St Paul’s church bells chimed seven. The thickened air rendered the peals directionless – they came from everywhere as if rung by God himself.
As it trundled away, the trolley bus missed a taxi which, hearse-like in the swirling dark, turned into Brook Green Road and halted outside the Palais de Danse. A crowd was milling around the blacked-out doors. Tonight, it was rumoured, Glenn Miller and his band would do a spot before flying out of RAF Northolt.
‘I say,’ Aleck paid off the taxi and, trim in belted coat and trilby, stepped up to Maple and took her by the shoulders, ‘it’s Tallulah Bankhead.’ He kissed her forehead.
‘Get on with you.’ Maple reached up and brushed his cheek, noting his smooth skin. She adjusted her stole. No bloke ever compared her to a film star. Fancy her, typist at the dairy, being engaged to a man with a proper job. She’d whispered to William as she pinned up the living room blackout that very soon they would be living happily ever after. Now, Maple said, ‘Dad says, seeing as we’re engaged, he wants to meet you.’ She gave a light laugh to smother the little fib. ‘You’ve to come to tea Sunday.’
*
At that moment, in Corney Road, Chiswick, crouched in the Anderson shelter with his wife, son and little grandson, Keith Greenhill knew nothing of this. He did indeed want to meet Aleck – the nameless scoundrel who was playing about with his daughter. The mink told Keith, as it had told his wife, that Maple’s fancy man was at best a trickster who’d signed up to the forces to escape responsibility, like the shiftless fellow who’d left Maple in the lurch. As he gazed at Maple’s distraught lad, cried-out in his wife’s arms, Keith Greenhill vowed to get him by the scruff of the neck and tell him… Neither of them would sleep until Maple got back, which, from recent experience, they knew would be the small hours.
‘Whoever he is, the scoundrel lacks the decency to walk her home.’ Greenhill leaned close to his wife to be heard above the cacophony of the guns. ‘We’ll have to have it out with her.’
‘Give her time, she’ll tell us.’
‘She’s had time.’
‘See how the land lies in the morning.’ Audrey stroked a cow-lick from William’s forehead. ‘She really could be seeing Ida.’
‘Pigs might fly.’ Vernon, the Greenhills’ twenty-one-year-old son who was slumped by the shelter’s entrance, roused himself.
‘Do you know something?’ Keith demanded.
‘Course not.’ Vernon pulled the horse-hair blanket up over his chin and rolled over to sleep. His parents exchanged a look; they didn’t believe him.
The ground shook with a bomb that they knew wasn’t as near as it sounded. Huddled in the cold damp of their newly constructed shelter, which Keith complained was cheap and nasty and not up to the job, the Greenhills retreated into private terror. Everyone knew the Nazis were not the only enemy. There was talk of women being raped in public shelters, old people attacked in their homes for savings and gold watches. Danger lurked around every corner.
Maple should hurry up and come home.
*
The Palais doors shifted briefly ajar and, gripping Maple’s elbow, Aleck piloted her into a world of glitter and magic where Hammersmith Broadway was Hollywood and, even as sirens wailed, one might believe the Blitz could be kept at bay.
Lamps, wreathed in a bluish canopy of cigarette smoke, cast ghostly light over a boiling mass. Ecstatic faces were caught in a match’s flare, red lipstick, sleek oiled hair. The floor was marked with scuffed chalk marks from where the BBC had snaked cables for the Force’s Sunday broadcast of Services Spotlight, the dance hall slot in The Sunday Nighters.
Tonight’s swing band’s sound, not Glenn Miller, bounced off walls plastered with posters that urged women to take up factory work. Tonight’s Gas Mask Ball was thrown to encourage Londoners to carry masks. Not really Hollywood.
For Maple, as she danced her life away, a gas mask and doing war work were the last things on her mind.
Last week, when she’d told Aleck about William, he’d just kissed her quiet and undone her blouse. ‘We all make mistakes.’ The next time they met he’d given her the mink and, from deep inside her, his hands around her hips, asked her to marry him.
William wasn’t a mistake. Maple hadn’t told Aleck the toddler with pudgy legs and such a cheeky smile was the best thing in her life. Every man liked to come first.
Aleck always got the barman’s attention. As he handed Maple the first of several daiquiris, he told her, ‘Chin-chin, baby.’
They swooped and swirled to ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ and ‘Easy to Love’. Aleck’s hand, on the small of Maple’s back, slipped lower. He pressed her to him and she felt his love. For her. If she was Tallulah Bankhead, he was James Stewart from It’s a Wonderful World. She’d tell him later. Maybe when he came to tea.
*
Watching the couple from the bar, a woman whose husband had been killed in a U-boat attack, who expected never to smile again, felt gin-infused hope. It was for such love Britain was fighting. A better world in which everyone cared. Then the man and his girl were lost amidst the throng. And the woman felt desolate as if, with their departure, had gone all chance of happiness. Later, spotting a polite notice for customers at the Palais on the night of the eleventh to come forward with any information about a murdered girl, Una Hughes recognized her. She was able to give the divisional detective an excellent description of the couple.
*
On the corner nearest the river, an incendiary had ripped away the front of a house to reveal a tableau of shattered domesticity. In
