The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  Gerald had grown up in the shadow of war. An uncle, his father’s only brother, had died in the second South African War in the first days of the new century, a few weeks before his own birth. He was fourteen at the outbreak of the Great War and spent his years at a minor public school in Dorset watching as the senior boys left in a blaze of glory, went off to France and were cut down a few weeks later, and he fully expected to join them. But the armistice came in his final year of school and he was spared.

  He was not spared for long. A telegram arrived at the school just a week later announcing the death of his parents in a road accident.

  They were out in Ceylon, his father a railway engineer who had accepted a position in the colonies in the first year of the war and took his wife with him, leaving Gerald at the minor public school. The war came and he and they were separated, and he felt it keenly, but most people were separated in war. His father, Percy Meadows, a kindly man with an anxious nature and a tendency towards melancholia, wrote him letters full of technical details and fascinating statistics about the railway. His mother, Abigail, a stout, hearty clergyman’s daughter who laughed a lot at life but whose laughter turned to tears sometimes when she thought no one was looking, wrote him endearing letters that described in colourful detail colonial life and the other wives and the endless tennis and polo parties and the trouble with the servants and, once, how an elephant had come crashing through a wall and into the house.

  None of it seemed entirely real. His parents’ sudden death, caused when the car they were travelling in had gone off the road and over a precipice in some mountainous region, did not seem real either. His form master took him aside and that was real. The headmaster called Gerald to his office and offered awkward condolences, he attended a memorial service in the village of his father’s family. And his parents’ letters ceased, all but one letter from his mother, sent the week before her death and arriving, disconcertingly, four weeks after it.

  They were gone. In an instant everything had been swept aside. He experienced something akin to vertigo, as though he, too, were plunging over a precipice, but after so much death it seemed churlish to make too much of it. The world had seen an orgy of death, it was tired of death, tired of mourning. Gerald kept his mourning to himself. He stayed on to the end of the school year, for the fees were paid in advance and his only relative now was an elderly great-aunt in Inverness. After his final exams he had little idea of what he might do, so his form master found him a position in a brokerage firm in the City. It felt an arbitrary decision, going directly into a position rather than trying for Oxford or Cambridge, going into a business about which he knew nothing, but his parents had not left him well provided for so in the end the decision was one of necessity as much as choice.

  He joined Goldberg Staedtler. This distinguished firm, located at Ludgate Hill, had established its offices in the dying years of the eighteenth century when the war against America was raging on the other side of the Atlantic and, unimpeded by the blockades and restrictions of that time, had made fortunes on the back of the tobacco, cotton and sugar trade. For a young man of limited funds and no family, and therefore no distractions, it provided a place and a reason to work hard. By the age of twenty-eight, Gerald made senior broker.

  Then he met Rosamund and it all came crashing down.

  She was the sister of Maurice Lambton, a fellow broker, and had recently returned from New York from where she had, enticingly, retained a trace of an American accent. For some reason never adequately explained, Rosamund was known to everyone, even her own parents, as Bunny. It was a name she somehow lived up to while not appearing to, affording Gerald fleeting glimpses of herself then vanishing with a flick of her hair out of a room and seemingly into thin air. They met at a dance in Mayfair a week into the new year. She wore a knee-length chiffon dress of bottle green hemmed with silken tassels that shimmered when she moved, a mink stole, a string of pearls at her throat and long black gloves, and she smoked her cigarette through an ivory holder. Her hair was bobbed and gleamed with a silky jet shine over a shapely nose and a pointed aristocratic chin and brooding green eyes that made one think of a Siamese kitten lapping a saucer of cream. She danced with everyone that night and appeared to adore everyone equally.

  It was bewildering and Gerald was smitten.

  He spent a wretched time in the days and weeks that followed, eventually engineering an invitation to a weekend party at a house in Berkshire. Bunny would be there. Bunny was there. He was smitten afresh. His every thought was of her, his only desire to see her, she filled his head and his heart, she coursed through his veins. She opened a door and showed him a part of himself he had been unaware existed and he galloped through that door like a horse over a fence. Certainly there were other young men at that weekend party, but Gerald bided his time. He picked his moment. He got up before dawn and presented her with a crocus at breakfast. She laughed, but afterwards she looked at him differently.

