ordered, there is no siren, but there’s a rumble of plane engines. They groan. A crunching explosion rattles their beers. They hear commotion in the back of the pub. They wait. They don’t know whether to leave and try somewhere else, or to stay put. The Germans were on their way to elsewhere. (“Maybe Blackpool?”) They dropped a stray bomb on the Ten Bells just to fuck with them.
“We’re never letting Julian choose where we eat again,” Frankie says.
“Good call,” Mia says. “Jules is a bomb magnet.”
They’ve already ordered so they decide to wait a bit longer.
Ten minutes later, the pale but composed waitress appears with their food.
“Sorry the lunch is a bit dusty, mates,” she says, primly setting down the tray with the plates. “The ceiling’s down in the kitchen.”
After she leaves, they have a laugh and raise a glass to the steadfast British woman, not easily rattled. “Nothing can replace the grace of London town,” Julian says.
“Sometimes when things look bleak,” says Mia, “and we feel a little down, we might say what’s the use? What’s the use of anything, we wail. But those with whom you share your pot and your bed and your bread will not say that. Those with whom you share your days will never say that. And that is worth a great deal.”
“Because what matters most is how you walk through the fire,” says Julian.
Hear, hear. Julian, Mia, Liz, and Frankie raise their pints to London.
And then, another stray bomb falls outside the Ten Bells windows.
21
Empty Igloo
WHEN THEY LAY UNDER THE RUBBLE, BLOWING DUST OUT OF their mouths, feeling for each other’s bodies, feeling for each other’s faces, when he held his palm to Mia’s bleeding head, Julian said in a moment of overpowering weakness for which he was sorry, we’re not going to make it, are we, you and me.
“If you’re speaking, and I can hear you,” Mia said, “then we already made it. We just have to get out of here.”
But that was then, in the heat of battle. Now that it’s three days later, and she’s left the hospital, and he reminds her of her words, she denies ever uttering them. She tells him he misunderstood. She meant get out from under the rubble, not get out for good.
“Maria.”
“What did you call me?” she says. “Are you using my full name in anger, my holy name that’s a prayer?”
“No. But—”
“What’s the rush, Jules? Where’s the fire?” Mia laughs. “See what I did there?”
“Yes. Very good. Don’t you want to see your mom for Christmas?”
“Mom? What are you, a Yank? And what do you care if I see my mum for Christmas? If we leave for Blackpool, what about Liz? What’s she going to do?”
Julian hasn’t thought about Liz. He is thinking only about Mia. He’s thinking about time. It’s December 11, 1940. He’s been with her 34 days. Yes, it’s 240 miles to Blackpool. In the present day, they could get there in an afternoon. But this isn’t the present day. The present is a shadow. The past is what’s alive. And in December 1940, the distance between London and Blackpool through the bomb corridor of central England might as well be 240 parsecs through a time warp.
Besides the brevity of minutes, they have another problem. All travel to Blackpool has been cancelled. Julian found this out when he went to Euston to get some information or, even better, two tickets. Between London and Blackpool lie Birmingham and Coventry, lie Liverpool and Manchester, and those cities and the trains to them are getting swallowed up almost as bad as London, which is to say irrevocably.
Irrevocably, like Julian and Mia have been swallowed up. All his boxing, his fencing, his fighting, his Krav Maga is nothing to him now. It has no meaning against the current enemy. The strong as well as the weak are laid waste in front of its black lair.
Mia was injured in the Ten Bells bombing. She hit her head when she was thrown from her chair. She has a hole in her upper chest where a piece of shrapnel entered and broke her right collarbone. A few inches higher, and it would’ve shredded her carotid. A few inches lower, and it would’ve collapsed her lung. Ten inches to the left, and it would’ve nicked her heart. She has a wound at the back of her head that bled like Julian’s brow had bled a few weeks earlier. She is weak from blood loss and concussed, showing