The Girl With No Name (7 page)

Harry nodded.

‘Course you do. Even that might prove useful.’ Mikey turned to the other man. ‘OK, Ginger, back to the barrow. I reckon half my stuff’ll have gone missing while you’ve been pratting about in here. Go on, out!’

‘Yes, boss.’ And the man hurried from the room.

‘So what is your name... when it ain’t Harry Black?’

‘Heinrich Schwarz.’

‘Hmm. Just like to know who it really is who’s working for me. And that’s what you wanna do, is it? Work for me?’

Harry nodded.

‘Well then, Harry, get up and listen to me. If I catch you nickin’ stuff from me or from any of my stalls ever again, you’ll wish you’d never been born. Understand that, do you?’

Though scared, Harry had nodded again. ‘Yes, sir.’ It would be a risk, working for a man like Mikey, but anything was better than going back to that school.

He grinned at Lisa. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I’m a working man now and I won’t be coming back to that school no more, not after Christmas.’

‘So I won’t see you,’ Lisa said.

‘Course you will,’ Harry assured her, ‘just not at school, but you tell me if that little shit Roger touches you again when I’m not there and I’ll come and break his neck for him.’

‘He won’t,’ Lisa said. ‘He leaves me alone, now.’

‘Yeah, well if he doesn’t, you just let me know,’ Harry said darkly. ‘Tell you what,’ his mind darting forward to the next thing, ‘tell you what, tomorrow we could go up west. What d’you think?’

‘Up west?’ replied Lisa uncertainly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Up to the West End. Look at Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square. See the shops and that.’

‘Aunt Naomi would never let me.’

‘Then don’t ask her,’ came Harry’s reply. ‘We’ll just go.’

Lisa thought about it. It was tempting. She had hardly been out of Shoreditch since she’d arrived and she did want to see the famous parts of London, the places she’d heard about before she came.

‘I could say I was going round Hilda’s, I suppose,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘Yeah, say that,’ grinned Harry. ‘She won’t know.’

‘’S all right as long as she don’t come looking for me.’

‘Why would she?’

‘All right for you.’ Lisa jabbed him in the ribs. ‘You can just walk out of your hostel and no one asks where you’re going. Aunt Naomi doesn’t let me go far. Always wants to know where I’m going, and who with.’ She glanced sideways at Harry. His dark, curly hair was unruly and needed cutting. He had a graze across his cheek and a streak of mud under his chin. He was always muddy or bloody, or both, Lisa thought. Always in a scrap or a scrape. ‘She wouldn’t approve of you!’

‘Why ever not?’ Harry cried. ‘What’s the matter with me?’

‘Nothing,’ Lisa said with a grin, ‘but she likes to keep me close. She lets me go to Hilda’s house, she knows Hilda’s parents, but she doesn’t know you.’

‘Then just say you’re going there. Come on, Lisa, let’s have a bit of a lark.’

They’d reached the end of Kemble Street now and Harry stopped on the corner. ‘See you tomorrow morning,’ he said as if it had all been agreed. ‘Meet you in the park.’

‘Don’t know when I’ll be able to get there,’ Lisa said, knowing as she spoke that she was giving in.

‘I’ll wait,’ said Harry.

‘See you then, but I’m not going on the Tube. Not going underground!’

‘No, OK,’ Harry agreed easily. ‘We can go on the bus.’

‘You got money for the bus?’

It was Harry’s turn to grin. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘I can get some.’

Lisa ran the last hundred yards home. The evening air was bitter; they had lingered too long and she wanted to get into the warm. She found Mary and Naomi sharing a pot of tea in the kitchen and flopped down at the table beside them. The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, but even so, with the fire as yet unlit in the grate, it was December-cold.

‘Tea, love?’ Naomi said, looking at Lisa’s chilly face. ‘You look freezing.’

‘Yes, please, Aunt Naomi.’

Naomi poured her a cup, topping up her own and Mary’s. She gave a half glance to a letter leaning against the clock on the mantelpiece. A letter for Lisa.

After the declaration of war Lisa knew that she couldn’t write directly to her family any more and as her mother had told her, she’d written to them care of Nikolaus Becker’s Zurich address. There had been no reply and she wasn’t even sure if her letter had reached Cousin Nikolaus. She wrote again, this time to the man himself, asking if he had received the letter to forward. It was some time before Nikolaus wrote back to say that he had sent the letter on, but had heard nothing back.

