The Way to London

by Alix Rickloff

  She chewed and swallowed, the boulder barely making room. She tried washing it down with a sip of champagne. “You know, just this afternoon, I was watching them pull bodies out of a collapsed building. Now, hours later, I’m in a world of caviar and cocktails.”

  “Is that so bad? You like caviar and cocktails, don’t you?”

  She nearly choked as her champagne turned to poison in her mouth.

  “Lucy? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course. Down the wrong tube.” She forced Michael’s face from her mind, but his conscience continued to cricket at her. “Did I tell you about the couple I met on the bus as I was coming to London? Mr. and Mrs. Britt. They’ve lost four sons in the war.”

  Oliver tsked with a sorrowful shake of his head.

  “And Bill. He’s only twelve. He was evacuated at the start of the war. Sent from his home and his mother and the only life he’d known to people who cared less than nothing about him.”

  “Surely it was for his own good. To keep him safe.”

  “What of Enzo? He . . . he wants only to marry Sophia Maria and work in his cotton mill in Campione del Garda.”

  Oliver reached over and patted her hand. “Your compassion does you credit, Lucy, but worrying over it will only put gray hairs on your head and wrinkles on your face. All your good intentions won’t change the world.” His eyes traveled past her to the approaching waiter. “Now, here comes the soup course.”

  By now, the weight in her stomach made the thought of food repugnant. She tried shaking off her growing misgivings. “Are you leaving for the States soon?” she asked, hoping he didn’t notice she’d not once lifted her spoon.

  “London’s my final stop. Tomorrow I leave for Bristol to catch a plane home.”

  “So, this is your last night on the town.”

  “It is, and I couldn’t think of a nicer person to spend it with. Seeing you last evening brought all those wonderful memories of my time in Singapore back. Have you ever heard from that lovely man you had tagging along after you the afternoon we met?”

  The boulder blossomed into an ache that spread like cement through her veins. “Yoon Hai?”

  “Was that his name? So mellifluous. Like a song or a line of poetry. He was divine, my dear. The bone structure . . . the accent . . . I could have made him a star.”

  “The last I heard he and his family had fled to China. I’m sure he must be married by now and has forgotten all about me.”

  “Maybe married, but I doubt he could forget you as quick as that.”

  Forcing a smile, she focused on choking down a piece of bread.

  “Have I ever told you how much you remind me of Lady Amelia?”

  First Lady Turnbull and now Mr. Oliver—Lucy wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the comparison.

  “Oh, not in looks or anything like that. You’ve a different sort of glamour, but you’re both strong and independent. Fierce, if you know what I mean. Willing to fight for what you want.”

  Now even the bread was too much. Her throat closed on a knot big as a fist. “I’ve been told that’s not exactly one of my more sterling qualities.”

  “Depends on what you want, I guess.”

  Lucy’s fingers clenched the stem of the glass, her knuckles white. “Amelia wanted power, money, position. She’d do anything to achieve those things.”

  “Not love?”

  “She didn’t know the meaning of the word.”

  “Maybe. Or did she simply look in all the wrong places?”

  Lucy had to admit that not all of Amelia’s conquests had been industrialists and cattle barons. There was that exiled musician from St. Petersburg and the writer she lived with for six months in Corfu, a waiter she ran off with for a long weekend that turned into three weeks and some chap she met in a queue for the cinema in Melbourne. Anyone who caught her fancy might turn up at the next family day at school as her mother’s special friend. But they never stayed long. Amelia would grow bored and move on.

  “If love was what she wanted, she could have had it any time these last twenty-one years,” Lucy answered harshly. “Instead, I was an inconvenience.”

  “Yes, that was her tragedy, wasn’t it? Chasing some elusive dream while never seeing the real thing right in front of her.” Oliver’s bright puckish expression faded as he pulled a folded newspaper from his inside breast pocket and laid it on the table between them. A gleam of tears washed his eyes. He made no move to wipe them away. “She left it too late.”

  Dutch Liner Torpedoed. Daughter of the 6th Earl of Melcombe Among Those Feared Dead.

