‘Nancy Keys. Who would have thought?’
For a moment Nancy could not reply. It was Milly Fenwick, who had left Madame Vivant’s hat shop to marry a police constable and live in a house near the park. Milly Fenwick, whose wedding Nancy had not been invited to, whom she had never—in five years of air raids and bombing—seen sheltering here in this Underground station; and whom, if she thought about it—which she had not—she would have assumed had her own cosy little Anderson shelter in her own little back garden overlooking Vic Park. Yet here she was, Milly, just the wrong side of thirty and looking it, too, the long shadows failing to hide the lines at her neck and mouth, the puckering of lips that perhaps no longer held any of her own teeth, the small eyes that had swept over Nancy unseeingly all the years they had worked side by side but that now fixed on her and would not let go.
Here was Milly, whose fiancé Nancy had stolen.
‘Milly.’
She wore a clever little hat that might have come from Bond Street but might, equally, have come from a stall down Petticoat Lane, in a prewar winter coat with fur trim (but rabbit not beaver) and lace-up Oxfords in patent leather with a Continental heel that would have cost half her pay packet in 1939 but that five years later she was wearing in an air raid, her hair—no sign of grey yet—held neatly in place underneath her hat by a hairnet (no headscarf for her), her lips carefully outlined and coloured in lipstick an unflattering shade of mauve, her face thinner (though everyone’s face was thinner), and you might describe her as slim if you were being generous, gaunt if you were not. And seated on the bunk beside her were two identical little boys in short trousers and matching pullovers, hair neatly parted and combed, observing Nancy unblinkingly from behind the lenses of large wire-framed spectacles.
‘Fancy us seeing you here,’ Milly said, as though they had met somewhere quite improbable, like a West End show or a posh teashop in Piccadilly, and not in the only shelter for miles in the suburb they had both worked in and both, presumably, still lived in. The remarkable bit was that they had never run into each other before tonight. Or perhaps they had, Nancy realised. Perhaps Milly had seen her many times but had never before stopped her.
In which case, why now, why tonight?
Milly’s eyes were very bright and they did not blink, not once, nor did they leave Nancy’s face.
‘These are my two boys. Nigel and Adrian. Boys, say hello, please.’
The two small boys regarded Nancy with a curious intensity. ‘Hello, please,’ they responded in unison and their mother gave an indulgent, slightly irritated smile.
‘How d’you do?’ Nancy replied, unnerved by their unblinking gaze, unnerved by Milly’s unblinking gaze. The bunk they were seated on was very low—they were stacked three high and this was the lowest bunk and the space between the thin little mattress and the slats of the bunk above was about the distance from hip to shoulder. The two little boys could sit quite happily cross-legged on the bunk with no inconvenience. Milly, and now Nancy, had to hunch down so that their heads were almost below their shoulders. It was restrictive. It was oppressive.
‘They’re both bright as buttons,’ Milly said, leaning forward a little and speaking slowly, carefully, as though she had said something not commonplace at all, but quite profound. ‘Their dad says he can’t understand where they get it from but you only have to look at Reg to see it.’
The boys, who were bright as buttons, continued their silent scrutiny.
Reg was Milly’s husband. Nancy had met him once when he had come by the shop after work to see Milly and had found him dull and unimaginative. If his boys were bright as buttons they certainly didn’t get it from their dad. But if Milly believed in her husband, who was she to mock? They had never been friends—Milly had not encouraged it, but was not some guilt attached to herself, to the other girls, Miriam and Lily? Had they, perhaps, excluded Milly? Was it not their fault that Milly had remained outside, alone? And now here they were, she and Milly, both married, both mothers, both sheltering in a raid, and really what was there to set them apart?
‘My Emily’s just turned three,’ Nancy said.
But there was something to set them apart, something awful and earth-shattering that could not be undone, that even a war could not soften.
Milly leaned forward so that her face was inches from Nancy’s and quite suddenly the very air around them turned chilly.
‘Do you think I care?’
Nancy sat perfectly still. She had wondered in the weeks after she and Joe had begun courting what it would be like if they ran into Milly one evening at the pictures or dancing at the Palais, but they never had run into her, not once in all that time, and gradually the likelihood of it had diminished and the likelihood of Milly finding out, or caring, had diminished with it. Now it was certain and immediate. For Nancy Keys was Nancy Keys no more. She was Nancy Levin and the woman seated before her, an inch from her face, was the girl Joe would have married, and never mind the house overlooking the park or the two neatly dressed little boys, this was the real Milly Fenwick.
‘Do you think I care?’
