Crooked Heart (3 page)

‘Hello,' said the boy. He had a scab on his lip; the greeting was not a friendly one. ‘Where are you going?' asked the boy.

‘Home,' said Noel.

‘Where's that, then?'

‘Relatively nearby,' said Noel. If he walked any faster, he would begin to limp. He kept his pace steady.

‘Why aren't you evacuated?' asked the boy.

‘Why aren't you?' asked Noel, bravely.

‘Went. Came back,' said the boy, laconically. ‘Stinks in the country. No flicks, no chippie and they shit in a
hole
in the
ground
. Give us a bob or I'll kill you.'

‘No,' said Noel.

‘Tanner.'

‘No. I don't have any money.'

‘Liar.' Almost casually, the boy extended a foot and tripped him up. ‘Two bob, now, for lying,' he said.

Noel dug around in his pocket and found three sixpences. ‘There,' he said, throwing them over his shoulder, and then trying to scramble up quickly. The boy stamped a plimsoll on Noel's hand, and strolled over to pick up the money. He
examined the coins carefully. ‘Go on, then,' he said, glancing back, ‘get off home to Mummy.'

There were still three halfpennies left in the other pocket – enough for the bus – but Noel somehow found himself in the Woolworth's at Camden Town, buying a bag of cinder toffee and a skein of liquorice laces. He ate a whole lace and two lumps of toffee at the same time, and felt his mouth fill up with sweet glue.

On the way home, he happened to pass along Mafeking Road where Uncle Geoffrey and Auntie Margery lived in the basement flat of number 23. He had only been there a couple of times. ‘A rabbit hutch,' Mattie had commented, after one of the visits, ‘and far too tidy. One should have
large, light
rooms with comfortable clutter. Remember that, Noel.' He peered down through the railings at the whitened step, and the china rabbit beside the front door.

They weren't really his aunt and uncle; Geoffrey was Mattie's nearest relative, a first cousin once removed, and no relation at all to Noel. ‘A recent literary analogy,' Mattie had remarked, not all that long ago, ‘compared one's family to an octopus – a
dear
octopus, from whose tentacles we never quite escape, but I'd say Geoffrey and Margery are more like a couple of barnacles, welded to the hull of the ancestral vessel. Whereas you, Noel, are my cabin boy, and shall some day replace me as captain.' He'd loved that image: Mattie and Noel, on a little wooden ship like the
Santa Maria
– a carved nutshell, intricate and rounded, scudding across the ocean with pennants fluttering. Though with such a small crew, you'd have to hope for fine weather.

He loitered by the railings until the sweets were finished, tipping his head back and eating the liquorice laces as if they were spaghetti. Then he crumpled the bag and threw it down into the area, so that it no longer looked quite so neat. It took him an hour to walk the rest of the way.

The house was frozen, the road outside filled with growling lorries. Mattie's bedroom door was closed, but when he pressed his ear against it, he thought he could hear snoring.

He went downstairs again and knelt to open the range, and the low sun poured in through the kitchen window. Suddenly every item was doused in orange light and it was as if he were seeing the room for the first time in weeks: the crusted dishes filling the sink and draining board, the hillocks of bric-a-brac on the table, chairs, dresser, sideboard and windowsill, the drifts of shoes and books, unwashed stockings, apple cores, hair grips, used matches and crumpled newspapers on a floor that was as sandy as Broadstairs beach. And through the open door, the slovenly tide flowing on into the drawing room, with a place for nothing and nothing in its place, a clutter no longer comfortable but choking.

‘My idea,' said Mattie's voice, coming down the stairs. She was still in her striped dressing gown, but was wearing galoshes and holding a torch. ‘And it was in the cupboard in the room there,' she said. ‘They'd hidden it, of course. The bread is quite dreadful, they must be adding that particular dust, wood dust you know, I said to the boy, that was what happened in the Great War although I don't think he believed me. How was your day?'

‘Oh,' said Noel, realizing belatedly that she'd lobbed him a question. ‘I went to the zoo.'

‘Splendid. Toast, I think.'

She cut a couple of slices from the loaf that had been delivered that afternoon, and then seemed to lose interest, leaving it unbuttered on the bread board. ‘Can't see a bloody thing,' she said. ‘O radiant dark, O darkly fostered ray.'

‘I'd better do the blackouts,' said Noel.

When he came back downstairs, she'd gone. The front door was wide open, moving slightly in the wind.

He went outside and looked up and down the road. The light
had dropped from the sky, leaving only a grey band along the western edge. A single lorry, the last of the day, was heading downhill towards Hampstead, its shaded lights smudging the ground as it bucked between the ruts. Noel waited till the sound had dwindled into the twilight, and then he called Mattie's name. There was no reply. Fear began to slide across his skin like a thin film of ice.

