Half a Crown (28 page)

Uncle Carmichael looked at me. “We’re going to drop you at a clothes shop. Ask to speak to Mr. Ambrose. When they say there is no Mr. Ambrose, say you want to buy some green flannel pajamas. They’ll take you through to the back, give you some clothes, and someone will take you on to a house where you can stay until it’s safe for me to collect you. Stay there, Elvira, or wherever they send you on, because otherwise I won’t be able to find you.”

“Yes,” I said. I was still bewildered. The car drew to a halt, and Uncle Carmichael leaned over and opened the door for me.

“Go safely,” he said, and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll see you soon. Here, you’d better have these, but don’t use them.”

I took a packet from him, and pushed it into my pocket. “Goodbye,” I said, getting out. “And thank you, and thank you too, Mr. Collins.”

The clothes shop was in front of me. It was called Ambrose Clothes and Stores. The slogan across the window was
GOOD QUALITY CLOTHES IN QUANTITY.
There was yellow cellophane in the windows, to protect the clothes inside, and I saw school blazers and summer dresses on display. It looked like the kind of place where a respectable but impoverished mother of a large family would shop. I went in. There was a counter across the room, dressmaker dummies displaying summer cotton dresses, racks of patterns, and bales of
cloth. There was a young woman behind the counter, and another older woman attending to a customer—she had two different sprigged cottons spread out before her and was clearly debating their merits.

“Can I speak to Mr. Ambrose?” I asked the young attendant. Without conscious decision, it had come out in my Cockney voice, which felt more natural for this shop.

“Mum!” the young woman said. “Someone asking for Mr. Ambrose.”

“I’ll deal with this,” her mother said. “You help Mrs. Tenant with the cottons, Flo.” The two of them changed places. “Now, there’s no Mr. Ambrose here, miss,” she said to me, giving me a penetrating look. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“I want some green flannel pajamas,” I said, feeling absurd, like the time I’d had to play Celia in the school play and I felt as if people would laugh at all my lines except the funny ones.

“You’d better come through to the back,” she said, and opened a flap in the counter and ushered me through, behind the bales of cloth and through a solid door, which she shut behind us, into another room. It was piled up with boxes and boxes, all brown, and all written on in neat black handwriting. “What are they thinking, no warning, and on Erev Pesach,” she said. “What do you need, love?”

“I need somewhere to stay for a few days, until it’s safe, and if you don’t mind, some clothes, because I only have this coat.” I opened it and showed her the prison dress underneath.

She tutted, and immediately started fumbling around in the boxes. “You’d be about a thirty-four?” she asked.

“Thirty-six-C,” I said, embarrassed, but she must not have meant bra size because she pulled out a navy blue polyester dress, some knickers, and after some more fumbling a cream woolly sweater. “And a bra, I haven’t forgotten,” she said.

She opened another box and whistled to herself. “Here you are, I
hope beige is all right,” she said. “Now put those on, and I’ll pop round with you to Paula’s. You’ll be safe enough there, and she doesn’t have anyone there at the moment.”

“Do you help a lot of people?” I asked, pulling off the prison dress, which tore, and putting on the bra and knickers as fast as I could.

“Sometimes we might go a week or two without anyone, other times ten people in a week,” she said. “They give us money; don’t worry about paying for those clothes.” I started, and missed the hooks on the bra, because I hadn’t even thought about it. I had no money, as of course they hadn’t given me my bag back. “They got you out of prison, did they?” she asked, picking up the dress and crumpling it into a ball. “I’ll burn this.”

“They were taking me to Finsbury,” I said.

“Don’t tell me anything, what I don’t know I can’t tell,” she said. “We’ve been doing this nearly ten years now, and never any trouble.”

I pulled the navy dress on. It wasn’t long enough, and it felt cheap and scratchy. I was cold, so I put the sweater on over it—it wasn’t wool—and then Uncle Carmichael’s coat over that. She handed me another two pairs of knickers, which I stuffed into the coat pocket. Then she gave me a hairbrush, which I used right away. “Is that your natural color?” she asked.

“What, my hair?” I asked. “Yes, it is.”

“You should try lightening it up with some highlights, if you get the chance,” she said. “Looks less Jewish, like, and you’ve got the skin for it.”

