The Past and Other Lies

by Maggie Joel

  Clive.

  She went to him, stumbling and almost falling, and it seemed that, beneath the black coating of smoke and dust, he appeared to be all in one piece.

  ‘Where’s Mum? Is Mum with you? Dad’s gone upstairs to find her. Where is she?’

  At her words, he opened his eyes and they were starkly white against the black of his face. He reached out to hold her arm, nodding, coughing.

  ‘Don’t know, don’t know, love. Must have been—cough—in the doorway when it... Blew me clean down the stairs—choke—Your mum...’ He jerked his head ceilingward. ‘Don’t know, love.’

  Caroline thrust his hand away and stumbled through the hallway and up the stairs, her scarf over her mouth, feeling her way, her head low to avoid the smoke. She was halfway up before it occurred to her the staircase must be damaged, that perhaps it would collapse at even the slightest vibration. She slowed her pace and found she couldn’t breathe.

  For a moment panic overtook her and she gripped the banister, clawing at the wall. Steady, keep calm, she told herself. It’s the smoke. It’s panic. Keep going.

  She took a step forward, treading carefully, but here the front of the house appeared remarkably intact, so that you could believe, apart from the smoke and choking dust, that there was no damage. Then she turned the corner in the stairs and stopped.

  The upstairs was gone. Or rather, it had vanished in a pile of debris where the roof had fallen in. There was moonlight above. But at eye level it was so dark and dusty it was difficult to be certain what she was looking at and for a moment she lost her bearings. But the front bedroom—it must be directly ahead of her. William’s house was a mirror image of their own. She continued upwards, following the stair-rail to the landing, her foot slipping, clambering over rubble and bricks, cutting her knees and hands, grabbing where she could find a steady hold. The doorframe to the bedroom was ahead remarkably still intact and she stepped through it. Beyond, she could make out the interior of the bedroom; two of the walls seemed to be still standing but the rest of the room had vanished in a great pile of timber and plaster and bricks.

  Before she could call out, she saw movement and there was Dad. He was standing just beyond the doorway, quite still, calmly, his hands loose by his sides like he was on a Sunday stroll in the park.

  Then Dad moved. He turned and looked at her.

  So Mum was dead. Dad had found her and she was dead.

  Caroline stared at him, her heart lurching sickeningly. She pushed herself onwards till she was standing level with him. The debris filled the whole room so that she couldn’t make out the start or end of it. It shifted every so often, with a creak and a trickle of rubble and dust. Otherwise it was strangely quiet up here. Her own ragged breathing seemed shatteringly loud. She could hear shouts from the street outside, the crackle of flames from the other houses. Her eyes adjusted to the scene and she saw that not far away, just a few feet really, almost touching distance, was a wooden roof joist, wedged where it had fallen and forming a sort of archway, and in the corner of the arch lay Mum.

  And she was alive.

  Mum moved her head and groaned. Her body, though, was trapped. A smear of blood across her face glistened darkly in the moonlight. She groaned again but her eyes remained closed.

  Instantly Caroline felt all the muscles in her body twitch in her urgency to reach out and grab Mum, to pull her to safety. But how? Which part was it safe to pull? What piece of rubble could she lift without bringing the whole lot crashing down on them?

  ‘Dad!’ she cried. Why didn’t he rescue Mum? Why didn’t he try to grab her?

  But Dad gazed at his wife as she lay trapped and something flickered across his face, something unnatural, something quiet and dead.

  Something like hatred.

  And Caroline thought, You don’t want to rescue her, you want her to die. It was because of Clive, because Dad thought Mum and Clive... No. This predated Clive. It predated everything.

  And she realised that it had always been like this. Always.

  Around her the house creaked and shifted but in the bedroom no one moved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WATFORD GAP OR Leicester Forest?

