Murray was treating him like a trusted confidant. Once the room was clear of serving staff, the MP had tapped his glass with the side of a dessert spoon.
‘I hope you’ve all had a splendid dinner,’ Murray began, to a murmur of approval around the table. ‘As you know, we’ve already welcomed our guest, Taylor Hastings from the colonies.’ A polite smile from the American. ‘But I know you will agree with me in saying that we strongly hope young Mr Hastings will be more than a guest in our country and more than a guest in our cause.’ A couple of ‘hear, hears’, including, Taylor was glad to note, from the Duke of Wellington.
‘So, for that reason, it is my great honour to present Mr Hastings with membership of our little society. In accepting it, he joins us in the first rank of those fighting for England. For the real England, that is. And against the real enemy. Not our fellow Aryan, the great nation of Germany, but the race which has been at war with Christendom from the very beginning. So let me present Mr Hastings with the crest that marks him as a valued member of the Right Club.’
There was applause as Taylor rose from his chair and walked the three or four paces to where Murray stood waiting to greet him. The MP gave him a strong handshake and then passed him a metal badge.
Hastings looked at the dulled silver brooch. It showed an eagle killing a snake, beside two capital letters: ‘PJ’.
‘Who’s PJ?’ Taylor asked, without thinking.
‘My good fellow, you surely know the motto of the Right Club, conveying our purpose in its pithiest form. PJ stands for “Perish Judah”.’
Chapter Fifteen My darling Florence, I feel as if I am writing into a void. I know you are in America, I know you are at Yale. And yet I have no idea of your situation, of where or how you are living. The last time I knew this sensation was four years ago when I had been rash and stupid and knew only that you were in Berlin. Your decision was right then, though it took me some time to see it. I understand why you could not be straight and truthful with me then: we had only just met. But now we are man and wife and yet you still felt able to deceive me. It may be like Berlin again: that, in the end, I will see that you were right and I was wrong. But that is not how it feels at present. Not least because in Berlin it was only our romance — our fledgling romance, you might say — that was at stake. Now there is a child involved. Your child, yes. But mine too…
James screwed the piece of paper into a tight paper ball and put it in his pocket, to join the other letters to Florence he had drafted and aborted. Too angry, even if the anger was controlled. He wanted her back, didn’t he? Well, letters like that would never do the trick. He dashed off something shorter and simpler, telling Florence that he was looking for her and that he would not rest until they were back together, once again addressing the envelope ‘care of Yale University’, just as he had countless times before, whether from the dockside at Liverpool, the harbour at Quebec or Penn Station in New York City.
‘New Haven, New Haven! Next stop, New Haven.’
It was the third time the guard had marched through the carriage making that announcement in the last twenty minutes. James was ready, his bag packed and above his head. He took another look out of the window, taking in the American countryside. In the several days he had spent on trains, hopping from Quebec to Montreal to Boston and now, at last, New Haven, he had alternated between two conflicting impressions. Most often he was struck by the vastness, the sheer scale of North America, where everything was wider and taller than in little England. He was used to the odd grand old man of a tree — there was one in his college quad, after all — but here you could pass whole forests of thick-trunked trees, majestically scraping the sky. The clouds themselves seemed to loom larger in skies that stretched further to the north, east and west. In America, God seemed to paint on a bigger canvas.
And then, less often, would come an unexpected jolt of familiarity. Perhaps it was his expectations that were at fault. With some shame he realized that he had pictured a land of deserts, cactuses, saloon bars and fighting Indians, as you would see at the pictures. But in Boston there had been elegant buildings in solid grey stone that would have sat comfortably in Edinburgh or Manchester. The train had stopped at Providence and Mystic, names that might have come from a fairytale, but had also passed through New London. It made the place confusing: at once both utterly like and unlike England.