  “Don’t you do the same, eh?”

  Lucy stared until the newsprint blurred into gibberish. “Excuse me, Mr. Oliver. I hate to dash, but there’s somewhere I have to be.”

  He blew his nose and cleared his throat, and whatever deeper emotion he might have felt at Amelia’s passing was tamped back down beneath his primped and perfect exterior. “We haven’t had dessert yet. I hear the kitchens do a marvelous chocolate mille-feuille.”

  “Another time perhaps.”

  “Of course.” He handed her his card. “I’m leaving for Bristol tomorrow afternoon at four. I’ll save you a seat.”

  She paused in the midst of grabbing up her handbag and calling for her wrap. “Do you really think I have what it takes?”

  “I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t think you could be glorious, though I wonder if you’re really suited for a life in the movies.”

  “Are you kidding? Do you know the hell I went through to get to London to see you? Endless days of trains and buses and hitching rides with strangers. A night spent in a rat-infested shed, bomb shelters, bicycle crashes, and creepy gangsters. Why would I go to so much trouble if I didn’t want to go with you to Hollywood?”

  He stared at her for a long assessing moment and his usual sunny features seemed particularly solemn. “As I said before, Miss Stanhope, you’re fierce like your mother and willing to fight for what you want, so maybe you can tell me.”

  Bill?” Lucy threw open the door to their suite and flipped on the light. “I’m back.”

  The rooms were just as she’d left them, clothes scattered, the remains of room service on a tray by the door. Rufus’s basket by the radiator, where it was warm. But Bill’s knapsack was missing. He’d left it beside the couch. Now it was gone.

  “Bill, I’m sorry I didn’t listen,” she called. “We can go look for your mother straightaway if that’s what you want.” She searched for the bag under the sofa, in drawers, behind the bed. No sign of it. She moved from the living area to the small bedroom to the bath, growing more frantic with each passing moment.

  The silent room seemed to echo with the panicked rush of her breathing.

  The silent room . . .

  No chirping. No fluttering. No scratching against the sides of the basket.

  Oh no.

  Lucy knelt beside Rufus’s basket, lifting the lid to peer inside. A few bread crumbs and a small saucer of water sat untouched. The siskin lay on its side, its legs tucked tight to its belly, its beak agape, eyes staring. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes. Her throat closed around a jagged lump.

  Be careful what you promise.

  Had Bill come back and found Rufus? Or would she have to tell him and add to the sorrows he already carried?

  She shut the basket, her fingers cold and trembling as they fumbled with the latch. Blood rushed in her ears with a sound like the sea and the room tipped and swayed.

  Amelia promised to see me off.

  She promised us it would be all right. She promised.

  Lucy wasn’t like Amelia. She never would be no matter how she tried. Amelia’s method of seeking love, if that’s what it was, had been selfish and self-satisfying. Love taken with none offered in return. It didn’t work like that. Real love ran in an unbroken current. It meant giving without strings. Wanting someone else’s happiness even at the expense of one’s own.

  Keeping promises.

  Grabbing
up an overcoat, she slammed out into the corridor and punched the lift. The doors opened on a man slouching in the corner, hands stuffed in his pockets, face bleached as bone.

  She stared as if she were seeing a ghost. “Michael?”

  His gaze narrowed, his body tensing at her distress. “What’s wrong?”

  “Bill’s gone, and it’s all my fault.”

  “Tell me everything.” He guided her into the lift with a hand on her elbow.

  “I promised him. Don’t you see?” Her words spilled out of her in a torrent of recrimination and blame. “I told Bill it would be all right. I told him he would be fine. Nothing is fine. Nothing is all right.”

  She knew by now that Michael didn’t offer sympathetic platitudes. That wasn’t his way. A good thing. She would have decked him had he tried. She didn’t want to be soothed or reassured. She didn’t want to have her emotions minimized or her thoughts belittled. She’d spent a lifetime fighting those who would diminish her. Who would misjudge her. Who would make her invisible.

  And in doing so, she had lost herself. She had become someone she no longer recognized.

  A stranger within her own tight hot skin.