  She invited him to a dance in Belgravia the following week. In an agony of joy he danced with her until dawn and walked with her along the Chelsea Embankment, which was nowhere near the dance or her house but seemed a romantic thing to do. When they reached Albert Bridge and were too far from anywhere to walk back home he put her in a cab and kissed her through the window. She laughed and his heart lurched.

  At Easter he arrived at her house with his dead mother’s engagement ring in his pocket, but she had gone out for the evening. He paced up and down her street until midnight, at which time she arrived home in a cab in the arms of another man.

  After that was a bad time. He plunged back to that place he had inhabited ten years previously, when his form master had taken him aside to announce the death of his parents. He had thought it a place he would never return to yet here he was. On that occasion ten years before he had steeled himself against the pain because everyone was in pain, his pain had been filtered through a prism of four years of cataclysmic war. But this time, ten years later, there was no prism. This time the pain was his alone, raw and terrible, and he reeled. The door that had opened, that she had opened, taunted him, and when he looked through it now he saw a no-man’s-land of crushed hope and despair.

  He closed and bolted the door forever. And perhaps, during this time, he looked no different, for he was young enough that pain did not outwardly leave its mark, but his heart had turned black.

  A few months later, as a favour to a friend, and only when he had been assured Bunny would not be there, he attended a tennis party in Ruislip.

  ‘Guv! Looks like smoke over there!’

  Enderby jogged over, stumbling over the rocky terrain, kicking up sand and dust with his boots. He was short enough in the leg that the hem of his khaki shorts almost reached his shins. His shirt sleeves were rolled up—all their shirt sleeves were rolled up—but Enderby’s rolled-up sleeves came down over his elbows. A deep permanent red sunburned V showed at his neck where his shirt was undone, a flash of almost translucent white skin visible where his headscarf had come loose.

  ‘Over there!’ he said, pointing.

  Crouch, a short distance away, scoffed. ‘What smoke? Out ’ere?’ You’re ’avin’ a laugh.’

  Enderby ignored him and indicated the western horizon. ‘Over there.’

  Gerald looked. He could see nothing. He lifted his field glasses to his eyes. Was there perhaps something, a dark shadow, shimmering in the heat? It could be smoke but it could just be low cloud or a mirage. Or a town, it could be a town. He knew it probably wasn’t.

  ‘We’re heading that way anyway,’ he said, making a decision. ‘Let’s move out.’

  But they finished their cigarettes first.

  There was no smoke. And there was no town either. There was nothing.

  After some hours they stopped on a crest and refuelled, Enderby cursing when Crouch spilled a few precious drops of petrol on the ground then shouting at him when he lit a cigarette too close to the engine. Gerald left them squabbling and went
off to relieve himself.

  The feud between the two stemmed from a night out and a girl in Tunis six months earlier. In the week following the city’s liberation a sort of madness had taken over the liberating troops and the newly liberated people that had seen soldiers running wildly down the streets, singing and dancing and drinking and feasting, firing guns and flares and rockets in the air and blasting the horns of purloined vehicles, scaling buildings to hang flags and kiss girls. The French residents had opened up what was left of their cellars and the liberating army, British and American, had been drunk for a week. And some of it had been spiked with petrol and anti-freeze by the Arabs who hated the liberators as much as they hated the Germans occupiers and a number of officers had died horrid deaths. Amid this insanity, Enderby—who had a girl called Elspeth back home in Northallerton—had danced with the widow of a dead French government official, but it was Crouch who had boasted the following morning that he had spent the night with the woman. Whether Crouch had in fact made this conquest Gerald doubted, but Enderby had gone for it, had gone for Crouch’s throat, and the two had ended up in a cell and on report. But rather than put them on a charge, the army had, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send them off into the desert together in a tiny Mk VI with Gerald as their commanding officer.

