Letters to the Lost (30 page)

‘Goddammit Stella . . .’ He let her go and took a few steps back, rubbing a hand over his face as the implications of her words sank in. ‘Jesus.
Jesus
.’

‘It’s all right. It’s over now. And you’re here . . .’ She still couldn’t be certain she wasn’t dreaming. ‘How long have you got?’

‘I’m back on duty Thursday.’

Thursday. She thought quickly. Charles was leaving on Tuesday, but not until the afternoon. He had to be at Waterloo at five o’clock.

‘That gives us Tuesday night and all of Wednesday.’ Not enough, never enough, but a gift nonetheless. Their eyes met across the table. ‘Where?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll find somewhere.’

*

Leaving her was like cutting off his own arm. The shadows were back in her eyes as she stood at the back door of that great bleak tomb of a house and watched him walk down the path to the gate.

The sound of singing drifted over from the ugly Victorian brick church across the road. He recognized the hymn:
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.
Hatred blackened his heart. What did that bastard know about love? He imagined slipping in through the arched doors and striding right down the aisle to land a punch right in his face in front of his blind, adoring congregation. It took just about every ounce of willpower to keep walking.

He had no sense of where he was going, his head too full to take in any detail of the streets he passed along. His thoughts were not distinct from one another but a dark mass, a swarm of bees. He could hear Louis Johnson’s voice calmly telling him to keep going forward, just like he did in dense cloud cover at twenty thousand feet, though Johnson had been hit in the chest by a twenty-millimetre shell on the Hanover mission and had died somewhere over the English Channel on the return to base.

The small of his back was wet with sweat. He felt slightly dizzy, like he hadn’t slept for days, though they’d given them tablets at the flak farm that knocked them out for ten hours straight. Fitcham Park it was called. It was some big fancy pants Neo-Palladian pile in the country that was supposed to supply the battle-weary officer with every comfort he might desire.

It had given Dan the creeps. The library-like silence that weighted the air in the huge rooms felt unnatural, and meant that the noises inside his head – the constant roar of engines, Louis Johnson’s voice – were all the louder. The smiles of the Red Cross girls had been painted on a little too brightly, and the empty days which they were supposed to fill playing croquet or shooting skeets gave him too much time to think. About Hamburg’s burning schools and burning houses. About Louis Johnson with his flying suit all dark and glistening with blood, his baby boy without a father. About Stella. He knew that seeing her for five minutes would do him more good than five weeks at Fitcham Park.

Leaving had just been a matter of signing out; the Red Cross girl on the desk had expressed regret but hadn’t tried to stop him. Adelman and Morgan had been more difficult to get past, but since neither of them had been sober since they’d arrived their objections were half-hearted. He’d caught the train to London and spent last night in the only hotel he could find with a room available; a tall, narrow building on Greek Street, that got progressively dingier and more down at heel on each successive floor.

He stopped at a crossroads now, totally disorientated. He had no idea where he was, nor how to get back into the city, though it occurred to him that he didn’t particularly want to go back there, either to the crowded streets or the depressing hotel room. The day stretched ahead of him and he felt the familiar panic begin to rise, filling his legs with sand.

A bus was swaying up the road. On impulse he stuck out his hand and swung onto the platform at the back, then climbed the narrow stairs to the top deck.

‘Where to, sweetheart?’

The woman with the ticket machine was blonde and stout and matronly. She smiled at Dan with great kindness, which told him how rough he must look.

‘I don’t care. Anywhere.’

It was warm. The sun on his cheek and the rocking and swaying of the vehicle were soporific and soothed him into a welcome half-doze. The branches of trees brushed against the windows and the streets were Sunday quiet. They passed people spilling out of a church into the sunshine and it made him think of Charles goddamn Thorne, which jolted him awake again.

He sighed and felt in his pockets for cigarettes before remembering he’d smoked the last one instead of having breakfast. Dammit. He turned to look out of the window, the brief spell of tranquillity broken. They were passing between rows of pretty Edwardian villas but a little further along the street, beyond a grassy gap where a house must once have stood, he could see a row of shops. He got to his feet and staggered down the steps.

