Crooked Heart

by Lissa Evans

  ‘When?’

  ‘Thursday morning.’

  ‘I’ve got school.’

  ‘Skip it.’

  ‘All right.’

  Noel lifted the tea towel that covered his own plate. A pile of cold boiled potatoes was arranged next to a smear of grease in the shape of a small slice of ham. He looked at Donald suspiciously.

  ‘Post this after, will you,’ said the other, blandly, smoothing on the licked stamp with his thumb. ‘And gran’s got some too, haven’t you, Gran?’

  There was no reply from the armchair, just a faint thread of music from the headphones – a dawdling violin – and the whisper of the pen as it glided across yet another page of yet another letter to Cousin Harold.

  ‘Why can’t you post it?’ asked Noel, emboldened by the absence of ham.

  ‘Got to rest after meals,’ said Donald. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

  He lit a cigarette and opened the Daily Express to an illustrated fashion spread.

  CIVILIAN MEASURES

  If you’re not in uniform, the rule today is ‘less of everything’ – narrow collars and no turn-ups mean cloth saved and style gained!

  When he’d got the money, and after he’d got Hilde’s presents, he’d go to a tailor, get something made-to-measure. Donald, you’re so smart.

  ‘Where’s the best place for tailors in London, then?’

  Noel shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Savile Row?’

  ‘Savile Row.’ Syllables of luxury, lolling on the tongue. ‘We’ll go there after,’ he said. ‘Make a day of it.’

  PART TWO

  12

  ‘You’ll never guess who’s died,’ called Vee, joyfully, opening the front door. ‘I’d just left Mrs Pilcher’s and I was in the fish queue and Ada Press in front of me was talking to that redheaded woman from the Post Office, and I heard her say . . .’

  She paused with her scarf half unwound, the smell of what the fishmonger had claimed was cod (but which clearly wasn’t, unless cod happened to be spelled W.H.A.L.E) oozing from her basket.

  Something was missing; there was a gap in the coat-hooks where her mother’s navy gaberdine should be hanging.

  ‘Mum?’ As she spoke she was already searching the silent flat – Donald out somewhere, Noel at school.

  ‘Mum?’

  In the bedroom she shared with her mother, the wardrobe was open, the only clothes still hanging in it Vee’s own. She stood staring, open-mouthed, and then swung round to look at the dressing table. A fine dusting of talcum powder outlined the missing hair-brush, the ivory comb. Propped against the mirror was an envelope bearing Vee’s name.

  She snatched it up, and then couldn’t open it; her fingers felt huge and jointless, like washing tongs. In the end, she pulled up the flap with her teeth and shook out the single page.

  Dear Vera

  As I’ve always said, you never know just what’s around the corner. I didn’t want this to come as a shock to you, Vera, but then I thought that it’s better to be truthful than beat around the bush. Mr Chamberlain was beating around the bush for at least a year and look where that got him, if he had gone after Hitler sharpish then perhaps none of this would have happened, as I pointed out in my last letter to him. I have always felt it’s my duty to offer help and advice to those in need, but it’s not often taken, or sometimes it’s taken and then I am given no credit. For instance I’ve read that iron indoor shelters like the one I suggested are going to be all the rage, but it is Mr Morrison in the government who is taking the credit and no doubt the profit.

  Harold says I should have kept a copy of my letter, setting out my idea for an iron indoor shelter, but it’s too late now. Anyway, Vee, I shan’t beat around the bush. You know that I have been corresponding with Harold in his troubles for many years. Since his wife passed on he has been very lonely and his daughter is now married and in the family way and never visiting, just because Harold won’t speak to her husband (Scottish). In his time of loneliness my friendship has been a great solace to him and last month he asked for my hand in marriage to which I have agreed

  Vee sat heavily on the bed and the springs twanged bathetically.

  and we will marry this morning in Harpenden Town Hall. Harold and I didn’t want any fuss and the registrar said that if I could mouth the words so he could see them it would all be legal, together with my signature.

