Into the Darkest Day

Something warm and welcome bloomed in Simon’s chest at that, and at the hesitant but hopeful look on her face, which made him feel like letting out some sort of ridiculous primal roar. He didn’t know how Abby felt, not exactly, but the look on her face was enough. “I don’t either,” he said.

The waitress came bearing their lumberjack platters, which really were enormous.

“We can put what we don’t eat in doggie bags and have it for dinner,” Abby suggested a bit doubtfully. “There’s no way I’m going to eat even a third of this.”

“But you can try,” Simon declared. “It’s practically your duty.”

She laughed and shook her head, and they both started eating. Outside, the sky was still pressing down on the earth, everything limp and colorless from an August day’s humidity, and yet Simon felt as if the world was turning to Technicolor. Something was expanding in his chest, taking over his body, making him smile. Grin.

Maybe they wouldn’t learn a thing from Guy Wessel. Maybe nothing would happen between him and Abby. But right here, right now, he felt as if he could live in this moment, and it would be enough.

Chapter Twenty

London

July 1944

There had been nothing to save from the rubble of the house on Holmside Road, nothing useful or precious, not a single keepsake to remember the many happy years in that home.

In the days after the bombing, Lily withdrew into herself, like an animal seeking self-protection, curling inward, while Sophie became hardened, the appealing gloss worn off her veneer, leaving her brittle and determined, the humor and charm that had once softened her seeming to have vanished completely.

Richard Mather had not been home when the V-1 had hit, which was, at least, a mercy. Moments after Lily had run towards the house, he’d come haring down the street, shouting his wife’s name uselessly.

Matthew had watched as the Mathers stood in front of their ruined house, praying that by some miracle Carol hadn’t been inside it. But there’d been so little warning, and when Lily had run to look, the Anderson shelter had been empty. Rescue workers had pulled her broken body from the wreckage as Sophie turned onto Holmside Road, Lily utterly silent as Richard let out an anguished cry.

In the aftermath, no one knew what to do. When it had been someone else, there was tea to brew and blankets to find and comfort to give. Now, other people were pressing cups of tea into their hands, and finding them clothes and blankets, murmuring sympathies and shaking their heads. Lily had looked blankly at the cup she was cradling as if she didn’t know what it was.

“Where will we sleep?” she’d asked no one in particular, as if it was a matter of only passing interest.

Neighbors up and down the street had offered spare rooms, settees, and more blankets than they knew what to do with, but Matthew knew the Mathers could hardly spend the rest of the war on someone’s sofa.

The next day, instead of walking with Lily in Regent’s Park or going to the cinema, holding hands and talking about nothing, he queued with her for a clothing grant, and then helped to look for accommodation for the family.

The government, Matthew discovered, was near to useless in providing anything behind the barest of essentials; there were simply too many people in similar situations, too many homes and lives wrecked for them even to try to make much of a difference.

Eventually, after three days of the Mathers sleeping in a neighbor’s sitting room, they found a set of rooms in Stockwell, a far cry from the cozy comfort of the house on Holmside Road, but just about adequate.

There was a small bedroom for Sophie and Lily, and a front room where Richard could sleep, along with a tap and a gas ring so they could make their own meals and wash. The toilet was outside, at the bottom of a muddy strip of garden. The whole place smelled of boiled vegetables and soiled nappies, and everyone living there seemed grim-faced and sullen, but it was all there was.

“It will do,” Lily said firmly, while Sophie simply curled her lip as she looked around the two shabby rooms with peeling linoleum floors and plaster flaking off the walls. “Mother would have been able to make this place a home,” Lily added as Sophie walked off. “She was brilliant that way. It’s up to us to carry on as best as we can.” And with a purposeful air, her lips trembling only a little, she reached for the little tin teapot they’d been given with a box of other secondhand household items and placed it on the table. This was home, Matthew realized with both affection and pride, because she would make it so.

“Let me take you all out to Rainbow Corner tonight,” Matthew suggested later. He didn’t know if he could get them in, with so many GIs on leave, but he would do his best. “For a slap-up meal. It’s the least I can do.”

“Why not?” Sophie answered with a toss of her head, a hard glitter in her eyes. “Might as well get a meal while I can.”

Richard cried off, insisting he was fine on his own and wouldn’t spoil their fun—although Matthew wondered how much fun they could have, considering the

circumstance. He knew Tom had been granted leave after his ended, and he hoped he’d be able to provide some comfort to Sophie, although she seemed indifferent to the prospect. Nothing seemed to matter much anymore.

This was what war did to you, Matthew thought, in the end. After all the fury and fear and the desperate, wild hope, it made you stop caring, and in its own way that was worse than anything that had gone before.

That evening, the crowd at Rainbow Corner seemed both determined and jubilant, a far cry from the dour mood of the little group who filed into the foyer of the former Lyons Corner House on Piccadilly.

“Haven’t you heard?” an airman at the bar asked Matthew, who shook his head. “They tried to kill Hitler. His own men. A bomb or something in a suitcase.”

Matthew’s heart felt as if it were lurching towards his throat. “They didn’t succeed?”

“Nah, he’s got the luck of the devil, that bastard.” The man tossed back half his beer in one gulp. “But his own men trying to kill him? Even they want to be shot of it all. It won’t be long now. It can’t be.”