The Blind Light Read online

  ‘You mind if I sleep while she does?’ Gwen says as she skirts the vehicle. ‘Wake me when she starts to scream.’

  ‘Just got to call Carter first,’ he says. ‘Let him know we’re on our way.’

  She takes off her coat and balls it up for a pillow as Drum puts the car into gear and pulls away. At the end of the road, he stops at the callbox, gets out of the car and dials Carter’s number. It rings out. He dials again and it rings out again, the same as it has the whole week. He pretends to put the coin in the slot – a canny French Drop – then speaks over the dial tone.

  ‘We’re on our way,’ he says. ‘Get out the Scotch.’

  He puts down the receiver and looks to the car: inside, his sleeping wife and sleeping daughter. No one to even observe the deception. How he would like to sleep so quick. Six hours. Seven possibly. Jesus wept.

  4

  Stiff-necked, Gwen wakes, hot under her pullover. The windscreen wipers jive, bored and busy; the heater hums a low, sour breath. Drum hunches in the driving seat, his head inches above the wheel, the better to see through the driving rain. She watches his rapt attention, hopes he can see through the downpour.

  Before Anneka, they’d take the car out for a drive on a Sunday. Places of beauty. The coast. The Epping Forest. On Saturdays, they’d ride the Underground into the city, the sights to see, the museums to visit. They’d alight at Victoria or Embankment and though there were buses, they walked the streets in cold and shine, saw the new and the old, the burning lights and shadowed nooks. A loose ring on her finger, her arm in his, standing in front of a Titian, an Egyptian mummy, a dinosaur’s bones, the dome of St Paul’s. The bridling joy of those walks. The sheer abundance of them.

  The last time she and Drum went into the city Gwen was five months gone; slow walking, a bus offered, a taxi; both of which she refused.

  ‘Is it far?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not far,’ he said. ‘But I know you can’t walk like you used to.’

  ‘I’m not a cripple,’ she said. ‘I can still walk.’

  Her ankles and thighs ached the short stretch of road up to the Monument, the gilded urn atop the Doric column. Standing in the quiet, September-warm street, they held hands and watched as a short man in a pork-pie hat took a photograph.

  ‘I should have taken you here before,’ he said. ‘We could have gone up to the top.’

  ‘We can still go to the top,’ she said.

  ‘There’s more than three hundred steps, love.’

  She felt something in her stomach, the old one-two; winced with the shock of it, snatched his hand, placed it on her belly. The feet or fists shifting under her skin.

  ‘He’s cast his vote, then,’ Drum said.

  ‘She’s not in favour.’

  ‘I wonder where he’d like to go,’ he said. ‘Fella, would you like to see the Palace? Tap once for yes, two for no.’

  The baby kicked twice.

  ‘She’s clearly not a royalist,’ Gwen said.

  They ended up touring the National Gallery; a decision reached without consulting the foetus. Inside, in the stately cool, they saw the creation of the world and its destruction; sex and death; landscapes and portraits. Outside, they ate sandwiches, looking up to the statue of Nelson, his one good arm resting on his sword.

  ‘She’s going to be so lucky to have all this,’ Gwen said. ‘On her doorstep. All of this.’

  ‘He’s going to be so lucky to have you,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, he’s got you.’

  She’d once heard a story of a woman who had birthed a pulsating mass of eyes. Someone from the town had a kid with two rows of teeth and the forceps’ pads permanently dented into his skull. Tina Boyle went mad after her girl was born, tried to drown herself or the girl, one of the two.

  Drum put his arm around her and they stayed there for a time, watching the pigeons in the fountains, the children throwing seed, the hawkers doling out their little bags. On the way home, she fell asleep on Drum’s shoulder, him waking her, gently, softly, as they pulled into their station stop. As she woke, she knew they would not do this again.

  Though she does not think of that moment as she watches Drum at the wheel, the sensation is the same. A touch of witchy intuition, inherited from her mother’s side, the sense that something has changed though impossible to finger exactly what.

  ‘Thought the weather was going to change,’ she says, looking through the windscreen. There are a few other cars; all slow, all tentative, all mindful of the deluge and the shortening visibility.