  Harold says he will look after me through Thick and Thin because as you know, Vera, since that terrible day when I had my brain seizure I can scarcely lift a hand around the house and I am only being honest when I tell you that Harold thinks lately I have not been looked after as well as I should have been. I know you are busy, Vera, and it has been a great sadness to me that I haven’t been able to help you as I’d like, but meal after meal has been left cold for me instead of fresh cooked, while you’ve been out and about taking the evacuee to his hospital visits and so on. When I’ve needed a pot of tea or something picking up you have not been there to help and last week when I ran out of ink it was three days before you remembered to get me some and in the end I had to go all the way downstairs and borrow a bottle from Mr Clare in the bookshop.

  Harold says I will never want for anything once I am married, and of course I hope you will visit us when you can spare the time, Vera. Harold has an electrical washing machine.

  I remain your affectionate mother

  Flora Brunton (note married name)

  ps Did you know that Donald has been walking out with a German?

  pps I have taken my ration book

  Vee lay back on the double bed. The ceiling had a pattern of cracks that looked vaguely like a swastika.

  ‘My mother has eloped,’ she said.

  Harold was tall and stooping, a shopfitter with arthritic knees and the ability to take a ten-second anecdote and stretch it out for a full hour. His wife – his first wife – had rolled her eyes whenever he spoke. His stories had no shape to them, no climax, no way of distinguishing whether the end was nigh, or whether there was still another twenty-five minutes to sit through – it was like eating your way through slice after slice of a plain loaf, without even a dab of jam to relieve the tedium. And that was what her mother had chosen: after twenty years of loving servitude, Vee had been thrown over for a washing machine and a bore.

  For a moment she thought she was going to cry, but her eyes seemed to have lost the know-how.

  Twenty years. Her mother had been skimming the fat off a pan of stock when Vee had told her she was expecting; she’d dropped the spoon in shock, reached for a cloth, slipped on the grease and fallen forward, rapping her head on the tabletop with a noise like a cleaver hitting a chop. And when she’d opened her eyes the next day in the cottage hospital, she’d not been able to say a word, and ever since then Vee had been breathing guilt, drinking it, wearing it next to her skin like a suit of long underwear. She’d tried to atone, God knows. She’d tried to fill her mother’s life with little luxuries, had never asked for help, had never burdened her with her own troubles. She’d treated her mother like a spun-glass ornament that might shatter if carelessly handled, except that now it seemed that it wasn’t an ornament she’d been tiptoeing round all these years, but a bloody great unexploded bomb – a couple of cold lunches, a missed cup of tea and boom . . .

  Vee closed her eyes and actually dozed for a moment or two, and then woke with a start and forced herself to her feet. Only sluts and invalids slept during the day. She straightened the eiderdown and plumped her mother’s pillows, covered with eau-de-nil sateen instead of cotton, because the texture of the latter irritated her delicate skin. The plumping went on for rather a long time, and then Vee took the pillows and threw them across the room at the framed photograph of her mother on the beach at Broadstairs, scoring a bull’s-eye with the second. ‘Apologies if the service here wasn’t up to scratch,’ she said, out loud, her voice a coarse shout. ‘See if Harold gives you bloody sateen. See if Harold tries never to turn over in bed, in case the noise of the sp
rings wakes you. See if Harold goes into nine different shops to try and get ink for you. Nine! ’

  Someone was ringing a handbell on the street outside and she went over to the window and saw two Boy Scouts, one fat, one thin, pulling a handcart piled with old clothes. She snatched up the pillows and the photograph and looked around for what else she could grab.

  The Scouts had almost reached the High Street before she caught up with them. ‘Salvage,’ she said, between gasps, off loading the pillows, the chalk, the galoshes, the umbrella, the half-eaten packet of Parma Violets.

  The boys exchanged glances. ‘We’re just collecting rags today, missus,’ said the fat one.

  ‘Won’t kill you, taking a bit extra.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Put them in the bin if you don’t want them.’ She threw in the photograph with such force that the glass cracked, and then she went back to the flat, closed the curtains, kicked off her shoes and climbed under the eiderdown. She was asleep in seconds.

