Fallout

18

Luisa Hozzel shook her head. “Not for me,” she said in a mixture of German and bad Russian. “I have a man back in Germany.”

“In Germany?” Nadezhda Chukovskaya tossed her head. She was short and stocky and tough. Laughing, she went on, “Germany is the other side of the moon. You don’t have anybody here. Everybody needs somebody.”

Yes, but you aren’t the somebody I need. Luisa didn’t say it. Nadezhda was one of the two or three women with the most pull in her barracks. If she got mad at somebody, she could make that person sorry. Telling her off was a last resort.

Another soft answer, then: “Not for me. I am woman for men, not woman for other women.”

“Men!” Nadezhda laughed again, scornfully this time. “Men don’t know anything! Wait till somebody loves you who can make you feel good because she understands what makes you feel good.”

The only polite answer Luisa found to that was a shrug. She hadn’t been lying. Women didn’t stoke her fires. They never had, and she didn’t think they ever would.

The Weimar Republic might have taken lesbianism in stride, along with so much else. But by the time Luisa was old enough to notice such things and to have such feelings herself, Germany had turned away from the Weimar Republic-about as far away as it could turn. Hitler and the Nazis? To them, anything that had to do with homosexuality was degenerate and disgusting. Homosexuals didn’t reproduce, after all, and that made them unnatural and not worth keeping alive (unless, she’d heard, they happened to belong to the SS).

Teachings from the Third Reich might still linger inside her. Or her natural bent might simply be the more common one. Whatever it was, past wishing she had Gustav back she seemed immune to the lure of romance here.

Nadezhda Chukovskaya might have seen as much in her eyes. They sat side by side on Luisa’s bunk in the brief, tired interlude between supper and lights-out. Nadezhda laughed once more, this time more nastily than the first two put together.

“You want a man so much?” she said. “You want a dick in you? Go to the fence between our half of the camp and theirs. Bend over and stick your ass in the air like a washerwoman. You’ll get a dick in you, all right, dog-fashion. And nobody breaks a rule because you both stay on your own side of the wire.”

“No!” Luisa had seen that happen once or twice. She thought it was unimaginably depraved. She’d looked away as soon as she realized what was going on. Most of the time, so did other people. Once, guards had whooped and hollered and cheered the couplers on.

“Why not? You’d sooner have a man than me? That’s how you get a man here.”

That might have been one of the ways. It wasn’t the only one. She remembered all too well the barber groping her while he trimmed her bush. If she’d said yes to him, she could have had soft work inside the barbed wire, not hard labor out in the taiga. But she wanted him no more than she wanted Nadezhda. Less, if anything.

“It’s not about a man. It’s about my man,” she said.

“Your man is in Germany.” Nadezhda spoke as if to an idiot child. “Germany is I don’t know how many thousand kilometers away. Lots of thousands-I know that. You’ll never see him again. Might as well grab what fun you can here.”

Luisa only shrugged again. She had no idea whether her husband was alive or dead, either. She hadn’t told that to Nadezhda, though the Russian woman might already know it. The reason the MGB had seized so many German women in this camp was no secret. It would just have strengthened the other woman’s argument.

Nadezhda stood up, her face set in angry lines. She strode away. Her stiff back and long strides made her more mannish than ever. That didn’t add to her attractiveness, not so far as Luisa was concerned.

She would have had things easier if she’d given in to the barber. She was sure she would have things easier if she gave in to Nadezhda, too. But her body was the only thing in the camp that still belonged to her. Other zeks had slept in this bunk before her. She was sure others would after her, too. Even her clothes, with Г963 replacing some older number, were hand-me-downs that belonged to the Soviet state.

She lay down on the hard, lumpy mattress. Maybe she could claim the bedbugs that bit her as her own, too. Other bugs also called the camp home. Sometimes Luisa felt more like a stray schnauzer than a human being.

Right this minute, she felt like a worn-out stray schnauzer. As soon as she lay flat, her eyes closed. She couldn’t have stayed awake more than a minute after that. As she often did, she dreamt she was back in Fulda.

No matter what she’d been talking about with Nadezhda, her dreams had nothing to do with Gustav. They revolved around food. A chocolate cake smothered in whipped cream her mother had made when she was small. A roast duck with cherry sauce. Goose-liver sausages. A giant pork roast she’d fixed for Christmas one year, with potatoes and sauerkraut on the side. Malty beer, its foam thick enough to give you a white mustache.

