The Safest Place in London (16 page)

And meanwhile the poor wretched child, motherless now, had made its way to the place her mother had last been and began to pick at the pile of rubble and debris. It was pitiful. Someone would help her, surely, sooner or later. They would not leave the child, someone would come and claim it. The man in the seaman's duffle coat would come for her.

But the man did not come.

Instead two firemen reached them and jumped down, faceless and anonymous men who gently moved the little girl aside and set about removing what debris they could. They moved methodically, expertly, gloved hands pulling piece by piece until a body emerged. They stopped at one point and waved then started
moving the debris with more haste and a stretcher was called for. There was a long moment of frenzied activity when Diana became aware that one of them was alive, or might be alive. A body was pulled out and put on the stretcher and wrapped in a blanket and taken away, a body with a pulse, alive, or not yet dead at any rate. The firemen continued their work and a second body was found and this one too was placed on a stretcher and covered with a blanket but this time the head was covered and there was less haste and no one came to take the second stretcher away in the ambulance; instead it was laid out on a clear space on the platform, a human form covered with a grey blanket, and the two firemen were called away to search for other bodies elsewhere.

One dead, one not quite dead. Diana had seen the shadowy stubble and the short brown hair of the policeman on the first stretcher. And from beneath the blanket on the second stretcher a single foot protruded, a foot bare of stocking or shoe but still recognisably a woman's foot, perfect and unblemished and very white, very still. Diana stared at the foot.

No one had remembered about the little girl. She had crept over to the lifeless form on the stretcher and now she lay down beside it, beside her dead mother. The horror of this image struck Diana but at some remote level. She pulled Abigail closer to her as though this might shield her from the appalling sight.

A rescue crew began pulling people up onto the platform and leading them away. But still Diana did not move. Really, they were quite safe, she and Abigail, right here in their little spot near the tunnel entrance. They would stay here. The debris had fallen all around them but had not touched them. They had survived.

‘Come on, luv.'

Diana looked up into the blackened face of a fireman, his eyes red-rimmed and very white in his smoke-blackened face, his helmet and boots and waterproof suit massive beside her. ‘Time to go,' he said, and it was odd that she knew that this was what he had said when she couldn't hear his voice. Perhaps he had in fact said something completely different; perhaps he had said, ‘Sorry, missus, you're sitting on a mine and if you get up it will go off.' But that didn't seem likely for his face was gentle, his eyes were gentle, odd for such a hulking brute of a man in boots and a fireman's helmet. Water coursed in rivers off his shoulders and dripped from the rim of his helmet. He held out a grimy hand to help her. He seemed to want to take Abigail from her.

‘WE ARE QUITE ALRIGHT,' Diana assured him, and she wondered if she had shouted this because the fireman started slightly. She had heard the words quite clearly inside her own head but not in her ears, which was an odd sensation.

The fireman made some reply. He held out both arms as though he would take Abigail from her but Diana clasped her child tighter to her and after a moment the man appeared to be called away to help elsewhere as he stood up and left. But they were quite alright, she and Abigail, and after a time Diana got unsteadily to her feet, for they could not remain here. And why had the fireman ignored the poor, stricken little girl? she wondered. Perhaps he had not seen her, for she lay quietly beside the stretcher. She was oddly still. Surely the poor child could not believe her mother was alive?

It was time. Awkwardly, stiffly, Diana got to her knees. Her legs quivered beneath her, as feeble as cardboard, but did not give way. She took a tentative step then another before turning
back and reaching down to scoop up Teddy: he had survived; she would not abandon him now. Abigail would never forgive her. They made their way, scrambling and uncertain, up onto the platform. From here they made their way to the stretcher and Diana kneeled down beside the lifeless form covered by the grey blanket where the single bare foot protruded. She wanted to say a prayer—it would be a prayer not just for the dead woman but for them all, the dead woman's child and herself and her own child—but in the end she said nothing as she didn't know what such a prayer might sound like.

It was time. She lowered her gaze to Abigail's face, which was perfect, flawless, untouched, just as though the explosion had sucked the breath out of her, had sucked the life from her body. So still. She could be sleeping. No sign of an injury, nothing to show that she was gone, just an absence of life. Diana kneeled. Another Diana, watching from very far above, saw her take the lifeless form that was at her breast and lay it beside the dead woman. Saw her bend over and for the final time kiss her child's smooth, white face. Saw her get calmly to her feet. Her child was dead.

She turned to the little girl who had lost her mother and who was crouching, senseless in her grief, beside her mother's body, and she picked the child up in both arms and walked out of the station with her.

Outside the dawn had come. Brilliant sunlight blinded them. A dozen, two dozen people milled about. Rescued shelterers sat on the floor with blankets wrapped around them. First-aid crews handed out steaming mugs, men from a fire crew stood silently sipping drinks. Hoses and buckets and shovels and axes
lay in piles at their feet. Stretchers were being loaded into waiting ambulances, a young woman with a limp was being led away. A man was having his head bandaged, his face and hands bloodied. The entrance to the station was blackened and smouldering, many of the bricks charred where a fire had broken out. It had rained in the night so that everything was shiny with that damp after-rain smell, and after the shouts and cries and screams and the crash of falling rubble there was now the silence of a sky free of bombers and searchlights and flak, the silence of an English winter morning.

