The Safest Place in London (9 page)

A yard or two away sat the posh woman, still awake, clutching her child and her belongings and rocking back and forth, murmuring to herself or to her child, a curious, terrified expression on her face. Everyone else slept. Someone should sit and talk with her, thought Nancy, for the woman was clearly frightened, clearly alone. But Joe had left that morning and the pain of his departure was too fresh. She did not think she could talk to a stranger when the memory of his leaving was so new, so keen. She preferred to keep it to herself, to nurse it until it dulled.

As she thought this her eye was caught by a man up on the platform, a stocky figure, dishevelled and hatless and wearing civilian clothes, who was making his way across the sleeping bodies, picking his way, searching each face, and a shadow crept over her when she ought to have cried with joy, for Nancy had seen that it was Joe.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The world had gone mad. And it was her own government, it was red tape and regulations that had brought Diana to her knees.

The increasingly stringent, increasingly petty regulations issued by the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Food, the Home Office in relentless and successive waves were every bit as terrifying, in their way, as the waves of Messerschmitts that nightly flew over London. It was simply not possible to keep up with them. Something that had been perfectly legal in peacetime, that had been perfectly legal
last week
, was now illegal, was punishable by fine or imprisonment, was reported in the newspaper to the open-mouthed glee of family members and neighbours and to the utter, undying shame of the poor, horrified, often unwitting defendant. Why, in Chalfont St Giles, no less (!), a young mother had been had up in front of the magistrate for turning on a light in a room before closing the blackout curtains! That was it—that was her crime. Her defence—that her baby had been crying—had been thrown out. She had been fined sixty-five
pounds. A week later a woman in Cedars Road had been fined for throwing away a used bus ticket instead of recycling it. She had been fined one hundred pounds—it was that or three months prison. The incident had been reported in the local paper. The woman, a Mrs Purcell, who was fifty-seven and prominent in the local Women's Institute, had not set foot outside her house since.

Diana had begun to open the weekly local paper with a growing dread of who she might find there, waiting in a state of almost permanent anxiety for a constable to knock on her own front door. She had done nothing wrong—her windows were covered and her lights were off, she wasted nothing and she reused everything, she bathed in two inches of water and she spoke to no one about anything more confidential than the weather—yet still the idea that one might, however inadvertently, have broken some regulation, kept her awake at night.

But that had all changed in an instant the day she had run into Lance Beckwith in Bond Street two weeks before Christmas.

Diana clutched Abigail and her handbag and the little blue travelling case. Her fingers ached, her arms were numb. She could no longer feel her feet. She felt desperately tired but she would not let herself sleep, not for a minute. Besides which, she needed the lav, though there was no question of going, no question at all.

‘Mummy, will we live here now?'

Diana sat up with a start. Abigail was crouched on the hard ground beside her, no longer clutching her mother, no longer panic-stricken, but a worried frown shadowed her face.

‘No, darling, of course not! We're just sheltering for the night because it's not safe outside. In the morning we shall go home. Tomorrow night you'll sleep in your own bed.'

‘Teddy too?'

‘Yes, Teddy too.'

‘And Uncle Lance?'

For a moment Diana thought she must have misheard.

She had waited a week after the Bond Street meeting to telephone him. A day or so later she had received a postcard from him saying his telephone was out so she had replied in similar vein, sending a postcard and signing her name ‘
D
', as though she were a spy in a novel. She had wished she
were
a spy in a novel; she might not feel so unclean. She might feel patriotic. She would make a poor spy, she realised, as she felt things too much, she could not switch off her conscience and she had an idea that a spy—a good spy—would need the ability to operate guilt-free. That would be a blessing, to be guilt-free, but also a small death. One's conscience was, after all, what made one human.

