The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  Abigail screamed.

  Diana hesitated, then she stood up, her hat in her hand.

  ‘Go on, dear. Off you go, now, and don’t worry about a thing,’ said Mrs Probart, and Diana felt her dismay grow. She had told Mrs Probart she had a medical appointment in Town. She had said she was to have some tests. She had been unspecific. She had intimated something was amiss. Mrs Probart had closed her down at once before she could say more. Of course she would babysit, there was no question of it. She was only too happy to help. You poor dear.

  ‘Bless you,’ Diana said, leaving at once because she could no longer be in the room with this dear old woman who just wanted to help.

  She paused at the hallway mirror to reaffix her hat. Then she reapplied her lipstick, though it would be a two-hour journey till she got there. She smoothed her gloves over her fingers and pulled the fox fur stole around her shoulders. Up to this point she had not raised her eyes to her face in the mirror other than to apply the lipstick. Now she looked at herself and saw a woman she did not know, a woman who was about to do something she would have thought unimaginable a few short months ago.

  A final farewell to Mrs Probart stuck in her throat and remained unspoken and, under cover of her daughter’s cries, she slipped out of the front door and away.

  A bus came through the village every hour on the hour but by a quarter past it had still not arrived and twice Diana made to leave and twice she turned back. At last the tiny local bus trundled around the corner and drew up at the bus stop with no explanation of its tardiness over and above a general sense that this was wartime and any bus turning up at all should be a cause for celebration not complaint. Diana boarded and took a window seat. The other passengers were all Home Counties wives like herself, in smart little hats and black gloves and fur-collared winter coats and stout black court shoes, hoping to catch the ten o’clock London train, but it was wartime and no one spoke as the train may or may not arrive and no one had any expectation of getting to Town or of finding any of the things they wanted there even if they did.

  Her journey had begun inauspiciously and Diana braced herself for every sort of delay that the war and the bus company and the Metropolitan Railway might throw her way, so she was unprepared for the bus driver putting his foot down and swinging around the country lanes as though he were at Le Mans, getting them to the station with time to spare. She was unprepared for the ten o’clock train arriving to the minute and the guard blowing his whistle fifteen seconds later. She was unprepared for the winding country lanes and the bleak winter fields and the endless rows of hedges flashing past in a rush so that they reached Rickmansworth in such good time the guard paused for a cuppa as the steam engine was replaced with an electric. In no time they were off, this time on the electrified lines, and they sailed through Pinner and Harrow and Wembley like the Flying Scotsman.

  Outside Neasden they stopped. There was no warning, there was no station in sight. The train simply stopped; its engines throbbed, softly and distantly, then fell silent. They sat and did not move. Diana sat and did not move. Beyond the window the ravaged suburbs of north-west London lay before her. A sprinkling of overnight frost still covered the mounds of earth and rubble. Outside no one stirred. The street below her window had an abandoned feel to it. She wondered where everyone had gone. She thought about the train in which she sat perched high on its embankment, sealed and silent with its cargo of wives in their fur coats and their Liberty gloves coming up to Town to shop.

  After fifteen minutes the guard could be heard outside down on the tracks, picking his way carefully because the rails were live, announcing that a bomb had landed on the line ahead and they would be stuck until it was defused or went off.

  ‘How thrilling!’ announced the portly woman in a fur coat who had got on at Chalfont & Latimer and was seated opposite her, the only other occupant of the compartment.

  It was not thrilling. It was infuriating, it was inconvenient, it was a little frightening and it was, potentially, deadly. No single part of it was thrilling. Diana gave her a tight smile. The woman was wearing a very ugly hat that she was almost certainly very pleased with and a great deal of powder on her face that gave the impression she had been caught in a bomb blast and was coated in dust. Diana slid further into the corner, her face close to the window, putting a barrier around herself intended to discourage conversation. It was now entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that she would be prevented from continuing her journey. She studied the sprinkling of frost that lay on the mounds of earth and rubble below.

  ‘My grandchildren will be very excited when I tell them about this!’ the portly woman said. It did not quite ring true. It was an act. Her eyes were very wide and blinking rapidly and her gloved fingers moved fretfully over her handbag. The woman was frightened.

  Diana gave her another quick smile. She stood up, pulled the window down and stuck her head out. Up and down the length of the train other people were doing the same thing, heads bobbing in and out, looking up and down, looking for the bomb as though there would be something to see. There was nothing to see.

  ‘What can you see, my dear?’ said the woman.

  ‘Lots of people sticking their heads out the window,’ Diana replied. She sat down and closed the window. ‘I expect they’ll offload us and send us back on another train and we’ll all be home in time for lunch,’ she said, because the woman was anxious and it cost her nothing to be friendly, to offer reassurance. She gave an encouraging smile and as she was already pretending to be something she wasn’t—a woman going up to Town to undergo medical tests—she found she could also pretend to be something else she was not, which was a young woman who was perfectly calm in a crisis. And it was easier to pretend with a stranger.

  She realised it was increasingly likely she would not be able to keep her appointment.

