The Safest Place in London (5 page)

The cigarette was finished. Emily had fallen into a restless sleep, her eyelids flickering from side to side as though tracking the aircraft high above, and Nancy reached down and brushed a strand of hair from her face. Emily was easier to love when she was asleep; perhaps all children were. Her face was still streaked with dirt and Nancy stifled the urge to spit on her handkerchief a second time and try to wipe the remaining dirt off, for she was oddly aware of the smartly dressed woman sitting a few feet away whose child was plump and spotless, her chestnut hair sleek and shiny and held in place by a natty little hairband. The coat she wore was a tiny perfect copy of her mother's coat, and on her feet were the kind of shoes Princess Elizabeth might have worn—smart and shiny with little silver buckles on top. Nancy looked at her own child, who was dressed in clothes salvaged from bombsites. But Emily was asleep, dead to the world as the world tore itself apart above her, and what did it matter if her face was dirty?

Nancy leaned her head back against the wall of the tunnel, feeling some small part of her unwind, and wondered if Joe's ship had sailed yet. She closed her eyes as an immense weariness overcame her and somewhere in the space between dreaming
and not dreaming she saw a vast gunmetal-grey warship slip silently away from the dockside and out to sea. The ocean was gunmetal grey too and the sky—indeed, her very dreams were gunmetal grey. She saw the ocean, smooth and calm and safe, a haven, and the horizon, towards which the ship sailed, was a place of calm serenity.

A baby began to scream and she sat up. She would not sleep, it was too early yet and, besides, she did not even know if Joe's ship had sailed. Not that it made any difference—Joe had gone and she would not see him again perhaps until the end of the war, if he made it that far.

The fact of his departure was a sharp ball of pain inside her that came and went, sometimes no more than a dull ache and other times catching at her throat and taking her breath away. At this moment it filled her up, squeezing the life out of her, but after a moment or two it lessened.

Joe had left that morning, three months' rest and recuperation ending abruptly with the arrival of his recall papers for his new ship just when she had got used to having him around. His ship was due to depart on the evening tide and where it was headed she had no idea and she doubted Joe did either. His last ship had been torpedoed somewhere between Iceland and Greenland and he had spent three days adrift in a lifeboat. The entire ship's company had died, he had said, dozens of men, though neither the papers nor the wireless had reported it. He had been picked up by a passing merchant ship and spent a fortnight in a hospital at Liverpool, then they had sent him home to recuperate. That had been October. Joe had been at sea three years. She had worried that they wouldn't know each other, or worse,
wouldn't like each other. They had been married so short a time before his call-up that they were still getting used to each other when he left. She worried that what he had gone through—three days adrift in a lifeboat, the ship's company lost—would affect him. But hadn't she witnessed dreadful things herself? Limbs blasted across a street, burnt torsos belonging to people she had once known, a baby burned black in a fire . . . So then, they were neither of them the same people they had been when they had met and married. But it worried her all the same.

Joe had come barrelling along the street one afternoon in October in his sailor's uniform with his kitbag over his shoulder and a big grin on his face hiding whatever uncertainty hid beneath, and Nancy had imagined a hundred times what that moment would be like, what they would say to each other, but it turned out there was nothing to say for she had burst into tears and run at him. That had surprised her, that surge of emotion. Where had it come from? There had been no warning of it. She had not cried when he'd left nor at any time since, even when she'd heard he'd been torpedoed but was safe. It had not seemed real. She had felt—nothing really, only a sort of dull amazement.

Yet there she was in the street, holding on to him and sobbing.

But later, after she had run out to him in tears, he had stood in the kitchen not knowing what to do with himself, taking up so much space and neither of them finding the right words. The distance between them seemed too great. He was not hurt in any way that she could see, other than the sunburn and blisters, but he spent the first week at home trying to count all the men who had died, counting fretfully on his fingers, remembering each name. But never when she was in the room, never when
he thought she was watching him. He sat in the armchair with his sleeves rolled up and read the paper, he went to the pub and drank watery wartime beer, he rolled his cigarettes and in the evenings he listened to the wireless and, when the news came on, he railed against the politicians and the government and the navy and the Admiralty and anyone, really, who sat in an office and made decisions while he was out there getting his arse shot off. She liked that: his fury, his energy. But apart from that first moment when she had burst into tears and run at him, they had forgotten how to be close.

And Emily, born seven months after Joe had left and now more than three years old, was a stranger to him as much as he was to her. Her demands, her constant presence, seemed to surprise him, and sometimes it was funny and other times it made him furious. At night, when Joe wanted what any man wanted after three years at sea, Emily's sleeping there in the same room with them infuriated him, but he had grown up in a small house with many people, they all had, and her presence quickly became familiar to him.

Emily greeted the sudden appearance of a dad with a mixture of disdain and open hostility that lasted up until the first tins had arrived. For Joe had got himself signed on at the dockyard, unloading the few convoys that made it past the German U-boats. He was supposed to be on sick leave and there he was putting in shifts at the dockyard. Nancy was furious. But it was hard to be angry with the extra money—and that wasn't all. After his first shift Joe came home with two tins of peaches and a tin of Carnation milk wrapped in a sack. How he'd done it without being caught she didn't know and she didn't ask. They
ate the peaches and drank the Carnation and sent him back for more.

But that would stop now Joe had gone.

