After registering false names and addresses, Rafe and Finn are assigned to guarding Tower Bridge at night. They blend in with other men in a melting pot of Londoners, who for one reason or another are not serving at the front.
Early on, when it became apparent that the war would not end quickly, Clovis felt triumphant when she collected enough phials to see them through the next few years. She frequently wrote to Benedikt who disappeared for weeks to return each time with another delivery. Now the supply has come to a halt. Her own engagement with the war effort is a restless wandering back and forth to Mocketts’ laboratory in Limehouse. Women have no budget for frills these days, but the home medical kits that she suggested Mockett manufacture are a runaway success.
In the small hours of these dark nights, Willa whispers her hesitant hopes to Jonesy.
‘It seems she’s trying to protect us,’ Willa says.
‘Maybe.’
‘We have a little more freedom,’ she adds.
‘To work,’ Jonesy replies.
‘Rafe has a studio now. That was unexpected.’
‘She does what she has to do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s an insect in China, the white wax insect. In August they build cocoons of pure, shining wax on the trees. By September the whole tree is covered with palaces of white, a quarter of an inch thick. Clovis is like the white insect. She secretes a wax cocoon around us.’
‘But she has no feelings for us. So why does she do it? Why won’t she just give us our phials and let us go.’
‘I think she does not want to be alone. Her strength feeds off us.’
On a June morning, Londoners are caught unawares. The brazen flight of the Gothas mercilessly drop bombs at eleven thirty that morning and they do not leave Bermondsey unharmed. Only Clovis is at home and all day she paces. She cannot eat and every attempt to settle leaves her more agitated. In the late afternoon they begin to straggle in – all but Finn.
If he could, he’d get rip-roaring drunk. But alcohol scorches his gut now and he can tolerate only a sip or two – not nearly enough to escape for a few hours. Each night that he is on watch, Finn stares down into the tenebrous water of the Thames. Its power stirs his memory, which is too sharp and burdened by his lengthy life. Guarding the bridge in the wet and cold reminds him of his first journey north to the volcanic island that now, in a wildly queer way, sustains him.
One night whilst on watch, a small, innocent gesture knocked him back. Rafe offered Finn his extra pair of gloves. He handed them over with a smile, exactly as Elísabet had once offered him gloves, finely knitted by her own hands. He thought about what he had done to her. Since that night she will not leave his dreams – and he likes it, and eagerly waits to fall asleep to be with her again in Iceland. These thoughts of Elísabet fisted him, so wholly unexpected.
Then he had asked Clovis to release their phials. He’d calculated it was a good time to approach her; ever since his return from the Continent she’d been not her usual, horrible fucking self. The chaos of war seemed to intensify whatever change in her had emerged. But she refused him. Her manner was almost sorrowful, as if she honestly regretted that she couldn’t release them.
Tonight he stuffs his hands in his trouser pockets. He’s wandered far today, it’s late. Walking towards Magdalen Street he looks skywards. Everyone in his path looks skywards. Bermondsey is on alert.
The fuss they make when he arrives home unnerves him and reinforces his mood.
‘Albany Road was hit,’ he says. ‘The dairy. I was nowhere near it. You’re all overreacting.’
In bed that night, when Clovis makes overtures that would send a believing man straight to heaven, Finn turns away.
‘I’m tired.’ He closes his eyes.
She strokes his face.
‘I was worried about you, Finn.’
‘There was no need, Elísabet.’
He feels her hand stiffen on his face.
They lie side by side in an eternal moment of silence in which Finn senses a chill rising from her skin.
He sighs. And then rolls out of bed.
‘You lied to me at Millbank, in the chapel.’ Each of her words are like tapered slivers of ice.
Sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to her he considers his response.
‘I don’t know, Clovis. I suppose I did. I didn’t mean to.’
He steps naked and barefoot to the hallway and takes a sheet from the corner linen cupboard. Back in the bedroom that he will no longer claim, he steps into his combinations and then patiently fills the sheet with his clothing, his shoes and boots, everything. He ties it up, then tosses the large bundle over his shoulder and gently shuts the door behind him.
Finn spends a good hour setting up the opium bed in the conservatory where the view of the sky is worth the effort.
In the following days, when Willa hears Clovis’s footsteps she braces herself for a torrent of criticism. Nothing pleases Mrs Fowler.
‘Your attempt to economize is appalling,’ Clovis shouts. ‘You waste food like a silly child. I should send you to Iceland for a winter. You’d learn rationing there. The years have made you an ungrateful girl. I’m increasing your contribution amount to the household. And if you don’t like it you can leave. There’s a housing shortage in Bermondsey. I wonder how long you’d last out there on your own – without your drops.’
Their night sessions had become sporadic since the beginning of the war, but now Clovis drags Willa out of bed more frequently. And much to Willa’s sleepy confusion, Clovis adds an odd kind of spiritualism to her repertoire. She claims to see the ghost of Willa’s mother, and is so convincing that Willa jumps from the chair and runs from the room disturbed and anxious, leaving Clovis
