The Fire Fighter Read online

  He kissed her.

  ‘Lucky bleeder,’ he heard someone say, from somewhere unimportant beyond the taste and warm touch of Rebecca.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, astonishing himself, when the kiss broke.

  ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘You have from the first. Just as I love you.’

  They turned right outside the station, Finlay carrying Rebecca’s bag, and walked the length of soot-blackened, sandbagged buildings stretching towards Euston. Traffic on the Euston Road was light. Finlay assumed they were heading for Rebecca’s flat; that they would walk along Southampton Row to Coptic Street. But instead they crossed the Euston Road before they got to Southampton Row and Rebecca led them down a little alleyway that doglegged behind a derelict theatre building into Lamb’s Conduit Street. She stopped outside an old pub called The Lamb.

  ‘This is what you would call my local,’ she said. ‘There was no refreshment on that awful train and there’s nothing in the flat and I need food and something cool first to drink.’

  A few minutes later they were seated at a corner table. She ran her hand down his chest to one side, and squeezed. He was unused to the proximity of her again and her touch was a physical thrill so potent that it left a tingling absence when she took her hand away.

  ‘How did you know when to meet the train?’

  ‘A little man I know carries the timetables around in his head. With much other information of far less use. There was only one train today from Glasgow.’

  ‘Are you not supposed to be on duty?’

  ‘They’ve given me two days’ leave. They think I’m exhausted. They think my morale is damaged. I’ve left men I’ve trained and drilled the best I can in my absence.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s only two days.’

  ‘Why are you staring like that at my sandwich?’

  ‘Because there’s a fortnight’s ham ration on it,’ Finlay said. ‘And as much butter as you might see in a month.’

  ‘Would you like some?’

  He shook his head and sipped bitter.

  ‘I’ve eaten. After a fashion.’

  ‘The landlord here has a soft spot for me,’ Rebecca said, removing a crumb from the corner of her mouth with a finger.

  Finlay nodded and shifted in his chair. It creaked. He could imagine the whole world having a soft spot for her.

  ‘How was Glasgow?’

  ‘A miserable place. It’s good to be back. It’s good to see you.’ She put a hand on the back of his and picked his hand off the table and squeezed. He squeezed back. Her skin was soft and cool and he was still shockingly sensitive to the thrill of her touch. He was tender to the touch of her, he realized. Like somebody burned.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, gulping the last of her drink. ‘Before we start to speak like two people with tennis racquets in the second act of one of your dismal English plays.’

  It had been White who had insisted on the leave. Grey and the Immaculate Major had detached from either side of White and left the room through doors in opposite walls behind where Finlay sat, closing their doors in careful unison. White sat for so long, still behind his steepled fingers, that Finlay began to feel forgotten about, and wondered if he had missed some subtle signal of dismissal. He listened to the sedate, insistent ticking of a ministerial clock and heard the drift of occasional traffic muffled by the chicken wire covering the windows. He fancied he saw shadows start to lengthen, though there were no shadows actually being cast in the matt, ministerial light.

  ‘I don’t care what they say about me when I’m dead, Chief Fire Officer,’ White offered eventually.

  There was another funereal silence. Finlay wondered whether the man was growing senile under all the stress. Perhaps his mind was simply capitulating.

  ‘Heard of a chap called Bismarck?’

  ‘I’ve heard of a ship called Bismarck, sir.’

  White did not respond either to the joke or his use of the forbidden appellation. Definitely getting senile, Finlay thought.

  ‘Quite. Well,’ White said. ‘Chap they named the ship after once said that the only true immortality is posthumous fame. Not an opinion I share, frankly. I don’t give a tuppenny fuck what they say about me when I’m gone, to tell the truth.’

  He looked at Finlay at this point and Finlay, holding his gaze, saw that White’s eyes were rheumed with red. ‘There’s only one detail in my obituary that I will care about, Chief Fire Officer. Only four words of it will have the remotest significance for me.’

  Another silence.

  ‘And what are they, sir?’

  White was crying. Tears were trickling over the contours age had mapped on his cheeks. ‘At the end they will write, “His son predeceased him”,’ White said. He sniffed and then coughed to regain composure. ‘Four saddest words in the language,’ he said. ‘Excuse me.’ He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Please don’t be, sir.’

  ‘A sniper bullet. Arras. Two days before James would have celebrated his nineteenth birthday. They said it was instantaneous, but of course they would say that to me, wouldn’t they? Look what they told Kipling about his boy.’

  Finlay assumed White must mean Kipling the writer. He did not know what ‘they’ had told Kipling about his boy. He had been obliged to learn by rote the poem ‘If at Borstal. Recalling the poem, he was pretty sure that Kipling must have written it before learning whatever it was they had told him about his boy.

  ‘What rank do you hold, sir? If you don’t mind me asking. You are in the military, aren’t you, sir?’

  White looked at him for a long moment. ‘’Course I’m in the bloody military. I’m a bloody General. And my name isn’t White.’ He sniffed, mightily. ‘I was a Major on Haig’s staff when they brought me the news about my son. I requested a posting at the front. Wanted to kill Germans. Would have done it with a bayonet. Haig wouldn’t hear of it. Said he valued intelligence.’ White dabbed his eyes again. ‘Bloody ironic for a man who didn’t have any.’