  Deirdre studied the AA road map that lay on her lap, open at the East Midlands. Northampton, Leicester and Nottingham showed as sprawling pink areas one above the other. The M1 was indicated by a thick blue line that bisected the page from north to south. Or in this case, from south to north, as that was the direction in which she and Eric were now travelling.

  Eric was driving, not because he was the better driver or because he had necessarily volunteered for this role, but because Deirdre needed her hands and mind free to plan the journey. They had filled up at the BP garage at Elstree just before joining the motorway at Junction 4 and if they kept a good speed the tank should do them there and back. So far, however, it had to be said, they had not kept a good speed. Indeed in some instances they had kept no sort of speed at all, a combination of Saturday morning drivers and contraflows around Newport Pagnell which meant that, an hour into their journey, they were barely past Northampton. And on the rare occasions when there had been a clear stretch of motorway, Eric, who had been driving for forty years and who had never had an accident, was reluctant to risk all by moving into the fast lane to overtake someone.

  Now they were approaching the M6 turn-off and it was time to decide whether to stop at the motorway services to spend a penny and get a quick cup of coffee or press on. And if they stopped, which services to stop at? Watford Gap, which was this side of the M6, or Leicester Forest, which was the other?

  She had not, Deirdre realised, been able to prepare for this journey as she would have liked. The phone call from this Mr Milthorpe had come late last night, long after you expected anyone—least of all a stranger—to ring. They’d been getting ready for bed and almost hadn’t answered.

  Thank God they had.

  But to drive straight up to Skipton first thing in the morning, well, it left no time at all for planning, other than a quick call to Charlotte first thing and a note popped through the door of Lorraine and Brian’s next door. And now here they were, hurtling north. Well, not hurtling exactly, but making their way at any rate, and it must be five years or more since she’d last driven to Skipton. There had been no time to study the map or plan their stops. All she had was Mr Milthorpe’s confused directions and Lord knew what sort of a mess they’d get into trying to find a hospital in a town they had only been to a handful of times.

  Watford Gap Services 1 mile, announced the blue and white motorway sign helpfully, followed by a dire warning: Next services 22 miles.

  It was now or never. Stop! No, stay on to the next one! Deirdre gripped the map as the slip lane came into view.

  ‘Keep going!’ she gasped and Eric started and swerved the car so that they veered left then right as he corrected himself. ‘Keep going,’ she repeated. ‘We’ll go on to Leicester Forest, then we’ll be nearer our destination.’

  ‘Right-ho,’ said Eric, taking a deep breath. ‘We could’ve packed sandwiches and a thermos of tea, then we wouldn’t have to stop at all,’ he added.

  ‘But there wasn’t time!’ Deirdre explained. ‘There wasn’t time. Anyway, it’s better to stop.’

  She didn’t explain why this was so.

  Deirdre turned to look out of the window at the empty fields and the bare, leafless trees still covered in early morning frost. Signs for the M6 turn-off appeared, became more insistent, split into different signs, then abruptly ceased. She drew a deep breath.

  It was best not to think about Leeds city centre which, on a busy Saturday morning, would be full of shoppers. There were ring roads and bypasses and such like but experience told her that they were heading for the centre of Leeds, no matter what.

  ‘Leicester Forest fifteen,’ she noted as another sign came into view.

  It was mid-morning as they turned off the motorway at the services, and despite it being late January with
the air temperature hovering just above freezing and snow forecast for later and drifts already a foot deep north of York, the place was heaving. What kind of people travelled north on a Saturday morning in January? wondered Deirdre.

  They located a parking spot eventually, not far from the farthest boundary of the car park and near to a rather bleak children’s playground. They left the car and trekked across the car park to the automatic glass doors of the cafeteria. Deirdre led the way inside.

  ‘You sit down, love, I’ll queue,’ offered Eric.

  Ordinarily Deirdre queued and she looked at him now, surprised. Then she remembered why they were here, and the thought of queuing for what would undoubtedly be disappointing fare seemed unutterably depressing.

