by Lorna Gray
I expected him to smile in return.
I’d thought a man like him would value the way I was alluding to my sympathy without trespassing into barefaced commentary, after all that had been left unsaid in the car. I’d thought it would amuse him because it would make sense to him. I wasn’t expecting him to react as he did.
He was suddenly looking blank. The set of his mouth was a deeper mark of the puzzlement that had steadied him in the past; a sudden intensity of concentration that came horribly close to looking like I’d hurt him.
Then I was suddenly aware of how close I was to him and was thinking I ought to step away, and I was belatedly snatching my hand from his sleeve and touching my fingertips to my temple instead as if to hide my confusion. But his stillness broke like it had been an ache in the mind. He moved to stem that retreat. He took hold of me. He hesitated just long enough to read the sudden adjustment of my thoughts as I better understood his intentions. Then he bent his head and kissed me.
The touch of his lips was a very brief blaze. The merest scorching run of seconds or more of contact with the core of him before he drew away. It rocked me when he told me on an undertone, ‘I think, Emily, you woefully underestimate the contribution you make.’
There was a whisper of a laugh beneath that roughened edge. It mingled with the uncontrolled awareness of knowing that it had been my last little statement of care that had unwittingly laid bare something deep within this man; and that for him it went beyond trust that he’d let me see.
For me, I thought that sometimes it was wonderful to be so lacking in confidence. Nervousness was followed by the intensity of perceiving that he meant to kiss me again.
Then, in the next moment, someone was coming along the pavement and it wasn’t the done thing to give way to public displays of affection and Richard was straightening to watch them pass behind. I was dragging my mind back into some kind of order while I discovered at the moment I attempted it that I’d been leaning into him. His grip steadied me as I stirred. When his hand moved to my upper arm and settled there with a brief contraction of his fingers, the gesture was like a question; a first real greeting, perhaps.
His gaze dropped to me. The attractive line of his jaw was perfectly defined in this summer’s afternoon. So was the brief smile that showed in his eyes. It hit me like a bolt. But he grew reluctantly businesslike as he told me, ‘I’d better go if I’m going to make this meeting. Are you happy that you know how to find the hospital?’
I mustered a nod as he stepped away; a busy man in a neatly tailored suit on a city street. I was in control of myself again too by now, but my cheeks burned. And so did my lips with the memory of his touch. I put an unsteady hand up to them. I thought I finally understood the feeling that had followed me from the car. It was the consciousness that in the midst of blundering through an attempt to explain my distress at being sent away, I’d actually been daring to assert who I was a little more clearly before him.
‘By the way,’ he added as his hand lifted to sketch a farewell, ‘it’s nice to hear you call me by my name.’
It was then that I noticed that I’d called him Richard and realised that he’d been Richard in my head for a rather longer time.
Chapter 18
I had, in the brief window between feeling belittled and unnervingly bold, thought to ask him if he had the time to spare five minutes to snatch a meal. He hadn’t. So my lunch had consisted of a solitary walk uphill to a tired crossroads and a table at a hotel that was one of a number of sagging medieval buildings feeling very sorely the present shortages of paint. The decay of age was, I realised, the main burden in this city and it was as I stepped downhill again bearing the additional prize of a small packet of sandwiches that it dawned on me that barely anywhere here was the dereliction of bombed-out buildings. It was a long time since I’d last passed along a shopping street in London and not been greeted by bare ground and defiant signs pasted up by the survivors declaring ‘businesses open as usual’ …
My destination lay downhill, beyond the place where we had left the car. The hospital was near the docks. I could just make out the tall rooftops of various warehouses glinting through the smog that oozed from the enormous chimney of an electricity station. The imposing spread of the hospital consisted of a vast spread of wards and extensions, all constructed in imposing brickwork and stained black by coal dust. It was also built on the corner of a junction with a little side street named Parliament Street. It was the name logged as Mrs Abbey’s former address in John Langton’s book of accounts.
Quite without any thought for my cousin, I abandoned any immediate idea of rescuing her and turned left instead.
