All Fall Down (7 page)

Hettie closed the magazine. In a way, though the question came out of the blue, she wasn't surprised. ‘Is that what all this is about?'

‘All what?'

‘You going narky on your ma. I knew it wasn't like you.'

‘Who says I'm narky?' Meggie's dark eyes flashed.

‘I do. That's it, isn't it? You're on your pa's trail and you don't want to let on.'

‘I wish I was.'

‘What?'

‘On his trail. I've been up Tottenham Court Road more times than I can count.' She explained her conviction that she'd once set eyes on Richie Palmer in the Underground shelter. ‘I've been back ever so many times, Auntie Ett.'

‘By yourself?'

‘Not always. Sometimes Jimmie O'Hagan comes along.'

‘Good, I wouldn't want you up Soho on your own.' Hettie knew from her time in the Sally Army that the streets could be grim. ‘And you've seen this tramp only the once?'

‘Yes. There are hundreds of them everywhere you look, huddled up in the bunks, or just drifting along the platforms. Every time I see one I think, this is him! Then he turns around with his horrible old face and his stinking breath and it isn't the same one after all. He gives me a mouthful for getting in his way and off he goes.'

Hettie leaned forward to take her hands. ‘It won't do you no good.'

‘Why? He ain't dead, is he?'

‘Not as far as we know.'

‘Do you know how I could find him?' She appealed from the bottom of her heart. Her lip trembled, she sounded desperate.

‘I don't, darling.' Hettie stroked her hair. It was natural for the poor girl to be curious, but she feared she would be in for a terrible shock. She didn't think for a second that the man Meggie had glimpsed could be Richie Palmer, but the truth could be equally bad. Last heard of, Richie was drinking himself to death in the back streets of Stepney, lying low from the police. ‘And even if I did, don't you think it should be your ma you were asking?'

Meggie turned her head away sharply. ‘I can't do that.'

‘Why not? You've always been close, you two. Sometimes I think you're more like sisters than mother and daughter.'

‘That's why. I know Ma too well; she ain't coping right now. She misses the boys. I can't go adding to her troubles, can I?'

Hettie thought this through. ‘You're a good girl, Meggie. But truth is always better than lies.'

‘I ain't telling lies!'

She meant the lie of omission. ‘But you ain't telling her what you're up to, see, and she's worried sick about you. Come to that, it might be a relief for her to hear what all this is about.'

‘I can't. I can't tell her.' Since she was small Meggie had been used to shielding her mother, who seemed somehow to live life on top of some sleeping volcano. There were times when she ‘wasn't herself', or ‘her nerves were bad'. Times when Meggie took charge of the boys and let her ma rest, not often, but the sense of Sadie's fragility was strong in the house.

Hettie sighed. Meggie was doing all the wrong things for the right reasons. ‘And I can't tell you about Richie Palmer without going to Sadie and asking her first. That wouldn't be right, see?' She was scrupulous. She saw rumour and gossip as dangerous weapons.

Meggie bit her lip. ‘I might as well ask her straight out myself.'

‘You might,' her aunt said gently, insistently.

‘If you ask me she's round the bleeding twist.' Rob switched off the radio with a violent snap. These days he and Walter had to hang around a lot in their Meredith Court depot, waiting for the phone to ring. Walter had just dropped the bombshell news that Sadie was out with Meggie, combing the streets to find Richie Palmer.

‘What can I do?'

‘Put your foot down, that's what.' He wouldn't have stood any such nonsense from Amy.

‘It ain't that easy, Rob.' Walter was on his way to check the sandbagging around the entrance to the Nelson Gardens shelter. He reached for his tin hat and got ready to go.

Rob flicked his cigarette to the floor and ground it underfoot. ‘You mean to say they're out looking for him right this minute?' For a second he was speechless. ‘And you let them? I don't know
why you didn't just take your taxi and drive them round, get it over and done with.'

‘Look, I ain't saying I like what's going on—'

‘Like it? I should bleeding well hope not.' He worked himself up. ‘And what's gonna happen if they do find him?'

‘They won't, don't you worry.' Walter tightened his helmet strap under his chin, ready to step out into the raw, cold night.

