The Last Night in London by Karen White (reading list .TXT) 📕

if someone had removed her bones and her heart, reducing her to a mere woman.

“Are you all right?” Eva asked. “Did anyone get hurt?”

Madame looked at her with blank eyes. She shook her head slowly before turning to survey the wreckage of her life, her devastation too much to express in tears. Eva held back her own sobs, not just at Madame’s shattering loss, but at the disappearance of the place where Ethel Maltby had been transformed into Eva Harlow. Ethel was truly and permanently gone now, buried in piles of brick and ash, erased and removed as if she’d never existed at all.

A man approached, and Eva saw it was Mr. Danek, carrying his bag of cosmetics, his expression grim. “We are lucky the building was empty,” he said. “And not filled with customers and models.”

Eva turned at the sound of soft sobbing and found Precious crying into her hands. “It’s all gone,” she said. “All of it! What are we going to do? How will we get by?”

Reluctantly, Eva put her arm around Precious, embarrassed at her friend’s outburst. Madame Lushtak had truly lost everything, worst of all the dreams she’d brought from Russia and used to create something wonderful and new. All irrevocably gone.

Mr. Danek gave Precious an unexpected smile. “Stay with Eva, my dear, and she will see you through this. She is a survivor.” His smile dimmed as he faced Eva. “Sadly, sometimes surviving is the easiest part.”

Precious pulled away and made it to the garden before she collapsed onto her knees and began to retch. When she was done, Eva helped her stand, giving her a handkerchief to wipe her mouth. “Come on, Precious. Let’s get you home, where you can rest.” She looked worriedly at Madame Lushtak.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Danek said. “I will see Madame gets home safely.”

Eva nodded, then put her arm around Precious, leading her back the way they’d come, unwilling to turn around and see their past disappearing from view.

—

The bombs continued to fall each night, the fiery explosions becoming as predictable as spring rain. When the air raid sirens started their bedtime wailing, Precious and Eva dutifully donned their WVS uniforms and draped the straps of their gas masks over their shoulders before venturing out of their flat.

But as November progressed, Eva found it harder and harder to rouse Precious from her bed. It was almost a blessing that Precious didn’t have to model each day, although she managed to show up for canteen duty most evenings.

Not going to work had freed Eva to consider her choices and to find another way to earn income. Freya had been stepping out with a businessman much older than she; he had a contact who didn’t ask questions when a fur or a piece of jewelry needed to be sold. Eva was discreet, choosing smaller pieces Alex might not notice were missing. She stashed any money not needed for daily living in a box hidden inside her leather valise, all of it buried in the back of her wardrobe.

She had no specific plan; her fear of Alex and his associates was as real as bars on a prison cell, and she couldn’t run away. Not yet. The growing pile of money was simply a thin thread to cling to, a hope of finding her mother and escaping together someplace where Alex could never find them. Mr. Danek had called her a survivor. She only wished he hadn’t told her that surviving was the easiest part.

She’d expected to see Graham again or at least to receive a message from him. An invitation to finish their conversation. But it had been two weeks with no word. Her remaining hope drowned in the bottom of a bottle.

In the evenings, Eva continued going out with Alex. She’d become an accomplished actress. She conversed with his friends and acquaintances, answering with smiles and laughter, as if she were a woman without cares, one whose biggest worry was selecting which fur to wear. It broke her inside. She imagined each word like a step on an ice-covered pond, waiting for the cracks to open up and swallow her. But as long as she kept the cracks from showing on the outside, she would survive.

One cold evening in late November, when the sirens above the Savoy began once again to shrill, Eva made her way to the cloakroom. She walked steadily across the lobby, moving against the sea of people drifting toward the basement of the hotel.

Alex had been deep in discussion with a rotund, bearded man with perpetual sweat beads on his forehead—Vladimir or Leonid, Eva thought. Something Russian. She still hadn’t been able to master the language but had become quite proficient at mimicking the accent. The men were too engrossed to notice her leave, and she felt a moment of freedom as she approached the cloakroom.

On a recommendation from Alex to the hotel’s manager—to help a fellow countryman, he’d told her with grave self-deprecation—Mr. Danek was the new coat check clerk. It was the reason Eva hadn’t dreaded her evenings at the hotel as much as usual. And Alex no longer required her to turn out the pockets of the guests. Maybe he’d sensed that she wasn’t forthcoming with everything she found, that she sometimes pretended her fingers had missed a ticket stub or a receipt.

Now, as the sirens screamed outside and her heels clicked against the marble floor, she looked for her friend, hoping to go down to the shelter together and talk. But when she neared, she saw that the cloakroom shutters had already been closed. She stopped to search the quickly emptying lobby for Mr. Danek. The floor vibrated under her feet, the lights flickering, scattering people like ants as they rushed for the stairs.

Eva stood still in the middle of the now-deserted lobby, unsure what to do. The floor vibrated again, the chandeliers above swaying as plaster drifted from the ceiling.

A strong hand grabbed her by the elbow. She swung around