Nancy pulled back sharply, unable to reply, unable to get up and leave, and the hand that had shot out and grabbed her wrist and had not let go since suddenly tightened painfully and she stifled a gasp. Milly’s face had been in shadow but now it was an inch from own face and was enormous, bloated, and Nancy could not move. The fingers tightened around her wrist. The unblinking eyes narrowed a fraction and there was something triumphant in them.
‘I saw him. He was here, not an hour gone. I saw him! Joe.’
There, she had done it, said his name out loud at last, and perhaps it was the first time she had said it in all these years. How odd it must sound to her, how familiar yet unfamiliar the word must feel on her lips.
‘He’s a deserter.’
And now Nancy could not move; though she recoiled from those lips, from those words, she could not move.
‘You got a bloody nerve! Sitting there, telling me my man’s a deserter! He did his bit, went off to serve his country. Not like some—’
‘I know what I saw!’
There was a strange light in Milly’s face, her eyes gleamed like a child on Christmas morning. Like a child who has murdered both its parents on Christmas morning because it did not get the presents it was expecting.
‘You saw nothing! Joe’s home on leave.’
‘I saw him.’ Milly’s breath was warm in her ear. ‘Creeping about in civvies, an old duffle coat, no hat, black trousers. I saw him looking over his shoulder like he knew the coppers were after him.’
Throughout this the little boys had sat unmoving, dispassionately observing every detail. Now Milly cocked her head a fraction towards them.
‘My Reg rounds up men like that every day. Don’t he, boys?’
‘Our daddy’s a policeman,’ they said in unison.
‘And what he does he do with deserters, boys?’
‘He arrests them and throws them in prison where they belong.’
It was grotesque. Did they even know what they were saying? There was something inhuman about them.
‘Where has he run to, Nancy? His brothers’ house? Does he think he’ll be safe there?’
‘You know nothing—’
The fingers pressed into Nancy’s wrist. She felt her tendons protesting, the bones crunched together. And Milly leaned closer, Milly said what she had waited five years to say: ‘You think you can steal my man and get away with it? You’re nothing but a cheap tart.’
The two little boys sitting unmoving behind her, their eyes wide, slowly licked their lips.
‘He deserved what he got and you deserve what you got: a cowardly deserter.’
‘Say what you like! It don’t change nothing.’ And now, finally, Nancy could say what she had waited five years to say: ‘He chose me over you!’
She wrenched herself free—and for a moment she was free—but Milly’s words pursued her: ‘We’re going to the police station, Nancy Keys, just the minute we get out of here!’
Nancy fled, tripping and falling in her haste to escape, throwing out her hands to break her fall; a woman tried to help her up but Nancy pushed her away. She needed to run but she could not, the ocean of bodies in every direction was too great. She scrambled down off the platform’s edge, falling again onto her hands and knees, pulling herself up and finding herself at the tunnel entrance. She paused to catch her breath. She had come too far down the platform, was at the wrong end of the station from where Emily waited for her. She looked down at her hands, which were dirt-encrusted and cut and beginning to sting. Her stockings were torn. She needed to catch her breath.
Milly’s hatred swam around her, it cut into her as the tiny pieces of grit cut into her hands. You loved him once, thought Nancy. You loved Joe. But the journey from love to hate, it turned out, was a short one, and one that was rarely, if ever, made in reverse.
She could not catch her breath. People were watching her, curious, wondering. For there were families sheltering here, right inside the tunnel. She made herself stop, straighten up, stand quite still, at the mouth of the tunnel. It drew her gaze, pulled her in. It emitted a strange musty, damp, electrical smell. A wind whistling distantly blew the scarf about her head, whipped the strands of hair into her eyes. The very last family sheltering the deepest inside the tunnel were wrapped up like Arctic explorers, only their eyes showing, huddling like people on a mountain top or on the edge of a precipice. And beyond the last family was darkness. If you went inside, if you walked far enough, you would reach Liverpool Street. It was perhaps a mile, which was no distance at all on the surface but underground in the darkness would be an eternity. She had never been afraid of the dark—for why be scared of something you could not see?—but this darkness, it leaped like a flame, touching something quite primeval within her, and she shivered. When she peered into the darkness after just a few yards there was nothing. A void. Probably sound itself was obliterated, though she heard the wind again. Anything might go on inside there and no one would know. A girl had been raped a few months back, down here during a raid, and no one had heard a thing. You could bring someone down here and finish them off, do away with them, and no one would ever know. You could put your hands around someone’s neck and strangle them or slip a knife between their ribs—if you had a knife—and no one would know.
She thought of Milly Fenwick and her two little boys who would go to the police station just the minute they got out of here.