The Safest Place in London (27 page)

He started towards the little stepladder up to the loft but Diana darted forward and snatched at him, pulling him back.

‘Please, Gerald, don't let's disturb her. She was so tired, so dreadfully tired. Please let her sleep. You've no idea what an ordeal it's been—first the dreadful raid and then the journey up here.'

He stared at her. ‘You had Abigail with you when you were caught in the raid?'

‘Yes.' Her eyes slid away from him. ‘I—we went up to London, just that once. For a pantomime. Just that one time. The raids seemed so infrequent. I took her with me. To a pantomime. And she enjoyed it so much! She laughed and laughed! Oh, you should have seen her!'

So that was it. She blamed herself for taking Abigail to London, for getting them both caught in the raid. Gerald took a
slow breath. ‘Then I am glad you took her with you,' he declared, taking both her hands again. ‘She deserves to laugh and so do you. And there was no harm done, was there? I mean, here you both are.'

But she ignored this. ‘We must have more tea!' she said, pulling his hand.

And now he was irritated. Why this damned obsession with the tea?

‘Later. Diana, I want to see her, even if she is still sleeping.'

And before she could stop him he went to the stepladder, climbing nimbly, half expecting her to call out, to make a grab for him, but she did neither and he found himself on the upper floor. Really it was just the loft, a single open space with a tiny window at one end, the roof sloping away on either side and even at its apex too low for him to stand upright. There was a bed in the centre and a smaller child's bed, hardly bigger than a cot, over by the window where his child slept. He felt a profound relief come over him and some part of him that had been wound very tightly slowly released. He moved softly over to the sleeping figure and in the fading winter daylight he gazed down at her beautiful fair curls.

Her beautiful fair curls.

Something clenched inside him. A pulse beat in his head. He went to the bed. He stood over her. Her beautiful fair curls. His little girl had fine dark hair. His little girl had a snub nose and her mother's chin. He had three years of photographs to prove it.

He did not know what it meant.

‘Abigail!' His voice sounded unnaturally loud, like a shout on a morning that has been made silent by snow.

‘Gerald,
please
!' Diana called to him, and he heard her coming up the steps, could not mistake the breathless panic in her voice that had been present, he realised, since she had opened the front door to him.

The sleeping figure in the bed stirred, murmured, half turned, the hair fell away from her face. Gerald shook his head violently, trying to dispel this image, trying to make some order out of the confusion, but the image remained and his thoughts could find no order. He yanked the bedclothes back, grabbed the child's thin little arms and pulled her up. The child's face was very pale, its features were alien to him, a small mouth, a straight nose, full lips, a high forehead—there was nothing of himself, nothing of his wife here. As he held her, the child's head lolled like a rag doll's and her eyes flickered and rolled back in her head.

‘What's wrong with her?'

‘I gave her a bromide to help her sleep. Poor little mite, she was so tired and distressed. You've no idea what she's been like—'

‘
But it's not her!
' Gerald turned and stared at his wife, wildly searching her face. ‘Diana,
it's not Abigail
!'

But she stared dumbly at him.

Gerald let go of the child and lurched towards his wife, taking both her arms, staring into her face.

‘
Diana! It's not her!
'

‘Of course it is,' she said simply, and her words were so calm, so quiet, but the ground had become a shifting sand dune beneath his feet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was Harry who opened the door to Joe's knock, his fingers curling around the doorframe, grey in the grey dawn, and something glinted in the meagre light: the blade of a knife. Anyone arriving at the house at this hour could not have good intentions and Harry was prepared. A hand shot out and grabbed Joe by his coat collar and pulled him inside. A glance up and down the street, the door hastily shut behind them. The knife was gone, stowed in some hidden pocket ready for the next person.

‘I told you not to come here.'

