I am pretty sure that Ellen picked up the crumpled cigarette paper just because she wanted another cigarette and didn’t want to ask Bill Yorke for one. I wouldn’t have either; I didn’t like him any more than I liked Chip. He leaned in too close to your face when he talked, and kept clasping your knee or shoulder when you weren’t looking. I saw Ellen unfold the crumpled paper, frown faintly, and put it in her pocket. She reached for the other he’d tossed away and did the same thing.

I picked up my own unsmoked cigarette and handed it to her.

“Have this one!”

She gave me a cool nod. “Ta, Louisa.” Then she got out her own box of matches to light it.

The young men from 648 Squadron stayed three hours, till afternoon closing. When it was time for Mrs. Campbell to shoo them away, two of the Australians—Harry, the tall pilot, and Dougie, the gunner with the wild gingery hair—had fallen asleep at the long table in the middle of the pub with their heads pillowed on their arms among the empty glasses.

“Flying all night will do that,” Phyllis told us.

Jane said it made her feel exhausted just thinking about it.

“I’d better go open up the Tilly,” said Ellen. “They’ll never make it back on foot.”

Bill Yorke, too, had fallen asleep, slumped in his chair in his flight suit by the fire with his legs spread and his elbows cocked on the wooden armrests. Ignacy and Derfel, the Pole and the Welshman, were still awake, but they were slouching against each other’s shoulders as if they couldn’t sit without support. Pimms Section’s commander, slender, sly-faced Jamie Beaufort-Stuart, looked relaxed now, but bone-tired. He was deep in conversation with good-looking David Silvermont, and as I watched I saw them click their mostly-empty glasses together again.

Ellen stood up and reached for her overcoat. Jane lifted one drooping hand, like a dying opera heroine, and asked her, “You wouldn’t happen to have another cigarette on you, would you, darling?”

“Aye, of course, Mrs. Warner!”

Ellen rummaged in her pockets. She came up with a battered paper packet of Woodbines and gave one to Jane.

The cigarette paper she’d fished out of the ashtray fell out of her pocket.

I didn’t see it till she’d gone, along with everybody else. By then, Jane had smoked her Woodbine and decided she needed to go upstairs to lie down and “rest her eyes.” As I was getting up to help Jane with her sticks I noticed the crumpled piece of cigarette paper beneath the table.

I only picked it up because I thought Ellen might want it back. Wartime rationing makes everybody terribly thrifty. It was a piece of paper not much bigger than a few postage stamps! Isn’t it strange how you follow along when somebody else does something?