by Maggie Joel
Mrs Ashby was seated on the settee, perched on its edge, her legs crossed at the ankles, hands placed, one over the other, on her knee. It was her feet he saw first, black shoes, slender ankles, dark stockings, a charcoal grey skirt, a pinkish or mauve blouse with a bow at the collar and a black collarless woollen jacket of some sort, fitted and well cut. She sat very upright, and in the soft light of the lampshade and the flickering light from the coals one side of her neck was bathed red, the other side was in shadow. Even so, Gerald knew her, had seen her photograph and would have recognised her at once. The photograph Ashby had had was a studio shot, carefully staged, a woman swathed in furs, artfully made up and glancing at the camera with a still, serene face devoid of expression. Quite, quite beautiful yet utterly devoid of expression—and that was how she appeared to him now. She observed him as though she was that photograph brought to life, her face perfectly symmetrical, her mouth and eyes unmoving so that he had no sense of her at all, could not tell even if she wore make-up or not. A woman made of porcelain, perfect and flawless—and utterly breakable. For now he saw it, a flush of colour on both cheeks that might have been heat from the fire but he knew was not. She rose in one fluid movement, uncrossing her legs, standing up, holding out one hand, the other hand falling to her side, her eyes never leaving his face.
‘Captain Meadows,’ she said in a deep, clear voice, taking his hand as though she had been expecting him. ‘Please sit down. Mrs Woodcock, would you be a dear and bring tea and cake?’
The utter conventionality of her words struck him mute and Gerald sat, at a loss where to put his kitbag, handing it finally to the waiting Mrs Woodcock. Mrs Ashby sat down again, exactly as she had been sitting before, and without realising it he mimicked her, sitting on the edge of the sofa, turned slightly towards her, hands on his knees. And all the while her face did not move. There was an intensity about her, held rigidly in check, and at the same time a languidness that defied—and denied—all feeling. Or did he imagine that intensity? Either way, he could not take his eyes from it, for the only women he had seen in three years had been the Syrian, Moroccan, Egyptian girls outside the brothels or the occasional WAC, twenty years his junior, gauche and giggling, swapping lipsticks like schoolgirls. Mrs Ashby was another thing altogether: a woman in her later thirties with all the poise and sophistication, the serenity and elegance that her age conferred on her but none of the petty anxiety and faded beauty of a woman past her prime.
‘So kind of you to visit us,’ she said. ‘Christopher mentioned you often in his letters.’
For a moment Gerald had no idea to whom she was referring. Ashby, of course, whom he had never, in all that time, called by his first name.
‘I wanted to pay my respects, Mrs Ashby. Your husband and I were in the same unit for a couple of years,’ he heard himself saying. ‘We went through it all. Together. We—’ He stopped. It was not what he wanted to say, but what did he want to say? Something momentous, something fitting. Something worthy of Ashby, of Ashby’s death. Ashby’s tank had been hit by a shell and Ashby had been incinerated at the start of the battle in the Western Desert. He hoped she already knew this or did not wish to know these details, for he doubted he could relate them to her in this room, seated on the chintz settee with the Pre-Raphaelites on the wall.
But she did not ask. Instead she smiled, though her face did not move. Her eyes told him nothing. Where was she? It was as though he was making conversation with a stranger on a train. His presence seemed to make no impression on her.
The woman, Mrs Woodcock, came in pushing a trolley and they both watched her as she served tea in two bone china teacups and two very small slices of some indeterminate cake on little plates.
‘Thank you, Mrs Woodcock,’ Mrs Ashby said. ‘Would you ask Marcus to come down?’
And when the woman had gone Gerald said, ‘I hope you don’t think me rude, turning up unannounced like this?’ He searched her face to find some indication that she was put out or grateful—or something.
‘Not at all. It’s so very kind of you to bother about us.’
Her words cut him painfully because they were so horribly bland and meaningless and because, truth be told, he had not wanted to come here at all—as surely she must know—and now that he was here, he felt lost, somehow, in her presence. Did she see that?
