“Oh.” She looked around at the crowd. “Now what happens?”
“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.
Aside from a few dog-walkers, he had the park to himself. He sat looking at the canvas lawn chairs scattered on the grass, hoping for sun, then glanced toward the hotel windows. Of course they’d be up. What did they talk about? After all these years, their life was still a mystery to him. He knew he should be grateful. Larry had rescued his mother from the bad time when she sleepwalked through the days and had made her happy. But she’d become someone else. There were moments still when she met Nick’s eyes and he felt they were back in their old life, but then the phone would ring or the flowers would arrive and she would turn away, literally facing forward as if, like Lot’s wife, the past would kill, turn her into a pillar of salt. Instead she seemed to spin in a circle of dinners and fittings and weekends and museum committees until, exhausted, she was too tired to think of anything else.
It was useless to pretend she didn’t enjoy it. Larry adored her and she answered him with an affectionate attention that Nick knew was more than simple gratitude, some emotional payback for security. They were a couple. Larry had given them a new life and his mother reveled in it, drawing on the blank check of Larry’s wealth. But she had paid something too. Her laugh was different. Or was it only age, a settling in? Nick knew that, finally, it wasn’t his concern, that he had no right to be uneasy. Nothing stays the same. But when she sat at her dressing table now, in her perfect clothes, her hair brushed into place, he felt that only part of her came back through the mirror and that in all that soft luxury it had become something shiny and hard, lacquered with money.
He stubbed out the cigarette and started back to the hotel.
In a way, Nick thought, he’d been luckier. Larry had offered the protection and anonymity of his name without asking anything in return. His mother had been anxious about them in the beginning, but Larry had approached him as a kind of thorny Government assignment, and with his usual tact and steady whittling away had won this negotiation too. He’d brought him back from the Priory. He did not ask to be called Dad and, except for those Sundays lugging gear to hockey practice at Lasker, hadn’t tried to be one. They got along. It came, probably, as a surprise to them both. They were careful and then they were attached, in a family neither of them had expected, and when Nick had left home they found they missed each other, the reluctant father and his accidental son. Larry always introduced him that way-“my son”-and it had been years since Nick had felt guilty hearing it. Out of deference to his mother, they never spoke of his real father, because they were conspirators in this, keeping his mother happy, while she stared out of high windows and never looked back.
The Ritz, however, had only managed a second-story room facing Piccadilly, and as he padded down the corridor, past the pink walls and faux Louis XVI chairs, he smiled to himself, imagining their arrival scene-his mother frostily put out, Larry accommodating.
Larry opened the door, still in stockinged feet and suspenders, and drew him in with the familiar broad smile and a hand on his shoulder.
“Nick, come in, come in. Good to see you. Just let me finish this,” he said, pointing to the telephone lying on the desk. The years had thickened him and the Van Johnson hair was gray, but the face was still boyish, as eager as a soldier’s on leave. “The duchess is still in her parlor,” he said, nodding toward the closed bathroom. For a second Nick wondered if it was an unkind joke, for in his worst moments he had begun to think of her like the Duchess of Windsor, idle and groomed. But Larry was incapable of that kind of crack. It was just the winking camaraderie of men waiting for their women to dress. “I’ll only be a sec,” he said, returning to the phone.
Nick looked past the flowers and the messy coffee tray toward the bedroom piled with suitcases, and went over to the window. The room was quieter than he’d expected, the traffic on Piccadilly barely audible through the
