Trafalgar Square was raucous and crammed with people banging on dustbin lids and singing, bodies pressing up against each other—Rose barely cleared five feet, so her view was of shoulders and chins, the backs of heads, arms swinging, jostling. “There’s Fred!” Margaret yelled, though they were standing right next to each other. “Fred!”
It took Rose a moment to remember who Fred was. Yes, the lumbering American MP that Margaret had met at the Rainbow Corner a few weeks ago. With Margaret these days, there was always a boy. None lasted. (You wouldn’t know from the way she went on and on about them that she was one of only a handful of women in her first year at the London School of Economics.) Margaret slipped off to Rose’s left, the crowd swallowing her up. Rose tried to follow, but she no longer could see Margaret, and she didn’t see Fred. A serviceman shimmied up a lamppost, whirling off his jacket. A girl in a yellow dress clambered up to the fountain with two officers and danced between them.
Rose stepped back, her ankle hitting something hard. It was only then that she realized she was standing at the bottom of the marble steps leading up to the National Gallery. Floodlights blazed, casting the building in an amber glow.
In the eight months that Rose had lived in London, she had been inside the National Gallery once, the same week she had moved, after Margaret had offered to share her London room and enabling Rose to leave the Cohens’. Margaret was registering for classes at LSE and Rose—well, she was supposed to be looking for a job. “Perhaps you can tutor,” Margaret had offered, not unkindly. “You can tutor and go to school.”
“We’ll see,” Rose had responded, not wanting to spoil the pretense. They both knew she needed a dependable paycheck that tutoring wouldn’t offer. But first Rose had come to the National Gallery and queued up. She had heard all about Myra Hess’s lunchtime concerts—in the papers, and on the wireless—a friend of the Cohens’ had attended one and said it was too wonderful to describe.
It took nearly two hours to get to the entrance, where she dropped her shilling into the box and stepped inside. The walls looked so strange with all those empty frames, no art inside (with the exception of the picture of the month, the gallery’s collection was squirreled away in a wartime hiding spot—where exactly, no one knew). Rose bought a raisin-and-honey sandwich from Lady Gater’s canteen and ate it at the counter, quickly and quietly, as if someone might spot her and tell her to leave. But no one said a word and she made her way into the packed area beneath the gallery’s glass dome, and when she realized that all the seats were taken, she stood along the side and Miss Hess came out—smaller and rounder than Rose would have thought—and she played Bach with such ferocity and perfection that all Rose could think was, I will tell Mutti all about it. One day I will bring her here.
Now here was Margaret, pulling her hand, her face shiny, her blond hair still neatly gathered in its roll at her neck and a big man in uniform at her side. They pulled her into a line of people dancing, Rose behind Margaret behind Fred, who wasn’t lumbering but graceful on his feet. Another American soldier, a handsome navy man in spite of his odd cap and tie, took his place behind her. It was easy to move, shuffle shuffle shuffle, kick, kick, to be pulled along—and she liked being a small part of a larger something. Rose marched, one-two-three, kick, kick. The war is gone, she thought. Kick, kick . . . she thrust out her legs, one after the other, exhilarated: no more war. Her hands slipped down Margaret’s waist.
“Help,” the navy man behind her said. He nearly shouted to make himself heard.
“Excuse me?”
He gripped his hands on her waist. “My dancing. I need guidance.” He swiveled her around. She was right; he was handsome, tall with bright eyes.
“Hardly.”
He repositioned his hands on her waist. “But I can think of more fun things than this dancing.”
“Now I know you’re not in your right mind.” Rose tried to say it tartly, but it didn’t come out that way. She turned back, hurried to catch up with the line, concentrated on Margaret’s backside, the slight way she was swiveling her hips to and fro.
He tottered, grasped at her waist. “Come on,” he said, and he pulled her off the line. “I’m Paul.”
“Rose.”
“I’m going home soon.”
“Everyone is coming home to me.” She liked saying that out loud. The more she said it, the more deeply she believed it. She’d gotten her last letter from Gerhard about a month ago, when his troop was on the outskirts of Berlin. It won’t be long, he had said.
“I’m going back home to Maryland, to work with my father.” He leaned close, played with the ribbon hanging from her dress.
Her heart sped up. He was so good-looking. She didn’t know where in America Maryland was—America was America—and she didn’t ask. She thought of the silk factory on Tottenham Court Road. Rose hoped to quit before long. Her parents would be horrified to learn that she had been working in a parachute factory—Mutti especially—but she would show them the hard-earned money she’d saved. She earned five pounds a week; that wasn’t nothing. “It was all worth it,” she would say.
“You’re beautiful,” Paul was saying now. He pulled off his cap, nuzzled her neck, his mouth languorous.
She stiffened. “I’m not,” she murmured, but she didn’t move. Except for a chaste awkward kiss by Phillip Trumbell, a friend of Margaret’s second-oldest brother, no one had ever touched her before. And certainly not like this. Was this the way it happened? Rose looked around, her heart careening this way and that, but no one seemed to be paying them any mind.
She tried pulling his head up to meet her lips, but his mouth was exploring her neck, her ear. She felt his tongue darting about. “No, not here,” she whispered, but he didn’t seem to hear. Tentatively she tried kissing him back, dropping a quick succession of pecks on the top of his head, her palms cupping his ears. They felt delicate, strangely separate from the rest of him.
But the more she tried to slow down, the more he sped up. He leaned over, clutched at her waist. His hands moved up.
“No,” she said, but the word was like a gelatinous thickening in her throat. “Paul.” That was his name, wasn’t it? She tried coaxing him up. She wanted him, but not this, not all of this.
“What?” He breathed out the word, the sound stretching thin, but his hands became all the surer. Before she knew it, he had lifted the hem of her dress and grabbed her backside as if it were simply his for the taking.
“No. Please,” she said—she could only manage that. She tried to push him off, but it was no use. Now he was pressing her up against something—a wall? He was so much larger. She went flat with fear. For a moment, she couldn’t hear a sound. It reminded her of the dreadful silence that punctuated her past year in London, the envelope of quiet before the chug chug and the awful splintering that sounded like a motor spinning out of control, and then a deafening rattle. It happened in seconds. Silence and then the unearthly noise: a rocket, exploding.