There was a pause. Audrey knew what love was. Her fingers reached for the ribbon, feeling it for Matthew’s presence. “Did you love him?”

“Of course I didn’t.” The answer came too fast, too abruptly to be true, Zelda focusing on her cooking. “I’d never do anything as stupid as that.”

“Love isn’t stupid, Zelda?”

“It is if the man’s an imbecile.”

Audrey pushed back an urge to put an arm around Zelda’s shoulders. It was clear that this man wounded Zelda’s heart—not just her pride. Gently, she asked, “What are you going to do, then?”

    Zelda focused on peeling and chopping potatoes. “Well, I thought I would have the baby here in the countryside, have it adopted, and then I can go back to my London life—my career. No one will know any different. I’ve never wanted children.”

“Are you sure? I don’t know where I’d be without my boys.” The back door was open, and that everyday small elation of seeing them there, playing and weeding, surged through her.

“Look, babies might be your cup of tea, but they’re most definitely not mine. I’m a chef. A woman who needs freedom, her own life.”

“You’re right!” Audrey looked at Matthew’s wallet, turning it over in her hands. “Men can have freedom and children, can’t they? They can be artists or pilots and be fathers, too. It’s women that have to make the choice between two of the most basic desires: a career or a family.”

Zelda dumped the chopped potatoes noisily into a pan. “But I don’t need a family. What I need is to have my life back.”

“But don’t you want to be part of something greater than yourself? I wouldn’t give this up for the world. I know that Matthew’s gone and times are heartbreakingly hard, but can’t you see that’s why it’s so utterly worthwhile.”

“I’m completely fine on my own,” Zelda said indignantly. “I’ve never had to rely on anyone.”

“Perhaps that’s because you’ve never had someone you can trust, someone to help you. Just because you’ve never had a proper family, it doesn’t make it wrong to feel kinship with another person.” She frowned. “Zelda, what were your parents like?”

“Well, my mother was despicable. What if I turned out like her, eh?” Zelda’s voice was starting to sound more cockney. “I was the eldest of four—five if you include little Mabel who got ill and died before she was two. I was the one who found her, cold and stiff in the pram where she slept—she’d had a fever, some kind of infection, I think. Our mother was never there—always out in her fancy clothes—and we were left in the squalor, starving. I had to steal food from shops, going farther afield after I was caught and banned from the ones nearby.” She looked around at Audrey. “Don’t tell me about babies—I had to look after my siblings till she sent me away to work.”

    “What about your father?”

She shrugged. “I never knew who he was. I’m not even sure if my mother knew herself.” She began chopping up a few sprigs of parsley, now slower, more considered. “You see, I don’t want that for any child.” She glanced at her belly, now bulging beneath her apron. “Which is why this little one deserves a respectable home with two married parents, where people don’t call him or her names.”

Audrey got up and helped her chop the chives. “But everything’s changing now, with the war. So many women are single or widowed, and now there are places where you can leave your children during the day to go to work. My cousin works in a munitions factory and says there’s a nursery where they look after the workers’ children. And I can help out if you’re still here.”

“But I won’t still be here,” Zelda said, scraping the chopped herbs into her hand and putting them into the pot. “I’ll be back in London, being me.” She turned to Audrey, annoyed. “Cooking is the only thing I know I can do right. All I have to do is win this contest, and then I’ll get a job as a head chef, just you see.” Her eyes bore into Audrey’s. “You can’t take that away from me.”

She went back to her cooking, singing again, louder, as if to blot out the conversation. The powdered egg mixed with water became thick and creamy-yellow under her whisk, and she gently poured it over the vegetables.

Audrey looked through the window. The boys were weeding, the hens pecking away, and over the garden to the hills, a hawk soared gracefully through the blue sky. The world was still turning, regardless that Matthew wasn’t there; but then, he hadn’t been for such a long time. And where was the package, his things, his precious things?

Yes, there they were, on the table.

Carefully, she put them back in the box, placing it on the shelf of the dresser. “Welcome home,” she murmured quietly to them, to him, wherever he was. “You won’t ever have to go away again.”

    A sudden yearning to go to the church filled her. Somehow she had to empty her heart, feel some sense of peace. She pulled on her cardigan, took the roses, and went to the door.

“Can I leave you with the boys for a while?” she asked Zelda, who nodded from the stove without turning around, and then she quietly slipped out the door into the afternoon sun.

It felt strange walking down the lane on her own. Leaving the house—leaving her boys and her cooking—it wasn’t something she did very often, if ever. The air, the space, felt different, as if her world had been put on pause, and she suddenly felt the sheer transience of life, the fragility as fine and delicate as a spider’s thread.

She glanced back at Willow Lodge, grateful for its certainty, grateful for Zelda, through all her chaos, helping with the boys and the cooking, rescuing her from the chicken coop, and resuscitating her with tea and friendship.

How she hoped that she, too, could help Zelda in return.

Cool and silent, the church was dark except for the blue light streaming through the stained-glass window, spreading a heavenly beam across the altar and down through the nave. The smell of damp entwined with the sweet, floral scent of roses.

There had been a time when Matthew’s rosebushes had been their pride and joy. Then, when the war looked inevitable, together they dug most of them up to make way for the vegetables. She smiled as she recalled that day, Matthew blinking in the August sunshine, his shirtsleeves rolled up.

“How much I’ll miss all this, when I’m away.” He’d given her a sad, clenched-mouth smile. “I want to remember it all, just like this, right now. The sun beaming down on us, the boys playing on the grass, and you, my darling, looking so absolutely beautiful.”

He’d come toward her, putting his hand on her cheek, looking over her face, into her eyes, as if trying to remember every last piece of her.

    She sat in the pew at the front, tears brimming over her eyes, and she sank to her knees.

“Dear Lord,” she began hesitantly. “Today I want to thank you. I want to thank you for giving me Matthew, for although it breaks me apart that he’s gone”—she had to stop as a lump caught in her throat—“at least I had him for the time that I did, that I reveled in the love of one so creative, so kind, so worldly, that we had each other, and knew a love so deep, so encompassing.”

There was a stillness around her, as if the entire place, the hymnbooks, the choir stalls, all the saints and apostles had paused to listen.

“My grief is only equal to what I had that was lost, and if my sorrow is immeasurable, it is because the depth of our love, our world, and the joy we created, was so immense on the other side of the balance. I would not be without it for all the world.”

Another sob came, but she swallowed it back.

“I want to thank you for my boys—the physical manifestation of him left for me. They are my one and only link with him now—them and my memories. Every time I recognize a smile as his, a movement of the head, the lift of an eyebrow, they bring me closer to him. Alexander with his creativity; Ben, who looks exactly like him; little Christopher with his big heart. He flows through all of them, and every day, as they become men, he will remain with them, running through their veins.”

She took a deep breath.

“I want to thank you for my home. I know it’s in tatters, but it’s an old friend, ready to give what it can to us. I think I used to see it as a burden, but now I realize that it’s our haven, a shelter from the storm. I pray that we can keep it.

“And finally, I want to thank you for Zelda. She might be an odd, chaotic creature, but she is also kind, resourceful, and caring. I don’t think I realized how much I needed a friend, and now, at the time when I truly need it, here she is, helping take care of me—helping take care of all of us.”

Audrey’s Fruit Scones

Makes 12

3 cups flour ? teaspoon salt 5 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon sugar 1? cups dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, red currants, apricots, prunes, etc.) ? cup butter ? cup margarine, lard, or suet 1 egg, beaten, or the equivalent in dried egg powder 1 cup milk