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But today her poised self-assurance had collapsed. "It was awful when you were in Spain," she said tearfully to Lloyd. "And Dave and Lenny never did come back. Now it will be you and my Abie off somewhere, and us women waiting every day for news, wondering if you're dead yet."
Ethel put in: "And your cousin Keir. He's almost eighteen now."
Lloyd said to his mother: "Which regiment was my real father in?"
"Oh, does it matter?" She was never keen to talk about Lloyd's father, perhaps out of consideration for Bernie.
But Lloyd wanted to know. "It matters to me," he said.
She threw a peeled potato into a pan of water with unnecessary vigor. "He was in the Welsh Rifles."
"The same as me! Why didn't you tell me before?"
"The past is the past."
There might be another reason for her caginess, Lloyd knew. She had probably been pregnant when she married. This did not bother Lloyd, but to her generation it was shameful. All the same, he persisted. "Was my father Welsh?"
"Yes."
"From Aberowen?"
"No."
"Where, then?"
She sighed. "His parents moved around--something to do with his father's job--but I think they were from Swansea originally. Satisfied now?"
"Yes."
Lloyd's aunt Mildred came in from church, a stylish middle-aged woman, pretty except for protruding front teeth. She wore a fancy hat--she was a milliner with a small factory. Her two daughters by her first marriage, Enid and Lillian, both in their late twenties, were married with children of their own. Her elder son was the Dave who died in Spain. Her younger son, Keir, followed her into the kitchen. Mildred insisted on taking her children to church, even though her husband, Billy, would have nothing to do with religion. "I had a lifetime's worth of that when I was a child," he often said. "If I'm not saved, no one is."
Lloyd looked around. This was his family: mother, stepfather, half sister, uncle, aunt, cousin. He did not want to leave them and go away to die somewhere.
Lloyd looked at his watch, a stainless steel model with a square face that Bernie had given him as a graduation present. It was eleven o'clock. On the radio, the fruity voice of newsreader Alvar Liddell said the prime minister was expected to make an announcement shortly. Then there was some solemn classical music.
"Hush, now, everyone," said Ethel. "I'll make you all a cup of tea after."
The kitchen went quiet.
Alvar Liddell announced the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.
The appeaser of Fascism, Lloyd thought; the man who gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler; the man who had stubbornly refused to help the elected government of Spain even after it became indisputably obvious that the Germans and Italians were arming the rebels. Was he about to cave in yet again?
Lloyd noticed that his parents were holding hands, Ethel's small fingers digging into Bernie's palm.
He checked his watch again. It was a quarter past eleven.
Then they heard the prime minister say: "I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Ten Downing Street."
Chamberlain's voice was reedy and overprecise. He sounded like a pedantic schoolmaster. What we need is a warrior, Lloyd thought.
"This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us."
Lloyd found himself feeling impatient with Chamberlain's verbiage. A state of war would exist between us: what a strange way to put it. Get on with it, he thought; get to the point. This is life and death.
Chamberlain's voice deepened and became more statesmanlike. Perhaps he was no longer looking at the microphone, but instead seeing millions of his countrymen in their homes, sitting by their radio sets, waiting for his fateful words. "I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received . . ."
Lloyd heard his mother say: "Oh, God, spare us." He looked at her. Her face was gray.
