The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore Page B

felt so much at ease. Maybe it was the effect of the gin, but it seemed perfectly natural to have a man in RAF uniform drinking with her in the middle of the day. The question of where he was stationed and what he was doing here could be sorted out later.
    ‘Aren’t you going to take off that apron?’
    ‘I’ve got to finish the pudding.’ There was flour on the rim of their glasses, where she’d touched them. She wiped her hands on the apron, and poured out his second drink. ‘Let me take your coat,’ she said, as if he had just arrived, an invited guest.
    His coat, when he handed it to her, was warm. She folded its bulk and laid it on the bedroom chair. He was taking off his boots. With a sudden movement he threw himself down on the bed, full-length, staring up at the ceiling.
    ‘You don’t know how good this feels,’ he said, and then he was silent, lost in thought. ‘To be indoors, in a proper house, not those bloody huts. When I was a kid I used to wish they’d let me sleep outside.’
    ‘In a tent, you mean?’
    ‘I wanted them to pull my bed out under the stars. I’d have my sheets and blankets and Mum’s eiderdown, and a hot water bottle if it was snowing – and I’d let the snow fall on my face. You know when you look up into a snowstorm it’s like looking into a tunnel and the flakes go round and round inside it?’
    ‘Did it ever happen?’
    ‘Not likely. Now I shouldn’t care if I never went outside in my life. Come over here and lie down.’
    ‘I told you, I’m covered in flour.’
    ‘It’s only your apron.’
    ‘And my hands.’
    ‘I don’t care. They’re
your
hands.’ Already his eyes were half shut. She saw how deadbeat he was. Marked, weary skin. He smelled of cigarettes, sweat, metal, the soap he’d scrubbed himself with before he came to her.
    ‘Filthy night,’ he murmured.
    ‘Did you get much sleep?’
    He shook his head from side to side, slowly, luxuriously. ‘Three hours. This pillow smells of you.’
    She was at the top of an endless slide, clinging to the rail, looking down at the fall. He was a stranger, but she knew him. Every word he spoke and every shadow of his expression fitted patterns she had never seen before but which had always been there, beneath the skin of her life.
    ‘Who are you?’ she breathed. Instantly, his eyes flew open and he gave her a brief, brilliant smile, as if they shared a joke. Philip is much more handsome, she thought. But this man was looking into her face, her eyes, as if they knew each other so well they didn’t have anything to explain. They could be silent if they chose. He was utterly exhausted. In the fog of her mind a name was forming: his name. Soon it would be close enough to pull it to her, like a handle to open a door.
    She stepped backwards. Her heart thudded in her throat. He had flung his right arm up and his face was perfectly still, as if sleep had caught him in the middle of a breath. She kept backing away, through the door, into the kitchen where her suet pastry still lay on the table. She lifted the saucepan off the gas and peered inside. The meat had cooked too long, and the gravy was as sticky as toffee. Isabel turned off the gas, untied her apron and brushed the flour off it, over the sink. She had placed a tiny mirror there and her face stared back at her, pale and startled, with bright eyes. She bit her lip, hard, until it hurt and the skin went white. It was real, then. She was this person, Isabel Carey. On the wall the little clock, which Philip had rescued from his dad’s Jowett before it was scrapped, said ten to eleven. Isabel watched the clock for a full minute, to be sure that time was moving, and then she left the kitchen.
    He was still there. Fast asleep, deadbeat. No wonder, she thought, and then checked herself. Why was it no wonder? But she knew. Everywhere she looked, more of his life appeared from the shadows. Charlie used to let her watch while he developed film in his improvised darkroom