“Yes, darling, of course.” She waved a distracted hand in his general direction. “Until this evening, then,” and she returned her attention to the table where her sketch lay. Staring now at her back, her husband gave a curt, superfluous nod, called out that the driver would return in four hours’ time to retrieve the lieutenant, then turned back through the gate to his car. When she heard the engine start, she addressed Gordon.

  “Please, have what you’d like,” she said, pointing toward the tray. “But first, I must ask you to use the washroom. Friedrich, please escort the Lieutenant to the lavatory.”

  They entered through the kitchen, where Friedrich greeted two women in the middle of preparing the day’s meals and polishing many place settings of silverware. They eyed Gordon with surprise and extended no welcome. Friedrich directed Gordon on to the servants’ washroom where he availed himself of the first flush toilet he’d seen in three years then soaped and washed his hands and his arms and his face with clear, clean, unscented water—quite unlike the poorly filtered taps in the camp.

  Gordon emerged, nodded to the women who seemed approving of his efforts, and followed the guard back outside. Frau Schröder stood at the table studying her sketch, one arm supporting her weight as she leaned over the drawing, the other at her hip, causing the lapel of her blouse to fall open, allowing a glimpse of the fine lace of her undergarments, the rise of her breast.

  “My, you’re a tall Englishman, aren’t you?” she observed. Their eyes met and as she straightened, Gordon moved his eyes down, just a few inches, to the middle of her chest, the dip of the V. If she wished him to notice her, he would. If she was laying a trap, he preferred to find out sooner instead of later.

  A smile played at the woman’s lips. “I can see that we are both eager to begin,” she said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In wartime, truth is so precious

  that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

  –Winston Churchill

  London, 1942

  In the pre-dawn, the hospital halls were blissfully quiet—just a soft brush of movement as orderlies returned gurneys to inventory and nurses made scheduled checks through the wards. Beryl tamped out her cigarette, then secured her unruly and overlong fringe with a pair of bobby pins. With a slow exhale, she reached across the receiving desk, her tired mind fit only for the most basic of tasks: stacking the patients’ folders alphabetically so the day shift workers could begin with some semblance of order. The wards of Grove Park Hospital remained at capacity, beds full of civilians mangled in months of bombing, but the pace of new admits and the numbers of family members circling the halls in worry had eased now that Germany had turned its attention to its enemy on its eastern flank. London was still standing, barely, residents gaining courage with every onslaught withstood: the Nazis had not swum across the Channel and climbed upon their shores yet. The soaring Coventry Cathedral might be hollowed out, but her walls stood, proud and defiant.

  Beryl’s workdays were busy, steady now, a change from the frenetic breathlessness that had characterized the prior year, the careening from ambulance bay to bedside to operating room, summoned by doctors in need of immediate help. She could now pause for a meal and a smoke mid-shift and visit the loo when she needed to. She had a moment to place dutiful telephone calls to ensure her in-laws were safe. But her hyper-vigilance did not recede. Within her, adrenaline coursed uninterrupted, every nerve ending poised to respond to the next threat. These many months of compressed, intense worry about Gordon, about Colin, about Britain’s very survival, had altered her internal chemistry and physical appearance—her brow perpetually creased, braced for the next round of bad news. Although she worked to hide it, she lived in a state of irritation over small things that didn’t used to annoy her. When she lay down to sleep, her mind would not quiet. It fought to stay aware, on guard. She carried through her work at the hospital bone-weary and at times a little muddle-headed, her need for genuine rest and restoration acute. But she soldiered on—chin up and brave, calm and reliable—the performance exacting a cost she did not acknowledge. Now was hardly the time for such considerations.

