The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  He had taken Diana to Wimbledon once because she had never been. It had been the year the Americans had made a clean sweep of it and they had watched Helen Wills Moody easily account for Elizabeth Ryan in straight sets and Diana had applauded wildly and enthusiastically and he had felt his heart lift. Afterwards they had eaten strawberries and clotted cream out of a bowl with their fingers and he had asked her to marry him. He had had no engagement ring with him, for he had not expected to ask her. It had struck him at the time what a very different thing this was to the thing with Bunny. That had been a voyage, exhilarating and terrifying but tainted by wretchedness and despair and, ultimately, hopelessness. With Diana it was a steady but satisfying climb on a warm August afternoon in the Peak District. Later, when he had located his mother’s engagement ring and presented it to her, she had said, ‘What was your mother’s name?’ And when he had told her she had said, ‘How beautiful, I wish I had met her,’ and, ‘If we are to have a little girl that must be her name.’

  They had married at Marylebone Registry Office after a downpour on a cool October morning and when they had emerged as man and wife the pavements had gleamed wetly in the sunlight.

  But there had been no little girl, and no little boy. There had been two babies in the early years of their marriage that Diana had lost in the first months of her pregnancy and then nothing. He had been unconcerned at their childlessness, for that appeared to be their fate. Diana had been twenty-five when they had married then, somehow, suddenly, she was thirty-five and he forty and he had felt keenly her growing misery, had assured her it did not matter. But it did matter, dreadfully, to her. It was a sort of craving in her, as if without a child she was unfinished, incomplete. He could not feel the same way but he saw how she suffered and it grieved him.

  War had been declared and it seemed to Gerald that his wife had declared her own war, that she had begun rationing, had hidden herself in the deepest shelter, already. The war would make very little difference.

  He had been seconded to the Ministry of Supply. It had not occurred to either of them he might be called up for active service. She had fallen pregnant around the turn of the new year, though she had told him nothing until Easter had come and gone. Out of fear, he presumed, that she would lose this one too. His joy had been tempered by fear but Diana had bloomed. He had thought of requesting time off around the birth—the ministry had, at that time, been in a constant and escalating state of panic, every ministry was, but he felt sure they would agree. Then Dunkirk had happened and suddenly he had found himself attached to a tank regiment doing basic training and it had seemed the cruel-lest joke of all, that their child was to come just as he was to be posted overseas.

  The baby was born at eight o’clock on a bright autumn morning exactly a year into the war and he had gazed upon this tiny thing they had produced together and had been unable to speak. And he had gazed at his wife and saw, perhaps properly for the first time, the grief she had endured that was, now, in this moment, gone. His indifference to all those childless years seemed to be that of another man, a misguided man who had been unable to imagine such a joyous thing as his own child, in a cot, red-faced and wrinkled and helpless, and a wife exhausted but so proud, so complete. And his imminent departure to fight in a war that Britain was losing on every front had hung heavily over it all, heightening every sense, lengthening and telescoping each moment. He had sworn to return safely to them but his awareness of the utter lack of control he now had over his own destiny had made his words hollow and meaningless.

  But I am alive, he said to himself now, on a Cairo evening more than three years later, and the river lapped at his feet, the dock rats scurried along the waterfront and through the night air he could hear, distantly, the girls outside the brothels calling desultorily to passers-by. He had seen his child just that once when she had been a single day old. She was now three years and four months and he had missed one thousand two hundred and fifteen days of her young life. The fact of his absence dismayed him but her existence made every day and every battle worth the price. He thought of the last photograph that Diana had sent him, of three-year-old Abigail, seated stiffly in a chair in a pretty dress, her stubby little legs dangling high above the floor, a hairband pulling her fine dark hair back from her forehead. He had three photographs of her now, and he had peered into his child’s eyes searching for some sign of himself, for some sense of her awareness of him, some comprehension in her eyes that he was the reason she went annually through this ritual. But he saw nothing. Her fingers curled around a ball that the photographer had placed in her lap.

