Reginald joins the Home Guard, explaining to Millie that he needs to be involved. What I do at the factory makes a difference, I suppose, he tells her, but I need to do more. There’s no point in sitting around in the evenings and on the weekends. I might as well be out in the streets, helping.
The truth is, Reg will do almost anything to get out of the flat. He often has a pint after work to delay coming home, unsure of what waits for him on the other side of the door. Some days it’s fine, and he is reminded of the girl he fell in love with all those years ago. But other days she’s angry at everything. He can do nothing right. He knows it’s too simplistic to think that life has divided into Beatrix and After Beatrix. It’s this damn war, these damn bombs. It’s changed everything.
He wishes now that he had joined up, back at the start, back in ’39. But he had been a year older than the conscription age, and his brother’s time in the first war had made him wary, even as he wanted to fight for the cause. Relief had flooded through him that he didn’t have to sign up. He hadn’t wanted to be separated from Beatrix and Millie, and yet here he is: his daughter across the Atlantic, his wife wrapped up in her worries.
Millie’s not the only one. All the fellows at work complain about their wives, about how they’re obsessed with what’s happening to the children who were sent away. But no one else they know sent their children to America. Reg still thinks this was the right choice. It does seem increasingly likely that America will enter this war. Still, it’s safer there. If she was in the country, where many of the children are, he would constantly be on edge. He likes the fact that he no longer has to worry. She’s eating well, she’s excelling in school, she’s with a family who cares.
He comes home from a Saturday of training to find Millie on the couch, waving a letter at him. A new one, she says, smiling. Shall I read it aloud to you? But her voice is sharp, and Reg can smell the liquor before he sees the bottle. It’s often this way on Saturdays. Go ahead, he says, collapsing into his chair, untying and kicking off his boots. Training is more difficult than he’d imagined it would be, but he likes that his mind and body are occupied for hours at a stretch. It’s difficult to think about anything else.
Dear Mummy and Dad, Millie reads, Today I caught a bluefish! We went out in one of the neighbor’s big boats. I caught it myself and then Mrs. G cooked it up with lemon and butter. It was delicious. Millie stops reading and looks at the ceiling, a crack from a blast early in the war running from east to west. I’ve never had bluefish, she says, pronouncing bluefish with an American accent and drawing the word out into multiple syllables. I wonder what it tastes like.
Reg pours himself a drink from the bottle on the coffee table. Fishy, probably, he says, and Millie laughs. You got it, she says. Fishy, indeed. Her laugh is grating. She continues reading the letter, which is full of the stuff of summer life in America: food and hikes and tennis and sunsets. Reg loves to hear the details; they allow him to see her in this unknown place. The dog injured his paw. Beatrix beat Gerald in a swimming race. She taught the boys how to make paper boats, just like Reg had taught her. Do you think, Millie says, these people even know there’s a war on? That people are dying every day?
Jesus Christ, Reg sighs, she’s happy. Isn’t that what we wanted? I wanted to keep her here, Millie says. Reg is tired of this conversation. Stop rehashing the past, Mil. She’s getting to be a child. He feels the drink starting to take hold, he feels drawn into the fight. Let me tell you what I heard the other day. In the country, children are being made to sleep in barns. A boy was beaten for breaking a dish. Reg stops then and wonders whether he should tell her the worst of it. Yes, he decides, she needs to know. I heard that a girl, just Beatrix’s age, was raped by the father in her home.
Millie doesn’t seem shocked. She’s probably heard this through her own grapevines. And how do we know those things aren’t happening to our girl? she asks. We don’t know that man. Those two boys. Don’t you ever think that could be happening under and behind and within this idyllic life? These beautiful words? She shakes the letter in his face. We have no idea. She’s presenting a world to us, one that she wants us to see. We do the same to her. She has no idea how much we fight, how miserable I am. No one knows what’s really happening behind closed doors.
Reginald slumps in his chair and closes his eyes. He guesses she doesn’t really believe what she is saying. She’s only drunk and trying to provoke him. He knows, in his heart, that Beatrix is safe. He believes the stories she tells. They give him joy. He can see her, climbing out of the water onto the dock, a grin on her face, her wet hair streaming down her back. He smiles at the thought of it.
You, Millie hisses. Cozying up to those Americans. They’re just as nasty as we are.