Twenty
THERE had been a time, right up until the Blitz had begun, when a missing child would have sent policemen scurrying to help. Neighbors and strangers alike would’ve stopped whatever they were doing to assist in the search. The moment a frantic parent or sibling sounded the alarm, caring strangers dropped everything to search nearby alleys and behind hedges, and they’d ask passersby whether they’d seen the child. It mattered when a child went missing.
But on that Sunday morning, when fires still burned and the dead were still being carried out and the extent of the destruction still could not be fathomed, a missing seven-year-old was just another calamity in a collection of calamities the likes of which no one had seen before. The police station where Emmy and her mother began their agonized search for Julia was filled with people who wanted information on the whereabouts of loved ones whose houses had been destroyed. An hour passed before a policeman took down their information. Emmy was asked twice why she had left Julia alone. “I had an appointment,” she said. “And I thought my mother would come home after she got off work.”
“And why didn’t you come home, then?” the cop said to Mum.
“I had an appointment, too,” Mum said, not taking her eyes off the policeman. “And I had already placed my children in the care of a foster mother who lives two hours away in Gloucestershire, so naturally there was no reason for me to think I was needed at home, now, was there?”
The cop shook his head, silently indicting them both for such a cavalier approach to responsibility. “All right, then,” he said when he was finished. “We’ll be on the lookout for her. Is your home still livable?”
“Barely,” Mum said.
“You might want to stay close to it the next couple days in case she comes back on her own.” The policeman removed the report from his clipboard, added it to the mountain of papers already on his desk, and then looked past to others waiting for help. “Next in line, please.”
*
FROM the police station, Emmy and her mother went to the hospital, which was bursting with the injured. No one there had admitted a little girl named Julia. No one had seen a little girl who fit her description.
They appealed to their local warden, Mr. Findley, whom they found making the rounds with officials whose job it was to determine whether the houses in his sector that had been destroyed still had victims inside them. He wearily told them to try Julia’s school, on the slim chance that someone had taken her there last night to be reevacuated out of London. But that suggestion also proved fruitless. The school was a burned-out shell.
Next they trudged to social services. They pounded on the door of the nearest children’s home for orphans and crawled inside every shelter in a two-mile radius.
No one had seen the seven-year-old girl. And no one had time to stop what they were doing to help Emmy and her mother figure out where she was. No one could do more than ask the same questions everyone else was asking.
Did you check the hospital?
Did you contact the police?
Did you search the shelters?
Did you check all the wardrobes and cupboards at home? Under the stairs? In the attic?
The neighbors?
Everywhere they turned they were reminded that their little woe meant nothing compared to the compounded loss of London’s East End.
Mum would not look at Emmy or speak to her after she had told her why she had come back to London and why she had brought Julia with her. In their search, Emmy and her mother went to each place together, but in silence. When they had exhausted all their options, they returned to the flat, hoping that Julia was waiting there for them, sitting on the stoop with her arms looped around knees folded to her chest. But the front step was empty.
Their neighbor to the left was covering her broken windows with pieces of plywood. When the woman, a quiet factory worker named Geraldine, saw Emmy and her mum, she paused with a hammer in hand.
“Did you find your little one?” she asked.
Mum shook her head. She went into the flat without a word.
“No one has seen her,” Emmy replied.
“She has to turn up,” the woman said, but her tone conveyed her doubt.
Inside, Mum was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the broken window at the bit of dirt that was their back garden. Her hands were folded across her chest.
Emmy lowered herself into a kitchen chair, grateful to be off her injured leg, but not wanting to be in the same room with Mum and the crushing weight of her anguish.
She had already told Mum she was sorry, so very sorry, and there was nothing else she could say. She said it again anyway.
“I’m so sorry, Mum.”
Her mother did not turn at the sound of Emmy’s voice. She just stood there, looking at the dirt and the scattering of war debris that had landed in the garden.
“Mum?”
“I should have known something like this would happen,” Mum murmured, more to the broken window than to Emmy.
“What?”
“I should have guessed that when you put you and me together, this is what comes of it.”
Emmy didn’t know what she meant. She didn’t want to know.
“I sent you away with Julia when you didn’t want to go and you came back with her when you should’ve left her where she was,” she said, her voice strangely emotionless.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” Emmy said for the hundredth time. “I didn’t know this was going to happen. I thought she’d be safe. I thought you were . . .” Her voice trailed away.
“Yes, you thought I’d be coming home. To my empty house, like I do every night because that’s the life I have.”
Her detached manner scared Emmy. She said nothing.
Her mum turned to face her. “Don’t you want to ask me where I was last night? Don’t you want to know since it’s my fault this happened?”
Emmy wanted the floor to open up beneath her and swallow her whole. She wanted to scream and scream until she had screamed all the oxygen out of the room and she could simply keel over dead in the chair.
“That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That it’s my fault?”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” Emmy whispered. “I didn’t know this would happen. I just wanted to make something of myself. I just . . . I just wanted you to be proud of me.”
Mum stared at Emmy for several long seconds, her arms crossed loosely over her chest. “Is that really what you wanted? Wasn’t it instead to prove to yourself that you’re better than I am? You’ve always been ashamed of what I am. No wonder you jumped at the first chance to get the hell out of life here with me.”
“That’s not true!” Emmy yelled.
“Of course it’s true. And who can blame you. You were never meant for this. Not this.”