On the other side of her, the pint glass in Nibbo’s hand clattered down heavily onto the bar. Uncharitably she hoped half its contents had been spilled.
‘You’re a landlady?’ the sailor asked, his eyebrows rising in surprise. ‘I hadn’t realized. I thought you said . . .’
‘She ain’t a landlady,’ Charlie interrupted, perturbed. ‘She’s a respectable young lady who doesn’t want to be doin’ with sailors.’
‘It’s all right, Charlie,’ Kate said again, grateful for his concern but having no need of it. ‘I’ve got plenty of spare rooms at home and if I don’t fill them soon, the council billeting officer will fill them for me.’
Returning her attention to the sailor, she said again, ‘If you want a room, I have one.’
‘’Ang on a minute, petal,’ Charlie’s craggy face was still profoundly unhappy. ‘It ain’t as if your Dad’s still at ’ome . . .’
‘I’d never have believed it,’ Kate could hear Daniel Collins saying to Albert. ‘She might have been brought up by a Jerry, but she was well brought up.’
‘It doesn’t matter how you bring them up,’ Albert responded dourly, thinking of his eldest daughter. ‘In wartime women go haywire. Mavis is giving Miriam more grey hair than Hitler’s entire bloody air force.’
‘I want a room,’ the sailor said to Kate, answering her question and ignoring the comments being made around them. He pushed his half-empty glass to one side. ‘If you’re ready to lead the way, I’m ready to follow.’
For the second time in the short time since he had first spoken to her Kate’s mouth curved in a wide smile. There was such innate good humour in his brown, gold-flecked eyes that it was impossible to be in his company and not feel similarly good-humoured. Also, she was well aware that the conversation now taking place between the two of them would be being recounted and embellished the length and breadth of Magnolia Square before morning. And the vastly amused expression in the sailor’s eyes told her it was a fact he was equally well aware of. And that he knew exactly what the main subject of the gossip would be.
As their eyes met Kate was aware that he could read her thoughts just as clearly as she could read his. It was the same friendly sensation of empathy that had once existed between herself and Carrie. And it was a sensation she had thought she would never enjoy again.
‘Come on,’ she said to him, turning away from the bar, her long braid of hair glistening with sleet. ‘My dog is on his own at home and it isn’t a situation he enjoys.’
‘Bloody hell,’ she heard Albert say as they stepped into the darkness outside, the sailor negotiating the step adroitly with his crutch. ‘If that don’t beat the band. Wait till I tell them at home that Kate Voigt’s taken in a darky as a lodger!’
Once outside Kate was grateful to discover that the sleet had stopped and that the pavement, barely discernible in the blacked-out darkness, was already beginning to dry.
‘If you’re going to be my landlady I’d better introduce myself properly,’ her companion said as they began to walk back up Magnolia Hill. ‘My name is Leon. Leon Emmerson.’
‘Mine’s Kate,’ Kate said as the faint strains of Away in a Manger emanated from St Mark’s Church. ‘Kate Voigt. My father is German. He’s in an internment camp on the Isle of Wight.’
‘That must be tough for you,’ he said sympathetically, his response very similar to Toby’s response when she had first broken the news to him of her father’s nationality.
At the memory pain shafted through her. The sunlit afternoon before the war, when she and Toby had sat overlooking the Thames at Greenwich and he had asked her if he could write to her seemed now to belong not only to another world, but to another century.
‘Where do you come from?’ she asked as they turned into the Square, walking past the waxy cream petals of Miss Helliwell’s head-high wintersweet.
His white teeth flashed in the darkness. ‘Everyone asks me that and no-one believes me when I tell them the answer.’ He adjusted the kit-bag one-handedly with difficulty. ‘I’m from Chatham.’
‘Your parents weren’t born in Chatham though, surely?’ Kate asked, bemused.
‘My mother was. My father was born in Bridgetown, Barbados. He was an able seaman in Queen Victoria’s navy and he met my mother when his ship was laid-up in Chatham Dockyard.’
