The Safest Place in London (23 page)

They boarded the next London train, finding space where they could in the corridor or standing. Fields and villages and lanes rushed past the window. England, it appeared, had changed out of all recognition and at the same time had not changed at all, and Gerald felt himself take pleasure in the tumble-down farm buildings, the canals, the frost on the ground, the bare branches of the trees.

Now I am on my way!

The train stopped and started again and was shunted into sidings to allow other trains to pass, it was rerouted and diverted and finally terminated altogether at Clapham Junction, which was not even on the Exeter to London line, but the line ahead was closed due to a bomb and they all disembarked.

It was late afternoon, around four. The day, such as it had been, had gone, and as Gerald stood on the platform with his kitbag the darkening evening air came at him through his ears and his mouth and his nose and even his eyes and he could not think.

There would be no more trains that day. They would have to continue their journey by bus or Underground. People drifted away, uncomplaining, numbed to discomfort, to unfulfilled expectations. Gerald could see none of his fellow Cairo travellers; they had melted away like the day itself, and any camaraderie that may have built up over the long and fraught journey had melted away with it. He left the station and found, outside, another public telephone and this one had a directory in it. He went into
the box and closed the door behind him, enjoying the relative warmth that the enclosed space momentarily afforded him, and repelled by the long-forgotten smell of phone-box stale cigarettes and piss. He fingers went to the ‘A's and he found Ashby's wife at 38 Commongate Road, Clapham. For Ashby had lived here, in Clapham, and of all the places he might have been stranded, fate had seen fit to dump him here, in Ashby's backyard. It was a penance for his survival, for his being spared while Ashby was taken. It must be done; why not now? God knew when he might find himself down here again.

He did not bother to try to telephone—the humourless laughter of the girl at the exchange in Exeter still sounded in his ear—but set off south and east towards the Common in the direction provided by a helpful clerk in the booking office.

There were Americans everywhere. He had not expected that. It seemed as though every uniform was that of a GI, every voice he heard an American one. They were fresh-faced and handsome, tall and lean and strong and smiling. He resented that. And so many civilians, hurrying home. Not one of them cast him a second glance, or if they did it was his deeply suntanned face that they saw, a visible sign that he had just returned from foreign parts, that he had just gone through a war in the desert.

Or did they think he had been on a long holiday on the Riviera?

No, they thought nothing, they turned away at once if they saw him at all. There was a barrier around him that they could not see and that Gerald was only dimly becoming aware of but it was swelling around him, intensifying, with each step he took among them. He very soon began to hate the civilians even more
than he resented the Americans. He wished only to be among other military men.

His eyes had adjusted quickly to the blackout so that he found the road easily enough. Pale moonlight showed him elegant late-Victorian villas on the north side of the road and the south side bordered the Common, a void that stretched away into the night, impenetrable and uninviting, and Gerald felt a longing for the desert so strong it took his breath away.

This was not how he'd imagined his homecoming.

Number 38 was a double-fronted four-storey establishment with bay windows and a small paved area at the front from which white-painted steps led up to a raised entranceway and a lead-lighted front door. A decorative lantern hanging above the door was unlit. The windows were black, as were all the windows the entire length of the street, and he only knew it was the right house because he had counted and now shone a tiny torch at the brass numbers on the gatepost. He had not given a thought to what he was going to say but little could be achieved by his remaining on the doorstep, so he rang the bell and waited. It seemed a vain and rather shameful hope that no one would be in, he knew Mrs Ashby
would
be in, and when he heard footsteps in the hallway he was not even surprised. Just for a second Ashby appeared, startlingly clear, before him and Gerald uttered a few silent words to him, part in prayer, part in apology.

The front door was cautiously opened and light from a distant room seeped out so that the blackout was compromised. Gerald saw a woman silhouetted in the doorway, a matronly figure with hair tied up in a bun and a girth that filled the doorway; he saw a tight-fitting functional dress and swollen ankles above feet
wedged into too-tight formal shoes. This could not be Ashby's wife. He had come to the wrong house.