  He guided her like a sleepwalker through the lobby. His touch steadied her. His silent reassurance pulled her free of the dizzying spin of her panicked thoughts.

  “Miss Stanhope?” the clerk called out. “There’s an issue with Mr. Fortescue’s account. We need to speak with you right away.”

  Michael speared the man with a look that had him hastily backing up, and together, they brushed past and out into the night.

  As if mirroring the downward spiral of her evening, the spring warmth had given way to mounting clouds and a misting damp crept up from the pavement to swirl in eddies around their ankles. The bus was nearly full to start, though with each stop farther north and east, the seats opened up, the crowd thinned. By the time they reached Whitechapel, there were only three women in union suits and an older man with a fire watcher’s helmet and binoculars left.

  She sensed Michael beside her. The warmth from his body flushed her chilled skin. His steady, even breaths slowed the rapid flutter of her heart. His presence kept her from flying apart with impatience at every tug of the cord that delayed their trip. She’d not questioned what circumstances had brought him to her when she needed him most. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. But tendrils of something very much like happiness pushed against a heart achy and throbbing with grief.

  Still, her thoughts slid like Alice down the rabbit hole, splintering and fracturing, notions colliding and overlapping. Bill’s final angry reproach superimposed upon her own childish, twisted, and tear-streaked features. Her vows, as hollow as Amelia’s had always been.

  She closed her eyes, opened her mind, and listened. The engine rumbled and bus tires plopped against the uneven macadam. Tired factory workers snored and a chippie made change. But she heard nothing like a mother’s song. Did Amelia even sing? Lucy had certainly never heard her do so. Instead, seeping like fog off the sea came the honeyed tones and false laughter that accompanied Amelia’s most scathing criticisms.

  You’re looking very solid these days, my dear.

  A shame you took after the Stanhope side of the family in looks, darling.

  Are you sure that outfit’s quite the thing, sweetheart?

  Dear. Darling. Sweetheart.

  She didn’t even call Lucy by name, as if they were barely acquaintances. Or as if Amelia couldn’t be bothered to remember.

  Lucy’s eyes snapped open to find Michael watching her carefully, his face sliced by shadow, his pale eyes a pinpoint gleam in the dark.

  “Amelia is dead,” she said quietly.

  Michael shifted beside her. Not so much a movement but an inhalation, a focusing of his attention. His gaze seemed to pierce every wall she erected, every barrier she built. That clear, unfaltering stare peeled away every pretense she used to keep the world at bay, leaving her as exposed as a clam pulled free of its protective shell. In her experience that kind of power over her always ended in grief and pain. But Michael had never once offered her anything but friendship. That was the sign of either a true hero . . . or a complete nutcase.

  “Amelia . . .” She choked, tasting the bitterness at the back of her throat, the poison of a lifetime’s rejection. “My mother,” she repeated, “is dead, and I’m not sorry.” Lucy’s voice came louder, stronger. A few people glanced over. She didn’t care. “I suppose that makes me a bad person, but what else is new?”

  Michael kept silent. Perhaps he knew that any interruption, no matter how inconsequential, would dam the flow of words that had to be spoken if she was ever to be free of this toxic resentment. And she knew now that she had to be free of it. For all poisons sooner or later destroyed one from the inside out.

  “Do you suppose it’s my fault?” she asked.

  “That your mother is dead?”

  “That she never loved me.” Lucy tried drawing a breath around the knifing ache in her gut. “Do you think if I’d been a better daughter Amelia would have been a better mother? I tried being what she wanted, but it was never good enough. I was never good enough.”

  Years of swallowed anger and disappointment became a raw boiling rage at the injustice. Not at her mother’s death. That was one small personal tragedy amid a global horror. But that she had been cheated out of her opportunity to finally step free of her mother’s shadow and make peace with herself.

  “I showed her, though, didn’t I?” She gave a harsh laugh. “I got Mason Oliver—Hollywood’s own version of King Midas—to take me with him to California.”

  “Did you? Congratulations,” Michael replied. “It’s what you wanted.”

  She sensed his reproach and ignored it. “You’re damn right it is.”

