Walters would not have hesitated to have agreed that she was stunningly, heartbreakingly beautiful.
So this was one of the other Oxford mothers, who had somehow tracked him down to the Elizabethan Club. Where had she seen him? And would she be the one who would, at last, tell him where he could find his wife and child?
From up here, he had a clear view over the treetops towards New Haven harbour. For the first time he realized what a beautiful place this was, no doubt lush and green in the springtime, scenic even in the arid summer. And yet he was barely two miles away from Yale.
He had called Mrs Goodwin first thing this morning, just after seven — the moment he felt it socially acceptable to make a telephone call. Her American host, Mrs Swanson, had sounded wary, but Mrs Goodwin herself had been perfectly polite. She explained that her son was attending summer school during the daytime hours and that she would not have a chance to meet till 4.30pm at the earliest.
‘Why don’t I meet you at the school?’ James had suggested. To his surprise she had agreed, and so he had hired a taxi to take him up the winding, tree-lined road to Hopkins Grammar School for Boys. En route he had looked on in envy at the large family houses, with their lawns, an occasional tyre swinging from a tree or basketball hoop on a post. Such space compared with the cramped, ration-book England he had left behind. But it was not America’s prosperity he envied, typified by the sleek, curved black motor car now purring along behind the cab — a moving sculpture in metal, topped off by natty white rims painted on the tyres — no, it was not America’s wealth that made James pity his own country. It was the peace. The peace of that woman there, checking her roses, or of that old fellow in the house next door, oiling the garden gate. No Yale colleges were given over to organizing munitions or fish and potato stocks. No men here had to learn how to polish their boots like mirrors or clean a rifle. No mother in America had to fear her two-year-old son would die under a falling bomb or be crushed by a Nazi jackboot, as Florence had feared for Harry. How serene this summer morning seemed. And yet, under the same sky, even at this very moment, he knew there was a continent at war with Britain — and that shabby, grey Britain was fighting for its life.
Now, as the cab got closer, he could read the sign that announced Hopkins Grammar, dedicated to ‘The Breeding up of Hopeful Youths’.
They had arranged to meet at the school office, so he walked through the arched entrance, past the portrait of Hopkins’s seventeenth century founder, musing that this might have been any boarding school in the English countryside. He ran into a secretary who told him he needed to go to the playing fields and promptly offered to walk him over there.
She chatted away, explaining that the school had only moved from the centre of New Haven fifteen years earlier. ‘I’m afraid the city is not quite what it used to be. So crowded there now.’
‘Cramped?’ asked James, making conversation.
‘Well, we’ve had so many immigrants in recent years. It’s not the country your ancestors left behind any more.’
The words were neutral enough, but James detected a note of distaste and snobbery that he did not like. ‘I see.’
‘Not that we’re complaining about being here, gosh no. It’s wonderful here. So good for the boys to be outside in the countryside, away from all the dirt and grime of the city.’
She led him down a slope, and now a large lawn came into view. On it were perhaps three dozen early teenage boys, in white shorts and plimsolls but no shirts, engaged in physical jerks. As James approached, they were doing press-ups, in unison. Watching on the sidelines were five or six mothers kitted out in their own uniform of floral dress and sunhat.
‘Mrs Goodwin!’ the secretary called in a sing-song voice and the tallest of them turned around. In her early forties, she was just as Walters had described: not pretty, her hair mousy, but kindly.
They shook hands while the secretary politely excused herself. The lady gave a gentle smile. ‘Well, I’m glad my eyes didn’t deceive me.’
Just hearing the rhythm of those precise, enunciated words filled James with a rush of emotions. Until that moment he had not particularly registered that he had not heard an English accent in more than three weeks. Hearing it now evoked home, as if he had been transported with just those few cadences back to Oxford, to its stones, its bicycles, its scones, its afternoons. He realized in that instant just how far away he was. Above all, it made him want to be with Florence, to hold her and to feel her holding him.
He said none of this of course. He simply shook her hand and said, ‘And so am I, Mrs Goodwin, so am I. Where on earth did you see me?’
‘In church, Dr Zennor: the Battell Chapel. I was there with Thomas.’ She tilted her head in the direction of the boys, who were now extending their arms and legs in a series of rhythmic star jumps.
‘On Sunday? During that debate about joining the war?’
‘Quite so.’
So that explained that fleeting sensation he had had, the nagging feeling that somewhere in that congregation he had glimpsed a familiar face. He had thought it was a trick of the light, or exhaustion after his journey, but it had been real. Not that he had any idea where or when in Oxford he had seen Mrs Goodwin. Was she another friend of Florence’s he had all but ignored?
‘I must say, I found the event rather sobering,’ she went on. ‘It seems our little island is to fight this war all alone, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Joining the war hardly seems popular in America, if that’s what you mean.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Goodwin, I’ve come here to Yale to find my wife. Do you have any idea where she is?’
‘You mean, you don’t know?’
‘I’m afraid, I don’t.’
She looked away, embarrassed. ‘It’s odd, but I had an inkling that that was the case. When I saw what I thought was you in church, I dismissed it at first. I assumed I had just glimpsed someone who looked like you. Such things do happen, you know. But then I was buying some cigarettes at the Owl Shop and the young man there mentioned an Englishman on his own, looking for his wife, and I began to wonder. I called in at the Elizabethan Club really on the off-chance-’
‘Mrs Goodwin, do you know where she is?’
‘I did know. She was with the rest of us at the Divinity School when we arrived.’
‘The Divinity School?’
‘Yes, that was where we were first received. Before they allocated us to our respective host families.’
‘And where was Florence allocated?’
‘Well, that’s just it, you see. I don’t know. She was still there when I was picked up by the Swansons last Friday. They’ve been terribly nice. And settling in took a few days, inevitably, and before I knew it everyone had been scattered to the four winds. A few ladies are in Pennsylvania.’
‘Do you not know where any of the others are?’
‘I do know where some are staying. A few of us have made contact with each other. Plenty of our hosts know each other of course. Especially those of us who have been housed here in New Haven. But there’s not many in that position, you see. Others are with professors who live away from here, or else have summer houses in the country.’
‘I understand.’
‘But surely the university must have records, Dr Zennor? What about that committee that arranged everything for us, have you spoken to them?’
‘Not exactly. But I have… ’ James hesitated. ‘I have consulted their records, as it were. And Florence and Harry are the only ones about whom there is no information.’
‘What about the Dean, Preston something, I forget his name-’
‘Dr McAndrew?’
‘That’s it. He’s been perfectly wonderful. He was the driving force behind the whole scheme, I hear. He’s in charge, he must know.’
‘He’s drawn a blank too.’
The woman bit her lip. ‘That really is most odd.’
‘Can I ask, Mrs Goodwin, when is the last time you saw Florence?’
‘As I say, at the Divinity School. We were there together for the first day or so.’