You could live without a man, and even without taking a woman as a substitute for him. You couldn’t live without food. When you did hard work without enough of it, your body reminded you of that every chance it got. When you slept, it played pictures-and tastes, and smells! oh, smells!-inside your head of all the good things it wanted.

Luisa was just bringing a spoonful of fragrant beef-and-barley soup to her mouth when the raucous clang of hammer on shell casing thrust her eyes open and rudely dropped her back into the real world. Her stomach growled in anger and frustration. Whenever she listened to it, that was all it ever reported.

She had no time to listen to it now. She had to get outside as soon as she could, to stand out there in the predawn cold for the morning count. The guards had to be satisfied before the zeks ate.

Outside she went, still yawning. Cold slapped her in the face. Electric lights blazed, making the assembly area noontime bright. A bright star-would that be Venus?-shone in the east. The lights drowned out the rest of those feeble little gleams.

“Line up!” the guard shouted. “Line up, you dumb cunts!” Across the wire, the Chekists who kept an eye on the men greeted them with the same insults.

Trudl Bachman slid into place next to Luisa. “Another wonderful day here in paradise,” she murmured out of the side of her mouth, her lips scarcely moving. Talking during the count was verboten, which didn’t mean people didn’t do it anyhow.

“Aber naturlich,” Luisa answered the same way. The two women smiled at each other. If you didn’t smile, if you didn’t joke, wouldn’t you start screaming instead?

Up and down the ranks prowled the guards. Counting the women should have been easy. It would have been easy, if the men with the machine pistols had had the brains God gave a tsetse fly. As things were, they needed four tries before they were sure that the number they got matched the number they thought they were supposed to have.

Only then could the women head for breakfast, which they did at a dead run. To be so eager, so desperate, for thin cabbage soup, a lump of black bread, and weak tea only went to show what the camp was like. It would have been a starvation ration even in the worst days of the war. When it was all you had, though…

Luisa ate with an animal intensity that left her frightened. So did her fellow zeks. She was surprised when Trudl asked her, “Was that Leckschwester after you again?” Talk at breakfast seemed a rare luxury.

She managed a nod. “Nadezhda? Ja. I told her again I wasn’t interested, but she doesn’t want to listen.”

Then they hurried to the stinking latrines: a necessary part of the day, but Luisa’s least favorite. And then it was out into the snow, out into the woods, once more.

–

Gustav Hozzel turned over a Russian’s corpse. The stink that came from the dead Ivan said he’d lain there for a while. So did the way he’d swollen enough to split his tunic and his trouser legs. Normally, Gustav wouldn’t have wanted to come within a hundred meters of him.

Normally, here, meant before he’d taken that AK-47 from the other dead Russian, the one in Wesel-before the American A-bomb flattened and melted Wesel and all the Ivans in it. Now he checked every Russian’s body he came across. He had to, if he was going to keep the assault rifle in cartridges. The enemy was the only source for them. They weren’t like 7.62mm and 9mm pistol rounds, the standard calibers for machine pistols, which were made all over the world.

He made sure he turned the dead soldier by the tunic, not by his bare skin. The corpse made horrible squashing noises just the same.

Rolf laughed. “Ain’t you got fun? That piece is more trouble than it’s worth.”

“They said the same thing about your last girlfriend, right?” Gustav returned. By the way Rolf scowled, maybe they had said something like that about his latest flame. Gustav didn’t care. He pointed happily. “Will you look at that?” The Ivan had several of the distinctive curved magazine pouches for the Kalashnikov hooked to his belt. Gustav took the magazines out of them. One went into a pouch he’d lifted from another Russian. The rest he stowed in his pockets and pack.

Max Bachman pointed to a roadside sign that tilted but hadn’t got knocked flat. “Look. Next stop is outer space.”

“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” Rolf jeered.

“I think it’s funny,” Gustav told Max. The sign announced that Marsberg was five kilometers away. The Germans were somewhere south of Paderborn, trying to take as much land back from the Russians as they could before the Red Army recovered from getting atom-bombed…if it did, if it could.

“Of course you two laugh at the same shit,” the ex-LAH veteran said. “You’ve been asshole buddies for God knows how long.”

“Only Arschloch I see around here is you, Rolf,” Gustav said. He figured he and Rolf would have it out one of these days. One of them would knock the crap out of the other, and they’d go on from there. Or maybe they’d rack each other up, and then they’d both get some time off from the war.

But a sputter of gunfire broke out from the direction of Marsberg. Whatever he and Rolf did to each other would have to wait. They both trotted toward the trouble, as did Max.

