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But any amount of time was too long, Matthew thought as he waited for their drinks. He glanced back at Lily and Sophie, standing apart from the jostle of GIs, Lily looking pensive and Sophie with her hand holding her jacket closed at the throat, her gaze darting here and there.
Matthew thanked the bartender and took the drinks back through the crowd.
“It’s like a party in here,” Lily remarked with a wan smile. “What are they celebrating?”
Matthew hesitated and then answered, “Some Nazis tried to assassinate Hitler, apparently. It’s been on the wireless.”
“What!” Lily’s eyes widened. “Did they—”
“They obviously didn’t,” Sophie cut in sharply. “Succeed, that is.” She threw back her drink—straight vermouth—in one abrupt movement. “Otherwise there really would be a party.” The bitterness in her tone was unmistakable. She thrust her empty glass towards Matthew. “Another?”
“Sophie,” Lily said quietly.
Sophie raised her eyebrows in challenge. “What is there left to do but to drink?”
Matthew took her glass and made his way back to the bar.
Sophie continued to drink steadily through the evening, despite Lily’s gentle reprimands. Matthew thought of refusing her requests for more drinks, but he suspected Sophie would just ask another GI, who would be all too willing to oblige. At least he was able to ask the bartender to water them down, but at the rate she was going that hardly mattered.
As the evening wore on, Sophie became louder and wilder, gesticulating with her arms, her bitter laugh like a bird cry, while Lily grew more anxious. It was hardly the respite from their troubles that Matthew had intended it to be, and conversation came in desperate fits and starts, with Lily doing her best to talk normally, until halfway through their steaks. While Lily was telling him about the WI effort to collect rosehips to make syrup for children, Sophie slammed her glass down so hard on the table, they all jumped.
“Oh, shut up, Lily,” she said in a voice that now carried through the whole dining room; a hundred GIs and their dates had fallen silent. Sophie pushed back from the table, standing up as she raked her hands through her hair, causing it to tumble from its French roll. “Just shut up,” she repeated, loud enough for everyone to hear. “What is the point?”
“Sophie, please,” Lily said quietly.
“What is the point?” Sophie repeated, her voice rising to something between a snarl and a wail. “What’s the point?” She gazed around the dining room, pinning people in their places with her contemptuous gaze. “You’re all sitting here guzzling your beer and sawing at your steaks, and I’m asking you, what’s the bloody point? Of any of it? If I were a man—my God, if I were a man—I wouldn’t be here, sitting back and relaxing. I’d be out there, shooting every damn German I could in the head. I’d be winning this war, I tell you, not typing a bloody letter or knitting some poor sod socks.”
“Give that girl a gun,” someone called out, and a titter ran through the room.
It wasn’t malicious, Matthew knew. It was meant kindly, a way to defuse the awful moment. He saw pity in people’s faces, but he knew Sophie didn’t see it, and he thought that was perhaps a good thing.
“Damn the whole lazy lot of you,” she cried, and then she stumbled from the room, with Lily lurching up after her.
Matthew threw some bills on the table before he hurried after them, catching up with them on the pavement outside. A light drizzle was falling, beading in their hair, and Lily’s arms were around Sophie as her sister sobbed as if she’d been split right in half.
“I’ll get a cab,” Matthew murmured.
A queue of hopeful entrants to Rainbow Corner watched the scene play out with a weary sort of curiosity that soon slouched into indifference. There had been too many similar scenes already; every street corner had become a stage for someone else’s tragedy.
Thankfully they didn’t have to bear the strangers’ apathetic scrutiny for very long. A cab came, and Matthew ushered the sisters into it.
Back at the set of rooms the Mathers now called home, Matthew stood in the kitchen with Richard, both of them silent, as Lily helped a now alarmingly docile Sophie to bed. It was as if the fight had drained right out of her, her face and hair both pale, her expression deadened. She said not a word as Lily ushered her into the bedroom, and Richard watched them with tired eyes.
“Carol would have known what to do,” he murmured. “She always knew how to handle Sophie, God bless her.” With a shake of his head, he reached for his newspaper. They no longer had a wireless.
After a few moments, Matthew excused himself and went to wait outside in the hall. Even though the older man wasn’t unfriendly, Matthew felt as if he were intruding into an intimate family moment. Out in the hallway, he could hear a baby crying upstairs and there was a persistent smell of boiled cabbage and drains. He waited, unsure if Lily would come out or not, and yet not wanting to leave.
After about twenty minutes of uncertainty, the door opened and Lily stood there, her dress rumpled, her smile tired.
“I was hoping you’d have waited,” she said quietly and then she stepped closer to Matthew, and he put his arms around her, a matter of instinct rather than decision.
Lily leaned her forehead against his shoulder and closed her eyes. Neither of them spoke. There felt like nothing to say, and yet a lifetime of conversations seemed to pass through the air between them, questions asked and answered, understanding given and taken in the mere drawing of their breaths.
“She’ll be all right,” Lily said after a few moments. “She just needs to sleep.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.” He had to say it, even though he didn’t want to. “I’ve got to report to Nottingham by four o’clock.”
Lily nodded, her eyes still closed, the top of her head brushing his chin.