He walked along the road a hundred yards or so and then tripped on a bluish shadow, a ridge masquerading as a hole, and grazed his knee. He hobbled back to the house and spent fifteen minutes trying to find another torch, raking through drawers full of rubbish and dead moths, before snatching up the old garden lantern and a stub of candle. It was probably illegal, but he lit it anyway. By the time he left the house again, darkness had fallen.

Apart from the circle of candlelight, he could see nothing at all. London might as well have disappeared. He walked cautiously, swinging the lantern, half-hoping that someone would notice and come rushing out to tell him off, but there was no noise apart from his own footsteps. Once he saw a fox, poised in the long grass; on the next swing of the light, it was gone.

Where the track met the tarmacadamed road down to Hampstead, he stopped. A motor car, barely visible, swished past. The lantern light began to flicker; it wouldn't be long before it went out altogether. He had no idea what to do. Should he ring the police? But Mattie hated the police, she would never forgive him. Should he knock on a neighbour's door? But then whoever it was would come round to the house, and see what it looked like and that would be the end of him and Mattie; he knew that people weren't supposed to live the way that they were living now; there would be letters written and decisions made.

He turned back. Perhaps he could just tidy downstairs, in the
places that a visitor might see. Though in any case, even if he summoned help, how could anyone search for Mattie when you weren't allowed to use a torch unless it was covered with two layers of tissue paper and pointed only at your own feet? Perhaps a dog could find her; a bloodhound. Except he wasn't sure if any dogs were left in London. He hadn't seen any for weeks; the Heath was full of rabbits now, the swathes of coarse grass cropped like a bowling green. And where had Mattie gone?

His body felt loose, unstrung, as if terror were cutting the cords that held it all together. He had never spent an evening without her, not since he was four. He could remember arriving at the house for the first time. ‘Would you believe that I don't have a single toy?' she'd asked, and had given him a fossil of an ammonite to play with. It had looked like a large grey pebble, the size of a hot-cross bun, and then he had lifted the top half like a lid and seen the ridged and shining curl from ages past, a hundred million years ago.

The candle lasted until he reached the front gate, and then he walked to the door with arms outstretched, like a child playing blind man's bluff. He had hoped that Mattie might be back, but she wasn't.

Her beaver-fur coat was hanging over the banister, and he put it on and sat halfway up the stairs, under the landing window. He could see the front door from there, and hear any noise from the back. After a while, he went and fetched the ammonite from his bedroom. At first it was like ice in his hands, but he tucked it under the fur and by the time he awoke it was quite warm.

His neck felt stiff, and pale yellow light was leaking around the shutters. He walked downstairs like an old man. Mattie wasn't home yet, and he opened the front door and went to look for her.

H
itler was thumbing his nose from just across the Channel, and London had decided to move the children out again, all the ones who had come back and all the ones who had never gone. This time Noel was going with them; once again, he hadn't been consulted. Margery had packed his suitcase and Geoffrey had walked him round to Rhyll Street Junior School, like a prisoner under escort. Not that he'd had any thought of escape: being sent away with a classful of children he hated was still an improvement on life in 23B Mafeking Road.

When the whistle blew at St Pancras, he watched the guard slide backwards. The train moved from under the blacked-out roof and sunshine slapped him in the face. He wrote:
I am sitting next to Harvey Madeley. His backside is so enormous that he is wearing his father's trousers cut down into shorts
.

‘Here we all are,' said Mr Waring, entering the compartment. ‘The Rhyll Street Fifth Column. And young Noel with his pencil and paper. A child amang ye taking notes.'

‘Where are we going, sir?' asked someone.

‘All very hush-hush,' said Mr Waring. ‘I have not been party to the plans.'

‘Is it Wales?'

‘Let us hope not.'

‘They don't speak English in Wales,' said one of the Ferris twins.

The only discernible difference between the Ferris twins
, wrote Noel,
is that one of them is even more cretinous than the other.

‘They eat squirrels in Wales,' said the other Ferris twin.

‘I won't go anywhere with cows again,' said Alice Beddows. ‘In Dorset I could see a cow out of
every
window. And I could
smell
a cow out of every window.'

‘Corned beef,' said Roy Pursey, peering into the brown paper bag that the WVS woman had given him.

‘Don't open those bags yet,' ordered Mr Waring. Everyone but Noel immediately opened their bags.

‘The items those contain are for your foster mothers, not for consuming on the journey,' said Mr Waring, but Roy Pursey had already started to turn the key on the tin of corned beef. Noel watched as a thin pink wound began to gape around the top of the tin.

‘Biscuits!' shouted Harvey Madeley.

‘When we find ourselves at midnight, progressing at a walking pace up the north-west coast of Scotland,' said Mr Waring, ‘you may come to regret your current greed.' He leaned back in his seat and opened a book.