As a result of the postcard she made another trip into London, a few days before Christmas. She would not be taking Abigail with her and pretended, as she dressed her child over breakfast, as they listened together to the Light Programme on the wireless, that it was just a normal day. Which it was until Mrs Probart from next door arrived to babysit. Abigail, at last understanding her mother was planning a trip without her, flung herself at her mother, wrapped her arms around her leg and refused to let go. Mrs Probart, who had four grandchildren in Leicestershire whom she only saw once a year, picked her up and swung her into her lap. ‘There now, sweetheart, don't take on so! Your mummy will be back in no time at all. Poor little mite. Hitler himself might be at the front door the way you're carrying on.'

‘Oh, Abi, darling!' said Diana, dismayed. ‘Mummy has to go out for a while. It won't be for very long.'

But Abigail would not be placated and Diana felt despair. She sank down into the armchair and pulled her hat off. Abigail was hungry, that was all. She just needed enough to eat. But there wasn't enough to eat, there was never enough to eat, and it seemed to Diana that her daughter's cries were a vocal embodiment of her own failure.

‘Now, Mrs Meadows, don't be silly. Off you go. We'll be just fine, won't we? We'll have such fun together while Mummy's away, won't we, poppet?'

Abigail screamed.

Diana hesitated, then she stood up, her hat in her hand.

‘Go on, dear. Off you go, now, and don't worry about a thing,' said Mrs Probart, and Diana felt her dismay grow. She had told Mrs Probart she had a medical appointment in Town. She had said she was to have some tests. She had been unspecific. She had intimated something was amiss. Mrs Probart had closed her down at once before she could say more. Of course she would babysit, there was no question of it. She was only too happy to help. You
poor
dear.

‘Bless you,' Diana said, leaving at once because she could no longer be in the room with this dear old woman who just wanted to help.

She paused at the hallway mirror to reaffix her hat. Then she reapplied her lipstick, though it would be a two-hour journey till she got there. She smoothed her gloves over her fingers and pulled the fox fur stole around her shoulders. Up to this point she had not raised her eyes to her face in the mirror other than
to apply the lipstick. Now she looked at herself and saw a woman she did not know, a woman who was about to do something she would have thought unimaginable a few short months ago.

A final farewell to Mrs Probart stuck in her throat and remained unspoken and, under cover of her daughter's cries, she slipped out of the front door and away.

A bus came through the village every hour on the hour but by a quarter past it had still not arrived and twice Diana made to leave and twice she turned back. At last the tiny local bus trundled around the corner and drew up at the bus stop with no explanation of its tardiness over and above a general sense that this was wartime and any bus turning up at all should be a cause for celebration not complaint. Diana boarded and took a window seat. The other passengers were all Home Counties wives like herself, in smart little hats and black gloves and fur-collared winter coats and stout black court shoes, hoping to catch the ten o'clock London train, but it was wartime and no one spoke as the train may or may not arrive and no one had any expectation of getting to Town or of finding any of the things they wanted there even if they did.

Her journey had begun inauspiciously and Diana braced herself for every sort of delay that the war and the bus company and the Metropolitan Railway might throw her way, so she was unprepared for the bus driver putting his foot down and swinging around the country lanes as though he were at Le Mans, getting them to the station with time to spare. She was unprepared for the ten o'clock train arriving to the minute and the guard blowing his whistle fifteen seconds later. She was unprepared for the winding country lanes and the bleak winter fields and the endless rows
of hedges flashing past in a rush so that they reached Rickmansworth in such good time the guard paused for a cuppa as the steam engine was replaced with an electric. In no time they were off, this time on the electrified lines, and they sailed through Pinner and Harrow and Wembley like the
Flying Scotsman
.

Outside Neasden they stopped. There was no warning, there was no station in sight. The train simply stopped; its engines throbbed, softly and distantly, then fell silent. They sat and did not move. Diana sat and did not move. Beyond the window the ravaged suburbs of north-west London lay before her. A sprinkling of overnight frost still covered the mounds of earth and rubble. Outside no one stirred. The street below her window had an abandoned feel to it. She wondered where everyone had gone. She thought about the train in which she sat perched high on its embankment, sealed and silent with its cargo of wives in their fur coats and their Liberty gloves coming up to Town to shop.