  Carrying on day after day—maintaining one’s sanity, really—required a case of intermittent amnesia. One did well not to formulate a list of the accumulating losses because the list was too long, too devastating. Like other Londoners, Beryl had learned to simply step around the piles of debris en route to Grove Park, forbidding her mind from dwelling on what this pile of rock and brick had been hours before when it sheltered living, breathing human beings. She tried not to tally the number of the hospital colleagues, neighbors, friends of hers and Gordon’s who had been so dreadfully unlucky in the barrage. Because luck was all it was, really. There was no outsmarting the bombs that fell. The people who’d been lost, Beryl chose to remember discretely as singular accidents detached from the overall death counts. Glenda, the lead nurse who had done the most to bring Beryl along and sharpen her clinical skills—the one who gave all the young nurses confidence they could handle the constant need, had only wished to get home to sleep off a long, demanding string of days on the ward.

  “Be off with you, then!” Beryl had smiled. “All’s well here. The day workers are arriving, so why not go while you can?” And with a cheerful wave, Glenda slipped out of work a few minutes early on the last morning of her life. Walking her usual path home, she was caught beneath a compromised wall that suddenly gave way, raining bricks on her, peppering her head and body, fatally compressing her spinal cord as she tried to crawl to safety. The nurses on the floor who had loved her like a sister received the news with tight nods and clenched jaws. There was no place for full-scale weeping and sorrow because acknowledging the depth of the loss, surrendering to the grief, would render them unable to take care of those who could still be saved.

  Diagonally across from the Clarke’s row house, a line of hodgepodge buildings stood, their architecture indicating that each had been constructed in disparate decades under wildly different budget considerations. There were several shops, with tidy family flats above, mostly wooden structures with stone footings. These shops comprised the neighborhood hub, along with the tavern one block over, their worn and familiar presence an extension of the homes that surrounded them, comforting especially to the lonesome many who had sent children to the country and husbands to war. At Densmore’s market, Beryl secured what foodstuffs she could, trading ideas with other shoppers on how to best use the limited supply of canned goods and scrawny produce. Cecil Densmore and wife Kate owned the small enterprise, the challenge of providing for their three children impossibly complicated by the bombings and blockades that interrupted supply lines and forced even broader rationing. Whatever their own worries, the Densmores remained generous and practical: they somehow managed to keep an inventory of cigarettes tucked underneath the front counter (a password and secret handshake practically required for purchase) and could locate supplies of extra milk for babies whose mothers feared they were not growing properly. Kate would privately prevail on her customers to forgo a bit of this for a ration of that. The back end of the bargain might take months to complete, but the Densmore word was true. Just apprise Kate of your need—sugar, to bake a birthday cake, or extra tea for relatives coming in to the city—and she set to work, devising a strategy that could involve any number of trades to make the thing happen.

  On Saturday mornings, Beryl moved with greater purpose as she made her way home from the hospital. She stopped home first to offer the cat a bit of milk before heading across the street to Densmore’s—the cat usually coming too but trailing her at a distance. And there in the market, a group gathered—shoppers, neighbors, friends of friends—eager to share. Precious snippets from a soldier’s postcard. An extra egg a hen had miraculously produced. Greens coaxed from the backyard garden. Cigarettes unearthed from a seldom-used bureau, a tad stale but still satisfying. Kate offered cups of tea while the Densmore children improvised war games with sticks for rifles and pine cones for hand grenades. The cat was the lone Nazi in this war tableau, eliciting shrieks from the children as he appeared suddenly from under the shelving or around a corner. On occasion, Beryl had brought small squares of chocolate to give the children, bounty mailed to her from an RAF officer she had treated at Grove Park—a survivor of Dunkirk. Afterwards, he had been sent to America for a particular type of flight training. He then spent a good portion of his paycheck expressing his gratitude to the hospital staff back home with gifts of chocolate, tea, and what became, in transit, very smelly cheeses. Bennie, the youngest Densmore child, had never tasted such a thing as chocolate. That first time, shyly accepting the proffered piece, the boy popped the morsel in his mouth and closed his eyes in bliss. He sank to the floor of the market, nappied bottom dropping between his chubby knees in utter surrender to this singular taste. From then on, the Densmores—children and adults—called Beryl “Chocolate Lady,” recalling her generous gift and perhaps to encourage her to direct future such benevolences their way.