Harry was a slight man, hair cut short like a squaddie's and sprinkled with flecks of grey, a chin permanently darkened by stubble and unblinking pale grey eyes that rarely twinkled with laughter, quick movements and a quicker mind always four or five steps ahead of the man he was dealing with. How different might things be if it was Sammy opening the door on this frozen January dawn, but their older brother was doing a five-year stretch at Wandsworth Prison so it was Harry who peered at Joe
in the half-light, his face displaying that habitual expression of watchful wariness, and when he saw it was his younger brother at the door the expression did not change.

‘I been on the run,' said Joe. ‘The cops was waiting for me at the docks. It weren't just some random security check—they was waiting for me.'

These words sounded to Joe like words spoken by another man living another life, not his words, not his life. He needed to explain the last eight days, his flight, the line of ambulances outside the hospital. But Harry had taken over the whole of the tenement house in Yalta Street where his father and mother had once lived in two rooms, and he had taken over the two terraces on each side, and he had taken over Myra, too, who had once been Sammy's girl, installing her in one house and using the other as a place of work. Harry wouldn't care about the line of ambulances. He wouldn't care about the dead little girl.

‘And you come
here
?'

Harry grabbed him by the collar in the darkened hallway and slammed him against the wall. He had done this often when they were younger and Joe, even now he was older, bigger, stronger, had never fought back. He did not fight back now.

‘I had nowhere else to go.'

‘There's always somewhere else to go. If you don't have some place set up where you can hide out then you're a bloody fool.'

‘I ain't like you,' Joe said. ‘I don't need places to hide out.'

He was not like Harry. Harry was the ten-year-old boy standing on a corner, hands thrust deep in pockets, watching everyone and everything as though there was money to be made by it, as though the thing he could pull from his pocket
might make his fortune or bring down his enemies. When the war had come Harry was ready. As the first ration books had flown off the government printing presses, as they had made their way by armoured lorry to the new Food Offices around the country, Harry had found a printer in Limehouse and soon the presses were running through the night spitting out fake ration books, then forged identity cards, and later, when clothes became rationed, fake clothing coupons too. As the war had progressed and it was simpler to go straight to the source, robbing the ration books directly from the Food Offices, he bought the stolen books for two quid each and sold them on for three. Lately he had turned his attention to the American and Canadian airbases that had sprung up and were stuffed to bursting with cigars, oranges, peanut butter, chocolate, coffee, fruit juice—and silk too, if you had no qualms about taking some poor sod's parachute, which Harry did not. It was a profitable time, war. As his older brother sewed mailbags and his younger brother shovelled coal in a stinking ship's engine room, Harry Levin had done very nicely. But with the war into its fifth year, with the government bringing in new laws and ever more severe penalties, the risk-free undetectable crimes of three, four years ago were a thing of the past. Harry was jumpy—Joe could see it, feel it, but he couldn't share it.

‘I ain't like you, Harry,' he said again. ‘I'm a sailor. A husband. A dad.'

Harry snorted. ‘You gave all that away when you agreed to work for me—and what the hell happened to your head?'

Joe put a hand up to his head, touching the bandage. He had forgotten. He suddenly felt unwell. ‘I got hit by something.'

Harry made no reply, studying Joe as though seeking some family resemblance, some hint they were related. He let go of Joe's collar and stalked off into the kitchen.

For a moment Joe didn't move. He had come home on leave in October and gone to work at the docks. He had returned home with tins of peaches in syrup, with a can of Carnation milk, and they had fallen on him, his wife and kids. And Nancy had assumed that was the extent of it, one or two items pilfered when the Docks Police weren't looking, a couple of cans hidden in his lunchbox, no harm done, everyone was doing it. And it had suited him that she think this. She didn't need to know her brother-in-law was at the centre of a full-scale operation that involved bribes to dockyard guards and a corrupt superintendent, holes cut into the wire of the perimeter fence, guard dogs doped and drivers waiting in stolen vans to cart the stuff away to receivers spread all across London; an operation that involved whole crates of sugar, tea, tinned goods—anything, really, that had made it across in the convoys and could be shifted through a hole in a fence and in the back of a lorry. Harry had required a man on the inside, someone he could trust. Who better than his own brother? So Joe had gone to work at the dockyard, Joe had become Harry's man on the inside.

