The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  ‘What’s it matter?’ She sighed and for a moment the bland coldness slipped and he saw Myra as she had once been, a little girl frightened and alone. In a second it was gone. ‘You won’t be around to see it.’

  And that was true enough. When this child came into the world he would be far away—Dublin, New York. He would not hear of its arrival for many weeks. Perhaps never. He would never meet this child—his own niece or nephew—nor have any part in its life. Indeed, there was every chance it would never know of his existence. He would be as remote to this child as Ely Levin seemed to him. More remote, in fact, for at least Ely lived on in the stubborn memories of his wife, in the presence of his two sons. He would be as remote, then, as Joe’s own father, who did not exist at all and was not even a name on a baptismal register.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful mother,’ he said to hurt her. And for once she made no reply.

  ‘I need you to keep an eye on Nancy and my kid,’ said Joe to his brother.

  The afternoon was nearing its end and Harry had returned from wherever he had been all day, tired and thirsty and clearly in no mood for conversation, certainly not this kind of conversation.

  ‘They’re your wife and kid, not mine,’ he replied, not looking up. ‘If a man can’t take care of his own family what kind of man is he?’

  Joe was across the room in an instant, clenching his brother’s collar in his fists and hauling him to his feet, his words tumbling out as though they had been there a long time, waiting: ‘The kind of man who spends four years of his life in a leaky tin boat being shot at for his country while his older brothers sit it out on their arses!’

  Afterwards there was a silence filled only by the sound of his own breath, coming quick and heavily, a pulse beating in his ears.

  Harry shook him off angrily. ‘Your wife and kids should come first. If you’re dumb enough to end up in the navy that’s your bloody lookout.’ He sat back down again, straightening his collar, running a hand over his chin. ‘But fine, if it means that much to you I’ll look in on them. Not that that wife of yours will thank me for it.’

  Joe took a deep breath. Whatever it was that had flooded his body and roared in his ears drained away, leaving him breathless, shaken.

  ‘I ain’t asking you to go round there and help Nancy hang new curtains or fix a leaky tap or play the kindly uncle. I’m just saying keep an eye. Make sure nothing bad happens to them. That’s all.’

  ‘I said I would, didn’t I?’

  Joe took another breath. He stood quite still, calming himself. He had never done that before, not to Harry, and the realisation of it shocked him a little. As a kid he had been frightened of Harry and with good reason, for Harry had had his own way of doing things and if you got in his way you felt it. It was hard to move beyond that, even now they were both adults, hard to believe Harry wouldn’t make him pay in some way for what had just happened.

  But Harry was reading the evening paper.

  A soft tap at the front door cut through the silence as effectively as an air-raid siren. Harry looked up from his paper. Joe glanced over at him. And Myra, who must have been lurking and presumably listening just outside the kitchen, now appeared in the doorway, a suggestion of controlled alarm in her eyes as she tried to exchange a look with Harry. But Harry had already got up, casting aside the paper and pushing past her without a look.

  They waited, Joe and Myra. Until Joe could wait no longer.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘What am I, a bloody mind-reader?’

  But Myra knew, he could feel it. The suggestion of controlled alarm was not because she didn’t know who it was, it was because she did know. Joe got up. He followed his brother out of the room and for a moment it seemed that Myra would try to stop him, then she shrugged and stepped aside to let him pass. The front door was slightly ajar. Harry was standing outside on the street. The low murmur of voices could just be heard. Joe took a step closer. The voices were speaking in angry whispers, there was no mistaking it. The room at the front of the house—the room where Joe had been born—was mostly unused now, except for storage. Joe tried the door and it was unlocked. He went in, stepping cautiously in the darkness, and made his way to the window and wiped his sleeve over years of grime so that he could see out to the street beyond. After a short time, he heard the front door click shut and a moment later a man in a long overcoat with his hat pulled down low, his arm in a sling, stalked past. After he had gone Joe remained where he was, at the window, watching the late-afternoon street. Then he left, closing the door behind him, and returned to the kitchen. Harry was back in his chair reading the same page of the paper. Myra was in the other chair. She looked up at him but Harry kept on reading the paper.

