Crooked Heart

by Lissa Evans

  She pointed to a chair by the bed, and after a moment he sat down. ‘I’ve been sleeping in Hampstead tube station,’ he said. ‘If you pretend you’ve been separated from your family then people give you food and things. During the day, I go to the library.’

  YOU COULD GO TO YOUR UNC

  ‘No,’ he said, reading upside down.

  THEY’RE NOT BAD PEOPLE

  He folded his arms and looked out of the window. At the next bed, Mrs Connell’s daughter was peeling an apple for her mother and complaining about the avarice of the greengrocer.

  ‘Cup of tea, Mrs Overs?’ asked the orderly.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She waited until the trolley had been pushed away again and then picked up her pencil.

  WHY ARE THEY CALLING ME THAT NAME?

  ‘Because I told the ambulance driver you were my auntie Margery. I thought if we were related they’d let me go to the hospital with you, but they didn’t. I think it’s because they didn’t want me telling anyone.’

  ‘Telling what?’ she mouthed.

  ‘How you got hurt.’

  She waited.

  ‘It was the door,’ said Noel. ‘You got hit in the face by the ambulance door.’

  She’d been thrown to the ground, taking Noel with her and he’d struggled to his knees in the black fog, shouting for help, hearing the groan of her breathing. The ambulance women had seemed more irritated than guilty, once it had been established that their victim was still alive. They’d loaded Vee into the back of the van and gone off to find more casualties and Noel had been handed over to a passing policeman.

  ‘I came to visit you the next day. And the day after.’

  ‘I know,’ mouthed Vee.

  She lifted her hand to her face and touched the dressing. Then she picked up the pencil again.

  DOES IT LOOK BAD

  He spoke reluctantly. ‘There was a bit of a dent.’

  ‘A dent?’

  ‘Actually, the correct medical term is “depression”. That’s why they did the operation.’

  ‘A dent.’ So she’d look different for ever, she thought. Ugly. Her vision blurred.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Noel said. ‘I’d honestly rather have a dent than ears like Etruscan jug handles.’

  That almost made her smile; she reached out and gave his elbow a pat and he looked down at his arm as if she’d just thrown paint at it.

  ‘I’ve brought a book with me,’ he said. ‘It occurred to me that when I’m not feeling tip-top I like being read to. Would you like that?’

  She nodded. Not that she’d had any experience of it.

  ‘It’s an American detective story called The Big Sleep. I was looking for something that would hold the attention of an invalid and the librarian said it was a whip-crack read.’

  He opened the book carefully. ‘I shan’t attempt the accent,’ he added, and cleared his throat. It was a long time since he’d read aloud; at the end of the first page he looked up to see if Mattie was listening, and saw Vee jolt into place. She nodded again, encouragingly.

  ‘Go on,’ called Mrs Connell from the next bed, ‘it’s very good so far.’

  ‘I think,’ said Noel, ‘that Philip Marlowe is assuming that Taylor had something to do with the death of Geiger.’

  ‘How long since you cleaned your teeth?’ asked Vee.

  ‘I had an apple yesterday.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked. And when did you last wash your face?’

  ‘Ages. They don’t have the facilities on the underground and I didn’t have any money for a toothbrush.’

  They were waiting at the bus stop a hundred yards from the hospital; in the daylight, Noel’s skin had a greyish tinge, peppered with smuts. Vee yearned for a handkerchief to spit on.

  ‘Of course it’s possible,’ said Noel, ‘that Geiger was killed by someone he was blackmailing. Don’t you think?’

  Vee nodded absently. The wind stung her injured cheek. The large dressing had been removed early that morning, the stitches tweaked out and she’d seen her face in the washroom mirror. It had been both better and worse than she’d feared: bruising, no obvious dent, but an iodine-daubed operation scar like a thick-lipped, complacent smile just beneath her cheekbone.

  ‘Lovely neat job,’ one of the nurses had said, reapplying a smaller dressing. ‘Try using lanolin daily.’

