by Juliet West
Alec’s thin jaw juts forward, and his eyes are sly with delight.
‘Who’s yer gentleman friend?’ he asks.
‘Someone I knew at school . . . Matthew, I think he’s called.’
‘Funny, thought I recognized him. He come knocking at Sabbarton Street, didn’t he, night Brunner’s went up?’
‘Did he?’
‘A friend of Dor’s, weren’t it?’
‘Oh, maybe you’re right.’
‘I saw him plain as anything, from up in the bedroom window. No glass in the windows that night, remember. Well, if it’s not him, it must be his double.’ He hawks some phlegm from his throat and spits into the sawdust. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Hannah. And the show ain’t even started yet.’
That night Jen’s baby finds his lungs. Each time I drop off, his crying starts and drags me from sleep. I dream it’s one of my babies crying, Alice as a newborn, driving me spare with her wailing, up and down like a hurdy-gurdy. I jolt awake again to find Alice and Teddy sleeping soundly. They don’t even twitch.
I try to think sensibly about Daniel, about how I must end it. If we stop now, there’s no harm done, only my conscience to think of, and somehow I’ll live with that. Alec might have an inkling, but he’s got no proof. He won’t leave it alone, though; I know that for sure. He’ll be watching me closer than ever.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to finish it now. I could survive on thoughts of Daniel, just the memory of our times together: Greenwich Park, the evenings in his room.
But then . . . perhaps it needn’t be as final. Perhaps we could break off for a while. Six months, or three. So much could change in that time. I can’t stop myself picturing the scene: the army letter dropping through the postbox. On His Majesty’s Service. I imagine opening the envelope, can actually see the words: It is my painful duty to inform you . . .
Well then, if I’m sinful as all that, sinful enough to wish George dead, I may as well run off with Daniel and finish what I’ve started.
On the landing, floorboards creak. Jen is pacing around, singing to the baby under her breath, patting his back until the crying dies away. ‘Baby Alec,’ she murmurs. ‘Baby Alec.’
My skin prickles under the blanket. Even when the house is silent, I hear the echo of the baby’s cry and I wonder if sleep will ever come. Easter Sunday dawns, and a pigeon coos from a rooftop. The sound is so soft, so comforting. Calm blankets me and I find myself walking along a white chalk path. There are no waves on the sea, only bobbing gulls and a distant pier winking under a blue sky. When I wake from this dream, the calm sea seems to lap at me still.
I think I have the answer.
I will write to Daniel now, before the children wake.
23
At the end of his Friday shift he walks to Cubitt Town, past the cafe and into the George. He avoids the cafe now, even on days when Hannah will not be working. He tried going in last month, on a Tuesday, when he knew she wouldn’t be there. It was an experiment, he had reasoned; it may help him, somehow, to take the edge off the pain. He had managed a bright greeting for Miss Wilton and a polite conversation with Mrs Stephens. ‘Why, Mr Blake,’ she’d said. ‘We thought you must’ve gone to the front.’
‘No, I’m still here. Still at Beaumont’s.’
She had looked him up and down, smiled thinly, then turned away.
Miss Wilton had fussed around him, asking if he wanted more bread or a sprinkle of pepper. That maddening voice of hers, it put him in mind of paper tearing. No, he didn’t want more bread; it was a struggle to swallow what he had.
He regretted the experiment, of course. It was torture, no question of healing. The smell of egg-brushed pastry, Hannah’s handwriting on the chalkboards, the cold, clean teaspoon between his thumb and forefinger – a teaspoon she may have washed and dried – he was deluded to think he could stand it, to think it might actually help.
The pub is busy with Friday drinkers and he has to wait to be served. On the bar is a copy of the Mirror, the front page damp and crinkled with spilt beer. He looks at the date, 1st June 1917. A new month and he hadn’t even registered. The talk is of daylight bombing raids. The Germans have given up on the Zeppelins. It’s all about aeroplanes now, great sodding aeroplanes, any time of the day or night. The papers are sketchy on the details, but stories have filtered in from Folkestone – a hundred dead, hundreds more injured. Families were out shopping for the Whitsun weekend, queuing for potatoes, when the aeroplanes swooped from nowhere and blew the high street to kingdom come.
