Secrets of a Charmed Life (17 page)

THERE
had been a time, right up until the Blitz had begun, when a missing child would have sent policemen scurrying to help. Neighbors and strangers alike would’ve stopped whatever they were doing to assist in the search. The moment a frantic parent or sibling sounded the alarm, caring strangers dropped everything to search nearby alleys and behind hedges, and they’d ask passersby whether they’d seen the child. It mattered when a child went missing.

But on that Sunday morning, when fires still burned and the dead were still being carried out and the extent of the destruction still could not be fathomed, a missing seven-year-old was just another calamity in a collection of calamities the likes of which no one had seen before. The police station where Emmy and her mother began their agonized search for Julia was filled with people who wanted information on the whereabouts of loved
ones whose houses had been destroyed. An hour passed before a policeman took down their information. Emmy was asked twice why she had left Julia alone. “I had an appointment,” she said. “And I thought my mother would come home after she got off work.”

“And why didn’t you come home, then?” the cop said to Mum.

“I had an appointment, too,” Mum said, not taking her eyes off the policeman. “And I had already placed my children in the care of a foster mother who lives two hours away in Gloucestershire, so naturally there was no reason for me to think I was needed at home, now, was there?”

The cop shook his head, silently indicting them both for such a cavalier approach to responsibility. “All right, then,” he said when he was finished. “We’ll be on the lookout for her. Is your home still livable?”

“Barely,” Mum said.

“You might want to stay close to it the next couple days in case she comes back on her own.” The policeman removed the report from his clipboard, added it to the mountain of papers already on his desk, and then looked past to others waiting for help. “Next in line, please.”

*   *   *

FROM
the police station, Emmy and her mother went to the hospital, which was bursting with the injured. No one there had admitted a little girl named Julia. No one had seen a little girl who fit her description.

They appealed to their local warden, Mr. Findley, whom they found making the rounds with officials whose job it was to determine whether the houses in his sector that had been destroyed still had victims inside them. He wearily told them to try Julia’s school, on the slim chance that someone had taken her there last night
to be reevacuated out of London. But that suggestion also proved fruitless. The school was a burned-out shell.

Next they trudged to social services. They pounded on the door of the nearest children’s home for orphans and crawled inside every shelter in a two-mile radius.

No one had seen the seven-year-old girl. And no one had time to stop what they were doing to help Emmy and her mother figure out where she was. No one could do more than ask the same questions everyone else was asking.

Did you check the hospital?

Did you contact the police?

Did you search the shelters?

Did you check all the wardrobes and cupboards at home? Under the stairs? In the attic?

The neighbors?

Everywhere they turned they were reminded that their little woe meant nothing compared to the compounded loss of London’s East End.

Mum would not look at Emmy or speak to her after she had told her why she had come back to London and why she had brought Julia with her. In their search, Emmy and her mother went to each place together, but in silence. When they had exhausted all their options, they returned to the flat, hoping that Julia was waiting there for them, sitting on the stoop with her arms looped around knees folded to her chest. But the front step was empty.

Their neighbor to the left was covering her broken windows with pieces of plywood. When the woman, a quiet factory worker named Geraldine, saw Emmy and her mum, she paused with a hammer in hand.

“Did you find your little one?” she asked.

Mum shook her head. She went into the flat without a word.

“No one has seen her,” Emmy replied.

“She has to turn up,” the woman said, but her tone conveyed her doubt.

Inside, Mum was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the broken window at the bit of dirt that was their back garden. Her hands were folded across her chest.

Emmy lowered herself into a kitchen chair, grateful to be off her injured leg, but not wanting to be in the same room with Mum and the crushing weight of her anguish.

She had already told Mum she was sorry, so very sorry, and there was nothing else she could say. She said it again anyway.

“I’m so sorry, Mum.”

Her mother did not turn at the sound of Emmy’s voice. She just stood there, looking at the dirt and the scattering of war debris that had landed in the garden.

“Mum?”

“I should have known something like this would happen,” Mum murmured, more to the broken window than to Emmy.

“What?”

“I should have guessed that when you put you and me together, this is what comes of it.”

Emmy didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t want to know.

“I sent you away with Julia when you didn’t want to go and you came back with her when you should’ve left her where she was,” she said, her voice strangely emotionless.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” Emmy said for the hundredth time. “I didn’t know this was going to happen. I thought she’d be safe. I thought you were . . .” Her voice trailed away.

“Yes, you thought I’d be coming home. To my empty house, like I do every night because that’s the life I have.”

Her detached manner scared Emmy. She said nothing.

