“A better question is, why are you staring at me?” he says, his full eyes twinkling.
In the dark, her pupils are dilated. “I’m not staring. But, um, why are you so muscled?”
“I’m not really.”
“You are. Very.”
“I train.”
“For what?”
“To fight, I guess. To endure.” He smiles. “You think it’s easy being in the line of fire with you? You think it’s easy walking through ice caves?”
“That story you told us about the ship and the fight on deck, and the knife that took half your hand and nearly your life, that wasn’t true, was it?”
“What do you think?”
“I thought you were embellishing things. But seeing you right now, I’m afraid it might be true.” But she doesn’t look afraid. She looks tantalized.
“What, Mia?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “Do you always sleep . . . naked?”
“When I’m next to sleeping beauty, yes,” he says, reaching for her. They thread their hands together. Turning her onto her back, he leans over her. She has taken off her robe. She is also naked. “You are beautiful when you are happy.”
“Then I’m beautiful all the time,” she says, stroking his arms and shoulders, “because I’m almost always happy.” Her breath quickens. “Jules, you are so . . . awake.”
“Yes, my flesh rises with your name.” Julian opens her mouth with his kiss.
Moaning, she reaches for him. Oh my word, Julian. She squeezes him, strokes him, tugs on him to beckon him on top of her. Come here. Honest, I can’t wait another second.
You can’t wait another second?
There’s a knock on the door.
“Go away!” Julian yells.
The knock gets louder.
“Jules! It’s us! It’s Wild and Dunk!”
“I know who you are! Go. Away.”
There’s another knock. “Jules, it’s Shona.”
And another. “And Sheila!”
“We’re starved, Jules.”
Me too, he says to Mia, his body over hers.
Me too, Mia says into his collarbone.
The knocking persists.
They groan. Mia hides in the bathroom, while Julian throws on a pair of trousers and grabs some pound notes from his pocket. He unlocks the door, opening it two inches and keeping the chain on. “Go away!” Julian says into Wild’s laughing face.
“Swedish, the morning is no time for what you’re about to do. It’s disgraceful. It is, however, time for breakfast. Let us in.”
“Go back to your suite or I’ll have you arrested. Here—take my money. Order room service, get whatever you want. We’ll be there shortly.”
“Not too shortly, I hope?” Mia whispers from behind.
Wild and Dunk crack up. “Chop, chop, Swedish,” Wild says, real fondness, real affection in his eyes and voice, “or there won’t be any scones left.”
After they leave, and he bolts the door, Julian sits on the bed and stands Mia naked in front of him, between his legs. Holding her hips, he pulls her close and presses his face between her weighty breasts. Sometimes they fit into his hands and sometimes like now they spill out. Either way, it’s all good. He fondles her, plays with her, kisses her nipples gently, kisses them until her head tips back and her body arches forward. I don’t need it, Jules, she whispers, honest.
But I like it, he says, running his hands over her rounded hips.
Me, too.
When he sees how softened she is and how weakened, he lays her down on the bed. She opens her arms. “Come lie on top of me. If I told you how long it’s been since anyone’s been on top of me, you would cry.”
“Why would I cry? I’d prefer it if no one had been on top of you.”
“I misspoke,” Mia says. “I meant me. I would cry. I don’t want anything else for now but you inside me. Come. It’s all I want.”
When his weight presses her into the bed, belly to belly, chest to breast, she does cry. She turns her head, maybe hoping he won’t see it. He is careful at first and slow. She moans as if she is being hurt. He holds himself up with his arms, with his knees. Her body is bruised at the ribs, she has cuts on her stomach and neck and legs. She is a bright angel with black wounds. She sears his eyes.
“On this earth, under all the stars in the sky,” he whispers, “there is a country, and in this country, a mighty unbreakable city, and in this city a mighty unbreakable girl, and in the girl a soul, and in the soul a heart.”
