JULIAN WRAPS THE STRAPS OF HIS STILL WORKING HEADLAMP around an old bottle of gin filled with water. He points the bulb so it shines into the liquid, and the passageway fills with reflected ambient light. Everyone is impressed. Everyone but Finch who looks as if he wants to beat Julian unconscious in that ginned-up ambience.
No matter what goes on outside, the disposition of the Ten Bells gang rarely changes, but Julian’s mood changes. He gets progressively less jovial, and he wasn’t so jovial to begin with. They’re playing the Luftwaffe roulette every night. During the day a few bombs, a few missions. At night, hundreds of bombs, dozens of missions. Some nights, fifty tons of bombs fall. Other nights, a hundred tons of bombs fall.
A hundred tons of bombs a night. Eventually one of those bombs is bound to drop on the singular spot in the city where Mia stands or rides or walks.
It’s only a matter of when.
It’s only a matter of time.
Outside London, nothing is any easier. Coventry gets destroyed. Half of Birmingham is destroyed, because that’s where the Spitfires are made. Liverpool destroyed; that’s where the American ships dock to resupply the Royal forces. And the British Rail gets hit a thousand times. Train wagons stand on the tracks by the tens of thousands, waiting, not moving. There is nowhere to go.
There is only the Underground.
Which Mia makes her life’s mission to leave every day and night. She is always itching to be somewhere else. As if she doesn’t even care about being safe.
“Why do you always want to go outside, Mia,” Julian says, grumbling, trying to pretend he’s kidding so the others don’t notice. He doesn’t care if she notices. “There is nowhere to go.”
“Sure there is,” she says. “Like the cinema or the cabaret if you were so inclined.”
“A cinema, really?” a weary and skeptical Julian asks. Not another thing. Not one more thing.
“What is this, the dark ages?” Mia says. “Well, technically we are in a blackout, but—of course there’s cinema! I told you, we are all going to Gone with the Wind next Thursday. We have to get there early, or we won’t get a seat.”
The girls flutter with delight. Every time they’ve tried to go before, it’s been house full. There is only one matinee performance. No shows begin after dark. And it gets dark so early these late November days.
“Or instead,” says Wild, “we could spend Thursday night on the lash, rolling from one West End pub to another until we are thoroughly blitzed. Oh sorry, I thought it was August, when ‘blitzed’ carried a whole other meaning. Swedish, you in?”
“Swedish is not in,” Julian says, looking away from Wild, the days of pub crawls forever behind him. The Three Horseshoes on the Yorkshire dales has made sure of that.
“Better yet, the Windmill is still open,” Duncan says with a lewd grin. “That’s my kind of theatre. Who’s with me, boys? Jules, you in? I walked past it the other day. Sign says, Never closed, never clothed. Girls still naked as the bombs fall. Is anybody’s birthday coming up? Jules, yours maybe? Let’s go while the girls are in Covent Garden, swooning over Clark Gable.”
“You must’ve walked past it a while ago,” Liz says. “It burned last Tuesday. No more Windmill.”
“Fuck off!” Nick and Duncan and Wild cry in unison.
With the Windmill closed, the boys reluctantly agree to go with the girls to see Gone with the Wind except for Finch who makes a show of pretending to be excited. “It’ll be almost like a romantic outing, dove,” he says, taking her hand.
“Yeah, almost,” says Mia.
Julian sits and twitches.
Later, Duncan and Wild mock him for his pining face, but he wants to tell them it’s not just Finch and Mia that upset him. For some reason, the Germans love to fly over London on Thursday nights. The last three Thursdays, the city has been ignited by buildings turning into Swedish flames entire.
* * *
On Tuesday, two days before the movie outing, there is a major attack. A hundred and fifty tons of bombs are dropped, most of them on Southbank and the Docklands.
The bombs are mixed, but most are incendiaries. London burns. The Rescue Squad must wait hours for the firemen to bring the flames under control. Wild feels powerless. Finch and Duncan sleep. Mia and Julian talk until Finch wakes just long enough to tell them to shut up.
There is injury on the streets. People are dead or badly burned. Once the worst of the flames has been put out, the squad is summoned to assist in the recovery of valuables and bodies. Are valuables first on the war list?
