All Fall Down (33 page)

‘Take Edie upstairs to Ernie's room,' Annie told Hettie after the raid. ‘Leave the lamp fit. We'll be up in a few minutes.'

They carried her there as best they could.

Walter came in from the street soon after, his face blackened, lined and weary. ‘They got Sadie's factory,' he reported. ‘But we got eight of their planes.'

‘Any sign of Bill Morell?' Annie asked. She lifted the takings from the till and locked them safe in the strongbox, ready to carry it upstairs.

Walter shook his head. ‘Looks like he went to ground.' After they'd carted him from the pub, no one had dapped eyes on him. Now, with Tommy roaming around looking, it was as if they had an unexploded bomb on their hands. ‘Tommy swears he'll get even. We couldn't get him down a shelter for love nor money.'

‘I ain't surprised,' Annie sighed. ‘Have you seen the state of Edie?'

‘How is she?'

‘Sadie and Hettie are settling her down for the night. But she won't get a wink of sleep, not until Tommy comes back.'

‘Sadie neither,' he confessed. ‘She's worried about Meggie.' He stood, tin hat under his arm, desperately weary. It was nearly midnight and he longed for his bed.

‘Tell her to stop worrying.' Annie was pleased to deliver the one good piece of news. ‘Meggie just telephoned to say she was safe. Ronnie's putting her in a taxi to send her back right this minute. So Sadie can take you home and give you a nice hot cup of Horlicks, Walter Davidson. And who says you don't deserve it?'

‘See them stars?' Ronnie asked. Meggie and he walked as one. The streets were empty after the air raid, the sky clear. ‘It's like that at sea. I look up at the stars and I think of you.'

‘Me too.'

‘Then we're linked, even when we're apart, now I know you're watching them too.' The same stars, the same heart. They walked by the pale grey walls of St Martin's.

‘Why does it have to be so hard?' She held both arms around his waist as they walked, leaning into him, looking up at the sky.

‘It ain't. It's easy.' He knew what she meant, though. ‘Forget it, Meggie. The more people say we should take things easy, the more I know I don't want to. Funny, that.' His chin rested on her soft hair, his arms folded around her. ‘Listen, I've been thinking.'

An empty taxi came by. It rolled on towards Trafalgar Square.
Up above, the sky was midnight blue, scattered with tiny points of white light.

‘Meggie, you and me should get married.'

She clung tightly to him, kept on walking.

‘You hear?'

She nodded. ‘When?'

‘Next time I get home on leave.'

‘Without saying anything?' It was a step into space, into the unknown.

‘They'd only say no.'

‘Yes,' she agreed. They would summon all their old reasons.

‘We can get a train to Gretna. When we come back, we'll be married.'

‘And no one will be able to un-marry us!'

‘We'd be legal and above board. Then they'd have to fall in with us. What do you say?'

It was breathtaking. It was an enormous step. ‘You mean it?' She stopped and took him by the hand.

‘I don't want to listen to them going on no more, Meg. I just want you.' He drew her in, kissed her, literally swept her off her feet. ‘Do you want me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Will you marry me?'

They were surrounded by dangers; by torn buildings, bombs, separation. But theirs was an island that no one could invade. It was a star out there in the heavens.

‘Yes.' She kissed his breath away. They would put up barricades, keep out the world.

At last Meggie went home in her taxi, floating on a cloud of happiness. Duke Street was quiet, and so was Paradise Court. The blackout made the houses look dead, but silver light poured down from the sky as she slotted her key into the lock and went inside. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece beside a framed photograph of Bertie and Geoff. Her mother had left a note on the table.
‘Dearest Meg, Knock on our bedroom door to let us know you're back.' Signed ‘S', with a heart, her mother's unvarying mark.

The tears welled up. Meggie sat and wept with joy, head resting on the table beside her mother's note.

‘What is it?'

She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. Sadie stood in her nightgown, hair brushed back, her face washed clear of the day.

Meggie stood up to embrace her.

‘What's wrong?' Sadie stroked the back of her head.

‘Nothing. Ma, Ronnie and me want to get married.' She confessed it all. ‘I'm so happy. I love him, Ma, and he loves me.'

Chapter Twenty

Walter switched on the early morning news broadcast. Bristol had been hit hard, and Cardiff. There was a nationwide call for extra blood donors. Production of Hurricanes and Spitfires was to be stepped up yet again.

