The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  The vegetables had failed. She had failed.

  She had wondered then, What am I good for? She had passed a handful of exams and done moderately well at a secretarial college; she had learned shorthand, though she doubted she could remember much of it now, and could type at a speed of thirty words a minute (a good typist could do forty-five). She still had a sound backhand, though she had not played tennis in four years and could not find a way, in her present circumstances, to put this particular skill to any practical use. She was a wife and a mother and she supposed that she had made a fair job of both these things—and were these not, when all was said and done, the two most important roles a woman could have? But she had not seen her husband in more than three years and she had failed to put fresh food on the table for her child. She had lived with her failure for many months and told no one because defeatism was now a crime in wartime.

  In the weeks leading up to Christmas, she had decided to go up to town to do her Christmas shopping, even though Christmas in wartime (and this was their fifth) was a pitiful affair. Abigail, however, was excited, though having only experienced wartime Christmases Abigail’s expectations were set rather low.

  She had taken the nine o’clock train, arriving at Baker Street a little after ten o’clock. She had made her way by bus to Bond Street and there ran into Lance Beckwith.

  ‘Diana Pettigrew! Is that really you?’

  He came out of nowhere (in fact, he came out of Boots, the chemist, but she wasn’t to learn this until later) and the use of her maiden name disorientated her for a moment. It was another moment before she realised who he was, this tall middle-aged man, incongruous in a light grey suit and a paisley-pattern silk scarf on this drearily overcast December day, a soft felt hat pushed to the back of his head and a smile in his eyes.

  ‘Lance!’ And at once the drearily overcast December day and the few hurrying Christmas shoppers and the stream of red buses and black cabs on Bond Street, the sandbags, the bombsites, the uniforms faded away. She thought of sunshine and birds singing and trees thick with summer foliage from a summer that had ended more than twenty years ago. It was Lance.

  ‘Diana Pettigrew. Well I never.’ He stood back to regard her, his eyes narrowing as though he viewed her from that distant place, that summer twenty years ago, but the smile never wavered, so that she felt a little flustered. Of course he was older, there were lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and the flesh at his cheeks had sunk a little, but still she felt a little flustered. ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ he said.

  Diana laughed. ‘That’s what people say when someone has deteriorated beyond all recognition.’

  ‘That’s not what I say! And anyway, it’s not true as I recognised you instantly.’

  She laughed again, conceding this. ‘I, on the other hand, would probably have passed you on the street without another glance if you hadn’t stopped me.’

  That was untrue. He looked so different to every other person in Bond Street that morning she would have noticed him regardless.

  ‘Oh dear. Have I gone so badly to seed?’

  ‘Not at all. You look the picture of health and vitality—as I am sure you well know. Where have you just sprung from? The Riviera?’ Lance had an unseasonal tan on his face and hands.

  ‘Boots!’ he replied, holding up a small brown bottle as proof then banging his chest. ‘I may look the picture of health and vitality but this climate is doing its best to bring me low.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have guessed it—you look marvellous!’

  ‘What an outrageous flatterer you’ve become, Diana. I would not have believed it of you. Come on—let’s find a cup of tea somewhere. What do you say?’ And he held out his arm to her.

  She had not even begun her shopping, had planned to complete everything by lunchtime so that she could lunch at Debenhams in Oxford Street and catch the two o’clock train home. Having tea with Lance Beckwith was not on the agenda but she took his arm and went with him anyway, because of John.

  He found a little cafe on Conduit Street, a dreary enough sort of place into which one would not dream of going but for the war. As it was, they were grateful for the tiny three-legged table they were allocated in the window, and the mismatching folding chairs they sat down on, and the menu which was a single sheet of typed paper with the words . . .

  Tea

  Bread and butter

  Bread no butter

  . . . printed on it, and Lance remarked that it would be quite amusing in a music hall comedy sketch and Diana agreed and suggested they order the tea. His hair, now that he had removed his hat, was very black, too black to be entirely real. She steered her gaze away from it. It did not quite fit the sense she had of his otherworldliness, the whisper of tropical skies and exotic locations that hung around him, eclipsing, for a blissful moment, the drabness of wartime London. She forgave him the too-black hair.