He had told Nancy if he got caught he would get fourteen years and she had not believed it. She had said,
What if you explained it to them? If you told them we was starving, that you took one or two things. Maybe it wouldn't be that bad. Maybe it would be only a short stretch.
He had told her fourteen years' penal servitude. He would be lucky to get fourteen years. Theft on this scale, and
from the docks, was a capital offence. He was glad he had not told Nancy this.

He followed Harry into the kitchen where his brother's girl, Myra, was seated at the kitchen table wrapped in a lurid turquoise dressing-gown, her hair in a net, smoking an Embassy and knocking the ash into a saucer. Her lips were made-up and a perfect red bow coloured the end of the burning cigarette. She looked up at Joe's early-morning arrival, her green eyes narrowing as she blew out a slow stream of smoke. She said nothing and her expression registered nothing. Myra did not care for Joe. It seemed to Joe that Myra did not really care for anyone—except, presumably, Harry. It was Sammy who had first brought her home the summer before the war and she had been Madge Carter then, in a cheap uniform selling cigarettes and ice-creams at the Regal in Mare Street. Now Sammy was in the nick and Madge Carter was Myra Cartier and it was a long time since she had trudged the aisles at the Regal plying her Pall Malls and her choc ices.

Harry looked at her irritably. ‘For God's sake, get some bloody clothes on.'

When she had gone, resentfully, pulling her gown about her with a flounce, Joe pulled out a chair and sank down. He felt light-headed. He needed rest, to sleep. He needed to drink something, to eat something. His head throbbed. He concentrated for a moment on just sitting.

After a time, his head settled, the kitchen came back into focus and he looked about him, confused, as anyone is confused when returning to their childhood home after a long time away, after thinking they might not see that home again. He thought
of the kitchen as it had been when he was a kid. It had been a communal room then, four families sharing it as they had all shared the outside lav in the backyard. There had been a gas ring in each room in those days, where each family did their own cooking, and this area here had been the scullery, being the only room in the house with a sink and cold running water. When his mother had moved in the only water had come from a pump in the street. Now they had running water and a kitchen all to themselves and briefly, before the war, gas lighting in the street. It was confusing.

Upstairs a door slammed.

Joe lifted his head. He wondered if his brother and Myra had got up early with the dawn or if they were just turning in for the night. That seemed more likely. He couldn't imagine any other reason they'd both be up at this hour. Harry certainly had not been on fire-watch duty. He had been thirty-three at the outbreak of war, which put him well within the age range for active service, but a medical exemption certificate had kept him out of it. This certificate had been provided by a helpful and hard-up doctor in Stepney whom a lot of young men had visited in those first heady weeks of the war and who now resided in the same wing of Wandsworth Prison as Samuel Levin. During those same weeks of September and October '39, Joe had waited at home with his new bride for his call-up papers, which had come soon enough. The difference between himself and his half-brothers had, at that time, never seemed so clear to him.

And yet here he was, a little over four years later, and the difference between him and them was no longer clear.

Upstairs another door slammed and he watched a flicker of
irritation pass over Harry's face. Why did they stick together, Joe wondered, Harry and Myra? They only ever seemed to irritate each other. If Harry wanted to score some point over Sammy by stealing his girl he had surely made that point long ago.

‘Tell me again what happened,' Harry demanded in a low voice, frowning. He had not sat down. He paced up and down the kitchen.

‘It's what I said. They was expecting me. Docks Police, six or seven of them, and a copper. Plainclothes. Soon as they see me, it was all up. I'd be banged up on a charge—half a dozen charges—right now if I hadn't legged it.'

‘Did you go back to your house?'

‘'Course I didn't.'

‘They arrest anyone else?'

‘I didn't see, I were too busy running. No, I don't think so.'

At some point the sun had risen and a sliver of daylight crept into the gloomy room. Harry went to the window and twitched the blackout aside, taking a quick glance up at the sky before replacing it.