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Mrs.Sutherland went on in that crystalline accent that made her sound like a duchess. Almost aggressively so, as if some iron-souled nanny had smacked every possible Bermudian lilt out of that voice long, long ago. “Wasn’t it a lovely service?”

I didn’t hear a word of it , Fliss thought. Too busy trying to keep Angela from wriggling and yowling. In the end she’d just let Angela tug as hard as she wanted on her pearl earring, and now her right ear burned like a hot coal and was probably an inch longer than the left one. “Yes, wonderful service!”

she said brightly. “Mr. Sutherland couldn’t join you today?”

“He’s at a committee meeting.”

Blandly, as if they both didn’t know she’d never have approached Fliss if her husband was here looming at her elbow. “No rest even on a Sunday, not when you’re working with HUAC.”

“Such important work,”

Fliss agreed, wondering why Americans got in such a strop about Communists. England had a Socialist Party, and she couldn’t remember anyone back home getting quite so lathered up.

The two of them stood watching Mrs.Sutherland’s little boy sneak around the tables, angling for another piece of cake. He was older than Angela, old enough for tiny pressed shorts and a bow tie. “Barrett Junior looks bigger every time I see him.”

This American habit of calling little boys Junior was another puzzler. “Would he like some treats for later? I made extra.”

Passing over a packet of her ginger biscuits, which just happened to have a certain small paper-wrapped tube tucked inside.

Mrs.Sutherland slid the packet into her patent leather pocketbook. “Thank you,”

she murmured, not meaning the biscuits.

“Not at all.”

Fliss didn’t think she and the senator’s daughter-in-law would have become acquaintances, in the normal course of things—they’d first met here at church, of course, Reverend Poolstock booming “You ladies must know each other already, both being British!”

and the two women had traded a certain amused look as Fliss murmured, “Bletchley, Buckinghamshire”

and Mrs.Sutherland said, “Hamilton, Bermuda”

and knew that they had never, ever crossed paths no matter what Americans thought about how two Englishwomen in the same room must automatically know all the same people. Fliss’s upbringing had been village fairs and pub lunches; Mrs. Sutherland’s had clearly been island breezes and then expensive London boarding schools—even now that they were both young mothers living in the same city, they were still worlds apart. They’d only bumped into each other in a setting outside Trinity Presbyterian because of Reka, Mrs. Sutherland delivering the old woman back to her own neighborhood after finding her in Georgetown, confused and angry. I’ll see Mrs. Muller home safely , Fliss had assured. I can look after her, I used to be a nurse.

Reka hadn’t needed any care; she’d just mumbled something in Hungarian and slammed her door in Fliss’s face once they got home. But Mrs.Sutherland had come up to Fliss at the first church service after the new year, hands strangling her expensive kid gloves, and in an awkward voice murmured: Mrs.Orton, if you’re a nurse—

Used to be , Fliss had corrected. The youngest nurse in the fertility clinic at the Free Hospital for Women in Boston, newly graduated from the Cadet Nurse Corps, but the steadiest hand with an IV needle and no squeamishness about bodily fluids, either. Of course, she’d given all that up after conceiving Angela.

If you used to be a nurse , Mrs.Sutherland had asked, can you help me get something?

“You’re going through it quickly,”

Fliss commented now, moving Angela out of the pram to her hip before she started fussing.

“I never know when Barrett will want to—”

A shrug. “So I use it every night.”

“If you can, give me more than a week’s notice next time. I have to get it across town.”

Because if Fliss bought spermicidal jelly at the drugstore on the corner, it would get around the neighborhood in about fifteen minutes flat: Mrs. Orton was stepping out on her husband, and him serving his country, too. She could kiss her room at Briarwood House goodbye; Mrs.Nilsson would probably hurl all her things straight out the window into the yard below.

“I know you think I should just go to a drugstore across town myself,”

Mrs.Sutherland said. That was exactly what Fliss had been thinking. “I would but my husband—I have to account for every nickel I spend. If I don’t have receipts that match up, and if I can’t show what I paid for...”

She trailed off, looking awkward. Fliss looked at her shoes, doubly awkward. Plenty of husbands don’t approve of limiting families —Uncle John had told her that during her first week at the clinic, his Boston clip warm rather than forbidding. But the women are our patients, not their husbands, which is why we need to be discreet with what they tell us. Dr.John Rock wasn’t her uncle, he was Dan’s, but Fliss had adored him since he first took her under his wing as a brand-new nurse, and it wasn’t as if she had any family of her own in the States. Fliss absolutely knew what Uncle John would tell Mrs.Sutherland now.