Diana saw all this and saw none of it. The roaring continued in her ears but she could make out other sounds now, too, though they were muffled and that was fine. The great pressing weight had gone, right at the very moment that it had overwhelmed her. A woman in a maroon apron reared into her line of vision to thrust a mug of tea into her hands, to place a blanket around her, but Diana veered away from the woman. She tasted dust and ash on her lips. She swallowed and ash coated her tongue and her throat. She picked her way over the debris, passing piles of rubble and the twisted girders of smouldering metal and the skeletons of houses that had been hit during the night. Hoses were strewn across the streets and huge puddles of water were everywhere. A column of thick black smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, covering everything with a choking, seared smell that grabbed at the windpipe and sucked the air out of her lungs. Many of the buildings had been cordoned off. On the ground were strewn pieces of furniture, items of clothing, a doll's head. Odd shoes. A hat. On the corner of Bethnal Green Road someone had hung a Union Jack and it fluttered limply in the chill winter air.

Diana picked her way carefully, maintaining her balance with difficulty as she held the little girl in both arms, though unhampered by the little blue travelling case, which she had not brought with her nor even given a thought to. They made their way to a bus stop. Surprisingly they did not have to wait long. London had been bombed and people had died but this morning the birds were singing and the buses were running. A number 8 bus came along and they got on and the bus pulled away and left.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

North Africa

Gerald Meadows kneeled down beside a dead German officer and saw that the man's eyes had been picked out by vultures. Two gaping black holes stared blankly back at him and a swarm of flies shot into the air and swirled angrily about him. Otherwise the man's face was untouched, the flesh puckered a little and peeling from the sun, but the forage cap still on his head, his unit insignia glinting in the sun, his uniform, that of a captain in the Afrika Korps, intact. His holster was empty. Someone had been here before them. The man was lying on his back and Gerald could see no obvious sign of how he had died. If he turned the fellow over he would see some gaping wound in the back of his skull or a scorched, bloodied hole in his back.

Gerald stood up. They were not here to investigate anyone's death.

A short distance away a burnt-out armoured vehicle lay on its side as though it had struck a mine or been hit by an anti-tank missile. Perhaps the dead officer had been thrown from the car.
It was a distance of thirty, forty yards but it was possible. Anything was possible, it seemed, in war. The limits of what one assumed was possible, in terms of human endeavour, human survival, human depravity, just kept expanding. Perhaps there was no limit. Perhaps the very notion of a limit was pointless.

Gerald walked away from the dead officer, ostensibly to look over the burnt-out vehicle but really just for form's sake. The vehicle had been destroyed, there was nothing salvageable. The upholstery was gone, the radio melted, even its markings had been burned off. It had clearly been here a long time, months perhaps. And yet the corpse was fresh. In the desert a two-day-old corpse was bloated and blackened and riddled with maggots. If you pulled, even gently, at a limb while searching for documents or identity discs it would come off in your hand.

But this corpse was fresh. Where had he come from, then?

The war here in the desert had ended six months ago with the capture of Tunis. Most of Rommel's troops and what remained of the Italian forces had been rounded up. Most, but not all. Some had escaped, made their way along the coast hoping for some sort of Dunkirk-esque evacuation by the German Navy that had never eventuated, or fled south into the Blue—like this chap, presumably. Had he been trying to get back to his own lines all this time? He would have been better off surrendering to the Allied forces rather than dying out here alone, in a desert, his eyes plucked out by vultures.

I would have surrendered, thought Gerald.

He studied the ground. Clearly the poor bastard had not come here on foot, yet there were no tracks, or none discernible in the rough scrubby terrain. Desert stretched in all directions, rocky and
impassable in this part, unscaleable soft sand dunes elsewhere, and it was odd, he reflected, referring to it as ‘the Blue', for there was every colour in the desert except blue. But that was what the men called it. And it was beautiful at dawn and at dusk when the myriad colours, the sudden change in temperature, made you stand in awe to see it. The rest of the time it was a hellish cauldron.

And the flies. They were enough to send a sane man crazy. He brushed them away from his face and readjusted the scarf that he wore wrapped Arab-style around his head. It was not official military headgear but the usual rules did not seem to apply in the desert. He had arrived fresh off a troopship three years earlier, laden down with all manner of kit, none of which seemed to have been designed with desert warfare in mind. Now all he wore—all any of the men wore—were his boots, a single pair of khaki drill shorts, a shirt so caked in dried sweat it was stiff as a board, and the headscarf. Aside from a change of underwear and a groundsheet and his mess tin and canteen, this was all the kit he had. It was all he needed.

Enderby and Crouch stood a little distance away, not together, smoking their foul cigarettes. Enderby, their gunner, stood in the shade provided by their stationary tank, squinting at some papers he had pulled from his pocket. Crouch, their driver, stood a little further away on a slight rise, surveying the horizon, a hand shielding his eyes, the other hand swatting the unceasing flies. They both waited silently, patiently, unquestioningly, for Gerald to decide what they would do next.

What
would
they do next? He wasn't entirely sure.

It had bothered him at first, that constant need to give orders, to make decisions. It had seemed wearying, burdensome,
potentially catastrophic, but they had survived thus far. Indeed, it had turned out that his decisions made very little difference. They would stay the night or move on; they would head south or bear east, they would stop and investigate, they would continue on their way. None of it actually seemed to matter. The war in the desert was over, the rest of the division had landed in Italy in September and were now back in England for rest, refitting and retraining. A handful of skeleton units had been left behind on a mopping-up operation: salvage and rescue, though there was nothing to salvage and no one to rescue.

Gerald pulled a battered chart and his sun compass from his shirt pocket and studied both carefully, hoping to find something that would help him. There was nothing on the chart. It was a chart of the desert. They were some sixty or seventy miles south of Khoms, between Misrata on the Mediterranean coast and the desert settlement of Bani Walid, which was, one presumed—one hoped—somewhere to the west, though it had thus far eluded them. They weren't lost, there was no question of that, it was just that their exact position at this moment was tricky to pinpoint. Their tank had a hundred-and-thirty-mile range and they had enough petrol for one more refuelling, assuming the petrol had not evaporated in the can.