The sympathetic landlady at whose Shoreditch boarding house Nancy Levin had been born and where, four years later, her mother had died, had proved to be a good friend to the Keys, initially to the deserted and friendless Jessie and later to her orphaned daughter.
Mrs Silver, for this was the landlady’s name, took a certain satisfaction in rescuing the destitute. ‘A person don’t need to be a Christian to have Christian morals and virtues,’ she had often said, which was to say Mrs Silver had been born into the Orthodox Jewish faith and had no more time for the Christian faith than she had for Judaism, which she had abandoned at the age of seventeen when she had fallen pregnant to a rabbi and had set out into the world on her own terms.
It was in this world, then, that the four-year-old Nancy had found herself and in which she soon thrived. Mrs Silver’s own children being long since grown up, and there being no Mr Silver (the title ‘Mrs’ being one that Mrs Silver had conferred on herself without feeling the need of a minister to confer it on her), and being over fifty and feeling a lack in herself that a sweet-natured, four-year-old child might fill, Mrs Silver had offered the child a home. True, Nancy was expected to fetch and carry for Mrs Silver’s boarders, run errands and generally pay her own way, but this was the natural way of things, and it still left time for her to attend the overcrowded school down the street to learn her letters and numbers and scripture.
At thirteen, Nancy finished her schooling, intending to expand her role in the boarding house run by Mrs Silver with a view to someday taking over the business. At this point, fate, as it had done before, stepped in, striking the sixty-year-old Mrs Silver down stone dead, of a stroke, over breakfast one bright morning in May. Nancy, finding herself alone and abandoned for the second time in her short life, her modest ambitions thwarted, wasted little time in self-pity (for her predicament was not unusual, she saw thwarted ambition and families lost everywhere she looked) and soon found herself a position in a hat shop in Bethnal Green Road.
The hat shop was owned by a Madame Vivant who spoke with a heavy French accent though she came originally from Hoxton and was no more French than the hats she sold which were labelled Made in Paris and Made in Milan though they heralded from a large factory in Birmingham. Nancy found herself on five shillings a week in a dingy back room packing and unpacking stock. It was a far cry from the Shoreditch boarding house, but the wages were better and the other shop girls were fun—Miriam, a giggling dark-haired Jewish girl from Aldgate, and Lily, a willowy, delicate-looking girl who walked with a stoop to hide her almost-six-foot height. There was also Mme Vivant’s assistant, a girl called Milly Fenwick, who was a little older than the others, and who only spoke in sharp tones to remind you of something you’d failed to do, but on the whole Nancy considered she had landed on her feet.
Six years passed rapidly. Nancy now knew about hats; she peered at the hats in the windows of the Bond Street shops and dreamed one day of working there. She had, in short, a new ambition. Mrs Silver and the days in the boarding house in Shoreditch already seemed very distant. Perhaps it would have happened, too. At the time Nancy had believed it: her own hat shop, her own girls. There was nothing wrong with ambition. But there was fate, too, and she had not reckoned on that.
They had taken the train to Clacton for the Whitsun bank holiday, herself and Miriam and Lily, a few short weeks before the start of the war but far enough away that war had not even seemed a possibility. On that day—a pleasingly warm and cloudless day, the sort of day that you hoped for on a bank holiday but rarely got—the three girls had ridden the rollercoaster (twice), bathed in the pool, seen the Punch and Judy show and finally, having exhausted the pier, linked arms and run laughing along the esplanade.
And this was there they had run into Milly Fenwick and Milly’s young man, to whom she had recently become engaged.
‘There’s Milly!’ Miriam exclaimed, flapping a hand, her words indistinct as she tackled a wad of fluffy pink candy floss.
There was Milly, frozen on the esplanade with her young man beside her, in her Sunday-best coat and shoes and one of Mme Vivant’s newest and most expensive creations perched on her head and an expression on her face like she had bitten into a toffee apple and chipped a tooth. But Miriam marched over and demanded, ‘Is this your young man, then, Milly? Why dontcha introduce us?’ And Milly, cornered, said ‘This is my fiancé. This is Joseph.’
‘Joe,’ he corrected her.
