Crooked Heart

by Lissa Evans

  ‘One for sorrow, two for joy,’ began Vee, ‘three for a girl, four for a—’

  ‘But that rhyme only goes up to seven,’ said Noel. ‘Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.’

  Vee shook her head. ‘Goes further where I grew up. Eight you live, nine you die, ten you—’

  She hesitated.

  ‘What?’ asked Noel. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not very nice.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Ten you eat a bogey pie.’

  Noel gave a laugh like a hiccup. ‘Anyway, I ran all the way back round and I banged on Major Lumb’s door, and he phoned an ambulance and they came and got Mattie. So that’s what happened, I’ve told you all of it now, every bit. We can walk to Mrs Gifford’s from here, it’ll be far quicker than going back down and taking the bus.’

  The only people they saw as they crossed the Heath were the female crew of an AA gun. They were sitting in their trench, a row of cheerful disembodied heads in tin hats. They waved as Noel and Vee walked by, and lobbed a screwed-up paper bag of cough candies over the perimeter fence.

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Noel, cheek bulging, ‘that we should start collecting for bombed-out families.’

  It was as they left the Heath, emerging abruptly from a willow-shaded alley into a street of shops, that they felt the change; a tension, a shrill of chatter, women talking in clusters. There was a reddish fog above the rooftops to the east and the air smelled of vinegar and fireworks. An ambulance was labouring up the hill towards them, while another hurtled in the opposite direction, bell ringing.

  They crossed the road and turned into a side street. Halfway along it, Noel’s shoe caught a fragment of glass and sent it spinning into the road. There was more glass further on; a woman in curlers was sweeping fiercely. At the corner, a yellow feather floated by, and then a purple one.

  ‘Over there,’ said Noel, pointing to a window opposite. The words ‘SHIRLEY ANNE – MILLINER’ were visible above an empty window. Heliotrope ribbon hung in loops from the sill.

  ‘I don’t like this much,’ said Vee. ‘Should we go back?’

  Noel shook his head and turned the corner. The next street was full of people, a shifting civilian crowd, odd figures in uniform, a woman in a tin hat. A few yards down, an ambulance was parked diagonally across the road, and beside it a fire engine with its wheels on the pavement. Next to the vehicles, a house was missing. It had been removed neatly as if with a cake-slice, the party wall intact: paisley paper downstairs, roses for the bedroom. On the low dome of rubble, a man was lying full length, a tack hammer in his hand.

  ‘Quiet!’ shouted the warden.

  On the other side of the rubble, like a framed picture, was the back garden, cabbages growing and a row of washing on the line, every item maroon with brick dust. There was dust in the air as well, an abrasive mist that caught the throat.

  ‘That’s the lady warden we met,’ said Vee.

  ‘Quiet! ’ shouted Sausage Curls again. ‘We do not need sightseers, we need quiet.’

  ‘I bet she’s the sort who always enjoyed shouting. The war’s just given her the chance to get paid for it.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Noel. ‘Mrs Gifford’s street’s next right.’ Except he was afraid that it would be gone, just as he’d thought that Mattie’s house had gone. His heart seemed to stumble as they turned the corner, and then it steadied again. Nothing had changed, except that a few yards along, a section of the road had been roughly fenced off by lengths of scaffolding propped on upturned crates. Beyond the makeshift barrier there was a hole, the size and shape of a coffin.

  ‘What happened there?’ asked Vee, peering over as they passed. They rang the top bell at number 14 and waited. After a minute or two, Noel backed up a few paces and looked up at the second-floor window.

  ‘The curtains are open,’ he said. ‘They’ve never been open before.’

  Vee frowned. ‘Maybe she’s out feeding the swans.’ She pressed the bell again, and then stepped aside as the door opened. A pram nosed its way out, followed by a fat, pale young woman in a blue knitted hat, her face furrowed in concentration as if wheeling a pram through a doorway was a skill on a par with juggling bananas.

  ‘Do you know if the top floor front’s in?’ asked Vee.

