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.