  ‘It was him, the same copper,’ Joe said. ‘Why’d he come back?’

  ‘They always come back,’ said Harry, still not looking up.

  Joe thought about this. ‘Did you give him more money?’

  ‘Leave it,’ said Harry, a frown appearing. Myra shifted, uncrossing her legs and recrossing them, hitching up her stockings.

  But something didn’t add up. ‘If you’re paying this copper off then why was he waiting for me at the docks that day? Like he knew, like he was expecting me?’

  He felt the chill of his words. The way they hung in the air, turning the air around them cold.

  Myra let out a horrid little laugh and Harry shot her a warning glance. ‘You, shut it,’ he warned her.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Joe.

  And Myra, who couldn’t shut it, got up and laughed again. ‘Because you’re a fool,’ she said.

  Harry shot up and in a second his hand was around her neck, his eyes blazing. ‘I said shut it!’

  She stumbled, and when, after a moment, he let her go, she shook herself, lifted her chin a little and strode out, wobbling slightly and putting out a steadying hand as she passed the table. Once she had gone, Harry sat back down, but he had closed the newspaper.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘You are a fool,’ said Harry, very softly, barely above a whisper.

  The whole room had turned cold now.

  ‘You set the copper onto me?’

  ‘So what if I did?’ Harry shrugged. ‘I ain’t paying him off. That copper ain’t bent, and believe me I tried. He knows everything, the whole operation, but he thinks someone else is the brains behind it. He wanted names, dates, places, details. I gave him that, everything I had, in exchange for—’

  ‘In exchange for me?’

  ‘In exchange for my freedom, mine and Myra’s. He needed someone, needed to make an arrest. It was a straight swap. Us or you.’

  Joe thought of the man who had been stabbed to death in the Underground station. He saw now that this was not Harry’s fate; that it was Harry with his hand on the knife, it was Harry ordering the hit. Joe felt his fingertips, his toes go numb.

  ‘But what about family, Harry?’

  ‘You ain’t family, Joe. You never was.’

  Ice had formed on the inside of the windows, on the walls, the very air turned to ice.

  Joe found himself in the hallway of the house he had grown up in, though he had no memory of leaving the kitchen. He turned one way and then the other, trying to clear his head. Now he was walking back into the kitchen and the ice had gone, replaced by a red mist. He pulled Harry to his feet and landed a fist in his stomach, and Harry folded in half, then sank to his knees, gasping, and he did not get up.

  Joe left then, going into one or two rooms, finding his coat, finding some money, taking what food he could find, and by the time he was ready to leave—just a very few minutes it had taken him—Myra was waiting for him and she flew at his face and he had to beat her away, making it to the front door, yanking it open and stumbling out and away with Myra’s foul words following him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Gerald went to see Yelland at the ministry. It was the only place, the only person, he could think of to go to.

 
; He moved like a man in a dream, haunted by the ghost of the man who had made this same journey in reverse the day before, so full of hope then, so blissfully ignorant. On the train south he squatted in a few inches of space in the corridor, smoking cigarette after cigarette until they ran out.

  His early start meant he arrived at Kings Cross by mid-afternoon and was outside his old building at the Ministry of Supply in the Strand at a little after three. It had hardly changed in the intervening three years—the same silver barrage balloons tethered high above the rooftop, the same stack of sandbags by the entrance, the same uniformed civil servants hurrying in and out with their leather portfolios and their attaché cases, the same babble of secretaries in their smart clipping heels and bright lipstick. But the hats and coats of the secretaries were a little more worn, a little shabbier after four years of war, their faces a little more gaunt. Opposite, the Elizabethan tavern and the little row of shops that had withstood plague and fire and civil war were gone, reduced to a large waterlogged crater, and the officers who passed by the crater, trying not to get their regulation boots wet, were all American. People no longer carried their gas masks—they were becoming careless or they were simply inured, by now, to war.

  Or perhaps, for the first time, they had begun to sense victory.

  He went up the front steps and presented himself at the porter’s desk, having no appointment and trusting that Yelland still worked there and had not been seconded to Civil Defence or the Home Office or the Admiralty or the War Office or anywhere else.

