“Bobby—come on, she’s your mother and she’s a good mother. You shouldn’t talk about her like that.”
“I know, but . . . it’s just that sometimes I want to get away from home.”
“Look, don’t tell your dad as soon as he walks into the house. Give them a chance to get settled, and if I were you, I would bide my time.”
“It’s because of what’s going on over there, isn’t it? Billy’s stuck there, I know he is.”
“Bobby—you’ve been working very hard lately. Get a good night’s sleep and use that fine-tuned ear of yours to listen to your father and don’t talk to him about this until he’s rested—all right?”
“All right.”
“And I’ll see what I can do about the cake.”
Bobby Beale laughed. “I’ll get my dad to give you a bell.”
Maisie replaced the receiver and sat down, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, her forehead resting on her hands.
“Oh, Bobby, I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said aloud to the room. “Poor Billy.”
Maisie kept the conversation short when Billy telephoned half an hour later. In the interim, she had started the case map and had been linking names, facts, dates, times, noting thoughts that occurred to her and questions to be answered. The diagram on paper resembled wires converging into a junction box. She now had the name of Billy’s friend—Peter Sands—and Billy said he would get in touch and ask him if he could pop into the office. She reiterated that she only wanted to draw upon his expertise, and would gladly remunerate him for his time. Billy did not mention Bobby—except to say he had been a good lad, and clearly had been looked after while alone in the house. Doreen was home now, and would return to Hampshire on Monday with Margaret Rose.
The telephone rang.
“So that’s where you are!” said Priscilla Partridge. “Did you forget? You’re supposed to be at a special ambulance driver practice this evening and you’ve got five minutes to get here. Mr. Roache is about to blow a gasket as two of the younger women are not here either, and he expected us ‘experienced ladies’ to set an example. That was a rather strange experience, I must say—I was always the one being punished as an ‘example to others’ when I was at school. We may be volunteers, but this is like being in the army!”
“I’m leaving now,” said Maisie as she grabbed her bag. “In fact, the doorbell has just rung and I think that’s my transport. Thank goodness for the police!”
“What?”
“Nothing. Tell Mr. Roache I’ll be ten minutes.”
Later, after she and Priscilla had managed to take an ambulance to Marble Arch and back in the dark and then negotiated a derelict building looking for “injured”—more volunteers—and then taken them to the nearest hospital, the two women were given a lift home to Holland Park in the back of an ambulance. They stood outside Priscilla’s mansion, which was a short walk from Maisie’s flat. The whereabouts of Priscilla’s eldest son seemed to consume her thoughts, along with worries about her middle and younger sons.
“Thank goodness Tarquin is minding his p’s and q’s, that’s all I can say. And I am so glad Tim is coming down to you—Douglas said that he needed work to get his back into. Serious man work, he said, on the farm, or with your father. Tim should stop thinking all the time of all the things he’s not doing and get on with the things he can. He’s so argumentative—he’s turned from my delightful second son into a little war machine unto himself.”
“He can come down tomorrow, if you like—I plan to catch the train before lunch. My motor is at Chelstone, and I’m trying not to use it too much now anyway—not fond of driving in the dark and I can’t afford to waste my petrol coupons.”
“Oh, Douglas has something lined up for Tim tomorrow—another distraction. By the way you did all right tonight, Maisie—the way you took that turn onto Oxford Street was quite amazing. I wonder if they deliberately put other vehicles right in the middle of the road to test us—after all, when we have a real emergency, there will be a lot in our way.”
“It was all the wood they scattered on the narrow alley up to the house—that was a test, because there’s obviously a point where we’ll have to leave the ambulance and run, and then bring the wounded to the ambulance—and reverse out again.”
“God willing we’ll never have to run into any burning buildings, eh Maisie? But according to Roache, we two outdid ourselves. Frankly, I think he’s shocked that anyone over thirty has the stamina for this job—but we showed him, didn’t we?”
Maisie laughed and kissed Priscilla on the cheek. “Tell Tim we’re looking forward to seeing him. Especially Anna. Oh, by the way—he has had measles, hasn’t he?”
Priscilla waved her hand. “My boys have had everything—everything you can imagine a boy can get.”
Later, as Maisie sat in her walled garden with a cup of tea and a sandwich, she gazed up at the outlines of barrage balloons obscuring the night sky, a darkness punctuated only by searchlights from a nearby anti-aircraft “ack-ack” battery scouring the heavens for possible Luftwaffe interlopers. And she wondered, then, how long the quiet would last. How long before Hitler’s armies would draw even closer, their aircraft overhead raining down a blitzkrieg of terror? In Madrid she had already seen what the Luftwaffe could inflict upon a people. Or would it all blow over—would Britain capitulate to the approaching enemy, coming closer and closer with every passing day?
She went into the house, washed her plate, cup, saucer and cutlery, and went to bed. Sleep did not come with ease, so instead she opened the blackout curtain and allowed herself to be lulled by the searchlights moving back and forth, cones of light against a midnight blue sky.
At nine o’clock the following morning, Maisie, Billy and Peter Sands sat at the long table in Maisie’s office.
“It’s very good of you to come in to see us, Mr. Sands—I really appreciate your time.”
“Aw, not to worry, Miss Dobbs—and call me ‘Pete.’ It’s a bit of a slow day, to tell you the truth. Now if it was last week, it would have been another matter, but I’m putting the finishing touches to a job over in Russell Square.” He paused, sipped from the mug of tea Billy had passed to him, and looked at Maisie, then Billy. “So, my mate here said you wanted to pick my brains.”
“Yes, Pete, I’m sure you can help us—we’d like to hear what you might know about Yates and Sons. They’ve landed a lucrative government contract for painting buildings on airfields across the country, and the emulsion—if you can call it that—is very viscous, has a strong vapor and, from what we understand already, it does the job it was designed for, which is to stop a fire from taking over if the airfield is attacked.”
“I heard they’d pulled in a big one. Of course, that’s not something that would come my way, being just me and one apprentice. Nice money, especially the way things are—I reckon that one job will keep them going throughout the war, and it’ll mean their boys are out of it, what with government work being protected.”
“Have you ever used anything like this emulsion—do you know what they put in it?” asked Maisie.
The man shook his head. “I’ve heard about paint like that, but not put a brush in it myself. But you know, what with the war, I reckon they’re using new stuff—and probably not tested, so they won’t know how long it will last, that sort of thing. Which again means that Yates’ lads will have jobs for as long as the war goes on—but let’s hope it’s not as long as the last one.”
“Let’s hope, mate,” said Billy.