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entranceway. Perhaps he had crossed to the Westbound platform or gone back up to the street. Perhaps he had found the person he was searching for. She shivered, knowing with a sudden and certain conviction that the man was a policeman and for the first time she was glad Joe had left. She placed a hand softly against her stomach. She was pregnant again but she had not told Joe before he had gone.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Another bomb exploded somewhere up on the surface and Diana ducked—it was impossible not to, though no one else did. She studied the dial of her watch but was unable to calculate how many hours they had been down here—one hour, two? Nor could she work out how many hours more they were likely to remain. The explosions overhead and the space between the explosions prevented her brain from undertaking even the most rudimentary calculations. She gave it up. And meanwhile more and more people and their children, their bedding, their belongings, their elderly parents surged onto the narrow platform above that was designed only to take workers to the docks and weekend shoppers up West.
    If they took a direct hit it would be carnage.
    The woman in the headscarf and her child were so close Diana could see the brand of cigarette the woman smoked, the stitches on the red woollen hat worn by the little girl, could smell on their clothes the chip fat from their last meal. Their very proximityalarmed her. The woman had smiled at her but the smile was cold. Unfriendly. Diana had looked away. This was a public shelter and the bombs made no distinction between one person and another but her presence, she could feel, was not welcome. If it came to calamity it would not be herself and Abigail they would rush to help. So many people seated very close by. She kept her gaze dully neutral but even so she felt eyes on her, crawling over her inch by inch, noticing.
    Abigail was dozing. Her head lolled against Diana’s lap, eyes half closed, safe in the twilight place between sleep and waking. If Diana had come alone she might not have got on the wrong bus, she might have made it home and be opening her front door at this very moment, taking off her hat, pulling off her shoes. But she had brought Abigail, putting them both in danger. And it was not merely that she had exhausted the babysitting goodwill of Mrs Probart. It was to provide herself with a cover, an excuse to come up to town, because a mother and child were, somehow, less conspicuous than a woman on her own.
    Perhaps it was not too late to leave? She imagined herself gathering up their things and simply walking out. She presumed no one would stop them.
    Another explosion sounded high above and her arms closed tightly around the little case and around Abigail and she waited, her eyes closed. The explosion rumbled away finally into nothing and with it any hope that they might leave before dawn. She would not think about it. She would think, instead, about Gerald, who was surely having a worse time of it than they were. She would think of their suffering, hers and Abigail’s, as something that must be borne for his sake. She tried to imagine where Geraldwas, what he might be doing at this very minute—standing atop a sand dune with a pair of field glasses or at an officers’ club drinking pink gins or inside a tank barking out orders to a subordinate—but it never seemed quite real. She never quite believed in it, in Gerald as a soldier. Even after three years it still seemed so improbable, so unlikely. In her mind he was dressed as he had been the first day she had met him: forever in tennis whites in the summer of 1928.
    They had met at a tennis party in Ruislip in the expansive gardens of an Edwardian villa on the edge of the golf course. Marian Fairfax had invited her. Marian, who moved in somewhat higher circles than Diana (her father being a specialist at a London hospital and her mother being distantly related to an air marshal), was an old school friend whom Diana had not