The Safest Place in London (22 page)

There had been no letters waiting for him. He did not fear that his wife would run off with a Yank, for he trusted implicitly in her fidelity and in their marriage. It concerned him that her letters to him had not got through, had perhaps been sunk by enemy action, or that his letters to her had somehow failed to arrive. In his last letter he had taken some time to describe the desert at dawn to her because it had struck him at the time as something beautiful and he had sat on the roof of the Mk VI and tried to put down in words how it had seemed to him. Of course, it was entirely likely the censors had struck the whole lot out as it gave away his location—though what use the enemy would make of it he could not imagine. But the rest of the letter, where he had asked after her and Abigail, about the rationing and the bombing, where he had recalled in vivid detail a tennis match they had attended together before the war, she would have been able to read that part. In that dawn sitting on the roof of the tank he had wanted to write,
I am alive! Ashby is dead but I have made it!
but he did not write that. Instead he asked about the rationing and recalled a tennis match.

He had taken Diana to Wimbledon once because she had never been. It had been the year the Americans had made a clean sweep of it and they had watched Helen Wills Moody easily account for Elizabeth Ryan in straight sets and Diana had
applauded wildly and enthusiastically and he had felt his heart lift. Afterwards they had eaten strawberries and clotted cream out of a bowl with their fingers and he had asked her to marry him. He had had no engagement ring with him, for he had not expected to ask her. It had struck him at the time what a very different thing this was to the thing with Bunny. That had been a voyage, exhilarating and terrifying but tainted by wretchedness and despair and, ultimately, hopelessness. With Diana it was a steady but satisfying climb on a warm August afternoon in the Peak District. Later, when he had located his mother's engagement ring and presented it to her, she had said, ‘What was your mother's name?' And when he had told her she had said, ‘How beautiful, I wish I had met her,' and, ‘If we are to have a little girl that must be her name.'

They had married at Marylebone Registry Office after a downpour on a cool October morning and when they had emerged as man and wife the pavements had gleamed wetly in the sunlight.

But there had been no little girl, and no little boy. There had been two babies in the early years of their marriage that Diana had lost in the first months of her pregnancy and then nothing. He had been unconcerned at their childlessness, for that appeared to be their fate. Diana had been twenty-five when they had married then, somehow, suddenly, she was thirty-five and he forty and he had felt keenly her growing misery, had assured her it did not matter. But it did matter, dreadfully, to her. It was a sort of craving in her, as if without a child she was unfinished, incomplete. He could not feel the same way but he saw how she suffered and it grieved him.

War had been declared and it seemed to Gerald that his wife had declared her own war, that she had begun rationing, had hidden herself in the deepest shelter, already. The war would make very little difference.

He had been seconded to the Ministry of Supply. It had not occurred to either of them he might be called up for active service. She had fallen pregnant around the turn of the new year, though she had told him nothing until Easter had come and gone. Out of fear, he presumed, that she would lose this one too. His joy had been tempered by fear but Diana had bloomed. He had thought of requesting time off around the birth—the ministry had, at that time, been in a constant and escalating state of panic, every ministry was, but he felt sure they would agree. Then Dunkirk had happened and suddenly he had found himself attached to a tank regiment doing basic training and it had seemed the cruel-lest joke of all, that their child was to come just as he was to be posted overseas.

The baby was born at eight o'clock on a bright autumn morning exactly a year into the war and he had gazed upon this tiny thing they had produced together and had been unable to speak. And he had gazed at his wife and saw, perhaps properly for the first time, the grief she had endured that was, now, in this moment, gone. His indifference to all those childless years seemed to be that of another man, a misguided man who had been unable to imagine such a joyous thing as his own child, in a cot, red-faced and wrinkled and helpless, and a wife exhausted but so proud, so complete. And his imminent departure to fight in a war that Britain was losing on every front had hung heavily over it all, heightening every sense, lengthening and telescoping
each moment. He had sworn to return safely to them but his awareness of the utter lack of control he now had over his own destiny had made his words hollow and meaningless.

But I am alive, he said to himself now, on a Cairo evening more than three years later, and the river lapped at his feet, the dock rats scurried along the waterfront and through the night air he could hear, distantly, the girls outside the brothels calling desultorily to passers-by. He had seen his child just that once when she had been a single day old. She was now three years and four months and he had missed one thousand two hundred and fifteen days of her young life. The fact of his absence dismayed him but her existence made every day and every battle worth the price. He thought of the last photograph that Diana had sent him, of three-year-old Abigail, seated stiffly in a chair in a pretty dress, her stubby little legs dangling high above the floor, a hairband pulling her fine dark hair back from her forehead. He had three photographs of her now, and he had peered into his child's eyes searching for some sign of himself, for some sense of her awareness of him, some comprehension in her eyes that he was the reason she went annually through this ritual. But he saw nothing. Her fingers curled around a ball that the photographer had placed in her lap.

Ashby had had a child too, a little boy called Marcus, and the fact of Marcus was like a pain striking his heart and he felt ashamed at his own feelings of helplessness and loss.

He returned to the barracks, passing through roadblocks and checkpoints, showing his pass to bored MPs who, like everyone, clearly wished they were somewhere else. A pretty young WAC from Cathcart's staff, in full uniform and smoking a
quiet cigarette, was waiting for him with a message to report to Cathcart at once. He smartened himself up, in a perfunctory way, and presented himself at Cathcart's door to be given the news that he was going home in the morning.

