“Super. Where?” The two boys, obviously students, looked over the iron railings toward the tall houses lining one side of the square.
“I don’t know, but she’s supposed to show. Check out the cameras.”
“Far out. We’ll be on TV.”
Eavesdropping, Nick smiled and looked toward the embassy steps, where the camera crews were setting up. The turnout was bigger than he’d expected. The day was raw and cold, damp morning mist still hanging from the trees, but the line snaked all around Grosvenor Square, ringing the enclosed park and spilling out down Brook Street. They couldn’t all be American. The streets were still open to traffic, and the police, polite and wary, walked along the edge of the curb, asking the crowd to stay on the pavement.
The rally, like London itself, was gentle and friendly. In front of the embassy there were microphones for the demonstration speeches and Americans Against Vietnam signs, but no one broke out of line or heckled the secretaries going into the building. A few faces stared out of the upper-story windows, more curious than besieged, but no one called out to them. The confrontations and shouting belonged somewhere else. They were here to listen to speeches and then, one by one, to read the names of the dead.
Nick looked around for his LSE group, but they’d become separated earlier and were now swallowed up in the queue. One of the organizers, megaphone dangling from his neck, was moving down the line, handing out index cards.
“When you get to the mike, just read off the name and place and say ‘dead’ and then drop the card in the coffin. Got it? Don’t yell-the mike’ll pick it up. And keep it moving, okay? No stunts.”
Nick took the card. Pvt. Richard Sczeczynski. Nu Phoc, 1968. That would have been during Tet, when the body bags flooded the airport, a hundred years ago.
The organizers looked like teenagers, but then everyone in the crowd looked young to him. Earlier he had noticed a middle-aged group in drab overcoats-academics, presumably, or English radicals old enough to have tramped from Aldermaston-but everyone else seemed to have stepped out of a dorm party, smooth-faced and eager, wrapped in capes and leather and old army greatcoats. A few had peace signs painted on their foreheads. Underneath the bushy mustaches and lumberjack beards their cheeks were pink. It was a thrift shop army — cast- off shawls and buckskin fringe and tight jeans with shiny studs planted along the seams. None of them had been there.
“Excuse me,” a girl behind him said, holding out her card. “Do you have any idea how to pronounce this?”
An American voice. He looked at her-long blond hair held away from her face by an Indian headband, shoulders draped with a patterned gaucho cape-and took the card.
“Hue,” he said automatically, wondering why she’d asked. She was pretty but slightly drawn, dressed to look younger than she was. Had she been standing there all this time?
“No, the name. I mean, he’s dead-awful if I couldn’t pronounce it. I mean-”
Nick looked again at the card. “Trochazka,” he read.
“Chaw?” she said, drawing out the flat a. “Like that? Russian?”
“No, it’s a Czech name.”
“Really? Do you know that?”
Nick shrugged. “It’s a common name. Smith. Jones. Like that.”
“Common if you’re Czech,” she said. “Are you?”
Nick shook his head. “Grandmother.”
“You take it, then. I’ll never say it right. Swap, okay? Do you mind?”
Nick smiled. “Be my guest,” he said, handing her his card. He watched her face as she read it, did a double- take, and then gave a wry smile.
“Okay, you win. I can’t even start this one. Is this like Jones too?”
“No. Che-chin-ski,” he pronounced. “Polish.”
“You can tell? Just like that?”
“Well, the ‘ski’ is Polish. The rest, I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”
She looked at him and smiled. “I’m impressed.” She reached over and took back her card, grazing his fingers. “Forget the swap, though. I think I was better off the first time. Imagine, two in a row. Maybe we’re the Slavic section. How do you say yours? In Czech. Z’s and y’s and all that?”
“Warren.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “Sorry.”
“No,” he said, studying her face, her quick brown eyes meeting his without embarrassment. “They’re funny names.”
“But not to them. I know. Mine’s Chisholm, by the way. With an l.”
“Imagine what the Poles would do with that.”
She smiled. “Yes, imagine.”
He looked at her again. Wide mouth and pale skin, a trace of freckles over the bridge of her nose.
“Where are you from?” she said, the usual American-abroad question.
“New York.”
“No, I mean where here. Are you with a group?”
“LSE,” Nick said.
“You’re a student?”
He laughed at her surprise. “Too old?”
“Well, the tie-” He followed her eyes to the senior-tutor wool jacket and plain tie he’d forgotten he had on. “Are you a teacher?”
“No, I’m finishing a dissertation,” he said, the all-purpose explanation for his time away, the drift. “Late start. What about you?”
“Oh, I’m-just here.” She looked away for a second, avoiding him, and adjusted the heavy bag hanging from her shoulder, a shapeless but good soft leadier that seemed at odds with the hippie cape. When she turned back, he was still staring at her. “What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, catching himself. “I was-never mind.”
“What?” she said, a laugh now in her throat.
“Well, I was going to say, Do you come here often? And I realized how dumb it sounded. What I meant was, have you been to one of these before?” But what he really meant was, why are you here? He wondered if she was like the girls in Hair, floating in a haze of smoke between protest marches and concerts, interchangeable parts of the same scene. But she was looking at him again with the same frank scrutiny, anything but mindless.
“Of course,” she said simply. “I don’t understand people who don’t.”
“Even over here?” Nick said, his own doubt.
She shrugged. “It all counts. Somehow. Why do you?”
“Same reason, I guess,” he said, letting it drop.
The line moved a little now, people drawing nearer to the steps where the speakers had appeared, and he began to move with it.
“So do you always wear a tie?” she said, trying to keep his attention.
He smiled. Was she flirting with him? “I have to meet somebody after,” he said. “That’s all. Tie people.”
She looked up at him and squinted her eyes. “Tie people?”
“Parents.”
“Parents?” she said, disconcerted.
“Am I too old for that too?”
She looked at him oddly, as if his answer had thrown her, a piece from the wrong puzzle. “They live here?” she said unexpectedly.
He shook his head. “Flying visit. One meal. One tie. Not too much to ask.” He glanced at his watch, reminded of the time. Larry and his mother were expecting him in just under an hour. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I-”
She seemed flustered again, but now there was a movement in the crowd, and before she could finish, people began to surge politely around them, looking down the street.
