Then, in early April, Sophie received a letter from Tom asking if he and Matthew could visit while they were on leave. The weather was warm but dull, and they suggested going to the cinema; Bees in Paradise was playing, and was meant to be, according to Tom, “a real gas”.
Sophie was in an immediate flurry, ripping out seams of an old dress in order to freshen it up with a bit of bright ribbon, while Lily’s old anxieties about the pigeons in Matthew’s shed rose up. For the last few months, she’d managed mostly to quash them; while he certainly wasn’t out of mind, the potential dangers he presented had been. But now she was going to see him, and she had no idea what he was, never mind how she felt about him, or how he felt about her.
On one gray afternoon in early April, the two GIs appeared at the door of the house in Holmside Road, familiar yet strange in their uniforms—Tom’s brash smile, Matthew’s quiet containment. They hadn’t changed at all.
Sophie chatted all the way to the Underground, her voice full of laughter, her manner a bit frantic as she linked arms with Tom and sauntered ahead. Lily gave Matthew a strained smile; this parade to the Tube station felt as awkward as that walk across the Common back in January when they’d first met, which saddened her, because surely they should be better than this by now, on easier terms, at least.
Then Matthew reached over and touched her arm. “How are you?” he asked quietly, as if he really wanted to know the answer, as if it mattered.
“I’m all right. It’s been so long.” She didn’t know whether she meant waiting for the invasion, or waiting for him. Perhaps both.
“It has,” he agreed. “I read about the Mahratta, and I thought of you.”
Lily’s throat closed. “Only sixteen survivors,” she whispered. And over two hundred letters to type.
Matthew nodded. “I wonder how you bear it. To only deal with the horror of war, and none of the hope.”
“Is there hope, in war?”
He nodded, the movement swift and sure. “There has to be. A belief, a faith that one day this will all be over, and the evil of fascism will be forever wiped from the world.”
He spoke with such bitterness, such ferocity, that Lily nearly stumbled in her step. He couldn’t be a spy, she thought yet again, filled with buoyant relief. Unless he was simply trying to gain her trust. Her thoughts forever circled.
“People are starting to hope now, I think,” she said. “You hear things.”
Matthew nodded again, solemnly this time. “Yes,” he said simply, and that was enough.
“Come on, you two!” Sophie called back to them. “Or we’ll miss the film.”
The film was atrocious—a ridiculous comedy filled with scantily clad women inhabiting a mysterious island where men were as good as drones, used only for breeding. Lily couldn’t help but flinch at the crude baseness of it, although, next to her, Sophie hooted with laughter and Tom made appreciative guffaws.
Matthew’s expression was rigid, and Lily suspected he found the absurdity of it all as excruciating as she did, the wide-eyed women with their exaggerated moues and the buffoonish soldiers bumbling around… it was the grossest parody of what they all knew, making a joke of what was their painful reality, and all for a few cheap laughs.
Back outside, Tom suggested they all get a drink, and they ended up drinking beer in a shabby pub near Piccadilly, a far cry from champagne at The Berkeley. Sophie squeezed in on the banquette next to Tom, his arm wrapped around her, while Matthew and Lily sat in chairs.
The mood of the city was both dour and expectant; the evenings were light and warm, and everyone was straining for news that still hadn’t come, and Lily felt that same push-pull here with Matthew, half of her clamoring to demand he tell her who he was, while the other half stayed meekly silent.
“Will you get any more leave?” she asked in a low voice after several minutes of silence. Tom and Sophie were wrapped up in themselves, her head on his shoulder, making the situation all the more awkward.
“I don’t know.” Matthew spread his hands in apology. “They don’t tell us much, I’m afraid.”
“It must be soon, though, surely.”
“One hopes.”
Lily caught a bead of condensation on the side of her glass with her finger. “Will you write to me?” she asked, feeling bold for saying as much as that.
“Do you want me to?”
Lily looked up in surprise and Matthew gave that lovely quirk of a smile.
“It’s only, sometimes it seems…” He paused, and Lily leapt in clumsily.
“I don’t… that is… I would like it very much if you wrote to me. I should have said before.”
“Good.
I’m glad.”