Nancy said nothing, offered only a polite smile. Milly’s young man was like any number of young men you might see striding along Bethnal Green Road on a Saturday night: an ordinary face, smooth-shaven, a chin with a dimple in it, and unblinking grey eyes, thick dark brown hair slicked down with Brylcreem beneath a grey felt hat pushed to the back of his head, jacket slung over his shoulder, a collarless shirt unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves rolled up over thickly muscular arms, hands in pockets and a girl on his arm. And Nancy wondered why him, and why Milly, for they did not look like a match at all. She had imagined Milly with a clerk or a policeman, someone dull but polite. Not this. This man had a swagger. You wouldn’t trust this man at all.
A seagull swooped down and hovered above his head letting out a shrill cry, as though it was calling to him or marking him out in some way, and he shot it a curious look. Then the grey eyes turned to her, looking at her, and she saw his eyebrows go up in slow, dawning surprise as though he knew her and had run into her unexpectedly, which was strange as they had never met before. He stared at her with an odd, dazed expression.
‘I’m Joe,’ he said, even though they had done all that already, the introductions. But he wasn’t introducing himself to them all, he was saying it to her. And the way he said it, it was as though he had said, It’s me, here I am, though why he would say that or why she would think it, Nancy couldn’t say.
She made no reply. Instead, she turned and walked away.
Afterwards, she thought, why had she walked away like that? She didn’t know then and she didn’t know now. She only knew that she had looked at him and something had lurched within her.
Milly made some excuse; there was some prior engagement, some pressing reason why she and her fiancé must depart at once. No one tried to prevent them leaving and in another moment Milly and her fiancé had gone.
The day ended right then and there, though it was still mid-afternoon. The sun slid behind a cloud and the laughing, shouting, excited voices around her sounded muffled in Nancy’s ears. Her head felt clouded and choked and confused and she hardly attended to the words of her two friends. The trek back to the station took an eternity, and when they arrived the London train had just left and it was an hour till the next one, so they sat on a bench and Miriam chattered and Lily ate a bun and Nancy could not speak.
That was all. Nothing had happened, yet everything had happened.
That night, Nancy sat up late filled with a thrilling despair. He was Milly’s fiancé.
She went to work the next day and it was like any other day, but it was not like any other day. She could not look at Milly. At the end of the day she came out of the shop and there he was, Milly’s young man—Joe—standing outside, and Nancy was not surprised. She knew he was not there to see Milly.
‘I had to see you,’ was all he said. And Nancy understood because she had to see him too.
A few weeks later Milly’s engagement was called off. Milly did not say why and no one asked. She moved about the shop with a pinched look, her movements rigid, jerky, her fingers fidgeting constantly. She looked at no one. She spent most of her time in the room at the back of the shop and some days she did not come in at all. Then one morning the pinched look had gone. Milly emerged from the back of the shop. A month later she married a policeman named Wainwright and left Mme Vivant’s employ to take up residence in Old Ford Road in a house that overlooked the park. And when, a short time later, Nancy married Milly’s young man, Joe, no one questioned it.
They were married the final weekend in August, just a week before war was declared and the same day Joe had been scheduled to marry Milly—the registry office had already been booked and Joe said, Well, they held the Coronation on the same day, didn’t they, even though it was a different king who was crowned? And Nancy, who had stood in the crowd at Westminster and watched the new king pass in his gold state coach on the way to the Abbey, agreed.
Nancy sat up with a start. Her neck and legs were stiff and numb. She had been dreaming of Joe, of their wedding at the registry office at the town hall. Joe’s two older brothers and his mother had come and, even though they lived only the other side of Whitechapel Road, the way they carried on Nancy had got the feeling none of them had ever set foot in Bethnal Green before. Joe’s older brother had worn a flashy suit to the wedding like some American film star and had a girl on his arm who looked like a tart. His other brother had looked bad-tempered and clearly hadn’t wanted to be there at all. As for his ancient mum, she looked like she hadn’t left her own house since Queen Victoria died. All the girls from the hat shop had come—except for Milly, of course. And it had rained. That was all she remembered, really. After the wedding Joe said there wasn’t room for him and her to live at his mum’s house and Nancy had been glad, but Joe knew of a family who had done a midnight bolt from a place in Odessa Street. Two rooms all to themselves, he’d said, if they acted sharpish. So they had acted sharpish and had moved in on the Tuesday. And on the Friday war had been declared.
Ah well, Joe said, we had a nice three days, didn’t we?