Lisa had been clinging to the hope that Cousin Nikolaus would have definite news of them all. She ached to hear from them, to know for certain that they were all right, to know if they were still living in Hanau, in the same small apartment she’d left five months earlier.

‘D’you think they’re OK?’ she’d asked Harry one afternoon, longing for reassurance to bolster her hope.

Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know, do I?’ Then, seeing his answer had upset her he said, ‘They’re probably OK if they keep their heads down, don’t draw attention to theirselves. Nazis’ll have other things to think about now, won’t they? Being at war with everyone, Poland, England, France. They won’t have no time to worry about a few Jews still scratching a living in a small town. Stands to reason.’

‘Suppose you’re right.’ Lisa was eager to accept this; the alternative was too awful to contemplate. She liked to be able to think of her parents and Martin being strong for each other. She wrote to them again care of Cousin Nikolaus, hoping that the letter might get through and they’d know she was thinking about them.

Now, as she drank her tea, safe in the Kemble Street kitchen, she was about to get her answer.

That morning, after she had left for school, a letter had plopped on to the mat; a letter with Swiss stamps and addressed to Lisa in neat, pointed handwriting. Naomi picked it up and looked at it.

Is this the letter from her parents that she’s been longing for? she wondered as she put it up on the kitchen mantelpiece. I do hope so, it’s so hard for her to have no news at all.

She and Dan knew Lisa had written again and there had been no reply, but neither of them dared mention it, for fear of reopening a partially healed wound.

The morning passed slowly and Naomi was constantly aware of the thick envelope, propped against the clock, waiting, bringing who knew what news of Lisa’s family. She wished Dan was at home, so they’d both be there when Lisa got in from school, but Dan was out driving his taxi and wouldn’t be back until the evening, when it would be too late. Should she hide the letter until Dan got home? she wondered. Keep it for a couple of days until they were all three together?

I’ll go and see Mary, Naomi thought. See what she thinks.

She hurried down the road to the Duke of Wellington and found Mary serving the lunchtime customers in the public bar.

‘I just don’t know what to do,’ Naomi told her. ‘There’s this letter from Switzerland come for Lisa. On the back is the name “Becker” and an address in Zurich. I think Lisa has relations there, so I’m hoping it’ll be good news about her family, but Dan isn’t home and in case it isn’t...’

‘In case it isn’t, I’ll come round before she gets home from school,’ Mary said with a smile. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there. We shut at two and Tom and Betsy can manage the clearing up.’

So, here they were, the three of them, sharing a pot of tea in the kitchen, Lisa cradling the cup in her hands to warm them as she drank the hot tea in tiny sips.

Now was the time. Naomi reached the letter down from the mantelpiece and laid it on the table, saying, ‘This came for you this morning, Lisa.’

For a long moment Lisa looked at it, then she put down her cup and picking up the envelope, turned it over.

‘Cousin Nikolaus in Zurich,’ she said and put it down again.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Naomi asked.

‘Maybe when you’re alone,’ suggested Mary quietly.

Lisa picked the letter up again. It was thick and squashy. What could be inside it? A letter from her mother? Surely that must be it. She slid her finger under the flap and pulled out the contents. Another, smaller envelope fell on to the table, wrapped in a single sheet of paper. Lisa looked at the second envelope, addressed in Cousin Nikolaus’s spiky writing to her parents’ address in Hanau. It had been opened and stamped on the back in smudged black letters were the words GONE AWAY. Inside was the letter she had sent to her parents weeks ago. The colour drained from her face and she dropped the letter back on to the table. Mary and Naomi looked at her with concern as she buried her head in her hands.

‘What is it?’ Mary asked gently.

‘I send letter to my family,’ Lisa said flatly. ‘It comes back.’ She scanned the note from Cousin Nikolaus which had come with it.

Dear Lisa,

I forwarded the letter to your parents, but it has since come back to me marked as you see, ‘Gone Away’. I’m afraid I do not know where they have gone and have no way of finding out. I hope you are well with your London family. If I hear more I will write again.

Nikolaus Becker

Pain flooded through her, the pain of despair. Fighting a lump in her throat, she managed to say, ‘He says he has no news of my family. They are lost. Now I have no one.’ With that she scooped up both letters and ran from the room, upstairs to her bedroom.

Naomi and Mary looked at each other in dismay. ‘Poor child,’ Naomi said softly. ‘Poor, poor child. As she says, now she has no one.’

‘She has you,’ replied Mary firmly. ‘You and Dan. You’re her family now. Her parents.’

