Survivor (26 page)

Mariette fled upstairs at that, afraid
of a man who could be so vicious.

It was over an hour later that
Jean-Philippe called Mariette to come downstairs. He had packed a box with some
papers, and she could see some velvet jewellery boxes in there too.

She had spent the last hour pacing her
bedroom in floods of angry tears. But she knew she might put herself in real danger
if she told him just what she thought of him.

‘I’m going now; I’ll
call you about the funeral,’ he said. ‘I realize I was a little hasty,
so you may stay for two days after the wake. But if, when I return, I find anything
missing, I will call the police.’

She was tempted to tell him where to go,
but she bit the words back and just nodded.

Once he’d gone, she put the chain
on the door – she wouldn’t put it past him to sneak back and check what she
was doing – then she leaned back against the door and tried to think what she must
do.

But considering her future was
impossible when she’d been told something so shocking about her mother. It was
five o’clock now, which meant her parents would be ringing in an hour. She
couldn’t ask her mother about something like this on the telephone. But she
did need to know if it was true.

How could she find out?

Noah’s study seemed the most
logical place to look.

She began by looking at the books
he’d written, and found one called
White Slaves
. But after a quick
flip through the pages, there didn’t appear to be any real names in the case
studies of victims, just details of how they were taken and
lots of statistics about how many girls were reported
missing and had never been found. There was also a section on foreign girls who had
been brought to England, supposedly as servants in private homes, but had been sold
into brothels and ruined.

Leaving that one out to read properly
later, she checked his other books, but they were either fiction or about the last
war. She went through a filing cabinet that held correspondence from the last five
years on a range of subjects, but there was nothing about prostitution.

Noah kept things very neat and tidy,
reference books arranged in alphabetical order by subject, fiction by author. There
was no clutter; a few box files on a shelf were all labelled, and a glance into them
proved they were full of bills, research material, recent magazine articles and
reviews of his books.

She had just about given up when the
telephone rang, and she raced to answer it.

‘Mum?’ she asked
breathlessly.

‘Oh my darling! I can’t even
begin to tell you how we all feel at the news. And how are you coping with
it?’

Just the sweetly familiar sound of her
mother’s voice brought more tears to her eyes. ‘I’ve been
better,’ she said. ‘Jean-Philippe was just here, he’ll do
everything that has to be done.’

‘Yes, I’m sure he will, he
was always such a good little boy.’

Mariette gritted her teeth. She
couldn’t tell her mother what had been said, not even that she was to get out
of the house, because she knew it would make her family frantic.

‘Now tell me exactly what
happened,’ Belle said. ‘Mog was so upset, she probably didn’t get
it right.’

Mariette explained everything again.
‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she finished up. ‘I’ve got
friends who will look
after me.
I’ll write after the funeral, just now I need to sit quietly and think things
through.’

‘I was so fond of Lisette and
Noah,’ Belle said, and it was clear she was crying. ‘They helped me
through some very bad times. And Rose was such a beautiful, placid little girl.
It’s so hard to take in that they all went together like that.’

‘Look, Mum, I’m finding it
really hard to talk. I’m going to sit down and write you a letter. Tell Dad
and Mog that I’m alright, just terribly sad. And this call will cost a
fortune, so you must go now.’

‘We all love you, darling,’
and this time Belle couldn’t control her sobs. ‘I wish I was there to
hold you.’

‘And I love you all too.
I’ll write straight away.’

Mariette felt she’d just been put
through the mangle and everything had been squashed out of her. She sank down on to
the sofa and cried again.

The noise of the telephone ringing
roused her again. She braced herself, expecting it to be Jean-Philippe with more
orders, but it was Johnny.

‘Thank God you are there,’
he burst out, as soon as he heard her voice. ‘I don’t often pray, but I
did when I was told just now about the bombing at the Café de Paris. I
couldn’t get hold of the casualty list and, as I knew you were going there
early, I was afraid I’d lost you. But my prayers were answered. What a
relief!’

She couldn’t bring herself to tell
him Lisette, Noah, Rose and Peter were all dead. She knew he would leave his shift
and come here. If Jean-Philippe found out, that would give him more ammunition to
use against her. So she said that she would be at Greville’s office tomorrow
and asked if he could get a few hours off to meet her after work.

‘It was all such a shock,’
she said. ‘I’m going to have a bath and go to bed now.’

