The Postmistress (9 page)

She stumbled even before the sound hit, the pop of windows a prelude to the boom of the smashed walls that would follow.
Boom
, the sound so big it rocked in the pit of her stomach and for a moment seemed to grab hold of her heart and beat for it also.
Boom
. The shrapnel clattered on the roofs. Directly ahead, three or four blocks off, another shell burst and Frankie dove for the railing of the basement stairs to the building she stood next to. Then a third shell burst overhead and she pushed herself all the way down the stairs and the door opened at her back and she was pulled inside. And she was safe, she was told. Safe. Underground for the first time in all the months she’d been in London. She stumbled down the stairs into a sea of hands that pulled her forward,
there you go, love, mind out, there you go
, until she reached an eddy and sank down against a wall, catching her breath. And at first, that’s all she could hear, people like her breathing. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the dark and she made out what looked like a family beside her fast asleep in a row, the father around the mother around the child, their blanketed form ranging away into the dark like a granite boulder sloping to the sea. Beyond them, she could hear breathing but couldn’t make out how many sleepers there were, or even the size of the shelter she’d landed in.

It had gone very quiet up above. Too quiet. As though the bombs were looking for them. Around her, those who were not sleeping stared at the ceiling. She’d heard that Murrow refused to ever go into a bomb shelter, sure he’d lose his nerve. There was no such thing as safety in numbers, everyone knew it. Still, the feeling ran strong, in the dark while the bombs fell down, if you looked up and found someone else’s face—if you heard human voices—somehow the whimpering, which could erupt as laughter hovering just inside your mouth and threatening to spill out, stalled. Come what may, down here, you were all in it together. The quiet twined around them. Frankie’s heart started to pound with that horrible excitement, as it used to do, waiting in a dark closet playing Sardines, waiting to be found.

A storm of gunfire shook the windows as the AA guns in the Thames battery started up again, cracking the eerie quiet, as though they’d waved. She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

She must have dozed, because when she opened her eyes it seemed to have grown lighter, or at least the dark had grown dimmer, though she still couldn’t make out the time on her watch. Dimly lit lanterns hung every thirty feet or so, stringing small pockets of light across the shelter. She patted her skirt for her matches, but the box was empty. Idly she followed the lumpen line of sleeping bodies, counting them in her head one by one until she arrived at the opposite wall.

The father beside her jolted in his sleep and then sat straight up, pulling the blanket off his wife and child.
Christ,
he said to no one. He was staring straight ahead of him as if the dream he had just left continued on there in the near dark.
Christ
, he muttered again and looked swiftly over at Frankie. She nodded amiably, not sure whether he was awake. He nodded back at her and it worked like a hand on the string of a kite, hand over hand, pulling him into wakefulness.
Oh,
he sighed,
where were we?
But he didn’t want an answer: the blanket had slipped off his wife and he turned away from Frankie to cover her. In the dim light, Frankie saw the woman’s arm reach up and pull her husband to her.

The all clear sounded around five o’clock, though it was still pitch-black outside, and cold. One by one people woke. The family beside her stirred and pushed themselves up off the ground, the blankets falling around them.

“Hello.” A hand tugged on her skirt.

She looked over. Billy, the boy from the end of her block, was kneeling beside her. She pushed herself upright, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Hello,” he said again.

“Hi.” She smiled, glad to see him.

He had lowered himself beside her and was sitting cross-legged, but rocking slightly from side to side as though he were on gliders. Frankie wondered if he’d been hurt. She came up on her knees.

“You okay?”

His round eyes took her in, but he didn’t answer.

“Are you by yourself?” She glanced around. “Where’s your mum?”

“She went to get Gran,” he said quickly. “She said, stay till I get there.”

“Last night?”

He nodded.

“Maybe she’s in here, then.” Frankie pushed herself up to standing, trying to look over the heads of the crowd.

“She can’t be here yet.” He shook his head. “She would have called for me.”

Frankie looked down at him quickly. “Of course she would have,” she agreed. “Shall I walk you home?”

He shook his head. “Mum wouldn’t like it.”

“I’ll stay here then, until she comes.”

The child’s relief flickered over his little body, but the face he turned up to Frankie showed nothing. She smiled down at him. He stared back at her and then dropped his gaze.

“So, Billy,” Frankie said, “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced, have we?”

He glanced up.

“I’m Frankie Bard.” She put out her hand.

“Very pleased to meet you,” Billy answered smartly. Frankie grinned.

“And how old are you, Billy? I’ve been guessing around six.”

“Just seven,” he pronounced proudly. “I only just turned it last week.”

“Well then, happy birthday.”

“Six days late.” He was firm.

“Happy birthday six days late,” Frankie repeated, smiling.

Slowly the sleepers made their way out, until the large underground room had nearly cleared. Frankie glanced down at Billy who was staring at the bright opening where the winter morning crept down the stone stairs into the basement. He was up on his knees now, and his agitation had grown.

“Do you need to pee?”

He shook his head.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk you home.”

He hesitated and then he stood up. “I do need the loo,” he admitted stiffly.

