Across Brighton, the raids had quietened and, by late August, life seemed almost languid again. Men played patient rounds of cricket on The Level, couples lounged on the Pavilion lawns, and a weekend parade of elephants marched up Grand Parade led by waving, sequinned girls.
Philip was eating a plum at the table on the terrace. His father was at a meeting at the Camp. His mother sat beside him, with her cup and saucer, her book, and his name tag to stitch to his new school blazer. Plum juice dribbled pleasurably down his chin. The sky over the Park was a ribbon of blue and, at first, it was only as if pins had pricked the fabric of the day. Tiny marks. He shielded his eyes to stare. Then a column of planes burst out of the sky.
He stumbled to his feet, knocking his mother’s cup to the terrace where it smashed, but his mother was stuck to her chair, her astonished face turned to the sky. Plane after plane after plane. A swarm of fighters and bombers. The roar of their blaze filled the world.
Why wasn’t she moving? They needed to run down the terrace stairs, through the scullery door and out the other side to the coal cupboard beneath the street. But his mother only stared as the enemy planes sawed the air overhead, splitting the sky so fiercely in their flight it was as if Heaven and all of its dead would come falling through.
She pulled him close to her. Her cheek was wet against his. ‘Poor London,’ she murmured, and he looked up too, marvelling, trembling and willing all at once. Yes, keep going, keep going, get London, not us.
Day after day, twilight came, the gulls went mad and, within minutes, the planes appeared, roaring over the cliffs of Sussex like grievous angels.
Life was a long, clenched vigil; a shuddering climax endlessly delayed. In The Times, Anthony Eden warned that the threat of an invasion by sea was ‘acute’. In Germany, Radio Bremen reported that ‘Hitler may at any hour give orders for the invasion to begin.’ On the six o’clock news, Churchill himself reported that invasion plans were moving steadily forward. There were rumours of an invasion attempt withstood at sea, though Geoffrey’s own sources couldn’t agree the location or the number of ships involved. The following week, it seemed they were spared again; the invaders, they were told, had turned back for the coast of France after encountering high winds in the Channel.
The beaches were only as ready as they would ever be. Army wagons rumbled up and down the Lewes Road, day and night. Geoffrey had his military travel pass and papers on him at all times, for any day now, at any moment, he might be required to leave. A packed suitcase waited under his desk at the Camp; another sat behind the door of his office at the Bank; a third in the under-stairs cupboard at the house. He and his small team at the Bank had rehearsed their departure each Tuesday for months, and he had long ago resigned himself to that dreadful day – to the slow tolling of the church bells and the agony of departure, to the panic on the streets as he made his way to the station. But now, little by little, in one form or another, Evelyn was leaving him. He had prepared for every eventuality but that.
What was worse, he had no idea what to do or how to bring her back. And so, in spite of every plan, he could no more contemplate leaving her than he could erase his memory of the first time he saw her, under that paper lantern, her eyes brighter than he’d known eyes could be.
Of course she was no longer that girl. He was no longer that unhappy young man who’d felt redeemed by her arrival that summer’s night. A single moment couldn’t ultimately matter. What was it compared to the span of a marriage and its undoing? Yet there in the dark of his office, on the grim edge of a camp dedicated to the manufacture of gun emplacements, with the sickening drone of the first planes of the night already in his ears, that thin, fleeting, first moment overwhelmed him again. He’d risked too much to be with Leah, more than he’d dared imagine. But in the moment he’d given her up, the knowledge of what he stood to lose had suddenly loomed. If he lost Evelyn, he’d lose his world.