The Light Over London(8)

But if she expected Kate to relent, she was sorely mistaken. Instead, Kate snapped her fingers. “That’s what we’ll do.”

“What?”

“Find you an airman.”

“I don’t want an airman.” But it was too late. Louise could tell the idea had already taken root in Kate’s mind and would no doubt be impossible to shake free.

“Come to my house at six on Friday. You can wear my red crepe with the buttons down the front. It’ll look far better on you than on me anyway. I’ve become too busty for it.”

Knowing that to argue any further would be futile, Louise let her shoulders sag while her cousin stuffed her hair up under her hat and buttoned up her slicker.

Twiddling her fingers in the air, Kate trilled, “We’re going to catch you a pilot, darling.”

Louise laughed into her sigh. Friday was bound to be a very long night.



Louise lifted the latch to the garden gate and hurried through the rain to the front door. On either side of her, the ground lay cold and mostly bare except where her father had erected a cloche to protect his winter vegetables. Digging up the family’s front garden had been the first big battle of her parents’ war within the war. Her mother, house-proud and keenly aware of the image the frontage projected to the rest of the neighborhood, hadn’t understood the need to pull her roses, geraniums, and hyssops out at the root. Her father, never an avid gardener, suddenly went mad, buying seed for all number of vegetables and insisting with great authority that the back garden facing the open sea was too harsh to cultivate enough food in case of rationing. The argument was finally won one spring day when Louise had returned from a bicycle ride to find her father on his knees in the mud, ripping out just-flowering plants, while her mother stood in the front window, arms crossed and face pale.

Her father, it would appear, had been right, Louise realized as she let herself into the house. Now, a year into rationing and well into the war, no one knew how far it would reach or when it would end. Yet Louise doubted that the fact that every other garden on their street had been given over to vegetables in an effort to “dig for victory” was a comfort to her mother.

“Louise, is that you?” her mother called from the kitchen.

“Yes, Mum,” Louise shouted back, shucking her mac and sitting down on the stairs to work off her wellies.

“Don’t you tread mud into this house. I’ve already cleaned up after your father once.”

Louise looked down at the thick layer of earth encasing the boot in her hand. Toeing the other boot off as carefully as she could, she tiptoed in the thick socks she wore to protect her precious stockings to the hall cupboard and wrestled free the mop. It was still damp from its last use.

Creeping back to the front door, she gave the floor a wipe as her father stuck his head out of the door of the front room.

“You’re home,” he said. “Good day at the shop?”

She shrugged, scrubbing away the dirt. “Hardly anyone came in.”

He grunted and then retreated, happiest sitting in his usual armchair until the meal was on the table. He would have his paper in hand and be plotting on his huge atlas the new troop movements that had been reported, just as he always did after coming home from his job as the local postmaster. She knew he couldn’t help but feel left out of this war, having fought in the last but being too old to be of any use this time around.

Upstairs in her room, Louise ran a brush over her hair and reset—hopefully for the last time—the comb that hadn’t stopped slipping all day. Looking in her mirror, she noticed that the postcard she’d tucked into the plain wood frame had slipped to a drunken angle, a slight on her normally tidy room. She recentered it, her fingers trailing along the printed rows of brashly colored orange groves, lush under the California sun. She’d bought the card for threepence at a junk shop in St. Ives she and Kate had stolen away to when they were fifteen. Her mother thought junk shops were common, and going had seemed like the height of rebellion at the time. Kate, obsessed with Hollywood, swept up an armful of publicity stills cut out of a fan magazine and pasted to pieces of cardboard. But the allure of glamour hadn’t captured Louise’s attention the way the promise of a warm California day and soaring mountains so different from pokey little Haybourne had.

Downstairs, Louise set the table as she did every night. Spoon, knife, plate, fork, napkin folded once, twice, three times, water glass. Her father occasionally had a whiskey before the fire, but only after dinner. Her mother rarely joined him in drinking alcohol except when there were guests in the house. Then she’d take a little bit of sherry, “to be polite.”

Supper arrived on the table just as the mantel clock in the parlor chimed seven. Louise’s mother placed a casserole that, thanks to rationing, was more vegetable than meat in front of her father, who picked up the serving spoon and began to help himself just as he did every night. There was something so unfailingly normal about the whole ritual. Outside, in the rest of Britain, families might be carrying their bedding down to air raid shelters or wrestling with the constant fear of an invasion, but here in the Keene household time marched on almost uninterrupted by war.

Louise focused her gaze on a faint gravy spot on her mother’s otherwise flawless white tablecloth, every ounce of energy repressing the urge to scream, to run, to do something unexpected.