The Fire Fighter Read online

  To which I’m anyway ideologically opposed.’

  ‘As well as too skint for.’

  ‘You’re a cynic, Mr Finlay.’

  ‘It’s the times in which we live.’

  ‘There is such a thing as the milk of human kindness,’ Babcock said.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘And then there is my brother-in-law, who works as a kitchen porter at the Dorchester. You know the Dorchester?’

  ‘Only by reputation. As a place unlikely to shift a lot of brown ale.’

  ‘Has to cater to a wide spectrum of tastes, a place like the Dorchester,’ Babcock said. He nodded to himself. ‘Very much a favourite rendezvous with Captain Grey, the Dorchester.’ He looked at Finlay as if satisfied that this confirmed a sort of royal seal of approval on the old hotel.

  ‘Is he a Captain? Grey?’

  ‘Lord, no,’ Babcock said. ‘He’s very much more important than that. These days, I mean. But he was Captain Grey to me, back in the old days, which as you know I have no intention of discussing with you at this or any other time.’

  Both men drank for a while in silence. Finlay felt completely at ease in the silence, in the company of the other man, a circumstance he thought odd, but not so odd as to break the spell of his relaxation and the relative comfort he was taking in the moment. It was funny, when he thought about it. And the humour of the situation slowly insinuated a smile on his face. So long as he didn’t try to get Babcock to recollect the summer slaughter of Gommecourt Wood, everything would be all right. It would be all right just so long as he didn’t mention Babcock’s boy and the aircraft carrier, Glorious, which had carried Babcock’s nineteen-year-old boy to his sea grave. As long as he did not mention Babcock’s wife and address the subject of her grief and derangement; or recollect poor Cooper and the brilliantine crackle of burning hair on poor Cooper’s crushed skull; or speculate on the death agony of Sweeney with his flesh boiled; or the danger to his own brother, Tom, sheltered by a thin skin of steel and rivets at the bottom of the Baltic; or Nevin, coming to pieces behind the rictus of his minstrel grin; as long as he thought about and mentioned none of these things, just so long as he maintained the happy fiction of the waging of a painless war, then everything would be just tickety-boo, and wouldn’t that be just the ticket? Christ, Finlay thought. No wonder the cinemas were full. No wonder baying crowds were mobbing the theatre and concert halls.

  ‘When you grin like that, it makes you look a bit simple,’ Babcock said.

  ‘Who are they, Babcock?’ Finlay said. ‘Who are we working for?’

  ‘The Ministry,’ Babcock said, bored, as if by rote.

  Both men swallowed beer in silence. ‘Who are they?’ Finlay asked. ‘Who are they really?’

  Babcock sighed and and looked at his beer through the dark glass of his bottle. ‘Describe Hitler to me, Finlay.’

  ‘Deadly serious,’ Finlay said. ‘Ambitious. Clever. Mad.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘A bully. A murderer.’

  Babcock nodded. ‘How much do you know about politics?’

  ‘Bugger all.’

  ‘In the nineteen-thirties, only one senior British politician shared your opinion of Hitler. At least, only one senior politician was prepared to voice such an opinion publicly. That man was Winston Churchill. And his belligerence cost him his ministerial career. His was a view shared, however, by several senior army officers. And those army officers, some of them very senior indeed, communicated.’

  Finlay drank and pondered the abyss yawning under his feet.

  ‘White, Grey, the people working for and with them, were absolutely right about what would happen if Hitler were appeased,’ Babcock said. ‘But that’s not entirely the point. Dissenting army officers do not get together and discuss strategies opposed to the policies of their elected leaders. Not in a democracy. Not in peacetime. That’s the point.’

  Finlay was not used to conversations like this. But he thought he got Babcock’s drift.

  ‘Why weren’t Grey and the rest sacked? Come to that, why weren’t they court-martialled?’

  ‘Maybe because dissent is a long way short of mutiny. Maybe for lack of hard evidence. Probably, in my view, because Chamberlain wouldn’t have had the stomach for a purge of the armed forces.’ Babcock sipped beer and smiled to himself. ‘Or come to that, the mandate. Peculiar time, the ‘thirties.’

