After a moment, he managed to nod and say, “All right,” but he still couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
“You’re a sensible boy, Lewis,” Edwina said, giving his shoulder a brief squeeze. “I knew I could count on you.”
Lewis heard her go down the stairs, her booted steps as quick and precise as she was in everything, but he didn’t feel sensible at all. In his heart he knew he’d failed his family, left them to an unknown fate that he should have suffered with them, and that his safe and sensible retreat marked him as an outsider and a coward.
THE HOUSE ON STEBONDALE STREET WAS was hit by an incendiary bomb on the third night of the Blitz, but this Lewis didn’t learn until almost a week later, when he received a note in the post. The paper was much blotched and stained, but the neatly looped, convent-school handwriting was instantly recognizable as his mother’s.Dear Lewis,The house is gone but we are all right. The third night the bombers came a fire bomb hit right on top of the house but we had gone round to the McNeills in Chapel House Street and went down their Anderson shelter when the alarm sounded. So it was lucky for us wasn’t it? They have given us a flat in Islington for now with two other families; it’s not very clean but at least we have a place to lay our heads. I will write more soon remember I love you.Your loving mother
Lewis had gone every day to wait for the post at the bottom of the drive, and now he stood, staring at the tattered paper, until the tears blurred his vision and splashed onto the page. He knew that William and Edwina and Mr. Cuddy and even Cook were watching him anxiously from the house, as they had every day, but he couldn’t seem to move.
After a bit, William came down to him, but Lewis found he couldn’t speak, either. He was forced to hand William the letter to read for himself.
William read, squinting at the unfamiliar script, his lips moving silently. Then he looked up, a grin spreading across his face, and whooped and pounded Lewis on the back, shouting, “Hooray! Bloody hooray!” and after that it was all right.
IT WAS MIDMORNING BEFORE KINCAID STARTED for Cambridge, after having made a stop at the Yard. He concentrated on negotiating London traffic until he reached the M11, then he popped a jazz piano tape Gemma had given him into the Rover’s tape deck and settled into the right-hand lane, determined to make good time.
The music was improvisational, the drifting notes of the piano sometimes as ethereal as wind in the grass, or as liquid as running water. After a bit, in the sort of free association often brought on by long-distance driving, the music seemed to combine his thoughts of Kit with memories of the long days of his own boyhood.
