Authors: Helen Dunmore
It’s almost dark. Lily and the children have changed from the London express on to the branch line. There’s a stretch of single-track railway ahead. As each train goes through, the driver hands over the key he carries to the waiting train at the other end. There is only ever one key, and it must be taken before the train can go forward. In that way, there will never be a collision on the single-track line. Paul already knew about the key system and he explains it to Bridget, who drums her heels into the upholstery until dust flies. The making of this journey is the one thing that has lightened Paul’s mood, but he knows that soon they won’t be travelling any more: they’ll be
there.
No London; no school; no Danny; nothing that he knows anything about. He won’t think about Dad. Their bags and suitcases are up in the racks. Two trunks have been sent ahead. Nothing else is coming with them. Sally preached at him yesterday about how much worse it must have been for Mum when she came to England, but even Sal is silent now,
with her cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window.
Lily is glad of the journey. It is a breathing space: for a few hours, at least, she can do nothing. The train is carrying them to their destination. It feels as if she hasn’t sat down for days. Every evening, until late in the night, she has sorted, cleared, labelled, packed. The loft is full of their belongings. She has cleaned until her hands are raw. Mrs Wiseman has got to like the house. She must come in, look around and turn to her husband with relief and satisfaction: ‘Why, this is just what I thought it would be like, from what you said. I think we’ll be happy here.’ If the tenants leave, there is no money to pay the mortgage. Finding the cottage was easier than she thought it would be. She decided on the Kent coast, because she would be able to visit Simon from there, and yet it was quiet, remote and cheap. The children would like the sea. She had picked out five villages from the Ordnance Survey map at the library. They were all on the railway: that was essential, because of visiting Simon. She telephoned the pub and the post office in each of them, to find out if there were any cottages to let. She’d struck lucky in the Smugglers’ Rest at East Knigge, where the landlord put her on to Mrs Woolley. The rent is less than a third of what the Wisemans are paying her.
‘It’s nothing fancy, mind,’ Mrs Woolley had warned. God knows what that meant. Well, they’d find out.
Lily closes her eyes. She’ll rest them, just for a moment.
The children are quiet: they’re tired too. The train canters on through the darkness. It knows where it’s going, at least, she thinks. She has left everything that she knows, but she doesn’t have to think about that, not yet, not until the journey is over. Her hair smells of train-smoke. The train from Berlin didn’t smell like this. The smoke was different. It was a big train and it went fast, until it stopped at the border. They had to show their papers. She had forgotten all that but now it is as clear as clear.
‘It’s so dark, Mum,’ says Sally. ‘We won’t be able to see anything when we get there. It’s never as black as this when you look out of the windows in London.’
She sounds scared. Lily rouses herself. Children are sensitive: they pick up your thoughts. ‘No, but just think how nice it will be to wake up in the morning and see it all for the first time,’ she says, as if Sally is as young as Bridget. ‘The beach is only half a mile down the lane. You’ll be able to run to the sea whenever you like.’ She does not repeat what Mrs Woolley has told her: ‘It’s not much of a beach. We don’t get many visitors, even in the summer.’
The cottage has two bedrooms upstairs and an attic where a bed will have been set up for Paul. Downstairs, a kitchen and a living room. There’s an outside toilet. No bathroom. However, there are washbasins in both bedrooms, and ‘a bath can be taken in the kitchen if desired’. Lily wonders why, since Mrs Woolley has already got running water, she hasn’t installed a bathroom. But if she had, the rent would be higher.
There is a grammar school five miles away, and the school bus runs through the village. For now, the children will go to the village primary school. There’s a station in East Knigge, although the railway is mostly used by freight trains from the quarry. Mrs Woolley told her all this and would have said more, but already Lily had used up almost nine minutes on the call.
‘We’ll soon be there,’ she says to the children. The carriage jolts and sways. Every so often the train slows and stops at empty platforms. A guard shouts, a lamp flashes, and they are off again.
At last, the train loses speed, slides under a footbridge and comes to a halt with a hiss of steam. It’s the end of the line: East Knigge. They are here. They clamber down from the carriage, cold and stiff. There’s no one on the platform but the guard. The train isn’t going any farther, and it waits, panting, for its journey back along the single line. No one else has got off the train, and no one seems to be waiting to board it. The air is damp, and smells of salt. The man in the ticketoffice goes to look in left luggage, and sure enough, their trunks are waiting. But there’s no porter. They can leave the trunks there until morning. They’ll need a taxi, with those cases. It’s a fair old walk out to Beach Road.
