The Safest Place in London (13 page)

‘Yes, Joe got off alright.'

‘It's a bloody miracle,' said Mrs Rosenthal, indicating the baby, who had stopped crying and was now sleeping, good as gold.

And Nancy agreed that yes, it was a miracle. She handed the baby back—the urge that had made her leap up and abandon Emily was fading. She made some excuse and left. She would see them in a few hours when they returned at dawn, worn out and bedraggled, to the house—if the house had survived—and they would all get on with their lives just as though nothing had happened, just as though Joe was back on a ship and at sea.

The bombing continued, if anything had worsened, and people were moving restlessly about so that her path was blocked and she was forced to take a circuitous route back. The rows of bunks continued on down the length of the platform, two, three, four people wedged into each one, and as she passed they watched her, every one of them, as men in a cellblock might watch a new inmate.

She felt again the urgency to be moving, active, but now it drove her back to Emily, drove her to think about her own baby growing inside her, hers and Joe's. Let it be alright, let this baby be alright. And she wondered then where the baby would be born.

As she reached the final row of bunks right at the end of the platform a hand shot out and grabbed her. Fingers closed around
her arm, gripping it, pulling her in, pulling her down, and she found herself seated on one of the bunks facing Milly Fenwick and two staring little boys.

‘Hello, Nancy,' said Milly. ‘We thought it was you.'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘Mummy, look—it's Uncle Lance!' said Abigail, and she tugged at Diana's hand.

But Diana did not move. For he stood with his coat flapping open and shirt collar awry, his hair unkempt and fallen forward over his eyes, out of breath and glancing behind him at the escalator down which he had just come, snatching at his hat and mopping his brow with it. This was not the urbane Lance in a silk scarf recently returned from South America who had sat across from her at the Conduit Street cafe, nor was it the hard-nosed Lance conducting dubious transactions from behind his desk eight, nine hours earlier. And this was not Lance caught in an air raid—she had an idea he would not be concerned by a raid. No, this was something quite different.

You shouldn't have brought her here
, Lance had said.
You shouldn't have told her my name. It was stupid
, as though simply by bringing her child with her Diana had somehow compromised his safety, as though his very existence was so precarious. At the
time she had been furious, embarrassed. Now, in the dimly lit concourse, she saw the whites of his eyes, wild and staring.

‘Mummy—want more chocolate!'

And in a second Abigail was gone, letting go of her mother's hand and darting off into the crowd after him.

‘Abigail,
stop
!'

Diana lunged after her. She could see Abigail's tiny figure just ahead of her, just out of reach, weaving between the people, and just beyond her was Lance, who had turned to the left and then to the right and now seemed almost to retrace his steps. Perhaps he saw Abigail or had heard her cry, a small child in a tweed coat with little mittens sewn to the cuffs and smart little shoes with silver buckles running towards him, and for a moment he seemed to regard her in bemusement.

Abigail, who had run full tilt at a man she had met only once in her life and in a place that was utterly unfamiliar and alien to her, suddenly lost her nerve and pulled up short. This gave her mother precious seconds to swoop down and whisk the girl into her arms. Whether she would, at this point, have raised her hand to wave to Lance or opened her mouth to call out to him afterwards Diana did not know, but before she had time to wave or call out, before she had time to wonder why, when Lance's office was at Liverpool Street, he would choose to take shelter in Bethnal Green, three men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded him.

At first Diana could make no sense of it. The men seemed to have followed him into the station, pursuing him down the escalator, and what flashed into her head was the boxes hastily sealed and haphazardly stacked in Lance's office and the frown
on his face that she had assumed was for herself but that she now realised had been for this.

She did not move, though Abigail squirmed furiously in her arms. The three men surrounded him and Diana thought of children in a playground surrounding their victim. But these were not schoolboys. She smelled the cheap cigarettes they smoked and she saw the brims of their hats, stained dark and steaming slightly from the rain, though it had not been raining earlier; she saw a rash of dark stubble on a chin, the callouses and blackened fingernails of another, the fresh mud caked on the heel of a boot—impressions, fleeting but profound. If words were exchanged she could not hear them, and in a moment, no longer, they separated, the three men melting away into the crowd, gone.