After fifteen minutes the guard could be heard outside down on the tracks, picking his way carefully because the rails were live, announcing that a bomb had landed on the line ahead and they would be stuck until it was defused or went off.

‘How thrilling!' announced the portly woman in a fur coat who had got on at Chalfont & Latimer and was seated opposite her, the only other occupant of the compartment.

It was not thrilling. It was infuriating, it was inconvenient, it was a little frightening and it was, potentially, deadly. No single part of it was thrilling. Diana gave her a tight smile. The woman was wearing a very ugly hat that she was almost certainly very pleased with and a great deal of powder on her face that gave the impression she had been caught in a bomb blast and was coated
in dust. Diana slid further into the corner, her face close to the window, putting a barrier around herself intended to discourage conversation. It was now entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that she would be prevented from continuing her journey. She studied the sprinkling of frost that lay on the mounds of earth and rubble below.

‘My grandchildren will be very excited when I tell them about this!' the portly woman said. It did not quite ring true. It was an act. Her eyes were very wide and blinking rapidly and her gloved fingers moved fretfully over her handbag. The woman was frightened.

Diana gave her another quick smile. She stood up, pulled the window down and stuck her head out. Up and down the length of the train other people were doing the same thing, heads bobbing in and out, looking up and down, looking for the bomb as though there would be something to see. There was nothing to see.

‘What can you see, my dear?' said the woman.

‘Lots of people sticking their heads out the window,' Diana replied. She sat down and closed the window. ‘I expect they'll offload us and send us back on another train and we'll all be home in time for lunch,' she said, because the woman was anxious and it cost her nothing to be friendly, to offer reassurance. She gave an encouraging smile and as she was already pretending to be something she wasn't—a woman going up to Town to undergo medical tests—she found she could also pretend to be something else she was not, which was a young woman who was perfectly calm in a crisis. And it was easier to pretend with a stranger.

She realised it was increasingly likely she would not be able to keep her appointment.

Lance had told her he was not married. No, that was not quite true—he had merely said he was not married, which did not preclude the possibility he
had
been married. Lovers then. Yes, there would have been many, in South America. What sort of women did he like? Not the sort who travelled up to Town on the Metropolitan Line train in prewar fur coats and prim hats and fussy black shoes and their last-but-one pair of silk stockings. No, something altogether more exotic. Or was that simply the impression he wished to give? Perhaps it was all a front and he was as conventional as the next man? He had seemed conventional enough, she supposed, as her brother's school friend twenty or more years ago. She realised she could not read him at all while she knew herself to be an open book. He had guessed at once at her loneliness and her attempt to deny it had made her ridiculous. Of course she was lonely, every wife in England was lonely. She had her child, yes, but he had exposed a longing that was like a physical presence. He had made that longing worse. She was a book that was not merely open, it was underlined and annotated with student notes provided. And yet she had exchanged furtive postcards with Lance, signing her name with a single initial, avoiding any reference to the reason for her visit, merely agreeing a time—did it not suggest that some part of her, at least, welcomed the clandestine?

The train did not move. She pulled out her compact and reapplied her lipstick. They were stuck, all up, for three hours.

At the end of that time the engine started up, the train slid cautiously forward and a round of restrained cheers rang up and
down the carriages. All thoughts of shopping in Town had gone and all anyone wanted was to get home so that, when they slunk finally into Finchley Road, the train emptied. The portly woman in the fur coat was the first to leap off. She had not stopped talking from the moment the train had sprung back into life till the moment it had arrived at Finchley Road and her departure left more than a merely physical absence. Diana took a slow, steady breath and stood up, preparing to leave too. But she had invented a medical appointment. If she gave up now her deceit would be for nothing and it had cost her a great deal already. She sat down again and when the train headed into the tunnel towards Baker Street she was the only passenger.