The Greatcoat Read online

  ‘Have you noticed something?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s gone quiet. Her upstairs,’ he said humorously, jerking his head in the direction of the ceiling.

  ‘But you said you couldn’t hear her.’

  ‘Once or twice; nobody could help it. But there hasn’t been a peep out of her for days. At night, I mean.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ said Isabel.

  ‘We’ll be out of here soon,’ he said in a rush, as if he were making her a promise.

  ‘I know we will.’

  ‘It’ll be just the two of us then. There’ll be no one to interfere.’

  She looked at him sharply, but his face was innocent of suspicion. All he meant was that they wouldn’t have to answer to a landlady once they had a place of their own.

  The whole weight of the house seemed to press down on her. She was afraid again. Alec’s words echoed in her head, but now they were more than a promise: I’ll knock on the window. Swear you won’t go to sleep. She saw his eyes on her. Her heart clenched at the remembered expression on his face. He was outside in the dark and the wind, staring in at the warm, lit world. Whatever happened, she knew that Alec would come for her, and she would slip into that other life again, her mind clouded with memories that weren’t hers, her body moving to rhythms it had learned elsewhere. Nothing on earth could stop him from coming, or her from becoming that other woman, once he was there. There was no one strong enough to hold her back.

  If she told Philip, he’d think she was mad. That would be dangerous. Philip would have the medical profession on his side if he decided that she needed treatment. She could imagine how his face would change. He wouldn’t see her as Isabel any more, his wife, the one he loved. His expression would be a doctor’s, full of concern and impersonal pity.

  He could have her locked away. She knew what that meant. She and Charlie used to watch the crocodile of inmates from Burleigh Hospital, on the rare occasions when they were allowed out of the grounds. Women as old as her aunt wore ankle socks, clumsy sandals and shapeless cotton print dresses, with no belts. They looked like big, deformed children. Her aunt had said, ‘They used not to let them out at all. Perhaps it was kinder that way.’

  Or, worse, Philip might think: Isabel has behaved like a tart and now she’s trying to get round me by pretending to be a madwoman.

  A shutter would come down and he would never trust her again. She knew him well enough to understand that it wasn’t a question of forgiveness; he wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said aloud, ‘just the two of us.’

  It was too warm under the eiderdown. She longed to push it off, but didn’t dare. The dark hours wore on. There was a wind that spattered rain on the bedroom window. The house creaked under its buffeting, but Philip didn’t stir. Upstairs, too, it was silent. The greatcoat, folded up by Philip, lay on the bedroom chair. She was safe under Philip’s eiderdown, but she lay there rigid with effort, struggling against the desire prickling in her limbs. She longed to creep out of bed, snatch up the greatcoat and cradle it in her arms like a living thing, before spreading it out on her side of the bed and waiting, waiting …

  ‘I won’t,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t. I won’t.’

  Nothing answered. The room was quite indifferent.

  In the morning she had a headache. Philip brought her tea and aspirin, and perched for a minute on her side of the bed, stroking back her hair. His eagerness to be on his way, and the husbandly decency that made him remain, were both so palpable that a smile crept onto Isabel’s lips.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘You are. Go on. Where are you off to today? Another of your secret trips?’

  ‘I’ve got surgery until midday, then a bite to eat, then I’m at the maternity hospital all afternoon.’

  ‘So you won’t be back late?’

  ‘I’ve got evening surgery, remember?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. Phil …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know you probably can’t – but do you think you could stay for a bit? Just for an hour or so? I do feel so awful.’

  Annoyance crossed his face, quickly suppressed by concern. ‘You know I can’t. I’ve got a roomful of patients waiting for me, and Dr Ingoldby—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said quickly, wishing she hadn’t asked. Now all she wanted was for him to go. She couldn’t stand him sitting there, telling her why he couldn’t stay.

  ‘You’ll feel better once the aspirin starts working. Why not have a day in bed? I’ll give you a ring mid-morning, to see how you are.’

  ‘Don’t do that. I might be asleep.’

