Page 77 of Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adventure

“If you want to know, I am stocking up on oil and petrol for my boat. In case there are shortages. I may store some of the oil cans in the garage here. I am going to put in a big tank down by the dock and keep it full of petrol. It is well hidden down there, I think.”

“Does the dock actually belong to this house?” she asked. “Does the owner know?”

“He does. And fully approves,” Nico said. “You need not worry about me or what I do. For now it is all legitimate. If things get worse later, who can say?”

“Do you think they will?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “I think there is no way that France can come through this unscathed.”

Ellie stood up, now horribly self-conscious at the intimacy. “I shouldn’t keep you,” she said. “You’ve been most kind. Thank you.”

“What else are friends for?” he said, rising, too. “You are my friend, aren’t you?”

“I hope so,” Ellie replied.

“Then that is good.” He put his hands on her shoulders, pulled her towards him and kissed her forehead. “Go back to your ladies. All will be well.”

He watched as she walked back to the house, then went on his way.

Inside Ellie found that Mavis had made tea.

“Come and sit down, love,” she said. “I expect it’s all for the best. If there’s going to be rationing, and that’s what they are saying, we couldn’t get a ration card for her, could we?”

“Or for ourselves,” Dora said. “Maybe this is the time to reconsider and go home while we can still cross the Channel.”

“Maybe it is,” Ellie said. She looked around her.I love this place,she thought,but now every day will remind me what I have lost.

“Oh.” Mavis stared, shook her head. “You really want to go back there? Where would we go?”

“I have my cottage still,” Dora said.

“Oh Dora, I wouldn’t want to live in the same village as Lionel and that woman,” Ellie said. “I do have a flat in London. It’s rented now, but we could always ...”

“London would be the worst place to go,” Mavis said. “It’s bound to be bombed, isn’t it? If you want my opinion, I don’t want to go back there. In England I was nothing. The charwoman. Mop your floors and get treated like dirt.”

“I hope I never treated you that way, Mavis,” Ellie said.

“Of course not. You were lovely. But here it’s different. People treat me as one of them. I feel like I belong more than I ever did in England. And then there’s Louis ...”

“You’re fond of him, aren’t you?” Dora asked.

Mavis went pink. “He’s a lovely man. Kind. Gentle. All the things Reg wasn’t.”

“I don’t really want to go home, either,” Dora said. “I want to die here, looking out at this view, not in some grim English hospital.”

“I agree. I’m not keen to go back there,” Ellie said. “This feels like home to me now. Should we look into applying for French nationality, just in case?”

“Give up being British, you mean? I don’t think I’m prepared to do that,” Dora said. “Besides, I believe that Mr Tommy said you had to have been a resident here for five years before you could apply. So that’s not going to work.”

“I’m just worried what might happen when rationing starts. There is already a mention of it in the newspapers.”

“The newspaper!” Mavis said out loud. “That’s it! That’s where I saw that bloke before.”

They both turned to her as if she had gone crazy. She was waving excitedly. “Remember when we were first staying at the pension, and we were looking at a newspaper, and it had the picture of a gang of bank robbers? One of them looked just like him.”

“Like whom?” Ellie asked.

“The bloke that came with Yvette just now. I’d swear it was him.”