  Though it seemed to Vee that what constituted a ‘neat job’ on someone’s face would be considered an incompetent botch on a pair of trousers.

  ‘So sorry you’re going,’ Mrs Connell had said. ‘I wanted to hear the rest of the detective book. He’s a card, your little nephew, isn’t he?’

  The card was currently looking up the road to see if the bus was coming. From this angle, Vee could see the back of his neck.

  ‘Soon as we get home, I’m going to run you a bath,’ said Vee. ‘You can stay in it until you’re the right colour again.’

  ‘If we get the 46 south,’ said Noel, ‘we can take it as far as King’s Cross, and then catch the train to St Albans. That way, you’ll hardly have to walk at all.’

  ‘Did you hear what I said about the bath?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just because you’ve managed on your own for a few days doesn’t mean that you don’t need me to look after you. I think that sometimes you forget how old you are.’

  ‘I’m eleven.’

  ‘You’re ten.’

  He shook his head. ‘I was eleven the day before yesterday.’

  It was ridiculous what made her cry these days; it was as if the blow from the ambulance door had unplugged something.

  Noel was looking at her anxiously.

  ‘I’ll make you a birthday cake,’ she said, wiping her eyes.

  ‘Oh, I don’t care about birthdays,’ said Noel, dismissively. ‘Don’t worry about missing that. Mattie said that we should celebrate each glad moment as it comes.’

  ‘I’ll make you a glad moment cake, then. If I can get any eggs.’

  When the bus came, a very old gentleman stood up to give Vee his seat, and she was glad to take it; bed-rest had made jellies of her legs. Noel stood in the aisle beside her, book in hand.

  ‘Diversions taking place,’ shouted the lady conductor. ‘Don’t thank us, thank Mr Goering.’

  They passed a lorry being loaded up with rubble; next to it was a lamp-post bent almost in half, so that it looked like a giraffe peering in through the bus window.

  ‘That’s right where our bomb dropped,’ said Noel. ‘I remember seeing that lamp-post when the dust started to clear.’

  None of the remaining houses in the street had any glass in the windows, or much in the way of roof slates, but there were still people living in them. One woman was scrubbing her doorstep, looking quite cheerful. Mrs Connell in the next bed at the hospital had informed Vee that it was good luck to have a bomb in your street, since the Germans never dropped two in the same place.

  Beside her, Noel turned a page.

  ‘I’m just glancing ahead,’ he said. ‘Getting the gist of it. It’ll be easier to read aloud if I know roughly what’s coming.’

  ‘You’ll have to return that to the library,’ said Vee.

  ‘I can post it.’

  ‘Stamps have to be paid for.’

  She closed her eyes for a minute or two and then opened them as the bus jogged over a pothole.

  ‘Look,’ said Noel. ‘I bet that was the one before ours.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Outside the window she could see another hillock of fresh rubble in another windowless street.

  ‘We heard four bombs dropped in a row, didn’t we? Ours was the fourth. I’ll bet this was where the third one landed. It’s about a quarter of a mile away and there’ve been no raids in this bit of London since then.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said the elderly gentleman standing beside him. ‘The buggers dropped a stick of half-tonners going nor-nor-west, pardon my language.’

  ‘Pardoned,’ s
aid Vee, closing her eyes again.

  Noel laid a ruler across his mental map of North London, lined up the first two sites and, after some consideration, marked the next cross beside St Dominic’s Priory. He felt guiltily pleased when the bus passed two friars exiting the church through a hole in the lady chapel wall. There was a crater in the playground of St Dominic’s School next door, and a huge, leafless tree beside the road had snapped like a toothpick. The exposed wood was a sheaf of pale yellow splinters.

  Noel shifted the imaginary ruler south-east.

  ‘First one they dropped was the worst,’ said the old gentleman. ‘It hit a gas main, firefighters there till morning.’

  ‘Diversion,’ called the conductor. ‘We will be diverting down Queen’s Crescent and then Haverstock Hill.’

  Noel worked out where the next mark would come, and frowned. The bus swung round a corner.

  ‘Which street had the gas main?’ asked Noel.

