He sits perfectly still.
She runs her fingers across the stump lightly. “So smooth,” she says, surprised. “Like a baby.”
Her fingers linger there.
Nigel thinks of his son. Robin knew this girl intimately, privately. She holds some key to him that Nigel would never have had if she had not appeared in April on their doorstep. He knows that his wife wants her gone, but how can they let her leave and take the last bits of Robin from them?
“Where do you go every morning?” Nigel asks her. The bourbon has numbed his tongue. It burns in his gut.
“I’m waiting to talk to Winston Churchill,” she says.
Her mother holds her on her lap while she kneads the bread. She tells her how you know the dough is ready. She has Martha press her little finger into the wet dough. See how it springs back? her mother says. Martha watches as the small dent her finger left disappears, and the dough is once again smooth and whole.
“If we could only get enough flour,” Martha tells them at dinner one night, “I would bake the most delicious bread. It’s all in the kneading, you know.”
It is almost June and still the air is damp and chilly. Nigel longs for the sunshine. He longs to throw open the windows and smell the warmth of it. Instead, the cold air smells, still, of war.
Nigel wants to please the girl. “Really?” he says, although he doesn’t care about any of it—bread or apples. “It’s in the kneading, is it?”
Diana is frowning. She concentrates on dissecting the fish on the platter. She slices it and reveals its spine. She lifts the bone from it whole.
“Lovely,” Nigel says. It is lovely too, he thinks. The shape of it. The sturdiness. Long ago he loved the sciences, biology most of all. He refills his wineglass, splashing some on the tablecloth. It is white, thank heavens. White wine with fish.
Diana holds a serving of the fish toward Martha, who lifts her plate to receive it.
“You weren’t married to him,” Diana says, her gray eyes leveled at the girl. “Did you think I wouldn’t check? Did you think I would simply believe you?”
Martha looks up, surprised, her fork held in midair.
“Robin,” Diana says, and Nigel is certain he has not heard his wife say their son’s name since they got word last winter, It sounds strangled in her throat. “You were not his wife.”
Martha puts a bite of fish into her mouth and chews slowly. “No,” she admits. “Not the way you mean.”
Diana laughs. “The way I mean? There is only one sort of wife. The other . . .” She lets her voice trail off.
The girl continues to eat her dinner. The overcooked green beans, the dry fish.
Nigel watches her, this girl who is not his daughter-in-law after all but instead was what? His son’s lover? Whore? He presses his fingertips into his temples, trying to clear the fog in his head.
“You have to leave,” Diana is saying. “You have to get out of our house. Go back to America. Or not. I don’t care where you go. But you must leave here.”
Martha continues to eat. She says between bites, “I met him at a dance. So handsome. So British.” This makes her laugh. “He came by my flat the next morning and asked if I’d like to take a ride with him. He said he would be going off to fight soon. He was trying to get a lot of living in. Just in case, he said. I don’t think I was away from him again, until he left. I came here because I didn’t know where else to go. Who else had loved him? Who else had known him, really?”
Nigel’s heart goes out to the girl. He says, “Surely you would have been his wife. . . .” When he sees the hurt look on her face, he corrects himself. “His legal wife, if he’d come back. We’d be sitting here, the four of us, with fresh-baked bread and lots of butter.”
Martha smiles at him, gratefully, he thinks.
“We don’t know any such thing,” Diana says. “He never once mentioned you to us. Why would he? Young men who go off to war need to have pleasures that make them feel alive. They need to have relations with a woman. It makes them feel invincible. If he had come home, he would be here without you. Without your bread. We would never know you even existed.”
“You’re wrong,” Martha says, her face set with determination.
ALL SHE HAS is one green valise, a small square thing. He watches from his window as she walks away from him, down the street, the suitcase bumping against her. There is a light rain falling. The air carries a chill unusual in early June.
Nigel imagines opening a window and calling for her to come back. We’ll drink Manhattans, he’ll say. He can almost hear her footsteps on the stairs and see her bright face in this dim room. The bourbon on her breath, the cool touch of her fingers. Shakily, Nigel pours himself a sherry and lifts it to his lips. It is ten o’clock in the morning. His day stretches before him, endless, cold, lonely.