Everything here was brick too. Beneath the settling fug of coal smoke, low workmen’s houses occupied every space not given over to either warehousing or health and recovery. Then, with a suddenness that rivalled the contrast between the Manor and Mr Winstone’s cottage, the cramped two-storey terraces with their small barren gardens abruptly terminated beside a significantly grander rank of merchants’ houses. These houses had no garden at all and stepped straight down onto the street from smart porticos. I was able to identify Mrs Abbey’s former home based solely on the fact that all the others were numbered and I remembered hers had a name. It was called Berwick House, which suggested nothing particularly significant to me, and it was a well-tended Victorian property, but no one was home.
Now that I was here, I had absolutely no idea what I was expecting to find, but the one thought that pushed through all the rest was to marvel at how determined she must have been to achieve a move if she had willingly exchanged this crisp style of dwelling for the soggy plasterwork of Eddington.
I didn’t have the chance to think about it for long. A woman’s voice accosted me as I dithered on the pavement. She called me ‘missus’ and she wasn’t terribly polite, as I suppose no one would be after discovering a person prying through their neighbour’s window.
She was short and sturdy with shrewd black eyes and she was wearing a knee-length housecoat of the style that renders a woman strangely rectangular. She was also brandishing a broom, which looked as though it frequently gave service as a fire iron and just occasionally, as it was doing now, weighed in her hands as a suitable weapon for repelling burglars.
I beamed and immediately transformed from burglar into something else – a person collecting charitable donations, perhaps – and remained equally unwelcome. ‘Good afternoon,’ I trilled and made it all so much worse. ‘I was hoping to find the owner at home. Are they away?’
I received a pair of blank stares in reply because now the lady’s friend or sister had emerged from the gloom within and had joined her upon her front step. The two yards of untended garden and the rotten little gate was no protection from their total absence of friendliness. In fact, I wasn’t even entirely sure they’d understood. I tried again and sounded even more stilted. ‘I was wondering who lives there now. I suppose you know?’
The women exchanged glances. Not sly and knowing ones, nor even hostile. But blank glances, where each silently asked the other if she had made out what the stranger had said. I might have thought they were doing it deliberately, except that I could hear my own accent and it sounded painfully stuffy even to me.
Very briefly, I considered the idea that I should offer them money, only I didn’t know how. They were losing patience and interest. The woman with the broom was considering her unfinished task of sweeping her front step. The other lady found something she didn’t like about the cut of my trousers. At least, I think that was what held her stare. Perhaps it was simply that her thoughts had given up and retreated elsewhere.
I drew myself up a little straighter and tried a fresh tack: a little honesty. ‘I’m a neighbour of Mrs Abbey where she’s living now.’ A waft of my hand to indicate somewhere above the distant escarpment that marked the edge of the Cotswold Hills. ‘Up on the hill. I believe she used to live next door to you, with her husband Mr Abbey?’
I don’t know that they’d caught any more of my words now than they had before, but one thing crossed the divide. The lady without a broom turned to her friend and whispered, ‘Him from the docks?’
She got a nod in reply from her stern friend and it prompted her to ask again eagerly, ‘The one who was in prison?’
‘Was?’
They understood my accent that time well enough.
This time the lady with the broom was the spokesperson. Disapproval formed on thin lips; hard, tough and entirely unforgiving. ‘Eight years he got for stealing the food out of our mouths and let off after three, for all that. And barely a murmur raised by anyone about the fact that someone must have sent that warehouse blazing up like a torch with three good men inside.’
I found that I was suddenly at the limit of her garden gate. The woman’s lips pursed, released and pursed again. She told me sourly, ‘The firemen didn’t get out again, missus.’
Her friend added, ‘They called it an unlucky accident and just sent him down for the fraud, but I said at the time and I’ll say it again now – that man is a fiend. What else do you call a man who ran one of the grain warehouses and instead of feeding a nation at war he fed his pockets and the black market, and then burnt down the lot the same week his little racket got discovered? Treason I call it, in a time of war.’
