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‘I should have guessed no one’d understand,’ he said mournfully. ‘It’s always the same. Not fair –’ And he went out of the room and down the stairs slapping his feet noisily on each step as a form of protest – it always annoyed Goosey dreadfully when he did it – leaving Robin wanting to weep for him. It is really a rotten time to be a child, she thought. At least she could be part of it all, and feel she was useful. Or could most of the time, for she remembered suddenly the expression on Staff Nurse Meek’s face when she had argued with her about Todd, and she sighed. Going to Norfolk with Joshy could be fun really. She might even decide to stay there with him, and to hell with the hospital and nursing. It was a thought –

But one not to be thought, or at least not now, and she went across the hallway to her own familiar room and went to bed. There was no way she could cope another moment without some rest. And she was asleep almost before she pulled the blankets above her naked body, for she had been too weary to go down to fetch her things from the hall.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ David said. ‘We’ll have a holiday. Tomorrow everyone has to get back to work – me to the bureau and your Ma to the canteen and you to the farm. That’s your war work, really, Joshy, isn’t it?’ Joshy opened his mouth to speak but his father rushed on, preventing him. ‘So what say we all go out to dinner tonight, hmm?’

Joshy was immediately enthralled. ‘To a restaurant? I mean, a real one, not Mummy’s or Auntie Jessie’s?’

David laughed as Poppy made a little face, but it was clear she wasn’t upset. ‘I think so. We could do better than at an hotel, I think. I wonder –’ and he looked thoughtfully at Joshy. ‘Is it time you tried Chinese food, do you think?’

Joshy’s eyes widened and Robin laughed. She remembered how exciting it had been the first time David and Poppy had taken her to a Chinese restaurant. It had been back in those days when she hadn’t been absolutely sure how she felt about David, whether she liked him for being fun or hated him for being so important to Poppy. That night learning from him
how to eat with chopsticks had helped to resolve the problem.

‘He’ll show you how to eat with chopsticks, Joshy,’ she said. ‘It’s fun. You’re allowed to pick the bowl up and hold it under your chin – ’

Joshy snorted with laughter. ‘Will Goosey be coming? She’d have a fit if she saw me do that.’

‘No,’ Poppy said. ‘Not Goosey. She doesn’t really like foreign food and anyway she likes to get to bed early. Will that help, Joshy?’

His face lost some of its sparkle as he glanced at her and then he sighed and nodded. ‘I suppose so. I mean I’ve got to go back anyway, so there it is. I might as well have some fun out of it all while I’m here. There isn’t any in rotten old Norfolk.’

‘Fiddle de dee,’ Poppy said crisply. ‘It’s there if you look for it. Fun comes from inside you most of the time anyway. When you go anywhere at all you always find yourself waiting on the step when you arrive.’

Joshy stared at her. ‘That’s soppy,’ he said. ‘I mean, I don’t want to be cheeky or anything, but it
is
soppy.’

‘It’s very wise, my son,’ David said and leaned over and tugged him to his feet. ‘As you’ll realize one day. Come on. We’ll kick a ball about in the garden for a bit and then get changed. Poppy, you can get someone to stand in for you tonight? Under the circumstances?’

‘What else can I do?’ Poppy said. ‘Sometimes it’s just – well, not to worry. Jessie said she’d go and keep an eye on things, which is good of her. I’ve asked Flo and Edna not to let her do too much, but you know how she is. And I just hope there aren’t any bad incidents tonight. At least she’ll be safe there. I worry myself sick about her at Cable Street. She never uses her shelter, you know?’

‘I thought she went to her cellar?’ Robin said.

‘If she feels like it. But too often she doesn’t. At the canteen she’ll be fine, though. It shakes a bit but even close hits leave it secure.’

‘I worry about Auntie Jessie,’ Robin said after a while and went over to the drawing-room window to look down into the garden where David and Joshy had arrived and were now kicking a battered football with a great deal more energy than accuracy. ‘She’s so stubborn – Ma, tell me about the man at Auntie Jessie’s.’

‘Man? What man?’

‘Oh, come on. You know who I mean! He turned up at Auntie Jessie’s the day I was there with Chick and you looked like thunder. He knew who I was and said something about Chloe. Who is he and why do you loathe him so?’

There was a little silence and then Poppy said shortly, ‘Private, my love. Private.’

‘Oh, Ma, come off it. This is me, remember?’