“The jelly isn’t infallible,”

she said. “You want to limit your family’s size, you need something more reliable.”

“It’s all I can get.”

The woman gently tickled Angela’s little fat foot in its lacy sock. “You probably think I’m unnatural. Playing with this darling baby of yours and telling you I don’t want any more.”

Bad mother , clicked the automatic yammer in Fliss’s mind. “No,”

she said. “It’s not unnatural.”

They stood in the middle of all the church chatter, so many women in their flowered Sunday hats balancing cups of stale coffee and plates of cake crumbs, watching the children swirl through the room in starched organdy frocks and sailor suits. So many children. “My husband wants four at least,”

Mrs.Sutherland said. “He and my father-in-law worry there’s something wrong with me, think I should see a specialist.”

You must have no friends , Fliss thought, or else you wouldn’t talk this way to someone like me . Strange that this glossy, beautiful woman draped in Lanvin and pearls had no one to reach out to but a woman from church with whom she had nothing in common but an accent... But sometimes that could be enough. There were times Fliss ached for fish and chips, for afternoon tea, for traffic that went the right way on the road—just talking to someone who understood those things could feel like old home week. It was so lonely sometimes, being the Foreign Wife—and Mrs.Sutherland would be even more foreign , wouldn’t she?

“You should see a doctor.”

Fliss kept her voice noncommittal, flicking a speck of dust off Angela’s ruffled collar. “I could introduce you to my husband’s uncle, Dr.John Rock—he’s a fertility specialist in Massachusetts, and he’s done wonders for his patients. You could see him for an examination—”

“I said I didn’t want—”

“That’s what you tell your husband the examination is for. While you’re there, you could get measured for... you know.”

Mutely, Fliss let her fingers form a circle, like a certain small rubber device. You couldn’t say a word like diaphragm in a church hall with Reverend Poolstock not ten feet away talking about the Christlike Lessons for the Deserving Poor.

Mrs.Sutherland gave a quick shake of her head. “Any doctor might tell my husband. I know I sound silly and paranoid, but it happened to me before—I asked my doctor for something to help me sleep, and he was ringing my husband almost before I was out of the office. Barrett was so angry with me for not asking his permission first...”

“Dr.Rock would never do that.”

Doctors like him , Fliss thought, are more precious than the Hope Diamond .

“Massachusetts, though... is he Catholic? Wouldn’t it be against his religion, helping to limit families?”

“Uncle John says he believed that for a long time, but that a man changes his mind after forty years treating women worn to the bone by eight, nine, ten pregnancies in ten years.”

Fliss remembered those women, too, from her time at the clinic. Women missing teeth at thirty-five, haggard to the bone, trying to work up that expectant glow when Fliss had to tell them that yes, they were pregnant again. Saying Well, lucky me! and looking like they wanted to heave themselves in front of a train. “You go to the clinic at the Free Hospital for Women in Boston, Mrs.Sutherland. Dr.Rock will measure you for what you need, and he’ll keep it quiet.”

The other woman chewed her dark red lipstick. “My husband would never let me go to Boston alone—”

She broke off as her little boy came hurtling into her side like a missile. “Is it time to get you home?”

she asked, ruffling his hair. “Your father said he’d be home after lunch, in time to play some catch. Go get your coat—”

and as Barrett Junior careened off for the coatrack, Mrs.Sutherland smoothed out her crumpled gloves. “You must have been a very good nurse, Mrs.Orton,”

she said, her voice light again. “You have a reassuring way about you.”

“It’s all I ever used to want to be,”

Fliss said. How she had fought for it, fought to get into the Cadet Nurse Corps when they said they were only taking American girls...

“Used to want?”

Now I can’t imagine wanting anything at all. Fliss felt a moment’s dizzy exhaustion coupled with a sincere desire to reach out and tip the nearest tray of coffee cups to the ground just to hear it all go smash, but she hitched her smile on and locked her molars at the back to keep it tightly in place. “I’d better get my little angel home, Mrs.Sutherland. Happy Sunday!”

