“Why not?”
“It’s my father’s.”
Her gaze flicked up, but Henrik’s head was turned, making his expression difficult to read.
“Onkel Albrecht encourages me to read the paper. He says it’s best that we all know what is happening in the world. He doesn’t trust Hitler,” she said.
That earned her a grunt and nothing else.
An only child, she’d wished for a sibling, and she’d briefly hoped Henrik might fill that role. Instead, her cousin mostly treated her with contempt or simply ignored her. Once, when he was twelve and she was fourteen, he’d stolen Frau Hafner’s tin of cooking oil and dumped the entire thing over Marie’s bed while she was shopping with her aunt for Christmas presents. The oil had destroyed the mattress, bedding, and Marie’s suitcase that had been sitting next to the bed. That had been the one time Marie had ever heard Onkel Albrecht yell at the boy, and Henrik had spent all of the holiday sulking in his room.
Accepting that she would never have an easy way with her cousin, she’d instead clung to her sisterhood with Nora and Hazel.
She folded her napkin and pushed back from the table. “I should finish getting ready.” She left, but not before unfolding her uncle’s paper so she could see the full headline: “Britain to Germany: We Stand by Poland.”
* * *
“Our cause is the cause of the people. We must do everything we can to quell the spread of fascism across Europe. It is time for the people to rise up—rise up against the fascist state that has infected Germany!”
The hall exploded into applause as the barrel-chested man who had barked his speech for the last hour brought his remarks to a thunderous close. Marie watched him clutch the podium and look out over the crowd before him with the satisfied expression of a man who knew his command over the public.
The woman sitting next to Marie nudged her and shouted over the applause, “You’ll write to your friends and family in Germany, won’t you? Tell them that we are with them.”
Marie started, but Neil leaned over her, his hands still clapping. “Of course she will. Marie is as dedicated to the cause as any of us.”
The woman gave a satisfied nod and returned to her adulation of the speaker.
“Neil,” Marie whispered to him.
He shrugged. “We all have to do what we can, Marie. I’ve told you, it isn’t just about attending meetings.”
She bit her lip. She was doing more than attending meetings. He, more than anyone else, should know that.
After her first two visits to CPGB meetings, Neil had asked her to look over one of his speeches before he delivered it the following week. He’d probably thought she would just read it and hand it back to him with morale-boosting praise, but as she’d been sitting at her desk it had seemed natural to reach for a pencil. She’d marked up the text, scribbling suggestions in the margins and swapping out phrases with ones she thought would have more impact. He had the ideas, but the execution had been… well, she had been sure he’d simply had an off day.
The next time he’d stopped by her desk, she’d handed the papers back to him, a little sheepish even though she knew her suggestions were good. He’d glanced at them, thanked her, and walked away. For a week, she’d been crawling with nerves, but when he took the stage she heard her words coming out of his mouth. The next time he had a speech, he appeared again, set the typewritten sheets on her desk, and walked off. She’d edited him again, and again his speech had shone. Every time someone had walked up to him to praise his words, she’d felt a little of that shine rub off on her—even if she was the only one who knew it.
“Come on,” Neil said as the applause around them died down. He grabbed her and tugged her along the row of seats as people began to stream out of the hall. Clear of the seats, he looped her hand through the crook of his arm.
“Did you enjoy the speech, kleine Maus?” he asked.
“It was… illuminating,” she said softly. She still lost her tongue a little when he called her kleine Maus. Nora would’ve burst out laughing, but it wasn’t Nora’s teasing she was most wary of. It was Hazel, who would smile and then launch into a thousand and one questions about who Neil was, what she liked about him, how he made her feel. Marie couldn’t answer those questions. Not yet. She knew that Neil wasn’t perfect. He could be a bit pompous, marching into Herr Gunter’s office within days of beginning his graduate work and demanding to meet the cantankerous academic with an air that made it sound as though Herr Gunter should be honored to work with him. And Neil had a habit of speaking about his work on Goethe and the Sturm und Drang movement a little too long. And there were moments when Marie thought that he wielded kleine Maus as a reminder of her place rather than the endearment she hoped for.
Still, Neil was human—complicated and fascinating—and most importantly he seemed to like her. He wasn’t perfect, but neither was she. She kept her worlds apart—her home, her friends, and dinners at the Harlan were so different from the infectious excitement of the CPGB meetings and Neil.
“The pub?” Neil asked.
“Yes,” said Marie, still a little tickled by the mere idea of going to a pub. Even ones that allowed ladies in the lounge seemed slightly daring to her, for she was sure that Tante Matilda had never stepped foot into a British drinking establishment.
Neil glanced around. “Let’s go a different way this time.”
Breaking off from the crowd, they walked in silence. Marie relished the heat emanating from Neil’s body and how it warmed her gloveless hands. He steered them down Scales Road, the lights in a few windows of the short, squat row houses diffused by cheap curtains.
“My friend works in the Air Raid Precautions Department. She says that the entire city will be under blackout orders if we end up at war,” she said, remembering seeing the marked-up prices for black cloth at the shop near her aunt and uncle’s flat the previous weekend.
“My mum remembers the blackout from the Great War… and the zeppelin raids.” He fell silent for a moment before saying, “The speaker tonight was right. Hitler won’t be kept back with diplomacy.”
Marie swallowed. “We don’t know that.”
“I do,” Neil insisted. “I can see it everywhere, but no one wants to come right out and say it. We’re going to be at war again sooner rather than later, and the more we deny it, the more ill prepared we’ll be.”
“I don’t think the government will let us be unprepared,” she said, thinking back to all Nora had confided about her work.
“The Home Office is gearing up as though we’re going to meet the end of days,” Nora would say. “Air raid shelters, gas masks, volunteer air raid wardens. We don’t know what Hitler will hit us with—if he hits us at all—but we’ll be ready for him.”
Every time, without fail, Marie had the same thought: How wonderful it must be to feel so confident. So British.
Yet Marie was glad for it. She wanted to think that people like Nora would be behind the great men of government if they found themselves at war.
“Don’t make the mistake of trusting the politicians to take care of this.” Neil snorted. “What will they do except send off a lot of men to be slaughtered, just like in the last war?”