‘Says you. If you ask me, we should've nailed him before now, right at the start when we found out his little game.'

‘Don't drag it up, Rob. It won't do no good.' He felt suddenly weary.

‘It ain't me dragging it up. It's Meggie, ain't it? And Sadie. She's gone soft in the head if she thinks Palmer will welcome his kid with open arms.'

Walter shrugged. ‘No need to rub it in.'

‘Sorry. But that's what I mean, she ain't taken you into account, has she?' Rob's old hatred of Richie Palmer had risen up and grabbed him by the throat. ‘After what he tried to do to you.'

‘She does think of me. She don't sleep at night for thinking of me, and Meggie, and the boys. She's worn to a shadow thinking of others. Don't suppose it's easy for Sadie; it ain't.' She'd agonized for weeks after Meggie had come in one night and announced that she wanted to find her real pa. ‘Coping with the war's bad enough, without any of this on top.'

‘And didn't Meggie think of that before she opened her big mouth?'

Walter sighed. ‘Don't go on, Rob. I just mentioned it in case they do manage to track him down. I didn't want it dropping on you out of the blue.' The truth was, he'd happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the so-called accident happened fifteen years earlier. Richie had messed about with the taxi's brakes in an effort to get back at Rob, not him. If Walter hadn't taken the cab out on the off-chance, it would have been Rob who'd ended up under the wheels of the tram. ‘Meggie don't know every little thing that went on. Sadie's kept it quiet all these years. All
she knows is, her pa ran off. Now she says she wants to meet up with him before it's too late.'

‘Too late for what? Maybe someone should tell the kid the whole truth.' Rob lit up another cigarette.

‘No.' Walter stopped in the doorway. ‘Don't do that.'

‘Why not?'

‘Sadie still don't want her to know.' It wasn't nice to find out your pa had tried to kill your uncle and got your stepdad by mistake.

Rob shook his head, diving for the ringing phone across the cluttered desk. ‘Bleeding mad.'

He sat shrouded by smoke, cigarette dangling from his mouth as he took down details of the job. By the time he'd finished, Walter had buttoned up his heavy jacket and was gone.

Walter didn't like any aspect of the current search for Richie Palmer any better than Rob. He had plenty of time to think of it as he paced the dark streets, finding his way by the white bands painted around the tree trunks at the edge of Nelson Gardens. For a kick-off, he didn't like to think of Sadie and Meggie out by themselves on these dark nights. After five months of waiting on tenterhooks for the German threat to materialize – for the gas rattles to sound, the fire bombs to land – it wasn't so much that he thought any longer that they'd get caught in an air raid. By now everyone was jaded, irritable, even let-down, but certainly not afraid that Jerry would suddenly arrive out of the sky in a storm of gas clouds and a burst of flames.

No, it was the blackout and what went on under cover of darkness. There were areas where it wasn't safe to walk, yet Meggie insisted that Soho was the area to search. She'd got it into her head that her father had moved on from the East End, north of the river to the richer pickings of the theatre and club area. Reluctantly, after much soul-searching, Sadie had agreed they should look together.

‘What if she's right?' Walter had wanted to know. ‘What if Richie does turn up?'

Sadie had stared back at him from hollow eyes, red-rimmed with
sleeplessness. ‘He won't,' she assured him. ‘You know Richie; when he wants to vanish he does it good and proper.'

‘Well then?' He wanted to hold her close so as not to see her fears.

‘Well then, let her look, get it out of her system. Where's the harm in that? But I'd rather she had me with her, and I'm glad we know what she's up to, at any rate.'

‘Righto, and what if Richie don't turn up, like you say?'

‘Then at least she tried. And she won't be so hard on herself after.'

‘Meggie? What's she got to feel bad about?'

Sadie had sighed and turned over in bed, her face away from him. Now Walter shone his torch over the wall of sandbags at the shelter entrance. He heard her reply loud and clear as if she stood next to him.

‘Meggie's got it into her head that it was her fault Richie ran off in the first place. No, it ain't sensible, I know, but that's what she thinks; that there was something the matter with her that made her pa leave us in the lurch.'

