At the Manor Inn
Bridey reached for the door and slipped through the drape. The pub was crowded and loud, the air dim and yellow from oil smoke.
“There’s nowhere to sit,” Bridey said.
“Get to the bar and I’ll do the rest.” But the dimple didn’t pop in her cheek. She lifted her chin to scan the room.
Bridey aimed herself into the crowd and broke through wherever weakness might be found, reaching back for Gigi’s hand and pulling her along through the attention she drew. A sliver of space at the bar opened up, a miracle, and Gigi rewarded the man who’d created it with a smile.
“I’m Lorraine,” she said.
He couldn’t believe his luck. Nothing to look at, sunburned and stout. Rather like Tommy, in fact. Uniform or not, he had that military bearing to him that so many boys had now, his hair cut too short, showing ears that should be under the brim of a hat in the fields.
“Fiona,” Bridey said. The lie came easily.
“Charlie,” he said. “This good lad is Arthur.”
He was the reedy kind, half his body weight in the Adam’s apple. “How do you do?” he said with a hand out. The other half in manners.
A girl on the other side of this fellow peeked around. “Lorraine, was it?”
Bridey recognized her at once—the woman from the train.
“Why hello,” Gigi said. “Nice to run into you here—”
Gigi stood back to take in the woman’s dowdy skirt and a double-breasted jacket, like a man’s. “Darling,” Gigi said, “are you a bird?”
The woman laughed and said yes, she was. “They’ve made me a messenger in the signals office. Look at these pegs, I ask you. Running up and down that hill, I’ll be muscled as a shoreman. And when they get around to teaching me semaphore, I’ll be able to fly on the strength of these wings.”
The woman waved her arms this direction and that, the arms of a clock. Gigi found this terribly funny and Bridey tried to ignore a slim dagger of jealousy poking at her. She had never had such friends, not her own age. Only Margaret, her oldest little sister—
Charlie leaned close to her ear. “A Wren,” he said. “Royal Navy.”
“I know,” Bridey said. She hadn’t but now she might feel annoyance at him and not grief.
“Willa,” the woman from the train said, putting her hand out to Bridey.
“Uh, Fiona.”
“What’s brought you to this distant outpost, Fiona?”
Bridey didn’t know how to answer. Was she not the woman from the train? Gigi jumped in. “Fi is also a hospital nurse sent down with ’vacs from London. You met on the train, remember? With all the children we’re caring for . . .”
Something passed between the women, then. “Oh, right. I remember you now,” Willa said, squinting at her. “’Vacs from London, what fun.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Bridey said.
Willa and Gigi turned in opposite directions. Willa considered the room. “We’d only just met, but thank you.”
“Did you catch his name?”
“I think someone said his name was Thorne,” Willa said. “Something like it.”
“Did they? What about the other one?”
“Which other one?”
“The other young man from the train.”
Willa cut her eyes at Gigi.
“He went on to Dartmouth,” Gigi said. “Didn’t he say? The Naval Academy, I believe it was.”
She’d seen him at the quay, though, a witness at the scene who had refused to give any bit of information. But then, so had Gigi. “But—”
Charlie handed the women half-pints of lager. “That’s where Artie and me are off to tomorrow.”
Artie’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
“What is? Oh, the academy,” Bridey said. When no one else offered a word, she added, “It’s a brave thing you’re doing.”
“Or blindly stupid,” Charlie said, raising his glass. “Lead the toast, Artie, you’re youngest.”
“To our wives and sweethearts,” Artie said. He held his glass high.
“May they never meet,” Charlie said.
Artie took a drink and said, “We don’t have either one, truly. It’s only tradition.”
Charlie took a long drink, watching Bridey over the rim, and when finished wiped foam from his lip. “You’re up at Mrs. Christie’s house.”
She wasn’t supposed to be precisely who she was. “How do you know that?”
“Everyone knows everything that happens around here.”
“We’ll have new accommodations soon, anyway, I imagine,” Gigi said. “Better ones, right, Fi?”
Was this part of the story? She had to pay attention to the lies so she wouldn’t lose track of them. Fiona and Lorraine. Fiona and Lorraine. And Willa. But was that her name, or was she pretending to be someone else, as well? And why should they be looking for a different place to stay? It was games for the sake of games, without scores kept.
“Shall we find a place to sit?” Artie said.
“We don’t mind standing,” Gigi said.
Bridey would have liked a seat. The other women were keeping their options open, drifting away from the baby-faced sailors now that they had a drink bought for them. Or they were hoping the table at their backs would come available. The men there leaned over their beers in earnest conversation, no sign of going.
“Better accommodations than Greenway House?” Charlie said. The way he said it, Bridey could tell he was local, had grown up thinking of the house as the center of the county, the manor and seat of power. Had taken the ferry to Dartmouth all his life, craning his neck to see the great house through the trees.
Gigi and Willa had gone back to quiet conversation. So quiet, Bridey could better hear the men at the table behind them. Were Gigi and Willa saying anything at all, or only pretending so they didn’t have to talk with Charlie and the other one?
And then she knew. Gigi was eavesdropping. Tuning into the local men’s conversation like it was time for the King’s speech on the wireless. Willa, a prop, didn’t seem to notice.
“I can’t think of a better house around than Greenway,” Charlie said. “Not one you could have for a war nursery in any case.”
“I think she’s joking about better accommodations,” Bridey said. She would have rather heard what the table of men had to say. They would be talking of the dead man. The entire pub might be. A Saturday night and a scandal, too. “It’s a lovely house.”
Charlie was appeased, but had a lot of questions about the interior of Greenway, as not many in the area had seen the house since the Mallowans had moved in.
“Was it the billiards room she took down?” Charlie said.
Bridey didn’t know they had taken down any rooms and found herself impatient to be saddled with the sailors on her own. “There’s no billiards room I’ve seen.”
Gigi reached in and claimed Charlie’s arm. “Darling, where might a girl go to spend a penny?” Her words landed on him like a weight. He nodded her toward the back corridor. “And why don’t you get us something else to drink?”
Suddenly they all wheeled away, Gigi pulling Willa toward the ladies’ and Charlie and Artie, to see about a bottle. Bridey stood alone in a room of strangers and wondered why she had come at all.