concrete steps into the Underground. They were a ragtag lot, these refugees from the bombing, Albert thought. Whole families with blankets and pillows and portable stoves and in one case even a wind-up gramophone, all desperate to get below and claim the best pitches until every inch of platform space was taken and latecomers had to sleep as best they could, sitting up on the winding stairs or flattened against the walls in the narrow corridors. All of them crammed in together like sardines because they thought they’d be safe, except that that was an illusion. Albert knew that even if they didn’t. Only the day before a heavy bomb had fallen on Marble Arch station, rupturing the water mains and fracturing the gas pipes. Seven people had died, enduring horrible deaths that didn’t bear thinking about, buried under piles of broken masonry, slowly drowning in sewage and seeping water, choking on the dust and gas. And the Tube would be hit again. It was only a matter of time. Nowhere was safe any more in this God-forsaken city.
Albert bought his ticket and picked his way down the stairs to the westbound platform, holding his nose against the stench of the overflowing toilets in the booking hall. And down below it was even worse, with the stink of hundreds of unwashed bodies crammed together in the fetid, airless atmosphere. The heat was extraordinary after the cold outside; some of the men were stripped to the waist, and most of the children were half naked. And the noise too was overwhelming. People were singing and shouting; a few were even playing mouth organs and beating on home-made drums. Albert was astonished by their cheerfulness inside this living hell. At least the overpowering assault on his senses meant that he no longer had the sensation of being followed. Someone could have been right on his shoulder and he would have neither known nor cared. All he wanted to do was get on a train and escape.
Slowly and laboriously, concentrating only on remaining upright, Albert picked his way between the shelterers and their possessions — filthy mattresses and battered suitcases, several that were serving as beds for tiny babies — until he reached the edge of the platform, where he waited nervously for his train, staring down at the columns of mice running this way and that between the tracks.
None of the shelterers seemed to be paying any attention to the rule that only passengers could stand in front of the white line painted eight feet from the platform edge, and when the westbound train finally arrived, there was a further delay while it waited in the tunnel as a team of London Passenger Transport Board officers went up and down the platform with sticks, pushing back the stray feet and arms that were overhanging the line.
Finally the train doors closed and Albert slumped back in his seat, exhausted by his ordeal. All this for a wasted journey, he thought bitterly, unless the message he’d left got through, and even then it might be too late. No one took him seriously any more at HQ except Alec. He knew that. He was yesterday’s man, and his fears were yesterday’s news. He closed his eyes for a moment, lulled by the noise of the train, and then came wide awake again, starting up from his seat. Someone was touching him, feeling at his neck, feeling for that point where a man could be killed with a single chop of the hand. But when he turned around, he saw nothing — just people getting on and off at Victoria, brushing against him as they passed.
He got out at Sloane Square and walked down to the river. A few cars and bicycles passed him by, but once again there were no taxis and the only bus he saw was going in the opposite direction. Albert looked up at the passengers’ anxious faces behind the meshed-over windows and wished he were home. He was too old for this, he thought as he stumbled and almost fell over a green hose twisting like a snake across the pavement. Glancing to his left, he saw its nozzle lying useless in the front garden of a half-destroyed Victorian house — a casualty of the previous night’s bombing. It had been sliced down the middle by a direct hit. Upstairs, the front wall had been blown away and an unmade bed and an open wardrobe hung on the edge of what was left of the sagging floor, like an unlit film set for a cheap movie, while at the back a full-length mahogany mirror swung gently to and fro in the breeze, creaking on its hinges but yielding no reflection, as all its glass was gone, shattered into a million silver fragments that glistened like raindrops on the dark blue carpet. But on either side of this scene of devastation, the other houses in the terrace were all untouched — rows of placid doors and windows, even a smoking chimney or two. Albert didn’t need reminding that this war was random in its choice of victims, the destruction it wrought entirely indiscriminate and unpredictable.
He turned away. He’d seen worse, far worse, in France and Belgium twenty-five years before — severed limbs and bloated soldiers’ bodies sinking in the oozing mud. But that had been when war was somewhere else, fought by soldiers in foreign places, not here in London, falling in a steel rain from the moonlit sky night after night, killing and maiming defenceless women and children as they trembled in inadequate shelters.
