Floodlight

She always felt judged by St Paul’s Cathedral.  

By evening it was floodlit. A jewel in the view from Waterloo Bridge, its dome floating benignly among the skyscrapers like an icon.  Then at 1am its lights went off as if it turned its back on the dark city in disapproval of its nighttime pursuits.  Mute abandonment leaving her vulnerable to temptation, lead us not.  

It was at those times that she knew she was alone.

That particular alone was about half-past-three, mild for November, the salmon-coloured sky a blanket over the quietly roaring city.  Stepping out onto the bridge, from sheltered Covent Garden, she felt the brisk wind rush by up the river, carrying its distant tang of sea.

The Southbank glowed enticingly on the opposite bank.  The handsome curve of the Festival Hall was crowned by the blue-lit Eye.  ‘Love’s Labours Lost Nov 2-28’ scrolled the tickertape on the wall of the National Theatre, ‘Look Back in Anger Oct 29-Dec 4’.

The bridge was quiet but gently humming.  Nightbuses passed ponderously, and a steady trickle of gliding Priuses and their homeward-bound passengers.  Feeling her head clearing of cocktail fumes, she paused, watching the blinking light on the summit of Canary Wharf, and leaned out over the concrete parapet towards the East.  

It was such a remarkable view, one of the great urban views of the world.  Whenever she felt, as she frequently did, that all London had ever done was chew her up and spit her out, she knew she could still feel some vestige of love for it when she stood here gazing along the river.  After many battered years it was the last echo of the joy the city had beaten out of her, a ghost of that feeling of possibility that had seemed inherent in somewhere with so much energy.  

She wished sometimes that she could go right back to the beginning and do it all again, trade her hard-won cynicism for a pair of fresh eyes.

“Built by women, you know, Waterloo Bridge” said a voice, suddenly next to her.  She glanced round.  It was just an old man, a ‘gentleman of the road’ her father would have termed him.

“During the war.  No men left, see, all on the battlefield or under it, and a new bridge needed.  So what to do?”

The man was bent and grizzled with age and hard living, but retained a whisper of glamour in his threadbare tweed suit and gently proprietary air.  He set down his tattered plastic bag of belongings on the handrail, extracted a cigarette packet from his waistcoat pocket with grimy fingers and proffered it

“Smoke?”

She glanced at the open packet, hesitated, then took one with a rueful smile

“I’d given up..”

“Don’t want to do that, now” said the man, drawing heavily on his fag and passing a shaded match

“Been smoking for sixty years, never done me any harm.”

She lit her cigarette from his roughened hands and looked downriver.

She had left at the right moment, tonight, she reflected.  There was a moment that came in every night when you could feel things turn, feel the darkness begin to get in among the gay abandon, the things in the shadows begin to stir and stretch themselves ready to prowl.  The trick was - and she’d learned this the hard way - the trick was to recognise that moment before it was too late and the darkness submerged you.  Get out while there was still light enough to see the exit.

The man seemed to follow her gaze towards the darkened dome.  

“Wreathed in smoke it was…” he said, almost to himself

“Bloody miracle it survived.  Gave us hope...”

She turned to look at him.  His untidy silver hair was catching the light thrown from Somerset House, but his eyes and the scored valleys in his cheeks were deep in shadow.  There was something insubstantial about his presence, as though he stood slightly apart.  She supposed he was homeless, a lost old man reduced to such indignity when he should be enjoying his retirement.  She wondered how old he was.

“During the blitz? “ she asked gently

The man took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled slowly, the smoke curling up until the breeze caught it and whisked it away

“They’d stopped for Christmas see, two nights of calm in all the bloody horror, ‘scuse my French.

Then they were back.  More than ever.  As if they’d just been regrouping, raining fire from the sky like Hell on Earth”

She tried to imagine it, wailing sirens and the smell of burning, the night sky lit up by the flames, the perils and dangers of this night.  The faceless glass and concrete of this modern city, so little stone or wood.

“It seemed like there’d be nothing left”

There was a long silence.  The clean wind blew fresh on their faces and the river glowed.  Nothing left.  Forsaken below and alone in the darkness that covered the Earth, the seeming triumph of evil...

When he spoke again, his voice crackled like dry leaves

“The fires began to die down just before dawn.

“Total devastation, it was.  There was no hope.”

A chilly grey dawn bringing no light so something so dark.  

“But then, early in the morning the smoke cleared.

And there it was, the dome of St Paul’s.  Like a miracle”

“Still there?”

“Still there.  Among the wreckage.  Untouched.”

He turned to face her and she saw his eyes for the first time, deep green and almost burning in the lights from the bridge.

“It was what kept us going”  he said fervently, as though he really wanted, really needed her to understand

“We knew then we could do it.  If St Paul’s could stand, so could we”

He smiled, seeming almost to glow with the vividness of his words.  She felt his  hopefulness, like a warm glow, light reflecting from his ancient face.

She looked past him onto the river, letting the strengthening wind blow back her hair and taking in the triumph in that darkened dome, of the living, vital city; if St Paul’s could stand, so could we.  She leaned far out and drank it in, like music.

When at last she turned back, the man was gone.  There was nothing but the cigarette butt, cold in her hand, and the humming bridge.