If the Invader Comes

Vic had the brown paper and glue; he fished for them in the bag he’d taken over from Figgsy. The moonlight caught the fine teeth in Tony’s elegant smile. He was grinning, holding the glass cutter. ‘Nice, eh?’ He indicated the house. ‘Hope they’ve all hung up their stockings.’

There came the gritty score of the cutting wheel on the pane. Vic looked up at the dark building and nodded. He stood back a step, even as Tony was easing the glass. He held the two torches, ready. It was only a second or two’s work to get the door open.

STRAIGHT AWAY, TO the right of him, Vic’s torch beam picked out the smoked-gold frame of a painting that hung from the picture rail. Then the light sweep opened up the interior. There were several more pictures along the wall – large canvases, and some smaller. The place was lined with a distinction quite unexpected. Between and around the pictures the flickering, searchlit wallpaper showed up a drab floral blue; but a great polished table was dressed with silver furnishings. It had carved upright chairs tucked beneath, and it filled much of the centre space, though there were smaller tables and a sideboard in the distance. All the surfaces were cluttered with objects, many of them glittering, cut glass, silver. There were no Christmas decorations.

Embers glowed in the grate. The torch showed the chimney breast with a poor brick fireplace, yet over the mantelshelf an astonishing high gilt mirror was mounted. Vic looked up from the eerie reflection. The ceiling had plain mouldings, but from the central rose hung a vast glass chandelier. The signs of wealth reminded him of the time when a kindly foreign professor had invited the external students to Prince’s Gate for drinks. A tang of cigar smoke drifted in the air.

Chest high under the pictures ran shelves of books, so many in the torch’s beam. He moved closer. The spines showed old-fashioned letter shapes which he couldn’t read. Tony, gone ahead once more, was already about his own concerns.

‘Come on then, brains. Finger out. No use standing here gawping. See that clock. And this bloody sideboard.’

Vic tiptoed to the far end of the room, and made himself lift the old gilded clock from its shelf. But the light from his torch was fading – the batteries must have been dud. With one hand he unhooked the long pendulum and tried to wriggle it free. The lever flicked back and forth like a live thing. He silenced it. The torch went out. He shook it back to life. A wonderful engraved bowl lay on its own tray on the sideboard. On either side of it, among the rest of the silver, stood two fine twisted candlesticks. They felt weighted by more than metal, clanking wretchedly against the clock. He imagined Tony’s laugh. Ten quid, maybe. Even twenty, the lot. Something told him what he knew already – that, financially, Tony had no need of this job, or his help. A sound of ripping filled the dark beside him.

The sideboard drawers hung open, revealing cutlery in disorder. Now Tony’s shape, the torch gripped under his chin, stood at a small bureau in the corner. ‘Get me your light on this lot,’ he whispered.

Vic shone his weakening beam on to a riffle of letters and bills. There were storage envelopes too, and a wadge of personal papers, with a passport, nipped up in a bulldog clip. Tony shook out the envelopes and snatched at the papers. ‘Not this, you bastard. Where’s your bloody ill-gotten? Come on.’ He flung the documents on to the floor and snickered. ‘Who knows, eh?’

Vic felt a movement behind him, and smelt a trace of hair oil. His torch beam suddenly caught Tony, slipping his fingers around the edge of a long drape. The door behind it gave a moaning swish. ‘Tony!’ But Tony had disappeared from view, and Vic stood rooted to the soft rug by the sideboard.

Character, Perce had so often said, was about not cracking up. Vic’s father had seen men crack up: men who couldn’t move – either towards the enemy, or back. Those buggers, Perce had said, were sitting ducks. A picture by the tapestried door hanging was caught in the beam. From it a man of property in sober seventeenth-century dress stared dimly back at Vic. There was reproach in the painted eye. Beside the figure were brown water scenes with boats and houses.

He heard noises in the hall beyond, as if Tony were trying to prise something away. ‘Tony!’ He turned and, in the dark, inadvertently swung his own bag against the back of one of the dining chairs. The rattle was deafening. Now his torch came to rest on the large canvas above the sideboard he’d just looted. Bold smears of red might be lips, or nipples; and there were eyes, gilded, female eyes, pale, laquered skin.