  Ashby had had a child too, a little boy called Marcus, and the fact of Marcus was like a pain striking his heart and he felt ashamed at his own feelings of helplessness and loss.

  He returned to the barracks, passing through roadblocks and checkpoints, showing his pass to bored MPs who, like everyone, clearly wished they were somewhere else. A pretty young WAC from Cathcart’s staff, in full uniform and smoking a quiet cigarette, was waiting for him with a message to report to Cathcart at once. He smartened himself up, in a perfunctory way, and presented himself at Cathcart’s door to be given the news that he was going home in the morning.

  The call to prayer from a dozen minarets sounded distantly across the city’s fading darkness. Not long after, dawn began to glow softly in the eastern sky like the embers of a dying fire, seeping between the slats of the blackout blind, and if Gerald had been asleep it would have woken him. He had not slept. His kitbag was packed, repacked, a dozen times. He heaved it over his shoulder and left, without a backward glance, out to the waiting car, his shirt already soaked through with sweat though the sun had hardly risen.

  He travelled in an open staff car with three other officers, the sun now blazing, and the road ahead shimmered and rippled with the heat. A second car followed behind and they drove through the silently deserted streets north-west out of the city and along the Desert Road the hundred or so miles to Alexandria where the airstrip was, for they were going home not by troopship but in an RAF aircraft. With stops for refuelling, they would be home within a day.

  They drew up at the airstrip where an aircraft was being readied for take-off, a twin-engine de Havilland Flamingo, a civilian plane originally, battered and worn, and for a moment Gerald’s bewildered joy was tempered at the thought of flying anywhere in that thing. Aircraft in far better condition than this got shot down every day and being a transport carrier was no protection, quite the opposite: they would be a sitting target. Cathcart had said Gerald had only got a seat on the plane because someone else had dropped out at the last moment.

  He stowed his kit and climbed wordlessly aboard, still numb from the early start, from the unexpected summons to Cathcart’s office last night, and found a seat. He thought about the navy troopships in the harbour that were still avoiding the U-boats in the Med, still sailing via the Red Sea and the Cape. Going by plane was the difference between many weeks’ voyage and a single day’s journey. He pushed his fear down and out of sight. He strapped himself into his seat and the chap next to him told him that the man whose spot he had taken was an adjutant from the Royal Rifles who had shot himself at the barracks the previous night. The man had not died, he said, but was lying, critical and insensible, in the military hospital in Cairo.

  The pilot and the co-pilot were already in the cockpit checking their instruments, a radio operator tucked in behind them. There were nine other passengers on the flight: a couple of doctors from a medical corps, two junior officers and a major all from the Durham Light Infantry, two NCOs from a New Zealand regiment, a captain from Reconnaissance and a South African sapper. One of the lieutenants from the DLI wore a bandage around his head and seemed not to be quite all there. His fellow officer stayed by his side the whole time, explaining everything, though the man seemed not to hear him. His major smoked foul-smelling cigars and ignored them both. The Kiwis and the South African began smoking and playing cards at once. The captain and the two
doctors just smoked and looked out of the window or tried to sleep. No one spoke. As the aircraft lurched upwards Gerald felt his stomach tighten sickeningly. The aircraft banked steeply and he grabbed the seat in front of him, seeing the horizon at a crazy angle through the tiny porthole, sea one moment, desert the next. He relaxed his grip and folded his arms before him. He would think of nothing.

  They flew west along the coast, covering in a matter of hours the mile after mile of rugged, mine-pocked desert that two armies had fought over for three years and where Ashby had died, coming down briefly in the afternoon to refuel in Tunis, where sandwiches were handed around, and again in Gibraltar, where blankets were distributed. After this they turned north, flying through the night over neutral Portugal and the Bay of Biscay, meeting no enemy aircraft but buffeted mercilessly by a fierce headwind, landing at RAF Exeter with ice on their wings in the frozen pre-dawn.

