The Gathering Storm (39 page)

ben and I were ushered to our seats in the crowded theatre as the musical prelude to
Gone with the Wind
played. The atmosphere was thick with the buzz of anticipation. House lights dimmed. The audience applauded and then fell silent. The music swelled as the red velvet curtain drew back.

Eben took my hand in his and slid his other arm around my shoulders. I did not resist. The love story began.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara looked remarkably like Eva, I thought. As Scarlett flirted with her southern beaus, I leaned closer against Eben. His jacket smelled of bay rum, cloves, and talcum. Strong fingers stroked my palm. The film flickered on the screen. Embers within me flickered, then sparked. I closed my eyes and inhaled the clean masculine aroma of Eben. Delicious warmth poured over me; electric desire coursed through me. I resisted the urge to bury my face against his neck. Scene by scene and line by line I imagined Eben as Rhett Butler, pulling me close against him in a passionate embrace. I only half heard the dialogue. I played out more intimate scenes in my mind.

The intermission lights came up.

"Well, what do you think?" Eben asked.

I did not dare look at him. Did what I was feeling show in my expression? "Wonderful."

"It is warm in here." He stood. "Your face is flushed."

"Is it?" My hand flew to my cheek. I felt my color deepen. There
was nothing I could do about my cursed tendency to blush.

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I was certain I would not, could not, breathe, unless Eben's lips touched mine before the night was over.

"I think Rhett will tame Scarlett," Eben said.

"I do hope so." I once more pictured Eben pulling me into his
arms and kissing me hungrily. I felt my face redden again and hoped
Eben would not notice.

"So," he said cheerfully, "it's been a very long time for you, eh?"

I swallowed hard. Was he a mind reader? "Long time?"

"You said it had been a very long time since you had been to a cinema."

"Oh! That. Yes." I fanned myself with a program. "I should. Come. More often. Good for language skills."

He observed me with unconcealed amusement. "You should. Perhaps I will come. We will. If you like, more often."

Inane conversation passed between us. It was something like lighting a candle to read by while the house was on fire.

The music began again and, ready for Act 2, everyone took their seats.

Eben put his arm around me. The electric current in my core uncoiled slowly. I grew weak at his touch. Hopeless, I leaned away from his arm and clasped my hands together. He looked at me curiously. The corner of his mouth turned up slightly. Did he understand what his touch had done to me?

Atlanta burned. Rhett rescued Scarlett and Miss Millie from the Yankees. Something wonderful and powerful had reignited within me. I had known breathless, awkward love with the boy I had married, but only briefly. When I had learned of Varrick's death, I had decided it was enough to live the rest of my life, merely remembering what it had been like to lay in a man's arms and yield to his kisses. That night, as I sat beside Eben, I knew memory was not enough. I felt alive again. I wondered when Eben had last held his beloved in his arms.

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No sooner had we emerged from the theatre than the air-raid sirens
began to wail. Since it was exactly straight up on the hour of eleven,
all London's clocks and bell towers appeared to also protest the disruption of the peaceful, romantic night.

If the blacked-out byways of London were a pit of gloom, then the plunge inside the closely curtained Oxford Street underground station was to enter the mouth of something like Dante's vision of hell. The steps were lined with reflective tape, but the procession of pedestrians tramping into the depths was so closely packed and so orderly that little guidance was needed. When we reached a landing and turned a corner, small electric lights again provided their dim glow. Even so I was grateful to have Eben in front of me, where the presence of his back beneath my hand was a comforting reassurance.

All talking was subdued, almost as if the Londoners feared their conversation would climb to the ears of the German pilots. Once we reached the level of the train platform the crowd spread out. Movement slowed, like a wave subsiding on a sandy shore.

"I'm scared, 'arry," said a woman who trod on my toe as she searched for her husband in the mob. "Ooh, I'm sorry, dearie. Beg yer pardon."

"Now don't fret, old girl," returned Harry. "Naught to be a'frighted of. This is what'yer call just a precaution."

"Not a raid, then?"

Eben reached up and patted my hand where I had let it remain on his shoulder.

"Them Nazees," Harry explained patiently. "Bombin all them warehouses and ships down t'the river. But never you mind, Myrtle. We'll be out in the air again quick as Bob's yer uncle.'"

"I do hope yer right, arry."

"Me too," Eben whispered with a grin in his tone.

That was just before the distant thump of anti-aircraft fire reached our ears. Buried as we were, it was impossible to judge directions, but it was clear the sounds came from a great distance at

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first, then drew nearer and nearer. Soon smaller caliber fire added its rasping pop to the heavier
whomps
of artillery.

"Hang onter me, 'arry!"

"Must be close," Eben muttered. "They don't waste ammunition if they don't have targets."

I pictured the soldiers up the street from my house, the ones atop the knoll in Primrose Hill Park. Their searchlights must even now be stabbing the sky, trying to pin the invading bombers like moths to a velvet-lined box.

"What's at?" Myrtle demanded as an ominous drone penetrated even past the racket of bursting shells.

"Heinkels," Eben answered. Under his breath he added, "German bombers. Slow but...just keep close."

I needed no urging. Scenes from the burning of Atlanta played over and over in my head—fearful flames that reached above the level of the housetops.

The floor jumped beneath my feet as the first of the German bombs detonated. Like a thunderstorm heard rolling in from afar, the explosions gathered force and speed. With each succeeding thump the pavement under my feet bounced. The mob on the platform swayed drunkenly. The lights flickered.

Myrtle groaned. "Why'd we hafter come t'the West End, 'arry? Whyn't we stay where we belonged?"

