Strangers

One body was lifted out a few moments ago …

Martin stood up, almost stumbling, and the coffee splashed again. He put it down on top of the set and in the same moment the report ended. The picture changed to a solemn-faced studio continuity announcer.

‘We will be bringing you more news of that explosion in London’s West End as soon as it reaches us. And now …’

Martin turned away, moving so stiffly that Thomas looked up at him.

‘What’s the matter, Dad?’

He saw Annie’s features printed on the boy’s face and irrational fear gripped him in the stomach.

‘Dad?’

‘I … I’m going out to look for Mummy. I’ll call Audrey and ask her to come and stay with you for a while.’

Even as he said it he knew that he should stay where he was and wait, but he couldn’t suppress his primitive urge to rush to the store and pull at the fallen bricks with his bare hands. He snatched up the telephone and dialled the number. It seemed to take an eternity to explain to Audrey. He stammered over the neutral phrases that wouldn’t frighten the boys yet would bring her, quickly. They stood in front of him, reflecting his anxiety back at him, magnified by their bewilderment.

‘Why?’ Thomas said. ‘She’s only gone shopping, hasn’t she? Why do you have to find her?’

‘I want to bring her home, Tom. I’ll go and get her, you’ll see.’ He had a picture in his mind’s eye of crowded shops with thousands of people milling to and fro, and then the bombed store, silent, as he had seen it on the television. How would he find Annie, in the midst of it all? He made himself smile at the boys. ‘Stay here with Audrey, and we’ll be back soon.’

Benjy’s mouth opened, making a third circle with his round eyes. ‘I want Mummy.’ He was frightened, picking the fear up out of the air. Martin didn’t know how to soothe him while his own anxiety pounded inside him. ‘I want Mummy.’ He began to cry, tears spilling out of his eyes and running down his face.

Martin knelt down and held him. ‘I’m going to get her, Benjy. I told you.’

Through the front window he saw Audrey coming up the path. He straightened up and taking Benjy’s hand he led him to the door. Audrey was wearing an overcoat open over her apron, and Martin saw that she hadn’t stopped to change out of her slippers. They left big, blurred prints in the dusting of powdery snow that lay on the path. Her urgency fanned his fear and he felt his hand tightening over Benjy’s so that the child whimpered and tried to pull away.

Audrey came in, incongruously stamping her slippers on the doormat to knock off the snow.

‘Do you know for sure that she was going down there?’ she asked at once.

‘No. But I think she might have.’

‘You should stay here, you know. Wait for the news. You can’t do anything there.’

‘I know, Audrey, but I can’t sit here. I want to be near, at least.’ She was looking at him, her face creased with sympathy. Martin put on his sheepskin coat, feeling in the pockets for his keys.

‘If … she telephones here,’ Audrey said carefully, ‘I’ll tell her what’s happened and where you’ve gone.’

‘I’ll ring in as soon as I can.’

He was ready now. He hugged the boys in turn, quickly. Benjy had stopped crying and was holding the corner of Audrey’s apron. Tom followed Martin to the door and reached out to him as it opened, the cold air blowing in around them.

‘Is … is Mum in that shop, the one on the TV?’

Martin’s throat felt as if it were closing on the words as he lied, ‘No, she isn’t. But if there are things like that going on today, I think she should come home. Don’t worry.’

He closed the door and left the three of them standing. He ran back over Audrey’s slipper-prints to the gate, and to the car parked in the roadway. Inside was the familiar litter of crumpled papers and discarded toys. Annie used the car mostly, for taking the boys to and fro. The thought came to him: What if she’s dead? and he leant forward over the steering wheel. He heard his own supplication – Please, let her be safe.

Then the engine roared and he swung the wheel sharply, heading the car towards the image of the store that he could see as clearly as he could see the road dipping ahead of him.

