A Place for Us (25 page)

“Daisy? She’s six. Don’t worry.” David wanted to clear the other drawings up now, to stow them away, safe and sound. “She’ll love it. So—should I get something off to you in the next couple of days? I have a deadline, but I can easily work with you to—”

“We want to get this rolling as soon as possible, you know,” said Horace. “Come into the office with me and let’s discuss the terms and all of that.”

“And these?” David gestured to the sketches as he swept them into his portfolio folder. “Any interest in seeing these again?”

“Oh, gosh no. This way, please. June, would you fetch me another drink? David—another for you? Marvelous. Yes, I think this could be the start of something rather special.”

A
FTERWARD, HE WALKED
out of the building with a contract and a cigarette, and he thought he would go straight to Paddington, but he didn’t. He headed out of Soho and through Bloomsbury, up the leafy, wide climb of Rosebery Avenue toward the Angel.

He didn’t know why after all these years, couldn’t have explained it. He just kept on walking, getting closer and closer. He thought he was fine, to begin with. Merely an interested party revisiting an old place; but his stomach started to cramp and he winced when he saw the Clerkenwell fire station. How often after Mum died he’d stood there waiting for news, rather than go back home, as if they might suddenly tell him she wasn’t dead and it was all a mistake, if he waited long enough. He’d hear the bells ringing and see them racing out at full pelt. By the end of the war he’d got so used to it he’d know already, just by the sounds of houses collapsing, where it was, whether their place was in danger.

The flashbacks started again as he crawled up and over the City Road, up to the backstreets near Chapel Market. Rubble like rain, the sounds of the baby screaming, the bewildered faces of the tiny kids who’d huddle together, moving in a pack toward the shelter of the Angel tube station. And his stomach started knotting up again. No food, the whiskey Horace had given him curdling the milky coffee he’d had for breakfast. Bile rose in his gullet, and his throat thickened as if it had swollen shut. He kept on walking, past the Lyons, past the old Peacock Inn.

“You all right, love?” an old woman with a headscarf asked him, peering into his face as he held on to some railings, trying not to retch.

As he walked down Chapel Market, past where the mission used to be, where his mother’d go to have her face dressed after his father
had kicked her or hit her with the pan or held a coal to her face or . . . whatever else he did, the images in his mind’s eye grew stronger and he couldn’t stop the sweating, the agony of his stomach cramping. The sounds in his ears. And he was back there again, running toward the hell of his home life, that freezing clear night, January 1945.

He’d seen his dad at the pub and knew he was drunk already, but he didn’t know where else to go. It was always the same: should he go home when the siren sounded, to make sure his mother and the baby were safe? Because it was always there, the fear that his dad really would get him this time. So he’d run along the street with the sirens sounding, caught up in the rush inside to be ready, and then, getting to the front door, creep in, hearing the sobbing, juddering screams as his father slammed his mother into whatever it was he was hitting her with that night. Tom Doolan wasn’t scared of the fucking Germans. He wasn’t fucking scared of anyone, not like that little drip of shit she said was his son.

The first time the bombs had fallen, David was ten. He got used to the Blitz, got used to the shelters and the drama and the sobbing. He learned how to climb over rubble and pretend he wasn’t scared. But in 1945, when everyone thought the war was coming to an end, it started up again. V-2s. David didn’t understand at first. Because D-Day had happened, we’d invaded France, wasn’t it all over? But January, February, March, these new, infinitely more terrifying bombs hit London, and you never heard them until it was too late and they smashed into you. And this time he really was scared.

His mum was so tired these days. The new baby took up all her time. She’d come out of the blue, a tiny little thing, and when David looked at her he felt no connection. He was fourteen, nearly fifteen. This mewling scrap of red skin and bone, she was nothing to do with him, was she? He was angry with his mum for having her, for being so sad, for letting his dad do this to her. Hadn’t she learned how not to have any more babies?

The night she was killed they heard V-2s over toward Shoreditch and the City. You heard them when they weren’t for you, which didn’t make it any less frightening. It just meant you might not hear the next one, and then it’d be too late. He’d run home from playing outside the Spanish Prisoners, the pub down the road from their house. There was a man there selling oranges if you gave him a fiddle, and one of David’s friends had pulled him off, but David didn’t want an orange that much. He’d
hung around outside the pub, watching to see if his father was coming home, what temper he’d be in. He liked to do that, to warn his mother. He had to try to look after her. He’d always done it.

