by MARY HOCKING
‘Here they come!’ the woman said.
In the distance a moving line of lights had appeared; now visible, now hidden by the branches of trees, now emerging again, slowly, majestically, the buses descended from Notting Hill, taking shape and substance as they drew nearer, their destinations branded on reluctant umber brows. The first to stop was an 88. Mr Kimberley’s friend said pleasantly to the conductor, ‘ “For thee the waggons of the world are drawn!” ’
‘What’s all this?’ the conductor asked suspiciously.
‘I was hymning the arrival of your caravan, sir.’
The conductor, by no means mollified by what he took to be a variation of the “why do they always travel in convoys?” theme, said sourly, ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘ “Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow/Across that angry or that glimmering sea . . .” ’
‘This bus stops at The Askew Arms.’
‘Yes, well, that will have to serve for the time being. We will make our journey to those isles where good men rest another time.’
‘You want your head seen to, mate, if you think it’s restful working on the buses.’
Alice, apprehensive, and confused by this unlikely exchange, ran along the line of buses. There were three 88s, all of which now showed signs – weary sighs from the nose of the beast, leisurely descent of driver to stretch cramped limbs – of having come to a good watering place. The fourth bus was having none of this, and was pulling clear as Alice reached it. Glancing up, she saw the word ‘Green’ and swung herself aboard with a feeling of enormous relief. Turnham Green would suit her even better than Stamford Brook. No sooner had she sat down, however, than it occurred to her that the destination might well be Shepherd’s Bush Green, which would explain the sudden acceleration of speed as it came into the home stretch. She ducked her head, as though by dissociating herself from its unfolding, the situation might miraculously be resolved in her favour. She took out her purse and busied herself counting change. The bus started, stopped, started again and kept going. By the time it could be assumed that it had left Shepherd’s Bush Green behind, Alice had another problem. She had only one shilling and three pence in her purse, and an exhaustive examination of the contents of her handbag had yielded only a halfpenny with a hole drilled through the King’s nose. A shilling would surely be sufficient for the train journey? The conductor had come down from the top deck and was now leaning against the stairs, moodily indifferent to fares. Perhaps he would assume she had got on at the Green if she handed him the three pence. She closed her handbag, relieved, and looked out of the window. To her surprise, she saw that the bus was approaching a station. It seemed rather soon for Stamford Brook, and she could not think what other station was on this route. She peered intently, heart thumping, and saw the familiar underground rail sign alongside the unfamiliar words: Wood Lane. She leapt up and pressed the bell.
‘I thought this went to Turnham Green,’ she said to the conductor.
‘Kensal Green,’ he said aggrievedly. ‘That’ll be three pence.’
‘I don’t want to go there.’ She jumped off the bus while it was still moving in case he insisted. The road was empty of traffic. She stood looking this way and that. Kensal Green. The name filled her with quite disproportionate dismay. She had never been to Kensal Green. Although it was probably only a few miles from places with which she had been familiar all her life, it now seemed to represent something menacing. Had she discovered herself in Tahiti, Fiji, or even Portofino, she would have known she had been transported into the realms of fantasy; but Kensal Green was only that slight degree adrift. It was that moment in the nightmare when the familiar door opens into the wrong room. But she had been saved from that. She had only gone as far as Wood Lane, which was just on the periphery of the known childhood land. Did she remember, as she stood there, that time when Katia, hemmed in by crowds, had been in danger of being carried beyond Shepherd’s Bush station? Certainly, as she stood watching the bus trundling away, she was shaken, not so much by her narrow escape from exposure to the outer regions of Willesden, as by that fear of what lies beyond the ordinary.
She turned to face Shepherd’s Bush Green. It would be quicker to walk back, rather than wait for another bus. As she made her way, every now and then breaking into a panic-stricken run, then steadying herself, a bus overtook her but refused to stop, although the conductor looked with morbid interest at her receding figure.
At Shepherd’s Bush Green she made careful enquiries before boarding a bus which did, in fact, take her to Stamford Brook station. There was a train waiting as she came racing on to the platform. She looked at the indicator board, saw that a Richmond train was signalled, and jumped in as the doors began to close. She landed in a heap on the floor and knew at once that something was wrong. The District Line trains stood tall above the platform; the floor of this train was well below the level of the platform. She was on a Piccadilly Line train, which did not normally stop at intermediate stations between Hammersmith and Acton Town.
‘You were lucky,’ a man informed her, as he helped her to her feet. ‘We’d been stopped here for ten minutes, and he only opened the doors the once. You know how bloody-minded they can be!’
Alice sat back and watched while first Turnham Green, then Chiswick Park stations flashed by. She felt sick with apprehension. Something malign had taken possession of the machinery of everyday life.
At Acton Town too many possibilities presented themselves. She could go back to Turnham Green and wait for another Richmond train. There was a shuttle service which at one time had linked Acton Town to South Acton where she could get a main line train to Kew. Only she wasn’t sure if the shuttle still operated. Or she could catch a bus. The bus service was unreliable. So why was it that she found herself outside the station waiting for the bus? It was because the very sight of all those railway lines fanning out from the station disturbed her. It would be no use crossing to the other platform and going back, she still wouldn’t come to the place where it had all started to go wrong. The place names would get stranger and stranger, and she would not dare to ask where she was, and she would be carried further and further away from Ben. So, she waited for the bus.
