The Safest Place in London (29 page)

Gerald followed her, watching as she went over to the range, was aware of her moving things about: pots, crockery, a storage jar. None of it was quite real.

‘How could she be someone else?' she went on. ‘I mean, Gerald, you've been away such a long time. When you saw her,
Abigail was only a day old. And now she is a three-year-old child. Quite grown. It's hardly a wonder you don't recognise her.'

He could not see her face as she said this, only her back, which was perfectly straight, and her shoulders, which were perfectly still even as her hands moved feverishly over the things on the range.

‘You must be hungry,' she said, as though the matter were now settled. ‘Do let me make you some supper. Mr Inghamthorpe gave me some eggs. Just think! I can do you an egg like I used to before the war. Would you like an egg?'

‘Diana,
stop
! For God's sake,
stop this
!'

Gerald placed his hands very slowly on either side of his head, pressing his fingertips into his scalp. If she didn't stop talking he knew he would go mad; already his sense of himself was slipping. The sand beneath his feet was rushing away into a hole and he was rushing with it.

At his words she had flinched as though he had struck her, but she did not turn around. She must know that what she was saying was a lie or, if she did not, then it was
she
who was mad. One of them, he realised, must be mad.

‘I have photographs of her. Photographs you sent me.'

Gerald went to his bag, unfastening it with fingers that were thick and clumsy. He got it open at last, fishing among his things until his fingers found his pocketbook. He pulled it out and shook it vigorously so that any number of scraps and notes and cards fell out, falling any which way onto the floor, and among them were the three photographs, taken one year apart each Christmas. Three dark-haired little girls with dark eyes and
dark eyebrows, a wide forehead, largish ears, the same contrary, slightly sullen expression on her face each time, in the last one a little ball in her lap.

‘See! Here!
This is her!
'

He stood up, stumbling and unsteady. Diana was standing a little distance away, looking not at the photographs that he held out to her, but at his face. He lurched over, thrusting the photographs at her, making her look, but she would not—or could not—see them. The frozen mask that had descended over her face prevented her.

‘For God's
sake
! Look,
look
!' And when she did not, he grabbed her hand and forced the photographs into it, he took hold of her head and forced her to look. ‘You took these! They are
your photographs
! What have you
done
?
Who is the girl upstairs? Who is the girl in these photographs?
'

‘Gerald, please, you're frightening me!'

And she was shaking, her eyes wide, trying to break free. He was frightening her, but she was frightening him, could she not see that? He let go of her and stepped back, and the photographs fluttered to the floor.

‘Then tell me, Diana. For God's sake, just tell me what is going on.'

But she dropped to her knees. Then she let out a dreadful sob, just one. The sound was worse than the whine of a shell overhead, worse than the whoosh of the fireball that had incinerated Ashby. Worse than the sound he had made when he had stood in his form master's room receiving the news of his parents' death. He stood looking down at her as the fear seeped
up from the floor and through his bones. Slowly he kneeled down, not touching her, waiting for her to speak.

‘She's dead. Abigail is dead.'

Gerald was no longer in the cottage. He was standing outside in the frozen night some distance away without his coat, the hillside veering away steeply on his left, the hard tussocky grass beneath his feet, the freezing night-time air biting at his face, his eyes, his hands.

She was dead, Abigail was dead.

He had known it the moment he had gone up to the loft. How long, then, had she been dead? All this time, perhaps, three years, and the photographs were—what? Some other child. A fake child. All the time he had been in the desert, battling his way inside his tank and outside of it, from one side of the desert to the other, back and forth, losing and winning, giving ground and making ground, seeing death and facing death and cheating death. All that time doing it not for England, not for his commanding officer, not even for his troops, but for them: his wife and child. Now one was dead and the other—the other had lied or had perpetrated some deception. Either way they were lost to him. His child, whom he had seen only that once, a tiny, red-faced, writhing and wrinkled thing in his arms.

He fell to his knees and cried.

Much later he got stiffly to his feet and returned to the cottage because he did not know where else to go. And because there were questions he must ask.

Diana was crouched on the floor where he had left her, silent
now and no longer crying, her knees pulled up to her chin. She looked up at him but he couldn't look at her. He saw an ancient armchair over by the hearth and he made for that, moving like an old man, sinking down into it and stretching his numbed fingers to the flames, desperate for warmth, to feel the blood flow once more. How could numbed fingers matter? But it was no different, he supposed, to being irritated by a fly buzzing in your face in the desert as shells landed all around you.

‘When did it happen?' he said after a time.

‘I took her into London with me,' Diana replied, her voice low, barely filling the space between the crackling of the fire and the rattling of the windows. ‘For a pantomime, and there was a raid. We were trapped. We took shelter in an Underground station.' In the hearth a log split and shifted, sending out a tiny cascade of embers. ‘It ought to have been safe. I thought it would be safe, but it wasn't. A bomb dropped and the roof collapsed. Abigail was in my arms—I tried to protect her—I thought I had protected her. But—'

But. She did not say the words and Gerald was glad for that. He sat quite still as her words slowly penetrated. So it had only just happened, the death of their child, just a week, two weeks ago, and it was as raw for her as it was for him. He saw it with a frightening clarity in his imagination, his wife holding their little girl as the roof collapsed around them, shielding her as best she could, alone and terribly frightened. He imagined her dismay on realising that Abigail was dead, her grief and the terrible secret she had kept since then, unable to tell him. He saw that she blamed herself, though it was surely no one's fault, or if it was it was the war.