“That’s yours. Have you come to take it?” she murmurs and curves into him. “Go ahead, then. Let nothing stop you.” She pulls on his arms, pleads with him to forget her pain, to lower himself on her, to flatten her, to hold himself up only a little bit, and to not stop moving.
Eventually the moving is going to cause me to stop moving, Julian says. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. She moans in dissent, in assent, in delirium. Her eyes are closed, but toward the end, she opens them, puts her hands on his chest, and asks him to wait, wait.
Julian almost can’t wait.
Wait, wait. Crawling out from underneath him, she hops off the bed, pulls off the quilt and throws it on the floor.
What are you doing?
I’m shameful, I know, she says, lying down in front of the full-length wardrobe mirror and beckoning him to her. But just once, I want to feel it and see it. I want to see what it looks like to be loved by you.
He is happy to oblige. He holds up her legs, one palm on the back of her raised thigh. He wants to give her what she wants. Trouble is, he’s almost done.
A little longer, Jules. Please. A little longer. Pressing his face to her face, he kisses her perspiring cheek and watches her stare into the mirror—at his body pulsing over hers, a piston in motion. He watches her watch him through the mirror, watching her as he comes.
* * *
“I don’t want to leave here,” she says, nestled into him. “I’m not hungry for food. I’m not thirsty for coffee. I just want you. How long until the next round?”
“Five minutes,” he replies. “But I’ve got fourteen more rounds in me, and yet they’re out there, waiting for us.”
“After fifteen rounds,” Mia says in an electrified whisper, raising her eyes, “I might not walk out of the ring on my own two feet.”
“Oh, for sure you won’t,” he says, kissing her upturned face.
“Come on, just once more?” she says.
“The next time will go on too long,” he says, and in response to her moan adds, “Shh. I promise you’ll have it. We have the room for the weekend. We’ll have plenty of time, for everything.”
“For everything?”
“Anything you want.”
Reluctantly she gets out of bed and looks for her robe. “I’m warning you, though, no Wild tonight, no Duncan, no Liz. No one. Just me and you.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it.”
Before they leave the room, she embraces him. “Out there, you’re going to be all proper with me, as always, but I want you to know how I feel.”
“I know how you feel.” Julian strokes her face.
“But how do you feel?” she asks in a trembling, uncertain whisper.
“You don’t know how I feel, Mia?” Almost everything he feels, he puts into his eyes. “I am yours. I belong to you.”
What he tries to conceal:
And at the bar, a tune is playing, a plaintive male voice complaining: his girl has found another boy another love, while the twirling ballerina round and round and round keeps spinning and then she stops, the Cheapside girl in silk and gold receding.
19
A House on Grimsby Street
IN THE SUITE, THE REST ARE ALMOST DONE EATING. THE curtains are open, and the winter Thames flows below their windows. There may not be much traffic over the bridges, but Julian has never seen the river so jammed with boats and ships. It’s become the primary mode of delivery in an
d out of London. The Allies and the Londoners are supplied through its waters. No wonder the Germans are hell-bent on blowing up everything on its banks.
The mood of the other seven people in the suite resembles Julian’s and Mia’s. Every person around the living area, eating bacon and fried tomatoes and eggs, devouring bread with jam and butter, drinking tomato juice and tea, has a smile from ear to ear. Some, like Liz and Kate, are trying to hide it. “Liz won’t look at me,” a grinning Wild says. “Perhaps I’ve disappointed her.” He takes her hand. Sitting by his side, beet red, her smile enormous, Liz can’t look at him even more. Frankie is at the little table by the window, doing her jigsaw. But she’s smiling down into her puzzle.
Duncan is completely unsuppressed. He is the most outwardly elated of them all. There are no shadows on his joy, no pretense that he feels anything other than what he’s feeling. Both Shona and Sheila are embarrassed by his open adulation. They tell him that if he makes one remark about last night, ever, in daylight, evening light, in front of other people, any time at all, they will strangle him with their own hands.
