The Safest Place in London (33 page)

‘Yes, I remember,' said Gerald. He
did
remember: Kemp and his polka-dot bowties and his manner of barking every order as though he were on the parade ground, and Meriwether, who had a mirror in his office and paused in the middle of a meeting to reapply pomade and dab pungent cologne behind his ears and on each wrist. He remembered the indescribable heat of the basement in summer and the insufferable cold in the winter, he remembered how the lift creaked and the names of each of the girls in the typing pool—Miss Poulter, Miss O'Flaherty, Miss Hale, Miss Kovacs, Miss Lambert. He remembered it all with a kind of shock because he had not thought of it in three years. It seemed as distant as childhood.

‘Yelland, you're a captain in the Household Cavalry!'

Yelland did his dipping movement. ‘Yes, but I can assure you it's just an honorary title. They gave all of us a rank a while back. I think I only got this one because they happened to have the uniform spare in my size. I don't know one end of a horse from another, really.
This is us.' And he led the way out of the lift and along a shabby corridor towards a large, very cluttered, very crowded anteroom and from there into a smaller office, little more than a storeroom really, containing a desk and a number of telephones, a couple of chairs and a bulging filing cabinet with a wilting aspidistra on top. ‘This is me,' said Yelland, squeezing into the chair behind the desk and indicating Gerald should take the other. ‘I think tea, don't you? Miss Linklater! Tea for two, if you please.'

A young woman, very tall, very slender and smartly dressed in a chocolate brown suit, could be seen in the room beyond.

‘Miss Linklater's recently joined us from five,' said Yelland. ‘She's really jolly good.' He leaned forward. ‘Between you and me, I don't think she really wanted to join us—bit dull after five—but it's wartime, isn't it? We all have to make sacrifices.'

Gerald turned around in his chair and saw Miss Linklater, who had made sacrifices, disappearing into a kitchenette armed with a teapot.

‘Now, where have you just come from, Meadows? Can't divulge, I suppose?'

Gerald turned back to face Yelland. ‘I travelled down from Wetherby this morning, as a matter of fact. I can't see there's any danger in my telling you that.'

‘Wetherby, eh? I doubt that's where you picked up that tan.'

‘No.'

‘And Diana? She's well?'

‘Yes. Yes. Quite well.'

Yelland leaned forward again. ‘And is this a social visit or business?'

Gerald waited a moment before replying. ‘Unofficial business,'
he said, and he looked directly at Yelland as he said this, gauging his response. Appealing to him, he realised belatedly, as a friend and former colleague, in a way that did not involve words.

Yelland nodded slowly. ‘Go on.'

‘I'm trying to locate a missing child. She—the child—was possibly reported killed in a bombing raid a week ago, maybe longer, somewhere in London. That's about all I know. It's on behalf a friend. Rather urgent, I'm afraid . . .'

He had rehearsed this. Decided carefully how he would present it to Yelland in a way that might be plausible and was suggestive of urgency but gave absolutely nothing away about the actual situation.

Yelland listened, nodded again, his eyes sliding off to the right as he digested the words and they went skidding off in the myriad directions of Yelland's mind. He had been emeritus professor of analytical philosophy at Cambridge before the war—or something along those lines—and the affable schoolboy thing, while not exactly an act, certainly did a good job of disguising a very keen brain.

‘Child's name? Location? Parents' names?' he said, cutting directly to the problem and not bothered by the whys and wherefores.

Gerald shook his head. ‘It's a girl, aged around three years. Possibly from one of the poorer districts. That's really all I have.'

‘Anyone else likely to be looking for it?' It was a shrewd question.

‘I'm afraid I don't know that either.'

The chocolate-brown-suited Miss Linklater came in at that moment, giving a cursory rap on the open door and striding in to place a tray of tea things on the desk. Her wrists and
fingers were very slender; like a pianist, Gerald thought. She left without a word but somehow a definite air of resentment followed her.

Yelland smiled apologetically at her retreating form then he got up and closed the door to his office with his foot. ‘Shall I be mother?' He poured out two cups and he measured out a quantity of the dreadful dried milk with a beautifully engraved silver teaspoon as though he was a duchess in her drawing room. ‘Here we are. I say, are you quite alright, Meadows?'

Gerald was not all right; his hands were shaking and his skin felt clammy. He couldn't feel his feet. There was a pounding in his head and it took all his concentration to focus.

‘Touch of malaria.' He had never had malaria in his life but Yelland couldn't know that. He had a feeling that what he was experiencing was delayed shock, or exhaustion, or both. He took a grateful gulp of the tea and felt its comforting warmth spread through him.

‘Yes, the malaria's particularly bad in Wetherby at this time of year, I understand,' said Yelland with a lift of his eyebrows.

‘Quite.'

Yelland drank his tea for a moment or two in silence, and it was clear he was already working on the matter at hand. At last he looked up, having apparently come to a decision.

