The Fire Fighter Read online

  Finlay walked across the glass-vaulted room. The floor was tiled in marble and the walls were constructed from large blocks of polished Portland stone. The big glass sections above his head were more than four inches thick. He knew because he had measured them. They were framed in bronze. He knew that a dome was one of the most rigid geometric structures known to architecture. He knew that glass was strong. He knew that the strength of glass was brittle and that bronze was a soft metal with little resistance to heat. But it was none of this that most directly bothered him. He looked out up at the sky. Five aeroplanes wearing camouflage paint flew eastwards in a delta formation a few hundred feet above his head. Finlay recognized them as Hurricanes. It occurred to him with a start that they were flying in silence.

  ‘Soundproof,’ said a voice behind him.

  She was standing with feet set slightly apart and her weight spread evenly between them. She wore a belted, calf-length skirt. The skirt was narrow and her stance pulled its satin fabric taut so that light from the sky silvered its smooth surface. Light played too on the ivory blouse, buttoned with pearls and worn under a tailored jacket draped across her shoulders. She stood with one arm across her body, her hand cupped to support the elbow of her other arm. A cigarette burned between the fingers of her free hand a few inches from her mouth. She waved for Finlay to sit, and smoke spiralled upward.

  Her gesture made him realize that he had been standing to attention. He looked around. She had indicated two leather and metal chairs beside a low wooden table. He took his cap from under his arm and placed it on the table and sat. She sat too. Sitting straight, the angle of her chair to his would have put her head in half profile. She twisted to face him and smiled.

  ‘Are you A-two, or one-B, I wonder.’

  She was not English. Her accent was close to perfect, in that it was accentless. Her mouth was sculpted. She pulled heavily on her cigarette and exhaled, watching him.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t think I understand the question.’

  ‘You have to be one or the other. Men who wear a uniform and don’t fight always fall into one or the other category.’ She pulled hard again on her cigarette and smiled at him through smoke. Her eyes were grey. Rings of iridescent blue marked the border between the grey of her eyes and the white. Finlay wondered how the white could remain so absolute under the assault of strong tobacco.

  ‘Let me give you an example,’ she said, standing. She gestured at the glass bowl inverted above their heads. ‘Firstly, you should have all that curtained off,’ she said. ‘And B, you’ve no business anyway being up here at night.’

  Her voice carried the lower-middle-class stamp of petty authority.

  Already, to Finlay, it was horribly familiar.

  ‘Or,’ she said, ‘A, a soundproof room makes a mockery of the air-raid warning system. And two,’ she touched the tip of her second finger for emphasis, ‘if you strike a match under that skylight, madam, you might as well be sending Jerry an invitation to tea.’

  She dropped her spent cigarette and ground it out on the marble with her hands on her hips and a challenge in her expression.

  Finlay smiled. A part of him was amused. But it was a small part in the fatigue he fought, and he thought her wilful battle pitifully little in the scheme of things.

  ‘You should curtain off the glass,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a tuppenny fuck about the soundproofing. But you should curtain off the glass, or secure black canvas over the dome, which would be the best precaution.’

  He rose to leave, passed her without looking.

  ‘Black canvas,’ she said.

  Finlay stopped but did not turn. ‘Secured with hawsers rather than rope. But make sure that the hawsers are painted black, matt black, along with any brass eyelets, if the canvas has them.’

  ‘Matt black,’ she said.

  He reached the door.

  ‘You are angry because you polished your buttons for me and I made fun of you,’ she said.

  Finlay turned and looked at her. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. Her hair was heavy and loose and in this light silvery, like her skirt. ‘I am angry because you’re the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. And you made fun of me.’

  The door whooshed in his wake, snug as it settled in its granite berth.

  He walked through the monochrome and quiet of the City back to Broad Street and descended the spiral steps to where they had him live. He unbuckled his belt and took off his tunic, laying it carefully across the bed. He walked across to his wall chart of Absalom House. He had listed the precautions requested. And taken.