  Someone on the ground yanked the door open and pulled down the steps and they climbed stiffly down from the aircraft and stood, like dazed animals, in the cold air, too stunned even to flap their arms or blow on their numbed fingers. Their bodies, which for years had sweated and laboured beneath a desert sun, went into shock—all except the captain from Recon, who had remained silent and sullen throughout the journey, and now fell to his knees and wept. No one said anything or even appeared particularly surprised but Gerald swallowed a lump in his throat and the de Havilland, the airstrip, the huts at the edge of the airstrip, blurred before his eyes. He looked upwards into a sky that was thick with impenetrable grey cloud, an English sky, and his eyes filled with tears.

  They shuffled in a ragged, bewildered group towards the huts, where a red-faced woman with a streaming cold in a headscarf and a dirty apron with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth was ill-naturedly serving weak, undrinkable coffee, and they gazed at her and her undrinkable coffee with grateful and mute joy, even when she tried to charge them a shilling and demanded ration books they did not possess. The major from the Durhams had a car and driver waiting for him and was whisked away. The rest of them hitched a lift into the town in the back of an army truck. The cold sliced through their thin desert fatigues like a thousand unceasing pinpricks, numbing and painful at the same time, and they shivered, hugging themselves, teeth chattering uncontrollably as the open truck lurched through country lanes and onto a main road. It hurt to open one’s eyes to the wind and the frozen air.

  As they reached the outskirts of the town Gerald saw bombed buildings, whole rows of houses gone, in street after street, deep craters everywhere. The people were pale and gaunt, jumping over puddles and bomb debris, huddled in layer upon layer and hurrying as though they feared being caught outside. They seemed like a crowd in a wilderness.

  The truck dropped them at the railway station and, seeing a public telephone, Gerald had the wild idea of telephoning Diana. It was dark but the day had begun, Diana would be at home. The telephone on the table in the hallway would ring. She would come to the phone, pulling on a dressing-gown, perhaps with Abigail in her arms, and pick up the receiver expecting—

  Here his imagination stalled. For what would he say? Hello, old girl, it’s me. I’m back. Dear God. It was dreadful. He baulked at the stilted blandness of his words but no others presented themselves. And in the end it did not matter, for the girl at the exchange laughed humourlessly and said there were no lines available and didn’t he know there was a war on? and promptly disconnected him.

  They boarded the next London train, finding space where they could in the corridor or standing. Fields and villages and lanes rushed past the window. England, it appeared, had changed out of all recognition and at the same time had not changed at all, and Gerald felt himself take pleasure in the tumble-down farm buildings, the canals, the frost on the ground, the bare branches of the trees.

  Now I am on my way!

  The train stopped and started again and was shunted into sidings to allow other trains to pass, it was rerouted and diverted and finally terminated altogether at Clapham Junction, which was not even on the Exeter to London line, but the line ahead was closed due to a bomb and they all disembarked.

  It was late afternoon, around four. The day, such as it had been, had gone, and as Gerald stood on the platform with his kitbag the darkening evening air came at him through his ears and his mouth and his nose and even his eyes and he could not think.

  There would be no more trains that day. They would have to continue their journey by bus or Underground. People drifted away, uncomplaining, numbed to discomfort, to unfulfilled expectations. Gerald could see none of his fellow Cairo travellers; they had melted away like the day itself, and any camaraderie that may have built up over the long and fraught journey had melted away with it. He left the station and found, outside, another public telephone and this one had a directory in it. He went into the box and closed the door behind him, enjoying the relative warmth that the enclosed space momentarily afforded him, and repelled by the long-forgotten smell of phone-box stale cigarettes and piss. He fingers went to the ‘A’s and he found Ashby’s wife at 38 Commongate Road, Clapham. For Ashby had lived here, in Clapham, and of all the places he might have been stranded, fate had seen fit to dump him here, in Ashby’s backyard. It was a penance for his survival, for his being spared while Ashby was taken. It must be done; why not now? God knew when he might find himself down here again.

  He did not bother to try to telephone—the humourless laughter of the girl at the exchange in Exeter still sounded in his ear—but set off south and east towards the Common in the direction provided by a helpful clerk in the booking office.