‘Alright, Meadows, going back to your . . . request. There were raids on the twenty-first and the twenty-second, Friday and Saturday nights. I remember the dates because they were the first raids we'd had in London for months. Took us a bit by surprise, I don't mind telling you. If you want specifics about recent bombs and casualties and so forth, that kind of information's
not collected here. It will be Civil Defence and they're under the Home Office, so that's the first place we must go. I have a contact there, Radnor—know him?'

Gerald shook his head.

‘I'll telephone him. Ask a few questions. Find out what I can and report back to you . . . let's see, tomorrow morning? How's that sound?'

It sounded exactly what he had hoped for. Gerald nodded his thanks, unable to speak.

Yelland watched him silently for a moment then he reached over and patted Gerald's arm. ‘Rough, was it, out there? Of course it was. Stupid thing to say. Ignore me. Now, how are you fixed for tonight? I'm probably staying at my post till late, then I'm on fire-watch duty, so why don't you take my key and stay at my bolthole in Bayswater? No hot water, I'm afraid. Come to think of it, no cold water either—but hey ho! All four walls and the roof are intact, or at least they were last time I was there. Help yourself to anything you find.'

So Gerald stayed in Yelland's Bayswater bolthole and helped himself to brandy, and pickles from a jar, and some biscuits that he found in a cupboard in the kitchen. It was tempting to finish off the brandy but he made himself stop. That was no way to repay Yelland's kindness. But it was seductive, the feel of the brandy burning the back of his throat, the fire hitting his guts, the gradual unfocusing of his eyes, the sense of the world receding. He made himself go to Yelland's bed and sleep, barely undressing in the unheated flat. Life had become transitory, thanks to the
war and being back home seemed to have made no difference at all, had made it worse, if anything.

He pulled his coat around himself and slept.

‘Got hold of Radnor last night,' said Yelland at his desk the following morning. His unruly grey hair was more unkempt than usual and his uniform appeared to have been slept in, but no one in the office commented on it or seemed to notice—but, then, most of them looked like this, Gerald realised. The only smart people he saw were the Americans and Miss Linklater.

‘Yes, Radnor was surprisingly forthcoming. Came back with all sorts of things. I wrote it down myself . . . sorry it's impossible to read. Here let me . . . Now, the raid on the nights of the twenty-first and the twenty-second were mostly in the Westminster area, Embankment, Pimlico, Clapham, Surry Docks, Poplar, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Rotherhithe. One or two further out, Home Counties, but you said just London? Alright, forty-eight houses destroyed or badly damaged, mains out in six locations, two warehouses burned down, a number of other commercial and civil buildings and utilities damaged. There are twenty-three UXBs still waiting to be dealt with. As for casualties. . . twenty-nine dead, another sixty or so injured or missing—that's everything from gravest not-likely-to-survive through to minor abrasions and concussions and the like.' He paused and looked up. ‘Anything there sound like what you're after?'

‘The buildings that were hit or damaged—any of them Underground stations or shelters?'

Yelland perused his notes. ‘Railway lines hit at Clapham
Junction, no casualties . . . Roof collapse at Bethnal Green tube—that what you want?'

Was it? He could not imagine Diana travelling into the East End. She had taken Abigail to a pantomime, which surely would be in the West End somewhere.

‘I'm not sure. The dead—do you have any details?'

‘Family of six in Poplar, direct hit—grandparents, mother, three children. Elderly couple in their home. Three young women walking home in Stepney. One policeman. Four firemen. One warden. Man in his forties stabbed in an Underground station—though that was a murder, so probably not what you want.'

‘Good God!' said Gerald, appalled. ‘Do you mean to say someone was murdered in a shelter during a raid?'

‘'Fraid so. Not so unusual as you might think, sadly. But this appears to be a gang-related incident. Black market. All sorts of shady things go on, unfortunately, under cover of the blackout.'

‘My God, we risk our lives while others line their pockets. It's unforgivable!'

‘Quite so. Here we are: another family killed—four children and one baby. And an airman home on leave (unlucky) and two members of another family—brother and sister. Mother and child . . . and another mother and child.' He looked up.

‘Where were the two mothers and children? Do you have that?'

‘Rotherhithe: twenty-seven-year-old mother and ten-year-old boy. And . . . Bethnal Green: mother and female child—age not shown.'

Yelland looked up and their eyes met over the desk.

Afterwards Gerald walked, in a sudden and heavy downpour up Kingsway to Holborn and caught the number 8 bus going east, which was a mistake. So many of the streets on the number 8's route were blocked off and impassable that his journey of perhaps two miles took him the best part of an hour.

The downpour ended as suddenly as it had begun. Seated, dripping wet, on the upper deck, Gerald looked out of the window at row after row of bombed buildings, at craters filled with water and choked with bomb weed that gave everything an abandoned, semi-permanent feel, as though the very landscape of London had been changed forever, as though an angry deity had torn the city up by its roots and tossed it about a bit then hurled it back down to Earth. He saw a city that had fallen from the sky.