Her mum turned to face her. “Don’t you want to ask me where I was last night? Don’t you want to know since it’s my fault this happened?”

Emmy wanted the floor to open up beneath her and swallow her whole. She wanted to scream and scream until she had screamed all the oxygen out of the room and she could simply keel over dead in the chair.

“That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That it’s my fault?”

“That’s not what I’m thinking,” Emmy whispered. “I didn’t know this would happen. I just wanted to make something of myself. I just . . . I just wanted you to be proud of me.”

Mum stared at Emmy for several long seconds, her arms crossed loosely over her chest. “Is that really what you wanted? Wasn’t it instead to prove to yourself that you’re better than I am? You’ve always been ashamed of what I am. No wonder you jumped at the first chance to get the hell out of life here with me.”

“That’s not true!” Emmy yelled.

“Of course it’s true. And who can blame you. You were never meant for this. Not this.”

She turned back to the window.

They were quiet for a few minutes, each lost in private regrets.

When she turned back around, Emmy could see that her mother had made a decision. She strode purposely past Emmy.

Emmy heard her on the stairs. She got up from the kitchen chair and limped up to the second floor. Mum was in her bedroom, looking through her wardrobe. Glass crunched beneath Emmy’s feet as she walked in.
Mum pulled out a heather gray dress she’d come home with last spring. If she had noticed Emmy was wearing one of her dresses, Emmy couldn’t tell. She said nothing.

“What are you doing?” Emmy asked.

Mum tossed the dress onto her bed, reached up to the buttons on her maid’s uniform, and undid them. She stepped out of her work clothes and pulled on the dress. “I can’t do this alone. I need help.”

“But we’ve already been to the police and they—”

“I’m not talking about the police. They don’t care about me or Julia. I’m no one to them. Just another pitiful soul they don’t have the time or the means to pay attention to. I need someone who has connections.”

She grabbed a hairbrush off her bureau, shook the dust from it, and ran it through her hair. Even after a night of hell and a day of torment, she still looked so beautiful.

“Where are you going?” Emmy asked softly.

Mum picked up a bottle of perfume and squeezed the ball. The room filled with a sweet scent. “Stay here,” she said. “I don’t want Julia coming home to an empty house.”

She moved past Emmy, who turned to follow her.

“Where are you going, Mum?”

“If the sirens go off again, go to the shelter at the corner. When they stop, get back here as quick as you can.”

“Mum!” Emmy rushed to keep up with her.

Her mother was down the stairs and reaching for her handbag where she had dropped it at the front door when Emmy reached for her.

“Mum, please! Wait.”

Her mother turned to face Emmy.

“Please, Mum. Tell me where you’re going.”

Mum looked at her for a moment, studying her daughter’s face as if seeing it for the first time in a long while. “I am going to get help.”

It made Emmy sick to think she was going to whomever she was selling her body to; she was sure that was where her mum was headed. Emmy had brought her to this moment. It was because of her that Mum’s options for finding Julia had been reduced to this.

“Mum, don’t go,” Emmy pleaded.

“I have to.”

Then, from some crazed part of her, Emmy tossed out an offer that scared her breathless the second she uttered it, not only because it was so terrible, but because she was ready to make good on it. “Take me with you. I’ll do . . . I’ll do whatever it is you have to do. I’ll do it. This is all my fault.”

Mum’s features softened into a look Emmy hadn’t seen since Neville first came into her life to stay. Julia was a baby, and Mum was happy then. She reached out to touch Emmy’s face, cupping her fingers gently under her daughter’s chin. “No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is! It is. Let me do what you have to do.”

She smiled, dropped her hand, and looked away. A mirthless laugh escaped her. “Oh, Em. You’re not like me. Deep down I’ve always known it. You’re not like me. This is my doing. I will fix it.”

When she turned back to look at Emmy, her eyes were glistening. “Find something to cover the windows.”

“Mum—”

“Stay here. Watch for your sister. Don’t go outside after dark. It’s not safe.”

Before Emmy could say another word, her mother stepped outside into the chaos of their broken street and she watched her walk away, a beautiful woman in a heather gray dress with whispers of floral scent trailing after her.

AFTER
Mum left, Emmy busied herself with looking for something to cover the windows in the front of the flat. Geraldine saw her poking about the ruins across the street for larger pieces of wood and brought over her last piece of plywood. She helped Emmy cover the front window downstairs, the biggest of the three that had shattered. And she let Emmy borrow her hammer and nails so that Emmy could cover the empty window frame in Mum’s upstairs room, and the little one upstairs in the privy.

