Beatriz Williams - The Golden Hour

“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. He’s smoking a cigarette. I figure the fellow’s probably deaf, but I speak softly anyway. Soft and firm.

“I understand your position, of course. I guess it’s about what I expected. I understand, I really do. But now I need you to understand me , Mr. B—.”

He turns his face toward me and lifts his eyebrows. At last, his voice goes a little cold, the way a man speaks to another man, his equal. “Oh? Understand what, Mrs. Thorpe? Let us be perfectly clear with each other.”

“All right, Mr. B—. Listen carefully. In the course of my service in Nassau, in my capacity as a journalist, as an intimate associate of the governor and his wife, I became privy to certain information. Do you catch my drift?”

There is this silence. I think, Well, he knows this already, doesn’t he? I wrote as much in my note. At the time, I thought I conveyed my meaning in circumspect sentences, that my note was a clever, sophisticated little epistle, but now it seems to me that my note was probably a masterpiece of amateurism, that Mr. B— probably laughed when he read it. Probably he’s suppressing his laughter right now. His silence is the silence of a man controlling his amusement.

He examines the end of his cigarette. “What kind of information?”

“You know. The kind of information that might prove embarrassing— embarrassing to say the least—were it to be made known to the general public.”

He drops his cigarette to the gravel and crushes it with his shoe. “Embarrassing to whom?”

“To the British government. To the king and queen.”

Mr. B— reaches into his jacket pocket and removes another cigarette from the case. He lights it with the same care as before, the same series of noises, the scratch and the flare, the covering of the flame. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says softly, “I’m afraid I have a little confession to make.”

“Oh?”

“I may have stretched the truth just a bit, when I told you I was astonished by the contents of your letter.”

We still sit side by side, except we’ve turned a few degrees inward to address each other. Mr. B—’s elbow rests on the top slat of the bench. Because he’s looking at my face now, almost tenderly, I make a tremendous effort to keep my expression as still as possible. My fingers, however, have developed some kind of tremor. Imagine that.

“How so?” I ask.

“I received a memorandum a day or two ago. From a certain member of the Cabinet, in response to a cable sent him from Government House in Nassau. So we had some warning, you see, of your imminent arrival. We had some notion of what to expect.”