And so they had, and longer really, for the navy had taken their time sending Joe his call-up papers. But they had, eventually, and a week after he’d gone she’d found out she was carrying a child. She’d been angry with Joe then, angry with the navy and the government and Hitler, because Joe had left just when she needed him. But there was nothing to be done about it. She had the baby on her own, she looked after her little girl on her own. And they had done alright on their own for three years, she and Emily, aside from last winter when they had nearly starved and she had had to beg some shifts down the market and at a pub and had even, on occasion, gone out at dawn scavenging in bins and in the gutters for whatever she might find. Aside from that then, and even then, they had survived. It was surprising that you did survive. People were starving but mostly they did not actually starve. Still, there was no denying things had improved after Joe’s return. She had put on a little weight—she was about to put on a whole lot more.
Her hand went to her lower stomach and rested there till she felt calm and still. She wanted this baby. Joe’s baby.
‘Mum!’
Emily was tugging at her arm.
Billy Rosenthal from upstairs was making his way across the mass of sleeping bodies towards them and he was carrying the baby. There were seven Rosenthal kids, Billy the eldest and the baby just three months old; at least with Len Rosenthal now in Burma Mrs Rosenthal was guaranteed a respite for a time. Len had got a twenty-four-hour pass just over a year ago and the baby was three months old. Please God, his wife had said, that Len get no more leave at least until the war was ended. Mrs Rosenthal, so paper-thin and yellow-tinged, hardly a tooth left in her head, her hair already grey with a permanent cough that racked her body, did not look like she would cope. Sometimes she didn’t cope and on those occasions Nancy, who only had the one to look after and who was just downstairs, helped out. This looked like being one of those times.
‘Mum says can you take him,’ Billy said when he reached them. He was a half-starved waif of a lad with eyes too large for a face gaunt with hunger, in a threadbare pullover and men’s trousers that hung off him and looked like they had been lifted from a corpse.
‘’Course we can, luv,’ Nancy said, and she gave Billy a smile as she took the baby. Billy disappeared back into the chaos of bodies. Emily, who had been oddly quiet all night, now perked up. She patted the baby’s head in a proprietorial way and launched into a complicated rendition of a nursery rhyme that involved three mice and a clock. Nancy rocked the baby gently on her knee. Her own baby would come in July, which was no time at all away, and perhaps the war would be ended by then. She doubted she could even have got pregnant this time last year, the way things were, the two of them starving—and considering what had happened that was just as well . . .
She had got some shifts working at the Black Bull in Silkweavers Row, one of the few public houses still open, still with an occasional supply of beer. On one particular night, the coldest night of the winter so far, a GI wandered into the bar. What the Americans were doing in Bethnal Green, Nancy didn’t ask. She presumed he was lost. She didn’t ask his name; if she had, he would have given her a false one. At closing time, they left the pub together and did it right there in the open in some dingy back alley, fumbling with clothes and stockings and underwear, wildly, like two people out of time without a past or a future. She never saw the GI again and the Black Bull was bombed not long after so there were no more shifts. Afterwards, she thought very little of it. She had been lonely. It was not an excuse but she felt no need of an excuse, it was simply what happened in wartime.
There had been no reason for Joe to find out. No reason at all. But Joe had found out, for she had told him. The fact of this baffled her, even now, two months later. They had gone out, she and Joe, a fortnight or so after Joe’s return, when his sunburn had begun to fade and the blisters to heal, leaving Emily asleep in her bed. They had gone to the Oxford Arms, a pub that, so far, had survived the bombing, and on the way home a tart accosted him. The tart—a girl so thin you imagined a bus going past at high speed might drag her into its slipstream and mangle her beneath its wheels like a leaf—tottered on high heels with painted-on stockings, her face a pale moon with a slash of scarlet at the mouth, ghoulish in the blackout, and a dress hitched high up her leg so that you got a flash of her underwear. And if that doesn’t turn you off I don’t know what will, thought Nancy, unamused, as the girl leered at her husband and draped an arm around his neck as though she, his wife, were not even there. Bloody nerve!
‘Wotcha say, darlin’? Fancy a bit of it, do ya?’ was the girl’s sales pitch and Joe laughed, basking in her lurid advances, and he laughed even louder when Nancy had flung the girl’s arm off him and pushed her so hard the girl had staggered backwards.