“I’m not Jewish,” I protested.

“What are you here for, then?” she said, skeptical. “Have you been passing? Well, you needn’t try that on me.”

I didn’t argue, but put the hairbrush in the pocket of Uncle Carmichael’s coat, along with the packet he had given me. I glanced at it, and saw it was my identity card and papers.

The woman led the way out of the back of the shop and down the road to the corner, where we waited at a bus stop. We got onto the bus, and she paid both fares. After a long ride through parts of London I didn’t know at all, we got off at another corner. In one way this was all terribly tedious and I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could sleep, but in another way it was all marvelous that London was so big and so full of people and red double-decker buses and houses, and I wanted to hug all of it for being there and normal and not a little cold room with someone asking me questions.

I trudged with her up another long street. The houses were all built in terraces of red brick, sharing walls with one another. They had little square gardens outside, some of which grew a few brave flowers. She didn’t talk at all while we were walking, and I didn’t feel I could start a conversation. I was getting more and more tired as we went. The little squares of grass in the gardens started to look as if they’d make comfortable beds. At last she stopped, opened a gate, took two steps up the garden path, and knocked on a door. She used an odd knock; two raps and then two more.

The door was opened by an elderly woman in a pink dress. “Oh, Mrs. Berman,” the shop woman said. “Is Paula here?”

“Where else would she be?” Mrs. Berman replied, and then bellowed down the passage, “Paula!”

Paula Berman was a pretty middle-aged woman with brown curly hair and a pleasant smile. She looked quite athletic, as if she could run a mile or swim fifty laps without breaking into a sweat. I felt relieved to see her somehow, as if she’d be able to organize everything now. “I’m sorry to bother you, and today of all days, but this little one needs a place for a day or two,” the shop woman said.

“It’s Pesach,” Mrs. Berman said.

“All the more reason to take her in, Mother. Dan and Becky will just have to go home to sleep, that’s all, and we can squeeze another one in around the table.” She spoke cheerfully, and smiled at me.
“Now I’d love to have you come in properly, but that won’t do, so you’ll have to come around the back and up inside. I’m sorry to do this when you’re so tired.”

“I’m all right,” I said, though I was ready to drop.

“Pesach kasher v’sameach,”
Mrs. Berman said, or something like that, and the shop woman echoed her. We left, calling good-byes, for the benefit of the neighbors, and walked around the block and down an alley that ran behind the row of houses. Each house had a back garden and many of them had sheds. The shop woman took me to one of the sheds, and looked both ways to make sure nobody was watching. Then she stepped inside, and beckoned me to follow. Once inside, she took a spade off the wall, and pulled the hook where the spade had hung, which opened a trapdoor.

“You go down those steps, and along the passage, and you’ll come up in Paula Berman’s kitchen,” she said.
“Mazel tov!”

There was a huge cobweb across the steps, which I gingerly edged around. The shop woman closed the trapdoor, and at once a little light came on. The passage was stone-flagged but the walls were earth. It bent to the right, and then there was another turn and another flight of stairs. Paula Berman was standing on them, with light pouring down behind her. “We never get around to cleaning in here,” she said. “Maybe I should sweep it out now. Apart from this, everything was done yesterday.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s very kind of you to have me.”

“Our pleasure, my dear,” she said. “It’s a good day for taking in strays. Now are you hungry? Tired?”

“Both,” I said, following her up the stairs and into the back kitchen.

Now whatever you may have heard, it isn’t true that Jews are dirty. Apart from the passageway, I didn’t see as much as a speck of dust or dirt anywhere in Paula’s house; in fact it was spectacularly and notably clean. Even the oven was spotless. “We’re going to be
eating late, of course,” she said, leading me out into the proper kitchen. “It’s five o’clock. There’s two hours until sunset. Would you like something to keep you going, and then a nap?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I sat down at the kitchen table—the kind of table that’s called a “scrubbed” table, and this one was scrubbed to within an inch of its life. A fat servant with a thick accent brought us a pot of tea—I declined milk and sugar—and after a moment a plate of new potatoes, cooked with mint. I’d never eaten anything so delicious in my life, and I said so. Paula sat down with me and drank tea, which was good, too, stronger than I like, but very good. While I was eating, Mrs. Berman came in and started fussing away at things, setting timers on the stove, and then just when I was finishing, two children erupted into the kitchen, a girl and a boy of about eight and six.

