by Lissa Evans
She inspected the key, in case it had sustained its own bomb damage during the week in London, and then she tried again. It wouldn’t turn in the lock. She took a step back and looked at the door and noticed a pale crevice in the wood beside the jamb, where a long splinter had peeled away. There was a dent in one of the panels as well.
Abruptly, the door opened from the inside.
‘Yes?’ said a small, pale figure in a flannel dressing gown.
Vee couldn’t speak at first, just flapped her mouth. ‘That’s my dressing gown,’ she said, at last. ‘What have you done to my door?’
‘We had to change the keyhole.’
‘What?’
‘To get different keys.’
‘You’ve changed the lock? What are you doing here anyway? It’s my flat, I’m a legal tenant, I’ll have the law on you.’ She was pushing past the Austrian girl as she spoke, using the case as a battering ram, turning to shove her out into the street. Explanations could wait: there was a foreigner in her bloody flat, and one who’d kicked her way in, by the look of it, and was now shouting her head off and clinging on to the door and—
Vee registered, suddenly, exactly what it was that the girl was shouting.
‘Donald!’ called Hilde again.
Vee’s head swivelled. At the top of the stairs, she saw her son. He was carrying a rifle.
Behind her, Hilde slid back inside the hall and closed the front door.
‘This person has attacked me, Donald.’
‘You’ve gone to Ireland,’ said Vee.
‘She has bended two of my fingers. They are very painful.’
‘And I’m not a person!’ shouted Vee, turning on the girl. ‘I’m his mother. I pay the rent for this place and I’m telling you to get out.’
‘No,’ said Donald.
‘What?’ Vee turned her head again, too quickly, and this time the whole world turned with her and she found herself clutching the banister. ‘You’ve got a gun,’ she said, faintly, closing her eyes to quell the heave of the floor. She heard Hilde patter past her up the stairs.
‘Are you hurt?’ asked Donald; there was, possibly, a thin thread of concern in his voice.
‘I got a concussion in the blackout, broke my cheekbone, had to have an operation, thank you for asking. This is my flat and I’m coming upstairs and I’m going to make myself a cup of tea so you’d better get that girl out of my way if you know what’s good for you.’
‘I do know what’s good for me,’ said Donald, in a peculiar tone of voice, and when Vee opened her eyes, Hilde was at his side, clutching his arm, looking down at Vee with those little black eyes.
‘May I ask you take off your shoes,’ she called down.
‘Ask away,’ said Vee. She dragged herself upstairs, and pushed past the pair of them on to the narrow landing.
Someone had hung a picture on the wall, a framed print of snow-covered mountains. Someone had tacked a fringe of beads on to the plain lampshade.
She opened the door to the kitchen and stared at the white tablecloth, the basket of raffia fruit, the vase of dried flowers, the easel – the easel! – by the window, slanted so that the morning light fell across a badly drawn tree. The curtains were tied back with ribbons. There were napkins on the table. In napkin rings.
‘I will make the tea,’ announced Hilde, bustling in. ‘Sit, please.’
Vee started to argue, and then wearily pulled out a chair.
‘I’ve only been away a week,’ she said, to no one in par ticular. There was a scraping noise behind her and she looked round to see Hilde on her hands and knees with a dustpan and brush, sweeping the diagonal route that Vee had just taken to the table.
‘Lemon or milk?’ asked the girl.
‘What?’
‘With your tea. Lemon or milk?’
‘And where are you proposing to get a lemon from? Mussolini dropping you a parcel?’
‘I have a liddle dry peel from the last time I saw one.’
‘Milk.’
Donald eased into Vee’s field of vision. He propped the rifle in a corner and sat down at the other end of the table.
‘What’s going on then?’ asked Vee, sharply, as if she was speaking to a passing stranger rather than the fruit of her womb. ‘Why are you still here? Why have you got a gun?’
‘I joined the Home Guard.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘To get a firearm. Hilde had the idea.’ He spoke her name with careful reverence, as if he’d get a cash prize for every mention.
