The Undertow (18 page)

“Still,” Mrs. says. “Count your blessings.”

“Mmm,” Ruby says. Count your blessings. I’m not dead. Billy’s not dead. I have a roof over my head.

Actually it helps.

She lets the tickets fall into the compost bucket—a subdued confetti of soft greens and blues, murky yellows and tired reds.

“You meeting that Evelyn?” Amelia asks.

“No, not today.”

“A concert would be a bit high class for her, I’d say. Bit cultured.”

This may well be true, but still it gets Ruby’s back up.
No better than she should be, that Evelyn; be leading her astray
. But the kind of straying Evelyn does just doesn’t appeal to Ruby. Fumbling in the park. Grass stains on your petticoat and your hair like a jackdaw’s nest. Can’t see the fun in it herself.

Ruby gives up on the lipstick, thumps up the stairs.

Standing at the bathroom sink, she turns her head from side to side, studying the angles of her bones. She presses her fingertips up under her jaw, touches the soft skin under her eyes. Her gold ring glints thinly. When she smiles, lines radiate from the corners of her eyes. Her hair is still good, its thick dark curls teased out into a glossy wave, but she needs a bit of colour nowadays, bit of lippy just to perk her up. She looks worn and tired and thin. But then, who doesn’t?

She opens her mascara pot, spits. She rubs at the blacking with the brush, opens her eyes wide to comb the blackness through her lashes. She bites at her lips, skims them over with Vaseline.

Count your blessings. She’s got three. That’s not so bad.

She gives herself a smile. ’Cause that helps too.

IT IS GOOD TO BE
on solid ground, Billy thinks. It’s a damn sight better than being on board. If they have to wait, then it’s better done here, in the canteen, with boards and cement and brick and deep chalky earth beneath his feet, and the exceptional pleasure of a proper Sunday lunch in front of him, for all it seems to mark a retreat before they’ve even started.

Above the hum of voices and clink of crockery, the rain clatters on the corrugated roof and the wind buffets the prefab walls, sneaks in through gaps, whines. Outside the window, the lilacs toss their heads like ponies. It is bloody awful weather for June, unseasonable. You could take it as a sign, if you were the kind of person to go looking for signs.

Behind the serving hatch, the catering corps boys are clearing up after the first course. Billy pushes his last scrap of meat around the plate, scooping up the gravy. The sauce boat is old and cracked and beautiful, with a gold seam that catches the light and Billy half considers filching it to bring back for his ma. She likes nice things.

“Good stuff that.” Gossum jerks his head at the plate.

“Oh yes.”

The potatoes were warm and firm and waxy, the skin peeling away from them in transparent curls. Briny French beans and carrots from a bottle. Across the table, Barker blinks up at them, pushes his mouthful into his cheek: “Never ate like this before I joined up.”

“Slap-up feed,” Gossum agrees.

Alfie nods. The skin moves over the cables of his thin wrist as he reaches out for the gravy boat. He pours the last thick clots onto his plate.

Billy never ate like this either, not when he was growing up. Since he joined up the food’s been sufficient, but not as good as this. And now, through the cluttered noisy air comes a faint whiff of something sweet and sharp. Stewed fruit, he reckons.

“Will there be custard, d’y’think?” Barker asks.

“You never know.”

Custard, not so long ago, was made from fresh eggs and milk and vanilla pods. Now it’s made from powdered milk, water, and custard powder. And Billy likes it. It doesn’t mean that he’s forgotten that there were ever fresh eggs and vanilla pods; it doesn’t mean that he’ll never want to have fresh eggs and vanilla pods again. It just means that right now, as far as he’s concerned, powdered custard is fine. It’s far superior, in fact, to no custard at all.

He looks at Alfie, and considers outlining his theory of custard, countering Alfie’s earlier notion about saccharin and parsnips and rhubarb cordial. Alfie’s crushing the last of the potato into his gravy, and then scraping it up to his mouth with the side of his fork, his jaw and throat working like a gannet’s.

Because maybe, by the theory of custard, the bikes will be fine. You might even find you develop a taste for them. They will be, at least, better than no bikes at all.

He leans back, tilting the chair onto its hind legs and looks idly down the length of table behind him, watching for the arrival of pudding. All along the line of chairs, men mop their plates with folded bread, chew on chop bones, or lean in and talk. But then he notices, sitting on the table top, three-four seats down from him, an untouched plateful of food. There are little beads of white fat on the surface of the cold gravy. The potatoes are crumbling and greyed. Billy looks up from the plate, and sees the lad sitting there. It’s the same young fellow he saw yesterday, on deck; the one who’d bit a strip of skin off his finger, who’d stared at Billy.

