The Greatcoat Read online

  Isabel heaved herself out of sleep. She was bolt upright in the bed and her nightie clung to her. Her heart thundered. It was a bad dream, she said to herself, it wasn’t real. But in her head her aunt still said, ‘Your parents will be home at Christmas,’ and the tapping man still winked knowingly. Philip’s side of the bed was empty. He must have gone out on a call.

  She could still hear the tapping sound that had woken her. It must be her dream still turning, like a record after the needle had been lifted off. Tap, tap, tap. Soft, insistent, determined. It was a real sound. It was coming from the living room. It sounded like someone tapping on glass … on a window …

  Relief flooded her. Philip must have gone out without his key and he was tapping on the front window to attract her attention. He didn’t want to rouse the landlady by ringing the bell at this hour.

  Isabel snatched up the greatcoat and pulled it around her. Thank heavens he was back. She’d make some tea and he’d tell her about his case and everything would be fine. She ran over the cold lino, into the living room and across to the window, without switching on the light. She drew back the curtains.

  There was a man outside the window. She saw the pallor of his face first, as it seemed to bob against the glass, too high up to belong to a man who had his feet on the ground. The street lamp lit him from the side, throwing the sharp shadow of his cap over his face. He was too close, inside the railings that separated the house from the pavement. Of course, the level of the ground there was higher than the level of the floor inside. That was why he seemed to float in midair. A man in a greatcoat. An RAF greatcoat, exactly like the one on her bed: she couldn’t mistake it. An officer. There he was, an everyday figure, safe as houses, but her heart clenched in fear. It was the look on his face: recognition, a familiarity so deep he didn’t have to say a word. But she had never seen him before in her life.

  He gave her a thumbs-up, as if to say, ‘Good show. I wasn’t sure if you’d heard me tapping.’ She stared at him without moving. He was young. Her age, maybe a year or two more.

  Her mind struggled from point to point. He thought he knew her but he was a stranger to her. He was on the other side of the glass. He hadn’t wanted to ring the doorbell or rouse the house. But he still wasn’t Philip.

  Suddenly, breaking across her thoughts, her body moved. Her arms snatched at the curtains and dragged them across. The man was blotted out. The room was dark. She stood there, clutching the coat to her while the blood banged in her ears. Was he still there on the other side of the glass, waiting? How long had he been tapping before she woke? If only Philip would come home.

  But then she reproached herself. Why had she pulled the curtains in his face like that? What a coward she was. He must have lost his way, and wanted directions. There were other airfields not far away, she knew, and some were still operational. The minster was a landmark and it would have been natural to try at a nearby house. Air crew didn’t stand on ceremony. They thumbed lifts and whistled at girls. He hadn’t meant to frighten her.

  Cautiously, Isabel drew back the curtains again. There was no one there. She took a deep breath: of relief, of disappointment, she didn’t know. There was the street lamp, shining. Even now, years after the end of the blackout, it seemed like a blessing. She’d grown up in the dark. Isabel pulled the curtains right back, felt for the window-catch and unlocked it. The window slid up easily. She leaned out into the cold night, looked to the right and then to the left, towards the minster. There was no one. The streets were still and the town muffled in sleep. Not a single car was moving. He had rounded the corner and disappeared. She strained for footsteps, but there was nothing.

  How good the night air tasted. Cold, fresh and wild, as if the country had blown over the town; but there was no wind. She huddled into the coat and the wool of the collar rubbed her neck. Well, he would find someone to help him, no doubt. There was frost settling on the ground and clinging to the lamp post. The minster roof shone faintly in the moonlight. A man wouldn’t choose to walk around for long on a night like this. He would go out to the main road and thumb a lift from a passing lorry, to wherever he was stationed.

  She should go back to bed. What if Philip were to come back and find her hanging out of the window, half frozen? In the morning he would say again, in that would-be casual way: ‘Is, you are starting to settle down, aren’t you? You do like it here?’ Or worse, he wouldn’t ask. He’d worry over it silently: Poor old Is, she’s letting things get to her.

