The Warning Bell Read online

‘I rest my case.’

  I smiled to myself. Pablo was secretly in love with Chantal, and sometimes not so secretly. I expect he fantasised about her in sweat stained khaki, dodging bullets in some distant war zone with cameras strapped around her body. He wouldn’t be the only man who did. It was different for me. I was married to her. I’d got past the fantasy stage some time ago, and moved on to being worried sick every time she went off on assignment. Now, thank God, all that would change too.

  I said: ‘Chantal’s spent enough time running around disaster areas with nothing more useful than a camera in her hand,’ I raised my hand to silence him. ‘Her words, not mine. She’s already told the agency. After this trip, she’s out.’

  Pablo filled my glass, but the look of doubt never quite left his face

  I said: ‘Don’t you ever wish you could break the pattern, Pablo? Feel the sun on your back? Watch the sunset and not think about the office on Monday?’

  ‘Is this a multiple choice question?’

  ‘I want to build something new. That’s all. Can you understand that?’

  ‘So buy a Lego set.’

  ‘We both want to build something new.’

  ‘Get her one too.’

  ‘You can say what you like.’ I lifted my glass and gave him my biggest smile. ‘Nobody’s going to stop us now.’

  I left his office an hour later and wandered through Covent Garden and down towards the river. I was euphoric from the champagne and my newfound freedom. It was April, cold and bright, and the buses shone like big red toys. I sat on a bench by the Embankment and stared out over the flashing river. I was scared to death of boats, but whenever I needed space to think I loved to gaze at water. My office in Camden Lock – my former office – overlooked the piazza on the Grand Union Canal where young people in bright clothes crowded the Asian and Mexican food stalls in summer, and sipped latte on terraces beside the narrowboats. Through my windows the crystalline blocks of central London stood against the sky like Camelot in a Burne-Jones canvas, but it was the shining strip of the canal that my eyes always found.

  I thought about the energy and optimism of that office, and the fun I’d had there. We designed on-line expert systems for the medical and legal professions, and our rooms hummed with hard drives and glowed with plasma screens and brainpower. The business had consumed me for nearly twenty years and the members of the team I had built up were the nearest I had to friends. For a moment, I couldn’t imagine what life would be like without them.

  But nothing would stop us now.

  My mobile rang.

  ‘Dad?’ Kate’s voice was urgent. ‘It’s Grandma.’

  2

  My parents’ front room was as ugly today as I remembered it, with its heavy square furniture and dark curtains, and the damp stain on the ceiling which had been there since I was child. They had lived here more than half a century, but there were no ornaments, no paintings, no flowers, and no postcards on the mantelpiece, none of the busy clutter of a home.

  Just one photograph hung above the mantel – my father, grim faced and awkward in his police uniform, on the day of his retirement. I knew even this was only on display because my mother had insisted. And the room was so very quiet. I remembered this Sabbath silence from thirty-five years ago, silence and dim afternoon light. Sunday mealtimes with glassy mashed potato, waterlogged carrots, a mat of beef, and the room heavy with the steam of overcooked food. Even now I felt a kind of panic, the fear that the gates might yet clang shut behind me and trap me here forever.

  ‘Dad!’ Kate said sharply. ‘Stop pacing about. You’re driving me mental.’

  She sat on one of the hardback chairs at the dining table, still in the clothes she had been wearing when I picked her up from school in London: a turquoise top which showed some of her midriff, denim jacket and jeans. Her pale hair blazed in the half-light. She had never seen anyone dying. I wanted to reassure her, but for the moment my own mind was too crowded. I just smiled at her and raised my hands contritely and forced myself to stand still beside the bookcase in the corner of the room.