  Finlay looked at the carpet and smiled at the thought that five minutes ago he had suspected this man of senility.

  ‘I want you to take a couple of days off, Chief Fire Officer.’

  Finlay took this in.

  ‘And if they bomb my buildings?’

  ‘There will be no break in the bombing this side of Christmas. Probably not until the spring. Perhaps not even then. They have the capacity to go on bombing us for ever. I’m suggesting two days’ leave, not unconditional surrender. If you don’t take a rest, you will break down. Everyone does, you know. Eventually. I dined with Winston last night. He very nearly came apart after Gallipoli. Told me so himself.’

  ‘And how’s he bearing up at the moment?’

  ‘That’s an impudent question,’ White said. ‘But he’s bearing up very well. In the pink. Spoiling for the fight.’

  And that means you’re in the pink too, Finlay thought. Whatever White and Grey and their bellicose little band of army brass were up to now had official sanction. Churchill surely wouldn’t share tales of how close he once was to a strait-jacket over dinner with a man he didn’t trust.

  He looked at the pattern on the carpet and thought of Nevin.

  ‘I’m hardly at the end of my tether, sir.’

  ‘Frankly, you’d be the last to know if you were,’ White said. ‘Enjoy yourself. See the Lange woman. Fornicate and get drunk. Try to forget for a while that you were brought up a Catholic. Don’t, for God’s sake, go to Whitstable. Stay away from Irishmen.’

  Finlay got to his feet, saluted and wheeled about.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Finlay sat.

  ‘You’ve a distinguished record, outside of your unfortunate tendency to assault Fenians.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘But there’s this story that’s followed you about. Something that dogs your file with the nagging persistence of truth.’

  Dread invaded Finlay. Dread engulfed him in its shivering chill.
He believed himself innocent of any real crime. But he knew that the man confronting him was much cleverer than he.

  ‘Sir?’ Finlay said.

  ‘Ladders,’ White said. ‘Apparently you have a problem climbing them. Somewhat unfortunate, no? In the circumstances?’

  Relief surged and settled through Finlay.

  ‘The story stems from an event long before I achieved my present rank, sir. I attended a tenement blaze. Fierce heat, wooden ladders. Evacuated a toddler from a fourth-floor bedroom, sir. When I tried to exit the bedroom window, I realized that the toddler was too small for safe evacuation by means of a fireman’s lift. Matters were further complicated by the fact that the ladder I had climbed was made of wood and had caught fire, sir.’

  ‘My God,’ White said.

  ‘So, sir, I gripped the baby between my legs and descended the ladder hand under hand down the rungs. They were intact. It was the rails of the ladder that had caught and were burning. Sir.’

  ‘I see. So who was responsible for the story?’

  ‘I believe it was fire fighter Albert Cooper, sir. A first-class man. But a man with a mischievous sense of humour.’

  ‘The man who perished in the school fire you fought in Kennington?’

  ‘You have an excellent memory, sir.’

  ‘I do,’ White said. ‘It’s my blessing and my curse. Dismissed, Finlay.’

  Finlay wheeled about.

  ‘Chief Fire Officer?’

  He stopped.

  ‘We did not have this conversation.’

  ‘Of course we didn’t, Mr White,’ Finlay said. He picked up his grip and walked out of the room, leaving its occupant to war and to the memory of war.

  It was after ten in the evening when Finlay and Rebecca finally left her flat and walked the dark, sand-and-canvas-damped distance to the antic light and bustle of The Fitzroy Tavern. They walked hand in hand, Finlay in thrall to emotions which for him were unfamiliar, feelings he had not come close to having for a woman before. Anticipation was a part of it. She was gorgeous and strange and yet he felt now that the intimacy he longed to share with her was not beyond him. All around them, night and even day, the life-and-death lottery of the bombing impelled strangers to frenzied bouts of fucking one another in blind alleys, in the doorways of closed shops, on random street corners. In the Moorgate canteen, they even ran a book on who’d be the first fire fighter to knee-tremble his way to a dose of the pox. Finlay felt frustrated by Rebecca’s reluctance, but flattered by it too. The talk about trust meant that the thought of his betrayal of her trust was painful to her. He was unused to having someone care about what he did, someone not linked by blood to him, someone not bloodied by the betrayals of his delinquent past.

  He had lied to her. The bull screw who tried to sodomize him on his first night at the Portland Borstal had called him beautiful as he cornered Finlay in the bathhouse. To Finlay, this seemed a lie without significance. He had butted and punched and finally stamped the man into bloody, pleading submission. A lashing with the cat, the several beatings he subsequently endured and four solitary months in the punishment block had left him with no particular regard for the man’s opinion in consideration of his looks.

  She had honoured the tit for tat of their trade. He had told her truthfully about his father. And she had told him truthfully about hers, he believed. He could not know. But her story had been heavy with the pain and bewilderment of unreconciled truth.

  ‘My father was queer,’ she told him. ‘Queer for Richard Frentz, as Richard Frentz had been queer for him.’