It was slashed, and the hardened paint near the bottom had come off in chunks, revealing the canvas. Below the cut Vic caught a signature in the bottom corner which he couldn’t read. It was as though he’d brushed up against Clarice’s naked body, there in the room. He stretched to feel for the table and began backing towards the french window.

‘Tony!’ His nerve failed. ‘Tony. I’m going back to the bike.’

‘That’s what you want, isn’t it, Vic.’ Like a tinkling whisper, out of nowhere.

He plunged after Tony into the hall where the wrenching sound had come from. A floorboard creaked above him. Across a vast chequerwork of tiles, he could just make out a front door and a large newel post at the foot of the staircase.

His torch went out and he groped for the banisters. And then holding fast on to them, he stepped sideways, several paces, still feeling for the woodwork. Above, in the stairwell, there was the faintest of gleams, the merest sense of outlines, no more.

Then a thump, and a woman’s scream and footfalls overhead. Vic panicked, his arms outstretched. He heard a man’s gruff voice upstairs and the sound of a door handle being turned. Something on the landing went over with a crash and there were footsteps on the stairs. Tony rushed past him in the hall and Vic turned back to follow. In the dining-room he clattered into the heavy chairs, and fell against a small table, dashing the glassware.

He was at the french windows. As he burst his wrist through a pane, a light switched on. He heard a run behind him, felt a blow to the back of his head and he swivelled, enraged, hitting out at the pyjamaed figure, raining and pummelling blows with his strong fists against the righteous protective arms, the plump sides, the grunting, wet, tobacco-smelling face, feeling the glass of spectacles against his bare knuckles, and its give.

He was escaping down the garden, his ludicrous sack bouncing and jingling on his back. A low wall tripped him. He crashed through stalks, was whipped by branches. He scrambled at the fence. Next he was paralysed and the forest was a sightless chaos. His chest was scraped and his foot hurt. A motor bike in the distance kicked into life: once, twice and then the roar. He inched his way towards the trace of its sound, shuffling with his feet for the path, feeling for tree trunks with his hands, but there was only the unexpected ditch, the unremembered scrub, the wicked bramble thorns. The back of his head ached with a dull, throbbing pain and he put his knuckles in his mouth, tasting blood.

Someone was shouting. He attempted to retrace his steps. But he could find no fence, no house. The ground was dropping away and frosted spines rose up and stung his hands. He straggled back again. Then he plunged in a different direction, and again.

He was relieved when they arrested him. His nails were torn and his shins were barked, but the blood on his hands showed up quite dry in the flash beams, only ten yards or so from the back of the burgled house.

Jack wasn’t dreaming when he heard the motor bike. He was in his bed, listening, waiting. He recognised the sound of it and knew how it stood revving in the street at the front of the shop. Then it stopped. He got out of bed and went into the front room. His mother and someone else were coming up the stairs. He heard their voices.

‘Where is he, then?’

‘How should I know?’

Jack retreated to his bedroom and stood just beside his door.

‘For heaven’s sake, Tony, he is my husband!’

‘What?’

‘What’s happened? Where is he?’

‘I’m not his fucking keeper. All right. Maybe he slipped up. Maybe there was just a weensy bit of a fucking hitch.’

‘A hitch?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What do you mean? I want to know. Where’s Vic? Tell me!’

‘Shut up, woman! Leave me alone, you stupid bitch. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll get back later. Maybe he won’t. Knowing him he’ll run smack in the wrong direction. And if the shite get him he’d better not open his bloody trapdoor, that’s all.’

‘Tony! What do you mean? What do you mean, Tony?’ She was almost screaming.

‘Some old Jew got fucking damaged. Rabbit was careless, that’s all. All right? What’s it to you, anyway?’

‘Oh, Tony. What am I going to do?’

