The Way to London

by Alix Rickloff

  “So you stopped trying?”

  His lips pressed to a flat line, his eyes hard as he stared out the window into the dark.

  “I’ve found it takes a lot less effort to live down to someone’s low opinion. The trouble comes when it doesn’t take any effort at all. Then you’ve let the Sayres of the world win.”

  The slop of the coach wheels against the macadam acted as a bass line to the murmur of quiet conversations. A group of soldiers near the front joined together in a chorus of “The Rose of Tralee,” but the tired passengers, stiff and impatient in their seats, didn’t have the heart or the energy to sing along. The attempt ended with a stern warning by the chippie.

  Lucy lit a cigarette and leaned back to exhale a thin stream of blue smoke. She knew all about low expectations. She’d made it her life’s work to sink to the bottom. People didn’t expect anything after that. They left you alone.

  She knew alone.

  Preferred it.

  What do you want, lass?

  Michael’s question lingered at the edges of her mind as his face hovered before her eyes, that quizzical mobile choirboy face.

  Excitement. Attention. Fun. That’s how she might have answered him once. Now she wasn’t so sure of her response. She wasn’t sure of a lot of things.

  A new and uncomfortable feeling.

  “Maybe your mam is in London too, miss. Maybe she’s in London looking for you just like you’re looking for her.”

  “A pleasant thought, but highly doubtful.”

  Bill continued to watch her expectantly.

  “I spent most of my life away at school. When I was home, my mum was always very busy with other things. She didn’t have much time for child raising.”

  “Is that why you want to go to America?”

  “I suppose it’s one of the reasons. There’s nothing for me here in England. I was born in the States and went to schools all over the world. Then I was in Singapore until last year, when I was sent to my aunt’s, where you met me.”

  “Were you evacuated like I was because of the war?”

  “In a way, though at the time no one really thought war would come to us there.”

  “Michael said I needed to look after you.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “He said it would be hard because you don’t think you need looking after, but that you really do.”

  “Well, you can tell Corporal McKeegan that I’m a big girl and don’t need him or anyone else sticking their nose in. And another thing you can tell him—”

  “I can’t tell him nothing.” He frowned, perplexed. “Michael’s gone back home. Remember?”

  She sighed and crushed out her cigarette. “So he has.” She turned to look out the window, but there was nothing to see except the hollowed cheeks and eyes of her own cheerless reflection.

  Miss, it’s a raid.” A hand shook Lucy free of a slightly risqué dream featuring Michael in a starring role. He crossed a rain-drenched field in a rain-drenched shirt, ready to sweep her into his strong arms, when—

  “Lucy, we have to get to a shelter before them Jerries smash us to smithereens.” The hand came again, more firmly this time, and the last streamers of pleasurably misty unconsciousness evaporated with a crash of ack-ack fire and the moan of sirens.

  “Where are we?” she asked thickly, her tongue feeling as if it had become glued to the roof of her mouth and her eyes scratchy and dry.

  “The city, miss. Leastways, close enough it makes no difference.”

  That brought her upright and awake. “London?”

  “Aye, miss. Now, please come on.”

  She peered out of the coach window to see a sky burning smoky red, great gouges of yellow and orange flame piercing the clouds each time the gunners sent up their fire. Explosions vibrated in her chest and along her bones. British. German. It didn’t matter to her heart, which lurched with every air-rushing whump, or the hair at the back of her neck, which prickled and rose at the scream of incoming HEs and incendiaries.

  She checked her watch. It was just past midnight. “How long have I been asleep?”

  Bill shrugged. “Dunno. I got bored and went up front to sit by the driver. He’s from Wandsworth. That’s south of the river.”

  A few straggling passengers were filing out of the coach. No one panicked or shouted. Instead weary resignation seemed to be the order of the day as they gathered belongings, grumbled about the inconvenience, and made their way onto the pavement, where the driver nudged them along with brisk instructions. “Shelter’s down the alley and off to the right, folks. Double quick like.”

  Lucy took her case down from the overhead rack. “Have you got your knapsack?”

