Charlie leaned out the window and shouted, “Oi, Lonzo, you come back with that. It’s mine. You hear me?”
Lonzo simply ran faster, until he reached a corner and was gone from sight.
“Who was that?”
Charlie turned to see Molly peering out the window beside him. “Lonzo.”
“So he has your book?”
“Yes,” replied Charlie bitterly.
“We’ll have to report this to the police.”
“The police?!” exclaimed a shocked Charlie.
“He stole from you, Charlie. That’s a crime.”
Charlie mumbled. “We... we don’t need no police. I’ll set things right.”
“How do you know this Lonzo?”
“He’s just a boy what lives round here.”
“So we can speak to his parents, then?”
Charlie rubbed his nose. “He ain’t got no parents.”
“Doesn’t have any parents,” corrected Molly. “Grandparents, perhaps?”
“No, he ain’ — he doesn’t have none of them, neither.”
“Who, then?”
“Well, nobody. He only had a mate—” Charlie shut his mouth.
“Why would Lonzo have taken the book?” asked Molly.
“’Cause I told him I could get quid for it, that’s why. And now Lonzo’ll be the one gettin’ the money. And I won’t be able to bury Gran proper,” he added miserably.
“Well, we must go to his house and demand the return of your book.”
“Lonzo don’t live in no house! And he’s goin’ to sell that book.” Charlie shook his head in despair. “Damn!”
Molly didn’t have the heart to scold him this time over his coarse language. As they walked outside, she said, “So, your parents? You said your father died at Dunkirk?”
“Yeah.”
“And your mum?”
“A bomb.”
“I’m so very sorry.”
Charlie looked at a blown-apart building down the street, where children played games amid the rubble.
He let out a sigh. “Seems like everybody’s sort of dead, Miss. Only some just don’t know it yet.”
The Complicated Business of the End
They stopped at a secondhand shop and found two sets of clothes, underwear, and socks for Charlie and a pair of boots that were in decent shape, along with a felt cap. Charlie protested at first when Molly explained her plan, but he finally relented and carefully packed his new clothes in a box provided by the shop’s assistant. Back in Chelsea, Charlie performed a rigorous bathing in Molly’s parents’ claw-foot tub. He came out of it scrubbed pink and feeling cleaner than he had ever thought possible. He put on a set of his new clothes, and they and the boots fit him well.
Later, he and Molly sat in her father’s study.
Charlie looked around in wonder at the shelves of books. “Have you read ’em all?”
“When I left here, I was really too young to read them, though when I was in the country I read every day. I went through the vicar’s library and then visited the library in town every week. It’s a true pleasure losing yourself in another’s imagined world. And you can spend time with so many different people from so very many places, places I may never actually go.”
Charlie looked at her knowingly. “My mum and I would sometimes go to the café and I’d have a little book and she hers. It was nice.”
“Your mother. You mentioned a bomb?”
Charlie glanced upward. “I guess nobody expected the Jerries to bomb a school.”
“And were you at the school, too?”
“Yeah, but I was just a bit jumbled.” He looked around. “So you got no parents, either?”
She said quickly, “I do have parents. My... my father is away on business presently. And as you know, my mother is in a sanatorium in Cornwall.”
Charlie rubbed his now very clean nose and nodded. “So, when’s your dad comin’ back from his... business?”
Molly couldn’t meet his eye as she prepared her lie. “I don’t expect it will be much longer, now that I’m home.”
“Were you and your mum close?”
“My mother was the closest friend I had. But she loved me perhaps too much.”
“How can you love somebody too much?” he asked.
“It’s not really important.” She added wistfully, “I so looked forward to seeing both her and my father when I got home. And I’ve seen neither.”
“Wait, not even your dad. I thought you said—”
“I was not being entirely truthful, Charlie,” she said, looking guilty and pained by this admission. “I have not seen him. And I’ve no idea when I will. That... is not the sort of homecoming I envisioned.” She glanced at him. “But you have it far harder. At least I’m reasonably certain my parents are still alive. I wish your parents could come back to you, Charlie. I know that they would want to more than anything.”
“Well, wishin’ for somethin’ never works. Least not for blokes like me.” He rose and said, “I guess I’ll be takin’ my leave now. Thanks for the food and the clothes.”
She looked surprised. “I thought you would stay here, at least for now.”
“Why? I’m not family or anythin’.”
“But you’re my friend.”
“Still, don’t think it’s a good idea. We’re, well, we’re different.”
“We do have to take care of your gran. I can help with that.”
Charlie gave her a searching look. “Why? I mean, I ain’t done nothin’ for you.”
“You led me to the Ministry of Food.”
“And you paid me a half crown for that,” he replied.
“Which you wouldn’t accept at first. Why was that?”
Charlie shrugged. “I was goin’ that way, so why get paid for goin’ somewheres I was already goin’?”
“I think you should stay here, at least for a bit. We’ll make the arrangements for your gran. Do you know where she — I mean, for the burial?”
“Same place we buried my mum and granddad, I guess.”
“Where is that?”
“At a church near where we used to live over in Stepney. We’d go there regular when my mum was alive. Got a little graveyard behind it.”
“It would be nice for her to be with family.”
“Do you reckon them undertakers can help with that?”
“People do die all the time, and they are taken care of with proper dignity and respect. This is England, after all.”
In her mind’s eye, Molly glimpsed rows of coffins containing the remains of soldiers lined up outside the hospital near Leiston.
Charlie said, “You woulda liked my gran. Now, she said her mind when she wanted to, but she took good care ’a me.”
Molly shook her head clear of coffins. “I’m sure she did, and I’m certain I would have very much enjoyed knowing her.”
The next morning, they took a taxi to Wilkinson & Dunn, Undertakers, which wasn’t that far from Charlie’s old flat. It was a dour, sooty brick building with two front doors painted black and a tall, round chimney with thick smoke belching from it. Since a sign posted outside said the building also housed a crematorium, Molly kept her eyes averted from the stream of smoke escaping into the sky.
They met with the gentleman who had given Charlie his card. He was Wilkinson the Second, son of the now-dead principal founder of the firm, he explained. When Charlie mentioned the church graveyard where his mother and grandfather were buried, Wilkinson stroked his whiskers, nodded, and said that could be arranged. He asked no questions about Charlie’s parents, or even Charlie’s age. With tens of thousands perishing in London from the bombings, many more having been left homeless, and untold numbers having succumbed to sickness, it apparently wasn’t unduly critical whether one was left alone or not, because so many had been.