  She put her hands on the cold sill, ready to draw her head back inside, but a sound arrested her: a vibration, very far off, chafing the air. She listened for a long time but the sound wouldn’t come closer and wouldn’t define itself. As it faded it pulled at her teasingly, like a memory that she couldn’t touch, until the town was silent. Isabel ducked her head inside, pulled down the sash and slipped the window-catch across. Again, she drew the curtains, and this time she felt her way across to the light-switch. The living room sprang out at her in all its dull, ugly banality. What was the time? Ten past three, and Philip was out there somewhere, perhaps at the side of a woman in labour, and so far away from Isabel that she wasn’t even in his thoughts.

  She ought not to have closed the curtains like that. It was cowardice.

  She was still awake when Philip came in.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half past four.’

  He switched on the bedside lamp and sat down heavily.

  ‘Are you all right, Phil?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘It was a stillbirth. Cord around the neck. Then we damn nearly lost the mother with a haemorrhage.’

  ‘Did you transfer her to York?’

  ‘In the end. You know what those lanes are like. It takes for ever for an ambulance to get down them. Absolute bloody nightmare.’

  ‘It was her first baby, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What? Oh. Yes, a first baby. Elderly primagravida in fact.’

  ‘How awful,’ said Isabel, thinking of a grey-haired woman straining to give birth to a dead child. ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Thirty.’

  ‘Thirty! That’s not so old.’

  ‘There’s some disagreement over when the term should first be applied,’ said Philip with animation. ‘There’s even a chap who thinks it should start at twenty-six, but he’s over in India.’

  ‘It’s a vile way of describing anybody.’

  ‘Isabel. It’s a precise description which serves a defined medical purpose. That’s how we work.’

  He was exhausted. He hated to fail. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Don’t bother for me. I’m going to sleep.’

  He stripped off his clothes as methodically as ever, and piled them on the chair by the bed. She watched his body with pity. In three hours he would be up again, washing, dressing, making ready for the day. He would hate her to pity him. He’d worked so long for all this.

  Philip turned to her, socks in hand. ‘These need a wash. I didn’t know what to say to her. She was lying there and she knew it was dead but no one said anything. She asked me if it was a boy or a girl. I said it was a boy. She said that was what they’d wanted. Then we realised there was a problem with the placenta.’

  ‘You did everything you could.’

  He sighed. ‘I didn’t let her bleed to death, I suppose. What a night. And then there was the husband waiting downstairs. Move that damned coat, Is, and let me lie down.’

  It was not the moment to tell him about the officer who had lost his way. Philip fell asleep instantly, without switching off the bedside light. She could see a small shaving cut on the side of his jaw. He must have been in a hurry when he shaved yesterday morning. Already, dark stubble was pushing through his skin. As if he felt her gaze, he twitched and burrowed his face into the pillow, away from her. She lay there for a long time – thinking of nothing, she would have said if anyone had asked. Once she thought she heard
a tap at the window in the other room, and tensed, but it was nothing. The light still burned.

  ‘I love you,’ she said to Philip’s back. It was true, but it sounded false. Instead she said, under her breath, ‘You are my husband.’ That, also, was true. The word brought back the white gash of celebration that had cut through her life. She had been a bride. There are some words, Isabel thought, that seem too weighty to be applied to oneself. Wife. Mother. But Philip did not seem ever to feel like an imposter in his own life. Perhaps that was why she had married him, she thought; a cold, middle-of-the-night thought she would never have had by day. Towards six o’clock she fell into a sleep so deep that Phil’s rising could not wake her.

  ‘Were you warmer, then?’ It was the landlady, standing at the top of the stairs, looking down on Isabel.

  ‘What?’

  ‘With that coat.’

  ‘Oh, the coat,’ said Isabel, as if it were a thing of slight importance. ‘Yes, thank you, it is warm. I’m looking out for an eiderdown.’ Then, feeling that she’d been ungracious, she added, ‘It’s beautiful cloth.’