A one-armed Wild serves tea (slowly), while Julian is asked to shadow Duncan and Frankie in search of bodies. But he can’t. Because he can’t take his eyes off Mia who is searching for valuables. She’s supposed to be getting out blankets and helping to bandage the wounded, but instead she is climbing into a ruined house to get something for someone. Julian can’t concentrate on what’s under his own feet because he is watching her so anxiously. Asking Duncan to give him five minutes, he walks over to stand behind Mia, who is balancing herself precariously on an end of a charred beam to get inside the house.
“Mia, stop.”
She turns to see him behind and below her. “What are you doing here? I’m fine.”
Julian blinks, the memory and the real girl colliding in his eyes. Is she Mirabelle at the peaceful Crystal Palace on a ladder? Or is she Mia in the midst of a disaster? Placing his firm hands on her slender legs, just below her hips, Julian stops her from moving. This isn’t Victorian London. This is war. “I’m serious, stop,” he says, giving her thighs a light squeeze. “Look.” He points up at the ashy window frames above them, teetering above the ripped-out floors, at the roof breaking off in patches.
“I’ll duck.” She smiles.
He shakes his head.
“I’ve been inside a hundred houses like this,” she says. “This one isn’t too bad.”
“It is bad,” he says, “and your luck is going to run out.”
“What, right now?”
Before Julian can nod, the beam she is standing on breaks. Gasping, she totters backwards and falls. He catches her. Like a see-saw, the half-burned crosspiece flies up and ricochets toward her. Julian has barely a picosecond to turn his shoulder to cover her before the beam smashes into his back, knocking them both to the ground, him on top of her.
Wild is the first one to run over, yelling for Finch and Duncan. “I’m fine,” Julian says. “Mia, you okay?” She is still underneath him. She grunts, her mouth full of soot. Duncan moves the charred timber, and he and Wild pull Julian and Mia out, helping them to their feet. Though he said he was fine, Julian is having trouble standing. A three-inch nail got jammed in his calf when the beam fell on him. He yanks the nail out, fleetingly hoping the tetanus shot he got when he came back from Mary in 1603 is still good.
Finch looks unhappy instead of relieved. “Are you all right, dove?” he says to Mia, pulling her away from Julian. “Did he hurt you when he fell on top of you like that? You should be more careful,” he says brusquely to Julian. “You could’ve hurt her.”
“Finch, don’t be an arsehole,” Wild says. “Did you even see what happened? He wasn’t chatting her up, he was . . .”
“I’m just saying,” Finch says. “What’s the point of hurting the people you’re trying to help?”
“Don’t listen to him, Jules, he’s a pillock,” Duncan says.
“He didn’t hurt me, Finch,” Mia says. “That beam would’ve hit me in the face if he hadn’t stepped in front of me.”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“What are you saying, Finch?”
Duncan and Wild support Julian as he limps to the HMU, his arms around their shoulders. Mia runs after them. While Sheila cleans and bandages his wound and confirms that his shoulder blade is not broken, Julian listens to Mia outside the medi truck arguing with Finch.
“Why are you standing here, dove? If you’re not hurt, as you say, why don’t you go . . .”
“I’m not going anywhere, Finch. I’m waiting for him to be done.”
“Why? There’s so much that still needs to be . . .”
“So hop to it, rabbit.”
“I have other things to do, as you well know.”
“So go do them.”
Julian finally emerges.
“Are you okay?” Mia asks, almost timidly, stepping forward.
“I’m fine.” Though Phil Cozens didn’t diagnose it, Julian knows he’s got a muscle tear in his calf, a common injury in contact sports. For the next few weeks, it’s not going to be easy for him to walk around the bomb sites. “Are you okay? Was Finch right? Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she says. “The beam in my face would’ve hurt a lot worse, so Finch was not right.”
Facing each other, they stand next to the medi truck.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” she says. “But it was just a freak accident.”
Julian says nothing.
“Okay, how did you do that?” she says. “You came over at just the right moment, almost as if you knew it was going to happen.”
“Mia, did you see what you were doing? It didn’t take a genius.”
“But why did you do that?” she says quietly.
“Do what?”
“Why did you throw yourself in front of me like that?”
“Like what?”
She can’t say.
“Anyone would’ve done the same, believe me,” Julian says.
She stares into his face a moment and doesn’t say anything.