The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  And the air-raid siren began to wail.

  Joe felt the siren filling his head, filling the laneway. He felt that he had never in his life been less afraid of its awful urgent sound.

  ‘Show us your papers!’ the policeman demanded over the noise.

  ‘There’s a bloody raid on!’ Joe shouted back.

  ‘Then you better hope no one drops a bomb on you.’ And the constable roughly patted Joe down, finding his papers and angling his torch to read them, peering closer in the darkness. ‘You’re having a laugh. This says you’re born in 1876.’

  But Joe wasn’t laughing. He could see a police van. He could see other men like himself, but not like himself, being lined up and loaded into the back of the van. They were doing a sweep then, picking up anyone who was out after dark and who looked suspicious. He had dodged the navy and the army and the detective who had pursued him for a week, only to be picked up in a routine sweep. He saw the faces of the men who had been picked up. They would be deserters, men who had been on the run and living in the shadows for months, years, and he saw the exhausted relief in their eyes. Their war was over. A year or two in prison, the war would end and they would be released. It would not end for him. If he stepped into that van he would never be free again. His life would be over.

  He tried to run. Threw every ounce of strength into this last-ditch attempt, almost broke free, but the constable lunged after him and brought him down so that for a moment they wrestled, struggled, and a second policeman joined in and together they pulled Joe to his feet, holding his arms in a tight lock behind his back. They marched him towards the van, ducking at the roar of an aircraft engine overhead. It was followed almost at once by the whoosh of an incendiary then an explosion that could not have been more than a street away. Close by, a bomb-damaged shell of a house on which someone had tacked sheets of corrugated metal as a temporary roof shook and rumbled as some inner wall collapsed in a cloud of dust.

  The raid had begun but it did not seem to matter.

  ‘Move it!’ shouted the first constable, a note of panic now noticeable in his voice. And suddenly the whole area was lit up by another incendiary and Joe saw that the constable was an old man, a special, not a regular at all, sporting a drooping old-fashioned moustache like the men had worn in the last war but white with age, the flesh on his face mottled and flushed almost purple by his exertions. A man who had done his forty years’ service and hung up his policeman’s helmet and his whistle and had no doubt looked forward to a quiet time in front of a fire with his pipe and his missus. Now he was back in uniform chasing looters in an air raid.

  This was Joe’s thought as his final few seconds of freedom passed, one by one, stretched out and squeezed together both at the same time, an eternity and no time at all. He noticed how the old man raised his head to the sky, his eyes wide and fearful, and this was the last thing Joe saw before an incendiary exploded very close by.

  When he came to he was lying face down on the pavement and his ears were roaring as though he was underwater. The roaring would not stop but he lifted his head then cautiously pulled himself to his feet. He was unhurt and perhaps the incendiary had exploded further away than he had imagined for the police van was untouched, so too all the men lined up inside the van gaping wordlessly at him. A sheet of corrugated metal, blown from the roof of the nearby house, lay on the ground not far away, dark splatters all along one edge. And standing before him was the elderly special constable—or, rather, there was his body.

  His head was nowhere to be seen.

  His torso ended at the collar of his uniform and his cape. As Joe watched the headless body wavered for a dreadful second, then tipped forward and crashed to the ground with a thud. Joe looked down and at his feet was the man’s head, the helmet still on, the eyes looking sightlessly up at him.

  For a moment everything went black again, and when Joe came to a second time, he was some yards away, coughing up bile onto the pavement. He flung out both hands as the pavement reeled up before him and he tipped forward in a gross mimicry of the torso of the dead constable, his legs buckling beneath him. But he pulled himself up almost at once, made his legs move. A moment later he was running, faster than he had ever run before and with less idea of where he was going than at any other time in his life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘Clapham,’ Gerald had said. ‘Take me to Clapham.’