  The other woman’s wintry face relaxed a little. ‘It is,’ she said with emphasis. ‘Those greatcoats were made to last.’

  I could ask you whose it was, thought Isabel. I could ask you why you stuffed it away in a cupboard like that. But I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of denying me the answers. Why should she feel as if she had to propitiate this woman?

  ‘You can’t do any harm to it,’ said the landlady. ‘You sleep with it, if that’s what you want, as long as your husband doesn’t object.’

  ‘It’s not on his side of the bed. He never feels the cold.’

  ‘Men don’t, do they? It’s as if they have an engine inside them.’ The landlady’s face was almost animated.

  Isabel recoiled. She did not want to discuss men with this woman, or anyone. Still less would she discuss Philip. She should not have said anything about where the coat was laid. It was too intimate: it seemed to allow the landlady into their bedroom. And she’s been there, I’m sure of it, Isabel thought. Prying and poking when I’m out. I’m not going to put up with it.

  ‘I must get on,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m sure you have things to do.’

  ‘It never stops, the work, does it?’ answered the landlady, and she continued to stand at the head of the stairs, arms folded, watching Isabel out.

  Chapter Four

  SHE WOULD GO out to the airfield again. The sky was sleet grey but exhilaration rose in Isabel’s blood as she left the town behind. Soon the minster would sink from view. She was alone, and free. She could look through the bare tangle of the hedges into the long ploughed fields, purple and chocolate, stiff with mud and frost. She walked fast, enjoying the strike of her stout heels on the road, and the puff of her breath into the freezing air.

  ‘I must get a job,’ she said to herself. She could coach children for their exams. She could give lessons in French conversation. Her accent was good; even French people said so. But Philip hadn’t liked the idea when she’d mentioned it to him.

  ‘There’s no call for that, Is.’ He looked annoyed, almost as if she’d insulted him.

  ‘It would only be a bit of private tutoring.’

  ‘Yes, but – going round to people’s houses …’ He hadn’t been able to say what he meant. She couldn’t understand what it meant to him, to know that he provided for her and kept her safe. He thought of her going into other people’s houses, standing on their doorsteps. He saw her pushing that lock of hair behind her ear, and looking up the street with the little air of remoteness that he loved. They would open their doors and expect service from her. No one else would ever see how beautiful she was. His own mother had thought Isabel was whey-faced and should take iron and drink Bovril every night. As for her hair, why didn’t she have a permanent wave instead of all that long slippery stuff hanging down her back, or else pinned up so that strands fell around her face? Not that anything was ever said, of course. That wasn’t his mother’s way. Hints, slips of the tongue and meaning silences were her style.

  I suppose he’s worried about people thinking the doctor’s wife ought not to work, thought Isabel now. She reached into the hedgerow, pulled out a stick and snapped off the ends. She whipped a stand of desiccated hogweed until the seeds flew.

  ‘You’d make yourself common, Is,’ Philip had told her, his face tight.

  ‘Make myself common!’ She had turned away from him, too angry to speak.

  He’d thought, You’d feel different if you’d had to go out in the wind and rain every school night, with other people’s groceries on your handlebars. She would never know what that felt like. Even in spite of herself, he would protect her.

  How good it was to be away from everything, Isabel thought, swinging her arms as she marched along. The cold stung but she didn’t care. She was used to piercing easterlies, those winds that swept clear from Siberia. It was only in the flat that she felt chilled to the bone. But she had escaped from them all: the flat and the landlady’s choking presence, the shops and the narrow streets, the looming bulk of the minster, which reared above their dwelling like a totem. She was going back to the airfield even though it frightened her.

  This time she didn’t hesitate. She walked past the deserted guardhouse and into dereliction. Stronger than ever, the wind buffeted her. Impossible to believe that the airfield had been peopled only seven years ago. Isabel stepped lightly. The roads were broken up and there was mud everywhere. There had always been mud, she remembered, in those wartime winters. The men had lived in it, cycling from Nissen hut to Nissen hut. They needed their bikes, her aunt had said, when a sergeant’s tyres were slashed by one of the local boys, outside the Green Man. It was sabotage, said her aunt. It was because of a girl, Charlie told Isabel later.