Billy watches as he shifts his cutlery, touches his cup. He doesn’t eat or drink. His lips are working, but if he’s talking he’s not talking to anyone Billy can see.

He’s in a bad way. Barely holding it together.

Billy turns back to his table, to his men, lands the front legs of his chair back on the ground. It’s not Billy’s problem. Let the lad’s own corporal deal with it.

But Gossum’s seen Billy looking; he’s twisted round in his seat, noticed the full plate.

“Don’t,” Billy says, just as Gossum leans over, taps the kid on the shoulder.

The kid swivels round. “What?”

“Don’t you want that?” Gossum asks.

The young man’s jaw is clamped tight. A muscle twitches. He shakes his head, like he’s shaking himself clear of cobwebs. “What?”

“ ’S good stuff that,” Gossum nods to the plate. “Put hairs on your teeth.”

“Leave him be,” Billy says, giving Gossum a warning look: you don’t want to go poking around there.

“Word to the wise,” Gossum says to the stranger. “Get it down you while you can.”

The frail men of the catering corps, with their limps and their thick glasses, their stoops, weak chests, flat feet and rickets, move between the tables, carrying bowls of something sweet.

“There’s pudding coming now,” Billy says. “We’ll get a cup of tea after too, I reckon.”

Billy knows the importance of pudding. He knows the importance of a decent cup of tea. All too soon there will only be field rations and whatever you can filch, and tea and sugar in a tin all together, and boiling up on a Tommy stove and before long there will be bleeding gums and boils and cracked skin and constipation or the runs. He knows that what’s coming will have its compensations; that there is something about being shot at that brings a new sharpness, a focus, a bright precise awareness of being alive; of still, for this one moment at least, being whole in your own skin; and that’s something you almost miss when it is over. But there is plenty about what’s coming—the hunger, the fatigue, squatting in a ditch shitting black water—that is entirely without redeeming features. So that when someone offers you a decent meal, you eat it, every last scrap of it, and then scrape the pattern off your plate. Gossum knows it too. Gossum is, in all fairness, trying to be kind. Considerably kinder than Billy, since Billy would rather just leave it well alone.

“That’s good lamb, that is,” Gossum insists.

The young man shunts the plate away.

Billy can feel the lad’s gaze catch on him again. He knows it’s the same puzzled, frowning, I-can’t-quite-place-you stare. But he won’t look round.

“That’s good food going to waste,” Gossum says.

“It’s none of your bloody business.”

Billy glares at Gossum, but Gossum’s attention’s fixed. And Billy suddenly wonders: is this kid right to turn his nose up here? The food is better, and there’s more of it, than usual—fresh meat, not tinned; two kinds of veg, potatoes
and
bread. They’ve really pushed the boat out here. This is, he thinks, the condemned man’s last meal. You have to feed a condemned man well: you have to feed him better than you feed the living. A bellyful of sacrificial lamb will keep him going all the way through death and out the other side. You can’t have him running out of steam before that, or he’ll drift back to haunt you.

Those of us who’ve eaten, Billy wonders, are we now obliged to die?

Despite himself, Billy glances round; the lad just stares, unblinking hazel eyes. Then his face breaks into a smile.

“It
is
you, isn’t it?”

He stretches out a knuckly raw hand towards Billy, not to shake but as if to keep him there.

Billy blinks. “Sorry?”

“Hastings? Billy Hastings?”

So it’s this. He hasn’t had this for a while.

“Yes. Billy Hastings! I thought it was you. I saw you yesterday. On the ship.”

Billy nods. He’s conscious of his men, the way they’re looking at him.

“I saw you ride at the Easter meet in ’thirty-five, Herne Hill, my dad took me,” the boy continues. “Jesus Christ, you gave that wop a thorough hiding!”

“Thanks.” Billy wants to go. Anywhere. Be anywhere but here.

“Ha! You shook his hand. I remember that. I remember my dad saying, look, there’s a sportsman for you. Shaking the ol’ fella’s hand.” He’s glittery with it, raggedly excited.

“Thank you.”

“So what the hell you doing here?” He leans in, an elbow on the back of his chair.

