Strangers

By the mid-seventies most of the parties were long over. Budgets were being cut back and unprofitable companies were toppling everywhere. The lunch-tables were ordered by a new breed of accountants, and to describe something as ‘Mickey Mouse’ was no longer a kind of inverted, admiring compliment. Steve’s job was never threatened, he was too good at it for that, but most of what he had liked about it was gone. Holding-company decisions and corporate images and long-term business projections bored him. He liked making commercials, and his freedom to do so was increasingly restricted.

He had known Bob Jefferies for two or three years before Bob suggested that they might set up on their own together. Bob was shrewd enough, and he was also unusually clever. He had been at the LSE while Steve was riding his Thompson, Wright, Rivington scooter around the West End delivering packages of artwork. And Bob’s proposal came at the tail end of a particularly dreary week.

Steve looked at him across the table in Zanzibar and shrugged. ‘Yes, I’ll come in with you. Why not?’

Bob exhaled sharply, irritated. ‘Christ, Steve, don’t you ever think anything out?’

Steve grinned at him. ‘You do that. I’ll make the commercials.’

That was how they had arranged it, and it had worked.

At the beginning, when there were just the two of them and an assistant and a girl to answer the telephones, it had even felt important. Not as exciting as the old Earl’s Court days, because Steve knew exactly what success would buy him if it came. But interesting enough to absorb his attention and energies for a while. Then the studio diaries filled up, and they took on new staff, and moved to the offices in Ingestre Place.

After that the images slid together again. There was Cass’s face looking down at him from the hoardings, and Vicky in her thick jersey and unflattering spectacles, his office with half a dozen people sitting around the table, and nothing that he could pick out and hold on to while the dizziness swooped down around him.

Annie’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘You sound important.’

She sounded stronger than he did now, and he took hold of that gratefully.

‘No. There are plenty of companies like ours. I made some money, if you think that’s important.’

‘Steve?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘When all this is over, will you give me a job?’

A job? He turned his face towards the sound of her, caught short in his disjointed recollections by the recognition of her casual courage. For a moment the dizziness lifted and his head was as clear as a bell again.

‘I don’t think I’ve got a card with me. But I’ll give you my number …’

‘And I can leave my name with your secretary …’

‘I’ll get back to you if there’s anything suitable on the books …’

They laughed in unison, crazy-sounding but it was real laughter, and it set the dust billowing in invisible clouds around them.

The traffic stood motionless in every direction. Martin peered ahead down the long line of cars and buses, and then over his shoulder at the blank faces waiting in the vehicles crammed behind him. In his panicky rush he hadn’t stopped to think that the streets surrounding the bombed store would be thrown into chaos. He sat with his hands rigid on the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do. The news bulletins on the car radio told him hardly anything more than he already knew, yet his conviction that Annie was there deepened with every minute.

The press of cars moved forward a few yards and then stopped again. Martin could see the junction a hundred yards ahead of him now, where a solitary policewoman was diverting the traffic northwards, the wrong way, and he was still nearly a mile from Annie’s store. He looked quickly from side to side, searching for a way out of the dense, immobile mass. He saw a narrow turning twenty yards ahead, on the wrong side of the road across three jammed lanes, but as soon as the next inching forwards began Martin turned on his headlights, rammed his finger on the horn and swung the car sideways. Oblivious to the storm of hooting that rose up around him he forced his way through the maze and shot down into the mews. He abandoned his car against a garage door and began to run.

The network of little streets at the back of the store were eerily quiet with the usual press of traffic. Once, ahead of him, Martin saw a patrolling police car nose across a junction. Instinctively he ducked sideways down another turning, and ran on until a stitch stabbed viciously into his side.

His feet seemed to drum out Annie, Annie, as they pounded along, but it was a relief to be moving, coming closer to her.

The streets nearest to the store had been cleared once by the police but there were still people passing quietly, in twos and threes. They turned to stare at Martin but he didn’t see them. At last, with the blood pounding in his ears, he turned the last corner and saw what was left of Annie’s store. He pushed through the people who still stood gaping outside the police cordons, and stared upwards. Terrified fear for her froze him motionless.

