![]() ![]() Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, was also playing in London, as were the films The Thin Man and the long-running Gaslight. In the city’s West End, theaters hosted twenty-four productions, among them the play Rebecca, adapted for the stage by Daphne du Maurier from her novel of the same name. The late-summer heat imparted an air of languid complacency. After the August air raid when bombs first fell on London proper, the city had retreated back into a dream of invulnerability, punctuated now and then by false alerts whose once-terrifying novelty was muted by the failure of bombers to appear. The giant barrage balloons overhead cast lumbering shadows on the streets below. Shoppers jammed the stores of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. People thronged Hyde Park and lounged on chairs set out beside the Serpentine. Temperatures by afternoon were in the nineties, odd for London. The day was warm and still, the sky blue above a rising haze. ![]() An Excerpt from The Splendid and the Vile Chapter 44: On a Quiet Blue Day ![]()
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