been defiantly planted only minutes earlier. As she watched Julian emerge slowly from his hiding place, his legs stiff from the awkward position into which they had been folded for the past half hour, his usually firm-cheeked face buckled.
“Frank, have you seen Frank? Fucking Nazis! What have they done to Frank?” he shouted as he stumbled across the hall towards her. “It was me that started the sign to attack!” Julian spluttered. “It was me that cried ‘Red Front.’ If Frank’s hurt it is all my fault.”
Tentatively, May put her arms around Julian as he buried his face in her shoulder. When Julian eventually pulled out of the embrace he looked up at May. His face was streaming with tears.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
May was looking forward to the summer. She had been missing the warmth that had been integral to her life until so recently. Her birthday month, for which she had been named, had delivered a welcome lift in temperature and she hoped June would bring more of the same.
The weekend after May’s encounter with Mosley’s henchmen there had been a small celebration at Oak Street. Another Fuller’s cake, identical to the one that had been part of her and Sam’s original welcome to the house, had appeared on the parlour table, except this time the soft icing had been punctured by twenty candles.
“Nothing like a moist bit of cake,” Rachel had remarked as May blew out the candles. “Try saying ‘pretty pussy’ with a mouthful of dry sponge and you’ll see what I mean,” she added, getting up to reach for a bottle of milk from the wall cupboard behind her.
Simon rolled his eyes at his wife’s unmatchable way with words. But May was beyond care, existing in a state dictated by a slowly accumulating sense of anticipation at the way her friendship with Julian was developing, even though she kept the feeling hidden from everyone, especially Julian himself. He had forgotten to ask her to return the shirt he had lent her in Wigan and each night, in the secrecy of her bedroom, she slipped the shirt over her naked body, hugging her cotton-clad arms around herself.
After returning from Oxford she had seen very little of Julian. He had remained there, working in the Bodleian library by day and in his college room at Magdalen by night, cramming for his final exams. But there had been one evening only two days after the drama of the fascist meeting when she had bumped into him in the hallway at St. John’s Wood and he had asked her what she was up to.
“When?” she had asked him, willing her treacherous, flushing skin to remain dormant.
“Now. Right now,” he replied. “I need to spend an evening when I am not thinking about dead philosophers or uniformed thugs or my nightmare of a mother. I must have covered hundreds of miles walking around Addison’s Walk. The college cloisters help to concentrate the mind and give me a new perspective on the eternally fascinating question of why a table is still in a room when I am not in the room.” He paused, noticing the puzzled expression on May’s face. “Such are the preoccupations of a philosophy undergraduate about to sit his finals,” he explained apologetically. “Anyway would you be a darling and save me from my thoughts by coming with me tonight to the Trocadero to see Mr. Deeds Goes to Town? Gary Cooper’s in it with Jean Arthur and she makes me laugh.”
And so they had gone to the Trocadero cinema and watched the film and then agreed that because they were both starving they would go for something to eat at the next door Lyons Corner House at Piccadilly. The place was even more packed than on May’s earlier visit. But the maître d’ had spoken conspiratorially to Julian and they were shown upstairs to a less crowded section. At the adjoining table two men were holding hands as one applied crimson coloured lipstick to his friend’s mouth. Julian had already sat down with his back to the couple and was studying the menu. He ordered fish and chips from the nippy while May settled for a cheese omelette and decided, against her instinct, to say nothing about their neighbours. Half her concentration had been distracted by a decision that nothing was going to make her eat fish and chips out of choice, not even for the sake of someone who had sort of called her “darling.”
They talked of Wigan and