Then, when she least expected it, Lily caught Matthew’s eye and he gave her the glimmer of a smile—a wry quirk of his lips that suggested a shared joke, a lovely secret. As Tom and Sophie broke apart, Lily felt herself smiling back, her heart lifting improbably, buoyed inside her.
As the train rattled back towards Clapham, Sophie’s gaiety drained out of her like champagne from a bottle. She leaned against a pole, her face pale, her lipstick blood red and slightly smeared, seeming to sink into herself the farther they traveled.
“I don’t think Mother will be too cross,” Lily said by way of encouragement. “We’re not that late, and she knows tonight was something special.”
“I don’t care about Mother,” Sophie answered, and turned away to stare out the window at the blackness of the tunnel they were trundling through.
As it happened, Carol Mather was cross, but only a little. “What if there had been an air raid?” she demanded as Sophie and Lily took their coats off in the hall. “We wouldn’t have known if you’d got to safety. We would have been worried to death.”
“Surely not to death,” Sophie tossed back, and Carol pressed her lips together. “Besides, The Berkeley has its own shelter. We’d have been as safe as houses.”
Carol harrumphed but left it at that; the hot-water bottles she offered them for their beds felt like a peace offering.
Upstairs in their bedroom, with the blackout curtain drawn tightly across and the water bottles warming their beds, Lily slipped off the dark green dress that had seemed frumpy next to Sophie’s silver frock.
“You and Lieutenant Reese certainly got on,” she remarked as Sophie unpinned her hair.
“Oh, don’t sound so stuffy,” she returned, and yawned. “He’s all right.”
“I’m not being stuffy,” Lily objected, knowing she could have been a good deal stuffier. “You think he’s just all right?”
Sophie shrugged and sat down to unroll her stockings. “He’s going to leave, isn’t he? Tom said they were only in London for a short while, until they’re transferred to a base somewhere.”
“They could still come to London on leave.”
“There’s a hundred willing girls for every GI,” Sophie answered with another shrug. She sounded more matter-of-fact than despondent.
Lily frowned, surprised by her sister’s sudden low mood. “He was certainly taken with you,” she persisted.
“Perhaps, but even so…” Sophie paused, a stocking in one hand, her gaze resting on some distant shore. “He’ll be over there soon enough, won’t he? Fighting for victory. And, meanwhile, I’m here, taking dictation from an—an old fart!”
“Sophie—”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Sophie’s voice was fierce as she turned to face her. “It’s all true. Every day, I sit in a stuffy office and type boring letters, while some smarmy old coot smacks my bottom and tells me what a ‘fine gel’ I am. I can’t stand it, Lily. I can’t stand another minute of it.”
Lily stared at her sister in wordless shock. She’d never heard her sound so impassioned, or so despairing. “But you’re doing your bit—”
“If that’s my bit, I don’t want to do it! Look what else I read in that silly little book.” Sophie reached for her handbag and yanked out the little book of Tom’s that he’d carelessly given her. “‘A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can—and often does—give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this way. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them.’” Sophie’s voice trembled, but she kept reading, her voice full of an angry determination. “‘They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at the gun posts and, as they have fallen, another girl has stepped directly into the position and carried on. There is not a single record of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing in her duty under fire. Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic—remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.’”
Sophie tossed the book onto the top of the bureau, her face full of a loathing Lily didn’t understand. “What have I done to be worthy of such respect, Lily? I haven’t even knit any socks.” She let out a humorless laugh as she stripped off her silver dress and flung it carelessly to the floor.
“Not everyone can be a hero,” Lily said quietly. Sophie had been requisitioned by the War Office thanks to the secretarial course she’d completed when she was seventeen; there was no shame in it, none at all.
While Sophie fumed silently, Lily picked up her dress and hung it on the back of a chair. If it belonged to one of the girls at the War Office, she’d want it back in good nick.
“I don’t need to be a hero,” Sophie said at last. “I just want to feel useful. If a bomb flattened me tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter in the least.”
Lily stared at her, horrified. “It would matter to me—”
“I don’t mean to people. I mean to the war. I’m not doing anything, Lily. Not one thing I can be proud of, and I don’t think I ever will.” Pulling her nightgown over her head, Sophie slipped under the covers of her bed and turned her back to Lily, the conversation clearly over.
Lily undressed in silence and then got into her own bed. Despite the welcome warmth of the hot-water bottle, the bed sheets were freezing. She closed her eyes, her mind spinning a little from the alcohol, Sophie’s surprising and desperate vitriol, the whole evening. Yet the last thing she thought of before sleep claimed her was Matthew Lawson’s
funny little smile as they’d said goodbye.
Chapter Seven
ABBY