The Safest Place in London (10 page)

Now that she was in London, the city and the people and tunnels and the trains and the buildings swept over her so that she became tiny and her lie became unimportant. She changed onto the Circle Line, eastbound. The wives and grandmothers from Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were gone. Now her fellow passengers were dock workers, civil servants from the various wartime ministries, servicemen and women. At Liverpool Street the train swung southwards and Diana got out. She followed a stream of people up onto the street and along Bishopsgate, turning left and becoming at once lost in the warren of tiny lanes and passages, eventually turning back and retracing her steps and asking for directions. When she finally found Botolph Passage she was so late it was beyond late. But the war turned notions of time on its head and, finally deciding she was at the right place, she walked up to a seedy little door and, after a moment's hesitation, opened it and entered.

The building was an old Victorian warehouse. A hatch and
a little platform far above her head indicated where, in another age, goods had been delivered; the faded letters of a long-gone merchant were just visible on the brickwork. She climbed a narrow stairway that turned in on itself once, twice, a third time before she reached the top floor. She met no one. The place appeared to be deserted. Paint and wallpaper peeled from the walls in great strips with brownish damp stains visible beneath, and at various points someone at some time had placed mousetraps that contained nothing but a thick layer of dust which suggested that even the mice had departed. At the top of the final twist of the stairs she was met by a passageway and a single unmarked doorway. She stood before the doorway, but only for a moment. She had come this far. She was not about to change her mind.

She straightened the seams of her stockings, raised her hand and knocked twice.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was Joe. He was still some distance off, making his way across the sleeping bodies, stopping and searching each face, searching—Nancy presumed—for her.

But how could it be Joe? He was meant to be on his ship, he was meant to be sailing on the evening tide. And he was not in his sailor's uniform. They had seen him off that morning in his new uniform; now, inexplicably, he was back, wearing a battered old duffle coat that did not belong to him and without a hat.

He saw her at that moment and at once started to make his away over, his face set hard, something controlled and awful in his eyes. The shadow that had come over her lengthened until Nancy felt her skin recoil at each new place that it touched. But she sat quite still. She did not want Emily to wake and she reached out blindly and laid a hand on her sleeping child's head.

‘They was waiting for me!'

Joe crashed down at her side, crouching low and breathing in short gasps. He had brought with him the cold night air and
the damp and the acrid stink of smoke from outside, and something else: an edge that had not been there before, a danger that had a different taste to it than the usual danger of air raids and bombers overhead, of unexploded bombs and landmines.

‘What do you mean? Who was waiting for you?' She tried to read the answer in his eyes. They had frightened her a little that first day on the seafront at Clacton, but today they were the eyes of a boy. He was so young, the man in him seemed to have been stripped away.

‘The
cops
,' he said.

For a time neither of them spoke. Joe crouched low by her side, his eyes flicking from side to side, watching every movement on the platform around them, and Nancy stared at her hands clenched tightly together in her lap. His words did not sink in and she did not want him to explain them to her. She just knew Joe was back when she had thought he was gone and she wanted to touch him but she felt as though her touch would be unwelcome, that he was locked inside some place without her.

‘
Christ!
' he said eventually, and he turned and peered into her face.

And Nancy, dazed by his look, thought:
You were meant to be the strong one
. But now she was not sure.

‘Joe, there was a man outside the house. I saw him this evening when the siren went off, standing outside in the shadows. I didn't think nothing of it at the time but he was watching us, I'm sure of it. I think—I'm sure he was a policeman.'

Joe's face fell. He ran his hand over his chin; it had been clean-shaven that morning, but now she heard the bristles scratching against the palm of his hand. ‘I almost went to the
house—but then I thought you'd be down here so I come here instead.'

But she had not yet told him the worst part: ‘Joe, I think he was
here
! The same man—I swear it was him, up on the platform. A few hours ago.'

‘Bloody hell,' he whispered.

And she had been certain the man had been looking for someone, that he was looking for Joe—though of course that was just plain daft and she had pushed the thought down but now—

‘Joe, what's happened? I don't understand.'

‘I told you. They was there. I seen them soon as I arrived at the dockside. Two Docks police and a plainclothes.'

It still seemed bewildering and, perhaps because she did not understand, Nancy felt a flicker of hope. ‘But they could have been waiting for anyone, not just you!'

Joe shook his head. ‘They takes one look at me and that was it. They was off—blowing whistles and shouting and all sorts. I only just legged it out of there before they could nab me. I hid out in some warehouse.' He paused to lick his lips, then he shook his head. ‘Christ, that was hairy! Bombs dropping left and right, and me a bloody sitting duck in a tinderbox. Hours I waited. Then I made a break for it and made me way here.'

Nancy saw him running through the darkness, hiding out in a warehouse, bombs dropping, and suddenly she felt angry. This was his home! They had
no right
to chase him! Not after all had been through, all that time in the ocean, all those men dead . . .

‘But how did they know? I mean, why was they waiting for you?'

Joe shook his head. ‘No idea. P'raps they been watching me for a while. I don't know.'

