Into the Darkest Day

“I haven’t had champagne in years,” she said as she put the glass back down. “I forgot how funny it is.”

He looked at her with a strangely penetrating gaze, his eyes so very dark, the irises nearly the same color as the pupils. “Has it been very hard here?” he asked. “During the war?”

“Not as hard as some have it, I’m sure.” Lily was always conscious that she shouldn’t complain, not when others had lost homes, or lives. “We haven’t been bombed out, and we haven’t lost anyone close to us yet. Mother says we’re very fortunate, really.” She sounded like such a child, she thought with a wince. How was it that her sister could seem so effortlessly sophisticated, and meanwhile she sounded as if she were about six? “What about you? I don’t suppose the war has affected you much yet, in New York.”

“No,” he agreed after a brief, heightened pause. “Not in New York.”

“Of course, now that you’re here…” With an uneasy ripple of awareness, she realized how one day, perhaps even one day soon, both Matthew and Tom would be right in the action, on the front lines, fighting for their lives, as well as for victory. One day they might be the names mentioned in one of the letters she wrote. Dear So-and-so…

Except, of course, they weren’t in the navy. It would be some other nameless girl, some American girl in a strange city somewhere, who would sit in front of a typewriter, her fingers poised over the keys. It is my painful duty to inform you…

“Are you scared?” she blurted. “When you think about fighting?”

“No.” The answer was so swift and stony that Lily blinked.

“Are you scared when you’re caught in a raid?” Matthew countered, and she shrugged uncertainly.

“Sometimes, but usually it doesn’t feel quite real. It’s almost as if I’m watching a film, or a newsreel. I wonder if that’s the only way we can survive it—by feeling as if it’s not actually happening to us.”

Matthew was silent for a long moment, his fingers rotating the stem of his coupe of untouched champagne. “At some point,” he said finally, “you will have to accept that it is real.”

There was no real censure to his voice, but Lily felt it all the same. Why had she sounded so… so vacuous, as if the war hadn’t really affected her, as if she wasn’t bothered at all by all the tragedy and violence around her, by the letters she wrote every day?

Words crowded in her throat, crammed in her mouth, unspoken revelations about how she couldn’t keep from imagining the faceless men whose letters she wrote, the men who had drowned in cold, empty seas, or died in the burning carcasses of torpedoed ships. How she lay in bed awake at night and pictured their terrible last moments, wondered if, when the end finally came, they’d been scared or sad or simply accepting? Had it hurt?

She wanted to tell Matthew how, in those sleepless moments, she felt a silent scream building in her chest, a howl of fury and fear and hopelessness, as the wooden tray on her desk filled with freshly typed letters every day, and yet there were always, always more to type.

And each one belonged to a person—a young man who had lived and loved, who had come down with colds and maybe kissed a girl; a boy who had hugged his mother. How could that be? How could that possibly be?

Staring at his implacable expression, dark eyebrows drawn over darker eyes, she wanted to share so much, and yet she struggled to say anything at all.

“Yes,” she finally mumbled. “I suppose you’re right.”

The silence stretched on again, painful this time. It was horribly apparent they had nothing to say to one another—or, at least, Sergeant Lawson had nothing to say to her, and she couldn’t even blame him. Somehow she hadn’t been able to convey anything of how she really felt—how much she felt.

Lily reached for her champagne once more, only to put it down, afraid she might cough again and embarrass herself further.

“So you write letters,” Matthew said after a moment. “What division?”

“I’m a Wren. That’s the Women’s Royal Naval Service—I work in the Admiralty.”

“And do you do as your sister said? Typing letters all day, every day, to the families of the servicemen who have been killed?”

“Or missing in action. Yes.”

Something flickered in Matthew’s eyes as he looked at her. “That must be terribly sad.”

Lily thought of all she’d wanted to say earlier, and still couldn’t. “Sometimes,” she said quietly, and looked away. “But it’s not as bad for me as it is for them,” she added after a moment, struggling to form her thoughts into words. “For the men, I mean, and for the families.” She turned back to him; he looked as inscrutable as ever. “It must be horrible, to receive one of those letters. To… to know.”

She’d imagined it many times—a woman in a housedress, or perhaps a young wife, a baby in her arms, taking the thin envelope, reading the impersonal typescript, the scant sentences. Lily tried, foolishly, she knew, to imbue each letter she wrote with some kind of warmth, a silent prayer said over the impersonal words that were always the same.

“Of course,” she added when Matthew had not said anything, “they receive letters from the soldiers themselves. Did you know that? Every soldier writes a letter that will be sent in case he dies.”

“Yes, I know.” His voice was toneless, his gaze somewhere off to the left. “I’ve written one myself, actually.”

“Oh.” Childishly, tears sprang to her eyes. She was making such a dreadful ninny of herself. “Of course you did,” she whispered and then looked down at her lap.

The music ended and the orchestra struck up another lively tune. Lily looked up to try to catch a glimpse of her sister; Sophie was a good dancer, but Lily didn’t think she’d ever jitterbugged as wildly as this before, heels kicking up and skirts flying. Lily couldn’t see her in the crowd of dancers, and with the silence like a heavy blanket over the table, she muttered an excuse and blindly made her way out of the ballroom to find the ladies’.