Al Bowlly had been killed in an air raid in the wee small hours one Thursday morning the previous month. A land mine had floated down, taken out a large slice of Jermyn Street and Mr Bowlly with it. The women of London still mourned him. England’s greatest crooner. A womanizer extraordinaire. Troy wondered if Kitty knew this. If she did it probably didn’t matter to her. A romantic ideal, that unfleshly object-while the real man, the flesh beneath the ideal, had had half the women he’d ever met. Kitty was weeping, softly, silently for Al Bowlly. Troy said nothing.
‘Could we play it?’ she asked.
Troy wound the gramophone. It was easier by far than finding anything to say to her. He was glad she’d caught it, though the rest he could willingly have seen smashed: Riptide had that certain something. He was particularly fond of that long, slow introduction before Bowlly came in. It had an inescapable intensity. After it Bowlly’s voice could only be a let-down. He had always sounded to Troy more like a man in his seventies than his forties. He had never understood the appellation ‘the English Crosby’-he sounded nothing like Bing Crosby. Troy much preferred the women singers-Elsie Carlisle or Greta Keller. Yet-the song was pleasing. Its structure delighted him. It was all verse. No chorus. The song did not repeat itself. Just when any other song would rehash all it had said so far, the band came in again and Bowlly sang no more. It was startling to realise the song was over. It had made its statement-made a song of its precisely captured emotion, but not a ‘song-and-dance’ of it.
Kitty was shuffling around the room in a slow, sad dance for one. Caught in her own little riptide.
She came to rest in front of him-still tearful-and, though the taller, managed to rest her head upon his shoulder.
‘When was it, Fred? When was ‘e killed?’
‘It was the seventeenth, I think. A month ago to the day, all but a few hours.’
Her arms slipped around his neck. Troy braced himself immovably. I won’t dance. Don’t ask me. He half expected her feet to resume their half-hearted shuffle. They didn’t. She swayed gently, leant into him, and aimed her words somewhere into his chest.
‘So this is the anniversary of Al’s last night on earth?’
‘I suppose so. If you think a month is any kind of an anniversary.’
It was three months to the day since she’d dropped him, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. He wasn’t counting.
‘I been lucky in this war. So far. I never lost anyone. None of me family. All me old boyfriends are still alive. Two of’em even made it back from Dunkirk. I knew people who died-the bombs and that-but they weren’t people I lost. I just knew ‘em, sort of. Al Bowlly dying was like losing someone. Really it was.’
She was right. She had been lucky. They’d both been lucky. But Troy would not have been the one to say so. They could lose all, lose everyone before this war was over. To say so seemed rather like inviting it.
‘I don’t want to spend the night alone,’ Kitty said. ‘Not tonight of all nights.’
Troy said nothing. He’d heard her say this before. It was line one of Kitty’s chat-up routine.
Kitty took his right arm and slipped it around her waist. Troy did not move. She wriggled until he could escape no longer the obligation to enfold her shoulders with his left. She looked at him, eye to eye, as she stooped. Her cheeks were still wet. She kissed him lightly, and buried her head in his shoulder, singing softly to herself.
‘Riptide. Caught in a riptide, torn between two loves, the old and the new. Riptide. Lost in a riptide, where will it take me, what shall I do?’
Troy said nothing. Telling Kitty what to do had always been a waste of time.
§ 34
‘St What?’ said Cal.
‘Alkmund. It’s Saxon. And it’s a whopping great church, one of the biggest in Shoreditch. They cleared out the crypt last November. Got rid of the dead to make room for the living.’
Stilton had stopped the car. Cal got out into another urban desert. The church stood like a redwood in wilderness-little else did, for what Cal estimated to be a couple of blocks in any direction.
‘Is it safe?’ he asked.
Stilton stared up at the spire.
‘Probably not. But where is, apart from down the Underground? Half a million tons of masonry held up by flying buttresses and prayer. Thing is, it feels safe-it’s well… reassuring.’
‘Give me sacred steel and God’s good concrete any day. We going in?’
Outside the main porch they passed a group of people sitting on a tomb. Cal heard the plummy tones of upper-class English voices. He’d heard that the English all ‘mucked in’, as they put it, but this lot were not the sort who looked as though they’d spend the night in a crypt except as a gag at Halloween. They were overdressed, as though they’d slipped out in the interval from a West End theatre, and they appeared to be sipping wine and eating sandwiches. Stilton’s feet clattered on the stone steps ahead of him.
‘Leeches,’ he said, cryptically.
‘Leeches?’
‘Well-mebbe not. More like voyeurs. Ghouls. Toffs coming East from Mayfair to see how the other half live.’
‘Die, how the other half die,’ said Cal.
‘Aye-whatever. Can’t stand the sight of ‘em. They should all have summat better to do.’
The crypt was on a scale Cal could not have anticipated-somehow he’d thought the word implied low and small. This was a cathedral beneath the streets, a cavern twenty feet high stretching into an infinity of half light, criss-crossed by arches, fragmented by alcoves. And full of people. Cal could not begin to guess. A thousand seemed arbitrary but suitably large. A sea of humanity pinpointed by flashes of light-a cigarette being lit, a portable stove fired up-punctuated by a thousand different noises and a dozen different smells. It hummed, literally and metaphorically. Only when Stilton shook him by the arm did he realise he’d stopped, and was just staring-not, he hoped, open-mouthed.
‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘Do you, Walter, do you?’
‘How can people live like this?’
‘Well-how can they?’
‘Believe me, Calvin, this is a damn sight better than it was last autumn. Then there’d be two and a half thousand people crammed in here. That was before the government had the sense to open up the Underground at night. Mind, they only did that ‘cos folk from round here defied the authorities. Went in and wouldn’t leave. There was talk of’em even being turfed out by the coppers. You can imagine how well that went down. But it’s fine now. Us and the toffs. We understand one another a bit better. A few ghouls notwithstanding.’
Stilton pointed upwards with his finger, back towards ground level.
‘What’s the smell?’ Cal asked. ‘It’s pretty… pervasive.’
‘Chemical lawies, lad. Imagine how pervasive the smell was before we had them. Now-let’s be getting on.’
‘Sure. What do I do?’
‘Wait here till I find Hudge.’
‘Wait? Walter, I’ve spent a week waiting.’
‘Do you know what Hudge looks like?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then leave this bit to me. I’ll not leave you out when I think there’s summat you can do. Trust me.’
Stilton took out his torch and walked off into the crowd. Cal felt stranded again. High and dry in a cavern that smelled like an accident in a high school chem lab. If Walter wanted him to wait, he’d do it outside. He didn’t much want to feel like a voyeur either.
On the surface, the small group of late night revellers had broken up. Only one woman remained, still perched on the tomb with, he noticed for the first time, a leather, squarish shoulder bag and an armband on her black jacket bearing a discreet red cross.
‘Are you lost?’ she said in an accent that rhymed lost with forced.
‘No, we-I mean the Chief Inspector and I-are looking for someone.’