Dear Zachary, I feel dreadful that I was not able to keep my promise to come with you, but I hope that you do understand the need for the evacuation.
She gnawed at the top of her pencil. Now that great solid London was blacked out and sandbagged and dug in, here was this awful silence that the wet wind couldn’t disguise. Autumn had come but the Germans hadn’t, after all.
I trust you have found a good family to take care of you.
The wind rattled the café’s windows, and in the absence of shrill voices she could hear the cutlery scrape as the couple by the window chased peas around their plates. They were parents, of course they were: there was no other way to accrue such intricate worry lines. Are we quite sure we have done the right thing?
On every corner Mary had passed that day there had been posters explaining that the children should remain evacuated—that the greatest Christmas gift to Herr Hitler would be to bring them home into harm’s way.
I am sure you are being jolly fearless
Mary frowned and rubbed this out. The authorities imagined that the individual was a glove, requiring only the animating hand of a slogan. She could almost see her father, in some windowless room of the House, penning the script in committee. All morning the damp southwesterly had caught at the corners of the new slogans and sent them flapping against the billboards, exposing the fossil seams of earlier imprecations in their sediment of paste.
Even though I was your teacher for only a week, I should like you to know that you are a blazing creature despite being an absolute knave, and that I slightly miss teaching you. I trust things are going well for you, but just in case they are not—and if you can bear to hold your nose and make a promise to a silly woman who has already broken her promise to you—then please guarantee me that you will write to let me know.
She signed the letter “Miss North,” tucked it into its envelope, and went out into the rain for a postbox.
She was home at five, as dusk fell. The front door swung open when her foot fell on the first of the steps that rose to it.
“Thank you, Palmer,” she said, giving him her raincoat to hang.
“How was teaching?” called her mother from the drawing room.
“Well,” said Mary, “you know children.”
“I only know you, darling, and I daresay they aren’t all so maddening.”
Mary popped her head through the drawing room door. “I am fond of you too, Mother.”
“Fortunately I had Nanny whenever it got too realistic.”
“Where’s Hilda? I saw her coat in the hall.”
“I made her go through to the scullery. I don’t care how much good these cigarettes do your chests, they are ruinous for the curtains.”
“They are slimming.”
Her mother lowered her voice. “They are slimming you, darling. They must do the opposite to Hilda.”
“Perhaps she lights the wrong end.”
“Her life is a carousel of torpid men and toffee éclairs. I tell her she should volunteer for war work, like you, or at least find a man who will.”
“She is fond of Geoffrey St. John.”
“As tripe is fond of onions, darling, but what a fright they look together in the pan.”
“Don’t be mean about Geoffrey, Mother—he kisses rather well.”
Her mother treated her to a knowing expression that Mary felt sure was pure bluff. It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with.
Mary breezed from the drawing room, blowing a kiss on the way out.
In the hallway the familiar air of the house closed around her—the beeswax on the banisters and the Brasso that burnished the stair rods. A hint of laundry on the boil. Somewhere far within, crockery clacked as a maid addressed the detritus of afternoon tea. Coal rumbled as it was decanted from scuttle to purdonium. That evening, it seemed, the fires would be lit for the first time since March.
In the scullery Hilda was smoking by the small window.
“And what of wild intrigue?”
Mary grinned. “I’m working on Tom. I shall telephone him again today. I’m sure he’ll find me a post. I keep reminding him there are scads of children who haven’t been evacuated.”
Hilda mimed a hunchback with the twisted face of a lunatic.
“Oh stop it,” said Mary. “I see no reason why they shouldn’t all be given a chance to learn. I just need to persuade Tom.”
“He seems a drip, if you ask me. You go for dinners, you practically beg him to kiss you, yet he offers you neither his lips nor his patronage. I should move on, if I were you.”
“Yes but he is a man though, don’t you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.’
“Move on, darling, before the drip-drip leaves you soaked.”
“All it is, is that Tom is rather shy. When I’m with him . . . well, it’s nice.”
Hilda offered an eyebrow.
“No, really! Tom is lovely.”
“What’s he like?”
“Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate.”