‘Is there a taxi rank outside?’
He laughs. ‘You from London?’
‘Yes.’
‘Turn right as you go out, and Joe’s number’s on a card in the phone box.’
They come out of the station into darkness, and stand in a tight clump, with their bags and suitcases, until the taxi comes. Ten past six, and it feels like the middle of the night. Bridget is too tired even to complain. She leans against Lily and asks, ‘Is this Kent?’
‘Yes, we’re here now.’
In one of Lily’s bags there is bread, butter, cheese, tea, a tin of Nescafé, a tin of baked beans and a tin of peaches. She’s packed the tin-opener too, just in case there isn’t one. There’s a shop in the village, but it will be shut now. Lily asked their landlady to arrange for three pints of milk a day. Today’s bottles should be waiting on the doorstep.
At last, the taxi comes. It’s a decrepit Jowett driven presumably by Joe, who must be at least sixty. In no time he has stowed bags and suitcases into the boot and the back of the car. If the little ‘un sits on Lily’s knee, they’ll be off in two twos. Lily is almost suspicious of such cheeriness. Is he about to overcharge her? But he seems to know where he’s going. The road gets bumpier. They are flying through the darkness, jouncing on the hard leather seats. Lily grips Bridget, who has woken up completely and is craning out of the window. But there’s nothing to see.
Joe puts on the brakes and they all slide forward.
‘Here you are.’
The track is pale underfoot. On their left, set back, is a darker bulk. It must be the cottage.
‘You’d think they’d have left a light on,’ says Joe, who has already unloaded everything, taken Lily’s half-crown,
ruffled Bridget’s hair and given back the change. She offers a tip, but he refuses.
‘I’m not a taxi-driver as such,’ he says, ‘I’m retired, but it keeps me on my toes.’
Lily has an absurd, fleeting hope that he will carry their luggage into the cottage, find the lights and show them where everything is. But of course he climbs back into his car, and as they troop towards the gate he does an impressively rapid three-point turn, honks his horn and is on his way.
Darkness and emptiness flow towards them.
‘I don’t like it here,’ says Bridget.
‘You’re so stupid,’ says Paul. ‘We haven’t seen anything yet.’
The key will be left under a white stone to the left of the front door. There’s no stone. Lily bends down, scrabbling, until a cry from Sally shows the stone and the key on the other side of the door. Of course: Mrs Woolley meant on the left from inside the house. Three bottles of milk glimmer through the dark. Lily feels over the wood of the door until she finds a keyhole. The key has to be jiggled in the lock but at last it turns, and they push in all around her, as if the creatures of the night are at their backs.
‘Wait, wait. Let me find the light-switch.’
Blindly, her hands sweep the wall. There it is, the blessed light-switch, and then a burst of light as they stand staring. They have stepped straight into a room, with furniture.
‘There isn’t any hall,’ says Sally.
Perhaps the room will look better by daylight. There is a brown, worn carpet and two floral armchairs with grease marks where heads have rested. But at least someone’s laid a fire.
‘That was kind of Mrs Woolley,’ says Lily, wanting to start the children off on the right foot.
‘Who’s Mrs Woolley?’
‘She’s a silly old sheep. Baaa!’ shouts Bridget, who is beyond tiredness now.
‘That’s enough. Sally, get the matches out of my blue bag and light the fire. Paul, get the milk in from the doorstep, then you can help me carry these suitcases upstairs. Bridget, you can take the red bag into the kitchen.’
The range in the kitchen was supposed to have been lit for them, but it’s cold. It heats the water, too, so there won’t be any hot for washing. Never mind, she’ll look at it later. There are fireplaces in both bedrooms. The whole place smells of damp.
‘It’s cold here. I don’t like it. Why can’t we go home?’
‘You know why we can’t go home. Don’t pretend to be an even stupider baby than you are,’ says Paul as he swings up another suitcase.
‘That’s enough, Paul. Bridgie, go and sit by the fire that Sally’s making, and you’ll soon be warm.’
I make a baby of Bridget, Lily thinks. That will have to stop. She reaches up to the kitchen shelf for a blackened saucepan. She can heat the baked beans over the fire and then at least the children will have something hot. If there’s a toasting fork, they can have toast too.
‘Are there sheets on the beds, Paul?’ she calls up.
A pause, then: ‘No. Just blankets and eiderdowns.’
