Chapter 23

Out with it, Beth, ” said Mab.

Beth blinked, holding the red silk petticoat she’d tiptoed into the room to return, and so did Osla, who sat buffing her nails by the light of a candle stub. The three of them had only just sneaked back in from the dance, absolutely knackered, long past Mrs. Finch’s lights-out, and mentally Osla was already totting up the next Bletchley Bletherings: What shy filly splashed out at the Bedford dance this weekend? Even the most brilliant brain needs a little Glenn Miller to invigorate the old gray matter, and BP’s boffins certainly sat up and took notice. . .

“You danced five times with Harry, Beth. ” Mab turned away from the glass where she’d been brushing her hair and fixed Beth with a stern eye. “All slow swoony tunes, too. ”

Beth closed the bedroom door as Boots trundled in on her heels. “We were talking shop. You know. . . ” Codebreaking, Osla knew she meant but wouldn’t say, even here in private.

“Cheek to cheek? ” Osla couldn’t help saying.

Beth looked puzzled. “Yes. So no one could overhear. ” Back in her high-necked nightdress with her hair combed out of its waves, she looked very much the colorless wallflower who had never been on a date in her life.

Osla sighed. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone moony over Harry Zarb. ”

Beth looked horrified. “We’ve worked together, that’s all. He’s good at what he does, I’m good at what I do, it’s easy to talk. . . ”

Osla and Mab exchanged glances.

“That’s called getting moony. ” Mab tossed her brush down. “High time you started looking about for a fellow, Beth, but don’t settle for a married man giving you a line. ”

“There was no line. ” Beth reached for the end of her plait to fidget with, but it was no longer there. “He didn’t—try anything. He only asked me to dance so we could talk safely, no one hearing. ”

“Only at BP. ” Mab settled on her own bed in her nylon slip. “Not ‘Let me whisper sweet nothings in your ear’ but ‘Let me whisper ciphers in your ear. ’ It doesn’t mean it still wasn’t a line, Beth. ”

Osla wasn’t sure. Was Harry really the sort to step out when he had nice, tired-looking Sheila at home looking after their frail son in his leg braces? She wasn’t so worried he would try things on with Beth—more like, Beth would get all starry for the first man who flirted through “Moonlight Serenade” without meaning anything serious by it.

“You can never predict what kind of man steps out on his wife, ” Mab said as though reading Osla’s mind. “That’s why you steer clear of all married men. Because it starts as a harmless friendship, and then you’re hearing how their wife doesn’t understand them and they’re going to leave her soon, and then you’re sneaking off behind the wife’s back until things get sorted, which they never do. It’s all rubbish. I’ve never got into that situation, ” she added, seeing the look on their faces. “But I’ve known girls who did, and their stories all turned out the same—not at the altar. Because the men were just looking for a bit of you-know. ”

“Bit of what? ” Beth asked, perched on the edge of Osla’s bed.

“You know. ” Mab looked at her. “Don’t you? ”

“No. . . ”

Osla stared down at her hands. “Actually, ” she heard herself saying, “I don’t, either. About. . . It. ” She could barely get the words out, but she couldn’t lie either. Not in this blackout-curtained bedroom with two girls she’d worked with and wept with and shared untold fears with for the last year.

“Come off it! ” Mab scoffed. “I’ll believe that Beth here never learned the facts of life from Mrs. Finch—though didn’t your sisters tell you, after they married? ” she demanded, sidetracked.

Beth looked blank. “They said never to let a boy kiss me until we were engaged, so I thought maybe kissing made you pregnant. ”

“Methodists, ” Mab muttered, and looked at Osla. “All right, I believe Beth, but I don’t see how you can possibly be in the same boat considering that racy mother of yours, you dizzy deb. ”

“Don’t call me that. ” Osla flared, knowing she was being oversensitive, not particularly caring. She was tired, tired, tired of climbing an endless ladder where she thought she’d finally reached a rung where she’d never be called dizzy deb or silly socialite again, only to find it still ringing in her ears, classifying her as dim-witted, inconsequential, ignorant. Only when it came to this, she was ignorant, no getting around it. You could spend your days translating Hitler’s personal telegrams and still be an utter ignoramus in other spheres. “You think my racy mother ever told me anything, Mab? I grew up surrounded by hirelings. Nannies taught me to wash behind my ears; boarding school taught me German grammar; finishing school taught me to make a court curtsy. My mother was too chuffed getting married, getting divorced, and getting remarried to notice I was there, much less teach me the facts of life. So I know nothing, and none of the girls I went to school with did either, because everyone’s mothers were too terribly proper to get into the whole nasty subject. ”

Mab still looked skeptical. “The day we met, you embarrassed a pervert on the train by asking if he needed to hide the tent in his trousers—”

“You think I had any idea what I was talking about? I fake being terribly worldly, darling, but it’s all flimflam. ” Osla looked down at her hands again. “At the Savoy last year, I was telling a friend that I wished my boyfriend wouldn’t carry his torch in his front pocket when we danced, and this old dowager at the next table rears back and hisses at me, ‘You silly fool, don’t you know what an erection is? ’ And I laughed like I knew what she meant, but I had not the foggiest. And now I’m twenty years old and in love, and I still have no idea how It happens. ” Osla ran out of breath, finally looking up. “I hate being such a—a silly deb. Can you just enlighten me? ”

“Why do you think I know all about it? ” Mab looked peculiarly still in the light of the candle stub. “Because Shoreditch girls are tarts? ”

“No, because you didn’t grow up wrapped in cotton wool like a china doll. ” Osla realized she had utterly derailed the conversation from Beth and Harry and the conundrum of married men, but who knew when a chance like this would come again? “What happens? ”

There was a short, embarrassed silence. Boots broke it with a yelp, because the scarlet-faced Beth was twisting her fingers through his collar. Mab looked between Osla and Beth and shook her head. “We need a drink for this. ”

“Where’d you get that? ” Beth blurted as Mab rummaged in her handbag and brought out a silver flask.