  ‘Sorry?’ The young woman looked round, and then carefully applied the brake before tucking a blanket a little more firmly around the occupant. ‘Who are you asking about?’

  ‘The lady on the top floor, Mrs Gifford.’

  ‘She’s been taken away.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘After we got back she went all loopy.’

  ‘Got back from where?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know where she went, but I went to my auntie on Booth Street.’ The woman rechecked the blanket, her head momentarily disappearing inside the hood of the pram. ‘Do you think it’s a bit cold for her?’ she asked, reappearing. ‘We’ve been under the stairs since lunchtime and they need fresh air, don’t they? Only she’s delicate.’

  ‘Oh.’ Vee peered in, compliment ready (‘She’s going to be a real old-fashioned beauty’) and found herself looking instead at a boot-faced toddler sitting up with a bottle in her fist, like a tramp in a church doorway. There was a pause. ‘You’ve got her well-wrapped,’ she said. ‘You were saying about the lady on the top floor . . . ?’

  ‘There was a time-bomb a week last Thursday’ – the woman nodded towards the hole in the road – ‘and the warden evacuated the whole street and we weren’t allowed home till the army came and took it away on the Saturday. And when we got back in Mrs Gifford started screaming and slamming doors because she said someone had been in her room and all her pins had gone, and they had to take her away. In an ambulance.’ She took a handkerchief from her pocket and reached into the pram. ‘Perhaps they’ll put someone nice in there now. The landlord said when the room was cleared he had to wear his gas mask.’

  ‘Cleared . . .’ repeated Vee, faintly.

  ‘Nothing but old clothes and the salvage people wouldn’t touch them, said they were all germs, so the whole lot had to be shovelled up and incinerated. They came with a truck.’

  Vee heard a bleating noise, and for a moment thought it was herself, but the woman bent solicitously towards the pram again.

  ‘Pins,’ said Vee. ‘What did she mean by pins?’

  ‘Where is Mrs Gifford?’ asked Noel, loudly. He had been lurking with the usual dull expression, but Vee was failing to ask the most important question, and the woman with the baby was taking off the brake and preparing to leave. She slid him a startled look, as if a lamp-post had just spoken.

  ‘How should I know?’ she asked. ‘A loony bin, I suppose, and not before time.’ She wheeled the pram away.

  ‘Your baby’s got a face like an arse!’ called Noel. Vee grabbed his arm and dragged him in the opposite direction, his legs galloping involuntarily along the pavement. She didn’t release him until they had rounded the corner, and when she did so she gave his elbow a little shake.

  ‘You shouldn’t say things like that.’

  ‘Stupid woman.’

  ‘Even stupid people think their babies are beautiful.’

  ‘More fool her.’

  They started walking again, slowly.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Vee. ‘I thought it was too good to last.’ She slipped a hand into her bag and touched the grey leather gloves. ‘Back to the usual next week then? RAF widows? Noel?’

  His feet slapped along the pavement.

  ‘Noel?’

  He said nothing more, though Vee tried a variety of tactics, from offering a mint to pointing out objects of interest (‘Look at that fire engine!’). She was used to his conversation now, the long words, the oddity and arrogance; half the time she didn’t know whether to clout him or applaud. It wasn’t nice, getting the silent pudding back again.

  ‘That’s the fourth rat I’ve seen this morning,’ she remarked, as they turned th
e corner into Kentish Town High Road. There was no response from Noel, and when she glanced at him he was no longer there. She wheeled round. A pack of sailors was clogging up the pavement, and she shoved her way through, getting her backside squeezed in the process, and at once saw Noel with his face pressed to a pawn-shop window.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  He pushed his finger against the window, and she saw a jumble of objects on a shelf: a pewter jug, a dish of jewellery, a brass telescope, a medal draped over a wrought-iron book-end.

  ‘It’s a hunger-strike medal. She had one like that,’ said Noel.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Gifford. She was wearing it the first time we saw her, when she asked us into the house. Her medal had a stain on the ribbon like that.’