She should have asked the taxi-driver to go back to the station for their trunks. Never mind, they can sleep without sheets for one night. She runs up and down stairs, unpacking and putting in place what’s needed for the night, telling the children to hang their nightclothes near the fire to warm them, to find their thickest jumpers and their hot-water bottles and bring these downstairs too. They do as Lily says with an alacrity that she finds almost painful. They want so much to believe that there is order in all this and that their mother knows what she is doing. When the fire is hot enough, she sets the kettle to boil and fills the children’s hot-water bottles one by one. Now it’s time for the baked beans. Paul kneels by the fire, toasting bread, while upstairs Bridget yelps at the cold as Sally washes her face and hands.
They sit in a half-circle around the fire, on a blanket from upstairs. The hot toast is deliciously sodden with tomato sauce and butter, and the children eat wolfishly, in silence. The coal scuttle is full. Thank God the woman did that, because Lily would never have found the coal bunker in this dark. The core of the fire glows red. There’s one piece of toast left. If Bridget goes to bed as soon as she’s finished eating, then the first day will be almost over, thinks Lily. She must get the range going, and then the house will warm up. Who knows how much better these rooms will look with sunlight coming
into them? And she’ll clean the whole place from top to bottom.
She sighs, and changes it to a cough when Sally glances quickly at her face. The children look so tired. She must put the chamber pots under their beds, for night-time. They can’t go out to that toilet in the dark.
‘I want to sleep in your bed, Mum,’ says Bridget.
‘Listen,’ says Lily. ‘Can you hear the sea?’
They are all still, listening. A long shushing sound, close but not loud. It must be the sea. It can’t be anything else.
Giles’s leg is doing well, but they haven’t moved him to the King David yet. His temperature stubbornly refuses to return to normal, and the slightest effort makes him breathless. The maggots have done their job. The wound is bright pink and clean, which Sister says is an excellent indicator of healing.
The little dark nurse, Nurse Davies, brings a kidney dish and his toothbrush, with the paste already spread on it. For Christ’s sake, surely he ought to be able to squeeze out his own toothpaste? But his hands tremble as they hold the brush and after he has finished, rinsed and spat he falls back on the pillows sweating with weakness.
‘Let’s get you more comfortable,’ says Nurse Davies. ‘Upsidaisy.’ She’s very strong. With one arm she levers him forward and up, and then she holds him there as she plumps up the pillows and puts them back in place, before gently lowering him into position again. ‘Better now?’
‘Thank you.’ How long has he been in here? He must ask Anstruther. Ridiculous not to be able to remember, but one day melts into the next in an atmosphere of relentless good cheer. Anstruther says that the next stage will be a cloud of new growth around the broken bones. It won’t look pretty but that’s what they want to see on the X-rays. The metalwork will stay in for at least a year, possibly two. Some people never have it removed. Bodies are remarkably adaptable things, and there are plenty of chaps still walking around with shrapnel from the trenches inside them.
Giles clings to these remarks. Soon he will be out of here, out and about, one of thousands of old coves who have more metal inside them than the Bank of England. The wound – everyone calls it that, impersonally, as if it’s only accidentally part of Giles – is a textbook example of maggot therapy. He’s been lying in a hospital bed for days – weeks – doing bugger all except when he is released from all the contraptions and Sister bullies him on to his feet. So why doesn’t he feel better? That’s not a question he can ask Anstruther or any of the nurses. He hasn’t had a drink since the night of the fall. Doesn’t even feel like it. The thought of a glass of whisky makes him nauseous. Smoking’s off the cards too: the one time he tried, he coughed until he choked. He is diabolically weak. It feels as if not only his leg but his entire body has been smashed up, beaten to a pulp deep inside where no surgeon will be able to get at it. The worst thing is the way he sweats at night. It must be the drugs they give him. He wakes up cold
and drenched, with his pyjamas soaked through and the sheets clinging. They say his temperature is still wrong.
‘Nurse Davies is going to take you along to the Orangery this morning,’ says Sister. ‘Mr Anstruther thinks it may be beneficial.’
The Orangery is a big conservatory on the ground floor. It faces south, and even in winter it is warm when the sun shines. The nurses help him into a wheelchair, and he goes down in the lift, like a child in its pushchair. The Orangery is a surprise. It is so bright that it makes his eyes sting. There are rows of day-beds, tubs of dusty lemon trees and a smell of trapped, heated air and citrus leaves. It has already been explained to him that exposure to sunlight, even through glass, is good for bone healing. It is the Vitamin D in sunlight that does the trick. Giles would have thought this could have waited until he was in the convalescent hospital. If he’s well enough to be wheeled down to the Orangery, then why the hell aren’t they transferring him to the King David?