The woman peered at him, and he could tell from the jerk of her head, her silence, that she took in his uniform, his kitbag. It was too dark for her to see his face.

‘I'm so sorry to bother you,' said Gerald, and his voice sounded absurd, somehow. ‘I'm looking for—is this the house of Mrs Ashby?' It was. He knew it by the way she lifted her chin, suspicion replaced by surprise, curiosity. ‘My name is Meadows. I was a friend of Captain Ashby. I just wanted to—'

He stopped. He wanted very much for this woman to interrupt him, to announce that, unfortunately, Mrs Ashby was out. That Mrs Ashby no longer lived here. That Mrs Ashby had taken her child and gone to live with relatives in Bristol for the duration. But instead she said, ‘Please wait here,' and went back inside, closing the door but reopening it almost at once and saying, ‘Won't you please come in, Mr Meadows?'

He followed her down a short, ill-lit but graceful hallway with a parquetry floor that smelled of wax furniture polish and potpourri and something indistinguishable but distinctively comforting and familiar, the smell of English houses filled with old furniture and thick carpets and flocked William Morris wallpaper and burning coal fires. And disconcertingly the hallway banked suddenly so that he reached out a hand to steady himself. It had happened periodically throughout the day as his body readjusted itself to the solid ground after the day spent in the aircraft, but he wished that the woman, who had paused outside a doorway, had not witnessed this. Her face gave nothing away and she stood aside to let him pass.

He found himself in a large and comfortable living room carpeted in dark green pile and wallpapered with some kind of roses design, heavy velvet curtains at the window and mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite reproductions on the wall. Crowded bookshelves, glass-fronted cabinets of chinaware and a chintz settee with two matching armchairs made up the bulk of the furniture. A beautiful original marble fireplace filled one wall with coals glowing hotly, a coal scuttle and tongs on the hearth before it. It was all so very, very English and Gerald smiled helplessly to see it.

Mrs Ashby was seated on the settee, perched on its edge, her legs crossed at the ankles, hands placed, one over the other, on her knee. It was her feet he saw first, black shoes, slender ankles, dark stockings, a charcoal grey skirt, a pinkish or mauve blouse with a bow at the collar and a black collarless woollen jacket of some sort, fitted and well cut. She sat very upright, and in the soft light of the lampshade and the flickering light from the coals one side of her neck was bathed red, the other side was in shadow. Even so, Gerald knew her, had seen her photograph and would have recognised her at once. The photograph Ashby had had was a studio shot, carefully staged, a woman swathed in furs, artfully made up and glancing at the camera with a still, serene face devoid of expression. Quite, quite beautiful yet utterly devoid of expression—and that was how she appeared to him now. She observed him as though she was that photograph brought to life, her face perfectly symmetrical, her mouth and eyes unmoving so that he had no sense of her at all, could not tell even if she wore make-up or not. A woman made of porcelain, perfect and flawless—and utterly breakable. For now he saw it, a flush of
colour on both cheeks that might have been heat from the fire but he knew was not. She rose in one fluid movement, uncrossing her legs, standing up, holding out one hand, the other hand falling to her side, her eyes never leaving his face.

‘Captain Meadows,' she said in a deep, clear voice, taking his hand as though she had been expecting him. ‘Please sit down. Mrs Woodcock, would you be a dear and bring tea and cake?'

The utter conventionality of her words struck him mute and Gerald sat, at a loss where to put his kitbag, handing it finally to the waiting Mrs Woodcock. Mrs Ashby sat down again, exactly as she had been sitting before, and without realising it he mimicked her, sitting on the edge of the sofa, turned slightly towards her, hands on his knees. And all the while her face did not move. There was an intensity about her, held rigidly in check, and at the same time a languidness that defied—and denied—all feeling. Or did he imagine that intensity? Either way, he could not take his eyes from it, for the only women he had seen in three years had been the Syrian, Moroccan, Egyptian girls outside the brothels or the occasional WAC, twenty years his junior, gauche and giggling, swapping lipsticks like schoolgirls. Mrs Ashby was another thing altogether: a woman in her later thirties with all the poise and sophistication, the serenity and elegance that her age conferred on her but none of the petty anxiety and faded beauty of a woman past her prime.