  After a short wait Yelland himself appeared, unexpectedly and somewhat sheepishly, in the uniform of a captain of the Household Cavalry. Otherwise he appeared unchanged—same self-conscious dipping movement as he approached, same unkempt prematurely grey thatch, same affable grin and innocently blinking blue eyes. A schoolboy who had never quite grown up and who, by a quirk of fate, found himself fighting a war, albeit from behind a desk.

  ‘Meadows!’ he exclaimed, with what seemed genuine pleasure, coming forward and extending both arms to him. ‘Where the devil did you spring from? The Riviera, by the look of you!’

  ‘Definitely not the Riviera! Yelland, it’s bloody good to see you,’ Gerald replied, pumping his former colleague’s arm up and down and clapping him on the shoulder. And then, horribly, feeling tears prick his eyes.

  ‘Well, come on in,’ said Yelland, turning away, and whether he was being decent about it or had not noticed Gerald couldn’t tell. ‘All sorts of jolly forms to fill in, of course, before they’ll let you inside,’ Yelland went on, leading him back to the reception desk, where for the next five minutes he was occupied with said forms. Eventually a pass was produced and clipped on and Yelland led the way towards the lift. ‘We’re up on six now,’ he said chattily, as the lift filled up and they waited for it to grind into action. ‘Kemp and his lot got moved to seven and Meriwether—you remember Meriwether?—was relocated down to two, so of course that meant we got sent upstairs. Bit of a relief, between you and me. That basement was like the boiler room of a transatlantic liner during summer and like a gulag in the winter.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Gerald. He did remember: Kemp and his polka-dot bowties and his manner of barking every order as though he were on the parade ground, and Meriwether, who had a mirror in his office and paused in the middle of a meeting to reapply pomade and dab pungent cologne behind his ears and on each wrist. He remembered the indescribable heat of the basement in summer and the insufferable cold in the winter, he remembered how the lift creaked and the names of each of the girls in the typing pool—Miss Poulter, Miss O’Flaherty, Miss Hale, Miss Kovacs, Miss Lambert. He remembered it all with a kind of shock because he had not thought of it in three years. It seemed as distant as childhood.

  ‘Yelland, you’re a captain in the Household Cavalry!’

  Yelland did his dipping movement. ‘Yes, but I can assure you it’s just an honorary title. They gave all of us a rank a while back. I think I only got this one because they happened to have the uniform spare in my size. I don’t know one end of a horse from another, really. This is us.’ And he led the way out of the lift and along a shabby corridor towards a large, very cluttered, very crowded anteroom and from there into a smaller office, little more than a storeroom really, containing a desk and a number of telephones, a couple of chairs and a bulging filing cabinet with a wilting aspidistra on top. ‘This is me,’ said Yelland, squeezing into the chair behind the desk and indicating Gerald should take the other. ‘I think tea, don’t you? Miss Linklater! Tea for two, if you please.’

  A young woman, very tall, very slender and smartly dressed in a chocolate brown suit, could be seen in the room beyond.

  ‘Miss Linklater’s recently joined us from five,’ said Yelland. ‘She’s really jolly good.’ He leaned forward. ‘Between you and me, I don’t think she really wanted to join us—bit dull after five—but it’s wartime, isn’t it? We all have to make sacrifices.’

  Gerald turned around in his chair and saw Miss Linklater, who had made sacrifices, disappearing into a kitchenette armed with a teapot.

  ‘Now, where have you just come from, Meadows? Can’t divulge, I suppose?’

  Gerald turned back to face Yelland. ‘I travelled down from Wetherby this morning, as a matter of fact. I can’t see there’s any danger in my telling you that.’

  ‘Wetherby, eh? I doubt that’s where you picked up that tan.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Diana? She’s well?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Quite well.’

  Yelland leaned forward again. ‘And is this a social visit or business?’

  Gerald waited a moment before replying. ‘Unofficial business,’ he said, and he looked directly at Yelland as he said this, gauging his response. Appealing to him, he realised belatedly, as a friend and former colleague, in a way that did not involve words.