‘Bloody nerve!’ Nancy said and Joe said the girl hadn’t meant no harm, she was starving, probably hadn’t eaten in days, poor kid.
But Nancy was furious.
‘We’re all bloody starving! We’ve all gone days on end without eating—d’you think I went out selling my body to the first sailor what come along? That would be alright, would it?’
And he had replied that, if it was a question of survival, well, you did whatever you had to do, he knew that now.
His answer, calm and reasonable as it was, and coloured inevitably by the events he had just undergone, only infuriated her further. ‘Well, I’m glad you think that way. So it don’t bother you none if I let some other man—a GI—have his way with me a while back, while you was out there bobbing about in the sea?’
Why had she said it? Joe would never have known. But out it had come, just like that, and she had been as surprised as he. Almost.
She regretted it at once. Joe’s face changed, the laughter gone, the reasoning, the calm, vanished. Instead a sort of cold hardness replaced it and she felt a flicker of fear. A heartbeat passed, then another, before he exploded, launching into a pile of wooden crates by the kerbside, kicking them into smithereens, and she watched, frozen, unable to stop him and unable to leave, aware that she had been a second away from feeling the force of those kicks herself, that many men would not have aimed their fury at a defenceless pile of wooden crates by the kerbside. When the crates were destroyed he turned away and left her, walked off into the night in the direction from which they had just come.
She had never seen such fury in him. That he had it inside him, that she could be the cause of it, frightened her. She went home quickly. Arriving at the house she somehow expected him to be there ahead of her, though it was impossible. She sat for a time at the place where the kitchen table had once stood. Then she set out the breakfast things for the morning, put their air-raid provisions by the front door in case they were needed and got herself ready for bed. She lay awake, listening for his return.
What if he did not return?
When she heard him finally come through the door many hours had passed, or she imagined they had, and her relief was matched by her fear. He hesitated outside their door and she reasoned that surely he would not hesitate like that if he was still angry, if he was still violent. Perhaps he would sleep in the kitchen, perhaps he would pack his things and leave and she would find him gone in the morning—
He came into their room, got into their bed and lay there, breathing loudly and quickly as though he had been running. The minutes stretched out between them interminably, a kind of torture, the two of them lying side by side in the bed, and she could not think what to say and she could not touch him. Eventually he turned to her, still angry, still wishing to hurt her, she could sense it in him, but instead he flung aside the bedclothes and her nightgown and they did it, right then and there, as loud and angry and frenzied as two animals.
And that—that was the moment! She knew it now, nearly three months later. Another baby, made in war, but this one was a baby created in a moment of utter, complete and angry harmony.
She wanted this baby.
It was quiet now, surely long after midnight. The Rosenthals’ baby had fallen into an exhausted sleep, his tiny fist curled tightly around Emily’s thumb, and Emily, having concluded her nursery rhyme, sat quite still though her eyes blinked sleepily and her head lolled, aware that the slightest movement would wake him, as though there wasn’t an air raid going on above them.
Eventually Billy returned, his face stern with concentration as he stepped carefully, stern with the seriousness of the task he had been set, though his life was one such task after another.
Nancy handed back the baby. ‘He was good as gold,’ she whispered, as though whispering in an air raid made any sense.
‘Mum says fanks.’ And Billy was gone.
Beside her Emily stirred restlessly, a hunger in her eyes that was only partly due to lack of food. ‘Mummy, we could keep the baby.’
‘It ain’t our baby.’
‘But if we took him then we could keep him.’
She had not told Emily about the new baby. She knew she should, should prepare her, but she had not. Some part of her wanted to keep the secret all to herself.
A yard or two away sat the posh woman, still awake, clutching her child and her belongings and rocking back and forth, murmuring to herself or to her child, a curious, terrified expression on her face. Everyone else slept. Someone should sit and talk with her, thought Nancy, for the woman was clearly frightened, clearly alone. But Joe had left that morning and the pain of his departure was too fresh. She did not think she could talk to a stranger when the memory of his leaving was so new, so keen. She preferred to keep it to herself, to nurse it until it dulled.
As she thought this her eye was caught by a man up on the platform, a stocky figure, dishevelled and hatless and wearing civilian clothes, who was making his way across the sleeping bodies, picking his way, searching each face, and a shadow crept over her when she ought to have cried with joy, for Nancy had seen that it was Joe.