The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Gerald, please, you’re frightening me!’

  And she was shaking, her eyes wide, trying to break free. He was frightening her, but she was frightening him, could she not see that? He let go of her and stepped back, and the photographs fluttered to the floor.

  ‘Then tell me, Diana. For God’s sake, just tell me what is going on.’

  But she dropped to her knees. Then she let out a dreadful sob, just one. The sound was worse than the whine of a shell overhead, worse than the whoosh of the fireball that had incinerated Ashby. Worse than the sound he had made when he had stood in his form master’s room receiving the news of his parents’ death. He stood looking down at her as the fear seeped up from the floor and through his bones. Slowly he kneeled down, not touching her, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘She’s dead. Abigail is dead.’

  Gerald was no longer in the cottage. He was standing outside in the frozen night some distance away without his coat, the hillside veering away steeply on his left, the hard tussocky grass beneath his feet, the freezing night-time air biting at his face, his eyes, his hands.

  She was dead, Abigail was dead.

  He had known it the moment he had gone up to the loft. How long, then, had she been dead? All this time, perhaps, three years, and the photographs were—what? Some other child. A fake child. All the time he had been in the desert, battling his way inside his tank and outside of it, from one side of the desert to the other, back and forth, losing and winning, giving ground and making ground, seeing death and facing death and cheating death. All that time doing it not for England, not for his commanding officer, not even for his troops, but for them: his wife and child. Now one was dead and the other—the other had lied or had perpetrated some deception. Either way they were lost to him. His child, whom he had seen only that once, a tiny, red-faced, writhing and wrinkled thing in his arms.

  He fell to his knees and cried.

  Much later he got stiffly to his feet and returned to the cottage because he did not know where else to go. And because there were questions he must ask.

  Diana was crouched on the floor where he had left her, silent now and no longer crying, her knees pulled up to her chin. She looked up at him but he couldn’t look at her. He saw an ancient armchair over by the hearth and he made for that, moving like an old man, sinking down into it and stretching his numbed fingers to the flames, desperate for warmth, to feel the blood flow once more. How could numbed fingers matter? But it was no different, he supposed, to being irritated by a fly buzzing in your face in the desert as shells landed all around you.

  ‘When did it happen?’ he said after a time.

  ‘I took her into London with me,’ Diana replied, her voice low, barely filling the space between the crackling of the fire and the rattling of the windows. ‘For a pantomime, and there was a raid. We were trapped. We took shelter in an Underground station.’ In the hearth a log split and shifted, sending out a tiny cascade of embers. ‘It ought to have been safe. I thought it would be safe, but it wasn’t. A bomb dropped and the roof collapsed. Abigail was in my arms—I tried to protect her—I thought I had protected her. But—’

  But. She did not say the words and Gerald was glad for that. He sat quite still as her words slowly penetrated. So it had only just happened, the death of their child, just a week, two weeks ago, and it was as raw for her as it was for him. He saw it with a frightening clarity in his imagination, his wife holding their little girl as the roof collapsed around them, shielding her as best she could, alone and terribly frightened. He imagined her dismay on realising that Abigail was dead, her grief and the terrible secret she had kept since then, unable to tell him. He saw that she blamed herself, though it was surely no one’s fault, or if it was it was the war.

  He felt strangely calm. He wondered why he did not get up and go to her, why he did not comfort her. But he did not move. The calmness wavered and something weighed heavily on him, a suffocating weight. He tugged at the tie around his neck, at his shirt collar, which was too tight. The ancient armchair pulled him in and closed over him. He felt as if he had stumbled unwittingly into a dwarf ’s house, where all the ceilings were four-foot high and, no matter which room he entered, he could never, ever stand up.

  ‘Then who is the child upstairs?’

  Diana did not reply and Gerald realised that he had, even at this late stage, expected some simple account, some reasonable explanation. But Diana did not reply and with her silence the possibility of a simple account, of a reasonable explanation faded.

  ‘Diana?’

  At this she made an odd, rather ghastly choking sound. Was she crying again? He couldn’t tell as he was staring into the fire and the fear that had turned to grief and then to pity now returned in full.

  ‘Tell me. Who is she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A silence followed these words. Gerald turned his head very slowly and in the softly flickering firelight they looked at each other.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said eventually, keeping his words even, measured.

  ‘It’s quite simple really.’ Diana uncurled her arms from around her knees and stood up, coming over to the other armchair and sitting down, her hands laid calmly in her lap. ‘There was a woman sheltering near me in the Underground station. A young mother with a small child. When the roof collapsed she was killed but her child was not. And Abigail was dead too. The little girl had survived but her mother was dead. And so—I took her.’

  Her words seemed to come from very far away, and curiously they appeared to flow harmlessly over him and slice straight through him both at the same time. The world had changed, irrevocably, as it had the day his parents had died and as it had the evening he saw Bunny Lambton come home at midnight in another man’s arms. Moments that changed your life and set it on another path—Ashby’s death, he saw now, had not done that. Ashby’s death made no difference at all. His little girl had died but quite suddenly, at his wife’s words, the fact of Abigail’s death no longer seemed the worst possible thing that could happen. For this was worse.

