The Safest Place in London (20 page)

On his last night, as the rest of the ward slept and the seaman in the bed opposite wept quietly, the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent came to him in the still of the night. She crept into his bed and gave him what he had waited a fortnight for. It did not surprise him that she did so. He was a man who
had cheated death and he had done so not with any great skill or prowess, but simply by dumb good fortune and the nurse recognised this. She gave herself to him, in part, as a reward but in some other, almost indefinable way, in the hope that his good fortune would rub off on her, would permeate her. She said nothing whatsoever to suggest this but Joe felt it and he did not question it.

After two weeks in the hospital the navy had sent Joe home to recuperate and after more than three years at sea, after nearly four years away, he had had to learn how to live in a house with a wife and a small child. And they had had to learn how to live with him.

An explosion somewhere to the south-east—the docks maybe—caused a low rumble and the air lit up a brilliant yellow and Joe dived for cover. The last thing he needed was a sky lit up like Guy Fawkes Night. He had found a narrow passageway between two buildings, barely wider than the breadth of a man's shoulders, and he crouched there, swallowed by the shadows, until the sky turned black once more.

It was the first time he had stopped running since he had left Nancy in the Underground station and he leaned his head back against the brickwork and closed his eyes, drawing in slow, deep breaths. He still wore the buff-coloured seaman's duffle coat he had purloined from the warehouse he had taken refuge in and now he stuffed his hands into its pockets for warmth, feeling the coat stretch across his shoulders and ride up at his wrists, feeling his own stocky frame fit uneasily inside another man's clothes.
He pulled up the hood of the coat, wishing he had taken a hat. He was making his way south. He was, he believed, though it was difficult to be sure, in Three Colts Lane.

He didn't pause for long. Even in the air raid people were out and about. He eased himself to his feet and set off once more, moving in a low crouching run with both hands thrust out, partly for balance, because the ground was uneven at best, partly in case he ran slap bang into something or someone, because he could see no more than a yard or so in front of his face. The clouds that had blanketed this part of the city for some hours shifted and a pale moonlight now illuminated his way. Joe stopped dead. This wasn't Three Colts Lane. He had missed his way in the blackout.

Where, then, was he? He stood quite still, his heart hammering under his ribs, the boom of distant explosions rippling through the air and making the earth beneath his feet vibrate. There were buildings on both sides, warehouses perhaps, and a large structure a little way ahead that stretched up and over the road. A railway bridge. He listened for footsteps ahead or behind him but could make out nothing. You'd have to be crazy to be out in this—crazy or desperate.

What was to be done? Go back and try to retrace his steps or press on and trust he'd find himself somewhere familiar soon enough?

A train rattled over the bridge in the darkness, making a terrific sound in the deserted lane, and Joe realised the bombing had stopped, for a time at least. The train showed no lights but it was going east. This was the overground line that took you north-east through Walthamstow and Wood Green as far as Chingford, or north to Seven Sisters and Edmonton and Enfield.
Only a goods train would be travelling at this hour. Carrying munitions, perhaps, or armaments. He stood quite still, waiting for it to pass, wincing every time the wheels sent sparks spraying into the darkness. It would make a good target for any stray passing bomber.

The last railway truck rattled nosily overhead and was gone and the laneway shuddered into silence. Not silence: a rat scurried over his foot, distant sirens, shouts, the bells of emergency vehicles testified to the continuing chaos of the raid. But it was to the south, over towards the docks, wasn't it? There had been no bombs behind him, from the direction in which he had just fled, had there?

Joe turned, his fingers clenched tightly in his coat pocket, feeling every muscle, every nerve tense and ready to spring forward. He wanted to go back, to run full pelt back to the Underground station to find Nancy and Emily. In his head he was already running and his heart was racing and he was gulping down breath after breath to fill his aching lungs. But he had not moved.

He mustn't go back.

He bent over, his hands on his knees, breathing deeply. He searched for a cigarette then stopped himself—the flare of the match would advertise his presence as accurately as a searchlight or the blast from a police whistle.

After a moment he straightened up, feeling his alarm slowly dissipate.

Behind him was the unmistakable crunch of a man's footsteps on broken glass, a heavy step in boots, perhaps a fireman, policeman, serviceman. He didn't wait to find out but set off once
more, moving swiftly, under the railway bridge, keeping close to the side of the street, a shadow among shadows, finding his way not by memory or starlight but by instinct. This way was south and now this way and now this. When at last he swung into Whitechapel Road he stopped as though as he had walked into a wall. It was dark, of course, but his eyes had adjusted by now. He could sense the broad east–west thoroughfare before him and a little to his left the giant edifice of the London Hospital, black against a black sky.

