out of London. The Allies and the Londoners are supplied through its waters. No wonder the Germans are hell-bent on blowing up everything on its banks.
The mood of the other seven people in the suite resembles Julian’s and Mia’s. Every person around the living area, eating bacon and fried tomatoes and eggs, devouring bread with jam and butter, drinking tomato juice and tea, has a smile from ear to ear. Some, like Liz and Kate, are trying to hide it. “Liz won’t look at me,” a grinning Wild says. “Perhaps I’ve disappointed her.” He takes her hand. Sitting by his side, beet red, her smile enormous, Liz can’t look at him even more. Frankie is at the little table by the window, doing her jigsaw. But she’s smiling down into her puzzle.
Duncan is completely unsuppressed. He is the most outwardly elated of them all. There are no shadows on his joy, no pretense that he feels anything other than what he’s feeling. Both Shona and Sheila are embarrassed by his open adulation. They tell him that if he makes one remark about last night, ever, in daylight, evening light, in front of other people, any time at all, they will strangle him with their own hands.
“Strangling implies you will touch me again. So it’ll be worth it,” Duncan says. “You can do anything you want to me after last night. Anything.”
“Duncan!”
He opens his arms. “Come here, my beauties, strangle me.”
Julian and Wild grin at each other. Mia, standing over a sitting Julian, throws her arms around his neck, bends to him and whispers, “Are you jealous of Duncan, Jules?”
“No,” Julian says, kissing her forearm.
“Why not?”
“Been there, done that,” he says, pinching her skin lightly, and smiling up at her. “You mean you don’t remember? You were there, too.”
They take their time with breakfast as they wait for their clothes to be returned. They wonder if the famed bomb shelter at the Savoy is all it’s cracked up to be. They endeavor never to find out.
In the afternoon, dressed and washed and shaved and full, utterly sated in their bodies and souls, the nine of them strut out of the hotel, arm in arm, walk up Savoy Place and stand at the Strand, gazing left and right at their dominion, like conquerors. They hail two black cabs and make their rowdy way to Royal London Hospital to visit Finch. They go bearing gifts, bringing him scones from the Savoy, bacon rashers, some pre-made Pink Gin in Duncan’s flask, and even a blooming lily.
At the hospital, they learn that Finch died the night before, from internal hemorrhage. While they were drinking and dancing and carousing, having a joyous time, the best time they’ve had, possibly ever, Finch was dying.
“I feel so guilty,” Mia says. She can’t stop crying. “Poor Finch. But we didn’t do anything wrong. Happiness is not wrong.”
The air raid siren goes off while they’re still at the hospital. Sheila stays to work the emergency shift. Frankie and Kate drive off with Shona and a new doctor in an HMU. Julian, Mia, Duncan and Wild are loaned a medical jeep, this one with a plastic windshield, and Julian drives them just north of the hospital into their last fray.
That Saturday, the Germans bomb London four times. Over three hundred tons of bombs are dropped on the city. At night the moon is full again, and even the blackout and the decoy buses don’t help. At night new London is lit up like the London of old, but with enemy fire and a bright round moon.
For seven hours that night the city shakes in the earthquake of hundreds of bombs falling so close together there seems to be hardly a pause between them.
That night Kate Cozens dies, and Shona loses her leg. A bomb falls on the HMU truck while Kate and Shona are amputating a man’s mangled arm to save his life. The man dies, too.
Frankie will spend days putting together Kate’s body, so she can release it whole to her sister, Sheila.
They don’t return to the Savoy.
* * *
The acrid air is thick with smoke. There’s a prolonged rumbling sound, followed by thunder. There is unholy crashing all around them.
Grimsby Street, close to the railroad in Bethnal Green, has been almost entirely destroyed as the Germans bombed the dozen lines of tracks heading out of east London. Grimsby is opened up. What was down is now up, and what was up is now down. Houses burn out of control,