Frank smiled uncertainly. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Mates, eh?’ Sean stretched out a hand, and Frank took it. David wondered if Eileen had told him off. Sean looked round the table. ‘Where’s the fair-haired feller?’
‘He went upstairs for a rest,’ David said. ‘He’s feeling poorly. I think it’s the fog.’
‘It’s a bugger. One of my workmates is asthmatic, they had to take him to hospital this afternoon. Hope they manage to get him there, traffic’s hardly moving. If they were planning to move the Jews today, that’s definitely off.’ He sighed. ‘I’m going to make a sandwich.’ He went out to the kitchen. David cleared the table and took everything back to the front room. He switched on the light and put the box back under the table. As he stood up he saw someone standing outside the window, a little white face looking in at him. He stood stock still for a second, then stepped forward. He glimpsed a cap and child’s raincoat as the figure darted away into the murk. He went quickly back to the living room.
‘What’s the matter?’ Natalia asked sharply.
‘There was a little boy, standing in the front garden, looking in. It might have been the one from two doors down.’
‘Shit,’ Ben said, half rising. Sean came out of the kitchen and ran to the front door, throwing it open. A minute later he came back, breathing hard.
‘I heard the door slam at Number 38. That little fucker, he’s always nosing round, he watches the TV programmes telling people to keep an eye out for terrorists.’
Natalia said, ‘He has only seen David, and he saw him yesterday.’
Sean frowned. ‘He’ll tell his dad the man with a posh accent is staying here now.’ He sat down, chewing anxiously on his knuckles. ‘I don’t bloody know. We’ll have to see what Eileen says.’
She returned half an hour later, weighed down with shopping bags. ‘What weather,’ she said. ‘The bus was so slow. The smog’s leaving black grease on everything, you should see the steps.’ Eileen looked round them, her face suddenly tense. ‘Has something happened?’
Sean told her about David seeing the little boy. ‘Ah, that’s bad luck. And I didn’t see his mother at the shops, I thought she’d be there. But young Philip’s always peeping into people’s houses, playing at spies and terrorists like all the little boys.’ She looked at Natalia. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know these people.’
‘We’ve had him looking in the window before when we’ve had visitors. He’s a lonely wee lad. Used to play with our two till his parents stopped him last year. I think it’s all right. He hasn’t seen any of the rest of you?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll have to try and get an excuse to speak to his mother, tell her you’re some sort of relation.’
‘With that accent?’ Sean said.
David reddened. ‘I only said a few words.’
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now,’ Eileen said.
‘Go and see her,’ Sean urged.
She shook her head. ‘No, she’d wonder why I was so worried about it. It’ll have to be casual.’ Eileen frowned, obviously still uneasy. She looked at her guests. ‘It looks like you’re staying in London another day or so. The submarine’s waiting in the Channel now, but it’s a question of when the weather’s going to be right for you to be picked up – I can’t say yet where from.’
Geoff had come down and was sitting by the fire, looking pale and sweating. He shook his head. ‘So there actually is a submarine waiting for us?’
‘There is.’
David thought, it’s real, it could happen. He said to Eileen, ‘Any word on my wife?’
‘She’s all right. She’s out of London, near where you’ll be leaving from.’ Eileen hesitated, then added, ‘Only an hour away.’
Natalia gave her a warning look. David thought, she’s right, the less everyone knows, the safer we are.
When dinner was over Eileen asked them to split the night watch, Ben first. After eating they all sat in the living room, except for Natalia, who went upstairs, to David and Geoff’s bedroom, for a rest. Geoff coughed frequently; with six of them packed into the living room, most smoking, the room had quickly become a fug. Eileen suggested Geoff go and sit in the front room. Frank asked if he could rest upstairs for a while. Ben looked at David, who nodded; Frank had given him his promise to do nothing stupid.
They watched the news; London was at a standstill because of the fog, emergency rooms in all the hospitals full of people with weak chests. A couple more women had been attacked by assailants they hadn’t been able to see, hit on the head and their handbags taken. One had been knifed. Sean grunted, ‘The good lord save them, as my mammy would have said. Only he doesn’t.’
‘You were brought up a Catholic?’ David had noticed that unlike other Irish homes he had visited, there was no Catholic imagery anywhere in the house.
‘We both were,’ Eileen said. ‘You?’
‘No, my parents weren’t believers.’
A look of sadness crossed her face. ‘How can anyone believe in the Catholic Church, after what they’ve done to support all the Fascist regimes – in Spain, Italy, Croatia?’
Sean nodded agreement. ‘Ireland too, that’s no paradise. Did anyone see that film the Pope made a few years ago?’
‘I did,’ David said. ‘Pius XII walking in his garden, showing the world the way of peace. As though he didn’t live in this world at all.’
‘Live in it. Ha.’ Sean growled. ‘He helped build it. That’s why they even show him on British TV now.’
At the end of the news there was an extended interview with Beaver brook about the new reduced tariffs on trade with Europe, Beaverbrook pugnacious and optimistic, the interviewer respectful as usual. The Jewish deportations were not mentioned. The Prime Minister said that on his recent visit he had formed the closest relations with Dr Goebbels, praised all the propaganda minister had done for Germany. Sean said, ‘The wind’s shifting further to Goebbels all the time. If Hitler dies, who will he go with, Himmler or Speer?’
Ben agreed. ‘Beaverbrook’s making Goebbels his insurance policy. Bet it was Goebbels who got him to promise he’d get rid of the Jews when he went to Germany. A personal favour.’
David went upstairs to check on Frank, who was sitting on the mattress massaging his bad hand. He looked up at David. ‘It’s sore tonight.’ He winced. ‘It doesn’t like the damp.’
‘Hopefully we’ll be off in a day or two.’
‘Where?’
‘We’ll know when it’s safe for us to know.’
Frank said, ‘Natalia came in to talk to me for a while. She’s nice, she understands things. She told me about her brother. He had problems too. Women – they mostly don’t understand, they can be even worse than men. But she’s not like that, is she?’
David smiled. ‘No. She’s pretty special.’
‘I told her about school.’ He looked at his hand. ‘You know, sometimes I wonder what my life might have been, if my mother had never met Mrs Baker, if I’d never gone to Strangmans. There’s a physicist in America who thinks the world we live in is only one of millions of parallel worlds, existing alongside each other, each different in tiny little ways. Maybe worlds where everyone is happy.’ His face clouded. ‘And maybe ones where everyone was killed by the atom bomb. I try not to think about that.’
‘We’re stuck in the world as it is,’ David said. ‘It’s a bad place but we have to do the best we can.’
‘That’s what Natalia said.’
‘I’m going to sleep here while Ben goes on watch. Leave Natalia to rest in my room for a bit.’
‘I’m ready to go to bed, too.’
‘I’ll leave you to get ready, go and have a last fag.’
‘Okay.’ Frank smiled a gentle little smile again. ‘Thanks, David,’ he said. ‘Thanks for everything.’