  He nodded and stood up. He wasn’t happy. ‘If you’re really ill, Isabel …’

  ‘No. It’s only a headache. You go.’

  She heard the front door of the house close and his car start up. She listened until the sound of the engine died away, and then she sat up. It was stifling under this eiderdown. She shoved the mass of it over to Philip’s side of the bed, but she pushed too hard and the thing slid to the floor.

  Philip hadn’t had time to light the fire, although she’d heard him riddling the kitchen stove and shovelling in coke. The flat was cold. She clasped herself, shivering. She knew what she was going to do – she was pretending to herself, delaying the moment.

  Isabel got out of bed and picked her way across the lino to the chair. She lifted the greatcoat and held it to her, inhaling its smell. She pressed the woollen cloth to her lips, and then climbed back into bed, spreading the greatcoat over herself. It’s broad daylight, she told herself. He won’t come now. She sighed and turned over, crossing her arms over her breasts and drawing up her knees. Now she felt safe. Now warmth was creeping through her, into the core of her body. She fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  There was no knocking. She woke because there was a weight beside her, pressing into her body. Alec was sitting on the bed, where Philip had been.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘The door was open, so I came in. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ she said.

  ‘I had to come. There isn’t much time,’ he explained. ‘Ops were scrubbed last night, after the briefing. Everyone was pretty browned off. It’s one thing when you get a stand-down in the morning, but at six o’clock … We’ll be on for sure tonight. We’ve done our air test—’

  ‘Why was it scrubbed?’

  ‘Bloody Met bods playing silly buggers again. We should have gone. All this hanging about is no good.’ He rattled out the words angrily. He looked as if he hadn’t slept. There were stains of shadow under his eyes, and the twitch over his right cheekbone was back.

  ‘I wondered why you didn’t come,’ she said.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the bike outside, I’d better get weaving.’

  ‘Wait, I’ll come out with you.’

  She pulled on her dressing gown, tied it tightly and smoothed back her hair. She was decent. ‘I’ll come to the front door,’ she said.

  ‘Better not come outside,’ he agreed. ‘Walls have eyes in this place.’

  ‘You mean ears.’

  ‘Do I?’ He stared at her, completely distracted. He wasn’t really here at all, she understood that. He was thinking about his kite and the ground crew who would be working on it now, bombing up and armouring, checking and rechecking. He should be there.

  ‘Why did you come here?’ she asked him, and in answer he brushed her cheek with his finger.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, and then, his blue eyes darkening, fixing hers, ‘I had to see you.’

  She nodded. She wouldn’t reach out for him. She remembered the games she and Philip used to play with magnets, pushing them away from one another. It was like that. There was a field around him that she couldn’t cross.

  ‘I just thought I’d like to see you,’ he said again, ‘but I’ve got to get back.’

 
‘I know you have.’ She opened the door to the hall and peered upstairs. Nothing stirred. He was already at the front door, tugging the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge.

  ‘What’s the matter? Is the lock jammed?’

  The Yale moved easily, but the door remained locked. He looked upwards. ‘No wonder, there’s a ruddy great bolt on it.’

  The door was locked and bolted, but Alec had come in. He hadn’t knocked on the window or rung the bell. He tugged at the bolt, but it wouldn’t give way. Suddenly he swore, and jerked his hand away. As he nursed his hand, she saw blood. One big drop splashed onto the tiled floor, and then another. The bolt hadn’t moved.

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said, stretching up.

  ‘You’ll hurt yourself,’ he said, and pushed her aside. He went at the bolt again, roughly, jamming it further in, she thought. She itched to have a go at it herself but the state he was in, she didn’t dare. More drops of blood fell and she got a handkerchief out of her dressing-gown pocket. ‘Let me tie this round it for you. That bolt’s rusty – you don’t want to get rust in the cut—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Issy!’

  He had almost shouted it. ‘Alec!’ she said, ‘Don’t!’ but it was too late. Upstairs, there was the rattle of a bolt being drawn back, and then a door opened. Isabel didn’t dare turn. If the landlady came down she would see Isabel in her dressing gown with a strange man. But Alec looked up, past Isabel, towards the landing. She heard the intake of his breath. His face froze.