She took a little breath before confiding in a voice that took a certain malicious delight in the horror of it, ‘I say it wasn’t an accident. I say he thought he’d pass off the whole conflagration as an unlucky hit from a bomb. I remember the sirens going off and the ack-ack guns starting up and he must have known it was always them sorry folk by the railway that took the brunt of our Blitz and never the docks. But still he took his little light and climbed six flights of stairs into the warehouse attic. The lot went up like a matchstick and he must have heard the auxiliaries raise the alarm and go in, but he didn’t stop them. He just laid himself sagging in a stairwell for the main rescue to come with the fireboat, while three poor old men went clambering up with nothing between them but blue bands on their sleeves and a hand-pump with a hosepipe to die suffocating in the smoke.’
I was repulsed. I blinked when the broom-laden woman spoke loudly into the silence.
She demanded sharply, ‘Why do you ask? You with the paper?’
‘Actually, no.’ I had no idea where people kept getting this impression. ‘I really am just a neighbour. Has he been back since, do you know? Mr Abbey, since he got out, I mean. He does still own this house, I presume?’
Suddenly, I was sensing a cause for Mrs Abbey’s exhaustion if this was the man she had married, and if I’d ever felt sympathy for her before I certainly felt it now. But it got all so much more tangled when the woman with the broom replied roundly, ‘It’s not his house. It was his wife’s and her mother’s before her and I’ll bet she thanks the heavens the law doesn’t give a man all his woman’s inheritances these days, eh? So she sold it and now it belongs to that other chap. The one she must have run to from up the hill.’
I caught a shrewd glance as she recalled that I was from that place too. She spoke slowly, while watching me like a hawk. ‘There was a terrible fuss about him. She doesn’t have much luck, that girl, does she?’
I think she was testing to see whether I was a love rival. Which, luckily of course, I wasn’t. And then, in the midst of my silent attempt to decipher just how possible it would be to probe this woman’s knowledge of when they’d met, the bustling friend lit up to contradict her gleefully, ‘No, it wasn’t him. He died. It was the other fellow that bought it; the soldier from that same place, who pitched up here in the spring. He came with a great band of demob boys to save people’s houses by stacking sandbags against the floodwaters. Mrs Blake next door was talking about him only the other day; about how she’d had to put up him and half a dozen others in her son’s room, with wet boots everywhere. Only,’ she added, just as I was squinting through the numbing unlikelihood of thinking does she mean Richard? ‘I don’t think he can still be a soldier now; he’s a farmer.’
She meant Danny.
Chapter 19
It was the water that intimidated me here. I’d come to the docks almost blindly, automatically undertaking a hunt for that warehouse. I suppose, in a way, it was a means of repeating the unthinking method of my discovery of Mrs Abbey’s former home and through it refocusing the distaste of what I had learned there. On my way to this place from the hospital I’d passed a sign pointing between the prison and an employment exchange to the barracks for the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars. That was Richard’s regiment and I had no idea whether Danny had served within it too but, like the punchline to a bad joke, the significance of all my doubts about his part in Mrs Abbey’s present life were stalking me now, just as I stalked the woman’s past.
Rail tracks ran everywhere here. They were embedded into the roadways at just the perfect depth to turn an ankle and on the far side of the main basin there was the incongruous sight of a big black steam train rolling tamely along in a queue of lorries and horse-drawn wagons. Just to my left, a fearsome crane was hoisting goods overhead from a heavily laden barge, supervised by coarsely spoken men. I ought to have been used to the noise and bustle, having grown up in the territory of barrow boys and cockney markets, but I didn’t remember ever being made to feel quite so clumsy at home. I think it was the water that finished the job. It oozed inkily between the rows of tightly moored barges. It cast rainbow reflections upon the bright flagstone kerb of the wharf and puddled too close for comfort when I had to move between hard-working people who were in the habit of shouldering aside anyone who had the stupidity to get in the way.
The Abbey warehouse loomed at the lower end of the largest basin. The channel of water narrowed again here between lines of waiting vehicles in smart liveries. Here I found Duckett too. His name joined the criminal’s under the title Abbey, Mole & Duckett Ltd. and even without the tall lettering emblazoned upon the brickwork, I might have identified the second warehouse as theirs because the upper five storeys had been demolished, leaving the building a stunted, shrunken version of its undamaged twin.
