He smiled. ‘I didn’t know you felt like that.’
His fist felt like a brick against the side of her head. The pain was bad, but the shock was worse. The outrage.
He had his hands on her. No pretence now. No false civility.
She couldn’t breathe. She was face down on the camp bed, suffocating. She tried to arch back, make some room, but his hand was holding her head. He was sitting on her back, both of her arms pulled back. He was like a dead weight.
‘Going to have to teach you a lesson,’ he said. He let go of her head and she gasped for air. He ripped her knickers off and forced his fingers inside her. One of his nails was broken. She could feel it.
From a long way away, she heard the siren, muffled by the earth that had been piled up around the shelter. She felt the ground shake. A bomb, perhaps. She willed the bomber towards her, praying for a direct hit. Something to kill her beforehedid.
44
The number nine bus wound its way through Piccadilly Circus. Eros was boarded up. A symbolic gesture, Cook thought. If it got hit by a bomb, the boards nailed around it were unlikely to do much to protect it. The statue itself was bronze, designed to last for centuries. They could level the whole city, and the statue would still be there. But Cook understood the power of symbols. If he was Churchill he’d be doing the same thing – box up the statues. Get some balloons up in the air, even though the bombers flew thousands of feet higher. Make it illegal to light a cigarette on a dark street on a dark night, even though the pinprick glow would be invisible to that bomber, up in the heavens. All of it theatre – give the people something to do. Make them feel part of it. The blitz spirit, the papers were calling it.
He’d started the journey at the Lyons tea room. Noted the time. Strode out into the street with the pace of someone leaving work and hurrying home. The manager had given him the address – anything to get rid of him. A bus had come along at the right moment, just as Cook had approached the stop, and he’d jumped on, grabbing the metal post on the rear platform as the bus pulled away into traffic.
He got off at Tower Hill, remembering the boat trip with Gracie, past the Tower of London.
He bought an A to Z at a newsagent’s, careful not to take too long, didn’t want to mess up his experiment. It was abook of maps, the whole of London, printed on rough wartime paper. As he strode up Tooley Street, he checked the requisite page. He was crossing a threshold – the first bus had been on one of the earlier pages devoted to central London – the maps a larger scale, easier to read. Now, he had to turn to page fifty-two, a smaller scale, the print smaller. Cook had to squint to find his destination. Avondale Street. Whitechapel. Another bus.
The house was on a quiet residential street, running parallel to a row of small shops. A nice neighbourhood, all things considered. Tiny front gardens, six foot square. White doorsteps, immaculate, whitened with chalk every morning. Lace curtains at every window, bought on tick most likely, paid off weekly when the tallyman made his visit. A place where appearances were important, where it was better to be in debt for your whole life than to have the wrong kind of curtains.
Cook checked his wristwatch. Forty-two minutes, door to door. If Ruby’s former colleague had got on the bus that had been bombed, that would have meant she was expected home just after twenty to six.
He knocked at the door, feeling the weight of his mission hanging on his shoulders. He was the bearer of bad news. The destroyer of hope.
The mother opened the door a crack, peering out at him. She was wearing the same red pinafore. She recognised him, and her face lit up. There it was, he thought. Hope.
Cook sat in the parlour, opened up in his honour.
She poured tea. A white teapot with images of Victoria’s coronation. Gold leaf around the spout. Mother and father, waiting for news of their only daughter.
‘Have you heard anything?’ she asked, unable to hold back.
‘I wanted to ask you the same thing,’ Cook said. ‘Whether you’d heard from Irene.’ Empty words, unnecessary. Every tock of the mournful clock on the mantelpiece screamed it.
Cook had come to make sure of two things. First, the journey. They’d told the manager what time she was expected home. Cook had assumed she’d have left at five. But assumption was the mother of all errors, as his old CO Blakeney used to say. So he’d had to check.
Secondly, Irene’s continued absence. If he’d been right about her staying out for a drink with a young man, she’d have been home by now. But she wasn’t home. Cook could feel it in every corner of the house. The absence of joy. The emptiness of a house where a man and a woman had lived hard lives, done what they could to give their daughter a chance.
‘What time would Irene get home, after work?’ Cook asked. He knew the answer, but he wanted it said out loud, one more time.
‘Twenty to six,’ she said.
‘Couple of minutes later,’ her husband said, ‘unless there wasn’t any traffic.’
Cook sipped his tea.
‘I think your daughter took the wrong coat,’ he said. ‘It was on the hook next to hers. It was the same type of coat. Same colour. Same design. She was in a hurry. Wanted to get home. She left at her usual time, ran along the road, and got on the number nine bus.’
45
Cook left the couple with their grief. They had questions he didn’t have the answers to. Half pretending not to believe him. Pretending to themselves.
There was a smell of autumn in the air, a smell Cook associated with the fields and the woods. Even here, in the heart of the city, brown leaves crunched underfoot. There was a chill in the air, and a softness in the light. Soon it would be Michaelmas, the start of the farming year. Normally Cook would be making plans with Bill Taylor, his farm manager, laying out this year’s plan. Contracts with the working men to be renewed, hiring to be done.
This year was different. Some things remained – the fields still had to be ploughed, crops sown, plans made. But most of the labourers were gone – the first of them had volunteered, then conscription had taken many more. Farming was a reserved occupation, meaning many of the men could have got out of their service, but most wanted to do their bit, as Cook had done when it was his time.