  The pair of photographs stood where they had always done, on the top shelf, in a jointed silver frame which was tarnished almost to black. There were three panels, but the middle one was empty. In the left, eight young men sat or sprawled on the deck of a launch at sea, crowding the narrow waist of the craft. Three of them sported jaunty RAF caps, a couple wore handsome white rollneck sweaters and one boasted a pair of old-fashioned sunglasses with round lenses. Another, older than the rest, was smoking a pipe. All eight of them were grinning. They were not merely cheerful, these men. They were unmistakably full of joy in that sunshine of sixty years ago.

  Only two of these smiling lads wore their tunics. They sat in the centre of the front row, turning their shoulders outwards so that the snapshot would capture their stripes of rank. One was a flight sergeant and the other a corporal, and both had raised their thumbs. All through my boyhood they had been my favourites, this pair of laughing young men. They looked indomitable. I would make up endless stories about them, naming them after my favourite movie characters or after personalities from my own secret world of adventure and escape. Usually I pretended I was the corporal. He was very young and remarkably handsome, fair haired and dashing. I liked his white knight good looks, but also his modest rank, which seemed to give so much scope for exceeding expectations, for surprising his superiors with his enterprise and bravery.

  I had always longed to be able to do that myself. Perhaps that was why this picture had always confused me. I couldn’t understand how it was that these young men all looked so happy being my father’s crew. It seemed to me that they could only be so pleased with themselves if he was pleased with them. Perhaps they were more competent than I was, good at important things I couldn’t do well, and which I knew my father valued, like woodwork, or fixing engines, or looking into the skies and reading the weather.

  ‘We should go in,’ Kate said abruptly. ‘I feel like I’m at the dentist’s.’

  ‘He’s saying goodbye, sweetheart. Give him a minute.’

  My daughter flicked back her hair in a characteristic gesture when she was stressed – half sullen, half defiant – and stared at the floor.

  The other photo wasn’t confusing at all. It showed a launch at speed in choppy seas, white spray pluming away behind her. Her bow had lifted out of the water and the RAF roundel and the tall numerals stood out: 2548. My father’s boat. I picked up the picture from the shelf. It still affected me. Somewhere in space and time, as that speeding craft tore through the sea, these eight men would have been at action stations, drunk with exhilaration. And there, hidden behind the wheelhouse windows, my father would have stood, braced against the thumping of the launch through the Channel swells, his hands guiding the wheel with a horseman’s touch. I was jealous of those young men. I always had been and even now, at close to fifty, I still was. Not since I was eight years old had I done anything with him that had made me drunk with exhilaration.

  The door to my parents’ bedroom opened. I put the photo down and turned to face my father. His face was wet with tears.

  I said: ‘Dad.’

  I moved towards him and instinctively held my arms out to him. I had not done this for longer than I could remember, and for a moment I thought he would ignore me. He did not do that, but our embrace was brief and awkward, a clumsy collision like all the other clumsy collisions between the two of us. When it was over he stepped past me and walked away without a word.

  I carried our bags in and dumped them on the single bed. Kate followed me, and sat down between the bags, making the bedsprings squeak.

  She said: ‘Did you speak to Mum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she coming back?’

  ‘There’s nothing she can do here, Kate. I told her we’d manage.’

  She nodded, tight-lipped, then lifted her head and gazed around her.

  ‘This was your room,’ she said.

  �
�Yes.’

  Whenever we came down to Plymouth I always insisted we stay in Betty Coleridge’s bed-and-breakfast down the lane. I claimed the cottage was too small for us all, meaning that it was too small for me.

  ‘It’s a nice room.’

  I hadn’t expected her to say that. The room was a cramped box, but I had loved it once, the angles of the ceiling and the wallpaper with its pattern of grinning cartoon fish, peeling now at the corners. I remembered my father pasting that wallpaper up for me when I was about six years old. I had always thought of it that way – that my father had pasted the wallpaper up just for me. In those days this little chamber had been my secret cavern, where I kept my books and my treasures and watched these happy fish endlessly pursuing one another around the walls.

  I sat beside my daughter on the bed. I put my arm around her and she rested the weight of her head against my cheek.

  ‘You were his little boy once,’ she said. ‘And he was just your Dad.’