  ‘It has changed,’ he says. ‘It’s better than it was.’

  She roots down inside the footwell and takes out the thermos.

  ‘Tea?’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, not looking from the windscreen. ‘Please.’

  She pours the tea and hands it to him, looking at the cup and his hand, not the windscreen, as he has taught her.

  ‘She’s not stirred,’ he says. ‘Out for the count.’

  Gwen looks over her back, Annie curled in on herself, coiled in the blue-starred blanket.

  ‘We’ll pay for that later,’ she says. ‘No chance of her sleeping tonight.’

  ‘Never sleeps the night anyway,’ he says.

  She takes an apple from the bag, passes it to him. Usually he would shine it on his sleeve before eating, but at the wheel he just takes a bite, loud and greedy.

  ‘I dreamed we crashed,’ she says. ‘That a big lorry smashed into us.’

  ‘Just now?’ he says.

  ‘Huge thing it was. It almost wiped us out.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘It was a miracle really. We should have been flattened, but we were fine. Not even a scratch.’

  She puts a hand on the dash.

  ‘The superior engineering of the Ford to the rescue again,’ she says.

  ‘Well, they do call them the cars of your dreams.’

  ‘I thank God Henry Ford doesn’t know about my dreams.’

  ‘He’d be shocked.’

  ‘Not as shocked as you.’

  Together they laugh, low and conspiratorial, aware of waking Annie, and Drum turns his eyes from the road just for a moment to catch Gwen’s. He looks happy, she thinks, schoolboy-before-the-holidays happy, the same face as when she cooks steak or kisses his neck without warning. She thinks she must look happy too.

  Her happiness, the ease of it, has been puzzling. She expected it not at all. Nick’s premonitions of disaster a low ringing; memories of her friends’ shifting tone when discussing their husbands: at first giddy in love, later in mystified vexation. So common this, she felt she must be delusional. When asked about him by other factory wives in the pub, she made the same noises they did. She complained of his flatulence, his indifference to the house, the way he never made the tea. None of which was true.

  She did not say he washed the dishes of an evening, changed the nappies on weekends, brought her flowers without reason, fetched her water in the night. To do so was to risk chiding, knowing looks between women. Better to say nothing and in saying nothing, avoid a hex. People only ever say they’re happy before it’s taken from them. Do not invite that in. Never to say that. Instead, say it with a hand on the leg. A kiss before breakfast. A whispered I love you at the most surprising time. Lips on his stomach, telling him her dreams, the things she saw there.

  ‘This was a good idea,’ she says. ‘To get away.’

  He swings the wheel and the car changes lane. They pass a red car driving even slower than them. She looks back at Annie sleeping, still soft breath, still under.

  ‘I feel a bit guilty, if I’m honest,’ he says. ‘Boys out on the picket and us up on holiday. Years ago, I’d have cut me dead when I got back.’

  ‘If you want, we can sing “The Red Flag”.’

  ‘Maybe later,’ he says. ‘After a sandwich perhaps?’

  She unwraps the sandwiches and passes one to him. She watches him eat, watches him strain his eyes on the road. She thinks, brief
ly, of the Carter wedding, the way the two of them clung to the walls, faced it down like an ordeal, before heading back to the inn where they were staying, drunk and exhausted, laughing at how sore-thumbed they looked.

  She imagines the house where they will stay, the size of the beds and the towels, the vastness of the kitchens, and a room, just one big room, full of books. She eats her sandwich. She smiles at her husband. Her baby does not wake and no lorry ploughs into them. She thinks about her cigarette. The one she will smoke after her sandwich. She thinks about the strike of the match and the crack of the window.

  5

  The Midlands come in lightening rain and brighter skies, busier roads and smoking chimneys, miles of sprawl he has never explored, never known except from behind a windscreen. Four hours now. Maybe less. No panic now. No panic. Plans to be made. Planning what men did best. Contingencies. A range of them. Main thing, they are safe. Whatever happens, safe.