  She wished she had a bike now. She was so small and insignificant, just a dab of life that could be squashed out by a finger. She remembered the vastness of the Lancasters when they lumbered over the sky. Isabel wandered on, past the hangars, drawn as if by a magnet to the main runway. She looked down its length, which disappeared into the distance. No aircraft could land on it now. Maybe time and harsh winters had ploughed up the surface; maybe it had been damaged deliberately, for reasons that Isabel couldn’t fathom.

  The wind moaned on the perimeter. The feeling of fear was in her again. She had braved it to come here, but still it was stronger than her. It seemed as if she could put out her hand and touch thousands of lives which had never ended but had broken off into a silence that hung more heavily than any noise. They were here, she knew it. The men on their motorbikes who raced the green lanes, or hauled their Lancs into the air with a thunder that made the walls of her childhood bedroom vibrate.

  They were not here. They were gone, the survivors back into their lives, the dead wherever the dead go. They would never again ease those huge black machines forward from the dispersal pans, and guide them along the narrow concrete taxiways, onto the chosen runway. She and Charlie had looked up into the air crew’s faces, and heard their tales. Not about ops – they never talked about them, and she and Charlie knew better than to ask. But they liked to talk about their Lancs.

  The wind blew grit at her and she closed her eyes. It was time to go, and not come back here again. All of it was over and there were good reasons why the place had been abandoned. It was a hostilities-only bomber station, like the one she and Charlie had haunted, pedalling out there on their bikes, getting as close as they could.

  She walked away westward. The pall of cloud was breaking up into red streaks of sunset. She turned and saw its reflection pulse at the top of the control tower, where the glass must still be unbroken. Light flashed, and flashed again.

  That night Philip wasn’t on call. He came home with a bottle of cider and two packets of crisps. Isabel poked the fire until sparks flew and tuned the wireless to the Light Programme. Sure enough, there was dance music.

  ‘But you’re tired,’
she said, seeing how Philip lay back in his chair. He took a deep draught of cider and smiled at her.

  ‘You can have my salt too,’ he said.

  Isabel emptied both blue-paper twists of salt into her own bag, held the top and shook hard. She ate her crisps one by one, with slow greed. Philip put down his empty glass and she reached to fill it, but he laid his hand over the top. ‘I might be going out later.’

  ‘But you’re not on call tonight.’

  ‘No, but the district nurse rang in about an emphysema case.’

  ‘Is Dr Ingoldby ever on call, or does he sit at home holding Janet’s wool every single evening?’

  ‘It’s all valuable experience, Is. You knew it would be like this.’

  ‘Yes, I knew.’

  ‘Isn’t there a play on or something?’

  ‘Don’t you like the music?’

  ‘It’s all right. If you like it, keep it on.’

  It was quarter to ten when the phone rang. Philip leaped up to answer it. She heard his voice through the bedroom doorway, his telephone voice, clear and professional. She heard him take down symptoms and directions. He didn’t know his way to the house of every patient in the practice yet, but at this rate he soon would, she thought.

  When he was gone she cleared away glasses and crisp packets, and re-stoppered the cider bottle. After a moment’s thought she unstoppered it again, poured out another glass and drank it off like medicine. Her head buzzed. She would fall into bed, into the darkest of slumbers where she would think of nothing.

  Isabel dreamed of the Lancasters. They came over so low and heavy that it seemed they must lose their grip on the air and plunge down, loaded with bombs, onto the sleeping village. She lay tense, willing them higher. The roof above her was transparent and she stared straight up at the belly of the aircraft that was passing over, and then she could see through metal, too, and there were the men, the pilot like a coal heaver at the controls, the flight engineer alongside him helping to push the throttles forward to get the laden beast into the night sky.