  Once they had ordered, Lance offered her a cigarette and when she refused leaned back in his chair to light one for himself with a long and thoughtful gaze.

  ‘You’re married,’ he said, noticing this fact with the sharpness of a man who made it his business to notice such details.

  ‘Yes. Gerald. 1930. He’s a stockbroker. Was a stockbroker. Currently he’s with the tank regiment. One child, Abigail, aged three and a half, at home in Bucks and under the watchful supervision of a helpful neighbour.’ She smiled. And thus could her life be summed up. ‘I’m Christmas shopping. You?’

  ‘Ah, nothing so conventional, I’m afraid.’ It seemed he was going to leave it at that, but after exhaling a stream of smoke he went on, ticking each item off on his fingers: ‘Not married, no kids, certainly not a stockbroker, definitely not a home in Bucks or Herts or Middlesex or Berkshire or indeed anywhere within striking distance of a golf course—and, as you can see, no tank regiment,’ he finished with a flourish. ‘Not that I’ve anything against golf courses, you understand, it’s just I’ve no wish to live near one.’

  ‘I don’t think we do live near a gold course,’ Diana protested. ‘Or if we do, I’ve never come across it.’

  ‘Impossible. Nowhere in Bucks is more than a mile from the nearest golf course.’

  ‘Well, I shall have to take your word for it. How did you avoid the tank regiment?’ she asked, deciding to be direct.

  ‘Easy. Out of the country. South America. Argentina mostly. Spent most of the last ten years down there following one business opportunity or another. Interesting place. Usual rules don’t apply. It can make a chap or break him.’

  All of which told her precisely nothing, though it did explain the unseasonal tan. ‘And which was it? Did it make you or break you?’

  ‘Both. And neither—for here I am, as you see!’ He laughed and was saved from further explanation by the girl arriving with their tea, which she slopped onto the table with all the ceremony of a pig farmer at swill time before promptly demanding payment.

  ‘Beautifully done, my dear,’ Lance said to the girl as he handed over sixpence. ‘One could be at the Ritz.’

  She ignored this and left.

  Diana laughed, and it was wonderful to laugh when it had begun to seem that laughter played no part in one’s world. ‘Lance, it’s so very good to see you,’ she said, surprising herself by reaching across the table and squeezing his arm. And then she ruined it by saying, ‘You’re the only person left who knew John. The only person I can talk to about him,’ and there they were, the old tears that she had not shed for a decade or longer, but she smiled because she really was happy to see him. And Lance, bless him, just smiled and patted her hand and let her pour the tea, which gave her the space to compose herself.

  When she had, and the first mouthfuls of tea had been drunk, they talked about John, for Lance had been her brother’s school friend and knew stories about him that his family did not know, and there were other stories that they both knew and that they remembered together and laughed over, and she talked finally of that dreadful day, of John�
��s motorcycle running at speed into a wall a mile outside Cambridge on a summer afternoon in May in the final weeks of term, a brilliant young man’s life ended in a senseless motor accident, and Lance listened in silence. He knew the details already, but everyone’s experience of death is different, and when she had last seen Lance, at the funeral, it had still been too raw to talk of such things. They had shaken hands at the church door and agreed to keep in touch.

  She had not seen him in twenty-two years. And now he and she were the only ones left who remembered.

  ‘Your parents are both . . .?’

  ‘Dead, yes. Mum within the year. I don’t think she ever really got over John, you know. And Dad six years later.’

  A horrid six years, with Dad waiting to die.

  Diana spoke simply because it was the only way to express the sheer horror of that time. They had folded up and died, her family, in that single moment when John’s motorcycle had crashed. But no, they had not all died, for here she was, the sole survivor. She thought of herself seated in a lifeboat adrift in an ocean as the rest of her family sank beneath the waves.

  Then Gerald had rescued her.