Fliss couldn’t say she had a favorite day of the week—they all blended together into an endless river of weariness—but Thursday night was a bright spot. “There you are, Bubble and Squeak,”

Grace greeted her as she slipped into the green-walled room. Grace had called her that (“You’re Bubble, and your little one’s Squeak!”) after Fliss made the mistake of making bubble and squeak for the Briar Club and realized there were some things you just shouldn’t try to serve Americans. “You look fresh as a daisy. Let me take your little goblin there—”

and Angela was whisked away. Grace joggled her first, and then passed her off to Nora and went to mix drinks, and Fliss sank down on the narrow bed that doubled as a couch. For two blessed hours she could just sit , without sticky childish hands clinging to her limbs, without loud childish babble demanding her eyes, her ears, her every morsel of attention. She could eat a meal without jumping up after every bite to keep Angela from falling off something or smashing something. She could have a drink without Angela cartwheeling past and sending it spilling to the floor. Grace pushed a Manhattan into her hand, saying, “Sorry it’s in a teacup, I’m out of glasses,”

and Fliss nearly burst into tears. She could just sit and know that her baby was all right, that the Briar Club women had closed around Angela in that blessedly breezy, automatic way they always did, passing her from one set of fresh arms to another while Fliss’s arms got a little bloody rest. “No,”

she could hear Angela shouting peevishly in the background, but she was saying it to someone else .

Things certainly hadn’t used to be like this: before these Thursday night suppers came along Fliss had barely known the names of her neighbors, much less been able to count on them taking the baby out of her arms for a spell one night per week. It had been like ships passing in the night here, until Grace. “Who’s cooking tonight?”

Fliss asked now, taking a gulp of her Manhattan and coughing. Grace had a heavy hand with the rye.

“Joe Reiss’s bandmate, Claude Cormier,”

Grace said. “Have you met? He’s on drums when they play the Amber Club.”

Fliss blinked at a tall, very dark-skinned man in shirtsleeves and suspenders, stirring a pot over the hot plate. “Grace, chère ,”

he called out in the Louisiana drawl Fliss remembered hearing in the background when she dropped off cookies, “you have any chili powder?”

Chère. My goodness , thought Fliss. She whispered, “Grace, I thought for a while, you and Joe... Does he mind, you and his bandmate?”

“Goodness, what is this, junior high? We’re all adults. Joe, tote that saxophone somewhere else, you are getting underfoot—”

Joe grinned, not looking at all jealous, and slid into a jazzy version of “Cold Cold Heart,”

jostling Reka, who cursed absently in Hungarian. She was adding a flower to the painted vine that now covered Grace’s apartment, the landing outside, and was making its way down the staircase wall— flick went Reka’s brush, finishing up something surreal and orange that would somehow in the way of Grace’s wall vine manage to blend in with the rest. Fliss took another slug of Manhattan from her teacup, squeezing into the kitchenette area. “What’s on the hob, Mr.Cormier?”

she asked Joe’s drummer (Grace’s lover?!), nodding at the pot after introducing herself.

“Gumbo, Mrs.Orton. A Louisiana specialty.”

He sounded cordial and just a bit reserved, and Fliss couldn’t blame him. Maybe Grace had invited him here but Arlene was shooting him looks across the room, and Mrs.Nilsson would pitch an absolute fit if she knew. I don’t have Negroes in the house unless they’re delivering , she prided herself on saying. And even then, never through the front door.

“Gumbo, is that some kind of stew?”

Fliss guessed, looking at the mix in the pot.

Claude smiled. “Not quite. Gumbo starts with a good roux plus the holy trinity—onions, bell peppers, celery. Then you add chicken, sausage, sometimes shrimp—”

Rattling off another half-dozen ingredients. “My tante Irene would skin me for making it without proper Cajun sausage, but...”

“ Gumbo ,”

Arlene sniffed from the other wall. “Sounds unsanitary.”

“I think it looks marvelous,”

Fliss said. “May I have a taste, Mr.Cormier?”

“If you’ve got the palate for some heat, most Brits don’t—”

Angela yelled, and Fliss’s gaze jerked across the room, but Claire was taking her daughter over now. Claire was sharp-tongued, but she was unexpectedly good with Angela. “Come over here to Auntie Claire, you little monster, and I’ll show you a game...”

“Didn’t think you liked children.”

Arlene nudged Grace’s cat, Red, away with one T-strap pump. Her Valentine’s Day date had evidently not produced a proposal from the sainted Harland, Fliss thought, since Arlene’s ring finger was still bare. She kept staring at it balefully, as if it had betrayed her. “I didn’t think you had a maternal bone in your body, Claire Hallett.”

“I like kids,”

Claire said, showing Angela some complicated game of pat-a-cake. “If only they didn’t grow up to be horrible adults... Try again, Ange.”

“No,”

said Angela automatically, but she kept on pat-a-caking.

“I keep thinking you’re too young to have a child of two and a nursing degree, Fliss.”

Grace squeezed into the kitchenette area, looking at Angela over one shoulder. “How on earth did you do it?”