I wondered where in London she thought was safe when bombs rained down so impersonally. A half-dozen detonations underscored my point, followed by three more in quick succession.

At last the raid seemed to be relenting. People began to offer each
other crooked smiles, registering,
See, that wasn't so bad, was it?

That was when the biggest, closest blast rocked the tube station with the force of an earthquake. My skull bounced off the brick wall of the tunnel, and I saw stars that were never really visible beneath Oxford Street. Eben sank with me to the floor, cradling my head beneath him and sheltering me with his body.

Myrtle screamed as the lights flared and winked out, plunging

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us into absolute blackness. Plaster dust dribbled down from overhead, causing some to shout that the tunnel was collapsing.

But the tube station remained intact, and in a minute the lights came back on.

The all-clear sounded, but there was no immediate rush toward the exits. The hesitation betrayed by the crowd showed our desire to be absolutely certain the danger had passed.

"There you are, luv," Harry said. "Right as rain."

'"arry," Myrtle returned, "don't never take me to a West End picture show never again."

So the burning of Atlanta had been in her thoughts too!

No one in the Oxford Street shelter was seriously hurt. Any scrapes
and bruises, unlike the lump on my head, were more a result of being
crammed into a narrow lair with a couple hundred other humans than from any action of the German bombs. The shared experience of living through a bombing raid caused a kind of camaraderie in the group emerging from the Underground.

There were jokes and a general air of good humor. This atmosphere continued until the head of the file exited the stairs. Then came an abrupt change in attitude: stifled exclamations of horror, accompanied by the wail of sirens.

No more than two blocks away, a house in the middle of a row of others had received a direct hit. The scene was illuminated by burning buildings on either side of the gap. The smoke billowing up to overhang the scene and the orange light peering out the windows combined to create the illusion of a skull: fiery eyes surmounted a gapping-jawed smile.

My hand flew to my mouth. I was shocked at the devastation. My sense of disbelief was heightened because only seconds before we had been laughing and joking.

Eben allowed me no time for self-recrimination. Grabbing me

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by the elbow, he dragged me north up Regent Street toward the fires. "They may need help," he shouted.

The building that had completely disappeared in the blast was no more than half a hundred yards from All Souls Church and the
Langham Hotel across from it. Fire crews were already on scene, but
they directed their hoses at the structures flanking the bombsite.

I tried to recall what had occupied the now vacant space: a three-story-high set of shops, offices, and flats had ceased to exist in the blink of an eye. What was left of it consisted of two piles of bricks: one partially blocking Little Portland Street, while the other spilled a trail of masonry guts across Mortimer Street like a slaughtered stone beast.

Eben ran ahead of me as I struggled in my dress shoes to climb over fragments of roof slates and chunks of cornice. He arrived in front of the surviving house just west of the bomb crater even as two men emerged from the building. An Air Raid Warden with the letters
A.R.P.
stenciled on his tin hat, and a passerby in shirtsleeves with a cut on his forehead, appeared on the steps, carrying an unconscious woman between them. Eben helped lift her over a
heap of debris and lower her to a clear bit of sidewalk on the far side
of the street. The firemen continued to play their streams of water on the upper floors of her building.

She lay very still.

"Is she...?" I said.

The warden looked up at me. "Just knocked out, miss," he reassured me. "No wounds visible. Found her on the stairs."

I knelt beside the woman and the men relinquished her to my care. The warden handed me a folded blanket, which I placed under her head. She appeared to be about thirty years of age. Her honey-blond hair was pushed back from her face as if she had just combed it with her fingers. A gold wedding band and gold cross on a chain around her neck were all her jewelry. Her white blouse was unwrin-kled and her dark skirt unmussed. She was in her stocking feet. She might have been napping.

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"Keep clear!" a fireman shouted. "There's a ruptured gas main the next street over."

As if entering the stage on cue, a sheet of bright yellow flame erupted from the ground floor of the woman's house. The firemen hastily backed away. They now concentrated their efforts on an adjoining undamaged house. "That one's a goner, that is," one of them said. "But we can save the rest of the block...maybe."

The woman's eyelids fluttered. Calling Eben to me, I noted, "She's coming round."

Unfocused eyes gazed upward for a space of a dozen blinks, then the victim asked, "Where am I? What happened?"

As I began to explain she abruptly sat upright. "Take it easy," I said. "You're safe. What's your name?"

"Name?" she repeated dully, looking about as if missing something but not sure what it was.

"Jenny," she answered, then, "Bill! Where's my boy, Bill? Have you
seen him? He was in the kitchen when I went down to get the post."

The heads of the two rescue workers, as well as Eben's and mine,
pivoted toward the burning building. As we stared at the blazing upper stories, Jenny's gaze was drawn to follow.

Then she screamed and struggled against my grip on her shoulders. "He's still in there! I know it! Bill! Bill!"

While the other two men sat paralyzed, Eben grabbed the blanket. Draping it over his head and shoulders, he sprinted toward the firefighters. "Wet me down," he said. "I'm going in."

"First floor up," the frantic mother called out. "At the back."

"You'll never make it," I heard one of the firemen reply.

Nevertheless, their hoses soaked him thoroughly even while I cried, "Eben! Eben!"

Jenny and I hugged each other as Eben dashed up the steps.
I saw him hesitate only an instant as a tongue of fire licked the porch
above him. Ducking his head, Eben darted inside and disappeared.

"Upstairs. At the back," Jenny repeated over and over, as if Eben
could still hear her. Perhaps the power of her desperation added