  Yelland nodded slowly. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’m trying to locate a missing child. She—the child—was possibly reported killed in a bombing raid a week ago, maybe longer, somewhere in London. That’s about all I know. It’s on behalf a friend. Rather urgent, I’m afraid . . .’

  He had rehearsed this. Decided carefully how he would present it to Yelland in a way that might be plausible and was suggestive of urgency but gave absolutely nothing away about the actual situation.

  Yelland listened, nodded again, his eyes sliding off to the right as he digested the words and they went skidding off in the myriad directions of Yelland’s mind. He had been emeritus professor of analytical philosophy at Cambridge before the war—or something along those lines—and the affable schoolboy thing, while not exactly an act, certainly did a good job of disguising a very keen brain.

  ‘Child’s name? Location? Parents’ names?’ he said, cutting directly to the problem and not bothered by the whys and wherefores.

  Gerald shook his head. ‘It’s a girl, aged around three years. Possibly from one of the poorer districts. That’s really all I have.’

  ‘Anyone else likely to be looking for it?’ It was a shrewd question.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know that either.’

  The chocolate-brown-suited Miss Linklater came in at that moment, giving a cursory rap on the open door and striding in to place a tray of tea things on the desk. Her wrists and fingers were very slender; like a pianist, Gerald thought. She left without a word but somehow a definite air of resentment followed her.

  Yelland smiled apologetically at her retreating form then he got up and closed the door to his office with his foot. ‘Shall I be mother?’ He poured out two cups and he measured out a quantity of the dreadful dried milk with a beautifully engraved silver teaspoon as though he was a duchess in her drawing room. ‘Here we are. I say, are you quite alright, Meadows?’

  Gerald was not all right; his hands were shaking and his skin felt clammy. He couldn’t feel his feet. There was a pounding in his head and it took all his concentration to focus.

  ‘Touch of mal
aria.’ He had never had malaria in his life but Yelland couldn’t know that. He had a feeling that what he was experiencing was delayed shock, or exhaustion, or both. He took a grateful gulp of the tea and felt its comforting warmth spread through him.

  ‘Yes, the malaria’s particularly bad in Wetherby at this time of year, I understand,’ said Yelland with a lift of his eyebrows.

  ‘Quite.’

  Yelland drank his tea for a moment or two in silence, and it was clear he was already working on the matter at hand. At last he looked up, having apparently come to a decision.

  ‘Alright, Meadows, going back to your . . . request. There were raids on the twenty-first and the twenty-second, Friday and Saturday nights. I remember the dates because they were the first raids we’d had in London for months. Took us a bit by surprise, I don’t mind telling you. If you want specifics about recent bombs and casualties and so forth, that kind of information’s not collected here. It will be Civil Defence and they’re under the Home Office, so that’s the first place we must go. I have a contact there, Radnor—know him?’

  Gerald shook his head.

  ‘I’ll telephone him. Ask a few questions. Find out what I can and report back to you . . . let’s see, tomorrow morning? How’s that sound?’

  It sounded exactly what he had hoped for. Gerald nodded his thanks, unable to speak.

  Yelland watched him silently for a moment then he reached over and patted Gerald’s arm. ‘Rough, was it, out there? Of course it was. Stupid thing to say. Ignore me. Now, how are you fixed for tonight? I’m probably staying at my post till late, then I’m on fire-watch duty, so why don’t you take my key and stay at my bolthole in Bayswater? No hot water, I’m afraid. Come to think of it, no cold water either—but hey ho! All four walls and the roof are intact, or at least they were last time I was there. Help yourself to anything you find.’

  So Gerald stayed in Yelland’s Bayswater bolthole and helped himself to brandy, and pickles from a jar, and some biscuits that he found in a cupboard in the kitchen. It was tempting to finish off the brandy but he made himself stop. That was no way to repay Yelland’s kindness. But it was seductive, the feel of the brandy burning the back of his throat, the fire hitting his guts, the gradual unfocusing of his eyes, the sense of the world receding. He made himself go to Yelland’s bed and sleep, barely undressing in the unheated flat. Life had become transitory, thanks to the war and being back home seemed to have made no difference at all, had made it worse, if anything.