A Place for Us (2 page)

David

I
T WAS A
mistake. He shouldn’t have come back.

David Winter sat alone in the corner of the pub, trying not to look as obviously out of place as he felt. Returning to the old neighborhood was one thing. Meeting here—he’d been crazy to suggest it, but he hadn’t known where else to go. The old Lyons Corner House was a bank, the other old places round here all gone or so gentrified they weren’t actual pubs anymore.

He flexed his aching hands and checked his watch again, blinking hard. Some days he felt better than others. And some days the black cloud felt as if it were swallowing him whole in its pillowing softness, so that he was ready to float away with it. He was so tired. All the time. Ready to lie down and go. And yet he couldn’t, not yet.

Seventy years ago, when he was a boy, the Spanish Prisoners had been the roughest pub in the whole area, and that was saying something. They said the Ripper had drunk there, once upon a time. That a barmaid had been murdered and buried beneath the bar. The clichés weren’t funny here, they were true. Every kind of Bill Sikes was to be found at the Spanish Prisoners—and Nancys too, women like his mother. There was nothing David didn’t know about that, about dark corners, terrified women, fear that sank into your bones so deep you didn’t know if you’d ever shake it off the rest of your life, ever be free of its shadow.

The Spanish Prisoners had stunk of tobacco, of piss and sweat, of mold and sewage and stout. There were men there who could recall sheep being driven down Islington High Street to Smithfield Market, who remembered the old Queen’s death, who’d had sons killed in the Boer War. Davy Doolan had collected the pennies whenever his mother
played piano and waited to help her husband home. If he decided to come home, that was. The pub was a vast Georgian box on the outside, London stock brick, big windows, and it was a mystery how inside it was such a dark warren of a place. You had to be fearless, or dying of thirst, to go in there.

Now, in 2012, it was unrecognizable—a gleaming temple to the religion of coffee and microbreweries—and David wished his hands weren’t so damned painful that he couldn’t whip out a notebook there and then and start drawing. The wood shone, glass sparkled. The list of beers was as long as David’s arm; he hadn’t known where to begin, and in the end had plumped for an orange juice. The barman had a beard and tortoiseshell-frame glasses, and when he walked past after his shift ended, David had noticed, with his cartoonist’s eye for detail, that he was wearing shorts, socks, and slip-on loafers, carrying a canvas printed bag. Before that, though, he’d presented David with a minuscule glass of hand-pressed Valencia orange juice and said politely, “Four pounds, please.”

Four pounds
for a glass of orange juice? He thought how Martha would laugh if she saw him, for the first time practically, balk at the expense of something. But Martha wasn’t here, and he couldn’t tell her about this. He had to carry on with this fiction for his visit to London. And he hated it, hated lying to his wife.

It wasn’t entirely fiction: there was to be an exhibition of his early East End work. When the call came through, he had agreed, hadn’t he? With a weary acceptance: time was running out. A fortnight after the gallery had rung him to suggest the idea, David had finally taken out the drawings, hidden away for decades in hard, cloth-backed folders in the cupboard in his study. He’d waited till Martha was out, gritted his teeth, and at first it had been fine. Then, suddenly, it had been too much, looking at them again, the weight of what he carried. He’d simply put his head on the desk and cried, like a little child. And he couldn’t stop crying, had to tell Martha he was going to bed, another headache. He knew then, knew it meant he had to ring her up, beg her to see him again.

“Davy?” The tap on his arm made David jump; he looked up in shock. “Don’t get up.”

“Of course—” He struggled to stand, his breathing rapid, every gulp an effort. “Of course I will. Cassie, my dear.” He put his hand on her shoulder.

They stared at each other, face-to-face after forty-four years.

She was the same height as he, tall for a woman; he’d loved that about her. And her eyes were cool and clear and gray, as if they saw through you and were laughing at you. Her ash-blond hair was smooth, carefully twisted up on her head. She wore no wedding ring. She looked . . . classy.

“You’re still tall,” he said. “Tall and slim and beautiful. I’d know you anywhere.”

She fiddled with the belt of her coat, never taking her eyes off him. “I can’t say the same about you, Davy. You look—well. I wouldn’t have known you.”

He gave a faint smile. “Let me get you a drink.”

“No, Davy. I’ll get it. You sit down.”