‘You’re going to keep quiet. That’s what you’re going to do, Phyllis. You’re going to keep quiet for Tony, aren’t you, dearest? Aren’t you? Rabbit’s going to keep quiet. And you’re going to keep quiet. Aren’t you, darling Phyllis? Poor old Bun, eh? Poor old Bunny Rabbit. Maybe he’ll show up after all. And maybe not. Eh, Phyllis? Come here, then, you bloody halfwitted bitch.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘I’ll call you what I like.’ Then Tony’s voice changed. ‘Come on, Phylly. You know I don’t mean it. Come on, eh? There’s my girl. That’s what you like, isn’t it? That’s what you want. Eh, baby? Just like it used to be. Eh?’

Jack left the door with its rim of light. He sneaked back to his bed, touched the bristly wool of his stocking, and pulled the covers over him because he was cold, and because of the noises. He sang her song in his head to shut them out. That there was a man and his lady, on Christmas Day. It was on Christmas Day. His father would take him down to Creekmouth. Swinging their great brown sails, the three ships would come in on the tide. On one of them, the wounded lady would be standing, her arms stretched out for him.

THEIR BOAT HEADED from Penang out of the Straits of Malacca on the voyage she’d made too often before. The gesture of Selama’s suicide, the pure speechless act, had drawn out from her father the story of his private life, of the dilemma of duty that had led to his buying the tickets home, and of the consequent betrayal of his lover. Clarice felt angry and let down by what had been going on behind her back; and which had come to so violent a termination.

Her own affair had drifted to its inevitable end. Robin had received his posting and with it a promotion to captain. He’d gone back to his wife, leaving Clarice only his Christmas gift of some scented notepaper. Now she saw Robin Townely just for what he was: a fairly ordinary and not particularly attractive army officer with a roving eye and stronger arms than hers. She wanted to punish both the men in her life.

But there was that triumph, too, inside her. How her heart raced every time she thought of Vic. In England her feelings would be heightened only to be mocked by the fact of his marriage. It would be a torment. Yet part of her longed to arrive. Another regretted that she would put herself through it all again.

Upon the high seas, the contradictions in her emotions made her listless. She suffered from want of spirits, putting on a brave face. She also drank and played poker for pennies with Ted Crow and Alf McCoy, two superannuated planters trying to get home. They were both absurdly indulgent and amusing but beyond that made few demands – upon either her feelings or her conversation. On tropical evenings the three of them hung over the piano in the ship’s saloon. She played popular songs: ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, and ‘Blue Moon’. They sang together, ‘She went to heaven and flip-flap she flied’, and ‘One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow’, and laughed, and walked about the deck under the huge stars.

More obviously distressed, Dr Pike drank to anaesthetise himself. Then he would stand on deck for hours, it seemed, watching the horizon. Clarice struggled to forgive him, with all his former talk of medicine as love and charms – and of honesty. How he’d pulled the wool over her eyes, how he’d kept up his affair behind her back. And the woman, the suicide had, yes, been very shocking; but then she’d hardly known her, Selama Yakub. Once the body had been taken away she’d cried, uncontrollably, all night in her room. She was annoyed with her, too, taking herself off like that before she even knew she might have had a stepmother.

There were U-boats in the Atlantic, which was why the Piet Hein ended its run at Marseilles. From there Clarice and her father made the last part of their journey across France. What should have been a fine adventure began well. She loved Marseilles the port. But the skies beyond were lacklustre. A change occurred during the rail journey up the Rhône valley; after Lyons everything grew tedious and craven cold. She saw herself and her father as two poor insects scuttling right under a web of fear and bad weather, stretched across the gloomy north from Siberia to Connemara, from Scapa Flow to the Caucasus. Her own nerve suffered, and a sense of foreboding began to preoccupy her. If Malaya had been spoiled for her, this headlong scamper over thousands of miles was pure folly.

The hotel they found in Paris had damp beds. The staff scowled, or sneered, pretending to find difficulty with her schoolroom French. Her father was even harder to manage. When there was no suitable train leaving the Gare du Nord until quite late the next morning, she had to ration his alcohol. At eleven forty-seven, an engine dawdled northwards through the Paris banlieux before at last getting up steam enough to tackle the countryside. By then he’d sobered up, but after Amiens and at an almost wilful snail’s pace, the train turned to reconnoitre the lines of the old British trenches. She saw Albert, Bapaume, Arras, Vimy, Loos and Béthune, all under traces of snow. Trees had regrown, the broken villages had recovered; yet against an eerie little sunset framed by the train window the ordinariness of those places gave her another sharp taste of anxiety. Calais was windswept, and the Channel crossing no more than a choppy dash under the cover of night.

