The Distant Dead by Lesley Thomson (most difficult books to read .txt) 📗

dancing flames, as if in a magic lantern show, was a carpeted staircase cut off before the landing, the bathroom mirror above a pallid sink still intact. The stern portrait of a Victorian grandee hanging askew above the drawing room mantelpiece frowned upon the front area infilled with smashed brick and timber, crockery and broken furniture displaced by the blast.

Maple couldn’t believe it would happen to her mum and dad’s home, their pride and joy. Since Aleck, she felt she and all those she loved would be safe.

The road was blocked by an AFS team attacking flames from a burst gas pipe in the kitchen. In intervals between guns and distant bombing was the grind of the pump engine. Urgent shouts – Ruddy low tide, Where’s the fire-boat?, Shift the turntable – helmeted fire-fighters, two of them women, like cut-out figures in the orange light which suffused the cobbled road as if it were paved with gold.

Guiding Maple past the criss-cross of vehicles, between pooling water and rubble, Aleck whispered in her ear, ‘Wardens dug the family from the cellar two nights ago, crushed to a pulp, all of them. Mind you, the wife was on short commons, and riddled with cancer when I opened her up – handy really, she got a painless death.’ He nuzzled into Maple’s neck.

Maple imagined telling her mum and dad how there was little Aleck doesn’t know about London’s dead. His phrase. Now, she said, ‘It’s not fair getting ill in a war. Everything like that should stop. At least we got those spies.’ She liked to show Aleck she was up on things.

‘Nothing’s fair, Maple. Blighters got their just desserts.’

Smoky clouds were thinning to the west. Light from a fitful moon flickered on the Thames. A mud-slicked cobbled causeway, accessible when the tide receded, led to the eyot, an outcrop of land overgrown with reeds and stubby trees. The stench of charred timber and damp mortar was stronger on the shoreline.

‘It’s the smell of death,’ Maple said to sound clever.

‘Death doesn’t smell like that,’ Aleck said. ‘Here we are.’

Skirting poles on trestles that protected a large house on Chiswick Mall, he flicked his torch over a board propped against the gate – Danger. Structure Unsafe – and led Maple up the path of a house on three floors with rooms either side of the door. Despite the danger sign, it looked undamaged. Maple would tell her dad that Aleck saw past danger, she felt safe with him. Her dad was always worrying, he’d cried during Chamberlain’s speech.

Aleck said the war had been good to him. It was good to her too. If not for Hitler, she wouldn’t have met Aleck and he’d never have proposed.

‘This is yours?’ Maple gasped when Aleck fitted a key into the front door. Aleck usually found an alley at the end of gardens, behind shops, hidden by bins. The first time Maple had worried they should wait until it was decent. Aleck told her, ‘There’s a war on, rules have changed.’

‘Of course not.’ He pocketed the key and opened the door.

‘Are we allowed?’

‘I’m allowed.’

‘Who does live here?’ Maple blinked in the encompassing light of a vast chandelier. A small voice suggested, We will.

‘A friend.’ Aleck shucked off his coat, folded it and placed it across the post at the bottom of the staircase.

‘Is he here?’ Maple darted a look up the stairs.

‘So many questions.’ Aleck gave a braying laugh.

‘We’ve never done it in a bed, will your friend mind?’ Shouting above the endless clatter of guns, Maple felt appalled. It had to be Aleck’s idea to do it, and she must act surprised. ‘What if he comes home?’

‘He won’t.’ Aleck lifted off Maple’s mink stole and pulled off her coat, his gift. Tugging her, he went into a room off the hall. A table lamp gave a soft circle of light. Aleck tossed Maple’s things onto a wing-back chair. The coat slipped off onto a Turkey carpet, but he didn’t notice. Without it, Maple shivered. The ashes in the grate looked cold and she imagined asking Aleck to make up a fire, but, in another man’s house, that would be cheeky. ‘He’s never coming back. Oliver Hurrell, aged fifty-three, solicitor of this parish, unmarried with no living relatives, was killed by shrapnel fire-watching at the Commodore yesterday. Our acquaintance began and ended at Hammersmith Mortuary.’ Aleck often said the dead were his friends. Sometimes, despite her pride in him, Maple wished he wouldn’t.

Afterwards, flicking on his lighter, Aleck lit them each a cigarette. He shuffled to sitting, his back against the sofa.

‘Tallulah Bankhead wouldn’t sit in her birthday suit in a dead man’s house without a ring on her finger. James Stewart wouldn’t let her.’ Not used to smoking, Maple took kissing puffs of her cigarette. A settee was a far cry from an alley but it was not a bridal chamber.

‘What are you talking about now?’ Aleck blew smoke-ribbons at the rose ceiling moulding.

‘I think we should not meet like this, not until we’re married.’ Ida said you had to put your foot down or things got out of hand.

‘It’s not me you lost your virginity with, dearie.’ Aleck narrowed his eyes. ‘And let’s face it, you never take persuading.’

‘What about Sunday? Dad’s expecting you. Mum’s making a cake with eggs.’ Coughing as she inhaled, Maple began gathering her clothes from the carpet where Aleck had strewn them. Her toe snagged a stocking and tears pricked. Real silk, they had cost more than a day’s wages.

When she’d fallen pregnant, her younger brother Vernon called her a tart. He’d gone with her dad to Bertie Spence’s lodgings in Fulham to find that the hod-carrier had signed up the day before. Keith Greenhill had made Vernon say sorry, treat your older sister with respect, yet Vernon was only saying what her parents felt.

‘A bed would have been nice,’ Maple mumbled. Watching Aleck tap his cigarette into an ashtray on an occasional table, she noted that, apart from tie and