I had, in the brief window between feeling belittled and unnervingly bold, thought to ask him if he had the time to spare five minutes to snatch a meal. He hadn’t. So my lunch had consisted of a solitary walk uphill to a tired crossroads and a table at a hotel that was one of a number of sagging medieval buildings feeling very sorely the present shortages of paint. The decay of age was, I realised, the main burden in this city and it was as I stepped downhill again bearing the additional prize of a small packet of sandwiches that it dawned on me that barely anywhere here was the dereliction of bombed-out buildings. It was a long time since I’d last passed along a shopping street in London and not been greeted by bare ground and defiant signs pasted up by the survivors declaring ‘businesses open as usual’ …
My destination lay downhill, beyond the place where we had left the car. The hospital was near the docks. I could just make out the tall rooftops of various warehouses glinting through the smog that oozed from the enormous chimney of an electricity station. The imposing spread of the hospital consisted of a vast spread of wards and extensions, all constructed in imposing brickwork and stained black by coal dust. It was also built on the corner of a junction with a little side street named Parliament Street. It was the name logged as Mrs Abbey’s former address in John Langton’s book of accounts.
Quite without any thought for my cousin, I abandoned any immediate idea of rescuing her and turned left instead.
Everything here was brick too. Beneath the settling fug of coal smoke, low workmen’s houses occupied every space not given over to either warehousing or health and recovery. Then, with a suddenness that rivalled the contrast between the Manor and Mr Winstone’s cottage, the cramped two-storey terraces with their small barren gardens abruptly terminated beside a significantly grander rank of merchants’ houses. These houses had no garden at all and stepped straight down onto the street from smart porticos. I was able to identify Mrs Abbey’s former home based solely on the fact that all the others were numbered and I remembered hers had a name. It was called Berwick House, which suggested nothing particularly significant to me, and it was a well-tended Victorian property, but no one was home.
Now that I was here, I had absolutely no idea what I was expecting to find, but the one thought that pushed through all the rest was to marvel at how determined she must have been to achieve a move if she had willingly exchanged this crisp style of dwelling for the soggy plasterwork of Eddington.
I didn’t have the chance to think about it for long. A woman’s voice accosted me as I dithered on the pavement. She called me ‘missus’ and she wasn’t terribly polite, as I suppose no one would be after discovering a person prying through their neighbour’s window.
She was short and sturdy with shrewd black eyes and she was wearing a knee-length housecoat of the style that renders a woman strangely rectangular. She was also brandishing a broom, which looked as though it frequently gave service as a fire iron and just occasionally, as it was doing now, weighed in her hands as a suitable weapon for repelling burglars.
I beamed and immediately transformed from burglar into something else – a person collecting charitable donations, perhaps – and remained equally unwelcome. ‘Good afternoon,’ I trilled and made it all so much worse. ‘I was hoping to find the owner at home. Are they away?’
I received a pair of blank stares in reply because now the lady’s friend or sister had emerged from the gloom within and had joined her upon her front step. The two yards of untended garden and the rotten little gate was no protection from their total absence of friendliness. In fact, I wasn’t even entirely sure they’d understood. I tried again and sounded even more stilted. ‘I was wondering who lives there now. I suppose you know?’
The women exchanged glances. Not sly and knowing ones, nor even hostile. But blank glances, where each silently asked the other if she had made out what the stranger had said. I might have thought they were doing it deliberately, except that I could hear my own accent and it sounded painfully stuffy even to me.
Very briefly, I considered the idea that I should offer them money, only I didn’t know how. They were losing patience and interest. The woman with the broom was considering her unfinished task of sweeping her front step. The other lady found something she didn’t like about the cut of my trousers. At least, I think that was what held her stare. Perhaps it was simply that her thoughts had given up and retreated elsewhere.
I drew myself up a little straighter and tried a fresh tack: a little honesty. ‘I’m a neighbour of Mrs Abbey where she’s living now.’ A waft of my hand to indicate somewhere above the distant escarpment that marked the edge of the Cotswold Hills. ‘Up on the hill. I believe she used to live next door to you, with her husband Mr Abbey?’
I don’t know that they’d caught any more of my words now than they had before, but one thing crossed the divide. The lady without a broom turned to her friend and whispered, ‘Him from the docks?’
She got a nod in reply from her stern friend and it prompted her to ask again eagerly, ‘The one who was in prison?’
‘Was?’
They understood my accent that time well enough.
This time the lady with the broom was the spokesperson. Disapproval formed on thin lips; hard, tough and entirely unforgiving. ‘Eight years he got for stealing the food out of our mouths and let off after three, for all that. And barely a murmur raised by anyone about the fact that someone must have sent that warehouse blazing up like a torch with three good men inside.’
I found that I was suddenly at the limit of her garden gate. The woman’s lips pursed, released and pursed again. She told me sourly, ‘The firemen didn’t get out again, missus.’
Her friend added, ‘They called it an unlucky accident and just sent him down for the fraud, but I said at the time and I’ll say it again now – that man is a fiend. What else do you call a man who ran one of the grain warehouses and instead of feeding a nation at war he fed his pockets and the black market, and then burnt down the lot the same week his little racket got discovered? Treason I call it, in a time of war.’
She took a little breath before confiding in a voice that took a certain malicious delight in the horror of it, ‘I say it wasn’t an accident. I say he thought he’d pass off the whole conflagration as an unlucky hit from a bomb. I remember the sirens going off and the ack-ack guns starting up and he must have known it was always them sorry folk by the railway that took the brunt of our Blitz and never the docks. But still he took his little light and climbed six flights of stairs into the warehouse attic. The lot went up like a matchstick and he must have heard the auxiliaries raise the alarm and go in, but he didn’t stop them. He just laid himself sagging in a stairwell for the main rescue to come with the fireboat, while three poor old men went clambering up with nothing between them but blue bands on their sleeves and a hand-pump with a hosepipe to die suffocating in the smoke.’
I was repulsed. I blinked when the broom-laden woman spoke loudly into the silence.
She demanded sharply, ‘Why do you ask? You with the paper?’
‘Actually, no.’ I had no idea where people kept getting this impression. ‘I really am just a neighbour. Has he been back since, do you know? Mr Abbey, since he got out, I mean. He does still own this house, I presume?’
Suddenly, I was sensing a cause for Mrs Abbey’s exhaustion if this was the man she had married, and if I’d ever felt sympathy for her before I certainly felt it now. But it got all so much more tangled when the woman with the broom replied roundly, ‘It’s not his house. It was his wife’s and her mother’s before her and I’ll bet she thanks the heavens the law doesn’t give a man all his woman’s inheritances these days, eh? So she sold it and now it belongs to that other chap. The one she must have run to from up the hill.’
I caught a shrewd glance as she recalled that I was from that place too. She spoke slowly, while watching me like a hawk. ‘There was a terrible fuss about him. She doesn’t have much luck, that girl, does she?’
I think she was testing to see whether I was a love rival. Which, luckily of course, I wasn’t. And then, in the midst of my silent attempt to decipher just how possible it would be to probe this woman’s knowledge of when they’d met, the bustling friend lit up to contradict her gleefully, ‘No, it wasn’t him. He died. It was the other fellow that bought it; the soldier from that same place, who pitched up here in the spring. He came with a great band of demob boys to save people’s houses by stacking sandbags against the floodwaters. Mrs Blake next door was talking about him only the other day; about how she’d had to put up him and half a dozen others in her son’s room, with wet boots everywhere. Only,’ she added, just as I was squinting through the numbing unlikelihood of thinking does she mean Richard? ‘I don’t think he can still be a soldier now; he’s a farmer.’
She meant Danny.