became Ludgate Hill became Fleet Street became the Strand became the Mall became Buckingham Palace.”
“Wild, you’re a boy after my own heart,” Julian says, raising his glass. “But speaking of Buckingham Palace, I don’t know why the King and Queen have not evacuated. They’d be so much safer in Canada.” In 1666, Charles II fled during the Black Plague, as Baroness Tilly had informed him. What’s happening now is worse than the plague.
“How would it look, the King said, if we left our people and ran for the hills?” says Mia. “What kind of an example would that set? The King’s exact words were: How can we look the East End in the face?” She shrugs. “Good old George needn’t have worried. Soon there’ll be no face left in the East End to look into.”
“At least Buckingham Palace hasn’t been hit,” Julian says.
“Oh, it has,” Mia says. “Fourteen times. Once again, where have you been that you don’t know that?”
“Hand on heart 153 Great Eastern Road,” Julian says. “And Greenwich.”
“The King is right to stay,” Duncan says. “The very awareness of our impermanence is what gives our lives meaning.”
“You’re less impermanent than you think, my friend,” says Julian.
The radio picks that moment to start playing “The Land of Hope and Glory,” and the genteel patrons of the Grill, who’ve all had a bit to drink, let their guard down for a few minutes and sing along, none more raucously than Julian’s gang. “God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!” they bellow, their arms around each other. By the end of the song, their rousing drunken voices drown out Vera Lynn’s on the speakers.
“Getting together with friends and holding court over a meal is one of the great joys in life,” a smiling Julian says when the song is finished. A great actor, Robert Duvall, will say that one day.
Hear, hear, his new friends yell. We told you things must improve and have they ever.
What a thing it is to have friends again, Julian thinks, taking Mia’s hand under the table.
For dessert they have chocolate bread-and-butter pudding with vanilla bourbon sauce. They wash it down with cognac, listening to the slow intoxicating beats of “When the Lights Go On Again,” watching a tall, elegant woman in trousers dance with her gentleman.
“Englishmen are unhappy at the sight of women in trousers,” Duncan proclaims—too loudly. He’s had an inordinate amount to drink. “A woman in trousers is considered fast.” He burps. “What I would give for a fast woman. The faster, the better. Who’s got time for a slow woman? Not me.”
“Not me either,” says Wild. Both men bob their heads and grin at Julian. “What about you, Swedish? You got time for a slow woman?”
“He most certainly does not,” says Mia, standing up and extending her hand. “Would you like to dance, my fake husband?”
Wild asks Liz to dance. Liz physically swoons as she rises from the table. Duncan asks Shona and Sheila. They both say yes. He asks Frankie and Kate, and they also say yes, though Julian senses that if it were allowed, Frankie and Kate would like to dance together. There is something in the look they give each other as they stand up. Liz dances with Wild, and Shona with Duncan and then Duncan switches four times, and dances with each of the girls, at one point, the changeover coming so slowly that he seems to be dancing with all four at once. Julian and Mia laugh as they watch the intoxicated giant with his tie askew, two-stepping under the dimmed down lights, his big arms around the ladies, looking as if he’s already in heaven.
Julian holds Mia lightly around her waist as they waltz while “There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover,” plays on the turned-up radio, and Mia sings along, her gin-spiked breath near Julian’s mouth. Just you wait and see, she murmurs, and he replies with, but tomorrow, right, and not tonight?
“Don’t be afraid,” she says. “There will be a tomorrow.”
He is glad she is sure. “How’s your arm? How’s your ankle?”
“They’re fine,” says Mia. “What kind of Brit would I be if I complained about a sore ankle? How’s your back?”
“All better.”
“Your head better, too? Because it still looks . . .”
“Yup, it’s good,” he says.
“Your leg? You’re dancing but when you walked, you limped.”
“Can’t feel a thing.”
They smile. She sways a little closer. Her breasts press against his chest. Liz leans over to them on the dance floor and