On Tuesday afternoon before work, Emmy took Julia next door to Thea’s as usual. Their neighbor was in the middle of getting together a box of supplies for her Anderson shelter, a hut of corrugated steel covered in earth and half-buried in the ground in her back garden.
The Downtrees’ flat was connected to Thea’s and six others so that their brick, two-story homes looked like one long house with the same front door repeated seven times over. Each of the narrow flats had a splash of lawn in the front and a tiny garden in the back. Brick partitions separated the gardens. The neighbors had little flower beds and tomato vines and pots of pansies in their tiny gardens. The Downtrees had a stone slab, overgrown hedges, and dirt. Thea had erected an Anderson shelter in her minuscule garden when she was told her cat would not be welcome in the public shelter the neighbors all shared in the cellar of the shoe repair shop at the end of the street. Her private shelter nearly filled the space from garden wall to garden wall. The Andy looked like a dog kennel made by someone who had no idea how to construct one and so the builder decided to bury the evidence of ever having tried. Mum thought it was hideous; Julia was plain terrified of it.
“Oh my goodness, do you still need me to take Julia today?” Thea’s eyes were shining with agitation. The news of the second evacuation had everyone on the street preparing for the worst, whatever that was.
“I still have to go to work today. It’s my last day—at least for a while,” Emmy said. “I’m hoping we’ll be back soon.”
Thea stared at Emmy as though she had spoken in a foreign language, one Thea didn’t understand.
“Soon?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m hoping this evacuation will be like the last one.”
Thea was holding a wicker basket filled with biscuits, tins of sardines, and bottles of soda water, but she set this down and told Julia, who was standing next to her, that the mother cat had moved the kittens into a bureau drawer and she should go see how cute they were. As soon as Julia had dashed upstairs, Thea turned to Emmy.
“Has your mother not told you how things are, Emmeline?”
Her tone made Emmy feel instantly young and uninformed, just like the child that everyone kept insisting she was. “What do you mean?”
“France is occupied and—”
“I know that,” Emmy interjected. It wasn’t as if she never read the papers or didn’t listen to the radio.
“Yes, but that means now the Germans can reachus. They can fly their planes right across the Channel from France. It’s not like last time. They’re saying the Germans plan to bomb London.”
“They said that a year ago.”
“Yes, but a year ago, the Germans didn’t have France.”
Now it was Emmy’s turn to stare at her as if she didn’t understand the language Thea was speaking.
“We’re on an island,” Emmy said. “The Nazis can’t roll in here with their tanks like they have everywhere else.”
“But that’s why no one can say how long this will last. I would hate for you to leave here thinking you’ll be back in a month. The papers say—”
Emmy didn’t want to hear any more. She was tired of everyone and everything deciding what was to become of everything that mattered to her. She cut Thea off in midsentence. “I have to go, Thea, or I’ll be late. Sorry. I’ll be back for Julia before six thirty.”
Emmy knew she had been abysmally rude, but she simply had to get away from Thea and her box of supplies for her bomb shelter, and from the fear in her eyes. She went back to the flat for the two sketches she had promised Mrs. Crofton and held them to her chest for a moment. These would keep her place, if not in Mrs. Crofton’s shop, then in Mr. Dabney’s future plans. They had to.
She headed for the bridal shop, passing sandbag walls on street corners that she and everyone else had been walking past for a year and hardly noticed anymore. Everyone on the sidewalk seemed distracted by unspoken ponderings as they dashed about without a word to one another, not even a tip of the head or a weak smile. It was as though the imminent departure of a quarter million children meant London was poised to lose her innocence and no one quite knew what to do on the eve of that loss.
Emmy arrived at Primrose Bridal and opened the door. The store was empty except for one young woman buying a veil.
And only a veil.
Emmy surmised from the conversation the womanand Mrs. Crofton were engaged in that she was to marry on Friday morning at Saint Martin–in-the-Fields wearing the veil and a dress of white dotted Swiss that she had worn to a piano recital in April. Her husband-to-be was shipping out with his platoon on Saturday afternoon.
While Mrs. Crofton finished the transaction, Emmy went into the back room to see what hand-sewing was lined up for that afternoon, but the long table was empty. A few moments later, Mrs. Crofton joined her. She looked haggard, as if she hadn’t slept well or perhaps had eaten something for lunch that now roiled inside her.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Crofton?” Emmy asked.
She produced a wan smile. “Ask me that question when the war is over, Emmeline, and I might have an answer for you.” Mrs. Crofton looked down at Emmy’s hands. “You brought them.”
“Of course.” Emmy held the sketches out to her.
She hesitated for a moment before taking them. “Do you have something to tell me?”
The words startled Emmy, but a second later she was glad Mrs. Crofton had suspected she was to be sent away.
