It was Harry who opened the door to Joe’s knock, his fingers curling around the doorframe, grey in the grey dawn, and something glinted in the meagre light: the blade of a knife. Anyone arriving at the house at this hour could not have good intentions and Harry was prepared. A hand shot out and grabbed Joe by his coat collar and pulled him inside. A glance up and down the street, the door hastily shut behind them. The knife was gone, stowed in some hidden pocket ready for the next person.
‘I told you not to come here.’
Harry was a slight man, hair cut short like a squaddie’s and sprinkled with flecks of grey, a chin permanently darkened by stubble and unblinking pale grey eyes that rarely twinkled with laughter, quick movements and a quicker mind always four or five steps ahead of the man he was dealing with. How different might things be if it was Sammy opening the door on this frozen January dawn, but their older brother was doing a five-year stretch at Wandsworth Prison so it was Harry who peered at Joe in the half-light, his face displaying that habitual expression of watchful wariness, and when he saw it was his younger brother at the door the expression did not change.
‘I been on the run,’ said Joe. ‘The cops was waiting for me at the docks. It weren’t just some random security check—they was waiting for me.’
These words sounded to Joe like words spoken by another man living another life, not his words, not his life. He needed to explain the last eight days, his flight, the line of ambulances outside the hospital. But Harry had taken over the whole of the tenement house in Yalta Street where his father and mother had once lived in two rooms, and he had taken over the two terraces on each side, and he had taken over Myra, too, who had once been Sammy’s girl, installing her in one house and using the other as a place of work. Harry wouldn’t care about the line of ambulances. He wouldn’t care about the dead little girl.
‘And you come here?’
Harry grabbed him by the collar in the darkened hallway and slammed him against the wall. He had done this often when they were younger and Joe, even now he was older, bigger, stronger, had never fought back. He did not fight back now.
‘I had nowhere else to go.’
‘There’s always somewhere else to go. If you don’t have some place set up where you can hide out then you’re a bloody fool.’
‘I ain’t like you,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t need places to hide out.’
He was not like Harry. Harry was the ten-year-old boy standing on a corner, hands thrust deep in pockets, watching everyone and everything as though there was money to be made by it, as though the thing he could pull from his pocket might make his fortune or bring down his enemies. When the war had come Harry was ready. As the first ration books had flown off the government printing presses, as they had made their way by armoured lorry to the new Food Offices around the country, Harry had found a printer in Limehouse and soon the presses were running through the night spitting out fake ration books, then forged identity cards, and later, when clothes became rationed, fake clothing coupons too. As the war had progressed and it was simpler to go straight to the source, robbing the ration books directly from the Food Offices, he bought the stolen books for two quid each and sold them on for three. Lately he had turned his attention to the American and Canadian airbases that had sprung up and were stuffed to bursting with cigars, oranges, peanut butter, chocolate, coffee, fruit juice—and silk too, if you had no qualms about taking some poor sod’s parachute, which Harry did not. It was a profitable time, war. As his older brother sewed mailbags and his younger brother shovelled coal in a stinking ship’s engine room, Harry Levin had done very nicely. But with the war into its fifth year, with the government bringing in new laws and ever more severe penalties, the risk-free undetectable crimes of three, four years ago were a thing of the past. Harry was jumpy—Joe could see it, feel it, but he couldn’t share it.
‘I ain’t like you, Harry,’ he said again. ‘I’m a sailor. A husband. A dad.’
Harry snorted. ‘You gave all that away when you agreed to work for me—and what the hell happened to your head?’
Joe put a hand up to his head, touching the bandage. He had forgotten. He suddenly felt unwell. ‘I got hit by something.’
Harry made no reply, studying Joe as though seeking some family resemblance, some hint they were related. He let go of Joe’s collar and stalked off into the kitchen.
For a moment Joe didn’t move. He had come home on leave in October and gone to work at the docks. He had returned home with tins of peaches in syrup, with a can of Carnation milk, and they had fallen on him, his wife and kids. And Nancy had assumed that was the extent of it, one or two items pilfered when the Docks Police weren’t looking, a couple of cans hidden in his lunchbox, no harm done, everyone was doing it. And it had suited him that she think this. She didn’t need to know her brother-in-law was at the centre of a full-scale operation that involved bribes to dockyard guards and a corrupt superintendent, holes cut into the wire of the perimeter fence, guard dogs doped and drivers waiting in stolen vans to cart the stuff away to receivers spread all across London; an operation that involved whole crates of sugar, tea, tinned goods—anything, really, that had made it across in the convoys and could be shifted through a hole in a fence and in the back of a lorry. Harry had required a man on the inside, someone he could trust. Who better than his own brother? So Joe had gone to work at the dockyard, Joe had become Harry’s man on the inside.