  She did not tell Lance this; rather, she smiled at him and let a comfortable silence fall between them. She wondered what he thought of her, a middle-aged wife and mother. She had been a girl still at their last meeting at the door of the church. Seventeen, gauche and unformed, just out of school, and he had been a friend of her brother, in a formal suit, shaking hands with her dad like a man who had been out in the world, though he must have been barely twenty-one himself. So tall and strong, as her family had crumbled around her. She had wanted to stand before him and feel his arms holding her up, holding them all up. Instead, Lance had gone and twenty-two years had passed. And now they sat together in a cafe in Conduit Street.

  Their table was bumped by another couple brushing past as they weaved their way towards the door, a GI and his girl, unspeaking and grave, intent only on themselves. Do we look like that? she wondered. Grave, intent only on ourselves? Do we look like a couple? The thought came unbidden and she pushed it aside uneasily even as she thought of the hat she had chosen that morning, the slim black gloves she had selected and that lay now on the table beside her, her fur coat from the final summer before the war but still in good condition; she thought of the lipstick she had applied hastily in the hallway mirror before she left home and not reapplied since. She had no sense of how she looked now to Lance. To any man.

  ‘You must find it lonely,’ he said. ‘With your husband away.’

  She reached for her gloves and smoothed the seam of one of them with her finger. Why had she taken them off? It was cold and normally one would not remove one’s gloves in a small and rather seedy cafe in Conduit Street. She looked up, smiled. ‘But I have Abigail. She is a comfort. Though one does feel such a failure as a mother, trying to provide for her.’ She stopped, ashamed at the triteness of her reply. She slid her fingers into her gloves, snapped the little buttons at her wrist, and looked up again. ‘Yes, I find it lonely. Dreadfully.’

  ‘It’s a difficult time,’ he said, and whether he meant John’s death or the war or both or neither did not seem to matter.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed; it was a difficult time, but she felt a calmness she had not felt in a long while.

  ‘Come and see me.’ He slid a card over the table. ‘I think I can help.’

  Diana thought of Gerald, who had rescued her and who was in North Africa or perhaps elsewhere, and as Lance poured her a second cup his card lay on the table between them.

  Lance could help her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The sympathetic landlady at whose Shoreditch boarding house Nancy Levin had been born and where, four years later, her mother had died, had proved to be a good friend to the Keys, initially to the deserted and friendless Jessie and later to her orphaned daughter.

  Mrs Silver, for this was the landlady’s name, took a certain satisfaction in rescuing the destitute. ‘A person don’t need to be a Christian to have Christian morals and virtues,’ she had often said, which was to say Mrs Silver had been born into the Orthodox Jewish faith and had no more time for the Christian faith than she had for Judaism, which she had abandoned at the age of seventeen when she had fallen pregnant to a rabbi and had set out into the world on her own terms.

  It was in this world, then, that the four-year-old Nancy had found herself and in which she soon thrived. Mrs Silver’s own children being long since grown up, and there being no Mr Silver (the title ‘Mrs’ being one that Mrs Silver had conferred on herself without feeling the need of a minister to confer it on her), and being over fifty and feeling a lack in herself that a sweet-natured, four-year-old child might fill, Mrs Silver had offered the child a home. True, Nancy was expected to fetch and carry for Mrs Silver’s boarders, run errands and generally pay her own way, but this was the natural way of things, and it still left time for her to attend the overcrowded school down the street to learn her letters and numbers and scripture.

  At thirteen, Nancy finished her schooling, intending to expand her role in the boarding house run by Mrs Silver with a view to someday taking over the business. At this point, fate, as it had done before, stepped in, striking the sixty-year-old Mrs Silver down stone dead, of a stroke, over breakfast one bright morning in May. Nancy, finding herself alone and abandoned for the second time in her short life, her modest ambitions thwarted, wasted little time in self-pity (for her predicament was not unusual, she saw thwarted ambition and families lost everywhere she looked) and soon found herself a position in a hat shop in Bethnal Green Road.

