The Safest Place in London (32 page)

Joe slept. One or two of the upstairs rooms still had beds in, still had the stained mattresses left behind by previous occupants who had departed in a hurry.

When he came downstairs it was late afternoon and there was no sign of Harry, but Myra was seated at the kitchen table in a mustard-yellow dress and stockings, flipping through a magazine. A cigarette burned in her left hand. She glanced up at Joe's arrival then down again. A heavy odour of frying fat and a pan still on the hob was evidence of a recent meal.

‘Harry gone out?' Joe said.

For a moment Myra did not reply. Then she looked up. ‘He told you to leave,' she said. ‘Why you even here? This ain't your home.' She pulled on the cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. ‘We don't want you here. You're in the way.'

‘Too bloody bad.'

He pushed past her to search for something to eat. But her words had stung him. Was that how Harry felt too? He found the end of a loaf of bread in a bread bin. No marg. He tore a hunk off and began to chew. If Harry had told him to leave it was simply because his being here put everyone in danger.

‘I hear congratulations are in order,' he said, leaning against the sink.

Myra's eyes narrowed and she blew out another thin stream of smoke. She did not look pleased. And it was hard to imagine Myra as a mother. He thought of his own mother as she had been when he was a child, middle-aged and already broken by the mean existence that was life in Yalta Street in two rooms with three growing boys and no husband to speak of. But what did it mean for any woman to be a mother? She had done their washing and patched their clothes and there had been food on the table most days. She had never worn silk stockings, though, or a mustard-coloured dress or had a net for her hair or smoked Pall
Malls or sat around reading magazines. If she had, they would have gone without. But times were different now, he supposed. All the same, it was hard to imagine Myra as a mother.

‘When's it due, then?'

‘What's it matter?' She sighed and for a moment the bland coldness slipped and he saw Myra as she had once been, a little girl frightened and alone. In a second it was gone. ‘You won't be around to see it.'

And that was true enough. When this child came into the world he would be far away—Dublin, New York. He would not hear of its arrival for many weeks. Perhaps never. He would never meet this child—his own niece or nephew—nor have any part in its life. Indeed, there was every chance it would never know of his existence. He would be as remote to this child as Ely Levin seemed to him. More remote, in fact, for at least Ely lived on in the stubborn memories of his wife, in the presence of his two sons. He would be as remote, then, as Joe's own father, who did not exist at all and was not even a name on a baptismal register.

‘I'm sure you'll make a wonderful mother,' he said to hurt her. And for once she made no reply.

‘I need you to keep an eye on Nancy and my kid,' said Joe to his brother.

The afternoon was nearing its end and Harry had returned from wherever he had been all day, tired and thirsty and clearly in no mood for conversation, certainly not this kind of conversation.

‘They're your wife and kid, not mine,' he replied, not looking up. ‘If a man can't take care of his own family what kind of man is he?'

Joe was across the room in an instant, clenching his brother's collar in his fists and hauling him to his feet, his words tumbling out as though they had been there a long time, waiting: ‘The kind of man who spends four years of his life in a leaky tin boat being shot at for his country while his older brothers sit it out on their arses!'

Afterwards there was a silence filled only by the sound of his own breath, coming quick and heavily, a pulse beating in his ears.

Harry shook him off angrily. ‘Your wife and kids should come first. If you're dumb enough to end up in the navy that's your bloody lookout.' He sat back down again, straightening his collar, running a hand over his chin. ‘But fine, if it means that much to you I'll look in on them. Not that that wife of yours will thank me for it.'

Joe took a deep breath. Whatever it was that had flooded his body and roared in his ears drained away, leaving him breathless, shaken.

‘I ain't asking you to go round there and help Nancy hang new curtains or fix a leaky tap or play the kindly uncle. I'm just saying keep an eye. Make sure nothing bad happens to them. That's all.'

‘I said I would, didn't I?'

Joe took another breath. He stood quite still, calming himself. He had never done that before, not to Harry, and the realisation of it shocked him a little. As a kid he had been frightened of Harry and with good reason, for Harry had had his own way of doing things and if you got in his way you felt it. It was hard
to move beyond that, even now they were both adults, hard to believe Harry wouldn't make him pay in some way for what had just happened.

But Harry was reading the evening paper.

A soft tap at the front door cut through the silence as effectively as an air-raid siren. Harry looked up from his paper. Joe glanced over at him. And Myra, who must have been lurking and presumably listening just outside the kitchen, now appeared in the doorway, a suggestion of controlled alarm in her eyes as she tried to exchange a look with Harry. But Harry had already got up, casting aside the paper and pushing past her without a look.

They waited, Joe and Myra. Until Joe could wait no longer.

‘Who is it?'

‘What am I, a bloody mind-reader?'

But Myra knew, he could feel it. The suggestion of controlled alarm was not because she didn't know who it was, it was because she did know. Joe got up. He followed his brother out of the room and for a moment it seemed that Myra would try to stop him, then she shrugged and stepped aside to let him pass. The front door was slightly ajar. Harry was standing outside on the street. The low murmur of voices could just be heard. Joe took a step closer. The voices were speaking in angry whispers, there was no mistaking it. The room at the front of the house—the room where Joe had been born—was mostly unused now, except for storage. Joe tried the door and it was unlocked. He went in, stepping cautiously in the darkness, and made his way to the window and wiped his sleeve over years of grime so that he could see out to the street beyond. After a short time, he heard the front door click shut and a moment later a man in a long overcoat with
his hat pulled down low, his arm in a sling, stalked past. After he had gone Joe remained where he was, at the window, watching the late-afternoon street. Then he left, closing the door behind him, and returned to the kitchen. Harry was back in his chair reading the same page of the paper. Myra was in the other chair. She looked up at him but Harry kept on reading the paper.