The name in question was taking biscuits out of a tin barrel that Vee had never seen before, and arranging them on a plate.
‘And was it her idea to move herself in?’
Donald looked shifty.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said.
‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ said Vee. ‘I’m not going anywhere – I live here, don’t I? And before you start, isn’t there someone else you should be asking about?’
There was a pause. Donald fingered his moustache.
‘I saw Gran outside the Co-op, she was with Cousin Har—’
‘I mean Noel! I mean the little boy you took to London and then lost.’
‘Did you find him then?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that’s all right.’
‘No thanks to you.’
There wasn’t a trace of guilt on his face, but there was something else – an expression, an air, that was unfamiliar. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she said, the plaintive words out before she knew they were there.
‘Something happened. We had to change the plan.’
‘Donald?’ It was Hilde speaking, holding out a tray to him. He stood up and went over and got it, Vee watching with astonishment.
‘And now I will join you,’ announced Hilde, taking a seat. She looked perfectly composed, sitting there in Vee’s dressing gown, on Vee’s chair, in Vee’s kitchen. Vee herself swung round so she didn’t have to look at her.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What happened?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘What, we’re just going to sit here and have a little chin-wag about the sugar ration while a German pours me tea and wears my clothes?’
‘Austrian.’
‘And what sort of woman’s still in a dressing gown in the middle of the morning?’
‘This week I am on night shift at the factory,’ said Hilde. ‘I was almost in my bed when you came.’
‘In my bed, almost in my bed.’
‘Mum—’
‘Would you like a Vanillekipferl?’ Hilde seemed preternaturally calm, holding out the plate of biscuits.
‘No.’
‘I have baked them, but there is no vanilla or budder so they are very plain.’
‘They’re not the only ones,’ said Vee with a venomous glance at her.
‘No, Mum, you mustn’t speak to Hilde like that.’
‘I can speak to her how I like. This is my flat, my table, my—’
‘I love her.’ Donald uttered the threadbare old phrase as if it were newly stitched.
‘What?’
‘And she saved my life.’
Vee looked from one of them to the other, the large man (that was it, that was the expression she’d spotted: he looked like a man, his jaw as firm as Desperate Dan’s) and the small, pale girl with her hair scraped back in an unbecoming bun, her eyes like currants on a dish.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, feebly.
‘We should tell her,’ said Hilde. ‘Because she has to know about the money.’
‘What money?’
In the pause that followed, Vee found herself taking a biscuit. It wasn’t bad. ‘What money?’ she asked again.
‘I will tell,’ said Hilde. ‘I read the ledder you brought to me, Mrs Setch. Donald asked that I should talk to him about a matter that is Life or Death, so after my shift I came here, to this small flat and we spoke abou
t these things for a long time, didn’t we?’
She wheeled her gaze round to Donald, and he nodded. That afternoon, seated at the kitchen table, behind the drawn curtains, he had started to explain the whole bloody mess to her, and she had peeled away his lies like someone stripping wallpaper: the hush-hush job, the landlady, the nobby background, the London club – he had confessed to everything, exposed the unglamorous truth. And afterwards, when she’d asked for time to think, he had sat in misery and listened to her footsteps as she’d walked from room to room around the flat. She’d paused in his mother’s room and he’d heard the squeak of the dressing-table mirror and had known she was looking at herself and he’d wished he could look at her too – wished he could stand behind her with his arms around her waist, gazing at their twin reflections.
Without her, he felt halved. A thought, tentative and unfamiliar, had wriggled up from some previously unvisited region of his brain: she deserved better than him.
‘Then someone broke the door,’ said Hilde.