Perhaps they had been watching him. She let this sink in. Perhaps they had watched him since October. In early November a convoy had made it through, miraculously dodging every U-boat, arriving at the docks loaded with supplies for a nation with only a few weeks of food reserves left. Armed guards had been stationed at the docks, the government had issued new laws with the severest penalties, and the men unloading the ships were searched routinely going in and out of the wharves. But there was always a way: a guard who could be persuaded to look the other way, a clerk who deliberately miscounted, a hole in the fence that even the dogs hadn't located. And so it was that a steady stream of goods had found their way onto the streets and into back rooms and onto market stalls and beneath the counters of local shopkeepers, and some of it had found its way into the pantry at 42 Odessa Street.

The Levins had eaten well at Christmas. Nancy wore a new pair of silk stockings. Emily tasted her first piece of chocolate, her first banana, her first tinned peach. Joe toasted the navy with a bottle of Canadian scotch. It had all ended abruptly with Joe's recall to duty; the Levins would go back to rations and dried eggs and bread and dripping and five-day-old tea-leaves. These things had seemed appalling a few hours earlier as she had stood on the doorstep and watched him leave.

‘But Joe, it was only a few odds and ends. It was just stuff you could carry, stuff we could eat 'cause we was starving. That was all. It weren't enough to hurt no one.'

Joe frowned. He said nothing.

‘Joe? I mean, if you turned yourself in . . .?'

‘If I get caught it's fourteen years. Fourteen years penal servitude.'

Nancy reeled. ‘But what about your new ship?'

Joe said nothing. On top of it all he was now a deserter.

Neither of them had spoken for some time. Joe seemed quite calm. He sat on the hard ground sharing her blanket, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped around them, observing the people sleeping around them as though he and they were separated by something impassable. The people slept or they got up and shuffled over to the stinking latrines. They coughed and snored and their babies cried, sleeping on as the raid continued far above, sleeping on as Joe silently observed them, as Nancy silently observed Joe.

Whoever had once owned the buff-coloured duffle coat was at least two sizes smaller than Joe and it was stretched tightly across his shoulders and ended above his wrists, showing an expanse of black-haired forearm. Where had he ditched his sailor's uniform? Nancy wondered. The thought of him tearing it off and stuffing it into a ditch or into the river appalled her. There seemed no way back from it. No way to undo what had happened. The world around them had changed, shifted on its axis so that everything looked the same but nothing was the same. A hope that had glowed inside her when she had thought the war must surely end soon and perhaps Joe would survive and make it home had withered and was now finally extinguished.

Emily slept on, lying between them, and this was a good thing.
Joe did not touch her, even when she murmured and fidgeted in her sleep under the blanket to find a warmer spot, a more comfortable position. Instead he hugged his knees more tightly, not looking at her, so that it seemed to Nancy that now he was on the run, a fugitive, he was tainted. He
was
tainted, they both were, and she felt them separate and cut off from everyone else, just as though they were both of them adrift on an ocean. She would have preferred that, she told herself, to this terrifying and silent waiting to be arrested.

And if he was arrested . . .

She could not bear it. All that had seemed unbearable before dissolved now into nothing and she wondered at herself for all the worrying and fretting over trifles that no longer mattered. She could not feel her feet, her hands, her lips, the tips of her fingers. She was numb with cold but it was a coldness that came from within and had nothing to do with the blasts of chilled air that blew out of the tube tunnel or the frozen January night far above. She was too cold even to reach out and touch him. They were separate and cut off from everyone but they could not touch each other.

‘What if you explained it to them?' she found herself saying. ‘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.'

‘I can't go to prison.'

And that was that. Besides, he was a deserter, too, now. There was no explaining it, there was no good outcome. She nodded, accepting what he said, allowing the hopelessness to swallow them up.

‘Joe, what we gonna do?'

But instead of answering her question he shook his head in wonder. ‘You wouldn't believe what it's like up there in the street. Lucky for me, I s'pose, hardly any folk about up there, but you wouldn't believe it. It's like the world's ended.'

Nancy made no reply. The world
had
ended and she didn't need to go up to the street to see it. They fell into another silence, which Joe finally broke. ‘I'll go to Ireland,' he said, turning to her. ‘If I can.'

Nancy looked away. She had had him to herself for such a short time, three months, which was longer than most women got with their husbands in wartime—longer than her own mother had got with her father—but still the unfairness of it took her breath away. She had got used to him lying beside her in the bed; she had got used to them curled up against each other on those dark winter mornings with the ice on the windows and their breath hanging in the air like a moment in time caught forever. She remembered how, on Christmas Day, he had sat cutting shapes out of a folded newspaper and turned them, magically, into hats, and how Emily had shrieked with laughter and how, later that evening, the electricity had gone out and the look on his face when she had immediately grabbed the torch and gone off to check the mains switchboard—as though she hadn't learned how to cope while he was away, learned how to be the man! And some men might have resented that but when she returned, knocking the dirt from her shoes and the dust from her hair, it was to find him and Emily playing tiddlywinks together on the floor by candlelight. She couldn't think of a time when she had loved him more than at that moment.

Except perhaps than at this moment.

‘Ireland?' repeated Nancy bleakly. ‘But—how?'

Joe shook his head. ‘Don't know. I can get to Liverpool at least. Harry will help me. He'll know a bloke who'll get me some papers. Once I get to Liverpool I'll be alright. I'll get on a boat, I'll be safe.' Nancy listened but his words seemed without meaning, insubstantial, like raindrops on glass. Harry was the elder brother who had been bad-tempered at the wedding and Joe saw him infrequently. She had never known him turn to Harry for help.

‘But Ireland . . .?'