He felt strangely calm. He wondered why he did not get up and go to her, why he did not comfort her. But he did not move. The calmness wavered and something weighed heavily on him, a suffocating weight. He tugged at the tie around his neck, at his shirt collar, which was too tight. The ancient armchair pulled him in and closed over him. He felt as if he had stumbled unwittingly into a dwarf 's house, where all the ceilings were four-foot high and, no matter which room he entered, he could never, ever stand up.

‘Then who is the child upstairs?'

Diana did not reply and Gerald realised that he had, even at this late stage, expected some simple account, some reasonable explanation. But Diana did not reply and with her silence the possibility of a simple account, of a reasonable explanation faded.

‘Diana?'

At this she made an odd, rather ghastly choking sound. Was she crying again? He couldn't tell as he was staring into the fire and the fear that had turned to grief and then to pity now returned in full.

‘Tell me. Who is she?'

‘I don't know.'

A silence followed these words. Gerald turned his head very slowly and in the softly flickering firelight they looked at each other.

‘I don't understand,' he said eventually, keeping his words even, measured.

‘It's quite simple really.' Diana uncurled her arms from around her knees and stood up, coming over to the other armchair and sitting down, her hands laid calmly in her lap.
‘There was a woman sheltering near me in the Underground station. A young mother with a small child. When the roof collapsed she was killed but her child was not. And Abigail was dead too. The little girl had survived but her mother was dead. And so—I took her.'

Her words seemed to come from very far away, and curiously they appeared to flow harmlessly over him and slice straight through him both at the same time. The world had changed, irrevocably, as it had the day his parents had died and as it had the evening he saw Bunny Lambton come home at midnight in another man's arms. Moments that changed your life and set it on another path—Ashby's death, he saw now, had not done that. Ashby's death made no difference at all. His little girl had died but quite suddenly, at his wife's words, the fact of Abigail's death no longer seemed the worst possible thing that could happen. For this was worse.

‘You stole her.'

He addressed the flickering flames in the hearth. If his fingers had been numb before, now his brain was numb. Now his entire body was numb.

‘I took her,' Diana said, as though changing the verb somehow made it alright. ‘She had no one. Her mother was dead. She was alone.'

So many objections crowded into Gerald's head that for a moment he could not grasp at a single one.

‘But how do you know she was alone? You didn't know her.
How could you know that she doesn't have an entire family? A family who are looking for her!
' His even and measured tone had failed him and he had got to his feet as his voice rose.

‘How could they be looking for her?' she replied. ‘They believe she is dead.'

Gerald did not reply at once. The implication of her words were a slow, creeping horror.

‘Why would they think that?'

‘There was a dead mother and there was a dead child. One mother survived and one child survived. No one questioned which child belonged to which mother.'

Gerald clamped his hands tightly over his face, his fingertips squeezing into his eyeball, into his ears. He pushed himself up from the armchair and paced the length of the cottage. ‘But it's
indefensible.
What you have done, stealing a child, it is
indefensible
.'

If he had expected her to cringe, to beg forgiveness, he was disappointed. She seemed, if anything, to grow in strength, though she remained seated in the armchair before the fire, her hands resting in her lap, studying the flames.

‘But what sort of a life would she have had with those people?' She looked up at him now, suddenly animated: ‘You didn't see what they were like, Gerald. They were barbaric. Primitive. Barely civilised. What kind of life could she have, could any child have, there? It was a kindness to take her.'

He stopped pacing and stared at her. Could she really believe this? He could not, in his heart, believe that she did. It was her way of dealing with the horror of what she had done, surely.

‘That does not make it right.'

‘I believe it does.'

‘And so what, exactly, are you proposing? That we raise this child, this unknown stranger's child, as our own? That we can
simply replace Abigail with another child and it will all be alright? As though she was a—a pair of shoes in the wrong size or the wrong colour that you can take back to the shop and replace with another?'

‘Of course I don't think that! I am not that heartless, Gerald! How can you think such a thing? Abigail was our child! When she died—'

But here she stopped, attempted to catch her breath.

‘When she died, I died too. I wanted to die. But I survived . . . I survived, and if I am to live then I would rather have a child to raise than have no child. Can't you understand that?' Her voice fell to barely a whisper: ‘I don't love this child, of course I don't. But I do pity her. And I hope that, given time, I will learn to love her, that she will learn to love us. That you will learn to love her—'

‘
No.
What you are saying—what you have done—
is monstrous
. I will have no part in it.'

As he had done before, he left the cottage, but this time he was aware of his footsteps as he walked down the short passage, his hands as they pulled open the heavy front door, carefully latching it behind him. He found his way with difficulty onto the track and down into the laneway, retracing his steps.

The absolute darkness and the piercing frozen night air hit him like a barrage of gunfire and for a time his thoughts fled, leaving him senseless. He walked and his footsteps made a dull thud on the road. After a time he came upon the village, along whose main street he paced. No one passed him. No light showed. The cloudy, starless night and the blackout meant that the scattering of houses were entirely in darkness.

She had left their child in an Underground station and taken another woman's child in her place. The fact of it made him reel. Who was she, this woman he had married? He did not know.