‘Not in your factory, it won't.' He told Sadie about the direct hit of the night before. She was already up, looking pale and tired. Another sleepless night. ‘Why not phone Jess and check on the boys?'

‘I did that yesterday.' Sadie picked at her breakfast of toast and marmalade. ‘I spoke to Maurice. He said Jess has gone up to Coniston for the weekend. Everyone's fine. Except Mo finally got his papers from the RAF. He'll be in uniform this time next week.'

Walter nodded. Within their own four walls they were past the stage of commenting on the rakish glamour of the boys in pilots' uniform and their heroic role. Statistics had leaked out on the number of British fliers lost in the Battle of Britain. Never was so much owed by so many to so few, maybe. But if those few happened to be your own flesh and blood . . .

‘Maurice says Jess is worried sick.'

‘She ain't the only one.' He studied Sadie across the table. ‘There's something eating you and all.'

Sadie pushed away her plate. She rolled her eyes at the sound of Meggie's footsteps corning downstairs. ‘I'll tell you later.'

Meggie breezed in, ready to go off and spend the day with Ronnie. She wore her prettiest summer dress, a white, cap-sleeved one with a flared skirt and tucks and gathers in the bodice. Her hair shone with coppery glints, simply tied at the nape of her neck.

‘Has anybody seen my little pearl earrings?' She felt carefully along the mantelpiece. ‘I thought I left them here.'

‘They're in the box on your dressing table. I moved them when I was dusting.' Sadie's voice was expressionless. She stood up and went to look out of the window onto the tiny brick back yard.

‘Never mind.' Meggie stood on tiptoe to catch more of her reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece. ‘I have to meet Ronnie at nine. I'd better dash.'

‘On an empty stomach?' Sadie didn't look round. ‘And you need a cardigan, just in case.'

‘No, it's a lovely day.' The midnight sky had turned to eggshell blue.

‘It'll be a scorcher,' Walter confirmed. ‘It was on the weather forecast.'

‘They could be wrong, couldn't they?' Sadie argued for the sake of it. Headstrong Meggie would go her own way.

‘Where are you meeting him?' The sight of his stepdaughter so excited made Walter smile.

‘Up at the bridge.'

He offered her a lift. ‘Hop in, I've got the cab outside. I'll take you there.' He also wanted to tour round the neighbourhood to look at recent bomb damage.

Meggie scrambled to find her shoes and handbag while Sadie, her face still closed off, cleared the table. ‘I won't be back till late, Ma. No need to wait up.'

‘What's there to do till late on a Sunday?'

Meggie was bubbling, doing everything at high speed. ‘ “That's fine, Meggie. Have a lovely time!” ' She rebuked her mother for being a killjoy. ‘It's his only full day. He goes back tomorrow dinnertime.'

And Sadie had to relent. She kissed Meggie's cheek and saw her off from the front doorstep. Meggie stepped into Walter's cab, eager to be gone. Sadie, watching them go up the court onto Duke Street, stood in the long morning shadows cast by the old houses, and came to a decision of her own.

An East Ender by birth, Sadie rarely visited the broad squares and terraces of central London, where the building lacked a human dimension. It was as if they were designed expressly to impress and intimidate and keep at bay the humble visitor who might stray across the river from the courts and alleyways of Southwark. But she made her way undeterred, a slight figure in a grey tailored two-piece, wearing a black hat with a curled brim, rehearsing the speech she would make when she arrived on Gertie Elliot's doorstep.

Approaching Shaftesbury Avenue via Piccadilly Circus, Sadie left behind the capital's monumental arches, its imperial statues, splendid galleries and museums, and entered the, to her, equally foreign world of theatreland. Sunday mornings meant empty streets, and space to notice the drabness behind the billboards and hoardings. These buildings wept soot down their carved and convoluted frontages, the pigeons showed them no respect from the crowded ledges, and the clear, bright air painted them in an unflattering light. Shattered windows had been boarded up, roadblocks erected across badly-bombed streets, dust left to lie in doorways, silting up pavements, drifting across wide streets in a flurry of summer breezes. Pages from an old newspaper lifted and blew around Sadie's ankles. Still, The Lyric, The Apollo, Queen's soldiered on.