“Nicked it off Giles. He’ll never miss it. ” Mab swigged; Osla swigged. Beth hesitated, but as soon as Mab said, “All right, when a man’s trousers come off. . . , ” she reached for the flask and gulped till she choked. Osla pounded Beth on the back, and the two of them listened, cringing, to Mab’s brief, blunt lecture.

“There are things you’ll hear, ” she finished. “Anyone who says you can’t get knocked up if it’s your first time—wrong. Anyone who says you can’t get knocked up if a man pulls away at the end—also wrong. The only thing that stops you getting knocked up is if a man wears a French letter”—a brief explanation of what that was; Osla and Beth made faces—“or if you get a doctor to fit you for a little rubber device you push up inside. ” She mimed. “But no doctor will give you that until you’re married or at least engaged, because doctors are men. And if a man promises he’ll marry you if you do it with him, that’s the lie that’s been told since Adam and Eve. ”

“Well, ” Osla said at last. “I can’t say I’m tempted to do it at all. ” It sounded perfectly horrid.

“Is it. . . nice? ” Beth was nearly inaudible with embarrassment.

“I thought so. ” Mab’s voice was carefully toneless. “Very nice. But I was only seventeen, so what did I know? ”

“. . . Who was he? ” Osla asked.

“A fellow I shouldn’t have listened to. ” Mab took another swallow of Giles’s gin. “So is your Philip prompting this desire for information? Or is someone new putting the make on you? ”

“Oh, the men I know don’t try to put the make on. Maybe a kiss after a date, but that’s all, or they’re on the NSIT list. ”

“NSIT? ” Beth said.

“Not Safe In Taxis. ”

“But you want this information for a reason. ” Mab refused to be deflected. “Come on, Os. You’ve told us all about your Philip being on the Valiant, and how his eyes are blue-gray and give you spasms—now give us the goods! ”

Somehow that cracked the tension—Osla laughed, Mab grinned, and an almost invisible smile escaped Beth. “I adore Philip, ” Osla confessed, “and I haven’t heard anything from him since Matapan, so—what? ” Beth had frozen at the word Matapan.

“Nothing. ” Beth took another sip from the flask, looking poker-faced.

“And when he comes back from Matapan, do you think you’re getting an offer to become Mrs. Philip—” Mab paused. “You know, I don’t think you’ve told us his last name. ”

“Because he doesn’t really have one. ” Osla cleared her throat. “He’s, well, he’s Prince Philip of Greece. ”

She looked up. Mab’s eyebrows had lofted clear to her hairline, and the flask in Beth’s hand hovered half-lowered.

“A bloody prince, ” Mab told Beth. “Of course. And a foreign prince! ”

“Not really. He’s Danish and German, but he went to school in Scotland and his uncle is Lord Mountbatten. . . it’s complicated. The family left Greece when he was a baby. He’s not heir to the throne. ”

“Good, ” drawled Mab, “because it would be funny if I’d just given the facts of life to the future Queen Osla. ”

“Shut up! ” Osla smacked her with a pillow. “This is exactly why I didn’t mention it, because you’d start talking drip, and he’s not like that. He’s just my Philip. ”

Mab took the flask from Beth, turning it upside down. “Not nearly enough gin for this discussion. ”

Beth actually laughed aloud. Her cheeks had faded from humiliated red to a rosy pink; she looked positively pretty. Osla wondered if Harry thought so, too. “Look, Beth, about Harry. I like him, so I want to think he wasn’t laying a line on you. But be careful. ”

Beth wrinkled her nose. “Someone married—I couldn’t. ” She glanced at the candle stub; it was down to the last half inch of wax. “I’d better get to bed. ”

She tucked Boots under her arm and padded out. Mab looked at Osla, waiting until they heard the other bedroom door click. “I worry about Beth, ” she said bluntly. “Shy girls like her are just the sort to fall into the wrong man’s arms and get in trouble. ”

“I think the appeal of someone like Harry is that he’s unattainable, ” Osla mused, sliding between her sheets. “He’s a topping good crush for a girl who doesn’t actually want to step out of the shadows. I can see Beth as a ninety-year-old virgin, breaking codes and living alone with her dog, happy as a clam. A lover or a husband would break that up. ”

“The end of war will break that up. Who’s going to be asking Beth Finch to break codes then? She’ll be a spinster at home again. ” Mab blew out the candle. “God help her. ”

“Things will be different after the war. ” Osla stared up into the darkness over her bed. “They have to be. Or else what’s it all for? ”

“Some things never change. ” Mab’s voice came through the dark, suddenly serious. “Listen, Os. . . you might know a bit more biology now, but that doesn’t mean you know other things. ”

Osla stiffened. “What do you mean by that? ”

“You don’t know how men sometimes use women. ” A long exhalation. “How they use and then leave women they never intended to marry. Nice boys do that. Gentlemen do that. Even princes. ”

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