Joe had gone. He had appeared out of thin air and their lives together here in London had ended. Now they must wait. On some unnamed date in the future, Nancy would pack up what remained of their lives and she and Emily would leave London forever for some unknown and undreamed-of place across the sea.
And each second that passed took Joe further away from them.
The blood pumped in her ears. She was one heartbeat away from leaping to her feet, scooping up Emily and running with her up the escalators and into the fire-stricken night, running after Joe, calling out his name, searching place after place for him and finding him or not finding him—either way, each possibility seemed a catastrophe.
But Nancy did not leap up. She did not run after Joe. The blood pumped in her ears. And meanwhile Emily slept on, unaware of the cataclysmic events that had transpired, that would change her life. The war would end and other dads would come home but Emily’s dad would not. There would be no medals and his name would not appear on any war memorial.
But Emily was not asleep. She lay unmoving beneath the blanket, her head on her mother’s lap, staring at the blue travelling case that the smart woman had brought with her down to the shelter and that clearly contained nothing of use in an air raid as the woman had not opened it once but had sat stiffly clutching the handle. Now the woman had gone, taking her little girl with her, and the case was left behind.
The distant boom of an explosion caused the floor to vibrate and Nancy looked up. Small cracks appeared in the ceiling, dust trickling down, and Emily’s hand darted out and made a grab, not for the blue travelling case, but for the little girl’s teddy bear that lay beside it, almost hidden and similarly abandoned.
A second explosion echoed distantly and all around heads bobbed up, bodies shifting, pulling blankets closer about them as though a blanket could protect you from a bomb blast. The bombing had picked up again and a murmur of voices accompanied it. People were frightened when no one had seemed very frightened before. It was being woken from their sleep that did it.
The teddy bear was gone, as though it had never existed, and Emily pulled the blanket tightly around herself. Of the mother and her child there was no sign. Presumably they had gone to the latrines and when they returned the little girl would discover her teddy was missing. Her mother would be angry with her, would conduct a search, would tell the child off and the child would cry. The teddy would not be found. The mother would not confront the people seated around her, she was not the type. She would tell the child to be quiet. She would tell the child she would buy her another teddy bear.
Nancy searched for her cigarettes, pulled one from the packet and stuck it in her mouth, striking the match and observing the flame flare, tasting the dry little flakes of tobacco on her lips. The tip of the cigarette glowed redly.
She could hear a baby crying, screaming furiously, and she realised she needed to be up and moving about, that something might snap if she did not get up at once. She located the Rosenthals easily enough. In the heaviest months of the Blitz the railway company had installed bunks up on the platform proper and this was where the Rosenthals had positioned themselves, looking very settled with a bunk of their own, with their bundle of blankets and pillows and a foul-smelling potty covered with a cloth for the youngest ones to use as the trip to the latrines was not always safe. Billy Rosenthal saw her and waved. He was squatting beside his younger brother, Stanley, and had one of the littlest girls—Pamela or Barbara, she didn’t know which, always had trouble distinguishing the younger ones—bouncing on his knee. Mrs Rosenthal was nursing the baby, or trying to. His face was red and scrunched up and he was bawling fit to burst. Mrs Rosenthal saw Nancy and gave a wan smile which turned to relief as Nancy took the baby off her. Nancy had brought half a sausage roll with her which she divided into pieces. The baby was too young for solids really, but she put some on her finger and let him suck it. The rest she shared among the youngest kids.
Nancy saw them then, the mother and daughter, emerging from the latrines a little distance away, faces white and shocked, as well they might be—a visit to the latrines at this stage of the night was not for the faint-hearted. The little girl was adjusting her skirt, holding out her hands to her mother as though she did not know what to do with them. The mother spoke to her, offered a handkerchief, then looked up, and perhaps she saw Nancy and recognised her and perhaps she did not. Either way, the child spotted something at that moment and darted off and they were gone.
‘He’s enough to frighten off Adolf all on his very own,’ said Mrs Rosenthal of the baby, pushing the hair out of her exhausted face. Her thin fingers seemed to be just bone and her dress was soaked through with sweat as though it was summer and not the middle of winter.