  The woman who ran a hair salon next to the market made a point to pop in to Densmore’s on Saturday mornings so she could catch up on how neighborhood men were faring in the war. A red-haired Scot, Jesse was the widow of a German bookkeeper, forced to leave Bavaria just as the war began in Poland when accusations surfaced that her veins carried Jewish blood. Her appearance seemed to belie that notion with her clear blue eyes and ivory skin, a furious rosacea occupying her cheeks. She and her late husband had no children and rather than return to live near family in Scotland—relatives who vehemently disapproved of her liaison with a German—she set up shop in London and worked quickly to assimilate in her new hometown. She had been pleased to leave Germany, she said, because the government had grown so radical, not at all the place she had settled with her dear husband twenty years earlier. His heart would have broken had he survived to witness Germany’s subjugation of France. Somehow, the doors of Jesse’s salon remained open, despite a tiny clientele. Women employed in the war industries had limited free time to indulge in an afternoon at a beauty shop. They’d sooner snip off their own fringe and tie their hair in a bandana. Jesse remained optimistic that after the war, her business would blossom. She only needed to hold on until then, although how she could accomplish that remained in question. Typically, Beryl stopped in after her overnight shift at the hospital—the first customer of the day—when she needed a shampoo or trim. Ensconced in the salon chair, she chatted mindlessly with Jesse, taking in the smell of the rosewater (her favorite) and lavender that permeated the place, a respite from the acrid air outside and the sharp antiseptic smell of the hospital. The experience was something akin to time travel; Beryl was 22 again, carefree and newly married to a brilliant architect with the world at their feet. In these rare few hours, her shoulders relaxed, her heart slowed, her scrunched forehead smoothed.

  Adjacent to Jesse’s salon stood a three-story office building. Ornate but artless wooden carvings hung over the main door, an attempt to lend age and stateliness to the structure and confer a sense of experience and wisdom to the insurance vendors who rotated through the premises. In times of war, insurance is a tricky business. And on the far end of this row of buildings was a lending library where Beryl and Colin had once spent happy, quiet hours first perusing the lovely picture books, then as Colin grew as a reader, favorite chapter books like The Railway Children, with its devious spies and glamorously wealthy Russians—and more recently, pouring over maps to track Hitler’s moves across Europe.

  And then came the morning when Beryl had rounded the corner as she returned from work to see pages and pages torn from the spines of these books; pages wafting and swirling in the air, dislodged from their once-secure and orderly shelves, their tales and truths now spinning and intermingled and confused atop the collapsed stone that was once the library. Jesse’s salon stood untouched, as did the office building, windows dusty but astonishingly intact. Beryl’s home across the lane was safe, as were the adjacent homes of her neighbors. But the Densmore’s market was gone, sheared off and mown down, splintered wooden planks now burying what had once been a vital place to find courage in community. Out front, two of the Densmore children sat atop a wooden crate, dirty and dazed, the girl staring blankly. When the air raid siren had sounded hours before, their parents rushed to corral the children into their garden shelter. But Bennie, unreasonable and disoriented in the way of abjectly exhausted toddlers, wrenched his hand free of his father’s and ran back inside and up the steps to retrieve his frayed favorite blanket. Cecil and Kate had charged after him in panic, unable to see him in the dark, the actions of all three perfectly timed to intersect with the arrival of a German bomb that obliterated them all. Their surviving children sat mutely, fingers interlaced, as a Home Guard volunteer knelt before them, gently inquiring about relatives who might be able to take them in.

  Jesse emerged inconsolable from her shop, tears streaming, hands tying and untying the strings of her work apron, unsure whether to stay or go home, saying again and again that this one was too close, that she’d just thought that it would befall others—not her, not here.

  “Jesse, love, it wasn’t you. Really, it wasn’t. The salon is standing. Your life is intact,” reasoned Beryl, a flicker of impatience in her tone. She pointed toward the children. “It’s those two who’ve lost everything. Their parents, their baby brother, and their home. You and I are right as rain, no thanks to the Germans. Remember that.”