  “Aye, miss.”

  “And Rufus. Where’s Rufus?”

  “I’ve got him.”

  “Where’s my handbag?”

  “It was right in your lap.”

  “It was, but I can’t find it now.” She laid aside her case to look on the floor, felt under her seat, checked the rack above. Checked under the seat again. “It’s gone.”

  “Hurry, folks,” the driver scolded. “It’s getting worse. Them planes are right on top of us.”

  Indeed they were. The drone of engines, roar of explosions, and return fire from the guns became a wall of sound that pummeled Lucy’s eardrums and made her stomach loosen. The air was punched from her lungs and tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. Or maybe they weren’t completely unbidden. If she’d lost her handbag, she was buggered but good.

  “Lucy, we’ve got to go.”

  “Not until I find my handbag. Every cent I possess is in that bag.” She knelt on the floor of the coach and reached to sweep under all the seats. “It has to be here somewhere.”

  Bill tried pulling her onto her feet. Rufus squawked and fluttered in his basket as if he were being pulled apart feather by feather. The driver finally grabbed her by the back of her coat and yanked her to her feet.

  “Found it!” She waved it in the air above her head like a prize.

  A street over, a bomb sent a plume of fire and shrapnel in all directions. The coach lurched sideways. Bill grabbed her arm, his eyes wide, mouth a frightened O. Lucy’s legs jellied, but she managed to swallow the terrified shriek jagging its way up her throat.

  The driver ushered them to the rear of the alley, where a flight of steps led down to a doorway. Inside, they pushed through a canvas curtain and followed a corridor into a room filled with a double row of bunks, all of them occupied. The place smelled of sweat and drains and boiled cabbage. Blinking owlish eyes in pale weary faces stared at the new arrivals. Some rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. A baby wailed. An old man grumbled and broke wind. A family sat on the floor, the children wrapped in blankets, sleeping, their mother engrossed in the latest edition of Tatler, all of them unmoved by the cacophony outside the shelter.

  The room was already crowded but with the addition of the coach’s passengers there was nowhere to sit that wasn’t uncomfortably close to one’s neighbor. Lucy found herself a few inches of floor space crushed between Bill and his basket, which dug into her rib cage whenever she tried to move, and an old woman smelling of stale urine who coughed her way through a pack of Player’s cigarettes.

  The shelter warden passed out cups of tea with a bright, determined smile. “Nasty night out, but a nice hot cuppa should do the trick. Warm you inside and out, it will.”

  “Ta.” Bill took the mug in both hands.

  Lucy sipped at the tea, which scalded all the way down to her stomach lining. Mouth on fire, she gulped, coughed, and choked her way through half the mug, but it seemed to ease the jittery sick feeling making her teary eyed and trembly. “Is it like this every night?”

  “Worst was the autumn of ’40. They’d come up the river every night and flatten anything what stood in their way. It’s better now. They still come, but not near as often.”

  Down in the subterranean bowels of the shelter, the noise dulled to only a hurricane gr
owl, but it still seemed to pulse along Lucy’s veins like small jolts of electricity.

  “One . . . two . . . three—”

  The shelter rocked, plaster sifting down on them like powdered sugar.

  “One . . . two—”

  The lights flickered, went out for a gasp of a second, and came back on with a blink of fluorescence.

  “What are you doing?” Bill asked.

  “When I was a child during thunderstorms, we’d count between the lightning flash and the thunder to see how close the storm was.”

  “But this isn’t a storm.”

  The walls seemed to shudder with the force of the attack.

  “Isn’t it?”

  Chapter 18

  The next morning Lucy woke from a broken sleep with a crick in her neck and a body stiff from the cold floor. The shelter was alive with activity as people took turns washing up in the one tiny lav at the back of the corridor before heading squinty eyed into the gritty daylight to assess the damage. The old woman was gone, the only evidence of her existence being an overloaded ashtray. But the squalling baby remained, and the family stood near the entryway, the mother in her printed cotton dress surrounded by her stair-step children chatting with the warden about the laundry merits of Oxydol versus Rinso.

