one dash of resolve multiplied to the power of ten. Work the equation, Charlie.
Break it down.
Solve for X.
Now or never.
I took a deep breath. I pulled out the scrap of paper, and with it came a crumpled pound note. Recklessly, I slapped it down on the table next to mine where the braying boys had left their measly tip, and I walked out of the hotel court clutching my traveling case and my French cigarettes. Straight out through the wide doors of the hotel, where I asked the doorman, “Excuse me, but can you direct me to the train station?”
Not the wisest idea I’ve ever had: strange city, girl on her own. I’d spent the last few weeks in such a daze from my endless bad luck—the Little Problem, the screaming in French from my mother, the icy silence from my father—I’d been willing to go anywhere I was led. Straight off a cliff I’d march, blank and obedient, and not wonder or care why I was falling till I was halfway down. I’d been halfway down the hole my life had become, turning endlessly in the air. But now I’d grabbed a handhold.
Granted, it was a handhold in the shape of a hallucination, a vision I’d been seeing on and off for months as my mind insisted on painting Rose’s face on every blond girl who passed me by. It had frightened me badly the first time, not because I thought Rose was a ghost, but because I thought I was going crazy. Maybe I was crazy, but I wasn’t seeing ghosts. Because no matter what my parents said, I didn’t entirely believe Rose was dead.
I held on to that hope as I hurried down the street toward the train station on the high cork soles of my impractical shoes (“always high heels for a girl as short as you, ma chère, or you’ll never look like anything but a little girl”). I pushed through the crowds, the rough, swaggering laborers headed toward the docks, the smartly dressed shopgirls, the soldiers lingering on street corners. I hurried until I was short of breath, and I let that hope bloom, rising through me with a pain that made my eyes burn.
Go back, the sharp voice of conscience scolded. You can still go back. Back to a hotel room, to my mother making all the decisions, to my insulating cotton-wool fog. But I kept hurrying. I heard the hoot of a train, took in the smell of cinders and billows of steam. Southampton Terminus. Hordes of passengers were disembarking, men in fedoras, children red faced and fretful, women lifting crumpled newspapers over their waved hair to protect it from the faint drizzle. When had it started to drizzle? I could feel my dark hair flattening under the brim of the green hat my mother had chosen for me, the one that made me look like a leprechaun. I pushed on, running into the station.
A train conductor was crying out something. A departure in ten more minutes, direct to London.
I looked again at the piece of paper clenched in my hand. 10 Hampson Street, Pimlico, London. Evelyn Gardiner.
Whoever the hell that was.
My mother would already be looking for me at the Dolphin, launching imperious monologues at the hotel clerks. But I didn’t really care. I was just seventy-five miles from 10 Hampson Street, Pimlico, London, and there was a train standing right in front of me.
“Five minutes!” the conductor bawled. Passengers scurried aboard, hoisting their luggage.
If you don’t go now, you never will, I thought.
So I bought a ticket and climbed onto the train, and just like that I was gone into the smoke.
As afternoon dropped toward evening, the train car turned cold. I shrugged into my old black raincoat for warmth, sharing my compartment with a gray-haired woman and her three sniffling grandchildren. The grandmother gave my ringless, glove-less hand a disapproving glance, as if wanting to know what kind of girl was traveling to London on her own. Surely girls traveled on trains all the time, given wartime necessities—but she clearly didn’t approve of me.
“I’m pregnant,” I told her the third time she tutted at me. “Do you want to change seats now?” She stiffened and got off at the next stop, dragging her grandchildren with her even as they whined, “Nana, we’re not supposed to get off till—” I set my chin at the I don’t care angle, meeting her final disapproving glance, and then sagged back into my