‘Mummy, look—it’s Uncle Lance!’ said Abigail, and she tugged at Diana’s hand.
But Diana did not move. For he stood with his coat flapping open and shirt collar awry, his hair unkempt and fallen forward over his eyes, out of breath and glancing behind him at the escalator down which he had just come, snatching at his hat and mopping his brow with it. This was not the urbane Lance in a silk scarf recently returned from South America who had sat across from her at the Conduit Street cafe, nor was it the hard-nosed Lance conducting dubious transactions from behind his desk eight, nine hours earlier. And this was not Lance caught in an air raid—she had an idea he would not be concerned by a raid. No, this was something quite different.
You shouldn’t have brought her here, Lance had said. You shouldn’t have told her my name. It was stupid, as though simply by bringing her child with her Diana had somehow compromised his safety, as though his very existence was so precarious. At the time she had been furious, embarrassed. Now, in the dimly lit concourse, she saw the whites of his eyes, wild and staring.
‘Mummy—want more chocolate!’
And in a second Abigail was gone, letting go of her mother’s hand and darting off into the crowd after him.
‘Abigail, stop!’
Diana lunged after her. She could see Abigail’s tiny figure just ahead of her, just out of reach, weaving between the people, and just beyond her was Lance, who had turned to the left and then to the right and now seemed almost to retrace his steps. Perhaps he saw Abigail or had heard her cry, a small child in a tweed coat with little mittens sewn to the cuffs and smart little shoes with silver buckles running towards him, and for a moment he seemed to regard her in bemusement.
Abigail, who had run full tilt at a man she had met only once in her life and in a place that was utterly unfamiliar and alien to her, suddenly lost her nerve and pulled up short. This gave her mother precious seconds to swoop down and whisk the girl into her arms. Whether she would, at this point, have raised her hand to wave to Lance or opened her mouth to call out to him afterwards Diana did not know, but before she had time to wave or call out, before she had time to wonder why, when Lance’s office was at Liverpool Street, he would choose to take shelter in Bethnal Green, three men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded him.
At first Diana could make no sense of it. The men seemed to have followed him into the station, pursuing him down the escalator, and what flashed into her head was the boxes hastily sealed and haphazardly stacked in Lance’s office and the frown on his face that she had assumed was for herself but that she now realised had been for this.
She did not move, though Abigail squirmed furiously in her arms. The three men surrounded him and Diana thought of children in a playground surrounding their victim. But these were not schoolboys. She smelled the cheap cigarettes they smoked and she saw the brims of their hats, stained dark and steaming slightly from the rain, though it had not been raining earlier; she saw a rash of dark stubble on a chin, the callouses and blackened fingernails of another, the fresh mud caked on the heel of a boot—impressions, fleeting but profound. If words were exchanged she could not hear them, and in a moment, no longer, they separated, the three men melting away into the crowd, gone.
Lance remained where he stood, alone now and dazed it seemed, then he reeled away. His felt hat had come off and rolled away and Diana found it at her feet. She could see the cream silk lining inside the hat which ordinarily would display the mark of a good tailor but the lettering, she saw, was in Spanish.
She stepped forward, her heart thudding, but still she did not call out.
He made for the latrines, though he stumbled almost at once and put out a hand to the wall to steady himself. His hand slid, leaving a dark mark on the painted brickwork, like soot, thought Diana, as though Lance had been out there in the air raid calmly lighting a fire. Or oil, perhaps it was oil. He sank to the ground and did not move and his hand slid from the wall creating an arc as he fell. And it wasn’t soot or oil.