The Safest Place in London (36 page)

They had reached their door, number 42.

‘Mrs Levin?' said Gerald, knowing it was not her but saying it anyway. At his words the women's eyes widened for a moment then she turned away. The boy's expression turned mocking.

‘She's dead,' he said. This earned him a clip around the ear from his mother. Clearly the boy had not yet learned that you do not speak to strangers, or not this kind of stranger.

‘Then I wonder if you can tell me—'

But they were gone, the door opened, the mother bundling her children in, the door firmly closed.

He went after her and knocked loudly and repeatedly, and when he stopped the silence was no longer the silence of an abandoned house, it was the silence of people holding their breath, hiding and waiting, not daring to move. He backed away. He had the same feeling from each of the windows in each of the houses, shadows watching him, darting away when he looked at them. The cluster of children across the street had fallen silent and they too were watching him, and for a moment he felt the same unease he had felt walking through the streets of Cairo at night, waiting to get his throat cut and his body thrown into the Nile.

For God's sake, would no one help him?

He thought of the decrepit old woman at the station who had pitied him, the woman ambulance driver who had offered him a cigarette. He clung to these two oases of kindness in this desert of indifference.

He left, turning and walking rapidly away, wanting to put as much distance as he could between himself and that house, this street. The day had faded, seeping away in a slow and protracted death, and the night lay ahead of him, unrelenting and endless. He shivered. He had not felt warm since he had climbed aboard the de Havilland three—no, four days ago. He wanted to be back there, in the desert, in the dusty, fly-blown, teeming streets of Cairo. He wanted to wind the clock back four days.

Emerging again onto Bethnal Green Road at the start of the blackout he was lost for a time, trying to determine his location, trying to decide where he should go. He began walking in a westerly direction, hoping to find a bus. Instead he found a black hackney cab, pulling up at the kerb and disgorging a group of drunken sailors. He darted forward and climbed in before anyone else could

‘Where to, guv?' said the cabbie, and behind them Gerald heard the first wails of the air-raid siren.

‘Clapham,' said Gerald. ‘Take me to Clapham.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Joe froze. A knock on a door in Odessa Street meant a stranger, not a good stranger, never someone you wanted to see.

He jumped up from the table. The two Rosenthal girls didn't jump; they remained in the kitchen doorway watching him. At the second knock, louder this time, more insistent, he went to the back door ready to run, then he turned back and stood, undecided. And the two little girls watched. He put his finger to his lips, not that they had made a sound, and crept past them and went soundlessly up the stairs and they followed a step behind. Upstairs, he found Archie, who was third oldest, and Norman who was next after Archie and who was holding the baby. They were standing at the window staring down at the street below, and when they saw Joe the two boys shuffled wordlessly up to make room so that he, too, could see.

Joe looked down and all he could see was the top of a hat and two khaki shoulders. It was an officer's hat. The head looked up at that moment and they all stepped back out of sight. Then
the knocking started again and they leaned forward and looked down again. The man was an army officer, there was no mistaking it. And now he pressed his face to the downstairs window. Then he looked up.

‘He's seen us!' squealed Norman.

The thrill of it seemed to electrify the squalid little room and its occupants and for a long moment no one spoke. Joe looked at the four little faces of the Rosenthal children—five if you counted the baby, who gaped at him, wide-eyed and toothless. They waited to see what he would do. But he couldn't think. He didn't know what he would do. A panic had gripped him at the sight of that hat, those khaki shoulders. What could it mean that they would send the army to pick him up? The police, yes, the navy—but an army officer? Was the man from the ministry? From military intelligence? Had he been watching and seen Joe come into the house?

His foolishness at coming here became horribly apparent.

And having now seen them the man was not going to give up and there followed another knock, loud, insistent.

Joe left then, sprinting back down the stairs, out of the back door and into the yard, across the fence and into the narrow laneway that ran along the back of the houses. A voice called out to him, he thought he heard his name called, and it might have been Mrs Rosenthal, though he could not be sure and he did not stop. There was a collapsed wall halfway along the lane that led into the backyard of a bombed-out house. He made for that, feeling his way, clambering through the rubble and popping out into another laneway. It was dark now, pitch dark, but out of nowhere someone shone a torch directly in his face.
Before he could throw up his hands to shield his eyes he was wrestled to the ground, where he lay for a moment, bewildered and winded.

‘What's your game then?' sneered a breathless but triumphant voice right in his ear, so that it became clear that the person holding the torch was a police constable, massive in the blackout in his cape and domed helmet, the smell of cooked onions on his breath. Before Joe could think, before he could move, he was hauled to his feet.

And the air-raid siren began to wail.

Joe felt the siren filling his head, filling the laneway. He felt that he had never in his life been less afraid of its awful urgent sound.

‘Show us your papers!' the policeman demanded over the noise.

‘There's a bloody raid on!' Joe shouted back.

‘Then you better hope no one drops a bomb on you.' And the constable roughly patted Joe down, finding his papers and angling his torch to read them, peering closer in the darkness. ‘You're having a laugh. This says you're born in 1876.'