‘He’s got a set of lungs on him, alright,’ Nancy agreed, but she didn’t mind it, didn’t mind it at all. There was something special about this one. She had been there at his birth, holding Mrs Rosenthal’s hand in the squalid upstairs room in Odessa Street on a wet Sunday afternoon the day after Halloween. A midwife had come, finally, when they had all but given her up, and the baby had stuck fast so that Mrs Rosenthal had screamed like a dying animal and there had been a moment when they’d thought the baby was lost. Perhaps that would have been for the best—the midwife had certainly seemed to think so, for when the baby was at last ejected from poor Mrs Rosenthal’s broken and spent body, she had held it up by its ankles, all bloodied and crumpled and purple, like a dead thing already, and she had looked at Mrs Rosenthal and at the squalor of the room they lived in and at the six other kids sitting outside waiting, wretched and unfed, in the stairwell and she had said, ‘Do you want this one?’ The baby was almost dead anyway; it was a small matter to help it on its way. ‘’Course I want it!’ Mrs Rosenthal had declared, loud as you like. ‘He’s my little boy. ’Course I want him!’ And now the baby was three months old and thriving, as much as any baby thrived down here, with a horde of brothers and sisters to look out for it.
‘You alright, luv?’
Nancy looked down and saw Mrs Rosenthal studying her, a little frown on her face. Was she alright? The question took Nancy by surprise. Their lives, hers and the Rosenthals’ (a shared toilet out the back, paper-thin walls, a meter for the electricity that broke down without warning, an intermittent water supply, uncarpeted stairs and a ceiling that shook every time someone slammed a door), were as intimately entwined as that of husband and wife. She had held Mrs Rosenthal’s hand while her baby was stuck fast inside her yet Nancy had never once used Mrs Rosenthal’s first name (which was Sylvia) and she had never once gone to her with a problem of her own that was not connected to the outside toilet or the electricity meter or the intermittent water supply. They were intimately entwined but utterly private from one another.
And so Mrs Rosenthal’s question took her by surprise.
‘’Course,’ she said, patting the baby’s back. I’ll tell Emily she must give it back, she decided, for the little girl and her teddy bear had been on her mind, though she had only now realised it.
‘Your Joe got off alright to his new ship, did he?’
Nancy buried her face in the baby’s blanket and made no reply. When she and Emily were gone would the Rosenthals move into their rooms? They would leave at night, just before dawn, for that was the way it was done in Odessa Street, and she did not know if they would say goodbye to the Rosenthals before they left or not. The war might be over by then. Len Rosenthal might have returned—or he might be dead.
‘Yes, Joe got off alright.’
‘It’s a bloody miracle,’ said Mrs Rosenthal, indicating the baby, who had stopped crying and was now sleeping, good as gold.
And Nancy agreed that yes, it was a miracle. She handed the baby back—the urge that had made her leap up and abandon Emily was fading. She made some excuse and left. She would see them in a few hours when they returned at dawn, worn out and bedraggled, to the house—if the house had survived—and they would all get on with their lives just as though nothing had happened, just as though Joe was back on a ship and at sea.
The bombing continued, if anything had worsened, and people were moving restlessly about so that her path was blocked and she was forced to take a circuitous route back. The rows of bunks continued on down the length of the platform, two, three, four people wedged into each one, and as she passed they watched her, every one of them, as men in a cellblock might watch a new inmate.
She felt again the urgency to be moving, active, but now it drove her back to Emily, drove her to think about her own baby growing inside her, hers and Joe’s. Let it be alright, let this baby be alright. And she wondered then where the baby would be born.
As she reached the final row of bunks right at the end of the platform a hand shot out and grabbed her. Fingers closed around her arm, gripping it, pulling her in, pulling her down, and she found herself seated on one of the bunks facing Milly Fenwick and two staring little boys.
‘Hello, Nancy,’ said Milly. ‘We thought it was you.’