  At first, as Gwen and Annie slept, he felt anything but safe. He saw cars bonnets-up and steaming at the roadside, men changing tyres, operating jacks. Vigilance needed, constant vigilance. A police car went past in a blue wash of sirens; an ambulance attended a crash site. Two cars fused. A new fear: the ironic death. At the pearling gates to heaven, St Peter raising a deified eyebrow and saying, ‘Ah, yes, Drummond, just in time to beat the rush. And I see you brought your family too.’

  He was grateful for the silence, for his sleeping family, the distraction of the roads. Feeling sure he could reach the Carters before they woke, the roads shortening, the wind blowing them a tempest to the north.

  In the silence of the car, neither girl making a noise more than breath, he approached the problem as though in a divisional meeting of the union. He liked the combative nature of it. The men ripping his arguments apart, pulling them back together. Those telling him to go home. To abandon the action. Him shaking his head, the way the stewards did: pitying and disdainful.

  I have made calls to Carter. And yes, they have not been answered, but I have sent a telegram. He will be expecting us.

  Why did he not telegram you back? Why not take your calls?

  So many reasons, none of which are important. Why would he telegram back? He knows I’m on my way.

  You can’t trust someone like that. One rule for us, another for them.

  He is a man of his word. He made a promise.

  Piss-poor planning, if you ask me. What if they’re not in? What if they’re on holiday?

  If they’re on holiday, I’ll force the window or something.

  And say what? How will you explain to Gwen?

  I have a note. Written in his hand. Saying they’ve been called away and will be back the next day.

  And if they’re in and never got the message?

  Carter will cover for me. Best liar I know. Can think on his feet.

  Assuming he wants to help you. Brothers, would you help this coward bastard?

  Worst comes to worst, I have money. We check in at the Wolf.

  Good luck explaining that one, Brother Moore.

  6

  She lights her cigarette and he cracks the window, she cracks hers too, and the rain blows in from both sides, spangles the sleeve of her cardigan. He puts a peppermint in his mouth. As soon as she’s thrown the dog-end out the window, he will offer her one from the roll: the last act of the dance. He turns up the heater. He hums to himself.

  ‘I should wake her,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘let her sleep.’

  ‘She’ll be murder if we let her sleep past four.’

  ‘Be murder anyway.’

  ‘I’ll finish this, then I’ll wake her.’

  ‘I said not to,’ he says. ‘Just let the girl sleep.’

  She holds the cigarette out of the window.

  ‘It’ll be fine for you. You’ll be drinking with Carter. It’ll be me up to the small hours with a bitten tit.’

  She likes to cuss at him, moments like that. Exasperate him; confuse his ire.

  ‘Another half-hour’ll make no difference.’

  ‘Not to you, no.’

  ‘I don’t think you realize the stress of driving in these conditions. I can barely bloody see out the windscreen.’

  ‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ she says.

  ‘You just said it was a good idea.’

  ‘I was trying to make you feel better! Who would want to travel in this weather? To see Carter and Daphne of all people . . .’

  ‘Now look—’

  The car takes a hit to the left wing, whatever striking it bouncing up onto the passenger-side window. Drum instinctively swerves to the left, onto the roadside, the tyres crunching stone and shingle. He slams on the brake and clutch, the car sliding down a narrow gulley, half on the road, half off. They careen, Drum turning the wheel, getting the car off road. She closes her eyes, braces for impact. The wheels feel like they are on glass, then beach, then glass again. She bows her head and keeps her eyes closed. Glass and shingle, glass and shingle, then thrown forward at the end, hands on the dash, stopping herself from heading through the window.

  ‘Gwen,’ he says. ‘Gwen, you all right, Gwen?’

  Hands on her, and she looks up and there is no blood and there is pain in her neck but the pain soon goes, and he is breathless. The engine ticks and steam rises from the bonnet.

  ‘I’m not hurt,’ she says, ‘I’m not hurt.’

  He looks to her, and she looks behind to the carrycot. It has shrugged down into the footwell. Annie is scrunched down, her face against the back of the driver’s seat.

  ‘Annie,’ she says and grabs her from the pile of blankets, holds her to her breast.

  ‘Oh, my girl. Oh, Annie love. You’re safe, Annie. You’re safe, Annie, my darling one.’