  The stripes were of purple, white and green; the stain looked like red wine. Above the ribbon was a bar with ‘For Valour’ written on it, and beneath it a tarnished silver disc.

  ‘And look,’ said Noel, ‘in the saucer, the gold safety pin with the bit of flint. They got that for throwing stones at Parliament. And there’s a Holloway brooch as well, can you see the portcullis and the arrow? Mattie had one of those too.’

  ‘Why? What for?’

  ‘Going to gaol,’ said Noel, impatiently.

  ‘Gaol?’

  ‘Mattie was a suffragette. And see that bar next to the brooch?’

  ‘With the numbers on?’

  ‘Those’ll be dates of imprisonment.’ He tapped his fingertips on the glass, at first distractedly and then with an insistent beat. ‘Her pins,’ he said. ‘Mrs Gifford said that someone had taken her pins.’

  ‘Hoy!’ It was a shout from the shop door, a short man with a moustache. ‘Get off that bloody window.’

  Vee flashed him a smile and caught Noel’s hand. ‘What are you getting at?’ she hissed, as the man disappeared again.

  ‘Someone stole her pins from her room and pawned them.’

  ‘And if they did?’

  ‘Well, that’s wrong. It’s a crime.’

  She waited for him to realize what he was saying, but he was too busy being indignant.

  ‘We have to get them back for her,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re special, they’re . . .’ he screwed up his face in an effort to make her understand, and he heard Mattie’s voice in his head, more clearly now than at any time since she’d died: Mattie at full blast, Mattie impassioned, oratorical. ‘They’re earned,’ he said. ‘“Suffrage” and “suffering” are historically linked and the reason that you have a vote now is because women like Mrs Gifford were prepared to break the law and take the consequences, not once, but over and over. They suffered so that you might have a say.’

  His face had gone quite pink; Vee bit back a smile.

  ‘I’ve never voted in my life,’ she said.

  ‘Well, you should. People have died for your vote.’

  ‘I didn’t ask them to.’

  ‘They took on the struggle so that you wouldn’t have to.’

  ‘Oh, don’t make me laugh, what did people like your godmother know about struggle? Struggle as a hobby, maybe – struggle as something she did when she wasn’t sitting reading a book.’

  Noel looked at her with hatred, and then bobbed down, cross-legged on the pavement.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m not moving until we get them back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to get them back and find out where she’s gone and go and give them to her.’ He was shouting, the ‘g’s like a shower of stones.

  ‘Get up.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Up now or I’ll slap your legs.’

  ‘No.’

  Vee looked around, desperately. People were staring. ‘He’s not right,’ she mouthed at an old man who’d paused, walking-stick in hand. ‘Shell shock. Poor little thing.’ She crouched down beside Noel.

  ‘Get up,’ she whispered, gripping his shoulder between her nails. He didn’t flinch. After a moment she stood again, and felt the sour familiar surge of heartburn.

  Little sod, she thought. She shouldered her bag and went into the shop.

  The man with the moustache was sitting on a stool behind the counter, a newspaper open in front of him over which he was cutting his nails.

  ‘Sorry about earlier,’ said Vee. ‘My little lad got very excited. He thought he saw some bits that belonged to his nan in the window there.’

  The scissors paused, and the man lifted his heavy gaze towards her.

  ‘What you implying?’

  ‘Nothing. They reminded him, that’s all. I’m not saying they were hers.’

  ‘All above board here,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure. I was just wondering how much they’d be.’

  There was a sharp click, and a hangnail winged across the shop.

  ‘Not everything in the window’s for sale.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Some are still on ticket.’ He put the scissors down and closed the paper with a sigh, saving his clippings for later. ‘What were you looking at?’

  She followed him over to the window. ‘There’s some brooches and pins in the saucer. Suffragette souvenirs, I think they are.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not for sale. They only came in this week.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She caught sight of Noel, on his feet now and staring fixedly at her through the glass; it was like being watched by a plainclothes copper. ‘And this?’ she asked, unhooking the medal.