Emmy attempted to return the hammer but Geraldine asked her if she and Mum were staying that night at the flat. When Emmy nodded, she said, “You know there’s no electricity, no gas, no running water?”

“Julia might come home.”

“Does your mother keep a gun?”

Emmy shook her head, unable to reason why her neighbor was asking that.

“Hang on to the hammer, then.”

She watched Geraldine trudge off with one suitcase to who knew where, the rest of her worldly belongings as secure as she could make them.

Back inside the flat, Emmy swept up the shards of glass, shook out all the sofa pillows, and waited for Mum.

At dusk she was still not back.

Emmy found half a package of biscuits and another of sardines and ate them.

Still Mum was not back.

She went upstairs to the room she shared with Julia, grabbed the coverlet and pillow from her bed, and took them downstairs. She arranged herself on the sofa so that she would hear if anyone came to the front door. The room quickly became inky black as the sun set and whatever residual light that crept in through the boards over the windows disappeared. She pulled the blanket up under her chin and clutched Geraldine’s hammer. Minutes later, the air raid sirens began to wail, and the drone of planes overhead rumbled outside. Emmy grabbed the blanket and hammer, and headed for Thea’s, pulling open the broken front door and running through the kitchen. When she flung open the back door, Emmy saw that Thea’s cats lay dead on the back step, stretched out as if they had been arranged there by Death itself. Emmy grimaced as she stepped over the bodies and crawled inside the Anderson shelter. Emmy yanked the door closed and scooted as far back as she could in the pitch black of the damp shelter, knocking over a box of metal items that skittered across the dirt floor. The ground beneath her knees rocked as somewhere nearby a bomb connected with its target, and a spray of dirt fell on her.

“Stop! Stop it!” Emmy yelled, pressing her hand to her ears, while fear coursed through her veins.

She was now the girl home alone while bombs rained down all around.

Julia!

Emmy called for her sister. She called for Mum.

She could do nothing but cover herself with the blanket and clutch the hammer as the bombs fell. Emmy would learn that this second night was worse than the first. Four hundred people would be killed, and more than seven hundred injured.

Warehouses along the Thames were again easy targets, and buildings that had been afire on Saturday night were burning again. Hundreds of fires would join together to become one.

And all the while, Emmy huddled in Thea’s bomb shelter, alone and afraid.

She didn’t know when she fell asleep. She only knew that when she awoke, she heard the far-off sounds of emergency vehicles. She emerged from the shelter to a fog of smoke and ash and mist. Her row of flats was still standing but the unit on the end was now minus a roof and a second story. Emmy picked her way back to the flat, calling for Mum, calling for Julia. But the street, the flat, all that she knew, were empty of people and silent. Inside, she used the toilet, its water soured and stinking since it had been used but not flushed in two days. The food in the fridge, the little there was, stank as well. She found a swallow of brandy in the cupboard above the fridge, which she drank because there was nothing else. Then she opened a tin of beans and ate them cold with a spoon.

Sometime later Emmy saw through a slit in the plywood a man approaching the flat. The warden perhaps? Emmy could not let him see her. He would insist she leave and that was something Emmy could not do. She had not locked the front door. Before she could turn the
latch, she heard him knock. Emmy sprang to the kitchen and let herself out the back door into the debris-littered garden where she concealed herself as best she could along the wall. She still held the hammer.

Emmy heard the man inside the house.

“Anyone here? Annie? Are you here?”

Emmy stood still against the wall. The voice didn’t belong to Mr. Findley. She didn’t recognize the voice at all. Still, he would only be able to see her if he came into the garden. And surely there was no reason for him to do that.

He called for Mum again. And again.

And then he left.

Emmy waited until she could see him over the garden wall, walking away. He wore a nice hat and a wool coat.

Should she have revealed herself? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t know him. What did he want with her mother?

Emmy watched the man until he was no longer in sight.

Then she went back inside and waited.

Mum did not come back.

Emmy read Julia’s book of fairy tales. She slept. She ate another can of cold beans. She watched the fires burning across town from the back garden.

When darkness began to fall, Emmy realized it was Monday. Mr. Dabney had expected her at his town house at four o’clock that afternoon with her mother and the brides box in tow.

He and his sweet wife were leaving for Edinburgh tomorrow. And she was to go with them, she and her brides box, because she was going to be Graham Dabney’s apprentice.

It was now after seven.

And the sirens began to wail.

Once again, Emmy grabbed the hammer and her blanket and ran to Thea’s Anderson shelter.

