chase, that he had been right to cross the ocean and come to Yale. The Oxford children were here. Then he spotted another, smaller photo lower down. Was that Harry, a blurred little face in the corner? He desperately wanted it to be, but now that he looked closer, he doubted it.
Of course there were two dozen mothers and five times as many children; it meant nothing that his wife and child had not been mentioned in the article. And yet he had never met any man with a camera who had been able to resist taking photographs of Florence. Half of the press stories about the People’s Olympiad seemed to be accompanied by a shot of the beautiful British swimmer Florence Walsingham. As a result, he had all but assumed that if the New Haven papers had made any mention at all of the Oxford arrivals, his wife would feature prominently.
But there could be other stories. He advanced to the editions for the subsequent days, eventually finding this: ‘Dress of British Refugees Here Sets Them Apart From US Youth’. There was another picture, of older girls, and a story about the long outer coats and long ‘short pants’ of the younger boys — but no photograph and no mention of Harry. There were references to the sandals and school blazers, with insignia ‘emblazoned on the pockets’, and much excitement over the ‘natural color straw hats to protect them from the rays of the sun’, especially the hat worn by one little girl on top of her pigtails. Back numbers of the Yale Daily News served up similar offerings, but of Florence and Harry there was not a trace.
He could see immediately why the Assistant Dean had wanted to meet here. A good twenty-minute walk from the university district, all the way down Chapel Street as if descending to some lower realm, this place was on the literal other side of the tracks — across the railway bridge and in the poor part of town. James was no longer among students in varsity football jerseys and professors in seersucker suits, but Italian immigrants, dark young men with slicked-back hair standing on street corners, their mothers swaddled in black, escaping the late summer heat in the house by sitting out on the stoop. If it was a secret meeting the Assistant Dean was after, this was just the place: surely no one would recognize him here, in New Haven’s Little Italy.
There was no missing Frank Pepe’s: a sign covered an entire wall of the building announcing it as a Pizzeria Napoletana, a phrase that meant next to nothing to James. Had he heard one of the Italians in Spain mentioning pizza? He might have done, but he still had little idea what it was.
Once inside he saw something that looked as if it belonged in a locomotive: on the far wall, surrounded by white tiles as wide as bricks, was a gaping hole filled by a roaring fire. Several chefs were standing before it, like the crew of a steam engine, apparently stoking the flames. Once he had watched, mesmerized, for a while, he realized they were in fact clutching long paddles which they used to deposit and retrieve discs of dough larger than gramophone records in what was a giant oven.
He was not sure of the etiquette of such a place. Would the Assistant Dean have made a reservation? It was no good if he had: he had never caught the man’s name. James decided to take up a position under the green awning just outside, and wait.
He hoped that if he looked out of place now it would be as a Yale man in the wrong part of town rather than as an Englishman abroad. At the J Press store on York Street he had invested in a jacket like those he had seen worn by college men his age, as well as a couple of shirts. The article in the local paper had made him realize that clothes that might strike an Englishman as perfectly ordinary could look strange and exotic to an American. And he did not want to stand out.
He wondered yet again why the Assistant Dean, an official whom he had never met, had offered to help him. How did he even know what help James needed? Was the rough manhandling and forced ejection from the building all a show and, if so, for whose benefit? What help was the man able to give him and why did it have to be secret?
James had no good answers to any of these questions and over the last six hours he had damped down his expectations, suspecting the Assistant Dean would probably not even turn up. But now, at twenty-five past seven, he glimpsed the outline of the man who had earlier whispered so urgently and promisingly into his ear, and he could not help but feel excited. Did this man know where Florence and Harry were and was he about to pass on that information?
On the pavement by the open door, the Assistant Dean gave him no more than a nod of greeting, beckoning him to follow him inside. He asked the waitress for a booth and was taken straight away to an arrangement of dark green benches with high wooden backs, with a tall post marking one booth from the other. Clearly familiar with this layout, the Assistant Dean instantly removed his jacket and hung it on the coat hook at the top of the post. There were two wide rings visible under the arms of his white shirt, sweat patches which, James concluded, suggested nerves rather than merely the sticky heat of a summer night in Connecticut.
‘George Lund,’ the man said, offering a brief, cramped handshake across the table. ‘Best if we look like we know each other.’ He gave James a wide and painfully artificial smile. If it was intended to convey long friendship with and affection for James, it would have instantly failed: the man simply looked strange.
‘Well, it’s good of you to see me,’ James began. ‘My situation is-’
‘We should order. There’s no one on that table over my left shoulder is there? No one who can hear what you’re saying or see us talking?’
James frowned. ‘Just a family; the adults have their backs to us and the children aren’t interested.’
At Lund’s insistence, they ordered right away, James opting for what was called a pizza margherita, which his host said was the best introduction to the dish for a novice. Lund made a point of doing the ordering. ‘Best if no one hears your accent,’ he explained once the waitress had gone.
Quietly, James attempted to restart the conversation and keep it light, calm the chap down a bit. ‘So how long have you been at Yale?’
‘Ten years. Straight out of college and into the faculty. The medical school.’
‘So you’re a doctor.’
‘Qualified but not practising. Preston recruited me straight after my final exams, to help him run the department.’
‘Preston?’
Lund looked puzzled. He was about to say something when the food arrived. Two plates the size of wagon wheels, steam rising from vast patches of melted cheese and deep gory smears of red that revealed themselves to be cooked tomatoes. James thought back to The Racket in Oxford, where this very evening there might be a few couples hiding behind the blackout curtains, sharing a small plate of tinned baked beans on a single slice of toast. What a contrast. Everything about this country screamed plenty; a single one of these pizzas would probably account for a month’s rations.
‘Preston McAndrew,’ Lund continued when they were alone again. ‘The man you came to see today.’
‘Oh, the Dean.’
‘Yes, though he wasn’t Dean then. Only head of the Medical School.’
‘And he’s your boss.’
Lund nodded, his eyes darting to a far corner of the room. ‘Listen, I should have said this before. You won’t tell anyone about this meeting, right?’
‘Not if you don’t want me to.’
‘I mean it. This entire conversation, even the fact that I’m here, is confidential. Are we agreed?’
‘We’re agreed.’ James noticed that Lund was methodically cutting up his pizza into even-sized slices but had not yet eaten any of them. James was not sure if he was allowed to begin eating or should wait. Was this an American custom?
‘I’ve taken a risk doing this,’ Lund said, still not eating.
‘What kind of risk?’
‘Never mind that. Now, why did you come into the Dean’s office today?’
‘I thought you knew. Isn’t that why you said you could help-’
Lund glared. ‘Don’t repeat that here.’
‘But I thought you heard what was going on outside your door. With me and the secretary. I thought you knew.’
‘I heard the secretaries discussing your earlier visit, when Miss Kelly had you thrown out. I wasn’t there, but they were talking about it. And then I heard you when you came back.’
‘So you decided to throw me out?’ James bit into the pizza, scalding his tongue on the hot cheese. It burned, but it was also delicious, like a thinner, tastier version of Welsh rarebit.