He’d known it was death thundering up the stairs, and when the two men – the pallid one from Kensington, and a squat thug with hands like shovels – burst into the kitchen, he was still sitting on his chair, paralysed. In seconds, there was a razor at his throat, pressed to his Adam’s apple so that he couldn’t talk, or shout or even beg, and a warm thread crawled down his neck, and pooled in the notch above his breastbone; the world receded, so that he seemed to be looking through the wrong end of a telescope at two tiny men, discussing in conversational tones whether they should kill him in the bathtub or in a bedroom, and he had no thoughts left, only fear roaring around the inside of his skull like a stunt motorcycle.
And then Hilde had opened the kitchen door.
‘What do you want?’ she’d enquired, coldly. The pallid man had been looking out of the window; he swore and stepped towards her and she came to meet him, staring up at his pointed features like someone examining a large, ugly painting.
‘What do you want?’ she repeated. He moved uneasily, like a horse confronting a wasp.
‘We ask the questions,’ he said, ‘not you. We’ll take him with us,’ he added, over his shoulder.
‘Why? What do you get if you take him away?’
‘Shut up. Sit there.’
She sat, and Donald felt the sting of the razor guiding him upwards and towards the door.
‘Are you going to kill him?’ asked Hilde. ‘Shut up.’
‘Do they pay you for this?’
‘Shut up.’
‘We can give you money. Donald has money, he has told me about his money. You could take his money and go away and I promise we would say nothing.’
The word ‘money’ seemed to hang in the air; the two men exchanged a swift, speculative glance.
‘And then there would be no crime for the police to see,’ added Hilde.
‘What police?’
‘I have just spoken out of the bedroom window to our neighbour who has a telephone, asking him to call the police. They will be here in a chiffy.’
‘You’re lying, you fucking foreign bitch.’ But he strode to the window again and eyed the empty street. ‘Get it then,’ he said to Donald, ‘get the money, let’s see it.’
It was like a cold dream from the smallest hour of the night: footsteps and a blade just behind him, Donald knelt beside his bed and pulled out the shoebox, the illustration on the side showing a pair of tasselled loafers. He lifted the lid and a hand reached past him and extracted a roll of notes.
‘How much is there?’ asked the pallid man from the doorway.
There was a rustle and a muttered count. ‘Maybe half a ton each. Bit more.’
The roll of notes reappeared in front of Donald’s face.
‘See this?’ The roll waggled emphatically.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not enough. We leave with this, we’ll be taking a few other things with us. Like your fucking fingers.’ The last word was shouted so close to Donald’s head that he jerked in shock. He started to gesture towards the Gladstone bag on top of the wardrobe, but Hilde was already speaking.
‘There is more,’ she said. ‘I will show you.’
Donald stayed crouching, trying to work out what he was hearing – a door opening elsewhere in the flat, the squeak of a hinge. He dared to look round and saw the pallid man returning to the room, pushing something into the pocket of his coat as he walked, breaking step only to thrust his face into Donald’s. ‘I’m going to tell him,’ he said, very close, very low, his breath smelling of bacon, ‘that you’d done a flit and we couldn’t find you. So from now on, you’re the Invisible fucking Man, you’re a cockroach under the carpet, we catch one more glimpse of you, you’re finished and Eva Braun here’s finished and they’ll have to scoop you up in buckets before they can bury you.’
And both men were gone, hurrying down the stairs, clapping the front door shut, footsteps fading.
After a moment, Hilde appeared with a tea towel and knelt and dabbed at Donald’s neck.
‘A scratch, only,’ she said.
He caught her hand and kissed it, and then laid it on his forehead like a cool benediction.
‘Will you run away with me now?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Please.’
‘No. I have already run and run and I will not run any more.’
He closed his eyes in despair.
‘I will stay, though,’ she said. ‘In this small flat. The rooms are not bad and the light is from the south-west.’
Vee had glanced between the couple as the story was recounted. She’d logged the tiny scab on Donald’s neck, the pragmatism on Hilde’s face, the soggy adoration on her son’s.
‘Whatever did you do to get in such trouble?’ she asked, fretfully.
‘I had a little business,’ said Donald. ‘Took me round and about.’