A little boy appeared in the doorway. He was about four, dressed in too-large pink-and-white striped pyjamas and a dressing-gown that was tied around his middle. He had Ashby’s hair, dark and wavy, and Ashby’s ears, neat and small and flat against his head, but his mother’s nose and eyes and mouth—watchful eyes, a delicate nose, slightly aristocratic, a wide mouth with narrow lips. The boy took in the tall, strange-smelling uniformed stranger and ran to his mother, wrapping his arms around her knees, burying his head in her lap.
And she gave the boy the same unsmiling smile, not moving other than to fold her arms around his small shoulders. She seemed to look over her little boy’s head at the opposite wall, at something the rest of them could not see. ‘Marcus, come along,’ she murmured, stroking his head. ‘Don’t be shy. Say hello to Captain Meadows. He has travelled a long way to visit us.’
He had travelled a long way, but if his train had not terminated at Clapham he would not have come. Gerald watched them both wretchedly. The boy lifted his head and peered shyly, twisting his body as though he did not want the stranger to see him, or did not quite know what to do with it. ‘Hullo, there, old man,’ said Gerald and hated himself.
Mrs Ashby had not touched her tiny slice of cake and now she pushed it towards her little boy and he gobbled it up and Gerald thought, There is rationing here, I had forgotten, and he passed his own slice to the boy too, though he was aching with hunger. He drank the tea, which was almost black, a few flakes of dried milk floating on its surface.
‘How long is your leave, Captain Meadows?’ she said.
‘No idea,’ he said truthfully, as no one had told him. ‘Not long, I expect. Once the paperwork catches up to me no doubt they’ll ship me off again.’
‘And have you a family of your own?’
‘A wife and a little girl. In Buckinghamshire. I am on my way there now.’
She smiled but made no reply and Ashby filled the space between them with his absence.
The little boy stared at Gerald, picking at the crumbs on his plate and staring and staring.
‘You’re just like him, old man,’ said Gerald, because the boy’s stare was unnerving him and because, at that moment, Marcus was just like his dead father. Horribly, Gerald felt his own eyes fill with tears.
Of course they both saw it, the little boy and her, Mrs Ashby, and Gerald saw the muscles go rigid beneath the skin on her face as her mask slipped for one dreadful moment then it was back and she smiled at him and said, ‘More tea, Captain Meadows?’
He did not want more tea but accepted with a nod and he knew the child saw through his politeness and despised him. But it allowed them both a minute of silence as she, his mother, carefully stirred the teapot, poured a small amount into Gerald’s cup and offered him a spoonful of the dreadful dried milk, and her calmness, her poise, was devastating and magnificent now that he had seen the mask slip for that one vital moment. He wanted to reach over and fold her in his arms as she had enfolded the boy, to take her hand and hold it in his. He felt this need filling him up and filling the room as, a short while ago, Ashby had filled it.
‘Ashby—Christopher—spoke of you often,’ he said desperately.
Ashby had spoken of her hardly at all. It was not what one did on the eve of battle, in the mess, under a tarpaulin in the desert, on the terrace of a hotel in Cairo. One talked about tanks and munitions and the other officers and the CO and the mosquitos and the flies and the dysentery.
‘Did he?’ she replied, almost wistfully, and he saw that she knew he was lying. Why had he even said such a thing? But he had needed to bring Ashby back into the room. ‘May I get you another slice of cake?�
� she said. ‘Not that we have any, but it’s conventional to offer, isn’t it?’ And before he could think of a reply, ‘It’s this damned war,’ she said, uttering the usual cliché but dully, as though it had ceased to hold any meaning. Gerald wondered if she was referring to the lack of cake or the death of her husband.
After half an hour he got up to go; any sooner would have looked improper. She stood up at once the way someone does when they have been waiting for you to leave, but when she stood by the door and held his hand she exclaimed, ‘Oh, you poor man! How cold your hands are!’ and disappeared into a cupboard. When she reappeared she was holding two big thick sheepskin gloves and she took each of his hands and placed the gloves on him one by one, the way a wife might do for her husband. Gerald realised they were Ashby’s gloves.
