Five minutes later, Bella came in.
Woody stood up, his pulse quickening. Just the sight of her made him smile. She wore a plain pale-yellow dress that set off her lustrous dark hair and coffee skin. She would always look good in dramatically simple clothing, he guessed; just like Joanne. He wanted to put his arms around her and crush her soft body to his own, but he waited for a sign from her.
She looked anxious and uncomfortable. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said.
‘I came looking for you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I can’t get you out of my mind.’
‘We don’t even know each other.’
‘Let’s put that right, starting today. Will you have dinner with me?’
‘I don’t know.’
He crossed the room to where she stood.
She was startled to see him using a walking stick. ‘What happened to you?’
‘My knee got shot up in France. It’s getting better, slowly.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Bella. I think you’re wonderful. I believe you like me. We’re both free of commitments. What’s worrying you?’
She gave that lopsided grin that he liked so much. ‘I guess I’m embarrassed. About what I did, that night in London.’
‘Is that all?’
‘It was a lot, for a first date.’
‘That kind of thing went on all the time. Not to me, necessarily, but I heard about it. You thought I was going to die.’
She nodded. ‘I’ve never done anything like that, not even with Victor. I don’t know what came over me. And in a public park! I feel like a whore.’
‘I know exactly what you are,’ Woody said. ‘You’re a smart, beautiful woman with a big heart. So why don’t we forget that mad moment in London, and start getting to know one another like the respectable well-brought-up young people that we are?’
She began to soften. ‘Can we, really?’
‘You bet.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll pick you up at seven?’
‘Okay.’
That was an exit line, but he hesitated. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that I found you again,’ he said.
She looked him in the eye for the first time. ‘Oh, Woody, so am I,’ she said. ‘So glad!’ Then she put her arms around his waist and hugged him.
It was what he had been longing for. He embraced her and put his face into her wonderful hair. They stayed like that for a long minute.
At last she pulled away. ‘I’ll see you at seven,’ she said.
‘You bet.’
He left the house in a cloud of happiness.
He went from there straight to a meeting of the steering committee in the Veterans Building next to the opera house. There were forty-six members around the long table, with aides such as Gus Dewar sitting behind them. Woody was an aide to an aide, and sat up against the wall.
The Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, made the first speech. He was not impressive to look at, Woody reflected. With his receding hair, neat moustache, and glasses, he looked like a store clerk, which was what his father had been. But he had survived a long time in Bolshevik politics. A friend of Stalin’s since before the revolution, he was the architect of the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939. He was a hard worker, and was nicknamed Stone-Arse because of the long hours he spent at his desk.
He proposed that Belorussia and Ukraine be admitted as original members of the United Nations. These two Soviet republics had borne the brunt of the Nazi invasion, he pointed out, and each had contributed more than a million men to the Red Army. It had been argued that they were not fully independent of Moscow, but the same argument could be applied to Canada and Australia, dominions of the British Empire that had each been given separate membership.
The vote was unanimous. It had all been fixed up in advance, Woody knew. The Latin American countries had threatened to dissent unless Hitler-supporting Argentina was admitted, and that concession had been granted to secure their votes.
Then came a bombshell. The Czech foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, stood up. He was a famous liberal and anti- Nazi who had been on the cover of
The Americans were refusing to admit Poland until Stalin permitted elections there, and Masaryk as a democrat