Outside, London moved past very slowly. Most of the view was of backyards and washing lines, though if Noel squashed his cheek against the window, he could see enough of the sky to spot the odd barrage balloon.

‘I need to go to the WC,' said Shirley Green.

‘In Dorset,' said one of the Ferris twins, ‘they only had an outside lav. That's why we came home. We wrote to our mum and she came and got us. She said if we'd stayed we'd have got typhoid. Mr Waring?'

‘Hmm?'

‘We're only allowed to go somewhere with an inside lav. Our mum said that we—'

‘There wasn't even
electricity
where I was,' said Roy Pursey, interrupting. ‘They used flipping candles.'

‘Detention,' said Mr Waring.

‘We're not at school, sir.'

‘Nevertheless, my first act when we resume lessons will be to place you in detention for use of bad language.'

The train passed over a bridge and Noel glimpsed a lorry-load of soldiers on the road beneath. If Hitler invaded, as he probably would, then the next time he came to London, the streets might be full of Nazis. Everyone would have to learn German. Uncle Geoffrey, as a member of the Conservative Party, would be lined up against a wall and shot.

‘What are you smirking about?' asked Roy Pursey.

‘Nothing,' said Noel.

‘What's in the notebook?'

‘Nothing,' said Noel, again. Roy snatched it and squinted at the rows of symbols.

‘It's gobbledegook,' he said.

Noel took it back, quietly satisfied. It was a very simple code called ‘Pigpen' and he had just written
Roy Pursey is the most ignorant and unpleasant boy in Rhyll Street Junior School
.

The train gathered speed through the suburbs. Noel wrote down a list of other people who ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. The next time that he glanced out of the window, he saw a field, with a goat.

‘It's a cow!' shouted a Ferris twin.

‘And there's a horse getting on top of another horse,' said Shirley Green. ‘Right on top of it. Why's it doing that, Mr Waring?'

‘If a train travels at an average speed of forty-five miles per hour for three and a half hours,' said Mr Waring, ‘and then an average speed of twenty-two miles an hour for five and a quarter hours, what distance would it have covered?'

Noel wrote
two hundred and seventy-three miles
in his notebook and then stared out at the mild, flat countryside. The train was beginning to slow again.

‘Are we there yet?' asked one of the Ferris twins.

‘We've only just left London, Doreen,' said Mr Waring.

The train slowed still further. Red-brick villas appeared outside the window.

‘It's a town,' said Roy Pursey. There was a spire visible above the rooftops.

‘City,' corrected Mr Waring. ‘It's St Albans.'

‘You're not supposed to tell anyone, sir,' said Roy Pursey. ‘A spy might be listening.'

‘And which of your comrades do you suspect of being in the pay of the Third Reich?'

‘It's not me,' said Harvey Madeley.

‘A classic double-bluff,' said Mr Waring. ‘Harvey's your spy.'

Roy shook his head and looked pointedly at Noel. ‘No, sir. It would be someone who started coming to our school out of nowhere six months ago, and who never speaks and when he does it's posh and who writes everything down.'

‘We're stopping at a
station
,' said Doreen Ferris, excitedly. ‘We're here!'

A big woman with a green hat and yellow teeth smiled brightly at them through the window.

‘Hello, little Londoners,' she shouted. ‘Welcome to safety.'

Vee paused with a plate in her hand, and stared out of the kitchen window as the children straggled past.

‘Vaccies,' she said. ‘Did I tell you, I saw them in town this morning? They were sending them into the Mason's Hall and that councillor with all the yellow hair who was so bloody—so rude to me last week, he was standing by the door, patting their heads as they went up the steps. Anything to get his picture in the paper.' And nits, with any luck.

The children had been fresh off the train, then, excited and
shrill; now only a very few were left unclaimed. Vee watched them trudge along the lane. One of them was yawning, another scowling, a third stopped mid-stride and sneezed messily. The Seven Dwarfs, she thought – there was even a jug-eared simpleton, limping along in the rear. Only the billeting officer, thirty years too old and a yard too wide for Snow White, spoiled the illusion.

‘She'll be trying Green End Cottages next,' said Vee. ‘Irene Fletcher took three last year but they've all gone back to London. Not that I blame them – give me a choice between Irene Fletcher and a bomb and I know which I'd go for.'

From behind her rose a hum of eerie sweetness, like a musical saw, and Vee turned to see her mother at the table, pen poised above a half-written letter, her face tilted towards the wireless. She was wearing headphones, the wire drooping at knee-height across the kitchen.

‘Singing along, are you?' asked Vee. ‘That's nice.'

She turned back to the sink, spirits only briefly buoyed by the sight of the old dear enjoying herself. She was feeling irritated, and she knew why.

