The Safest Place in London (37 page)

Time had passed. It was still dark outside and he was glad of that. He had slept for a little while, he thought, but he no longer felt tired. It might be midnight, it might be eight o'clock in the morning and the little boy, Marcus, downstairs with the housekeeper whose name he could not remember, having breakfast.

‘I'm afraid I don't know your name,' he said, ashamed of this.

‘Marian.'

‘Marian,' he repeated, tasting the word. ‘I used to know a girl called Marian. I went to a tennis party at her house in Ruislip. Do you know her, perhaps?'

Their voices were soft, not subdued, just hushed, like the morning after a snowfall.

No, she said, she did not know her, and he could tell she was smiling.

‘I'm Gerald.'

‘I know. You told me.'

Had he told her? He couldn't remember doing so.

It was morning when he awoke again. A chink in the blackout cut a thin corridor of light across the bed, across her side of the bed, where she no longer lay. Gerald struggled to sit up, resting on his elbows, seeing her not far away, snapping her stockings onto her suspenders. He watched her, enjoying the intimacy that her movements implied. She looked up and gave him a gentle smile.

‘Sleep,' she said, ‘if you like.'

But he was no longer tired. Instead, he watched her. She neither hurried her dressing nor slowed it down at his gaze, just
continued with what she had been doing. As he watched he was aware of many things crowding around the edges of his memory, but for the moment they did not matter. He felt as though he were sitting in a large, airy room from which many rooms led off, and each of those rooms was full of a great many people all wishing to speak to him but, for the moment, all the doors were closed and no one disturbed him.

‘I'll see about some breakfast,' she said. ‘Come down when you're ready.'

Once she had gone he sat up, placing his feet on the thick bedroom carpet, looking around her room—was it just her room now, or was there some trace of Ashby? He saw nothing but for a single wedding photograph on the dressing table. Was she the sort of woman who kept all her dead husband's things, his clothes and shoes? He didn't know. There was no wardrobe and, even if there had been, he felt no compunction to look. And then he saw a pipe, Ashby's pipe, or one just like it, on the bedside table, right at his elbow where, in his drunkenness, in his preoccupation, he had missed it last night and had almost missed it this morning, and for a moment he could not move. He heard Ashby's wry laughter.

He got dressed and went downstairs, finding her in the kitchen.

The child was there, Marcus, and Gerald paused in the doorway as the child lifted a toy train into the air with a whoosh on an imaginary track, caught up in his game. Then he saw Gerald and stopped to stare at him with Ashby's eyes, reproachful, accusing—or just surprised, just shy?—before pushing past him into another room without a second glance. The boy's mother
said nothing about the child, attempted no explanation, simply poured him coffee and cut some bread.

‘No jam or marg; I have my toast plain,' he said, remembering the rationing. She sat at the kitchen table and watched him eat his breakfast as any wife did in the morning before her husband left for the office, and for a moment Gerald imagined himself staying here all day, staying here forever.

He stood up. ‘Well, I should go,' he said, and she smiled that same smile and nodded, and he had a feeling she would have done the same if he had said, I'd like to stay the rest of the day, I'd like to stay forever.

She got his coat for him. Ashby's gloves were still in the pocket and she helped him on with them for the second time. At the door, she kissed him and said, ‘This war. It gives us situations, moments, we wouldn't normally have. If we grasp them we shouldn't regret it. There'll be plenty of time for regrets and recriminations later, when peace comes. Till then, we must live, mustn't we?'

This was her creed. And there was no question it made things easier. There were no regrets, no recriminations yet. They may come later.

He squeezed her hand and left her, slipping out into the frozen winter morning, just as Ashby must have done that last time.

Gerald's train had been rerouted. They had trundled through Rugby and then Coventry so that Birmingham had seemed an inevitability, but at the final moment they had careered off onto a branch line and ground to a halt just outside Nuneaton. He was
already tired of this journey, having made it now three times in four days, though admittedly it was never quite the same journey twice. The railway company always managed to surprise with its choice of routes. He found himself regarding each detour, each new station or branch line, with the incurious acceptance that every soldier cultivated in the army.

In any case, he was in no particular hurry, this time, to reach his destination.

It was a Wednesday, he saw, reading the date on the newspaper of the airman seated opposite. It had been a surprise to find a seat. When a very flustered young woman with a battered suitcase whose hat had come off had breathlessly boarded at Rugby there had been a moment of shifty-eyed and silent negotiation inside the compartment until the naval officer seated beside Gerald had gallantly given up his seat and the rest of them—two other naval officers, two junior lieutenants from the Yorkshire Dragoons and a captain in the Fusiliers—had breathed a sigh of collective relief and settled back into their journey. For the most part no one spoke, aside from an occasional exchange of cigarettes between the three naval officers, and no one seemed in the least surprised at the unlikely itinerary of places their train travelled through, and when the flustered young woman enquired if anyone knew what time they were due to arrive in Portsmouth no one seemed surprised by that either.

