Orders from Berlin (7 page)
None of the shelterers seemed to be paying any attention to the rule that only passengers could stand in front of the white line painted eight feet from the platform edge, and when the westbound train finally arrived, there was a further delay while it waited in the tunnel as a team of London Passenger Transport Board officers went up and down the platform with sticks, pushing back the stray feet and arms that were overhanging the line.
Finally the train doors closed and Albert slumped back in his seat, exhausted by his ordeal. All this for a wasted journey, he thought bitterly, unless the message he’d left got through, and even then it might be too late. No one took him seriously any more at HQ except Alec. He knew that. He was yesterday’s man, and his fears were yesterday’s news. He closed his eyes for a moment, lulled by the noise of the train, and then came wide awake again, starting up from his seat. Someone was touching him, feeling at his neck, feeling for that point where a man could be killed with a single chop of the hand. But when he turned around, he saw nothing – just people getting on and off at Victoria, brushing against him as they passed.
He got out at Sloane Square and walked down to the river. A few cars and bicycles passed him by, but once again there were no taxis and the only bus he saw was going i
n the opposite
direction. Albert looked up at the passengers’ anxious faces behind the meshed-over windows and wished he were home. He was too old for this, he thought as he stumbled and almost fell over a green hose twisting like a snake across the pavement. Glancing to his left, he saw its nozzle lying useless in the front garden of a half-destroyed Victorian house – a casualty of the previous night’s bombing. It had been sliced down the middle by a direct hit. Upstairs, the front wall had been blown away and an unmade bed and an open wardrobe hung on the edge of what was left of the sagging floor, like an unlit film set for a cheap movie, while at the back a full-length mahogany mirror swung gently to and fro in the breeze, creaking on its hinges but yielding no reflection, as all its glass was gone, shattered into a million silver fragments that glistened like raindrops on the dark blue carpet. But on either side of this scene of devastation, the other houses in the terrace were all untouched – rows of placid doors and windows, even a smoking chimney or two. Albert didn’t need reminding that this war was random in its choice of victims, the destruction it wrought entirely indiscriminate and unpredictable.
He turned away. He’d seen worse, far worse, in France and Belgium twenty-five years before – severed limbs and bloated soldiers’ bodies sinking in the oozing mud. But that had been when war was somewhere else, fought by soldiers in foreign places, not here in London, falling in a steel rain from the moonlit sky night after night, killing and maiming defenceless women and children as they trembled in inadequate shelters.
Two children hurried by, a girl and boy tightly holding hands with gas masks in Mickey Mouse satchels bouncing on their backs. There’d been no gas yet, but there would be. Albert was sure of it. Because gas was the worst. Shutting his eyes for a moment, he remembered the mustard gas attacks he’d endured with his company on the Ypres Salient in 1915 – the blinded, dying men with blistered yellow skin struggling to breathe, whispering for their mothers. Beyond hope or consolation.
Hitler had been gassed too, on the Western Front in 1918. Albert had read the intelligence reports; he knew everything there was to know and more about the Austrian corporal and his gang of murderous henchmen. All through the Thirties he’d warned Whitehall about them, but no one had listened. They’d all been obsessed with Stalin and the creeping threat of Communism, and where had that got them?
A voice crying in the wilderness – that was how the years of his career seemed to Albert now. Warnings, endless unheeded warnings, about Nazis and traitors and the need for more money. It hadn’t been what they’d wanted to hear. They’d called him C to his face and Cassandra behind his back, and then, when the opportunity had come, they’d stabbed him in the back and got rid of him – sent him out to pasture like a broken-down old carthorse with a B-level Civil Service pension and a gold watch engraved with their thanks. Thanks! All those years of service to his king and country and he hadn’t even come away with a knighthood. Not like his predecessors or the new man they’d brought in from the Navy to replace him.