“Strangling implies you will touch me again. So it’ll be worth it,” Duncan says. “You can do anything you want to me after last night. Anything.”
“Duncan!”
He opens his arms. “Come here, my beauties, strangle me.”
Julian and Wild grin at each other. Mia, standing over a sitting Julian, throws her arms around his neck, bends to him and whispers, “Are you jealous of Duncan, Jules?”
“No,” Julian says, kissing her forearm.
“Why not?”
“Been there, done that,” he says, pinching her skin lightly, and smiling up at her. “You mean you don’t remember? You were there, too.”
They take their time with breakfast as they wait for their clothes to be returned. They wonder if the famed bomb shelter at the Savoy is all it’s cracked up to be. They endeavor never to find out.
In the afternoon, dressed and washed and shaved and full, utterly sated in their bodies and souls, the nine of them strut out of the hotel, arm in arm, walk up Savoy Place and stand at the Strand, gazing left and right at their dominion, like conquerors. They hail two black cabs and make their rowdy way to Royal London Hospital to visit Finch. They go bearing gifts, bringing him scones from the Savoy, bacon rashers, some pre-made Pink Gin in Duncan’s flask, and even a blooming lily.
At the hospital, they learn that Finch died the night before, from internal hemorrhage. While they were drinking and dancing and carousing, having a joyous time, the best time they’ve had, possibly ever, Finch was dying.
“I feel so guilty,” Mia says. She can’t stop crying. “Poor Finch. But we didn’t do anything wrong. Happiness is not wrong.”
The air raid siren goes off while they’re still at the hospital. Sheila stays to work the emergency shift. Frankie and Kate drive off with Shona and a new doctor in an HMU. Julian, Mia, Duncan and Wild are loaned a medical jeep, this one with a plastic windshield, and Julian drives them just north of the hospital into their last fray.
That Saturday, the Germans bomb London four times. Over three hundred tons of bombs are dropped on the city. At night the moon is full again, and even the blackout and the decoy buses don’t help. At night new London is lit up like the London of old, but with enemy fire and a bright round moon.
For seven hours that night the city shakes in the earthquake of hundreds of bombs falling so close together there seems to be hardly a pause between them.
That night Kate Cozens dies, and Shona loses her leg. A bomb falls on the HMU truck while Kate and Shona are amputating a man’s mangled arm to save his life. The man dies, too.
Frankie will spend days putting together Kate’s body, so she can release it whole to her sister, Sheila.
They don’t return to the Savoy.
* * *
The acrid air is thick with smoke. There’s a prolonged rumbling sound, followed by thunder. There is unholy crashing all around them.
Grimsby Street, close to the railroad in Bethnal Green, has been almost entirely destroyed as the Germans bombed the dozen lines of tracks heading out of east London. Grimsby is opened up. What was down is now up, and what was up is now down. Houses burn out of control, many have crumbled.
But from one, awful sounds come, the sounds of live female human beings trapped under the weight of looming death.
We have to wait for the fire brigade, Duncan says. We can’t go in there. We have no hoses, no water, our truck has no sandbags or buckets. How can we help?
Duncan, listen!
We need to wait.
Duncan! Listen!
We need to wait!
Julian doesn’t disagree with Duncan.
Wild doesn’t disagree with Duncan.
Neither does Mia. But all four of them hear the unbearable sound of a young woman’s voice crying, Michael, Michael.
Wild is distraught, but he doesn’t move.
We gotta help her, Dunk, Mia says.
The fire truck will be here soon. They’ll help her.
I hate to agree with Duncan, Wild says, but it’s a bad idea to go in there.
But we’re the first ones here!
Is it our fault that Jules got here so quick? Jules, stop driving so fucking fast.
Michael, Michael . . .
It’s one thing to put out a kitchen flare-up, but Wild can’t go inside a fully burning house; everyone who knows his story knows that. No one is asking him to. Mia can’t go inside because she is terrified of fire for reasons no one but Julian understands.
Michael!
Men! Mia yells. Are you going to make me go in there on my own?