  He remembered little about the journey and could not be certain whether it had taken an age or an instant nor what route the cabbie had taken, but here they were pulling up in Commongate Road. And now he was standing in the doorway and he must have rung the bell for the front door was opening and Mrs Ashby herself was leading him inside. He found himself on the settee in the beautiful drawing room that he had visited, briefly, a few days before. There was no one else here, not the housekeeper—he had forgotten her name—nor the little boy, Marcus, just the two of them, seated side by side on the settee. He smelled again the furniture polish and the potpourri but it was mingled now with the slightly acrid smell of the coal burning slowly in the grate and with something enticingly like blossoms or tropical fruit or clean laundry or spice or all four. What was it? He could not place it.

  She was handing him a drink, whisky and soda, which she placed in his hands and curled his fingers around, closing her own hands around his to make sure he was holding the tumbler, and he realised the smell was her, Mrs Ashby. The woman made of porcelain, perfect and flawless and utterly breakable. She had put on some scent, then, in anticipation of his arrival. But she had not known of his arrival until he had arrived. He had an idea he had simply turned up at her door, rather late at night, rather dishevelled and distressed. And now he was telling her about Ashby, who had died, horribly, in a tank that had been hit by an enemy shell so that nothing was left of him but a name. Not that he told her that. He told her about Ashby standing at the dockside in his khaki shirt and shorts throwing Gerald’s gas mask into the Nile.

  Some time had passed for he no longer had the whisky in his hands, though he could feel its warmth seeping through him, and he was telling her that his little girl was dead, killed in an air raid, and when he began to cry and seemed quite unable to stop, she held him. She kissed him, slowly, tenderly, in the same way she had said that thing about the damned war: dully, as though it had ceased to mean anything. He felt the effects of the whisky muddying his head in a pleasant way; he felt her kisses having the same effect. He sensed something in her that was dead but that still needed to be stirred up like ashes in the grate in the morning, and his arrival, his tears, allowed her to give in to it. He wondered how he knew all this from just a kiss, her arms urgently around him. Perhaps he did not know it, was inventing a world for her to inhabit. She led him upstairs to the room she had once shared with Ashby.

  Time had passed. It was still dark outside and he was glad of that. He had slept for a little while, he thought, but he no longer felt tired. It might be midnight, it might be eight o’clock in the morning and the little boy, Marcus, downstairs with the housekeeper whose name he could not remember, having breakfast.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name,’ he said, ashamed of this.

  ‘Marian.’

  ‘Marian,’ he repeated, tasting the word. ‘I used to know a girl called Marian. I went to a tennis party at her house in Ruislip. Do you know her, perhaps?’

  Their voices were soft, not subdued, just hushed, like the morning after a snowfall.

  No, she said, she did not know her, and he could tell she was smiling.

  ‘I’m Gerald.’

  ‘I know. You told me.’

  Had he told her? He couldn’t remember doing so.

  It was morning when he awoke again. A chink in the blackout cut a thin corridor of light across the bed, across her side of the bed, where she no longer lay. Gerald struggled to sit up, resting on his elbows, seeing her not far away, snapping her stockings onto her suspenders. He watched her, enjoying the intimacy that her
movements implied. She looked up and gave him a gentle smile.

  ‘Sleep,’ she said, ‘if you like.’

  But he was no longer tired. Instead, he watched her. She neither hurried her dressing nor slowed it down at his gaze, just continued with what she had been doing. As he watched he was aware of many things crowding around the edges of his memory, but for the moment they did not matter. He felt as though he were sitting in a large, airy room from which many rooms led off, and each of those rooms was full of a great many people all wishing to speak to him but, for the moment, all the doors were closed and no one disturbed him.

  ‘I’ll see about some breakfast,’ she said. ‘Come down when you’re ready.’