  “Aye,” Jesse nodded. “We are. We are. It’s just that my whole life is in that shop and had I lost it…”

  . . .

  Beryl never saw the children again. They were taken off to relatives in Cornwall—safer for them anyway—another of the many losses that she worked hard not to tally. But losing this little family and the community that had coalesced around their Saturday conversations produced a silent heartache in Beryl about which she could not speak, fearing it would surely untether the frayed cords with which she held herself together. She still visited Jesse’s, but their conversations were more sober now, especially since Jesse remained jittery and anxious for months after the bombing.

  Glancing at her watch, Beryl resolved to stop by Jesse’s after her shift to get her fringe snipped off and out of her eyes. She stubbed out her cigarette, tidied the files, closed out with the ward clerk, and departed for the salon.

  . . .

  Jesse Jordan had found the weekly gatherings at the market essential to interpreting what was happening—or the British understanding, anyway, of what was happening. She listened solemnly, nodding as the women and the few older men still in the neighborhood shared cherished lines of the letters they received that pointed to how their son or brother or husband was faring. Taken together, their dispatches comprised for Jesse a vibrant and full picture of the war—the raging, seesaw battles in North Africa, the vast expansion of the RAF, now training fliers at countless bases across England, Beryl’s husband in a wretched camp for prisoners somewhere in Germany. And of course, they dissected the increasing privation—the limited food, the scarcity of dry goods—relaying the latest news from cousins or in-laws or friends elsewhere in Britain and comparing it to their own daily challenges. What Jesse would not give for new hair clippers with a better hinge. Hers left her hand aching with the maneuvering she had to do to make a straight and even cut. But factories in England needed every scrap of metal for ammunition, not scissors. Jesse faithfully sharpened her blades as best she could, knowing her small base of customers were generous in these times, forgiving minor irritations like imperfect haircuts that simply could not be helped.

  One soldier son of the neighborhood, Jesse learned, worked with the RDF—something to do with radio waves that detected incoming planes—and more than once, his mum outlined in detail what the series of detection towers along the coast could accomplish. After the third or fourth explication, Jesse finally grasped that this invention could actually spot German planes headed across the Channel so Hurricanes and Spitfires could knock them down before they dropped their lethal payloads over land. News of this development was not something found in daily papers. Propaganda posters crossly asserted that “Careless talk cost lives,” but the market conversations were hardly careless or ill-considered: they were weekly succor for families mad with worry over the present danger they and their soldier faced, a brief moment that allowed them to drop the public façade that all was well and puzzle through the facts they knew about the Allied effort. In this gentle company, they could shed a tear of sorrow or proudly share news of a promotion or medal earned. No danger, because it would not extend beyond their little circle.

  And indeed, the talk ceased entirely after Densmore’s was lost. The group did not reform elsewhere, in part because each had work to do to figure out how to fill this new hole, where they could now turn for the support that Densmore’s had provided. They walked new paths home from work to take them past new shops, making for longer days peopled with less-familiar faces. But in truth, there was no effort made to find a new gathering place because doing so would only call to mind the many Saturdays they’d gathered, with the Densmore children scurrying through the aisles, the cat in their sites, Kate making hush-hush deals in service to her neediest customers, Cecil presiding proudly over all of it—his vital contribution to keeping wartime spirits lifted.

  . . .

  The bell on the door jingled as Beryl made her way inside the salon. Jesse stood at the front desk, rifling through her paper receipts, calculating, perhaps, how long she could afford to keep the shop doors open.

  “Hello, love,” Beryl called.

  Jesse lifted her head, eyes meeting Beryl’s but not seeing her. Then she recovered herself, masking her worry and greeting her customer.

  “Beryl. Hello. Sorry. Just wrapped up in the ledger. Thoughts elsewhere. But I’m happy you’re here. I miss seeing you. Judging by the look of ya, you’re in genuine need! That fringe is astonishing. Looks like they’ve got a mind of their own!”