A Place for Us

by Harriet Evans

  “Sorry.” David covered his mouth, trying to hide his panicky, labored breathing. “Miles away.”

  Horace was giving him a curious look. “Right. Listen, are you in town this evening? I’m rather keen on going to a club in Pimlico I think you’d like—it’s got a—”

  “No,” said David, louder than he had meant. “I really just came up to show you these. I have to be back tonight. Work and . . . other business.” He hoped he sounded vague. As though the real reason he had to be home wasn’t just because he hated being away from Martha, whether she was speaking to him or not. But that was the truth. He was only happy when he was with Martha, was only able to work when he could hear her low, clear voice singing around the house. She was his home.

  “Well, what a shame.” Horace glanced again over the pen-and-ink drawings. He scratched his chin, jangling the glass of melting ice in his other hand, and muttered something under his breath: David heard the word “domesticated.”

  “Listen,” Horace said after a moment. “It’s certainly an impressive collection, old bean. I’ll give you that. You’re rather . . . brave. I’d have thought you’d have learned your lesson with the dying industries lot you shoved my way last year.”

  David stared at the sheets of paper spread out over the table. “This isn’t some Sunday Hyde Park artist’s stuff, Horace—this is my life’s work. What happened there, it’s all been forgotten. We build new things and make new homes and it all gets bulldozed over, and we mustn’t forget, that’s all.” He could hear himself, how desperate he sounded, and he tried to modulate his voice. “You know, I’d rather hoped you could see your way to something rather like that prisoner of war series you did with Ronnie Searle.”

  “Ah, but he’s—he’s got the whole package. Wonderful chap. Anyway, it isn’t what people want these days, David.” Horace swilled the liquid in his glass around languorously. “It’s a hip, crazy world out there, everything’s changing, old order gone, all of that, and—”

  “Exactly,” said David. “I want to—”

  A flash of anger lit up Horace Sayers’s face. “Do let me finish, old thing, will you? I’ll be frank. We can offer you work, but it’s got to be light entertainment, you savvy? We want to make people laugh. Give them a break from their dire little lives.”

  David couldn’t bear to look at the sketches, spread out in front of them. Instead, he saw the overdue electricity bill . . . Martha’s face that morning . . . the gate that hung off the hinge. He saw his own ridiculous folly, how trying to pull himself out of the past had led them to this house; how stupid he was, wanting something he couldn’t afford and didn’t deserve. “I got the wrong end of the stick, I’m afraid. Not clear what you were looking for in my mind, and that’s my fault.” He was talking, saying anything to hold Horace’s attention, his nimble mind jumping over the conversational rubble to get to safety, away from the demons that pursued him.

  He knew, without stopping to think, that this was the moment everything hinged on. “How about dogs? They off the table too?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have a dog called Wilbur.” His mind was racing; he tried to sound calm, as if this was part of the plan. “Wonderful chap. Mongrel. Very affectionate, bit stupid, but wise in his way. You see?” He raised his chin, meeting Horace’s eyes, smiling gently as though they were both in on a joke he hadn’t even thought of yet. “My elder daughter, Daisy, got him for Christmas a few years ago, but he’s all of ours, really. Now, Daisy’s very naughty and Wilbur gets her out of scrapes. But they’re also rather sweet together. The other afternoon, for instance. I came into the kitchen. Hot day, I rather fancy a bottle of beer. I catch him chasing his tail, round and round. . . .” He twirled his finger in the air, and Horace nodded. David knew he had him then.

  “Daisy was watching him, nodding solemnly, and I thought he was talking to her, saying something like, ‘It’s like a merry-go-round, old girl. I’ll just catch this tail and then I’ll get off.’ ” Horace laughed. “And he appears at the other side of the table like a jumping bean at supper, bouncing in the air in case there’s some spare food. He’s jolly funny. Here,” David said, his heart beating hard, “let me show you. Do you have any . . .” He looked around for paper, but there was none in the empty boardroom. “Never mind.” He turned over one of the sketches, pulled his pen out of his pocket, and swiftly drew the picture Daisy had shown him that morning of Wilbur whirling round in a circle, and he added Daisy, brows drawn together, arms crossed, glowering at him in confusion.