I never slept , Fliss thought, taking a spoonful of piping hot gumbo from Claude. And I still don’t. But that wasn’t the answer people wanted when they gushed How on earth do you do it? They wanted the answer to be simple, for a woman to flip her (fluffy, perfectly starched) skirts and smooth her (fluffy, perfectly curled) hair, and say, Oh, it was nothing!

“Just luck,”

she told Grace now, swallowing a spoonful of spicy, savory deliciousness. “In England they’d have made me wait till I was twenty-one to train as a nurse, but the Cadet Nurse Corps here in the States will take you at seventeen. My mother married an American; he brought us over in ’43, and by July that year I was queuing up in uniform and fainting at my first needlestick!”

I never fainted at a needlestick in my life , she thought. Why do I say these things? “Delicious,”

she told Claude instead, handing the spoon back.

“I never see your mother visit,”

Grace observed. “Most women have to pry their mothers out of their hair once the grandbabies come along.”

“Mother and her husband settled back in Buckinghamshire after the war. She wasn’t happy here.”

Would I be happy here now, if she was? Fliss sometimes wondered. The way she’d grown up, her mother and all her aunts were constantly in and out of one another’s lives, juggling each other’s babies and doing each other’s errands. Not entirely happily, no. There was a fair amount of squabbling and resentment—Fliss remembered the way Aunt Beth had gone completely round the bend in the middle of the war and washed her hands of the whole family, just moved out and flatly refused to do even one more round of nappy-washing or errand-fetching for any of her sisters. But mad Aunt Beth aside, all the nets of women in Fliss’s family could be relied on when babies came around. She’d never seen her mother or her aunts weeping into their laundry tubs or scrubbing kitchen tiles with a toothbrush at three in the morning. Was it because they all knew how to keep up appearances? Or was it because they had nets of people to help ?

You could ask the Briar Club for a hand , Fliss told herself. Grace had a way of nudging everyone into helping each other, just by quietly pitching in until everyone else did too. A week of fetching Bea’s mail for her so she wouldn’t have to limp down the stairs, and now Claire or Nora had picked up the habit of grabbing it when they collected their own. A month of Grace correcting Mrs.Nilsson every time she called Mr.Rosenberg next door “that Yid,”

and now they all corrected her. I could ask for help , Fliss thought again, looking at Nora discussing the latest I Love Lucy skit, looking at Claire tickling Angela and Grace quietly getting out her sewing scissors to clip a fraying thread on Reka’s shawl... But the Briar Club weren’t family, were they? Maybe they were all a good deal friendlier than when she’d first moved in, but a weekly supper didn’t give Fliss any right to lean on them. She tipped her teacup back and drained it to the dregs.

“Supper’s up!”

Claude called, slinging a kitchen towel over one shoulder.

“Surely he’s not eating with us,”

Arlene whispered to Grace, low enough so Claude wouldn’t hear over the clatter of bowls, but not quite low enough to escape Fliss’s ears. “Because really, I’m as broad-minded as they come, but—”

“Sugar pie,”

Grace said, “if you don’t care for the company, feel free to eat downstairs.”

“I’m just saying that this is our country—”

“Claude’s, too. He flew with the Tuskegee Airmen during the war; what did you do? Collect war bonds?”

Grace gave one of her long, cool looks. “I’ll thank you not to be rude to my guest under my roof, Arlene.”

“Mrs.Nilsson’s roof!”

Still whispering, casting a glance back at Claude, who was dishing steaming white rice into bowls. “And I wonder what she’d think if she knew the kind of company you—”

“I’m sure she’d be interested to know you brought Harland here for dinner just last week, and long after visiting hours, too. Also a breach of house rules.”

Arlene opened her mouth, but the door creaked then and Bea limped in with her arm slung around Pete’s bony shoulders. “Sorry I’m late,”

she said breathlessly. “Slipped on the steps, and Pete swooped in with an outfield assist—”

“Anytime, MissBea.”

Pete looked like he was about to faint, having his arm around the waist of an actual living female.

Bea smacked a kiss on his cheek, grinning to see it go completely scarlet. “You’re a good one, rookie. Put me down in a chair somewhere—”

Lina tramped through the door after them, calling, “I made chocolate cream squares! Only I added too much Jell-O—”

Everyone jumped in with the usual flood of assurances that her oozing chocolate blisters looked wonderful, positively mouthwatering.

Grace’s cat gave a hiss and jumped to his windowsill, Grace was showing Arlene the door, and Fliss saw the faint curl of Claude’s smile as he spooned gumbo over bowls of rice. “Can I help serve?”