  Every inch of wood panelling, varnished and therefore volatile, had been stripped from its walls. The old drapes, swagged and decorous, had been swapped for fire blankets stitched together and dyed in a bad approximation of what they replaced. All the windows had been taped and wire mesh stretched across the insides of the larger ones. Every room on every floor had been provided with zinc pails of dry sand and spades to spread it with. The petrol generator that provided the building’s independent power supply had been uprooted and dumped, replaced by one that ran on diesel oil. The presence of the generator meant that the basement of Absalom House could not be flooded with a supply of static water; but Finlay’s triangle was in easy reach of tenders from the Moorgate and Shoreditch fire stations. Fire-resistant paint had been slapped in several heavy coats over the hardwood doors in the building. The doors had been reinforced with steel and oxygen-starving draft excluders attached to them once the building’s carpets had been stripped. Gas had fuelled the small cooking range in the staff kitchen as well as some of the lighting at Absalom House. But the gas supply had been disconnected. Now the lights ran on electricity from the generator, and they had candles. And they pressured tiny Primus stoves into miserly life when they wanted to heat their tea, their acorn coffee, or their thin tins of soup.

  ‘A compliance issue,’ Finlay said to nobody. He looked at the tunic and cap on the bed, wondering if there wasn’t some comic opera quality to the crest on the cap, the brightly embellished epaulettes stitched to the shoulders of the tunic.

  He hung his dress uniform, worn for the Absalom appointment at Grey’s insistence, and washed away as best he could with whale soap and cold water the patina of grime even the short walk from Camomile Street had left on his hands and face and neck. Grey, via Babcock, had brought him a suit of civilian clothes together with good shoes in his size and an overcoat. The only previous occasion he had worn these, he had been so roundly abused in a bus queue that he had walked through pouring rain to his destination. Today, however, Finlay felt that he might welcome a row.

  He reached under the cot for the kit bag containing his personal bits and pieces. He took out a towel, a pair of plimsolls, a jock strap, shorts, an undershirt and a heavy sweater. He zipped these items into a canvas grip. There was a gymnasium he sometimes used behind the Strand. At least, it had been there before the war. If it was no longer there, he would find another gymnasium. He had some energy to expend and hungered for hard physical effort.

  Finlay found his gymnasium intact, open, empty. He went through his old routines on the rings and the horse and the parallel bars until the muscles and tendons in his arms and shoulders were rigid with effort. Then he did floorwork until he reached exhaustion, mouth burning with lactic acid, abdominal muscles unable to raise his shoulders off the mat. He sweated for half an hour in the steam room and then paid five shillings for a masseur with the arms of a stevedore to rub alcohol and embrocation deep into his body.

  ‘Been a long time, Jack,’ the masseur said.

  Finlay could not remember the last time anyone had called him by his Christian name.

  ‘Been overseas, Harry,’ Finlay said.

  ‘Somewhere sunny, from your colour. Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Egypt.’

  The masseur walked over to the sink to rinse the rubbing alcohol from his hands. ‘Served overseas myself, in the ’fourteen-eighteen,’ he said.


  That’s what they must be calling it in the conversational occupations, now, Finlay thought. Since they can hardly any longer call it the Great War.

  ‘Mesopotamia,’ Harry said. ‘A dirty lot, the Turks.’ He lifted his sweater, still facing the sink. A livid purple scar gouged a crescent from the base of his spine to his ribcage.

  Finlay had twisted on the massage table to look. ‘Shrapnel?’

  ‘Trench morter,’ Harry said. ‘You seen any action yet?’

  ‘Not much,’ Finlay said. ‘Few skirmishes against the Italians. Tit for tat, really.’

  Harry turned, towelling his hands. ‘When do you go back?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  The masseur could not mask a look of bewilderment. ‘Injured?’ he said.

  Finlay smiled, wondering what kind of war wound it was could be concealed from a masseur’s searching fingers. ‘Incapacitated,’ he said. He climbed off the table.

