Again from the top of the bomb shelter her mother called with hushed stridency:
“Susan, come back here.”
“There’s smoke,” she responded.
She went around the corner and tried the door. Its pane was gone too, cleanly as if it’d been removed by glaziers. She reached in and turned the dead bolt and pushed, and there was a scratching sound. That was the door brushing across the glass that her sandals crunched and crackled as she went in. A light, red and pointed, moved and flitted like a firefly over by the table.
“Hello?” she called. She stepped closer. Someone was there and it was her father. Just sitting there in the darkness, a cigarette burning in his hand. She could smell the half-wine half-whiskey smell of sherry and she said, “Dad?” He made no reply. He didn’t smoke the cigarette, only held it. Then he sobbed. And her mother was at the back door with the candle. “Mum,” Susan said.
“The panes have all been blown out,” her mother said. “Wait until your father gets home.”
“Mum,” Susan said again, “he is home.”
Her mother entered, crushing with her shoes more glass. “Mac?” she asked Susan. “Where?”
Susan stepped aside and her mother came and stood by the table. The candlelight was tall and pale and the light leaned upon the wall and upon the ceiling and also too upon her father who was bent over now, his head in his hands, the smoke from his cigarette fluttering as it rose through the candlelight like a tiny scarf in a breeze. Her mother didn’t say anything. She just set the candle on the table. By it was the sherry bottle and a glass and an ashtray and beside these scattered and everyday monuments was an envelope—yellow even in the candlelight with the wide stripe of blue reading priority—and beside it the telegram it had with scant ill earlier conveyed.
Her mother looked at these things—the bottle, the glass, the envelope—then stared at the telegram. Stared at her husband, her husband crippled with sorrow. “No, Mac,” she said. “Don’t, Mac—please.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding, “yes.”
“No, Mac,” her mother said defiantly, “I won’t hear it. I won’t.”
“It came to me at work,” he said, his voice breaking.
“I won’t hear it, I told you.”
Susan picked the telegram up.
“I won’t hear it,” her mother said, desperately looking back and forth at the two of them, “won’t hear it from either of you!”
Susan read, silently, and as word-for-word carefully as though bearing forth the decree of her own demise:
His Majesty’s Government regrets to inform you that Flight Lieutenant Phillip Charles William . . .
“Put it down, Susan!” her mother demanded. She was shaking.
. . . Flight Lieutenant Phillip Charles William McEwan was reported missing. Our deepest . . .
“Please, Susan,” her mother now pleaded softly, “put it down. Please?”
. . . reported missing. Our deepest sympathy.
“Down,” her mother repeated to herself.
And then Mrs. Tranter was at the back door, asking:
“Are you all right, Cless? Cless? Susan?”
“Down.”
Afterward
They let her take Phillip’s final letter with her, and alone in the swaying compartment by the window she read it on the train. Eventually to Godmanchester. An evacuee. At Letchworth as the train chuffed in and idled in the station, a young man perhaps about Phillip’s age strolled past on the platform, glanced in through the window, froze in mid-step, and opened the compartment door. She didn’t look up. Just concentrated on the letter, conjuring forth her brother from within:
I’ll be sending home soon another package of laun dry, Mum.
“Excuse me,” the man said.
She looked up from the letter. His face was tanned, almost dark, like a character in the Bible, and he was finely dressed in a brown tailored suit. He carried a small suitcase and he wore a pair of white gloves and held a cane.
“D’you mind?” he enquired. An American accent. Like at the pictures.
“No,” she said, “not at all.”
“Good,” he said, and he stepped in, and with that solid metal-and-leather thoonk of a train door he closed it behind him. With one hand he stowed his suitcase on the luggage rack above—opposite her—and he sat next to the window on the seat beneath, sat so gracefully that the movement might have been choreographed for him. He sleeked a cigarette case from his suit jacket’s inside pocket and thumbing it open he offered her one.
“No, thanks,” she said.
“Camels,” he told her.
“Please, no.”
She looked down at Phillip’s letter. How—how could such an instrument still be? Still exist? Haunted and haunting calligraphy, each word utterly alive and inked in blue fountain pen on a tissue-thin aerogram. Shouldn’t it have rightfully perished with him? Reside with him?
“It’s okay, then?” the man asked.
She looked up.
“That I smoke?” he said.
“Yes, do.”
Came a vague platform announcement about Peterborough.
“This is my only suit,” he said.
“Oh.” She didn’t look up.
“Actually,” he continued, “these are all the clothes I have in the world.”
She didn’t respond.
“My uncle gave it to me,” he said. “The suit. As a favor to his brother. He’s a tailor.”
She thought for a second then looked up and nodded. “Yes,” she said. She glanced up at his suitcase on the luggage rack above.
“Empty,” he explained.
She blinked at him and returned her attention to the letter:
You’ll be shocked to know, Mum, I’ve met a girl, Joyce, through Captain Grey of all people. You’ll like her, Dad, quite good-looking, though Roger said not as pretty as our . . .
Her eyes skipped down a line or two until they touched on what she sought.
And Dad, please reconsider sending Susan up to Uncle Cec’s brother-in-law. Ben, isn’t it? The blacksmith? Look at it this way, Dad, not only will she be safe, but she might even learn a trade, ha, ha. (I know you’re reading this, Susan, I do.)
She folded the letter over on itself, unable to continue. The conductor’s whistle blew and the train lurched slightly and like all trains for an infinitesimal moment the linked carriages not only paused but almost reared back. Through the window, she could see the station building: dun-bricked, the mortar pock-holed from neglect, the pock-holes square, like a nag’s missing teeth; the station’s windows steamed and piped in peeling red. Slowly she shook her head.
“Everything going to be okay?” the well-dressed man asked.
“Who—who