  “Your mother would have been proud.”

  “She’d have been green. And that would have made it all the sweeter. She’d have finally had to admit I was her daughter. Hell, she’d have made sure people knew she’d given birth to me—the successful movie star.”

  She continued to feel Michael’s every flinch and sway as if she were connected to him by a tensile wire, the smallest vibrations passing between them. It made speaking easier. It made everything easier.

  “A proper daughter would weep.” Her scratchy eyes burned and her chest throbbed, but no tears threatened. “Not that Amelia was ever a proper mother. Hell, she wouldn’t even let me call her Mother, as if it was something to be ashamed of.” She fumbled for a cigarette, but her hands shook too badly. Her words, when they came, were soft and broken. “It’s a horrible thing to realize your own mother would rather you didn’t exist.”

  They got off the bus at Stepney Green, the streets dark and quiet.

  “There’s more to being a mother than giving birth,” Michael offered, his face now completely lost to shadow, but his lean muscled body a bolstering presence when both her past and her future were crumbling to pieces.

  “Someone should have told Amelia that.”

  Michael’s fingers laced with hers, his wide callused palm enveloping hers as he offered a reassuring squeeze. “And then there are those who can love a child even if he doesn’t belong to them.”

  Bill. Out there somewhere. She’d not claim he was either lost or afraid, he’d far too much savvy for that, but he was definitely swimming beyond his depth. “I don’t know how it happened. One moment the little fiend was driving me completely mad and now I feel as if I’d die if anything happened to the brat.”

  Michael smiled faintly. “I know just how you feel.”

  Chapter 24

  Lucy and Michael pushed through the Lion’s grungy door and into the smoky interior. A gramophone played a scratchy rendition of “Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Good-Bye.” The same barman stood pulling pints. The same barflies warmed the same stools at the counter. Tables were full; a couple clung to each other on the small dance floor. A group of rowdy boys in uniform were in the private parlo
r, laughing and shouting and toasting each other’s good fortunes.

  Lucy shoved her way to the bar. “I’m looking for Bill Smedley. Have you seen him?”

  The barman’s indifferent gaze passed right through her.

  “You have to tell me. It’s vital I find him.”

  “Is it?” He pushed a pint across to a faded narrow-shouldered clerk in a threadbare coat and tie. “Seems to me you’ve done enough.”

  “So he has been here.”

  He remained stone faced, turning instead to Michael, who had taken a stool at the bar. “You all right, mate? How about a drink?”

  “Ta.” He took a long foamy swallow from the pint he was handed.

  “I know I mucked things up,” Lucy barged in, “but I want to make it right.”

  “You talkin’ about our Billy boy?” the clerk asked.

  “That’s right.”

  He broke into a thready and slightly drunken tenor. “Where have you been all the day, my boy Willie? Where have you been all the day, Willie, won’t you tell me now?”

  “You’ll get nothing of sense from him,” the barman said. “He’s been here since noon. The rest aren’t much better.”

  She turned to the men on either side. “I’m looking for Bill Smedley. Maybe you’ve seen him?”

  Neither spoke. She beseeched the men at the tables behind her. Finally, a white-whiskered, rheumy-eyed chap looked up from his backgammon board. “A young lad was in here a few hours ago. Met with the lads what hang about in the back bar. They all went out again a short time after. Haven’t seen him since.”

  “Did they say where they were going?”

  “It’s best not to know what that lot are up to, then you don’t have to lie when the cops come sniffing round after.”

  “I have been all the day, courtin’ of a lady gay.”

  “Thanks for your help.” She had almost reached the door when she noticed Michael wasn’t with her. “Are you coming?”

  He passed across ten pence for the pint. “Thanks again.”

  “Anytime, mate.” The barman scooped up the coins. Rolling them around in his hand, he seemed to be warring with himself. Finally, he heaved a sigh as he dropped the pennies into the till. “Look, I can’t say for certain, but if I were you two, I’d try my luck down by Globe and Portman. There’s a warehouse on the corner. Follow the alley to the end and you’ll come to a loading bay.”