The final stage, from Dover to London on the morning boat train, ran them up through snow-covered hop gardens under dirty skies. The Kentish suburbs were house backs, coal dumps, or overgrown depots; and Victoria Station, heaped up with sandbags and slush, showed no interest in their arrival. Clarice noted with disbelief the air-raid shelters, the slit trenches, and the government posters about how to behave. Overcoated guns in Hyde Park looked upwards at phoney skies. Any patriotic nostalgia she’d concocted on the way evaporated. The old country was profoundly uninspiring. As for the English, how unlovely they were. After the ease and colour of the tropics, everyone looked shabby.

And would Vic look shabby too, she wondered, if by chance she ran into him – as around every turning, almost, those first few days, she was sure she would? Would she even know him, remember his face? Perhaps she’d already passed him in the street. Urgently and involuntarily, she stopped in her tracks where she and her father were walking along the Bayswater Road, and looked behind her. Nothing – of course, nothing. But suppose he should appear; would she feel the same about him?

Her father lectured her on Disraeli’s two nations. ‘At least the Malayans know how to take a pride in themselves.’ He held forth from Marble Arch, staggering slightly amid the traffic. ‘In England there are the Privileged and the People, Property or Population. Each hates the bloody sight and sound of the other.’

‘And which are we, Daddy?’ she asked, steadying him. He looked her blankly in the eye, and then they crossed back to the corner of Park Lane, jinking their way by inches out of the path of a bus.

There was no relief from the cold. A bone-invading chill came in from the streets and sat down with them in their hotel, unchallenged by any of the stoves in the corners of drab rooms, the puttering gas fires or the lukewarm pipes. Ice patterns on the inside of windows persisted all day, and wherever Clarice went she took the frosty trace of her own breath. Outdoors, its shapes dissipated against the grey; inside, it mingled with the various odoriferous steams caused by boiled cabbage, by brown soup, and by the chamber-pots borne along corridors by clumping maids. Again, she wondered what on earth they’d set out upon, the two of them.

Every evening the guests in the hotel lounge tuned in to Lord Haw Haw. Londoners claimed the Germans had got what they wanted: Hitler would soon sue for peace, and be accepted by both Britain and France. It was the Bore War, they said, pleased with themselves. They were bored with the blackout and bored with rationing. Some believed the bombing threat had turned out to be an elaborate hoax. The Nazi menace would simply wither away and the kids could all come home. She latched on to the idea, and held it. She shut her mind to newspaper tales of Finnish casualties, or the continuing deportation and savagery in divided Poland. These days, apparently, it was more to enquire about the next fall of snow that Londoners surveyed the skies, than to care about Stuka dive-bombers. The winter, they said, was one of the coldest in memory. Well then, they kept on adding, it would all eventually thaw, even Hitler. About Vic, possibly so near at hand, she began to convince herself that she could feel a touch blasé. She had got through so far without seeing him; now she was perfectly in control.

The family solicitor was visited. It turned out they were Property – and therefore Privileged. By the skin of their teeth the old house in Suffolk still belonged to them. So it came about that Clarice and Dr Pike found themselves running down to the country again, this time north of the Thames through Essex and on into prettiest blanketed Suffolk. She did stare intently out of the window as the train inched through the tawdry environs of Wanstead Flats, Ilford and Seven Kings – having seen on a map how close they were to Barking, the address on Phyllis’s letter. She paid particular attention as the train crossed the River Ripple. Then, past Becontree, her thoughts were a mixture of relief and overwhelming regret.

The train was ice cold, full and filthy, with soldiers sitting on their kitbags in the corridor, and trodden cigarette butts everywhere on the floors. She allowed one of the boys to engage her in conversation but disdained him a few minutes later, savouring his blushes.

After a while, as ever-thickening snowflakes began to race past the carriage, she grew excited, piqued that her window was grimy, and that smoke from the engine billowed past in such smutty reels as to blot out what might amount to a childhood recaptured. The prospect seemed to lift her father, too.