She returned with a rum and Coke. “Five pound eighty! Five pound eighty, Davy, what a racket!”

Her rueful smile relaxed him. He pointed. “Four pounds, this was.”

“The world’s gone mad.”

“Too right, Cassie.”

There was an awkward pause; she took a sip of her drink. David cleared his throat. “So—you keeping well?”

“I’m all right, thanks.”

“Where you living?”

“Flat off the Essex Road. I came back, you see.”

“I’m glad,” he said uncomfortably.

“It’s not the same. Everyone’s gone. It’s bankers and lawyers round here mostly. Or younger people. I don’t know anyone.” Beneath her heavy fringe her eyes filled with tears. “Long way back to Muriel Street from where you are, isn’t it?”

He nodded. He didn’t belong here. He’d hoped he might walk around afterward, but fear haunted these streets for him, the way it always had. Suddenly he wished he was at home, sitting in his sunny study, the sound of Martha singing in the kitchen, Daisy and Florence playing in the garden. . . . He blinked. Daisy was gone, wasn’t she? And Florence . . . Cat was still there, yes? No, Cat had gone too. They’d all gone.

“You got any more kids? I’m sorry. I don’t know—anything about you.” He gave an embarrassed half-laugh.

“You know I didn’t want us to stay in touch,” she said. “Look, we got
our own lives. No. I haven’t got any kids, Davy. We never had any, me and Terry.” Her watery eyes were fixed on him again. “You understand what I mean.”

His hand covered hers. “I do, Cassie.”

“What I don’t understand is why you wanted to see me,” she said. “After all this time.”

David shifted in his seat. “I’m dying,” he said. He smiled at her, trying to ignore the pain that was always there. Her gray eyes widened.

“Davy. That true? Cancer?”

He loved the vowels.
Kainsa
. That London voice. He’d lost it deliberately, couldn’t wait for it to melt away. “No. My heart.” He clenched his fist, in and out, like the doctor had showed him. “The muscle’s dying. It doesn’t want to work anymore. One day I’ll just—
phut
. Then that’s it.”

Her tears fell then, little black circles staining the newly waxed wood tables. “Oh, Davy.”

He hadn’t told Martha. Only his son, Bill, knew. As Cassie put her arms round him and drew his head onto her heaving shoulder, as she cried softly and silently, it occurred to David she was the only link he had to where he’d come from. He’d tried for years to put it away, to push forward toward the golden life he’d promised himself he and Martha deserved, only to be obsessively seeking it out again now. He thought of the meeting he’d had that morning with his gallery on Dover Street.

“I mean, there’s a few I wonder if we need to show. Sensitivity and all that. Do we want to include this one?” Jeremy, the director of the gallery, had slid the watercolor, pen, and ink toward him.

David had looked at it and, as he always did with everything he drew, squeezed his arms against his sides, a little
aide-mémoire
to help him recall what it was, why he’d done it, how, what it had been like. In fact, he remembered the scene well, a bombed block of flats out in Limehouse. He’d walked there, the morning after a bad night. V-2 rockets had come to London when the war was almost over, and they were worse than the bombs of the Blitz. You only heard them flying toward you if you were out of their path. If they were headed right for you, you never knew until it was too late.

David hadn’t slept much, since the bomb had hit their street. He’d dream about pulling Mum out of the wreckage, his sister too, running away with them somewhere safe. Not to the shelters but far away, out
of the city, out where there were trees and no dead people, and no Dad coming at him, huge and black, stinking of stout and that smell men got.

He’d woken up early that morning. Walked and walked as he liked to do. He could walk for hours; no one was bothered where he was, after all. He’d gone along the canal to Limehouse, past the bombed-out warehouses, the abandoned boats, the muck. A girl asleep on a bench, lipstick smudged, greenish tweed skirt twisted around her legs. He wondered if she was one of those kinds of girls, and he’d have stopped to draw her but a policeman came past on a bicycle and shoved him along. He kept on walking, and walking, because John, a boy down the street, had told him there was a bad lot there.

The sketches he produced that morning of the scene in Victoria Court had become the painting he’d seen that morning, nearly seventy years later, in the white, hushed gallery in Mayfair. But he could still remember how it felt, all these years later. Women sobbing, hair coming loose from their scarves. Men dazed, picking through the rubble. It was very quiet, otherwise. There was one wall standing, against the road, and he’d squatted and sketched, a parody of a still-life scene of the corner of a room.

