*
EMMY dreaded telling Mrs. Crofton that she was being forced to leave London. For the next two days after Mum got the notice, she imagined herself arriving for work on Tuesday and telling Mrs. Crofton she was being evacuated. She pictured Mrs. Crofton replying that she would not be able to keep the job open until Emmy could return. Emmy rehearsed hearing Mrs. Crofton say that there was no way now to hide Emmy’s age from her cousin, and that Emmy would have to hope she could win him over when she was older, assuming he still had any interest. Emmy pictured Mrs. Crofton muttering she should never have hired Emmy in the first place. She didn’t want to keep hearing those words in her head, but they played and replayed over and over until it seemed like she had already told Mrs. Crofton and the dream was already dead. Everything about the situation seemed so ridiculously unfair. Emmy couldn’t completely blame Mum for the turn of events, but she needed to blame someone for the war and Emmy was angry at her mother for insisting she evacuate for Julia’s sake, as though Emmy’s own safety were not a consideration.
Mum came home Monday evening from a meeting at the school with a list of things the girls were to bring and not bring. Julia, excited to be going on a train to the country like some privileged heiress, was full of questions. She was enthralled at the idea of spending the autumn at a country home and riding a horse—as if all country homes had one—and growing her own pumpkins and skipping stones over a pond and counting stars. Emmy had only one question. How long would the evacuation last? The year before, the children began returning within a month. She could only hope it would be the same this time around. She had to get back to London. This opportunity for her and her designs would not wait for her.
Wishes didn’t come true by wishing.
On Tuesday afternoon before work, Emmy took Julia next door to Thea’s as usual. Their neighbor was in the middle of getting together a box of supplies for her Anderson shelter, a hut of corrugated steel covered in earth and half-buried in the ground in her back garden.
The Downtrees’ flat was connected to Thea’s and six others so that their brick, two-story homes looked like one long house with the same front door repeated seven times over. Each of the narrow flats had a splash of lawn in the front and a tiny garden in the back. Brick partitions separated the gardens. The neighbors had little flower beds and tomato vines and pots of pansies in their tiny gardens. The Downtrees had a stone slab, overgrown hedges, and dirt. Thea had erected an Anderson shelter in her minuscule garden when she was told her cat would not be welcome in the public shelter the neighbors all shared in the cellar of the shoe repair shop at the end of the street. Her private shelter nearly filled the space from garden wall to garden wall. The Andy looked like a dog kennel made by someone who had no idea how to construct one and so the builder decided to bury the evidence of ever having tried. Mum thought it was hideous; Julia was plain terrified of it.
“Oh my goodness, do you still need me to take Julia today?” Thea’s eyes were shining with agitation. The news of the second evacuation had everyone on the street preparing for the worst, whatever that was.
“I still have to go to work today. It’s my last day—at least for a while,” Emmy said. “I’m hoping we’ll be back soon.”
Thea stared at Emmy as though she had spoken in a foreign language, one Thea didn’t understand.
“Soon?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m hoping this evacuation will be like the last one.”
Thea was holding a wicker basket filled with biscuits, tins of sardines, and bottles of soda water, but she set this down and told Julia, who was standing next to her, that the mother cat had moved the kittens into a bureau drawer and she should go see how cute they were. As soon as Julia had dashed upstairs, Thea turned to Emmy.
“Has your mother not told you how things are, Emmeline?”
Her tone made Emmy feel instantly young and uninformed, just like the child that everyone kept insisting she was. “What do you mean?”
“France is occupied and—”
“I know that,” Emmy interjected. It wasn’t as if she never read the papers or didn’t listen to the radio.
“Yes, but that means now the Germans can reach us. They can fly their planes right across the Channel from France. It’s not like last time. They’re saying the Germans plan to bomb London.”
“They said that a year ago.”
“Yes, but a year ago, the Germans didn’t have France.”
Now it was Emmy’s turn to stare at her as if she didn’t understand the language Thea was speaking.
“We’re on an island,” Emmy said. “The Nazis can’t roll in here with their tanks like they have everywhere else.”
“But that’s why no one can say how long this will last. I would hate for you to leave here thinking you’ll be back in a month. The papers say—”
Emmy didn’t want to hear any more. She was tired of everyone and everything deciding what was to become of everything that mattered to her. She cut Thea off in midsentence. “I have to go, Thea, or I’ll be late. Sorry. I’ll be back for Julia before six thirty.”
Emmy knew she had been abysmally rude, but she simply had to get away from Thea and her box of supplies for her bomb shelter, and from the fear in her eyes. She went back to the flat for the two sketches she had promised Mrs. Crofton and held them to her chest for a moment. These would keep her place, if not in Mrs. Crofton’s shop, then in Mr. Dabney’s future plans. They had to.
She headed for the bridal shop, passing sandbag walls on street corners that she and everyone else had been walking past for a year and hardly noticed anymore. Everyone on the sidewalk seemed distracted by unspoken ponderings as they dashed about without a word to one another, not even a tip of the head or a weak smile. It was as though the imminent departure of a quarter million children meant London was poised to lose her innocence and no one quite knew what to do on the eve of that loss.
Emmy arrived at Primrose Bridal and opened the door. The store was empty except for one young woman buying a veil.
And only a veil.
Emmy surmised from the conversation the woman and Mrs. Crofton were engaged in that she was to marry on Friday morning at Saint Martin–in-the-Fields wearing the veil and a dress of white dotted Swiss that she had worn to a piano recital in April. Her husband-to-be was shipping out with his platoon on Saturday afternoon.
While Mrs. Crofton finished the transaction, Emmy went into the back room to see what hand-sewing was lined up for that afternoon, but the long table was empty. A few moments later, Mrs. Crofton joined her. She looked haggard, as if she hadn’t slept well or perhaps had eaten something for lunch that now roiled inside her.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Crofton?” Emmy asked.
She produced a wan smile. “Ask me that question when the war is over, Emmeline, and I might have an answer for you.” Mrs. Crofton looked down at Emmy’s hands. “You brought them.”
“Of course.” Emmy held the sketches out to her.
She hesitated for a moment before taking them. “Do you have something to tell me?”
The words startled Emmy, but a second later she was glad Mrs. Crofton had suspected she was to be sent away.
“My mother is making me leave. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Crofton. I had no idea this would happen when I took this job.”
The woman nodded once and cast her gaze to the sketches in Emmy’s hand. “I really thought I could pretend there was nothing to worry about as long as I just went about my business and sold wedding dresses to happy young women.”
Emmy hadn’t rehearsed a response from Mrs. Crofton that had nothing to do with her, so she had no words at the ready.
“Do you still want me to send these to my cousin?” Mrs. Crofton’s voice was void of emotion and strength, as though it really didn’t matter anymore that she had met Emmy and liked her sketches and wanted to help Emmy embark on a future as a wedding dress designer.
“I most certainly do. The evacuation doesn’t change anything.”
Mrs. Crofton looked up at Emmy. “Except that you won’t be in London.”
“But I am going to return as soon as I can. I very much want you to send the sketches to Mr. Dabney and I want to know when he will be returning to the city.”
The woman laughed, a short little chortle shrouded in lassitude. “Oh, the confidence of the young! You would have us all drinking victory champagne by Christmas. My neighbor’s son is in the British navy and she told me he has no idea how long this will last. I’m not getting any more dresses from my suppliers in Paris. It will be hard to sell wedding gowns when I haven’t any to sell. And if all the London designers head to the hills, where will that leave me?”