  “Something like this. A little girl and her dog. You call it The Adventures of Daisy and Wilbur. Have a page every week. How Wilbur helps the family and hinders at the same time. Hmm?” He rapidly traced his pen across the page again. Now that he knew what he had to do, he was in control. “Wilbur’s waiting at the end of the lane for Daisy to come back from school.” He laughed. “He does it every day. It’s sweet. But he doesn’t recognize her, keeps running up to the wrong people and licking them, and they often . . . let’s say they don’t welcome the overtures. The young mother with the pram, she screams and says, ‘Leave my Susan alone!’ Then there’s the vicar. Wilbur likes chewing his waistcoat. And the barmaid at the Oak Tree, well. You can imagine what Wilbur goes for there, I’m sorry to say.”

  Horace gave a snickering giggle. “It sounds idyllic. You’re a clever chap, David. I like it. I think we’ve got something there. Will your daughter mind?”

  “Daisy? She’s six. Don’t worry.” David wanted to clear the other drawings up now, to stow them away, safe and sound. “She’ll love it. So—should I get something off to you in the next couple of days? I have a deadline, but I can easily work with you to—”

  “We want to get this rolling as soon as possible, you know,” said Horace. “Come into the office with me and let’s discuss the terms and all of that.”

  “And these?” David gestured to the sketches as he swept them into his portfolio folder. “Any interest in seeing these again?”

  “Oh, gosh no. This way, please. June, would you fetch me another drink? David—another for you? Marvelous. Yes, I think this could be the start of something rather special.”

  AFTERWARD, HE WALKED out of the building with a contract and a cigarette, and he thought he would go straight to Paddington, but he didn’t. He headed out of Soho and through Bloomsbury, up the leafy, wide climb of Rosebery Avenue toward the Angel.

  He didn’t know why after all these years, couldn’t have explained it. He just kept on walking, getting closer and closer. He thought he was fine, to begin with. Merely an interested party revisiting an old place; but his stomach started to cramp and he winced when he saw the Clerkenwell fire station. How often after Mum died he’d stood there waiting for news, rather than go back home, as if they might suddenly tell him she wasn’t dead and it was all a mistake, if he waited long enough. He’d hear the bells ringing and see them racing out at full pelt. By the end of the war he’d got so used to it he’d know already, just by the sounds of houses collapsing, where it was, whether their place was in danger.

  The flashbacks started again as he crawled up and over the City Road, up to the backstreets near Chapel Market. Rubble like rain, the sounds of the baby screaming, the bewildered faces of the tiny kids who’d huddle together, moving in a pack toward the shelter of the Angel tube station. And his stomach started knotting up again. No food, the whiskey Horace had given him curdling the milky coffee he’d had for breakfast. Bile rose in his gullet, and his throat thickened as if it had swollen shut. He kept on walking, past the Lyons, past the old Peacock Inn.

  “You all right, love?” an old woman with a headscarf asked him, peering into his face as he held on to some railings, trying not to retch.

  As he walked down Chapel Market, past where the mission used to be, where his mother’d go to have her face dressed after his father had kicked her or hit her with the pan or held a coal to h
er face or . . . whatever else he did, the images in his mind’s eye grew stronger and he couldn’t stop the sweating, the agony of his stomach cramping. The sounds in his ears. And he was back there again, running toward the hell of his home life, that freezing clear night, January 1945.

  He’d seen his dad at the pub and knew he was drunk already, but he didn’t know where else to go. It was always the same: should he go home when the siren sounded, to make sure his mother and the baby were safe? Because it was always there, the fear that his dad really would get him this time. So he’d run along the street with the sirens sounding, caught up in the rush inside to be ready, and then, getting to the front door, creep in, hearing the sobbing, juddering screams as his father slammed his mother into whatever it was he was hitting her with that night. Tom Doolan wasn’t scared of the fucking Germans. He wasn’t fucking scared of anyone, not like that little drip of shit she said was his son.

