Nancy had believed, absolutely, in Joe’s escape, in his nocturnal flight across the city, his clandestine meeting with a man who could get him the right papers, his flight across the country and finally across the sea. She had believed, unquestioningly, in Joe’s eventual and ultimate success. But Milly Fenwick had vowed to denounce him—the man she had once agreed to marry—and all at once Joe’s escape seemed perilous, his eventual success no longer assured, his capture and incarceration a distinct possibility.
She must think. For she wasn’t helpless, she could help Joe. There were things she could do, actions she could take. She must think.
But in the meantime it was foolish to be blundering about the station on her own, leaving Emily alone and unprotected. This thought struck her horribly and Nancy began to make her way back, hurrying, though her way was blocked at every turn and she slipped and stumbled and her panic rose again just when she had got it under control. She had left Emily on her own. She often left Emily on her own and nothing bad ever happened, of course it didn’t, she was always good as gold, but now all the certainties, all the risks she took daily and without a thought, seemed breathtakingly foolish and a thousand horrific consequences crowded into her head.
She craned her neck to locate Emily through the sea of bodies, but identifying one small child amid so many proved impossible when surely a mum ought to be able to pick out her own kid in a crowd at once. But she was too far away, her line of sight was blocked by a dozen, two dozen people.
The bombers were back. She was aware of an increase in her heart rate, a flutter against her ribs that made her breathless, and the need to reach Emily became urgent, for a terrible, almost unthinkable dismay had descended on her: what if Emily had been taken? There was no logical reason to think this, yet you heard about such things: kids being snatched, babies taken from their prams right outside their own front doors and never heard of again. A girl had been raped in the tunnels just a few months ago. If something happened to Emily she would never forgive herself. And she would never be able to face Joe, who had done everything, risked everything, for them both. She would kill herself if anything happened to their little girl.
But nothing had happened, for there she was! Safe and sound and sitting up with the blanket wrapped about her skinny shoulders, looking for her mother with a frightened, anxious face, and Nancy laughed aloud in her relief, and the need to hurl herself beneath the wheels of a train rather than face her husband’s grief and recriminations vanished. She had allowed her fears to get the better of her. She was in control: she would protect Emily and she would protect Joe, too, if she had to.
Before she had gone even a few steps she saw the two men coming towards her. One was the man she had seen in the shadows standing outside her house so many hours ago when the air-raid siren had first gone off and had seen again much later in the entranceway to the platform and had convinced herself was a policeman: a tallish, slender young man in a long, shabby raincoat and a soft felt hat, damp from the rain and pulled low over his brow, a face shadowy with stubble. She had convinced herself he was a policeman and now her guess appeared to be spot on, for right behind him was a police constable with an ugly enlarged nose, red-faced and out of breath in a uniform that was stretched tightly over a swollen belly. Two policemen coming towards her. A long way off but they spotted her in the same instant that she saw them.
They had arrested Joe. For a moment she could not breathe. Some spark of life died away.
But the two policeman started forward and so she ran. There was nowhere to run. She was on a platform packed with sleeping people, there was only one way in or out, aside from the tunnels at each end. She could hide down there in the tunnel, but could she could make it along the tracks, in the darkness, to the next station, to Liverpool Street? And there was Emily, she could not abandon Emily. Each possibility for escape was dashed the instant it presented itself. She needed some luck, on this night when it had all come crashing down about her; she deserved something, surely?
When it came, salvation was delivered by the Luftwaffe. Not a direct hit—not that, God forbid—but a near miss, a strike so close it caused the whole structure of the station to rumble and shake, for dust to stream from the ceiling and cracks to appear in the walls. It caused heads to lift and muffled screams and shouts to ripple the length of the platform. It caused all eyes—just for that moment—to gaze upwards. How could it not? You were not human if you did not, in that instant, gaze upwards. It lasted a few seconds, no longer, but in that time Nancy stopped running and threw herself to the ground, not to avoid the bombs but because some ingenious, quite unknown part of herself had worked out that there were hundreds of people lying on the ground and that, lying on the ground with their coats over them and their faces covered, it was all but impossible to tell one person from another. In the moment that all eyes were gazing upwards she threw herself to the ground, pulling her coat over her head, and was gone.