‘And your injury?’ she asked, not feeling at all as if she was being intrusive; feeling as if she had known him for years.
‘Norway,’ he said succinctly. ‘I was a member of the gun-crew on the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious. We’d been evacuating Allied troops from Narvik and were on our way home when we were caught unawares by two German battle cruisers. They opened fire at a range of about twenty-eight thousand yards and an hour and a half later Glorious turned over and sank.’ His voice was off-handedly factual but she could tell how difficult he was finding it to keep it so.
‘Out of a ship’s company of more than one thousand two hundred, only forty-three of us survived,’ he continued, and despite all his efforts, naked emotion had now entered his rich deep voice. ‘Forty-seven airmen were lost as well, including the crews of eight Gladiators and ten Hurricanes who had flown on board rather than abandon their aircraft in Norway.’
Kate remained silent, thinking again of Toby, knowing from harsh experience how trivial even the most well-meaning of words could sound.
‘I was one of the few lucky ones,’ he said as they approached her gate, and from the rawness in his voice she knew the guilt he felt at having lived when so many of his shipmates had died. ‘Four days and nights in a damaged lifeboat and we were plucked from the sea by the RAF.’ A glimmer of humour entered his voice again as she opened her front gate. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see air-force blue in all my life.’
As she put her key in the lock Hector could be heard charging down the hall to greet her, barking furiously.
‘You’d better take care,’ she said dryly. ‘He nearly knocks me off my feet when he greets me and he’s quite likely to do the same to you.’
He flashed her his ready, easy smile. ‘Thanks for the warning. What is he? An alsatian?’
‘A Labrador. Charlie, the gentleman who was standing nearby you in the pub, has an alsatian. Her name is Queenie and she has the same disconcerting habit.’
The curiosity he already felt about her deepened. He remembered the man drinking nearby him in the pub and by no stretch of the imagination could he imagine anyone else referring to him as ‘a gentleman’. He had been disreputably dressed with a large beer gut hanging over the broad leather belt holding up his trousers and there had been at least a three days’ growth of grizzly stubble on his chin and jowls.
Hector leapt up at her and as he watched her lovingly fuss and pat the dog his initial feeling of liking for her, and the heartfelt gratitude he felt towards her for offering him lodgings, increased. She was an oddity, no doubt about that. He had sensed it from the tension she had aroused from the inmates of the saloon-bar the instant she had set foot across the threshold. It had been a tension far over and above that which normally arose when a woman invaded a masculine sanctum. It had been a tension he was all too painfully familiar with. The tension that arose when people were confronted with someone they regarded as being not of their own kind.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said, giving Hector a last, loving pat. ‘I was on my way home from Lewisham when you asked me about lodgings and I’m frozen to the marrow. Leave your kit-bag in the hall for now. I’ll show you your room, or rather you can take your choice of room because I’ve got three that are spare, when we’ve had a warming drink.’
She began to walk down the long hallway towards the kitchen, pausing just long enough to say over her shoulder, ‘The sitting-room is the first door on the left. There’s no fire on but I’ll light one after I’ve made the tea.’
Even without the heat of a fire the house had a warm feel to it. A colourful home-made rag rug lay on the linoleum of the hallway. There were pictures on the walls.
A reproduction of something that looked both primitive and Italian; a professionally painted watercolour of the pretty church that sat on the Heath just above Blackheath Village; a crayoned picture of a tree with a doll at its foot, obviously executed by a child and framed by proud parents.
As he obeyed her instructions and lowered his kit-bag with relief to the floor, he wondered if she had been the child who, long ago, had proudly brought the picture home from school. He knew that her father wasn’t living at home because Charlie had made that clear when they were in the pub and she had since told him the reason for her father’s absence and his present whereabouts. Her husband and the father of the child she was obviously expecting was, presumably, serving in the Army or the RAF. If, like himself, he was in the Navy she would surely have mentioned the fact.
As he walked into the sitting-room, Hector sniffing suspiciously at his heels, he wondered if her mother was still alive. There was no sign of there being anyone else in the house. He looked around the room and, though it was a little cheerless without the benefit of a fire in the grate, he liked what he saw.