  The first time the bombs had fallen, David was ten. He got used to the Blitz, got used to the shelters and the drama and the sobbing. He learned how to climb over rubble and pretend he wasn’t scared. But in 1945, when everyone thought the war was coming to an end, it started up again. V-2s. David didn’t understand at first. Because D-Day had happened, we’d invaded France, wasn’t it all over? But January, February, March, these new, infinitely more terrifying bombs hit London, and you never heard them until it was too late and they smashed into you. And this time he really was scared.

  His mum was so tired these days. The new baby took up all her time. She’d come out of the blue, a tiny little thing, and when David looked at her he felt no connection. He was fourteen, nearly fifteen. This mewling scrap of red skin and bone, she was nothing to do with him, was she? He was angry with his mum for having her, for being so sad, for letting his dad do this to her. Hadn’t she learned how not to have any more babies?

  The night she was killed they heard V-2s over toward Shoreditch and the City. You heard them when they weren’t for you, which didn’t make it any less frightening. It just meant you might not hear the next one, and then it’d be too late. He’d run home from playing outside the Spanish Prisoners, the pub down the road from their house. There was a man there selling oranges if you gave him a fiddle, and one of David’s friends had pulled him off, but David didn’t want an orange that much. He’d hung around outside the pub, watching to see if his father was coming home, what temper he’d be in. He liked to do that, to warn his mother. He had to try to look after her. He’d always done it.

  When he ran home and into the house, upstairs was having another row about something and his mother was playing her beloved piano—to block out the noise, he thought. Calm as you like, smooth hair coiled up around her long, slim neck, and the little baby beside her, asleep in a drawer. Her tiny legs were waving. He thought she might be cold. Her blanket had fallen off.

  “Ma,” he’d said. “Didn’t you hear the sirens?”

  “No, I was singing, to cheer her up,” she said, turning round and smiling. “Hello, my lovely boy. I suppose we’d best get off to the station, then.”

  “It’s too late, Ma,” he’d said, half-angry, half-proud of her, playing her painted, dusty piano while the city exploded around her. “No time. And, Ma, he’s coming back. He’s in a bad way.”

  He remembered her face then. “Oh, Davy.”

  They hid under the piano, because he was sure by now there wasn’t time to get to the shelter, and David didn’t know if they were hiding from the bombs or from his father. His mother’s calm breathing, her hands smoothing his hair back from his head: he could still remember the feel of the tags and cuts on her red-raw fingers decades later. How small she always seemed, curled next to him.

  They were quiet as mice for ten awful minutes. The baby didn’t make a sound. And just when the silence had stretched to an unbearable breaking point, the baby woke up and started crying; and just like that, there was a crashing sound, an explosion, a crunching, elemental force like the earth was cracking open. The piano buckled above them from the weight of the floor above collapsing, and David felt his mother’s warm, heavy body fall on top of him and the baby, as the house crumpled down around them all. It seemed to go on for ages, louder than anything. A great blow of something fell onto them, the baby was screaming, his back felt as though knives were stabbing him, and his mother was crushing him, hard, the weight of something above her like a battering ram.

  Everything was white. David didn’t remember crawling into a tiny shape, as small as he could possibly make himself go, just like his mother had always said. But he must have done. He stayed there until he was sure there weren’t more bombs coming, until he saw the sky, out of the corner of his eye, turn from black to gray. It occurred to him he couldn’t usually see the sky from his home, and something was different.

  It must have been a long time. He stank of his own urine and he didn’t think he could move. He could hear voices, calling, and he crawled slowly out from underneath his mother, blinking away the sharp dust in his eyes. One of her arms, and the side of her, had been ripped away. The ribs, like ribbons of flesh. David looked at her face and then looked away again, and was sick on the ground.

  “Someone in there? Is that Emily’s place?”