‘You
sound like all the stuffing’s been knocked out of you,’ he said.
‘I can get off tomorrow, I’ll meet you at five thirty.’

The siren went off about half past
seven that evening. Mariette was tempted to go to bed and take her chances, but she
knew that was reckless, so she picked up her pyjamas and her dressing gown, filled
up a hot-water bottle as she passed through the kitchen and went down to the
cellar.

Lisette had added some embellishments to
the cellar recently – a standard lamp, a rug on the floor – and had tacked a large
colourful patchwork quilt to the wall. She said she had begun it when she was
expecting Rose and while Noah was away a great deal, during the first war. But when
they moved into this house, it didn’t fit in with the decor in the
bedrooms.

It was another reminder of
Lisette’s talents. She had been a serene, gentle woman who enjoyed gliding
quietly about her home, caring more for other people’s comfort than her own.
She never raised her voice, meals were prepared without fuss, and Mariette hardly
ever observed her cleaning, doing the laundry or anything else to keep the house
clean, polished and tidy. Yet it always was pristine, nothing had changed since Mr
and Mrs Andrews left to go and help their farming relatives. She did it all. Even
down here, she had to make it homely and pleasant for her family. There were
jigsaws, board games and books on the shelves, even some artificial flowers in a
vase.

Mariette put the hot-water bottle in one
of the beds, and turned on the electric fire, then sat down in one of the easy
chairs. She could hear the soft thud of bombs dropping in the far distance, and she
wondered if they were dropping on the East End again or whether some other area of
London was getting it tonight.

Where would she
live when she had to leave here? Where could she afford, with only two days’
paid work a week?

The answer to that was obvious, of
course: she’d have to get another job. But doing what? The munitions factory?
Clippie on a bus?

As she sat there, she noticed in the far
corner there were three stout cardboard boxes, stacked on top of one another. Noah
had said to leave them there as they weren’t in the way. Lisette had teased
him about the contents, she said she suspected they were the first articles he wrote
when he became a journalist, and he was a sentimental fool not throwing them out.
Noah had just laughed, which implied she was right.

Mariette thought that she might find
something about her mother in there. It could be that Jean-Philippe had looked
through them, back in the days when he lived here, and that was how he’d got
his information.

The first box was just as Lisette had
thought. Newspaper cuttings. Noah had stuck each one on to thin card and written the
date and the newspaper in which it appeared. The oldest one she could see was dated
1905, when he had been just twenty. It was about a wedding in Camden Town; he
described the bride’s dress, which was cream taffeta with a lace overlay,
while the bridesmaids, younger sisters of the bride, were in pink.

As she looked further, she found most of
the early dates were either weddings or funerals, with the occasional article about
a fund-raising lunch or dinner, where he’d noted who had held it, how much was
raised for the charity, and any notable people present.

He was organized even then, and the
cuttings were filed in date order. She flicked through them, only stopping to read
ones that had a heading that stood out. Seeing one that said ‘Tarantula
Terror’, dated January 1910, in
The Herald
, she
read about a porter in Covent Garden who was spotted
with a tarantula on his shoulder. Once advised of this, the porter became rigid with
terror and it took a young boy with a glass and a sheet of card to remove it and
place it in a box for safety. Later, the spider was taken to London Zoo. Beside the
cutting Noah had written ‘My first proper story’.

From that date on, judging by the sheer
numbers of cuttings, Noah was obviously getting more work, and being sent to write
up more interesting events. But then, in August of 1910, there was a big article in
The Herald
about young girls who had gone missing from around the Seven
Dials area. This one was the first that carried his byline.

It was a passionate article – Noah was
obviously deeply concerned about the plight of these young girls – and it sounded as
if he had researched the article thoroughly. All the disappearances had been
reported to the police, but none of the girls had been found. He stressed that all
of them were pretty, but they were good girls from loving homes, with no reason to
run away. All had disappeared while out on an errand or on their way to see a
friend, and he believed they could have been taken to work as prostitutes, possibly
in France or Belgium. Then, at the bottom, he had listed each of the girls. And one
was Belle Cooper.

Mariette was stunned.

Shutting that box up, she moved on to
the second one. Again, it was full of cuttings, but there was nothing of interest to
her. But she did notice that Noah’s star was clearly rising in the world of
journalism as many of his stories appeared on the front page of the newspaper, and
all carried his name.

