siren goes off at five. Julian is still walking up from Holborn. Before the Ten Bells can shop and dine, the planes fly and the bombs fall. One drops near Holborn, one on Chancery Lane, and one on Oxford Street. As a limping Julian run-and-guns, he opens and closes his hands. Are they tingling? Or is Mia still alive?
She is still alive. She was late getting out from Lebus and missed the worst.
An entire black cab got blown into a shop window.
One woman’s torso couldn’t be found.
Another woman, waiting on Oxford Street with her husband, was found hours later on the next block still holding her husband’s arm. Only his arm.
That man was Phil Cozens.
And the woman was his wife Lucinda.
The evening at the Savoy gets postponed.
On Friday morning, Oxford Street is mobbed. Despite the massive post-bombing clean-up, Londoners scour the stores, hunting for bargains, getting ahead on their Christmas shopping before the real crunch in mid-December, and all the while Frankie sifts through the rubble and dust. Julian, Mia, and Nick help her. Days later, when Frankie’s work on Phil and Lucinda is complete, they’re released to their daughters, and Kate and Sheila can bury their mother and father.
Afterward, Frankie travels to Royal London with what’s left of the gang, and those who can donate three more pints of blood to Finch.
17
Ghost Bride and Johnny Blaze
TO CHEER THEMSELVES UP, THE TEN BELLS PUT UP A SMALL Christmas tree outside their passageway. They trim it with some garland, Mia’s Brodie for a topper, and a red ball. Julian and Nick go together to pick up some more things from the lorries behind Smithfield. Duncan is nursing his sore back, and Wild is up in North Camden, visiting his parents. Julian likes Nick. He doesn’t say much, but what he says is choice. To every black-market price he hears, his reaction is the same. “Fuck off!” says Nick. “It’s a steak and kidney pie, not fucking caviar!”
“Who said anything about steak?” the seller says. “I’m not guaranteeing what meat’s in that pie. Could be horse. Could be possum. Could be anything. You want it or not? Look at the queue behind ya.”
Back at Bank, they have a wake for Phil and Lucinda. They eat black-market meat and kidney pies, they drink good whisky, have chocolate, they smoke. Julian makes a Swedish flame, and in thanks, Kate changes the dressings on his head wound. Their jeep has died. It won’t start at all. It’s parked on Lothbury, nothing but a giant paperweight on the street. Soon it will be impounded. Everyone wonders how Finch will take it when he finds out.
“I went to visit him again today,” says Mia. “He squeezed my hand but didn’t open his eyes.”
“Poor Finch.”
“Poor Phil,” says Robbie. He and Phil were the same age, were good friends. They’d known each other forty years, since the turn of the century.
Everyone raises a glass to Finch and Phil and Lucinda.
Mia questions all her choices. If only they hadn’t gone to Oxford Street to buy new clothes to go to the Savoy without Finch.
The gang mocks her. Doesn’t she know that bombs fall anywhere? Or does she think it’s karma? That the Germans are singling her out for mutilation because she dared to want to buy herself a dress?
“Mock if you will,” Mia says, “but the council keeps telling us that overindulging is unpatriotic. And doesn’t it feel like the Krauts are getting closer and closer?”
“It certainly must feel that way to Phil and Lucinda,” says Robbie.
Boom boom.
Thud thud.
They drink to Phil and Lucinda, and they sing.
Weigh-HEY, up she rises
Weigh-HEY, up she rises
Weigh-HEY, up she rises
Earlye in the morning . . .
At first they talk about the dead, but the more they drink, the more they talk about the living.
The single girls lament spending their nights underground, waiting for their lives to begin.
“There’s plenty of stuff we can do down here, ladies,” Duncan says, liberated by the absence of censorious parents. “Do you want me to show you?”
“Duncan is terrible but right,” Julian says. “This isn’t waiting. This isn’t limbo or the in-between. This is your life. The trenches are your life. The temporary thing, the impermanent thing, the chaotic thing, the impossible thing. This is it. It’s all you’ve got.”
He won’t look at Mia, and she won’t look at him.
They drink some more, hoping it will make them less maudlin.
We’re not going to die. Dying is for old people.
“The old people don’t want to die either,” Robbie says.
Shona walks