The Safest Place in London Read Free

her nose. She had studied her profile in the hallway mirror, and had registered with a disappointment that had become habit a small, almost snub nose and a chin a little too long, lips a little too thin, eyes a colour that could never quite be pinned down. An English face, plain and serviceable, but never beautiful. But her hair was set. And her hat was smart. Her gloves too—slender and fawn-coloured and fastened with little buttons at the wrist. But no one who passed her on this dark street wore gloves. No one wore smart little hats. Her coat—a tweed coat from Liberty—had become invisible. Or she had become invisible inside it.
    Why could she not move?
    ‘ Mummy! ’
    Beside her, three-and-a-half-year-old Abigail stared up at her wide-eyed, clutching Teddy tightly in both hands and in her distress—though only dimly comprehending their predicament—holding him upside down. The child was a facsimile of her mother (the flat little nose, the funny little chin, the thin little lips, the pale features and the dark hair), though when Diana looked at her child she saw only Gerald—the sticking-out ears, the thick dark brows, the unshakable belief in right over wrong—and saw nothing of herself, and was glad.
    ‘ MUMMY! ’
    Let it be a false alarm. Frozen, Diana clutched Abigail’s hand, clutched Teddy’s paw. No one paused to help them. No one seemed to notice them. One woman swore at them when they did not move out of her way. And the darkness, it seethed and thickened about them, its tentacles slithering deep inside Diana’s clothes and she remembered as a child being so afraid of the dark that she had screamed in terror night after night.
    The all-clear did not sound.
    But she was not helpless. She may be alone and a long way from home and a little frightened but she was at least as good as these shapeless and faceless figures who pushed past her without a thought. And she had her daughter to protect. Diana grabbed the arm of a passing man and demanded in a voice that served her well at the tennis matches she had adjudicated at her local club: ‘Please tell me where the nearest shelter is. We are lost. We went to a pantomime and we got on the wrong bus and—’
    She made herself stop. The man did not need to know they had been to a pantomime yet the urge to explain their presence in what was, one must assume, London’s East End was paramount. She knew she could not possibly blend in and nor, quite frankly, would she wish to.
    ‘The station—go to the tube station!’ the man shouted as he pulled his arm free.
    Of course: the tube station. That was where people in London sheltered.
    ‘Thank you so much—’ But he was gone. ‘We shall go and shelter in the tube station,’ Diana said to Abigail. ‘You’ll like that, won’t you, darling? It will be a grand adventure.’
    They set off at once and it was a relief to be moving swiftly, if not at a run—no one else was running—then certainly at a brisk pace. Abigail, who was flagging even before the adventure had begun, made heavy weather of it, and Diana had to half drag, half carry her.
    But now Abigail stopped, jerking her mother to a halt too.
    ‘Mummy, we didn’t go to a pantomime.’
    Diana could only dimly make out her child’s form in the blackout, her face was quite invisible, but her voice was full of indignant consternation and it seemed extraordinary to Diana that this was what Abigail was pondering as they hurried together through the strange and frightening darkness.
    ‘Don’t be silly, Abigail. We must hurry. Oh, do come on !’
    And though she clearly did not think this a satisfactory reply to her observation, Abigail allowed herself to be led onwards. They passed shops, boarded up or derelict, and row after row of bombed-out terraces, gaping black holes in the black night. But ahead the busy street on which they found themselves reached a junction with a much larger thoroughfare. They passed beneath an archway beside a pub that was