  Lance had told her he was not married. No, that was not quite true—he had merely said he was not married, which did not preclude the possibility he had been married. Lovers then. Yes, there would have been many, in South America. What sort of women did he like? Not the sort who travelled up to Town on the Metropolitan Line train in prewar fur coats and prim hats and fussy black shoes and their last-but-one pair of silk stockings. No, something altogether more exotic. Or was that simply the impression he wished to give? Perhaps it was all a front and he was as conventional as the next man? He had seemed conventional enough, she supposed, as her brother’s school friend twenty or more years ago. She realised she could not read him at all while she knew herself to be an open book. He had guessed at once at her loneliness and her attempt to deny it had made her ridiculous. Of course she was lonely, every wife in England was lonely. She had her child, yes, but he had exposed a longing that was like a physical presence. He had made that longing worse. She was a book that was not merely open, it was underlined and annotated with student notes provided. And yet she had exchanged furtive postcards with Lance, signing her name with a single initial, avoiding any reference to the reason for her visit, merely agreeing a time—did it not suggest that some part of her, at least, welcomed the clandestine?

  The train did not move. She pulled out her compact and reapplied her lipstick. They were stuck, all up, for three hours.

  At the end of that time the engine started up, the train slid cautiously forward and a round of restrained cheers rang up and down the carriages. All thoughts of shopping in Town had gone and all anyone wanted was to get home so that, when they slunk finally into Finchley Road, the train emptied. The portly woman in the fur coat was the first to leap off. She had not stopped talking from the moment the train had sprung back into life till the moment it had arrived at Finchley Road and her departure left more than a merely physical absence. Diana took a slow, steady breath and stood up, preparing to leave too. But she had invented a medical appointment. If she gave up now her deceit would be for nothing and it had cost her a great deal already. She sat down again and when the train headed into the tunnel towards Baker Str
eet she was the only passenger.

  Now that she was in London, the city and the people and tunnels and the trains and the buildings swept over her so that she became tiny and her lie became unimportant. She changed onto the Circle Line, eastbound. The wives and grandmothers from Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were gone. Now her fellow passengers were dock workers, civil servants from the various wartime ministries, servicemen and women. At Liverpool Street the train swung southwards and Diana got out. She followed a stream of people up onto the street and along Bishopsgate, turning left and becoming at once lost in the warren of tiny lanes and passages, eventually turning back and retracing her steps and asking for directions. When she finally found Botolph Passage she was so late it was beyond late. But the war turned notions of time on its head and, finally deciding she was at the right place, she walked up to a seedy little door and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened it and entered.

  The building was an old Victorian warehouse. A hatch and a little platform far above her head indicated where, in another age, goods had been delivered; the faded letters of a long-gone merchant were just visible on the brickwork. She climbed a narrow stairway that turned in on itself once, twice, a third time before she reached the top floor. She met no one. The place appeared to be deserted. Paint and wallpaper peeled from the walls in great strips with brownish damp stains visible beneath, and at various points someone at some time had placed mousetraps that contained nothing but a thick layer of dust which suggested that even the mice had departed. At the top of the final twist of the stairs she was met by a passageway and a single unmarked doorway. She stood before the doorway, but only for a moment. She had come this far. She was not about to change her mind.

  She straightened the seams of her stockings, raised her hand and knocked twice.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was Joe. He was still some distance off, making his way across the sleeping bodies, stopping and searching each face, searching—Nancy presumed—for her.

  But how could it be Joe? He was meant to be on his ship, he was meant to be sailing on the evening tide. And he was not in his sailor’s uniform. They had seen him off that morning in his new uniform; now, inexplicably, he was back, wearing a battered old duffle coat that did not belong to him and without a hat.

  He saw her at that moment and at once started to make his away over, his face set hard, something controlled and awful in his eyes. The shadow that had come over her lengthened until Nancy felt her skin recoil at each new place that it touched. But she sat quite still. She did not want Emily to wake and she reached out blindly and laid a hand on her sleeping child’s head.

  ‘They was waiting for me!’

  Joe crashed down at her side, crouching low and breathing in short gasps. He had brought with him the cold night air and the damp and the acrid stink of smoke from outside, and something else: an edge that had not been there before, a danger that had a different taste to it than the usual danger of air raids and bombers overhead, of unexploded bombs and landmines.

  ‘What do you mean? Who was waiting for you?’ She tried to read the answer in his eyes. They had frightened her a little that first day on the seafront at Clacton, but today they were the eyes of a boy. He was so young, the man in him seemed to have been stripped away.

  ‘The cops,’ he said.

  For a time neither of them spoke. Joe crouched low by her side, his eyes flicking from side to side, watching every movement on the platform around them, and Nancy stared at her hands clenched tightly together in her lap. His words did not sink in and she did not want him to explain them to her. She just knew Joe was back when she had thought he was gone and she wanted to touch him but she felt as though her touch would be unwelcome, that he was locked inside some place without her.

  ‘Christ!’ he said eventually, and he turned and peered into her face.

  And Nancy, dazed by his look, thought: You were meant to be the strong one. But now she was not sure.

  ‘Joe, there was a man outside the house. I saw him this evening when the siren went off, standing outside in the shadows. I didn’t think nothing of it at the time but he was watching us, I’m sure of it. I think—I’m sure he was a policeman.’

