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Daisy and Eva returned to the drawing room. Bea was asleep on a couch. Andy had his arm around May, who was still sniveling. Boy was smoking a cigar and drinking brandy. Daisy decided she would definitely be driving home.
Fitz came in at half past midnight, his evening suit soaking wet. "The dithering is over," he said. "Neville will send the Germans an ultimatum in the morning. If they do not begin to withdraw their troops from Poland by midday--eleven o'clock our time--we will be at war."
They all got up and prepared to leave. In the hall, Daisy said: "I'll drive," and Boy did not argue with her. They got into the cream Bentley and Daisy started the engine. Grout closed the door of Fitz's house. Daisy turned on the windscreen wipers but did not pull away.
"Boy," she said, "let's try again."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't really want to leave you."
"I certainly don't want you to go."
"Give up those women in Aldgate. Sleep with me every night. Let's really try for a baby. It's what you want, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Then will you do as I ask?"
There was a long pause. Then he said: "All right."
"Thank you."
She looked at him, hoping for a kiss, but he sat still, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, as the rhythmic wipers swept away the relentless rain.
vi
On Sunday the rain stopped and the sun came out. Lloyd Williams felt as if London had been washed clean.
During the course of the morning, the Williams family gathered in the kitchen of Ethel's house in Aldgate. There was no prior arrangement: they turned up spontaneously. They wanted to be together, Lloyd guessed, if war was declared.
Lloyd longed for action against the Fascists, and at the same time dreaded the prospect of war. In Spain he had seen enough bloodshed and suffering for a lifetime. He wished never to take part in another battle. He had even given up boxing. Yet he hoped with all his heart that Chamberlain would not back down. He had seen for himself what Fascism meant in Germany, and the rumors coming out of Spain were equally nightmarish: the Franco regime was murdering former supporters of the elected government in their hundreds and thousands, and the priests were in control of the schools again.
This summer, after he graduated, he had immediately joined the Welsh Rifles, and as a former member of the Officer Training Corps he had been given the rank of lieutenant. The army was energetically preparing for combat: it was only with the greatest difficulty that he had got a twenty-four-hour pass to visit his mother this weekend. If the prime minister declared war today, Lloyd would be among the first to go.
Billy Williams came to the house in Nutley Street after breakfast on Sunday morning. Lloyd and Bernie were sitting by the radio, newspapers open on the kitchen table, while Ethel prepared a leg of pork for dinner. Uncle Billy almost wept when he saw Lloyd in uniform. "It makes me think of our Dave, that's all," he said. "He'd be a conscript, now, if he'd come back from Spain."
Lloyd had never told Billy the truth about how Dave had died. He pretended he did not know the details, just that Dave had been killed in action at Belchite and was presumably buried there. Billy had been in the Great War and knew how haphazardly bodies were dealt with on the battlefield, and that probably made his grief worse. His great hope was to visit Belchite one day, when Spain was freed at last, and pay his respects to the son who died fighting in that great cause.
Lenny Griffiths was another who had never returned from Spain. No one had any idea where he might be buried. It was even possible he was still alive, in one of Franco's prison camps.
Now the radio reported Prime Minister Chamberlain's statement to the House of Commons last night, but nothing further.
"You'd never know what a stink there was afterwards," said Billy.
"The BBC doesn't report stinks," said Lloyd. "They like to sound reassuring."
Both Billy and Lloyd were members of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee--Lloyd as the representative of the party's youth section. After he came back from Spain he had managed to gain readmission to Cambridge University, and while finishing his studies he had toured the country addressing Labour Party groups, telling people how the elected Spanish government had been betrayed by Britain's Fascist-friendly government. It had done no good--Franco's antidemocracy rebels had won anyway--but Lloyd had become a wel
l-known figure, even something of a hero, especially among young left-wingers, hence his election to the Executive.
So both Lloyd and Uncle Billy had been at last night's committee meeting. They knew that Chamberlain had bowed to pressure from the cabinet and sent the ultimatum to Hitler. Now they were waiting on tenterhooks to see what would happen.
As far as they knew, no response had yet been received from Hitler.
Lloyd recalled his mother's friend Maud and her family in Berlin. Those two little children would be eighteen and nineteen now, he calculated. He wondered if they were sitting around a radio wondering whether they were going to war against England.
At ten o'clock Lloyd's half sister, Millie, arrived. She was now nineteen, and married to her friend Naomi Avery's brother Abe, a leather wholesaler. She earned good money as a salesgirl on commission in an expensive dress shop. She had ambitions to open her own shop, and Lloyd had no doubt that she would do it one day. Although it was not the career Bernie would have chosen for her, Lloyd could see how proud he was of her brains and ambition and smart appearance.