“These are my children, Ben and Debbie,” Paula said. “Children, this is our cousin Hava.”

I looked at Paula and raised my eyebrows as the children shook hands with me and went dashing off out of the room. Mrs. Berman followed after them. “Hava?” I asked. It had a long
A,
in fact it sounded just like “harbor” except with a
V.

“I should have told you,” she said. “I haven’t asked your name, though you know mine. I always call all our visitors my cousin Hava, or my cousin Michael, that way if the children babble in school it doesn’t sound like anything. I hope you don’t mind the name.”

“It’s very pretty,” I said. “I haven’t heard it before, is it a Jewish name?”

She looked at me with her head a little on one side. “Are you not Jewish?” she asked.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

The servant sniffed. Paula laughed. “Well, I think we won’t mention that to my mother-in-law. She’s a little old-fashioned. It doesn’t
make any difference to me. We help anyone who needs help. We’ve had people who weren’t Jews before, occasionally, but they’ve always been men.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

“Everyone knows I’m Jewish. It’s on my identity card, after all. Hava certainly is a Jewish name, and if anyone wants to know details about my cousin Hava, I can say that’s her Hebrew name, and her real name is … one of my real cousins from Manchester. It’s just a safety precaution, more for when the children were younger than now.”

“You’ve really thought about this,” I said, but what I was thinking was how brave she was, taking this extra risk, when being Jewish was risk enough for anyone.

“You look exhausted, let me show you to the spare bedroom. I’ll send Debbie up to wake you before we start,” she said. “I hope you don’t find it all too confusing.”

“I’m sure it’ll be all right,” I said. My eyes were closing. She showed me out into the hallway and up a flight of carpeted stairs into a little room with a bed. I took off my shoes and lay down and was asleep before I could even start to think about what was happening to me.

It was half past four. Time to get back to the Watchtower and cover whatever needed to be covered. Everything had been done in the open, except for the very end. If Penn-Barkis, or even Normanby, took it as a challenge, he had better be where they could get hold of him to shout at him. But shouting was all they could do—they needed him, and he’d just shown them that the Watch would follow him.

“Back to the Watchtower now, Collins,” Carmichael said.

“Yes, sir.” Collins changed lanes sharply. “I’m sorry if I spoke a bit out of turn, before.”

“Not at all, thank you for saying it. She needed to hear it. I don’t know what she’s going to think about all this in the end, but at least she’ll be safe to think about it. I’ve been so worried.” It was only as he said this that Carmichael realized how worried he had been. He was still worried, and would be until she was back where she belonged, but she was safe in the hands of the Inner Watch.

He started to relax as Collins drove him into more familiar streets and at last drew up in front of the Watchtower steps. “Don’t forget, if they ask—,” he began.

“Dropped her behind Claridge’s, then took you back to the
Watchtower,” Collins said. “And if they ask, I’ll let you know, or Mr. Jacobson.”

“That’s right,” Carmichael said. “Thank you, Collins. Good job.”

Miss Duthie looked up as he came down the corridor. “Where’s your coat?” she asked.

“I gave it to Elvira,” he said. “She’s safe, we got her away.”

“Oh, thank God,” she said, fervently.

“I’m going to go home a bit early, but I’ll look at anything urgent first,” Carmichael said, opening his door.

“Your telephone has been ringing off the hook, but Mr. Ogilvie and Mr. Jacobson have dealt with most of it. Mr. Ogilvie said to tell you he’s gone out to Heath Row with the Duke of Hampshire to meet Herr Hitler.”

“Good,” Carmichael said. “Bring me some tea and whatever is most urgent.”

“Right away,” Miss Duthie said. “I’m so glad about Elvira, really, it’s a great load off my mind.”

“Mine too, Miss Duthie,” he said.

As soon as he sat down at his desk the external telephone rang. He answered it. “Carmichael here.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” It was Mark Normanby, absolutely furious.

“Protecting my own, since you wouldn’t help me,” Carmichael said, calmly. “No harm done.”