The Greatcoat Page 13

  ‘See you later, young man, look after your mother,’ said Philip, tapping Michael on the nose, and he was gone, striding away across the rough grass. He turned the corner of the house and disappeared. She heard the car door clunk shut, and then the engine started.

  Isabel picked up Michael and rocked him gently, to comfort herself, but he didn’t want to be held. She wouldn’t bother to go upstairs. She would just lie down on the blanket beside Michael and rest her eyes until it was time to make his bottle. It was cool here, in the shade …

  The tree rustled, and something fell on her face. A leaf or an unripe fruit. Isabel rolled over, pushed her hair off her face and opened her eyes. Michael was sitting up beside her, crowing and stretching out his arms to the distance. She looked where he was looking, out of the shade and into the dazzle.

  Alec was walking towards her, in his greatcoat despite the heat of the day. As he crossed the lawn he smiled at Isabel, a warm, brilliant smile.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ he said. He bent down and she smelled his smell: cigarette smoke, a trace of engine oil, the bitter tang of his oxygen mask. He lifted the baby from the blanket and cradled him in his arms. He handled Michael confidently, as if he had held him many times, and Michael, she could see, was happy with him. Isabel did not stir. She could not. The world was dissolving, breaking up around her. Dappled light glinted on the fairness of Alec’s hair, and the air moved like water.

  ‘I haven’t got much time,’ said Alec. ‘I shouldn’t be here. We’re off again tonight.’

  ‘You mustn’t tell me that,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Don’t you remember, you told me that you were a grave of secrets? I had to see you. Thank God for the old bike. I’ve only got a few minutes.’ He took off his greatcoat, spread it on the grass next to the blanket and knelt on it. He was about to lower the child onto the coat, but Isabel grabbed his arm.

  ‘Don’t put him down on that!’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘It might be … it might be dirty.’

  Alec shrugged but got to his feet again, still holding the baby. Isabel held out her arms to take him, but Alec began to fool with him, bouncing him, chucking him a little way into the air and catching him again, while Michael squealed with delight.

  ‘Dance to your Daddy

  My bonnie laddie

  Dance to your Daddy

  My little man’

  sang Alec, and his eyes were on Isabel.

  ‘Give him to me,’ said Isabel sharply. ‘My husband will be back soon.’

  ‘That’s where you’re mistaken. He’s out on the far field. I saw him on the tractor,’ said Alec.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The farmer’s in his den

  The farmer’s in his den

  Eee Aye Eee Aye

  The farmer’s in his den …’

  sang Alec.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Isabel.

  ‘I can sing something else if you prefer.’

  ‘One of your mess songs, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s perfectly decent.

  ‘We don’t want to go to Chopland

  We don’t want to go at all

  We don’t want to go to Chopland

  Where our chances are f*** all …’

  ‘Sorry, darling. Not quite so decent after all. But it’s Laney’s song, not mine – you’ll have to blame him.’

  ‘You’ve got to go. He – my husband – he really will be back in a minute.’

  ‘He won’t be back until the light’s gone. You’ve told me before that he won’t waste a drop of daylight. He can plod up and down in his tractor for as long as he likes. What it is to be a man in a reserved occupation,’ said Alec, and the tang of bitterness in his voice made Michael’s face crumple.

  ‘Alec, don’t.’

  ‘Listen, Lizzie. Briefing’s at four. The gen is that it’ll be the big city tonight for sure – that’s more than seven hours, there and back again.’

  ‘It might not be,’ said Isabel quickly. ‘You’ve had duff gen before.’

  ‘You only have to look at the fuel load. Tell him you’ve got to go into town tonight. You can think of some excuse. I’ll come to the flat, whatever happens. I’ll be there as soon as I can after the debrief.’

  Isabel’s hair crisped at the roots with terror. She must not let him see. She must not antagonise Alec in any way, not while he held Michael in his arms. He was back there, between the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh ops. He hadn’t got away after all.

  Lizzie. Had it always been Lizzie he was looking for? When he first mouthed her name on the other side of the glass, she’d thought his lips were moving in the shape of her name: Isabel. But it might have been Elizabeth …

  The landlady’s presence thickened around her. It wanted to come in. It wanted to flood her once again with memories that weren’t hers. It wanted to possess Alec through her.

