The Undertow by Jo Baker Page B

man’s land days later, it had seemed like rare good news. But all you had to do is look at a picture of him, a picture from afterwards, and you could see that he wasn’t well, he wasn’t the man he had been. He was shadowed, hollowed out inside.
    He was infected. Why did no-one notice? He’d caught death out there on no man’s land, as he lay out amongst the dead. They let him bring the contagion home with him, God help him. Let him, through no fault of his own, pass it on to his wife, like with the Spanish flu.
    Which leaves their daughter, a tiny daughter. And it makes her think of Billy: Billy bounding through to the kitchen, bringing the smell of fog and wool and school. Billy sitting at the tea table, scrubbed up and shining and solemn, and his pleasure when she brings out the cake box, and lets him choose between a vanilla slice, and a cherry bakewell, and a macaroon. To think of the dark hollow eatenness of that poor infected man, of death worming through his young wife’s heart, to think that they could find no solace at all, no joy that was worth the suffering for, even in their child.
    She used to say things like,
when all this is over
, and,
afterwards
. She would think that if you had your man back then you were lucky, that it was everything you’d need.
    Ahead, the stranger moves on down the street. Their twinned footfalls are muffled by the fog. He pauses under the second streetlamp. He wears a brownish coat and hat, she notices. He carries a small suitcase. He peers at a front door. The Clarys’ house, halfway up the street from hers. He moves on.
    There is tea to make, and the table to set, and the old man is going out later to his class, and she’ll have a quiet evening with her knitting. Billy’ll choose the vanilla slice, she knows. And the old man will have the macaroon, which leaves the tooth-jangling sweetness of the cherry bakewell for her.
    She passes through the white glow of the second streetlamp and outinto the blur of fog on the other side. She slips the basket back onto her arm, and rifles in her pocket for her key. Up ahead, under the third streetlamp, the man is peering at the front doors, picking out house numbers. A new rent man, she thinks as she gets closer; a tallyman. Or door-to-door salesman perhaps, with that suitcase. Whatever he’s after, it’s nothing to do with her. She’s paid this week’s rent already, she’s not buying anything, and she doesn’t owe anyone anything beyond what she can settle on a Friday. She’s almost beside him now: he’s checking the Hollidges’ door, next door but one to home. She steps aside and off the kerb onto the cobbles to go past him, but he turns and follows her round, watching her. In the corner of her eye she sees his profile as she moves past him—a strange face, bony, taut.
    The key presses hard through her woollen gloves. She steps back up onto the pavement and approaches her own door. He moves too, coming round behind her, and she knows he’s checking the house number.
    “Ah.”
    She isn’t going to look round. She’s just going to go in and shut the door behind her and ignore him, and even lock the door behind her if she has to. She’s not got time or money to waste. These people: what do they think they’re doing, intruding like this? Hovering around a lone woman as she lets herself into an empty house. In the dark. Her skin blooms with perspiration.
    “Madam?”
    Despite herself, she glances at him. He stands almost directly under the streetlamp. His face is shadowed by his hat brim; her gaze drops down the length of his brown coat and lands on his boots. They stand out stark in the gaslight. They’re old; the soles are scuffed thin at the toes. And the trouser cuffs above them are worn through at the edge. She sees what he probably thinks people won’t notice—that he’s snipped off the fraying threads of the hems in an attempt to neaten them. Her heart flushes through with unexpected sympathy: whoever he is, he