retrieved a bottle of milk and a small piece of cheese from the windowsill, pulled the curtains across, and switched the lamp back on again. “He’s been after me to go out dancing with him, and I’d told him I’d meet him tonight—”
And if she’d met him, I wouldn’t be here and in danger of being bombed. “You can still go,” Polly said. And I can go back to Russell Square—
“No, I’m glad you kept me from going. I should never have said yes in the first place. I mean, he’s a pilot. They’re all terribly fast. Brenda, that’s the girl I used to share with, says they’re only after one thing, and she’s right. Lucille in Kitchenwares went out with a rear gunner, and he was all over her.” Marjorie reached up on the shelf for two teacups. “He refused to take no for an answer, and Lucille had to—”
There was a high-pitched whistle, and Polly looked over at the kettle, thinking it had come to a boil, but it was a siren. “That tears it,” Marjorie said disgustedly. “The Germans don’t even let us have our tea.” She switched off the gas ring and the lamp. “They’re coming sooner every night, have you noticed? Only think what it will be like by Christmas. Last year was bad enough, and we only had the blackout to deal with—dark by half past three in the afternoon.”
And I’ll still be here, Polly thought. And when New Year’s comes, I won’t even know when and where the raids are.
“Come along,” Marjorie was saying. “I’ll show you our ‘safe and comfortable shelter accommodations.’” She led the way back downstairs, across the kitchen, and down to the cellar.
She hadn’t been exaggerating about its dangerousness. The steps were perilously steep and one was broken, and the beams in the low-ceilinged cellar looked as if they might give way at the mere sound of a bomb, let alone a direct hit. It should be on Mr. Dunworthy’s forbidden list.
St. George’s hadn’t been on his list. Why not?
Because you were supposed to be staying in a tube shelter, she told herself. But St. George’s hadn’t been on Colin’s list either.
An antiaircraft gun began pounding away at the droning planes, both of them as loud and as close as they’d sounded when she sat in the drop, waiting for it to open and unaware that the retrieval team should already have been there, that Miss Laburnum and the little girls were already dead.
And Sir Godfrey, who’d saved her life that first night when she’d gone over to look at Mr. Simms’s newspaper, who’d said, “‘If we no more meet until we meet in heaven—’”
“Do the guns frighten you?” Marjorie asked. “They used to drive my flatmate Brenda completely mad. That’s why she left London. She’s always after me to leave it, as well. She wrote last week and said if I’d come to Bath, she was certain she could get me on at the shop where she works. And when something like this happens—I mean, the church and all those people—it makes me think perhaps I should take her up on it. Do you ever think about chucking the whole thing and getting out?”
Yes.
“At least it would be better than sitting here, waiting to be killed. Oh, I am sorry,” Marjorie said, “but, I mean, things like that do make one think. Tom—that’s the pilot I told you about—says in a war you can’t afford to wait to live, you’ve got to take what happiness you can find because you don’t know how much time you’ve got.”
How much time you’ve got.
“Brenda says that’s only a line of chat, that men use it on all girls, but sometimes they mean it. The Navy lieutenant Joanna—she used to work in China and Glassware—went out with said the same thing to her, and he meant it. They eloped, just like that, without a word to anyone. And even if Tom is only feeding me a line, it is true. Any one of us could be killed tonight, or next week, and if that’s the case, then why not go out dancing and all the rest of it? Have a bit of fun? It would be better than never having lived at all. Sorry,” she said, “I’m talking rot. It’s sitting in this wretched cellar. It makes me nervy. Perhaps I should go to Bath, only everyone at work would think I was a coward.” She looked up suddenly at the ceiling.