  ‘Churchill was a soldier,’ Finlay said. ‘He swore a solemn oath to serve king and country. And I should think he has the stomach for anything.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Babcock said. ‘But he also wants to win this war.’

  Finlay said, ‘What do you know about my buildings?’

  Babcock sipped beer and swallowed with exaggerated relish. He was enjoying himself.

  ‘What am I supposed to know?’

  ‘Absalom House, for instance. What do you know about Absalom?’

  ‘Built by a dilettante architect for a greedy entrepreneur who got his come-uppance in the crash of ’twenty-nine. Threw himself off that glass dome, he did. It was years before they entirely got rid of the stain he left on the pavement. After that, the Government leased it from the Official Receiver. And I have as much idea of what goes on there nowadays as you do. Less, probably, since you’ve been inside the place.’

  ‘Why do you say Lange was a dilettante?’

  ‘Because he was.’

  ‘He was good enough to complete postgraduate studies in London.’

  ‘Yes. But in engineering.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I work in engineering, Mr Finlay. In case you’d forgotten, that’s my trade. I help maintain the London Underground.’

  ‘I thought you worked for Grey.’

  ‘That’s voluntary.’

  ‘I see,’ Finlay said. ‘It seems to me there’s a lot that’s voluntary.’

  ‘Backbone of the war effort,’ Babcock said. ‘Secret warriors, Mr Churchill called us. Something like that, anyway. Some line of throwaway rhetoric’ He reached down and replaced his empty bottle in the crate beside his chair and then felt around until his fingers found the stopper of one that was unopened. All the time his eyes were on Finlay. Obliged into honesty by drink, his expression was by this time openly crafty. ‘Lange’s profession was architecture. But engineering was his passion. Most of the profit from those fashionable commissions was spent on his pet project.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Some kind of energy source. He got interested in energy when he designed the turbine house for a dam in the Austrian Alps. But it wasn’t energy derived from water pressure that interested him. It was something completely unexplored. He was working on it with a physicist he met during his year in London.’

  ‘An English physicist?’

  Babcock shook his head. ‘Another German. Chap from Düsseldorf.’

  ‘Richard Frentz,’ Finlay said.

  Babcock laughed and wagged a finger at him. ‘You need watching, you do, Chief Fire Officer, and no mistake. You pretend to be a bit foggy. But you know more than you let on.’

  Seven

  Finlay saw his mother before she saw him. They had given him the number of a guest house at an address called Wavecrest at the Seasalter end of Whitstable beach. He had expected an exhaustive briefing from the Immaculate Major, or a feral-eyed warning from Grey. At the very least, he had thought he would get the chance to inspect the increasingly fraught Ministry windows and watch White practise semaphore with his eyebrows. But they had sent the ticket and directions and one line of instruction, via Babcock. The instruction had been to wear his civilian suit.

  Walking towards the bench where his mother sat, he was glad he had worn the overcoat they had given him, too. Wind whipped off the sea in white smudges on the peaks of undulating green and screamed around his ears and stung his scalp with salt cold under its covering of shorn hair. His mother sat facing the sea and he could see her hair, thick and grey, undulate like a living thing respon
ding to the strength of each separate gust. He could tell by the shape of her shoulders that her hands were shoved deep into her pockets for warmth. She was not a tall woman and her feet just reached the ground under where she sat on the bench. She had on a pair of imitation-leather ankle boots that were familiar to him. He knew that they zipped up the front and were lined with fake rabbit fur. He could see the arthritic swelling of her ankles from a hundred feet away, despite the boots. He recognized her coat, as well. It was a wool coat with a fox-fur collar Tom had bought for her from Peter Jones on his first home leave.

  Still about twenty yards away from his mother, Finlay had to stop to try to compose himself. He loved her very much and felt he had been such a dreadful disappointment to her. Seeing her there, in the freezing blast off the capering sea, she seemed tiny and vulnerable. All the pain he had brought to those he loved most seemed to consolidate in that small, seated figure with her back to him. Then she cocked her head, though she could not have heard him in that withering wind, and he knew that she had sensed her son, become suddenly aware of his presence and proximity. And so he closed the distance between them in a few strides and sat beside her and gathered her in his arms and hugged her, in the gathering gale, for a long time before saying anything at all.

