Page 54 of A Thousand Painted Hours

Please come to London.

Elsie

PS: I do not have a cat in the dorms. Mother has adopted a slew of kittens for mousing in the house at Herewich, and I enjoy them when I visit. She, too, will want to see you. My father has been poorly the past few months. Oddly, he seems to have adapted far less well to returning to his home country than my mother, who never lived here at all.

The Children We Did Not Have

October 1940

London

—29—

Nina rang to invite me to lunch, and I gladly escaped to meet her at Selfridges. It was a gloomy, misty morning, which leant a sense of safety to the journey, for the bombers rarely flew in such weather. My fellow Tube passengers were a silent lot, each of us cloaked in the armor of stoicism. If one didn’t think too hard about it all, it was just possible to make one’s way through the day.

The tearoom was an oasis of calm, familiar, and my nerves unwound the minute I entered the room. I found Nina already seated, beautifully dressed as ever, with a tilted hat on her smooth hair. I kissed her. “Hello, darling. How are you?”

“I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” she said. “Did you?”

“No.” It had been a wretched night, with endless bombings. “Even mother with her morphine was restless.”

“Did you hear about Balham Station? Jonathan stopped in to shave and shower this morning, and I gather it was dreadful.”

“What happened?” The waiter soundlessly laid down my teapot and cup.

“I didn’t quite gather all the details, but between an enormous bomb and a bus crashing, some waterlines were broken and flooded the station. Hundreds of people were sheltering there.”

“Dear God.” An exhausted place between my shoulder blades pinched hard. I rolled my neck a little, trying to loosen it. “Nothing is safe, really.”

“I suppose not.” She picked up the menu and scanned it desultorily. “Oh, I do long for a sole Véronique. And a decadent plate of oysters.”

“Mmm. Cheese tartlets and a lobster salad.”

“And ice cream.”

“And those little petit fours.”

Nina sighed. “I suppose I’ll indulge myself with Woolton vegetable pie.”

“Same for me.” I set the menu aside. “It’s lovely to see you, dear, but I felt a sense of urgency in your telephone call. Is everything all right?”

“No,” she said, and her eyes shone, almost as if she would weep. “Helen is terrified, and she wants to return to her home outside Bath. She feels she will be safer.”

Helen was her longtime lover, a woman she’d been involved with off and on since the late twenties. I’d often felt the union was tilted more toward Helen’s benefit; she was a lush beauty, some years younger, and Nina was impossibly in love with her. “I’m sorry,” I said, as a good friend should do. “I know you’ll miss her terribly.”

“Whatever shall I do with myself during the raids? Jonathan is always gone, and the servants are there, but I’m essentially alone in the fortress.”

“Come to us, if you like.”

She shook her head. “Jonathan would not approve at all. The place truly has been fortified as well as anything could be. Perhaps you and your mother should come to me, instead.”

“I should dearly love that, but my mother cannot make the trip.”

At this, she looked genuinely aggrieved. I reached for her hand. “You will only be alone, not abandoned. Perhaps you should set up a course of study to distract yourself. Or take up knitting,” I added slyly.

She laughed. “Don’t be beastly. I shan’t knit unless I’ve not even a scrap of fabric to cover myself.”

“Mother knits when she feels well enough, but mostly she’s been sleeping.”