There was a slightly shabby but exceedingly comfortable-looking settee and two matching easy-chairs. The alcoves on either side of the fire-breast were lined with shelves, every one of them heavy with books. A standard lamp stood behind one of the chairs, strategically placed to give added light for reading. A wireless sat on a low table. On another low table lay a half-opened book, face down.
He picked it up, being careful not to lose the reader’s page. His eyebrows rose slightly. It wasn’t a lightweight love novel. It was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
As he put it back down on the table he could hear the welcoming sound of tap-water gushing into a kettle. He turned towards the wood-surrounded, tiled fireplace. On one side stood a polished brass coal scuttle and on the other stood an equally gleaming tongs, shovel and brush stand. On the mantelpiece were three photographs in silver frames, two on the left-hand side, and one on the right-hand side.
He walked over to the fireplace in order to see them more clearly. Of the two photographs near together, one was much larger than the other. It was a head and shoulders shot of a bespectacled middle-aged man. It looked as if it had been taken in a garden and as if he had just turned round to face the camera and had been caught unawares.
It was a pleasant face, if not particularly arresting. His hair was thinning; his cheekbones high. There was an abstracted expression in his eyes as if, despite his surprise at being so unexpectedly photographed, his thoughts had not entirely returned from whatever subject they had been dwelling on. It was, Leon mused, the face of an intellectual; of a man far more at ease with academia than the practical world. It was also, quite obviously, Kate Voigt’s father.
The smaller photograph was a sepia studio photograph of a young woman dressed in the fashion of nearly twenty years ago. Her mouth was Kate Voigt’s mouth, full and well shaped and generously laughing. Her delicately boned features were that of a perfectly carved cameo. As were her daughter’s. Leon felt a pang of sadness on Kate Voigt’s behalf. From the age of the photograph it was safe to assume that her mother was dead and had been dead for several years. From personal experience he knew how hard a blow the loss of a mother in early childhood could be.
With an added feeling of empathy towards his new landlady, he turned towards the photograph standing alone on the left-hand side of the mantelpiece. It was of an airman. He was wearing a flying-jacket and no cap and it was impossible to tell his rank, but from his proprietorial stance beside his aircraft it was obvious to Leon that he was a pilot and an officer.
He regarded the photograph with interest. So this was Kate Voigt’s husband. He wondered why she hadn’t mentioned that her husband was an RAF pilot when he had told her of the RAF losses aboard Glorious and then cursed himself immediately for a fool. She hadn’t told him because she couldn’t bear to contemplate a similar fate befalling her husband; because the entire subject of the enormous losses being sustained by air crew was one too horrific for her to be able to talk about.
His eyes held those of the young man in the photograph. Just as Kate Voigt’s father’s photograph had, in some indefinable way, proclaimed him to be a quiet, self-effacing intellectual, so this photograph indefinably proclaimed public-school education and the confidence, often bordering on arrogance, that accompanied such an education.
His lips crooked at the corners. Kate Voigt’s husband was his antithesis in other ways, apart from education and class. Whereas he was five-foot-nine-inches tall, with the broad-shouldered build of a useful middle-weight boxer, the young man in the photograph was easily over six foot tall and possessed a lean, whippy quality as opposed to mere muscle. He was also fair-haired to the point of being almost Nordic.
Wryly he raised a hand to his hair. Tight, coarse curls sprang against his palm. He wondered what the public school educated Mr Voigt would say when he discovered that his heavily pregnant wife had impulsively offered board and lodging to a man his Magnolia Square neighbours had had no hesitation in describing as ‘a darky’. His eyes continued to hold those of the young man in the photograph. There was good-humour there; and tolerance. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind. Perhaps, on his half-German wife’s behalf, he had come face to face with prejudice and was too aware of its ugliness and hurtfulness to ever give vent to it himself.
He surveyed the fire-grate. Apart from coal it was laid ready for lighting. Sheets of newspaper, rolled and then knotted, lay beneath a scattering of precious wood chippings. He bent down, took the tongs from their holder and began laying coal.