There were one or two people that Vee tried very hard not to think about: that blond councillor for a start, who'd been stopping people in the street, asking them to sign up for National Savings Week, and who had shouted out to Vee in front of everybody that she was being unpatriotic when she ran across Holywell Hill in order to avoid him.
Savings
. She could almost have laughed.

And that foreman at the Ballito factory, who made her wince with rage and humiliation every time she pictured him. And her current landlord, Mr Croxton of Croxton Scrap Metals, with his nasty comments (‘Can you inform your lump of a son, Mrs Sedge, that the words “regular patrol of the premises” don't mean “sit on your arse for ten hours”'). And Ezra Rigg, who called himself a rates collector but was just a bully boy, plain and
simple, and Vic Allerby and his ‘nice little jobs' as if she might actually enjoy shredding her fingers on cut-price fancy work, and Mrs Pilcher, who'd told Vee the bare-faced lie that she only needed some ‘light cleaning' four times a week, and Mr Farrell the butcher (‘I am not a charity, Mrs Sedge'), and that customer at the scarves counter of Harpenden Woolworth's who just couldn't bring herself to mind her own business, and of course Irene Fletcher at Green End cottages. And now Irene had spilled into her thoughts and was fizzing away like a pinch of liver salts.

They'd bumped into each other on the platform at St Albans City station, the previous Thursday. ‘Ooh, fancy seeing you here again,' Irene had said to her. ‘Back to visit your Uncle Clive in hospital, are you?' Which was the excuse Vee had given when they'd met the week before, though she'd actually been on her way to Luton to see whether it might be the place to carry out a little money-spinning idea she'd had. ‘And don't you look smart,' Irene had added, fixing her with eyes like steel press-studs. ‘Lucky old Uncle Clive, that's what I say. What did you tell me was wrong with him?'

‘Ulcers.'

‘Oh, not a bladder stone like last week then?'

‘All sorts,' Vee had said, rather wildly. When the train had arrived, she'd locked herself in the third-class lavatory and stayed there all the way to Luton. And once there, she'd still felt so shaken that she'd ended up taking a nip at the Bird in Hand, opposite the station. Which had meant that she hadn't been in a fit state of mind to carry out her plan of knocking on doors to ask for contributions, and the whole morning had been wasted.

The only comfort was that Irene had obviously jumped to the wrong conclusion, and had assumed that Vee was off to meet a man. Which wasn't illegal, after all. It could have been someone quite respectable, or even a soldier. So there was nothing to worry about on that score.

Perhaps, though, she ought to learn from the encounter and start making notes when she talked to people. She could keep an old envelope and a pencil in her bag:

Uncle Clive, bladder stone, Ward 4, Luton General Hospital. Told to Irene F., 14th June 1940.

That would do. And, while she thought of it:

I've always loved small dogs. Had a brown-and-white Jack Russell terrier called ‘Happy' when I was a girl. Told to Mrs Fillimore, 20th June.

And, come to mention it:

Was at school with a girl who lives in California now, called Eileen, she married a salesman and did very well for herself, and she sends us parcels with more silk scarves than we know what to do with. Told to policewoman with red hair after Woolworth's incident. Second half of May.

And:

Have bilious stomach, can't come to the door, we've all come down with it, will pay it off next week. Note left on door for Ezra Rigg, 22nd June.

An exercise book, rather than an envelope, perhaps.

Her mother was humming again, a different tune this time. ‘Gold and Silver Waltz,' said Vee. ‘Is that right, Mum? Gold and Silver Waltz?'

There was no response. The previous letter had been folded and stuck in an envelope, and her mother had started on another, her pen sprinting across the paper. In spite of her
double vision, she had lovely handwriting, put Vee's own to shame.

‘Who's that one to, Mum?' she asked. In lieu of an answer, she peered at the addresses on the envelopes. It was the usual mixture of domestic and official – Cousin Harold, ex-neighbour Phyllis Gladney, the Archbishop of Canterbury, President Roosevelt. Harold's envelope was the thickest; he had a vixen of a wife, and a daughter who'd run off to live with a Scotchman, and was much in need of the words of encouragement and Christian comfort her mother offered.

‘Cup of tea, Mum? Piece of toast?'

Her mother looked up and nodded. As Vee lit the grill, the electric clock made a noise like a cup hit with a teaspoon; half past five. It was nearly time to wake Donald for work.

Her son was lying with the eiderdown over his face when she went into the room. She laid the tray on the bedside table, and opened the curtains.

‘It's a lovely evening,' she said. ‘Proper summer.' The low sun had gilded the edge of a pile of hub caps in the yard below, and turned a dented zinc bath into a crimson shell. ‘And I've made you a nice rarebit,' she added. ‘Oh, and you've got three letters.'