  This time, waking up was like climbing out of a pit; she kept slipping back down, her eyes gummed with clay. In the end, it was the smell of fish that pulled her into the afternoon light. The whole flat smelled like Whitstable quayside.

  She retrieved the basket and slid the stinking grey overpriced slab into a pan of water. Then she leaned against the kitchen table and tried to clear her head. ‘My mother has eloped,’ she said again, and it sounded no saner than the first time. She’d have to tell Donald, of course, and she tried to imagine how he might respond to the news, but she couldn’t; he was as sealed as a nut, a riddle inside a mystery, and instead she thought about what Noel would say. He’d be home soon and then she’d have an evening of it (‘Strictly speaking, an elopement is a marriage without parental consent, which in this case would be impossible, so you really ought to find another term for it . . .’). She looked at the clock and felt the room jolt. It was half past six; Noel should have been back hours ago. Any other child you’d say that they were out playing with friends, but Noel didn’t have any friends and in any case she’d never seen him do anything as childish as play.

  In detention, she thought, for correcting the teacher too many times.

  She made tea and listened to the wireless, but couldn’t settle. It was years since she’d been in a house on her own; she didn’t know what to do with herself. The announcer’s voice reminded her of Noel, scrolling out the long words.

  At seven o’clock, she jammed on a hat and went to find him.

  ‘Bostock?’ said Mr Waring, standing at the door of his lodgings with a book in his hand, a finger marking his place. ‘He wasn’t at school today.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I take a register. Had he been present I would certainly have noticed.’ His voice was mild but precise, every sentence perfectly formed, ten out of ten for grammar.

  ‘Well, where was he then if he wasn’t at school?’

  ‘Mrs—’

  ‘Sedge.’

  ‘Mrs Sedge, could I ask your connection to my pupil?’ He looked, as well as sounded, like a teacher – rumpled flannels and a tweed jacket, an air of looking down at her, even though he was the same height. His grey moustache had a sepia fringe from pipe-smoke.

  ‘He’s my evacuee,’ said Vee.

  ‘And did you see him actually leave for school?’

  ‘No, I went to work early.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he decided to . . .’ There was a pause. Mr Waring glanced at the page number and took his finger out of the book. ‘I was going to say “play truant”, but that doesn’t seem very likely, does it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you tried the library?’

  ‘It closed at six.’

  She realized she was fingering the large bone button at the neck of her coat, as if it were a St Christopher medal.

  ‘The trouble is that I don’t know where to look for him,’ she said. ‘There isn’t anywhere else. Unless he’s friends with some child I don’t know anything about. Is he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, I didn’t think so.’

  She looked up and down the twilit street, gnawing her lip. ‘There isn’t anywhere else,’ she repeated.

  ‘I’m sure that no harm will have come to him. We are, after all, in a safe zone.’

  It took a moment for her to register the waggish tone of voice; teachers and unfunny jokes, she thought – they were inextricably linked, like damp and bronchitis. ‘I’ll try home again,’ she said, turning away. ‘Maybe he’s back by now.’

  She’d only gone a yard or two when he called her name.

  ‘I’ve just remembered something,’ he said. ‘I had rather an odd conversation with the boy last week. He was preoccupied with the idea of vengeance.’

  ‘Vengeance? For what?’

  ‘An unspecified theft. He was concerned that no one was seeking justice for the victim. He implied that the only other witness was also engaged in crime.’

  Vee flinched, as if flicked with a whip. ‘He makes up stories,’ she said, mechanically. ‘Reads too many books.’

  ‘So you’d suggest this was merely childish fantasy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was twisting the coat button again and it was suddenly in her hand, the thread broken. She looked at it, stupidly.

  ‘He’s an unusual child,’ said Mr Waring. ‘Do you know very much about his family?’

  ‘He doesn’t have one.’

  ‘So you truly are in loco parentis.’

  More Latin. She guessed the meaning and nodded.