Russian generals spent men the way a drunk tycoon spent money on dancing girls. They kept throwing them into the fight, on the notion that whatever they were facing was bound to fall over sooner or later. It had worked for them against the Wehrmacht. They thought it would again.

“Urra!” the Red Army men shouted. The war cry always made the hair at the back of Gustav’s neck stand up in alarm. To him, it meant a swarm of drunken Ivans rolling forward like the tide, careless of whether they lived or died, and no King Canute anywhere to hold them back.

Gustav skidded down behind a jeep that would never go anywhere again. He rose to one knee and started banging away with the Kalashnikov. He could hit what he aimed at out to three or four hundred meters, twice as far as he would have been able to with the PPSh. The bullets had more stopping power when they hit something-somebody-too.

This Russian steamroller had less steam behind it than attacks Gustav had faced in bygone days. When the Ivans saw they wouldn’t smash the forces in front of them, they didn’t keep trying to break through in spite of casualties. They went to earth and started digging scrapes, the way any sensible soldiers would have.

Back in Marsberg, some potbellied Soviet lieutenant colonel had to be on the brink of apoplexy. How could you fight a proper war if soldiers kept trying to stay alive? Mortar bombs started whistling down on German and Russian positions with little discrimination between the two.

Blasts, screaming fragments…Gustav tried to scramble under the dead jeep. But its tires had burned, and on the iron wheels it sat too low to let him. A clang announced that a fragment had ripped into the back fender. A few centimeters farther to the right and it would have ripped into him instead. You went into a stupid little fight like this, you rolled dice with your life as the stake.

And if you went into enough stupid little fights like this, you would crap out. The odds made it a certainty.

Lieutenant Fiebig got up and dashed toward the Russians, firing his U.S.-issue grease gun from the hip as he ran. “Come on, boys!” the company CO shouted. “Follow me!”

Those had been the magic words in the last war, and they still were. Officers and sergeants who led from the front got better results than the ones who just ordered their men forward while they stayed safe in the rear, the way so many World War I commanders had. Of course, officers and sergeants who led from the front also took more casualties than the other kind. Bravery could be its own punishment.

Gustav got up, too. He slapped a full magazine onto the AK-47 and ran after the lieutenant. Fire and rush, fire and rush…No one needed to tell the Germans how to advance. It wasn’t as if most of them hadn’t learned in a school that buried you if you flunked an exam.

Some of the Russians knew how to fall back the same way. But they had more kids in their ranks than Gustav’s countrymen did. The Germans in this fight were all volunteers. The Ivans put any warm bodies they could find into uniform. Even in the last war, Gustav had been fighting sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Hitler kept screaming how Stalin was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Stalin was, too. But Hitler’s barrel had no bottom left to scrape after a while.

A terrified guy with a broad Slavic face threw down his rifle and threw his hands in the air. “Kamerad!” he bleated. “Freund!”

Gustav pulled the ammo pouches and grenades off the Russian’s belt so he couldn’t change his mind, then gestured with the Soviet assault rifle. “Go on back,” he said. “Somebody’ll take care of you.”

Blubbering palatal gratitude that Gustav couldn’t understand, the Red Army man headed west, hands still high above his head. And maybe some German would get him off to a POW camp, or maybe somebody like Rolf would decide he wasn’t worth wasting time over and plug him. Surrendering could be the riskiest thing you tried on the battlefield.

Marsberg was another town whose church had a tall steeple. The Russians didn’t put an artillery spotter up there-they had a couple of snipers banging away at the advancing German soldiers. But the Red Army wasn’t the only force that issued its men mortars. Bombs began bursting around the church. Then two in a row slammed into the steeple and sent it crashing down.

If the Ivans had tanks in town, taking it wouldn’t be easy and might be impossible. As Gustav knew too well, any tank, no matter how old-fashioned, was death on infantry without armor support. The Germans still relied on the Amis for that. Memories of panzers and blitzkrieg left the USA skittish even yet about a West German army with tanks and planes of its own.

But no tracked behemoths started flinging murder at the advancing foot soldiers. Nor did the Red Army men in Marsberg seem determined to fight to the death to hold every laundry and secondhand bookstore. A couple of machine guns slowed the Germans, but not for long. The Russians pulled back, leaving behind a stench of strong tobacco and sour sweat.

Cautiously, locals started coming out of their cellars and looking around their battered town. A woman burst into tears at seeing the shattered church. “What are you blaming us for, you stupid bitch? It’s Stalin’s fault!” Rolf shouted at her. For some reason, that didn’t make her stop crying.