“But when we turned the corner at the end of the street, smoke was rising in blankets into the absurd blue sky, and the boy broke free and ran ahead of me. The bomb had cut an angled path down our block, shearing off all the roofs, but leaving front stoops and doorways, even first-story windows intact at the end of the block. My heart hammering, I followed the boy, staring at the bombed-out face of my own flat. The windows were smashed, and I could see all the way through to what used to be our kitchen. I stared up, hoping against hope to see the face of my flatmate, Harriet Mendelsohn, staring down. But there was nothing. The boy had run up the steps of his own smashed house two doors down, and stopped on the threshold. Mum! he called”
—Frankie ’s voice broke there on the word
Mum
. And Murrow, sitting right beside her, put his hand on her arm. She shook her head—“
to his house. He’d come home. Mum? he called again with the faith any child calls out to his house, never mind the bombs. His mother would always come down the stairs when he called; any minute she would come, or come around the corner from the kitchen into the hallway. Mummy! Now he was asking. Now he was knowing. From the sidewalk, I heard the shift in the boy’s voice, though his small back was still straight in the open doorway.”

Frankie put both hands on the base of the microphone and closed her eyes, forcing her voice to keep steady, forcing the imaginary ball in her head to stay floating, stay up, to carry the story forward, though tears were sliding through her shut lids.

Frankie’s hands were holding so tight to the microphone that it had gone hot against her palms. She took a breath and went in for the end.

IN THE QUIET after that voice stopped, Emma found herself stuck at the sink with a cigarette halfway to her lips, remembering being five and standing on the doorstep of her great-aunts’ house, staring at the door, waiting to meet them after her parents had died. And it hit Emma for the first time that the voice on the other end of the radio was a woman, a woman like herself, only over there. And she wondered what the radio gal had done in the seconds right after the boy had slid to his knees. She wondered whether Frankie had stood there on the outside of the gate, or whether she had been shushed away by the neighbor. She wondered when she found out her friend had died. All there was was the story she had told, not what happened around the edges. What happened after? What happened next? Where was the little boy now?

“Will?” Her voice trembled.

He held out his hand and Emma crept quietly into the clasp of his arm and sank down on his lap in the kitchen chair.

“It’s going on over there, right now. I mean right now.” She leaned against his shoulder. “That boy, who’s with him? I wish we could do something.”

“I’m sure he’s safe.”

She was flooded with a picture of the last time she had seen her own mother, asleep in the hospital bed, her face turned on the pillow facing the door.
Go on,
the nurse had whispered through the gauze mask,
wave good-bye
. And the little girl she was then had understood there would be no help. The grown-up world had departed and left her standing, waving, all alone. She shuddered.

That she was warm and against him and that her cheek rested in his neck steadied the rocking world in his own head. The picture of the boy staring at his smashed house was so clear. But the picture of the woman on the radio watching the boy, watching helplessly—that got him. And the voice of that gal on the radio stirred him, called to him like a siren. Called him, though he didn’t know toward what. He pulled Emma in tighter and lay his head on top of hers.

“We ought to do something,” she murmured.

“What?” He could feel her heart beating against the arm he’d wrapped across her chest.

“The boy,” she said into his chest. He tightened his hold and leaned his forehead against her back and they were quiet like that for a long while together. Life seemed to her like a city hotel with many floors. She did not like to think of all the hallways she’d never seen, nor all the hallways that she might have walked along if she had gotten off at a different floor. She didn’t like to think that there was more than one hallway than the one she was in—one in which she hadn’t met Will. One in which his eyes weren’t on her, watching her, smiling back at what she did.

“If I’d stayed in my rooms last year as I meant to, and not gone to the doctors’ Christmas party, we’d never have met.”

“No,” he whispered into her hair. “I’d have found you.”

The front doorbell rang long and hard.

“Dr. Fitch?” someone called from outside the front door. In three strides Will was up and down the hall to the door to find Maggie’s eldest boy on the porch, stamping his feet in the cold. He’d run out without a sweater.

“Ma says would you please come.” He was excited and proud about giving the news.

“Tell your ma and dad I’ll be right over.” Will smiled down at him and the boy nodded and turned out of the porch light and ran back down the road to home.

“Don’t wait supper for me,” Will called to Emma, reaching for his bag and opening it to check again that everything was there.

“Oh, I’ll have something by.” She had come out into the hall.

“I may be all night,” he said gently, pulling her to him and kissing the top of her head.

“All right,” she said and then pulled away to look up at him. “I suppose this is what I’ve married, isn’t it?”

She was so small just then in the half-light of the hall. But she lifted her face up to be kissed again and he kissed her. “Are you all right?” Will asked, quite low.

She nodded, flushing. “Of course, darling.”

“What will you do?”

Emma lifted the latch. “I don’t know,” she said a little brightly. “It’s still early. Maybe I’ll walk into town.”

“Good,” he answered. “That’s good.” He leaned down, grazing the top of her head with his lips, but she stepped back and looked up at him a little desperately, as if she were going to say something. Just now with her chin tipped up toward him, all he wanted was to kiss her, kiss her as he was used to doing, long and deep and with no thought of what was ahead.

He put his hands on her two shoulders and tipped his forehead down to touch hers. She smiled. She could feel his breath along the ridge of her chin. It was him. His body here. This was all. This was all, ever, that was needed. “Go along, now,” she whispered.