His duty done, Walter switched off his torch and headed for home. Absent-mindedly he checked the blackout as he went along Union Street and on to Duke Street. The odd car crept by, headlights hooded and dimmed. Gas mask posters hung in tatters from an old billboard, some wag had scratched a Hitler moustache onto the face of the blonde socialite beauty who bore the message, ‘Keep Mum, She's Not So Dumb'. The Duke was already closed up for the night, Paradise Court was silent and empty.

At Number 32 he turned the key and opened the door into the dark, cold house. Sadie and Meggie weren't back, though it was half past eleven, on the mantelpiece clock. He turned on the radio. ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling.' The jackass tones of Lord Haw-Haw droned over the airwaves as Walter went through to the kitchen to boil the kettle and wait.

‘You ain't carrying your gas mask.' Edie looked up from her desk.
Tommy was setting off for the bank to fetch the wages. She tut-tutted in a maternal fashion.

He hitched up his jacket collar. ‘It ain't me you're worried about, Edie Morell, it's your blessed pay packet.' Teasing her was one of life's few remaining pleasures.

‘How did you guess?'

‘ 'Cos I know you women, you're all the same. You're only ever after a bloke's money.'

She smiled. ‘Anyhow you should take your mask.' She went to the filing cabinet to fetch it for him. He ducked sideways as she tried to sling it around his neck.

There was something about her that knocked him off balance; not physically, though he pretended to stagger across the room. Well, yes, it was physical; her slim figure and wavy golden hair sent him reeling in earnest. He felt again that one of these days he would let this reaction slip, when he should do his best to conceal it. They could all do without that sort of complication in their lives.

‘Righto then, it's your neck you're risking.' She hung the mask from the door hook and went bade to work at her desk, totting up hours for Lorna Bennett who'd recently stepped into Dorothy's shoes behind the furnishing fabric counter. Tommy's wife now refused to serve in the shop; she preferred to spend her days dolling herself up ready for her nights out.

‘If I'm not back in an hour send out reinforcements,' Tommy joked. He set his hat at an angle, one foot on the bottom step of the basement office. ‘
If you want a sack of flour send out three and fourpence
.'

‘Come again?' She glanced up, trying not to laugh. It only encouraged him.

‘Chinese whispers.'

‘I'll whisper you,' she warned.

‘Is that a threat or a promise?' He'd pushed his luck. He saw her blush and pointedly ignore him, so he took the stairs two at a time, whistling his way past Lorna, who arched her already
arched and pencilled eyebrows and wriggled her skirt smooth over her hips.

‘Remember my bonus, Mister O'Hagan,' she called out over the head of Dolly Ogden, in to price up net curtain material for Charlie's room. Lorna had all the cheek Edie lacked.

‘What bonus is that, Lorna?'

‘Danger money, for staying open like the Windmill Theatre. You know, “We never close!” ' She'd taken to ignoring the warning sirens, like many of her friends. And now she resented all the business with identity and ration cards. It made everything so drab. She was even having to consider using curtain fabric from the shop to make herself a new dress.

‘Pigs might fly.' Tommy sniffed and went out. His trip to the bank might take in the market at the back of the cathedral, where he would see what he could pick up on the sly. He didn't mind doing his best for the girls who worked for him; they, at least, would appreciate his efforts.

He came back with the wages and a pair of nylon stockings each for Lorna and Edie.

‘You'll never guess what I heard,' he told Jimmie, just come into the shop from his job serving petrol outside Powells. His kid brother hung around luscious Lorna like a bee round a honeypot. ‘They say in the market that the whole of the cathedral crypt is stacked high with empty coffins, just in case. You can't move for the bleeding things, thousands of them, horrible boxes made of plywood.'

‘Cheerful, ain't we?' Lorna took her nylons and stuffed them into her bag.

‘No point hiding your head in the sand, that's what I say.'

‘Well they got it wrong, ain't they?' She tilted her head defiantly. ‘Might as well chop them all up for firewood, all the use they're gonna be.'

‘Touch wood.' Jimmie tapped the counter. ‘See, wood – coffins – touch wood. See?'

‘Yeah, yeah.' Lorna screwed up her red mouth and told him to
shove off. Meanwhile Tommy went down to deliver the wages to Edie.