  Isabel, too, looked up. There was the landlady, in her grey pinafore, with her hair scragged back. She was stock-still, her face white in the shadow, staring at Alec. She looked him up and down as if he were a thing, a creature, loathsome. She didn’t even glance at Isabel. Slowly, deliberately, she walked to the landing banisters and gripped them. Alec stepped forward, until he was standing beneath her. She leaned forward, her body tipping until it seemed that she would fall, and then she spoke, but only to Alec.

  ‘You didn’t come,’ she said. ‘You said you’d come, and you never came.’

  Isabel saw Alec start forward, as if to go up to her, but the landlady put out her hand to ward him off. Alec stared up at her. ‘You weren’t there,’ he said, and then he raised one hand, as if to shield his eyes from the sight of her. And no wonder, thought Isabel. She was shrivelled, her face skull-like, her skin colourless as if the blood scarcely moved there any more. There was a long silence. Isabel could not take her eyes from them. The young officer with his head tipped back, the old woman looking down, engulfing him with her gaze. Isabel watched them as if she were watching a film. This Alec was a stranger. She could not believe that he had ever touched her. She knew that he didn’t belong to her: he had never belonged to her.

  The landlady’s anger had gone quiet. She breathed out a slow, exhausted sigh. Very slowly, she put out one hand and held it towards Alec, but gropingly, as if she didn’t believe she would ever reach him, and then she was still, as Alec was still. Isabel barely breathed. Alec and the landlady no longer seemed to know that there was anyone in the house but them. Isabel clenched her fists. She would make them see her. She would make them know her. Humiliation burned in her, as if she were a child, helpless in the face of her parents’ storms. But she was not a child.

  ‘Alec,’ she said quietly, and put out her hand, but she couldn’t touch him. The landlady’s gaze slipped to Isabel’s face, and then away. Had she seen her, or not seen her? There was no telling. The landlady turned at last, holding the banister to support herself. Slowly, bowed over, she made her way back into her flat. She looked like an old, old woman, struck by a blow from which she would never recover.

  Alec was gone, and Isabel was alone in the hall. She looked down, expecting to see nothing, but the dark splash of blood was there on the tiles. She knelt beside it. She still had her handkerchief. She laid it over the tiles and then lifted it. The stain was dark red, and sticky on her fingers when she touched it.

  Chapter Ten

  ISABEL THREW BACK the bedclothes, pulled the curtains wide and opened the window. Cold air coursed in over her body and she felt its chill with satisfaction. Upstairs it was silent. She went into the kitchen, took the wooden cover off the bath and ran the water way past the painted line five inches from the bottom of the tub. The hot water gave out but Isabel let it run on, cold. She got in then lay back, let her hair sink, and then her face. She was completely underwater. She opened her eyes and looked up through the distorted surface. The bath was too small and her knees were bent up, hunched against the taps. She lay there until her lungs burned, and then surfaced, streaming with water and rubbing it out of her eyes.

  She took the loofah and scrubbed herself fiercely until her skin was red. For the first time in weeks, she was wide awake. She got out of the bath and dried herself vigorously. Of course she had never slept with another man. It was a crazy fantasy. She’d been on her own far too much and had lost her sense of what was real and what was not. The war had been over for years. The aircrew had all gone back to their lives – if they still had them. The airfield was deserted.

  She wiped steam from the mirror and peered at herself. Her face was rosy and her eyes were bright. She would dry her hair, put on a sensible skirt and jumper and her warm coat, and go into town to do her shopping. Later she would call on Janet Ingoldby and talk to her about joining a sewing circle. She would write a letter to the grammar school, offering her services for extra French conversation lessons. Surely Philip couldn’t mind that.

  ‘You’ve been completely off your head,’ she told her mirrored image severely. ‘It’s high time you got a grip.’

