It began to rain again, the sky so dark it was impossible to tell whether the sun had come up yet or not. Swales brought a tarp to cover Mrs Lucy.
Petersby came back. 'The ambulance has gone off again,' he said. 'I've sent for the mortuary van, but they said they doubt they can be here before half past eight.'
I looked at Jack. He was standing over the tarp, his hands slackly at his sides. He looked worse than Renfrew ever had, impossibly tired, his face grey with wet plaster dust. 'We'll wait,' I said.
'There's no point in all of us standing here in the rain for two hours,' Morris said. 'I'll wait here with the I'll wait here. Jack,' he turned to him, 'go and report to Nelson.'
'I'll do it,' Vi said. 'Jack needs to get to his day job.'
'Is she up?' Nelson said. He clambered over the fourth-floor beams to where we were standing. 'Is she dead?' He glared at Morris and then at my hat, and I wondered if he were going to reprimand me for the condition of my uniform.
'Which of you found her?' he demanded.
I looked at Jack. 'Settle did,' I said. 'He's a regular wonder. He's found six this week alone.'
Two days after Mrs Lucy's funeral, a memo came through from Civil Defence transferring Jack to Nelson's post, and I got my official notice to report for duty. I was sent to basic training and then on to Portsmouth. Vi sent me food packets, and Twickenham posted me copies of his Twitterings .
The post had relocated across the street from the butcher's in a house belonging to a Miss Arthur, who had subsequently joined the post. 'Miss Arthur loves knitting and flower arranging and will make a valuable addition to our brave little band,' Twickenham had written. Vi had got engaged to a pilot in the RAF. Hitler had bombed Birmingham. Jack, in Nelson's post now, had saved sixteen people in one week, a record for the ARP.
After two weeks I was shipped to North Africa, out of the reach of the mails. When I finally got Morris's letter, it was three months old. Jack had been killed while rescuing a child at an incident. A delayed-action bomb had fallen nearby, but 'that bloody murderer Nelson' had refused to allow the rescue squad to evacuate. The DA had gone off, the tunnel Jack was working in had collapsed, and he'd been killed. They had got the child out, though, and she was unhurt except for a few cuts.
But he isn't dead, I thought. It's impossible to kill him. I had tried, but even betraying him to von Nelson hadn't worked, and he was still somewhere in London, hidden by the blackout and the noise of the bombs and the number of dead bodies, and who would notice a few more?
In January I helped take out a tank battalion at Tobruk. I killed nine Germans before I caught a piece of shrapnel. I was shipped to Gibraltar to hospital, where the rest of my mail caught up with me. Vi had got married, the raids had let up considerably, Jack had been awarded the George Cross posthumously.
In March I was sent back to hospital in England for surgery. It was near North Weald, where Morris's son Quincy was stationed. He came to see me after the surgery. He looked the very picture of an RAF pilot, firm-jawed, steely-eyed, rakish grin, not at all like a delinquent minor. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, he told me, 'giving Hitler a bit of our own back'.
'I hear you're to get a medal,' he said, looking at the wall above my head as if he expected to see violets painted there, nine of them, one for each kill.
I asked him about his father. He was fine, he told me. He'd been appointed senior warden. 'I admire you ARP people,' he said, 'saving lives and all that.'
He meant it. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, reducing their cities to rubble, creating incidents for their air-raid wardens to scrabble through looking for dead children. I wondered if they had body- sniffers there, too, and if they were monsters like Jack.
'Dad wrote to me about your friend Jack,' Quincy said. 'It must have been rough, hearing so far away from home and all.'
He looked genuinely sympathetic, and I supposed he was. He had shot down twenty-eight planes and killed who knows how many fat women in hairnets and thirteen-year-old girls, but no one had ever thought to call him a monster. The Duchess of York had called him the pride of England and kissed him on both cheeks.
'I went with Dad to Vi Westren's wedding,' he said. 'Pretty as a picture she was.'
I thought of Vi, with her pincurls and her plain face. It was as though the war had transformed her into someone completely different, someone pretty and sought-after.
'There were strawberries and two kinds of cake,' he said. 'One of the wardens — Tottenham? — read a poem in honour of the happy couple. Wrote it himself.'
It was as if the war had transformed Twickenham as well, and Mrs Lucy, who had been the terror of the churchwardens. What the War Has Done for Us. But it hadn't transformed them. All that was wanted was for someone to give Vi a bit of attention for all her latent sweetness to blossom. Every girl is pretty when she knows she's sought after.
Twickenham had always longed to be a writer. Nelson had always been a bully and a stickler, and Mrs Lucy, in spite of what she said, had never been either. 'Sometimes it takes something dreadful like a war for one to find one's proper job,' she'd said.
Like Quincy, who had been, in spite of what Morris said, a bad boy, headed for a life of petty crime or worse, when the war came along. And suddenly his wildness and daring and 'high spirits' were virtues, were just what was needed.
What the War Has Done For Us. Number Two. It has made jobs that didn't exist before. Like post warden. Like body-sniffer.
'Did they find Jack's body?' I asked, though I knew the answer. No, Quincy would say, we couldn't find it, or there was nothing left.
'Didn't Dad tell you?' Quincy said with an anxious look at the transfusion bag hanging above the bed. 'They had to dig past him to get to the little girl. It was pretty bad, Dad said. The blast from the DA had driven the leg of a chair straight through his chest.'
So I had killed him after all. Nelson and Hitler and me.