By the time Kate entered the room, the fire had taken hold and the flicker of the flames was already beginning to cast a cheery glow.
‘Thanks,’ she said gratefully, setting down a tray bearing a teapot, a small milk-jug, sugar-bowl and two mugs, on one of the low tables. ‘It doesn’t matter how carefully I lay a fire, it doesn’t always catch hold first time for me. When Dad was at home, he always saw to the fires.’
She began to pour the tea into mugs. ‘I thought you’d prefer a mug to a cup,’ she said as she did so. ‘Dad always does. He says cups are too finicky for men.’
From his position in front of the fireplace he regarded her with intrigued curiosity. She was behaving as though he were a family friend or a formal house-guest, not a lodger. He said, more bemused by her than ever, ‘You’ve never taken a lodger in before, have you, Mrs Voigt?’
She stood perfectly still for a moment, her back and her incredibly long swing of plaited hair towards him, the teapot still in her hand. Then, very slowly, she set the teapot back on the tray. Even more slowly she turned to face him.
Gentian-blue eyes met his.
‘It’s Miss Voigt,’ she said steadily, the huge mound of her belly even more apparent now that she had taken off her coat. ‘I’m not married and I never have been.’
It took a lot to disconcert Leon but stunned surprise did so now. Kate Voigt looked a lot of things; beautiful, warm-hearted, unconventional. But she didn’t look the kind of young woman to find herself in what was, for women, the oldest kind of trouble possible. His thoughts immediately went to the photograph on the mantelpiece.
As if reading them she said, and this time her voice was not quite so steady, ‘My fiancé was killed at Dunkirk. He was a fighter pilot. His name was Toby. Toby Harvey.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, hating the total inadequacy of his words.
She gave a slight, almost infinitesimal shrug of her shoulders. He knew that she was not dismissing his sympathy. She was simply refusing to descend to the level of a trite, conventional response; a response that would be as totally inadequate as his words of sympathy had been.
A chill went through him as, for the first time, he realized just how alone she was. She hadn’t said so, but he was certain that her mother was dead, her father was in an internment camp and the father of her expected child was buried in a makeshift grave on the other side of the Englis
h Channel. No wonder her friend, Charlie, had been so concerned at the thought of her taking into her home a war-injured sailor she knew absolutely nothing about.
As she handed him his mug of tea he said awkwardly, ‘I appreciate you helping me out of a tight spot with lodgings over Christmas, Miss Voigt, but perhaps . . . under the circumstances . . . it might be best if I looked for somewhere else to board once Christmas is over.’
She picked her mug of tea up from off the tray and sat down in one of the comfortable-looking armchairs. She was wearing a navy-blue maternity dress, the material obviously salvaged from some other garment in order that her precious clothing coupons could be set aside for baby clothing. The material was warm and serviceable and that was all that could be said in its favour. It should have looked dowdy, but it didn’t. She had embroidered small crimson rosebuds on the collar and the dark colour of the dress merely emphasized the pale goldness of her hair and the stunning blueness of her black-lashed eyes.
‘Are you being protective of my reputation?’ she asked, and the bitterness in her soft, husky voice was so unexpected that it sent a fresh shock vibrating through him. ‘If so, it’s very thoughtful of you, but you’re wasting your time. I don’t have a reputation to protect.’
Without being able to stop himself, his eyes moved down from her face to the ripe roundness of her belly.
‘And it’s not only because of the baby,’ she said, putting his thoughts into words for him. ‘The vast majority of my neighbours have had nothing to do with me since my father was interned. They seem to have taken his internment as proof that he was a German spy or fifth columnist.’
The pain in her voice was so raw he felt his scalp tingle. ‘My having an illegitimate baby is merely the icing on the cake. If you’re worried about loss of reputation, I should be warning you. Once it’s known you’re lodging here, you’ll be treated by my neighbours as if you’ve moved into the Reichstag.’
‘I think that’s a slander I can cope with,’ he said equably.
The Londoners Page 25