Albert halted in the middle of Chelsea Bridge, gazing down into the murky depths of the slow-flowing river below his feet. He thought of all he had to offer, all his accumulated knowledge and years of experience, and realized with sudden insight that none of it mattered. No one was interested in what he had to say. He had no friends. Bertram was interested only in his money, and Alec hadn’t been round in months – until today, and that wasn’t a social call. He was good for nothing now. The only person who cared a jot about whether he lived or died was his daughter, and she’d be better off without him. The Luftwaffe would be doing him a favour if they got him with one of their bombs or a piece of shrapnel through the neck. Or perhaps he should just throw himself into the dark water and put an end to it all, right now. But Albert had no sooner thought of jumping than he pushed himself violently back from the white iron parapet and into the road, where an air raid warden on a bicycle had to swerve hard to avoid a collision.
‘Mind where you’re bloody going,’ the man shouted as he remounted. ‘You’d better take shelter, you know,’ he added in a more kindly voice. ‘Wireless says they’re over the coast already. You’ll hear the siren soon.’
Albert nodded, watching the man ride away. He was frightened now, and his hands were shaking. He looked across the river towards the bomb-blasted trees in Battersea Park. There were anti-aircraft guns in there that the Germans had tried to target the previous week, and overhead a silver-grey barrage balloon swam in the air like a strange airborne elephant, its wires a last defence against the incoming bombers.
Leaving the bridge behind, Albert walked down the road past the towers of Battersea Power Station on his left sticking up like chalk-white fingers into the evening sky. Looking around, he realized he was alone. The street was silent, but the air was still and heavy, weighing him down so that he found it hard to put one foot in front of the other. He listened to the sound of his footsteps on the sidewalk and once more sensed an echo coming at him from behind. He turned and looked back, but there was nothing, just the grey outline of the curving suspension cables of the bridge. It had to be a trick of the senses, like the way in which shadows seemed to be moving under the trees on his right. The park seemed closer than it had before, reaching out towards him. The wrought-iron railings that had marked its borders had been removed the previous year for melting down to help the war effort, and Albert didn’t think he’d ever get used to the change.
He turned the corner into Prince of Wales Drive. Now he couldn’t get it out of his head that he was being followed. Perhaps it was some ne’er-do-well looking to attack vulnerable passers-by and steal their wallets. Rumour had it that all the London parks were infested with such people, particularly since police resources had become stretched to the limit by the bombing. Albert willed himself not to run. In the night men were like animals – to show fear was to invite attack.
A dog barked somewhere out of sight, and as if in response, the air-raid siren began to wail – its agonizing cry undulating up and down through octaves of pain, building to a despairing scream at the end before it stopped abruptly and then started again. And suddenly people were running in the street, materializing as if from nowhere, and the park sprang to life as the white searchlights camouflaged in the bushes shot their beams high into the sky, crisscrossing one another as they searched for the as-yet-invisible incoming planes.
Albert had his key in his hand. In a moment he’d be home. He always felt safe inside his flat; he didn’t need to take shelter, cowering in the basement with his neighbours. It was people that unnerved him, not bombs.
Everything was going to be all right. With a surge of relief he pushed open the heavy front door of his building and was halfway over the threshold when he suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder and the muzzle of a gun thrust into the small of his back, propelling him forward into the hall and up the stairs towards his empty flat.
Ava went and got her coat as soon as she heard the siren. She knew that her father would ignore it just as he’d done before, sitting alone in his flat among the tottering piles of books, peering at old papers in the candlelight while the bombers passed overhead and the ack-ack shells burst like useless white fireworks in the sky all around them. Perhaps he was right and his neighbours huddled in the basement were wrong – perhaps Gloucester Mansions would come through the war untouched while all the surrounding buildings were blown apart. But she couldn’t take the risk. She couldn’t accept the responsibility for him not taking shelter, so she set out across Battersea with her torch, heading for the park. She kept her eyes fixed on the sidewalk as she walked, hunching her shoulders against the cold, trying to ignore the first spatterings of rain on her face.