‘We won’t need them,’ she said simply, as though he had spoken out loud.
He escaped with Ashby’s gloves on his hands, fleeing the house, fleeing the woman, who was Ashby’s widow, and her son, who was Ashby’s little boy, bumbling his way in the blackout, not knowing where he was going or in which direction. Her calmness and her poise followed him, no matter which way he turned.
It was raining. The coldness of the rain shocked him into stopping and lifting his face to the rain till it was wet. He must get home. The delay seemed suddenly intolerable.
He found himself on a main road with a bus stop, where he waited, without hope, for a bus. When one came, he got on and an hour later was disgorged into the busy, choking melee around Victoria Station. It was a test, the visit to Mrs Ashby, some complicated test that he had somehow failed, though he could not put his finger on how, but now that he was away from the woman and her son, as every step put time and miles between him and them, the fact of his failure receded.
He walked north from Victoria, a part of, yet separate from, the melee, colliding with lampposts and other people, stumbling into craters and over bomb debris, making his way doggedly across the city that was his home and was as alien as the surface of the moon. And when he reached Baker Street Underground station it was closed due to the bombing, and when he went, instead, to Marylebone that was closed too and he was forced to give up and find a hotel—a wretched place off Dorset Square frequented by callgirls and Polish and Czech officers—where he put up for the night.
My first night back on English soil, he thought later, as he sat on the bed in shirt sleeves and listened to the pipes knocking behind the walls and the couple in the next room copulating. It was tawdry. Bleak, rundown, mean-spirited, inhospitable, unwelcoming. They had had it bad in London, of course he knew that, but the reality of it was . . . shocking. He pictured his home, so tantalisingly close now, but somehow as distant as victory had seemed in 1940. He pictured Diana in her Sunday coat and gloves after church, arranging flowers on the dining room table, turning to look at him, the secateurs in her hand, a look of calm contentment on her face; but he could not quite see her face, could only see Mrs Ashby’s face, unsmiling and smiling at the same time.
He didn’t want to lie down on the greasy pillow or beneath the sheets and the thin blanket, but in the end exhaustion overcame him and he wrapped himself in the blanket and pulled his cap low over his ears and slept.
He awoke with a start before dawn and for a disorientating moment was utterly lost. It was cold, numbingly cold, and when he struck a match in the grey light he saw his breath hanging in the air, he saw the ice on the inside of the hotel window. Gathering his things, he left at once, hurrying through the fading darkness to the station, catching the first Metropolitan Line train north, having a compartment to himself, and reaching Amersham an hour later. There he hitched a lift on a milk cart. Dawn had come, sluggishly and reluctantly, during his train journey, and when the milk cart dropped him on the Amersham Road his footsteps crunched in the frost.
Why had they chosen to live somewhere so damnably difficult to get to? he wondered as he walked briskly down the hill in the chilly early morning air. But it had seemed charming, he remembered, motoring up from Middlesex one late summer afternoon in 1930 and seeing a village barely touched by the modern world with straw on the ground and horse-drawn carts in the street. They had found a village green lined with gabled red-brick houses overlooked by a medieval church tower, the church at the end of an ancient bricked lane, entered via a crazy Tudor archway. They had found a bridge over a stream and a pond bordered by willows and filled with ducks. They had found happiness here, even if they had failed to find a railway anywhere nearby.
Gerald crossed the bridge over the stream and saw that the pond had been drained. A large mallard waddled over in search of food. He saw that all the ducks were watching him, standing stock-still, as though waiting to see what he would do. He walked past them. People were about now—no cars, of course, due to the petrol ration, but on foot or horseback, men and women in working clothes making their way silently in the cold morning to the bus stop, the shop, the farm. Horse-drawn traps and carts, long abandoned, had been unearthed and put to work so that one could almost imagine the village had slipped back into the previous century were it not for the sandbags and stirrup pumps at every front door, the blackout curtains and the tape on every window. One or two people looked at him, frowning, wondering who he was perhaps, but no one passed close enough to recognise him and he was glad of that, for he had a sudden dread of being impeded, now, this close to home.