–

It was over, but then again it wasn’t. In thirteen months, Harry Truman wouldn’t be President of the United States any more. He and Bess would go home to Independence. The reporters would write about him. Then, as soon as he’d settled into the obscurity that was all an ex-President merited, they’d forget about him. After that, the historians would get their licks.

In the meantime, though, he had a war to fight, and with luck to win. He didn’t want to burden his successor, whether Donkey or Elephant, with cleaning up the mess he’d made. He was a proud man, and a tidy one. He wanted to clean up his own messes.

The Oval Office telephone rang. He picked it up. “Truman here. Yes?”

“Mr. Kennan is here to see you, sir,” Rose Conway said.

“Send him in,” Truman answered.

That he was conferring with George Kennan showed how much he wanted to clean up his own messes. Kennan was a Soviet expert. He’d been assistant chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Moscow till after the end of the last war. He’d helped shape the policy of containing the Russians that Truman had carried out. As the Russians blockaded Berlin, set off their own first atom bomb, and let their stooges start the fight in Korea, containing them didn’t seem such a hot idea any more. Pushing them back looked ever more necessary.

Kennan had opposed letting Douglas MacArthur take American troops north of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea. He’d said it was dangerous. No one else had thought so. MacArthur sure hadn’t. Neither had Truman himself. And neither had Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East. And they’d all proved wrong, and George Kennan much too right.

In he came. He was in his late forties, with a patrician bearing, or maybe just one that said he was used to being the smartest man in the room. He was tall and slim and dressed well. His strong-chinned face probably wowed the ladies even if his hairline was in full retreat.

“Mr. President,” he said, and held out his hand. Something in his voice shouted Ivy League.

Truman shook with him. Kennan had a good, firm grip. “Thanks for coming in,” the President said, more conscious than usual of his own Missouri twang. He waved the diplomat to a chair. A colored steward followed Kennan in with coffee.

After the steward disappeared again, Kennan remarked, “I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk to me any more after our earlier…disagreements, sir.”

“I’m not fool enough to think I’m right all the damn time,” Truman said. “That’s for Hitler and Stalin and Mao and people of their stripe. When I sit down on the pot, I know what comes out, and it ain’t angels.”

He got a thin smile from Kennan, who said, “That’s a healthy attitude.”

“Well, I hope so. Healthy or not, it’s my attitude. And you were right, much too right, about what would come of MacArthur’s push north,” Truman said. “So now I want to pick your brain about something else.”

“I’ll do whatever I can for you, Mr. President,” Kennan said, “but I know that, even if I happened to be right the last time, that doesn’t necessarily mean I will be this time.”

“Fair enough,” Truman said. “Don’t worry. Whatever happens, you won’t get the blame. I will. That comes with sitting on this side of the desk.”

“Oh, yes.” George Kennan nodded. “I wouldn’t trade places with you for all the money in the world.”

“I don’t particularly like this seat myself, but I’ve got it. I have to do the best I can in it,” Truman said. “Stalin has made it plain as day that he won’t settle for the status quo ante bellum. Do you think the other Russian Communists will show better sense if he isn’t there any more to stop them?”

“If he’s deceased, do you mean?”

Truman nodded. “That’s just what I mean. As long as Hitler stayed alive, the Germans wouldn’t surrender. He scared them worse than we did. Christ, he scared ’em worse than the Russians did, and that’s really saying something. But it wasn’t much more than a week after he blew his brains out that they decided to throw in the towel.”

“It’s an interesting question, sir.” Kennan, who probably looked thoughtful all the time, looked more thoughtful now. “It would depend on who took power after he, ah, died, of course.”

“Well, sure.” The President nodded. “With luck, some of his higher-ups would go to the Devil along with him. I’m talking about landing an A-bomb on his head, you understand.”

“Yes, I thought you had to be,” Kennan replied. “I assume you haven’t tried to do this before-”

“Oh, we did, when we hit Moscow,” Truman broke in. “It didn’t work, but not for lack of effort.”

“I see. I wondered if that might be so. I might have tried harder to find out if some of my acquaintances in the Defense Department hadn’t got nervous about talking to me.” Kennan brought out the implied accusation with no particular rancor.

“I never told anyone not to talk to you,” Truman said truthfully.

“I didn’t say you did, sir. People there did understand, though, that I was no longer in good odor here or at the State Department.” Kennan had got on fine with George Marshall when Marshall was Secretary of State. He and Dean Acheson, though, struck sparks off each other.