And of course the biggest difference was not in the physical details that caught his eye, the motor cars as big as boats — including one blue, wooden-sided monster he had spotted when the train was chugging alongside a road outside Boston and which a fellow passenger had identified as a ‘station-wagon’ — or the perennial chewing gum in the mouths of porters and ticket collectors. The biggest difference was the expressions on the faces of the people. They were not tight or drawn, as they were, constantly, in England but open and relaxed: mothers smiling at their children, businessmen doing the crossword puzzle in the morning paper, all of them going about their ordinary lives, worrying about paying the bills or cutting the back lawn, rather than fearing for their country’s very survival. Here, war was so far away, it might as well have been happening on another planet.
There was a bright sound of a whistle and the exhalation of a fresh cloud of white smoke. The rhythm of the pistons was slowing down, the train heaving itself to a halt, like an aged rower on the river running out of puff. Through the billowing steam he could see the name on the station platform: New Haven.
He felt his jaw clench three or four times in quick session, an involuntary move that used to precede every race on the river. During the long voyage from Liverpool and the journey south from Canada, he had not had to prepare himself: he could think about the past and concentrate on reaching his destination. But now, as he stepped off the train, he had arrived. New Haven was home to Yale, which meant she was here. It was quite possible he would run into her any moment now; she might even be at the station. He spotted a balloon, the string held by a boy around Harry’s age. Next to him was a woman buying something from a cart. (He squinted to read a sign that said ‘Pretzels’, a word he had never seen and could not pronounce.) She was not the right height for Florence — few women were — but the sight of a mother and child, and the possibility that, logically speaking, it could have been Florence and Harry, hit him hard. He looked away.
Only now did he notice the station itself, the ceiling almost as high as St Pancras in London. But where such places in England were permanently drab and dirty — the shabbiness exacerbated by nearly a year of war — this was clean and stylish, the ceilings, from which fancy chandeliers were suspended, elaborately decorated in a complex pattern of gold. Even the rooves of the tunnels leading from the platforms were clad in gleaming stainless steel. Not for the first time, he felt as if he had left England, the ageing mother country, for America, the vigorous young son.
Once he had popped his letter in a blue post-box, he looked down at the note he had scribbled in his book. 459 College Street. This was where Grey had arranged rooms for him, a late addition to the list of demands James had put to the college Master in return for his silence. He asked a porter for directions, struggling first to be understood and then to understand: divided by a common language indeed.
With just a single knapsack, picked up in Liverpool, he had travelled lightly enough to walk. The short journey up George Street took him to College Street, a right turn and then he was inside the university district. What he saw astounded him. He had been expecting a place bursting with 1940s modernity, a Flash Gordon landscape of shiny towers, strange shapes and clean lines.
True, the cars were once again something to behold. Vast, bulky machines that moved like mighty beasts of the jungle, hippos or rhinos who would trample over any creature reckless enough to stray into their path. But the university itself seemed as rooted in the ancient past as Oxford.
The streets were lined with faux-medieval arches and stone walls, punctuated by churches with steeples and Gothic spires, as if by the wave of a magician’s wand an entire thirteenth century English university town had been moved across the ocean and planted on this other continent. He peered inside one college building at random (it might have been called Calhoun though he was barely taking in the names). There was a quad, complete with a perfectly maintained lawn. Two tall, fair-haired men passed him, both carrying tennis rackets, just as their counterparts might do back home. He passed a grand entrance to a tower that clearly aspired to be a castle, bearing the motto Lux et Veritas, carved in a pale stone. Perhaps an expert would be able to see, on closer inspection, that the likes of Bingham Hall or the Battell Chapel belonged to the last or even the current century, rather than seven hundred years earlier. But to the layman’s eye, the illusion was complete.
He glanced across the street, spotting with relief the number 459 — attached not to the grand structure with pillared portico next door, but to a relatively modest colonial-style house, clad in pale clapboard. He had half- expected Grey to put him up in a college dormitory, like some of the younger fellows back home. The last thing James needed now was small-talk with scholars, eagerly making awkward inquiries about his precise ‘field of
