The shop door burst open with a rush of wind and rain, almost tearing the little bell from the door jam. Topper Schiffer entered with a great show of shaking the rain off his coat and hat. Beatrice, who had been writing prices on little paper tags, stepped away from the rain that hurled in after her brother.
“Topper, must you go about on this horrible night?”
“Can’t be helped, Bea,” Topper said, pulling off his rain-soaked coat and hanging it on a coatrack near the counter. He slapped his hat on the peg and rubbed his hands briskly.
“Ought to post small dog warnings with that blow,” he said. “In fact it’s raining cats and dogs out there. You know how I know, Bea?”
She’d heard this joke a dozen times. “No, Topper, how do you know?”
“I just stepped in a poodle,” he said with an enthusiastic chuckle. “Been down to the pub, I have.”
“That is the only thing that would take you out in weather like this,” Beatrice said, printing her numbers carefully. She was proud of her penmanship and was careful to properly write numbers and letters.
“Well, scoff if you like,” Topper said, “but I’ve been catching up on the war news.”
The pencil stopped momentarily. “Have you?” Beatrice feigned disinterest.
“Indeed I have. It’s the big push all right. They got everybody bottled up, ready for action. I thought something was amiss; Stan and I were talking it over. Traffic slowed almost to a trickle and then it was gone. Stan knows a bloke who feeds the Yanks at Selsey. This bloke says that it’s a regular race, Yank trucks rolling in one after another, day and night, until he’s sure there can’t be a cot left in Selsey. This bloke that Stan knows. So he tells Stan, something big’s in the wind and he ought to keep his eyes open. Why? I don’t know. I’m sure Stan doesn’t know either…”
“Topper, please,” Beatrice said, wanting to ask about the navy, but holding back for fear that she would say too much. Topper was the best brother that a girl could have, but he was a clumsy sort and likely to smother Beatrice with concern. She decided it was best to let him ramble.
“Well, Bea,” Topper said. “I’m just telling you what the bloke told Stan and what Stan told me. Everybody’s on the move: air force, army, and the navy, too, can’t forget the navy. God bless them. So this bloke, friend of Stan’s, says that the waters off Selsey Bill are packed top to bottom with ships. He said every type of ship that you could imagine. Ours and theirs. He says ‘Invade! Why just put them end-to-end and walk across the Channel on them.’ That’s how many there were.”
“Yes,” Beatrice said, examining a price ticket. “That sounds as if things are about to get under way.”
“Under way? Under way?” Topper said incredulously. “Why, woman, this is the greatest invasion since the Normans. Under way. And your own Captain Hardy in the middle of it.”
“He’s not my Captain Hardy,” Beatrice said. She had kept her true feelings about George Hardy from her brother. “He is a fine man that we both care for.”
“Yes,” Topper shot her a skeptical glance. “Some more than others. Now, Bea, don’t you go worrying about Captain Hardy. He’s an experienced seaman, all right. He’s got decades in the naval service. Look, he’s been all through this war, hasn’t he? Well, there you have it.”
“Yes, Topper,” Beatrice said, surrendering. “Why don’t you go in and see if the wireless has something to say?”
Topper slapped his hands together. “The BBC. That’s the ticket. Come in too, Bea.”
“In a minute, Topper. Let me finish this row.” She continued marking, waiting until she heard Topper settled into the worn easy chair situated in front of the radio cabinet, and the scratchy sounds of static as he tried to find the channel. It would be difficult in the storm, more so because of the war. All of the wireless interference of ships, planes, and the army seemed to jumble everything up so that they were lucky if they heard much more than a bit of a program. It was a way that they spent many nights. It was comforting to realize that a bit of normalcy still existed in the midst of insanity. The fact that the calm cadence of the BBC announcers appeared in their parlor on a regular basis provided stability.
They had learned to settle into a routine: Topper methodically going through his magazines, each page requiring a majestic lick of his thumb, a gentle sweep of the page with his hand, and renewed interest in the article. Beatrice would sketch.
She found some subjects in Topper’s magazines, a landscape, or an interesting face, and she would take the soft lead pencil and create images on a barren plain of paper.
The wind picked up and Beatrice thought she could hear something break loose down the street and blow away. Her eyes fell on the tag in her hand and she realized that she had marked it twice.
Her mind was on Captain Hardy. He was on Firedancer somewhere out there and she had no idea when she would hear from him again. There had been reports of a very bad battle just to the west but no one was quite sure what had happened, or who was involved, but there were reports of dead bodies being lined up on the beach. And this before the great invasion.
It was not knowing that was most difficult. She had tried to keep busy tending to the shop and to Topper, but she found her mind would drift fitfully back to the question of Captain Hardy’s safety. It was the not knowing.
She had seen it for nearly five years. Friends, customers, relatives whose sons or husbands were someplace that no one had ever heard of fighting first the Germans, and the Italians, and then the Japanese. Then there would be that awful, hollow feeling when she realized that Mrs. Dunphree’s son Alex wasn’t coming home, or that the Mackenzie twins would not have a father. Or old Mrs. Roget, a short, plump white-haired lady who never traveled farther than the end of Haden Street and had no idea who the Japanese were, found out that William Paul was dead. Mr. Roget had been a brick mason with features as hard as the walls he built. Mrs. Roget, denied the warmth of a sympathetic husband, doted on William Paul, her only child.
William Paul had enlisted with his chums and gone off to camp and from there to North Africa, or at least that was his worried mother’s understanding. Beatrice often saw Mrs. Roget trundling after the postman, hounding him in her inoffensive way for a letter she knew that he surely must have been carrying from her son.
She could not read and brought William Paul’s letters to Beatrice with a smile of expectation, and over tea, Beatrice would read them. They always began, “Dear Mother,” and sometimes the spelling was a bit unusual, but Beatrice had no trouble reading the love in them. They were like two companions, William Paul and Mrs. Roget, holding a hidden conspiracy under the nose of the solemn Mr. Roget.
There was a mix-up one day and the letter that Mrs. Roget held in her hand was from William Paul’s commanding officer. Mrs. Roget handed over the letter with some hesitation because, although she could not read the letter, she could tell that it was not William Paul’s handwriting.
Beatrice took it and as she opened it the dread mounted until she wished that she were not at home when the white-haired lady called. Somewhere in the first sentence were the words “we shall all miss William Paul, very much.” Beatrice tried to keep her hands from trembling as she read the letter, but that single phrase, “we shall all miss William Paul, very much,” hounded her. She read what had happened and how by now Mrs. Roget had received the official notification, but the commanding officer felt it his duty to write. It was obvious that the official notification, had been delayed or overlooked altogether and a letter meant to console William Paul’s mother had done just the opposite.
“We shall all miss William Paul, very much.”