“Mr. Dorming doesn’t even like dogs,” Polly said when Miss Laburnum told her. “And I thought Mrs. Rickett didn’t allow her boarders to keep pets.”

“I told you, my dear. Mr. Dorming’s moved out. He’s taken Mr. Simms’s old rooms.”

Polly didn’t remember Miss Laburnum having told her that. She didn’t even remember having been told that Mr. Simms had been killed, though she must have been because she recalled wondering if he had been in Houndsditch, too. She remembered scarcely anything of those first few days. It was all she could manage to absorb the fact that Mike was dead and to do all the things that had to be done.

She had always wondered how the contemps had found the courage to go on after their husbands, parents, children, and friends had been pulled lifeless from the rubble. But it wasn’t courage. It was that there were so many things that had to be taken care of that by the time one had done all of them, it was too late to give way.

She had to go with the warden to the ARP post to identify Mike’s effects and sign for them, had to talk to the incident officer, had to telephone Townsend Brothers to tell them she and Eileen wouldn’t be in to work, and to remove Mike’s belongings from his room so new tenants could move in. “I do hate to worry you so soon,” Mrs. Leary said, “but it’s a couple who were bombed out last night and have nowhere to go.”

“It’s quite all right,” Polly said. And because she didn’t want Mrs. Leary going through his things and finding a list of upcoming raids and thinking he had been a spy, she went straight over.

But there was nothing incriminating in his room, only his clothes and his suitcase, his towel and shaving things, and a paperback biography of Shackleton.

She packed them up, took them back to Mrs. Rickett’s, and went to the Daily Express to tell his editor, all the while protected by a barrier of numbness through which the pain would presently begin to work its way.

But there was no time to worry about that. She had to respond to Mike’s editor’s questions and to the condolences of the troupe and Sir Godfrey’s anxious concern, had to put the flowers Doreen had brought “from everyone on third” in water. And, worst of all, had to deal with Eileen, who refused to believe Mike was dead.

“It’s all a mistake. It was someone else,” she insisted, even though the warden had shown them Mike’s identity card and ration book and the reporter’s notebook he’d carried. And the pumpkin-colored scarf Miss Hibbard had knitted and Polly had lent him at St. Bart’s that morning after they’d tried to find John Bartholomew.

The edges of his papers were charred, and all of the things were sodden. “The fire hoses,” the warden explained apologetically.

“Those could have been stolen from him,” Eileen said. “Alf and Binnie stole that sort of thing from people all the time. I won’t believe it till I’ve seen the body.”