The day-beds, too, are wheeled. Nurse Davies and another nurse help him out of the wheelchair into the bed. He lies back, utterly exhausted, sweating and out of breath. He feels a hand take his wrist and fingers on his pulse.
‘Just lie quite still. You might not think it, but it’s quite an effort, the first time a patient comes down here.’
Her voice is so kind that tears gather behind his eyelids.
For Christ’s sake, man, you’re getting maudlin. With an effort, he unsticks his eyes. The nurse is gazing into the distance, her face perfectly calm. Everything must be all right. After another half-minute she releases her hold on his wrist, lays his hand down carefully at his side and nods as if thoroughly satisfied.
‘I’ll just take your temperature,’ she says, whipping a thermometer out of its holder and inserting it beneath his tongue. His mouth is so used to this routine by now that it opens meekly at a word. But he is still out of breath, even though he’s lying down. She seems to know this, because she calls another nurse and they raise the back-rest on the day-bed so that they can prop him up into a sitting position.
‘I’ll have a word with Mr Anstruther,’ says the other nurse, who seems to be in charge of things here.
‘Yes, Sister,’ says Nurse Davies.
The day-beds are set to face the light, and here the patients lie, waiting for the pale winter sun to creep from behind the clouds again. Giles drowses, and then wakes suddenly at the rasp of a snort from the back of his nose. Has he been making that noise all the time? No one turns. Each is in his own world, preoccupied with the advance and retreat of his own pain. And Giles lies there, one of them.
Enough snow has fallen in the night to coat the roofs of the prison, and the air is raw. There’s slush in the exercise yard, and the screws stamp their feet to keep warm. Christmas, thank God, is over. Simon has taken
to attending chapel. One must do something. His mother has put in a request for a visit, but he has refused. He cannot have her here, to see him stripped bare. She’d sit there, taking in everything, asking the same idiotic questions she used to ask when she came down to visit him at school. She might make observations about the other men and their visitors, in her voice that was always slightly too loud.
‘What does it matter if they
do
hear, Simon? For heaven’s sake, why are you always so touchy?’
After the visit, she’d take the train back to Stopstone, rearranging the day in her head as she planned what she would say to Pa and his brothers. Her day had been simply frightful, but it was over now. His brothers would telephone Stopstone that evening to hear how things had gone. They would be very manly and stern and careful of her.
He must get money for Lily, he thinks suddenly. Perhaps he ought to have allowed his mother to visit him. He could have tried to make her see that whatever she thought about him, it mustn’t affect Lily and the children. They are her grandchildren, for Christ’s sake. Lily’s mother, who has nothing, puts ten-shilling notes into birthday cards and sends each child a five-shilling book token at the start of the summer holidays. His own mother talks endlessly about the terrible drain of running Stopstone. She will pretend to think that Lily can manage perfectly well, with her job and the little house in Muswell Hill. He hasn’t told his parents that Lily has left London. He hasn’t even told Pargeter. The
less that they know, he thinks, the better for Lily and the children.
Pargeter is running out of steam. Every case, even the most hopeless, can be transformed by conviction. He smiles at his own double-entendre. The other side will pick up every sign of weakness and make sure that the jury does too. They won’t even know why they don’t believe a word that comes out of Callington’s mouth; they simply won’t believe him.
There’s a smell to a case which has little to do with the facts. And this one not only smells bad, but the facts are against Callington as well. He’s as stubborn as a mule, and refuses to accept that the jury will want to know a little more than that ‘someone’ must have put the camera in his desk, although he has no idea who that someone might be, or why they might want to incriminate him. Pargeter taps his pen cap. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
If he had any choice in the matter he wouldn’t put Simon Callington on the stand. He might well come apart spectacularly. Pargeter has his reputation to consider. He can’t afford to be made a B. F. by Simon Callington in Court No. 1. Clients who hold back material facts from their own defence and think that they won’t be pulled apart by the other side are the worst, and thank God he hasn’t had to deal with too many of those in his career. Soon, it’s going to be time to have a very frank word indeed with Callington. And now there are the Portland arrests. God knows whether
that will make matters better or worse for Simon. The evidence against the Portland trio looks as if it will be pretty damning. Anyone who reads the newspapers – any jury – will now know that spies can perfectly well live next door, in a bungalow in Ruislip, without a cloak or dagger in sight. Or in a terraced house in Muswell Hill. But on the other hand that bungalow seems to have been an Aladdin’s Cave of evidence, whereas at the Callington home they found nothing at all. So it cuts both ways.