People are muttering. It feels subversive to be a young man dressed in civilian clothing. Doubtless there are customers in this pub passing judgement on him right now. Well, the warmongers can mutter all they like. He has his exemption: he is needed at the docks. How will the war be won if all the ships lie broken?
He buys a pint and takes a seat near the window. He can see the cafe from here, the windows obscured with chalkboards and posters, adverts for Bovril and cocoa, American cream soda. In the spaces between the posters, a shadowy figure moves, wiping down the tables.
From his jacket pocket he takes a small volume and opens the book where a thin red ribbon marks the place. It is a collection by Ezra Pound, Lustra, lent by Lady Tolland last Sunday. ‘Avant-garde,’ she had said, handing it to him with a deadpan expression. ‘Such a bore.’
He reads the words and manages, almost, to concentrate. There is a wildness to the poems, beautiful but unsettling. He thinks of the rhododendron bushes in Greenwich Park that cold Sunday, their twisted branches and the tightly wrapped buds waiting to flower. The blooms will be dying now, brown petals falling onto a bed of leaves.
He hasn’t seen his children since Easter. His sister wrote and said they oughtn’t to stay with him at the boarding house again. They acted up terrible after the Easter visit. No wonder, complained Ellen – they were exhausted, sleeping all together in one room like that, and the sanitary conditions leaving so much to be desired. I’m sorry, Daniel, but it’s not hygienic, Ellen had written. We’ve moved on from those days. And he couldn’t argue with that: they had a new semi-detached house in Maidstone, whole place to themselves with a bathroom upstairs. White enamel and the taps plumbed in. Ellen could afford to be sniffy. He was welcome in Kent at any time, she said. But send us plenty of warning because it does unsettle them when they see their dad.
Without Hannah, he is fading.
He tries, again, to see the sense of her letter. Hannah was right to break it off. It was all too dangerous. He’d be lynched if word got out at Beaumont’s, and she’d lose her job at the cafe, guaranteed.
All the single girls in London and he has to fall for a soldier’s wife. He can’t help that finally he’d met her, the woman he’d dreamed of in Robbo’s shed, standing before him at the Glengall cafe: beautiful, odd, vulnerable. She was his salvation, and he was hers, and they both knew it as surely as they knew their own names. How sentimental it sounds. How impossible to explain.
Saturday lunchtime and the weather has turned warm. Heat shimmers from the pavements as he turns onto Poplar High Street. He could find someone new, surely, if he tried. Christ knows the girls are willing.
It’s true. Sonia would give herself any night of the week: no charge for Mr Blake; she’s made that perfectly clear. He is tempted to knock, of course he is, but the thought of her bare pink legs repulses him, her cheap scent, the melodrama as she comes to her pleasure. Just as likely an act she puts on, all that moaning: nothing but a show.
Immy in the bivouac, she was willing. He had found the perfect hiding place, not ten yards away, in a clump of tall ferns behind a young lime tree. He would catch flashes of Immy’s white skin between the bivouac branches, Ralph’s pale arse, rising and falling.
Poor old Dora. She couldn’t have been more willing. He had liked her, she was a character, but the brash humour soon began to grate. It would have been wrong to take her to bed. She was Hannah’s friend; that was the attraction. If he had s
lept with Dora, Hannah would have drifted beyond his reach.
He pushes open the pub door. Half a dozen men are dotted along the bar, a couple in khaki, the rest of them older men in shirt sleeves and waistcoats. Tobacco smoke has settled above the drinkers in flat clouds. At a table near the back room, two women are chatting. One of them is shelling peas, a basin clamped between her knees.
He buys a pint and chooses a seat near the door, but the voices of the two women carry from the back of the pub, some drama over a bailiff. ‘I told ’im straight, I’ll give you a shilling a week, but you don’t put your ’ands on our ’ome . . .’
Daniel pictures Hannah in the Sabbarton Street house, sitting on the front step, perhaps, watching the children play fourstones in the road, the sun warming her face. The brother-in-law, the little fellow, would he be hanging around too? Daniel didn’t like the look of him, the way he stared at them from the ghost show, his sharp sallow cheeks, like a rat. And it was that very night she changed her mind, wasn’t it? It gave her a fright, being seen together at the funfair; she said so in the letter. Even the remembrance of her handwriting is enough to pain him, those pen strokes so elegant and strong.
