foreboding from Europe. At the bottom of the page Blackler’s was offering half-price bargains – men’s worsted suits at 45/-. Was that actually a bargain?

  A short volley of laughter brought him back to attention. Bella had said something to amuse the soldiers, who looked quite relieved to be done with the scrutinising lens. She laughed too as she shook hands with them, and he heard her say, ‘Good luck.’ As they trooped out one of them nodded at Baines.

  ‘Our brave boys,’ said Bella, turning to him with a rueful smile.

  ‘They looked like – brothers?’

  ‘They are. Joined up when they turned eighteen – like Richard. Who sends his apologies, by the way. There’s a wedding in Formby this afternoon – a friend of his begged a favour after the photographer dropped out yesterday. He felt he couldn’t refuse.’

  ‘Oh well –’

  ‘– but he knew there was a lot to do today, so that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘You?’ said Baines, confused.

  ‘Yes, me. Unless you have strong objections to a woman taking charge of a camera.’

  He blushed. ‘No, not at all – I just thought …’ He didn’t really know what he thought.

  ‘Good,’ she said, with a kind of head-girl breeziness, stacking the photographic plates and handing them to her assistant in the Fair Isle sweater. ‘Tim, would you mind locking up the place? I’ll be out for the rest of the day.’

  She trotted off upstairs, returning almost immediately with a folding camera, somewhat sleeker-looking than Richard’s Leica. She saw him peering at it.

  ‘Are you interested in cameras?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue about them. I just noticed that marque on yours.’

  ‘You mean Newman and Guardia?’

  ‘No, this,’ he said, pointing at a tiny plate beneath the maker’s name. ‘Sibyl. It’s the name of a woman the Greek and Roman gods spoke through. She foretold the future.’

  Bella musingly examined the marque for herself. ‘That’s a useful talent … No wonder they charged me thirty guineas for it.’

  ‘Would you like to be able to see into the future?’

  ‘No, not really … it would spoil so much of the excitement, wouldn’t it?’

  Baines nodded, consideringly. Outside, the late-morning temperature was warming into sultriness; vast zeppelins of silvery-white cloud heaved determinedly across the sky, offering swift oscillations between glare and gloom.

  ‘So – let’s get started,’ said Bella, squinting and shading her eyes against the sun.

  Baines produced a little map he’d sketched, marking the area’s surviving patches of Georgian housing and shops, much of it abandoned but still handsome for all the neglect. As they walked he felt very conscious of her presence at his side. She was perhaps thirty, tall with a willowy dancer’s body, and moved in long, almost loping strides. He noticed people staring at her as they passed by, and imagined them reporting the sight to their friends: ‘A woman in trousers, bold as brass she was …’

  He stopped at a terrace of five houses on Seel Street. ‘Those pedimented doorcases are quite rare now, 1790s …’

  ‘Shall I do – all of them?’ asked Bella, and at Baines’s apologetic nod she began photographing. She worked more slowly than Richard, he noticed. At first he thought this might be owing to a lack of confidence, but he gradually realised that hers was a more deliberative style; while Richard’s movements were quick and decided, Bella held back and seemed to wait, almost, for the picture to come to her. For the next few hours they toured the once-affluent quarter between Seel Street and Park Lane, a network of tall merchants’ dwellings, bonded warehouses and industrial buildings linked to the port. Now the poor dwelt in the grid of narrow alleys and courts thrown up in the middle of the nineteenth century. When children playing in the streets saw Bella with the camera at her eye they would stop and gaze, or else begin capering in front of her. A boy of about six, with dark serious eyes and a smeared face, followed them around for a while. He wore no shoes. Baines felt mortified, as if he, playing host to an out-of-towner, were obscurely responsible for this destitution, but all Bella said was, ‘Poor thing’s got nothing else to do.’ Eventually she turned and smiled at the boy: ‘Hullo there.’ The boy stared on, silently appraising them; his features, beneath the grime, were delicate, with a girlishly plump lower lip. Bella, shrugging, half knelt and took his photograph – and without a word he turned on his unshod heel and tramped off.