The last box was more of the same. But,
just as she was getting close to the bottom of the box, she found what she was
looking for. A report on a murder trial at the Old Bailey
in 1913. It wasn’t written by Noah, and it
wasn’t mounted on card like everything else. It was short and to the
point.

Mr Frank James Waldegrave, also known as
Kent, was convicted of the murder of one Millie Simmons, at Jake’s Court,
Seven Dials, in January 1910, and sentenced to be hanged. The principal witness,
Belle Cooper, gave evidence that she had witnessed the murder when she was fifteen
and was subsequently abducted by Waldegrave and an accomplice, and taken to Paris to
be sold into prostitution.

Stunned and horrified, Mariette just sat
there holding the newspaper cutting in her hands. She wondered how her mother could
be so gentle, caring and so normal after going through something as bad as that.

She needed to know the whole story: how
Noah, Lisette and her papa all fitted into it; and how Mog coped when Belle went
missing. Yet, as horrific as it was, it did explain why her parents and Mog had
always been so understanding of other people’s frailties.

Yet if Jean-Philippe had hoped he would
crush her with this family history, he was out of luck. If anything, it just made
her love and admire her mother still more.

‘I’ll find somewhere for you
to stay,’ Johnny said, taking Mariette’s hands across the café table and
squeezing them. ‘I’d also like to go round and give Jean-Philippe a good
hiding. He’s not a man, he’s a snake.’

The café was close to the office in
Baker Street, and she’d just finished telling Johnny the whole story about
what had happened at the Café de Paris and how horrible Jean-Philippe had been.

Mariette managed a weak smile.
‘That won’t help things, he’d have you locked up. And then what
would I do?’

‘I wish I could do more,’
Johnny said. ‘I can’t believe you went to work today. You must have
steel in your spine.’

‘What was I going to do all day,
if I stayed home? It doesn’t feel like home any more. Jean-Philippe
didn’t need to order me to leave – I don’t want to stay there alone, and
neither could I afford too. But Lisette will be spinning in her grave at the way her
son is behaving. Well, she would if she was in one.’

‘What did my uncle say
today?’

‘He was kind, very shocked, of
course. Well, you don’t expect one of your staff to come in and tell you four
of the six people she went out with, to celebrate her birthday, are now dead. He
said that I should demand to know the contents of Noah’s will. But I
can’t do that.’

‘But if you find the name of
Noah’s solicitor, you could tell him what’s happened,’ Johnny
suggested. ‘I expect Jean-Philippe is entitled to everything now his mother
and sister are gone. But you never know, Noah might have left you
something too – after all, you are his god-daughter.
That snake might just tell the solicitor that you’ve disappeared or something.
I wouldn’t put it past him.’

‘I wouldn’t want to ask such
a thing. That puts me on the same level as Jean-Philippe.’

‘You don’t have to ask if
you’ve been left anything, you could just say that you want to give him a
forwarding address, just in case he needs to contact you. But, like I said,
I’ll find somewhere for you to stay. I know loads of people who might have
room for a lodger, and they don’t live in slums either.’

‘You are very sweet. Last night, I
felt I was being crushed by the weight of it all. But when I woke this morning, I
felt a bit better knowing I was going to see you this evening.’

He didn’t respond for a moment,
just looked down at her hands in his on the table.

When he spoke, it was haltingly, as if
struggling to find the right words. ‘When I thought I might have lost you, I
wished I’d told you I loved you. I never dared say it before because I was
scared you’d back away from me. Then, when you answered the phone yesterday, I
was so happy you were alive that I thought I must tell you.

‘I was watching you come out of
the office this evening, and you looked like you were on your way to be executed.
But as soon as you saw me, you switched on a smile. But you know what I
thought?’

‘No, tell me.’

‘That you’d asked to meet me
to tell me it was over.’

In view of everything she’d just
told him, Mariette was shocked that he should be thinking of himself, and the
thought crossed her mind that he was going to use her tragedy for his own ends.

‘Why on earth would you think
that?’ she asked.

‘It’s easy, sweetheart.
You’re special, beautiful, clever, got
everything going for you. Why would you want to tie
yourself up with a fireman, when you could have a rich man who could give you a nice
house and all the stuff you’re used to? And why didn’t you tell me
yesterday on the phone that all your folks had been killed?’

‘Because I knew you’d drop
everything and come over,’ she said. ‘I was afraid Jean-Philippe might
come back. If he found you there, it would’ve turned ugly.’