  Joe’s face fell. He ran his hand over his chin; it had been clean-shaven that morning, but now she heard the bristles scratching against the palm of his hand. ‘I almost went to the house—but then I thought you’d be down here so I come here instead.’

  But she had not yet told him the worst part: ‘Joe, I think he was here! The same man—I swear it was him, up on the platform. A few hours ago.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered.

  And she had been certain the man had been looking for someone, that he was looking for Joe—though of course that was just plain daft and she had pushed the thought down but now—

  ‘Joe, what’s happened? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I told you. They was there. I seen them soon as I arrived at the dockside. Two Docks police and a plainclothes.’

  It still seemed bewildering and, perhaps because she did not understand, Nancy felt a flicker of hope. ‘But they could have been waiting for anyone, not just you!’

  Joe shook his head. ‘They takes one look at me and that was it. They was off—blowing whistles and shouting and all sorts. I only just legged it out of there before they could nab me. I hid out in some warehouse.’ He paused to lick his lips, then he shook his head. ‘Christ, that was hairy! Bombs dropping left and right, and me a bloody sitting duck in a tinderbox. Hours I waited. Then I made a break for it and made me way here.’

  Nancy saw him running through the darkness, hiding out in a warehouse, bombs dropping, and suddenly she felt angry. This was his home! They had no right to chase him! Not after all had been through, all that time in the ocean, all those men dead . . .

  ‘But how did they know? I mean, why was they waiting for you?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘No idea. P’raps they been watching me for a while. I don’t know.’

  Perhaps they had been watching him. She let this sink in. Perhaps they had watched him since October. In early November a convoy had made it through, miraculously dodging every U-boat, arriving at the docks loaded with supplies for a nation with only a few weeks of food reserves left. Armed guards had been stationed at the docks, the government had issued new laws with the severest penalties, and the men unloading the ships were searched routinely going in and out of the wharves. But there was always a way: a guard who could be persuaded to look the other way, a clerk who deliberately miscounted, a hole in the fence that even the dogs hadn’t located. And so it was that a steady stream of goods had found their way onto the streets and into back rooms and onto market stalls and beneath the counters of local shopkeepers, and some of it had found its way into the pantry at 42 Odessa Street.

  The Levins had eaten well at Christmas. Nancy wore a new pair of silk stockings. Emily tasted her first piece of chocolate, her first banana, her first tinned peach. Joe toasted the navy with a bottle of Canadian scotch. It had all ended abruptly with Joe’s recall to duty; the Levins would go back to rations and dried eggs and bread and dripping and five-day-old tea-leaves. These things had seemed appalling a few hours earlier as she had stood on the doorstep and watched him leave.

  ‘But Joe, it was only a few odds and ends. It was just stuff you could carry, stuff we could eat ’cause we was starving. That was all. It weren’t enough to hurt no one.’

  Joe frowned. He said nothing.

  ‘Joe? I mean, if you turned yourself in . . .?’

  ‘If I get caught it’s fourteen years. Fourteen years penal servitude.’

  Nancy reeled. ‘But what about your new ship?’

  Joe said nothing. On top of it all he was now a deserter.

  Neither of them had spoken for some time. Joe seemed quite calm. He sat on the hard ground sharing her blanket, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped around them, observing the people sleeping around them as though he and they
were separated by something impassable. The people slept or they got up and shuffled over to the stinking latrines. They coughed and snored and their babies cried, sleeping on as the raid continued far above, sleeping on as Joe silently observed them, as Nancy silently observed Joe.

  Whoever had once owned the buff-coloured duffle coat was at least two sizes smaller than Joe and it was stretched tightly across his shoulders and ended above his wrists, showing an expanse of black-haired forearm. Where had he ditched his sailor’s uniform? Nancy wondered. The thought of him tearing it off and stuffing it into a ditch or into the river appalled her. There seemed no way back from it. No way to undo what had happened. The world around them had changed, shifted on its axis so that everything looked the same but nothing was the same. A hope that had glowed inside her when she had thought the war must surely end soon and perhaps Joe would survive and make it home had withered and was now finally extinguished.

  Emily slept on, lying between them, and this was a good thing. Joe did not touch her, even when she murmured and fidgeted in her sleep under the blanket to find a warmer spot, a more comfortable position. Instead he hugged his knees more tightly, not looking at her, so that it seemed to Nancy that now he was on the run, a fugitive, he was tainted. He was tainted, they both were, and she felt them separate and cut off from everyone else, just as though they were both of them adrift on an ocean. She would have preferred that, she told herself, to this terrifying and silent waiting to be arrested.

  And if he was arrested . . .

  She could not bear it. All that had seemed unbearable before dissolved now into nothing and she wondered at herself for all the worrying and fretting over trifles that no longer mattered. She could not feel her feet, her hands, her lips, the tips of her fingers. She was numb with cold but it was a coldness that came from within and had nothing to do with the blasts of chilled air that blew out of the tube tunnel or the frozen January night far above. She was too cold even to reach out and touch him. They were separate and cut off from everyone but they could not touch each other.