“You will all be perfectly fine without me,” Mr. Cuddy had replied. “William will rebuild his father’s business when the war is over. Lewis, I think you can do anythingyou set your mind to, once you decide what that is. And Irene—our Irene is going to be prime minister, of course.” He lifted Irene’s chin gently with his forefinger, the first time Lewis remembered him touching any of them, then he had bid them a determined goodbye.
They’d watched him from the window, tramping down the drive with his rucksack as if he were going on holiday after all, and Lewis had felt as if he’d awakened from a silly sort of bad dream and found it not to be a dream.
In the autumn, Edwina had enrolled them in the village school, and while they were bored with their schoolwork, life at the Hall had gone on very much as before.
At first, Lewis wouldn’t talk about Mr. Cuddy when William or Irene brought his name up, and when letters came from Italy, he pretended disinterest and refused to read them. But sometimes in the evenings, when everyone had gone to bed, he would creep into Edwina’s drawing room. There he could pore over the letters alone, by the light of a guttering candle, as many times as he wanted.
Mr. Cuddy had been posted to General Clark’s 5th Army, which had landed at Salerno, on the shin of Italy, a few days after Montgomery’s 8th Army entered Italy at its toe on the 3rd of September. As the weeks passed and William and Irene speculated about whether Mr. Cuddy would eventually meet up with John Pebbles, Lewis occasionally let slip that he knew more than he admitted. Irene looked at him but said nothing, and somehow this made their friendship closer.
Raids had been light and infrequent over the past eighteen months, since the Blitz had ended in May of ’41. They were all allowed home for a long holiday at Christmas—William to his family’s home in Greenwich; Irene to Kilburn, where her house had been repaired enough to be at least habitable; and Lewis to his parents’ tiny flat in Millwall.
As they sat down to tea the first evening in the room that served his family as bedroom, parlor, and kitchen, Lewis had glanced at the three places set on the makeshifttable and asked, “Where’s Cath, then?” thinking she must be working an evening shift at her factory.
The look he’d come to recognize passed between his parents again, then his father stared down at the pile of mashed turnips on his plate and muttered, “Bloody Yanks.”