‘I’d have kicked his teeth
in. But I dare say that’s just what you were afraid of.’

There was the implication in that remark
that she was ashamed of him. She resented the fact that he would bring it up now,
when she already had enough on her plate. It had been her intention to tell him what
Jean-Philippe had said about her mother. But under the circumstances, maybe that
wasn’t such a good idea.

They went to a pub and had a couple of
drinks, but Mariette felt too sad, dejected and worried to talk. She couldn’t
help but compare how Edwin had been with her the previous day to the way Johnny was
behaving now. Edwin had been really comforting, and he’d only met her for the
first time a couple of hours before the disaster. Yet Johnny, who had known her for
months, seemed unable to grasp how bad all this was for her.

‘I want to go home,’ she
said, when he offered her a third drink. It was only eight o’clock but
she’d had enough for one day. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but I feel too
miserable to even try to chat.’

‘That’s OK, I’ll come
with you,’ he said.

‘No, Johnny,’ she said.
‘I meant alone.’

‘You always said you wished we had
a chance to be alone somewhere comfortable,’ he said reproachfully.

‘There’s a time and a place
for everything,’ she said sharply.
‘But this is not the time. And my uncle’s
house, so soon after his death, is not the place. Have some respect,
Johnny!’

‘I only wanted to take care of
you. There’s no pleasing some people,’ he retorted.

Johnny’s sulky expression played
on Mariette’s mind as she walked home. She really did feel he had hoped to
take advantage of her when she was vulnerable, and that hurt. But maybe she was
overreacting and thinking the worst of him because she had no one else to lash out
at?

But when she arrived home, she was very
glad that she hadn’t weakened and allowed Johnny to come back with her,
because Jean-Philippe was there. He had a large notepad and pen in his hands and
appeared to be making an inventory of valuable items.

‘The funeral is arranged for St
Mark’s on Friday, at two,’ he said, breaking off from his list to speak
to her. ‘Arrange refreshments for twenty people afterwards.’

She wanted to suggest he use the world
‘please’, but she was more concerned by the number.

‘Only twenty?’ she queried.
Just off the top of her head she could think of at least fifteen couples who were
close friends of Noah and Lisette’s, without including Noah’s fellow
journalists and authors, or Rose’s friends and work colleagues.

‘I am not providing a bun fight
for all and sundry,’ he said loftily. ‘I have left a list in the kitchen
of those I have invited back here. A few sandwiches will be quite sufficient, I
believe one is allowed to have extra rations for a funeral, but I see no sense in
squandering food on people at such a time.’

Mariette thought such meanness
wasn’t even worthy of a reply. ‘But you have contacted all of the people
they cared about?’

‘I placed an obituary in
The
Times
.’

She knew that
meant he hadn’t, and he didn’t intend to telephone or write a personal
letter to anyone. She was stunned by such callous behaviour.

‘Don’t you think your family
would expect you to make personal calls to the people they cared about?’ she
asked.

His face darkened. ‘Who are you to
pass comment on what I decide?’ he sneered. ‘I’ve got more
important things to do with my time than telephoning Rose’s vacuous friends,
or the nodding acquaintances of my stepfather’s.’

Mariette thought it better to show her
disapproval by walking away from him than by saying anything further. They were
after all his family, not hers. And if he hadn’t the good manners or the
compassion to think about what they would have liked, it wasn’t her fault.

Jean-Philippe left the house just after
ten without saying anything more to her. He took with him the silver candlesticks
and a large silver dish from the dining room, a carriage clock from the drawing room
and a set of four small watercolours in gilt frames from Noah and Lisette’s
bedroom. She had to assume he was afraid she would steal them and, coming on top of
everything else, she dissolved into tears.

The following morning, she went into
work to find Mr Greville looking at
The
Times
.

‘Have you seen this obituary,
about your uncle?’ he asked, pointing to a column on the third page written by
Walter Franklin, the editor. ‘I know you said your uncle was a writer, but I
hadn’t realized he was so well known.’

She had long since realized that
Greville wasn’t quite as hard-hearted as he liked to make out. He’d been
very kind the day after the bombing, and asked if she was alright for money. It
helped to feel he cared about her, and she smiled at him gratefully as she picked up
the newspaper.

Her eyes
prickled with tears of pride as she read it.

Jean-Philippe might think a few lines
that announced the deaths of his mother, stepfather and sister, plus the date and
time of the funeral, was a sufficient obituary. But this was a real one, written by
a man who knew Noah well and admired him.

