Sam Bourne - Pantheon

‘All right,’ Walters began. ‘There was a knock on the door just after four or so. A quiet one, kind of uncertain. I opened it and there was this lady there, holding her son’s hand. She looked kind of nervous. She didn’t even come in at first, just asked if you were here and if she could speak to you. I told her I was expecting you back later. I asked her in, but she said no. Just could I tell you she’d called. The little boy seemed shy: he kept staring at me from behind his mother. I don’t think he ever saw a black man before. Round-eyes, he had. Very quiet.’

‘Very quiet.’ Yes, thought James. That sounds like Harry. ‘And can you describe what she looked like, Walters?’

‘A tall lady, sir.’

‘Very beautiful, very straight-backed and upright? With smiling eyes?’

‘She looked very kind, sir.’

‘Kind, yes… ’

‘Though she looked worried too.’

‘Did she tell you how she knew I was here?’

‘Yes, sir. She did. She said she had seen you. In town.’

James felt himself unsteady again, as if his legs were about to give way. The thoughts were rushing into his brain so fast, they were falling on top of each other. If Florence had seen him, why hadn’t she rushed over to him immediately? Where exactly had she seen him? And when? Surely not today, when he was with Dorothy Lake? Had Florence seen the two of them just now… His stomach twisted. What if he had come all this way, if he had crossed the Atlantic, only to be rejected as a faithless husband now, here in America? He cursed himself and his weakness all over again.

It took a moment to compose himself. At last he said quietly, ‘And did she leave anything for me, a card or a letter?’

‘She just had me write down her details, so that you could get in touch with her. I’ll go get them.’

James watched the butler shuffle off to the backroom that seemed to serve as both his office and his home: there was certainly no other bedroom in evidence, and yet he seemed to be at the club day and night. James waited a while, pacing and clenching his fists. But even the thirty-second delay was too much. He walked out of the sitting room, meeting a returning Walters in the hallway.

‘Here it is, sir.’ The old man passed him a small square of paper.

It was as if a slab of stone had landed on James’s chest.

Elizabeth Goodwin, staying with Mr and Mrs Swanson, New Haven. Telephone number…

The words were swimming on the page, the disappointment clouding his vision. His head began to throb, the pain from banging it against the wall suddenly asserting itself.

The butler must have seen his desperation because he began muttering some kind of reassurance, the words lost and muffled in James’s ears.

What an idiot he had been, once again succumbing to foolish optimism. The warning sign was there in how Walters had described the appearance of the woman at the door: kind, he had said. Florence certainly could be kind and generous. But kind was not the first word any man used to describe her. If it had been Florence at the door, Walters would not have hesitated to have agreed that she was stunningly, heartbreakingly beautiful.

So this was one of the other Oxford mothers, who had somehow tracked him down to the Elizabethan Club. Where had she seen him? And would she be the one who would, at last, tell him where he could find his wife and child?

From up here, he had a clear view over the treetops towards New Haven harbour. For the first time he realized what a beautiful place this was, no doubt lush and green in the springtime, scenic even in the arid summer. And yet he was barely two miles away from Yale.

He had called Mrs Goodwin first thing this morning, just after seven — the moment he felt it socially acceptable to make a telephone call. Her American host, Mrs Swanson, had sounded wary, but Mrs Goodwin herself had been perfectly polite. She explained that her son was attending summer school during the daytime hours and that she would not have a chance to meet till 4.30pm at the earliest.

‘Why don’t I meet you at the school?’ James had suggested. To his surprise she had agreed, and so he had hired a taxi to take him up the winding, tree-lined road to Hopkins Grammar School for Boys. En route he had looked on in envy at the large family houses, with their lawns, an occasional tyre swinging from a tree or basketball hoop on a post. Such space compared with the cramped, ration-book England he had left behind. But it was not America’s prosperity he envied, typified by the sleek, curved black motor car now purring along behind the cab — a moving sculpture in metal, topped off by natty white rims painted on the tyres — no, it was not America’s wealth that made James pity his own country. It was the peace. The peace of that woman there, checking her roses, or of that old fellow in the house next door, oiling the garden gate. No Yale colleges were given over to organizing munitions or fish and potato stocks. No men here had to learn how to polish their boots like mirrors or clean a rifle. No mother in America had to fear her two-year-old son would die under a falling bomb or be crushed by a Nazi jackboot, as Florence had feared for Harry. How serene this summer morning seemed. And yet, under the same sky, even at this very moment, he knew there was a continent at war with Britain — and that shabby, grey Britain was fighting for its life.

Now, as the cab got closer, he could read the sign that announced Hopkins Grammar, dedicated to ‘The Breeding up of Hopeful Youths’.

They had arranged to meet at the school office, so he walked through the arched entrance, past the portrait of Hopkins’s seventeenth century founder, musing that this might have been any boarding school in the English countryside. He ran into a secretary who told him he needed to go to the playing fields and promptly offered to walk him over there.

She chatted away, explaining that the school had only moved from the centre of New Haven fifteen years earlier. ‘I’m afraid the city is not quite what it used to be. So crowded there now.’

‘Cramped?’ asked James, making conversation.

‘Well, we’ve had so many immigrants in recent years. It’s not the country your ancestors left behind any more.’

The words were neutral enough, but James detected a note of distaste and snobbery that he did not like. ‘I see.’

‘Not that we’re complaining about being here, gosh no. It’s wonderful here. So good for the boys to be outside in the countryside, away from all the dirt and grime of the city.’

She led him down a slope, and now a large lawn came into view. On it were perhaps three dozen early teenage boys, in white shorts and plimsolls but no shirts, engaged in physical jerks. As James approached, they were doing press-ups, in unison. Watching on the sidelines were five or six mothers kitted out in their own uniform of floral dress and sunhat.

‘Mrs Goodwin!’ the secretary called in a sing-song voice and the tallest of them turned around. In her early forties, she was just as Walters had described: not pretty, her hair mousy, but kindly.

They shook hands while the secretary politely excused herself. The lady gave a gentle smile. ‘Well, I’m glad my eyes didn’t deceive me.’

Just hearing the rhythm of those precise, enunciated words filled James with a rush of emotions. Until that moment he had not particularly registered that he had not heard an English accent in more than three weeks. Hearing it now evoked home, as if he had been transported with just those few cadences back to Oxford, to its stones, its bicycles, its scones, its afternoons. He realized in that instant just how far away he was. Above all, it made him want to be with Florence, to hold her and to feel her holding him.