Wreckage was swept over the drains. They began to back up. Very suddenly, Milena’s feet were wet. A sheet of water extended itself down the basement corridor. The children made sounds of dismay and disgust. Those who had been sitting, stood up crying or laughing.
They would have to stand all night. Fear and exhilaration both faded. It was wearisome having to stand, wet and cold. Water rose up over the tops of their shoes. The steady whiring of the wind made them sleepy. They nodded their heads and longed to be able to lie down. Sudden batterings startled them and made them jump. Some of them wept with exhaustion. The Nurses shushed and tutted and held them and called them darlings and babes. Some of them wept too, for their own lost homes, their parents. Their parents seemed to speak out of the howling wind.
The rain eased, the flood retreated. The children sat down in puddles, too tired to care, and the Nurses stroked their heads until they fell asleep, moaning like the wind.
Milena thought of Rose Ella and was suddenly awake.
The sky over the lightwell was a silver-grey, cloudy but full of light. Everyone else was still asleep, a tumble of arms and legs. Milena stepped out from under the arches onto the floor of the well.
A train wreck. Bamboo lay in twisted heaps. There had been a shower of glass and tiles. The walls were bare in patches. The roof showed naked timber, still looking fresh and cream-yellow at its heart.
Milena went to the door of the staircase, and when she pulled it open, a shower of glass crystals poured out, down from the staircase, over her feet. She shook her shoes and climbed up over glass and wood and lumps of plaster.
The walls of the stairwell were cracked in places and there was a light scattering everywhere of dust and rubble. She turned the corner of the stairway, leading to the front door. The corridor was full of leaves and branches, as if invaded by vegetation. A tree had fallen into the Child Garden.
Milena stood looking at its curtains of leaves at her feet, and the jigsaw-puzzle bark. ‘Oh no,’ she whispered heartstruck. It was her tree, the Tree of Heaven. The wind had pulled it down. Oh no, oh no, she kept thinking, not my tree, not my beautiful tree. She stepped through its broken branches that still smelled of sap and green wood. Leaves brushed her face like tender hands.
A great gash had been torn through the front of the building where the tree had fallen. The doorway was gone. Stone and brick and bars of twisted metal lay all around the tree. Milena climbed up onto the trunk, where the main branches met and looked down its length. Around the base of the tree, a halo of roots arched up above the ground.
This far, she thought, it used to be this far down to the ground. When it stood.
She walked along its trunk, out from under the unsteady wall of the building. She stood in the middle of the street. Her bedroom had been wiped away. Someone’s bedstead lay half buried in rubble, twisted and flattened. Lengths of bamboo had been driven into the walls as if they were hammered nails. The shutters had been torn away, and all the windows broken.
Milena thought of her tree, how tall it had stood, how it had been the first thing she had seen every day. She murmured for it, out of pity. ‘Tree. Oh, tree.’
She had not known that a tree could take root in you as well as in the soil, and that when it was uprooted, it was from your life as well as from the ground, as if it were pulled out of your own breast. Poor tree, full of wet leaf, in high wind, in damp weak soil. And you had stood so long, for a century or more so tall.
Milena wandered dazed in too many clothes, all her clothes worn at once, coat and jumpsuit and squelching boots. All the scaffolding was gone, all the windows. The old weak buildings of London had fallen as well. They lay stretched and broken across the streets. If they still managed to stand their upper floors were indecently exposed. Disorder embarrassed them, made them look foolish. A cart with no wheels half-hung out of a dignified old room. The polished doors, the moulded plaster, the glass of the sash-cord windows were scattered like cards. The work of the Restorers had been undone.
Milena walked down Gower Street to the Row.
The roof was gone. There was old furniture all about Bedford Square. Already the Restorers were picking mournfully through it, shaking their heads, scratching them. Women stepped out over rubble, over fallen beams, carrying tea. Oh no, Milena thought again. Not this too. Not the beautiful Row, with its beautiful things. Milena’s feet slipped on wood panelling. Hay from the stables was distributed in drifts, like snow. Two of the fathers stood side by side, unmoving.
‘They’ll have to give it all over to the Reefers now,’ one of them said. ‘Bloody Coral.’
‘Milena!’ wailed a voice. ‘Oh Milena, Milena!’
It was Rose Ella. The two girls ran to each other and hugged each other, and encouraged by each other, burst into tears, and sobbed, shaking in each other’s arms.
‘Oh, Milena, it’s gone. It’s all gone. It’s all broken.’ Rose Ella’s lip was torn, black with dried blood, and tears were like snail trails on her cheeks.
‘Our beautiful house!’ exclaimed Milena.
‘Come on, my love, have some tea,’ said Rose Ella. They helped each other like two old women, across the ruin of the square to the tea. There was smoke from somewhere. A cooking fire? Milena hoped so. She was hungry and cold.
‘Stay here,’ said Rose Ella. ‘You stay here with us, eh?’
So, under canvas, thrown up to keep out the rain, Milena went to live, finally and briefly with Rose Ella.
One wing of the Row was still in place. All the children were bundled up together in rooms, to sleep together on mattresses. Milena was shaken, made truly insecure by the blast. Her life had been completely overturned twice before. Somehow, that made her weaker, not stronger. Her teeth rattled. They had not done that since her mother had left her, bereft and alone among strangers. Milena was back in that blank, black unremembered time. Her fingers were dirty, there was no water to wash. She was frightened. She hid from people. She just wanted Rose Ella and her family, no one else. She hid from the Nurses of the Child Garden. She saw them coming, picking their way over the fallen plaster, on the second day. She darted back, and nipped into a cupboard under a staircase. She pulled fallen curtains over herself. She heard Rose Ella say: ‘Oh I’m so sorry! We should have told you, Milena came here to stay with us. Oh, this is awful! You must have been looking all this time.’ Rose Ella called for her. ‘Lena? Milena? I don’t think she’s here.’
Then Milena heard Rose Ella whisper:
That night, on the mattress they shared, Milena clung to her tightly, as if to drifting wreckage at sea.
‘Milena love, I can’t breathe! Please!’ said Rose Ella.
She woke up some time before dawn. She thought she was seeing a dream. She woke up in a fallen ruin, with strewn familiar objects. There were the four small cannons, too heavy for the wind to take. It seemed to her that she was looking at the ruin of her life. The ruin of her life had always been there, unrealised, since Milena had lost a father, lost a mother, lost a language, lost her very self, lost it forever behind layers of growing up, layers of loss, layers of scorn, self-hatred, ceaseless work, unfulfilled hopes. Lost it where there was no childhood, nothing simple or safe or sweet or whole.
Except that next to her was Rose Ella. Rose Ella was there as in a dream, kissed with the faintest light of early sunrise, the first clear dawn since the hurricane. Milena looked down at Rose Ella, beautiful, asleep, hair fallen from her face, nightrobe fallen open, and there was her beautiful breast. It was young and small, with a dark nipple. Stranded somewhere between sleep and dream, suspended in a kind of stillness in the light, and in the light mist, thinking how much the breast looked like a mother, Milena kissed the nipple. She took the nipple in her mouth.
Rose Ella’s eyes opened with a snap.
She looked round at Milena.
Milena looked at her, dazed loving.
