‘No, the next bit.’
‘“… the founding of the Elizabethan Club, as well-”’
‘That’s it. The Elizabethan Club. That’s where I’m staying.’
‘I know.’
‘That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?’
‘Well, not really. I mean, these WHS fellows also wrote the college song. They did a lot of things. It has no connection to Lund, does it?’
‘No, I suppose not.’ He gestured at her notebook. ‘Go back to the rebel magazine. Does it list any names?’
‘It does, but it seems to be purely speculative. Rumours and gossip.’
‘Can I look?’
‘Sure,’ she passed the notebook across the table.
He saw a series of scribbled notations he could not decipher and then, continuing onto the next page, a list of names, apparently in alphabetical order: Harrison, Hayes, Hinton. He scanned ahead to McLellan, Merritt, Moore, Morton. Then to Simpson, Sutton, Symes, back up, his eye stopping briefly at the F’s, where he saw a Ford and wondered if it might be the Ford of the motor car company, and then back down again. He was about to hand the list back when he saw an entry that halted him.
He turned the notebook around, his finger hovering over the name. ‘Well, that one certainly means something to me.’
She peered at it, as if struggling to read her own handwriting. James’s finger rested on the name of Theodore Lowell: the pastor James had heard within hours of arriving in New Haven, preaching so effectively from his pulpit at the Battell Chapel, urging his fellow Americans to stay out of Europe’s war.
Chapter Twenty-four
‘All you have to do is provide a distraction,’ he said, after he had explained the plan for the first time.
‘At the administration building?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the Dean’s private office?’
‘No need to make it sound harder than it is. Not the Dean’s private office, his outer office. I am fully confident in your abilities, Miss Lake.’ When he saw that she was still not convinced, he decided to take a risk. ‘I can’t imagine any of the men on the Yale Daily News hesitating like this. Isn’t this the kind of thing intrepid reporters do all the time?’
Lake signalled for the bill then said, ‘If you talked to her like that, I’m not surprised your wife left you.’
James glared at her. ‘How dare you? My wife did not leave me. She evacuated our child to safety. That’s all she was doing.’ He could hear a catch in his own voice, like a dry, repressed cough, but he could not stop himself. ‘Because what none of you people seem to realize is that our country is fighting a war. You’d never know it here, with all your milkshakes and pizza and three-egg omelettes. Might as well be on another planet. But England is in danger, do you see? We might lose. We might be bloody well invaded. That’s what Florence was frightened of. She believed our child was in danger. She worried that he was not… safe. That was all. She came here to be safe. To be safe…’
He drew to a halt, avoiding her eyes. He hadn’t blubbed: he’d caught himself just in time and hoped she had not noticed. But he knew what had just happened — and he was ashamed of himself.
And yet when he eventually caught her eye, he was surprised by what he saw. He had imagined a gaze that was chilly or, at best, pitying. But this was neither. Instead, her eyes had welled up in sympathy. Then, ‘How old is Harry?’ she said, in a voice she had not used until then. ‘You never told me.’
Soon James was back where he had been twenty-four hours earlier, though this time he had a woman, rather than a newspaper, to hide behind. The administrative building was a matter of yards away. He thought he saw Dorothy Lake chewing her lower lip in anxiety.
‘Now remember,’ he was saying. ‘There are two entrances to that corridor. You have to do whatever you’re going to do at the far end, on the other side of the office. Are we clear?’
‘We’re clear.’
‘All right then. Best of luck.’
She straightened her blouse and was taking her first stride towards the front entrance when he spoke again. ‘Oh and Miss Lake-’
She turned around, a movement that briefly — in its suggestion of long, taut limbs beneath the clothing — reminded him of Florence; Florence how she used to be, when they had first met, before the weight of war and her shattered husband had borne down on her. ‘Thank you,’ he said. And she was gone.
He waited for about thirty seconds, as they had agreed. Then he approached the entrance, making sure to stay far enough away that the doorman would not see him. He counted ten more seconds and then, true to their script, he heard a yelp of pain coming from inside the building: Dorothy, far down the corridor, crying out in apparent agony.
The commissionaire did what they had expected him to do: he left his post and rushed to help. Now was James’s moment to slip inside.
From the hallway he craned his head round just long enough to see Dorothy sitting on the floor, clutching her leg. She had done as she was told, staging her fall at the far end of the corridor, well past the Dean’s office. James had a clear run from here to there. But it was still not safe to move.
Judging the moment perfectly, Dorothy ripped the air with another howl of pain. James stole another glimpse into the corridor, and saw her struggling to stand up. At last, people started emerging from their offices, among them, James was relieved to see, the secretary to the Dean.
He could hear voices now, Dorothy’s loudest. The echo made the words indistinct, but he got the gist. She was asking for someone to help her get to the bathroom, so that she could clean herself up.
Now. James began his walk down the corridor, affecting the gait of a man who was not visiting, but worked here. He took the five or six strides to reach the Dean’s office, then turned left.
The plan had worked: they had timed Dorothy’s little accident just right, the two secretaries’ desks were both empty. Instantly, James moved around them to the bank of filing cabinets behind. There were cards placed on the front of each drawer, starting at the top left: ‘Admissions — Disciplinary Code’.
His eye moved to the drawers below, picking out the subject headings, arranged alphabetically: Dwight Chapel, Endowment, Geography Faculty. He found a drawer labelled ‘Memorial — Saybrook College’. He tugged at it, surprised to see that it extended well over a yard. It must have contained several hundred files, each identified by a tab.
He went past the M’s — Memorial, Monroe, Montana — and overshot, landing in the P’s — Political Science, Posture Study, Professional Training — before tracking back to the O’s. His heart leapt when he saw a divider labelled ‘Oxford’, which preceded perhaps a dozen more files: ‘Oxford, Chancellor’, ‘Oxford, History faculty’ and ‘Oxford, Rhodes scholarships’. Not what he was looking for.
He went back, slower this time, and his heart jumped. Just after the ‘Chancellor’ file was a tab he had missed: ‘Oxford, children’. He pulled it out, only to discover that the tab was attached not to a file but a single sheet of card. On it was stuck a typed label: ‘See Yale Faculty Committee for Receiving Oxford and Cambridge University Children’.
James looked up. There was a sound outside: two voices. Instinctively, he straightened his back and took a pace back. He held still as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw two men deep in conversation pass the door. Neither of them looked his way. He wondered what bathroom theatrics Dorothy was engaging in to keep the Dean’s secretary busy: whatever she was doing, she would have to keep doing it a bit longer.
He now looked towards the floor, finding the drawer that would contain files labelled with a ‘Y’. There it was.
There must have been a thousand files crammed together: ‘Yale, Alumni Association’; ‘Yale, Divinity School’; ‘Yale, Faculty Committee’. He burrowed deep into the last category and found that too was subdivided into a score