‘Could I forget? Well, I suppose – it’s just that he’s – oh, he’s such a chancer! Not as scrupulously honest as he might be, and nasty with it.’

‘That doesn’t tell me who he is. Just what he is.’ Robin looked over her shoulder at Poppy. ‘Come on, Ma, Spill it!’

‘Oh –’ Poppy made a face and went and curled up on one of the big multi-coloured cushions by the empty fireplace. ‘I suppose you’ll find out sooner or later. He’s Bernie – ’

Robin frowned. ‘Bernie? I’ve heard of him before – ’

‘Possibly,’ Poppy said drily. ‘He’s Jessie’s son.’

‘That’s it! I knew I’d heard hints from – well, never mind. I just knew there was something about him! So he’s Jessie’s, is he? He must have had a simply gorgeous-looking father!’

Poppy lifted her brows. ‘As a matter of fact, he gets his looks from his mother’s side of the family,’ she said a little frostily. ‘Your grandfather – my father and Jessie’s brother – was a very good-looking person and Jessie, when she was younger – and anyway, look at you. You’re no slouch!’

Robin went pink. ‘Thanking you kindly, ma’am,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘So, he’s Jessie’s son and he’s a bit of a chancer, not too honest. Is that why you loathe him so? And where does Chloe come in?’

‘Enough,’ Poppy said. ‘This is turning into gossip.’

‘Mm’ Robin’s eyes glinted with amusement. ‘And isn’t it fun?’

Poppy laughed in spite of herself. ‘Honestly, Robin, you’re as bad as Joshy sometimes.’

‘I wish I had half his intelligence and a quarter of his charm,’ Robin said. ‘He really is something rather special.’

‘He is, isn’t he?’ Poppy smiled at her daughter then. ‘You all are. And it’s lovely to see you so attached to him. Half-brother and all – ’

‘To quote an expert,’ Robin said lightly. ‘Fiddle de dee! He’s
my little brother completely, and there’s an end to it. Now tell me about Chloe. Don’t keep changing the subject.’

‘I can’t,’ Poppy said uncomfortably. ‘She’s your sister too, and – ’

Robin made a face. ‘Now she really
feels
like a half-sister. In fact a quarter, or less. She can be so – oh, you know what I mean.’

‘I do and I don’t want to talk about it.’ Poppy was more uneasy than ever. ‘She’s a – I mean she’s a private person now. Lives her own life. We don’t see much of her and it’s horrid to gossip about her – ’

‘I see,’ Robin said shrewdly. ‘So she and Bernie were some sort of – ’

‘That’s enough, Robin!’ Poppy was on her feet. ‘I’m going to bath and change. It’s high time I dressed properly. I’ve been slopping around like this for far too long.’ And she tugged at her dressing gown. ‘You could do with something different too. Have you anything with you from the hospital you can wear? Or would you like to borrow something of mine?’

Robin pulled at her skimpy green siren suit. ‘I can’t go in this?’

‘You know perfectly well that –’ And then Poppy stopped. ‘You really can get me so agitated, Robin! Time you grew out of that at your great age.’

Robin laughed. ‘I know. Isn’t it awful? But at least it means I’m old enough to wear that little green number of yours. The suit – the one with the silly hat to match.’

Poppy made a face. ‘I was going to wear that – oh, all right. I’ll make do with the black.’

‘And very nice, too,’ Robin said as they made for the door. ‘You look like a femme fatale in it. I’ll need some stockings too. Any possibility of those?’

And arguing amiably over clothes they went upstairs. Talking about Chloe clearly wasn’t on the agenda today, Robin thought privately as she chattered on about the use of a string of pearls that Poppy had and which would look splendid with the green suit. Sooner or later she’d find out about the link between her and the amazingly good-looking and highly dubious cousin. Be nice, and persuade Ma, that was the secret, but not now. Now they were going out as almost a family to eat exotic food and have some fun, war or no war.

Joshy was for once in his life silenced with awe by the restaurant to which David took them. The place was full of bead curtains and low lights and carved wooden partitions between the tables, all painted in bright green and red and gold lacquer, and the smell was extraordinary; Robin identified ginger and cinnamon and garlic and then had to give up as the scent, exotic, delicious and highly promising, overwhelmed her, and then laughed aloud as she caught sight of Joshy with his head up, snuffling the air like a small hedgehog.

The place was full, with blue and khaki uniforms predominating among the diners, and there was a great deal of noise as people laughed and chattered, but the owner, a round man with a smile almost as wide as his teeth were white and with the most oriental of eyes and brows, welcomed David as though he had every table available to him and his party alone, and led them to a large round one almost in the middle of the restaurant.

