It finished at last. Our ceiling was still holding. I sensed that, in spite of all the noise, the building had been spared a direct hit. Temporarily deafened, I shook my head and swallowed. As my ears cleared I heard outbursts of coughing and crying. Faces flickered here and there, underlit by match flames and lighters. They could have been Goya’s people, gurning and grimacing at the disasters of war. My lips were caked in dirt. I tried to wipe my mouth but my hands were also filthy.

Célia stirred beside me and put her hands to her head. She said, “Oh, damn, I’ll have to wash my hair again.”

In a loud, singsong, only mildly cross voice, as if she were lounging in her bedroom, calling to me across the passageway.

“Darling,” I croaked. “Don’t worry about your hair.”

“And it’ll never be dry in time,” she declared, as if I hadn’t spoken.

“Lie down, sweetheart, put your head in my lap,” I said, and she obeyed me without a word, and went to sleep.

“She’s in shock,” James said.

“I know.”

The crying had subsided into murmurs and groans. People were starting to talk. Somebody said, “Not long till the all-clear,” and other voices agreed.

“Are you all right, Yvette?” I heard James say.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so. Are you?”

“Yes.”

He wasn’t holding my hand anymore. I wasn’t sure when he’d let go. I wanted to thank him for it. But the hand-holding had belonged to the bombing, and that was over now.

So I said, “Good.”

I suddenly pictured St. Mark’s Church ruined, that lovely stone frieze, that always reminded me of a row of palmiers, crashed down from the tops of the broken walls. Suddenly I wanted to eat a palmier, which was strange because I didn’t even like them, the way the pastry was simultaneously flaky and hard. It gummed up my teeth. Next I imagined a rubble-filled cavern in the middle of the Metropole. Then, worst of all, a sheet of smoke hanging over Peter’s club.

“James,” I said in desperation, “talk to me. Tell me about—about Hurricanes. You fly a Hurricane too, like Peter and Alastair? Tell me about them.”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

“Well,” he said. “Hurricanes are very sturdy planes. Workhorses, you could say. They’ve all done four thousand miles before we even set eyes on them. We can’t bring them across the Med, you see, or the Germans will get them, so they get shipped to Takoradi in West Africa and flown all the way to Egypt. Some of the pilots get lost en route and run out of fuel. Others just crash. But most of the planes reach Heliopolis more or less intact.”

That was fairly awe-inspiring.

“What else?”