  Once she had gone he sat up, placing his feet on the thick bedroom carpet, looking around her room—was it just her room now, or was there some trace of Ashby? He saw nothing but for a single wedding photograph on the dressing table. Was she the sort of woman who kept all her dead husband’s things, his clothes and shoes? He didn’t know. There was no wardrobe and, even if there had been, he felt no compunction to look. And then he saw a pipe, Ashby’s pipe, or one just like it, on the bedside table, right at his elbow where, in his drunkenness, in his preoccupation, he had missed it last night and had almost missed it this morning, and for a moment he could not move. He heard Ashby’s wry laughter.

  He got dressed and went downstairs, finding her in the kitchen.

  The child was there, Marcus, and Gerald paused in the doorway as the child lifted a toy train into the air with a whoosh on an imaginary track, caught up in his game. Then he saw Gerald and stopped to stare at him with Ashby’s eyes, reproachful, accusing—or just surprised, just shy?—before pushing past him into another room without a second glance. The boy’s mother said nothing about the child, attempted no explanation, simply poured him coffee and cut some bread.

  ‘No jam or marg; I have my toast plain,’ he said, remembering the rationing. She sat at the kitchen table and watched him eat his breakfast as any wife did in the morning before her husband left for the office, and for a moment Gerald imagined himself staying here all day, staying here forever.

  He stood up. ‘Well, I should go,’ he said, and she smiled that same smile and nodded, and he had a feeling she would have done the same if he had said, I’d like to stay the rest of the day, I’d like to stay forever.

  She got his coat for him. Ashby’s gloves were still in the pocket and she helped him on with them for the second time. At the door, she kissed him and said, ‘This war. It gives us situations, moments, we wouldn’t normally have. If we grasp them we shouldn’t regret it. There’ll be plenty of time for regrets and recriminations later, when peace comes. Till then, we must live, mustn’t we?’

  This was her creed. And there was no question it made things easier. There were no regrets, no recriminations yet. They may come later.

  He squeezed her hand and left her, slipping out into the frozen winter morning, just as Ashby must have done that last time.

  Gerald’s train had been rerouted. They had trundled through Rugby and then Coventry so that Birmingham had seemed an inevitability, but at the final moment they had careered off onto a branch line and ground to a halt just outside Nuneaton. He was already tired of this journey, having made it now three times in four days, though admittedly it was never quite the same journey twice. The railway company always managed to surprise with its choice of routes. He found himself regarding each detour, each new station or branch line, with the incurious acceptance that every soldier cultivated in the army.

  In any case, he was in no particular hurry, this time, to reach his destination.

  It was a Wednesday, he saw, reading the date on the newspaper of the airman seated opposite. It had been a surprise to find a seat. When a very flustered young woman with a battered suitcase whose hat had come off had breathlessly boarded at Rugby there had been a moment of shifty-eyed and silent negotiation inside the compartment until the naval officer seated beside Gerald had gallantly given up his seat and the rest of them—two other naval officers, two junior lieutenants from the Yorkshire Dragoons and a captain in the Fusiliers—had breathed a sigh of collective relief and settled back into their journey. For the most part no one spoke, aside from an occasional exchange of cigarettes between the three naval officers, and no one seemed in the least surprised at the unlikely itinerary of places their train travelled through, and when the flustered young woman enquired if anyone knew what time they were due to arrive in Portsmouth no one seemed surprised by that either.

  Gerald stared out of the window. Cathcart, his CO in Cairo, had told him to contact the divisional CO when he got back—not at once, but after a week or two. This morning he had telephoned the divisional HQ and been connected, after a lengthy delay, not to the divisional CO but to a Miss Littlejohn, whose exact position and location he had not quite been able to grasp but who had appeared to have been expecting his call.

  ‘Good news, Captain Meadows,’ she had announced in a plummy voice, as though she was studying his test results after a tricky exam or a medical. ‘You’re to report to the War Office, quartermaster-general’s office, on the sixteenth.’