‘Poor substitute for her own mum and dad,’ Naomi sighed.

‘But alive and well and the ones to take care of her from now on,’ Mary answered briskly.

‘I suppose...’ Naomi said, adding, ‘I wish Dan was here.’

‘He’ll be back before long,’ Mary said, ‘and in the meantime I think you should go up to her. She needs you.’

Naomi nodded and got to her feet. Quietly, she went upstairs, pausing outside Lisa’s room. She could hear the girl sobbing and hesitated. Should she leave her alone to come to terms with her loss, or should she go in and try to offer comfort? She looked back downstairs and saw Mary at the bottom, gesticulating her into the room. She turned again and, tapping on the door gently, pushed it open and went in.

Lisa was sitting on her bed, clutching the letters, tears streaming down her cheeks. Naomi said nothing, simply crossed the room and kneeling down beside her, gathered her into her arms. She had become very fond of her foster daughter in the few months since she’d been with them and now she was probably the only mother the child had. Neither of them moved, Naomi holding her close, Lisa clinging to her, sobs racking her body.

When at last the sobs subsided and she pulled free, Naomi pulled her hankie from her pocket and Lisa blew her nose. ‘It says “Gone away”.’ She pointed to the smudged black ink on the envelope. ‘Where would they go? Not to Cousin Nikolaus. He don’t know where.’

‘They may just have had to move house,’ suggested Naomi, ‘to a new address.’

‘If they went they would tell Cousin Nikolaus. He is, how you say? He is between us in Zurich.’

‘Well, they may have written,’ Naomi said, trying to sound encouraging. ‘He may not have had their letter yet.’

She stood up and taking Lisa by the hand helped her to her feet. ‘Come on, me duck,’ she said, ‘we have to make Uncle Dan some tea.’

When they got down to the kitchen, it was getting dark outside and Mary had disappeared.

‘She’s gone back to the Duke, I expect,’ Naomi said as she wrestled the blackout screen into place before turning on the light. Bending down she put a match to the ready-laid fire and immediately the room was more cheerful. ‘After all, it’s nearly opening time. Tom will be needing her.’

‘She very kind,’ Lisa said with a glance at the dictionary still perched in readiness on the mantelpiece. ‘He not like me.’

‘Who? Tom? Course he likes you.’

‘No, I meet him in the street and he turn away with bad face.’

‘Expect he was going somewhere in a hurry,’ said Naomi. ‘Never saw you.’ But in her heart she knew Lisa was right. Tom had been taken prisoner by the Germans in the last war and had nearly starved to death in one of their POW camps before being released. She knew only too well that Tom hated anything and everything German. She had seen him scowl at Lisa and it’d made her angry. Lisa was only a child and had nothing to do with what was happening in Germany. She was a victim of this war as he had been a victim of the last.

It was with great relief that Naomi saw Dan coming in the front door that evening. She had managed to calm Lisa down, settling her by the kitchen fire with the mending basket while she herself peeled some potatoes. She knew that Lisa had to be kept occupied so that she didn’t brood on the news she’d received, but she, herself, needed Dan’s company and his solid reassuring presence.

‘Now then,’ he said as he quickly closed the door behind him against escaping light. ‘Hive of industry going on here.’ He kissed his wife on the cheek and patted Lisa on hers. ‘You mending the potatoes in my socks again?’ he asked. ‘Glad of that cos me feet was getting cold.’ He turned back to his wife. ‘Any tea on the go, love?’

Naomi set the kettle to boil and put out a clean cup and saucer. Dan settled himself in his chair and looking across at Lisa said, ‘Had a good day, Lisa?’ It was a question he asked every evening when he got in. It had become almost a game as Lisa searched for the right words to tell him of her day, but this evening she did not look up and smile, she kept her head bent, apparently concentrating on her mending.

‘Lisa’s had some bad news today, Dan,’ Naomi said softly. ‘Her letter to her parents has been returned “Gone away”. She don’t know where they’ve gone and her cousin don’t know neither. As you see she’s very upset.’

Dan reached over and rested his hand on Lisa’s. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, duck,’ he said, ‘but whatever happens, we’re here, Aunt Naomi and me. We ain’t yer mum and dad, we know that, but you do have us.’ Lisa dropped the sock she’d been darning and grasped his fingers. Looking at both her foster parents watching her anxiously, she remembered her mother’s admonition to be a good and grateful girl and though the tears were welling once again in her eyes she mustered a tremulous smile.