Even so, Pargeter is losing hope of getting home on this one.
After conviction, Simon knows that he might be sent to the other end of the country. How will Lily manage then? She’d have to find the fares to visit him, on top of all the other expenses. She said she was pleased about the rent that she’d negotiated with the Americans, but still worried about how their savings were dwindling. She’s found a part-time job as housekeeper to a retired solicitor called Austin, who had lost his wife in April. It always amuses him when people use that expression, as if the wife might be somewhere in the attic or coal cellar, waiting to be found. The solicitor’s house was already going to pot. A nice man, Lily said. When she went for her interview, she found him in the scullery with his sleeves rolled up, peeling potatoes with a scout knife. He had taken off so much peel that there was hardly any potato left to cook.
She was happy with the housekeeping job. Things
were cheap in East Knigge, compared to London. The woodshed was almost full. The farm sold milk and eggs for two-thirds of what they cost in Muswell Hill. They wanted to charge her visitors’ rates at first, because they knew she was from London, but they didn’t try that any more.
‘What do people there think you’ve done with your husband?’ he asked Lily on her last visit.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Perhaps they think you’re a brave little widow.’
Her mouth twitched, but she answered calmly, ‘Of course they don’t think that. Why should they?’
‘The children must say something at school.’
‘I don’t think anyone’s very curious. We’re outside the village, and the lane doesn’t go anywhere. Only to the beach. Nobody sees us. You might be coming home every weekend, for all they know.’
She had put a card in the village shop window, advertising private French lessons.
‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’ he asked.
‘How else am I going to get pupils? I’ve written to the grammar school in St Mary Regis but I haven’t heard anything.’
‘Simmery Regis? Is that where Paul will go?’
‘It’s Saint Mary really, but they say Simmery.’
And so do you now, he thought. She was picking up local ways. God knows what people in a little village in Kent thought when they saw a postcard advertising French lessons. He kept getting pictures in his head and they wouldn’t go away. There was Lily in front of him,
sitting on one of the mean iron-framed chairs that were put out for visitors. She wore her navy suit and her hair was up in a chignon. She looked cool and remote but he knew that she had dressed like this on purpose, to give herself confidence as she walked in through the gates. She glanced from side to side, nervously. Her mouth was set.
He knew he should praise her courage and good sense. It was all he could have expected and more, but his heart was so flooded with bitterness that he didn’t dare open his mouth. He could do nothing for Lily or the children. The more he tried, the more he was a drag on them. He’d suggested to Lily, before they went to East Knigge, that it might be a good idea to change the children’s surname. His name would be in all the papers when the trial came on. The children would be going to a new school, and it was a chance for a fresh start. She’d refused. The children were who they were. She could never explain to them why they couldn’t be Callingtons any longer.
‘But you changed your name when you came to England,’ he’d said. ‘You changed your language. That was a much bigger thing. You told me that you never spoke German, even at home. You changed your whole life.’
‘That was different. It was to fit in, not to hide anything.’ Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure it was true. They had hidden themselves in Englishness. Her mother had known what they had to do.
But Simon knew what English villages were like. As
soon as the trial opened, someone would see the name Callington in the papers. There would be details about his family. They might even say that his wife and children had left the family home in Muswell Hill for an unknown destination. Journalists used that kind of language, to make something perfectly innocent sound sinister. Anybody who lived in an English village miles from anywhere and had never been to London would be perfectly capable of putting two and two together in less time than it took to walk home from the village shop, newspaper under arm. Not very curious! They’d have been talking about her for weeks. A woman with three children, suddenly appearing in East Knigge, with no connection to the place, no sign of any husband, not much money from the look of it, taken a job with Mr Austin, shouldn’t wonder if she was after his money. Nothing would be said to Lily. No questions would be asked, but the news would seep into every house in the village. Lily would be watched, weighed up, judged and condemned.
He must say something, he thinks now. There she sat on the chair. She had travelled for four hours to get here. She looked tired.
‘The children like the cottage,’ she said. ‘They finish school at half past three and then they run down to the beach and don’t come back until dark. They collect driftwood and last week they found some sea coal. There was a colliery near the beach once, apparently, and coal washes up. Paul seems to know all about it.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Sally told me that the teacher asked all the children who had ever been to London to put up their hands. Only two hands went up.’
‘Sally’s and Paul’s?’