When he ran home and into the house, upstairs was having another row about something and his mother was playing her beloved piano—to block out the noise, he thought. Calm as you like, smooth hair coiled up around her long, slim neck, and the little baby beside her, asleep in a drawer. Her tiny legs were waving. He thought she might be cold. Her blanket had fallen off.

“Ma,” he’d said. “Didn’t you hear the sirens?”

“No, I was singing, to cheer her up,” she said, turning round and smiling. “Hello, my lovely boy. I suppose we’d best get off to the station, then.”

“It’s too late, Ma,” he’d said, half-angry, half-proud of her, playing her painted, dusty piano while the city exploded around her. “No time. And, Ma, he’s coming back. He’s in a bad way.”

He remembered her face then. “Oh, Davy.”

They hid under the piano, because he was sure by now there wasn’t time to get to the shelter, and David didn’t know if they were hiding from the bombs or from his father. His mother’s calm breathing, her hands smoothing his hair back from his head: he could still remember the feel of the tags and cuts on her red-raw fingers decades later. How small she always seemed, curled next to him.

They were quiet as mice for ten awful minutes. The baby didn’t make a sound. And just when the silence had stretched to an unbearable breaking point, the baby woke up and started crying; and just like that, there was a crashing sound, an explosion, a crunching, elemental force like the earth was cracking open. The piano buckled above them from the weight of the floor above collapsing, and David felt his mother’s warm, heavy body fall on top of him and the baby, as the house crumpled down around them all. It seemed to go on for ages, louder than anything. A great blow of something fell onto them, the baby was screaming, his back felt as though knives were stabbing him, and his mother was crushing him, hard, the weight of something above her like a battering ram.

Everything was white. David didn’t remember crawling into a tiny shape, as small as he could possibly make himself go, just like his mother had always said. But he must have done. He stayed there until he was
sure there weren’t more bombs coming, until he saw the sky, out of the corner of his eye, turn from black to gray. It occurred to him he couldn’t usually see the sky from his home, and something was different.

It must have been a long time. He stank of his own urine and he didn’t think he could move. He could hear voices, calling, and he crawled slowly out from underneath his mother, blinking away the sharp dust in his eyes. One of her arms, and the side of her, had been ripped away. The ribs, like ribbons of flesh. David looked at her face and then looked away again, and was sick on the ground.

“Someone in there? Is that Emily’s place?”

He’d forgotten about the baby till a little sound from beside his mother’s body made him look over. There it was, this tiny little thing. Her mother had taken her out of the drawer. She must have had her on her lap, and the baby’d rolled away onto the floor beside her mother. Her legs were still waving in the air. She was thick with dust. He pulled the blanket over her, wrapping it tightly round her, then picked her up carefully, clutching her to him, like girls with dolls he’d seen playing on the bomb sites. His legs almost buckled but he walked toward the voices. He couldn’t work out where the door was, which way round he was.

“There’s a kid in there. Oi, son! You all right? You hear me?”

“It’s Emily’s kid. Where’s Tom Doolan?” he heard someone else say. “Maybe he’s under all that rubble.”

There was a hole at the edge of something. He saw it and knew it had been the front door. He crawled through it, still clutching his sister. The light was bright; his eyes stung with the dust.

“It’s all right, Cassie,” he said to the tiny bundle, which barely seemed alive to him, or even human. “It’s just you and me now. But we’re going to be all right.”

H
E HADN
’
T BEEN
back there since—he knew well enough when. It was five years ago, and he wondered if she still worked round the corner. Perhaps that was what had pushed him up the hill. The hope of seeing her again.

Stumbling slightly, flashing lights in the corners of his field of vision blurring everything, David found himself standing outside the Spanish Prisoners, and without knowing what else to do, he went in. Before and during the war it had been a dark place, but not like this. Then at least you had a community, even if the community was poor and desperate and afraid. His mother had played piano there, and he’d sometimes sit next to her on the long, worn wooden bench and sing the old songs with her. Everyone went in there, even if when they came out they were apt to be drunk and sometimes violent. It was just where you went.