In that hellish cocoon Emmy did not know that fires were burning all around Saint Paul’s and buildings were ablaze on both sides of Ludgate Hill. A women’s hospital was hit as was a school being used to shelter homeless families. More than four hundred people were killed and more than a thousand injured on the second night that she huddled in Thea’s shelter, the third night of the Blitz. There were a few tins of canned milk inside the shelter, which she drank, and a package of digestive biscuits, which she ate.

She fell asleep when exhaustion overcame her, to the rumblings of explosions that filled her dreams with terror.

In the morning, as the East End continued to burn, Emmy let herself back inside Thea’s flat, hardly noticing the dead cats as she stepped over them.

She needed food and water.

Thea had emptied her kitchen of food in preparation for evacuating with her mother to Wales, but Emmy found a few jars of preserves, canned meat, and other items that would not spoil in their absence. She grabbed a market basket from Thea’s kitchen and filled it with all the food she had left, even the cats’ food.

She took the basket and her hammer back to the flat to wait for Mum.

But she did not come.

And Julia did not return home.

Rain began to fall in the late afternoon, a weeping, mournful downpour. Extending into the early-evening hours, it should have kept the Luftwaffe from continuing its assault. But no. The Luftwaffe made full use of the cloud cover. Bombers pounded the city once again and Emmy spent another night in Thea’s shelter.

On Wednesday with no sign of Mum or Julia, Emmy
hid the basket of food in her wardrobe upstairs and ventured out to look for them.

She went back to the places Mum and she had been before. She also went to the shelters where the homeless were gathering. No one at the hospital had seen Julia and there was no record of either Julia or Mum having been admitted. Emmy returned to the police station, which was as chaotically busy as it had been three days before. A different policeman was on duty and she had to explain all over again how Julia came to be missing.

“And where is your mother right now?” this new policeman said, looking past Emmy. Emmy was a child and he didn’t have time for children.

“She’s out looking for my sister.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

It was obvious he was perturbed that Emmy was at the station alone without Mum. “Look, I’ve heard nothing of a young girl turning up. Have your Mum check with all the neighbors, and the child’s friends, and—”

Emmy cut him off. “We don’t have any more neighbors! Our street has been bombed. Everyone has left. That is what I have been telling you. She went missing the first night of the bombing.”

He frowned at the interruption. “You bring your mum here and I will make out an official report.”

“We already did that!” Emmy yelled. “On Sunday. This is Wednesday. She’s been missing for four days!”

The policeman wagged a finger at Emmy. “Do you think you’re the only soul in London with a tale of woe today? Do you know how many people are dead or missing? You tell your mum to come next time. I’m done with you.”

He turned from Emmy to help someone else.

She stood there stunned, unable to believe no one
could help her. An older woman sitting on a bench and looking as though she had been waiting a long time crooked a finger, beckoning Emmy to approach her.

“I heard what you told the policeman, and I’m very sorry your little sister is missing,” she said. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you and your mum should check the casualty listings at one of the Incident Inquiry Points.”

Emmy had no idea what she was talking about. “The what?”

She reached for Emmy’s arm and squeezed it gently. “They have listings, my dear. The names of those who’ve been killed. They have a list.”

Emmy felt the blood drain from her face. “I don’t know what you’re saying.” But she did. She did know what she was saying.

The woman released her hold and patted Emmy’s arm. “Tell your mum to check at the nearest Incident Inquiry Point, love. There’s an IIP just around the corner from the police station here. Tell your mum to check with them.”

The woman withdrew her hand and her attention. She turned from Emmy to stare at the queue of people waiting their turn for help, allowing Emmy a sliver of privacy to take in the idea that Julia’s body might be lying in a morgue somewhere, waiting for a family member to claim her remains.

Emmy left the station, numb with fear and dread.

Somehow she put one foot in front of the other and walked to the IIP office, as the woman had called it. Emmy stepped inside and fell in with the crowds of people seeking information. Her mind seemed to drift into that state between sleep and wakefulness as she waited her turn. Others ahead of her also wanted to see the
lists. New copies of the latest reports of the dead were laid out on the counter by a green-uniformed matron of the Women’s Volunteer Service. Those on an errand like no other moved forward to peer at them. The man ahead of Emmy looked and turned away, relief evident in his face. Emmy bent over to look, her gaze traveling over the letters of the alphabet. Past the As, the Bs, the Cs and then the Ds.

And then she saw it.

Downtree.

Emmy’s heart slammed against her chest.

Downtree
.

And then she saw the name following it, separated from
Downtree
with a tiny, gentle comma.

Anne Louise.

It wasn’t Julia’s name listed on the roll call of the dead.

It was Mum’s.