  The greatcoat, thought Isabel. It had opened the door for Alec again, and now he was here. The landlady had never let him lie. She had brought him back again and again. She walked and walked over that floor, until she had walked him back to her. If he couldn’t be with her, then she would still have him through Isabel. She might be lying flat on her back in a hospital bed in York, but in her mind she was walking still.

  The child. The landlady would have her child too. She would have her child again, through Isabel. A lovely little boy by all accounts. I never saw him.

  There was Alec, with Michael in his arms, bending down his fair head to the child’s fairness. Michael was so peaceful, gazing at the man whose eyes were the colour of his own. Gooseflesh rose on Isabel’s arms, but she said, ‘Give the baby to me a minute. I think he’s wet.’

  She said it so matter-of-factly that he simply handed Michael to her. She took him and felt his nappy. ‘I thought so. I’ll have to change him, Alec. Wait here.’

  ‘But I can’t stay long!’ Alec burst out, and his face twisted. She saw the exhaustion etched into it again, the dark stains under his eyes, the twitch in his right cheek. He’d had enough and he knew it, but he was still trapped between the twenty-six and twenty-seventh ops. Death couldn’t wipe the fear from his eyes. Not while she still kept him coming back to her …

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Alec,’ she said.

  ‘I know that,’ he said.

  His arms were around her. He held her carefully, so as not to scare the child. He whispered in her ear: Lizzie, Lizzie. Issy, Issy. She thought: He would never have come to me like this, not in life. He would never have left the airfield, or his crew. She has almost got what she wanted. They are almost back together. The landlady, Alec, the child.

  She felt herself drifting. It was true, the world was turning to water around her. Everything that she’d thought solid was drifting away. She could smell his smell. He had missed so much. He’d been outside for so long, in the dark and cold. Why not let him come in? Why not let it happen? Why not empty herself, and let the landlady return, so that Alec could stay? It was what Elizabeth Atkinson had wanted, year after year. She had walked that floor all night long, waiting and wanting, until she brought him back.

  But what did she bring him back to? The worst days. Four more ops to go, and then tour expired, but he never allowed himself to think of that.

  ‘You’ve got to press on.’ He’d said that to Isabel, in those clipped words out of his weary face. He was so afraid. Isabel could see it now, in the way he held Michael, as if the baby were life itself, unbearably precious. She must have known how afraid he was. Afraid of what was coming, afraid of fear itself, afraid that he might not make it, might break down in front of his crew as they put their valuables into their lockers, and gave in the keys so that their lockers wouldn’t have to be broken open if they failed to return.

  Alec knew what the defences were like on the bombing run over Berlin. He’d been coned and got them out of it but you don’t get that luck twice. That was what the landlady wa
s making him return to, over and over: and now it was the worst day of all, with the night ahead of him. That wasn’t love, thought Isabel. It was more like vengeance.

  The world was turning to water. She could let go now. Let herself sink, fall, go down endlessly until her mind was empty for someone else to occupy—

  Michael cried. A small protest, the most he ever allowed himself. He didn’t like the way she was holding him, or the way Alec was pressing so close. He wanted his bottle. Gently, Isabel disengaged herself. She stepped backwards, holding the child.

  ‘You don’t have to go into town after the debriefing,’ she said. ‘You can come here. It’ll be all right: I’ll make sure of it. He’s going over to his brother’s to help with the milking tomorrow. I’ll tell him to sleep there, so he can make an early start. There will only be me and the baby here. I’ll send the girl home. She’ll be glad of a night off.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I’m quite sure. You can come here, and I’ll be waiting for you. It will be all right. It’s much simpler than your going into town.’

  He smiled at her. She saw the naked sweetness of it, the smile of a boy who hadn’t gone through any of this yet, or maybe of a man who was beginning to believe that one day it might all be over for him. ‘I do love you, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for all this—’

  ‘I know. It’s all right.’

  ‘Look at that, he’s dropped off.’

  It was true. Michael had fallen asleep between them.

  ‘Must have a clear conscience,’ said Alec.

  ‘I should hope so.’

