The Safest Place in London (12 page)

Abigail had emerged then, pulling at her dress, her shoes damp where she had stepped in a puddle or had a little accident, and Diana busied herself helping Abigail to wash her hands at the cracked and stained basin in the corner.

When they returned to his office Lance was sweeping piles of papers into a box. She saw other boxes hastily sealed and stacked haphazardly on top of each other.
This office shuts down and disappears on a regular basis
, Lance had said. He offered to see them out but it was perfunctory—he clearly wanted them gone—and Diana said no, thank you, they could manage. They had left in a hurry down the long, winding staircase, the small travelling case, heavy now with its illicit cargo, banging against Diana's legs and Abigail trying valiantly to keep up.

It
was
stupid, Diana realised, fighting back sudden, ridiculous tears as they reached the ground floor at last. We won't come back, she resolved. We won't return here and I shan't see Lance again, or not for a long time. And Abigail would say nothing. Abigail would forget quickly where they had been and why. She would forget there had ever been a man called Uncle Lance.
Children did forget things very quickly—she knew that even if Lance, who had no children of his own, did not.

They had arrived at Lance's office much later than usual because of the train disruption and they emerged now into the evening blackout, and in her anxiety to get home Diana had boarded the wrong bus. And now here they were, in the East End of London, caught in their first ever real air raid. If she was asked, she would say they had gone to a pantomime up west and got on the wrong bus. It was half true. But no one had asked, and in the meantime her fingers ached where she was clutching the handle of her case so tightly.

The bombing had let up for the time being, or had moved away, and into the silence a child cried.

Diana clutched the handle of the case and her fingers ached. It was a small overnight case, very lightweight, in pale blue vinyl with a metal handle and gold clasps burnished with age and use. Inside it was lined with imitation pale blue silk with a deep pocket sewed into the lid in the same material and two canvas straps with buckles with which one could secure the contents tightly. It was Gerald's case, though Diana had never seen him use it and she wondered if he had inherited it, perhaps, at some time. It was rather cheap and battered, and next to her Florida alligator handbag with the morocco leather purse nestling inside it looked cheap, out of place, but it was lightweight and that was the thing.

The little girl was awake. Her mother, the woman with the fair hair and the shaped eyebrows, had been minding a baby earlier,
brought by a small, grubby child who had emerged out of the chaos to hand it to her, and though the baby clearly was not her own she had walked up and down with it, unconcerned by its screaming. A bomb had fallen and another and the woman had not flinched. A near miss, the rumble and shaking of the station, the horror of their crowded circumstances, none of it touched her. The woman was fearless and splendid, and Diana imagined her the heroine of a government propaganda poster captioned
Hitler Beware! Mothers of Britain Stand Firm!
—or something nonsensical like that.

Of course it was absurd and Diana had looked away before the woman noticed her watching.

After a time the baby had been reclaimed by the same small, grubby child, its place taken by a man in a duffle coat with an unsettling intensity in his eyes who had sat with the woman for a time and they had whispered together, touched once, then sat in silence. Eventually the man had got up and gone. Now the woman sat and did not move. Did not smoke, even. During the man's visit her little girl had slept, her head on her mother's lap, but now the child was wake and she watched Diana with a face that showed no expression, with eyes that saw through the cheap pale blue vinyl of her case to the bounty within.

Diana clutched the handle of the case and her fingers ached. She uncurled them to flex each one. She could not sleep and she would not sleep, there was no question of it.

‘Need the lav!' said Abigail, pulling at her mother's hand.

Diana had no feeling in her legs and wondered if she could stand even if she wanted to, but there was nothing for it. She got stiffly to her feet. Ought she to take the case? She took her
handbag and left the case—they could hardly take it with them—casting a doubtful glance around her to see who was watching. The little girl was watching. Everyone else slept. The little girl did not move but her eyes saw everything.

Diana took Abigail's hand and they picked their way over the people towards the large tarpaulins up on the platform proper. The smell grew more intense as they approached and they held their handkerchiefs over their faces. Naturally there was a queue and Abigail cried, ‘Mum, need to go!' because now it was urgent. Abigail hopped and crossed her legs and eventually it was their turn. They braced themselves and found a latrine and it was best not to look where they were stepping or look at anything at all really, and when it was done and they realised there was nowhere to wash their hands, they came out.

And Diana saw Lance Beckwith leap off the escalator and emerge onto the platform, breathless and dishevelled and clearly terrified.

CHAPTER TEN

Joe had gone. He had appeared out of thin air and their lives together here in London had ended. Now they must wait. On some unnamed date in the future, Nancy would pack up what remained of their lives and she and Emily would leave London forever for some unknown and undreamed-of place across the sea.

And each second that passed took Joe further away from them.

The blood pumped in her ears. She was one heartbeat away from leaping to her feet, scooping up Emily and running with her up the escalators and into the fire-stricken night, running after Joe, calling out his name, searching place after place for him and finding him or not finding him—either way, each possibility seemed a catastrophe.

But Nancy did not leap up. She did not run after Joe. The blood pumped in her ears. And meanwhile Emily slept on, unaware of the cataclysmic events that had transpired, that would change
her life. The war would end and other dads would come home but Emily's dad would not. There would be no medals and his name would not appear on any war memorial.

But Emily was not asleep. She lay unmoving beneath the blanket, her head on her mother's lap, staring at the blue travelling case that the smart woman had brought with her down to the shelter and that clearly contained nothing of use in an air raid as the woman had not opened it once but had sat stiffly clutching the handle. Now the woman had gone, taking her little girl with her, and the case was left behind.