  ‘You stole her.’

  He addressed the flickering flames in the hearth. If his fingers had been numb before, now his brain was numb. Now his entire body was numb.

  ‘I took her,’ Diana said, as though changing the verb somehow made it alright. ‘She had no one. Her mother was dead. She was alone.’

  So many objections crowded into Gerald’s head that for a moment he could not grasp at a single one.

  ‘But how do you know she was alone? You didn’t know her. How could you know that she doesn’t have an entire family? A family who are looking for her!’ His even and measured tone had failed him and he had got to his feet as his voice rose.

  ‘How could they be looking for her?’ she replied. ‘They believe she is dead.’

  Gerald did not reply at once. The implication of her words were a slow, creeping horror.

  ‘Why would they think that?’

  ‘There was a dead mother and there was a dead child. One mother survived and one child survived. No one questioned which child belonged to which mother.’

  Gerald clamped his hands tightly over his face, his fingertips squeezing into his eyeball, into his ears. He pushed himself up from the armchair and paced the length of the cottage. ‘But it’s indefensible. What you have done, stealing a child, it is indefensible.’

  If he had expected her to cringe, to beg forgiveness, he was disappointed. She seemed, if anything, to grow in strength, though she remained seated in the armchair before the fire, her hands resting in her lap, studying the flames.

  ‘But what sort of a life would she have had with those people?’ She looked up at him now, suddenly animated: ‘You didn’t see what they were like, Gerald. They were barbaric. Primitive. Barely civilised. What kind of life could she have, could any child have, there? It was a kindness to take her.’

  He stopped pacing and stared at her. Could she really believe this? He could not, in
his heart, believe that she did. It was her way of dealing with the horror of what she had done, surely.

  ‘That does not make it right.’

  ‘I believe it does.’

  ‘And so what, exactly, are you proposing? That we raise this child, this unknown stranger’s child, as our own? That we can simply replace Abigail with another child and it will all be alright? As though she was a—a pair of shoes in the wrong size or the wrong colour that you can take back to the shop and replace with another?’

  ‘Of course I don’t think that! I am not that heartless, Gerald! How can you think such a thing? Abigail was our child! When she died—’

  But here she stopped, attempted to catch her breath.

  ‘When she died, I died too. I wanted to die. But I survived . . . I survived, and if I am to live then I would rather have a child to raise than have no child. Can’t you understand that?’ Her voice fell to barely a whisper: ‘I don’t love this child, of course I don’t. But I do pity her. And I hope that, given time, I will learn to love her, that she will learn to love us. That you will learn to love her—’

  ‘No. What you are saying—what you have done—is monstrous. I will have no part in it.’

  As he had done before, he left the cottage, but this time he was aware of his footsteps as he walked down the short passage, his hands as they pulled open the heavy front door, carefully latching it behind him. He found his way with difficulty onto the track and down into the laneway, retracing his steps.

  The absolute darkness and the piercing frozen night air hit him like a barrage of gunfire and for a time his thoughts fled, leaving him senseless. He walked and his footsteps made a dull thud on the road. After a time he came upon the village, along whose main street he paced. No one passed him. No light showed. The cloudy, starless night and the blackout meant that the scattering of houses were entirely in darkness.

  She had left their child in an Underground station and taken another woman’s child in her place. The fact of it made him reel. Who was she, this woman he had married? He did not know.

  What was he to do? No solution presented itself. But clarity came to him, in one sense anyway, for he understood now his wife’s reason for coming north where no one knew them, where no one knew Abigail. If she had tried to present this other child as Abigail at home she could not have hoped to get away with it. He tried to imagine Diana planning their flight, finding the cottage, writing her letter to Inghamthorpe, saying her goodbyes and giving her explanations, arranging the journey. How had she managed it, he wondered, with a small, terrified, unwilling child and all their luggage, travelling by train all this way and with every expectation of remaining here until the war ended? A year, two years? Dreading, the whole time, his return.

  For she must have dreaded it.

  He had reached the edge of the village and, not knowing what else to do, he turned around and walked back. It must have been well after midnight when he arrived back at the cottage, having missed the turning three times in the darkness and stumbled a quarter-mile in the wrong direction. He had eaten nothing since a sandwich at Leeds and his weakness now was as much from hunger and exhaustion as anything else. He let himself in. On the table a candle burned very low in pool of wax, flickering wildly. We have returned to the Dark Ages, he thought, seeing the candle. We have reverted to savages.

  There was no sign of Diana other than the remains of a scratch tea at the sink. She was upstairs in the loft, presumably, though he could not imagine that she slept. He found a loaf and carved a ragged slice and ate it ravenously without margarine or jam. It’s this damned war, Mrs Ashby had said, and he understood now how she could say this as though it no longer had any meaning. He pulled the two armchairs together and lay full length and closed his eyes.

  He awoke to the sound of a child screaming. The sound tore through him and he opened his eyes with a start, heart pounding. The hearth had been lit, the blackout removed so that the cottage, which had been all dark nooks and shadows the previous night, was now bright and exposed in the weak winter sunlight. A succession of chaotic and random images filled his head, all that had happened since he had woken in the London hotel a day ago, and he lay unable to move.

