‘Who’s Irene?’ Mum asked, taking the card and peering at it through her thick glasses.
Frankie shrugged.
The name rang a bell, Cook thought, and then he remembered. The couple in the Lyons, the night he and Gracie had gone to collect Ruby. They’d been there on a similar errand to Cook. Looking for someone. Looking for their daughter.
Cook thought of the two pegs in the staff room. One with a coat. One without. Two pegs, next to each other. Two missing girls. Only one of them working at the Lyons the day the bus got bombed.
‘Think I’ll go up to London tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Again?’ Mum asked. Even Frankie seemed curious.
‘Probably nothing,’ Cook said.
Cook drank his tea, and ate his bread and jam. He thought of a young woman, leaving work after a long day. Rushing to catch the bus. Reaching for a coat. Two coats, the same design. Grabbing one, hurrying down the road. Dropping her name tag into the pocket, jumping onto a bus.
Probably nothing, he’d said. But he didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe that at all.
43
The siren was earlier than usual, although Ruby worried that her sense of time was slipping. It was difficult to keep track without windows.
She sat on the bed, a thin wool blanket pulled taut over the sheets. Hospital corners. Important to keep to a certain standard. At home, she’d have left her bed unmade, but here it seemed like a defiance. Show him he hasn’t got through to you. Hasn’t beaten you.
Not yet.
Ruby’s assessment of her current situation was bleak. She was going to die in this Anderson shelter. And the stupid thing was, she’d known. She’d known the second she’d seen him near the Empire. She’d always known, right from the start.
He was coming. He’d put in concrete steps leading down to the entrance and his slippers scraped on them, bits of grit he’d picked up from the gravel path, leading down from the house.
Of course, he must be thinking the same thing. He couldn’t let her go – he’d hang for this – and he couldn’t keep her here for the rest of her life. So he, too, must have been thinking about when, and how, he’d end it. End her. So it was going to be him or her, one of these days. She’d see her moment, and she’d take it.
Not today. He was still like a kid in a candy store, as the Americans in the pictures would say, his eyes roving over herbody, then his hands. The cat that got the cream, her mum would’ve said. Ruby had never much listened to her mum when she was a child, but now she was a grown-up, out in the world, she found her mum’s aphorisms coming to her, and more often than not they were bang on.
He carried the tea tray into the shelter and locked the door behind him. A brass key in a brass padlock. Put the key on a hook by the door. A little game, letting her see the means of her escape, torturing her with the hope.
‘Lot of bombers tonight,’ he said, as he set down the tea tray on an upturned apple crate. ‘Heinkels, mostly.’ The tray had two cups, one for her and one for him, and a sandwich, for her. He had his own meal up at the house. Got to keep her strength up, he liked to say. She thought back to the first night, when he’d slapped her. How it had shocked her. It seemed like a lifetime ago. A lifetime of being locked in an underground bunker with a man who raped you every evening, straight after tea.
She ate slowly. Not much to write home about. Two thin slices of brown bread and an even thinner slice of cheese. No butter. Not even margarine. There was a slight bloom of mould on the corner of the bread this evening, but she ate it, slowly, trying not to gag.
‘I saw your mum,’ he said. Ruby tried not to show interest.
‘It was your funeral,’ he continued. ‘Good turnout.’
She finished the bread, sipped the tea, washing it down. The tea was too sweet for her, but she drank it anyway.
‘The boy was there. They let him come up. Time off for good behaviour,’ he joked.
Ruby looked up, before she remembered not to.
‘Hardly recognised him, turning into a country lad. New clothes and everything. There was a brute of a farmer brought him up, must be the one who’s looking after him.’
He stood up and took his jacket off. Hung it on the hook by the door.
‘No,’ Ruby said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Leave me alone,’ she said.
