The Safest Place in London (24 page)

He did not want more tea but accepted with a nod and he knew the child saw through his politeness and despised him. But it allowed them both a minute of silence as she, his mother, carefully stirred the teapot, poured a small amount into Gerald's cup and offered him a spoonful of the dreadful dried milk, and her calmness, her poise, was devastating and magnificent now that he had seen the mask slip for that one vital moment. He wanted to reach over and fold her in his arms as she had enfolded the boy, to take her hand and hold it in his. He felt this need filling him up and filling the room as, a short while ago, Ashby had filled it.

‘Ashby—Christopher—spoke of you often,' he said desperately.

Ashby had spoken of her hardly at all. It was not what one did on the eve of battle, in the mess, under a tarpaulin in the desert, on the terrace of a hotel in Cairo. One talked about tanks and munitions and the other officers and the CO and the mosquitos and the flies and the dysentery.

‘Did he?' she replied, almost wistfully, and he saw that she knew he was lying. Why had he even said such a thing? But he had needed to bring Ashby back into the room. ‘May I get you another slice of cake?' she said. ‘Not that we have any, but it's conventional to offer, isn't it?' And before he could think of a reply, ‘It's this damned war,' she said, uttering the usual cliché but dully, as though it had ceased to hold any meaning. Gerald wondered if she was referring to the lack of cake or the death of her husband.

After half an hour he got up to go; any sooner would have looked improper. She stood up at once the way someone does when they have been waiting for you to leave, but when she stood by the door and held his hand she exclaimed, ‘Oh, you poor man! How cold your hands are!' and disappeared into a cupboard. When she reappeared she was holding two big thick sheepskin gloves and she took each of his hands and placed the gloves on him one by one, the way a wife might do for her husband. Gerald realised they were Ashby's gloves.

‘We won't need them,' she said simply, as though he had spoken out loud.

He escaped with Ashby's gloves on his hands, fleeing the house, fleeing the woman, who was Ashby's widow, and her son, who was Ashby's little boy, bumbling his way in the blackout, not
knowing where he was going or in which direction. Her calmness and her poise followed him, no matter which way he turned.

It was raining. The coldness of the rain shocked him into stopping and lifting his face to the rain till it was wet. He must get home. The delay seemed suddenly intolerable.

He found himself on a main road with a bus stop, where he waited, without hope, for a bus. When one came, he got on and an hour later was disgorged into the busy, choking melee around Victoria Station. It was a test, the visit to Mrs Ashby, some complicated test that he had somehow failed, though he could not put his finger on how, but now that he was away from the woman and her son, as every step put time and miles between him and them, the fact of his failure receded.

He walked north from Victoria, a part of, yet separate from, the melee, colliding with lampposts and other people, stumbling into craters and over bomb debris, making his way doggedly across the city that was his home and was as alien as the surface of the moon. And when he reached Baker Street Underground station it was closed due to the bombing, and when he went, instead, to Marylebone that was closed too and he was forced to give up and find a hotel—a wretched place off Dorset Square frequented by callgirls and Polish and Czech officers—where he put up for the night.

My first night back on English soil, he thought later, as he sat on the bed in shirt sleeves and listened to the pipes knocking behind the walls and the couple in the next room copulating. It was tawdry. Bleak, rundown, mean-spirited, inhospitable, unwelcoming. They had had it bad in London, of course he knew that, but the reality of it was . . . shocking. He pictured his home,
so tantalisingly close now, but somehow as distant as victory had seemed in 1940. He pictured Diana in her Sunday coat and gloves after church, arranging flowers on the dining room table, turning to look at him, the secateurs in her hand, a look of calm contentment on her face; but he could not quite see her face, could only see Mrs Ashby's face, unsmiling and smiling at the same time.

He didn't want to lie down on the greasy pillow or beneath the sheets and the thin blanket, but in the end exhaustion overcame him and he wrapped himself in the blanket and pulled his cap low over his ears and slept.

He awoke with a start before dawn and for a disorientating moment was utterly lost. It was cold, numbingly cold, and when he struck a match in the grey light he saw his breath hanging in the air, he saw the ice on the inside of the hotel window. Gathering his things, he left at once, hurrying through the fading darkness to the station, catching the first Metropolitan Line train north, having a compartment to himself, and reaching Amersham an hour later. There he hitched a lift on a milk cart. Dawn had come, sluggishly and reluctantly, during his train journey, and when the milk cart dropped him on the Amersham Road his footsteps crunched in the frost.

Why had they chosen to live somewhere so damnably difficult to get to?
he wondered as he walked briskly down the hill in the chilly early morning air. But it had seemed charming, he remembered, motoring up from Middlesex one late summer afternoon in 1930 and seeing a village barely touched by the modern world with straw on the ground and horse-drawn carts in the street.
They had found a village green lined with gabled red-brick houses overlooked by a medieval church tower, the church at the end of an ancient bricked lane, entered via a crazy Tudor archway. They had found a bridge over a stream and a pond bordered by willows and filled with ducks. They had found happiness here, even if they had failed to find a railway anywhere nearby.

Gerald crossed the bridge over the stream and saw that the pond had been drained. A large mallard waddled over in search of food. He saw that all the ducks were watching him, standing stock-still, as though waiting to see what he would do. He walked past them. People were about now—no cars, of course, due to the petrol ration, but on foot or horseback, men and women in working clothes making their way silently in the cold morning to the bus stop, the shop, the farm. Horse-drawn traps and carts, long abandoned, had been unearthed and put to work so that one could almost imagine the village had slipped back into the previous century were it not for the sandbags and stirrup pumps at every front door, the blackout curtains and the tape on every window. One or two people looked at him, frowning, wondering who he was perhaps, but no one passed close enough to recognise him and he was glad of that, for he had a sudden dread of being impeded, now, this close to home.

