Miriam stood at the back door of the shop smoking a cigarette. It was an indulgence, this cigarette, just as everything seemed to be these days. The twopenny bars of chocolate were to be made smaller and restricted to standard lines—milk or plain, with or without nuts. The price of sausage was up, as was bread, and Lyle’s Golden Syrup was now unobtainable.
She should go home and have her tea, but she was a bit heady with the smoke, feeling as though she’d had a glass of sherry, the evening air sharp with the faint smell of bonfires and chrysanthemums. She let this mood take her where she wanted to be, up in the cobalt blue, staring down at the horizon that was ablaze at just this moment, a match for the actual fires that had started up across the village when the frost moved in a few nights ago. Edmund had caught a few revellers lighting a bonfire in their garden, their excuse an early celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. “They don’t have a clue,” Edmund had said to her later. “A bonfire! Why not call Hitler himself and give him our co-ordinates?”
Edmund, his role as warden taken so seriously, but she knew it was all for show, for she understood that he was worried about being called up, and between his duties as postmaster and warden, he was doing his best to make himself indispensable.
“I’m a coward,” he’d said to her after they’d gone to the pub a few weeks ago. He’d had a few pints and talked to Nigel about what he’d done as a warden, not mentioning names of course, but there had been infractions, he’d had to issue warnings. Not fines, but now that war was on there would be no excuses. “I’m a coward,” he’d said, later. “When it comes to it, will I be able to fine Mrs Webster when she tells me she’s doing her best for the fifth time?”
She knew he lay awake at night worried that he would fail.
They all had to be extra careful. This is what he’d told Nigel at the pub, and later when she questioned Edmund about why he’d been so insistent with Nigel, he told her their neighbour could be a spy for the government, sent out to villages like theirs to seek those who were working against them. They’d argued about this, Miriam telling him he was getting paranoid, his job as warden causing him to lose judgment.
Three days later, when they found a note from Nigel telling them he’d been transferred in his job and was moving to Sheffield, neither knew what to think.
“I signed up to the Air Transport Auxiliary,” she told him on the way home that night. Frank had told her they would start taking women in January. She was not trying to frighten him, it’s just that everything had changed, and though she still loved Edmund, she had become someone other than the person he’d married. She had stepped out of herself, out of her role in the relationship, and she knew that he had to test himself for them to continue in some way, so that he could fit alongside her. He’d kept the pond, not willing to give it up for the Anderson shelter. That she gave him for all that he didn’t object, at least outwardly, to her time away from the shop, the time she spent flying. It was as though he understood that sometimes the sense of duty must be to oneself.
Edmund’s gaze, usually darting like a fly around her, locked on hers, and she could see that he was truly frightened, not of having to go to war himself, but of what her joining would mean.
“Ah, Edmund, I’ll be all right,” she told him. “It’s not like I’m signing up to war.”
“What are you signing up to then?” he’d asked.
A question she couldn’t answer, and by this time they were home and she was making them a cup of tea, just as she’d done every night since they were married. But strange things were happening all over the place. Edmund’s cousin who worked for the London council had called in on his way to visiting family last week and spoke of people leaving London in droves. He’d been going all around the neighbourhood collecting council rates and said there were a number of well-to-do people who had just up and left. A back door left open, breakfast things unwashed, and a half-smoked cigarette dipped in tea, fruit going mouldy in a bowl.
Everything strange.
The cigarette singed her fingers, so she took a quick drag and dropped it, crushing it under her foot, but she didn’t move from her spot. This time of night, with the shop closed and the evening ahead of her, was her stolen time. A few moments to be still and not in service to others. Tomorrow she’d see Audrey, just back from Cambridge. They’d sit in the caravan and tell each other how awful things were getting, and then they would settle into talking about their own lives. Miriam knew that her flying was a kind of selfishness, but she also thought that everyone was selfish in some way, otherwise how would anyone see through to their desires.
She was worried about Audrey. The crowds for her lectures were diminishing; the war that wasn’t visible turned men’s and women’s attentions elsewhere, their efforts going in different directions. Duty. That was the only passion that mattered these days, and it did seem a form of passion as she watched men sign up, or grow crops, stockpile, conserve, preserve, look for ways to do without, and the women alongside them coming to grips with rationing, tending to kitchen gardens, mending clothes. They knew so little of what was to come, as little as nothing. This was something that made them greater than they were as individuals.
Time had slowed, and these days held Miriam in a kind of bored agitation. The shop a place to hold out as she waited for the war to truly get started. The skies were all but closed off now as they became military territory. Everything became purposeful. Everything was about preparation. Everything was still about the waiting.