“And we have the bomb,” Bill said.
“We sure do. So does Stalin.” The major grimaced. “Ain’t life grand?”
–
“Time, gentlemen, please!” Daisy Baxter had run the Owl and Unicorn since her husband’s tank stopped a Panzerfaust in the closing days of World War II. Tom’s picture still hung behind the bar. In it, he looked young and eager and brave, ready to do whatever it took to get rid of the Nazis once for all. He’d never get any older now.
And I’ll never get any younger, Daisy thought discontentedly. She’d been only twenty-two when she got the telegram from the Ministry of War. Hard to believe that would be six years ago in a couple of months. Not at all hard to believe she was getting close to thirty. As tired as the pub could make her, some nights she felt close to fifty.
“Time, gentlemen!” she said again. Would a male publican have to repeat himself four or five times a week to get noticed or believed? She didn’t think so. Tom hadn’t needed to, nor had his father before him. But they were gone and she was here, so she did what she needed to do.
Grumbling, her customers drank up, paid up, and filed-sometimes lurched-out into the chilly night. Most of them wore the RAF’s slaty blue or the slightly darker uniforms of the U.S. Air Force. If not for the air base at Sculthorpe, three or four miles west of Fakenham, she didn’t think she would have been able to keep the Owl and Unicorn going. Fakenham was only a small town; there weren’t many big towns in northern Norfolk. But the men who flew planes for his Majesty and their Yankee counterparts did like to take the edge off whenever they got the chance. The way they drank, they could have kept someone a good deal less thrifty than she was comfortably in the black.
Closing time meant her customers had to go. It didn’t mean her day was done-nowhere near. She had to clean off the bar and the tables. She had to empty the ashtrays. Why was it that so many people who drank hard smoked hard, too? She’d never got the habit herself. She thought it was nasty, in fact. Nasty or not, with so many puffing away in there, she might have been smoking a packet a day. And nothing was more disgusting than the stink of stale tobacco ashes.
Once she got rid of those and the rest of the rubbish, she washed and dried the pint mugs and the smaller glasses that held stronger brew. The Americans said a British pint was bigger than one of theirs-not that they complained about the difference when they were pouring down her best bitter. But it bothered her. Shouldn’t a measure with the same name on both sides of the Atlantic also be the same size?
She was low on potato crisps. She’d have to get more before she opened tomorrow. Potatoes, thank heaven, weren’t rationed. Too many things still were, all these years after the war ended. England might have been one of the winners, but she’d beggared herself in the process. France was better off these days, and France had packed it in straightaway. From things Daisy heard, even the western part of Germany was better off. That seemed bitterly unfair.
Not that she could do anything about it, regardless of whether the damned Germans ate caviar for breakfast and beefsteak for supper every day. By the way the airmen talked, the bloody Germans were liable to get theirs pretty soon.
By the way the airmen talked, the whole world was liable to get its pretty soon. And even a place like Fakenham, far from any big city, could get its along with the rest of the world. The Nazis hadn’t bothered it; the only industry in town worth mentioning was printing.
But Fakenham lay much too close to Sculthorpe. Some of the planes that flew out of the base there were B-29s: bombers that could carry a deadly payload all the way to Russia. Daisy had no idea whether the Russians knew that. If they did, though, they would want to find ways to keep it from happening. She was no general, but she could see that.
Daisy yawned. What she couldn’t see right this minute was straight. She’d either fall asleep here, next to the gleaming glassware, or she’d go upstairs to the flat over the pub and do it somewhere a little more comfortable. Upstairs won, though the weary trudge felt a lot longer than it really was.
The sun had risen when she sat bolt upright in bed, but it was much too early. “Bloody hell!” she said, even if no one was there to hear her swear. “I forgot to clean the stinking toilets!”
They would be stinking, too. Beer made men piss more and aim less. She didn’t think anybody’d puked the night before-no one had complained about it. The job would be bad enough anyhow. She could see why she’d forgotten about it. It was nothing anybody would want to remember.
Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t have to do it, even before she brewed her first cuppa and grilled a bloater for breakfast. Those were part of today’s business. The toilets still belonged to yesterday’s, so they came first.
Sighing, she went downstairs and into that dark, smelly little room to do what wanted doing. The toilets were an afterthought in the pub, put in when indoor plumbing came to Fakenham some time late in Queen Victoria’s reign. It would have been Tom’s granddad or great-granddad who added them, and he cost himself no more space than he could help. When things were busy, as they had been last night, that made crowding and messes worse.
Afterwards, Daisy wished she could scrub her hands with steel wool. Washing them like Lady Macbeth was the next best thing. She did that every night after cleaning the toilets. Because she did, her hands were red and rough all the time in spite of the creams and lotions she rubbed in.
No matter how tired she got, she was still on the chipper side of thirty. She sometimes dreamt that, in spite of rough, red hands, an American pilot would sweep her off her feet and take her back across the Atlantic to Wyoming or Arkansas or Nevada or one of those other states with a romantic-sounding name. She was sure she’d be happier in some town there than she was in out-on-its-feet Fakenham.
The flyers chatted her up. They would have loved to take her to bed for the fun of it. Going to bed with a man was fun; she remembered that only too well. You stayed warm afterwards much better than you did with a flannel nightgown and a pile of blankets and a hot-water bottle on your feet.
But if you went to bed with men for the fun of it, word got around. And they said women gossiped! Plenty of flyers would want to sleep with that kind of woman. Not a one of them, though, would want to take her back to the United States when his tour here finished.
And so she smiled behind the bar as she worked the tap. She made pleasant conversation. She swatted hands away when she carried pints to tables. If she had to, she spilled things on people too stupid to get the message any other way.
She slept by herself, in a flannel nightgown, under a pile of blankets, with a hot-water bottle on her feet. If, one night or another when she wasn’t too exhausted, her hand sometimes slipped under the nightgown and took care of certain needs, she was the only one who knew that. By now, she’d got over feeling guilty about it, or even very embarrassed. It was just something she did. Under the clothes, people were animals. She slept better on nights when she scratched that particular itch.
She did tonight, even though she was tired. But bombers flying low overhead woke her before sunup all the same. When those engines thundered just above the housetops, a body would have had trouble staying dead, much less asleep.
“Daft buggers,” Daisy muttered through a yawn. They weren’t supposed to land or take off right above Fakenham. The American colonel in charge of the planes at Sculthorpe made noises about how he wanted his men to be good neighbors.
Good neighbors didn’t shake people out of bed at whatever heathen hour this was. Of course, good neighbors also didn’t fly thousands of miles across the North Sea and Europe to deliver incandescent hell on people they judged to be not such good neighbors. And those not-such-good neighbors didn’t pay return visits. Daisy hoped like blazes they didn’t, anyhow. She yawned again and tried to go back to sleep.