It was cool and quiet by the bus stop. Just beyond the station was a small parade of shops set back from a wide pavement; here were a grocer’s, hairdresser’s, an off-licence, and a bakery with a small tea shop at the rear where Alice remembered her father taking the family after a visit to Gunnersbury Park. She had had a crusty roll, still warm, and a Devonshire slice. Claire had got jam on her new frock and had cried so unrelentingly that they had had to leave before Alice could eat the cream split she had kept for last. Such were the heartaches of those days. Beyond the shops were small, mock-Tudor houses, and in the distance, enclosed by high walls, was the park itself. At one time there had been a pond outside the gates with a horse trough near by, and often a gypsy caravan encamped; an old man at the Acton chapel could remember seeing Disraeli drive up to the park to be greeted by Baron Rothschild. One had been aware of a rural and, for some, more gracious past which had vanished now. The area still seemed quiet, comfortable, sane.
And she had felt so much a part of it once. Where had it all gone wrong? How had it come about that people who lived within a few miles’ radius of this place, whose lives had been contained by streets and houses as trim and sane, had been heirs to such unrest? She and Claire had walked in the park with nothing more to exercise their minds than why Daphne always spat out the pips when she ate a pomegranate, and Katia came to school with egg on her face – ‘You’d think just one morning she would wash properly!’ How unbelievable it would have seemed to them had they known that within a few years their father would have been dismembered by a bomb in the quiet street where they lived, that Ben would become a prisoner on the other side of the world in a land they had barely heard of, that Mr Drummond would be paralysed, and Angus, so disarmingly diffident standing on the Drummond lawn handing
round cucumber sandwiches, would have betrayed his country! While Katia, anything but diffident, would have disappeared without trace. Is shipwreck the fate of all those who look for a smooth passage through calm waters? By the light of the street lamps, Alice could see the names above the first three shops; none appeared to have changed hands since the time when she first saw them. It was all a bad dream, they seemed to be saying.
She could hear singing now. The door of a house on the opposite side of the road opened, and a chain of young people emerged; waggling hips and flicking legs, they followed their leader out onto the pavement, chanting, ‘I came, I saw, I conga’d . . .’ Several of the girls had rolled up their blouses to expose bare midriffs, while the men had grasped whatever colourful item was available to serve as a cummerbund. Their leader sported a handlebar moustache so impressive as to resemble the horns of some magnificent beast attached to his upper lip; on his head he wore a tea cosy with an ostrich feather stuck in it. Someone had a pair of castanets. Delighted to have at least one witness to their performance, they all waved at Alice as they side-kicked their way to the back gate. Alice, who only a few days ago, would have joined in with zest reporting later to friends ‘We danced in the street!’ – watched them with detachment, feeling about a hundred. They went singing to the rear of the house where their voices dissolved in general hilarity, overtopped by a great bellow, ‘I’ll have your knickers off for that, you naughty girl!’
A bus was coming. The conductor was Irish. Sure and they were going to Kew, where else? And even if they hadn’t been, they would have gone just to please her, if only she could manage a wee smile, now? Within a quarter of an hour, she was saying to Terence, who had opened the front door, ‘Ben, I must see Ben!’
Behind Terence, she saw Claire’s alarmed face angled round the kitchen door. The ginger cat came and rubbed its head against her legs.
‘He’s gone,’ Terence said. ‘A few minutes ago . . .’
‘I must see him!’ Alice turned and stumbled down the drive, pursued by Terence with whom she wrestled clumsily at the gate, much to the diversion of the next door neighbour who had been about to draw her bedroom curtains under the impression that the day was drawing peacefully to its close.
‘You can’t go running off like that,’ Terence said, lugging Alice up the drive. ‘And anyway, you will never catch him. I’ll go on my bike.’
Claire was already standing by the front door with a torch in one hand. He went to a shed, removed a padlock from a wheel, and prepared to set off. He had not asked any questions. Claire and Alice, and the next door neighbour, watched as he wheeled the bike on to the road, mounted, and wobbled off, hunched over the handlebars like a gigantic tortoise.
‘How kind he is!’ Alice said, surprised and ashamed, thinking how often she had made fun of him.
‘Terence is like that,’ Claire said, ‘If anyone is in trouble, he drops everything. You had better come in and tell me what your trouble is.’ Her voice held a hint of disapproval.
‘It’s not what you think, whatever that may be,’ Alice said when they were sitting in the kitchen and Claire had squeezed two cups of lukewarm tea from a pot where it had been stewing for some time. She did not consider it wise to say too much. ‘I’ve had bad news . . . about a friend, and I need Ben’s advice.’
