“No matter,” Miss Laburnum said. “My nephew in Canada sent me a Christmas box and the convoy got safely through.” She brought down a tin of biscuits, a packet of tea, and a bag of walnuts. Eileen and Polly chipped in their emergency stash of tinned beef, marmalade, and chocolate, and Mr. Dorming produced a tin of condensed milk and one of peaches.

“In syrup,” Miss Laburnum said, as if it were ambrosia, and insisted on serving it separately in Mrs. Rickett’s sherry glasses.

They put everything else in the center of the table, “just like a picnic,” as Miss Hibbard said.

“This is a far better dinner than we would have had had Mrs. Rickett been here,” Miss Laburnum said. “Goose or no goose.”

“There is no need to call Mrs. Rickett names,” Mr. Dorming said, and they all collapsed in giggles.

After dinner, they listened to the King’s speech on the wireless. “This time we are all in the front line and the danger together,” he said in his stammering voice. “The future will be hard, but our feet are planted on the path of victory.”

I fervently hope so, Polly thought.

After the speech, they drank the King’s health—in tea, the peach syrup having all been consumed—and then exchanged gifts. Miss Laburnum presented Polly and Eileen each with a homemade lavender sachet, and Miss Hibbard gave them knitted scarves.

“I made them for the soldiers, but after I’d finished them, I was afraid they were perhaps too bright and might endanger them.” They might indeed. They were a bright pumpkin orange, which would stand out like a target to the enemy.

Polly gave Eileen tattered secondhand paperbacks of Murder at the Vicarage, Three Act Tragedy, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which Eileen clutched rapturously to her breast. Eileen and Polly gave Mr. Dorming a packet of tobacco, Miss Hibbard a box of soaps with a picture of the King and Queen on it, and Miss Laburnum a secondhand copy of The Tempest, all wrapped in smuggled-out Townsend Brothers Christmas paper.

“Look at the frontispiece of your book,” Polly told Miss Laburnum. “Sir Godfrey signed it to you.”

“ ‘To my fellow player and costumer extraordinaire,’ ” Miss Laburnum read aloud, “ ‘the best of Christmases from your fellow thespian, Sir Godfrey Kingsman,’ ” and burst into tears. “It is the best of Christmases,” she said. “I don’t know how I should get through this war without all of you.”

And I don’t know how we’d have got through today—and these months—without you, Polly thought, grateful that Townsend Brothers would be open on Boxing Day.

But even post-Christmas exchanges and taking down decorations and preparing for the New Year’s sales weren’t enough to take Polly’s mind off Mike, and she and Eileen raced home after work to see if he’d phoned.

He hadn’t, and he didn’t come on the twenty-seventh, or the twenty-eighth. What if he’s dead? Polly thought, taking down paper bells. What if he was killed when they shelled Dover? Or on the day he left for Saltram-on-Sea, and he’s been dead all this time? Like Mr. Dunworthy. And Colin. Or what if the retrieval team was in Plymouth or Liverpool, both of which had been bombed, and he’d gone there to find them?