Flaps of yellow wallpaper printed with ribbons, fluttering in the morning breeze. The side of a cup, a packet of rice, a tin plate, blue paint scratched off. And a child’s arm, probably a toddler’s, the cotton sleeve of its shirt frayed where it had become detached from the body with the force of the explosion. The small pink fingers, curled up.

“Of course it stays in,” he’d said.

Jeremy had hesitated. “David, I think it’s wonderful. But it’s very dark.”

“War is very dark,” David had said, the pain almost sending him under. “Either we do this or we don’t. If you want cheeky urchins playing in rubble, forget it.” He had bowed his head, remembering, remembering, and the other men were silent.

•   •   •

Now, as he hugged Cassie, he realized he didn’t know her anymore, and that he had to do what he’d come here for. He sat back and patted her hand.

“Don’t cry, dearest. Let me tell you why I wanted to meet.”

She wiped her nose. “Fine. Make it good. You bastard, making me cry, after all these years. You’re the one who ran out on me, Davy.”

“Don’t start that. Didn’t I help you?”

“You saved my life,” she said. “And my little girl’s, later. I know it, I’ll always know it. Davy . . .” She gave a big sigh. “I wish it was all different, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’d never have gone to Winterfold if it hadn’t been like this. I’d never have met Martha. And had the children.”

“Give me their names, then? All of them?”

“Bill, he’s the eldest.”

“Where’s he?”

“Oh, Bill never went far. Lives in the village, he’s a GP. Pillar of the community, you might say. Married to a nice girl, Karen, much younger than him. Second marriage; he’s got a grown-up daughter, Lucy. Then there’s Daisy . . . she’s—well, we don’t see her so much anymore. She’s in India. A charity worker. Very dedicated. Raises money for these schools in Kerala.”

“Blimey. How often does she come home?”

“It’s sad. She doesn’t, really.”

“Never?”

“Not for years now. She has a daughter, too. Cat. Lives in Paris. We raised her, after Daisy . . . left.”

Cassie seemed fascinated by this. “She ran out on her own kid?”

“Yes. But . . . it’s hard to explain Daisy. She was—she’s difficult to understand. We’re very proud of her.”

It was such an easy lie, once you got used to it. He kept thinking of Daisy these days. Wondering what had gone wrong with her, whether it was his fault, something in his genes.

“And—the other one, Davy, so what’s she called?”

“Florence. Florence is the baby. But she’s very tall too.”

Her eyes met his. “Just like her father.”

“Just like her father, and we’re very close. She’s . . .” He hesitated. “Very academic. She’s a professor, Cassie. Of art history. Lives in Florence.”

“Lives in Florence and she’s called Florence?”

He smiled. “It’s true. She—”

A languorous waiter came over to ask them if they wanted food, and broke the spell. David looked at his watch and said no, and Cassie slid her wallet into her handbag. She clicked her tongue. “So tell me what you want.”

David took a deep breath, ignoring the fluttering pain in his chest. “I want you to come to Winterfold. Meet them all. Before I die.”

She laughed. It took him by surprise, a big belly laugh, a touch of hysteria, and it went on and on, until the fellow drinkers turned round to see what the two old people in the corner found to laugh about.

When she stopped laughing, she swallowed, and drained the rest of her rum and Coke.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. You got your nice life down there, I got mine. That’s the deal we made. I wish it were different but it’s not. Forget about the past, Davy.”

“But we need to straighten everything out. I want it all done
before . . . I don’t know how long I’ve got. It could be months, it could be years, but—”

She gripped his wrist, her eyes bright. “Davy, you always said I was cleverer than you. Didn’t you? So listen to me. Leave the past alone. Forget you saw me. All right?”

“But doesn’t family mean anything to you, anything at all?” David tried to hold on to her grip, but she pulled her hand away from him and stood up.

“Yes, my dear, it does. It means pain, and misery, and suffering, and you’re mixed up with it enough. Take the time you’ve got and just enjoy it,” she said, fixing her big bright scarf, not looking at him. Her voice wavered, but she finished firmly, “Let it be, Davy. God bless you, my love.”