  ‘Yes, alright. I’ll find us a table,’ she said. ‘I’ll just have a pot of coffee and maybe a biscuit. And if the milk comes in those little cartons, make sure you get two. One’s never enough. Don’t forget napkins.’

  She found a table that wasn’t littered with other people’s remains and wasn’t right next to any families with very young children and sat down. The table was near the window and provided a fine view of the car park, the slip road that rejoined the motorway and the three lanes of northbound traffic. It gave you a sense of movement, made you want to get on with your journey. Or maybe it was just the cafeteria that made you want to move on quickly.

  Eric was taking a long time. She could see him deep in conversation with the girl at the tea and coffee counter and she could tell from the nods and the hand gestures and the pointing that this was a discussion about teabags and tea leaves. It wasn’t the first such discussion Eric had had with a girl behind a counter. Tea leaves and teabags were something he felt strongly about—Eric, who had once had fifteen staff under him and, for a while, a company car. Now it had come down to teabags and tea leaves.

  Deirdre turned back to the window and watched a football coach wheel around in a tight circle beneath the window then head onto the slip road heading north. She looked down at the table which was smeared where a cloth had wiped its plastic surface.

  A stroke.

  Caroline was past eighty, yes, but she was as strong as an ox, never been sick in her life. She wasn’t the sort of person you expected to have a stroke.

  What sort of person did you expect to have a stroke?

  She raised her head to watch the cars on the motorway. An ambulance went by, blue lights flashing, weaving in and out of the traffic, but no one moved out of its way.

  If Caroline died... If Caroline were no longer there...

  She blinked and couldn’t, wouldn’t believe it. Not again, not a second time. She had been through it once already.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  FEBRUARY 1945

  CAROLINE ALWAYS LEFT TOO early for work and no one ever noticed.

  ‘Cheerio, Mum’ she called from the hallway as she left for the nightshift one bitterly cold Monday evening in February—a clear two hours before her shift was meant to start.

  Mum didn’t notice. She was too busy with yet another horrid recipe from her women’s magazine for some inedible stew made from dandelions and nettles and other bomb-crater refuse. And Dad was bunkered down in the lounge engaged in important post office work—as if what happened in a dreary suburban post office could ever be in the least bit important.

  So no one noticed that Caroline had left at six when the nightshift didn’t start till eight.

  And no one noticed Deirdre either, crouching on the stairs then creeping down the hallway and slipping silently out the front door after her.

  Once outside, Deirdre felt the frozen February night close in around her, biting at her face and throat and placing icy tentacles along her neck and spine. She pulled her coat tightly around herself and spied Caroline already on the other side of the street.

  Where was she going? Who she was meeting? Because she had to be meeting someone. It had been ages since William was killed, after all.

  But to her surprise Caroline paused outside number twenty-eight, the Davenports’ old house. She opened the gate and walked up the path and down the side of the house.

  That was odd. That was very odd!

  The Davenports’ house had been empty for ages—why would Caroline go there? Unless Kitty Davenport had come back and was staying there? But no, that was daft, Kitty was engaged to that Yank, probably even married by now. And if Kitty was back, she would have come round to visit. And that went for any of the Davenports. You would have heard, the whole street would have known if the Davenports were back.

  Unless...

  It came to Deirdre in a flash so that she stopped dead in the middle of the street, slapping her hand to her head and feeling dazed, breathless.

  It was William! William was alive! He had returned, only to find all his family gone! He hadn’t been killed by that Wellington bomber, he had survived!

  But why keep it a secret? It didn’t make sense. Why had Caroline said nothing?

  She tried to think. Caroline and William had been stepping out...oh, forever. Everyone knew that. And come to think of it, Caroline hadn’t seemed that bothered at all when William had been killed. When they thought he’d been killed. She’d just got on with it really. She was sort of quiet, distant. But that was just Caroline... But if William was alive—had been alive all this time...!