‘Well you can’t go round and about any more, can you?’
‘I don’t need to,’ he said.
‘Donald has a chob,’ announced Hilde.
‘What? Where?’
‘In the bookshop.’
‘The one downstairs?’
‘Mr Clare needed an assistant.’
‘What for? To clean his teeth for him?’
The insult was random, a time-filler as she tried to pull her thoughts together. ‘So you’re staying and she’s staying. When were you going to ask me?’
‘I didn’t know when you were coming back.’
‘You didn’t wait long.’
‘Hilde saved my life.’
‘And spent all your money.’
‘Yes, well . . .’
There was an odd pause. Hilde was sitting very upright, hands clasped in front of her.
‘What?’ asked Vee.
Donald cleared his throat.
‘It wasn’t just my money.’
It took a moment for the meaning to trickle through, and then Vee stood up so abruptly that her chair toppled over.
‘You didn’t,’ she said.
There was no reply. She headed for her bedroom; it appeared untouched, spared the general redecoration, but she saw at once that the angle of the dressing-table mirrors was wrong, her bandaged face peering back at her in tilted triplicate. She lunged toward the left-hand mirror, swung it forward and stared at the hinge. Dangling from it was a frayed black thread.
She returned unsteadily to the kitchen doorway.
‘You stole my savings.’
It was Hilde who answered. ‘I had found the money by accident.’
‘Accident?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think I’m soft in the head?’
‘I had moved the mirror and something banged behind it and when I looked I saw a small bag hanging there.’
‘And why did you move my mirror? Why did you need to do that?’
For the first time, the girl hesitated.
‘I wanted to see my face,’ she said. ‘All of my face. The sides of it
and the front of it.’
‘Why?’
Hilde put a hand to her own cheek and pressed it, as if checking the freshness of a loaf. ‘Because I wanted to know if I was more pretty than before. I wanted to know why Donald was so much in love with a woman who looked like me.’
Donald made a choking noise. ‘Not a woman,’ he said. ‘A lady.’
There was a brief silence.
‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ shouted Vee, derisively. ‘This isn’t a flipping stage play, I’m not going to start clapping. You swiped a hundred and seventeen pounds off me, you and this . . . this . . .’ She struggled for a word to adequately describe Hilde; her son might think he’d bagged himself a member of the aristocracy but Vee knew a peasant when she saw one: all those airs and graces had been glued on, like beauty spots. She’d bet the whole bundle that Hilde had grown up on potato soup and an outdoor privy shared with half the village and any refinements had been filched from the place where she’d been employed as an under-housemaid. She opened her mouth to say as much – had the words ‘If she’s a lady then I’m Rin Tin Tin’ ready to roll off her tongue – and then she saw that Hilde had leaned her head on Donald’s shoulder, and he had put his right arm around her – gently, tenderly – and nobody had ever done that to Vee, not Harry Pedder (too busy unbuttoning her blouse), nor Samuel Sedge, who hadn’t even had an arm on that side, and her rage was swept aside by a great gush of self-pity. Her throat closed, as if with a purse-string.
‘Tea?’ asked Hilde. ‘Please sit.’
Vee sat.
‘I knew,’ said Hilde, pouring, ‘that a good mother would of course spend all she has to save her child’s life, so that is why I took the money. So now you have saved Donald with your savings and you can be very heppy. Another Vanillekipferl?’
Vee shook her head. ‘What if those men come back?’
‘I’ve got a gun now,’ said Donald. ‘Anyway, they think they’ve got all my money.’
Hilde flicked a glance at him.
‘And they have,’ added Donald. ‘They have got all of it. So they won’t be back.’
Vee looked from one of them to the other; she knew she was missing something but so much had been crammed into the last half hour that her head felt like a bolster.
‘How can you be sure?’ she asked. ‘I won’t be able to sleep at night, worrying. And there’s Noel to think of, too. You can’t have a child here with people waving guns around.’
