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Chapter 20

Wednesday, 15 February 1950

Ursula’s daughter answers the door this morning, and before I can say hello, Peter cries from deep in the house, “It’s broken, Nina. It won’t work.”

Footsteps patter in our direction, and Peter stands before me with a small airplane lifted high. Its pull string dangles all the way to his feet. I suspect he’s stretched the spring from its grounding and it can’t retract the string. Over the past two months, many kids, or their frustrated mums, have returned to the store with the same problem on a similar toy.

I stretch out my hand. “We sell a whole variety of these at the store. I’ve gotten quite good at fixing them. May I?”

He hands me the plane as Nina finally speaks. “Mum had to run out and said if you arrived before she got back, you’re to wait for her.”

I nod in acknowledgment and step through the door. The house feels warm and wonderful, redolent with the scents of porridge and cinnamon. It’s another contradiction within Ursula. Is she a spy? Is she Wonder Mum? Is she both? I also can’t deny that, in many ways, she’s been a good friend. She took me under her wing. She taught me to bake, to play chess, to think more perceptively and clearly, to assess and plan ahead, to—

“Can you fix it?” Peter swipes a hand across his runny nose.

I turn to Nina. “Do you have a screwdriver?”

Nina raises a finger as if she’s found a clue. “Papa’s toolbox.”

She runs off and I continue through the hallway into the parlor. As usual the room is a chaotic, happy mess. “Is your father home today?” I ask Peter.

“He’s gone to ask about work. His leg is getting better.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“Is Mummy still teaching you to bake?” He narrows his eyes at me.

I nearly laugh at his drawn-out tone and almost reply that I agree it’s taking a very long time. Instead I merely state that she is and drop into the chair I usually sit in when Ursula and I come into the room to chat rather than to play chess.

My eyes drift to the board. “Peter, who is playing the chess game?”

He scrunches up his face. “This one is Nina and Mummy. Mummy beat Papa weeks ago and so did Nina. They’re in the finals now, but they have to finish before we go on our trip.”

“You’re going on a trip?”

“Mummy’s taking us away.”

Before I can ask more, Nina crosses into the room. “I found one.”

She hands me the screwdriver. I set the toy on the table before us and take out each of the four screws. “When you do something like this,” I tell the children, “always lay your screws out in a grid. That way you’ll know exactly where to replace them.”

“Aren’t they all the same?” Nina crowds close.

“These are, but that’s not always the case. Some things will have different-sized screws or different threads in the holes, and if you lose the pattern you might not be able to put it back together again.”

I refrain from telling them that I learned that lesson the hard way. I took apart Mrs. Derwet’s coffee grinder to release a trapped bean and couldn’t get the screws back properly. The Unicorn was without coffee for two days before Mr. Hastings ended up giving her a brand-new one.

It worked out in the end though. It took me several evenings, but I finally got all twenty screws into their proper places, and now—at Mr. Hastings’s insistence—I have a wonderful coffee grinder and have even started to enjoy coffee.

I remove the tiny plane’s metal casing, and as I suspected, the spring is stretched clean off its mounting. I show the children how to compress the spring and recoil it before threading the string upon it once more. I then hand Nina the screwdriver to replace each of the screws while I counsel Peter to be a bit gentler.

Once the little metal fuselage is reattached, she hands the plane to Peter, and he sets it on the ground with such exaggerated gentleness both Nina and I share an amused look. I marvel at the kids: Peter, so absorbed in his toy, and Nina, who sits straight and proud after fixing it. Peter pulls the string, and the plane zooms across the wood floor and crashes into the wall just as it should. He jumps up, clapping his hands.

I pat Nina’s shoulder. “You did a good job.” I gesture to the screwdriver. “Better put that back where you found it.”

As she heads to the cellar stairs, I sit surveying the room, trying to avoid the gramophone. If I focus upon it I know I’m just going to want to open its side again and examine the two-way radio. And that is the very last thing I should do. Charlie would definitely classify such a move as “dangerous.”

A crashing noise draws my attention from the radio to the basement. I race to the back stairs and call down. Nina doesn’t reply so I head down.