—36—
I very nearly did not go to a planned dinner at Nina’s.
A huge battle took place overhead in the afternoon, rattling all of us, and the blitzkrieg followed all night.
Mother slept through the night somehow, bless her, and I’d grown rather adept myself at catching a little sleep even with gunfire and incendiaries falling for hours.
But when everyone had gone to their daily tasks, Mother to her embroidery, Peter to the ministry, I found myself unsettled again.
Restless. I returned to my studio, and rather than paint, I found myself organizing my brushes by size, sorting the various pencils and charcoals into tidy piles, tossing scraps of paper and old sketches into the trash.
Beyond the windows, rain fell against the glass relentlessly.
I had the sense that I’d forgotten something.
Mother had suggested, “Drink some chamomile to settle your nerves, darling. Who wouldn’t be rattled in such a din?”
She wasn’t, I noticed, but I knew that was her illness coupled with a hefty dosing of morphine.
She’d rallied with the infusion of apple pie and a beef stew made with the rump roast Peter had come by somehow.
She had not eaten a lot, but it was cheering, and I feasted myself, hungry in a way I hadn’t been for years.
Perhaps it was the good food that eventually lifted my spirits.
On Friday afternoon, I took a bath and washed my hair, which I’d had trimmed only a couple of weeks before, so it sprang into good order with only a little coaxing, and I took the time to put on a full round of makeup, powder, lipstick, rouge.
It was remarkable how much strain it obscured.
Peter was in good spirits, picking me up after work so we could walk together the scant mile to Nina’s townhome, a safer choice than driving, even if bombs were falling later.
The rain had stopped, leaving the air cleansed and fresh, all the more noticeable after days of smoky aftertaste.
Twilight lingered, turning the sky a soft purple that felt somehow hopeful, and I dared to wish no planes would come tonight.
“A night without bombs would be such a luxury,” I said.
I had not worn high heels in quite some time, and felt myself teetering, clinging to his elbow.
“Indeed.” He eyed the sky. “One can always hope.”
Peter spoke mildly, about the weather, a friend he’d seen at Paddington Station, and a new secretary in the pool at the foreign office. “She’s quite good. Her husband has shipped out to Africa.”
I glanced at him, alerted by something in his tone, but his face showed nothing. “She must welcome the work to distract her.”
“I would imagine.” He patted the pocket of his overcoat for a lighter, and instead pulled out a tiny vial and showed it to me. The cyanide. I’d forgotten about it again. I touched the inner pocket of my own coat and felt the rigid shape. Oddly comforting.
He lit his cigarette. “We’ve been coordinating troops from any number of directions. Australians.” A pause. “Quite a lot of Indians, actually.”
“I don’t know why they would bother. This is hardly their war.” Any more than the last one had been.
“Patriotism prevails.”
Patriotism for what land? I wanted to ask, but it would only start an argument, and nothing I said would shift his opinion. “Mmm,” I said.
“It’s a chance for young men of no means to discover a better life.”
Or die, I thought. “Let’s not, Peter.” We turned the corner, and suddenly, there was a half block in ruins.
Both of us halted. I couldn’t quite make sense of the rubble, tumbles of gray stone and beams sticking up like broken bones.
On an upper floor, a wall had fallen away to reveal a bedroom, the bed still made, a curtain floating in an unseen breeze.
“Good God,” Peter said. “Isn’t this the building where George and Catherine lived?”
They were acquaintances, a woman my mother had played whist with on Monday afternoons. “It is. I wonder where they are. Will you look into it tomorrow?”
“Of course.” He took my elbow. “Are you all right?”
I sighed. “I am, honestly. What does that say about me?”
“That these are trying days for all of us.” He looked upward, shook his head. “Good God,” he repeated.
At Nina’s, she took my coat, kissed my cheek, and gave me a look I couldn’t quite interpret. “What?”
She shook her head, drawing us into the room. The usual suspects mingled in the salon, cocktails in hand—a handful of couples who worked with the government and war offices. We’d known them for decades.
Added to the mix were three young women. “We’ve taken in some refugees,” Nina announced. “Everyone, this is Adelaide, Mary, and Gertrude.”
“Trudy,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
Adelaide was a sturdy girl, about twenty, with freckles from head to toe. She’d been bombed out of Kensington, and worked in the canteen. Mary was a plain girl, brown hair, who worked in the library.
Gertrude—Trudy—was remarkably small and delicate, built like a bird, with big eyes and red hair, proved to be Peter’s new secretary. A redheaded woman had made a great deal of trouble in my life, once upon a time in Cairo, and I suddenly realized why Peter seemed so much more chipper recently.
A sudden flash of him back then, wild with drink and fury and the unpredictable violence that overtook him, gave me a sense of remembered dread. I fingered a scar I bore across the side of one arm.
But he couldn’t touch me now. We had not been intimate since those days in Cairo and never would be again.
Nina said, “Welcome to all! We’re so glad to have you.”