Gerald stared out of the window. Cathcart, his CO in Cairo, had told him to contact the divisional CO when he got back—not at once, but after a week or two. This morning he had telephoned the divisional HQ and been connected, after a lengthy delay, not to the divisional CO but to a Miss Littlejohn, whose exact
position and location he had not quite been able to grasp but who had appeared to have been expecting his call.

‘Good news, Captain Meadows,' she had announced in a plummy voice, as though she was studying his test results after a tricky exam or a medical. ‘You're to report to the War Office, quartermaster-general's office, on the sixteenth.'

He had been given a desk job. In Whitehall. Doing what, exactly, he had not the least idea. Something to with movements, supply, ordnance, logistics. The disembodied Miss Littlejohn had clearly expected him to be pleased and had sounded disappointed when he had merely thanked her and rung off. No more active service. He had done his bit. His reward, a desk job at the QMG's office. He was forty-four. Soldiering was a young man's game and when he looked about him at the faces of the other officers in the train compartment he saw boys a year or two out of school or university; not one of them had seen his twenty-fifth birthday.

He turned back to the window. The train had just started up again with a jolt. The problem was, he was unable to see himself seated at a desk in the QMG, could not visualise a Captain Meadows of the Royal Tank Regiment presenting himself at the office in Whitehall on the sixteenth. He could picture the office, oh yes, he could picture it very clearly—the buff folders in filing cabinets, the classified documents tied with red ribbons, the petty office hierarchy, the puttering tea urn that was always breaking down, the frantic search for the critical document that had inexplicably got lost somewhere between the office and the typing pool—he could see it all, could hear it, smell it even, but his own place there, the desk at which he was to sit, he could not see.

The train was now passing through Coventry once more. The airman sitting opposite lowered his newspaper briefly to peer out of the window. With the slightest raising of his eyebrows and a tiny, almost inaudible sigh, the man shook out his paper and resumed reading. With any luck, Gerald thought, the fellow would finish his paper soon and offer it around. It had been foolish embarking on such a journey without anything to read, not even a fresh packet of cigarettes. He hadn't been thinking.

He had made himself not think. The telephone call to the divisional HQ had been made with a curious sense of unreality. He would not have been surprised whatever orders he had been given. It did not touch him. Any order or posting seemed to him inconsequential.

So far he had not thought at all about yesterday's frantic and futile search. It had already passed into that same place of unreality. He saw himself, a tiny uniformed ant, scurrying from one location to the next, randomly and with no purpose, vainly seeking answers, fruitlessly following each new lead and running into one dead end after another. He was no closer to the truth, though now he knew that two people had died and had been cremated. And he knew, he had caught the briefest glimpse, of the kind of place the little girl had come from. Diana had said,
What kind of life could she have, could any child have, there? It was a kindness to take her.
And that was all the justification she had required.

He was no closer to understanding how his wife could have swapped one child for another. His mind recoiled from it. It was like trying to pick up something with buttery fingers; he was
simply unable to grasp it. How could she do this thing? Discard her own child and take up another. It beggared belief. He would never have thought her capable of such a thing. When he thought of his wife he no longer saw the anxious girl at the tennis party, the exhausted but triumphant woman in a maternity ward bed who had just given birth to their child. He wasn't certain what he saw.

He thought about Marian Ashby, viewing her and their night together with the cool dispassion that his wife had displayed when she had perpetrated her terrible crime. Had he done that, slept with Mrs Ashby, to punish Diana? He didn't think so, but he was unsure. How extraordinary it now seemed! He would not have thought of himself as a man who would sleep with another woman. But there you are, he thought now as the outer suburbs of some large city rushed past the window: sometimes you surprised yourself. His wife had surprised him. Mrs Ashby had surprised him. Why shouldn't he surprise himself?

Ah, here they were at Birmingham, and he felt a sort of grim satisfaction at the crushing, unavoidable inevitability of their arrival into Birmingham New Street. The flustered young woman seated opposite stood up in dismay, grabbed her suitcase and departed, and the gallant naval officer closed the door behind her and reclaimed the seat she had vacated with a little sigh.

In the end they reached Leeds from the north, going through Huddersfield and Bradford then on to Otley before swinging south and east and approaching the city from Headingley. If it was a route designed to confound the enemy, it surely succeeded.

Gerald had barely a quarter of an hour's wait for the Wetherby connection, which was enough time to purchase cigarettes, a newspaper, some sandwiches. But he found he could not concentrate on the paper and gave it up almost at once. The sandwiches he similarly abandoned. He had begun to rehearse what he was going to say.