  Or that was how it felt. It was entirely possible no one had made any such decision, that the fact of Enderby and Crouch ending up together in the desert on this pointless mission was just an accident of fate. Gerald had been in the army long enough not to question its wisdom or to read too much into its decisions. In the first weeks of his arrival and attachment to a tank regiment he had let himself think, with a sort of surreal bemusement, But I am a stockbroker. What am I doing here in a tank in the desert? It was a lazy thought, it was cheap, for everyone was a stockbroker or a meat-carrier or a dairy farmer or a butcher or a miner or a teacher. Ashby had been a barrister.

  A barrister, for God’s sake!

  He was the first person Gerald met as he staggered down the gangway of the troopship in Cairo in late November ’40 with a full kit and a gas mask banging against his lily-white knees. Ashby, already brown and lean as a native, having been there a month, an unlit pipe dangling from the side of his mouth and eyes permanently narrowed against the searing heat and the blistering white light, took one look at him and, with a sardonic laugh, tossed his gas mask into the Nile and led him to the mess.

  They left Cairo almost at once, with the division, and hurtled on that extraordinary five-hundred-mile advance across the desert to overrun the fleeing Italians, taking a hundred and thirty thousand prisoners, capturing four hundred tanks. Ashby was there with him the whole time, his pipe in his mouth, a wry laugh always on his lips. Ashby, who had been a barrister in civvy street, helped him. They helped each other. Like Gerald, Ashby had a wife and small child in a middle-class suburb of London. They talked about ‘after the war’. They went through Sidi Rezegh, the retreat from Tobruk, Gazala, Mersa Matruh, Alam Halfa, the first El Alamein. They would both survive or they would both die.

  It had not occurred to Gerald that one of them might die and the other survive.

  He thought of the burning Sherman in the pre-dawn desert. Fourteen months had passed and it was looking increasingly likely that he, Gerald, would survive but Ashby was dead, fourteen months dead. Gerald would make it home and he had assumed that, on his return, he would seek out Ashby’s widow and child, but now he was no longer sure. The reason for seeking them out was no longer clear.

  The place he had found to relieve himself was a ridge a little beyond the spot they had chosen to stop the tank and as he crested the ridge he found himself at the top of a vast escarpment with a steep drop beyond. At the bottom of this escarpment was a large flat area in the middle of which was an abandoned Scorpion, its arms stuck out before it.

  A minefield. And they had almost missed it. Missing a minefield was actually better than driving into one, but still it was a bit slack to have simply driven blithely past utterly unaware. Not that there was much one could do with it except chart its position. If one knew one’s positon . . . Still, they could record it.

  ‘Crouch! Enderby! Over here.’

  ‘Bloody ’ell! How’d we miss that?’ Crouch said, joining him on the crest of the ridge, and when Gerald offered no reply, ‘How long d’you think it’s been there?’

  Gerald shrugged. ‘Since ’41 at least, I should say.’

  Most of the warfare in the last two years had been concentrated along the coastline far to the north, but this Scorpion looked in good condition and completely undamaged. It was a flail tank, a vehicle with two extending arms designed to be sent into a minefield ahead of the men, the arms beating the ground and making a pathway though the mined area. In reality the Scorpions overheated rapidly in the North African climate and the petrol evaporated after only a couple of hundred yards or so. If they didn’t overheat their air filters got so clogged with dust they simply broke down, at which point they either had to be repaired on the field of battle under enemy fire or they were abandoned—as this one evidently had been. At Alamein the sappers had ended up going in on foot with bayonets, prodding the earth and locating the mines that way.

  ‘Looks in good nick,’ said Crouch, making no move to go down to it.

  ‘How long’s that thing been down there, then?’ said Enderby, joining them, his flat Yorkshire vowels even more pronounced than usual.

  ‘Dunno. Why don’t you go down there and take a shufty, Endy?’ suggested Crouch with a sneer.

  ‘I ain’t going nowhere near no bloody minefield. Is it one of ours?’

  Gerald cast his field glasses over the terrain and something glinted in the sunlight at ground level. No, the mines weren’t theirs. They were German anti-personnel ‘S’ mines, about the size of a tin can buried just beneath the ground with three prongs sticking up out of the sand. That was what he could see, the tip of one prong. He lifted his gaze to take in the entire plateau. How many were there? How far did it stretch? No way to tell. If you stepped on one of these the initial explosion flung the mine upwards. A secondary explosion sent hundreds of steel ball bearings into the air. He had seen it happen, he had no desire to experience it for himself.