The call to prayer from a dozen minarets sounded distantly across the city's fading darkness. Not long after, dawn began to glow softly in the eastern sky like the embers of a dying fire, seeping between the slats of the blackout blind, and if Gerald had been asleep it would have woken him. He had not slept. His kitbag was packed, repacked, a dozen times. He heaved it over his shoulder and left, without a backward glance, out to the waiting car, his shirt already soaked through with sweat though the sun had hardly risen.

He travelled in an open staff car with three other officers, the sun now blazing, and the road ahead shimmered and rippled with the heat. A second car followed behind and they drove through the silently deserted streets north-west out of the city and along the Desert Road the hundred or so miles to Alexandria where the airstrip was, for they were going home not by troopship but in an RAF aircraft. With stops for refuelling, they would be home within a day.

They drew up at the airstrip where an aircraft was being readied for take-off, a twin-engine de Havilland Flamingo, a civilian plane originally, battered and worn, and for a moment Gerald's bewildered joy was tempered at the thought of flying anywhere in that thing. Aircraft in far better condition than this got shot down every day and being a transport carrier was no protection,
quite the opposite: they would be a sitting target. Cathcart had said Gerald had only got a seat on the plane because someone else had dropped out at the last moment.

He stowed his kit and climbed wordlessly aboard, still numb from the early start, from the unexpected summons to Cathcart's office last night, and found a seat. He thought about the navy troopships in the harbour that were still avoiding the U-boats in the Med, still sailing via the Red Sea and the Cape. Going by plane was the difference between many weeks' voyage and a single day's journey. He pushed his fear down and out of sight. He strapped himself into his seat and the chap next to him told him that the man whose spot he had taken was an adjutant from the Royal Rifles who had shot himself at the barracks the previous night. The man had not died, he said, but was lying, critical and insensible, in the military hospital in Cairo.

The pilot and the co-pilot were already in the cockpit checking their instruments, a radio operator tucked in behind them. There were nine other passengers on the flight: a couple of doctors from a medical corps, two junior officers and a major all from the Durham Light Infantry, two NCOs from a New Zealand regiment, a captain from Reconnaissance and a South African sapper. One of the lieutenants from the DLI wore a bandage around his head and seemed not to be quite all there. His fellow officer stayed by his side the whole time, explaining everything, though the man seemed not to hear him. His major smoked foul-smelling cigars and ignored them both. The Kiwis and the South African began smoking and playing cards at once. The captain and the two doctors just smoked and looked out of the window or tried to sleep. No one spoke. As the aircraft lurched
upwards Gerald felt his stomach tighten sickeningly. The aircraft banked steeply and he grabbed the seat in front of him, seeing the horizon at a crazy angle through the tiny porthole, sea one moment, desert the next. He relaxed his grip and folded his arms before him. He would think of nothing.

They flew west along the coast, covering in a matter of hours the mile after mile of rugged, mine-pocked desert that two armies had fought over for three years and where Ashby had died, coming down briefly in the afternoon to refuel in Tunis, where sandwiches were handed around, and again in Gibraltar, where blankets were distributed. After this they turned north, flying through the night over neutral Portugal and the Bay of Biscay, meeting no enemy aircraft but buffeted mercilessly by a fierce headwind, landing at RAF Exeter with ice on their wings in the frozen pre-dawn.

Someone on the ground yanked the door open and pulled down the steps and they climbed stiffly down from the aircraft and stood, like dazed animals, in the cold air, too stunned even to flap their arms or blow on their numbed fingers. Their bodies, which for years had sweated and laboured beneath a desert sun, went into shock—all except the captain from Recon, who had remained silent and sullen throughout the journey, and now fell to his knees and wept. No one said anything or even appeared particularly surprised but Gerald swallowed a lump in his throat and the de Havilland, the airstrip, the huts at the edge of the airstrip, blurred before his eyes. He looked upwards into a sky that was thick with impenetrable grey cloud, an English sky, and his eyes filled with tears.

They shuffled in a ragged, bewildered group towards the huts, where a red-faced woman with a streaming cold in a headscarf
and a dirty apron with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth was ill-naturedly serving weak, undrinkable coffee, and they gazed at her and her undrinkable coffee with grateful and mute joy, even when she tried to charge them a shilling and demanded ration books they did not possess. The major from the Durhams had a car and driver waiting for him and was whisked away. The rest of them hitched a lift into the town in the back of an army truck. The cold sliced through their thin desert fatigues like a thousand unceasing pinpricks, numbing and painful at the same time, and they shivered, hugging themselves, teeth chattering uncontrollably as the open truck lurched through country lanes and onto a main road. It hurt to open one's eyes to the wind and the frozen air.

As they reached the outskirts of the town Gerald saw bombed buildings, whole rows of houses gone, in street after street, deep craters everywhere. The people were pale and gaunt, jumping over puddles and bomb debris, huddled in layer upon layer and hurrying as though they feared being caught outside. They seemed like a crowd in a wilderness.

The truck dropped them at the railway station and, seeing a public telephone, Gerald had the wild idea of telephoning Diana. It was dark but the day had begun, Diana would be at home. The telephone on the table in the hallway would ring. She would come to the phone, pulling on a dressing-gown, perhaps with Abigail in her arms, and pick up the receiver expecting—

Here his imagination stalled. For what would he say?
Hello, old girl, it's me. I'm back.
Dear God. It was dreadful. He baulked at the stilted blandness of his words but no others presented themselves. And in the end it did not matter, for the girl at the
exchange laughed humourlessly and said there were no lines available and didn't he know there was a war on? and promptly disconnected him.