Free The Safest Place in London by Maggie Joel

of time without a past or a future. She never saw the GI again and the Black Bull was bombed not long after so there were no more shifts. Afterwards, she thought very little of it. She had been lonely. It was not an excuse but she felt no need of an excuse, it was simply what happened in wartime.
    There had been no reason for Joe to find out. No reason at all. But Joe had found out, for she had told him. The fact of this baffled her, even now, two months later. They had gone out, she and Joe, a fortnight or so after Joe’s return, when his sunburn had begun to fade and the blisters to heal, leaving Emily asleep in her bed. They had gone to the Oxford Arms, a pub that, so far, had survived the bombing, and on the way home a tartaccosted him. The tart—a girl so thin you imagined a bus going past at high speed might drag her into its slipstream and mangle her beneath its wheels like a leaf—tottered on high heels with painted-on stockings, her face a pale moon with a slash of scarlet at the mouth, ghoulish in the blackout, and a dress hitched high up her leg so that you got a flash of her underwear. And if that doesn’t turn you off I don’t know what will, thought Nancy, unamused, as the girl leered at her husband and draped an arm around his neck as though she, his wife, were not even there. Bloody nerve!
    ‘Wotcha say, darlin’? Fancy a bit of it, do ya?’ was the girl’s sales pitch and Joe laughed, basking in her lurid advances, and he laughed even louder when Nancy had flung the girl’s arm off him and pushed her so hard the girl had staggered backwards.
    ‘Bloody nerve!’ Nancy said and Joe said the girl hadn’t meant no harm, she was starving, probably hadn’t eaten in days, poor kid.
    But Nancy was furious.
    ‘We’re all bloody starving! We’ve all gone days on end without eating—d’you think I went out selling my body to the first sailor what come along? That would be alright, would it?’
    And he had replied that, if it was a question of survival, well, you did whatever you had to do, he knew that now.
    His answer, calm and reasonable as it was, and coloured inevitably by the events he had just undergone, only infuriated her further. ‘Well, I’m glad you think that way. So it don’t bother you none if I let some other man—a GI —have his way with me a while back, while you was out there bobbing about in the sea?’
    Why had she said it? Joe would never have known. But outit had come, just like that, and she had been as surprised as he. Almost.
    She regretted it at once. Joe’s face changed, the laughter gone, the reasoning, the calm, vanished. Instead a sort of cold hardness replaced it and she felt a flicker of fear. A heartbeat passed, then another, before he exploded, launching into a pile of wooden crates by the kerbside, kicking them into smithereens, and she watched, frozen, unable to stop him and unable to leave, aware that she had been a second away from feeling the force of those kicks herself, that many men would not have aimed their fury at a defenceless pile of wooden crates by the kerbside. When the crates were destroyed he turned away and left her, walked off into the night in the direction from which they had just come.
    She had never seen such fury in him. That he had it inside him, that she could be the cause of it, frightened her. She went home quickly. Arriving at the house she somehow expected him to be there ahead of her, though it was impossible. She sat for a time at the place where the kitchen table had once stood. Then she set out the breakfast things for the morning, put their air-raid provisions by the front door in case they were needed and got herself ready for bed. She lay awake, listening for his return.
    What if he did not return?
    When she heard him finally come through the door many hours had passed, or she imagined they had, and her relief was matched by her fear. He hesitated outside their door and she reasoned that surely he would not hesitate like that