He had told Nancy if he got caught he would get fourteen years and she had not believed it. She had said, What if you explained it to them? If you told them we was starving, that you took one or two things. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe it would be only a short stretch. He had told her fourteen years’ penal servitude. He would be lucky to get fourteen years. Theft on this scale, and from the docks, was a capital offence. He was glad he had not told Nancy this.
He followed Harry into the kitchen where his brother’s girl, Myra, was seated at the kitchen table wrapped in a lurid turquoise dressing-gown, her hair in a net, smoking an Embassy and knocking the ash into a saucer. Her lips were made-up and a perfect red bow coloured the end of the burning cigarette. She looked up at Joe’s early-morning arrival, her green eyes narrowing as she blew out a slow stream of smoke. She said nothing and her expression registered nothing. Myra did not care for Joe. It seemed to Joe that Myra did not really care for anyone—except, presumably, Harry. It was Sammy who had first brought her home the summer before the war and she had been Madge Carter then, in a cheap uniform selling cigarettes and ice-creams at the Regal in Mare Street. Now Sammy was in the nick and Madge Carter was Myra Cartier and it was a long time since she had trudged the aisles at the Regal plying her Pall Malls and her choc ices.
Harry looked at her irritably. ‘For God’s sake, get some bloody clothes on.’
When she had gone, resentfully, pulling her gown about her with a flounce, Joe pulled out a chair and sank down. He felt light-headed. He needed rest, to sleep. He needed to drink something, to eat something. His head throbbed. He concentrated for a moment on just sitting.
After a time, his head settled, the kitchen came back into focus and he looked about him, confused, as anyone is confused when returning to their childhood home after a long time away, after thinking they might not see that home again. He thought of the kitchen as it had been when he was a kid. It had been a communal room then, four families sharing it as they had all shared the outside lav in the backyard. There had been a gas ring in each room in those days, where each family did their own cooking, and this area here had been the scullery, being the only room in the house with a sink and cold running water. When his mother had moved in the only water had come from a pump in the street. Now they had running water and a kitchen all to themselves and briefly, before the war, gas lighting in the street. It was confusing.
Upstairs a door slammed.
Joe lifted his head. He wondered if his brother and Myra had got up early with the dawn or if they were just turning in for the night. That seemed more likely. He couldn’t imagine any other reason they’d both be up at this hour. Harry certainly had not been on fire-watch duty. He had been thirty-three at the outbreak of war, which put him well within the age range for active service, but a medical exemption certificate had kept him out of it. This certificate had been provided by a helpful and hard-up doctor in Stepney whom a lot of young men had visited in those first heady weeks of the war and who now resided in the same wing of Wandsworth Prison as Samuel Levin. During those same weeks of September and October ’39, Joe had waited at home with his new bride for his call-up papers, which had come soon enough. The difference between himself and his half-brothers had, at that time, never seemed so clear to him.
And yet here he was, a little over four years later, and the difference between him and them was no longer clear.
Upstairs another door slammed and he watched a flicker of irritation pass over Harry’s face. Why did they stick together, Joe wondered, Harry and Myra? They only ever seemed to irritate each other. If Harry wanted to score some point over Sammy by stealing his girl he had surely made that point long ago.
‘Tell me again what happened,’ Harry demanded in a low voice, frowning. He had not sat down. He paced up and down the kitchen.
‘It’s what I said. They was expecting me. Docks Police, six or seven of them, and a copper. Plainclothes. Soon as they see me, it was all up. I’d be banged up on a charge—half a dozen charges—right now if I hadn’t legged it.’
‘Did you go back to your house?’
‘’Course I didn’t.’
‘They arrest anyone else?’
‘I didn’t see, I were too busy running. No, I don’t think so.’
At some point the sun had risen and a sliver of daylight crept into the gloomy room. Harry went to the window and twitched the blackout aside, taking a quick glance up at the sky before replacing it.
‘Why’re you here, Joe? What d’you expect me to do?’
‘I need papers,’ Joe said, and, seeing his brother unmoved: ‘Blimey, Harry, if you can’t get me new papers who the hell can? You could fit out the entire German army with new identities if you wanted to, just from the stuff you’ve got lying about in the house.’