  Despite the acrid aromas of dozens of grubby people trapped in a space the size of her aunt’s drawing room and the mysterious stains on the lumpy mattress, Lucy gazed with longing at an empty bunk. An hour of uninterrupted sleep. Maybe two. That was all she asked.

  “Lucy!”

  It was not to be.

  Bill stood over her with a revoltingly cheerful expression on his face. “I’ve brought you a piece of toast and marg.”

  Not exactly the breakfast in bed she envisioned, but it was the best on offer.

  Her tidying consisted of a sponge-off with a handkerchief dipped in the lav sink and a quick swipe of powder from her compact. The outfit was a dead loss, but that was easy enough to fix once she booked herself into a hotel, while her hair would need at least an hour under the hot rollers to look even halfway decent. If she was going to make it to the Dorchester in time for a pre-dinner aperitif, she needed to get cracking.

  She found Bill in the alley outside the shelter, shuffling his deck of cards. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Aye. Mrs. Driscoll, she’s the shelter warden, she says we should take the 116 as far as Wellington Road, change to the 657 and ride that to Shepherd’s Bush, change again to the 17 to Holborn, and then there’s a trolley bus that will take us along to Hackney Road. Isn’t that smart?”

  “I hope you wrote that algebraic equation down because I lost track somewhere among the fractions.”

  “She done it for me,” he said, holding out a piece of paper. “She give me some sesame seeds as well. Rufus hasn’t eaten them, though.”

  “Maybe he’s not hungry.”

  “I hope he’s not taken sick. I’ve done everything Michael told me and I’ve bound up his wing but he just lays there. He don’t even cheep anymore.”

  “You wait. Once he’s out in the sunshine of a spring day, he’ll feel much better.” She slung her coat over her shoulders and took up her bags. “And so shall I.”

  The air stank of cordite and gas from a ruptured main while smoke and ash swirled in eddies like low-lying mist. But above the gray cheerless streets, the sun rose bright, clouds high and fine across a blue spring sky. From a shrubbery nearby, a resilient thrush sang its lungs out just as if the world hadn’t been about to end a few short hours ago.

  Lucy felt her spirits lift as they climbed aboard the 116 per the warden’s instructions. Funneling in from the suburbs were shopgirls in faded print dresses and painted-on nylons and clerks in practical tweeds and tailored jackets, worn shiny at elbows and cuffs. Factory workers in serviceable wraparound overalls or bib dungarees hung upon the straps jostling for balance with what seemed like a battle array of women attired in the ranks and uniforms of half a dozen government agencies. Everyone rushing to be somewhere, moving with studied purpose and habit.

  They rattled up Holland Park Avenue, past Notting Hill Gate. An ambulance nosed its way through traffic. A street was roped off where a building had been sliced open, its contents tumbled into the street like scree off the side of a mountain. Another, nearly as damaged, sported a hand-painted sign: STILL OPEN FOR BUSINESS. A mobile canteen served a queue of fire wardens and shelter staff. Sidewalks full of grim-faced, war-weary soldiers from every country in the empire rubbed shoulders with starry-eyed, gawp-jawed GIs fresh off the transports and as yet unbloodied by battle.

  Bill pressed his nose against the glass, his eyes darting everywhere, Rufus’s basket balanced between his legs. “Crikey, miss.” His voice sober and almost afraid.

  “Crikey is damned right,” she breathed in agreement.

  This was not the London she recognized from the few shopping expeditions she’d made here with Amelia. The dull colorless conformity she’d experienced in Cornwall had infected this once-vibrant city, leaching the beauty from its stones and its people until the very air seemed bone white and ash dark. Pinched faces, hunched gaits, no-nonsense clothes sapped of style and worn with sensible shoes. If she noticed an occasional splash of color, it inevitably belonged to some WVS do-gooder in her gaudy red sweater.

  There was a head-down, shoulders-squared, back-straight, gritty determination that gave jaws a sharper angle and eyes a more sober glint. Even their humor bore a darker edge after years of facing the almost certainty of invasion.