Marshall, of course, was one of the few men perhaps even smarter than Kennan. Acheson, while nobody’s dope, wasn’t in that lofty league. Chances were he’d disliked being looked down upon from on high, as it were. Few human beings didn’t. Truman himself had the unpleasant suspicion that he was being measured by Kennan’s mental calipers.

“Suppose we do send some of Stalin’s button men to hell with him,” Truman said. “Will the ones who’re left make peace?”

“If they see that their national survival, or maybe their personal survival, is at stake, I think they will,” Kennan said. “But I gather that finding where Stalin is isn’t easy. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t sleep in the same bed twice in a row.”

“We’re working on that,” the President said. It was, in fact, something of an understatement. The less he said, the better the chance nothing would leak. No one had told him about the atom bomb till he moved into the White house, and he’d been Vice President. He’d been mad about that at first, but only at first. Till the weight of the world landed on his shoulders, he hadn’t needed to know.

George Kennan was only-only!-a diplomat out of work at the moment. There were plenty of things he didn’t need to know. Truman was no Joe McCarthy, to distrust an out-of-work diplomat’s loyalty. But he understood that the fewer chances you took, the better off you were likely to end up.

“I do thank you very much for your help,” the President said.

That was dismissal. George Kennan recognized it as such. He rose from his chair. Truman also stood. As they shook hands again, Kennan said, “I’m pleased to do whatever I can, sir, as I told you before. But I shouldn’t be the only man whose views you seek. Get as many opinions as you can, judge the value of the people who give them, and make your own choices accordingly.”

“I’m trying to do that, yes,” Truman said. “I called you in because I wanted to hear from someone who wasn’t connected to the State Department.”

“Oh, I’m still connected to it,” Kennan said. “It doesn’t pay my salary any more, but I’ll always bear its mark.”

“Its scars,” Truman suggested with a grin.

“Well, yes, there is that,” Kennan agreed with a wry grin. “We all have them here and there, don’t we? At least I know where those came from.”

“True enough.” In his late sixties, Truman had plenty of scars of his own. But he also had the satisfaction of knowing he’d dealt out even more of them than he’d taken.

–

Bruce McNulty swept off his officer’s cap and bowed from the waist. “Madame, your humble chariot awaits,” he said in what an American fondly imagined to be an English accent.

The accent wasn’t what gave Daisy Baxter a fit of the giggles. Neither was the humble chariot: a jeep from some U.S. Air Force motor pool. The uncovering and the bow, though…“You act like somebody out of a movie about Henry VIII or Shakespeare or something,” Daisy said.

He took off the cap again and looked at it with regret. “No feather, darn it,” he said in his usual American tones. “But I can buckle a mean swash without one. What’s Errol Flynn got that I don’t? I mean, besides money, looks, and talent?”

“I like the way you look just fine,” Daisy said.

“That’s nice,” he answered blandly. “I notice you didn’t talk about the other two.”

“You’re impossible,” she said, wagging her finger at him.

His grin was pure impudence. “Hey, I do my best. C’mon, toots-hop in. You’ve got yourself a pass from the hospital. I’ve got one from my base. Let’s go cut a rug. Tomorrow morning it’ll be 1952.”

Daisy was glad to slide into the jeep’s passenger seat-which, since it was on the right, to her way of thinking should have been the driving seat (or, if you were a Yank, the driver’s seat). Even though it hadn’t been built for comfort, sitting down was a relief. She still didn’t have all her strength, or all her hair, back. But they’d let her go out on New Year’s Eve once she promised not to get too crazy or wild.

Bruce got in beside her. “You warm enough?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I won’t break if you look at me sidewise.” She was also bundled into a thick lamb’s-fleece coat one of the sisters had lent her. It would have kept a giraffe cozy at the South Pole.

“Okey-doke.” He turned the key and put the jeep in gear.

“Are you all right driving on the left?” She had frets of her own.

“I’ve done it enough by now that I’ve got the hang of it,” he answered. “I have to remember not to look the wrong way, that’s all. But nobody’s going to be moving real fast even if we do bump fenders.”

“Mudguards,” Daisy corrected automatically.

“Yeah, mudguards.” Bruce’s agreement was sarcastic. “And the boot, and a spanner to change the tyres-you don’t say those funny, you just spell ’em wrong-and the hood is the bonnet. Can you imagine a jeep with a bonnet? Makes me think it ought to have curly hair.”

“Impossible,” she said again, but she couldn’t help laughing.