  ‘It can’t be an easy life,’ said Baines.

  Bella shook her head sadly. ‘Not many kinds of life are.’

  By mid-afternoon, sensing that she might be tiring of the heat, or else of his pedantry, Baines decided to call a halt. They stood on Hanover Street, amid a roiling throng of shoppers.

  ‘Warm work, isn’t it?’ said Bella, looking slightly wilted.

  ‘May I, um, buy you a cup of tea?’ he asked.

  ‘I should say so!’

  They retreated from the crowds down the slope of School Lane. Baines, still feeling the spectre of poverty at their backs, looked with relief on the oasis of Bluecoat Chambers, a beautifully proportioned Queen Anne building that enclosed three sides of an old cobbled quadrangle.

  ‘That’s the oldest surviving building in the city. It started as a charity school in 1718 for …’ he heard the pride in his voice falter, ‘children of the poor.’ There was no getting away from them after all. Without needing to be asked Bella lined up her shot, clicked, then turned to Baines.

  ‘That little barefooted boy … have you ever wondered what poverty is really like?’ He had, but he never could admit that what he really felt, more than compassion, was fear.

  ‘I’m afraid this place and poverty have always gone together,’ he replied. He hated the banality of the line, it sounded pious yet non-committal, and he hated the sound of his voice – that adenoidal Liverpudlian drone – as he said it. But he hated most of all the unconfessed guilt of never having known or helped a poor person in his life.

  In search of a cafe they crossed into Church Street, clanging with trams. The one next to Bunney’s was nearest, but the room was full to the door so they walked up to the Kardomah on Dale Street. Settled at a corner table, where the low babble of voices was distantly interrupted by the angry hiss of steam from the urn, they faced one another inescapably. A waitress took their order for tea, and Bella added a request for a toasted teacake.

  ‘I’ve just realised how famished I am,’ she giggled. Baines offered her a Player’s, and they smoked for a few moments in abstracted silence.

  ‘Thanks for helping out today,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sure you had better things to do.’

  She accepted his gratitude with a sly smile. ‘You seemed a bit doubtful about me this morning.’

  ‘No, just – surprised. I don’t know why. Richard reckons you’re a better photographer than he is.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him. I don’t even think of myself a
s a photographer.’

  ‘He told me that you paint.’

  ‘I was at the Slade for three years. William Nicholson taught me – William Nicholson painted me, in fact. Though it’s not one of his best, I’m afraid. Probably a fault with the sitter.’ Baines thought again of the unsatisfactory photograph of her he’d seen at the studio; perhaps hers was a difficult likeness to catch.

  ‘How did you and Richard meet?’

  ‘Oh, I’d come up here from London one weekend for a friend’s birthday party. He’d got to know Richard through the studio, invited him along and …’

  ‘… your eyes met across a crowded room,’ Baines supplied.

  ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘We got married in ’34, and I’ve been here more or less ever since.’ He heard something wistful in her tone.

  ‘You don’t sound –’

  ‘Well … obviously I wanted to be with Richard. But I’ve not really settled here.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I know, you’re like Richard. You probably think it’s the greatest city in the world.’

  Baines considered this. ‘No, not the greatest. But maybe the most interesting.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that, Liverpool is an interesting place. I just … don’t particularly like Liverpudlians.’ She clapped her hand over her mouth and leaned towards him, lowering her voice. ‘Sorry, that sounds terrible, I don’t mean you – you seem nice, very nice. I’m sure there are others, too. Oh God, I should just shut up …’

  As she paused, flustered, to drag on her cigarette, Baines stole the opportunity to study her. His eye kept being drawn to a tiny chip on her front tooth, the one flaw in an otherwise even row; it was an imperfection, he thought, that altered the whole character of her face, made her seem more – what was the word? – individual.

  ‘So – you don’t like us,’ he said, rather enjoying her awkwardness.

  ‘It’s not that, really,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I just don’t know where Richard gets this idea that Liverpudlians are the salt of the earth. Scousers. He thinks they’re funny, I think they’re rude and aggressive.’