The woman in the vegetable garden was one and the same as the scruff-bag in the cooking contest.

The letter from the Middleton billeting officer had arrived on the weekend, briefly giving an address and a day for her to move into a new billet. Her new home was to be in Fenley. It sounded as if it might be fancy, “Willow Lodge.” The name rolled off her tongue, quaint, upmarket, yet hopefully not home to one of those old Victorian ladies with “precise” moral values.

    That wouldn’t do at all!

Zelda knew that she wasn’t in a position to be fussy. It was imperative that she got out of the murky room and the barrage of abuse. Only that morning, she had refused to scrub the house before leaving and thus received a bitter scold, “In case you forget your place in this world, you hussy.”

No, however dreadful her new landlady, Zelda was simply going to have to put on a smile and make the best of it.

The name on the letter, Mrs. Landon, rang a bell. It’s probably someone from the pie factory, Zelda had thought absently.

Yet here she was: Mrs. Landon, Zelda’s cooking competitor. Alongside her were three boys, one of them doing the long jump between rows, and the little one singing “Jingle Bells” in the middle of summer.

Zelda stood stock-still, suitcase in hand, the blood draining from her face.

At that moment, Audrey stood upright, one hand going to her brow, the other to her lower back. As she looked around at the boys, her eye caught the newcomer, and she squinted slightly as if to check. Her face scrunched with confusion as she made her way to the gate, trying to look around Zelda as if looking for another person, a different woman.

“Can I help you? It’s Zelda, isn’t it?” Audrey was paying special attention to Zelda’s waistline, obviously checking for the customary signs of pregnancy, which were not yet especially apparent.

“I believe I am your new billet.” Zelda brought out the letter and handed it to Audrey.

Tugging off her gardening gloves, Audrey grasped it, quickly read it, frowned, then handed it back.

“There must be some mistake. I’m expecting a pregnant evacuee, not a cook in need of a billet.”

Zelda gave her a quick smile. “I am both. As I told you at the cooking contest meeting, I am head cook at the Fenley Pie Factory, but I’m also a pregnant evacuee escaping the bombs in London.”

    “But…you can’t possibly want to stay with me, a fellow competitor?” Her forehead creasing, Audrey looked again at Zelda’s stomach. “In any case, the woman I’m expecting is already five months’ pregnant.”

Starting from when she had been working in London, Zelda had taken to wearing a corset to conceal her growing bump. A magazine article had detailed how women were taking to it—some because they didn’t want to lose their well-paid war jobs, others because the baby was illegitimate. They reckoned it could go unnoticed until at least seven months, possibly eight with a first baby. Over the past few months, however, Zelda had taken to loosening it, making it more comfortable for all concerned. These days, it smoothed over the bump rather than pressing it in, and she found that, with careful dressing, it hardly showed at all.

“Yes, that’s me.” Her lower jaw jutted to the side challengingly, a childish habit from the crowded tenement of her youth. “And regardless of being in the same cooking contest, I still need a room.”

Battling to overcome her confusion, Audrey clearly decided that, since she could hardly ask Zelda to prove her pregnancy, it was time to move on to what appeared to be a prepared speech.

“I told the Fenley billeting officer that I wasn’t able to have any evacuees,” Audrey snapped. “We are about to be evicted, and the house is in dreadful condition with mold and damp. The roof leaks in all the spare rooms, and I don’t have the money to fix it. My three boys are handful enough, and what’s more I have a baking business, the contest, and all this to look after.” She spread open her arms to show the vegetables, a beehive, the hens. Was that a pigsty in the corner?

“You almost have a complete farm back here!” Zelda had heard about the perks of living in the countryside, but this was a bounty! Perhaps billeting with Audrey would prove more useful than she initially thought. She put on a smile, and tried to make it seem honest, heartfelt.

    Yet Audrey was determined. “It’ll be unfair for you to stay, with the contest going on. You might steal my ideas or take over my kitchen.”

“I can use the factory kitchen for the contest.”

Hands on hips, Audrey was trenchant. “It simply won’t do. Look, I’ll show you the room. You can see for yourself what a mess the house is in. I’m quite certain you’ll see my point.”

She headed up the path to the back of the house and yanked open the back door, not even holding it open for the newcomer as she strode through the cluttered kitchen. The three boys filtered behind, and Zelda sensed their nudging and giggles. The children would be a drudge, but the kitchen looked well stocked, if unspeakably disorganized. Her mind kept flitting back to the pigsty in the corner, pork recipes springing irrepressibly to mind.

“What a good-sized kitchen,” she said, eyeing the sink piled high with dishes. “All it needs is a little, well, tidying.”

Audrey spun around. “No one has any time to tidy around here. If you think I’m going to clean up—”

“No, I only meant that I could help.” Zelda was trying her utmost to be nice. It went against the grain, but she was a dab hand at putting on a good act. She needed that room and was willing to curry favor if necessary.

Audrey snapped, “I don’t need any help.” It was said sharply, like a slap across the face.

She hurried on through to the hallway, avoiding the various muddy boots and debris on the floor, and then tramped up the stairs to the bedrooms. A wet towel lay on the floor on the landing, along with an old teddy. Audrey scooped it up, loosened the string that was tight around its neck, and threw it into a bedroom.

“That’s the bathroom,” Audrey pointed into the bare room with a bath down one side. “It’s freezing cold. But not as damp as the outside toilet.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Zelda said, thinking that the place could do with a good tidying. Frankly, it was a miracle anyone could find anything.

    “This is the spare room.” Audrey pushed the door open, and the smell of damp almost knocked her out.

Breathing through her mouth, Zelda pressed on into the room, feigning enthusiasm. It was bare except for an old double bed, the thin horsehair mattress gray and lumpy. A pair of worn beige curtains hung limply from either side of the cobwebbed window, and the strong whiff of must made the place smell like a haunted mansion. A patch of the wall in the far corner bore the large shadow of mold, and a dull green sprout showed that something was trying to grow out of the crumbling old floorboards. Two tin buckets were placed under small leaks in the roof, and a big chipped enamel chamber pot sat right in the middle of the bed below a gaping hole in the ceiling the size of a pudding basin.

“This is why I told the Fenley billeting officer that we couldn’t have people staying.” Audrey stood, hands on hips, as if the point had been well and truly proven.

But Zelda put her suitcase down and began brushing some of the cobwebs away from around the window. “All it needs is a bit of a spring clean.”

Audrey’s eyes hardened, her voice rising to a screech. “It needs far more than a clean. There’s a whopping great hole in the ceiling. The roof is leaking. You can’t possibly stay here.”

Zelda peered nervously up through the hole. “There must be a way to mend the roof.”

“All the handymen in the village have left for war. Nobody can mend it, even if I had any money to pay someone,” Audrey continued, adding brusquely, “which I don’t.”

“I can find someone from Middleton, and I’ll pay for it, too. I just got a pay rise.”

Audrey handed the suitcase back to Zelda and stormed back to the door. “I’m afraid you can’t possibly stay here. It simply isn’t inhabitable. I’m sorry that you have been misled, but now you’ll have to go back to where you were before.”

At this thought, Zelda upped her game, staying resolute in the bedroom. “If you’re worried about the baby, you won’t hear a peep.” She decided not to tell her that there wouldn’t be a baby. Zelda somehow knew that the adoption she was planning would not go down well. The woman was one of those family sorts who would force her to marry the child’s father or find a caring relative to bring up the baby, no doubt. These people didn’t have a clue what real life was like.