“He thinks so.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“And the other?”
“Nial?”
“Does he use the same method?”
“Roger says Nial doesn’t need to.”
“Because he’s so pretty?”
“Likely, though you’d never get Roger to admit to that part of it.”
They were quiet. After a bit, Susan nodded towards the channel. “And this is your battlefield?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
A breeze picked up and it blew her hair slightly across her face and she cleared it away with a hand.
“Phillip,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry I told class about your . . . you know—”
“Water thing?”
“Yes.”
He placed his hand on hers and kissed her quickly on the cheek. “That’s all right,” he said, “really. It’s like telling them my—my shoe size. It doesn’t matter.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “That’s why I love the Sunderlands. You get shot out of the sky, you’ve still got a boat between you and the water.”
The caffey door opened with a tingling and the owner came out carrying a low wooden stool. On its flat top was a color print of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin (C.R. in his Wellingtons), the print faded yet still recognizable, and the owner set it at their feet. “It was our Albert’s,” he said. “For your pot ’n cups. I couldn’t stand the thought of one of our young fliers being scalded by me tea. Perhaps put out of action.”
“I haven’t seen any action, yet,” Phillip said, “but the stool is marvelous.”
“’Scuse my effrontery, Miss,” the owner said, “but our Albert used it in the loo.”
“Oh,” Susan said, glancing at Phillip.
“As a step-up. When he was a little ’un.”
“Yes,” she said.
The owner straightened and turned to take in the day and the sea. He took a moment, looking. “There’s clouds,” he said, “coming from Calais. Dark ones, too.”
“They won’t reach us here, luckily,” Phillip said. “The wind’s from the west. It’ll blow them back into Germany where they belong.”
“Let’s pray,” the owner said, going back inside.
Phillip studied the clouds above the far coast of France, frowning.
“What is it?” she asked.
A bell tingled and they looked round, but the shop door hadn’t opened; rather, in the street a young boy her age coasted by on his bicycle. The boy waved at her and rang his bell again. Then again. Then it was quiet and they could almost hear the smell of the sea with its waves whispering across the sand of the shore. And too they could hear a soft and gentle hum, like bees at their gathering labor of buttercups.
“Phillip?” she said again but he didn’t respond. He still watched the horizon, the clouds. Another bell tingled and this time the caffey door did open and they looked around and the owner emerged carrying a black lacquered tray. He stood before them and stooped slightly. “Here,” he said. “Will you do the honors, young miss?”
“Yes,” she said, “yes,” and from the tray she hoisted first the cozied teapot and placed it on the Pooh stool then the two cups tilted one inside the other and both on the doubled-up saucers. She separated and arranged the cups and saucers then found room for the cucumber sandwiches. The crusts had been trimmed off.
“Ta,” the owner said. He straightened and looked out across the water. The hum was louder now. “Dark as Marmite is that rain cloud,” he said.
“It’s not a rain cloud,” Phillip said, his voice containing equal measures of matter-of-fact and sheer disbelief.
“No?” the owner asked. He stared at the cloud, then said, “No, no it’s not.”
It had taken minutes to become visible, then minutes to cast its noise of passage—its horrendous hum—but it surely seemed to the three of them there on the sidewalk with their pot of tea and Marmite sandwiches to take no longer than a heartbeat to swoop across the channel like an enormous lid of darkness, a wide and droning iron roof of war.
“Good Christ!” said Phillip.
Neither Phillip nor she nor the owner moved. The word “awe” has as its root the Icelandic word “agi,” meaning the terror one experiences when one looks directly into the face of God. And it was indeed that awe, that terror that was on their faces as getting louder and louder the Heinkels and Dorniers and Messerschmitts and Fokkers roared towards and above them, the thousand-plane flotilla—a thousand planes!—forming in the sky a deafening and dark horde, a dark and relentless canopy of precision and death.
Their force was such that their passing overhead blew Phillip’s RAF cap off and he snatched at it and Susan put her young hand atop her head as her own hair swirled in a tangle of silken wire and eyes raised she watched as if transfigured, her mouth open.
“They’re following the Thames!” the owner shouted.
“To London!” Phillip cried. “They’re following it straight to bloody London!”
THE SOUND OF THE BOMBS dropping (she and Phillip could not but hear that sound even above the Ariel’s engine as they ran it west in their maniacal race back to the City), that sound was dull and muted and terrifying, like the thump of bodies being thrown endlessly one after another onto a charnel cart. Ahead of them on the horizon the sky filled with smoke, black pillars of it twisting up into the sky in desperation and there were sudden flames cast up in splashes of lurid red gore that settled like mirages and there was that forever dull and lifeless pounding, that pounding.
And the soft punching-bag sound of the City’s few anti-aircraft guns and the Ariel’s engine switching as Phillip geared up and down and sped back up and did so over and over again, but loudest of all, their thoughts, their thoughts.
Seven
The candle blew out and the tiny underground bomb shelter was dark, cold. They could hear the bombs whistling one after another as they fell to earth, howling like marauding Huns at the gates. Mrs. Tranter struck a match, and her face illuminated, blue and undulate as if inhabiting a gas flame. She rose as best she could, bent double, the roof of corrugated iron looming mere inches above her doubled-over spine. She two-stepped the dying match to the candle and managed to light it again and the shelter filled with wickering light.
She wagged out the match. The bombs that had whistled fell poom! poom! poom! and Susan’s mother, sitting on the liner of the floor with legs splayed, propped her back against the post of twin bunks stacked low and tight as dresser drawers. She swung her purse onto her lap and from within salvaged a near-gone packet of Woodbines and snapped the purse shut and took out a cigarette and said:
“They’re getting closer.”
“D’you need the candle?”
“Ta. Thanks,” her mother said.
She took the candle in its Arabian brass holder and lit her cigarette and passed the candle back to Mrs. Tranter.
Mrs. Tranter set the candle on top of the small army trunk that sat in the middle of the floor. “Where’s Mac, then?” she asked.
“He’ll be here soon,” her mother said.
“Mum?”