  I walked through the gloomy house into the dining room. The day was closing. I was his little boy once. I leaned on the table with both hands, and stared out over the twilit fields to the sea. Something caught my eye from across the room, the very smallest of movements, and I looked around and saw my father in his leather wing chair in the bay window. He was utterly still. I walked over and took the window seat opposite him.

  I said: ‘You didn’t tell me she was so bad.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have me call sooner. She looked like she was coming good, then she took a fall in the night. The doctor wanted to take her in, but she wouldn’t have it. Wanted to die here, she said.’ His eyes were like stones. ‘Only when she was settled would she let me call.’

  I stared at the floor.

  ‘She’s leaving,’ he said, his voice softening. ‘That’s all that matters now. She’s leaving, and neither you nor I can call her back.’

  Short as it was, this was the longest and most intimate conversation that he and I had shared for years. My throat tightened, and I knew it wasn’t because of my mother, or not only because of her. He still had the power to do this to me, after all this time, even without meaning to.

  ‘How did it get to be this way between us, Dad?’

  I looked up and found his dark, unreadable gaze on me.

  ‘I was cold with you, when you were growing. And since. I know it well enough. For what it’s worth, it grieves me. More, maybe, than it grieves you.’

  ‘Then why?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s too late. Your mother will be gone soon, and I shan’t be far behind her. And then it won’t signify no more.’

  ‘It will always signify,’ I said.

  Beyond the clutter of lean-tos and beanpoles, green fields fell away to the estuary, shining like enamel in the last of the light. A catamaran was curving out of Plymouth on a creamy wake, passing to the east of the Plymouth Breakwater, the great man-made ridge of rock which broke the force of Atlantic storms and kept the anchorage safe. Off the Devon shore the lights of lobster boats and pleasure craft rode the darkening sea. But my father was seeing none of this. He was looking at something else altogether, and in my mind I was looking at it too – a pretty blue boat, upturned in a pewter sea, and not far away the tripod timbers of a channel marker standing out of the tide like a gibbet, hung with weed.

  Yes, there had been a time when he was just my Dad, and I was his little boy. There had been a time when he pasted up wallpaper with happy fish on it, just for me. But that had come to an end one day out there, among the flotsam on the grey water, when I was eight years old. He had thrown his arms around me in the cold sea that day, wrapped them around me and crushed me to him until it hurt. I had wanted him never to let me go. But he had. He had let me go.

  When I looked up, his scuffed leather chair was empty. I had not even heard him leave.

  3

  I was to take the midnight watch. I pushed open the door of my parents’ bedroom and noticed the smells again as soon as I closed it behind me – disinfectant and air freshener, and under it, something else, not quite disguised. Something sweet, fecal, troubling. The curtains were drawn and a lamp glowed yellow on the dressing table. I felt like a trespasser in here and I moved with reverence, not just because a woman was dying in the bed, but because this room had been forbidden territory all through my childhood, a place into which I never ventured.

  My mother lay with her eyes closed and her grey hair spread in a fan on the pillow. She seemed impossibly small in the double bed. I could not remember seeing her hair undone like that, and it was as if she had momentarily regained some flowering of her youth. There was a drip stand next to her and a tube fed into a vein in her elbow through a plastic device bandaged to her arm. I sat in the armchair beside the bed and found her hand and took it between both of mine. It was weightless and cool, like a bird’s wing, and I felt that if I held it up to the light I would have been able to see through it, as if she were already fading away.

  After a while the silence made me uneasy and I got up and busied myself quietly around the room, tidying unnecessarily, adjusting the curtains, filling the carafe with fresh water. I put it down on the bedside table next to the single framed photograph she always kept there, and glanced at her face.

  Her eyes were open, huge and flooded with a light I had not seen in them before. It made the hairs lift on the back of my neck. As if fearing I would start back she reached out and hooked her thin hand around my wrist and fiercely tugged me closer to her.