The three of them, with Wild far behind, make their careful way through the cratered rubble up to the house.
There is trouble in that house. The second floor has fallen and collapsed into the first, and all the bedrooms and furniture that were up are now down.
Two women are trapped under a bed. They must have hidden under it, and then the bed fell through the ceiling, and a dresser and part of the roof fell on top of them. One woman is badly injured because she’s not speaking, but the other one wails agonizingly, trying to point, crying Michael! It’s all right, darling, it’s all right.
When she sees the three men and a woman making their way toward her, she yells, “Not me, not me! Please—save my baby. Look. Save my baby.”
Sure enough, there’s an intact crib nearby, standing upright in the wreckage. It too must have fallen through the ceiling. Inside it, a child, caked in mortar dust, sits tangled in the cords of the fallen curtains. If he’s making any sounds, Julian can’t hear, because the air raid siren is at full throttle. It’s been twenty minutes, and the siren still shrieks, like the baby might shriek if his throat weren’t glued together with wet dust.
“Get him, please,” the mother trapped under the bedframe and the wardrobe begs. “Forget me, just get my baby.”
Every beam in the crumpling house is unstable, and the fire is raging.
Julian turns to Mia. “I’ll help her,” he says, “but you go back to the street. Don’t come in with us, it’s too dangerous. I can’t worry about you when I’m trying to help her. Please. Just turn around and get away from this. No, Wild—you stay.”
Mia returns to the street. Duncan and Julian try to lift the wardrobe off the woman. Wild stands back.
“My baby, my baby,” the woman keeps saying. “Just get my baby. Look, he’s scared. He’s stuck. It’s all right, darling! It’s all right, son, Mummy’s here. Please! Have him pull out my baby!” She motions to motionless Wild.
“Wild!” Julian yells. “Go get the kid!”
Wild shakes his head. “He’s stuck,” Wild says. “He can’t stand up.” He keeps shaking his head. “I can’t.”
“Wild! Go! Use the knife I gave you.”
“I can’t get him out with one arm.” What he doesn’t say is his brother was trapped like this, and Wild couldn’t save him even with tw
o arms.
Julian can’t deal with Wild because he and Duncan are having zero luck budging the wardrobe. Above them, the house is burning and pieces of debris keep falling on top of them, on top of the wardrobe, onto the woman. The other woman has stopped moving or blinking. They can’t look into that face. They’re still trying to save the living.
A chunk of burning wood falls inside the crib.
The mother screams. Mia screams. Julian screams for Wild.
Finally, Wild moves. Taking out his knife, he makes his way to the crib. He loosens and cuts the drapery cords trapping the baby and frees the boy. Dropping the knife, he manages to pick up the infant like a puppy, by the scruff of his pajama suit. The boy, maybe six months old, grabs on to Wild’s neck. Holding him with one arm, Wild carries him from the burning crib, out of the house, and into the street where Mia stands with her arms out. While Wild holds him, she sticks her finger inside the baby’s mouth to clear his throat, pulling out a piece of wet wallpaper, a piece of plaster. The baby cries. He cries so heartily, he drowns out the wailing siren.
When the mother hears that sound, she calms down, stops being frantic and lies silently, watching Julian and Duncan struggle to move the wardrobe. “His name is Michael,” she says to them.
“We’ll get you out,” Duncan says. “You can call him by his name yourself.”
What’s left of the house is crackling, the fragile frame turning to tinder.
“Get out of there!” Wild calls from the street. “Get out! Duncan! Julian!” He points to the quivering roof.
“Let’s try one more time, Dunk,” Julian says. “You lift the cabinet just a few inches, and I’ll try to drag her out.” With a grunt, red from exertion, Duncan raises the wardrobe. Julian grabs the woman under her arms. He is able to move her half a foot. She is stuck somewhere he can’t see. “Just a little more,” Julian says. “You’re doing great.” He pulls the woman halfway out. “Almost there.”
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