About a month after Rose arrived, Mrs. Cohen took her to Woolworth’s, or Woolies, as everyone in Leeds called it. Rose was spending most of her time hidden in the darkness of the servants’ staircase or beneath the piano in the drawing room. The afternoon when Mrs. Cohen had invited over a pair of sisters around Rose’s age, refugees from Germany who had arrived on a train a few months before Rose, did not go well. (The older sister wanted to talk only about hairstyles; the younger sister barely spoke, and all Rose could think about was the unfairness that they had been placed together, while she and Gerhard had been split up. “It’s a big expense and responsibility to care for a child,” Mutti wrote. “We are very fortunate that two families agreed to take you both in.”)
Perhaps a trip to Woolies would prove a useful distraction, Rose heard Mrs. Cohen say one morning to Mr. Cohen as he was nearly out the door. Off to Woolies they went. Rose was examining a display of notebooks, trying to decide what to buy, when a young blond girl peered over from the inkwell section and said, nearly bored: “You want the lined one.” As Rose soon would learn, Margaret was six months older, and having lived in Leeds all her life, she seemed to know it all.
They tried to see each other every weekend, Rose skipping synagogue when she could. Today they went to the cinema, and using the sixpence that Mr. Cohen gave to her on Sundays, Rose paid to see Intermezzo for the second time. Sitting on the back steps of the post office afterward, digging their hands into the grease-stained bag in which Margaret kept the sourballs and jelly babies that they bought weekly with their ration stamps, Rose found it difficult to care who might walk by and spot her.
“Leslie Howard is the perfect gentleman,” Margaret proclaimed. “I’m going to marry someone like him.”
“Me too.” Rose could picture it. She too would marry an Englishman. He would be tall and fair, with light-colored eyes like Margaret and Gerhard, and even the slightest bit stoop-shouldered like Margaret’s father, a doctor, his steps heavy with the gravity of his work.
Margaret said that she had read that in his next film Leslie Howard was going to play a pilot; what could be grander than that?
“Mmm.” Rose was focused on breaking a sourball into two. She tried biting it, gnawing on its underside, but nothing was working. The tips of her fingers became sticky and discolored with sugary purple.
“He’s very active in the war effort, you know.”
Rose nodded. She did know, but she did not want to think about the war effort. Studiously she concentrated on the marbleized fissures in her sourball. The sourball looked so easy to crack, and yet, she was getting nowhere. “What movie is coming next—did you ask Mr. Early?”
Margaret shook her head. “My dad says that it’s because of men like Leslie Howard that we’re going to get rid of Hitler.” She bit off a licorice end, chewing thoughtfully. “He’ll be gone, the war will be over, and then you can go home again.”
Rose nodded mutely, her throat tightening. Home. The very word filled her with such a gust of icy hollowness, one whoosh and her insides were emptied out. “Yes, of course,” she finally said, trying to be the good English girl she told herself she was. When she thought about leaving, all she could remember were the reasons she wanted to stay: Margaret and the movies and Woolies and the scrapbook she was making of the royal family.
“Then my brothers will come home,” Margaret said. “Can you imagine, the war over?”
“No,” Rose said, putting the sticky-wet sourball back into the paper bag. In her mind’s eye, she saw her beautiful Mutti, her slender neck bent over the piano keys, intent on practice. She remembered the heavy smell of Papi’s leather case and the way he used to let her sit on his lap when she was little and stamp his correspondence. It had been hours since she had thought about her parents. What were they doing now? What would her mother think, if she could see Rose, ignoring the Cohens’ rules, stealing off to go to the cinema, laughing with her friend?
Rose stood, unsteady on her feet. “I should get home,” she said. All that sugar was unsettling her stomach. “I don’t feel so well after all.”
When she returned to the Cohens’, she didn’t bother climbing up through the cellar, but opened the front door slowly, resigned. There was Mary in the entry hall, her stout body down on her knees, furiously brightening the brass inlay of the umbrella stand. She looked up at Rose, her little blue eyes set deep in her pale moon face, a face that inspired equal amounts of fear and admiration. “Child.”
“I went outside,” Rose said.
Mary looked at her, but didn’t respond. She rubbed the clawed foot of the umbrella stand, and then swatted at it for good measure.
“I shouldn’t have.”
Mary snorted. “Not my house, not my business.”
Rose was feeling too miserable to answer. She felt another twinge in her stomach. Was this God’s way of punishing her for skipping out on synagogue, lying to the Cohens? She wished it was Mary’s business, she truly did.
“You’ve got a letter,” Mary said. “I’ve laid it on your bed.”
A letter? Rose’s stomach flew up to her throat. She hadn’t gotten a letter in months. What if it were bad news? After all this time, it could only be bad news. “Oh,” she said.
“Go upstairs, read it. Get back into bed.” Mary touched the tiny silver cross that nestled in the hollow of her neck. “Or Mrs. Cohen is liable to blame all your nonsense on me, just like everything else.”
Rose nodded, swallowed. She pictured the letter upstairs, waiting for her, lying on her tan coverlet—whatever news it contained, it existed, it was not something conjured up by her imagination. She turned to Mary, as if to speak, but no words came out. She wheeled around and tore up the front staircase to the third floor, where she was told she belonged.