But Joe wasn't laughing. He could see a police van. He could see other men like himself, but not like himself, being lined up and loaded into the back of the van. They were doing a sweep then, picking up anyone who was out after dark and who looked suspicious. He had dodged the navy and the army and the detective who had pursued him for a week, only to be picked up in a routine sweep. He saw the faces of the men who had been picked up. They would be deserters, men who had been on the run and living in the shadows for months, years, and he saw the exhausted
relief in their eyes. Their war was over. A year or two in prison, the war would end and they would be released. It would not end for him. If he stepped into that van he would never be free again. His life would be over.

He tried to run. Threw every ounce of strength into this last-ditch attempt, almost broke free, but the constable lunged after him and brought him down so that for a moment they wrestled, struggled, and a second policeman joined in and together they pulled Joe to his feet, holding his arms in a tight lock behind his back. They marched him towards the van, ducking at the roar of an aircraft engine overhead. It was followed almost at once by the whoosh of an incendiary then an explosion that could not have been more than a street away. Close by, a bomb-damaged shell of a house on which someone had tacked sheets of corrugated metal as a temporary roof shook and rumbled as some inner wall collapsed in a cloud of dust.

The raid had begun but it did not seem to matter.

‘Move it!' shouted the first constable, a note of panic now noticeable in his voice. And suddenly the whole area was lit up by another incendiary and Joe saw that the constable was an old man, a special, not a regular at all, sporting a drooping old-fashioned moustache like the men had worn in the last war but white with age, the flesh on his face mottled and flushed almost purple by his exertions. A man who had done his forty years' service and hung up his policeman's helmet and his whistle and had no doubt looked forward to a quiet time in front of a fire with his pipe and his missus. Now he was back in uniform chasing looters in an air raid.

This was Joe's thought as his final few seconds of freedom
passed, one by one, stretched out and squeezed together both at the same time, an eternity and no time at all. He noticed how the old man raised his head to the sky, his eyes wide and fearful, and this was the last thing Joe saw before an incendiary exploded very close by.

When he came to he was lying face down on the pavement and his ears were roaring as though he was underwater. The roaring would not stop but he lifted his head then cautiously pulled himself to his feet. He was unhurt and perhaps the incendiary had exploded further away than he had imagined for the police van was untouched, so too all the men lined up inside the van gaping wordlessly at him. A sheet of corrugated metal, blown from the roof of the nearby house, lay on the ground not far away, dark splatters all along one edge. And standing before him was the elderly special constable—or, rather, there was his body.

His head was nowhere to be seen.

His torso ended at the collar of his uniform and his cape. As Joe watched the headless body wavered for a dreadful second, then tipped forward and crashed to the ground with a thud. Joe looked down and at his feet was the man's head, the helmet still on, the eyes looking sightlessly up at him.

For a moment everything went black again, and when Joe came to a second time, he was some yards away, coughing up bile onto the pavement. He flung out both hands as the pavement reeled up before him and he tipped forward in a gross mimicry of the torso of the dead constable, his legs buckling beneath him.
But he pulled himself up almost at once, made his legs move. A moment later he was running, faster than he had ever run before and with less idea of where he was going than at any other time in his life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

‘Clapham,' Gerald had said. ‘Take me to Clapham.'

He remembered little about the journey and could not be certain whether it had taken an age or an instant nor what route the cabbie had taken, but here they were pulling up in Commongate Road. And now he was standing in the doorway and he must have rung the bell for the front door was opening and Mrs Ashby herself was leading him inside. He found himself on the settee in the beautiful drawing room that he had visited, briefly, a few days before. There was no one else here, not the housekeeper—he had forgotten her name—nor the little boy, Marcus, just the two of them, seated side by side on the settee. He smelled again the furniture polish and the potpourri but it was mingled now with the slightly acrid smell of the coal burning slowly in the grate and with something enticingly like blossoms or tropical fruit or clean laundry or spice or all four. What
was
it? He could not place it.

She was handing him a drink, whisky and soda, which she placed in his hands and curled his fingers around, closing her
own hands around his to make sure he was holding the tumbler, and he realised the smell was her, Mrs Ashby. The woman made of porcelain, perfect and flawless and utterly breakable. She had put on some scent, then, in anticipation of his arrival. But she had not known of his arrival until he had arrived. He had an idea he had simply turned up at her door, rather late at night, rather dishevelled and distressed. And now he was telling her about Ashby, who had died, horribly, in a tank that had been hit by an enemy shell so that nothing was left of him but a name. Not that he told her that. He told her about Ashby standing at the dockside in his khaki shirt and shorts throwing Gerald's gas mask into the Nile.

Some time had passed for he no longer had the whisky in his hands, though he could feel its warmth seeping through him, and he was telling her that his little girl was dead, killed in an air raid, and when he began to cry and seemed quite unable to stop, she held him. She kissed him, slowly, tenderly, in the same way she had said that thing about the damned war: dully, as though it had ceased to mean anything. He felt the effects of the whisky muddying his head in a pleasant way; he felt her kisses having the same effect. He sensed something in her that was dead but that still needed to be stirred up like ashes in the grate in the morning, and his arrival, his tears, allowed her to give in to it. He wondered how he knew all this from just a kiss, her arms urgently around him. Perhaps he did not know it, was inventing a world for her to inhabit. She led him upstairs to the room she had once shared with Ashby.