Now it was dirty, unloved, dusty. Full of memories. An old thin man behind the bar, bent almost double. Flies buzzing around the curling sandwiches next to the tills. Ashtrays full to overflowing. A few mean-faced old-timers, gazing into empty drinks. Only men. He wondered if one of them was his father. He’d no idea if he was alive or dead somewhere, under a railway arch, chucked in the river after a fight. Or waiting, just biding his time to come back and get his son, the bogeyman of his nightmares.

His stomach started cramping unbearably now, and David went to the lavatory outside in the backyard. He emptied his liquid bowels, shaking and staring into space in the narrow, cramped privy, grateful that no one could hear him. Then, standing up at the bar, he ordered himself a gin this time, and drank it whole, wondering what he should do, if he
was brave enough to hang around, see if he could find her, just see her for a few seconds, make sure she was all right. Aunt Jem had said she was living here now, working a stone’s throw away. That was why he’d come back, wasn’t it? Even though half of him didn’t even know if he should walk along the market, in case he bumped into her. He was sure she didn’t want to see him.

That silly cartoon again . . . he sketched out another picture of Wilbur in his book, tearing out the page, marooning it on the dirty old wood. He stared at the dog, his head spinning. What had he agreed to, back in that office? And why on earth had he come here?

He finished his drink and walked slowly down Chapel Market, picking up an apple on the way, hoping that might make him feel better; and as he bit into the sharply sweet juice his sense of self, the story he believed about himself, returned a little. He’d got out; he’d got his sister out. He’d gone to the Slade, got his degree. He’d met Martha, and that had saved him, he was sure. She was his angel, his great love, his muse, his friend; he did everything for her, for her first, and then the children. He sometimes wondered what would have happened to him had he not gone out and met her that day.

Somehow he’d managed to escape his father, and the life that had nearly sucked him in. But that didn’t mean he forgot. He couldn’t forget, much as he wished he could.

In another minute he was going past Cassie’s work. A framer’s, now that was funny too, when you thought about it, him an artist. The shops were mostly hidden from view by the market stalls in front, and the framer’s had an old chap selling a pile of shoes right outside it, so David couldn’t see in. He stopped behind a fishmonger’s stall and peered over, to see if he could spot her bright hair through the window. She wasn’t there, and it was a good thing. What would he say to her, anyway?

“Davy!
Davy
, is that you?”

He froze.

Instantly, David knew it had been a mistake to look for her.
Stay calm, act like nothing’s happening.
He began walking casually away.

“Davy!” The voice bubbled in and out of the crowds. “Davy! It’s him, I know it is. . . .” There was a muffled sound. “Let me through! Oh, please stop! It’s me, Cassie!”

David wished he had the guts to just walk on. But he couldn’t; there was something in her tone that drove right through him.

“Hello, Cassie,” he said. He wheeled round so swiftly that she almost bumped into him.

“It is you! I bloody knew it was.” Cassie hit him on the arm. “You bloody deaf or something? I was yelling all the way back down the market.”

He glanced at her, and his heart started thumping in his chest. He wished he could feel nothing, wished she seemed more like a stranger, but she didn’t. She was smiling at him awkwardly, tall as ever, slim and gangly. Still so young, how old was she? Twenty-four? He thought of the last time he’d seen her, terrified, tired, her pale face determined.

“How you doing, Cass?” he said.

“All right,” she said, and then she shrugged, and he knew she was regretting calling out to him. She crossed her arms, her bobbed hair shaking as she said, “Terry’s got some work up the reclamation yard off the Essex Road. We’re living back here now. Funny how things work out, ain’t it? How . . . how are you, Davy?”

“I’m not too bad.” He almost couldn’t bear to meet her gaze. His little sister, who sucked her thumb so hard there was a red welt on the joint, who had thick black lashes and funny little scrunched-up toes, who screamed like a rat in a trap if you put a barrette in her hair. His sister, who looked so much like his mother. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Bloody right. I saw you in the paper, one of them exhibitions. ‘Hark at him!’ I said to Terry. ‘Who the hell does he think he is!’ ”

“What do you mean?” He shrugged. “It’s my work, isn’t it? Can’t help that.”

