London felt like a battered paradise when Matthew stepped off the train and into a rainy summer’s evening. The sky was a dull pewter with intermittent drizzle, and everything looked tired and dirty and gray, but he could breathe easily as he walked down the street, grateful for the strange silence of a place that was not being constantly shelled, except he soon found out it was.
In the month since D-Day, London had been hit worse than ever before; the Germans had begun launching V-1 rockets, buzz bombs known as doodlebugs that moved so quickly that anti-aircraft guns couldn’t be mobilized in time and people often weren’t able to take cover.
Thousands of bombs had been dropped on London alone in the last five weeks, and it showed. The city looked worn down to the bone. With a clench of true fear, Matthew wondered if Lily had stayed safe.
He checked into a small, rather shabby hotel near Piccadilly, reveling in a few inches of tepid bath water and a cup of tea the color of dishwater as if these were great luxuries. He went to Rainbow Corner for a hamburger and a beer, and then fell into bed and slept for sixteen hours straight, waking at midday to watery sunlight and a sense of unreality that he was no longer in France.
It wasn’t until that evening that he took the Tube to Clapham, feeling unaccountably nervous as to what reception he might have. He hadn’t alerted Lily to the fact that he was returning to England, or that he had leave; he hadn’t been able to bring himself to write her at all, but now he regretted his reticence. What if she couldn’t get any time off? What if she wasn’t even there? What if—and this was surely the worst of all—she no longer felt the way he did?
Yet how did he feel?
Sometimes he wasn’t sure he knew.
As he emerged from the Underground near Clapham Common, the rain had cleared, revealing a pale blue sky, the sun still bright above, even though it was nearing seven o’clock. The Common seemed peaceful, people strolling in the sunshine, enjoying the balmy weather, the respite from their troubles.
Matthew had just turned the corner when he felt a prickling along his skin, an instinctive awareness, followed by a whistling sound he knew well, although it was usually accompanied by the distinctive wail of the air-raid sirens.
With a sound like a thunderclap, smoke billowed up in the next street over, and it felt as if the very ground beneath his feet had rocked. The sirens started up, and the people near him began dodging for cover.
Matthew whirled around, looking for shelter as another doodlebug landed another street over, and smoke clogged his lungs. He stumbled towards a doorway, one arm thrown above his head.
He could hear the thunder of the bombs falling, just as he had before with Lily, and he closed his eyes tight against it all, half-wishing he was back in France. Then, after what could have been a minute or an hour, the all-clear sounded.
Matthew straightened, lowering his arm as he blinked in a world that seemed muted, the air full of smoke and grit, the sound of police and ambulance sirens starting up.
“Matthew!”
He whirled towards the sound of his name, and, calling out again, Lily came, half-running, half-stumbling towards him. There was dust and grit in her hair and mud on her cheek, but she was safe and whole and in his arms, her slight frame shuddering against him as he pressed his lips to her hair.
“I thought you were a ghost,” she choked out. “Or I was… I thought I must have died. I’d just come out of the Tube when it happened.”
“We’re both alive,” he assured her as he kissed her forehead. Now that she was here, in his arms, he knew he’d been simply waiting these last five weeks to see her. To hold her. “We’re both very much alive.”
She eased back to study his face, her eyes wide, her expression serious, her voice full of wonder. “How did you come to be here? How can you be back?”
“I’m on leave. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you—”
“I didn’t expect letters, not with everything.” Even though Tom had written Sophie, or so he’d told Matthew once, when they’d come across each other in the canteen. They’d continued to avoid each other otherwise, Tom looking at Matthew with wary distrust whenever he saw him. “I knew you wouldn’t,” Lily continued quietly. “I understood.” And even though he hadn’t said a word about why he hadn’t written, Matthew felt that she did.
“You’re safe?” he asked. “Your family?”
“Yes, all safe. Not even a crack in a windowpane.”
“Thank God.”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank God.”
They were quiet for a moment, holding each other in their arms, and then Matthew let go and they started walking towards Holmside Road.
“Has it been very bad?” Lily asked, and even though Matthew knew she understood, he shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about Normandy, or the interrogations, or any of it.
He reached for her hand and they walked silently towards her home, slowing as they came to a building that had been hit directly, reduced to little more than rubble and broken beams, with several people huddled around.
“Can you help?” a man called, his voice hoarse with anxiety. “We need someone small.”
Lily stopped, squeezing Matthew’s hand tightly. “Someone small,” she repeated, as if to herself.
“To go down there.” A soot-faced man nodded towards a deep crater that had opened up in the middle of what had once been a house, a house just like Lily’s. “There’s a man stuck down there, he’s in a bad way. He needs help.”