Please forgive me – it’s for the best, she’d written. Cheating isn’t my nature, although I hope you know I only did it out of the strongest love. Daniel does know that, but the fact she loves him only makes it worse. He drains the pint, though the beer is on the turn and he’s certain it will give him bellyache. The Eagle might be a better bet.
Outside, a queue for vanilla ices straggles along the pavement. Two young women stand aside to allow Daniel through. One of them reminds him of Dor: blonde hair and a striped blouse, a cheap brooch pinned above her bosom. She blinks slowly up at him, her lips parted, whispers something to her friend as he passes. The two women giggle, but he does not turn.
After the Eagle he moves on to the Gun at Coldharbour. Anything to keep away from the boarding house, from Sonia and her stained blue gown, and the small room that has never felt so lonely.
24
‘Hannah!’ Ada bursts into the cafe and marches up to the counter. Flypapers sway in the warm draught from the open door, already black with corpses.
‘What you doing here?’ It tumbles out of my mouth without thinking. What a surprise! I should have said, or, How lovely to see you, Ada.
‘Tracked you down, haven’t I? Not that it was any trouble. Cafe in Cubitt Town – you’d told us that much – and this one leaped out at me.’ She looks around the dining room, nods to Vernon Cridge, who’s staring at her with his mouth hanging open.
‘Are you all right, Ada?’ The rash has spread from her arms to her face. It’s scalding red with crusts of yellow skin around the edges. Hard to tell if the yellow is chemicals from the factory or some kind of ointment she’s rubbed in.
‘Oh, this, you mean?’ She pats her cheeks as if she couldn’t care less, like a man who’s just had a tidy shave. ‘I’m working in Woolwich now. Don’t think the new factory agrees with me. Still, got to do my duty, eh? King and country. Anyway, where’ve you been? Haven’t seen you in weeks.’
‘I haven’t been out. Don’t want to chance it with the air raids.’
‘Can’t blame you, girl. But the way I see it, if one of them bombs has got my name on it, there’s nothing I can do.’ Ada scratches the skin on her left hand. ‘But look, the reason I’ve come is that my Cole’s got leave. His old man’s dying, thank Christ, and they’re letting him home on compassionate. What he’ll make of me Lord knows, but then, he never married me for my looks.’ She winks and I can’t help smiling. ‘I thought you might want to give Cole something to take back for your other half – George, ain’t it?’
‘Take back?’
‘You know, a little gift parcel, a token of your affection?’
‘Yes. Yes, thanks, I will.’
‘Drop it round at the weekend if you like.’ She picks up my pad and pencil from the counter and scribbles her address. ‘I’ll be home Saturday morning.’
I spend the rest of my shift wondering what to send George. Some cigarettes, toffees if I can find them and a couple of handkerchiefs from the stall at Chrisp Street. It occurs to me that what he really wants is a photograph: he asked for it months ago. I make up my mind to take the children to Whiffin’s after school tomorrow. I might be able to pick up the photos Saturday; then I could call straight round to Ada’s with the parcel.
Nettie comes out from the kitchen, her face sweaty from the washing-up.
‘That’s me finished,’ she says, untying the knot at the back of her apron. ‘I’m ready to drop.’
‘Go careful.’
‘I’ll take the long way home. Gives me the willies to walk near North Street, just thinking about those poor children.’
‘Is it a terrible mess up there?’
‘You can’t imagine unless you see for yourself. Scraps of desk and blackboard swept up in a pile. I crossed to the other side and there was some charred paper crumpled in the gutter, tiny flowers drawn on in pencil. It was one of them paper lanterns they’d been gluing. My cousin’s friend’s little girl goes to North Street – did I tell you? A fireman carried her home on his shoulder. She wouldn’t let go of her lantern the whole way. “Clare and me was doing it,” she said, and of course Clare was her little chum. She got killed.’
‘Horrible. I can’t think about it.’
‘Must be worse if you have your own little ones?’
