Free This Was Tomorrow by Elswyth Thane

There’s something brewing in Italy, as a matter of fact.”
    “But—could that affect us here?”
    “Yes Because of the Suez Canal.”
    “Oh, Jeff—” She reached for him blindly, and he caught and held her hand. “I thought that was all behind us!”
    “We’re working on it,” he said. “Disarmament is dead, of course, but we may still work out something at Geneva.”
    “What does Bracken really think?” It always came down to that now, in the family, as once it had been Bracken’s father.
    “I don’t know,” said Jeff truthfully. “Nobody does. Why don’t you ask him?”
3
    But meanwhile it was Jubilee Summer, and King’s weather prevailed. London was floodlighted at night, Covent Garden was ablaze with Grace Moore, Lehmann, and Melchior, the Royal Academy was full of Laverys and Salisburys and Brocks; the theatres were full of Ivor Novello, Dodie Smith, Gertrude Lawrence, Leontovich, Hardwicke, and Gielgud; Wimbledon was full of Perry, Austen, von Cramm, Helen Jacobs, Mrs. Moody, and Kay Stammers; and England was full of strangers and some old friends returned.
    And Mab saw Jeff almost every day.
    She wanted to hear what he had been doing, but mostly she wanted the latest news from America. As there was no point anyway in dwelling on the uneasy European situation and its futile pacts and conferences and air-raid exercises and sinister rumblings, when he was with her Jeff allowed his natural nostalgia to come out. There was a joke in the family about Mab’s American blood, which came to her from Virginia through Irene with two British sires. Ever since she had heard last Christmas about Jeff’s inheriting the house in Williamsburg Mab had gone American in a big way. Now he had sent for pictures of the restored buildings in the town as the Rockefeller project proceeded on its painstaking way, and Sylvia had found some snapshots for her of more personal subjects, even one of Jeff as a boy, down by the College Gate. Mab put them all carefully into a scrapbook, even the cheapest postcards of therebuilt Capitol and the Raleigh Tavern. She asked for American books, and was inclined to argue with Miss Sim about the finer points of that little spot of bother in 1776. She even read up about Red Indians, though Jeff assured her they were no longer a daily feature of American life.
    Virginia, racking her brains, had drawn up a family tree on a large piece of paper, which Mab kept pinned to the wall in the schoolroom like a map, and which she soon knew by heart. A favourite game was to put her finger on a name and ask for its personal history, every detail of which was absorbed into her retentive memory. Jeff’s mother Phoebe, who had grown up in Williamsburg, was especially good at this, better than Virginia, who had not been back to America since her marriage. Bracken too was always good for a new yam when he could be cornered, especially about the war in Cuba, at which he had personally assisted. Mab’s piano lessons now included songs from the musical comedies Fitz Sprague had written, and she treasured gramophone records from the later shows in which Stephen and Sylvia had appeared. The prospect of their actually coming to London, these fabulous American cousins who sang and danced on the stage to music their own father had written, filled her with an almost holy delight of anticipation, and she was prepared to worship them both with no reservations even for Sylvia, who was by her pictures even prettier than Evadne and who might, Mab knew, be the one Jeff would fall in love with.
    Jeff had promised that he would have Sylvia bring with her from the Williamsburg house his own notebooks full of family history, which Mab was to have for herself as he now doubted very much that the next few years would leave him much leisure or freedom of mind to reconstruct the past. What no one realized was that it was less Mab’s one-quarter American heritage than her secret, unchildlike preoccupation with Jeff himself that