As the bus lumbered away he found himself standing on a neat high street. There was a butcher’s shop, its blinds pulled down and a sign saying ‘Closed’ hanging on the door. Next to it was a dress shop called Uptown Fashions with a headless, handless mannequin in the window, wearing a grey dress of notable ugliness. Beyond that was a greengrocer, a tiny drugstore and – right at the end – a newsagent and tobacconist’s.

It was closed.

Of course. Sunday. A great surge of frustrated fury rose up inside him and he grasped the brass handle on the door and shook it roughly before falling forward against the glass, resting his hands and his forehead on its cool surface. A mosaic of hand-written cards was stuck behind the glass, making it difficult to see anything inside.
LOST: BLACK AND WHITE CAT
, he read on one of the cards. The paper was yellowed, the ink faded – along with any hope of recovering the cat, Dan imagined. He glanced at the other cards, all of which seemed to be of a similar vintage:
Daily Help Wanted by Gentleman, Weston Park, Lunch Provided. SEWING BEE, Tuesdays 10 am – 12 noon, All Saints Church Hall, all welcome. HOUSE FOR SALE: 4 Greenfields Lane, Church End. Contact J. B. Furnivall Solicitors, Highgate 8369.

His pointless anger spent, he was about to turn away but something made him look back and read the last card again. Then he felt in his pockets and dug out the bus ticket he’d just bought. On the back, very small, he wrote the name and telephone number of the solicitor, as out of the chaos of his raging thoughts, a plan began to emerge.

J. B. Furnivall’s office was on the ground floor of his home, a handsome Georgian townhouse on a leafy square. At five minutes to two on Monday afternoon, Dan was shown into the waiting room by his secretary. She had the solid proportions and stately profile of a ship’s figurehead and Dan assumed she was the person he’d spoken to that morning, who’d made out that it was both hugely inconvenient and nigh-on impossible to grant Dan an appointment at such short notice. Mr Furnivall was engaged with other business, she informed him now, gesturing to a row of hard chairs lined up against the wall. Dan waited, trying to ignore the smell of mutton that hung greasily in the air and mentally recreating the room as it must have been before partition walls had cut through cornices and mouldings to divide the space. Eventually Mr Furnivall appeared. It was quite obvious that the only business he’d been engaged with was lunch.

As briefly as possible, Dan outlined the reason for his visit and opened his cheque book. The solicitor steepled his plump fingers and gave a patronizing smile.

‘I’m afraid, Lieutenant Rosinski, it’s not that simple. I don’t know about Chicago, but over here these things take time.’

‘And I’m afraid, Mr Furnivall, I don’t
have
time.’

He kept his voice even, pleasant, but his patience – frayed by another impatient, sleepless night in the Greek Street hotel – was down to its last thin threads.

Mr Furnivall sighed and began rearranging the papers on his desk. ‘As I hope my secretary made clear, I too am very busy. However, I will endeavour to get a letter sent off to Mrs Nichols by the end of the day. She’s the current owner of the house, now residing at Blackstone Hall in Dorset.’ Dan wondered if this detail was intended to intimidate him. ‘Then, when I have had her reply I will contact you and arrange—’

‘How about you telephone her?’ Dan interrupted. ‘Now. Save yourself the job of writing the letter.’ He managed to stop himself from prefixing the word ‘letter’ with ‘fucking’, but only just.

‘Telephone her?’

‘Sure. You said she was living in some big house – Black-something Hall – so she must be on the telephone there, right? Tell her I’m sitting right here with the money and I’d like to buy her house. I guess she wants to sell it, so it really is quite simple.’

‘If I may just point out that you don’t exactly have the money, Lieutenant Rosinski. You have a cheque, from the –’ he leaned forward, sliding his spectacles down his nose to peer at the cheque with elaborate disdain, ‘Illinois National Bank; a cheque which I have no proof will be worth any more than the paper on which it is written – which, although a valuable commodity in these troubled times, doesn’t quite cover the price of a house.’

That was J. B. Furnivall’s attempt at a joke, Dan realized. He could tell from the way his lips stretched into his attempt at a smile.

‘Does the name JMR mean anything to you, sir?’

‘The motor manufacturing company?’