  ‘Same lot. Come back in a month. If he hasn’t collected, I’ll consider an offer.’

  ‘Are they, er . . .’ She lost the thread of what she was saying; there was writing on the disc at the bottom of the medal.

  Aileen Gifford

  Fed by Force 1/3/12

  She blinked at the caption, read it again. It hadn’t occurred to her that Noel might actually be right, that these bits had truly belonged to Mrs Gifford. Fed by Force. She closed her hand over the medal.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘That’s silver, that is. You’d be looking at five bob.’

  ‘I’ll give you six. To have it now, I mean.’

  ‘Can’t do that.’

  ‘Six and six.’

  He shook his head. ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be right.’ He held out his hand for the medal and, feeling baffled, she dropped it into his palm. Moral scruples in a pawn-shop owner! It was like a bailiff mouthing psalms as he carried off your furniture.

  Then she had a thought: it wasn’t morals, it was mammon.

  ‘Regular customer, is it?’ she asked. ‘Someone who brings you lots of stuff?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘These bits belong to a Mrs Gifford, she had them nicked from her room when she got bombed out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  She had another thought, snapping neatly on to the first.

  ‘Get a lot in here the day after a raid, do you? All sorts of things left lying about, I’d imagine.’ And who’d be able to resist the odd lucky find: a purse blown into a garden, or a wristwatch lying in the rubble? But the right sort of person could make their own luck – make a business of it, especially if their job was to be on the spot, unquestioned, official.

  ‘This regular customer of yours,’ she said – and she knew the answer before she spoke – ‘he wouldn’t be a warden, would he? With bad skin? McIver?’

  The man’s face closed, but not before she’d seen fear on it.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘Got to do my shutters.’

  And she found herself skittering out of the shop ahead of him, as if swept with a broom, the door jangling shut behind her. By the time she turned, a bolt had been drawn across.

  ‘Did you get them?’ asked Noel.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they’re not for sale.’ She jerked her head and did
some frantic acting, and he stared at her open-mouthed.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Not here. Wait till we’re somewhere private.’ She set off briskly for the station and he trailed after her, bleating questions while she hissed at him to shut up. The platform was full, the train fuller, a carriageload of ATS, big, plain, noisy girls, bulging out of their khaki. That’s where all the rations go, thought Vee. And they were so happy, with their bellowed conversations about men and dances, all nicknames and secret jokes and snorting abbreviations. Vee tried to imagine herself at eighteen, whisked off to learn how to mend trucks, everything found and not a whit of responsibility, a clean start, a new life on a platter. Heaven. She smiled at the fatty next to her, and was offered a fag.

  ‘Now can you tell me?’ asked Noel, when they got off at St Albans.

  ‘Remember that warden we met at Mrs Gifford’s? It was him that pinched them, he must take something to the pawnbroker every time there’s a raid. Half the stuff in there’s crooked, I wouldn’t wonder – they’d keep the small bits in the window and sell the rest on, split the profit. And you know what?’ Realization dawned as she spoke. ‘I bet he took all Mrs Gifford’s money as well. Just walked in there when she was gone and searched around, found the pins and the banknotes. He’d know nobody would believe her if she reported it, poor old soul.’

  ‘Who should we tell?’ asked Noel.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Should we tell the police here, or should we go back to Kentish Town?’

  ‘The police?’ She turned and looked at him, to see if he was joking, except he never told jokes.

  ‘Are you cracked? How can we go to the police? What could we say we were doing there? How would we even know she had money unless we were getting some of it ourselves?’

  She could see him thinking, sifting through ideas. ‘We could . . . we could tell them that . . .’

  ‘We’re telling them nothing,’ said Vee. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘So you’d let him get away with that sort of behaviour?’

  He sounded like a county court judge; Vee had an urge to laugh. ‘What about us? What do you think we’re getting away with?’ she asked.