Gerald knocked a second time, louder, then he went to the downstairs window, cupping his hand against the glass, and peered in. It was a bedroom, tiny, cluttered and cramped. He made out an old-fashioned iron bedstead, a thin mattress, blankets. Against the back wall was a narrow Victorian wardrobe, its door hanging open, but it was impossible to see what, if anything, was inside it. On the floor were items of clothing, shoes strewn about, a suitcase standing opened and empty.
He stepped back. It could be any room, belonging to anyone, recently vacated by the occupants who had just popped out to do their shopping or who had left in a hurry at the sound of the air-raid siren and never returned. It told him nothing. If there were no living relatives what became of a person’s things, of their house? What became of the rooms they rented? The local authorities would sort it out, he presumed; indeed, there was probably a department that dealt solely with the possessions of dead people.
He stepped back and studied the upstairs window and at once saw a shadow pulling back out of sight. Gerald waited, standing there, gazing up, and sure enough, after a time, there it was again, a shadow at the window.
As he tried to decide what to do, he saw a woman making her way breathlessly along the street towards him, a shopping basket banging at her knees and two small children at her side. She paused at the sight of him. Even from a distance of twenty yards or more he could see a dozen frightened possibilities flit across the woman’s face and she seemed poised to flee. Gerald had no clue how to reassure her so he just stood there and said nothing and after a while she started forward again, moving quickly like a bird hopping across a lawn, her eyes turned away from him, her hands grasping both the children—two little boys—tightly. They were coming to this house. He stepped aside, trying not to stare at her but still taking in a tiny shrunken figure bundled up in a headscarf and a man’s overcoat but with bare legs and light summer shoes. He thought at first it was an old woman though, as she neared, he saw she was quite young but terribly worn down. Something about her pallor, her eyes, her posture spoke of complete and utter exhaustion. The children, by contrast, eyed him boldly; the eldest, who was all of nine or ten, shivering in a decrepit old pullover and a pair of men’s trousers held up with string, pulled himself up sharply in a manner that suggested there was no father around.
They had reached their door, number 42.
‘Mrs Levin?’ said Gerald, knowing it was not her but saying it anyway. At his words the women’s eyes widened for a moment then she turned away. The boy’s expression turned mocking.
‘She’s dead,’ he said. This earned him a clip around the ear from his mother. Clearly the boy had not yet learned that you do not speak to strangers, or not this kind of stranger.
‘Then I wonder if you can tell me—’
But they were gone, the door opened, the mother bundling her children in, the door firmly closed.
He went after her and knocked loudly and repeatedly, and when he stopped the silence was no longer the silence of an abandoned house, it was the silence of people holding their breath, hiding and waiting, not daring to move. He backed away. He had the same feeling from each of the windows in each of the houses, shadows watching him, darting away when he looked at them. The cluster of children across the street had fallen silent and they too were watching him, and for a moment he felt the same unease he had felt walking through the streets of Cairo at night, waiting to get his throat cut and his body thrown into the Nile.
For God’s sake, would no one help him?
He thought of the decrepit old woman at the station who had pitied him, the woman ambulance driver who had offered him a cigarette. He clung to these two oases of kindness in this desert of indifference.
He left, turning and walking rapidly away, wanting to put as much distance as he could between himself and that house, this street. The day had faded, seeping away in a slow and protracted death, and the night lay ahead of him, unrelenting and endless. He shivered. He had not felt warm since he had climbed aboard the de Havilland three—no, four days ago. He wanted to be back there, in the desert, in the dusty, fly-blown, teeming streets of Cairo. He wanted to wind the clock back four days.
Emerging again onto Bethnal Green Road at the start of the blackout he was lost for a time, trying to determine his location, trying to decide where he should go. He began walking in a westerly direction, hoping to find a bus. Instead he found a black hackney cab, pulling up at the kerb and disgorging a group of drunken sailors. He darted forward and climbed in before anyone else could
‘Where to, guv?’ said the cabbie, and behind them Gerald heard the first wails of the air-raid siren.
‘Clapham,’ said Gerald. ‘Take me to Clapham.’