  He ate a meagre lunch of potato and cabbage and what the menu claimed was haddock in a café behind the Strand, washing it down with two pale cups of tea. He paid and then walked along Whitehall and crossed Parliament Square for the Embankment, to his left Big Ben, all four sets of hands and four faces of the great clock miraculously unblemished. It was silenced now, of course, but telling the correct time, its mechanism intact. Finlay walked past the ravaged Abbey and the House of Commons and sat on one of the benches facing the river in the Victoria Tower Gardens. They had taken the statues from the gardens. The river was low and Finlay could barely hear the water lapping against the sand and small stones and gathered debris of a diminishing tide. Directly opposite where he sat, he could see St Thomas’s, the hospital building scarred, holed, battered by the deliberate onslaught of bombs. There should have been something sad about those red brick edifices, Finlay thought; something pathetic in the Tuscan affectation of the architecture, in the dismayed fate of all that well-meaning Victorian money. But there wasn’t. The hospital spoke to him only of the same weary indifference to its misfortune he had seen on the faces of Londoners.

  He thought of the woman at Absalom House, picking a stray shred of tobacco from her lip with painted fingernails.

  Finlay wished, with a heartfelt longing, to be back in the desert, coaxing Baxter’s obsolete guns into delivering death to an enemy tangible, reachable, there to be engaged and bloodied and defeated without compromise. He did not doubt the importance of this war or the winning of it. Sitting there, with the smell of embrocation, a smell like horse liniment, rising in his nostrils when his skin stirred under his civilian clothes, Finlay felt despondency overwhelm him like a sickness. It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fucking fair. He had thought the two years spent in Borstal for a church fire he did not set an injustice. But the anger he had felt in adolescence was nothing to the desolation he felt now at being taken out of the waging of the war.

  Finlay’s eyes strayed to the right of the hospital, to Lambeth Palace, which had been hit, and to Lambeth Bridge, which had not. Beyond the bridge, on its southern side, was the fire station where he had trained. He wondered would the pub behind the station still be intact. He might benefit in the isolation he felt now from walking through the door of The Windmill and seeing familiar faces from a happier past. Certainly, he thought, he might benefit from a drink.

  The beer was thin and brackish. Finlay abandoned his pint on the bar after two sips and ordered a double whisky. The whisky barely registered as amber and tasted watered. He drank it at a swallow and went back to his pint. Then he scented something at once forgotten and familiar, and turned. Someone had lit a pipe filled with a pungent and singular tobacco blend in the corner of the pub to Finlay’s rear. The smell insinuated memories a decade old into his mind. He could not see who it was who had lit the pipe. He could see only a table-top, gusts of smoke, a set of dominoes and a pair of hands occupied by a solitary game. But he knew who it was, so he went over and sat without invitation in the vacant seat opposite the man.

  ‘Albert Cooper,’ Finlay said.

  Cooper looked up through the folds of smoke in which his pipe had enveloped his features.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Jack Finlay. Didn’t think to see you again, Jack. Thought you’d be dead by now. I’d have bet money you’d have toppled off a ladder a long time ago.’

  Finlay looked at Cooper, at the grizzle of hair framing the face and the brass-buckled belt and the thick serge trousers tucked into boots.

  ‘Albert. What the fuck are you doing in that uniform?’

  ‘Playing dominoes,’ Cooper said. ‘Smoking a pipe. Minding my own. But since you’re here, Jack, you can treat an old comrade to a pint.’

  ‘I’m serious, Albert,’ Finlay said. ‘You retired in ’thirty-seven. The date’s inscribed on the back of the watch we bought you.’

  Something receded in Albert Cooper’s expression. He took his pipe away from his mouth and lines firmed in his face. ‘Buy me that pint, son,’ he said. ‘Let old Uncle Albert tell you all about his retirement.’