  Red cheeks then and eyes open and Annie screams. Gwen shushes and sorries, runs her hands over the bones, the legs and arms, and Annie screams and screams, and Gwen pulls down her top and offers her breast, the only sure way to calm her. Drum tries to hold any part of his daughter, her bobby-socked feet, her chunky legs, but Gwen pushes him away.

  ‘My girl,’ she says, ‘Annie-moo, you’re safe, little girl, you’re safe now.’

  Annie opens her eyes and pauses her screams, screams again louder if that were possible. Gwen struggles a nipple into the infant mouth. She feels the milk flood from her into her child, feels the shake and chill of her baby, holds Annie as close as she can, wishing her skin could envelop her.

  ‘It’s not safe,’ Gwen hears Drum say. ‘We need to get out. It’s not safe.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘We’re staying here. Aren’t we, Annie? We’re staying right here.’

  7

  He leans against a five-bar gate, kicking mud from his wet boots. Hands shake, cold and shock. He can hear traffic and the occasional scream from Annie. He does not turn. Fear that he will see himself in the wing mirrors, his reflection in the driver-side window. All this and for what. And for what now? Four hours from Carter’s. More than four, surely. Stuck now at the roadside, perhaps to get the best views of the coming bombs, their rainbows blooming in the damp.

  They remain inside the car, his wife and child. His. They will not get out, Annie is clamped to Gwen, held so tight he’s surprised she can breathe. He resents the breasts. Resents that he cannot comfort Annie that way. That the first she turns to is her mother. Stop thinking this.

  ‘You all right?’ Gwen says, opening the passenger door. ‘You’re shaking.’

  For this, glad. The rose hip of the cheeks of his girl, the closed eye on the breast.

  ‘She’s okay,’ Gwen says. ‘No breaks I think.’

  ‘We need to get moving,’ he says. ‘Dangerous here. Anything could come off the road.’

  ‘No,’ Gwen says. ‘We stay here.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No.’

  Show no fear. Four hours, no more than that. No fear as he turns the key; no fear as he hears nothing but whine. No fear when trying again; no fear as the whin
e gives way to nothing. The Ford logo looking back, blue and white, clean and shining. The engine not turning over. The windscreen unblemished, not even a scratch, not even spritzed with mud, but nothing from the engine. The rain is sheeting. Again and again, and nothing and nothing. Four hours from safety and nothing. What did you call them, Curtis? Was it dreams?

  8

  On the back seat, he removes his soaked trousers and his now see-through underpants and dries himself with a towel. There is oil on the trousers where he has wiped his hands, oil on his drenched jumper, but she does not tell him to watch the upholstery. Both she and Annie watch his quiet ballet, his awkward movements, pulling on pants and jeans, covering up the whiteness of his legs. The speed of it. Off now the shirt and jumper, drying his chest and torso like a boxer after a round in the ring. No idea why he packed towels – surely Carter would have more than enough – but happy at his foresight. Happy the engine is running, the heater blowing warmth onto Annie’s legs and her lap. Happy at least that they will soon be making a move.

  He climbs around the driver’s seat, not wishing to get wet again. Two hours out there. Testing, checking, looking for the culprit, her wishing they’d joined the RAC, but saying nothing. There is oil on his cheek. Just a single fleck, like a beauty spot. He puts the car in gear and pulls onto the road, the car hesitant, snarling through its exhaust. Annie looks like she is about to say something, but Gwen puts her finger to her lip. Annie says nothing. No one says anything until Drum wipes the condensation from the inside of the windscreen.

  ‘We were lucky,’ he says. ‘It could have done serious damage. There’s not even a chip in the windscreen.’

  ‘It’s a good job you were driving slowly. Any quicker and I don’t know what would have happened.’

  ‘And you’re fine, aren’t you, Annie?’

  ‘Yes, she’s fine.’

  There is silence, then the conversation again; how lucky; what might have happened; how well he did. Loops and spools, winding and rewinding. His hands shake as he drives. They have drunk all the tea; all the food is now for Annie. They sing songs to keep her entertained. She plays with a rattle, Gwen tells her several favourite stories. Drum starts the same conversation again and again – how lucky, what might have happened – so much so Gwen thinks Annie might soon join in.