This Lovely City - Louise Hare

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precious pets emerging from the large houses that surrounded the Common to walk their pampered animals in circles. Their children were grown and their housework managed by a housekeeper or a charlady, someone like Mrs Coleridge who did for a family over on the north side. They came striding along with an entitlement that Lawrie would never possess, letting their dogs off the leash and looking the other way as their beloveds squatted and left the mess for someone else to step in. Just before he reached Eagle Pond, Lawrie looked up and saw one such woman coming towards him, veering to one side as she walked briskly down the centre of the path; there was a Jack Russell trotting along at her heels, and if Lawrie had learned anything in his postal career it was to watch out for those little bastards. The woman stared as he rode past, and he knew that if he looked back she’d be watching him. Making sure he kept moving and didn’t hang around like a bad smell.

      The lady who answered the door at Englewood Road was no better. Barely two words to say to him, neither of them wasted on thanks, but the money felt comforting in his pocket. Lawrie’s cut was twenty per cent, bargained up from ten the year before. Derek needed a trusted delivery man, he’d argued. Someone who didn’t look suspicious knocking on a door and handing over a brown paper package. Who better than the local postman?

      Maybe he should take Evie out, he mused. Not just to the pictures. The boss of the club where he’d played the night before, he’d mentioned a few times that he’d get Lawrie a good table if he wanted to bring his girl along. Lawrie always smiled back and thanked him for the offer, said that he’d let him know. He wasn’t sure what he was wary of. There was no shame in playing music for a living. It wasn’t as though Evie didn’t know what he did but he liked that she was separate from all that. The women who frequented the club, not all of them but a few, they reminded him of his mistakes. They reminded him of Rose.

      He cycled back the way he’d come, recognising the woman he’d seen with the terrier as he drew close to Eagle Pond, but the dog was nowhere to be seen. There was something strange about the way she was moving, and he found himself slowing down. She was pacing up and down in front of the pond, looking for something. Her gait was lopsided and, when she drew closer, he saw that her face was wet from tears that were blinding her. She didn’t notice Lawrie until the last moment, suddenly aiming towards him and coming up short as she took him in properly. She held herself rigid, her mouth gasping for air that her lungs didn’t seem to want to accept.

      ‘Ma’am?’ Lawrie swung his leg and dismounted, making his movements slow so that she didn’t spook. ‘You all right? Can I help you?’

      She looked over her shoulder but turned back to him, fixing her eyes on his uniform. Whatever she’d seen was more frightening than one skinny black man. And there was no one else in sight. ‘You – you’re… a postman?’ Her tongue tripped as she spoke.

      ‘Yes, ma’am. Do you need help?’

      She nodded and pointed in the direction she’d come from, a ragged sob creasing her body.

      He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first. There was the pond, and there he spied the terrier. The small dog was soaked through. Barking urgently at him, it ran back towards the water.

      ‘The pond.’ The woman squeezed out the words and he noticed now that her hands were filthy, her coat spattered with mud.

      ‘There’s something in the pond?’

      It was useless. She had begun to shiver, her teeth actually chattering as shock took hold. Lawrie laid his bike down on the grass and headed towards the pond on foot. The dog was still barking in a fury, running laps between the edge of the pond and the path.

      ‘What you got, boy?’

      The dog splashed into the water, checking back to make sure he was being followed. There was a bundle there, a dirty blanket that once had been white. Lawrie crouched by the edge next to a smaller set of footprints that must have belonged to the woman. It didn’t look like much, this wad of sodden wool, but that didn’t stop fear from squeezing his chest tight as he reached out with his right hand, the palm of his left sinking into freezing mud as he tried to keep his balance.

      He strained his arm and caught an inch of fabric between two fingers. Pulling gently, the bundle moved closer and he grabbed a tighter hold. The wool was heavy with water. White and yellow embroidered flowers peeked out from beneath the pond filth. Daisies. When he lifted it the bundle was heavier than he’d anticipated, but it wasn’t the weight that sent him crashing to the ground – only sheer luck landing him onto the bank rather than into the water. His heart pounded his ribs so hard that he glanced down at his chest, expecting to see it burst out through his coat, scattering buttons onto the ground.

      The blanket lay there on the grass, the bundle coming apart. A baby’s arm had escaped, along with a shock of dark curly hair and a glimpse of a cheek. It could have been a doll, but one touch had been enough to convince him that it wasn’t. The hand was frozen stiff but the skin gave as his fingers had brushed against it.

      Someone had left a baby in the pond to die. A baby whose skin was as dark as Lawrie’s.

      Typing had a rhythm to it that Evie enjoyed. When she was in a good mood, more often than not these days, she sang along quietly to the tapping of the keys as she transcribed Mr Sullivan’s letters. He called her his little songbird and had been known to pat her on the head like a child, but he was a nice older gentleman and she knew she was lucky to have him. When his last secretary had left to get married, Evie had only been in the typing pool for a few months. Mr Sullivan’s single stipulation for her replacement was that she should be the fastest and most accurate typist. Mrs Jones, the pool supervisor, had sent Evie upstairs with a sly smile on her lips, and Evie had braced herself for his polite excuse but Mr Sullivan’s jaw had only dropped half an inch when he saw her, quickly masked by a smile, and it was Evie who had skipped back downstairs to whisk away Mrs Jones’s smirk along with her coat and bag.

      She loved her job at Vernon & Sons. A light and airy office on the third floor, a desk by the window so that she could indulge in the odd daydream, and her best friend sitting right opposite. Delia was attached, professionally speaking, to the young Mr Vernon, the boss’s son, and would fix a tight smile to her face each time she had to untangle herself from his wandering hands and their clammy palms, her head turned away from his halitosis. As Ma often said, thank goodness Evie had not been born pretty and blonde. Not that Delia was a bad typist, only the young Mr Vernon had his own set of requirements when it came to secretaries.

      ‘I’ll be off now, Evie.’ Mr Sullivan emerged from his office, hat on head and overcoat slung over an arm. ‘I’m taking a slightly longer lunch today but you won’t tell anyone, will you?’ He winked and grinned, in the manner of a kindly uncle to his favourite niece.

      Evie smiled conspiratorially. ‘I’ll not say a word. Off anywhere special?’

      ‘Just to see the kiddies.’ His eldest daughter had two of her own now and lived just off Lavender Hill, only up the road. ‘I’ll be back by three if anyone needs me.’

      She waved him off. It was one o’clock and the offices were all emptying out; she could hear doors opening and closing throughout the three floors that the company occupied, echoing up and down the staircase. The girls would be heading to the small staffroom, or outside if they were brave enough, to eat their sandwiches. The men would be going out to a café or home for a hot meal, to see their wives, or mistress in the case of the young Mr Vernon – he’d packed his wife off to Surrey during the war and never thought to bring her back.

      ‘You almost done?’ Delia whizzed a sheet of paper from her typewriter with a flourish. ‘I’m starving.’

      ‘Two ticks.’ Evie locked her drawer. Things had a habit of going missing when she didn’t.

      ‘Off out are you?’

      Evie looked up, stifling a groan. The suspected thief herself was standing in the doorway, her lip curling upwards in a

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