  They walked first away from the open. The lanes of Whitstable were old and their timber cottages had been built with proper regard for the exposure of the town to a winter wind that travelled, unimpeded by land mass, all the way from arctic Russia. So the lanes were narrow and dense and their shelter a sudden relief after the exposure to the open sea. They walked slowly because of Margaret Finlay’s arthritis. They gained the high street, which was dismal. Canvas awnings flapped and shuddered over dark shops devoid of anything in the way of goods anyone would want to eat or wear. Glass gave on to black space and displays of ration calculations done in crayon on the cardboard of flattened boxes and taped to the inside of the panes. The high street was almost deserted. Gulls wheeled, screaming, and a pub sign batted back and forth in a steel frame depending from a sort of gibbet. In the distance, carried by the wind, Finlay could hear the insistent anger of fighter engines from a squadron patrolling the coast.

  They found a tea-shop and Finlay bought two cups of tea and a rock cake for his mother. The tea-shop was warm and quiet, wallpapered like somebody’s sitting-room, but welcoming after the buffeting of the street. Three ovals of compressed coal slack burned quietly in the grate. They were the only customers and they took a table beside the fire.

  ‘What were you doing there, mum, you’d catch your death,’ Finlay said.

  ‘The room they put me in is very nice,’ she said. ‘But I don’t like to be cooped up in a strange room. I had to get out. You know I’ve never minded the cold.’

  Only the damp, Finlay said to himself.

  ‘Only the damp,’ his mother said. She sipped tea and smiled at her son. She put a hand over his on the table. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s up?’

  And so, of course, he told her everything.

  When he had finished, they sat silent for a time. Finlay fetched them a second cup of tea and his mother broke pieces from her rock cake and dipped them in her tea and ate them.

  ‘Babcock is wrong, you know,’ she said, quietly. ‘We have not lost this war. But men like White and Grey and your Major will not be the winning of it.’

  ‘They seem so soft, mum. Effete, almost. I hate the way they all call the enemy Jerry. They don’t seem men capable of waging war. They’re not cut from Colonel Baxter’s cloth, that’s for sure.’

  ‘You should read the newspapers, son.’

  ‘I do read them. What there is of them.’

  ‘Really read them, between the lines, I mean. There’s a pattern, a general reluctance to engage the enemy with any conviction. Whole divisions are capitulating without a fight.’

  Margaret Finlay’s voice was little more than a whisper now. The woman who had served them had retreated to a back room. But sound travelled. And seditious talk travelled further. ‘It isn’t the men, it’s the senior officers,’ she said. ‘And it isn’t that they don’t know how to fight, it is that all the appetite they had for a fight was bled out of them twenty-odd years ago in France and Flanders. The men who were subalterns in the trenches then are full colonels and even generals now, a lot of them. They haven’t the heart for a repetition of what they went through then. They just have not got it in them to put men through what they endured themselves.’

  ‘Baxter has.’

  Margaret Finlay shook her head. ‘I’m sure your Colonel Baxter is a brave and cantankerous soldier. Scots usually are. But he’s an artillery man. He did not have to drop into German trenches and fight with a bayonet, wading through mud and slaughter as your father did at Mons and Neuve Chapelle. He was not obliged, like your Captain Grey, to try to lead men through Gommecourt Wood.’

  ‘It wasn’t Gommecourt,’ Finlay said, remembering. ‘It was a place called Serre.’

  His mother played with the fragments of her bun on the tablecloth, fingers stiff with swollen joints. She looked directly at her son. ‘Serre was worse. Serre was the Pals Battalions. At Serre, Captain Grey would have been leading boys to their deaths. Sweet, brave boys from Bradford and Barnsley and Durham who perished all at once on a summer morning.’