He did drive slowly and carefully. The blackout was as stern as it had been during the Blitz. Starlight was what he had to steer by, and the clouds scudding across the sky robbed him of much of that.

The dance was in Yaxham, a tiny village a few miles south of East Dereham. Daisy wondered how Bruce had heard about it, and how he intended to find the hall where it was being held once he managed to find Yaxham.

That, she turned out not to need to worry about. Once they got into Yaxham, they could play it by ear. The hall might be blacked out, but music spilled into the street even if light didn’t.

“Let’s see if I can park this critter without leaving it in the middle of the road,” Bruce said.

“That would be good.” Daisy nodded, though he might not be able to see her.

He did a splendid job, possibly by Braille. Then he said, “Shall we go make fools of ourselves?”

“Let’s,” she replied. She wasn’t sure how much dancing she was up for, not when she’d spent so long flat on her back. Even a little would be fun, though. She reached for his hand in the darkness as he was reaching for hers. They squeezed each other. The firm pressure felt good.

Two sets of blackout curtains kept lights in the dance hall from leaking out. Daisy wore a cloche straight out of the Roaring Twenties to hide as best she could how much hair she’d lost. As best she could wasn’t all that good; she’d been nervous about showing herself in public. She needn’t have been. Several other men and women were about as bald as she was. She recognized a man who lived only a few blocks from the Owl and Unicorn. They smiled and waved to each other.

Bruce didn’t get jealous, the way he had once before. He just asked, “Somebody you know?”

“Stuart? Only my whole life. I went through school with his kid sister,” Daisy answered. She looked around. “I don’t see Kitty here. I hope she’s all right.”

“Me, too,” Bruce said. “Well, if old Stuart cuts in on me, you can ask him. C’mon.”

Out on the dance floor they went. The combo on the bandstand played hot jazz, or what a provincial combo imagined hot jazz to be. Their front man had a trumpet, a sloping belly, and a balding pate with nothing to do with radiation sickness. Other than that, he resembled Louis Armstrong much less than he wished he did.

“He’d better be careful with that thing,” Bruce said, nodding toward the trumpet. “He’s liable to hurt somebody with it.”

“You’re a horrible man,” Daisy told him.

“Yeah, but I have fun. I try, anyway,” the American answered. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, people would also be gathering for New Year’s. They’d also be looking around to see who was there and who had died under atomic fire. And he would have been the one who’d visited it upon them.

Daisy wondered if he thought about that. How could you help it? Then again, how could you live with yourself if you did?

She didn’t want to think about it. She danced two quick numbers and a slow one, then felt herself drooping. Bruce noticed as soon as she did. “Want to take a break and grab a pint?” he asked.

“That sounds marvelous,” she said. They had to queue up for the beer. Standing wasn’t too bad. Bruce shoved money across the bar. The red-faced man behind it returned two pint mugs. One sip told Daisy she’d served better bitter. She wasn’t about to complain, though.

Bruce liked what they had here. From the things Daisy had heard about American beer, this was bound to improve on that.

They danced some more, then took another break. She did get to talk to Stuart. Kitty had come through the bombing. She was up in Wells-next-the-Sea, waiting tables at a cafe. That was good news.

The trumpeter with delusions of Satchmo counted down the seconds to midnight on his wristwatch. “Happy New Year!” he shouted when there were no seconds left to count. “Happy 1952!”

Everyone cheered. Men and women embraced. Bruce bent his head to kiss Daisy. She clutched at him greedily.

Not too much later, they slipped out of the hall. Bruce found the jeep without even lighting a match. There was more starlight now. It had cleared up, though it was colder than before.

“That was wonderful!” Daisy said as he started the motor. “Thank you so much! I had the best time.”

“It was fun, yeah.” She could just about see him nod. “Now…Can I work out how to make it back to good old East Dereham?”

“If you need to stop along the way to get your bearings, I won’t mind,” Daisy said. She felt flame on her face. Had she really been that brazen?

She must have been, because somewhere north of Yaxham he pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as the jeep stopped. They were as much alone as if they’d booked a hotel room.

“I don’t want to worry about a baby,” Daisy said, somewhere in the midst of the kisses and caresses. Not just her cheeks were on fire now. She burned all over.

“Then we’ll try some other things instead,” Bruce answered. And they did. The jeep’s seats were awkward. So was the steering wheel. They managed. His fingers and tongue were knowing and skilled.

She discovered he was circumcised, which Tom hadn’t been. He came before she quite expected him to, so she choked a little. She managed to laugh about it when she pulled away. She was still laughing as he started the jeep again.