The wailing siren had done its work, destroying her fragile self-possession, and she cursed her father under her breath as she walked. Always demanding, always complaining, expecting her to minister to his every need and yet giving nothing back. She couldn’t remember when he had last asked her a question about herself. He just seemed to assume that she would always be there, cooking for him, darning his socks, taking over her mother’s duties when the poor woman had inconsiderately upped and died four years earlier. The doctor had said it was her heart, but Ava sometimes thought that it was her father who’d killed his wife with his endless demands. At the very least, he’d given her nothing to live for.
But she hadn’t stayed at home. Instead she’d married the doctor who wrote her mother’s death certificate. She didn’t love Bertram Brive, wasn’t attracted by his portly figure and thick-featured face at all, in fact, but she’d jumped at his proposal when he’d awkwardly popped the question over tea and cake across a rickety table at the back of the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street one Sunday afternoon. He was her passport to a new life away from her father, or so she’d thought. She’d wished Bertram’s surgery were a little further than three streets away from her old home, but she’d hoped that in a few years they might move – across the river into Chelsea, perhaps, where the people were better off and there was more money to be made from general practice.
Except it hadn’t worked out that way. For some reason, Bertram didn’t seem able to get ahead. Quite the opposite in fact. He had debts, spiralling debts that he tried to conceal from her by locking all his papers inside the bureau in the sitting room of their tiny flat. And his practice was suffering just when he needed to work harder. He was heavy and humourless and lacked the bedside manner that was so crucial to inspiring confidence in patients; but what made it worse was that he didn’t seem to want to try, except with his father-in-law, who’d become far and away Bertram’s most lucrative patient in the last year or two. Albert had embraced a new career as a professional hypochondriac since his retirement from the job in the City that he’d always refused to tell anyone anything about. Ava smiled bitterly at the irony: her marriage had only served to make her more beholden to her father than ever before.
He telephoned day and night, but never to say anything significant. He’d lost this, he needed that; he was feeling pain or he wasn’t feeling anything at all. It was all a means of controlling her, she felt: a slow revenge for having left him to marry Bertram. He wasn’t really worried about his health; he’d take shelter when the bombers came over, if that was the case. And in her heart she believed that his interest in Bertram was just another way of hurting her, of making her jealous. The two men had nothing in common, yet her father had Bertram round there day and night, treating him like a long-lost son.
She knew her father was angry, knew that since his
retirement
he’d become disappointed with his life in some fundamental way, but he wouldn’t tell her why. The two of them were like dancers who never touched, circling each other endlessly in the same slow, metronomic step. She raged against her sense of responsibility to him, yet she couldn’t escape his hold over her. It would have been easier to bear if her husband had been fun or sympathetic, but he was neither. Now that it was too late, she wished that she hadn’t married him. She knew she was still attractive. Not as pretty as she had once been – Bertram and her father had seen to that – but her long brown hair when brushed out was still luxuriant, and there was a gleam in her green eyes on good days that could make men stop and take notice. But really it didn’t matter if she looked like Greta Garbo, she thought bitterly. She was a prisoner of her marriage – the wedding ring on her finger was her personal ball and chain.
Life was passing her by, but she couldn’t reach out and take hold of it. She thought sometimes that it was as if she were watching the world from inside an empty train that she had caught by mistake and couldn’t get off – a train moving slowly but steadily in the opposite direction from where she needed to go.
And the war had made it worse. All around, London was a hive of activity. Women were working in jobs that no one would have heard of them doing a year earlier. Driving the buses that Ava took to go shopping across the river; putting on steel helmets to work as ARP wardens. She’d even heard that there were female operators of the mobile anti-aircraft gun batteries. It was a new world with new opportunities, but they all seemed out of reach. Bertram wouldn’t hear of her working, and neither would her father. ‘A woman’s place is in the home’ was one of their favourite sayings. ‘Looking after us,’ they might have added, except there was no need. Ava knew exactly what was expected of her.
She reached her father’s apartment block without incident. The searchlight beams crisscrossed the sky, but there was still no sign of the enemy. Perhaps they were coming into London by a different route; probably Battersea wasn’t even the target tonight. You never knew – that was the problem.