  A second thought hit her, with at least the same force as the first, though this one made her feel a little sick.

  William was a deserter. That was it, it had to be, it fitted so exactly, explained why he was hiding out here, why Caroline had said nothing.

  Oh, William! Oh, Caroline! Assisting a deserter, perhaps engaged—or even married, God forbid!—to a deserter! He would go to prison. Or be on the run, for life. Forever. And Caroline, too, for aiding him.

  And what about herself, standing there, knowing there was a deserter in that house? She was an accomplice. She would be arrested. They would all be arrested!

  It was better not to know, then there was no question of being involved. She must leave at once and say nothing. Do nothing. Act surprised. Lie, if necessary!

  But she had to know...

  She approached the house, a feeling of dread dragging her stomach down into her bowels but somehow also forcing her on. She pushed open the gate of number twenty-eight and crept silently up the path.

  Deidre wasn’t a snitch. She would keep their secret, of course she would, if they asked her to, if they made her.

  She paused at the Davenports’ front door, listening. Inside there was silence. Outside, a dozen noises suddenly came into focus: men’s voices calling, a dog barking, a door slamming and, further off, the splutter of a motor engine, the klaxon of a distant ambulance. There had been no rockets for a while. Mum said it was almost like peacetime.

  She slipped silently down the side passage until she came to the kitchen window, which was ajar. She knew the Davenports’ house, it was the same as her own house, although in reverse. She had been friends for a time with Jeanie and Dotty, Kitty’s younger sisters, though the friendship hadn’t lasted. But she remembered the house, its smells, the colour of the walls and carpets.

  There was an old wooden crate beneath the kitchen window and after only a slight hesitation she stepped onto it, reached up to the window ledge and pulled herself up. She paused there on the ledge, waiting, reassuring herself all was quiet. Then she ducked inside, and clambered awkwardly down, landing with a thud on the floor and waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  The kitchen was empty, she could tell instantly because, even though she had made almost no sound, still her breathing, her muffled footstep on the linoleum, echoed in a way they never would in a room full of furniture.

  She shivered violently. It was a vacant house in the blackout and God alone knew who might be hiding out here, what tramps and vagrants and looters and spies and murderers might be in this house, in this very room, right now. Watching her.

  Sweat burst through the pores o
n the palms of her hands and her upper lip and under her arms and she became aware of the beating of her heart and the pulse of blood in her head. What if Caroline wasn’t here? What if she had been attacked or kidnapped and tied up?

  She shouldn’t have come. It was stupid! Stupid being in this horrible empty house!

  Deirdre scrabbled for the window ledge in the darkness and was about to pull herself up and climb back outside when she heard it.

  A groan. Or a grunt. Made by a man.

  Oh God.

  She froze again. William? Could that have been William?

  There it was again, louder, followed by a scuffle or a scraping sound, muffled. And upstairs, definitely upstairs. Were they struggling? But who was it? She couldn’t even say for sure that Caroline was up there. It could be anyone.

  She left the kitchen and went along the hallway, reached the stairs and began to climb. Each stair creaked loudly, shrieking her presence, and the blood rushed in her ears. As she reached the top stair she heard another grunt followed by a thud. She froze, every muscle taut. If she moved now he would hear her, for sure.

  I’m not brave, she realised with a sudden, ghastly clarity. I don’t want to be brave. And I don’t want to be murdered! Why am I even here?

  She felt light-headed.

  Ahead, just a couple of feet away, was the doorway of what had been Mr and Mrs Davenport’s bedroom. The bedroom door was wide open. The Davenports had taken the blackout curtains with them so that a shaft of yellow moonlight pierced the room, striking the wall, the bedroom floor, and an old mattress that lay in the centre of the empty room. And it struck Caroline, who was on the mattress and...

  And Uncle Clive who was on there with her.

  Deirdre gasped. She must have gasped because they heard her and as she hurled herself back down the stairs their voices floated after her.