Some of the giant letters spelling out the shop’s name that hadn’t been blown away hung at crazy angles. One of them swung outwards, buffeted by the wind. On either side of the name Christmas trees hung with golden lights had stood on ledges. There were a few tattered shreds of green left now, and the lights had been blown out with all the others. High above the remains of the trees the shop was open to the sky, because the roof had gone. The front of it looked as if a giant fist had smashed downwards, ripping through the floors like tissue paper, and as he looked at it a jagged column of masonry seemed to sway, ready to topple inwards.

On either side, away from its ruined centre, the façade was a blinded expanse of broken windows. Decorations had spilled out of the windows and they lay ruined in the street on top of the shattered glass. Everywhere, beneath the buckled walls and in and out of the smashed windows, rescue workers swarmed to and fro, pathetically small, like busy ants over some huge carcass.

Martin stared at the torn-out heart of the shop. It was impossible to imagine that anyone could be alive in there.

He heard the words of the radio announcer repeating themselves endlessly inside his skull. A second body has been recovered from the store in London’s West End, severely damaged by a bomb explosion this morning.

Not Annie, please, not Annie. If she is in there …

Martin’s limbs began to work again. He stumbled forwards, elbowing his way brutally until he came up against the cordons. He clambered through them, thinking blindly that he would run forward to stand beneath the twisted letters and call out her name.

A police constable moved quickly to intercept him, putting his black-leather hand on his arm.

‘Would you move back behind the barricade, sir. This way.’

‘I’m looking for my wife. She’s in there somewhere.’

The policeman hesitated for a moment in propelling Martin backwards. Martin saw the young face twitch with sympathy under the helmet.

‘Do you know for sure that your wife was in there, sir?’

Martin thought, he didn’t know anything. Annie could be anywhere in London. But yet he was sure, with sick, intuitive certainty, that she was here.

‘Not for certain. But she could be.’

The policeman’s brisk manner reasserted itself. There was a procedure to follow. He guided Martin back across the tapes, and they faced each other over them. The officer pointed away down the displaced street.

‘If you will go to the local station, sir, down there on the left …’

He knew where it was. Once, when he and Annie had been out shopping, they had found a gold earring on the pavement. She had insisted on taking it to the police station, and he had waited impatiently beside her while the desk sergeant wrote everything in the lost property file.

‘… they will take down your wife’s details. And there is a number you can ring at Scotland Yard. They’ll give you more information there.’

I want to help her. Over the man’s shoulder Martin looked at the devastation again, and felt his own impotence. His fists clenched involuntarily, aching to reach out and pull at the rubble, to uncover her and set her free.

He shrugged uncertainly and turned away from the barrier. The watchers stood aside to let him through, and he walked down the road to the police station.

They showed him to a corridor lined with hard chairs. There was an office at the far end with a frosted glass panel in the closed door. Two or three people were sitting in a row, waiting, not looking at one another, and the stagnant air smelt of their anxiety.

Martin sat down in the empty chair at the end of the line.

The minutes ticked by and he thought about Annie and the boys. Whenever the question What would we do, without her? reared up he tried to make himself face it, but there was nothing he could see beyond it. It was impossible to envisage. He couldn’t think beyond the diminished figures of the firemen that he had seen, working away up the road. He thought about them instead, willing them to uncover her, as if the intensity of his longing would spur them on.

The door at the end of the corridor opened and a woman came out. Someone else from the silent line went in in her place, and the rest of them went on helplessly waiting. A fat woman in a checked overall came past and asked if anyone wanted a cup of tea from the canteen. Martin shook his head numbly.

At last, after what seemed like hours, it was his turn. The office was cramped, lined with steel filing cabinets. A police sergeant sat behind the desk with a young WPC beside him. They nodded reassuringly at Martin, and the sergeant asked him to sit down.

As Martin answered their questions, the girl filled in a sheet of paper. He gave Annie’s name and age, her general description. They asked him why he thought she had been in the shop and he answered, unable to convey his fearful conviction, simply that it seemed likely.

‘I’ve got a photograph of her here,’ he said.