  They left the tea-shop and walked back towards the shore. They found a wooden shelter built around a bench behind the sea wall, in the lee of the Whitstable Oyster Sheds, a looming permanence of wood and steel and corrugated iron that rose from the pebbled slope of the beach on the near side of the town’s small harbour. Their seat faced the town. From where they sat, they could hear the boom of water forced between the wooden groynes of the beach. Water surged and dissipated under protest, wave upon hissing wave as it sank, high up the beach, into the shingle. There was spray and salt in the cold, vigorous air. From where they sat, Finlay could look down on the town, on its huddle of shellfishers’ cottages, its labyrinthine lanes, on two pubs tucked against the sea wall and constructed, it seemed, from the spare timbers of ships. He saw a child in yellow oilskins running a stick along a gutter fouled with beach debris. Under the back porch of one of the cottages, a man in a tight wool sweater sat repairing a fishing net with a clumsy wooden needle. Further up the beach, three figures, huddled and rushing like fugitives, entered the door of one of the pubs. Finlay screwed up his eyes and could just make out the name, The Neptune, written in signwriter’s script on the pub’s wood-planked facing wall. Above the words, a bearded figure with a trident rose florid from painted waves. Finlay stood so that he could follow the sweep of his vision, blocked by their shelter, beyond the pub, out over the water. He took a step to the right, into the exposure of the wind, and narrowed his eyes against the grit and salt spray scouring off the shingle. The sea was turbulent, composed of huge green folds laced with white intricacies of foam, the folds so big in their slow, rhythmic undulations that Finlay had to steady himself against the pitch and yaw of false motion brought on by watching them. The tide was up, the water high on the shore, but in those brief intervals between advancing waves, when the sea receded, Finlay could just make out some structure built by men beyond the beach. Four or five times he snatched sight of it, before making sense of its flat, boarded deck and staunch supporting pillars of wood and spindly, topmost rungs of iron ladder. It was a diving platform. It was a thing built not for defence, or observation, or naval training, as he had first supposed, but for recreation. Whitstable endured the violence of a late October sea, its small fleet of fishing smacks sheltered no doubt in its harbour, beyond the oyster sheds and the breakwater, hidden in their sanctuary from storms. Thirty miles to the west were the Medway towns of Rochester and Chatham, pounded nightly by the bombs. The same distance to the south-east, across the Kent peninsula, Folkestone and Dover faced occupied France, and who knew what massed and looming threat of invasion. Finlay looked out over the sea as the swell diminished and the diving platform came grey, gaunt,
dripping into view. He wondered would the next happy gang of swimmers to climb its ladder in summer play be English, or German.

  ‘There’s more than one England,’ Margaret Finlay said.

  Her son sat back down.

  ‘I was just thinking that.’

  ‘You couldn’t but,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been to Kent before. But I’ve never seen so many aeroplanes in my life.’

  ‘What’s Liverpool like now?’

  ‘Much the same, really. It’s hard. Harder for anyone with kin aboard a ship. And that’s a lot of us. Some have had their younger kids evacuated to Wales. So the streets are quieter. There’s talk about bombing. But of course there’s been no bombs. You can almost always get some kind of food, living near the docks. And the pubs are packed, most afternoons and every night, because the war’s brought wages.’

  ‘What’s the atmosphere like?’

  Jack Finlay’s mother looked at her son. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The attitude.’

  ‘To the war?’

  He shifted on the bench. ‘I suppose to the war.’

  She thought about this. ‘Well the last one was a patriotic war. At least, it was until nineteen-sixteen. After that, after the losses that summer, it became a war of revenge. This one’s different because nobody wanted it. There’s no flag-waving. Anyway, you know what Bootle is like. There’s nights in Bootle you’d think you were in Dublin.’

  Finlay nodded.

  ‘But the feeling generally seems to be that this is a war that needs to be fought and has to be won.’

  Finlay nodded again. His mind was back in Liverpool, in the house in Stanley Road, in the parlour, where his father’s medals lay on the polished sideboard under desiccated light from the net curtain over the window, there with his brass cap-badge, his bronze belt-buckle, his grinning picture in a leather frame. ‘What do you think, mum?’

  She took his hand. ‘Hitler is an evil man. Fascism is an evil creed. But I don’t want to lose a son. And when I hear Winston Churchill on the wireless, Churchill, the hero of Gallipoli, pontificating on the wireless, I want to vomit.’