When at last the train drew up at Manningtree, she stepped out into the flickering white with amazement. The platform, the fields, the station roof were blanketed with fresh snow. She was coming to her old house; everything could be beautiful again.

AN ANCIENT MAN with a horse chaise was all the transport there was to convey daughter and father and their travelling cases the last seaward miles. She didn’t mind. She clapped her hands to keep warm, and listened to the slow drawl in which the driver was remembering Dr Pike, no really, from all these years gone. His ‘growen gel’ Clarice smiled and offered herself to be admired. Snow-garlanded, they clopped through the village of Holbrook, after which a dip in the road and a swirl of the miniature blizzard brought them to their destination.

She dashed the snowflakes from her eyes. Pook’s Hill was in the old manor-house style. Under its weight of white, the cat-slide roof seemed at once hoisted by, and sagging from, the off-centre chimney stack. At either end of the property there were gabled wings. It looked quaint as its name, touching as the scene on a card, though smaller perhaps than she remembered, with the mullioned windows of the original modest hall squeezed under the roof’s vast blank perfection, and all the leads and ledges delicately iced in casements of peeling green paint. There was a simple wooden door cut in the left-hand section of wall. Snow-capped weeds had grown up on either side, while great dagger icicles hung from the eaves. Untrained stalks of a snowdrifted, leafless creeper reached away in both directions across the brickwork.

Clarice led her father inside. All at once the long journey caught up with her. The interior was only mould and damage: walls were peeled, areas of ceiling had fallen. There’d been a tenant, but nowhere had been cared for. In one of the rooms a lapse of soot had blackened everything. Her elation was dashed in a pervading smell of fungus and old rags.

A local Miss Farmer was supposed to have laid a fire and left a meal. In a dim, oak-beamed and barely furnished parlour they found a flicker in the grate; and, in the flagstoned region adjoining, a pot of unlikely stew sat on the kitchen range. Eventually, while her father prowled the bedrooms, Clarice brought herself to rummage for kindling in an outhouse. Then she perched on her high heels at the edge of the hearth, trying to revive the embers. The sticks were cold and damp and the flame did its utmost to resist.

Frustration overcame her. She stood up and stamped. Then sobs burst out, and all she could think of was Selama Yakub. Once more she cried secretly, uncontrollably; and when eventually the tears subsided, she was left drained and utterly dismal. The fire sulked. Her father’s footsteps sounded somewhere overhead like the walk of a troubled ghost. Forced out of the compensations of her bright life in Singapore, whisked past any second chance of meeting Vic, she’d been thrust into an agrarian confinement so severe that the prospects of love, freedom and fulfilment were almost infinitely remote.

The phrase ‘a want of spirits’ had first been planted in Clarice’s head by Mrs Christopher, who’d taken her under her wing in Singapore. During the voyage its elegant understatement had fitted her exactly. It reminded her of certain literary heroines she’d admired – the passionate girls held captive by circumstance or relatives, while forbidden by duty to think so.

She’d once wanted to be entirely useful: to save the world, discover radium, inspire a great composer with her playing. She’d gone on to find a man, Vic, whose flashes of warmth and intellectual openness seemed to make such things possible – had he not been trapped himself. Now her father had rushed her to the moated grange. The wooded soil of Suffolk ran away to two rivers on either side of her. Their salt and frozen mouths were only a mile or so away. An old physician and his daughter caught in the snow; it was simply too melancholic. She heard him come downstairs and go out at the back through the kitchen.

But in reality she knew she couldn’t blame him. After Selama’s death and the hasty inquest, her father had had half a mind to tear up the tickets. It was Clarice who’d insisted on using them, and Dr Pike had done what she told him. That was the truth of the matter, and she should come clean about it.

She pulled herself round, and was glad. The fire, too, flicked up around the sticks, the spent char deigning at last to glow. She dried her face and shouted to her father to bring in more coal.

A far-off scraping came by way of reply. Then Dr Pike appeared with the coals held out in front of him on his shovel. ‘Good girl. Good girl. You make everything better.’

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