He left the main street and turned south into Milton Crescent, just as he had done every day for ten years on his return from his office, but he had never returned home in such turmoil, with his heart thudding in his chest and his head booming with some inner pulse that made it feel like he was in battle. He found he was staring at his boots as he walked, afraid to look up. He made himself look up. Yes, see! It had not
changed, not much—despite the sandbags and stirrup pumps, the blackout curtains, the taped windows—and his sense of a previous century faded, for Milton Crescent was a between-the-wars development. Two rows of sprawling, mock-Tudor houses led up the hill away from the high street and into the fields that surrounded the village. The road veered sharply to the left two-thirds of the way along, almost curving back on itself. Their house, The Larches, was on the west side of the street, right on the apex of the curve, which provided a wonderful view from the front rooms looking back down the entire length of the street to the medieval tower of the parish church, with the rear of the house surrounded by fields. It was this double vista that had prompted them to take this house and they had enjoyed almost ten glorious years until the fields behind the house had been slated for development. Then the war had come. He could see the fields now and they stood fallow and untouched, exactly as they had been on the morning he had left.

His footsteps crunched on the gravel but fallen autumn leaves that had never been swept away and had turned to mulch soon dulled the sound. The clematis by the front door had grown monstrously, all but obscuring the door. The blackout curtains were drawn. Even now, this close, he hesitated. He wanted Diana to see him but the blackout prevented that. He wanted the front door to be flung open and her to run out, blindly, into his arms.

The front door did not open. So he walked up and knocked, like a stranger might, not using his key. He waited. He knocked a second time, louder.

‘Mr Meadows! It
is
, isn't it? I saw you come up the hill but I couldn't be sure.'

It was Mrs Probart who lived next door and who was standing now at the entrance to her driveway. They had been neighbours for ten years yet he had utterly forgotten her existence. She stood now in a pair of outsized men's wellingtons and a big winter coat, blinking at the weak winter sunlight and he summoned a smile. ‘It is. Hullo, Mrs Probart. How are you?' he said, feeling a sort of pounding impatience overcome him. He did not want Mrs Probart to be the first person he met, to be the woman to welcome him home.

But she was peering at him curiously now. Coming up the drive and peering at him. ‘But surely you know Mrs Meadows isn't here?' she said, and for a moment he did not understand her. He remembered that Mrs Probart's husband had died many years ago, in a farming accident, that she had a number of grandchildren somewhere. Leamington Spa, was it?

‘I'm sorry, what do you mean?' he said.

‘Mrs Meadows dropped in to say goodbye about a week ago. It was quite out of the blue—well, to me, anyway. She said she was taking Abigail away. She felt it wasn't safe here. Not with the bombs. Though I must say we've not had it at all out here. But she was anxious. She'd had a bad time of it in London, got caught in a raid, and that decided it for her, I suppose. Anyway, she left that morning—but surely you knew?'

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ely Levin, the man whose name Joe bore, though there was little else to connect them, had once walked these streets. Perhaps his ghost walked them now. It was even conceivable he was still alive, though he would be—

But Joe had no idea what age the old man would be.

Ely had lived his earliest years in Dukes Place at Aldgate, beneath the walls of the Great Synagogue where his ancestors had, for five generations, conducted their business, worshipped and raised their families. In his thirtieth year he had fled the confines of an Orthodox life and an early marriage to a suitable girl who had borne him five fine strong boys and two handsome and dutiful little girls but whose manner he had never become accustomed to and whose features he had never quite become reconciled to. He had fled a mile east to Whitechapel, just a week or two before the Ripper began his year-long reign of terror, and here he had met the fourteen-year-old Mary Pendergast, who knew the streets of Whitechapel well and who might herself
have become a Ripper victim had Ely not taken her into his new home—two rented rooms in a tenement building in Yalta Street, in the shadow of the London Hospital—and made her his wife. An indifferent disregard for gentile law meant that Ely had not so much as changed his name before embarking on this, his second marriage. And in that district of London the name ‘Ely Levin' was as common as ‘John Smith' might be in other parts of the city.

There had followed a succession of children, all of whom died before their second birthday until Samuel had been born in the last weeks of the old century and had thrived. Harry had come along six years later and that had appeared to be that until the exhausted Mary, in her forty-fourth year and believing that such things were now, thankfully, beyond her, gave birth to her last child, Joseph.

During this period of uninterrupted pregnancies, births and deaths, Ely had worked for many years, though with little material gain, in the rag trade. Abandoning this vocation, he had dabbled in second-hand bookselling and the wholesaling of paper and parchment before becoming, in turn, a purveyor of spirits, of candles, of men's walking canes and of pins for ladies' hats and, finally, a supplier of hair—used in the manufacture of ladies' wigs—which he had procured, in bulk and on the sly, from a man at the London's mortuary.

He disappeared for good one bleak and windswept dawn in late October in the first year of the Great War, leaving his two sons to speculate that he had been seized by the Kaiser's spies and was languishing, forgotten, in some Prussian dungeon. It seemed more likely Ely had simply used the opportunity of a new war in
Europe to up sticks and move on to pastures new and, perhaps, to start his third family, leaving Mary to cope as best she could.

Mary's last child, Joe, had been born while the ink was still wet on the Armistice, which was to say some four years after Ely's disappearance, so the mathematical possibility of him being Ely's son seemed to be approximately nil, a conclusion that his two older brothers had reached far earlier than Joe himself and with which they had squandered no opportunity to baffle and later humiliate him as he was growing up.