‘If we’d stayed in Alton Street, Alice might have gone to that school.’
‘Don’t. But you’re all safe and that’s that. Life goes on . . .’
She’s doing her best to sound brave, but her voice is shaky nonetheless.
Something has changed since the raid last Wednesday. The weather is dry and hot, and everyone’s nerves are boiling. It’s hard to believe the Germans can just turn up like that on a warm summer morning, a whole fleet of shining silver aeroplanes dropping bombs.
Nettie is scared stiff. She sleeps every night in Stepney Green Tube. No wonder she looks so tired.
There are no more dinners to cook, and the tables are all wiped down. I refill the salt cellars and clean out the cutlery drawer. If he was going to come in, he would have by now. Nine weeks it’s been. Nine weeks and four days without setting eyes on him.
Once or twice I’ve been tempted to tell Nettie about Daniel, in a sideways fashion, perhaps, a friend-of-a-friend-type story. We’ve become quite pally, me and Nettie: took a walk once, around the Island Gardens, when she was upset about losing her weekend job at the Queen’s. They’d told her it was because of the war, audiences down, et cetera, et cetera, but she knew the real reason: the boss had found a new girl, a seventeen-year-old with a look of Theda Bara.
‘Fancy being on the scrapheap at nineteen,’ she’d said as we walked into the gardens. There was a warm wind blowing off the Thames. Almost pleasant if you didn’t breathe in too deep.
‘Try being twenty-five.’
‘Oh, you’re all right. You’ve got your children, and a good husband. Bet you miss him something rotten, though, don’t you, Hannah?’
‘I didn’t want him to go, but it’s done now and you have to make do.’
Nettie was quiet for a moment. ‘Shall I tell you a secret?’ she said.
‘If you like.’
‘I’m married meself.’
‘You’re never!’
‘October last year. I had to . . . you know.’ She patted her stomach. ‘So he takes me up St Anne’s – he was a trumpet player at the Queen’s – says, “I do,” and then a month later he disappears. Last I heard he was working up west. I’m back at me mum’s and there’s nothing I can do but wait.’
‘The baby?’
‘Lost it, a week after the wedding. All that fuss for nothing.’
I ached to tell Nettie my secret. I even opened my mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come out. Daniel. How I wanted to say his name aloud. As if speaking of him would conjure some of th
e happiness. But I couldn’t risk it.
We stopped at the river wall and Nettie leaned over, looked down into the surging Thames. A barge hooted and she waved at the watermen, the top half of her body lurching forward.
‘Careful!’ I grabbed at her coat.
Nettie turned to me, amused. ‘I ain’t ready to chuck myself in just yet,’ she said. ‘Ain’t letting the bastard off that easily.’ She linked her arm in mine and we carried on walking. ‘We girls have to stick together, eh?’ she said. ‘You can cope with anything if you’ve got friends.’
It’s after three. I go out the back to collect my coat. Too warm for a coat really, but I slip it on anyway, shove my hands into the pockets. Empty pockets: scratchy black lining against my skin.
Jen is sitting in the armchair feeding the baby. The top of her blouse rests on the baby’s head, and his wispy hair looks damp with sweat. Jen is clutching at him with hunched shoulders. She has been crying.
‘Jen?’
Mum stands up from the chair by the window. ‘She’s had a shock.’
‘What is it?’
‘Alec. They’re taking him.’
‘The army?’
Mum nods, and now Jen speaks. ‘They’ve re-examined him and by some miracle he’s fit for service.’
‘With his chest?’ I try to sound upset for her. ‘Can’t he appeal . . . the tribunal?’
‘This was the tribunal. Final decision.’
‘You never said it was coming up.’
‘Didn’t want to talk about it. Wouldn’t have made no difference.’ The baby breaks off and starts to fuss. ‘Shush, shush,’ says Jen. She drapes him over her shoulder and pats his back to burp him. The silly thing is that she burps first. I almost laugh, but somehow I turn it into a cough.
‘Well, you’ve got little Alec now. That’s a blessing,’ says Mum.
‘Yes.’ Jen lifts the other side of her blouse and the baby latches on. Her shoulders relax.
Outside in the street, a tin can rattles. The children are throwing stones.