  The bus traveled up Bayswater Road past Hyde Park, bristling with giant guns pointed skyward and sliced through with sludgy trenches dug during the first panic of war, now sandbagged pits of mud and debris. Barrage balloons hovered ominously over the churned turf while a lone agitator stood at Speakers Corner, his gas mask hanging from one raincoated shoulder as he prophesied doom to a crew of soot-blackened firemen heading home and an ATS driver leaning against her car as she waited for her high-ranking charge.

  A spark of a thought had Lucy pulling the cord to be let off. “Grab your things. Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” Bill followed after. “This ain’t Holborn. Mrs. Driscoll said—”

  “You’ve heard of reconnoitering, haven’t you? What soldiers do when they want to check a place out before an attack?”

  “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “I need to do a little reconnoitering of my own before I attack.”

  After the first burst of morning rush-hour bustle, the leafy sidewalks of Park Lane were relatively quiet. Lucy felt herself standing a bit taller, slowing her gait to one less rushed and more beguiling. She even tossed her hair off her shoulders with a practiced flip of her head.

  “You all right, Lucy?” Bill asked. “You got a sore neck or something from sleeping in the shelter? You’re all twitchy-like.”

  “I am not twitchy.”

  She slowed her pace. There it was just ahead. Its famous front was hidden behind a wall of sandbags, but still recognizable—the Dorchester.

  “Is that grand place what we’re reconnoitering?”

  “It is.” She didn’t cross the street. There was no way she was going to suffer the humiliation of being seen in a dingy outfit she’d worn across half the country. She’d save her big entrance for tonight, when she’d had a chance for a scrub and a primp. “I’ve got a job for you, Bill.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Here’s a sovereign. I want you to ask around. See if you can find out if a Mr. Mason Oliver is staying there.”

  “They’ll call the coppers on me.”

  “That’s what the money is for.” He stared skeptically at his palm and back to her. “Oh, all right. Here’s two sovereigns. If you can’t finagle some information with that, you don’t deserve to call yourself a sharper.”

  He continued to eye her cautiously, his cheeks pale but for two high spots of color. “I don’t know . . . remember what Michael said? Keep our
heads down and our mouths shut?”

  “The police aren’t looking for you. They’re looking for me.”

  He swallowed, kicking his toe against the curb as if still uncertain.

  “I’m sure the boys at the Lion wouldn’t be put off by a little danger,” she cajoled.

  That did it. His narrow shoulders lifted in a deep breath. Then he clamped his jaw, his gaze hardening with purpose. “You’ll look after Rufus?”

  “As if he were my own,” she replied.

  “Right,” he said firmly. “Be back in a tick.”

  He dashed across the street, dodging the liveried doorman to disappear inside the hotel.

  Lucy waited beneath the greening plane trees, letting the grumbling bus engines and squeak of car tires wash over her drowsy brain. Funny, maybe it was Bill’s worry, but she could almost make herself believe she was back in Cornwall listening to the growl of a storm surf and the squabble of seabirds. She glanced over her shoulder, half-expecting Aunt Cynthia to pounce from out of the bushes reciting all the ways in which she was a horrible disappointment.

  She didn’t know Lucy was used to being a horrible disappointment.

  It was being looked up to that was a new—and somewhat terrifying—experience.

  The minutes passed. Lucy tapped her watch to make sure it was still working. What was Bill doing? Going room by bloody room?

  As she watched, a young woman in a rumpled dress and fur stole slipped through the swinging doors. Head down, she carried her shoes, and there was a definite look of morning-after remorse about her posture.

  Lucy knew that look. She’d worn it more times than she could count. It was the look of someone who’d begun the evening sipping fancy cocktails while listening to a crooning tuxedoed jazz singer and ended it swilling bathtub gin while listening to the squawking serenade of sloppy drunks. Of someone waking dry-mouthed with a hammer pounding between her eyes and gaps in her memory, gathering the shreds of her dignity, and making a discreet exit, hoping she’d not done something too humiliating, but knowing she probably had. And trying to brazen it out anyway.