“You had a flowery sodding necktie on, you big jessie.”

“It’s what I wear to . . .” He trailed off. It sounded so stupid. She laughed.

“I’m only having a go at you, Davy! I’m your sister, ain’t I? I can do that? I’m the only family you got.” That wasn’t true anymore, though. She realized it as she was speaking; he saw it. “How’s everyone? Your lot?”

“They’re all good.” He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, painful.

“How is she, Davy? My little girl?”

He realized this was why he was so scared. He was terrified she’d want her back again.

“She’s really well. She’s ever so bright, Cass. Into her books, she loves history. I read to her every night.”

“You tell her where she comes from?” She shifted, moving away from him, and he thought she might suddenly run off again.

He shook his head. “No. Never. Like you wanted.”

Then Cassie gripped his wrist, her thin face pale in the afternoon sun. “You don’t ever tell anyone. You promised me, all right? I know I was a mistake. Dad hated me. I know what it’s like. I couldn’t have another mistake round here. She’s better off with you.”

“You can come and visit her whenever you want, Cass.” He wished he could share just a tiny piece of the joy her daughter,
his
daughter, brought him. “She’s wonderful. We come up to London together, she and I, we visit a gallery, have lunch, and she always—”

“Don’t talk to me about her,” Cassie said, and she lowered her head, looked away, curling her face into an expression of agony. “I don’t want to know. I want to start over, see? Me and Terry, I’m sure we’ll have our own kids, sometime soon. That little one, she was a mistake, I was too young.” Her face darkened. “That piano poof, eh? All that time Aunt Jem thought it’d be nice for me to learn like Ma, and all the time he was just waiting to get into my knickers.”

It was Aunt Jem who’d called him. From a phone box, outside the Tube station. He’d picked up, thank goodness. “Cassie’s in trouble.” Just like that, after—how long had it been? Ten years? And he’d known right away who it was, what the problem was, known exactly what they wanted.

She was nearly nineteen. It was her piano teacher. Like her mother, she’d always loved the piano. Sentimental Jem had given her lessons every year as a birthday present. A moony-eyed, thin-faced, hungry boy in London with no money, come down from Edinburgh to study music, passionately in love with her, he said. Angus was his name. He wanted to marry Cassie; Cassie, out of her mind with fear and shame, had said no. She was seeing Terry already. And she couldn’t bear the idea that she’d be the girl at secretarial college who’d have to leave because she got knocked up. She’d got the measure of Angus too, got him to agree to pay for the backstreet abortion, and Aunt Jem, full of surprises, had known just the woman. But Angus had done a bunk the day before, never turned up with the money. Aunt Jem didn’t have it, and then Cassie started saying
she’d run away. Have it, then ditch it. That’s when Jem called her nephew. “I don’t know what to do,” she’d said, her voice breaking. “I think she might hurt herself. Or the baby. Can’t you—come and see her?”

That summer was the last time he’d been back here, several visits culminating in the final time, when he came to collect his new daughter. For though things were changing on the King’s Road and elsewhere, in working-class Walthamstow where Cassie lived with Aunt Jem, a nineteen-year-old unmarried mother would have found herself alone and friendless fairly soon. Terry wouldn’t stick around, Cassie was sure of that. She’d lose her place at the secretarial college.

They told everyone Cassie was spending the summer in Ireland, helping a sick aunt. In fact, she came back to the old neighborhood, to Penton Street with Aunt Jem, took a room by the market, had the baby at the University College hospital down the road.

When Cassie handed the ten-day-old baby girl over to David, he took her gently, cradling the soft wrinkled head in one hand.

“Now, listen,” Cassie told him. “I don’t want to see her again.” She was very calm. “I don’t want nothing to do with it. I want to go on and forget all about it.”

He remembered her face when she said it. Only people who’d had a childhood like theirs would understand the need to start again, put the past entirely behind them. He’d done the same thing, after all, hadn’t he?

“Of course,” he’d said, and he’d leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, Cass. Don’t worry anymore.”

