“Speeches.”
“Do you want to get some coffee?”
“I can’t. Really. I’m meeting somebody.” He fingered his tie. “Remember?”
“One tie. One meal.” She nodded. “Look, it’s not what you think,” she said, suddenly hesitant.
“It’s not?”
She met his look, debating, then gave it up. “Screw it,” she said. “As if you’d believe me now anyway. Look, I didn’t do this right. I just wanted to see-” She stopped. “One of my bright ideas. Not exactly the best place, though, was it?” she said, extending her hand toward the steps, where the names were still being read. “You probably think-well, I know what you think.”
“Take it easy,” he said, smiling. “Want to start this over?”
She smiled. “I thought you had to go.”
“I do. Can I call you?”
“I don’t want you to think-oh, what’s the difference? You probably wouldn’t call otherwise. Anyway, we can’t talk here.”
He watched her, intrigued, feeling that he was eavesdropping on a conversation she was having with herself. “So can I call you?”
She looked at him again, the same appraising once-over. “Flaxman, double-oh two nine,” she said carefully. “Better write it down.”
“I’ll say it three times. Then it’s mine for life.”
But this seemed to throw her.
“Like the game,” he said. “You know, for new vocabulary words.”
“Does that really work?” she said, genuinely curious.
“Usually. Flaxman, double-oh two nine,” he repeated. “Chisholm, with an l.”
She smiled at him. “Molly. Two l’s,” she said, extending her hand to shake his, just introduced.
“And I’m Nick.” He held her hand for a moment. “I’ll call,” he said, wondering if he would.
He watched her cape as she worked her way through the crowd. When she turned to look back, he felt caught and she laughed at his expression, then wiggled her fingers in a wave and was gone.
“What was that about?” he said to Henry, still staring after her.
“I don’t know. She asked if you were around.”
“Really? By name?” Nick said, puzzled again.
Henry grinned. “Maybe you were recommended. They talk, you know.”
He looked for the cape, but it had disappeared, taking the answer with it. A girl at a rally. He grinned back. “Yeah, right,” he said, the locker-room answer Henry expected. If he really wanted to know, all he had to do was call.
“I told you. Demonstrations are the best,” Henry said.
Nick listened to a few of the speeches. Wiseman, the historian, who had served Churchill in the great days, spoke of the folly of imperial adventures. Then an expatriate writer spoke on the criminality of the bombing, the tear in the social fabric at home. Nobody talked about the Lon Sue boy’s parents, bowing their heads to the inevitable. But what was there to say to that? Nobody here had pulled the trigger. They weren’t the problem. They were the good guys, even Henry, who only pretended to be frivolous, and Annie, in her white makeup and Twiggy eye shadow, listening hard. It was easy to dismiss them and their tie-dyed politics, but what about the others, who used the dead soldiers to justify sending more? Because otherwise what had been the point? Private Bauer had to be redeemed. Nick had the same sense of futile dislocation he’d felt at the other rallies. They were here to talk to themselves, but the war had taken on a momentum of its own, killing everything. Who cared why it was crazy if it couldn’t be stopped? As if he was doing anything about it either, dropping a name in a box.
Nick slipped away to the edge of the crowd, not even bothering to say goodbye. There was nothing worth hearing, and he was already late. He headed toward the Brook Street end of the square, then turned right, down past the bright flags on the Connaught to Mount Street, past the antique shops and the smart butcher where dressed fowl hung in the window like pieces of rare furniture. The crowd had been yelling back responses to one of the speakers, but even that had disappeared by the time he got to Berkeley Square, drowned out by the traffic zipping around the auto showrooms and the old plane trees that had survived the blitz.
It was a different London here, window boxes and polished brass, gleaming with privilege. With each block he felt he was leaving his own life for the smooth deep pile of his mother’s world, where every step was cushioned and even the light was soft, filtered through trees in the park. In New York her windows looked out over the reservoir, and here, he suspected, she would be high over Green Park, exchanging one eyrie for another without bothering to come down to earth.
When he reached the Ritz he hesitated, reluctant to go in, and instead walked over to the park to have a cigarette. They’d still be groggy from a jet-lag nap, grateful for the delay. But Larry never napped. It was Nick who wanted the few minutes, to clear his head.