Lance remained where he stood, alone now and dazed it seemed, then he reeled away. His felt hat had come off and rolled away and Diana found it at her feet. She could see the cream silk lining inside the hat which ordinarily would display the mark of a good tailor but the lettering, she saw, was in Spanish.

She stepped forward, her heart thudding, but still she did not call out.

He made for the latrines, though he stumbled almost at once and put out a hand to the wall to steady himself. His hand slid, leaving a dark mark on the painted brickwork, like soot, thought Diana, as though Lance had been out there in the air raid calmly lighting a fire. Or oil, perhaps it was oil. He sank to the ground and did not move and his hand slid from the wall creating an arc as he fell. And it wasn't soot or oil.

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘Nancy Keys. Who would have thought?'

For a moment Nancy could not reply. It was Milly Fenwick, who had left Madame Vivant's hat shop to marry a police constable and live in a house near the park. Milly Fenwick, whose wedding Nancy had not been invited to, whom she had never—in five years of air raids and bombing—seen sheltering here in this Underground station; and whom, if she thought about it—which she had not—she would have assumed had her own cosy little Anderson shelter in her own little back garden overlooking Vic Park. Yet here she was, Milly, just the wrong side of thirty and looking it, too, the long shadows failing to hide the lines at her neck and mouth, the puckering of lips that perhaps no longer held any of her own teeth, the small eyes that had swept over Nancy unseeingly all the years they had worked side by side but that now fixed on her and would not let go.

Here was Milly, whose fiancé Nancy had stolen.

‘Milly.'

She wore a clever little hat that might have come from Bond Street but might, equally, have come from a stall down Petticoat Lane, in a prewar winter coat with fur trim (but rabbit not beaver) and lace-up Oxfords in patent leather with a Continental heel that would have cost half her pay packet in 1939 but that five years later she was wearing in an air raid, her hair—no sign of grey yet—held neatly in place underneath her hat by a hairnet (no headscarf for her), her lips carefully outlined and coloured in lipstick an unflattering shade of mauve, her face thinner (though everyone's face was thinner), and you might describe her as slim if you were being generous, gaunt if you were not. And seated on the bunk beside her were two identical little boys in short trousers and matching pullovers, hair neatly parted and combed, observing Nancy unblinkingly from behind the lenses of large wire-framed spectacles.

‘Fancy us seeing you here,' Milly said, as though they had met somewhere quite improbable, like a West End show or a posh teashop in Piccadilly, and not in the only shelter for miles in the suburb they had both worked in and both, presumably, still lived in. The remarkable bit was that they had never run into each other before tonight. Or perhaps they had, Nancy realised. Perhaps Milly had seen her many times but had never before stopped her.

In which case, why now, why tonight?

Milly's eyes were very bright and they did not blink, not once, nor did they leave Nancy's face.

‘These are my two boys. Nigel and Adrian. Boys, say hello, please.'

The two small boys regarded Nancy with a curious intensity. ‘Hello, please,' they responded in unison and their mother gave an indulgent, slightly irritated smile.

‘How d'you do?' Nancy replied, unnerved by their unblinking gaze, unnerved by Milly's unblinking gaze. The bunk they were seated on was very low—they were stacked three high and this was the lowest bunk and the space between the thin little mattress and the slats of the bunk above was about the distance from hip to shoulder. The two little boys could sit quite happily cross-legged on the bunk with no inconvenience. Milly, and now Nancy, had to hunch down so that their heads were almost below their shoulders. It was restrictive. It was oppressive.

‘They're both bright as buttons,' Milly said, leaning forward a little and speaking slowly, carefully, as though she had said something not commonplace at all, but quite profound. ‘Their dad says he can't understand where they get it from but you only have to look at Reg to see it.'

The boys, who were bright as buttons, continued their silent scrutiny.