The distant boom of an explosion caused the floor to vibrate and Nancy looked up. Small cracks appeared in the ceiling, dust trickling down, and Emily's hand darted out and made a grab, not for the blue travelling case, but for the little girl's teddy bear that lay beside it, almost hidden and similarly abandoned.

A second explosion echoed distantly and all around heads bobbed up, bodies shifting, pulling blankets closer about them as though a blanket could protect you from a bomb blast. The bombing had picked up again and a murmur of voices accompanied it. People were frightened when no one had seemed very frightened before. It was being woken from their sleep that did it.

The teddy bear was gone, as though it had never existed, and Emily pulled the blanket tightly around herself. Of the mother and her child there was no sign. Presumably they had gone to the latrines and when they returned the little girl would discover her teddy was missing. Her mother would be angry with her, would conduct a search, would tell the child off and the child would cry.
The teddy would not be found. The mother would not confront the people seated around her, she was not the type. She would tell the child to be quiet. She would tell the child she would buy her another teddy bear.

Nancy searched for her cigarettes, pulled one from the packet and stuck it in her mouth, striking the match and observing the flame flare, tasting the dry little flakes of tobacco on her lips. The tip of the cigarette glowed redly.

She could hear a baby crying, screaming furiously, and she realised she needed to be up and moving about, that something might snap if she did not get up at once. She located the Rosenthals easily enough. In the heaviest months of the Blitz the railway company had installed bunks up on the platform proper and this was where the Rosenthals had positioned themselves, looking very settled with a bunk of their own, with their bundle of blankets and pillows and a foul-smelling potty covered with a cloth for the youngest ones to use as the trip to the latrines was not always safe. Billy Rosenthal saw her and waved. He was squatting beside his younger brother, Stanley, and had one of the littlest girls—Pamela or Barbara, she didn't know which, always had trouble distinguishing the younger ones—bouncing on his knee. Mrs Rosenthal was nursing the baby, or trying to. His face was red and scrunched up and he was bawling fit to burst. Mrs Rosenthal saw Nancy and gave a wan smile which turned to relief as Nancy took the baby off her. Nancy had brought half a sausage roll with her which she divided into pieces. The baby was too young for solids really, but she put some on her finger and let him suck it. The rest she shared among the youngest kids.

Nancy saw them then, the mother and daughter, emerging from the latrines a little distance away, faces white and shocked, as well they might be—a visit to the latrines at this stage of the night was not for the faint-hearted. The little girl was adjusting her skirt, holding out her hands to her mother as though she did not know what to do with them. The mother spoke to her, offered a handkerchief, then looked up, and perhaps she saw Nancy and recognised her and perhaps she did not. Either way, the child spotted something at that moment and darted off and they were gone.

‘He's enough to frighten off Adolf all on his very own,' said Mrs Rosenthal of the baby, pushing the hair out of her exhausted face. Her thin fingers seemed to be just bone and her dress was soaked through with sweat as though it was summer and not the middle of winter.

‘He's got a set of lungs on him, alright,' Nancy agreed, but she didn't mind it, didn't mind it at all. There was something special about this one. She had been there at his birth, holding Mrs Rosenthal's hand in the squalid upstairs room in Odessa Street on a wet Sunday afternoon the day after Halloween. A midwife had come, finally, when they had all but given her up, and the baby had stuck fast so that Mrs Rosenthal had screamed like a dying animal and there had been a moment when they'd thought the baby was lost. Perhaps that would have been for the best—the midwife had certainly seemed to think so, for when the baby was at last ejected from poor Mrs Rosenthal's broken and spent body, she had held it up by its ankles, all bloodied and crumpled and purple, like a dead thing already, and she had looked at Mrs Rosenthal and at the squalor of the room
they lived in and at the six other kids sitting outside waiting, wretched and unfed, in the stairwell and she had said, ‘Do you want this one?' The baby was almost dead anyway; it was a small matter to help it on its way. ‘'Course I want it!' Mrs Rosenthal had declared, loud as you like. ‘He's my little boy. 'Course I want him!' And now the baby was three months old and thriving, as much as any baby thrived down here, with a horde of brothers and sisters to look out for it.

‘You alright, luv?'

Nancy looked down and saw Mrs Rosenthal studying her, a little frown on her face. Was she alright? The question took Nancy by surprise. Their lives, hers and the Rosenthals' (a shared toilet out the back, paper-thin walls, a meter for the electricity that broke down without warning, an intermittent water supply, uncarpeted stairs and a ceiling that shook every time someone slammed a door), were as intimately entwined as that of husband and wife. She had held Mrs Rosenthal's hand while her baby was stuck fast inside her yet Nancy had never once used Mrs Rosenthal's first name (which was Sylvia) and she had never once gone to her with a problem of her own that was not connected to the outside toilet or the electricity meter or the intermittent water supply. They were intimately entwined but utterly private from one another.

And so Mrs Rosenthal's question took her by surprise.

‘'Course,' she said, patting the baby's back. I'll tell Emily she must give it back, she decided, for the little girl and her teddy bear had been on her mind, though she had only now realised it.

‘Your Joe got off alright to his new ship, did he?'

Nancy buried her face in the baby's blanket and made no reply.
When she and Emily were gone would the Rosenthals move into their rooms? They would leave at night, just before dawn, for that was the way it was done in Odessa Street, and she did not know if they would say goodbye to the Rosenthals before they left or not. The war might be over by then. Len Rosenthal might have returned—or he might be dead.