She hoped she was gone. If she had got it wrong, if the two policemen had not been distracted like everyone else by the explosion, if she were not in fact invisible, then she was trapped. They would find her and arrest her and there was precious little she could do to prevent it.
Until that happened she would wait, when already her heart was bursting and her breathing so rapid she couldn’t quite think. She would wait. How long? She could not risk lifting her head. She would count. She would make herself wait a full ten minutes. So she counted, one to sixty slowly and steadily, ten times. As she counted and one part of her brain maintained a steady and calming rhythm, the other part imagined the bodies all around her dissolving away to leave her lying alone and naked and horribly exposed. Every instinct told her to leap up and run but she made herself lie perfectly still.
Ten minutes, or thereabouts. The bombing had gone quiet again, but everyone was talking, moving about, frightened. She lifted her head an inch, two inches, from the ground. The back and shoulders of an elderly man were almost touching her. The old man smelled of stale beer and stale piss, of unwashed clothes. She could see the worn, loose threads of his coat, a darned patch already undoing, a collar half torn off. She could hear his ragged, phlegmy breathing. Every sensation seemed heightened and extreme and terrible. She raised her head to look over the old man and saw another old man, a sea of old men, the same and different and endless.
Of the policemen there was no sign. No sign at all. She had evaded them! For a moment she revelled in her good fortune, in her ingenuity. She sat up, and now that she could afford the luxury of thinking things through and not simply reacting in a blind panic it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Joe had not been arrested. For if he had, surely the policemen would be interrogating him, would be charging him right now. They would not be wasting their time chasing Joe’s wife in an overcrowded tube station during a raid. No, it was far more likely Joe had evaded them too, was even now making his way, stealthily in the blackout, to the man who would provide the right papers, to the railway station to catch the first train north in the morning, to the ship that would take him across the sea to freedom.
Cautiously she got to her feet and her limbs felt curiously light and difficult to control and her head spun dizzyingly. It was all for Joe, she realised; if she believed in him she could go on, and she did believe in him now. She crouched low and stayed low as she began to make her way back, keeping to the shadowy overhang just below the platform’s edge. She would leave at once, go with Joe this very night, all her hesitations and fears, all her doubts had gone.
But there was Emily and the fact of Emily made it impossible.
There was still no sign of the two policemen who seemed to have vanished into thin air. Dawn was still an hour or two away but all around folk were awake and restless after the near miss. A steady stream of elderly people and small children got up and stretched and shuffled off to the latrines, rearranged themselves on the ground, squabbled in angry whispers with their families and with the strangers around them, and all of this gave her cover. This time she saw Emily at once, picking her out instantly in the crowd of people, and though only a short time ago Emily had been anxious and frightened, now she appeared to have accepted her abandonment and the near miss and was sitting patiently with the blanket wrapped around her, waiting. A child born during a war in the downstairs room of a house in Odessa Street had realistic expectations about her life and the options that were available. This evidence of her child’s stoicism—or perhaps it was merely Emily’s acceptance of her lot in life—brought tears to her mother’s eyes. She would not abandon her again, no matter what happened. This was her pledge to her waiting child.
Nancy was still too far off to pick her up, to hold her, still she could see Emily’s patiently waiting form and she could make her pledge. It was a moment of joyful reunion with her child even if it was only in her mind.
In the next instant the policeman in the raincoat (who had not, in fact, vanished into thin air but had instead worked his way methodically along the platform, shaking and waking one sleeping figure after another in his quest to find her) did now find her—indeed, she walked straight into him—and for a second, two seconds, they faced each other. Nancy saw a much younger man than she had expected, his narrow face and hollow cheeks not so very different from those of the hungry and exhausted people around them, his dark eyes blurred by the dark shadows beneath them, the ghost of a beard along his jawline proof of the many hours that had passed since he had shaved that morning. She did not see triumph in his dark eyes, merely a sort of tired inevitability.
It made no difference. Another bomb landed and this one was not a near miss, it was not a miss at all, and Nancy saw the policeman who had pursued her and then she saw nothing.