‘So kind of you to visit us,' she said. ‘Christopher mentioned you often in his letters.'

For a moment Gerald had no idea to whom she was referring. Ashby, of course, whom he had never, in all that time, called by his first name.

‘I wanted to pay my respects, Mrs Ashby. Your husband and I were in the same unit for a couple of years,' he heard himself saying. ‘We went through it all. Together. We—' He stopped. It was not what he wanted to say, but what
did
he want to say? Something momentous, something fitting. Something worthy of Ashby, of Ashby's death. Ashby's tank had been hit by a shell and Ashby had been incinerated at the start of the battle in the Western Desert. He hoped she already knew this or did not wish to know these details, for he doubted he could relate them to her in this room, seated on the chintz settee with the Pre-Raphaelites on the wall.

But she did not ask. Instead she smiled, though her face did not move. Her eyes told him nothing. Where was she? It was as though he was making conversation with a stranger on a train. His presence seemed to make no impression on her.

The woman, Mrs Woodcock, came in pushing a trolley and they both watched her as she served tea in two bone china teacups and two very small slices of some indeterminate cake on little plates.

‘Thank you, Mrs Woodcock,' Mrs Ashby said. ‘Would you ask Marcus to come down?'

And when the woman had gone Gerald said, ‘I hope you don't think me rude, turning up unannounced like this?' He searched her face to find some indication that she was put out or grateful—or something.

‘Not at all. It's so very kind of you to bother about us.'

Her words cut him painfully because they were so horribly bland and meaningless and because, truth be told, he had not wanted to come here at all—as surely she must know—and now
that he was here, he felt lost, somehow, in her presence. Did she see that?

A little boy appeared in the doorway. He was about four, dressed in too-large pink-and-white striped pyjamas and a dressing-gown that was tied around his middle. He had Ashby's hair, dark and wavy, and Ashby's ears, neat and small and flat against his head, but his mother's nose and eyes and mouth—watchful eyes, a delicate nose, slightly aristocratic, a wide mouth with narrow lips. The boy took in the tall, strange-smelling uniformed stranger and ran to his mother, wrapping his arms around her knees, burying his head in her lap.

And she gave the boy the same unsmiling smile, not moving other than to fold her arms around his small shoulders. She seemed to look over her little boy's head at the opposite wall, at something the rest of them could not see. ‘Marcus, come along,' she murmured, stroking his head. ‘Don't be shy. Say hello to Captain Meadows. He has travelled a long way to visit us.'

He
had
travelled a long way, but if his train had not terminated at Clapham he would not have come. Gerald watched them both wretchedly. The boy lifted his head and peered shyly, twisting his body as though he did not want the stranger to see him, or did not quite know what to do with it. ‘Hullo, there, old man,' said Gerald and hated himself.

Mrs Ashby had not touched her tiny slice of cake and now she pushed it towards her little boy and he gobbled it up and Gerald thought,
There is rationing here, I had forgotten
, and he passed his own slice to the boy too, though he was aching with hunger. He drank the tea, which was almost black, a few flakes of dried milk floating on its surface.

‘How long is your leave, Captain Meadows?' she said.

‘No idea,' he said truthfully, as no one had told him. ‘Not long, I expect. Once the paperwork catches up to me no doubt they'll ship me off again.'

‘And have you a family of your own?'

‘A wife and a little girl. In Buckinghamshire. I am on my way there now.'

She smiled but made no reply and Ashby filled the space between them with his absence.

The little boy stared at Gerald, picking at the crumbs on his plate and staring and staring.

‘You're just like him, old man,' said Gerald, because the boy's stare was unnerving him and because, at that moment, Marcus was just like his dead father. Horribly, Gerald felt his own eyes fill with tears.

Of course they both saw it, the little boy and her, Mrs Ashby, and Gerald saw the muscles go rigid beneath the skin on her face as her mask slipped for one dreadful moment then it was back and she smiled at him and said, ‘More tea, Captain Meadows?'