The whole of Fleet Street is
mourning the death of writer and journalist Noah Baylis, who lost his life on 8
March, along with his wife, daughter and family friend at the Café de Paris
while celebrating his god-daughter’s twenty-first birthday.

Often called ‘The Voice of
the Great War’, the reports Baylis wrote during that conflict will stand
for all time as some of the best, most informative insights into the terrible
destruction and true cost of war.

He was honest, portraying not
only the heroism he saw, but also the shocking waste of human life. His
passionately descriptive passages allowed us to see what he had seen, to enter
into that hell that haunted so many of our men for so long afterwards.

He went on to praise Noah’s books
and his many hard-hitting pieces of investigative journalism on the subjects of
slum-property landlords, indifference to the plight of those left disabled after the
war, and the extreme poverty which many people faced during the Depression years. He
concluded:

Baylis had a big heart, and he used
his talent as a writer to make others aware of the inequality in this country.
His death is a huge loss to journalism and to all those who revered him.

Mariette didn’t think she’d
ever met Mr Franklin, but she hoped he would be at the funeral so she could shake
his hand and thank him.

‘I hope
Jean-Philippe reads it and feels ashamed,’ she said, wiping her eyes. She then
told Greville what had happened the previous evening. ‘All he cares about is
grabbing everything valuable. Imagine what Aunt Lisette would have thought of his
behaviour!’

‘The sooner you get away from
there the better,’ Greville said, putting his hand on her shoulder. ‘You
can come and work at the factory, you know. And it would be easy enough to find a
place to live down there. But, from what I hear, you’ll probably want to be
nearer our Johnny.’

On seeing her surprised look, he gave
her one of his infrequent smiles. ‘I guessed ages ago. He wouldn’t be my
choice for you. But it isn’t up to me, is it?’

She wondered what he meant by Johnny not
being his choice for her. That seemed an odd thing for anyone to say about their
nephew. Did he know something about Johnny that she didn’t?

Mariette cut out the obituary so she
could send it to her parents. It was so very sad that this was all she could offer
to comfort them on losing their dear friends.

On the Friday morning, Mariette sat up
in bed and looked at her suitcase lying open on the floor. It was all packed, ready
to go, just a few last-minute things to add. She would go to the funeral, come back
here and say all the right things to the people Jean-Philippe thought worthy of an
invitation to the house, and then she’d leave.

Joan, a friend she worked with at the
old factory, had offered her a bed until she could find something permanent. It was
in Bow, a tiny little house with an outside lavatory, no bathroom and gas lighting.
Joan was lonely as her two children had been evacuated down to Devon and her husband
was serving in North Africa. While Mariette was very grateful
to Joan, and relieved that after today she would never
need to see Jean-Philippe again, her heart ached at leaving a place that held so
many wonderful memories.

Only six days ago she had been bursting
with happiness. Her twenty-first birthday meant she was officially an adult, and
she’d felt like one then, strong, capable, ready for anything that might lie
ahead. But she hadn’t known then that her world was going to fall apart and
she would lose three people who meant everything to her. There was a hole inside her
where they’d once been. Maybe, if she could go home to New Zealand, she could
fill that hole with her own family. But she couldn’t go home. And there was no
one here, not even Johnny, who could take away the deep sorrow she felt.

She got out of bed and went to run a
bath. After today, she’d have to make do with the public baths, and she knew
she was going to hate that. Once she was dressed, there was bread to be picked up at
the bakery – Mr Giggs, who owned it, had been fond of Lisette and he’d
promised three white loaves to make the sandwiches.

It was fortunate that Lisette had been
such a hoarder: there were four tins of salmon in the cupboard, two of spam, and
more than enough ingredients for a large fruit cake. Mariette had made the cake
yesterday, along with some sausage rolls and some jam tarts. It was a small revenge
on Jean-Philippe to make sure he saw the guests eating up everything he’d
probably planned to take home. She’d also packed tea, sugar and some other
things in the bottom of her suitcase to help Joan out.

By half past twelve, everything was
ready. The dining-room table looked pretty, with Lisette’s favourite white
lace-edged tablecloth, a vase of daffodils from the garden, and the food arranged on
the best plates, sandwiches covered with damp tea towels to keep them fresh. Tea
cups and saucers were on
a trolley, and
the alcohol and glasses were arranged on a table in the drawing room.