‘Yeah, and if he handed over four quid I’d fit out Hitler himself—and chuck in some clothing coupons for good measure,’ replied Harry with a piercing look. ‘You got four quid, have you, Joe?’
‘I’ve got what I’m standing up in.’
Harry turned away, shaking his head. ‘I don’t keep none of that stuff here any more. It ain’t safe.’
‘Then what am I supposed to do?’
He hated this feeling of dependency. Harry had come to him in the pub and offered him an opportunity; that was what he had called it. What Joe had seen was a way to stick it to the government, to the navy, to the men who had sent him off to sea and left him to drown alone in an ocean when they didn’t even get their feet wet. He had taken control of his own destiny. But now his destiny was in the hands of his brother.
‘You have to help me,’ he said.
‘If I do, it’ll be the last time,’ said Harry.
A narrow and treacherously steep staircase in very poor repair led to the upper floors where, in Joe’s youth, a family called the Brownsteins had lived, and above them a family called the Buchmans, who had disappeared one night never to be heard of again. The Buchmans had been replaced by the Lipinskis, who in turn had been succeeded by the Mollers. Mr Lipinksi had fallen down the upper flight one Saturday night and had landed on his head and lain insensible and unable to speak in his bed ever after. The Brownsteins eldest boy had died of scarlet fever in one of these rooms. And the Mollers’ baby had fallen from the top-storey window and perished, and some had said it had been thrown by Mrs Moller herself in a fit of despair. Mrs Moller had died herself not long after and, though no one had said it, everyone had known it was by her own hand. The Brownsteins and the Buchmans and the Lipinskis and the Mollers were long gone but still it felt odd climbing the steep staircase to the upper floors. Joe still expected the elderly Mr Buchman to come out of his room and shout at him. But now his mother lived where the Moller children had slept, and she sat in a chair in the room where Mr Moller had impregnated his wife year after year.
Joe reached the top of the stairs and paused. This was where his mother—at seventy, her body stooped and broken by years of childbirth and poverty—now spent her days. She never came downstairs or received any visitors and no one could remember the last time she had set foot outside the house—it might have been his own wedding day. Her sole contact with the outside world was through Harry and Myra and what she spied in the street far below from her upstairs window. How much she knew of, or cared about, the various illegal goings-on in the rooms downstairs and in the houses on either side of her was unknown, for she said little and when she did speak it was often to enquire after the husband who had abandoned her thirty years earlier.
She was seated now in her chair by the window in the same black crepe dress and mob-cap, her fingers in the same woollen mittens, that she had been wearing on Joe’s last visit three months ago. Whether she had moved in all that time he could not tell.
‘Mum, it’s Joe.’
She turned her head sharply at his greeting but her eyes remained on the window as though his presence was no more than a sound heard in a distant room. The blackout had been pinned up to let the day in and a starling was perched unsteadily on the sill outside, buffeted by the wind. Mrs Levin studied the starling and when Joe came into the room the starling froze, sensing movement, its black eyes flickering, its wings shivering in preparation for flight.
‘Nasty vermin!’ she shouted furiously. ‘I hate them.’
Alarmed, the starling flew off.
Joe pulled up a chair beside her and sat down. ‘You been alright, have you, Mum?’ he said, watching her warily. Each time he saw her she seemed to have aged a little more, her cheeks a little more sunken, the skin on her face and neck and fingertips a little more transparent, her eyes a little more clouded over. But her voice was strong enough. ‘Are you getting enough to eat?’ he asked. He never saw her eat. It seemed possible she didn’t eat at all.
But the starling—or a different starling—had returned to the sill and she was fully taken up with retrieving her stick and rapping it furiously against the pane.
He had come to see her in this room the day before he’d left to join his ship three years ago and she had been angry with him. Angry because he had not got himself out of it like Harry had, like Sammy had in his own inimitable way. He was a fool, she had said, and perhaps he had been, for which one of them—Harry or Sammy or himself—was about to flee the country forever? The war would end and Sammy would come back and Harry would take over every house in the street and Joe would be gone. She would be gone, too, he realised, looking sideways at the old woman seated beside him.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘Last night there was so much noise I couldn’t sleep.’
‘There was an air raid. You ought to go down the shelter.’ He knew she would never go down to any shelter.
‘That weren’t no air raid. That was some tart turning tricks with some soldier down ’neath my window. Went on for ages, it did, and then she knifed him and robbed him and buggered off, far as I can tell. There was blood on the street.’