‘Got it in one – the motor manufacturing company that produced most of the tanks that ground Rommel into the dirt in Africa earlier this year. Perhaps you don’t know that those initials stand for Josef Marek Rosinski; my father, who founded the company. I have no worries that the Illinois National Bank will honour this cheque, or that my lawyers in Chicago will be able to handle the paperwork arising from the purchase of one small, vacant London property. Now please, if you would put a call through to Mrs Nichols I can buy her house before I go back to my base to get shot up over Germany again.’

Furnivall glared at him coldly but reached for the telephone. In a tone of quivering superiority he asked the operator for Blackstone Hall, Upper Compton, switching to oily ingratiation as Mrs Nichols answered.

For a man who claimed to be busy he sure didn’t seem to be in a hurry as he enquired after first her health, and then that of Mr Nichols. When he finally got round to raising the subject of the house, he made it sound almost like an irrelevant detail. An
American
gentleman, he said regretfully, looking past Dan towards the portrait of a pinched-looking man in a wig and gown above the fireplace. ‘Lieutenant Rosinski, an airman in the US Air Force. He’s keen to conclude matters as quickly as possible, though of course I have pointed out to him that that’s not necessarily in your best interests, Mrs Nichols.’

He said this like he expected it to conclude the matter. Dan felt the last glow of hope begin to fade and clenched his fists in impotent rage. In that moment it struck him how much hope he’d invested in this plan: the only hope he had left.

He’d asked about the house yesterday, in the pub where he’d bought cigarettes. The landlady had given him directions that led eventually to a little row of four cottages tucked away like overlooked children between the shops along the main street and the backs of tall Victorian houses. Workers’ cottages of absolute architectural simplicity; unadorned London brick, small square windows beneath a low slate roof. There was something honest about them. Something clean and straightforward that appealed to him.

An ordinary house in an ordinary street.

When he’d said he’d find somewhere for them to be together he’d meant a room in one of the better hotels – better than Greek Street anyway. But then he’d thought of the bruise on her cheek and he knew that he had to offer her something more solid than that. More permanent. Somewhere that would be hers, and would keep her safe and give her the chance to get out of her god-awful travesty of a marriage if he didn’t survive.

And now some bastard of a solicitor was about to close off that escape route. Slumped in the chair he felt a blast of utter desolation. Sure, there must be other houses, but he didn’t have the time to go looking for them. He didn’t have the time to hang around waiting while Furnivall shuffled paper and sent laborious letters and took two hours for lunch. With nineteen missions behind him, the odds shortening, luck running out and the targets getting more ambitious he had a feeling he didn’t have the time for anything much any more.

He was just about to get to his feet and stop wasting whatever time was left to him when he saw Furnivall’s expression change. The smugness was abruptly wiped away and replaced with alarm.

‘Now? Yes, I have him here, but—’ A pause. ‘Of course.’ Alarm hardened into flinty dislike as he held out the receiver to Dan. ‘Mrs Nichols would like to speak to you.’

‘Close your eyes.’

‘Dan! I’ll fall over!’

‘You won’t. I’ve got you. I’m holding you. I’m not going to let you fall.’

In the darkness all her senses were sharpened. She was aware of the rank green smell of shrubbery in late-summer gardens, the dusty street, Dan’s clean, warm scent. His arm was around her waist, guiding her forwards and holding her firm. An involuntary smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, like a kite catching the breeze. All this secrecy reminded her of the Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s and the moment she first knew she was falling in love with him. She wondered what special surprising thing he was going to show her now.

They stopped. She felt him bend to put her suitcase down; he’d taken it from her the moment she stepped out of the cab. In it were the mysterious items – two sheets and a blanket – he’d asked her to bring when he’d telephoned the Vicarage after Charles had left. She’d joked that he was taking her to spend the night in some musty army bell tent, but he’d simply said she’d have to wait and see.

There was grass beneath her feet, long grass that tickled her bare ankles, making the tent idea seem more plausible than ever. But where could you put up a tent in London? Curiosity almost got the better of her but he stood behind her and covered her eyes with his hands – gently, so as not to hurt her bruised cheek, even though the swelling was mostly gone.