  The hat shop was owned by a Madame Vivant who spoke with a heavy French accent though she came originally from Hoxton and was no more French than the hats she sold which were labelled Made in Paris and Made in Milan though they heralded from a large factory in Birmingham. Nancy found herself on five shillings a week in a dingy back room packing and unpacking stock. It was a far cry from the Shoreditch boarding house, but the wages were better and the other shop girls were fun—Miriam, a giggling dark-haired Jewish girl from Aldgate, and Lily, a willowy, delicate-looking girl who walked with a stoop to hide her almost-six-foot height. There was also Mme Vivant’s assistant, a girl called Milly Fenwick, who was a little older than the others, and who only spoke in sharp tones to remind you of something you’d failed to do, but on the whole Nancy considered she had landed on her feet.

  Six years passed rapidly. Nancy now knew about hats; she peered at the hats in the windows of the Bond Street shops and dreamed one day of working there. She had, in short, a new ambition. Mrs Silver and the days in the boarding house in Shoreditch already seemed very distant. Perhaps it would have happened, too. At the time Nancy had believed it: her own hat shop, her own girls. There was nothing wrong with ambition. But there was fate, too, and she had not reckoned on that.

  They had taken the train to Clacton for the Whitsun bank holiday, herself and Miriam and Lily, a few short weeks before the start of the war but far enough away that war had not even seemed a possibility. On that day—a pleasingly warm and cloudless day, the sort of day that you hoped for on a bank holiday but rarely got—the three girls had ridden the rollercoaster (twice), bathed in the pool, seen the Punch and Judy show and finally, having exhausted the pier, linked arms and run laughing along the esplanade.

  And this was there they had run into Milly Fenwick and Milly’s young man, to whom she had recently become engaged.

  ‘There’s Milly!’ Miriam exclaimed, flapping a hand, her words indistinct as she tackled a wad of fluffy pink candy floss.

  There was Milly, frozen on the esplanade with her young man beside her, in her Sunday-best coat and shoes and one of Mme Vivant’s newest and most expensive creations perched on her head and an expression on her face like she had bitten into a toffee apple and chipped a tooth. But Miriam marched over and demanded, ‘Is this your young man, then, Milly? Why dontcha introduce us?’ And Milly, cornered, said ‘This is
my fiancé. This is Joseph.’

  ‘Joe,’ he corrected her.

  Nancy said nothing, offered only a polite smile. Milly’s young man was like any number of young men you might see striding along Bethnal Green Road on a Saturday night: an ordinary face, smooth-shaven, a chin with a dimple in it, and unblinking grey eyes, thick dark brown hair slicked down with Brylcreem beneath a grey felt hat pushed to the back of his head, jacket slung over his shoulder, a collarless shirt unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves rolled up over thickly muscular arms, hands in pockets and a girl on his arm. And Nancy wondered why him, and why Milly, for they did not look like a match at all. She had imagined Milly with a clerk or a policeman, someone dull but polite. Not this. This man had a swagger. You wouldn’t trust this man at all.

  A seagull swooped down and hovered above his head letting out a shrill cry, as though it was calling to him or marking him out in some way, and he shot it a curious look. Then the grey eyes turned to her, looking at her, and she saw his eyebrows go up in slow, dawning surprise as though he knew her and had run into her unexpectedly, which was strange as they had never met before. He stared at her with an odd, dazed expression.

  ‘I’m Joe,’ he said, even though they had done all that already, the introductions. But he wasn’t introducing himself to them all, he was saying it to her. And the way he said it, it was as though he had said, It’s me, here I am, though why he would say that or why she would think it, Nancy couldn’t say.

  She made no reply. Instead, she turned and walked away.

  Afterwards, she thought, why had she walked away like that? She didn’t know then and she didn’t know now. She only knew that she had looked at him and something had lurched within her.

  Milly made some excuse; there was some prior engagement, some pressing reason why she and her fiancé must depart at once. No one tried to prevent them leaving and in another moment Milly and her fiancé had gone.