  He’d forgotten about the baby till a little sound from beside his mother’s body made him look over. There it was, this tiny little thing. Her mother had taken her out of the drawer. She must have had her on her lap, and the baby’d rolled away onto the floor beside her mother. Her legs were still waving in the air. She was thick with dust. He pulled the blanket over her, wrapping it tightly round her, then picked her up carefully, clutching her to him, like girls with dolls he’d seen playing on the bomb sites. His legs almost buckled but he walked toward the voices. He couldn’t work out where the door was, which way round he was.

  “There’s a kid in there. Oi, son! You all right? You hear me?”

  “It’s Emily’s kid. Where’s Tom Doolan?” he heard someone else say. “Maybe he’s under all that rubble.”

  There was a hole at the edge of something. He saw it and knew it had been the front door. He crawled through it, still clutching his sister. The light was bright; his eyes stung with the dust.

  “It’s all right, Cassie,” he said to the tiny bundle, which barely seemed alive to him, or even human. “It’s just you and me now. But we’re going to be all right.”

  HE HADN’T BEEN back there since—he knew well enough when. It was five years ago, and he wondered if she still worked round the corner. Perhaps that was what had pushed him up the hill. The hope of seeing her again.

  Stumbling slightly, flashing lights in the corners of his field of vision blurring everything, David found himself standing outside the Spanish Prisoners, and without knowing what else to do, he went in. Before and during the war it had been a dark place, but not like this. Then at least you had a community, even if the community was poor and desperate and afraid. His mother had played piano there, and he’d sometimes sit next to her on the long, worn wooden bench and sing the old songs with her. Everyone went in there, even if when they came out they were apt to be drunk and sometimes violent. It was just where you went.

  Now it was dirty, unloved, dusty. Full of memories. An old thin man behind the bar, bent almost double. Flies buzzing around the curling sandwiches next to the tills. Ashtrays full to overflowing. A few mean-faced old-timers, gazing into empty drinks. Only men. He wondered if one of them was his father. He’d no idea if he was alive or dead somewhere, under a railway arch, chucked in the river after a fight. Or waiting, just biding his time to come back and get his son, the bogeyman of his nightmares.

  His stomach started cramping unbearably now, and David went to the lavatory outside in the backyard. He emptied his liquid bowels, shaking and staring into space in the narrow, cramped privy, grateful that no one could hear him. Then, standing up at the bar, he ordered himself a gin this time, and
drank it whole, wondering what he should do, if he was brave enough to hang around, see if he could find her, just see her for a few seconds, make sure she was all right. Aunt Jem had said she was living here now, working a stone’s throw away. That was why he’d come back, wasn’t it? Even though half of him didn’t even know if he should walk along the market, in case he bumped into her. He was sure she didn’t want to see him.

  That silly cartoon again . . . he sketched out another picture of Wilbur in his book, tearing out the page, marooning it on the dirty old wood. He stared at the dog, his head spinning. What had he agreed to, back in that office? And why on earth had he come here?

  He finished his drink and walked slowly down Chapel Market, picking up an apple on the way, hoping that might make him feel better; and as he bit into the sharply sweet juice his sense of self, the story he believed about himself, returned a little. He’d got out; he’d got his sister out. He’d gone to the Slade, got his degree. He’d met Martha, and that had saved him, he was sure. She was his angel, his great love, his muse, his friend; he did everything for her, for her first, and then the children. He sometimes wondered what would have happened to him had he not gone out and met her that day.

  Somehow he’d managed to escape his father, and the life that had nearly sucked him in. But that didn’t mean he forgot. He couldn’t forget, much as he wished he could.

  In another minute he was going past Cassie’s work. A framer’s, now that was funny too, when you thought about it, him an artist. The shops were mostly hidden from view by the market stalls in front, and the framer’s had an old chap selling a pile of shoes right outside it, so David couldn’t see in. He stopped behind a fishmonger’s stall and peered over, to see if he could spot her bright hair through the window. She wasn’t there, and it was a good thing. What would he say to her, anyway?