‘It was him, the same copper,' Joe said. ‘Why'd he come back?'

‘They always come back,' said Harry, still not looking up.

Joe thought about this. ‘Did you give him more money?'

‘Leave it,' said Harry, a frown appearing. Myra shifted, uncrossing her legs and recrossing them, hitching up her stockings.

But something didn't add up. ‘If you're paying this copper off then why was he waiting for me at the docks that day? Like he knew, like he was expecting me?'

He felt the chill of his words. The way they hung in the air, turning the air around them cold.

Myra let out a horrid little laugh and Harry shot her a warning glance. ‘You, shut it,' he warned her.

‘I don't understand,' said Joe.

And Myra, who couldn't shut it, got up and laughed again. ‘Because you're a fool,' she said.

Harry shot up and in a second his hand was around her neck, his eyes blazing. ‘I said
shut it
!'

She stumbled, and when, after a moment, he let her go, she shook herself, lifted her chin a little and strode out, wobbling slightly and putting out a steadying hand as she passed the table. Once she had gone, Harry sat back down, but he had closed the newspaper.

‘Harry?'

‘You
are
a fool,' said Harry, very softly, barely above a whisper.

The whole room had turned cold now.

‘You set the copper onto me?'

‘So what if I did?' Harry shrugged. ‘I ain't paying him off. That copper ain't bent, and believe me I tried. He knows everything, the whole operation, but he thinks someone else is the brains behind it. He wanted names, dates, places, details. I gave him that, everything I had, in exchange for—'

‘In exchange for me?'

‘In exchange for my freedom, mine and Myra's. He needed someone, needed to make an arrest. It was a straight swap. Us or you.'

Joe thought of the man who had been stabbed to death in the Underground station. He saw now that this was not Harry's fate; that it was Harry with his hand on the knife, it was Harry ordering the hit. Joe felt his fingertips, his toes go numb.

‘But what about family, Harry?'

‘You ain't family, Joe. You never was.'

Ice had formed on the inside of the windows, on the walls, the very air turned to ice.

Joe found himself in the hallway of the house he had grown up in, though he had no memory of leaving the kitchen. He turned one way and then the other, trying to clear his head. Now he was walking back into the kitchen and the ice had gone, replaced by a red mist. He pulled Harry to his feet and landed a fist in his stomach, and Harry folded in half, then sank to his knees, gasping, and he did not get up.

Joe left then, going into one or two rooms, finding his coat, finding some money, taking what food he could find, and by
the time he was ready to leave—just a very few minutes it had taken him—Myra was waiting for him and she flew at his face and he had to beat her away, making it to the front door, yanking it open and stumbling out and away with Myra's foul words following him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Gerald went to see Yelland at the ministry. It was the only place, the only person, he could think of to go to.

He moved like a man in a dream, haunted by the ghost of the man who had made this same journey in reverse the day before, so full of hope then, so blissfully ignorant. On the train south he squatted in a few inches of space in the corridor, smoking cigarette after cigarette until they ran out.

His early start meant he arrived at Kings Cross by mid-afternoon and was outside his old building at the Ministry of Supply in the Strand at a little after three. It had hardly changed in the intervening three years—the same silver barrage balloons tethered high above the rooftop, the same stack of sandbags by the entrance, the same uniformed civil servants hurrying in and out with their leather portfolios and their attaché cases, the same babble of secretaries in their smart clipping heels and bright lipstick. But the hats and coats of the secretaries were a little more worn, a little shabbier after four years of war, their faces a little
more gaunt. Opposite, the Elizabethan tavern and the little row of shops that had withstood plague and fire and civil war were gone, reduced to a large waterlogged crater, and the officers who passed by the crater, trying not to get their regulation boots wet, were all American. People no longer carried their gas masks—they were becoming careless or they were simply inured, by now, to war.

Or perhaps, for the first time, they had begun to sense victory.

He went up the front steps and presented himself at the porter's desk, having no appointment and trusting that Yelland still worked there and had not been seconded to Civil Defence or the Home Office or the Admiralty or the War Office or anywhere else.

After a short wait Yelland himself appeared, unexpectedly and somewhat sheepishly, in the uniform of a captain of the Household Cavalry. Otherwise he appeared unchanged—same self-conscious dipping movement as he approached, same unkempt prematurely grey thatch, same affable grin and innocently blinking blue eyes. A schoolboy who had never quite grown up and who, by a quirk of fate, found himself fighting a war, albeit from behind a desk.

‘Meadows!' he exclaimed, with what seemed genuine pleasure, coming forward and extending both arms to him. ‘Where the devil did you spring from? The Riviera, by the look of you!'

‘Definitely not the Riviera! Yelland, it's bloody good to see you,' Gerald replied, pumping his former colleague's arm up and down and clapping him on the shoulder. And then, horribly, feeling tears prick his eyes.

‘Well, come on in,' said Yelland, turning away, and whether he
was being decent about it or had not noticed Gerald couldn't tell. ‘All sorts of jolly forms to fill in, of course, before they'll let you inside,' Yelland went on, leading him back to the reception desk, where for the next five minutes he was occupied with said forms. Eventually a pass was produced and clipped on and Yelland led the way towards the lift. ‘We're up on six now,' he said chattily, as the lift filled up and they waited for it to grind into action. ‘Kemp and his lot got moved to seven and Meriwether—you remember Meriwether?—was relocated down to two, so of course that meant we got sent upstairs. Bit of a relief, between you and me. That basement was like the boiler room of a transatlantic liner during summer and like a gulag in the winter.'