If Sadie had been in two minds when she decided to pay a visit to the Bell earlier that morning, she had been through dozens of twists and turns since then. For one thing, how would she feel if the shoe was on the other foot and Gertie turned up unannounced in Paradise Court? For another, ought she not to have consulted Walter first? Then again, she risked denting Meggie's sinning happiness by interfering. Gertie Elliot was bound to put her foot down over the harum-scarum plan to get married, and Sadie wouldn't blame her. Between them, the two mothers should form a counter-movement to steady things down and make the young people behave more sensibly. It was crucial that they didn't rush into something they might later regret.

Sadie wove in and out of side streets, a frown of concentration on her face. She'd come partly because she wanted to understand what Gertie held against Meggie; was it only that she was too
young for Ronnie, or that she knew something about him that set her against the whole romance? Perhaps he had another girl to whom he was promised; something in his past that Meggie knew nothing about. She must go very carefully, Sadie decided. She would introduce herself and open up the general topic of Ronnie and Meggie; see how the land lay before she mentioned the bombshell news.

Bernhardt Court, squeezed between the high, blank wall of the theatre and a row of small shops and eating places, had the same ghost town feel as the rest of the West End on a summer Sunday morning. Blinds were down, windows shuttered. A disconsolate lad shouldering a ladder and wearing faded blue overalls ambled ahead of her, a woman stood in a doorway smoking a cigarette.

It was an easy matter to find the Bell by the sign over the door. The publican's daughter in Sadie approved of the newly washed leaded windows, the scrubbed doorstep, the polished brass door handles. It was a small but well-kept place, barred and bolted to the world at this time of day, but inviting looking all the same. She peered above street level at the living quarters, where the windows were open and the net curtains shifting in the breeze.

‘Who do you want?' The boy in overalls had propped his ladder against a neighbouring wall. He asked out of idle curiosity, as a way of putting off whatever he had to do.

‘Gertie Elliot,' she said quietly. There didn't seem to be an entrance round the side, or any way round the back. She saw that brewery deliveries were made down a shute to one side of the main door.

The boy swung the peak of his cap back from his forehead and yelled up at one of the open windows. ‘Gert, you're wanted!'

Sadie took a step back from the raucous cry. It had practically split her eardrums and spoiled her carefully prepared entrance.

‘She's in,' the boy assured her. ‘I seen her doing the steps.'

Soon there were footsteps in the tiled hall, the sound of bolts being drawn back. Then the shiny black door opened and a grey head, a lined face with long moustaches peered out.

‘Shankley, tell Gertie she's wanted, will you.' The lad spoke with the volume permanently turned up.

Reddening under the old man's scrutiny, Sadie gave the boy a few coppers to get rid of him. Meanwhile, Shankley opened the door wide, and Sadie could see beyond the man's small frame into an inner porch and a bar room lined with photographs.

‘Wanted, who by?' Shankley took his time while Gertie did her face and hair. He knew she wasn't keen on letting strangers in out of hours. As it happened, he'd called in early to lend a hand, as he sometimes did these days. According to Gertie, Ronnie was worse than useless when he came home, spending all his time with the little girl from Southwark.

‘I'd like to see Mrs Elliot.' Sadie spoke firmly. She hadn't come all this way to be turned away by a go-between.

‘You don't say.'

‘Could you tell her, please?'

‘I could if you give your name.'

‘Sadie Davidson.'

Shankley chewed this over. The name meant nothing, but he was beginning to see something familiar under the smart black hat, behind the formal approach. Take them away, subtract twenty years from the age, and you had a young Meggie.

‘It's all right, Shanks, ask her in.' Gertie had been eavesdropping. She came slowly downstairs and stood staring at Sadie. ‘Lock the door, will you. We'll be in the bar.' Leading the way, she gestured Sadie to follow.

Though Meggie had set up an image of Gertie in her mother's mind of a woman young for her age, popular with her customers and game for a laugh, Sadie found she was still startled by coming face-to-face. It was true, her looks placed her well below what must be her real age of forty-something, but she was-not so much young as ageless. To appear young she would have needed an air of vulnerability, an artlessness, which Gertie lacked. In fact, she was all art, from her rich chestnut hair piled high on her head, to her painted lips and nails, her nipped-in waist and high heels. And she was in charge. She showed no surprise, little curiosity, except to appraise Sadie's own appearance and to decide, no doubt, that she, Gertie, was wearing the better of the two.