  Finlay went back to the bar and ordered. Late afternoon was making its melancholy transition into early evening in the pub and The Windmill was all but empty. Finlay could pick his spot at the bar without jostling to be served. So he chose a place from which he could study Albert Cooper in the big mirror framed high along the length of the bar while he waited for the barmaid to draw their two pints. Albert had let his pipe go out and was no longer concealed by its smoke. Like a lot of men, he had aged more rapidly in retirement. His nose and cheeks were a latticework of broken veins that from a distance made him look countrified and ruddy. But close to, he looked weathered and worn by too much life and an appetite for drink. He was a big man and there was still strength in his short neck and massive shoulders. But there was a stiffness to his movements even as he shuffled dominoes and when he relit his pipe there was a tremor in the hand that held the match. He looked towards where Finlay stood and Finlay looked quickly away from the mirror, making a show of searching his pockets for coins to pay the woman behind the bar for their beer.

  Cooper lifted his fresh pint high as if to scrutinize its quality. The tilt of his head exposed the top of the scarring on his chest inflicted by the molten latex that had fallen like a monsoon of fire as they fought the flames at Pimlico Rubber. He lowered his glass and held it out. The scar disappeared again. The hand holding his drink was steady. Finlay chinked glasses with him.

  ‘Cheers,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Here’s to old times.’

  And Finlay felt guilty for spying on his one-time colleague and friend in the mirror above the bar. ‘Old times,’ he said. Both men sipped and there was a silence between them.

  ‘You look like the dog that lost its dick,’ Cooper said eventually. ‘Can’t just be the beer.’

  ‘Why aren’t you retired any more?’

  Cooper sat back against his seat, his pipe, even his pint, momentarily forgotten.

  ‘I was born around here, Jack. Raised not five minutes’ walk from here, in Fitzalan Street.’

  The old fire fighter paused. Finlay remembered Cooper as a witty man, fluent in humour, seldom lost for a sharp line or a well-chosen word of repartee. Perhaps it was the unaccustomed seriousness of what he wanted to say that was making him inarticulate now.

  ‘They’ve dug trenches in Archbishop’s Park. Only they’re not calling them trenches. They’re calling them bomb shelters. No revetting. No roofing. No drainage. Already a foot deep in water. What state are these bomb shelters going to be in come the winter?’

  Finlay sipped beer.

  ‘Bomb shelters. For the women and the kids. Fucking comedians running the country.’

  Finlay could think of nothing to say.

  ‘It’s a mess, all of it,’ Cooper said. He remembered his beer and emptied half a pint in a couple of gulps. ‘I’m back, Jack, because I’m too old to fight. But I’m not too bloody old to fight fire.’

  His fists were
clenched and massive on the table-top. His knuckles were white in rings around the bone the size of pennies and veins throbbed in the backs of his hands. It occurred to Finlay that Albert Cooper in this condition would have failed his routine medical on blood pressure alone. The rules must not so much have been relaxed as discarded.

  ‘Do you think we can win this war?’

  Cooper breathed for a while, recovering himself, before answering.

  ‘You’ve been overseas, Jack. Nobody gets a colour like yours on the sands at Blackpool. When did you get back?’

  ‘Eleven days ago.’

  ‘Well then, you don’t need me to tell you how bad things are. Norway, Belgium, Holland, France.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re all that’s left on the list.’

  Heat crawled along the flesh inside Finlay’s clothes and made him shiver, like someone trying to shed a leech. ‘So you think we’re going to lose?’

  Albert Cooper leaned forward over his own empty glass and traced a circle with his finger in the scum settling on the surface of the pint Finlay sat neglecting. ‘We can’t lose,’ he said. ‘Not to Hitler. We lose to him, son, we’ve had it.’

  The two men were saying their goodbyes on Old Paradise Street when the dusk was split by the sound of the air-raid siren and the rumble of Junkers amplified its way along the river. What happened next Finlay put down, in his own recollection, later, to drink. But it had been a long day and it might have been the result of a culmination of things. Whatever, he should have turned and walked to the shelter of the Lambeth Palace Crypt, or to the trenches in Archbishop’s Park. Instead, he gripped Cooper’s heavy arm and screamed against the siren in his ear.