  ‘Then your obvious concern does you credit.’

  ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters,’ said Vee. ‘He’s been a help to me.’

  Mr Waring smiled, sweetly and unexpectedly, with the look of someone who’d just spotted an old friend. ‘Give,’ he said, ‘and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down and shaken together, and running over.’

  ‘Luke 6,’ supplied Vee. ‘I’d better go,’ she added. ‘It’s getting dark.’

  ‘Should you, perhaps, call in at the police station? If you’re worried.’

  Briefly she met his gaze, but it was too clever; she was worried he’d pick the truth out of her like a splinter, and she hurried away, nodding as she went.

  13

  It had been a mistake to bring the suitcase. It was half-empty and the ammonite kept rolling from one end to the other, shifting the handle in Noel’s grip at every step. It was like walking a badly trained dog.

  Since leaving for the station, he’d been waiting for Donald to ask him why he’d brought a large item of luggage on a day trip to London, and had even prepared an answer (‘I’m going to see if I can bring back some shrapnel to sell at school’) but the question hadn’t been asked, and now they were nearly at their destination.

  ‘It’s those houses there,’ said Noel, gesturing to the north side of Exhibition Road. ‘So can I go now?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Donald, mentally lunching at the Ritz with Hilde (consommé followed by salmon, Hilde in a white fur stole, Oh, Donald, I am so heppy), glanced down at Noel, with the expression of someone noticing a piece of lint on their trouser leg.

  ‘Can I go now?’ repeated Noel.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To look around for shrapnel, so I can sell it at school. That’s why I’ve brought the suitcase, you see.’

  ‘No, stay right here. I’ll be out in half a tick and then I’ll have to get to somewhere else, a drill hall or something like it. You’ll have to find the way.’

  ‘Why?’

  But Donald was already crossing the road, straightening his jacket as he went, smoothing his hair, taking a letter out of his breast pocket. He had spent half the journey sighing and examining his profile in the train window, and the other half cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a matchstick. ‘What wine d’you have with salmon?’ he’d asked, just outside Watford, and Noel had instantly given Mattie’s answer: ‘A good wine. All other considerations are m
ere pretension.’ And for the first time since Mattie had died, the thought of her had actually been nice, a simple pleasure – like having the back of his neck stroked – rather than a bone-deep ache.

  He set the suitcase down. He’d planned to drop into the Natural History Museum (just to see the diplodocus) before sneaking away through the usual crowds and abandoning Fat Donald, but the road, usually nose-to-tail with taxis and charabancs, was empty, the museums shuttered and sandbagged. The stone walls of the V & A looked as if they’d been attacked by a giant with a pea-shooter.

  As Donald mounted the steps of number 40 and pulled the bell-wire, Noel sat gingerly on one end of his suitcase and started to work out how many words he could make from the letters of diplodocus:

  Did

  Dip

  Disc

  Plod

  The door was opened by a seedy-looking man in his fifties, his skin lemon-tinged, his eyes peering wetly between crumpled lids.

  ‘Yes?’ He was wearing a tweed jacket, gone at the elbows, and a maroon paisley scarf, spotted with grease. There was a bicycle with a basket in the hall behind him, and a cold smell of mildew.

  Donald glanced again at the number on the door to check he’d got the right house. ‘My name’s Sedge, I believe I’m expected.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Close the door.’ As he spoke, a tiny sausage dog skidded out of a side room into the hall and threw itself at Donald’s ankles, barking.

  ‘Don’t, Rexy,’ said the man, stooping to pick it up, ‘naughty laddie.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be meeting a Mr JD,’ said Donald.

  ‘In the drawing room,’ said the man, setting off back along the hall, the dog peering vindictively over his shoulder. ‘Follow us.’

  Donald looked once more at the letter in his hand; the man’s voice matched the expensive paper, but if there had once been money in this house, it had long gone. He hesitated, trying to work out how little he’d accept; eighty, he thought – if they offered him less than eighty, he’d leave. He had standards to maintain.

  The barking had started again and Donald followed it into the room.