The Postmistress Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned down the street— and the lid in peacetime is the kettle on to boil, nothing ahead but bedtime, children in their bath, and the supper dishes on the lip of the sink for later .
    She crossed the High Street, heading toward Argyll Road. It is evening in the upstairs world, the hour before the time to go underground, the last hour of light. Though it is a chilly October evening, everyone is out in it. Good night. Good night, God bless. The bells no longer ring in the churches. Fifty nights into the bombing, the Germans could be counted on to come, and—though this would never get by the censor—the truth was, the regularity of the bombs, the consistent appearance of the Luftwaffe, was losing the Germans their battle. Because Londoners had realized they could go on. One could plan around the night. At the corner, Mr. Fainsley pulled in his cart and shuttered his plate-glass window—can’t help it, the grocer had shrugged the night before—can’t help closing up the way I always have, though they both knew the window and the shop might be gone in the morning. Can’t help it, she’d heard over and over for the past six weeks with the same wry grin, can’t help going on the way I always do.
    One could stand on a corner and see a long row of untouched houses, their white fronts perfectly sharp against the autumn sky—all England in a block—then turn the next corner to find nothing but flat waste and fire, the exhausted faces of the women carrying cheap cardboard suitcases and handing their children up into the refugee buses waiting at the square. Each night of the Blitz, the war passed over London like the Old Testament angel, block by block: touching here, turning from there, and Frankie followed, wanting to get it down, wanting to get at the heart of it.
    She rolled her eyes. The heart of it would have been redlined without a pause by Max Prescott, her editor at the New York Trib . It? What ’ s it, Frankie? he would have asked. What’s the story? Where’s the story in it ? Be the gal who hooks the throat of the world. Not the lip, for God’s sake. The throat. Okay, Boss, she ’d say, smiling at the image she’d called to mind.
    A woman heading into the Liverpool Street shelter, carrying her baby and—improbably—the baby’s heavy wooden cradle, looked backward over her shoulder at Frankie as she descended into the dark. Frankie stopped short. Many people went down into the shelters like this, before the sirens sounded, to get a good spot—a corner spot—an elderly woman had explained to Frankie last week, is what you’re after. The woman with her baby looked back at Frankie standing there on the pavement, long enough for Frankie to see the dull blond hair tied back with a black ribbon, and the collar of her sweater sagging slightly where she had lost weight.
    And not for the first time, Frankie wished she could return to this spot in the morning to make sure the woman and her baby were rising back up into the day, just to know they had slept and woken and would carry on. Just to know the next part.
    The danger all around meant that everyone—Frankie jammed her shoulder against the front door of number 8 Argyll Road—might be living their last days. Everyone’s—she turned her head toward the street as she pushed on the door—might be a heartbreaking story.
    “Say, Miss!”
    She relaxed her shoulder and straightened up. The boy from the end of the block stood in her walk. “Hello, Billy. What’s cooking?”
    He shifted his weight, impatiently, with the wary attention of a six-year-old. “My mum says all Americans have chocolate—but it’s a secret, she says. And we aren’t to ask.”
    Frankie nodded. “So you thought you’d get to the bottom of it?”
    “That’s right.” He stared back at her.
    She wished she had some chocolate to give him. “It is a secret,” Frankie agreed. “Because I haven’t heard anything about it. And I’m in the know.”
    He nodded. He knew all about her