What? Rose almost scolded her on behalf of Mr. Bradshaw. She almost said, I’m not the buying type. He isn’t either. Can’t you see? It was exhausting, Rose thought, all that people couldn’t see, right in front of their faces. “So sorry, I can’t,” she said, but nevertheless she lingered.
“I’ll take this one,” he said, and pointed with authority to a sterling brooch in the form of a sunburst, tiny red stones winking at its center. Looking at him up close, his thin face, the set of his jaw, she realized that he wasn’t a boy at all.
“So lovely!” Julie said. “That was my choice too.” She wrote out a ticket, copied the number into a ledger, then took the pin and wrapped it in a dark cloth with a purple ribbon—wrapping that looked more sumptuous than the jewelry itself. “What a good son. My first sale of the day and a lovely story at that! You would think this would make Mr. Bradshaw very happy. But he’ll say something like: ‘I don’t know the point in making more money. It’ll all go to Atlee’s government men anyway.’ Just you wait.”
“All right,” the boy said as he slipped the small package, the velvet now twice covered in butcher paper, into his pocket. “We will.” He directed a shy smile at Rose. He had a long but friendly face, with a sharp nose, not unlike hers. His eyes were not dark brown as she had first thought, but a lovely striated green. “We will.”
Wordlessly, she followed him outside. The air was warmer than she had thought. The rain had ceased. They passed an elegant but worn town house, its fa?ade pocked with shrapnel. At the corner, they slowed. The sun hovered low in the pale afternoon sky. The light above the chemist’s shop flickered.
“I don’t know why I bought it,” he said.
“You’re a good son,” Rose said. She was only repeating the words that Julie had said, but they seemed hollow leaving her mouth, nearly querulous. Try to be nice, she told herself. Why was it so hard to be nice? She imagined the room in which such a gift would be offered. She saw a tea trolley in a richly appointed drawing room, a platinum bowl filled with delphiniums.
“I’m not,” he said, and he let out a low mangled laugh. “But she always wanted one. And now she’s sick. She’s dying.”
“Oh,” Rose said, less a word than an exhalation. The flickering chemist light caught a wave of his blond hair, and for a moment his curl turned silver. She saw a darkened spot of stubble along his jawline that he had missed shaving. He was skinny and slight, not more than a few inches taller than she. And whatever she had thought was so young about him before dissolved in the face of his proximity. “That’s very kind of you,” she said.
He thrust his hands in his pockets—his mackintosh was too big on him, its sleeves spoiled and loose with unraveling threads. “I don’t feel kind. I’m Thomas.”
For once she didn’t hesitate. “Rose,” she said, and her name seemed to glide out of her mouth.
Thomas smiled. “Do you want to walk, Rose?”
It felt too improbable to be real. “Yes,” she breathed.
“It’s raining again.” Eva sighed. “I cannot believe it’s raining again.” She had grown fleshier in the years since they had studied together at university, and now her sighs were voluble, full like the rest of her. “When I first came here, I thought it was nonsense—it can’t truly rain all the time—but no, it does. It’s England, and it rains.” She leaned against Rose’s desk and admired her left hand, on which a tiny diamond caught light. “Edgar says New York isn’t nearly as gloomy.”
“Is that so?” Rose murmured. She knew far too much about Edgar, Eva’s USAF officer, for someone she had never met. She had been typing up letters all morning, and now she was supposed to finish hand-copying the long list of suppliers to another list, but she had hardly made a dent. “I don’t mind the rain. It’s bracing, natural.” This, despite the fact that she feared the rain would mar her blouse when she stepped outside for lunch. She was wearing her best one today, her navy silk, purchased six months ago when she was offered this position, a job she had learned about because of Eva, whose mother had a cousin who knew Mr. Marks. Everyone in the office was an immigrant, including Mr. Marks himself. (He liked to hire his own, he said.) “Perhaps it takes some getting used to. You’ve been here, what? Five years?”
“Just under,” Eva said with a smile.
“I’ve lived here for more than ten years, nearly half my life. I’m practically English.”
“You?” Eva looked amused.
“Yes, me. I’m more English than most English people.” Rose prided herself on her degree in English literature and her diction scrubbed free of any German. She was grateful for her ration books, for the fact that there were rations to be had, and she liked watching Kaleidoscope and relished the smells emanating from the cafés along Haverstock Hill and taking turns in Belsize Park.
Eva laughed. “That’s the problem. No one English tries so hard.”
Rose cringed, and Eva’s words reverberated, as much as she tried to swat them away. Did she try too hard?
Soon it was half past twelve, lunchtime. Mr. Marks was yelling again. His girl was out but Rose suspected he left his door open on purpose; he wanted the office to hear every word. “Do not tell me that we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I am so tired of hearing that phrase. Let me buy the casings now!” He slammed the phone down. “Schwachkopf. Stupid bridge crossers.”
Rose had finally finished the forms and was straightening her desk—she worked hard, she was no bridge crosser—when Eva appeared. “Come now, Claire and I are off to look at all we can’t buy at Derry and Toms.”
“I can’t,” Rose said. “I promised my sister-in-law I’d pick things up for Sunday supper.”
“Oh, Rose. How will you ever meet a chap in a grocery queue?”
“She’s eight months’ pregnant. And I am interested in things well beyond chaps,” Rose said as briskly as she could manage.
“Of course you are,” Eva murmured, and freed a few of her abundant curls from under her wool collar. Rose watched her file out of the office and waited a few crucial minutes, telling herself not to rush. Then she took her coat and went outside.
Near the newsstand, Thomas’s face lit up when he spotted Rose. “I’ve been waiting,” he announced with mock seriousness, “four and a half minutes. Four and a half minutes is too long for Miss Rose Zimmer to appear again in my life.”
“Hush,” she said, laughing, looking around. It had been a little more than a month since they had first met. She still found it shocking that he rang when he said he would, that his interest in her seemed to grow instead of abating. “How was your interview?”
He took her elbow, guiding her past a phone box. She hurried to keep up with him. “You worried someone might think you’re with me? Like that coworker of yours that just left?”
“Eva?” Rose looked down the street, trying to spot Eva’s full figure, those dark curls that looked wet even when dry. “No.”
“The infamous Eva! She turned at the newsstand. Now, why wouldn’t you introduce me?”
“I don’t know. We’re not close.”