Thank God. Here was a place he had left behind when he had met Nancy, but here was a place he fled to now when he needed help. Something welled inside him. It was the same feeling he had had adrift in the lifeboat when the Polish ship had appeared out of the mist and his life had been saved.

He waited a few minutes in the shadow before venturing to cross the wide road. Even in a blackout, with a raid going on half a mile away, Whitechapel Road was never entirely deserted. And there were plenty of men out tonight simply because there was a raid on, and each one of them was every bit as desperate as he was and would not hesitate to cut his throat and rob him if it advanced their own position. It wasn't just men. Out of the darkness a girl emerged, shivering in a summer dress, her thin arms wrapped around herself, pacing the roadside. She turned to stare at him, her face was as white as the whites of her eyes. You'd have to be desperate to ply your wares in a raid, in the blackout, on a night this cold. But there was always someone more desperate than yourself, that was what war taught you.

The girl saw him, called out to him, but her words were lost in another explosion. This time it was to the west, towards the City,
and under its cover Joe darted over the road and plunged down the first side street he came to, and then another. He heard the drone of an enemy aircraft right overhead and he dived into a doorway, crouching, his hands covering his head.

After his three days adrift in the North Atlantic he had spent three months at home recuperating. One month for each day—that had seemed the least the navy could do; three months for the entire ship's company lost, eighty-five men, roughly one day for each man. Two or three days each, he reckoned, for the few who had survived and been picked up by the
Itchen
only to be torpedoed a day or so later, and a day or two for the petty officer whose body he had tipped out of the lifeboat and who lay now at the bottom of the ocean. And with each day of his leave some part of him had thought,
The navy has forgotten about me, they have forgotten I am here. If I just keep my head down they will let me be
. For, by then, he had learned how to be at home with his family, and they had learned how to be with him.

It had not been easy. He had been married so short a time before his call-up that all he wanted on his return was to be alone with his wife, to remember who she was, to learn what it meant to be a husband. But they were not alone. There was Emily, who had grown up in a house with only her mum and the Rosenthals upstairs, who had no place in her world for a dad, had no use for one. She had screamed when he had arrived home in his uniform with his sun-blistered skin and his bristly chin and smelling of the sea. Nancy knew how to handle her and he did not. He
learned, quickly, to resent how much of his wife's time, his wife's energy, the kid gobbled up.

It was not a happy house that first week or two.

Then Harry turned up.

He appeared one evening at Joe's local when Joe had not even told his brother he was home with an offer of work down the docks. It was extra money, Harry said, and Joe welcomed the idea, though Nancy, when she found out, was furious.

But a convoy had come in and after his first shift Joe arrived home with two tins of peaches in syrup and a tin of Carnation milk and his wife and child fell on him like he had won the Victoria Cross. The kid ran to him, screaming with delirious excitement. After this they had got along just fine, he and the kid. He took her to the park, though it was all dug up for the war effort. He carried her on his shoulders through the stalls on market day and sat with her on his lap at his local letting her lick the froth from his beer. He marvelled at all the things she could do and say, this tiny perfect creature that was a part of him and a part of his wife, at times almost a miniature of Nancy the way she became cross in a moment just as his wife did, the way she would shrug her tiny shoulders with contrary stubbornness.

She tripped one Sunday evening after tea on the hard kitchen tiles and split her lip and he felt his insides turn over. He scooped her up and felt the world a hostile place closing in around them.

It had not been easy with Nancy either, and her love had required more to coax it than a tin of peaches and a can of Carnation milk. In a world of rationing and bombs and blackouts his wife had learned to survive on her own. And then he wondered, had she already been that person when he had met her, orphaned
and alone, brought up in a Shoreditch boarding house? He did not know. The person he had written frantic, bored, yearning letters to from his bunk on board his ship seemed not to exist except in his own head. His wife was strong. She hardly seemed to need him. Her beauty and her strength overwhelmed him, it frightened him. The two of them, she and the kid, had grown to fill the space he had left and he felt clumsy in her presence, a grotesque giant of a thing, too large for the furniture, too tall for the room, always crashing into things. He blamed his sea legs for this; he had been at sea three years, it took a while to learn how to be on dry land.

At night he thought about the red-haired nurse with the lilting Highlands accent who had crept into his bed on the ward and made love to him as a stranger would. His wife made love to him in the same way, like a stranger, and that disturbed him. And it bewitched and transfixed him. The evening she had told him she had gone with another man he thought he would go mad. But he did not go mad. Instead he crossed the space that had separated them and woke the next morning beside her in their bed. It turned out his wife knew him better than he knew himself.

He had not let her out of his sight or out of his heart since that morning.