The office building was even smaller. It squatted with dwarfed dignity before its nearest warehouse – the undamaged one – and when I stepped in, I found myself at a smart reception desk staffed by two very busy young women. I’d forgotten this was a Friday afternoon. So much of my approach to this moment had been guided by nothing but a general sense of curiosity. Now my wide eyes took in the vision of two harassed office girls who were furiously hammering at their typewriters, presumably on a mission to get the week’s invoices out. There was a man in shirt and tie and overalls who looked like the foreman, flirting unsuccessfully with the prettier of the two while ostensibly trying to check his hours for the coming week. The other girl was scowling into a telephone receiver, saying nothing and not appearing to be listening to anything either, typing all the while and looking as though she would have preferred it if the foreman had chosen to hint about the Saturday dance to her instead. A pair of private offices – almost everything seemed to be done in pairs in this company – stood at the back and were empty; or, at least, I could see no sign of movement through the partially frosted glass.
‘Yes?’ The girl who wasn’t batting aside compliments had looked up. The telephone receiver was still held loosely against one ear, so presumably she was waiting to hear from someone on the other end of the line. Neatly rouged lips moved. ‘May I help?’
I smiled haplessly. ‘I’m looking for Mr Abbey. Is he in?’
I knew he wasn’t. I was hoping for more good fortune of the sort that had come from my encounter with the woman with her broom, if good fortune it could be called. But this young woman delivered the company line on Mr Abbey’s fall from grace very smoothly. I also had a feeling that she, in her turn, was noticing my age and my looks and was decidedly disinclined to imagine I was anything impressive like a prying journalist. I found myself wishing abstractedly for my han
dbag and a hairbrush.
She told me in crisp tones, ‘I’m afraid Mr Abbey doesn’t have an office here any more. He hasn’t been here for quite some time. Mr Duckett handles his side of the business now. Perhaps I can take a message. Unless …’
The poor woman gave me a flustered stare when the earpiece beside her suddenly stuttered and she had to tear her mind between me and her counterpart on the other end of the line. ‘Yes? Hello? Is this about the—?’ She was suddenly speaking very seriously about pelleted animal feeds. It made me aware that Mrs Abbey’s husband had lost something else in the course of his misdemeanours. His business was clearly no longer in a position to sell rationed foodstuffs to anyone, whether legitimate customers or black-market dealers if it now had been relegated to the business of processing the waste into animal feeds.
I turned my head to the foreman, who was eavesdropping near my side. ‘What were you making before the fire?’
He told me easily, ‘Toasted cereal. We—’
‘Excuse me, what about the fire?’ The girl before me had her hand over the mouthpiece to her telephone and was suddenly looking at me as though I were something poisonous. She told me huffily, ‘I told you, Mr Abbey’s business is being handled by Mr Duckett. You’ll have to direct your questions to him. He’s just coming in now. Someone to see you, sir. It’s concerning Mr Abbey. Yes, I’m here! Don’t go away again!’ This last was to the telephone as the receiver chattered crossly.
Behind, the volume from outside briefly rushed in as the door was opened and then silenced again as it clicked shut. I turned. The middle-aged man who had stolen my suitcase stood there staring at me as I stared at him. I was suddenly truly feeling the lack of my handbag when my hands clasped tightly upon a packet of sandwiches and found it didn’t give quite the same sense of something secure to hang on to. Duckett pulled himself together rather swifter than I. He lifted off his grey-banded hat – a must for any gentleman of business – in vague salute and dropped it on a convenient stand just inside the front door. It emphasised for me that he was there, between me and the outside world, and I was here in his office asking questions about his discredited business associate, who was the husband of the woman he’d been so determined to trace that he’d committed burglary. I’d said to Richard that I always seemed to get things so very wrong. The idea that I’d come blindly to the place of one criminal without a thought for the fact it was also the place of the other was one of those moments, I felt.