  There were Americans everywhere. He had not expected that. It seemed as though every uniform was that of a GI, every voice he heard an American one. They were fresh-faced and handsome, tall and lean and strong and smiling. He resented that. And so many civilians, hurrying home. Not one of them cast him a second glance, or if they did it was his deeply suntanned face that they saw, a visible sign that he had just returned from foreign parts, that he had just gone through a war in the desert.

  Or did they think he had been on a long holiday on the Riviera?

  No, they thought nothing, they turned away at once if they saw him at all. There was a barrier around him that they could not see and that Gerald was only dimly becoming aware of but it was swelling around him, intensifying, with each step he took among them. He very soon began to hate the civilians even more than he resented the Americans. He wished only to be among other military men.

  His eyes had adjusted quickly to the blackout so that he found the road easily enough. Pale moonlight showed him elegant late-Victorian villas on the north side of the road and the south side bordered the Common, a void that stretched away into the night, impenetrable and uninviting, and Gerald felt a longing for the desert so strong it took his breath away.

  This was not how he’d imagined his homecoming.

  Number 38 was a double-fronted four-storey establishment with bay windows and a small paved area at the front from which white-painted steps led up to a raised entranceway and a lead-lighted front door. A decorative lantern hanging above the door was unlit. The windows were black, as were all the windows the entire length of the street, and he only knew it was the right house because he had counted and now shone a tiny torch at the brass numbers on the gatepost. He had not given a thought to what he was going to say but little could be achieved by his remaining on the doorstep, so he rang the bell and waited. It seemed a vain and rather shameful hope that no one would be in, he knew Mrs Ashby would be in, and when he heard footsteps in the hallway he was not even surprised. Just for a second Ashby appeared, startlingly clear, before him and Gerald uttered a few silent words to him, part in prayer, part in apology.

  The front door was cautiously opened and light from a distant room seeped out so that the blackout was compromised. Gerald saw a woman silhouetted in the doorway, a matronly figure with hair tied up in a bun and a girth that filled the doorway; he saw a tight-fi
tting functional dress and swollen ankles above feet wedged into too-tight formal shoes. This could not be Ashby’s wife. He had come to the wrong house.

  The woman peered at him, and he could tell from the jerk of her head, her silence, that she took in his uniform, his kitbag. It was too dark for her to see his face.

  ‘I’m so sorry to bother you,’ said Gerald, and his voice sounded absurd, somehow. ‘I’m looking for—is this the house of Mrs Ashby?’ It was. He knew it by the way she lifted her chin, suspicion replaced by surprise, curiosity. ‘My name is Meadows. I was a friend of Captain Ashby. I just wanted to—’

  He stopped. He wanted very much for this woman to interrupt him, to announce that, unfortunately, Mrs Ashby was out. That Mrs Ashby no longer lived here. That Mrs Ashby had taken her child and gone to live with relatives in Bristol for the duration. But instead she said, ‘Please wait here,’ and went back inside, closing the door but reopening it almost at once and saying, ‘Won’t you please come in, Mr Meadows?’

  He followed her down a short, ill-lit but graceful hallway with a parquetry floor that smelled of wax furniture polish and potpourri and something indistinguishable but distinctively comforting and familiar, the smell of English houses filled with old furniture and thick carpets and flocked William Morris wallpaper and burning coal fires. And disconcertingly the hallway banked suddenly so that he reached out a hand to steady himself. It had happened periodically throughout the day as his body readjusted itself to the solid ground after the day spent in the aircraft, but he wished that the woman, who had paused outside a doorway, had not witnessed this. Her face gave nothing away and she stood aside to let him pass.

  He found himself in a large and comfortable living room carpeted in dark green pile and wallpapered with some kind of roses design, heavy velvet curtains at the window and mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite reproductions on the wall. Crowded bookshelves, glass-fronted cabinets of chinaware and a chintz settee with two matching armchairs made up the bulk of the furniture. A beautiful original marble fireplace filled one wall with coals glowing hotly, a coal scuttle and tongs on the hearth before it. It was all so very, very English and Gerald smiled helplessly to see it.