“You suppose?”
Mr. B— taps the edge of the envelope against his knee. “I suppose it depends on what one means by friendship.”
“In wartime, friendship can mean anything, can’t it?”
“True enough. This note of yours. Quite astonished me this morning, when my secretary delivered it to my desk.”
“But you must have known Thorpe was captured.”
“Naturally. I take the most anxious interest in my agents, Mrs. Thorpe, and your—ah, your husband—he was one of—well. Well. That is to say, Mr. Thorpe in particular. We took the news very hard. Very hard indeed. Colditz, my God. Poor chap. Awful show.”
He takes out a cigarette case, opens the lid, and tilts it toward me. I select one, and he selects another. As he lights the match, he covers the flame with his cupped hand. We sit back against the bench and smoke quietly. The wind on my cheek is cold, and the air tastes of soot, and the sky’s blackening by the instant. At first I don’t quite understand what’s missing, until I realize it’s the absence of light. Not a pinprick escapes the windows around us, not a ray of comfort. It’s as if we’re the only two people alive in London.
“There used to be a railing,” says Mr. B—.
“What’s that?”
“Around the square gardens. A railing, to keep residents in and everybody else out, you see. They took it away and melted it down for iron.”
“I suppose it’s more democratic this way.”
“I suppose so. Here we are, after all, the two of us. Sitting on this bench, quite without permission.”
“And that’s what we’re fighting for, isn’t it? Democracy.”
He straightens his back against the bench. “Well, then. Leonora Thorpe. Plucky young American from across the ocean. What are we to do with you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why are you here? You’ll forgive me, but London isn’t the most peaceful of cities, at the moment. I imagine, wherever you come from—”
“Nassau.”
“Yes, Nassau. But you weren’t born there, were you?”
“No. I was raised in New York. I arrived in the Bahamas a couple of years ago, to cover the governor and his wife for a magazine.”
“A magazine?”
“Metropolitan magazine. Nothing serious, just society news. The American appetite for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is just insatiable.”
Mr. B— sucks on his cigarette. “I must confess, it puzzles me. You Americans went to such trouble to rid yourselves of our quaint little monarchy.”
“Oh, we like to gossip about them, all right. Just not to let them rule over us and all that.”
“I imagine you were well paid?”
“Well enough.”
“A plum assignment, Mrs. Thorpe, spending the war in a tropical paradise. Plenty of food, plenty of money. Why didn’t you stay there?”
“Why? Isn’t it obvious?”
“But what’s to be gained by coming to London? Look around you. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and it’s already dark. Decent food in short supply. The weather—as you see—is simply dreadful, to say nothing of air raids and the threat of invasion. You ought to have stayed in the tropics, nice and safe, to wait for news.”
I crush out my cigarette on the arm of the bench.
“But that’s the thing, Mr. B—. I don’t mean to sit around and wait. That’s why I’ve come to London.”
I say this carelessly—come to London—as if it were as easy as that. As easy as boarding an ocean liner and waddling from meal to meal, deck chair to deck chair, until you step off a week later, and poof! you’re in England. And maybe it was that easy, in another time. These days, it’s not so simple. That ocean teems with objects that hope to kill you. And if you want to reach London in a hurry, well, the challenge grows by geometric leaps and bounds, because there’s only one way to cross the Atlantic in a hurry, and it doesn’t come cheap, believe me.
And then you contrive to meet this challenge. Clever you. You pay the necessary price, because you must, there’s no other choice. You find yourself strapped inside the comfortless fuselage of a B-24 Liberator as it prepares to separate you from the nice safe sun-soaked ground of the Bahamas and bear you, by leaps and bounds, to darkest England, a place you know only by hearsay. The engines gather power, the noise fills your ears like all the world’s bumblebees pollinating a single rose. The metal around you bickers and clatters, the world tilts, the air freezes, and there you are, eyes shut, stomach flipping, ears roaring, mouth watering, chest rattling, lungs panting, nerves screaming, heart aching, wishing you had goddamn well fallen in love with someone else. Someone you could live without.
But you can’t. So now you’re here in London. London at last, on a garden bench in the middle of a darkened city, next to the only man in the world who can help you. Except the fellow’s shaking his head, the fellow’s got no faith in you at all.
“Come to London,” he says. “How on earth did you manage it?”
“I managed it because I had to. I’d do anything to free my husband.”
“Free your husband? Is that the idea?”
“I damned well won’t run around Nassau going to parties while my husband rots away in the middle of Nazi Germany.”
Mr. B— extends his arm and flicks ash onto the gravel. His shoes are beautifully polished, his trousers creased. Standards must be kept. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says, “I don’t know quite how to express this.”
“How about straight out? That’s how we Americans prefer it.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. Once one of our men falls into enemy hands, why, he’s on his own. Thorpe knew this. We can’t possibly risk more agents on hairy schemes that—you’ll forgive me—offer almost no chance of success. We’re stretched enough as it is. We’re scarcely hanging on.”
“But I’m not asking you to risk anyone else. I’d go myself.”
“I’m afraid it’s impossible. Thorpe’s been trained. He knows it’s his duty to escape, not ours to spring him out, and I’ve no doubt he’s doing his utmost.”
“That’s not enough for me.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Thorpe,” Mr. B— says. “I don’t mean to be unkind. Naturally you’re suffering. It’s the most beastly news. One hopes for the best, of course. But one soldiers on. That’s all there is, just to soldier on.”
“That’s all terrific, if you’re a soldier. If you’re allowed to do something useful instead of twiddling your thumbs.”
“There are many ways in which women are able to serve the war effort, Mrs. Thorpe. And I can offer you my steadfast assurance that we’re doing our best, in my department and in Britain as a whole, all the services, every man Jack, to defeat Germany and bring your husband safely home.”
Across the street, a pair of women hurry down the sidewalk, buttoned up in wool coats and economical hats. The clatter of shoes echoes from the bricks, and it occurs to me how silent a city can be, when gas is rationed and private automobiles are banned. You can hear an omnibus rattle and grind from a couple of streets away, and you realize how alone you are, how desolate war is.
The women turn the corner. A man begins a slow, arthritic progress from the opposite direction, bent beneath the weight of his coat and hat.