He left the main street and turned south into Milton Crescent, just as he had done every day for ten years on his return from his office, but he had never returned home in such turmoil, with his heart thudding in his chest and his head booming with some inner pulse that made it feel like he was in battle. He found he was staring at his boots as he walked, afraid to look up. He made himself look up. Yes, see! It had not changed, not much—despite the sandbags and stirrup pumps, the blackout curtains, the taped windows—and his sense of a previous century faded, for Milton Crescent was a between-the-wars development. Two rows of sprawling, mock-Tudor houses led up the hill away from the high street and into the fields that surrounded the village. The road veered sharply to the left two-thirds of the way along, almost curving back on itself. Their house, The Larches, was on the west side of the street, right on the apex of the curve, which provided a wonderful view from the front rooms looking back down the entire length of the street to the medieval tower of the parish church, with the rear of the house surrounded by fields. It was this double vista that had prompted them to take this house and they had enjoyed almost ten glorious years until the fields behind the house had been slated for development. Then the war had come. He could see the fields now and they stood fallow and untouched, exactly as they had been on the morning he had left.
His footsteps crunched on the gravel but fallen autumn leaves that had never been swept away and had turned to mulch soon dulled the sound. The clematis by the front door had grown monstrously, all but obscuring the door. The blackout curtains were drawn. Even now, this close, he hesitated. He wanted Diana to see him but the blackout prevented that. He wanted the front door to be flung open and her to run out, blindly, into his arms.
The front door did not open. So he walked up and knocked, like a stranger might, not using his key. He waited. He knocked a second time, louder.
‘Mr Meadows! It is, isn’t it? I saw you come up the hill but I couldn’t be sure.’
It was Mrs Probart who lived next door and who was standing now at the entrance to her driveway. They had been neighbours for ten years yet he had utterly forgotten her existence. She stood now in a pair of outsized men’s wellingtons and a big winter coat, blinking at the weak winter sunlight and he summoned a smile. ‘It is. Hullo, Mrs Probart. How are you?’ he said, feeling a sort of pounding impatience overcome him. He did not want Mrs Probart to be the first person he met, to be the woman to welcome him home.
But she was peering at him curiously now. Coming up the drive and peering at him. ‘But surely you know Mrs Meadows isn’t here?’ she said, and for a m
oment he did not understand her. He remembered that Mrs Probart’s husband had died many years ago, in a farming accident, that she had a number of grandchildren somewhere. Leamington Spa, was it?
‘I’m sorry, what do you mean?’ he said.
‘Mrs Meadows dropped in to say goodbye about a week ago. It was quite out of the blue—well, to me, anyway. She said she was taking Abigail away. She felt it wasn’t safe here. Not with the bombs. Though I must say we’ve not had it at all out here. But she was anxious. She’d had a bad time of it in London, got caught in a raid, and that decided it for her, I suppose. Anyway, she left that morning—but surely you knew?’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ely Levin, the man whose name Joe bore, though there was little else to connect them, had once walked these streets. Perhaps his ghost walked them now. It was even conceivable he was still alive, though he would be—
But Joe had no idea what age the old man would be.
Ely had lived his earliest years in Dukes Place at Aldgate, beneath the walls of the Great Synagogue where his ancestors had, for five generations, conducted their business, worshipped and raised their families. In his thirtieth year he had fled the confines of an Orthodox life and an early marriage to a suitable girl who had borne him five fine strong boys and two handsome and dutiful little girls but whose manner he had never become accustomed to and whose features he had never quite become reconciled to. He had fled a mile east to Whitechapel, just a week or two before the Ripper began his year-long reign of terror, and here he had met the fourteen-year-old Mary Pendergast, who knew the streets of Whitechapel well and who might herself have become a Ripper victim had Ely not taken her into his new home—two rented rooms in a tenement building in Yalta Street, in the shadow of the London Hospital—and made her his wife. An indifferent disregard for gentile law meant that Ely had not so much as changed his name before embarking on this, his second marriage. And in that district of London the name ‘Ely Levin’ was as common as ‘John Smith’ might be in other parts of the city.