  Her language was clumsy now, rather than fluent. Her tenses were not certain. She was failing to find in the certainty of a foreign grammar a chronology which seemed to be unclear to her.

  ‘Had been?’

  There wasn’t even the clatter of bone sliding down skin now to punctuate her silences. She had run out of cigarettes.

  ‘My father’s… predilection.’

  Finlay shook his head, unfamiliar with the word.

  ‘His sexual preferences?’

  ‘We call it perversion,’ Finlay said.

  ‘Don’t be a total bastard to me, Jack. Please?’

  ‘I’m here wringing water out of a dry rag,’ Finlay said. ‘I feel a fool for having blabbed on about my past. I tell you things I’ve told nobody. I get back riddles.’

  An intake of breath clattered through her. And beside her, Finlay considered. Was he angry at her, or at himself for having articulated to her a pain he kept private? Was she playing him like a tinker’s fiddle, or was she simply telling the truth about the reason for her father’s disappearance and death? The Nazis did not like queers. That much was the plainest logic to the simplest fool.

  ‘Go on,’ Finlay said.

  ‘I don’t know when they stopped being lovers. I suspect it was considerably after what happened in Düsseldorf.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Love is not contingent, Jack. Even among queers.’

  Contingencies to Finlay were what the fire-fighting manuals taught you by heart to prepare for and guard against.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘Our countries are at war.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here because our countries are at war. That’s perfect, Jack. Only hours ago, you told me you loved me. Love me: you told me that you love me.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘And if you had your way, you’d have fucked me. You’d be fucking me still,’ she said, her throat catching. Finlay waited for the theatricality of a sob. It did not come. ‘You’d better go,’ she said, her accent Germanic now. ‘Go, Finlay. Schnell.’

  He turned from the hip and found the round warmth of her shoulders spreading indignant heat under the fingers of each of his hands as he held her gentle, insistent.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Rebecca.’

  She settled back. She closed her eyes. He listened to her breathe for a while. It was possible to forget how solitary she must feel, he thought, in a land at war with the country of her birth. He thought of her emerging from steam on the railway platform. He remembered a poster he had seen at the station, pasted on to half a dozen prominent places along its walls. Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

  ‘Why did you go to Scotland?’

  ‘To interrogate a man.’ She coughed. ‘The people you work for have captured a U-boat captain. His submarine collided with a mine and foundered off the Scottish coast. The crew set off distress flares in the water and they were spotted by some trawlermen.’

  ‘Bloody lucky for the Krauts.’

  Rebecca barked laughter.

  ‘Yes, and no. Some of those trawlermen have relatives and friends on your Atlantic convoys. By the time I got to the captain of the U-boat, he had been quite badly beaten.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Finlay said.

  Rebecca laughed her bitter laugh again.

  ‘Are you? Didn’t you fight under a Scot?’

  So the gloves are coming off, Finlay thought. We’re getting to the meat. And to the bone.

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘It was the manner of the telling, Finlay. Perhaps he was a relative of your unfortunate brother’s Hangy Todd. The Captain waited until I opened my mouth to speak and then he spat blood from his broken teeth and phlegm industriously stored from his broken nose accurately to the back of my throat.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything?’

  ‘When he revived. A Company Sergeant Major from the Black Watch was acting as my escort and took exception to the spitting.’

  ‘So what did the spitter tell you when he came round?’

  ‘That I was a traitor and would hang when Germany has won the war. That I would be fortunate to hang.’

  Finlay thought for a moment.

  ‘And you were able to identify this CSM’s regiment from his tartan?’

  ‘Of course I was not,’ she said. ‘He told me himself when I mentioned that he was the first soldier I had seen dressed in a plea
ted skirt.’

  Finlay laughed. ‘No wonder he belted the Kraut. Which one of them sent you to Scotland?’

  ‘The one you call Grey. He is my godfather.’

  ‘How did he get to be your godfather?’

  Rebecca shifted on the sofa at his side.

  ‘I need a cigarette.’

  ‘Not as much as I need an answer. How did Grey get to be your godfather?’

  ‘Grey was a mathematician at Cambridge. He was brilliant, creative, precocious. He would have been the youngest professor of mathematics in the history of the University. He published as a postgraduate student and some of his papers in the field of theoretical physics are still standard works. My father read Grey and was excited by what he discovered. He thought that much of Grey’s thinking had practical applications in engineering. Specifically in propulsion. In power.’ Rebecca stopped talking.

  Somewhere beneath them, Finlay fancied he heard footsteps and then a door slam.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘They corresponded. When my father studied in London with Frentz, they met with Grey and he and my father became friends. Perhaps they became more than that. I don’t know. Certainly they were friends.’

  ‘And they worked together on their theories about propulsion?’

  ‘No. They did not. Shortly after war broke out in 1914, in common with almost every other young Oxbridge man, Grey volunteered for the army. He was at the front pretty much continuously for almost two years. And then he had some sort of breakdown. He recovered as a soldier and continued to serve. But he lost his gift for abstract thought. Or perhaps he merely lost his enthusiasm, his ardour for it. Either way, by the time the armistice came, he was finished as a creative scientist.’