Two children hurried by, a girl and boy tightly holding hands with gas masks in Mickey Mouse satchels bouncing on their backs. There’d been no gas yet, but there would be. Albert was sure of it. Because gas was the worst. Shutting his eyes for a moment, he remembered the mustard gas attacks he’d endured with his company on the Ypres Salient in 1915 — the blinded, dying men with blistered yellow skin struggling to breathe, whispering for their mothers. Beyond hope or consolation.
Hitler had been gassed too, on the Western Front in 1918. Albert had read the intelligence reports; he knew everything there was to know and more about the Austrian corporal and his gang of murderous henchmen. All through the Thirties he’d warned Whitehall about them, but no one had listened. They’d all been obsessed with Stalin and the creeping threat of Communism, and where had that got them?
A voice crying in the wilderness — that was how the years of his career seemed to Albert now. Warnings, endless unheeded warnings, about Nazis and traitors and the need for more money. It hadn’t been what they’d wanted to hear. They’d called him C to his face and Cassandra behind his back, and then, when the opportunity had come, they’d stabbed him in the back and got rid of him — sent him out to pasture like a broken-down old carthorse with a B-level Civil Service pension and a gold watch engraved with their thanks. Thanks! All those years of service to his king and country and he hadn’t even come away with a knighthood. Not like his predecessors or the new man they’d brought in from the Navy to replace him.
Albert halted in the middle of Chelsea Bridge, gazing down into the murky depths of the slow-flowing river below his feet. He thought of all he had to offer, all his accumulated knowledge and years of experience, and realized with sudden insight that none of it mattered. No one was interested in what he had to say. He had no friends. Bertram was interested only in his money, and Alec hadn’t been round in months — until today, and that wasn’t a social call. He was good for nothing now. The only person who cared a jot about whether he lived or died was his daughter, and she’d be better off without him. The Luftwaffe would be doing him a favour if they got him with one of their bombs or a piece of shrapnel through the neck. Or perhaps he should just throw himself into the dark water and put an end to it all, right now. But Albert had no sooner thought of jumping than he pushed himself violently back from the white iron parapet and into the road, where an air raid warden on a bicycle had to swerve hard to avoid a collision.
‘Mind where you’re bloody going,’ the man shouted as he remounted. ‘You’d better take shelter, you know,’ he added in a more kindly voice. ‘Wireless says they’re over the coast already. You’ll hear the siren soon.’
Albert nodded, watching the man ride away. He was frightened now, and his hands were shaking. He looked across the river towards the bomb-blasted trees in Battersea Park. There were anti-aircraft guns in there that the Germans had tried to target the previous week, and overhead a silver-grey barrage balloon swam in the air like a strange airborne elephant, its wires a last defence against the incoming bombers.
Leaving the bridge behind, Albert walked down the road past the towers of Battersea Power Station on his left sticking up like chalk-white fingers into the evening sky. Looking around, he realized he was alone. The street was silent, but the air was still and heavy, weighing him down so that he found it hard to put one foot in front of the other. He listened to the sound of his footsteps on the sidewalk and once more sensed an echo coming at him from behind. He turned and looked back, but there was nothing, just the grey outline of the curving suspension cables of the bridge. It had to be a trick of the senses, like the way in which shadows seemed to be moving under the trees on his right. The park seemed closer than it had before, reaching out towards him. The wrought-iron railings that had marked its borders had been removed the previous year for melting down to help the war effort, and Albert didn’t think he’d ever get used to the change.
He turned the corner into Prince of Wales Drive. Now he couldn’t get it out of his head that he was being followed. Perhaps it was some ne’er-do-well looking to attack vulnerable passers-by and steal their wallets. Rumour had it that all the London parks were infested with such people, particularly since police resources had become stretched to the limit by the bombing. Albert willed himself not to run. In the night men were like animals — to show fear was to invite attack.
A dog barked somewhere out of sight, and as if in response, the air-raid siren began to wail — its agonizing cry undulating up and down through octaves of pain, building to a despairing scream at the end before it stopped