  ‘He loves you, Iain.’

  ‘Don’t talk now.’

  ‘He’s always loved you. Don’t you realise that?’

  Moonlight lay across our joined knuckles.

  At last she relaxed her grip and her clenched face softened. ‘Iain, I know things haven’t been easy.’

  ‘They would have been a harder, but for you.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ She gave me a small, tired smile. ‘I can feel a speech coming on.’

  ‘It was you who always stood up for me, Mum. It was you who’d come and find me when I had to go and hide.’ I patted her hard fingers. ‘It was always you.’

  ‘I loved you both,’ she said simply. ‘I still do.’ She drew a long breath. ‘You have to put things right with him, Iain.’

  I said nothing.

  She gave a vexed sigh, as if my silence was no more than she had expected. ‘Help me sit up.’

  ‘You’ve got to rest.’

  ‘I’ll be dead in a few hours,’ she said testily. ‘I’ll rest then. Now help me up.’

  I lifted her, plumped the pillows behind her, settled her back against them. She asked for a drink. I tried to hold it for her, but her strength was returning and she waved me impatiently away and clasped the glass in both hands. When she had finished I took the glass and put it on the bedside table, and when I looked up again she was sitting with her hands crossed over the sheet, gazing steadily at me.

  ‘Did you never ask yourself,’ she said, ‘what happened that made him so afraid?’

  ‘Afraid?’ I snorted. ‘Dad was never afraid of anything in his life.’

  ‘Oh, yes. He was afraid of losing you.’ And she looked steadily at me until I could hold her gaze no longer. ‘You are a stupid, stubborn boy,’ she said, softly.

  I fussed with the corner of the sheet and waited for the moment to pass. When I glanced at her again I saw with relief that her eyes were focused not on me, but on the photograph on her bedside table. It showed the simple stone which marked the grave of my older brother Callum, whom I had never known, stillborn ten years before I had entered the world. She never spoke of Callum in front of me: neither of my parents ever had. The grave itself was barely two miles away in St Bede’s churchyard, but so far as I know neither of my parents ever visited it. Still, that sad and solitary photograph had stood beside my mother’s bed for as long as I could remember.

  I wondered what she was thinking now, as she gazed on it. Perhaps she was about to speak of that distant loss at
last. I couldn’t begrudge that to her, but selfishly I hoped she wouldn’t. I knew we had such a short time left together, and I didn’t want this unknown dead boy in the way.

  But when she spoke, it wasn’t about Callum at all.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said, speaking very clearly. ‘I don’t have much time, and I need to tell you this. Back in the War, in April of 1944, they sent your father across to the coast of Brittany.’

  I looked at her blankly. This news didn’t strike me as surprising. I knew that RAF Air-Sea Rescue boats often hovered off the coast of France to pick up downed pilots. I wondered why she was telling me now.

  Then she said: ‘He didn’t come back for two months.’

  I blinked. ‘For two months?’

  ‘He went over to collect a man. A French agent. A …commando of some kind. And something awful happened.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Be quiet. Listen. Your father had taken this same man over there weeks before, in March, but something went wrong when he went to pick him up again and somehow he was trapped there. Captured, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  But she ignored my question and stared into the darkness over my shoulder. Her eyes had a hollow look. ‘When the boat didn’t come home I thought George was dead. Nobody here seemed to know anything. It wasn’t until October that a doctor called me from a military hospital, a place near Harrogate. George had been there for weeks.’

  I couldn’t make sense of this. ‘And no-one told you he was safe?’

  ‘We weren’t married then, or they would have contacted me. It’s only that the doctor found my letters among your father’s things and took pity on me. The thought of me not knowing.’

  ‘But what had happened to him?’

  ‘Your father had escaped somehow, and sailed back across the Channel in an open boat in June, just after the Normandy Landings. He’d even brought one of his crew back with him. He was a hero, apparently. But if that doctor hadn’t called I would never have known any of that.’