Striking the Balance

“Makes a bit of a difference,” Roundbush agreed. “I hear the blackout regulations will be going soon, if this truce holds up.” He waved to Naomi Kaplan, who stood behind the bar. She smiled and waved back, then turned up the wattage of that smile when she spotted the shorter Goldfarb behind him. Roundbush chuckled. “You are a lucky fellow. I hope you know it.”

“You’d best believe I do,” Goldfarb said, so enthusiastically that Roundbush laughed again. “And if I didn’t, my family would tell me too often to let me forget.” His parents and siblings approved of Naomi. He’d been certain they would. To his great relief, she approved of them, too, though their crowded East End flat was far from the upper-middle-class comforts she’d known growing up in Germany before Hitler made life there impossible.

They found a narrow opening at the bar and squeezed in to widen it. Roundbush slapped silver on the damp, polished wood. “Two pints of best bitter,” he said to Naomi, and then set out more coins: “And one for yourself, if you’ve a mind to.”

“Thank you, no,” she said, and pushed those back at the RAF officer. The others she scooped into the cash box under the bar. Goldfarb wished she didn’t have to work here, but she was making much better money than he was. The landlord of the White Horse Inn could raise prices to keep up with the inflation galloping through the British economy, and raise wages almost as much. Goldfarb’s meager RAF salary ran several bureaucratic lurches behind. He would have thought it a princely sum when he enlisted in 1939; what had been princely now left him a pauper.

He gulped down his pint and bought a round in return. Naomi let him get her a pint, too, which set Basil Roundbush to making indignant noises through his mustache.

They were just lifting the pint pots when someone behind Goldfarb said, “Who’s your new chum, old man?”

Goldfarb hadn’t heard those Cantabrian tones in a long time. “Jones!” he said. “I haven’t seen you in so long, I’d long since figured you’d bought your plot.” Then he got a good look at Jerome Jones’ companions, and his eyes went even wider. “Mr. Embry! Mr. Bagnall! I didn’t know they’d declared this old home week.”

Introductions followed. Jerome Jones blinked with surprise when Goldfarb presented Naomi Kaplan as his fiancee. “You lucky dog!” he exclaimed. “You found yourself a beautiful girl, and I’d lay two to one she’s neither a sniper nor a Communist”

“Er-no,” David said. He coughed. “Would I be wrong in guessing you’ve not had a dull time of it this past little while?”

“Not half dull,” the other radarman said with unwonted sincerity. He shivered. “Not half.” Goldfarb recognized that tone of voice: someone trying hard not to think about places he’d been and things he’d done. The more he looked at it, giving up thought for the duration seemed a good scheme.

Sylvia came back to the bar carrying a tray crowded with empty pint pots. “Good Lord,” she said, staring at the new arrivals. “Look what the breeze blew in.” Of itself, her hand went up to smooth her hair. “Where the devil have you lads been? I thought-” She’d thought the same thing Goldfarb had, but didn’t want to say it out loud.

“Beautiful, romantic Pskov.” George Bagnall rolled his eyes to show how seriously the adjectives were meant to be taken.

“Where’s whatever-you-call-it?” Sylvia asked, beating everyone else to the punch.

“If you draw a line from Leningrad to Warsaw, you won’t be far off,” Bagnall answered. That let Goldfarb put it on his mental map.

Jerome Jones added, “And all the time we were there, the only thing sustaining us was the thought of the White Horse Inn and the sweet, gentle, lovely lasses working here.”

Sylvia looked down under her feet. “Fetch me a dustpan,” she said to Naomi. “It’s getting pretty deep in here.” She turned back to Jones. “You’re even cheekier than I recall.” He grinned, not a bit abashed. Looking him, Embry, and Bagnall over with a critical eye, Sylvia went on, “You must be the lot who were in here last week looking for me. I was in bed with the influenza.”

“I never thought to be jealous of a germ,” Jones said. Sylvia planted an elbow in his ribs, hard enough to lift him off his feet She went on behind the bar, emptying the tray of the pints it had carried, and started filling fresh ones.

“Where’s Daphne?” Ken Embry asked.

“She had twin girls last month, I hear,” Goldfarb answered, which effectively ended that line of inquiry.

“I do believe I’d kill for a bit of beefsteak,” Bagnall said, in a tone of voice implying that wasn’t meant altogether as a joke. “One thing I’ve found since we got here is that we’re on even shorter commons than they are on the Continent. Black bread, parsnips, cabbage, spuds-it’s like what the Germans were eating the last winter of the Great War.”