  Her aunt had once said that to her. Isabel had taken to not eating, after news began to trickle in about the camps where her parents had died. Her aunt had folded her arms and stood over her while Isabel sat there with a plate of apple crumble on the table in front of her. Charlie had already escaped. Her aunt had said, ‘This isn’t going to bring them back, Isabel. It’s time you got a grip.’ Isabel had glanced up at Aunt Jean’s lips, pressed tightly together now that she’d finished speaking. There was grey at her temples. She reminded Isabel of someone, and then she knew who it was. Of course: her aunt was Dad’s sister. Isabel had never thought of that properly before. Her aunt unsealed her lips again. ‘We have to carry on,’ she said. ‘It’s what they would have wanted.’ An extraordinary feeling of relief filled Isabel, as if some black poison were being leached away. It was all right not to think. It was good not to feel. She dug her spoon into the apple crumble.

  That night Isabel could not sleep. Philip had gone out again, to a child with Still’s disease. She turned over and over in bed, cold in spite of the eiderdown. She knew that Alec wouldn’t come. Philip was so good, such a good doctor, she thought drearily. Janet Ingoldby had been pleased to see her. She had given her a pot of last summer’s gooseberry jam. It was a beautiful deep transparent red, with the seeds shining dark through it. Janet had held it up to the light with satisfaction. The jam had set exactly as it ought.

  ‘When you think of how much fruit went to waste, because we couldn’t get the sugar,’ she said. ‘During the war, I mean. But of course, you’re too young; you wouldn’t remember.’

  ‘I remember,’ Isabel had said.

  She was so cold now that her teeth were chattering. The eiderdown might as well not be there.

  ‘Carrot jam!’ went on Janet Ingoldby scornfully. ‘The Ministry of Food appeared to have got carrots on the brain, when any woman could have told them there were pounds of blackberries rotting in the hedges for want of the sugar to make bramble jelly. Have you ever tasted wild damson preserve, my dear?’

  I’m so cold, thought Isabel.

  ‘Cook has always made our own rose-hip syrup. It’s a bit of a fiddle to get the seeds out, but the children enjoyed helping. Give them a teaspoon of rose-hip syrup morning and evening. There’s no necessity for runny noses all winter.’

  Isabel turned over and huddled herself in the
centre of the icy bed. She was so tired, but she would never be able to get to sleep. Janet Ingoldby’s voice drummed in her head ‘… Home preserving … Chilprufe vests … Dr Ingoldby is very fond of smoked haddock …’

  She had got to get warm. Surely it couldn’t do any harm to get the greatcoat, just for a minute …

  But it wasn’t on the chair. Isabel’s heart beat fast with panic. She hadn’t touched it, she knew she hadn’t. It had lain folded on the chair when she last looked. But when was that? She concentrated, trying to grip the sight of the greatcoat through the fog of her memory. It had been there, she was sure of it, when she’d tidied the flat before Philip came home.

  There it was, hanging from the hook on the back of the door. The door had swung back, hiding it. It must have been Philip who put it there. She would just lay it on the bed for a little while, and then, when she was warm, she would hang it up again. As she thought this, Janet Ingoldby’s voice stopped, as if someone had lifted the needle from the surface of a record.

  Isabel dreamed. Alec’s face emerged from the darkness in front of her, and hung there. It was appalling, so disfigured by anguish that she wanted to turn away but could not. His eyes were like caves. She touched his sleeve but he seemed not to feel her hand. She reached up to kiss him and bring him back to her. He turned away. She knew he was thinking of tonight. He was afraid. They’d been coned on the last trip to the big city. He did his stuff and by a miracle he got them away, but that doesn’t happen twice. All those searchlights locked on to you so you could read a bloody book by them while you waited for the shell-burst to blow you out of the sky. Haul the kite into a screaming dive until it sounds as if every rivet is about to burst open. The lights tracking and you pinned against the darkness, spread out, the target for everything. They got out of it that time but it wouldn’t happen again.

  ‘I know,’ she said over and over, trying to get to where he was, but he said, ‘You don’t,’ and brushed her hand away.