“Well, that’s lovely of you both. You can see that the bombs haven’t got me yet. Shall we sit in the garden?”
Iris dabbed at her forehead with the handkerchief again.
“Too hot for you, dear? That’s unlike you. You always liked the heat as a child. Just like your old dad. Maudie couldn’t stand it, but I’ve always loved it. In India, the men used to call me ‘Devil Brown’ because—”
“Yes, we know, Dad. I still like the heat, but it’s not such a wonderful thing when you’re almost seven months pregnant.” Two small beads of sweat evaded the handkerchief and slid down Iris’ left cheek. Sam thought that pregnancy had made her even more beautiful. Her curly brown perm now framed a slightly fuller face than it had at the beginning of the year. There was the slightest hint of a double chin, but Sam found this charming. In fact, he found everything about her charming – her sparkling, oval, green eyes, her high cheekbones, her neat nose and her small, determined mouth.
“Well, yes, of course. But I can move the garden table and chairs into the shade, dear.”
“Oh, alright.”
Thirty minutes later the three of them were sitting with their empty teacups in Fred Brown’s neat little garden, relaxing under the cloudless Tooting sky. The cottage was at the end of a long street of terraced two-up two-downs. It was the only detached property, a fact in which Fred took much pride, and it backed on to some old fields where allotments were kept. A small gate at the end of the garden led into these fields and to his own nearby allotment. As they relaxed in the garden, they could hear birds singing and chickens clucking. They could as well have been in deepest Kent or Sussex countryside as a fifty-minute bus ride from Big Ben. Sam and his father-in-law were stretched out in deckchairs in the small area of garden that still had some sun. Iris sat at the table in the cool shadow of the house with her feet on a chair. They had tried to avoid talking about the war as such discussions usually sent Fred Brown’s blood pressure haywire. They had heard that Fred had not slept much in the past week with all the night activity, but, as he reminded them, he could get by with a minimum of sleep as he’d learned in the army. Discussion had moved on to the naming of his grandson.
“It might well be a girl, Dad. Don’t count your chickens.”
“Poppycock, Iris. It’s going to be a boy. I know it. Aren’t I right, Sam? Now what do you think about Winston? No, I suppose you’re right. Everyone and their uncle will be calling their kids Winston, I suppose. Then again, if things don’t go so well perhaps we’ll have to call him Adolf, eh?”
Iris steered the conversation away from names to her father’s domestic arrangements. Before she had become pregnant she had come down every week from Battersea to see to her father’s cleaning and washing, but her father had insisted on her dropping this when he’d learned that a baby was on the way. He’d found someone down the street who was prepared to do for him for a modest fee. Mrs Hammond, a sprightly little widow whom Fred found pleasant company.
“She doesn’t have designs on you, Dad, does she?”