This morning she had scrubbed the front step and Emily had played in the bomb wreckage in the street outside as Joe had flung his things into his kitbag. It was all new, his kit; he had lost everything in the ship that had been torpedoed so the navy had given him new stuff. It didn't look new—it looked like a hundred sailors had used it before him—but she made sure it was clean at least. Joe placed his new sailor's hat on Emily's head and laughed at her. He didn't tell them the name of his new ship and Nancy had not wanted to know because his last ship had been torpedoed and it seemed like bad luck. Seeing him in his uniform for the first time, Emily went suddenly shy. She understood he was departing—that huge, heavy kitbag was hard to ignore—but what did it mean when you were three? By the end of the day she would have forgotten him.

‘Right then.' Joe placed his kit on the floor. He had shaved, making a better job of it than usual, as though he wanted to make a good impression on his new ship. ‘Em, you mind you look after your mum,' he said, tweaking her nose, and instead of looking outraged Emily regarded him wordlessly, silenced by the uniform and the kitbag and an awareness of something terrible but unspoken.

‘You got everything?' Nancy said.

‘Think so. You'll be alright, then, will you?'

‘'Course we will. We're used to it, ain't we, Em?'

Emily nodded uncertainly.

‘Don't do anything daft,' Nancy added.

‘'Course I won't. Right then . . .' And he had picked up his kitbag, slung it over his shoulder, and kissed them both goodbye.

Nancy had stood at the door with Emily and together they watched him till he had turned the corner.

Nancy scanned the sea of faces on the platform above. The man in the raincoat whom she had noticed earlier had gone from his spot in the entranceway. Perhaps he had crossed to the Westbound platform or gone back up to the street. Perhaps he had found the person he was searching for. She shivered, knowing with a sudden and certain conviction that the man was a policeman and for the first time she was glad Joe had left. She placed a hand softly against her stomach. She was pregnant again but she had not told Joe before he had gone.

CHAPTER FIVE

Another bomb exploded somewhere up on the surface and Diana ducked—it was impossible not to, though no one else did. She studied the dial of her watch but was unable to calculate how many hours they had been down here—one hour, two? Nor could she work out how many hours more they were likely to remain. The explosions overhead and the space between the explosions prevented her brain from undertaking even the most rudimentary calculations. She gave it up. And meanwhile more and more people and their children, their bedding, their belongings, their elderly parents surged onto the narrow platform above that was designed only to take workers to the docks and weekend shoppers up West.

If they took a direct hit it would be carnage.

The woman in the headscarf and her child were so close Diana could see the brand of cigarette the woman smoked, the stitches on the red woollen hat worn by the little girl, could smell on their clothes the chip fat from their last meal. Their very proximity
alarmed her. The woman had smiled at her but the smile was cold. Unfriendly. Diana had looked away. This was a public shelter and the bombs made no distinction between one person and another but her presence, she could feel, was not welcome. If it came to calamity it would not be herself and Abigail they would rush to help. So many people seated very close by. She kept her gaze dully neutral but even so she felt eyes on her, crawling over her inch by inch, noticing.

Abigail was dozing. Her head lolled against Diana's lap, eyes half closed, safe in the twilight place between sleep and waking. If Diana had come alone she might not have got on the wrong bus, she might have made it home and be opening her front door at this very moment, taking off her hat, pulling off her shoes. But she had brought Abigail, putting them both in danger. And it was not merely that she had exhausted the babysitting goodwill of Mrs Probart. It was to provide herself with a cover, an excuse to come up to town, because a mother and child were, somehow, less conspicuous than a woman on her own.

Perhaps it was not too late to leave? She imagined herself gathering up their things and simply walking out. She presumed no one would stop them.

Another explosion sounded high above and her arms closed tightly around the little case and around Abigail and she waited, her eyes closed. The explosion rumbled away finally into nothing and with it any hope that they might leave before dawn. She would not think about it. She would think, instead, about Gerald, who was surely having a worse time of it than they were. She would think of their suffering, hers and Abigail's, as something that must be borne for his sake. She tried to imagine where Gerald
was, what he might be doing at this very minute—standing atop a sand dune with a pair of field glasses or at an officers' club drinking pink gins or inside a tank barking out orders to a subordinate—but it never seemed quite real. She never quite believed in it, in Gerald as a soldier. Even after three years it still seemed so improbable, so unlikely. In her mind he was dressed as he had been the first day she had met him: forever in tennis whites in the summer of 1928.

They had met at a tennis party in Ruislip in the expansive gardens of an Edwardian villa on the edge of the golf course. Marian Fairfax had invited her. Marian, who moved in somewhat higher circles than Diana (her father being a specialist at a London hospital and her mother being distantly related to an air marshal), was an old school friend whom Diana had not seen a great deal of in the seven years since they had both left school. Diana, under no illusions about her social worth, had been invited that day on the strength of her backhand, which was unrivalled among her particular set and had won her as many admirers as it had lost her friends. Even so, she had only received the invitation when another friend of Marian's, a girl called Bunny, had dropped out at the last minute.

They were a party of eight, four teams of mixed doubles, and strawberries and gin and tonics were served on a silver tray by a man in a spotless white coat. For Diana—who had left a rather average school in Pinner with a handful of minor exam passes and enrolled in a local secretarial college, where she had done moderately well, and now worked in the front office of a local solicitor's firm—the strawberries and the gin and tonics and the man in the spotless white coat with a silver tray were like a
glimpse of some exotic coastline seen from the deck of a ship far out to sea. And yet she was acutely aware of her social worth so that the strawberries, which were better than any strawberries she had ever tasted before, stuck in her throat and turned to ash in her stomach; the gin and tonics, though intoxicating, burned like acid; the man in the white coat looked down his nose at her even as he served her with polished deference. She hated it, she wanted to leave as soon as she had arrived, and yet the thought of returning to the dreary little flat above her parents' shop seemed like a slow death.