  ‘Mafeking Road.’

  Vee opened her eyes.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Mafeking Road. Blew up half the damn street,’ said the old gentleman. ‘Pardon my language.’

  Vee nudged Noel. ‘Ring the bell,’ she said.

  Where the solid, four-storey Victorian terrace had stood, there was only an undulating black wall, punched through with rectangles of sky.

  A rope hung limply across the road. Noel stepped over it and walked towards number 23. Through the gap where the main front door had stood, he could see the scarlet berries of a rowan tree in the back garden. There was a frill of molten metal beside the doorstep; it took him a moment to realize that he was looking at the bootscraper.

  ‘Wait for me,’ said Vee. She caught up, and stood beside him as he looked down into the basement area. It was half-full of water, the surface scummed with ash and dotted with islets of charred wood. Only the top part of the window hole was visible and it framed not a pin-neat room but a dense mush of broken bricks.

  ‘The floorboards burned through,’ said a voice. Vee turned to see a girl of about twelve with a baby on her hip.

  ‘It all fell in and they haven’t got the people out yet and my cousin who’s a fireman says they won’t ever get anyone out because there’ll be nothing left of them after the fire.’ She shifted the baby on to the other hip. ‘You’re not supposed to go near it, in case it collapses.’

  ‘So why are you here then?’ asked Noel, savagely. He walked straight past her, away from the terrace, his face white.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ said Vee. ‘He’s had a shock. We both have.’ Her cheek throbbed as if someone were rapping it with a drumstick. ‘We knew the lady who lived in the basement of number twenty-three.’

  ‘Oh.’ The girl slid a curious look at Vee’s face. ‘And did you know the man as well?’

  It took a moment for Vee to realize that the question was awry. ‘What do you mean, did? Mr Overs wasn’t down there. He was on duty. He’d started his shift.’

  The girl was already shaking her head, her expression tense with superior knowledge. ‘When the bomb went off, Mr Overs rushed back here and went in to try and rescue Mrs Overs.’

  Yes, thought Vee, heavily, yes of course he did, that’s exactly what he did; no power on earth could ever have stopped him.

  She couldn’t speak. She looked back at the window full of bricks. So they were both down there, poor sods, poor dull, devoted sods, and she would have been down there too, in that shoebox inferno, if Margery Overs hadn’t been so . . . so . . . She shoved the uncharitable thought away and then flinched as a rat plopped into the basement lake and swam for the steps.

  ‘Horrible,’ she said, inadequately.

  ‘Yes, it’s very, very sad,’ agreed the girl. The baby was wriggling, and she gave it her knuckle to suck. ‘Did you get hurt in an air-raid too?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Vee.

  She found Noel sitting on a low wall just around the corner, and she sat down beside him.

  ‘I’d better tell you,’ she said, ‘they’re both gone. Your uncle went back in there to try and get your aunt.’

  ‘They’re not my aunt and uncle,’ said Noel, automatically, his lips barely moving. He stared at his shoes for a full minute before speaking again. ‘I have to tell you something. Something terrible.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘When I lived there I used to hope that I’d wake up in the morning and they’d be dead and Mattie would be alive again. That’s what I hoped for.’ He fiddled with one of his shoelaces and waited for a response. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he asked, when there was none. ‘I wished they’d die. I honestly did wish that, every single day, and now they’re actually dead.’ He looked round at Vee defiantly, as if hoping for a smack on the ear.

  ‘Well, you can try and blame it on yourself if you like, but I think Hitler had something to do with it.’

  He started to speak.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You didn’t make it happen. Lots of people are dying. Some of them are good and some of them are bad, and some of them are loved and some of them never got a single speck of love while they were on this earth, but none of them are dead just because a ten-year-old didn’t like them. Eleven,’ she corrected quickly, before he could jump in. ‘Goodness knows I’ve wished plenty of people dead in my time, and it never works. Never.’

  That sounded wrong, she thought.

  ‘Bad thoughts aren’t the same as bad deeds,’ she added, and that sounded better.