The police commander followed his opposite number from the fire brigade down the steps of the control van and across the few yards of pavement to the gaping, shattered windows. In the nearest one, on the corner, a tall Christmas tree made out of some green shiny stuff had been blown sideways. It lay amongst torn screens papered with scarlet satin ribbons. Broken glass lay everywhere, and the commander’s shoes crunched in it as he walked.

They came to what had once been the big doors, and looked upwards. The grey sky showed overhead through the torn ends of girders and ragged floors. Dust still whirled in the air and it blew up in choking gusts behind the firemen as they inched under the tangle of brick and metal.

A young policeman stepped forward and handed the commander a protective helmet. There were two other men waiting. One, a big man in a waterproof jacket, was the borough engineer. He had been called straight out of bed and, under his waterproofs and sweater, he was still in his pyjamas. The other man was grey-faced and his silver hair stood up in unbrushed wings at the sides of his head. He held a helmet in one hand, and as the senior officers approached he put it on with an awkward, unpractised movement. He was one of the directors of the store, and he had arrived ten minutes ago from his home in Hampstead.

‘Our main problem,’ the fire brigade officer was saying, and he gestured upwards as he spoke, ‘is that this portion of the frontage is almost entirely unsupported. There is a real danger that our work underneath will topple it this way.’ He held his arm up to illustrate, flat-handed as if he was directing traffic, and then swung it graphically downwards. Even as they stood there conferring the crooked edifice above them seemed to creak and sway.

‘It will take hours to bring it down from the top,’ the engineer said. ‘Erecting the scaffolding alone will take time. My works people can do it as quickly as is humanly possible, of course, but …’

The unspoken truth was that if there were any survivors underneath, they couldn’t wait that long.

‘Can you go on down as it is?’ the director asked, ‘whilst the work goes on to secure the frontage?’

The policeman and the fireman glanced at each other before the fireman said, ‘Yes. At some risk.’

There was another pause. The policeman waited, touching the corner of his small, clipped moustache with a fingertip. At length he said, ‘Is that the consensus, gentlemen? To continue the rescue operation and to work to make the façade safe, as far as possible, at the same time?’

The three men nodded. ‘Good,’ the policeman said quietly. ‘Thank you.’

They waited side by side, sheltered from the wind by the threatening frontage. A medical team stood a few yards away, huddled together, not speaking. Everyone was watching the black-coated backs of two firemen who were kneeling side by side to lift chunks of masonry away from the lip of a black hollow.

‘Heat camera pinpointed this one. They can see her now. It’s another young girl.’

The commander glanced across at the medical team.

‘Alive?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

The minutes passed. Overhead a crane was being manoeuvred into position to begin the painstaking process of dismantling the toppling store front, piece by piece. The rescue workers in their helmets passed to and fro underneath it, never looking up. The commander waited until the second body was recovered. The girl’s legs looked pitifully thin and white as they lifted her out and laid her on a stretcher. She followed her friend into an ambulance and then away through the cordons towards the hospital.

The commander ducked his head and walked back through the splinters of glass to the trailer. A preliminary report from the bomb squad was waiting for him. It had been a single bomb, sited on the third floor towards the back of the store, probably in a cloakroom. It appeared now that the possibility of another unexploded bomb hidden elsewhere in the store could be discounted.

‘Thank Christ for that, at least,’ the commander murmured. The explosives experts had been at work for an hour. One of them handed him a second report and he glanced quickly at it. Diagrams showed the probable direction of the blast waves following the explosion, and the sliding masses of rubble.

‘Almost exactly the same as at Brighton, sir,’ one of the officers murmured.

‘Except that by a rare stroke of good fortune the PM hadn’t slipped in there for her Christmas shopping.’

‘No, sir.’

According to the calculations, the most hopeful place for survivors in the centre of the store was the basement, sheltered from the falling wreckage by the reinforced thickness of the ground floor. The commander stared through the trailer window at the tangled mountain resting on top of that floor. He put his finger up to his moustache again.

‘Side access to the basement?’ he asked.

‘Almost entirely blocked, sir. They’re working to clear it from both sides now.’