Joshy was even more enthralled to discover that the centre of the table, far from being rigid, was a roundabout, and he reached forwards and pushed on it and it turned indolently on its axis.

‘It’s called a Lazy Susan in America,’ David explained just as he had once explained to Robin long ago. ‘I don’t know what it is in Chinese. Anyway, the thing is, Chinese food comes in lots of different dishes and everyone helps themselves into their own bowls. The Lazy Susan makes it easier for everyone to get what they want without stretching all the time.’

Joshy turned it again and then dug into his pocket and pulled out a rather battered wooden model of a Spitfire. ‘Old George –
he’s the cowherd on the farm – he says the trouble the Air Force has is it can’t find enough places where it can build ever such long runways to take off on and land on,’ he said, and reached forwards with his Spitfire. ‘Look, Pa, if I turn the table this way, and then make the aeroplane land from the opposite way, see? The aeroplane sort of stays in the same place but manages to run enough to land safely, and still it doesn’t take up as much space as a long runway, would it? It’d be a sort of round runway, wouldn’t it?’

David said nothing, staring at him, and Poppy and Robin were silent too, gazing at Joshy’s absorbed face as he pushed the Lazy Susan from the left and brought his toy plane in to land from the right. ‘Mind you,’ he said then. ‘You’d have to have some sort of cooling system, wouldn’t you, because of the friction on the wheels making them too hot? And you’d have to have special equipment on the wheels for landing to make sure the plane sort of went round in a curve instead of straight because it’d go off the edge if you didn’t have something to guide it – ’

He sighed then and pushed his plane back in his pocket. ‘I’ll have to think about that. Maybe George’ll help me make a Lazy Runway.’

‘George will make you one?’ David said a little weakly, still staring with some awe at his son. ‘Did he make that Spitfire?’

‘Mmm? Oh, a bit of it. He sort of showed me how and then I did it. I say, where’s the lavatory? I really must go to the lavatory.’

Poppy smiled. All his life Joshy had been passionately interested in lavatories and had never failed to visit a new one when he could. ‘You won’t find any bead curtains or lacquer there, you know,’ she said. ‘There’s a sign on the wall over there – see?’ And Joshy nodded and scrambled down from his place and hurried away, his small legs, sun browned beneath his short trousers, looking plump and healthy as he moved.

‘I say, he really is something, isn’t he?’ Robin said after a moment. ‘He scares me sometimes, he’s so bright.’

‘Me too,’ David said. ‘Or is it just that I don’t remember how I used to think? Maybe all boys think like that – ’

‘And girls,’ Robin said. ‘I mean, I’m admiring Joshy because he’s clever, but I don’t think he’s clever just because he’s a boy. There’s more to brains than sex, you know!’

‘Well, yes, of course,’ David said. ‘I wasn’t being – I just thought that Joshy seems to have the promise of a fine mind and I wasn’t sure if I was right or whether it was just the way boys think. I wasn’t criticizing you.’

‘Hmm!’ Robin said and Poppy laughed.

‘He’s better than most men, you know, darling,’ she said. ‘I get so many people throwing their hands up in amazement because I can run a business and don’t look like something out of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. David’s not like that – at least I don’t think so – ’

‘Hey, after all these years, you can say that?’ David said indignantly. ‘Of course I’m not! Ye gods, where’d we all be without women in this war? They’re filling all the gaps the men in the services have left behind and – ’

‘Yes – and what will they do when the war’s over, hmm? Go back home to be good and quiet again?’ Robin said. ‘I was listening to some of them at the hospital – the women who’re taking over the porters’ jobs. We’ve only got old men there now, and these women, and one of them was saying it’d be just like last time. When the war was on, she said, no one could be nicer to women than the men were, but as soon as it was over, it was a matter of get back where you belong – stop taking our jobs away.’

David shook his head. ‘Not this time,’ he said confidently. ‘It has to be different this time.’

‘I wish I could be so sure,’ Poppy said unexpectedly. ‘In some ways it’s getting worse. I mean, I know more women have jobs now and so forth and are in the Army and all the rest of it, but there were men in the restaurant the other day complaining that women’s real war work was looking wonderful to cheer the chaps up when they come home on leave – ’

‘You see?’ Robin was triumphant. ‘It isn’t easy for us, after all – and you thinking boys better than girls is just another – ’