•   •   •

He thought about that now, and Florence growing every day at home, and the leaks and the money pouring down the Winterfold drains.

“I’m not sorry I did it,” she said. “Maybe I should be, but I’m not.”

And David said the first heartfelt thing he’d said all day. “I’m glad you did it too, Cassie. I love her more than—I love her more than if she was my own.”

She gave no sign that this pleased her, but he knew it did. “What’d you call her in the end?”

“We named her Florence. We call her Flo most of the time.”

“Flo.” She said it a few times. “It’s nice. She like me?”

“Yes, she is,” he said. “Really like you. She’s very clever.”

“Oh, sod off.”

“Her language is better than yours, anyway.” She laughed. “She’s very gangly, but very charming.”

“That’s her dad, the weirdo.”

“I think it’s us too. Mum.” They moved out of the way to let two shuffling old ladies pass.

“I was right, wasn’t I? To give her to you? Tell me I was right?”

“I think you were right.” He wished he didn’t feel so sick, so apprehensive, being back here. He’d throw his arms round her, squeeze her tight. “I know you were right, Cassie. Don’t you want to come and see her one day?” He thought of Florence, kneeling on her bed that morning, trying to make a flower out of paper, tongue sticking out in concentration. “She’s lovely.”

Cassie closed her eyes briefly and gave a bitter little smile. “No, Davy love. I don’t want to ever see her again, all right? Please don’t ask me again. You said you weren’t ever coming back. What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” David said.

His father hadn’t seen the point of Cassie, but her being born meant he didn’t bother David’s mother for a while, and that was a good thing. He kicked David around instead. Balanced him on the mantelpiece once, so he sat there, legs dangling, the coals from the fire burning his bare feet, while his father ate supper and laughed; and when his mother came home and scooped him back onto the floor, he hit her across the face. That time he broke her nose.

So every time he thought of his mother, something would remind him, lead him back to something else. David couldn’t see that the memories were important, that he shouldn’t bury them deep in his heart, that he might do himself more injury that way. He could only see how much they hurt him and his sister, and the damage they could do to Florence. He was sure Daisy knew the truth, he didn’t know how. And he sometimes felt Martha didn’t understand Florence the way he did.

He shivered. Cassie put her hand on his arm. “Listen, Davy. I’d best be off. They’ll be wondering where I went. I only said I was going to the post office. You get back home to Molly and those kids.”

“Martha.”

“All right, then.” She tossed her hair, and he knew she knew what
Martha was called. It was just bravado, what they did to get by, the Doolans of Muriel Street. “Good to see you, Davy. Honest.”

It occurred to him she was called Bourne now; that was Terry’s name. And he’d changed his name to Winter. Aunt Jem was dead, a heart attack last year. In a generation, there’d be nothing left of their old family, or their father’s name. Just their children, being brought up in the same house. David took out his little sketchbook, scribbled down his address, tore out the page and pressed it into her cold fingers. “Here. In case you ever need me.”

Cassie shook her head, her mouth clamped shut, her gray eyes swimming with tears. “Don’t ask me again,” she said after a minute. She looked down at the paper, then shoved it into her pocket. A gesture just like Florence’s, full of confidence and strangely awkward. “Got to get back to work now. Good seeing you again, big brother.”

“You too.” He kissed her cheek. “Terry treating you well?”

She waggled her head. “So-so. He’s all right. I’m all right. Hoping to have our kids next year. That’s what Terry wants. Suppose I do too. Anyway, bye, then.” She raised her hand like a signal, and then she was gone.

•   •   •

As he walked through the crowded backstreets, the old roads he knew so well, past the site of the old mission hall and Grimaldi’s churchyard and the old fishmongers, Cally Road toward King’s Cross, he knew he wouldn’t tell Martha he’d seen Cassie. And afterward, on the train going back to Winterfold, David flicked through the bomb-site drawings again, his eyes taking in every last detail, as if there might be some salvation in it. He knew he’d put them away when he got home, maybe never look at them again. Perhaps it was right they stayed in the past. Perhaps Cassie was right. For the remainder of the journey he practiced drawing Wilbur, as the coal-black steam threw smuts against the carriage windows, taking him farther and farther away from hell and back to his own home.