Despite the reality of rationing, the meal was quite delicious.
Jonathan must have been the source of the black-market beef, or perhaps Nina had found a contact through her father in the country.
Either way, we feasted on a rich, deep stew, fragrant with herbs, shiny with fat.
No butter for the bread, but the rolls were light and fluffy, a masterpiece of clever baking, and for dessert, an actual pie, just like the one Peter had brought home.
“Where in the world did you get this?” Trudy asked.
“One doesn’t ask such questions in the modern world, darling,” Nina drawled, sipping a sidecar.
“Oh! I’m so sorry!” Her pale face showed her embarrassment, and also her extreme youth. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty.
“You’ve been out of the country,” Peter said. “I’m sure you didn’t realize.”
Nina was in fine form, recounting her best stories to make us laugh. The phonograph played a symphony by Sibelius. I no longer partook of spirits and hadn’t for more than a decade, but my mood was lifted by the good company. Peter was his charming best, eyes flashing.
The sirens went off just as we were finishing the first course. Nina stood up with her cocktail. “Right, everyone, under the table.”
Titters met her suggestion. Jonathan said, “She is quite serious. Everyone under the table. Take the pillows from your chairs.”
I glanced around, startled and amused, and then the guns started rat-a-tat-tatting overhead, and I dived with everyone else into the space beneath the ancient, broad table.
Snatching the pillow from my chair, I sat, but couldn’t quite get settled until I tugged the dress up over my knees.
“Sorry for my lack of modesty, but the skirt is tight.”
A boom made the silver on the table clatter, and someone made a little shriek.
“I tell myself it’s a thunderstorm,” I said.
Nina sipped her cocktail. “Remember the weekend the maharaja came to my humble country house? That was one of the most dramatic storms I ever remember.”
“He wasn’t maharaja then,” I said. “Only prince.”
“Right.” She gestured toward invisible guests. “Rocky was quite smitten, as I recall.”
“Goodness, I miss him,” Jonathan exclaimed. “Was there ever a man as exuberant as he? Such a zest for life.”
Rocky’s face rose in memory, the thick curls, his dancing blue eyes. “Everyone fell in love with him.”
“Not the prince,” Peter said from the other end of the space. “As I recall he only had eyes for Elsie.”
That had been the entire reason for the gathering—for us, Tanveer, and me. Peter had been there, too, and Rocky and Grayson.
A whistling bomb sounded nearby, and we all winced, bending over ourselves as it fell, bracing for impact. A trio of small snapping sounds came one, two, three.
“Incendiaries,” one of the men said at the other end of the table. “Sounded close. I’ll go check.”
“I sometimes wish the one that was going to get me would just get it over with,” said Mary. “It’s so exhausting, never sleeping, never knowing. I’m so tired, it would be easier to just die.”
“Bite your tongue,” said Trudy in a whispery, baby voice. “Think of all the poor lads out there fighting, taking bullets.” She made a sharp noise, and bit her finger, like a movie heroine. I tried not to show that I was rolling my eyes.
“All hands on deck,” Gregory cried from the doorway. “Fire in the garden.”
“What do we do?” squeaked the sturdy girl.
I pushed a chair out of my way. “Stay here. Not all of us need to fight the fire.”
“Peter,” Jonathan said, “stay with the women.”
A knot of us hurried behind him, and quickly formed a bucket brigade to contain the fire in the garden.
It was the first time I’d done it in real time, although we all had been instructed.
I was the body just beyond the doorway, and it was the first time I’d been outside during a nighttime raid.
I had little time to think about it, passing buckets back and forth, but there was something liberating about not hiding, about standing in the garden beneath the night sky, daring the Nazis to kill us.
We didn’t die. The fire was halted, and we trooped back inside. “I say that calls for a drink,” Jonathan said in a jolly voice.
“Under the table?”
“Hell no!” Alexander cried. “Fuck the bloody bastards.”
No one corrected his language. The rest of the party crawled out from under the table, Peter reaching a hand back to help Trudy stand. She blinked up at him with grateful eyes.
I glanced at Nina, who remembered the days in Cairo as well as I did.
I felt a chill of foreboding.
“Never mind,” Nina said at my elbow, inhaling smoke from her cigarette. “You don’t, do you? Mind?”
“What he does is none of my business,” I said. “It’s just the—” Eyeing Peter in thrall to Trudy, I spoke my worry aloud. “Do have Jonathan keep an eye on that.”
“He has been. We all say it was the war, but I remember that weekend in the country, when the prince was there, Peter was . . . rather rough . . . with a village girl.”
A chill twisted through my gut. I’d always believed his violence had been a result of his shell shock in combination with drink. “And you never thought to mention this?”
She pressed her lips together. “It was only the once. And anyway, you were otherwise engaged.” She took my arm. “That was a good party—I took care of you.”
It had been a beautiful weekend in many ways, but it had also been laced with sorrow and the coming losses. But to reassure her, I covered her hand. “It was an important time in my life.”