  ‘I think we chart its position from a safe distance and move on,’ he announced, giving his final order of the day, and Crouch and Enderby almost fell over themselves in their haste to comply.

  They were soon underway again, steering well clear of the minefield, which meant moving over rough rocky terrain. This was not good news for the Mk VI, which was a very short vehicle in relation to its width, meaning it lurched alarmingly and if they weren’t careful Crouch, in the driver’s seat up beside the engine, would throw up. They were already driving with the hatch open from the last time he had spewed.

  They were headed in a vaguely westerly direction and sooner or later they were bound to run into someone and hopefully it would be someone from their own side. That was about as much as one did hope for. The bigger picture—battles, strategy, theatres of war—there was no point worrying about, for one could do nothing about them. Gerald had no illusions about his own, or his men’s, heroic capabilities. Mostly what had been required of him over the last four years was to know when to take cover and when to run and when to sit tight, which he had done, often, sealed into the tank providing support for the infantry and under heavy enemy fire hour after hour and not being able to return fire or to turn and run or do anything really except take it and hope it would be alright.

  And sometimes it wasn’t alright.

  Gerald had gone to a tennis party in Ruislip in the summer of ’28.

  He went with bad grace, determined to hate everyone and everything. Finally Marian Fairfax, at whose house the tennis party was held and at whose behest he had sacrificed his Saturday to motor into darkest Middlesex, took him aside and roundly scolded him. Chastened, smarting but still aggrieved (for what did Marian Fairfax know of his black heart?) he changed into h
is tennis whites. Bunny hadn’t come and in her place was a girl he didn’t know. She was a curious little thing, not pretty, her snub nose almost like a child’s and her chin a little too prominent and lips too narrow around a too-large mouth that badly applied lipstick had only accentuated. But she was poised, somehow, with an elegant neck and very fierce, very frightening little eyes that told him she was out of her depth socially and that she minded this very much. The girl—her name was Diana—had been partnered with Eddie Devlin, which was bad luck for her as Eddie always took the whole thing very seriously and made his partner pay if they fluffed a shot. But miraculously the girl was up to it, more than up to it; she matched him shot for shot, whipping out stunning backhands one after another. It was marvellous to see and the most marvellous part was that the girl’s fear utterly vanished and she glowed, positively glowed—until Ed sent a ball right at poor Cecily Porter’s face in the deciding set and that was the end of that. They had won, Eddie and the girl, but Gerald could see her dismay at the manner of their victory and when Phyllis Devlin caused a nasty little scene afterwards her dismay turned to horror. An outraged horror, he saw; the outraged horror of a very upright, moral person when faced with a bully. And, damn it, Ed was a bully. And, as much to his own surprise as hers, Gerald presented himself to the girl shortly afterwards and suggested he drive her home.

  It was all a long time ago. A tennis party in Ruislip in 1928.

  Where the hell was Bani Walid?

  Gerald stuck his head out through the Mk VI’s turret and scanned the western horizon. What if they should get this far, survive three years of war, only to die like this, blundering about in the desert? He was the commanding officer, it was incumbent on him to keep his men safe, to get them home. He imagined, with unsettling clarity, an ageing and weathered Mrs Enderby many miles away in Northallerton, a woman with broken veins in her legs and bunions on her feet, waiting for her boy to come home. He imagined Endersby’s Elspeth working silently and solemnly in the dairy, day after interminable day, waiting for the boy who would never come home. He had a little more trouble picturing Crouch’s family, imagining a violent, angry father and a terrified meek woman, Crouch’s mother, living in nightly fear of her husband’s fists. He imagined the telegram coming to the house and the terrified, meek Mrs Crouch falling into a faint from which she would never recover. He could see it all quite clearly. The longer he spent in the company of Enderby and Crouch the more vivid these images of their families became, and always he pictured them at the moment at which news of their sons’ deaths were received.