  They both looked down at the sleeping baby. She wondered if Alec could see, as she did, the separateness of him. He wasn’t Lizzie’s, or Issy’s. He was Michael. She would fight to the death for that.

  ‘Let me take him,’ said Alec, as if a sudden, unbearable impulse had rushed over him.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  They were silent. It was all there between them, almost on the surface now: the life she held; the life he couldn’t have again. All those others, millions of them, and the world had filled up and gone on without them.

  ‘Better go,’ said Alec, glancing again at his watch. ‘I shouldn’t be here at all.’

  ‘Kiss me first.’

  They kissed quickly, a light dry kiss of the kind lovers can afford when they know they will be together again within hours. He turned and walked out of the sunlight, into the shadow of the path that led to the overgrown orchard, and beyond it, to the lane. She didn’t even try to see what he saw. She just watched him as he went, the fairness of him, the sun glinting on his head. He didn’t turn back. She listened. After a while, sure enough, she heard his motorbike.

  ‘I’ll be out again tonight, I’m afraid,’ said Philip over supper.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Eden baby’s on its way. It’s her third, but she’s over forty and I’m not happy about her blood pressure.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You look a lot better than you did earlier.’

  ‘I’m fine. How is the … I mean, Mrs Atkinson?’

  ‘No change.’

  The night wore on, warm, moonlit, full of drifting scent from the stocks Isabel had planted under the windows. It was too fine a night to be indoors. She lifted Michael from his cot and wrapped him in a shawl. He smelled of sleep and baby sweat. She pressed him close and went down the stairs without turning on the lights.

  The garden was still. She walked over the dewy grass to the medlar tree and stood in its shelter, watching the house. The chirring of a hidden nightjar spilled from the orchard behind her. She listened, almost wishing that the baby would wake so that he could hear it too. The warm air stirred, smelling of grass.

  Suddenly the sound of the nightjar was cut, as if the night had been sliced through. From the far distance there came the low rumble of engines, like an incoming storm. She knew them: they were Merlin engines. They were coming closer, beating their way in from the south-east. They didn’t sound right. Quickly, she ran over the dewy grass, away from the house, through the tangled orchard. She huddled over Michael, listening intently and watching the house.

  In the moonlight a woman appeared at her bedroom window. She had pushed aside the blackout blind and she was standing there, looking up at the sky. She was holding a white bundle. She, like Isabel, had her baby in her arms. The thunder of engines was coming closer now, searching them out.

  Freezing air washed over Isabel. Before her eyes the clear summer moonlight thickened into fog. It was winter now, and the early hours of morning. Two o’clock, three o’clock perhaps. They had been all the way to the big city and now they were limping home. That sound must mean that the Lanc had engine damage. The noise swelled towards Isabel, rasping the sky, making the ground tremble. The Lanc was behind her, descending towards the airfield, coming in to land on the runway where the flare path was lit and the chance light waiting. But he could not get her down. Get down, you bitch, he said as the Lanc fought him and the runway slid past to the left of her groping wheels, and then the throttles were rammed forward with both of them holding it, him and Laney, K-Katie shaking as if she would shake herself to pieces and the two remaining engines screaming as she fought to climb and they cleared the admin block and they were over the trees and then the ground went up and the undercart, the fucking undercart—

  The grey farmhouse with the green back door exploded as the Lanc came down.

  Of such disasters, people usually said, ‘At least they wouldn’t have known anything.’ There was a fraction of a second, maybe, when the inferno bloomed around Alec, before he felt it and was obliterated by it. But who knows? This time, there was nothing left of any of them. The fire slumped into ash, into earth, into grass, into speedwell and scarlet pimpernel. It was over.

  * * *

  A long time later, Isabel opened her eyes. The baby’s shawl had slipped down over her arm, but it didn’t matter. It was a summer’s night, and when she touched Michael’s bare feet, they were warm. She waded forward through the wet tangle of the orchard, until she was out on the lawn. Once again, the moon shone clear. The nightjar chirred. Now she was in the moon-shadow, under the medlar tree, with Michael in her arms. The air was still, but down on the grass the greatcoat’s heavy cloth rippled, as if a night wind were walking under it.

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  Copyright © Helen Dunmore, 2012

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