Claire contemplated this statement, thumbnail inserted between her front teeth. If this was tact, Alice was surprised. In the circumstances, a request for enlightenment would not have been unreasonable, even from someone less aware of their dues than Claire. She sipped her tea. Now that the action had been taken over by Terence, she felt the kind of detachment from what was happening around her which she often experienced just before a bilious attack. Quite apart from any considerations of discretion, she could not have summoned the energy to tell her story twice. All she wanted was to hand the whole matter over to Ben in as few words as possible. Claire said, ‘I had been wondering whether to tell you or not.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘About Katia.’
‘Katia?’
‘Heather told me.’
‘What did Heather tell you?’
‘This business about a woman who had been on the train with Katia – the train taking them to the camp – saying that she called out your name . . .’
‘Name? I don’t understand.’
‘She called “Alice”. Apparently Jacov told Heather not to tell you. Now I suppose he has. Is he in some kind of trouble?’
Claire could not think of anyone else who would give enough trouble to make Alice come pounding over to Kew at half-past nine at night. She associated the Vaseyelins with trouble. Had not her father been killed in Mrs Vaseyelin’s house, no doubt answering one of her many calls for help?
The sound of the key turning in the lock saved Alice from the need to make any comment, and the sudden raucous awakening of the twins occupied Claire.
Terence, owl-eyed and short of breath, had not failed to convey a sense of urgency, with the result that Ben was in a highly nervous state. His love for Alice was something salvaged from havoc while there was still the possibility that darkness might prevail. Alice, for her part, was no longer primarily concerned with Angus. She was like a child desperately crying for a nightmare to be dispelled. They clung to each other, seeking reassurance that life was good. It was some time before Ben, perceiving that she was uninjured, said, ‘Then what is it?’
She shivered, very cold now that he had released her. ‘Not here.’
He was mystified when she hustled him out of the house. ‘What’s wrong? You’ve scared me clean out of my wits.’ He peered at her in the dull light of a street lamp, on the verge of anger at finding her apparently more composed than himself.
She told him what was wrong. It did not take many words, and when they were said she felt so relieved at having passed on her burden that she could have sunk down then and there on the pavement and gone fast to sleep. He said, ‘Good grief!’ After that he did not speak for quite a long time. They trudged past the wall of Kew Gardens and were in sight of the river before he said, ‘We shall have to think about this.’
Alice, who had been confident that he would have got it all sorted out by now, said, ‘What is there to think about? He’s there.’
‘You let him in,’ he said gravely.
‘What else could I have done?’ She was stung by what she took to be an accusation. He gave her shoulders a little shake and lapsed into Cornish. ‘We’ve got to talk about it, me lover. People will say much worse things than that by the time we’re through.’
They came to the parapet of the bridge and stood looking down at the river. The tide was at the ebb, the water was still, and mud glistened, wrinkled like the discarded skin of a snake sloughed along the banks. The smell of putrefaction mingled with the habitual fumes from the gasworks.
Ben said, ‘We’ll have to hand him over. The question is, what is the best way to go about it?’
‘We couldn’t just hand him over, could we? Not Angus.’
‘If we don’t, we become involved. And it’s a matter of treason. People don’t think well of it.’ They watched a barge emerging slowly from beneath the bridge. The pungent smell of smoking fish from the galley was so strong one could almost hear the crisp brown skins rustling in the blackened pot. Ben said rather sharply, ‘Do you want him to get away?’
‘I don’t want him to be caught.’
‘But do you want him to get to Russia? Taking whatever information is useful to them with him?’
‘We’d have the police round at the house,’ she said evasively. ‘There’d be pictures in the papers. Louise and Guy would never live it down.’
There’ll be pictures in the papers either way when this comes out – if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I’m thinking of Louise and Guy,’ she said obstinately.
‘It would be better not to go back – just to go to the nearest police station and let them deal with it. You know that,
don’t you?’ He spoke in his hectoring, courtroom manner.
‘Ben, we couldn’t! Not without seeing him again, talking to him. That would be an unforgivable thing to do.’
‘You don’t think what He has done is unforgivable?’
She felt the ominous vibration of his anger. In the dim light his face seemed composed of ill-assorted knots and cords. This was the man she had feared he might become.
‘I know what you are thinking . . .’
‘You can’t possibly know what I am thinking!’ His voice rose a notch. ‘You didn’t know the men whom I watched dying by inches in that nightmare place, while people like Angus were playing their game . . .’ The staleness of the phrases sickened him.
‘It wasn’t just a game, Ben. Not with Angus. He had a very bad home life . . .’
‘A bad home life, indeed!’ She winced, knowing his scorn was merited. ‘Hundreds and thousands of people have had bad home lives without betraying their fellows. Because that’s what he has done. Don’t make any mistake about that. It’s not just a matter of handing a few secrets over in order to annoy the government. These things are paid for in blood.’
‘There was something very unhealthy going on in the Drummond household.’ Alice was aware of the inadequacy of this description, just as Ben had been aware of the impossibility of conveying the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camp. ‘And then spying can’t have helped, can it? It must blur the picture – constantly playing a part until you don’t know who you are, or what you are supposed to be believing at any given moment . . .’
