Page 13 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“Leave the sugar for someone else,” she said, but she sank against the chintz of the chair with a weary sigh, closing her eyes.

Betty sliced potatoes at the table, appearing to be fully restored. I said, “I’m going to make a pot of tea for Mother.”

She nodded, gesturing toward the box that held our ration.

The kettle was hot on the stove, the fire low but warm in the grate. What would happen if a bomb fell on the house? I wondered, but it was plain once I considered. The gas lines would break in the bombing, and there would be an explosion.

“Will you fetch a handful of parsley, Miss Elsie?”

“Of course.” I opened the back door, to head out to the garden. “Oh, my!” I cried. “Look! Betty, come look!”

She rushed over, knife in hand, and we stared agape at the southern horizon. Great billows of black smoke clouded the sky, and all around the clouds was a deep-orange glaze. “I reckon they’ve bombed the docks,” I said, and although we’d known it was likely coming, it was hard to adjust the mind to the reality.

Her family lived on the East End. “Do you want to go?” I asked. “Make sure your family is well?”

Tears welled in her eyes, and she nodded. “I would, please. I’ll make the dinner and then go on, if that’s all right.”

“Heavens, no. I’ll manage.”

She yanked off her apron, dropped the knife on the table with a clatter, and raced down the corridor. Her coat was on a hook near the door, and I followed her out, to see the aftermath from this angle. It was much calmer here, people in the streets returning from the Tube station, full of chatter and worry, comparing notes. A car made its way down the street. Nothing appeared to be hit or on fire, but then we were a long way from the docks.

Mrs. Newsom, from two doors down, stopped at the foot of our steps. Her hat was askew, but her jacket was as tidy as ever. “Everyone all right in there, Elsie?”

“Yes, thank you. Do you need anything?”

She raised a hand as she walked on. Betty hurried away to the bus stop. Would buses run as normal? Would she be able to get through? I thought to call out to her, but she was too far away to hear. If a bus did not come, she would soon return.

I saw no sign of Peter. He’d likely made a beeline for the pub, and would be working his way into an obliterating drunk. Well, he could make his way home on his own tonight. I needed to tend to my mother.

By the time I brought the tea, she’d fallen asleep. I left it at her elbow and went back to the kitchen, turning on the radio for company. The announcer’s voice came through, a comforting ordinariness, and I found calm in slicing the robust potatoes.

Toward the end of the last war, when food had grown scarce in London, I’d retreated to our deserted family estate in Herewich, and learned how to grow a victory garden. But that had been twenty years before and I hardly remembered any of it. Luckily, Betty had been raised in the country. She ordered the local man to build beds and dig them deep, augmenting with eggshells and coffee and other mysterious additions until we had the mix she pronounced ready. The two of us pitched in to do the planting, while Mother had sat with us in the cool of the garden, enjoying the fresh air. It had proved a soothing way to spend our time, digging and weeding, keeping anxiety at bay over the encroaching march of the Nazis, the air battles overhead, the heavy threat of bombings.

Awake too early over worry, I’d come outside and pull weeds and tuck up a tendril of beans, pluck snails from the tomatoes. In the evenings, when dark thoughts of what might happen crept in to haunt me—how would I keep my mother safe? What would happen to all of us?—I puttered again. A weed, a handful of snails, a carrot, and I could breathe again.

While the potatoes fried, I stepped out the open back door to gather the parsley Betty had asked for. Clouds of smoke still billowed against the horizon, but it was otherwise a mild evening, the drama over for the day. From the earth seeped the reassuring scent of fecund summer. I pinched parsley between my fingers, and the sharp green fragrance brought back that other summer when I had not been alone, when the war had taken so much, but delivered a blessing I could almost not grasp.

Closing my eyes to inhale it all, earth and herbs and carrots and the onset of evening, I was filled with longing. The story of the tiger had called up my yearning for India, the smell of it, the feel of it enfolding me. I wished for a forest that might hold a tiger, for a market alive with color and animals and bells, for elephants, for bowls of spice in many shapes and colors.

And as ever, I longed for the company of Tanveer, for his perceptive gaze, and gentle teasing, his questing mind and far-reaching ideas.

Standing there below the smoky sky that promised another long, exhausting war, I ached for a different life, one where we might have been able to live our days as husband and wife, and raise a family, and be happy.

But that was not the life we were given.

Alone in the garden, a wave of deep loneliness moved through me.

Abruptly, the air-raid sirens bleated their warning of incoming airplanes. I jerked in alarm, dropping the herbs, and looked up, fear bolting through my chest. I ran for the house, pulled the potatoes off the burner on my way through to Mother, who stirred awake at the noise. “Do you think it’s an error?”

“I don’t know. It does seem odd that they would come back, doesn’t it? Surely they’d have to refuel?”

The sirens continued, up and down, up and down. Through the back door, I saw nothing amiss. “We can wait a little.” The stairs to the basement were close enough.

And then, on the horizon, I saw them. Lines of birds, so many birds.

But not birds, of course. Planes. “We need to go down,” I said. I closed the back door, and I helped Mother hobble back down the cellar stairs to the little couch and her basket of knitting. “I hope Betty’s made it home all right,” I said.

“Where’s Peter?” Mother asked.