James Herbert - ‘48

The girls arrived ten minutes later, both of them looking a whole lot prettier than when they’d emerged from the tunnels. The wife of whoever had once occupied the suite next door had great taste in fashion, and it looked like the husband hadn’t been mean with her dress allowance. The girls’ outfits were simple but classy.

Muriel wore a light green knee-length skirt, cream square-shouldered blouse tucked into the waist, the ensemble a little looser than Cissie’s who was, well, a little more up-holstered. Don’t get me wrong – both girls were slim, but Cissie had been given more curves. Her pleated skirt fell just below the knees and she wore a matching jacket, despite the heat (I think she wanted to make the most of what she’d found in the closets), with a white blouse underneath. Neither one wore stockings, though I was willing to bet the previous tenant had plenty – that was their one concession to the climate, I assumed – and both balanced on high heels that did a lot for the shape of their legs. I had to admit it was swell to see the female form looking so goddamn good again, although it went no further than that for me. Not at that time, anyway.

Their hair gleamed from fresh grooming, Muriel’s light-brown locks curling round one cheek, Cissie’s darkly vibrant curls resting over her shoulders. The thin scar line across her face was barely noticeable as she smiled at us three men.

The German, who’d cleared an easy chair for himself when he’d entered the room, stood to attention. ‘It is wonderful to know that such beauty still exists,’ he said to them with oily sincerity.

Cissie ignored him, following the warden’s example by heading straight for the cocktail bar – the booze-laden coffee table where Potter was holding fort. He tipped his glass at her in greeting.

‘Give me something strong, long and life-preserving,’ she begged. ‘Something I can regret tomorrow.’

‘Well there’s gin, but I can’t see no tonic,’ said Potter, lifting bottles and scouring the collection in front of him.

She looked at me accusingly and I said lamely, ‘There’s no call for it.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Open a tin of peaches and use the juice. I’m a girl who’s used to roughing it.’

For the first time that day I grinned. I quickly found the right can and punched a hole in its top with the opener, then handed it to Potter, who’d already worked on the gin.

‘Ice would have been perfect,’ Cissie complained jokingly, ‘but I suppose the Savoy isn’t what it used to be. Mu, I expect it’s champagne for you?’

It was as if a shadow had darkened her friend’s face. ‘A glass of wine will do,’ she responded quietly, and I remembered she and her father had toasted her mother’s memory with champagne in this very hotel.

‘Vino it is,’ piped Potter, picking up the bottle already opened by Stern. ‘And a very sensible choice, if I may say so. Leave the hard stuff to reprobates like me.’

‘And me,’ piped Cissie.

They drank and watched me cooking over the small stoves on the floor, no one saying anything for a while. I think that initial coolness between us all was due to something more than just unfamiliarity: I think it was because there was no trust between us yet, despite what we’d been through together that morning. Even though we were the survivors of a scourged world, we weren’t sure of each other, we weren’t comfortable in each other’s presence. It was different between the two girls – they were already friends – but the rest of us were strangers. Heck, one was even an alien, a Kraut at that. Just sharing the same blood type wasn’t enough, not by a long chalk. Part of the problem, for the girls I mean, was that in a depleted society, our gender roles took on a whole new significance, and they weren’t quite ready for that just yet. None of us were. And to add to the girls’ discomfort, they couldn’t be sure if any of the men they were with were quite sane.

The ice only began to break when I started serving up the food.

THE INFORMATION didn’t come out like this; it was in no sense as concise and dispassionate. The evening developed in its own easy way, you see, after a while people just gabbing when they felt like it, their bellies a little fuller, their heads a little mellowed by the booze; a person could be maudlin one minute, cold-blooded the next, emotional after that, a real mixture of sentiment and hard fact. Regret figured a lot, nostalgia for the good things now gone even more; but grief, having had three years to settle, was pretty much subdued. Here’s what most of that evening’s parley amounted to.

First Cissie, her whole name Cicely Rebecca Briley. Like me, she was of mixed parentage, her father English, mother Jewish. Her folks had run a public house in Islington and she had helped out behind the bar (illegally, of course) until old enough to find herself proper employment, one that might help the war effort. That was back in ‘41 and she was sixteen at the time. With most of the able menfolk off fighting the war, the country was crying out for women to fill the men’s jobs, so Cissie began her working life on a lathe in an engineering company.

On the same day the factory was bombed and a flying piece of metal scythed across her face, her parents’ pub was demolished by another pilotless plane – these were the doodlebugs, the flying bombs, the first German V1s to be used on England and Belgium in June ‘44. Henry Briley was dead when the Heavy Rescue squad dug him out of the rubble, but his wife, Rachel, Cissie’s mother, survived almost another three days with both legs and pelvis crushed, and one arm missing. Cissie’s stay in hospital was only overnight – beds were needed for the seriously ill or injured – and when she left there was no home to go to. It took her two days to locate the hospital they’d taken her mother to, and by that time Rachel was dead. Home gone, parents gone, job gone, there wasn’t much left for Cissie. She moved in with relatives and joined the ambulance service, channelling all her anger and grief into the work and quickly realizing hers was not the only tragedy of this devastating war. Within a year and with Hitler losing, the V2s replaced the V1s; and then everything changed.

Naturally she couldn’t figure out why everybody around her was dropping dead even though the rocket bombs were falling in other parts of the city; but then, nobody could at first, not even the military or the government itself. All hell had broken loose, but the panic was short-lived, as short-lived as the people themselves. It was horrific, a hideous nightmare, the deaths so sudden and so gruesome to watch; and not knowing if they were going to be next added to everyone’s terror. Soon, because Cissie remained healthy while everyone else was dead or dying, she was taken into hospital and blood-tested. Before she knew what was happening she was in the back of a truck with a bunch of other ABneg blood types being driven down to the special sanatorium in Dorset, and it was in the truck that she made friends with Muriel Drake, a fellow passenger and blood kind.

All manner of tests were carried out on the ABnegs at the sanatorium, but still no scientist or medical officer could figure out why they were immune from whatever it was that had been released by the V2 rockets. To make progress towards a solution even more difficult, those very same investigators were falling dead themselves, and it was only when a couple of medics with the immune blood type were found that any sustained research was achieved. Another problem was that it was only in the last decade that truly extensive research was being carried out on blood groupings, so very little was already known. Now they were learning fast, but it was too late.