“Well,” Billy says. “There’s this war on—”

“I know, I know, I know, but I mean, you were really something. You were—” He shakes his head, sucks his teeth. “Brilliant.”

He starts on about other races now, races that Billy has half forgotten, and some that he has tried to forget. Races that came after the Olympic trials, when things had continued to go wrong, when maybe his heart just wasn’t in it, or maybe it was broken. But the boy goes
on and on. He elbows his neighbour and tries to bring him into the enthusiasm too, but then he has to explain who Billy Hastings is, and Billy nods to the blank, bemused newcomer, his skin crawling with embarrassment.

His own corner of the room has gone quiet. Billy knows Alfie, Gossum and Barker are exchanging glances, but he doesn’t look at them. They don’t know any of this. Apart from Alfie, who was there, and knew it all already, without being told.

“S’cuse me, Boss,” Gossum leans over to the stranger again. “You eating that or not?”

Billy sinks out of the way, straightens the cutlery on his plate, glad of the interruption.

“Eh? What—no.”

“All right then.”

Gossum lifts the plate, spirits it across the gap between the tables and lands it down in front of himself. He flashes Billy a look: eyebrows up, a grin. He ducks down to eat.

At the table behind him, Billy can hear the boy go on, pointing him out to someone else, listing races.

They should be in France by now. They should be storming along the French lanes, racing off ahead of the shambling columns, finding their crossroads, clearing out snipers, setting up their positions. But instead here he is, feeling queasy, listening to an account of his cycling career and watching Gossum shovel down a second plate of Sunday lunch.

“S’cuse me, s’cuse me, Mr. Hastings.”

Billy grits his teeth, turns back to him. There are sharp points of red on the boy’s white cheeks now, like he’s got a fever.

“I just wanted to tell you—”

“Yes?”

“You were great that day, back in ’thirty-five. You were really great.”

“Thanks,” Billy says.

“We used to say you were going to be someone.”

“Right.”

“Dad, God rest him, and my brothers—God rest them too—” The words start to gain momentum, stumble over themselves. Specks of spit fly out with them. “ ’Cause of course they’re gone too now, John and Alan; just me and my mum now.”

“Sorry—”

He shakes his head like a bridling horse. “Still! Billy Hastings here of all places. Who’d’ve thought it!” He sits back, eyes still fixed and wide. A big tight grin hurting his face. And at the sight of that, at his desperation to be distracted, all misery and shame just falls from Billy, and what he feels, more than anything, is sympathy.

“This your first time?” Billy asks.

The boy looks at him. Swallows. “What?”

“Is this going to be the first time you see action?”

The lad brushes the question away, like it doesn’t matter. “Oh. Yes, but.” Shakes his head.

“It’ll be okay,” Billy says. “You’ll be all right once it gets started.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

“I’m not.”

“It’s just the waiting,” Billy says. “It’s not easy, all this waiting.”

The young man hesitates, bites on the ragged skin beside a nail, where there are already snicks of bare red flesh. “Still! Billy Hastings! Well I never.”

“Don’t look beyond the next ten yards,” Billy says.

Alfie looks up, smiles.

“ ’S what we used to say,” Billy says. “Back in the day, when we were racing. Keep your focus tight. Don’t look too far ahead. ’Cause it doesn’t help to look too far ahead.”

The boy nods, blinks, as though determined to commit this to memory.

“Best advice
I
can give you,” Gossum speaks the words over his shoulder, round a mouthful of meat and mangled beans. He swallows. “Best advice you’ll ever get for free: don’t get between the enemy and the Yanks.”

But the boy just looks to Billy. “So what happened? Why’d you stop?”

Billy can feel Alfie’s watching him. He could make some excuse. Blame that shoulder injury. He could blame their poverty: he grew up small and hungry. He could make excuses for himself.

Billy lifts a shoulder: half a shrug. “I wasn’t good enough.”

RUBY CLIPS BREATHLESSLY
along the pavement. The sky was blue when she clattered down the steps into the Tube; now it’s covered by grey swollen clouds, which doesn’t seem fair.

At Marlborough Gate, she pauses to listen to the fountains whisper in the Long Water, and just look at the green space opening out ahead of her. One gloved hand on the cool grainy stone gatepost, she hesitates like a diver on the brink. She can hear her own watch as it ticks on her wrist, and she knows it’s late and the music will have started before she gets there, but she still lingers on the threshold; like the slow unwrap of chocolate, the soft gloss of it before you bite. Because moments like this are the best that you can hope for nowadays.