“Not at all,” said Gertie. “Is everything all right?”
“Oh yes. Quite all right, thank you,” said Margery. “How’s the Old General doing?”
“Wheezing into life as usual,” said Gertie.
Margery snorted with uncustomary amusement. “Jolly good.”
Gertie noticed her face was a little pink and there was a far-off expression in her eyes. “Mrs. Fortescue,” she said gently. “Have you been drinking?”
Margery hiccupped and put a hand to her mouth. “Only a small sherry. I do it every year on this day.”
“Oh,” said Gertie. “Is it a special occasion?”
Margery’s shoulders sagged a little. “It’s my dear Edward’s birthday,” she said. “I always toast his memory with a small schooner of sherry, but I must have dropped off afterward, hence my tardiness.”
Gertie lifted one of the tea mugs. “Happy birthday, Edward.”
Margery gave a resigned smile. “He would have been seventy-two this year. I miss him every day.” She stared into the distance for a moment before snapping back to the present. “Sorry, Mrs. Bingham. That’s dreadfully ill-mannered, and after I was late as well. Forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive. I miss my husband every day.”
Margery regarded her for a moment. “What was his name?”
“Harry.”
Margery held up a tea mug. “To Harry and Edward.”
“Harry and Edward,” said Gertie. “Mrs. Fortescue?”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if we might address each other by our first names. I do find the formality of Mrs. Bingham rather stifling sometimes. Please call me Gertie.”
Margery straightened her shoulders and smoothed down her uniform. “It’s highly irregular, but I suppose we could give it a try, Gertie.”
“Thank you, Margery,” said Gertie with a smile.
Gertie was so immersed in the task of earthing up her potatoes that she didn’t hear the doorbell. It had been a particularly warm spring, and she was enjoying her Sundays in the garden with a tin mug of tea and Hemingway for company. If it weren’t for the air-raid shelter, now decorated with a creeping marrow’s form, and the line of barrage balloons in the distance, you could almost forget there was a war on. The sky was cornflower-blue with just the odd thread of cloud scudding in the breeze. Gertie inhaled and realized she was happy. In this moment, in her garden, with Hedy upstairs writing her letters and stories, she was happy. No one could predict what was around the corner, but if she had learned one thing over the past five years, it was the importance of seizing the day. After all, what was life but a series of moments to be grasped: meeting Harry, finding the bookshop, allowing Hedy into her life, and, now, joining Margery’s war effort. Gertie sensed that she was moving forward once more, instead of being doggedly glued to the past.
It was Hemingway who first alerted her to the visitor, as he abandoned his sun-blanketed snooze and scampered back toward the kitchen. When Gertie heard Hedy’s cry, she dropped her trowel and flew toward the house. News. There must be news. Please. Let it be good.
Gertie almost bumped into the news as it bowled out through the kitchen door in the form of Sam hand in hand with Hedy. “Sam has asked me to marry him,” she cried.
“Oh, but that’s wonderful, my dears,” said Gertie, throwing open her arms. At that moment, she understood how it was for mothers, some watching their sons march off to war, others seeing their daughters left behind. Waiting. Hoping. Praying. Falling in love shouldn’t be so perilous, so reliant on fate. Theirs should be a life filled with effortless happiness. Of marriage, a family, a life together. And yet the war made it impossible to plan or ever dare to hope for this. She recalled with shame how she’d taken Harry’s love for granted to start with. Life was so fragile, and yet how quickly humans forgot this when events overtook them. How quickly they took everything for granted. “When will you marry?” she asked.
“Not until my parents know,” said Hedy. “I’ve told them about Sam in my letters, of course, but this is different.”
Sam curled an arm around his fiancée and kissed the top of her head. “When this war is over, we’ll have the wedding to end all weddings.”
“I’ll start saving my rations for the cake,” said Gertie. Part of her was relieved that they weren’t marrying right away. She knew of too many young widows who’d done just that. As she, Sam, and Hedy celebrated with tea and slices of ginger cake, the talk was of the future, of wedding plans, of Hedy’s family coming to England for the celebrations, of her mother making her dress. Gertie knew now this was the only way to survive a war: to keep going, to keep reaching forward to a bright horizon and whatever lay beyond it.
It was fast becoming apparent that Gerald Travers’s admiration for Margery Fortescue was growing into something more than mere friendship and that the feeling was mutual. Hedy noticed it first and was quick to point it out to Gertie.
“You watch. He walks past the shop at ten to eleven on the dot every day on his way to see her.”
“Are you sure you’re not dizzy with romance yourself, given recent events?” said Gertie. “You were very insistent about our book club choice this month,” she added, nodding toward the copies of Gone with the Wind that Hedy was arranging in the window.
Hedy shook her head. “I was helping at one of Mrs. Fortescue’s ‘Make Do and Mend’ sessions the other day, and you should have seen her face when he walked through the door. It was Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes all over again.”
Gertie laughed.
“Excuse me, but surely there’s been a mistake?”
Gertie looked up into the scowling face of a man whom she estimated to be around the same age as her uncle Thomas. “Mistake?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the man, holding up a copy of Gone with the Wind. “Surely a bookshop wouldn’t recommend a tome such as this?”
Gertie raised her eyebrows. “What exactly is it that you object to?”
His deepening frown coupled with a pair of small round spectacles gave him the appearance of an angry mole. “It’s not exactly literature, is it?”
Gertie folded her arms. “And how does one define literature?”
The man waved his arms expansively. “Tolstoy, Dickens, Henry James. Not this kind of emotional scribbling.”
Gertie fixed him with a look. “Personally, I believe that a jolly good story is a jolly good story, and it would appear that half the reading world agrees with me on this one,” she said. “It’s one of our bestselling books.”
The man gave a vexed sigh and placed a copy of Moby-Dick on the counter. “I’ll take this, thank you.” He placed a copy of Gone with the Wind on top. “And this. For my wife. She loves her silly romances.”
“Well,” declared Gertie after he’d gone. “What a pompous little man.”
Hedy shrugged. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”
“Gertie, do you have a minute?” called Margery, appearing in the doorway. “Could we perhaps go for a stroll through the gardens by the village hall? It’s something of an emergency.”