  And the child screamed.

  He turned his head a fraction, dreading but compelled to see it.

  She was squatting on the floor, hugging her skinny little knees, furiously shaking her head, squeezing her eyes shut. She was a wispy, undernourished thing, incongruous in a dainty little fuchsia nightdress, all lace and frills, and tiny child’s slippers (whose nightdress, he wondered, whose slippers?) and, as he watched, she pulled first one slipper off and then the other, hurling them, not randomly but with purpose, at Diana. He saw, in a corner, a teddy bear that, too, had presumably been hurled in fury and he looked away. And the sound the child made tore through him. She opened her eyes wide and he saw the eyes of a wild animal, terrified and caged. He felt himself recoil. He wondered how Diana could bear it for she kneeled before the child, coaxing her with a slice of bread and margarine on a plate, still in her own nightdress and slippers, and she held her arm up in front of her face to ward off the flying slippers.

  ‘Oh do stop, please!’ she begged the child, and Gerald turned away so he wouldn’t have to see it. He found he was holding his breath, dreading—

  ‘Please stop, Abigail.’

  That was it. That was what he had dreaded. She had called the child ‘Abigail’ and he lay quite still as the horror rolled over him, wave after wave, unrelenting. He covered his ears. He found himself remembering the voyage he had made three years ago on the troopship around the coast of Africa and into the Red Sea, a voyage full of terror and foreboding, the ship buffeted and tossed day after day so that he had wished a torpedo would strike them. He remembered the night-long flight in the de Havilland five days ago, dropping and climbing and banking through the darkness so that the only thing that had been real had been his prayers, whispered over and over and with increasing urgency to a God he did not believe in. He had prayed for dry land, he had prayed to feel his feet back on the ground. And here he was, on dry land, his feet were on the ground and the horror rolled over him.

  The child continued to scream. It was the scream of a child who knew its name was not Abigail and who knew it had no control over what was happening to it. She thrust the plate of bread and margarine away so that it flew from Diana’s hand and fell to the floor with a crash, scrambled to her feet and made a mad, frenzied dash for the door. The door was closed but the child hurled herself at it, flying at the old iron door handle, her fingers scrabbling for purchase, unable in her panic to open it, screaming in her frustration. And when Diana tried to snatch her up, the child squirmed and fought and kicked and punched like a mad thing. Eventually she freed herself and, abandoning the door, scampered instead to the furthest part of room, where she crammed herself into a corner and would not come out again, her screams subsiding into a terrified, desolate sobbing.

  Gerald had watched, unable to move, as this horror unfolded before him.

  ‘Dear God, Diana! It’s no good. This must end, surely you see that?’

  Diana started, perhaps not even realising he was awake, but he did not wait for her reply, getting up and striding over to the little girl—but Diana thrust herself between them.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He pushed her aside, surprised at how flimsy she seemed, that he could brush her aside like a fly. He went to the child and crouched down. She had curled into a ball, her arms over her head, silent now, her silence somehow more dreadful than the screaming had been.

  ‘It’s alright,’ he said very gently. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. I just want to know your name. Please, can you tell me your name?’

  But the child would not speak or could not, and they had done this to her, or Diana had, though he felt himself complicit. He did not know how to help the little girl and his heart was wrung.

  ‘Please,’ he said again, reaching out to peel h
er tiny arms away from her face but hesitating even to touch the child, for she seemed so utterly bereft, so broken. ‘Just tell me your name,’ he pleaded, knowing it was hopeless, uncertain if the child heard his words or understood. Did the child even understand English? he wondered. She might come from any sort of family, speak any language. He sat back on his haunches, reaching for the abandoned teddy bear, which was a sorry-looking creature, one ear missing, as though it had gone through a bombing raid too, but when he offered it to her she thrust it away.

  Eventually he gave up and got stiffly to his feet, turning to his wife, studying her.

  ‘Diana, where does she come from? Tell me where you were sheltering that night. What station?’

  Diana had not moved, her arms by her side, her face with its now permanently pinched, aghast expression. But there was something else: a dreadful and desperate determination that he had not seen in her before. It was pointless, he saw. She would tell him nothing and he felt no anger or frustration, merely a sort of calm purpose. He passed her without a glance, taking up his coat and hat, the gloves Mrs Ashby had given him and the three discarded photographs. He would leave his bag. He had no need of it.

  Diana had stood quite still, observing him, but when it became clear he was leaving she darted forward, panicked. ‘Gerald, please, stop! What are you doing? Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to London. To find her family.’

  And he left at once, not giving her a chance to stop him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Septimus John Vasey had made his painful way from London’s East End to Euston Station by bus and on foot, no mean feat for a man with a walking stick and a pronounced limp. He had been made lame perhaps at Dunkirk, perhaps at Tobruk. He wore a soiled bandage around his head and when he rested on a bench outside the station a woman in a smart hat and a coat with a fur collar pressed a coin into his hand.