There was no blood on the street. She had told him this story many times. It was some incident she had heard about years ago or had witnessed, perhaps, as a girl. Sometimes Joe wondered if the story was about herself. He had long ago decided he’d rather not know.
‘Well, it’s quiet now,’ he said.
The daylight had come and gone and Harry had been absent the whole time. He returned at nightfall, slipping back into the house, shaking the raindrops from his coat and bringing a rush of cold air into the kitchen.
‘Here,’ he said, thrusting an envelope into Joe’s hands.
Joe turned it over, strangely reluctant to open it. Inside the envelope was a set of papers with the words NATIONAL REGISTRATION IDENTITY CARD stamped in big official lettering on the front and on the back: MUST NOT PART WITH TO ANY OTHER PERSON. Well, this person had parted with it. Joe opened the cover and read: Septimus John Vasey. What sort of name was that? There was also a buff-coloured ration book made out in the same name. He wondered if Septimus John was dead. He stuffed the papers in his pocket. He did not feel like a Septimus. The name had a sinister ring to it that he could not quite explain.
‘Anyone come?’ said Harry to Myra, who was seated at the kitchen table, where she had passed most of the day, smoking and flipping through a magazine, ignoring Joe. She shook her head, not looking up. Nancy sat like that too, perhaps all women did: legs crossed, an elbow on the table, cigarette held between index and middle finger an inch from her mouth, staring through narrowed eyes at endless photographs of the Royal Family and American film stars. But Myra had a diamond ring on her finger, she had another on her other hand and the silk dressing-gown she wore really was silk, not imitation, and the coat hanging on the back of her chair was fur, and not rabbit either, perhaps not even fox. It paid then, this life they lived, even if it meant living like you were under siege, always expecting the worst. But we’re all under siege, thought Joe, we’re all expecting the worst. The only difference was Myra had diamonds and silk and fur.
The stolen identity papers pressed uncomfortably into his side.
Harry wanted him to leave first thing in the morning, had provided a change of clothes—an old man’s hat and a suit that smelled like an old man had died in it—and a walking stick. ‘Use the stick and walk with a limp anytime you see anyone in authority,’ Harry had said. ‘That way people might not question why you’re not in uniform. And keep the bandage, it adds to your cover. And travel by day, it’s less suspicious. You’re bound to be stopped if you travel after dark.’
And Joe thought: It’s not just that he’s worried the whole operation’s in jeopardy. It’s more than that. Harry wants me to get away to safety.
The thought confounded him for a moment.
They passed the evening playing cards using fake clothing coupons as stake and Myra listened to a comedy program on the wireless with a frown on her face as though she was listening to a Ministry of War casualty list. When the news came on Harry got up and turned it off. He poured them both a Canadian scotch and Myra a crème de menthe. She was in her dressing-gown, her hair back in its net, but she still wore the diamonds. They would both be here after he had gone, Joe realised, after he had made it, with any luck, to America, and it occurred to him to ask his brother to keep an eye on Nancy and Emily. He would not have dreamed of it twenty-four hours earlier but now it seemed possible. He would ask Harry in the morning.
He passed a restless night in the armchair, eventually giving up and silently smoking as the dawn crept over the hospital buildings. Tuesday morning.
They had not agreed on a time for Joe’s departure but already Harry was up and dressed and bundling him towards the front door. ‘Be careful if you get a train from any of the mainline stations,’ he said, his usual taciturnity overcome for once. ‘The entrances are all watched. Someone’s bound to stop you. Enter through the Underground station or jump a train once it’s pulled out the station. Avoid Victoria and Kings Cross. Use Euston.’
Joe listened and nodded, trying to remember, but it was hard to take it in. He reached out and laid his hand on his brother’s shoulder. It occurred to him they would probably never meet again. He pushed down the panic that seemed, now, always to be just beneath the surface.
They had reached the door and Harry eased it open cautiously, letting in the wan yellowish daylight. He stood perfectly still as a cat would, scanning the street, tasting the air, then he nodded and stood aside. As Joe passed him in the narrow hallway Harry said again, ‘Remember: Euston. And use the walking stick.’
Joe nodded.
Harry gave him a quick push through the door, and under his breath he murmured, ‘Good luck,’ or it sounded like good luck.
Joe stepped out into the cold dawn, realising he had not asked Harry to keep an eye on Nancy and Emily. He turned back but the door had already closed behind him.