  They sat in silence for a minute or two, but the wind was picking up and the air was full of black ash.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Vee. ‘You’ll have to help me up, I’m as weak as a kitten.’

  He gave her his arm, and she kept hold of it, all the way to the bus stop.

  PART THREE

  19

  ‘I feel as if I’ve been away for a month,’ said Vee. ‘I’d for gotten how clean it was here. And the air’s nice and fresh.’

  ‘It’s the same as when you get back from a holiday,’ said Noel. ‘Though usually it works the other way around, doesn’t it? Everything at home seems duller and smaller.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been on a holiday.’

  ‘What, never?’

  ‘We had a chapel day trip to Saffron Walden, once. It was foggy.’

  They were standing on the pavement outside St Albans station, oddly, mutually reluctant to step back into their life there. It was ten o’clock and the morning sky was the colour of cold cocoa, threatening snow.

  ‘People are staring at me,’ said Vee. ‘What do I say if they ask? Where do I say we’ve been?’

  ‘Visiting my relatives.’

  ‘And one of them punched me?’

  ‘You could tell the truth, say that you got injured in a raid.’

  ‘No.’ She didn’t want to be a sensation; the spotlight made her panic. ‘I’ll say I fell over in the blackout. Heaven knows enough people do.’

  And she recalled, suddenly, the thrilling snippet of local news that she’d overheard the week before – overheard and then forgotten in the scramble of events that had followed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Noel.

  ‘I’ve got to pop into the insurance office before we go home. I’ve just remembered something.’

  They were passing Fleckney’s Garage when Noel heard his surname called, and he looked up to see Mr Waring crossing the road, a crocodile of children trailing behind him.

  ‘The wanderer returns! Mrs Sedge’ – the teacher lifted his hat, paused momentarily when he saw her face, and then gave a little bow – ‘I rejoice to see that the lost sheep has been gathered to the fold.’

  ‘Yes, he’s back,’ she said, awkwardly. ‘Needs feeding up a bit.’

  ‘And when shall we be seeing him in the classroom?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Noel, just as Vee said, ‘Today.’

  ‘Today,’ she repeated, more firmly, giving him a look to remind him of his new, childish, status.
‘I’ll take your case and you go along with Mr Waring. I expect that he’s doing something educational, aren’t you, Mr Waring?’

  ‘We’re on our way to Brickett Wood for a lesson on edible fungus identification.’

  ‘Well, there we are. Useful as well.’

  She ignored Noel’s pale glare; it would be much easier to sort out her business at the Firebrand office without him.

  It didn’t take long – in fact the whole procedure went so smoothly that she felt like composing a testimonial:

  I insured my elderly neighbour at a shilling a week, and twenty-eight pounds and a florin has just landed safely in my purse, thanks to the efficient and honest services of this company. I’ll certainly be recommending Firebrand Insurance to all my friends!

  Gratefully

  A housewife of England

  Old age had at last caught up with Miss Fillimore, who had keeled over while walking her dog one evening, gone – according to the Coroner – between one breath and the next; a kindly death, especially compared to those poor souls in Kentish Town. The funeral had already taken place and Vee wasn’t sorry she’d missed it; funerals always raised uneasy questions in her mind about the afterlife, and the difficult prospect of meeting those who’d gone before, particularly those whom God hath joined. When her own time came she didn’t want to be ushered through the pearly gates only to find Samuel Sedge waiting for her with a song-sheet.

  There had been forms to sign at Firebrand, and then a delay while the clerk went to fetch the key to the cash-box, but Vee had never had so sweet a wait. As she walked back to the flat, the bundle of money seemed to lighten the suitcase, rather than the reverse, and she spent it a few times in her head, first blowing the lot on a convalescent holiday in a spa hotel – her feet up on a chaise longue, a maid bringing her tea, Noel sitting in a nearby armchair with his nose in a book – and then changing her mind and buying a fawn cashmere coat for herself, and a brand-new bicycle for the boy. The next fantasy, a motor-tour of the Lake District, halted abruptly when she found that she couldn’t open her own front door.