Reg was Milly's husband. Nancy had met him once when he had come by the shop after work to see Milly and had found him dull and unimaginative. If his boys were bright as buttons they certainly didn't get it from their dad. But if Milly believed in her husband, who was she to mock? They had never been friends—Milly had not encouraged it, but was not some guilt attached to herself, to the other girls, Miriam and Lily? Had they, perhaps, excluded Milly? Was it not their fault that Milly had remained outside, alone? And now here they were, she and Milly, both
married, both mothers, both sheltering in a raid, and really what was there to set them apart?

‘My Emily's just turned three,' Nancy said.

But there
was
something to set them apart, something awful and earth-shattering that could not be undone, that even a war could not soften.

Milly leaned forward so that her face was inches from Nancy's and quite suddenly the very air around them turned chilly.

‘
Do you think I care?
'

Nancy sat perfectly still. She had wondered in the weeks after she and Joe had begun courting what it would be like if they ran into Milly one evening at the pictures or dancing at the Palais, but they never had run into her, not once in all that time, and gradually the likelihood of it had diminished and the likelihood of Milly finding out, or caring, had diminished with it. Now it was certain and immediate. For Nancy Keys was Nancy Keys no more. She was Nancy Levin and the woman seated before her, an inch from her face, was the girl Joe would have married, and never mind the house overlooking the park or the two neatly dressed little boys, this was the real Milly Fenwick.

‘
Do you think I care?
'

Nancy pulled back sharply, unable to reply, unable to get up and leave, and the hand that had shot out and grabbed her wrist and had not let go since suddenly tightened painfully and she stifled a gasp. Milly's face had been in shadow but now it was an inch from own face and was enormous, bloated, and Nancy could not move. The fingers tightened around her wrist. The unblinking eyes narrowed a fraction and there was something triumphant in them.

‘
I saw him.
He was
here
, not an hour gone. I saw
him
!
Joe
.'

There, she had done it, said his name out loud at last, and perhaps it was the first time she had said it in all these years. How odd it must sound to her, how familiar yet unfamiliar the word must feel on her lips.

‘He's a
deserter.
'

And now Nancy could not move; though she recoiled from those lips, from those words, she could not move.

‘You got a bloody nerve! Sitting there, telling me my man's a deserter! He did his bit, went off to serve his country. Not like some—'

‘I know what I saw!'

There was a strange light in Milly's face, her eyes gleamed like a child on Christmas morning. Like a child who has murdered both its parents on Christmas morning because it did not get the presents it was expecting.

‘You saw
nothing
! Joe's home on leave.'

‘I saw him.' Milly's breath was warm in her ear. ‘Creeping about in civvies, an old duffle coat, no hat, black trousers. I saw him looking over his shoulder like he knew the coppers were after him.'

Throughout this the little boys had sat unmoving, dispassionately observing every detail. Now Milly cocked her head a fraction towards them.

‘My Reg rounds up men like that every day. Don't he, boys?'

‘Our daddy's a policeman,' they said in unison.

‘And what he does he do with deserters, boys?'

‘He arrests them and throws them in prison where they belong.'

It was grotesque. Did they even know what they were saying? There was something inhuman about them.

‘Where has he run to, Nancy? His brothers' house? Does he think he'll be safe there?'

‘You know
nothing
—'

The fingers pressed into Nancy's wrist. She felt her tendons protesting, the bones crunched together. And Milly leaned closer, Milly said what she had waited five years to say: ‘You think you can steal my man and get away with it? You're nothing but a cheap tart.'

The two little boys sitting unmoving behind her, their eyes wide, slowly licked their lips.

‘He deserved what he got and you deserve what you got: a cowardly deserter.'

‘Say what you like! It don't change nothing.' And now, finally, Nancy could say what she had waited five years to say: ‘
He chose me over you!
'

She wrenched herself free—and for a moment she
was
free—but Milly's words pursued her: ‘We're going to the police station, Nancy Keys, just the minute we get out of here!'