Waterloo Station by Emily Grayson

Author:Emily Grayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Six

It was too late. That was the hell of it, as Stephen would have said, but what Stephen would have said no longer mattered. It would have been very tricky getting out of England now, so she was here, and that was that. At the start of the war, Maude had pledged her service to Britain, committing her foreseeable future to the preservation of the empire and the world, as dramatic as that sounded, and for better or worse it was in Britain that she would now remain for the duration.

“For the duration.” That was the expression. It was the expression for everything these days. It was an awful term, an ugly term, Maude felt. It was a phrase that on the surface simply meant “for as long as this war might last,” but it had come to suggest so much more. This war wasn’t like other wars; this was an all-or-nothing affair. Even the Great War had ended in a kind of mutual exhaustion, the two sides equally spent, punch-drunk boxers barely standing, holding on to each other for support, each equally unable and unwilling to continue. Not this time. No truce, no treaty, no compromise was going to end this war. Once it had begun in earnest, there was no going back. It wasn’t just the Great War all over again, everyone said; it was the Great War still: the same two old fighters, off the canvas, out of their corners, shoulders rubbed, smelling salts whiffed, back on the balls of their feet, only this time there was no bell to stop the pounding, the bloodletting, and the flesh-rending. A fight to the finish. Last man standing, and all that. You either won, and your conception of the future of humanity would come to pass, or—well, there was no or.

Which made the fight worth fighting. There was no denying that. Never, not once, did Maude doubt that. For that, she was grateful. If you were going to devote your life, possibly sacrifice it, for a greater good, then this was the one to do it for. It wasn’t always easy to remember this, when the bombs were dropping and she was sitting in a shelter shoulder to shoulder with Edith, breathing that same gas that always came from where?—the ground? the air? the bombs? who knew where?—and closing her eyes against the same rain of dirt. Even the wounded men in their stretchers and chairs and bandages and pathetic stained pajamas stopped groaning, the better to hear just how close the drumming of the bombs had come. “Pinch me,” Edith would whisper, or Maude, and then the other would do so, digging a fingernail into the fleshy thumb pad of her friend’s hand, giving her a gift: here is the pain you will think about now, instead.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.

What did the nurses in a bunker in Berlin count to? Maude wondered. Or, better, here, in London? One Thames, two Thames—no, that would never do. It was madness, to count down a war.

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