  He had been given a desk job. In Whitehall. Doing what, exactly, he had not the least idea. Something to with movements, supply, ordnance, logistics. The disembodied Miss Littlejohn had clearly expected him to be pleased and had sounded disappointed when he had merely thanked her and rung off. No more active service. He had done his bit. His reward, a desk job at the QMG’s office. He was forty-four. Soldiering was a young man’s game and when he looked about him at the faces of the other officers in the train compartment he saw boys a year or two out of school or university; not one of them had seen his twenty-fifth birthday.

  He turned back to the window. The train had just started up again with a jolt. The problem was, he was unable to see himself seated at a desk in the QMG, could not visualise a Captain Meadows of the Royal Tank Regiment presenting himself at the office in Whitehall on the sixteenth. He could picture the office, oh yes, he could picture it very clearly—the buff folders in filing cabinets, the classified documents tied with red ribbons, the petty office hierarchy, the puttering tea urn that was always breaking down, the frantic search for the critical document that had inexplicably got lost somewhere between the office and the typing pool—he could see it all, could hear it, smell it even, but his own place there, the desk at which he was to sit, he could not see.

  The train was now passing through Coventry once more. The airman sitting opposite lowered his newspaper briefly to peer out of the window. With the slightest raising of his eyebrows and a tiny, almost inaudible sigh, the man shook out his paper and resumed reading. With any luck, Gerald thought, the fellow would finish his paper soon and offer it around. It had been foolish embarking on such a journey without anything to read, not even a fresh packet of cigarettes. He hadn’t been thinking.

  He had made himself not think. The telephone call to the divisional HQ had been made with a curious sense of unreality. He would not have been surprised whatever orders he had been given. It did not touch him. Any order or posting seemed to him inconsequential.

  So far he had not thought at all about yesterday’s frantic and futile search. It had already passed into that same place of unreality. He saw himself, a tiny uniformed ant, scurrying from one location to the next, randomly and with no purpose, vainly seeking answers, fruitlessly following each new lead and running into one dead end after another. He was no closer to the truth, though now he knew that two people had died and had been cremated. And he knew, he had caught the briefest glimpse, of the kind of place the little girl had come from. Diana had said, What kind of life could she have, could any child have, there? It was a kindness to take her. And that was all the justification she had required.

  He was no closer to understanding how his wife could have swapped one child for another. His mind recoiled from it. It was like trying to pick up something with buttery fingers; he was
simply unable to grasp it. How could she do this thing? Discard her own child and take up another. It beggared belief. He would never have thought her capable of such a thing. When he thought of his wife he no longer saw the anxious girl at the tennis party, the exhausted but triumphant woman in a maternity ward bed who had just given birth to their child. He wasn’t certain what he saw.

  He thought about Marian Ashby, viewing her and their night together with the cool dispassion that his wife had displayed when she had perpetrated her terrible crime. Had he done that, slept with Mrs Ashby, to punish Diana? He didn’t think so, but he was unsure. How extraordinary it now seemed! He would not have thought of himself as a man who would sleep with another woman. But there you are, he thought now as the outer suburbs of some large city rushed past the window: sometimes you surprised yourself. His wife had surprised him. Mrs Ashby had surprised him. Why shouldn’t he surprise himself?

  Ah, here they were at Birmingham, and he felt a sort of grim satisfaction at the crushing, unavoidable inevitability of their arrival into Birmingham New Street. The flustered young woman seated opposite stood up in dismay, grabbed her suitcase and departed, and the gallant naval officer closed the door behind her and reclaimed the seat she had vacated with a little sigh.

  In the end they reached Leeds from the north, going through Huddersfield and Bradford then on to Otley before swinging south and east and approaching the city from Headingley. If it was a route designed to confound the enemy, it surely succeeded.

  Gerald had barely a quarter of an hour’s wait for the Wetherby connection, which was enough time to purchase cigarettes, a newspaper, some sandwiches. But he found he could not concentrate on the paper and gave it up almost at once. The sandwiches he similarly abandoned. He had begun to rehearse what he was going to say.