Jack sniffed and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand, cap still clutched between his thick fingers. “That’s not the only reason I’m here.”
“Oh?” She smiled. “Can I help you find a book?”
He twisted at his cap again. “You hadn’t finished Middlemarch. A couple of us queued at Farringdon Station anticipating an air raid. When it didn’t happen, well… We were wondering what’s next in the story.”
“We?” She followed his side gaze to the large plate-glass windows of Primrose Hill Books and found a crowd gathered outside the store. Mrs. Kittering was there, as well as many others Grace recognized, and waved with a hopeful smile.
Grace turned her attention back to Jack, who gave her a hesitant grin. “Would you be so kind as to read to us still, even though we aren’t in the tube?”
She glanced to Mr. Evans who looked at her with a paternal pride that crinkled the corners of his blue eyes as he offered her a nod of silent consent to their request.
Biting her lip, Grace considered the size of the store. Last year, such a request would have been impossible. But now…
“Yes,” she replied. “I absolutely can.”
And so it was she settled on the second step of the circular metal stairs while everyone else sat about on the floor or propped themselves against the wall to listen to her read from Middlemarch.
Mr. Evans’s white hair was visible along the top of a bookshelf one row over and remained there for the duration of her reading, as though he too was listening.
After that, she read every day, either in the tube, or at Primrose Hill Books when there was no air raid. But while the days were filled with stories and the many people who came to listen to her, the nights were filled with bombs.
It was, in a single encompassing word, wretched.
The evenings when Grace didn’t work alongside Mr. Stokes, she was getting only a few moments of miserable sleep in the cramped Anderson shelter buried in the backyard.
One such evening, she and Mrs. Weatherford had prepared to go into the Andy with their bedding and a small box containing necessities: a candle, their gas masks, though Germany no longer seemed interested in poison, Grace’s latest book, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and a vacuum flask of tea.
Rain was pouring down when the air raid siren went off, sending the women racing out into the deluge and through the muddy garden. The Andy rose in the dark like a sleeping beast, its hump wild with bristles of hair where sprigs of tomato plants sprouted from the dirt layering it. But when Grace stepped into the shelter, her foot sank up to the ankle in a pool of icy water.
She cried out in surprise and leapt back out.
“Is it mice?” Mrs. Weatherford asked, jerking away in horror.
“It’s flooded.” Grace shook her damp shoe to little effect. “We’ll have to go to Farringdon Station until the Andy has dried out.” She made her way back to the house, one foot weighty and sodden from the soaking, issuing a derisive squish with every step.
Mrs. Weatherford rushed behind her, but didn’t set about to prepare to go to the tube station.
“If we hurry, we might still manage a decent spot,” Grace said by way of politely trying to rush Mrs. Weatherford.
Already it was past eight, which was usually when the Germans began their nightly raids. Most likely they had been put off by the inclement weather. But that also meant the tube station would be packed with people like sardines in a tin by now. Grace had seen it on her nights as warden. People lay side by side wherever they might find the space to do so, strangers nestled as closely as families. Not only on the floor of the platform, but up the stairs and escalators and even some brave souls who slept beside the tracks.
Mrs. Weatherford sat at the kitchen table and poured herself a cup of tea from the Thermos.
“There isn’t time for all that.” Grace’s nerves scrabbled with an anxiety she could no longer temper. “We must be going.”
Mrs. Weatherford offered a little sigh and set aside her cup. “I’m not going, Grace. I only go in the Andy to soothe your mind, but I confess, I never seek shelter during the day when you aren’t here.” She blinked, slow and tired. “I’ll not go to the tube station.”
The ire deflated from Grace, replaced instead with a heavy ache. “But it won’t be safe.” Her protest was weak. She already knew there was scarcely any point in arguing.
Mrs. Weatherford didn’t bother replying and merely stared dejectedly at the floor. Her face was lined with anguish where she sat in the white-and-yellow kitchen, a place that had once felt so cheerful and now seemed dull and stark. While she had once again begun to have a care with her appearance, she wore only dark clothes in place of her floral housedresses, each one belted tighter and tighter on her frame as she lost more and more weight.